MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-08-24 20:08:22+00:00
Incidentally these are all languages that come preinstalled out of the box on Debian. [1] So that leads me to suspect this person might be trying to develop something in extremis, with zero connection to the internet whatsoever and zero tools except what comes preinstalled on a typical Linux box.

[1]: https://til.andrew-quinn.me/posts/what-programming-languages...
by CompoundEyes | 2025-08-24 20:09:02+00:00
There are schemes happening in interviews too. I've been doing many technical interviews for a senior role with off shore candidates lately. They come to me after passing a challenging online test that has controls to check for browser focus lost, opening new tabs etc. I think it may require a camera to be on too. Even with that more than half of the candidates can't code.

Our interview usually starts with them breathlessly reading from a script out of the corner of their eye. I'm ok with notes to make sure you hit some high points about yourself even in person. Nervousness shouldn't disqualify a talented person. But with the coding part I've gotten exasperated and started asking these senior candidates to share their screen and do a fizz buzz exercise live in a text editor in the first few minutes. If they struggle I politely end the interview on the 15.

One candidate cheated and it was interesting to watch. In the time I sent the message in Zoom and them sharing their screen, just a few seconds, they had either queried or LLM-ed it on their phone or another computer, had someone off screen or in the same room listening and sharing the answer on another monitor or something else. Whatever it was they turned their head slightly to the side, squinted a bit and typed the answer in Java. A few syncopated characters at a time. When asked what modulo was they didn't know and couldn't make any changes to it. It was wacky. In retrospect I think it was them reading the question out loud to an LLM.

I'm waiting for the candidate who has someone behind them with the same shirt on pretending to be their arms.
by tomrod | 2025-08-24 20:09:50+00:00
I'm not studied in any particular tradition. I typically take a few minutes to connect with exactly what my body is feeling. The socks on my feet, the cinch of a belt, the wind blowing my hair, the cool or hot of HVAC on my palms and knuckles, the minor ache or pain, and so on.

I typically start from my feet and go to top of my head, then back down to my nose. It typically takes me about 10 minutes.

Then, I ponder what I remember of my coffee, breakfast, dinner the night before, how I felt when I woke up. Then I imagine how I want to change things. I do this 2-5 minutes.

At that point, I plan my day.

It works for me. I know there are a ton of different ways to do it, but for me it's simply a time for reconnecting to my internal and external self. Because its the same format with new content (what I feel now, what happened most recently) it feels more like a common exercise routine than a hard thing. But it took a few weeks of frustrating effort to learn to keep focus.
by uecker | 2025-08-24 20:10:01+00:00
Bias is a good keyword with respect to CVEs. As long as there is not much Rust code which is relevant to my daily life I think this is not comparable. And the few Rust packages which now ended up on my system, see no regular security support because they pose a maintenance burden, so actually make me less safe: https://www.debian.org/releases/trixie/release-notes/issues....

But the original claim was that "C code crashes all the time" which is blatantly wrong.
by pton_xd | 2025-08-24 20:10:16+00:00
There are some game systems that lend themselves to unit testing, like say map generation to ensure that the expected landmarks are placed reasonably, or rooms are connected, or whatever. But most game interactions are just not easily "unit testable" since they happen across frames (eg over time). How would you unit test an enemy that spawns, moves towards the player, and attacks?

I'm sure you could conjure up any number of ways to do that, but they won't be trivial, and maintaining those tests while you iterate will only slow you down. And what's the point? Even if the unit-move-and-attack test passes, it's not going to tell you if it looks good, or if it's fun.

Ultimately you just have to play the game, constantly, to make sure the interactions are fun and working as you expect.
by arp242 | 2025-08-24 20:10:26+00:00
Depends; you should be able to still run binaries from the 90s, but if it's dynamically linked and doesn't ship with the libraries finding compatible libraries might be a pain and it won't run out the box. If you have the source code, then it should usually compile with minimal or no changes unless it depends on very old libraries that have seen incompatible changes (which is often the case). One of the nicer things about Windows is that it's a much more comprehensive "batteries included" system.
by Syzygies | 2025-08-24 20:11:26+00:00
One can't have an informed opinion on this without witnessing how grading a college exam takes place, first hand.

Grading a stack of blue books is a "just kill me now" brutal experience. A majority of cognitive effort is just finding the page for the next problem to grade, with finding the answer another delay; any programming language with this kind of access latency would stay a "one bus" language. So of course professors rely on disinterested grad students to help grade. They'll make one pass through the stack, getting the hang of the problem and refining the point system about twenty blue books in, but never going back.

With stapled exams one problem per page one can instead sort into piles for scores 0-6 (if you think your workplace is petty, try to imagine a sincere conversation about whether an answer is worth 14 or 15 points out of 20), and it's easy to review piles.

When I had 200 linear algebra exams to grade at once, I'd scan everything, and use my own software to mark and bin one question at a time, making review passes a pleasure. I could grade a 10 question final in one intense sitting, with far more confidence in the results than team grading ever gave me.
by rustandmore | 2025-08-24 20:11:47+00:00
Most of non-opinion parts of this article are "Go sucks because <insert newbie mistake>" or otherwise factually incorrect points.

At that point, all languages suck because there's newbie mistakes and I don't understand them.

Maybe it is time to dump credentials rather than being obscure. I don't believe it for a moment that you have decade+ experience in Go.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-24 20:11:59+00:00
Once homeowners have done everything they can (as you have, in your example), the remaining optimization is to drive down storage costs (LFP is ~$52/kWh in China at utility scale) until seasonal storage is solved for (which is likely a combination of electrical transmission [to be able to shift low carbon energy from areas that are constantly plentiful] and longer term storage like ammonia or similar fuels created and transported [pumped around] with low carbon energy). Of course, if you have the space, keep putting solar PV up until it's no longer an issue when paired with heat pumps.
by joshka | 2025-08-24 20:12:12+00:00
One of the big things I think a lot of tooling misses, which Geoffrey touches on is the automated feedback loops built into the tooling. I expect you could probably incorporate generation time and token cost to automatically self tune this over time. Perhaps such things as discovering which prompts and models are best for which tasks automatically instead of manually choosing these things.

You want to go meta-meta? Get ralph to spawn subagents that analyze the process of how feedback and experimentation with techniques works. Perhaps allocate 10% of the time and effort to identifying what's missing that would make the loops more effective (better context, better tooling, better feedback mechanism, better prompts, ...?). Have the tooling help produce actionable ideas for how humans in the loop can effectively help the tooling. Have the tooling produce information and guidelines for how to review the generated code.

I think one of the big things missing in many of the tools currently available is tracking metrics through the entire software development loop. How long does it take to implement a feature. How many mistakes were made? How many errors were caught by tests? How many tokens does it take? And then using this information to automatically self-tune.
by propter_hoc | 2025-08-24 20:13:04+00:00
Your comment is fair; obviously I wrote a pretty flippant comment, but the message is largely useful for most people.

The fact is that (largely due to the incredible marketing of Johnson & Johnson's Tylenol brand in the US) way too many people think acetaminophen is "safe and effective" when it's actually both pretty unsafe and pretty ineffective. Most people just "pop a Tylenol" by default without realizing it's not much better than placebo.

Sure there are cases where people have unique risks and should avoid NSAIDs. But for the vast majority of the public, if they or their kid are dealing with a headache, fever, menstrual cramp, or other transient pain or fever, they should reach for ibuprofen (with a snack) over acetaminophen. It's not remotely a close call.

I'm frankly pleased that people are becoming more aware of this and I don't mind taking a couple correction comments for presenting the info in a superficial way.
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 20:13:21+00:00
It's because the government regulations only apply to Chinese citizens. My first trip to China was back in the '00s, and I went for work. I was also surprised to find that my home SIM worked just fine there without any interference from the Great Firewall.

Roaming works somewhat unintuitively from what you'd expect. You do indeed connect to the local mobile network, but all of your data traffic is tunneled back to your home wireless provider's PoP. I realized this once I checked what websites I was visiting saw as my public IP address, and it was an address from a network in Texas!

So China's Great Firewall can't actually inspect or block your traffic while you're traveling, and using roaming on your home mobile network's SIM. It's all sent over the equivalent of a VPN to your home soil before going out to the public internet. This iswhy latency can be pretty bad while roaming.
by duped | 2025-08-24 20:13:28+00:00
Durability just guarantees that you don't return that a write transaction has completed successfully until after all the layers are done writing to disk. fsync is the high level abstraction that file systems implement to mean "this data has actually gone to disk" (although handling errors is a rabbit hole worth reading about). It absolutely has a performance cost which is why applications that can live without durability sometimes get away with it.

If your application can tolerate writes silently failing then you can live without it. But a lot of applications can't, so it does matter.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-24 20:13:56+00:00
> Oyster came in as travelcard only

I don't think this can be correct. One of the early Oyster "problems" was that people who'd routinely made some particular journey on their travelcard, perhaps for years, would get locked out of Oyster and be unable to start a second journey. The reason was that their Travelcard had never been valid for their journey but it was valid for both the entry station and exit station and before Oyster it had no way to connect the dots, now Oyster could see the journey route wasn't allowed and so it charged them, making their balance negative, whereupon they can't start a second journey until they pay for the first.

Edited to add: Oh wait, maybe you meant only on (what would be) Overground stations ? That seems very weird, but I guess I can't prove you're wrong.
by delduca | 2025-08-24 20:14:23+00:00
I wrote everything from scratch[1], like old games. However, unlike them, I designed a flexible Lua API that’s powerful enough to create (small) games.

I used SDL3 with hardware acceleration, OpenAL, Lua (via sol3), PhysFS, and nlohmann::json. (I could have used only Lua, but the engine needs to interface with the web via WebSockets.) For WebSockets, I use Boost only on desktop and mobile; on the web, I rely on the browser’s native API.

1 - Code is like pasta — much more delicious when homemade.
by holameraj | 2025-08-24 20:15:12+00:00
I built something called Tinyplan, a minimal task planner that helps you break down what you want to do into simple steps you can follow.

The motivation came from trying a lot of productivity tools that felt too heavy, cluttered, or locked me into rigid templates. I wanted something lighter, more focused, and less distracting. With Tinyplan you just open a page, write down what you are working on, and it helps organize it into a plan.

It is free to use forever. You get one page with unlimited planning if you bring your own Gemini API key, which stays in your browser and never leaves your machine. There is no login required and no data is stored on any server. If you want more than one page, there is a small $1/month upgrade that unlocks unlimited pages and extra features.

Try it live: https://tinyplan.space/
by bevr1337 | 2025-08-24 20:15:17+00:00
> Why did the stock market go up 20% relative to pre pandemic levels? Have another explanation? Who was buying these shit coins?

These are rhetorical questions and frankly kind of silly. You're implying that the poorest, unemployed Americans temporarily receiving $600/wk caused the creation of shitcoins. There are so many leaps and bounds and no context. So no, I can't offer you another explanation.
by cowboylowrez | 2025-08-24 20:16:04+00:00
I think you're correct with accounting for the security "attributes" of these llms if you're going to use them, like you said, "taking that insecurity into account".

If we sit down and examine the statistics of bugs, the costs of their occurance in production and weighed everything with some reasonable criteria, I think we could somehow arrive at a reasonable level of confidence that allows us to ship a system to production. Some organizations do better with this than others of course. During a projects development cycle, we could watch out for common patterns, buffer overflows, use after free for c folks, sql injection or non escaping stuff in web programming but we know these are mistakes and we want to fix them.

With llms the mitigation that I'm seeing is that we reduce the errors 90 percent, but this is not a mitigation unless we also detect and prevent the other 10 percent. Its just much more straightforward to treat llms as untrusted, because they are, you're getting input from randos by virtue of its training data. producing mistaken output is not actually a bug, its actually expected behavior, unless you also believe in the tooth fairy lol

>To me, "we fix bugs" sounds the same as "we ship systems with unknown vulnerabilities".

to me, they sound different ;)
by jcalvinowens | 2025-08-24 20:16:37+00:00
I've always been able to solve this problem more simply using IPv4 link-local addressing (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3927), it doesn't matter if somebody abuses the same range because the outbound interface is explicitly specified in sin6_scope_id passed to connect() and bind().

But if you're writing code at a higher level than the bsd sockets api, it's a whole can of worms.
by kelnos | 2025-08-24 20:17:46+00:00
I think part of the issue is that cell tower antennas are designed for talking to devices on the ground or at very low altitudes (like those you'd experience in a tall building). So a cell tower's capacity for talking to lots of somethings directly above it, thousands of feet up, is much lower than talking to lots of somethings below it or adjacent to it.
by ajmurmann | 2025-08-24 20:18:05+00:00
Just because the venue is owned by one entity doesn't mean you cannot have competition between tenants. In fact venue owner could take competition in consideration when choosing a new tenant. This would be what the Chinese government does with their catfish effect philosophy (https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S02184958960...).
by godelski | 2025-08-24 20:18:58+00:00
I'm an AI critic, but I use AI every day. In fact, I am an AI researcher and work on making models more capable and powerful (probably where a lot of my criticism stems from).

My main problem with AI usage is that people use it and turn their brains off. This isn't a new problem, but it is a new scale. People mindlessly punch numbers into a formula, run software they don't understand, or read a summary of a complex topics declaring mastery. The problem is sloppiness and our human tendencies to be lazy. Lazy by focusing on the least amount of energy at the moment, not the least amount of energy through time. That's the critical distinction. Slop is momentary laziness while thoughtfulness is amortized laziness.

The problem is in a way not the AI but us and the cultures we have created. At the end of the day no one cares if you wrote AI code (or docs or whatever), they care about how well it was done. You want to do things fast, but speed is nothing if the quality suffers.

I really like how Mitchell put it in this Ghostty PR[0,1]. The disclosure is to help people know what to pay more attention to. It is a declaration of where you were lazy or didn't have expertise or took some shortcut. It tells us what the actually problem is: slop isn't always obvious.

A little slop generally doesn't do too much harm (unless it grows and compounds), but a lot of slop does. If you are concerned about slop and the rate of slop is increasing then it means you must treat everything as potential slop. Because slop isn't easily recognized, it makes effort increase, exponentially. So by producing AI slop (or any kind of slop) you aren't decreasing the workload, you're outsourcing it to someone else. Often, that outsourcing produces additional costs. It only creates the illusion of productivity.

It's not about the AI, it is about shoving your work onto others. Doesn't matter if you use a shovel or bulldozer. But people are sure going to be louder (or cross that threshold where they'll actually speak up) if you start using a bulldozer to offload your work to others. The problem is it makes others have to constantly be in System 2 thinking all the time. It is absolutely exhausting.

[0] https://github.com/ghostty-org/ghostty/pull/8289

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44976568
by owenversteeg | 2025-08-24 20:19:14+00:00
I would strongly disagree. Inexpensive batteries are everywhere now - this is the work of market forces, not some guy on Youtube - and he's one of a handful of people who you can trust to do an honest dissection of a battery. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to check for a handful of basic safety features and characteristics, which is more or less what he does.
by globnomulous | 2025-08-24 20:19:19+00:00
I gather you don't particularly care (that's essentially your point), but in case you really do want to know how it could be 1/34, and why some weirdo would insist that it does or can, I wrote up the following. :)

Is "1x smaller" equivalent to "1x larger?" If it is, then 'it's 1/33' and "2x larger/more" means the same thing as "double the size/amount." But if you have two times more than I have, then you have what I have, plus 2x that amount. So you don't have two times as much as I have. You have three times as much. "2x larger," to my ear, clearly does not mean the same thing as "2x as much." "2x larger" should mean "3x as much." That's why "33x smaller" can be read as "1 part of 34."

When we're even stricter with sense, the expression "33x smaller" becomes completely incoherent, because 1x should represent the original quantity. A 33x reduction should give us a result of -32x.

Obviously that's not what the article means. It's what the words mean, though, when you read them literally mean, rather than reading past their literal meaning to the intentions of the speaker/writer.

Most people don't care whether someone means one thing or the other, because, as you wrote, it's close enough to give the general idea.

The problem that fussy people like me and the commenter above me have is that we want people to say what they mean. And I'd wager that most of us fussy people have to do more mental work in order to get to the result that other people reach intuitively. Having to ignore literal sense in order to read someone's intended meaning is harder for us/me than it is for most people. That's our/my problem. As a matter of sociolinguistics and pragmatics, we're wrong, because literal meaning takes a back seat to idiomatic usage. (It probably does even in this comment that I'm writing.)

That's why I said these are the errors of a normal, native speaker.
by jmclnx | 2025-08-24 20:20:56+00:00
So will China, but in a good way as research the US funded heads to mainland China. Xi must be dancing for joy, in maybe 10 to 20 years, China will be by far a big economic powerhouse, eclipsing the US on its way to the top. Funny thing is, the US is doing this all on its own.

This seems to me a repeat of 1930s Germany, where many scientists left Nazi Germany for the US. That turned the US into an R&D powerhouse. By then, no one will care what the US does, it will be totally ignored.
by leakycap | 2025-08-24 20:21:57+00:00
Likely craigslist unless you're willing to make some local connections.

Be aware this equipment is not pleasant to be around (loud, hot)

Server hardware is too heavy/bulky to be able to support a big online marketplace. Your best bet is to identify the type of organizations that buy the server hardware you want to buy used and find out how they get rid of their excess.

I've gotten a handful of free server equipment (no drives) by being willing to show up and take whatever is being offered.
by mjg59 | 2025-08-24 20:22:12+00:00
You made the assertion that basebands remain in contact with towers even in airplane mode, and so can be tracked. Someone asked for supporting evidence for that claim. You've responded with examples and links to different issues. It's a fairly extraordinary claim (it's not one I'd heard before - it's clear that other radios may remain alive for various purposes even when airplane mode is switched on, given that you can use wifi and bluetooth on planes, but you're the first person I've heard make this claim about the cellular radio), and you haven't provided any evidence to back it up at all.
by userbinator | 2025-08-24 20:22:21+00:00
meaning the modem will run in sleep mode even when you are in airplane mode

AFAIK this is not true at least for the Mediatek 65xx and early 67xx platforms; I've analysed the firmware and hardware on those. They actually power off the modem and rest of the RF system when in airplane mode. The modem only boots up and starts searching for a signal when you take it out of airplane mode, which is why it takes a noticeable time (10-30 seconds, depending on how many bands are enabled) to get a signal. If your phone goes from airplane mode to having a signal and immediately capable of calling, then I suspect it's one where the modem is not truly turned off.

I haven't inspected Broadcom, Qualcomm, or Spreadtrum in any detail to say whether they do things differently.

Are there actually smartphones without an IMEI

Look for a "tablet" or anything else without the word "phone" in it if you just want a touchscreen portable computer. An IMEI is obligatory to connect to cellular networks, in much the same way as a MAC address is to Ethernet and WiFi.