MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by psychoslave | 2025-08-24 16:40:40+00:00
Can't the facility just as well try to nuke the repository and every remote it can push force to? The thing is that with prompt injection being a thing, if the automation chain can access arbitrary remote resources, the initial surface can be extremely tiny initially, once it's turned into an infiltrated agent, opening the doors from within is almost a garantee.

Or am I missing something?
by lithocarpus | 2025-08-24 16:40:51+00:00
No bother,

persistence in humans: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11522584/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22425036/ https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neurology/articles/10.3...

persistence in animals: https://bmcmedicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1741-... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27908630

showing aluminum accumulation in human brain: (not known to be from vaccines it could be from other sources, point is just that it did accumulate in these brains) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28159219/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-64734-6
by pron | 2025-08-24 16:41:01+00:00
> It goes without saying that memory compaction involves a whole lot of extra traffic on the memory subsystem

It doesn't go without saying that compaction involves a lot of memory traffic, because memory is utilised to reduce the frequency of GC cycles and only live objects are copied. The whole point of tracing collection is that extra RAM is used to reduce the total amount of memory management work. If we ignore the old generation (which the talk covers separately), the idea is that you allocate more and more in the young gen, and when it's exhausted you compact only the remaining live objects (which is a constant for the app); the more memory you assign to the young gen, the less frequently you need to do even that work. There is no work for dead objects.

> when it comes to how it's impacted by the memory bottleneck is one that I have some trouble understanding also - especially since you've been arguing for using up more memory for the exact same workload.

Memory bandwidth - at least as far as latency is concerned - is used when you have a cache miss. Once your live set is much bigger than your L3 cache, you get cache misses even when you want to read it. If you have good temporal locality (few cache misses), it doesn't matter how big your live set is, but the same is if you have bad temporal locality (many cache misses).

> which, AIUI, is also what the talk is about

The talk focuses on tracing GCs, but it applies equally to manual memory management (as discussed in the Q&A; using less memory for the same algorithm requires CPU work regardless if it's manual or automatic)

> when that's a forced choice

I don't think tracing GCs are ever a forced choice. They keep getting chosen over and over for heavy workloads on machines with >= 1GB/core because they offer a more attractive tradeoff than other approaches for some of the most popular application domains. There's little reason for that to change unless the economics of DRAM/CPU change significantly.
by risyachka | 2025-08-24 16:41:09+00:00
This.

You may as well buy a shooter game starter pack or whatever that can save you >1year of coding, no llm needed.

Code is not a hard part.

Making mechanics fun and good assets is what is hard and takes forever.

Sure you can use llm to write a generic game, but its easier to find same game on github and just use that code, why would you write it again with llm.
by didibus | 2025-08-24 16:41:44+00:00
The mystery seems pretty much "solved" to me.

We know where that number originated from, it's from this Gallup interview with Gloria Mark.

We also know the Gloria Mark paper corroborates the number:

> When people did resume work on the same day, it took an average length of time of 25 min. 26 sec (sd=54 min. 48 sec.).

From the Gloria Mark paper: https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/CHI2005.pdf

Now we're only left guessing the discrepancy between her paper saying 25 minutes and 26 seconds and her quoting 23 minutes and 15 seconds when interviewed about it.

My guess is she didn't recall exactly and gave a ballpark as she remembered it.
by taormina | 2025-08-24 16:42:27+00:00
I mean, this really isn't a large codebase, this is a small-medium sized codebase as judged by prior jobs/projects. 9000 lines of code?

When I give them the same task I tried to give them the day before, and the output gets noticeably worse than their last model version, is that better? When the day by day performance feels like it's degrading?

They are definitely not as good as I would like them to be but that's to be expected of professionals who beg for money hyping them up.
by avinassh | 2025-08-24 16:43:18+00:00
hey, I just tested and `NORMAL` is default:

$ sqlite3 test.db SQLite version 3.43.2 2023-10-10 13:08:14 Enter ".help" for usage hints. sqlite> PRAGMA journal_mode=wal; wal sqlite> PRAGMA synchronous; 1 sqlite>

edit: fresh installation from homebrew shows default as FULL:

/opt/homebrew/opt/sqlite/bin/sqlite3 test.db SQLite version 3.50.4 2025-07-30 19:33:53 Enter ".help" for usage hints. sqlite> PRAGMA journal_mode=wal; wal sqlite> PRAGMA synchronous; 2 sqlite>

I will update the post, thanks!
by jfengel | 2025-08-24 16:43:42+00:00
I don't believe that fixing those problems would solve the underlying issue, which is that the voters themselves have a deep antipathy towards each other. We could alter the rules to try to reduce the effects of it, but I don't expect it to reduce the underlying division that leads us to push the rules to (and past) the breaking point.

Plus, of course, there is little appetite for any given set of fixes. We can easily calculate who will benefit, and because of the division I mentioned, half the people will oppose the change just to avoid losing influence.

I'm hard pressed for a solution short of starting over from scratch, which would at least make some of the existing alliances moot.
by npn | 2025-08-24 16:43:51+00:00
I find it crazy that some people only use a single laptop for their dev work. Meanwhile I have 3 PCs, 5 monitors, keyboards and mouses, and still think they are not enough.

There are a lot of jobs that should run in a home server running 24/7 instead of abusing your poor laptop. Remote dedicated servers work, but the latency is killing your productivity, and it is pricey if you want a server with a lot of disk space.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-08-24 16:44:32+00:00
Something I learned the hard way is that SSD performance can nosedive if DISCARD/TRIM commands are not sent to the device. Up to 50% lower throughput on our Samsung DC drives.

Through metrics I noticed that some SSD in a cluster were much slower than others despite being uniform hardware. After a bit of investigation it was found that the slow devices had been in service longer, and we were mot sending DISCARDs to the SSDs due to a default in dm-crypt: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Dm-crypt/Specialties#Discar...

The performance penalty for our drives (Samsung DC drives) was around 50% if TRIM was never run. We now run blkdiscard when provisioning new drives and enable discards on the crypt devices and things seem to be much better now.

Reflecting a bit more, this makes me more bullish on system integrators like Oxide as I have seen so many times software which was misconfigured to not use the full potential of the hardware. There is a size of company between a one person shop and somewhere like facebook/google where they are running their own racks but they don’t have the in house expertise to triage and fix these performance issues. If for example you are getting 50% less performance out of your DB nodes, what is the cost of that inefficiency?
by sczi | 2025-08-24 16:44:32+00:00
Oh that is really interesting, I was just aware of IPython's autoreload extension, I hadn't found your library. I'm also working on hot reload for python as I'm working on a development environment for python that aims to give it a development experience closer to lisp: https://codeberg.org/sczi/swanky-python/

Some minor details. You currently aren't updating functions if their freevars have changed, you can actually do that by using c-api to update __closure__ which is a readonly attribute from python:

ctypes.pythonapi.PyFunction_SetClosure.argtypes = [ctypes.py_object, ctypes.py_object] ctypes.pythonapi.PyFunction_SetClosure(old, new.__closure__)

Also I think you should update __annotations__, __type_params__, __doc__, and __dict__ attributes for the function.

Rather than using gc.get_referrers I just maintain a set for each function containing all the old versions (using weakref so they go away if that old version isn't still referenced by anything). Then when a function updates I don't need to find all references, all references will be to some old version of the function so I just update that set of old functions, and all references will be using the new code. I took this from IPython autoreload. I think it is both more efficient than gc.get_referrers, and more complete as it solves the issue of references "decorated or stashed in some data structure that Jurigged does not understand". The code for that is here: https://codeberg.org/sczi/swanky-python/src/commit/365702a6c...

hot reload for python is quite tricky to fully get right, I'm still missing plenty parts that I know about and plan on implementing, and surely plenty more that I don't even know. If you or anyone else that's worked on hot reload in python wants to talk about it, I'm happy to, just reach out, my email is visible on codeberg if you're signed in.
by jijijijij | 2025-08-24 16:44:41+00:00
> I think the main problem is that Germany does not have a constitutional equivalent to the U.S. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Instead, each federal state and the federal government have fragmented information access laws, often with broad exemptions for official secrecy.

At first sight, I don't see how the FOIA is much different to the Informationsfreiheitsgesetz (freedom of information law). https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informationsfreiheitsgesetz

Isn't the FOIA also applied on the federal level?

> In Germany, you are generally not allowed to film law enforcement

I think this is misleading. It's not especially prohibited. Generally, law enforcement enjoys the same rights as everyone else, that is having a right to privacy and the confidentiality of the spoken, non-public word. You can't film law enforcement folks preemptively, or without cause, if they have the reasonable expectation of confidentiality of the spoken word. If law enforcement is breaking the law, you are allowed to collect video evidence. In any case, you are not allowed to publish non-public video recordings or pictures of anyone, taken without explicit, or implicit consent. Public or non-public here means the implied confidentiality of communication, not necessarily where it happened. Eg. talking on a public street doesn't make every conversation public.

Mind you, in Germany, illegally obtained evidence isn't as easily dismissed as it is in the US. If you record the police without cause (illegally) and they happen to commit a crime, your recording isn't tainted evidence as far as I know, but rather you may (if indicted) face legal consequences yourself, independently. Again, publication is a completely different matter.

Legality of video recordings is pretty much irrelevant, regarding the legal power dynamics you described, as the police could just confiscate your phone and find some excuse for destroying the evidence. Independent oversight seems more important to address this.

On the other hand, I do think law enforcement should enjoy privacy, generally, as everyone else. I don't think, having a camera in your face with every interaction is helpful for anyone, all things considered, but would rather aid escalation and discourage leniency. Constant video surveillance just sucks, no matter who is doing the recording.
by toast0 | 2025-08-24 16:45:10+00:00
Yahoo was cheap/stingy/cost concious as hell. They still had a well stocked ergo team, at least for the years I was there. You'd schedule an ergo consult during new hire orientation, and you'd get a properly sized seat and your desk height adjusted if needed and etc. Lots of ergo keyboards, although I didn't see a lot of kinesis back then.

Proper ergo is a cost concious move. It helps keep your employees able to work which saves on hiring and training. It reduces medical expenses, which affects the bottom line because large companies are usually self-insured; they pay a medical insurance company only to administer the plan, not for insurance --- claims are paid from company money.
by JonChesterfield | 2025-08-24 16:45:16+00:00
Whether ~$10k is infeasibly expensive or a bargain depends strongly on what workloads you're running. Single threaded stuff? Sure, bad idea. Massively parallel set suites backed by way too much C++, where building it all has wound up on the dev critical path? The big machine is much cheaper than rearchitecting the build structure and porting to a non-daft language.

I'm not very enamoured with distcc style build farms (never seem to be as fast as one hopes and fall over a lot) or ccache (picks up stale components) so tend to make the single dev machine about as fast as one can manage, but getting good results out of caching or distribution would be more cash-efficient.
by vikingerik | 2025-08-24 16:46:41+00:00
It's not exempt. I don't trust Steam long term and so don't spend any significant money on it. I only ever buy cheap games for like $8 or less, where I know I'll get that much worth of gameplay in a short time frame and it won't bother me if the platform ever later enshittifies.

Gabe says that the platform will fail-open if ever necessary, that it would revert to offline DRMless functionality. I believe that he has that intention, but the realities of operating from receivership or assimilation by Microsoft would likely be very different.
by breuleux | 2025-08-24 16:47:04+00:00
Well... what are you trying to do with "1 + 1"? Lisps are "homoiconic" in the sense that everything is a list, but honestly? When I worked with Scheme in the past, I almost never manipulated code as actual lists. It's not robust. I used match and quote/unquote. What's where I see template strings.

So what you could do is something like this:

addition = "1 + 1" multiplication = t"{addition} * 7" result = eval(multiplication) # result is 14

Instead of inserting addition as an exact string, producing "1 + 1 * 7" which is 8, it would parse as an AST and insert the addition node as a unit, so that you get the intended result. You could also do an alpha conversion if the injected code declares variables to avoid name clashes.

It wouldn't let you do true macros, but it would make codegen easier and less error-prone.
by ruined | 2025-08-24 16:47:13+00:00
conversely, china has installed more solar than the US has in total capacity - every year for the past several years

https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/10/1119941/china-en...

https://apnews.com/article/china-climate-solar-wind-carbon-e...

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65064
by arcticbull | 2025-08-24 16:47:33+00:00
Renewables really aren't that cheap unless you view them entirely in isolation. Sun doesn't shine all night and wind doesn't blow continuously, it needs to be viewed with storage to represent a complete picture. Rooftop solar is more expensive than nuclear due to the zero economies of scale, residential storage is staggeringly expensive, and utility scale solar + storage only became less expensive than nuclear power a couple of years ago.

Solar and wind both have significant sovereignty issues. The entire solar supply chain is in China where they're heavily subsidized so the PRC can corner the market -- and substantially all the rare earths in wind turbines come from China. Generally recycling costs aren't considered and at least in the west there's no plan to recycle at least the fiberglass in turbine blades, leaving them to be buried.

I'm all for renewables but the way they're positioned is unrealistic.

Nuclear is only expensive because of the way it's built in the US, relying on the few locations made available (if any) to build basically fully customized installations. If we copy-pasted reactors onto sites that suit them it would be very competitive, don't take my word for it. Jigar Shah who headed the DOE loans program said the exact same thing during his term.

If we're being pedantic, nuclear is renewable too thanks to seawater extraction. There's a practically unlimited amount of uranium in the ocean and the rock underneath it.
by watwut | 2025-08-24 16:48:41+00:00
> Similarly, if you're a runner you've probably multiple times had people say, directly to you, "oh I could never do that to my knees, running is so bad for them!"

Incidentally, yes if you have knees with tendency to hurt, you should not run much. That is not controversial, that is what doctors will tell you: running regularly can often cause pain in the knees from overuse. People who self identify as runners do run a lot. They are not doing 5km twice a week, they do something like 10km every day. And not everyone, especially not older people, can do that sort of load without damaging knees.

And those overuse injuries can make you stuck at home having to skip any kind of sport for very long time.
by TechSquidTV | 2025-08-24 16:50:00+00:00
I've been "able" to make likely decent games for a number of years now. Code and 3D I could potentially have covered. That's no longer what scares me.

Having a good and semi unique idea, is a rare. If I had a great game mechanic idea, the rest would be trivial.

Say you do get a good game loop together that you feel will be successful. You will also now need to loop in art teams for artistic direction, music, character design, etc. A good game loop isnt enough, it needs to be presented in an equally interesting and unique way.

Finally, there is the risk. There is a massive time investment in making games, and you are catering to an audience that is not only accustomed to pirating but finds it morally righteous to steal your work. This is why app developers prefer to make iOS apps. The customers are accustomed to paying and have little interest in pirating.

post-launch and even before that, your job becomes paying and convincing streamers to play your game constantly in the HOPE people start to notice it.

All of this stress and work to hopefully just make an ok amount of money. I have so many excellent games in my steam library by indie devs that gave up after one or two very successful games. And I doubt it's because everything was going so well.
by che_shr_cat | 2025-08-24 16:50:31+00:00
I'm the author of this blog. That's correct, the texts are generated and then validated manually by me.

I also do manual reviews (https://gonzoml.substack.com/), but there are many more papers for which I don't have time to write a review. So I created a multi-agentic system to help me, and I'm constantly iterating to improve it. And I like the result. It was also validated by the paper authors a couple of times, they agree the reviews are correct. So, if you see something is definitely wrong, please let me know.

Regarding myself, I became at least x10 more productive in reading papers and understanding what's happening. Hope, it will also help some of you.
by bwestergard | 2025-08-24 16:51:04+00:00
There are always two major results from any software development process: a change in the code and a change in cognition for the people who wrote the code (whether they did so directly or with an LLM).

Python and Typescript are elaborate formal languages that emerged from a lengthy process of development involving thousands of people around the world over many years. They are non-trivially different, and it's neat that we can port a library from one to the other quasi-automatically.

The difficulty, from an economic perspective, is that the "agent" workflow dramatically alters the cognitive demands during the initial development process. It is plain to see that the developers who prompted an LLM to generate this library will not have the same familiarity with the resulting code that they would have had they written it directly.

For some economic purposes, this altering of cognitive effort, and the dramatic diminution of its duration, probably doesn't matter.

But my hunch is that most of the economic value of code is contingent on there being a set of human beings familiar with the code in a manner that requires writing having written it directly.

Denial of this basic reality was an economic problem even before LLMs: how often did churn in a development team result in a codebase that no one could maintain, undermining the long-term prospects of a firm?
by ViewTrick1002 | 2025-08-24 16:51:42+00:00
> That means it’s fully within China’s purchasing power parity advantage sphere, where everything costs 40% less than in the west. That means zero tariffs.

Something like $70-80 per MWH.

https://medium.com/the-future-is-electric/grid-storage-at-66...

Archive: https://archive.is/UXcdL
by toast0 | 2025-08-24 16:51:50+00:00
I mean; looks like someone volunteered to make the product work on low spec machines. That's needed.

I've been on teams where corporate hardware is all max spec, 4-5 years ahead of common user hardware, provided phones are all flagships replaced every two years. The product works great for corporate users, but not for users with earthly budgets. And they wonder how competitors swallow market in low income countries.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-24 16:52:01+00:00
>Having a conceptual understanding means that you always provide the same answer to a conceptually equivalent question. Producing the wrong answer when a question is rephrased is indicative of rote memorization.

False. I can lie right? I can shift. I don't need to be consistent. And I don't need to consistently understand something. I can understand something right now and suddenly not understand later. This FITS the definition of understanding a concept.

But If I gave an answer that has such a low probability of being correct, and the answer is correct, then the answer arrived at by random chance. If the answer wasn't arrived at by random chance it must be reasoning AND understanding.

The logic is inescapable.
by the__alchemist | 2025-08-24 16:52:21+00:00
FYI, going from some Radeon I had from 6 years ago to a 9950x made a huge impact on game frame rate: choppy to smoother-than-i-can-percieve. And much faster compile times, and code execution if using thread pools. But, I think it was a 3 series Radeon, not 5. Totally worth it compared to say, GPU costs
by jimbob45 | 2025-08-24 16:52:40+00:00
What did it take? A dedication to multiculturalism and diversity. Pittsburgh would have died without embracing the global economy and attracting doctors, professors, students, entertainers, and athletes from all over the world to visit, live, and grow a family.

Just cater to the rich folks! That’s the same playbook every city in world is running right now to rampant failure. Rich people don’t bring prosperity. Prosperity brings the rich. Building prosperity is a difficult ordeal that takes time, sacrifice, a lot of money, and a culture of safety and community.
by margalabargala | 2025-08-24 16:52:57+00:00
> Lying about a laptop being stolen is black and white. I'm not sure how you are trying to say that is ambiguous.

I've been at startups where there's sometimes late night food served.

I've never been at a startup where there was an epidemic about lying about stolen hardware.

Staying just late enough to order dinner on the company, and theft by the employee of computer hardware plus lying about it, are not in the same category and do not happen with equal frequency. I cannot believe the parent comment presented these as the same, and is being taken seriously.