MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quantumHazer | 2025-08-24 21:35:26+00:00
This comments shows that most of the users in this thread have not done game development.

We are judging the usefulness of a LLM in a project that is really over represented in training data (a bunch of Intro to Programming courses requires a project like this, and in southern Europe countries we have a lot of similar games like the one in the blog)

In the first year of college I reimplemented Moon Patrol in Python, I had no previous experience basically and it tooks me two/three months of work coding 3 days per week mostly.

Coding a card game is easier than that. LLMs are useful for certain things but this is not a good way to benchmark their usefulness in any type of game development coding.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-08-24 21:35:29+00:00
No reinventing going on here. Just an overhaul of the design after quite a few models which were essentially evolutionary and facelifts. Pretty normal stuff. All we have new is an IPhone air line and maybe a folding IPhone. And of course AI.

More concerning is they will increase their efforts to monetize services. But that's it.
by okanat | 2025-08-24 21:36:36+00:00
and Linux will not penetrate that market unless it makes it possible to release completely proprietary (even woefully crappy, move fast and break things) software easily. For most proprietary desktop software businesses, porting to Linux is not profitable.

There could be incentives for hobbyists and off-hours professionals to contribute to it for fun. However, there are huge missing gaps of usability for the wider population. Windows, macOS, iOS and Android guarantees good support for internationalized, proprietary-first, out-of-the box working OSes which disappear under apps.

Making Linux popular means commonizing things. It requires finding economic incentives to people to maintain unwanted parts not for fun but for money. It'll bring all the things that make the technical people avoid. It has to drive zealots and strong open-source people away. It happened with Android, it will happen to Linux, if somebody finds a way to monetize it for the consumer market.

Ultimately, I don't believe we can solve a socioeconomic problem surfacing on technical devices with technical solutions. Whatever fight against big tech has to be won on the streets, parliaments and courtrooms.
by 3eb7988a1663 | 2025-08-24 21:36:47+00:00
Computers are so stupidly fast now, it does seem like this is the future. Thanks to the laptop market, the tiny desktop models have more then sufficient oomph to do everything that 99% of users require. Keep the bulky tower for gaming or workstation loads.

Hypocrite because my daily driver is a uATX where I mostly just browser the internet and watch movies.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-08-24 21:36:51+00:00
Who the hell would set 4Gb swap for a 32Gb RAM machine in 2025?

A guy with a decade old 64Gb SSD as the only drive in the system?

> and makes everything slow while doing it

It was so when the OS was on a HDD. Nowadays it's a PCIe device with 1 million IOPS.

And five years ago fans of some fruit company run around singing praises on how good their brand new laptops worked with a mere 8Gb of RAM.
by stanford_labrat | 2025-08-24 21:37:43+00:00
Painkillers like ibuprofen are NSAIDs which inhibit the enzyme COX1/2, reducing prostaglandin production.

Prostaglandins are an inflammatory hormone that do a variety of things, but specifically PGE2 plays a role in muscle stem cell activation to divide and produce more muscle fibers. The effect is probably realistically small, but you will leave gains on the table by taking ibuprofen after hard workouts.
by rikafurude21 | 2025-08-24 21:39:34+00:00
I always reach for aspirin for mild pain and people have this weird idea that its way more dangerous than paracetamol because its a blood thinner and "what if you bleed for some reason and it doesnt stop" - How is that worse than guaranteed liver damage if you take paracetamol? It almost seems like there was this big push to get people away from Aspirin to tylenol and thats why people have that idea stuck in their heads
by mystraline | 2025-08-24 21:39:56+00:00
Remember, half the population are under 100 IQ points.

And most general people I meet here in the USA are either heavily propagandized, extraordinarily dumb, or both.

We could be for "better and better, which is what the Chinese have been doing the last 50 years. Instead we've been at" fuck you I got mine haha", and "don't let THEM have anything".

Well, the out groups have sacrificed so they have no more. Now making the lower and middle and even upper middle class suffer is the name of the game.
by bluGill | 2025-08-24 21:40:22+00:00
I got my boss to get me the most powerful server we could find, $15000 or so. In benchmarks there was minimal benefit and sometimes a loss going with more than 40 cores even though it has 56. (52? - I can't check now) sometimes using more cores slows the build down. We have concluded that memory bandwidth is the limit, but are not sure how to prove it.
by OptionOfT | 2025-08-24 21:41:34+00:00
> They come to me after passing a challenging online test that has controls to check for browser focus lost, opening new tabs etc.

These are the absolute worst.

You're taking people out of their comfort zone (highly customized IDE like JetBrains / VSCode / Vim) which cause them to lose shortcuts and decently working intellisense. Yes, my TypeScript in my projects is configured in such a way that I get way more information from the compiler than the standard config. After all, you're testing my ability as a software engineer, not a code monkey, right?

In this very uncomfortable place there is no way of asking questions. Yes, sometimes stuff is ambiguous. I rather have someone who asks questions vs someone who guesses and gets it right.

The testing setup is horrible too. No feedback as to what part of the tests fail, just... fail.

No debugger. No way of adding log messages. When was the last time you've been in that situation at your workplace?

All under the pressure of time, and additional stress from the person that they really NEED a new job.

Oh, and when you use compiled languages, they're way slower than say TypeScript due to the compilation phase.

And then even when your score (comprised of x passed tests and y failed tests) is of passing grade there is a manager out there looking at how many times someone tabbed outside of the window/tab?

Where am I supposed to look up stuff? Do you know all of this information by heart: https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/collections/struct.BTreeMap.ht...

Which reminded me that one time I used a function recently stabilized, but the Rust version used was about 8 versions behind. With that slow compilation cycle.

/sigh.
by machomaster | 2025-08-24 21:41:50+00:00
But how large is the internal wiki, how well is it updated, how easy is it to find the information?

If it takes 10 minutes to search for info and 1 minute to ask, then the latter is a more efficient way. That's the job of the manager, to make developers more efficient, give them more time, preferably uninterrupted.
by scns | 2025-08-24 21:42:34+00:00
> the only way to even approach that would be to have liquid cooling loop ports out the back that you had to plug into an under-desk cooling loop and I don't think anyone is doing that

It is (maybe was) done by XMG and Schenker. Called Oasis IIRC. Yep

https://www.xmg.gg/en/xmg-oasis/
by XorNot | 2025-08-24 21:43:28+00:00
If you need to do this then start by figuring out why you need to do it, and adjust your approach too your threat model.

Because the most significant evidence we have lately is that in-person meetings or dead drops and other low tech means are how you avoid being tracked.

Turning on any sort of radio transmitter is just turning on a big flash light into the sky.

Turning on anything relatively uncommon is even worse: normal people have cellphones and use them. They don't use LoRa devices, there aren't a lot of LoRa devices and someone who only uses LoRa devices will stand out in any dataset.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-24 21:43:29+00:00
>they're jsut regurgitating other designs from their training data

I'm deep into the crank/lone genius territory with my BitGrid project, doing things with code that nobody else would be silly enough to waste time on. If it's just copy/pasting code from some latent space, I have no idea where it's getting it.

When's the last time you wrote code to directly handle all the bits to multiply two floating point numbers? I've never done it.
by Animats | 2025-08-24 21:43:31+00:00
Because they're trying to go way up on temperature. The idea is to get dirt up to 600°C. It's easy to get warm water from solar, and solar water heaters have been around for decades, if not centuries. But that's well below 100°C. If you start from electricity, you can reach any temperature up to plasma. If you're just storing warm water, you can't get much of the energy back. E = (T2-T1)/T2, remember.

They've made no progress on getting the energy out of their heated dirt. They want to make a hot dirt powered boiler - run pipes through the dirt, put in water, and get steam. Not hot water, superheated steam. That's the hard part, and it will have to be custom.

Small steam turbines are available. Siemens has a whole range.[1] They start around 750KW, at the high end of automotive scale. Siemens can sell you a matching generator. When these guys can power one of those, it's real.

Right now, it's three guys. They need VC funding and a really good boiler engineer. The goal should be a working prototype at about 500KW scale. That would be a big enough prototype to get some meaningful efficiency measurements.

(Maintenance will be tough. You can't turn the heat source off.)

[1] file:///home/john/Downloads/SE-Brochure-Dresser-Rand-Steam-Turbines-2021-pdf_Original_20file.pdf
by godelski | 2025-08-24 21:43:53+00:00
What distro are you on? I have `FastConnectable` off and `JustWorksRepairing` as never. Both are the defaults. I use a bluetooth connected mouse every day and an xbox controller quite frequently.

I think the issue might be something else and that these names are just not great names. Personally I think "Just Works" is a terrible name and I don't understand how something so non-descriptive and confusing was allowed... but that's a different conversation... (2 jokes in CS?)

A little note on "Just Works". It probably doesn't matter for your use case but understanding that

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42862560/should-one-create-a-bond-with-a-bluetooth-le-device/42916081#42916081 https://www.cve.news/cve-2024-53144/
by tecleandor | 2025-08-24 21:45:06+00:00
If I ever had to say anything about Paracetamol, it would be:

Remember: Paracetamol is hepatotoxic, very strong for your liver. Never take it if you have been drinking alcohol or have a weak/damaged liver. Paracetamol is the worst thing you can have for hungover: it might reduce your headache but will hurt a liver that it's already under pressure by the alcohol you drank last night.

In moderation, as prescribed, shouldn't be bad. I'm more of an ibuprofen guy though (although I rarely take it).
by klabb3 | 2025-08-24 21:45:44+00:00
> The hand-wringing post facto justifications, which include Star Wars references to "freedom", are maybe a little tto much, don't you think?

Back in university RMS came to a neighbor uni in Stockholm for a traditional lecture about software freedoms etc. I think everyone thought he was a bit crazy or idealistic (I guess most still do). But the warnings of how you weren't going to own anything, that you have to ask permission, that your devices can be disabled etc, that sounded like fiction at the time. But looking back to that era (2011 or so), it slowly did change for the worse exactly like he warned.

While a lot of the early internet idealisms have fizzled out, I think today those ideas and passions were much more important than we thought. For instance, I usually say that if the web was invented today, browsers would not be approved by the app stores. We take some things for granted, and a lot of those things came from a different era, arising out of preconditions that largely no longer exist.
by hinkley | 2025-08-24 21:46:12+00:00
You’re not waiting for the end of a thing though. You might hope you are, but the truth is there’s always one little thing you still have to take care of. So until the last build is green and the PR is filed, you’re being held hostage by the train of thought that’s tied to this unit of work. Thinking too much about the next one just ends up adding time to this one.

You’re a grownup. You should know when to take a break and that’ll be getting away from the keyboard, not just frittering time waiting for a slow task to complete.
by XorNot | 2025-08-24 21:46:29+00:00
And yet realistically you also probably don't turn it on except when you're within about 50 miles of your home.

And this is while you're flagging yourself heavily by (1) using a phone which is easily identified as a burner and (2) using it intermittently which means you're trying not to be tracked.

So you've already substantially identified yourself in any dataset.
by exe34 | 2025-08-24 21:46:42+00:00
no I actually get it, I think like most fads, it seems to work great for really trivial things or for debugging. I have myself used pair programming in those cases.

I just can't imagine using it for serious work. navigating/explaining? I know neither the science I'm trying to code nor the code I'm trying to write - I'll write code to explore the data, I'll have a hunch, I'll wonder about something and I'll go find that one paper I came across 10 years ago to check - I don't see what code the other would be writing while I'm trying to figure that stuff out.

I'm sure it works great for yet another CRUD.
by DaveZale | 2025-08-24 21:47:08+00:00
Yes, I think I see what you are saying. Actually, since the pandemic lockdown, from what I gather locally, volunteer activity has dropped off by up to 75% in this garden. My best guess is that screen addictions (like Netflix and other streaming) are now widespread, and were exacerbated by the lockdown.

Locally, outside activity in yards and gardens is down drastically, and it shows. Weeds and neglected yards tell that story.

But sure, we have a 79 year old who has been at the garden for 20 years and, despite aches and pains, is the most active! He is also my mentor and I appreciate his devotion. Would he be as physically active if not for the volunteering? Doubtful. So I believe that I concur with you on this.
by modeless | 2025-08-24 21:47:44+00:00
Edit: The launch was scrubbed for today. "Standing down from today's tenth flight of Starship to allow time to troubleshoot an issue with ground systems" https://x.com/SpaceX/status/1959755893324865963

Everyday Astronaut's live stream has started already: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xv97hecvwfI

NASASpaceflight also, with guest Scott Manley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7WmlTp7ue0

The only official SpaceX stream will be here closer to launch: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1yoKMPRjeYYxQ but the YouTube channels will be rebroadcasting it after their own cameras lose sight of the rocket.

There may or may not be an official SpaceX technical update presentation before or after the launch. There was supposed to be one last time too but it was silently canceled, so TBD.
by bullen | 2025-08-24 21:48:48+00:00
We have gone through this if you look at my comment history.

Yes you can do everything, but not without added complexity, that will end up failing faster.

We have peaked in all tech. Nothing will ever get as good as the raw peak in longevity:

- SSDs ~2011 (pure SLC)

- RAM ~2013 (DDR3 fast low latency but low Hz = cooler = lasts longer)

- CPUs ~2018 (debatable but I think those will outlast everything else)
by david38 | 2025-08-24 21:49:04+00:00
No doubt you mean well. In some cases it’s obvious- low memory machine can’t handle some docket setup, etc.

In reality, you can’t even predict time to project completion accurately. Rarely is a fast computer a “time saver”.

Either it’s a binary “can this run that” or a work environment thing “will the dev get frustrated knowing he has to wait an extra 10 minutes a day when a measly $1k would make this go away”
by bobalob | 2025-08-24 21:49:22+00:00
> intersex people disagree

Not really. Each of these conditions can be understood and described in terms of male and/or female sex development. The "spectrum" rhetoric obfuscates detail.

> the traits that society-at-large attributes to the sexes

This is just sexist stereotyping though. Doesn't mean you're neither woman nor man if you don't adhere to these stereotypes. That's absurd.

The problem with "non-binary" is that it is inherently sexist in the worldview it describes.
by fragmede | 2025-08-24 21:50:38+00:00
There's also the perception of time. How long did it take you to write that email/comment/code? Did you laborious pour over every word, every line, for hours, before you hit send, regardless of if you used an LLM or not. Or did you spend barely five minutes, and just pasted whatever ChatGPT shit out?

That's the real question that people are trying to suss out.
by geerlingguy | 2025-08-24 21:52:58+00:00
I was able to see the (under construction) launch stand for Starship at KSC last week; it sounds like they built it and are rebuilding it constantly in response to pad learnings in Texas. It'd be amazing to get at least the first stage to a reliable state so the launch site could be complete in Florida without major concerns about the Falcon 9 launch tower situated close nearby!

The main thing I took away from visiting KSC the first time (alas missed out on any launches) was how incredibly huge all things orbital-launch-related are, even for smaller rockets. Also didn't realize how large the Blue Origin facilities are there. It's one thing to see glimpses in a spaceflight YouTube channel video, it's another to drive alongside them.
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-24 21:53:57+00:00
It'll be a while before they're comfortable landing Starship itself onto the launch tower, so an ocean splashdown is the best outcome possible. And the booster is going to be testing another one of those extra aggressive reentry trajectories.

They broke the previous booster by overdoing it, so it remains to be seen whether they'll find the balance between "fuel efficient" and "doesn't cause catastrophic internal booster damage" this time around.
by jh12z | 2025-08-24 21:54:26+00:00
I'd say that's a Windows issue and Linux has a solution to make it compatible with Windows. Why would you want the system clock to be in local time instead of UTC? For example you switch off your laptop in one timezone, fly to another timezone, switch it back on, the time has been ticking the same whether you moved to a different timezone or not, you only need to change the timezone for display, why would you need to save back to RTC a different value based on the timezone? I never tested it but I'd like to see what happens on a Windows desktop if you change the timezone and unplug the computer without giving a chance to save to RTC. On next boot the local time read from RTC will be wrong.
by xphos | 2025-08-24 21:55:26+00:00
But like you don't have that because AI will lie to you but kindly. People who are learning don't have the tools to point out those types of mistakes yet either so they will learn things the wrong way. Not to say teachers dont teach the wrong thing most of math is learning the wrong way only to later distill the right lesson but I think the automation of it is much worse
by jondwillis | 2025-08-24 21:55:39+00:00
Repeat after me

Every read an LLM does with a tool is a write into its context window.

If the scope of your tools allows reading from untrusted arbitrary sources, you’ve actually given write access to the untrusted source. This alone is enough to leak data, to say nothing of the tools that actually have write access into other systems, or have side effects.
by godelski | 2025-08-24 21:55:58+00:00
> Windows has its own share of idiosyncrasies.

Using all 3 main OSes frequently (Windows the least) I think this is the key point I've noticed. There's tons of frustrations on each of them. But at least for me, the reason why I like Linux so much is that I am far more likely to be able to fix things and move on. With Windows and OSX a fix usually involves some super hacky method that comes with costs, often invisibly so.

It reminds me of an argument I had with a friend. I was saying <FAANG Company> should add an option to change some (very minor) attributes. My ask was literally about text size and location. He just came back and said that I like to fiddle with things and am out of touch because most people want things to "just work." He's not wrong, I like to fiddle. But the problem was that something was broken. Things weren't "just working". I was asking for that feature because the options were "clicking 3 buttons worth of fiddling" and "not using the product." If it is broken it is broken ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. If people are willing to fiddle to repair, great! They'll continue using the product. People that won't? Well it's broken so they weren't going to anyways. At least with the capacity for fiddling you maintain some.

These days, I find myself having fewer problems on Linux than either Windows or OSX. I expect most people to be surprised by that comment because I am too. A decade ago it was the exact opposite situation. But things change.

> The name is stupid

"2 hard things in Computer Science" but it isn't a off-by-one error! Though these names are just objectively stupid and confusing. At least an incomprehensible name wouldn't be misleading.
by zahlman | 2025-08-24 21:56:03+00:00
This issue, as I understand it, is about the actual choice to use an emdash character (—) rather than a hyphen (-), and about the effort involved in doing so. It's not about sentence structure.

I don't really understand how AI developed a bias towards doing it correctly rather than doing it the lazy way. But hearing so much about emdashes qua LLM detection mechanism eventually just got me to decide that typing an ordinary hyphen really is just lazy. And then I ended up configuring my system to make it reasonably easy to type them.
by dbg31415 | 2025-08-24 21:56:13+00:00
Austin didn't "fire all the cops." What happened was messier.

After 2020, the city council cut about a third of the police budget and paused new cadet classes. At the same time, hundreds of officers retired early or left for better pay elsewhere. By 2023, patrol vacancies were over 30%. With fewer officers, APD stopped handling whole categories of calls -- traffic enforcement, minor crashes, and low-level 911 calls -- because they just didn't have the staff.

Then politics made it worse. Austin leaders (Blue) pushed for more oversight and accountability. The governor (Red) fought back with bills to hide misconduct records and block transparency. The Travis County DA started prosecuting misconduct more aggressively, straining relations even further. The result: a demoralized force, hollowed-out staffing, and a city caught between "fund them less" and "hold them accountable more," while basic policing collapsed.

So no, they weren't fired. But yes, many stopped doing the job -- leaving Austin residents stuck in the middle of a state–city standoff. And honestly, it feels like that was Governor Abbott's goal all along: "If you didn't vote for me, don't expect police to lift a finger for you." These days, even for traffic accidents, assaults, or vandalism, 911 just tells you to file a report online.
by DiogenesKynikos | 2025-08-24 21:57:03+00:00
The existence of individual Arab Jews in Israel in 1948 does not change the point that the founders of Israel were almost all Ashkenazi Jews.

Almost every important Israeli politician in the founding years was Ashkenazi (and to this day, every prime minister has been Ashkenazi, surprisingly enough). Yes, you can name various individual members of the pre-state militias / terrorist groups who were not Ashenazi, but they were a tiny minority in a movement dominated by people from Central / Eastern Europe.