MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zargon | 2025-08-10 17:53:56+00:00
> As an aside, Lenovo are pretty awesome.

These things would be important if they made products that actually work. My T14s Gen 3 AMD simply doesn’t work. Half the time I go to wake it from sleep, the firmware has crashed and I have to hard-reset it. I spent months trying to get Lenovo to fix this. They did replace the motherboard twice (once on-site, once shipped to them) and eventually replaced the entire laptop with a new one. None of this is useful when they can’t make a laptop that doesn’t crash while it sleeps.
by umanwizard | 2025-08-10 17:54:06+00:00
> Used as an intensifier with statements or terms that are in fact meant figuratively and not word for word as stated

That is not the same as the meaning of “figuratively”!

“‘Literally’ is used with statements that are meant figuratively” does not mean the same thing as “‘Literally’ means ‘figuratively’”.

> "it hurts so bad I’m intensely dying" would be wrong too

Indeed, because “intensely” is not an intensifier. In your example, “intensely” modifies “dying”, whereas “literally” modifies the tone of your utterance.

For an example of another intensifier: “it hurts so bad I’m fucking dying” would work.

Nobody would claim that “fucking” means the same thing as “figuratively” in this sentence, even though the sentence is itself figurative.
by jstummbillig | 2025-08-10 17:54:51+00:00
How would we not be able to know?

If we don't know because it's good optimization that does not impact us in a noticeable way, then that seems like a fine trade-off.

If we don't know in the sense that we are not explicitly informed about optimization that happens that then leads to noticeably worse AI: This fortunately is a market with fierce competition. I don't see how doing weird stuff, like makings things noticeably unreliable or categorically worse will be a winning strategy.

In either case "not knowing" is really not an issue.
by antonvs | 2025-08-10 17:55:20+00:00
The statement I responded to was, "creating an effective workflow is not trivial".

There are plenty of useful LLM workflows that are possible to create pretty trivially.

The example you gave is not hardly the first thing a beginning LLM user would need. Yes, more sophisticated uses of an advanced tool require more experience. There's nothing different from any other tool here. You can find similar debates about programming languages.

Again, what I said in my original comment applies: people place unrealistic expectations on LLMs.

I suspect that this is at least partly is a psychological game people unconsciously play to try to minimize the competence of LLMs, to reduce the level of threat they feel. A sort of variation of terror management theory.
by solardev | 2025-08-10 17:57:08+00:00
You can't just add a phone line option from your ISP? It's all VOIP these days and sometimes it's actually cheaper to get it bundled (if you have a cable modem) than without. Fiber and DSL usually offer it too.

It'll be a bit more than a DIY SIP phone, but a hell lot less hassle.

Also, it's probably easier to just use the smartphons' parental controls.
by aesh2Xa1 | 2025-08-10 17:57:52+00:00
Yeah, your point about implementation is correct -- much of the MDM functionality runs within macOS.

But, eh, I still think it's fair to describe it as a feature of the firmware. The enrollment and prevention of removal have firmware-level components through Apple's Secure Boot and System Integrity Protection. A user can't simply disable MDM because these firmware-level protections prevent tampering with the enrollment.

Case in point, getting Linux installed in the first place would be blocked by firmware-level boot policies, right? I'm not too knowledge about this, and maybe you are more so.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-08-10 17:58:02+00:00
I‘m not saying it’s equal, just pointing out that it’s a good indicator of processing capacity that is necessary to match human intelligence. We are aware of the environment and learn continuously from interactions with it. It should be expected that AGI can do the same.

Your case with locked-in syndrome is interesting. Can human brain develop intelligence in full absence of any senses? I doubt so.
by illiac786 | 2025-08-10 17:58:11+00:00
The US used the word socialist is very strange way. Socialists and communists are not the same thing at all – except in the US, which is one of the very very rare countries that never had a socialist party as far as I know. A socialist party (labor, “social democrat”, etc) is what most countries consider “left” (as opposed to communists which are “far left”)
by lenkite | 2025-08-10 17:58:49+00:00
> There's no need to design the syntax for grep because Kotlin is intended to be used with a good IDE that can answer this query instantly and precisely.

On large projects its still cheaper and faster to grep from the CLI than to use Intellij IDE search. Esp if you wish to restrict search to subsets of dirs.

Command-line greppability is a serious use case.

Zig is also 5-10x faster to compile than Kotlin.

On function syntax, I agree with you. It was a mistake not to use fn:ReturnType. It has destroyed future lambdas.
by quotemstr | 2025-08-10 17:59:51+00:00
> there is truly no correct way to say something

Yes, there is. Linguistic descriptivism is a stale 1960s academic fad wrapped up in a revolutionary energy that's dead and cringe now. Like that era's other insane postmodernisms, it rejects reality and reality has rejected it right back.

"Truly", we understand each other better and communicate faster when draw speech from a a collection of words, idioms, and grammatical constructions familiar to the listener. This linguistic inventory is not natural. It must be taught. Errors must he corrected, not validated. Not every utterance from someone's mouth has equal merit.
by gradschool | 2025-08-10 18:00:57+00:00
> I've never had a Debian system break without it being my fault in some way.

My experience has been contrary to that. I'm a Linux user of 25+ years with various distros but about half of that time with Debian as my main desktop. I broke up with Debian about ten years ago thinking we could still be friends, but every time I've tried to put it on a new box it since then something weird has happened, most recently about a month ago on a completely new Intel N150, when it gave me some stick about video modes. Today my laptop got hosed by an attempted upgrade from bookworm to trixie, as in tons of error messages and then no more docker and no more virtualbox. No harm done because Debian taught me long ago to store a copy of the whole root filesystem on external media before an upgrade, but now the clock is ticking until I have to migrate off it or get stuck with something too old to be compatible with anything.
by ivape | 2025-08-10 18:01:02+00:00
The thing is dial-up was transmitting data via sound. It would be kind of interesting if that ever made a comeback for encryption purposes. Maybe not exactly through wires and modem, but I could see a universe where messages are sent via videos that can only be decoded by certain people that are recording the audio.

I don't know why we would do that though. Maybe someone else can riff off this idea.
by Tainnor | 2025-08-10 18:01:43+00:00
As someone who leans more towards the side of LLM-sceptiscism, I find Sonnet 4 quite useful for generating tests, provided I describe in enough detail how I want the tests to be structured and which cases should be tested. There's a lot of boilerplate code in tests and IMO because of that many developers make the mistake of DRYing out their test code so much that you can barely understand what is being tested anymore. With LLM test generation, I feel that this is no longer necessary.
by n42 | 2025-08-10 18:02:13+00:00
this is a really, really good article with a lot of nuance and a deep understanding of the tradeoffs in syntax design. unfortunately, it is evoking a lot of knee-jerk reactions from the title and emotional responses to surface level syntax aesthetics.

the thing that stands out to me about Zig's syntax that makes it "lovely" (and I think matklad is getting at here), is there is both minimalism and consistency to the design, while ruthlessly prioritizing readability. and it's not the kind of surface level "aesthetically beautiful" readability that tickles the mind of an abstract thinker; it is brutalist in a way that leaves no room for surprise in an industrial application. it's really, really hard to balance syntax design like this, and Zig has done a lovely and respectable job at doing so.
by parasubvert | 2025-08-10 18:02:42+00:00
Has there ever been a time, going back to the 70s with original PCs, where new software didn't necessitate a new computer?

Things are also getting better now that Intel is dying. I mean, the new Apple silicon chips are astoundingly fast and energy efficient, an M1 from 5 years ago is still going strong and probably won't truly need replacing for another 2. Similar for Ryzen chips from 5 years ago!

Things have changed a lot in 20 years. In 2005 we didn't consume all of our video / audio media online. We didn't have social media, just blogs and RSS readers. YouTube had just been released. TikTok, Facebook and Twitter didn't exist. Hypermedia today is very rich and necessitates a lot of resources. But at the same time, most work the past 10 years has been on native apps (on mobile particularly but also PCs), not web sites. Most people don't use the web browser as much.
by scosman | 2025-08-10 18:03:12+00:00
He's comparing to a studio when he should compare to the mini for this performance. They are almost the same price at a 64gb RAM + 500gb storage config (CAD).

- Framework, Max+ 64GB: $2,861.16

- Apple Mini M4 Pro, 64GB: $2,899.00

Apple does charge way too much for integrated storage, but Apple is only a 25% premium at 2TB not double (if you compare to the mini instead of the studio). Plug in a NVMe SSD if you're building an Apple desktop.
by jchw | 2025-08-10 18:03:30+00:00
I was just going for a head-to-head comparison, that's the closest you can get in price/performance. The closest M4 Pro Mac Mini is already a lot more expensive than the baseline Framework Desktop.

The Framework Desktop Max+ 395 with 128 GB of RAM, and a 500 GB SSD costs around $2,147.00 USD before tax. The M4 Pro with the 20-core GPU, 64 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB SSD costs around $2,199.00 USD. That's still short 64 GB of RAM, of course.*

The lowest-end M4 Max Mac Studio that can support 128 GB of RAM seems to cost $3,499.00 with 128 GB of RAM and a 512 GB SSD. For that you get 546GB/s of maximum memory bandwidth according to Apple, which is definitely a step up from the 256GB/s maximum for the Ryzen AI Max+ 395, but obviously also at a price that is quite higher too.

Apparently though, 128 GB of RAM is currently the ceiling for the M4 Max right now. So it seems like if you were going for a maximum performance local AI cluster at any price, the M3 Ultra Mac Studios are definitely in the running, though at that point it probably is starting to get to the price where AMD and NVIDIA's data center GPUs start to enter the picture, and AMD Instinct cards measure memory bandwidth in terabytes per second.

* Regarding GPUs: The Framework Desktop Max+ 395 Radeon 8060S seems to be vastly faster than all of the non-Max M4 SKUs, for anyone that cares a lot about GPU performance. The M4 Max seems to outperform the 8060S by a bit though, and obviously it has some stand-out features like a shit load of video encoding/decoding hardware. This complicates the value comparison a lot. The Radeon core definitely gets a much better value for the performance in any case. I'm really impressed by what they managed to do there.
by cuu508 | 2025-08-10 18:03:38+00:00
6 seconds is the time it takes for the tests to run, after I've switched to the terminal and ran the command. If I switch from 8 cores to, say, 16 faster cores, IMHO it is not unthinkable the tests could speed up to 3 seconds. How much money to invest for this speedup is a subjective question.

I'm thinking about a new system, not upgrading the existing one.
by scratcheee | 2025-08-10 18:03:46+00:00
Easy: provide high quality output when being tested for a new task, The moment you are done outperforming the competition in the tests and have hit production you slowly ramp down quality, perhaps with exceptions when the queries look like more testing.

Same problem as ai safety, but the actual problem is now the corporate greed of humans behind the ai rather than an actual agi trying to manipulate you.
by wtallis | 2025-08-10 18:04:25+00:00
> Does mystify me that x86 has a hard time matching even a mac mini pro on bandwidth, let alone the models with 2x or 4x the memory bandwidth.

The market dynamics are pretty clear. Having that much memory bandwidth only makes sense if you're going to provide an integrated GPU that can use that bandwidth; CPU-based laptop/desktop workloads that bandwidth-hungry are too rare. The PC market has long been relying on discrete GPUs for any high-performance GPU configuration, and the GPU market leader is the one that doesn't make x86 CPUs.

Intel's consumer CPU product line is a confusing mess, but at the silicon level it comes down to one or two designs for laptops (a low-power and a mid-power design) that are both adequately served by a 128-bit memory bus, and one or two desktop designs with only a token iGPU. The rest of the complexity comes from binning on clock speeds and core counts, and sometimes putting the desktop CPU in a BGA package for high-power laptops.

For Intel to make a part following the Strix Halo and Apple strategy, Intel would need to add a third major category of consumer CPU silicon, using far more than twice the total die size of any of their existing consumer CPUs, to go after a niche that's pretty small and very hard for Intel to break into given the poor quality of their current GPU IP. Intel doesn't have the cash to burn pursuing something like this.

It's a bit surprising AMD actually went for it, but they were in a better position than Intel to make a part like Strix Halo from both a CPU and GPU IP perspective. But they still ended up not including their latest GPU architecture, and only went for a 256-bit bus rather than 512-bit.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-10 18:05:34+00:00
I picked programming because I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer in the mid 80s.

You can “trust” I have those skills because I can talk about my past experiences, you can throw any architectural or business problem at me and I can talk through it including tradeoffs and why I made the decisions I made. How I deal with organizational challenges, etc.

My being able to dig into a topic is not “passion”. It’s my job. I get paid to know my subject matter deeply and to be able to ramp up fast on technology and the business domain.

The deal is if I work at your company, you agreed to give me $x amount of money, benefits and for me remote work and in exchange I agreed to give your company all of my expertise gained over 30 years of working for 40-45 hours a week.

You need me to code those 40 hours a week? You got me. You need me to be on a zoom call or fly to a client site? No problem. You want me to do pretty diagrams and spit out 40 page requirement documents or business proposals? I can do that too. Along with leading projects, cloud architecture, etc.

Just understand, you get 40-45 hours a week. You don’t get late nights, you don’t get on call, you don’t get weekend work, and my bullshit tolerance level is relatively low before I am looking for another job - ask my last nine employers.
by Spooky23 | 2025-08-10 18:06:09+00:00
It’s the opposite, the web was the new disruptor and AOL served everyone AOL as a pre-web online service, which continued to be used by their legacy users for many years.

Pre-Internet AOL was like Yahoo in the 2000s which aped it on the Internet. Sort of a hybrid syndication machine like a magazine/newspaper/tv hybrid.

There was a few similar services, Prodigy was the one my family used. They basically did web commerce before the web. My dad even did banking. Prodigy was a joint venture between Sears and IBM and used an x.25 network behind the scenes powered by AS/400 iirc.
by hinkley | 2025-08-10 18:06:35+00:00
They could still fix it with arrow functions, but it’s always gonna look weird.

Some other people have tried to explain how they prefer types before variable declarations, and they’ve done a decent job of it, but it’s the function return type being buried that bothers me the most. Since I read method signatures far more often than method bodies.

fn i32 add(…) is always going to scan better to me.
by bsoles | 2025-08-10 18:06:53+00:00
As a nonnative speaker of English who lived more than 30 years in an English speaking country, "try and" sounds to me as bad as "should of". Right or wrong, I perceive it as something an "uneducated" person would say. That said, I firmly believe that correct language is whatever people deem to be appropriate for their communication.
by Contortion | 2025-08-10 18:07:17+00:00
Microsoft documentation is a nightmare, it doesn't surprise me there are vulnerabilities.

I recently built an SSO login using Entra ID (which was thankfully single-tenant) and I basically had to keep randomly stabbing in the dark until I got it to work with the correct scopes and extra fields returned with the access token.

Trying to search for any kind of Getting started guide just took me to child pages several levels deep full of incomprehensible Microsoft jargon and hyperlinks to helpful-sounding but ultimately similarly useless articles.
by strken | 2025-08-10 18:08:08+00:00
Well, no, but I can't understand 99% of Spanish and Chinese using my knowledge of my native English dialect, so I'm not going to lecture Spanish or Chinese speakers on correct grammar.

My point was that differences between dialects drive a lot of arguments about grammar. If I'm annoyed about the phrase "could care less" then that originates in my native dialect not allowing it. Not being part of the prestige grammar is secondary, as is whether the phrase makes any logical sense.
by brabel | 2025-08-10 18:08:22+00:00
If you like C-like syntax and want a functional language that uses it, try Gleam: https://gleam.run/

Quite lovely looking code.

fn spawn_greeter(i: Int) { process.spawn(fn() { let n = int.to_string(i) io.println("Hello from " <> n) }) }

There's also Reason, which is basically OCaml (also compiles to JS - funnily enough, Gleam does that too.. but the default is the Erlang VM) with C-like syntax: https://reasonml.github.io/
by 0x7cfe | 2025-08-10 18:08:34+00:00
If I'm not mistaken, Musk admitted he has Asperger's. His speech resembles someone with a mild autistic disorder.

Still, I'd rather patiently wait for him to serialize his thoughts, than to listen to some super fluent person saying utter nonsense, especially if it's a pitch talk. It's all about _what_ is being said, not _how_.
by teiferer | 2025-08-10 18:09:30+00:00
I appreciate your consideration, disagree != downvote.

To your point, "free from having to spend money" is exactly it. It's paid for with other things, and I get that some folks don't care. But being more open about this would be nice. You don't typically hide a monetary cost either, and everybody trying to do that is rightfully called out on it by being called a scam. Doing that with non-monetary costs would be a nice custom.
by dijit | 2025-08-10 18:10:07+00:00
Not to defend Apple here, but it's also a bit apples to oranges (heh) because the power consumption is not easily comparable.

I would hazard a guess and say: at that spec, if you're looking at 1Y TCO, the Apple could easily be cost competitive performance per dollar.

Since they're in spitting distance of each other, just get the one you're most comfortable with. Personally I prefer Linux and I'm really happy that non-Apple machines are starting to get closer to the same efficiency and performance!
by musicale | 2025-08-10 18:10:30+00:00
More like 300 million:

> AOL's former chief marketing officer Jan Brandt estimates that the company spent more than $300 million handing out all those free trials. The marketing effort allegedly cornered half of the world's CD market.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/aol-cd-rom-collect...
by akgoel | 2025-08-10 18:11:00+00:00
I've come to realize that asking an LLM to do something that a purpose-built software program can already do is a mistake. Instead, the LLM must be an agent for that computer program.

Therefore, the correct prompt is "write a python program to count the number of letters in a word, and then use it to count the number of Rs in strawberry".
by 418tpot | 2025-08-10 18:11:03+00:00
I believe the reason is, at the frequencies these CPUs are talking to RAM, the reflection coefficient[1] starts playing a big role. This means any change in impedance in the wire cause reflections of the signal.

This is also the reasoning why you can't just have a dumb female to female HDMI coupling and expect video to work. All of such devices are active and read the stream on the input and relay them on the output.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflection_coefficient
by ath3nd | 2025-08-10 18:11:24+00:00
> The true value return of spending way more time and effort to improve code quality often simply isn’t worth it from a holistic perspective.

Sure, if you want to do with 100 developers what 10 can do better, cheaper and faster, don't spend time on code quality. Just vibe it. More work for the experts to fix that mess later.
by marvin1222 | 2025-08-10 18:11:56+00:00
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by brabel | 2025-08-10 18:12:27+00:00
I always thought that languages (or at least editors) should allow the user to use whatever syntax they want! It's possible. Just look at Kotlin and Java... you can write the exact same code in both, even if you discount the actual differences in the languages. It's not hard to see how you could use Haskell, or Python syntax, to write the exact same thing. People don't like the idea too much because they think that makes it sharing code and reading code together harder, but I don't buy that because at least I myself, read code by myself 99% of the time, and the few times I read code with someone else, I can imagine we can just agree quite easily on which syntax to use - or just agree to always use the "default" syntax to avoid disagreements.

I dream to one day get the time to write an editor plugin that lets you read and write in any syntax... then commit the code in the "standard" syntax. How hard would that be?!
by SeanAnderson | 2025-08-10 18:12:30+00:00
The city demo was really unconvincing, heh. Super laggy for the amount of detail. I click "wow mode" and the whole thing disappeared. idk. feels like non-coders getting excited that they think they're getting 80% of the code when in reality the other 20% is 80% of the work and going to be exponentially harder to squeeze from the AI.

I do think the vibecoding tools are good at spitting out well-defined CRUD apps, but more creative things are still rough without experienced hands to guide things along.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-10 18:12:43+00:00
> then goes back on that thesis by saying "but if there was an AI between these things, then it becomes a universal plugin system".

This is neither an accurate quote of the article, nor an accurate paraphrase of something the article says, nor an accurate description of something subtly implied by the article without directly being said.

The article, in fact, gives an example without AI in the middle.