MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by st-keller | 2025-08-22 07:18:36+00:00
„This renders the meaning of significance-testing unclear; it is calculating precisely the odds of the data under scenarios known a priori to be false.“

I cannot see the problem in that. To get to meaningful results we often calculate with simplyfied models - which are known to be false in a strict sense. We use Newtons laws - we analyze electric networks based on simplifications - a bank-year used to be 360 days! Works well.

What did i miss?
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-08-22 07:19:08+00:00
Almost the same here. Could read everything fluently before school, or even kindergarden, which I've skipped, because 'too playful'.

Whatever, I didn't learn it by reading cursive, but reading printed stuff. So that never really made sense to me, though depending on who is writing, it can look nice.

So I do a few fast strokes of lines and/or curves or dots to form a letter, and hop to the next. I wasn't slower than the cursive writers. Which works better with ball pens, than fountain pens, btw. Cursive is a fountain pen thing, IMO.

But my writing doesn't look bad at all. Just block letters leaning slightly to the right. I can even do "DIN-Schrift" like in technical drawings freehanded, slower though.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-22 07:20:09+00:00
Such a good read.

I am patient to wait for the benchmarks so take your time ,but I honestly love how the author doesn't care about benchmarks right now and wanted to clean the code first. Its kinda impressive that there are people who have such line of thinking in this world where benchmarks gets maxxed and whole project's sole existence is to satisfy benchmarks.

Really a breath of fresh air and honestly I admire the author so much for this. It was such a good read, loved it a lot thank you. Didn't know ktls existed or Io_uring could be used in such a way.
by chao- | 2025-08-22 07:21:13+00:00
If there is a Micro Center near you, they have been reliable.

I recently had to replace an entire array of SATA SSDs with models that could support DRAT/DZAT*. Their Samsung 2.5" SATA SSDs came with the original Samsung stickers sealing them, and they scanned each one to attribute it to my purchase. I'm sure it as much to protect them as me, i.e. that if I returned a drive, I gave them back the drive with the exact Device ID that originally came in that package. Nonetheless it was reassuring for me as well.

*For anyone who uses SATA drives attached to an SAS HBA, please check that your SATA drives support DRAT and DZAT. Unbeknownst to you, your drives may be failing to TRIM when connected through your HBA!
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-22 07:21:28+00:00
> Get some sort of job in the company, do something illegal, threaten your manager with going to the feds, since at this point they are criminally liable for your act.

I guess I left out a key word in my conclusion there: "You are presumptively liable." The point is to shift the burden of proof. If it can be proven that someone else willfully did the violation (especially in order to screw you), that might be a defense. But the point is that the default assumption should be that greater responsibility/authority equals greater liability, and the burden should be on those with that responsibility/authority to prove that they are not liable.

> But i still think morally its important that we punish people for things they actually did (or failed to do), not just by mere association.

But that's it exactly. What they failed to do was ensure that bad things didn't happen while they were in charge.

> Although perhaps something like an enhanced version of how supervisory responsibility in war crimes works would make sense - basically the way that works is if you are aware or ought to have been aware that someone under you is commiting a crime, and you don't investigate/take measures to punish/take measures to stop them, you are on the hook for the crime.

Yes, something like that. The key phrase being "or ought to have been".
by mrheosuper | 2025-08-22 07:21:50+00:00
>We’ve seen four different lengths so far:

Number of UTF-8 code units (17 in this case) Number of UTF-16 code units (7 in this case) Number of UTF-32 code units or Unicode scalar values (5 in this case) Number of extended grapheme clusters (1 in this case)

We would not have this problem if we all agree to return number of bytes instead.

Edit: My mistake. There would still be inconsistency between different encoding. My point is, if we all decided to report number of bytes that string used instead number of printable characters, we would not have the inconsistency between languages.
by themafia | 2025-08-22 07:22:03+00:00
> “because we think electric scooters are the most important vehicle innovation of this century.”

Perhaps.. if you've never experienced urban property theft. Which is what prevents me from buying an electric bicycle. Similarly the designers of these products seem to incorporate no anti theft technology into any of their products.

A scooter that goes blisteringly fast? Hardly an innovation on it's own.
by kstenerud | 2025-08-22 07:22:18+00:00
I just had Claude Sonnet 4 build this for me: https://github.com/kstenerud/orb-serde

Using the following prompt:

Write a rust serde implementation for the ORB binary data format. Here is the background information you need: * The ORB reference material is here: https://github.com/kstenerud/orb/blob/main/orb.md * The formal grammar dscribing ORB is here: https://github.com/kstenerud/orb/blob/main/orb.dogma * The formal grammar used to describe ORB is called Dogma. * Dogma reference material is here: https://github.com/kstenerud/dogma/blob/master/v1/dogma_v1.0.md * The end of the Dogma description document has a section called "Dogma described as Dogma", which contains the formal grammar describing Dogma. Other important things to remember: * ORB is an extension of BONJSON, so it must also implement all of BONJSON. * The BONJSON reference material is here: https://github.com/kstenerud/bonjson/blob/main/bonjson.md * The formal grammar desribing BONJSON is here: https://github.com/kstenerud/bonjson/blob/main/bonjson.dogma

Is it perfect? Nope, but it's 90% of the way there. It would have taken me all day to build all of these ceremonious bits, and Claude did it in 10 minutes. Now I can concentrate on the important parts.
by p0w3n3d | 2025-08-22 07:23:20+00:00
I miss the times when companies were building their brands on trust and honor. I remember calling HP support because I bought a monitor that was probably lying in a warehouse somewhere, and it had some "stain" on the screen. It still had 9 of 36 months of warranty. HP sent a fedex WITH the new monitor and they replaced the old one. Best support ever!
by rane | 2025-08-22 07:23:48+00:00
Using AI to generate code in a PR does not necessarily mean however that the user has not taken time to understand the changes and is not willing to learn. There are AI users who generate whole files without understanding the contents, and then there are AI users who generate the exact same files but have known in advance what they want, and merely use AI as a tool to save typing.

The intention here seems to be to filter out low quality submissions for which the only purpose is to only pimp Github resume for having contributions in highly starred repo. Not sure if the people doing that will be disclosing use of AI anyway.
by herewulf | 2025-08-22 07:25:06+00:00
The 21st century way might be some combination of watchexec[1] and just[2] but you can't assume the availability of these tools.

You can almost assume the availability of make but a lot of distros (hello, Ubuntu) omit basic build tools.

Admittedly I used an LLM recently to write me a Makefile because my brain doesn't have the capacity to remember all make's idiosyncrasies every few years that I touch a Makefile. Once the file is done, it's done, and it was easy to pare down from the verbosity that the LLM coughed up.

I also wanted targets for intermediate build files (long story) so that would have required excessive poring over the man page.

[1]: https://github.com/kurtbuilds/checkexec [2]: https://github.com/casey/just
by renewiltord | 2025-08-22 07:25:20+00:00
The whole debate is retarded and only real because we try to shut down our power plants so we can’t have large scale desalination. When I was younger I hoped that all these degrowthers would just age out. But it turns out young people keep filling in the ranks.

The interesting thing is watching as they all complain about the consequences of stifling growth without realizing that’s what’s happening.

“I don’t want any more housing here. It’s too expensive”

Totally retarded but fortunately I’ve figured out my way around this stuff.
by raymond_goo | 2025-08-22 07:25:24+00:00
Run Gemma3 270M in your browser. 100% privacy. Needs WebGPU (and probably Chrome)

https://rhulha.github.io/Gemma3-270m-WebGPU/

Source code: https://github.com/rhulha/Gemma3-270m-WebGPU
by dolebirchwood | 2025-08-22 07:25:31+00:00
I do frontend work (React/TypeScript). I barely write my own code anymore, aside from CSS (the LLMs have no aesthetic sensibilities). Just prompting with Gemini 2.5 Pro. Sometimes Sonnet 4.

I don't know what to tell you. I just talk to the thing in plain but very specific English and it generally does what I want. Sometimes it will do stupid things, but then I either steer it back in the direction I want or just do it myself if I have to.
by jinminghu | 2025-08-22 07:26:53+00:00
I wrote a C++ core to speed up a Python text deduplication script for a large ML dataset. My first "optimized" version was only 10x faster and, worse, produced incorrect results. I spent a full day chasing down a series of nasty bugs that pushed me to my limits. The journey involved fighting classic concurrency problems (lock contention), subtle SIMD instruction bugs (AVX2), memory safety hell (std::string_view dangling pointers), and finally, a fundamental conflict between byte-stream algorithms and Unicode (CDC splitting UTF-8 characters). I documented the entire process, from each bug's diagnosis to its solution, and the lessons I learned about high-performance computing along the way. The final version is 50-100x faster than the original Python script and is now correct. Thought this "war story" might be useful for others working on performance-critical C++/Python projects. The full write-up is linked.
by jeffrallen | 2025-08-22 07:27:52+00:00
So the nice thing about open source is you get to make your own rules. But then you need to accept the consequences.

For example, the GNU project has certain norms, and those dissuade a lot of people from contributing (e.g. I prefer working on projects with simpler, non-viral licenses). The limited volunteer labor pool is allocated according to people's interests towards other projects, and maybe GNU projects suffer for less attention on them.
by close04 | 2025-08-22 07:29:16+00:00
> the company’s engineers left Formula 1 to work on scooters “because we think electric scooters are the most important vehicle innovation of this century.”

Oh, they left F1 to develop another exciting, high performance vehicle that will sell in similar numbers to an F1 car.

> It reportedly produces over 24,000 watts of juice with a high-power dual motor controller setup developed with partner Rage Mechanics, which is a French company making all kinds of high-performance electric microvehicles.

So they actually left F1 to resell a downsized version of someone else's designs (Rage Mechanics developed a 50kW version) with extra springiness in the steering to make it less twitchy at higher speeds.
by ChiefNotAClue | 2025-08-22 07:30:22+00:00
For what it's worth, been buying from Amazon for the past 15 years or so, and not once received a counterfeit product. Granted, I still don't like they they mix up their inventory, but I think it's a smaller problem than people make it to be. Most people are buying household supplies off of Amazon; that's not really a category that gets affected by counterfeits.
by herewulf | 2025-08-22 07:30:23+00:00
I recommend trying Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup also. The devs are constantly refining the game to increase the fun factor and aren't afraid of removing decades old features to do it. E.g.: In more recent versions there is no food hence you cannot starve to death (a questionable game mechanic in a type of game lacking any real "economy").

https://crawl.develz.org
by PeterStuer | 2025-08-22 07:30:50+00:00
It is from the banks that leveraged their KYC but was adopted very broadly by gov and many other id required or linked services. AFAIK it does not need a computer to activate besides your phone and one of those bank issued 2FA challange card readers.

For CSAM, also AFAIK, first 'activation' includes a visit to your local municipality to verify your identity. Unless you go via itsme, as it is and authorized CSAM key holder.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-22 07:31:47+00:00
I tried to comment on this just now but I was blocked as the thread has been limited to collaborators, their word not mine, but wow.

So I guess I'll put it here assuming someone reads.

Given the various comments people have about the dependencies on XSLT that various standards, applications and workflows have. I believe that the default display of XML documents in Chrome, Firefox, and I suppose Edge is handled by an XSLT.

It used to be that MSXML shipped with an XSLT (and even earlier a wd-xsl document) as a resource that was used to style any XML document for display if the XML document did not have an associated stylesheet when you opened it in IE or other views that used IE for rendering.

I believe this same thing is done by the browsers mentioned, or at least it used to be

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9463402/default-xml-styl...

which is why when you open an XML document without styling information in those documents it is represented as a tree view with expandable collapsible nodes.

I suppose they will just implement a default rendering for XML using some other code rather than running an XSLT upon it, but this applies as well as all these edge cases of handling RSS feeds etc.

Safari does not have a stylesheet rendering for unstyled XML which is why it just shows the text nodes of the document and nothing else.
by BrenBarn | 2025-08-22 07:32:04+00:00
I could be persuaded it's worth having a lower standard of liability for "sibling" orgs within a company, so that if, e.g., the billing department does something shady then the HR department doesn't necessarily bear liability for that (but execs above both still would).

But I'm kind of okay with shareholders being liable to a certain extent, as long as their liability is proportional to their benefit. Someone who had a few shares in their 401k and made a couple thousand dollars, okay, no big deal. But the prospect of having gains clawed back could make shareholders more vigilant in ensuring the company is fully aboveboard. It doesn't make sense for me to someone to rake in, say, $50 million in unrealized gains and then say "oh, I had no idea, oh well, I'll just enjoy my $50 million". It's sort of like how if a drug kingpin gets arrested, it may well be that assets of their family members are seized as ill-gotten gains.
by rane | 2025-08-22 07:33:04+00:00
Why would these people disclose their use of AI? These are not responsible and thoughful users of AI. The slop producers won't disclose, and the responsible users who produce high quality PRs with AI will get the "AI slop" label. At this point, why even disclose if the AI-assisted high-quality PR is indistinguishable from having been manually written (which it should be)? No point.
by ares623 | 2025-08-22 07:33:19+00:00
To clarify on the “learn and improve” part, I mean I get it in the context of a human doing it. When a person learns, that lesson sticks so errors and retries are valuable.

For LLMs none of it sticks. You keep “teaching” it and the next time it forgets everything.

So again you keep trying until you get the results you want, which you need to know ahead of time.
by 9dev | 2025-08-22 07:33:28+00:00
There is no "knowing" in LLMs, and it doesn’t matter for the proposed solution either. Detecting a pattern that is unusual by the certainty of having seen something previously does not require understanding of the pattern itself, if the only required action is reporting the event.

In simple terms: The AI doesn’t need to say, "something unusual is happening because I saw walking trees and trees usually cannot walk", but merely "something unusual is happening because what I saw was unusual, care to take a look?"
by yonatan8070 | 2025-08-22 07:33:48+00:00
I recently got a new 4TB Seagate drive from the biggest computer/electronics retailers here, it was shipped in the worst way I've ever seen a hard drive shipped. An anti-static bag, inside of one of those slightly padded envelopes you get when you order an Arduino from AliExpress. Naturally, it had a big dent on one of the corners, and it started clicking the moment I plugged it in.

It was replaced with a working unit iunder warranty, but still a rather unfortunate buying experience.
by DavidPiper | 2025-08-22 07:36:38+00:00
I think that string length is one of those things that people (including me) don't realise they never actually want. In a production system, I have never actually wanted string length. I have wanted:

- Number of bytes this will be stored as in the DB

- Number of monospaced font character blocks this string will take up on the screen

- Number of bytes that are actually being stored in memory

"String length" is just a proxy for something else, and whenever I'm thinking shallowly enough to want it (small scripts, mostly-ASCII, mostly-English, mostly-obvious failure modes, etc) I like grapheme cluster being the sensible default thing that people probably expect, on average.
by mdp2021 | 2025-08-22 07:38:00+00:00
> pretty common

The interpretation of "common" will vary:

> [In recent decades, a]n average of seven human plague cases are reported each year in the United States

> The last urban plague epidemic in the United States occurred in Los Angeles from 1924 through 1925

https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps-statistics/index.html
by phito | 2025-08-22 07:38:35+00:00
It's amazing to make small custom apps and scripts, and they're such high quality (compared to what I would half-ass write and never finish/polish them) that they don't end up as "throwaway", I keep using them all the time. The LLM is saving me time to write these small programs, and the small programs boost my productivity.

Often, I will solve a problem in a crappy single-file script, then feed it to Claude and ask to turn it into a proper GUI/TUI/CLI, add CI/CD workflows, a README, etc...

I was very skeptical and reluctant of LLM assisted coding (you can look at my history) until I actually tried it last month. Now I am sold.
by aspenmayer | 2025-08-22 07:38:45+00:00
They’re laying off folks, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing it due to payroll pressure. They’re a megacorp. They can’t go broke from payroll, they have accountants for that. The folks getting acquihired and poached aren’t at risk of being laid off as long as they’re producing value. If the value they bring at Meta is also not being provided elsewhere, so much the better for Meta. It hurts Meta’s competitors more than it hurts Meta, because Meta won’t miss the money. They don’t need high headcount, they need folks who are irreplaceable. It’s a different hiring process for different jobs.

I doubt Zuck is out anytime soon, unless folks stop using their products compared to alternatives. I think it’s possible, but I think the odds are at best even for him to go in 5 years. In 10 years, who can say? Facebook users are pretty locked in because there’s nothing else like it for the users that regularly use it. Facebook users who aren’t on alternatives aren’t just going to switch to Reddit or TikTok overnight. Why would they? I can’t follow your reasoning, but I understand not being a fan of Zuck or Meta, I guess, but I think their business seems pretty strong right now, though that is subject to change along with consumer whims.
by bubblyworld | 2025-08-22 07:40:43+00:00
You seem to be having strong emotions about this stuff, so I'm a little nervous that I'm going to get flamed in response, but my best take at a well-intentioned response:

I don't think the author is arguing that all computing is going to become probabilistic. I don't get that message at all - in fact they point out many times that LLMs can't be trusted for problems with definite answers ("if you need to add 1+1 use a calculator"). Their opening paragraph was literally about not blindly trusting LLM output.

> I don’t actually think the above paragraph makes any sense, does anyone disagree with me?

Yes - it makes perfect sense to me. Working with LLMs requires a shift in perspective. There isn't a formal semantics you can use to understand what they are likely to do (unlike programming languages). You really do need to resort to observation and hypothesis testing, which yes, the scientific method is a good philosophy for! Two things can be true.

> the use of formal mathematical notation just adds insult to injury here

I don't get your issue with the use of a function symbol and an arrow. I'm a published mathematician - it seems fine to me? There's clearly no serious mathematics here, it's just an analogy.

> This AI conversation could not be a better example of the loss of meaning.

The "meaningless" sentence you quote after this is perfectly fine to me. It's heavy on philosophy jargon, but that's more a taste thing no? Words like "ontology" aren't that complicated or nonsensical - in this case it just refers to a set of concepts being used for some purpose (like understanding the behaviour of some code).
by kazinator | 2025-08-22 07:43:06+00:00
Why would I want this to be 17, if I'm representing strings as array of code points, rather than UTF-8?

TXR Lisp:

1> (len " ") 5 2> (coded-length " ") 17

(Trust me when I say that the emoji was there when I edited the comment.)

The second value takes work; we have to go through the code points and add up their UTF-8 lengths. The coded length is not cached.
by Khelo | 2025-08-22 07:45:08+00:00
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by eastbound | 2025-08-22 07:46:19+00:00
It can be many Zero-Width Space, or a few Hair-Width Space.

You never know, when you don’t know CSS and try to align your pixels with spaces. Some programers should start a trend where 1 tab = 3 hairline-width spaces (smaller than 1 char width).

Next up: The <half-br/> tag.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-22 07:46:55+00:00
Easily solvable with SCM pre-commit hooks, at very least since CVS days.

All major IDEs allow to save the format configurations, which can be stored on the repo alongside the code as the team official's configuration.

Coding agents solve this problem in that eventually all programming languages will be as relevant as mastering Assembly is nowadays.

I already do stuff in low code/no code, that in the past I would be manually writing code to sort out those issues.

In the meantime, you can also ask them to format generated code in whatever way one feels like it.
by teekert | 2025-08-22 07:48:15+00:00
I do a combi, sometimes even asking the LLM and starting a ddg search in parallel. It speeds me up. Sometimes the LLM is right, sometimes it's not. NP, I'll get it to work. One should never do anything that one does not understand, but I get to the understand faster as I can also ask more in depth follow up questions to the LLM.