MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Tajnymag | 2025-08-11 06:31:22+00:00
Bottles has certain sandboxing capabilities on top of wine. Plus, Bottles can download and manage various wine versions, separate from your distro's offerrings. It's pretty neat. Of course, technically, you could do almost everything it offers manually via scripting and your own wrappers, but that can be said about almost any software. Heck, C and C compilers are nothing else than syntax sugar for writing assembly.
by AstralStorm | 2025-08-11 06:31:39+00:00
> Productivity was tracked through metrics such as completed tasks (pull requests), code commits, and successful builds.

Making untested garbage faster to check off tasks quicker. Reopen rate please? New bug task rate? Nobody looked...

> The study also monitored code quality via build success rates. Importantly, increased productivity did not come at the cost of more errors, showing that Copilot helped developers code faster and more accurately.

It builds therefore it works. And the test suite was also AI generated?

Feels like we're back in primary school learning programming.

Classic case of gaming the metrics.
by motorest | 2025-08-11 06:32:57+00:00
> I think the question we should be focusing on is why this is possible in the first place?

No, that's specious reasoning. OP points out the possibility this is not even real. Do you have any indication that any of this is true? That should be your first step. However, you're somehow arguing that hypotheticals serve as any kind of justification, and a potentially made-up scenario is worth anything.
by masklinn | 2025-08-11 06:32:59+00:00
> "we want these elaborate type systems, but we also want typeless because that is far more convenient to use, so we invented generics, a method to untype your type system"

It's rather the exact opposite. Parametric types are a way to properly type "deeply" instead of just the topmost layer. Just like inference, type parameters don't remove types.

> isn't that just python, strongly typed but your functions don't have built in type checks.

That doesn't really make any sense? Static types mean you don't have runtime type checks, since the types are known statically.
by Sesse__ | 2025-08-11 06:33:37+00:00
There's an error here: “NT instructions are used when there is an overlap between destination and source since destination may be in cache when source is loaded.”

Non-temporal instructions don't have anything to do with correctness. They are for cache management; a non-temporal write is a hint to the cache system that you don't expect to read this data (well, address) back soon, so it shouldn't push out other things in the cache. They may skip the cache entirely, or (more likely) go into just some special small subsection of it reserved for non-temporal writes only.
Show HN: TrainCheck – Catch ML Training Bugs Before It's Too Late
by justmattyou | 2025-08-11 06:34:04+00:00
Silent training errors are bugs in ML training jobs that do not crash, raise exceptions, or obviously break metrics. They waste GPU hours and silently degrade model quality, and often go unnoticed until it is too late.

An early example of a silent error from Bloom-176B training, where model parameters silently diverged across GPUs and caused conflicting model checkpoints: https://github.com/bigscience-workshop/bigscience/blob/maste...

TrainCheck is a runtime checking tool that catches these issues early. It automatically infers invariants (semantic correctness rules) from known-good training runs, such as official examples maintained by framework developers. It enforces them on new runs to spot subtle violations in-flight. Many errors can be caught within a single iteration. TrainCheck also tries to make invariants transferable across runs, setups, and even code structures, so that users can immediately benefit from TrainCheck, without always needing to infer invariants from very specialized setups/envs.

We have used TrainCheck to uncover 18 real-world silent errors in popular PyTorch, DeepSpeed, and HuggingFace pipelines, including one during BLOOM-176B pretraining that standard metric monitoring missed. We also found 6 new bugs in DeepSpeed and Transformers.

- A 5-minute TrainCheck experience for you to try out: https://github.com/OrderLab/TrainCheck/blob/main/docs/5-min-...

- Link to the paper and slides: https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi25/presentation/jiang

For anyone training large or long-running ML models, what silent bugs have you run into, and how do you catch them today?
by bapak | 2025-08-11 06:34:11+00:00
Thanks! Yes that would work, just like an .html file would work. The advantages of SVG in this case are

- the OS previews it as an image, but on click it opens a website (which to be fair, once you click on a downloaded file, you're already done)

- SVGs are allowed in any "image/*" form, bypassing certain filters
by famahar | 2025-08-11 06:34:15+00:00
I may likely be limiting my audience since many people are used to 60fps and higher now. I'm slightly strange in that I think on a visual level, it just does not match my intent as I actually prefer the lack of visual clarity in art.

I do have a fear that most people won't see the intent and instead just see a badly performing game (I have not got this critique yet in every other game I have with intentional low frames yet, but then again my audience cares less about performance and more about the experience). Here is the game for reference that I am locking to 30fps.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3215280/TORI/

And one that I locked to 14fps

https://infinitetears.itch.io/cityephemera
by CraigJPerry | 2025-08-11 06:34:18+00:00
What happened in the early 2010s?

1980s widespread adoption of electronic fuel injection - this is generally a good thing, cars become more complex but run better more of the time

1990s widespread adoption of more advanced emissions control systems - for reliability i'd say this is only a backwards step - none of these systems are required to propel the car down the road but many of them can stop a car from driving. They are additional complexity, weight and cost for limited functional benefit (in this generation, fuel economy improvements were fairly small compared to the leap from carbs to EFI in the previous gen).

2000s widespread adoption of on-car networks, the emissions diagnostics technology introduced in the previous decade was now no longer the primary use of on-car networks. Now your car stereo knew how to increase its volume as your road speed increased etc. screens became larger and colourful. Onboard software (typically bug ridden) became a security risk.

2010s widespread adoption of telematics maybe? That was more mid-late 2010s though
by palata | 2025-08-11 06:34:26+00:00
Because people keep believing that there must be a technical solution that will improve security without causing harm. They are just uninformed, IMO.

Just like governments pretty much don't do anything about climate change and the mass extinction that is currently happening, even though they may well end up killing most people on Earth. If they understood how bad it is, they would act. But they don't.
by EdwardDiego | 2025-08-11 06:35:34+00:00
> A 38-year-old Russian crime gang leader arrested in ... Kyiv, Ukraine.

That tracks. How many Russian cybercriminals can you think of who were arrested in Russia? Hence why a lot of malware checks for your keyboard's language - so the payload doesn't deploy in Russia, which _would_ actually get you arrested.

But if you're targeting people outside Russia, you're golden.

As for why he's in Kyiv? Maybe his girlfriend is from there. Maybe he prefers Kyiv to Moscow or whichever oblast he's from. Maybe he's hiding from the Russian draft?
by simianwords | 2025-08-11 06:37:01+00:00
This seems like an often repeated myth but it doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

Isn’t it just much simpler to accept that they indeed provide value in making good judgements? Instead of this more contrived explanation.

Many McKinsey go on to be executives in companies which means they had - at some point - the skills or judgement required to drive companies.
by justmattyou | 2025-08-11 06:38:58+00:00
We have also spent a huge amount of effort making TrainCheck work for real ML engineering workflows, while also dealing with the quirks and limitations of Python itself. Here are a few of the hardest challenges we are still working through, and we would love to hear how others have approached similar problems:

1. Instrumentation that just works

TrainCheck monkey patches APIs in PyTorch and other frameworks so users can start monitoring without building custom binaries. This is convenient, but it can break tools like torchDynamo and sometimes trigger low-level issues. We are exploring ways to keep the plug-and-play experience while reducing overhead by instrumenting only APIs that matter.

2. Single-threaded inference

Our traces are large, schema-less, and heterogeneous (Python dictionaries with things like tensors of different shapes). This rules out simple vectorization and keeps us stuck with Pandas/NumPy in a single thread. Suggestions for scalable querying on irregular data are welcome.

3. Overlapping CPU and GPU work

CPU-heavy steps like trace serialization and invariant inference could overlap with GPU compute, but Python’s IPC costs and limited shared memory support (assuming we have to use multiprocessing) make this problematic. We are curious about practical approaches that avoid major rewrites in C++.
by Peteragain | 2025-08-11 06:39:27+00:00
No mention of lightening! The idea that the triboelectric series is more guidelines than rules was interesting, but the metal-insulator distinction seems a bit off. Is there a triboelectric effect between two conductors? How? Why wouldn't the distribution of electrons even out in a pair of conductors, or do they mean non conducting metals? And I imagine someone has looked at triboelectric effects between crystals of varying materials - does anyone know?
DOI-Registered, License-Free P2P Protocol – Implemented and Open to Adaptation
by mzk_pi | 2025-08-11 06:41:23+00:00
Preprint, but now formally published on Zenodo with a DOI, making it permanently citable as part of the global academic record. The design and mathematical model are fully open and license-free.

It separates trust from currency, operates without ownership, competition, or central authority, and is structurally designed to prevent exclusion, inflation, and market closure.

The current public release contains the conceptual and mathematical foundation; code is not yet public. The system is already running in a real-world environment.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.16791767
by speerer | 2025-08-11 06:41:40+00:00
Take heart: I checked this by taking a random screenshot, and browsing down to see how long it took me to find a commercial page. A quick sense of my trail was really encouraging:

- Open source wasm runtime

- Science transparency campaign

- Netherlands gov anti-climate change program

- open thesaurus

- GNOME conference

- France's portal of towns and cities

- Scientific measurement standardistion page

- Scientific journal

- free eBook library

- parked domain

- Linux community

- Open source graphics library

- placeholder/template blog

- A book publisher (selling books!)

It took quite a while to find a commercial site,and that itself (a bookseller) is a positive thing itself.
by 4ndrewl | 2025-08-11 06:41:48+00:00
I doubt anyone here is working to 1% of fb scale, let alone 10%.

The answer to "why Hack" needs to be viewed in the historical context of "when Hack" and what was happening (or not) in the php ecosystem at that time.

Things have changed a lot since, in terms of performance, language longevity, ecosystem etc. Its a perfectly reasonable language to adopt for many orgs.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-11 06:42:58+00:00
Circa 1987, DOS boot disk had a "Backpack" hard disk driver on it, so I could plug it in the parallel printer port and boot up with 300 Megabytes of my stuff instantly available as D: on on any customer machine. It made service calls a lot easier to manage, no more stacks of floppy disks.

300 Megabytes!!!

I had all my source code on it, archives, utilities, compilers, the whole shebang!
by aussieguy1234 | 2025-08-11 06:43:27+00:00
Wine can get quite complicated to configure.

It tends to work best when each app has its own isolated wine prefix. This lets you tweak wine settings/params as needed for each app.

This is how I do it for games using Lutris. I have a few games that work best on particular wine versions that won't be able to share the same prefix.
by strken | 2025-08-11 06:43:54+00:00
On the topic of "support your friends", if there's a funeral for someone you weren't super close with but your friend knew well and you're not sure whether to go, I would recommend just going, sitting up the back, offering your condolences if the opportunity comes up, and leaving.

I've failed to do this twice. Nobody else said or did anything, but I regretted it.
by jcheng | 2025-08-11 06:44:53+00:00
Not at all. The iPod of the day had a click wheel as an input device. The iPhone introduced us to capacitive touch, multitouch, gesture recognition, full web browsing. Huge leap compared to not only the iPod but the PocketPCs of the day.

Listen to the audience reaction when he shows how you scroll a list view: https://youtu.be/VQKMoT-6XSg?si=OmbgSG7nmEpdAETl&t=970
by noelwelsh | 2025-08-11 06:45:59+00:00
The introduction to me reads as very confused:

One of the most sought-after features for PHP is Generics: The ability to have a type that takes another type as a parameter. It's a feature found in most compiled languages by now, but implementing generics in an interpreted language like PHP, where all the type checking would have to be done at runtime, has always proven Really Really Hard(tm), Really Really Slow(tm), or both.

* The topic of the article is implementing generics at compile time, but this claims that PHP is not compiled.

* Type checking is orthogonal to compilation vs interpreter.

* Types are not checked at runtime. It is kinda the point of types that they are checked before code runs. Runtime checks are on values. You can reify types at runtime but this breaks a useful property of generics (parametricity) and it prevents the very useful feature of types without a runtime representation (often known as newtypes).

* If you want to use types in the colloquial "dynamic type" meaning as tags on values, and you also want to talk about generics (a feature that only makes sense for types-as-compile-time-properties) you need to be really careful in your terminology or confusion will abound!
by simianwords | 2025-08-11 06:47:02+00:00
This seems like an advertisement for Xavier AI which is okay but anyone reading this should be skeptical of even the possibility of replacing judgement calls with AI.

AI _can_ help you create dashboards, analyse data and help with reports. AI can't realistically replace good taste. A good taste involves experience and a person's ideology - their prediction towards how things will play out in the future. This will be the biggest skill differentiator in a time where getting unambiguous things done can be oneshotted.

Consultancies will still exist because people with good taste exist.
by condiment | 2025-08-11 06:48:04+00:00
What a hot take! If you're in an organization where leadership 'points the finger' at McKinsey to cast blame for an unpopular decision, imagine what sorts of decisions they would have made without the consultants!

Consultants are hired to improve decision quality. They do that through a combination of analysis, experience, and industry connections. The work product is rarely 'powerpoints'. The work product is the actual work, which entails people doing research, making decisions, executing on them, and measuring results.

At any rate, I don't disagree with you that consultants aren't going anywhere. This post is an ad for an immature AI service that makes a bunch of claims about how they've solved for hallucinations and knowledge cutoffs in order to take down McKinsey. If they had solves for those problems, they'd be wasting their effort building a replacement for consulting firms.
by jaccola | 2025-08-11 06:48:06+00:00
In my experience it is often subtly simpler than this.

Rising to the top of a company is rarely the meritocracy we'd like to think, (or, at least, the merit required to rise is different than the merit required to lead a company successfully). Often people rise to the top who don't want to make decisions, don't have a vision and very much are used to leading by consensus.

So there is not a masterful plan to avoid blame for the difficult thing they know they need to do, they just don't know what to do - they are incapable of making decisions.
by 535188B17C93743 | 2025-08-11 06:48:40+00:00
I really don't want to be a conspiracy theorist, but it honestly feels like a pyramid scheme. The MBAs/consultants help out the MBAs/consultants. Their effectiveness isn't super important. It's very rare I see a coworker who is actually effective get promoted––it's always the ones who are loudest, steal credit from others, and who are really social/fun to be around.
by moltar | 2025-08-11 06:48:50+00:00
I was thinking of doing something similar. I think I’m well positioned for this as I have a natural ability to juggle many contexts, I used to run a software agency, and I’m pretty good at architecture early on which means solutions come out more robust and flexible. I have had really good experience with AI tools and I’m constantly evolving my workflows.

I’m wondering how did you land your current gigs?

Thank you.
by pxc | 2025-08-11 06:49:56+00:00
It's a pun on Wine, the syscall translation layer that lets you run Windows programs on Linux without hardware virtualization.

A working Wine configuration includes a directory that functions as a virtual C;\ drive, has a registry, and various other settings. You can actually have multiple of these if you specify which one to use at launch time through the environment variable WINEPREFIX, which points to a directory containing the relevant config files and other data directories.

A "bottle" is a user-friendly way of interacting with this functionality, managing these prefixes and their settings, and recommending known compatibility fixes for them. It may also involve managing multiple Wine versions, perhaps including some with patches.

It seems comparable to a lot of older tools in the same vein like CrossOver Linux (by Codeweavers, who maintain Wine), PlayOnLinux, Lutris (gaming-focused), and Cedega (gaming-focused and defunct).
by AstralStorm | 2025-08-11 06:50:04+00:00
You can use an LLM as an advanced search engine. The results may vary. Tends to sometimes return hallucinated garbage wasting your time especially for harder queries.

Which are the ones you would want answers to... Everything else is memorized unless you're new.

Usually these things do not have an answer in the search engine either. Or a lousy one like using an insufficiently completed premade library.
by jgb1984 | 2025-08-11 06:50:33+00:00
I'm not using AI for anything. I read and write my own emails, make my own slides, write my own python code using vim, debian, openbox, bash and tmux, just as I have been for almost 20 years. I don't even use an LSP or autocompletion! Hell, I even read actual books, on paper!

And yes, I did test ChatGPT, claude, cursor, aider... They produce subpar code, riddled with subtle and not so subtle bugs, each of my attempts turned out to be a massive waste of time.

LLM is a plague and I wish it had never showed up, the negative effects on so many aspects of the world are numerous and saddening.
by bux93 | 2025-08-11 06:50:34+00:00
The paper mentions TCXOs and OCXOs, respectively temperature and oven-controlled crystal oscillator. You can get PCIe cards that have these on them, and devices for audio studios with a rubidium oscillator like the Tascam CG-1800.

Jane Street has a podcast that lifts the veil a little bit on how they keep their gear synced up, which is pretty interesting: https://signalsandthreads.com/clock-synchronization/
by simianwords | 2025-08-11 06:50:34+00:00
I understand where you are coming from. Here you have two misaligned incentives.

You have people making coming from the outside, making decisions that would affect rank and file in a company. I think its natural for the rank and file to be biased towards believing in their own skills and dismissing outsiders.

Why would shareholders, the board and the CEO waste so much money on paying consultancies when the only value is being able to pass blame? Isn't it simply easier to believe that consultancies indeed provide valuable judgements and the price paid is worth it?
by theshackleford | 2025-08-11 06:50:50+00:00
It’s not about badly performing for me, but reality.

Low frame rates on modern display technology make me physically ill if there is a viewport component.

The “smearing” of the image induces nausea for whatever reason. I do not suffer this from CRT displays, just modern ones and have done since LCD effectively arrived. Though I can tolerate it on teeny tiny screens like handhelds interestingly enough.
by southwindcg | 2025-08-11 06:51:56+00:00
I think Spot[0] would be the more apt comparison. These always remind me of the nightmare fuel Black Mirror episode Metalhead[1] where this style of robot goes on a rampage against humanity.

[0] https://bostondynamics.com/products/spot/

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5710984
by brabel | 2025-08-11 06:53:40+00:00
Yes, but how is that equivalent?

Zig:

const std = @import("std"); pub fn main() !void { // std is like a namespace here std.debug.print("Hello, World!\n", .{}); }

D:

import std.stdio; void main() { // no namespace here, "writeln" and everything else in "std.stdio" is imported writeln("Hello, World!"); }

The closest to Zig in D would be:

import io = std.stdio; void main() { io.writeln("Hello, World!"); }
by evidenciary | 2025-08-11 06:53:42+00:00
I don't think the "non-deterministic" accusation is a good one. Same as "hallucination", it's a bit of misdirection.

These LLMs are buggy. They have bugs. They don't do what they promise. They do it sometimes, other times they give garbled output.

This is buggy software. And after years and billions of dollars, the bug persists.
by Simon_O_Rourke | 2025-08-11 06:55:22+00:00
I've worked with lots of folks on the spectrum and to be honest it's more fun dealing with them as team members rather than "normies".

One guy particularly stands out, he joined the team and started off on a solo run with a couple of projects a few others were involved in. A few weeks later I asked him if he'd setup any meetings with the team to get context and, you know, say hello and his response was "why should I do that, can't they read my PRs?". Classic.

Another one was the very loudly self-diagnosed neurodiverse girl, who seemed to just use it as cover for being a total jerk. Eventually she had to be managed out, as she tipped the scale between doing good work and tolerance of odd behaviors too far - screaming in meetings, histrionics and stuff you'd expect more of someone living on a street corner.
by musicale | 2025-08-11 06:56:36+00:00
Now we live in obnoxiously loud cities with 24/7 emergency vehicle sirens (hey! there's an emergency somewhere!), loud aircraft flying overhead at all hours, loud low-frequency rumbling from ground vehicles, jet engines, power plants, and all manner of machinery, loud hums from electrical equipment, etc.

Unsurprisingly, this disturbs many people's sleep.

Moving outside of cities doesn't even solve the problem because low frequency noise travels for miles, highways go everywhere, and aircraft are inescapable.

And the EPA has simply abandoned any attempt to regulate noise pollution.