MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by meindnoch | 2025-08-09 15:27:27+00:00
Also, what people fail to realize is that the whiteboard coding interview was never about testing skills that are necessary for your day to day work.

Most fighter pilots don't fly missions that require superhuman reaction time or enduring 9.5g acceleration either.

Whiteboard coding exercises are just a proxy for certain thinking skills, a kind of je ne sais quoi that successful engineers tend to have.
by thrown-0825 | 2025-08-09 15:27:43+00:00
We have obviously had different experiences, but I would much rather have a high level conversation on an abstract academic topic like reinforcement learning, set theory and how it applies to sql, merkle trees, cpu architectures etc that a junior dev will be adjacent to but not necessarily need to interact with vs something like AWS IAM roles or the various gotcha's and foot guns in CSS.

I agree that vocational knowledge decays faster, which is why I would prefer stricter training and certification in those areas vs something like building a compiler from scratch in the your final year of undergrad based on a textbook written by the professor 10 years ago.
by lemonberry | 2025-08-09 15:30:10+00:00
As the sole caregiver for a father with dementia I can tell you it's a nightmare.

If you have children please, please plan for late life care. And if you're going to be caring for either of your parents start planning and build a support network. By the time I knew I needed help I was drowning. Learn how to ask for help. I thought I was a relatively progressive 50 year old man, but it turns out help is a 4-letter word.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-09 15:31:08+00:00
> You can't definitively say that two words "wouldn't be used together in that way".

Languages aren't just aggregates of individual words. There are several individual words in English that mean “person who tells the news”, and it is idiomatic to use them, not the combination “News-Teller".

Word-by-word translation is not the gold standard of translation, because individual words that seem to have the right meaning can be meaningless, have different meaning, or just be non-idiomatic in combination. Good translation is more than word-by-word and takes into account idiom in both the source language and the destination language.
by simianwords | 2025-08-09 15:31:40+00:00
The prompt works for me and correctly identifies that zstd doesn't work https://chatgpt.com/share/689769c5-bd68-800b-ae63-c6a337dcfa...

"Short answer: you can’t. iOS doesn’t ship a Zstandard (zstd) encoder/decoder in any first-party framework. Apple’s built-in Compression framework supports LZFSE, LZ4, zlib/deflate, and LZMA—not zstd."
by jakubmazanec | 2025-08-09 15:32:16+00:00
> if we see F1 cars a way to measure the cutting edge of cars being developed

As other commenters noted, F1 regulations are made to make the racing competitive and interesting to watch. But you can design car that would be much faster [1] and even undrivable for humans due to large Gs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Bull_X2010
by Maro | 2025-08-09 15:32:21+00:00
I'm currently working as a hands-off VP, so I don't use LLMs for coding at work, only for emails and document editing. I do use it for my hobby weekend coding stuff, which usually involves writing short 100-1000 LOC Python toy programs for my own education/entertainment. My way-of-working is quite primitive, I have zero integrations, nothing agentic, I just copy/paste with ChatGPT.

For this use-case it's been very useful, it can usually generate close-to-complete solutions, as long as it's one of the major programming languages, and it's a reasonably standard problem. So in general I'm always surprised when people say that LLMs are completely useless for coding --- this is just not true, and I feel sorry for people who shut themselves off from a useful tool.

But even at this small scale, even the best (o3) models sometimes totally fail. Recently I started a series of posts on distributed algorithms [1], and when I was working on the post/code for the Byzantine Generals / Consensus algorithm, o3 --- to my honest surprise --- just totally failed. I tried about 10 different times (both from scratch and describing the incorrect behaviour of its code), also showing it the original Lamport paper, and it just couldn't get it right... even though the toy implementation is just ~100 LOC, the actual algorithm portion is maybe 25 LOC. My hypothesis is that there are very few implementations online, and additionally I find the descriptions of the algorithm a bit vague (interleaves message cascade and decision logic).

[1] https://bytepawn.com/tag/distributed.html
by eterm | 2025-08-09 15:32:25+00:00
That's a good question, I've never tried to benchmark AoT compiled code. I don't know how to do it with BenchmarkDotNET. I believe the way BDM works is that it compiles sub-assemblies to execute the benchmarks, so it would have to be those, not the benchmark runner that would need the AOT compilation step?
by timacles | 2025-08-09 15:33:35+00:00
this part of LLMs is the pre-programmed human logic. The LLMs arent actually thinking, they're just going through a defined IF THEN loop based on whatever weights, if there is some ambiguity in a prompt the LLM is just programmed to prompt for more info. Its not actually thinking it needs to ask anything, its just coming back with low precision probability.

All of the recent improvements in the LLM's "thinking" have just been layers of programming on top of its statistical models. Which is why its becoming clear LLMs are really not advancing that much.
by Sytten | 2025-08-09 15:33:53+00:00
So far I think the adoption in critical infrastructure (Linux, AWS, Windows, etc.) is clearly in Rust favor but I agree that something at some point will replace Rust. My belief is that more guardrails will end up winning no matter the language since the last 50 years of progamming have shown us we can't rely on humans to write bug free code and it is even worse with LLM.
by drakenot | 2025-08-09 15:33:59+00:00
ChatGPT 5> Without adding third-party dependencies, how can I compress a Data stream with zstd in Swift on an iPhone?

(It auto-routed to its thinking model, took 25s)

> Short answer: you can’t. iOS doesn’t ship a public zstd encoder/decoder. The system Compression and AppleArchive frameworks only expose lzfse, lz4, zlib/deflate, and lzma. So with only Apple SDKs, there’s no way to produce zstd-compressed bytes.

> > Two practical paths:

> 1. If zstd isn’t mandatory, use a built-in codec (lzfse or lz4 are fastest) via Compression’s streaming API. Example (pure Swift, no deps) that compresses an arbitrary byte stream: >

> <code example>

> 2. If zstd is mandatory, you must embed zstd yourself. That can mean:

> - Vendoring the official C sources (libzstd) directly into your project and calling them via a tiny Swift wrapper/bridging header

> - Statically linking a prebuilt libzstd.a you compile for iOS
by while_true_ | 2025-08-09 15:34:40+00:00
That 1985 Toyota emits more GHG and NOx per mile than a new vehicle because it wasn't built to meet the latest US or Canadian emissions standards. Older vehicles emit more pollutants so in some US states the government will buy the car to have it scrapped, thus improving the overall fleet emissions statewide. In California there are owners who keep and maintain pre-1975 vehicles because they have little or no smog control systems, are easy to work on, and they are exempt from mandatory bi-annual smog testing.
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-08-09 15:34:54+00:00
I didn't say it doesn't have no impact on number of jobs. I said that the best that can be said is that it has no impact (I didn't say jobs here at all).

The government deciding the value of X is Y doesn't actually increase the actual value of anything, because that is decided by things the government does not control. Your point about carrots assumes, for some reason that you don't explain, that a firm chooses to sell for a price that is less than market-clearing (this happens all the time with people who make this argument: claims that businesses are both greedy and non-profit maximising). And this model is generally not true of labour either: minimum wage is minimum productivity, that is it, no need to talk about carrots.

Right, and you should be totally clear with people reading your comment: no economic theory supports what you are saying. Wages are productivity, the money to pay wages comes from customers, who choose to pay for something that the worker is producing. Minimum wages do not, and cannot, increase the share of productivity that is paid to workers anymore than the government can demand that shareholders accept lower returns. This is just total economic nonsense.
by snozolli | 2025-08-09 15:35:34+00:00
no base on the moon (or mars) has the potential to be earth independent.

I see no reason that a Mars base couldn't eventually be entirely self-sustaining. More importantly, the challenges drive the innovation necessary to make humanity a spacefaring species, which is necessary to ensure the survival of humanity.

The fields of science best done on the moon are insanely narrow.

Nobody said anything about science on the moon. Again, the challenge drives innovation.

All of the scientific advancements from Apollo etc were from building stuff to get there, not being there.

So you already understood the point I was making, yet you decided to argue against a complete straw man instead?!

The point of a moon base as a stepping stone to Mars habitation -- again, from 20 year old memories of articles -- is in studying the real-world, long-term effects on humans of living off-Earth, as well as a low-gravity environment in which to assemble the sort of large ship required to move humans such a long distance.
by vikramkr | 2025-08-09 15:37:58+00:00
In addition to stuff like that they also handle it with rate limits, that message that Claude would throw almost all the time when they were like "demand is high so you have automatically switched to concise mode", making batch inference cheaper for API customers to convince them to use that instead of real time replies. The site erroring out during a period of high demand also works, prioritizing business customers during a rollout, the service degrading. It's not like any provider has a track record for effortlessly keeping responsiveness super high. Usually it's more the opposite.
by pm215 | 2025-08-09 15:38:52+00:00
In particular listed buildings are subject to special planning rules and need permission for any extension, alteration or deletion; the planning authorities can mandate that you do any alterations in particular ways (e.g. use of traditional materials) to avoid damaging the character of the building. This means that everything is more expensive and takes longer. Luckily in this case the current owner seems to have done all that hard work already...
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-09 15:39:34+00:00
Yeah. The empty “it’s just a statistical model” critique (or the dressed-up “stochastic parrots” version of it) is almost a sign at this point that the person using it formed their opinions about AI back when ChatGPT first came out, and hasn’t really bothered to engage with it much since then.

If in 2022 I’d tried to convince AI skeptics that in three years we might have tools on the level of Claude Code, I’m sure I’d have heard everyone say it would be impossible because “it’s just a statistical model.” But it turned out that there was a lot more potential in the architecture for encoding structured knowledge, complex reasoning, etc., despite that architecture being probabilistic. (Don’t bet against the Bitter Lesson.)

LLMs have a lot of problems, hallucination still being one of them. I’d be the first to advocate for a skeptical hype-free approach to deploying them in software engineering. But at this point we need careful informed engagement with where the models are at now rather than cherry-picked examples and rants.
by lkrubner | 2025-08-09 15:39:59+00:00
I have read that before the Industrial Revolution, most people faced famine for about 10% of their lives. And while, historically, that would have probably been concentrated into a few bad years during their lifetime (months of starvation, during a few bad years), if we were to generalize that and make it a rule, it would work out to 3 days a month.

There is some evidence that there are health benefits that are specific to the fasting mode. This has mostly been studied in the context of chemotherapy, where fasting can protect against some of the side-effects of chemotherapy:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5870384/

Most of this has only been studied in animals, not humans, but in animals the results were clear:

"Fasting before chemotherapy (CT) was shown to protect healthy cells from treatment toxicity by reducing the expression of some oncogenes, such as RAS and the AKT signaling pathway [2]. This reduction is mediated by the decrease of circulating insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1) and glucose. In addition, starvation and calorie restriction activate other oncogenes in cancer cells, induce autophagy, and decrease cellular growth rates while increasing sensitivity to antimitotic drugs [2]."

If we assume that we have been shaped by millions of years of frequent famine, then our evolution has been shaped by famine. It is possible that our immune system simply makes the assumption that we will soon face famine, and therefore some important tasks, such as extreme autophagy, are normally postponed till the famine arrives. However, in the modern era the famine never arrives, and so we may have to induce it by artificial means.

I have experimented with very long fasts. My longest fast ever was in September of 2015 when I managed to go 12 straight days on nothing but water.

Obviously, any health benefits from that incident might have been psychosomatic, since I was expecting health benefits. But all the same, I did find some of the health benefits to be shocking and completely unexpected. Since at least 1995, and possibly 1990, I had a mole on my skin on my left arm. I wasn't worried about it, so I simply ignored it. I had it on my arm at least 20 years, maybe 25 years. I recall one morning in November of 2015 when I was in my kitchen, making breakfast, and I reached over to pour myself some coffee, and of course my arm was in my field of vision, and after a moment of thinking something was different, it occurred to me that the mole was gone. It had been there at least 20 years, and then it disappeared, at some point during the weeks after I had done the 12 day fast. I don't know when it disappeared, it just slowly faded away at some point between September and November. There was no remaining sign of it on my arm.

Again, that might have been purely psychosomatic, but it was interesting.
by attractivechaos | 2025-08-09 15:40:02+00:00
> Another thing is human readable is typically synonymous with unindexed

Indexing is not directly related to binary vs text. Many text formats in bioinformatics are indexed and many binary formats are not when they are not designed with indexing in mind.

> a human-eye check is tedious/impossible because you have to scroll through gigabytes to find what you want.

Yes, indexing is better but without indexing, you can use command line tools to extract the portion you want to look at and then pipe to "more" or "less".
by while_true_ | 2025-08-09 15:40:40+00:00
20 year old cars tend to be heavy polluters because they don't meet the latest emissions standards. Here in California the state will buy old cars and scrap them to get dirty emitters out of service. Also, nearly every day electrical generation is over 50% using solar, wind or hydro so EVs are cleaner here than any ICE vehicle by far.
Ask HN: What do you use for user management/IAM in your SaaS app?
by sahilarora535 | 2025-08-09 15:40:49+00:00
I have been trying to figure out what that one(or more) IAM solution I can use for building a SaaS application with the following features:

1. True multitenancy - Concept of users/organisations 2. SAML/OIDC/Active Directory connect 3. Multi-factor authentication 4. RBAC/ABAC access control model 5. Session management 6. Social sign-on 7. Low management overhead 8. Modern UI/UX

I want to optimise for the lowest total cost of ownership over 3+ years, and aim for 10-50k users. The market is filled with IAM products, some of them are:

1. Keycloak (OpenSource) 2. Supertokens (OpenSource with paid plans) 3. Supabase (OpenSource with paid plans) 4. Authelia (OpenSource with paid plans) 5. Authentik (OpenSource with paid plans) 6. Logto (OpenSource with paid plans) 7. Clerk (Paid) 8. Zitadel (OpenSource with paid plans) 9. FusionAuth (OpenSource with paid plans) 10. Stytch (Paid) 11. WorkOS (Paid) 12. Ory Kratos (OpenSource with paid plans)

Every time I ask Gemini/Claude/ChatGPT/... to do a deep-research and give me one recommendation for a tool from here, I get a different answer, with different rationale. I have also read so many articles for both very high praise and very staunch criticisms of all of these tools. With so many options around, which one do you choose, why, and how is that decision coming along so far? Thank you.
by rkomorn | 2025-08-09 15:41:01+00:00
> So if for some reason you're in the second one, even though you ingest the same amount of calories, the amount of energy you have usable is much less.

This is technically true but not particularly relevant.

It's quite difficult to be in only anaerobic effort, though (and I'd say pretty ill advised since that basically means stuff like all out sprinting without warmup or cooldown).

Higher intensity effort burns more calories than lower intensity (eg [1]). It's just harder to sustain.

1- https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/what-to-know-heart-ra... )
by raincole | 2025-08-09 15:41:40+00:00
While the normal distribution meme is notoriously overused, I think it fits the scenario here.

LLMs know so much (when you just use ChatGPT for the first time like it's an Oracle machine) -> LLMs don't know anything (when you understand how machine learning works) -> LLMs know so much (when you actually think about what 'know' means)
by bluGill | 2025-08-09 15:42:01+00:00
new cars would be far more than that for people who only buy new. Even if you bought 3 year old cars and replaced them in year 10 you are getting that costs.

i buy used cars because while I can fix things it time I don't have. I'm looking at a transmisson rebuild - it would take me 6 months to do myself. Or I can buy a newer car that works and get around now.
by djeastm | 2025-08-09 15:42:10+00:00
Here's what I got with ChatGPT GPT-5, it must not have thought about it because it was near instantaneous:

>On iOS, you can use Apple’s built-in Zstandard (zstd) compression API from the Compression framework — no third-party dependencies required.

>Here’s how you can compress a Data stream with zstd: >...

https://chatgpt.com/share/68976c8f-7ae0-8012-b7a8-58e016246d...
by bwfan123 | 2025-08-09 15:42:23+00:00
Humans build theories of how things work. llms dont. Theories are deterministic symbolic representation of the chaotic worlds of meaning . Take the turing machine for example as a theory of computation in general, euclidean geometry as a theory for space, and newtonian mechanics as a theory for motion.

A theory gives 100% correct predictions. Although the theory itself may not model the world accurately. Such feedback between the theory, and its application in the world causes iterations to the theory. From newtonian mechanics to relativity etc.

Long story short, the LLM is a long way away from any of this. And to be fair to LLMs, the average human is not creating theories, it takes some genius to create them (newton, turing, etc).

Understanding something == knowing the theory of it.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-08-09 15:42:55+00:00
Think systematically. Why are so many renting?

I was talking about private equity/institutional and foreign investors, specifically. An average young family cannot compete against them, especially in a housing shortage.

Don't hide behind the "freedom" defense. Being priced out of housing isn't freedom. Housing is a place to live and to build a life, not an investment.
by giantrobot | 2025-08-09 15:43:39+00:00
> With all respect you do seem to not understand much of how privacy works. Llama-server is working in Http.

What in the world are you trying to say here? llama.cpp can run completely locally and web access can be limited to localhost only. That's entirely private and offline (after downloading a model). I can't tell if you're spreading FUD about llama.cpp or are just generally misinformed about how it works. You certainly have some motivated reasoning trying to promote your app which makes your replies seem very disingenuous.
by jononor | 2025-08-09 15:43:47+00:00
I for one am quite surprised. Sometimes impressed. But also often frustrated. And occasionally disappointed. Sometimes worried about the negative follow-on effects. Working with current LLMs spans the whole gamut... But for coding we are at the point where even the current level is quite useful. And as the tools/systems get better, the usefilness is going to increase quite a bit. Even if models improve slowly from this point on. It will impact the whole industry over the next years, and since software is eating the world, will impact many other industries as well. Exponential? Perhaps in the same way as computers and Internet have been exponential - cost per X (say tokens) will probably go down exponentially the next years and decades, the same way cost per FLOP went down, on megabytes transferred. But those exponential gains did not results in exponential growth in productivity, or if so, the exponent is much much lower. And I suspect it will likely be the same for artificial intelligence.
by pron | 2025-08-09 15:44:25+00:00
> Maybe if someone bends over backwards to rationalize it, but not in any real sense.

In a simple, real sense. Zig prevents out-of-bounds access just as Rust does; C++ doesn't. Interestingly, almost all of Rust's complexity is invested in the less dangerous kind of memory unsafety (https://cwe.mitre.org/top25/archive/2024/2024_cwe_top25.html).

> You can't build RAII and moves into zig.

So RAII is part of the definition of memory safety now?

Why not just declare memory safety to be "whatever Rust does", say that anything that isn't exactly that is worthless, and be done with that, since that's the level of the arguments anyway.

We could, of course, argue over which of Rust, Zig, and C++ offers the best contribution to correctness beyond the sound guarantees they make, except these are empirical arguments with little empirical data to make any determination, which is part of my point.

Software correctness is such a complicated topic and, if anything, it's become more, not less, mysterious over the decades (see Tony Hoare's astonishment that unsound methods have proven more effective than sound methods in many regards). It's now understood to be a complicated game of confidence vs cost that depends on a great many factors. Those who claim to have definitive solutions don't know what they're talking about (or are making unfounded extrapolations).
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-08-09 15:44:46+00:00
> ThermoWorks products are made in China

Not sure what you are trying to imply here. Products manufactured in China are of poor quality? iPhones are made in China and it would be a challenge to find any device with higher build quality than that. On the flip side, we all know how terrible the quality of US made cars is.
by dantillberg | 2025-08-09 15:45:25+00:00
I'd say it's fair to call this a footgun, though not a bug. The context is really only intended to apply to the goroutines. And Wait has to cancel the context to prevent a resource leak.

I suggest in general using function scoping to drive the lifetime of contexts, etc. This works also for defers and tracing spans in addition to the canonically shadowed `ctx` variable.

There is an old issue in the tracker proposing changes to alleviate this: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/34510. The original author (bcmills) of the errgroup package shared insight into the design choices/tradeoffs he made.