MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sevg | 2025-08-30 19:46:26+00:00
> it doesn't really communicate why Kent's actions are problematic

I agree that the kernel community can be a hostile environment.

Though I’d argue that people _have_ tried to explain things to Kent, multiple times. At least a few have been calm, respectful attempts.

Sadly, Kent responds to everything in an email except the key part that is being pointed out to him (usually his behavior). Or deflects by going on the attack. And generally refuses to apologise.
by YetAnotherNick | 2025-08-30 19:46:35+00:00
> AI doesn't have any of these limitation

> AI is unable to solve their problems.

You are contradicting yourself. AI works worse than humans in places where cognitive load is required, and so it can't cross the boundary of cognitive load. If say it becomes better at managing cognitive load in the future, then in any case it doesn't matter as you can ask it to reduce the cognitive load in the code and it would.
by jhbadger | 2025-08-30 19:46:35+00:00
I love reading old magazines computer related or not. It really feels like a time machine when you read them, with the articles and advertisements taking you back to when they were current. And it is always interesting to read articles from 40 years ago that debate the merits of portable virtual machines (the p-system back then) versus native code that aren't very different from the same debates today.
by wolvesechoes | 2025-08-30 19:46:38+00:00
I, on the other hand, tried to vibe-code BDF-like ODE solver. Not some rough prototype, because I can do the rough prototype easily myself, but something robust and fast, with event handling etc. AI couldn't do it. Actually it couldn't do correctly anything more complex than out-of-the-textbook explicit RK4, but this is something undergrad students do while learning numerical methods for the first time.

And solvers are actually a simpler aspect of the project I am working on. It also includes (or rather aims to include) optimizing compiler with DAE to ODE reduction, advanced numerical debugging etc.

This is why these discussions are pointless - AI works well for some people in some contexts, for others not so much, yet both sides extrapolate their experience as universal.
by tim333 | 2025-08-30 19:47:13+00:00
This is kind of a weird article that mashed together different strands of thought.

For a start

>Peter Thiel and his friends feel they no longer belong to our species.

is basically bollocks. He still thinks he's human and the author is making stuff up. I think because Thiel is right wing and the author thinks that's bad.

The species bit seems to rest on a bit in an interview:

>Douthat: It seems very clear to me that a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism—for transcendence of our mortal flesh—and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine. Do you think that’s all irrelevant fantasy? Or do you think it’s just hype? Do you think people are raising money by pretending that we’re going to build a machine god? Is it hype? Is it delusion? Is it something you worry about?

and then in answer to those six complex questions Thiel goes kinda um, er, dunno, it's complicated.

I'm not sure that really makes the authors point.

Also I've been casually interested in transhumanism for ages as have a lot of people. It's not exclusively a billionaire thing. I think "transcendence of our mortal flesh" through tech is maybe more a sci-fi or futurist enthusiasm.
by riazrizvi | 2025-08-30 19:47:36+00:00
It’s just a business, and it sells because institution leaders find it useful to have some convincing ideas to back up their positions, then the cottage industry it spawns defends it, and we all arrive in the world with established ideas like this in play. There are many little distortions like this in society that experience eventually puts the lie to. It’s the landscape to navigate, to play along with. A huge part of what makes a strong society is how many of us know what the game is, who can also put on a good performance of it. Imagine being in an improv group and people keep calling out that it’s pretend.
by pscanf | 2025-08-30 19:47:47+00:00
A better-argued, less ranty version of a blog post I wrote some time ago which generated some interesting discussions here, and to which the article above is a reply / complement.

I think the prime number example (if obviously artificial) illustrates well the point I also wanted to make: while it might be technically possible to perfectly represent this function's I/O with the type system, what are the benefits and what are the costs? We seem to broadly agree that, as one approaches type perfection, benefits get smaller while costs grow bigger. A classic engineering tradeoff.

I also really liked how the author highlights the differences between application code and library code, which I hadn't taken much into consideration in my post. For example, I really didn't think about how using a library can be frustrating in many other ways, not only types! But, as he notes, we're accustomed to that, so it goes more unnoticed. And I really like the idea of having features in the language that allow encapsulating types. No clue what they could look like (I don't have strong CS foundations, so I'm out of my depth here), but the idea sounds very appealing.
by throw310822 | 2025-08-30 19:47:49+00:00
The author is very clear that he considers Israel being "the victim" despite the fact that it is the illegal occupier of parts of Palestine, and that the disproportion in military power between it and its supposed "tormentor" it's so huge that they have razed its entire region to the ground suffering minimal military losses (and that's only because they showed a minimal amount of restraint). That's what his whole argument hinges on.
by ewoodrich | 2025-08-30 19:48:20+00:00
Well I'm not expecting to run the model, but being able to simply browse a website to learn about what they've released doesn't seem like a massive ask. I'm not talking about 512 megabytes here, it's a regular up-to-date supported device that can browse 99.99% of the modern web without any issues.

It's pretty horrible performance even on my two year Windows laptop with 16GB of RAM, I could try on my M1 Macbook too but the juice just isn't worth the squeeze for me at this point.
by adolph | 2025-08-30 19:49:06+00:00
"Cognitive Load" may be a buzzword, and not well defined, and that doesn't mean it isn't a useful concept for evaluating different approaches toward solving problems that may extend the useful life of that solution instead of reinventing yet another wheel.

Getting to a better understanding of "cognitive load" does seem useful. Some things are "easier" to understand than others. Could things that are less efficient to understand be formulated in a way that is more efficient?

I have a notion that "cognitive load" is related to the human's ability to gain and maintain attention to mentally ingesting a solution (along with the problem the solution putatively solves). Interesting reads for this include McGilchrist's Master and His Emissary, and Carolyn Dicey Jennings' "I attend, therefore I am," [0], who was interviewed on the Rutt podcast [1].

0. https://aeon.co/essays/what-is-the-self-if-not-that-which-pa...

1. https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/the-jim-rutt-show-transcript...
by bornfreddy | 2025-08-30 19:49:16+00:00
Being an outsider to this whole scene, the whole thread reads very differently to me.

Kent seems very patient in explaining his position (and frustrations arising from other people introducing bugs to his code) and the kernel & debian folks are performing a smearing campaign instead of replying to what I see are genuine problems in the process. As an example, the quotes that are referenced by user paravoid are, imho, taken out of context (judging by reading the provided links).

There probably is a lot more history to it, but judging from that thread it's not Kent who looks like a bad guy.
by jama211 | 2025-08-30 19:49:46+00:00
Like any tool, it has use cases where it excels and use cases where it’s pretty useless.

Unfamiliar code bases is a great example, if it’s able to find the bug it could do so almost instantly, as opposed to a human trying to read through the code base for ages. But for someone who is intimately familiar with a code base, they’ll probably solve the problem way faster, especially if it’s subtle.

Also say if your job is taking image designs and building them in html/css, just feeding it an image getting it to dump you an html/css framework and then you just clean up the details of will save you a lot of time. But on the flip side if you need to make critically safe software where every line matters, you’ll be way faster on your own.

People want to give a black and white “ai is bad” or “ai is great”, but the truth _as always_ is “it depends”. Humans aren’t very good at “it depends”.
by georgeburdell | 2025-08-30 19:50:18+00:00
Long term programs such as Duke’s TIP have provided significant evidence that kids who score highly on the things they measure are correlated with high levels of professional achievement, such as patents. It makes sense to identify talented individuals and provide them with the resources they need to reach their potential

https://today.duke.edu/2016/06/whenlightningstrikestwice
by sfn42 | 2025-08-30 19:51:26+00:00
> "A single order ships to a single address, keep it simple, build it, oh actually, a salesman promised a big customer, so now we need to make it so a single order can ship to multiple addresses"--you've heard something like this before, haven't you?

I don't see the problem. Okay, so we need to support multiple addresses for orders. We can add a relationship table between the Orders and ShippingAddresses tables, fix the parts of the API that need it so that it still works for all existing code like before using the updated data model, then publish a v2 of the api with updated endpoints that support creating orders with multiple addresses, adding shipping addresses, whatever you need.

Now whoever is dependent on your system can update their software to use the v2 endpoints when they're ready for it. If you've been foolish enough to let other applications connect to your DB directly then those guys are going to have a bad time, might want to fix that problem first if those apps are critical. Or you could try to coordinate the fix across all of them and deploy them together with the db update.

The problems occur when people don't do things properly, we have solutions for these problems. It's just that people love taking shortcuts and that leads to a terrible system full of workarounds rather than abstractions. Abstractions are malleable, you can change them to suit your needs. Use the abstractions that work for you, change them if they don't work any more. Design the code in such a way that changing them isn't a gargantuan task.
by Telemakhos | 2025-08-30 19:52:03+00:00
How much privacy did you have in an airport to begin with? You gave your identity to the airline when you bought a ticket, and the airline passed that on to the government. You can't fly anonymously and, as far back as I can remember, never could. Even without cameras, you need a ticket to get past security, so everyone airside has already been identified. If it's an international flight, you already gave some government a biometric-friendly photograph with your passport application.

When you rent housing, your landlord is likely to require some identification for a credit check. Your face isn't going to make a difference here, because you already handed him your ID. Where it might make a difference is internal security camera footage: if you let your significant other live with you without paying rent, the landlord will know because her face will be recognized. If you sublet without notifying the landlord, he'll know. If you're running a flophouse or drug den, he'll know. But he already knew who you were before you signed a lease, because ID is more than a face.
by dns_snek | 2025-08-30 19:52:20+00:00
Okay great, seeing how every reasonable warning and technical restriction is completely pointless and how people will do everything they're told if they're naive enough and the person on the other end is convincing enough, we can skip this whole dance.

Because at the end of the day the scammer is going to convince your grandma to go to the bank, withdraw the entirety of her savings and send them to the scammer in an envelope.

Any technical restrictions therefore only harm our personal freedoms and don't actually protect those who are vulnerable because those people's problems aren't technical in nature.
by fluidcruft | 2025-08-30 19:52:59+00:00
One feature I like about ZFS and have not seen elsewhere is that you can have each filesystem within the pool use its own encryption keys but more importantly all of the pool's data integrity and maintenance protection (scrubs, migrations, etc) work with filesystems in their encrypted state. So you can boot up the full system and then unlock and access projects only as needed.

The dm stuff is one key for the entire partition and you can't check it for bitrot or repair it without the key.
Show HN: Wispbit – Keep codebase standards alive
by dearilos | 2025-08-30 19:53:41+00:00
Hey HN! Ilya and Nikita here. We're building wispbit (https://wispbit.com) - a tool that helps keep codebase standards alive.

With the help of AI coding tools, engineers are writing more code than ever. Code output has increased, but the tooling to manage this hasn't improved. Background agents still write bad code, and your IDE still writes slop without the right context.

So we built wispbit. It works by scanning your codebase for patterns you already use, and coming up with rules. Rules are kept up to date as standards change, and you can edit rules any time.

You can enforce these rules during code review, and because we have this rules system, you can bring them as an MCP into your coding IDE so that your agents produce more accurate code. You can think of it as a portable rules file that you can bring anywhere.

We put a lot of work into making a system that produces good rules and avoids slop. For repository crawling, we have an agent that dispatches subagents, similar to Anthropic's research agent. These subagents will go through and look for common patterns within modules and directories, and report back to the main agent, which synthesizes the results. We also do a historical scan on your pull request comments, determine which ones were addressed, filter out comments that wouldn't make a good rule, and use that to create or update rules.

Our early users are seeing 80%+ resolution rates, meaning that 80% of comments that wispbit makes are resolved.

Long-term, we see ourselves being a validation layer for AI-written code. With tools like Devin and Cursor, we find ourselves having to re-prompt the same solution many times. We still don't know the long-term implications on AI-assisted codebases, so we want to get in front of that as soon as possible.

We've opened up signups for free to HN folks at https://wispbit.com. We're also around to chat and answer questions!
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-08-30 19:53:51+00:00
> The goal is to predict if, for example, someone is better suited to sweeping the floors vs working with complex systems.

That is a perversion of the purpose and origin of these tests, and a core reason why ICAR tries to replace IQ tests with a wider set of different logic puzzles without any established "aggregate score" metric for people to abuse.
by rixed | 2025-08-30 19:54:43+00:00
Your definition of an IQ test seems to be so vague as to be meaningless.

Last time I passed a job interview, on several rounds of interview not one was about general intelligence, or general knowledge, or general anything. It was about my ability to solve the kind of problems they were solving and I had some experience solving. Last time I failed a job interview it was because of a bad culture fit.

I have not looked at the numbers, but I would suspect Ivy league admissions to be more correlated with wealth / geography than possibly anything else, but you probably square that with a belief that intelligence is hereditary as wealth is.

IQ tests measure the ability to solve quickly some abstract problems in an exam-like situation. There is certainly a use case for that, but thinking it captures the whole of "cognitive ability" is like thinking that duolingo captures the whole of litterary.

By the way, anytime one can't understand why $DEBATED_TOPIC is debatable should be an indication that one should switch to a slower though process.
by rcxdude | 2025-08-30 19:55:25+00:00
I highly doubt the people overeating are picking up the fork, then considering "oh, I'll be really unhealthy when I'm older, but at least I won't be out any money for it" before they take their bite. Much like harsher punishments for crimes, this kind of thinking doesn't work because it's just not something people factor into their behaviour anywhere near as much as you would think.
by kulahan | 2025-08-30 19:55:26+00:00
Nope, I’m not thinking about their test in any way. I’m explaining that it’s explicitly unrelated to your cognitive ability. Getting a more convenient job does not boost your brain.

I’m going to guess you’re obsessed with the plight of those you perceive to be “under” you. I mean, they’re poor - there’s NO WAY they’re doing well on the test right!?

Such an obnoxious point of view. Of COURSE your job has no causative effect on your natural cognitive ability. What a ridiculous way to try and look down on the poor.
by sarlalian | 2025-08-30 19:55:58+00:00
If you look at all the places where Kent has had drama, the common element is him and environments that have pretty rigid workflows. The common thread seems to be him not respecting workflows and processes that those places have, that inconvenience his goals. So, he ignores the workflows and processes of those places, and creates a constant state of friction and papercuts for those who he needs to accomplish his goals. They eventually get fed up, and either say no, not working with you anymore, or no, you’re not welcome to contribute here anymore.

He’s not super offensive, but he will tell a Debian package maintainer that their process sucks, and the should change it and they are being stupid by following that process. Overall, he seems a bit entitled, and unwilling to compromise with others. It’s not just Kent though, the areas that seem to be the most problematic for him, are when it’s an unstoppable force (Kent), and an immovable wall (Linux / Debian).

Working in the Linux kernel is well known for its frustrations and the personal conflict that it creates, to the point that there are almost no linux kernel devs/maintainers that aren’t paid to do the work. You can see a similar set of events happen with Rust4Linux people, Asahi linux project and their R4L drivers, etc.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-30 19:56:16+00:00
Most programmers can't make much sense of the output of a C compiler, either. We'll all be in that boat before long.

(To anticipate the usual reaction when I point that out: if you're going to sputter with rage and say that compilers are deterministic while AI isn't, well... save it for a future argument with someone who can be convinced that it matters.)
by ghaff | 2025-08-30 19:56:18+00:00
A lot of people are looking for reasons why landing tech jobs isn't the turkey shoot that it was for the past 15 years or so. I'm unconvinced how much AI is the answer. I do think a lot of tech companies probably overhired during COVID for a variety of reasons. From what I see, professional hiring seems pretty normal even if certainly not overheated and you can argue about how it compares to the general economy by a percentage point or two.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-30 19:57:35+00:00
Apple has not really innovated under him. They’ve just abused their walled garden monopoly more, and charged a lot for basic things like more memory. They provide services that cost money like iCloud, but with lots of lock in - like iCloud sync still doesn’t work properly on windows and I bet it’s on purpose. Meanwhile he’s advanced censorship on the devices (like the gun emoji going away), in the App Store (forcing moderation schemes on third party apps and services), etc.

Now the magic is gone. I can’t remember when I was last excited by some Apple announcement. I don’t even look at that news anymore. Not a great legacy even if he squeezed more profits. The article says it’s not fair to call Cook uncreative. But that’s what Apple has been under him.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-30 19:58:02+00:00
In general the security model of desktop operating systems is woefully inadequate for the modern era. Given the sheer volume of software known to do things not in the user’s best interest it’s borderline insanity that we hand it the keys to the kingdom without so much as a second thought with such frequency.

Of course if the user truly desires a zero-guardrail experience they should be able to get that, but it probably shouldn’t be the default. Software should be on a very short leash until the user has indicated trust, and even then privileges should be granted only on a per-domain basis. A program designed to visually represent disk usage will need full filesystem access for example, but there’s no reason it should be able to sniff around on my local network (or on platforms where package managers handle updates, connect to the internet at all).
by dns_snek | 2025-08-30 19:58:52+00:00
> let innocent people get scammed because you want to be able to run whatever on your phone.

As always it comes down to insulting and emotionally guilt tripping people to screw them out of their freedoms and of course there's never even a shred of evidence to support any of these incredible claims. You're laying it on too thick, give us a break.

> You’re acting like we (and these massive corporations) haven’t been trying for decades at this point.

You're acting like this would make a dent in the total number of people who are scammed every day.

And it just so happens that the only acceptable remedy necessitates infringing on billions of people's personal freedoms which will, incidentally, secure trillions in future profits for these corporations. All that for a temporary speed bump that would only affect a minority of scammers who would adapt in a month.
by layer8 | 2025-08-30 19:59:34+00:00
> Note the difference between "where" and "such that". "Where" is used when the preceding notation is being defined; "such that" is used when it is already defined and its value is being restricted.

I found this interesting. SQL and Swift use “where” for restrictions. Any other examples in programming languages?

If a programming language wanted to use a keyword for restrictions that isn’t “where” (and still is a single word, hence “such that” doesn’t qualify), what word would be suitable instead? “With”? “Having”?
by andix | 2025-08-30 20:00:27+00:00
I'm also into building abstractions, but I always try to leave "escape hatches" in place. I try to build my abstractions out of reusable components, that can also be used independently.

If the abstraction doesn't fit a new problem, it should be easy to reassemble the components in a different way, or use an existing abstraction and replace some components with something that fits this one problem.

The developers shouldn't be forced to use the abstractions, they should voluntarily use them because it makes it easier for them.