MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by warsheep | 2025-08-10 05:57:49+00:00
What you're describing is a simplified version of gradient descent (tweaking the weights) and online learning (working on one sample at a time).

This version will not get you far, you will just train a model that solves the last math problem you gave it and maybe some others, but it will probably forget the first ones.

There are other similar procedures that train better, but they've been tried and are currently worse than classical SGD with large batches
by myaccountonhn | 2025-08-10 05:57:49+00:00
I hate AIs because I think overall they're bad for the environment, centralizes power, and worsen quality.

That said I never really doubted that they can help you get more done. I use it occasionally to refactor or generate some boilerplate. But very often though I need to rewrite most of the functionality, I find it more true the more code it generates.

The agentic stuff I've tried have been terrible. Yeah I personally haven't used the latest models, but I deal with teammates who use them and the frontend it generates looks bland and the shell scripts generated with them are very hard to debug but also just flat out broken.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-10 05:58:23+00:00
The ability to convert existing apps is possibly one of the strongest benefits, even if it is a lot of work.

One person actually trying to take a pass at this without trying to support app porting is Olivier Forget's Dropserver. I'd argue he's got the closest model to Sandstorm's security focus without worrying about supporting legacy packaging.

I do think if vibe coding is up to the task it should be possible to vibe code Sandstorm right out of its dependency lock. ;)
by rep_lodsb | 2025-08-10 06:02:01+00:00
It had ICE mode (precursor to SMM, but used for production testing and low-level debugging), and according to this article, the pins were exposed at least on some of the chips you could buy:

https://www.rcollins.org/ddj/Jan97/Jan97.html

>On the standard Intel 80386 DX, asserting the undocumented pin at location B6 will cause the microprocessor to halt emulation and enter ICE mode.

[this is written from an ICE perspective - for "emulation", read "normal operation"]

This mode was introduced in the 80286, but I don't think the pins were exposed except in the special bond-out variant for ICE, and maybe early samples. You can trigger it in software (opcode 0F 04 on the 286, or by enabling a bit in DR7 on the 386), but then the processor disconnects from the bus and you have to reset it.

On the 286, you can get it to dump some otherwise hidden internal state, by using a prefix that no longer exists on 386s: https://rep-lodsb.mataroa.blog/blog/intel-286-secrets-ice-mo...
by tomnipotent | 2025-08-10 06:02:34+00:00
> brand throwing away the thing it's marketed itself for

I don't see what you see. It's a single product, not a realignment of their business model. They saw an opportunity and brought to market a product that will likely sell out, which tells us that customers are happy to make the trade-off of modularity and repairability for what the Strix Halo brings to the table. I think your interpretation of their mission is a bit uncharitable, maybe naive, and leaves the company little room to be a company.
by Galanwe | 2025-08-10 06:02:48+00:00
You don't mention say what you like specifically about Debian, most of what you wrote could be said for a lot of distributions.

So here is what I _don't_ like about Debian :-)

- I don't like Debian package tooling (dpkg, debootstrap, de build...). Actually I hate everything about the experience of Debian packaging. Every time I package for Debian, I end up with a messed up setup of chroots and have to make triple sure nothing leaked from my environment.

- Debian has a habit of repackaging everything at their own sauce, disregarding upstream philosophy. Debian packages will have their own microcosm of configuration directories, defaults, paths, etc. orthogonal to what a pristine installation look like.

- Debian has the annoying habit of default starting installed services. So you always have to dance around your configuration management to disable services, install them, configure them, then restart them.
by gyulai | 2025-08-10 06:02:57+00:00
I disagree on the "taste" aspect: I don't think it's valuable to take that into account in the slightest.

A lot of the time, technical interviews and take-home exercises turn into 100 iterations of "Do you prefer vanilla ice cream or chocolate?" or "Do you prefer vi or emacs?"

A good employee will figure out the subjective tastes, biases, and cultural quirks of a workplace, and fit in. A senior engineer will have done it perhaps half a dozen times in their career. -- And yet, companies insist on putting interviewees in a situation of having to basically mind-read those subjective tastes and biases to try to tell interviewers what they want to hear, because they'll reject a candidate on the false premise that a vi guy will never fit into an emacs shop.

"How do you feel about unit tests?" I really don't have any feelings about them whatsoever. Just tell me, if you want me to write them or not. Instead you're asking me to mind-read and trigger some hidden trauma in you. I just don't know whether the trauma is that codebase that required breaking production every single day, because there was no way to test it. Or whether the trauma is that one guy that you hired who never got any work done because he obsessed over refactoring the codebase for optimal testability instead.
by snickerbockers | 2025-08-10 06:04:35+00:00
>When people say “let it crash”, they are referring to the fact that practically any exited process in your application will be subsequently restarted. Because of this, you can often be much less defensive around unexpected errors. You will see far fewer try/rescue, or matching on error states in Elixir code.

I just threw up in my mouth when I read this. I've never used this language so maybe my experience doesn't apply here but I'm imagining all the different security implications that ive seen arise from failing to check error codes.
by banginghead | 2025-08-10 06:05:41+00:00
Why is the entire discussion between: "people should be able to pay rent and buy groceries and maybe save a little money on minimum wage" versus "those greedy poors"? I mean 10% of the US population are millionaires, we're all paying billionaires' taxes so they only have to pay a pittance, and soon we'll have a trillionaire. But no, screw the minimum wage workers, they should work extra jobs ... we'll never tax the rich what they owe, they are worshipped like gods.
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-08-10 06:05:56+00:00
There is a small community working on it (hi!) but there is several hard problems in the way of moving forward, all of which can be solved with time and money, neither of which we have a lot of. :/

I think ten years on there remains nothing even remotely comparable to Sandstorm for a dozen reasons, but I also can't assure you an issue you find would get fixed expediently, for sure.
by devjab | 2025-08-10 06:08:40+00:00
I think it depends a lot on what you're trying to get them to do and what you're working on. I don't really buy into the whole "prompt engineering" part. I use agents quite a lot, but they have limitations. They excel at writing SQL, kubernetes configuration, bicep and similar... at least so long as you know what you're doing. I also have quite a lot of success with them keeping documentation and tests updated. I wouldn't recommend using them for your tests unless tests are a nice to have feature for you because you actively deal with corrupted states through explicit error handling, but we do.

In my experience every model absolutely sucks at doing any form of software engineering. The thing is though, you don't need to do any software engineering to write software... until you do. Since LLM's got decent at programming we've let them loose among our BI and solar plant engineers and they're building some really useful tools in Python. They have no idea what they are doing, and they are still getting stuff to work. It's obviously absolute horse shit, but for a lot of it, the shit code will be "good enough" for nobody having to touch it for it's lifecycle. For the rest, actual software engineers take over.

If you're working in a field where "good enough" is fine, then I imagine that LLM's can do a lot for you. It might sound like I'm being disrespectful, but I really don't mean to be. In my decades of experience with software in enterprise settings, I've seen so many programs build with horrible code just trundle along. Creating great value for the business while requiring no to minimal maintenance. Bad from a traditionalist software engineering perspective, but great from a business perspective (which is what matters). Not everything needs to scale after all. Anyway, I do question whether the author has actually worked with LLM's a lot. I would think that the strengths failings of LLM's would get obvious rather quickly to anyone who uses them.
by changisaac | 2025-08-10 06:09:18+00:00
This is a great analysis btw, thanks for this!

My take away from this is that my startup should spend some time investing in some cost analysis with our LLM usage and context engineering (perhaps closely after some level of PMF). If it’s not happening anytime soon, might as well treat it as it’s not happening at all considering that startups die out pretty quick lol.
by quantummagic | 2025-08-10 06:10:41+00:00
That is really a separate, unrelated issue.

Not everyone needs the deepest, most intelligent therapist in order to improve their situation. A lot of therapy turns out to be about what you say yourself, not what a therapist says to you. It's the very act of engaging thoughtfully on your own problems that helps, not some magic that the therapist brings. So, if you could maintain a conversation with a tree, it would in many cases, be therapeutically helpful. The thing the LLM is doing, is facilitating your introspection more helpfully than a typical inanimate object. This has been borne out by studies of people who have engaged in therapy sessions with an LLM interlocutor, and reported positive results.

That said, an LLM wouldn't be appropriate in every situation, or for every affliction. At least not with the current state of the art.
by Epa095 | 2025-08-10 06:12:50+00:00
So, talk me through where I am wrong. I will use the example in my sibling post you did not reply to.

If you put 10 million into the S&P 500 in 2002 you would get a dividend of roughly 132k (1.32%). That's your share, as a owner, of the wealth produced that year across all the companies you own tiny parts of. Keep the money there, do absolutely nothing, and in 2025 it has grown to 70 million. Your yearly payout is roughly 925k, 7 times what it was 20 years ago.

You agree with this? And then we compare that to wages, and see that they have grown significantly less. You agree to this as well? For sake of argument, let's say they doubled.

From this I conclude:

- Income from capital grows exponentially faster than income from salaries.

- The person who invested 10 million in 2002 gets a larger fraction of what the economy produces compared to a salaried person today than 20 years ago.

- That difference will increase if the stock market continues as it has done in the past.

Please help me understand which conclusion you disagree with, and why.
by itsmek | 2025-08-10 06:12:58+00:00
This comment is weirdly heavy on lecture and light on substance. I'm going to ignore the second two paragraphs and just stick to the first. The person you're replying to says that labor is different because it has more complex costs to society aka an externality. Your rebuttal, as far as I can tell, is "nuh uh". I can think of a very simple externality - low paid workers are supported by the rest of us via social programs. Goods that require similar support from the rest of us (cigarettes for example) should also be regulated because it breaks the economic magic that makes efficient decisions and allocations. We have known about these basic (literally econ 101) flaws for almost as long as we've studied markets.

I am open to being convinced by either you or OP but your argument is failing to do so.
by teslabox | 2025-08-10 06:13:14+00:00
Nightshades are problematic for stressed and old people because the plants have mild poisons. Old people and addicts tend to not be able to handle the poisons in tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and chilis.

But for people that are nightshade-tolerant potatoes are an excellent food crop.

IIRC, someone was annoyed that do-gooders wanted to remove potatoes from the food stamp programs, because the potato is actually an almost-complete food. This has morphed into The Potato Diet, which calls for eating potatoes and only potatoes for a short period of time.

From the start of October through November in 2010, Voigt consumed only spuds, a few basic seasonings and small amounts of oil for cooking. His endeavor drew attention from NBC’s Today Show, CBS News, Fox, NPR and the UK’s Daily Telegraph. Voigt documented his journey through a blog ( 20potatoesaday.com ). Tired of potatoes getting a bad rap as being nothing but fattening starch and carbs, he wanted to make a statement that proved potatoes were very nutritious.

- https://spudman.com/article/all-potato-diet-eight-years-late...
by accidentallfact | 2025-08-10 06:14:11+00:00
I don't think there is any specific feature that makes potatoes unique.

Two chromozome copies are typical for animals, but the number of copies in plants varies widely, and and often changes easily, even different variants of the same crop can have different numbers of copies.

Underground storage organs are nothing unique, and those of potatoes are not even particularly large. Many places prohibit fig trees for example, because what you see is basically just the tip, and there can be a giant 100m in diameter underground that ruins every underground structure in its path. But it's full of nasty toxic sap, and harvesting it would be a nightmare.

It's just the particular combination of fast growth, edibility, and ease of cloning and harvest that makes potatoes unique.
by AuryGlenz | 2025-08-10 06:14:14+00:00
I agree. I can listen to a podcast in my car, there's no chance someone will cough or sneeze near me, etc.

My first time being into a McDonalds since I was a kid was earlier this summer when I gave my 3 year old the option of going in or staying in the car. I was pretty shocked at how barebones it was now. There weren't even napkins available and none with our food...which, when you have a kid with, is an issue.
by changisaac | 2025-08-10 06:14:31+00:00
>"Code review" as defined as a human in the loop getting the final say on whether a change will be made to the system will be the absolute last thing to go. That process may look very different as both the inputs massively increase in scale and the methods get disrupted by AI.

I know this is probably not something you can divulge but I look forward to how your team at Graphite plans to solve this! (Would also love your personal take!)
by jen729w | 2025-08-10 06:18:30+00:00
See their blog post about this from last week.

https://tailscale.com/blog/tailscale-privacy-anonymity

# What Tailscale isn't: an anonymity service

Tailscale is a secure connectivity tool that puts the highest value on the privacy of your packets. But we made an intentional choice from day one that we weren't going to try to be an anonymity tool. Quite the opposite in fact! We're an identity-centric network.

Anonymity tools, like Tor, need to be architected very differently. They trade away speed to reduce traceability. They are hard to inspect and diagnose and debug, as a feature. They make enemies, both political and corporate. They are inherently hard to audit and control, by design. In short, they are the exact opposite of what you want your corporate (or even homelab) network to be.

We believe anonymity tools are essential to safe network infrastructure and a free society. But, those tools are made by other people.

…

But if you’re looking for complete anonymity online, Tailscale is not the tool for you. Y'all, we're an identity-centric network with a centralized control plane. You should assume law enforcement can easily find out that you use Tailscale. Tailscale packets are pretty easy to detect, so you can assume they could know, through ISP logs, the shape and size of data you send between different nodes in different places (albeit without knowing the decrypted packet contents). You should assume they can correlate that flow metadata with your login identity.
by starkparker | 2025-08-10 06:20:06+00:00
Maybe a niche concern, but SDL2 is still in Trixie. The sdl2-compat layer (translating SDL2 APIs to SDL3) is in testing, where SDL2 also exists side-by-side with it and is intended to be used to test and verify that SDL2 apps that use it are actually compatible.

Night-and-day decision-making process compared to Fedora and Arch, which both replaced SDL2 with sdl2-compat, broke a bunch of SDL2 apps because sdl2-compat isn't actually SDL2-compatible yet, and sent everyone to yell at the SDL team about it.
by praptak | 2025-08-10 06:20:11+00:00
A condition that "should not happen" might still be a problem specific to a particular request. If you "just crash" it turns this request from one that only triggers a http 500 response to one that crashes the process. This increases the risk of Query of Death scenarios where the frontend that needs to serve this particular request starts retrying it with different backends and triggers restarts faster than the processes come back up.

So being too eager to "just crash" may turn a scenario where you fail to serve 1% of requests into a scenario where you serve none because all your processes keep restarting.
by msuniverse2026 | 2025-08-10 06:21:01+00:00
Personally I feel the worst contributing factor to low TFR is the mismatch between the maturity of women and their fertility window. Many women don't even engage with the thought of family formation until it starts to become a fading possibility. It isn't a very politically correct thing to say so I'll use a throwaway but as women's fertility lowers so does their general attractiveness to men. So right when they start to 'feel ready' they are facing a closing window, a tougher marriage market and it comes after a decade or so of career or academic achievement leaving them with even fewer options as they typically won't date down.
by pabs3 | 2025-08-10 06:21:13+00:00
The folks behind Debian LTS and Freexian ELTS are all Debian members/contributors, and the Debian LTS changes end up in the Debian archive, while the Freexian ELTS ones are publicly available, just in an external archive.

https://wiki.debian.org/LTS https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Team https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Funding https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended
Ask HN: Canadian founders, how do you build in SF?
by changisaac | 2025-08-10 06:25:50+00:00
Hi HN. This is a question to all the Canadian founders out there in SF.

I’m a Canadian startup founder myself, I also realize that SF is probably the highest ROI place to be to build a startup especially in my problem space (dev tools). Not mandatory sure, but helpful.

For other Canadian founders out there, how do you manage to build in SF? We can stay for 6 months visa free for business reasons but after that, what do you do?

(And yes I’m from Waterloo haha)
by comex | 2025-08-10 06:26:22+00:00
Because if the minimum wage is too high, employers can't afford to pay it, so it will just result in reduced employment rather than wages going up, aka economic "deadweight loss".

That much is obvious. What is in question is the effects of more realistic minimum wages like this one. Some claim that _any_ minimum wage will only result in deadweight loss, which is true in simplified models, but the effect in the real world is not so clear, hence the need for this type of research.
by yyyk | 2025-08-10 06:27:05+00:00
It's all very simple: Entra* (Azure AD or however you'd call it) should not be used for AuthZ. Entra AuthN is okayish, but forget about Entra AuthZ, do it all yourself. It's all very simple to avoid once you do AuthZ.

* No idea why the rename happened. Does some manager in Microsoft have the plaque: "Renomino, ergo sum."?
by kruffalon | 2025-08-10 06:28:23+00:00
I got some kind of summer flu the other day. It always catches me by surprise that you can get "a cold" in summer.

Oh, well, I don't really mind, it is one of the few times I rest and don't keep chipping away at my todo-list.

It sucks too though, because I also had plans with friends and it's harder to make new plans since many of my friends are teachers and start working soon, around the 20th.
by josevalim | 2025-08-10 06:29:11+00:00
That’s actually a good example. Imagine someone forgot to check the error code from an API response. In some languages, they may attempt to parse it as if it was successful request, and succeed, leading to a result with nulls, empty arrays, or missing data that then spreads through the system. In Elixir, parsing would most likely fail thanks to pattern matching [1] and if it by any chance that fails in a core part of the system, that failure will be isolated and that particular component can be restarted.

Elixir is not about willingly ignoring error codes or failure scenarios. It is about naturally limiting the blast radius of errors without a need to program defensively (as in writing code for scenarios you don’t know “just in case”).

1: https://dashbit.co/blog/writing-assertive-code-with-elixir
by mcteamster | 2025-08-10 06:30:41+00:00
Depending on how "approximate" is acceptable, I've found that using timezone names can be a good proxy for location. As most users have their timezones set correctly it's more consistent and private than IP or GPS.

I've made a library for my own use cases that does this (https://github.com/mcteamster/virgo), but it's also pretty straightforward to parse the city/state name out of the timezone and look it up somewhere.
by laidoffamazon | 2025-08-10 06:31:24+00:00
Seems fair. Stanford isn't in the business of conferring education. It's in the business of conferring status.

Public funds shouldn't pay any tuition costs for anybody that attends Stanford as an undergraduate. I'll admit for PhD programs the benefit is typically via publicly funded research so I think that can stay. But it's absurd that a California taxpayer would fund elites that consider everyone else beneath them.
by pabs3 | 2025-08-10 06:32:12+00:00
Freexian is for-profit, and all the LTS/ELTS contributors are Debian maintainers, and LTS is part of Debian, while ELTS is publicly available too, but in an external archive.

https://wiki.debian.org/LTS https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Team https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Extended https://wiki.debian.org/LTS/Funding
by lwo32k | 2025-08-10 06:34:26+00:00
Thiel has to be read as a counter to Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum etc.

Neither side has perfect solutions about how society should handle complexity, chaos and unpredictability.

So its always going to be an oscillation between the two camps.

Hopefully more and more people realize it doesn't have to be an antagonistic back and forth. Requires constant daily reminders of humility and recognition we chimps are chimps not gods.
by rohansood15 | 2025-08-10 06:34:45+00:00
What do you think it is 'mocking'? It is exactly the behavior that would make the tests work. And unless I give it access to production, it has no way to verify tasks like how values (in this case secrets/envs) are being passed.

Plus, this is all besides the point. Simon argued that the model hallucinates less, not a specific product.