MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1dom | 2025-08-30 15:08:11+00:00
This article makes me feel weird.

I think I'm not smart enough for it. I can't really take anything new away from it, mainly just a message of "we're smart people, and trust us when we say smart things are bad. All the smart sounding stuff you learned about how to program from smart sounding people like us? Lol, that's all wrong now."

Okay, I get the cognitive load is bad, so what's the solution?

"Just do simple dumb stuff, duh." Oh, right... Useful.

The problem is never just the code, or the architecture, or the business, or the cognitive load. It's the mismatch of those things against the people expected to work with them.

Walk into a team full of not-simple engineers, and tell them all what they've been doing is wrong, and they need to just write simple code, some of them will fail, some will walk out, and you'll be no closer to a solution.

I wish I knew of the tech world before 20 years ago, where technical roles were long and stable enough for teams to build their own understanding of a suitable level of complexity. Without that, churn means we all have to aim for the lowest common denominator.
by miven | 2025-08-30 15:08:39+00:00
Correct me if I'm misinterpreting something in your argument but as I see it Matryoshka embeddings just sort the vector bases of the output space roughly by order of their importance for the task, PCA-style, so when you truncate your 4096-dimensionnal embedding down to a set of let's say 256 dimensions, those are the exact same 256 vector bases doing the core job of encoding important information for each sample, so you're back to dense retrieval on 256-dimensional vectors, just that all the minor miscellaneous slack useful for a very low fraction of queries has been trimmed away.

True sparsity would imply keeping different important vector bases for different documents, but MRL doesn't magically shuffle vector bases around depending on what's your document contains, were that the case cosine similarity between the resulting documents embeddings would simply make no sense as a similarity measure.
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by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-08-30 15:08:52+00:00
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a screw.

The problem is not the tool, the problem are the people selling the hype, the people accepting the hype as it is and this "everyone" person who I keep on listening about, I wonder why his takes are often times wrong but he doesn't accept them...

People can be wrong, People are wrong in a lot of contexts, I don't think the world is efficient in this sense. We are emotional beings, sell us hype and we would accept it and run with it.

Agree on how it is not an omnitool. Why are we going towards an inferior product (AI for VMS??) when this doesn't make sense when we already have superior product (I think)

I guess somethings don't make sense and if everyone jumps in a well, most people would follow it (maybe including myself, if I didn't want to be contrarian in such sense, my knowledge is really limited regarding AI so all of the above statements can be wrong and hey I am wrong I usually am)
by zaphar | 2025-08-30 15:09:02+00:00
To be fair, Rust could have done CheckedExceptions like Java has but no one uses. The problematic version is the RuntimeException. I think the real problem was that when Rust conceived of Result they didn't constrain the problem to just error handling and made it a little bit too much "anything goes". Which means that trying to shoehorn backtraces in after the fact with `?` and `try_into` is now hard. There could have been a world where `Result::Err` was actually a wrapper type that specified an optional source error for backtracing and the generic type was embedded in that instead. It would have been less flexible but it would have made proper backtraces more tractable.
by shagie | 2025-08-30 15:10:45+00:00
Tech... a "maybe" yes.

However, this isn't entirely a tech problem - it's a social/human one.

Not every mechanic has a driver's license. Sure, they may enjoy working on cars and the technology of cars... but for one reason or another they may have never gotten or have lost their driver's license.

Not everyone who is tech literate is similarly socially literate. I have programmer co-workers who have been scammed into sending gift card authentication codes or installed malware (or allowed the installation) onto their personal computing devices.

It isn't possible to prevent someone from accessing the internet any more than it is possible to prevent them from accessing a phone.

I am not saying that one should have a license to access the internet. Rather, I am saying that a device that holds and maintains the authentication mechanism for doing banking transactions, it is not unreasonable for the maker of that device and its software to attempt to mitigate the possibility that they are held liable for negligence in allowing user installed software to do banking without the owner's consent.

With the uncertainty that everything in the operating system and hardware is locked down to the point where no-consent access by malware to those banking capabilities is completely restricted (and thus they're not liable for negligence) - the wall that is being put up to try to prevent that is "no software that has not been vetted can be run on this device."

Consider that the phone is often the authentication mechanism and second factor for authorization to restricted systems. Authy, Microsoft Authenticator, and other 2nd factor applications typically do not run on general computing devices.

Technical literacy does not imply social or security literacy.
by adobrawy | 2025-08-30 15:10:54+00:00
MCP also started as JSON-RPC over stdio. With solutions like GitHub Codespaces, devcontainers, or "background agents", I wonder if we'll see the development of JSON over SSE.

Currently, my environment uses Claude Code on bare metal, and my application runs in a container, and the agent can do "docker compose exec backend" without any restrictions (YOLO).

My biggest obstacles to adopting workflows with git worktree are the need to share the database engine (local resource constrains) and the initial migration time. Offloading to cloud might be interesting for that.
by Ericson2314 | 2025-08-30 15:10:56+00:00
The fact that Facebook, a company far richer than Bell labs ever was, like all FAANG, has a culture of expensive employees baby sitting broken software products (rather than lab researcher vs field technician separation), and cannot be bothered to do the long term investment in a new OS, is why I think the industry actually doesn't deserve these R&D tax breaks HN was bemoaning had gone away until this year.

The point of R&D is the time horizon is long, and the uncertainty is high. Making JS slop that then has to be constantly babysat is opex, not capex.
by PeterWhittaker | 2025-08-30 15:12:08+00:00
The most important user of my temporary variables, à la "isValid" or "isSecure" is older/later me.

I could be adding a new feature six months later, or debugging a customer reported issue a week later. Especially in the latter case, where the pressure is greater and available time more constrained, I love that earlier/younger me was thoughtful enough to take the extra time to make things clear.

That this might help others is lagniappe.
by edtechdev | 2025-08-30 15:12:12+00:00
Cognitive load isn't a valid or useful concept: https://edtechdev.wordpress.com/2009/11/16/cognitive-load-th... https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00131857.2024.2...

There are separate contexts involved here: the coder, the compiler, the runtime, a person trying to understand the code (context of this article), etc. What's better for one context may not be better for another, and programming languages favor certain contexts over others.

In this case, since programming languages primarily favor making things easier for the compiler and have barely improved their design and usability in 50 years, both coders and readers should employ third party tools to assist them. AI can help the reader understand the code and the coder generate clearer documentation and labels, on top of using linters, test driven development, literate documentation practices, etc.
by noiv | 2025-08-30 15:12:55+00:00
I spend a few decades in the industry and in even more teams. I think, the quality of code strongly correlates with the team's ability to articulate its members cognitive load and skills. In some projects it is just not opportune to point out a need to skill up, so everybody just accepts whatever in PRs and quality never gets any better.

On the other end of the spectrum you hear sentences starting with: "It would help me to understand this more easily, if ...".

Guess, what happens over time in these teams?
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-08-30 15:13:11+00:00
Almost as if having GDPR to keep at least the worst of the data-brokering/selling industry out is a good thing.

The more detailed report someone posted does sound like this was hacked at the source, but a lot of the data can be bought legally on the open, not-even-too-grey market. Some journalists bought one of the location data sets and used it to demonstrate that you can identify intelligence agency employees from it (if someone spends almost every workday at one site belonging to the agency, occasionally visits the other one... the other place that "anonymous" user spends a lot of time at is likely the home of an intelligence agency employee).

If the industry wasn't selling it to anyone who asks, they'd still likely keep it in easily hacked places.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-08-30 15:13:49+00:00
This is the subject of the Hutter Prize and the algorithmic information theory that underpins it. There are some hard algorithm and data structure problems underlying lossless approximations of general learning even for relatively closed domains.

As an example, current AI is famously very poor at learning relationships between non-scalar types, like complex geometry, which humans learn with ease. That isn’t too surprising because the same representation problem exists in non-AI computer science.
by reactordev | 2025-08-30 15:14:00+00:00
Boy if I had a dollar for every “we’ve been doing it wrong” posts.

The issue with this stance is, it’s not a zero sum game. There’s no arriving to a point where there isn’t a cognitive load on the task you’re doing. There will always be some sort of load. Pushing things off so that you reduce your load is how social security databases end up on S3.

Confusion comes from complexity. Not a high cognitive load. You can have a high load and still know how it all works. I would better word this as Cognitive load increases stress as you have more things to wrestle about in your head. Doesn’t add or remove confusion (unless that’s the kind of person you are), it just adds or removes complexity.

An example of a highly complex thing with little to no cognitive load due to conditioning, driving an automobile. A not-complex thing that imparts a huge cognitive load, golf.
by antoinealb | 2025-08-30 15:14:26+00:00
The goal of this kind of system is not to replace the application server. This is intended to work on the data plane where you do simple operations but do them many time per second. Think things like load balancers, cache server, routers, security appliances, etc. In this space Kernel Bypass is still very much the norm if you want to get an efficient system.
by xmichael909 | 2025-08-30 15:14:30+00:00
Ever tried to build something with IP cameras and put the word ONVIF on your site? ONVIF.org will come after you with trademark threats. Doesn’t matter if your product really supports it, or if it’s even open source. They’ll tell you to delete “ONVIF-compatible” unless you cough up for their $20,000/year membership.

It feels backwards ... engineers need to say if things interoperate, customers search for “ONVIF” to check compatibility, yet instead of helping adoption they act like brand cops. Is this normal for “open standards”? Or is ONVIF.org just uniquely hostile here? I don't think they are right here, but having released a completely free product and got a trademark and a demand for 20k a year and being told I cannot use the word ONVIF in any way shape or form seems insane! Thoughts?
by baobabKoodaa | 2025-08-30 15:14:51+00:00
Andrew Ng has had a really sad career trajectory to a point where it's hard to take him seriously anymore. When I started in ML the very first course I took was actually Andrew Ng's course and it was amazingly good. But the past few years whenever he pops up, it always seems to be him repeating the talking points of some AI company that's paying him money. It's like seeing your hero turn into a complete sellout, shoveling bullshit for anyone who pays him.
by Rendello | 2025-08-30 15:14:57+00:00
Me too, I had 11 hits for the `en`, 7 for "--", and only 4 for the `em` using the curl script:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45074990

Also see the relevant XKCD:

https://www.xkcd.com/3126/
by bilsbie | 2025-08-30 15:15:30+00:00
> Over the lifetime of an air conditioner, the cost of the energy used to run the equipment will be larger than the cost of the equipment itself

My point is this is rapidly becoming not true.

Thanks for the info on the efficiency though. I’m still hoping we can figure something out. If not , we should switch to propane for the coolant. Way cheaper than whatever they keep making manufacture switch to.
by Swizec | 2025-08-30 15:15:30+00:00
> People are using them [LLMs] for everything

Yeah and when I was in college, StackOverflow was full of questions like “how do I add 2 numbers with jQuery”. This is normal. The newbies don’t know what they’re doing and with time they will get enough hard knocks to learn. We’ve all gone through this and still are in areas that are new to us.

LLMs aren’t gonna solve the fundamentals: Seniors still gotta senior and newbies still gotta learn.
by microtonal | 2025-08-30 15:16:52+00:00
Lots of research focus around that time was on recurrent models—because that was the conventional wisdom about how you model sequences. Markov chains had led to vanilla RNNs, LSTMs, GRU, etc., which all seemed tantalizingly promising. (MAMBA fans take note.) Attention mechanisms were even used in recurrent models…but so was everything else.

I feel like there is a step missing here...

People were using RNN encoders/decoders for machine translation - the encoder was used to make a representation (fixed-size vector) of the source language sentence, the decoder generated the target language sentence from the source representation.

The issue that people were bumping into is that the fixed-sized vector bottlenecked the encoder/decoder architecture. Representing a variable-length source sentence as a fixed-size vector leads to a loss of information that increases with the source sentence length.

People started adding attention to the decoder as a way to work around this issue. Each decoder step could attend to every token (well, RNN hidden representation) of the source sentence. So, this led to the RNN + attention architecture.

The title 'Attention is all you need' comes from the realization that in this architecture the RNN is not needed, neither for the encoder and decoder. It's a message to the field who was using RNNs + attention (to avoid the bottleneck). Of course, the rest was born from that, encoder-only transformer models like BERT and decoder-only models like current LLMs.
by mindslight | 2025-08-30 15:17:00+00:00
The comments still focusing on Shein/Temu/Ali are wild. De minimis for China ended back on May 2nd. From what I saw on Aliexpress, it wasn't even a speed bump - the prices just went up, with "customs charges included". I've been receiving orders just fine.

Trump's policies are big on tough talk while actually having the opposite effects of the marketing. High import taxes hurt the pre-imported selection available from domestic retailers, as sellers have to pay the tax ahead of the sale and navigate the uncertainty that the rates might change in the future. Whereas direct-from-China goods already have cash in hand to pay the tariffs, and the only uncertainty is in the few days between purchase and arrival at customs. I expect to be buying many more things direct from Aliexpress, as the tariffs set in, domestic inventory is exhausted, and domestic-seller prices creep upwards.

Furthermore, the high tariffs on China do encourage investments in factories. Specifically, Chinese investment in factories outside of China, for final assembly of products. Investing in the United States would not be prudent, with the environment of political instability. So these policies are effectively strengthening China's relationships with other countries.

Never mind that many of the companies still known for manufacturing quality goods do so in other western countries. If the goal was really to oppose China, then it should have been time to pull together with our allies - not to levy import taxes to keep them (price-) uncompetitive with Chinese products, while alienating them with hostile rhetoric. Ultimately, our adversaries couldn't have dreamed of more favorable policies.
by lynndotpy | 2025-08-30 15:17:35+00:00
You might also want to rank by how often people use double hyphens-- like so.

I'm probably not alone here in being a longtime Linux user who started using a Macbook after the Apple Silicon transition, late 2022.

On Windows and Linux, inserting an em-dash is a laborious alt-code process. But on MacOS with an Apple keyboard, the `option` key acts like a tertiary shift, so an `–` em dash is just <option><->.

I didn't start using em-dashes (typing -- is just second nature to me and I'm still on Linux most of the time) when I got a Macbook, but I imagine some people in my shoes did.
by blargthorwars | 2025-08-30 15:17:36+00:00
I'll add some more for both sexes:

Fear of HR violations in the workplace.

A good portion of people are morbidly obese. That hinders attraction and expression.

The modern inability to escape your past, leading to timid behaviour (in many endeavors).

The modern ability to find previous lovers of your partner, leading to jealousy and other emotions.
by Terretta | 2025-08-30 15:18:12+00:00
My usage is not just parentheticals—when they're used like this—it's ironically continuations — a turn the sentence takes but not really standalone.

And the continuations… Honestly? They'll never 
.

// • Chronic option-dash and option-shift-dash user, option-[ or option-shift-[ as well as option-] and option-shift-] — not to mention option-8 and option-; …
by marginalia_nu | 2025-08-30 15:18:32+00:00
Yup.

I've got a function the gist of which is

if (!cond()) return val; do { // logic } while (cond()); return val;

This looks like it could be simplified as

while (cond()) // logic } return val;

But if you do you lose out on 20% of performance due to branch mispredictions, and this is a very hot function. It looks like a mistake, like the two are equivalent, but they are actually not. So it gets a comment that explains what's happening.
by vbezhenar | 2025-08-30 15:18:37+00:00
Every function can fail with StackOverflowError and you can't do anything about it.

Almost every function can fail with OutOfMemoryError and you can't do anything about it.

I've accepted that everything can fail. Just write code and expect it to throw. Write programs and expect them to abort.

I don't understand this obsession with error values. I remember when C++ designers claimed, that exceptions provide faster code execution for happy path, so even for systems language they should be preferred. Go error handling is bad. Rust error handling is bad. C error handling is bad, but at least that's understandable.
by djtango | 2025-08-30 15:20:13+00:00
IMO you touch on the real heart of the issue at the end - the real world and business is messy and really _is_ just a pile of if statements.

When the problem itself is technical or can be generalised then abstractions can eliminate the need for 1000s of if-statement developers but if the domain itself is messy and poorly specified then the only ways abstractions (and tooling) can help is to bake in flexibility, because contradiction might be a feature not a bug...
by bee_rider | 2025-08-30 15:20:27+00:00
The static schedule part seems really interesting. They note that it only works for some instructions, but I wonder if it would be possible to have a compiler report “this section of the code can be statically scheduled.” In that case, could this have a benefit for real-time operation? Or maybe some specialized partially real-time application—mark a segment of the program as desiring static scheduling, and don’t allow memory loads, etc, inside there.
by Arrowmaster | 2025-08-30 15:20:46+00:00
Hey sorry for the late response. My mother is the medical billing and insurance specialist for a private religious organization. She moves all the nuns from their private insurance to Medicare as they become old enough to qualify.

What I've constantly heard from her is that the standard benefits are enough to cover everything but the private addons advertise they can make it cheaper. But as soon as you sign up, Medicare stops covering parts that private addons do (because the private insurance is now getting money from Medicare). This forces a lock in where you can't really go back.

Also from conferences she has attended, there are experts in the field predicting these private insurances are going to bleed Medicare dry from increased costs. What's happening is they keep adding these benefits that only some of their customers use (like silver sneakers membership?) then telling Medicare their operating costs have gone up and they need more money.
by 627467 | 2025-08-30 15:22:15+00:00
It's funny to see so much ideological incoherence: > we should consume local produce, is more sustainable and supports local communities

> what's your carbon footprint?! You fly around in jets 3 times a year?!

> let's buy 30c disposable crap from across the world while essentially subsidizing advanced industrialization of societies completely disconnected from our own
by egorelik | 2025-08-30 15:22:26+00:00
Skepticism of a ZFC axiom in particular could just be in terms of its standard status. I don't think anyone debates that ZFC in a particular logic doesn't imply this or that, but people can get into philosophical questions about whether it is the right foundation. There are also purely mathematical reasons to care - an extra axiom may allow you to produce more useful math, but it also potentially blocks you from other interesting math by keeping you out of models where, e.g., Choice is false.
by Voultapher | 2025-08-30 15:23:06+00:00
Genuinely this isn't a tech specific or even novel problem. There is plenty of prior art when it comes to inhibiting unwanted behavior.

> But how do you stop an EU company paying a Moldovan company (that has existed for 10 days) for "internet services", that pays a Brazilian company, that pays a Russian company to do the actual residential scraping?

The same example could be made with money laundering, and yes it's a real and sizable issue. Yet, the majority of money is not laundered. How does the EU company make sure it will not be held liable, especially the people that made the decision? Maybe on a technical level the perfect crime is possible and not getting caught is possible or even likely given a certain approach. But the uncertainty around it will dissuade many, not all. The same goes for companies selling the services, you might think you have a foolproof way to circumvent the measures put in play, but what if not and the government comes knocking?