MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by weiliddat | 2025-08-31 13:41:32+00:00
Yes, and I hope I made a point that it's not the right approach always.

> If you've internalized the mental models of the project into your long-term memory, you won't experience a high cognitive load ... If you keep the cognitive load low, people can contribute to your codebase within the first few hours of joining your company.

Yes, if you really are having new joiners often, and you expect them to be onboarded quickly. That happens for a specific segment of the software industry, not generally.

If you're working with the same people all the time, and it's the nth time someone made a mistake in a huge frontend JS codebase (pre-Angular/React) trying to wrangle with plain events and DOM state, a new framework (like React and co) that abstracts away events and DOM state management was perhaps the right choice.

This way of thinking and abstraction is so popular now that it's taken almost for granted by people who started learning programming for the web recently. For these people, using plain JS might be higher cognitive load, so

> Lots of cool architectures, fancy libraries and trendy technologies were used. In other words, the author had created a high cognitive load for us.

that's not a universal statement.

Do I personally believe there are better levels of abstraction, and simpler frameworks than React, Express, Django, Spring, Laravel, etc.? Yes, but if the developers you are hiring/teaching/working with are familiar with those, and it's working for them, then maybe that is the right choice to use.

The main statement I agree with in the article (apart from the goal of reducing cognitive load) comes much later, in

> So, why pay the price of high cognitive load for such a layered architecture, if it doesn't pay off in the future? Plus, in most cases, that future of replacing some core component never happens.

where the main problem is having the wrong reasons or wrong choice of architecture. It's not necessarily that abstraction/architecture is bad. I feel like the message of "you should keep it simple" is overemphasized in the rest of the article. Maybe that's in response to overengineering in the industry or the author's experience.
by coliveira | 2025-08-31 13:42:01+00:00
Yes, Trump is destroying it. But this order was crumbling already. The reason is that the "smart" people from the past believed they could always count on being the middlemen of the world. They believed that other countries would always be happy to send their best people and products to the US so that American companies would trade their branded versions around the world for a high markup. The reality is that other countries slowly understood that they had everything they needed to start trading among themselves without the need of a middleman. And once this realization sinks in it is difficult to go back to the status quo of depending on a single country.
by diggan | 2025-08-31 13:43:28+00:00
Yeah, I think four of the founders/initial employees were ex-Ableton people, it was a thing that was highlighted when Bitwig first launched (around 2014 maybe?), together with that they were also Berlin-based (because that matters...) and it had Linux support from day one :)

I'm not finding any first-hand sources about it, but remember that most articles at the time mentioned it one way or another.
by righthand | 2025-08-31 13:43:42+00:00
Yeah but you don’t get to make the calls. Linus does and your “well kernel daddy does it too” and “actually I’m doing it better than my critics understand” don’t play well with the kernel daddy (or really any bdfl). Do you not see your comment as dismissive?

All your comments are dismissive of the criticisms so far and you’re shrugging your shoulders as to why.

It’s great you’re able to reason and defend yourself but Linux as a whole is larger than you and refusing to submit to their ways will make technology move no where.
by lazide | 2025-08-31 13:44:29+00:00
Same with everyone who has a drivers license. Still, it would be a bit of a shock if when you’d normally pull it out at a traffic stop, the cop instead waves it off and says ‘No need Bob, we already know you were just heading home. Go slower next time eh?’.

Brave new world, etc? Certainly can’t be a Jason Bourne in this situation!
by sequin | 2025-08-31 13:44:53+00:00
I don't get this. I have no education, no resume, no Linkedin and I've never applied for a job in my life. Employers/recruiters reach out to me, and I usually turn them down. I'm not humblebragging, I'm not better at my job than most people. What seemed to have worked for me was doing tons of FOSS work (unpaid, in my spare time). People started noticing me and it naturally picked up from there. I'd wager that actual, observable software engineering (FOSS) is simply a closer proxy for job performance than accreditation and past experience.
by mtndew4brkfst | 2025-08-31 13:44:53+00:00
Very very much so. The project also includes separate binary releases with this feature compiled out altogether, but I'd much rather this sort of feature was never ideated or acted upon in this first place.

Generally speaking I don't want a terminal multiplexer to be doing network IO of any sort, so I also didn't love it when they shipped "load WASM plugins from a non-checksummed arbitrary URL via your config file" in a previous release.
by foldr | 2025-08-31 13:45:13+00:00
Although I think JC is right in this case, I'm not convinced that he had any kind of insight that wouldn't have already been obvious to the OS experts hired on the team. Writing a new OS is going to be really difficult? No shit!

I guess if he'd been on the Apollo program he'd be the guy telling all the experts that landing humans safely on the moon was going to be quite hard. Thanks John. We'll bear that in mind.
by diggan | 2025-08-31 13:46:09+00:00
> Stem separation in Logic is an insanely useful feature.

For some, and for others not. DAWs are so huge, feature-packed and try to cater to so many use cases, that at one point you have to say no to something.

While stem separation is useful for many things, I've only "missed" it for DJ duties, and then I'm not using a DAW anyways but whatever DJ OS/software the controller needs/has, so I'd probably say I'm another user who don't care about my DAW having stem separation or not. I don't think I've felt like I needed that even once for production purposes.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-31 13:47:53+00:00
They pivoted into that when Mastodon blew up in Japan, German authorities got involved, and its benevolent dictator Eugen Rochko felt need to distance himself from Japanese for his own safety. German police, especially parts of its federal counter-terrorism swat units(?) seem to have odd fixations with anime and take great offense with those contents for some reason.

They can roll that back, or push moderation angle more, but they won't be able to do so without also come forward with the fact that East Asia is producing substantially more amount overall and on average higher quality content incompatible with Western moderation. Those realities won't be popular anyway.
by nullc | 2025-08-31 13:48:04+00:00
> minimum avoid pissing everyone else off

Which also, at times, means appeasing people even when you are confident that they are wrong because you need their cooperation in the future. In a large complicated system, being able to work together is often more important to the system's reliability, performance, etc. than being as right as possible.

Plus even when you're confident you are in the right you might still be in the wrong. After all, the people you are disagreeing with are also superbly competent and they believe they're in the right just as you do. There can be hills worth dying on, but they ought to be very rare.
by swat535 | 2025-08-31 13:48:18+00:00
"Suicide in an acceptable manner" sounds as like an oxymoron.

Why would you care that it's "acceptable" by society which you will no longer take part of ? If your concern is pain, then perhaps that is your mind telling you NOT to end your life and seek therapy instead.

Assisted suicide only makes sense in situations where the person is in extreme chronic pain and no palliative care or treatment can be provided, which is rather rare.

We should not be encouraging or celebrating suicide, it takes away innocent lives, especially younger ones. If you ask the survivors, many of them are glad they didn't go through with it.
by eterm | 2025-08-31 13:48:26+00:00
What do you mean exactly by "point in time event"?

As I understand it, a metric is information at a point in time.

A span however has a start timestamp and end timestamp, and is about a single operation that happens across that time.

https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/metrics/

vs

https://opentelemetry.io/docs/specs/otel/trace/api/#span
by loeg | 2025-08-31 13:48:46+00:00
Agner's instruction manual says "A LOCK prefix typically costs more than a hundred clock cycles," which might be dated but is directionally correct. (The atomic version is LOCK ADD.)

If you go to the CPU-specific tables, LOCK ADD is like 10-50 (Zen 3: 8, Zen 2: 20, Bulldozer: 55, lol) cycles latency vs the expected 1 cycle for regular ADD. And about 10 cycles on Intel CPUs.

So it can be starkly slower on some older AMD platforms, and merely ~10x slower on modern x86 platforms.
by stavros | 2025-08-31 13:49:11+00:00
I've come to view LLMs as a consulting firm where, for each request, I have a 50% chance of getting either an expert or an intern writing my code, and there's no way to tell which.

Sometimes I accept this, and I vibe-code, when I don't care about the result. When I do care about the result, I have to read every line myself. Since reading code is harder than writing it, this takes longer, but LLMs have made me too lazy to write code now, so that's probably the only alternative that works.

I have to say, though, the best thing I've tried is Cursor's autocomplete, which writes 3-4 lines for you. That way, I can easily verify that the code does what I want, while still reaping the benefit of not having to look up all the APIs and function signatures.
by 1718627440 | 2025-08-31 13:49:17+00:00
> he system of chapter-and-verse left scripture ‘so chop’d and minc’d […] so broken and divided’

I don't get the problem. You never hear them, and when you read them yourself, you also just ignore them. When your starting at a chapter, just read the last few verses of the previous to get the context.
by lemoncookiechip | 2025-08-31 13:49:47+00:00
I find it a tough sell to add another 20 years to life expectancy, considering that by the time you reach 70, most people are already in decline (some worse than others), and the drop from 70 to 80 tends to be steep for many. Those who make it past 80 into their 90s or even 100s often aren’t living particularly fulfilling lives, if you can even call it living at that point.

Losing your vision, your hearing, your mobility, and worst of all, your mind, doesn’t sound very appealing to me.

So unless we find a way to both live longer and to decliner slower, I just don't see the point for the majority of people who will unfortunately live lonely worse lives.
by twp | 2025-08-31 13:50:17+00:00
> I know my way around emacs. vimdiff is a foreign country.

You don't have to use vimdiff. You can use any merge tool you want. See https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/tools/merge/.

> Often my changes are speculative or experimental. So I checkout, edit, apply and only then discover I’ve messed up. Or I can edit in place. Voila vimdiff!

> What’s the better way?

There are lots of options. See https://www.chezmoi.io/user-guide/frequently-asked-questions....

Personally, I tend to use `chezmoi edit` and then use git in my source directory to `git add -p . && git commit` the changes I want to keep and `git checkout` to discard the changes I don't want.
by bingbing123 | 2025-08-31 13:51:37+00:00
I tested a simple workflow: • Generate an image with NanoBanana. • Feed it into Veo3 as the first frame.

The outcome is impressive: • Very high consistency between still and video. • Smooth cinematic motion, not the usual jitter. • Feels like the image just… starts moving.

Fast. Cheap. Surprisingly good. Curious if others are exploring image → video chains like this?
by vbezhenar | 2025-08-31 13:52:12+00:00
> We can avoid stack overflow by avoiding unbounded recursion.

Only if you control the entire ecosystem, from application to every library you're ever going to use. And will not work for library code anyway.

> In user-space, memory overcommit means that we will almost or literally never see an out of memory error.

Have you ever deployed an application to production? Where it runs in the container, with memory limits. Or just good old ulimit. Or any language with VM or GC which provides explicit knobs to limit heap size (and these knobs are actually used by deployers).

> This is a terrible argument for treating all code as potentially failing with any possible error condition.

This is reality. Some programs can ignore it, hand-waving possibilities out, expecting that it won't happen and it's not your problem. That's one approach, I guess.
by gazpacho | 2025-08-31 13:52:14+00:00
I work for Pydantic. We make Logfire, a commercial OTEL backend. But we’ve made wrappers around the OTEL SDKs in various languages that simplify configuration and usage. They can be used with any OTEL compatible backend (although we’d love if you try our SaaS offering): - JavaScript / Typescript: https://github.com/pydantic/logfire-js - Rust: https://github.com/pydantic/logfire-rust - Python: https://github.com/pydantic/logfire
by baranul | 2025-08-31 13:53:11+00:00
My comment was specific, backed up by evidence and statements from Golang developers, not a cookie cutter response. HN is arguably best served by fair and balanced views.

Speaking of fairness, Golang and other languages have lots of bugs and issues too. Furthermore, what you stated did not align with the overall sentiment expressed by the author of the article. He liked Vlang.

> "I like V a lot. The abstraction over the syntax is so nice that made me enjoy writing the syntax as a whole. It makes me wish that Go could do more with what they have, but you and I know that Go would never." -- Kris Tun
Show HN: 70 days, 800 stars. If AI bugs are not random but math inevitable?
by tgrrr9111 | 2025-08-31 13:53:13+00:00
hi all. i’ve been shipping a small open project that tries to answer that question with evidence, not vibes. in 70 days it reached \~800 stars. the core claim is simple:

many AI failures are not noise. they repeat because the geometry and ordering underneath are stable. if so, we should be able to name each failure mode, set acceptance targets, and stop shipping the same bug twice.

### what it is

* a compact Problem Map of 16 reproducible failure modes in RAG and agents. * each item has a minimal fix and measurable gates. examples:

* Semantic ≠ Embedding: metric and normalization mismatch. accept if coverage of target section ≥ 0.70 and deltaS(question, retrieved) ≤ 0.45 across 3 paraphrases. * Logic Collapse & Recovery: synthesis runs on thin evidence. require a bridge step before answering. * Memory Breaks Across Sessions: new chat loses context. use metadata trace then reattach. * Bootstrap Ordering / Pre-deploy Collapse: shipped an empty or mixed index. block deploy until ingest counts and retrieval smoke tests pass.

* MIT licensed. no SDK, no telemetry, no infra change.

### why i believe this is true

* repeated A/B/C runs across mainstream models show the same patterns returning. * small changes in metric, normalization, or chunk contract flip outcomes in a predictable way. * when you enforce simple gates, detours drop and chains stabilize across paraphrases.

### quick falsification you can run

1. pick any non-toy question where your system struggles. 2. run it three ways: retriever only, retriever+rerank, and with a bridge step that refuses to answer on thin evidence. 3. measure: coverage of the target span, deltaS(question, retrieved), citations per atomic claim, answer stability across 3 paraphrases. 4. if coverage is low and only looks good after rerank, you are likely in Semantic ≠ Embedding. if coverage is ok but prose still drifts, it is Logic Collapse. if a fresh chat forgets prior context, it is Memory Breaks. these are all predictable, not random.

### what i’m asking from HN

* try to break it. if you have a counterexample where the gates do not stabilize the chain, i want to see it. * if you maintain a vector store, agent framework, or eval suite, tell me where this framing fails in the real world. * if the map helps you ship fewer regressions, say which item saved you time so we can harden that fix.

happy to answer pointed questions. if this is wrong, i’d like to know exactly where the math breaks. if it is roughly right, maybe we can stop treating these bugs as mysterious and start treating them like unit failures with thresholds.
by gruez | 2025-08-31 13:53:45+00:00
>No, this will not effectively help to reduce the fingerprint of your Browser.

Ironically many of your fingerprinting tweaks in your article make your more fingerprintable, because disabling random web APIs makes you stick out like a sore thumb (think https://xkcd.com/1105/). Besides, most of the configs you're modifying for anti-fingerprinting purposes are already covered by RFP.

>A LOT more tracking services are integrated into the Firefox browser in various places (like New Tab page, Sync, Pocket, Shavar, Google Safebrowsing, OSCP, etc pp).

Can you elaborate on how these services are "tracking"? Except for maybe safebrowsing, and OSCP, none of these services actually send information on what sites you visit. Unless you mean "tracking" to mean "make connections to the internet".
by xyzzy_plugh | 2025-08-31 13:54:01+00:00
I remain wholly unconvinced that side loading and user safety are even related at scale. They are orthogonal.

There are plenty of apps available through the Play store that are not safe. Even if side loading requires chain-of-trust, malicious behavior will remain rampant. I'll concede that it restricts the ease with which one can redistribute malware but by how much? It doesn't seem significant to me compared to the hassle for end users/developers.

It all seems so contrived. The only rational explanation to all of this is backpedaling into a closed garden.
by koverstreet | 2025-08-31 13:54:17+00:00
Again: the elephant in the room is that a lot of bcachefs users are using it explicitly because they have lost a lot of data on btrfs, and they've found it to be more trustworthy.

This puts us all in a shitty situation. I want the experimental label to come off at the right time - when every critical bug is fixed and it's as trustworthy as I can reasonably make it, when I know according to the data I have that everyone is going to have a good experience - but I have real users who need this thing and need to be supported.

There is _no reason_ to interpret the experimental label in the way that you're saying, you're advocating that reliability for the end user be deprioritized versus every other filesystem.

But deprioritizing reliability is what got us into this mess.
by nsaintt | 2025-08-31 13:55:09+00:00
Today I opened our analytics and noticed something unusual. FYI, we are building a social network for entrepreneurs where you buy business advice to avoid mistakes, it's called HustleAdvisor.

I saw that someone visited our site through ChatGPT. It was not me or anyone from the team, because the visit came from a country where none of us live.

That means ChatGPT itself recommended our project to a real person.

Now I have so many questions. How did this happen? What exactly did the person ask? How did ChatGPT describe us?

link for the HustleAdvisor waitlist: https://hustle-advisor.com
by ApeWithCompiler | 2025-08-31 13:55:22+00:00
I had a similar experience with Hugo and the PaperMod theme. Such a large tool with all the dependencies to then just fail because of version mismatches with the theme.

In the end I sat down two weeks and wrote my own generator in python for my blog. Even wrote my own markdown parser for it. It's a sub optimal implementation for sure, but at least it's all my faults and I may fix them.
by xtiansimon | 2025-08-31 13:55:31+00:00
Interesting. I liked the explanations in the accepted answer. This rule especially,“Never repeat in the clear the identical text of a message once sent in cryptographic form, or repeat in cryptographic form the text of a message once sent in the clear.”

As a child I learned about codes from a library book. Fascinated with one-time pads, I convinced a friend to try a correspondence. We exchanged a few messages, and then got bored, because the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

Which makes me wonder about people who work in secrets. Encrypted communications seem opposite of scientific communications. Secrets peeps seem prolly aligned to politics.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-31 13:56:01+00:00
If this is true (and I don't think it is), then we need a fundamental, radical overthrowing of the social order, and a lot of work put into constructing a new one. Any system where putting people to death is more "practical" than giving them fulfilling lives must be destroyed, and replaced. (It may be more effective to destroy and replace the system gradually – "reform" – since revolutions tend to have too many moving parts for Blanquists to keep track of, the situation has to be pretty bad before a popular revolution becomes likely, and the world's so interconnected now that foreign powers will take advantage of the malleability of a society undergoing revolution, likely to the detriment of the locals.)
by notahacker | 2025-08-31 13:56:45+00:00
Seems more like billionaires spending money on trying to live forever has an edgy image in non-billionaire cycles. Sure, maybe Gates and Buffet really aren't that interested in living forever, but the likes of Thiel and Musk aren't exactly noted for techno-pessimism or caring whether the average normie thinks they and some of their investments are creepy, and they absolutely have the dealflow and the connections to evaluate any promising life extension ideas. If they're still spending more on stuff like 140 characters, maybe the low hanging fruit just aren't that low
by cainxinth | 2025-08-31 13:56:49+00:00
I have a friend who is a music supervisor. Navigating the web of rights and relationships necessary to license music is as much art as science. Sometimes it’s as straightforward as you describe (minus the convenient online platform), but from his telling, it more often involves a lot of begging, pleading, and favor trading.

Also, podcasters rarely pay for licensed music. There is a ton of high quality royalty free “sound alikes” these days.
by aurareturn | 2025-08-31 13:57:03+00:00
The truth is that China, while making great strides, is still about as rich as Thailand on average. They need decades are very strong economic growth to even match the US, let alone exceed it.

Anyone who has ever been to China and Thailand knows China is far wealthier. Wealth isn't just GDP. It's in infrastructure, cleanliness, tech, crime, etc. A large part of Thailand's wealth is tied to tourism and with that comes sex pats. Selling out your citizens to serve foreigners. Allowing the country to become the capital of drugs and sex in Asia. That's not wealth.

Cheap healthcare in China is just that - cheap. I've been to Chinese hospitals. I've seen doctors prescribe antibiotics for viral infections. I've seen them recommend "hot water" as a cure.

You can get the same treatment in Thailand. China leading the world in some medical areas.

Maybe you misunderstood? Clearly Shanghai is nicer than Bangkok, but China is not 1.4B people living in Shanghai, you need to include the people living on a few dollars per days in rural Chinese areas.

I already acknowledged this. I don't think it needs to be said that Shanghai and Shenzhen is not all of China. Yet, these cities are the bellweathers. T2 Chinese cities are far better than Bangkok already.