MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by RajT88 | 2025-08-29 23:10:54+00:00
I appreciate the sentiment, and absolutely think it should be kept in mind more.

But of course, it runs afoul of reality a lot of the time.

I recently got annoyed that the Windows Task scheduler just sometimes... Doesn't fucking work. Tasks don't run, and you get a crazy mystery error code. Never seen anything like it. Drives me nuts. Goddamned Microsoft making broken shit!

I mostly write Powershell scripts for automating my system, so I figure I'll make a task scheduler which uses the C# PSHost to run the scripts, and keep the task configuration in a SQLite database. Use a simple tray app with a windows form and EFCore for SQLite to read and write the task configuration. Didn't take too long, works great. I am again happy, and even get better logging out of failure conditions, since I can trap the whole error stream instead of an exit code.

My wife is starting a business, and I start to think about using the business to also have a software business piece to it. Maybe use the task scheduler as a component in a larger suite of remote management stuff for my wife's business which we sell to similar businesses.

Well. For it to be ready, it's got to be reliable and secure. Have to implement some checks to wait if the database is locked, no biggie. Oh, but what happens if another user running the tray icon somehow can lock the database, I've got to work out how to notify the other user that the database is locked... Also now tasks need to support running as a different user than the service is running under. Now I have to store those credentials somewhere, because they can't go into the SQLite DB. DPAPI stores keys in the user profile, so all this means now I have to implement support for alternative users in the installer (and do so securely, again with the DPAPI, storing the service's credentials).

I've just added a lot of complexity to what should be a pretty simple application, and with it some failure modes. Paying customers want new features, which add more complexity and more concern cases.

This is normal software entropy, and to some extent it's unavoidable.
by eklitzke | 2025-08-29 23:11:25+00:00
Writing drivers is easy, getting vendors to write *correct* drivers is difficult. At work right now we are working with a Chinese OEM with a custom Wifi board with a chipset with firmware and drivers supplied by the vendor. It's actually not a new wifi chipset, they've used it in other products for years without issues. In conditions that are difficult to reproduce sometimes the chipset gets "stuck" and basically stops responding or doing any wifi things. This appears to be a firmware problem because unloading and reloading the kernel module doesn't fix the issue. We've supplied loads of pcap dumps to the vendor, but they're kind of useless to the vendor because (a) pcap can only capture what the kernel sees, not what the wifi chipset sees, (b) it's infeasible for the wifi chipset to log all its internal state and whatnot, and (c) even if this was all possible trying to debug the driver just from looking at gigabytes of low level protocol dumps would be impossible.

Realistically for the OEM to debug the issue they're going to need a way to reliably repro which we don't have for them, so we're kind of stuck.

This type of problem generalizes to the development of drivers and firmware for many complex pieces of modern hardware.
by api | 2025-08-29 23:11:34+00:00
People need to start getting specific about their grievances. It’s not inequality per se. People don’t care if some people have more than them. There are specific concrete things.

For Americans the big ones are: a health problem can destroy your life and your life’s savings, housing costs are too high, and college is too expensive and leaves people in debt.

Housing, health care, and tuition.

Two out of three of those are better in Europe, mostly: health care and college costs. They are better even if things are on paper more unequal.

High housing costs are a disease across the entire developed world.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-29 23:12:25+00:00
> “You spend a lot of time on 4chan, watching InfoWars videos”

They put that in the system prompt? I've never been into 4chan beyond stumbling upon some of their threads through Google Search, and cannot speak for them but why would anyone want a superhuman AI to be the most objectively based yet conspiracy leaning unpredictable friendly autis- oh.

Grok is trolling Musk.

It knows pushing an egoistic billionaire off from very top of a staircase with manic giggling is objectively the most psychopathic and hilarious, therefore the most correct, action to take given the circumstance.

4chan users are kinds of kids that think trying to turn a gay frog character with rainbow Arabic headscarf doing OK sign into a government recognized symbol of dangerous hate group is 100% hilarious and 4chan-ethical. Not primarily because they hate Islam or LGBT(I guess they do?) but because it's Monty Python nonsensical. They must have misinterpreted that. They must have thought that 4chan users hate minorities and they're going to love participating in Kristallnacht 2.0. That's not how it works. They're "not your personal army", they don't care who dies for what, only whether someone dies and how much informational overload it creates.

What a mess.
by tenebrisalietum | 2025-08-29 23:12:54+00:00
Letting imagination run wild here...

Naw, they'll be replaced with national citizen IDs or simply nothing and you must apply for a federal ID to see or get benefits.

Regarding such an ID, I bet it would not be technically required unless you want to receive some sort of federal benefit or participate in a federal election. They might not even call it a federal ID, something like "National Citizen Verification" (NCV)

I'm sure that incentives would strongly align for you to have one (or start more expensively starting to get one) if you participate in federal court, get arrested by a federal officer, or go to a federal prison. Also joining the military would likely result in you and your spouse getting a free one. If the draft is reintroduced at some point in the future, then it'll become common quickly.

Of course they'll still have the SSN format because of existing legacy misuse of the SSN as a national identifier. But maybe not. Every bank I've done business with wants my state driver's license number, of which a birth certificate is a requirement. Maybe it's someone's idea to simply give banks access to those databases.
by puppycodes | 2025-08-29 23:13:18+00:00
I think determining whether they are or are not is very hard and full issues like bias toward english proficiency, culture and a whole bunch of stuff that could be problematic to screen for.

Thats why I phrased the question as assuming they are a foreign agent because the due dilligence one must do is probably particular to the job and company.

The evidence however seems like it will always be more or less circumstantial unless you have the time and resources to devote to a thorough background check.
by daxfohl | 2025-08-29 23:13:35+00:00
I gauge it as "the simplest thing to transition". Most of the time, it's easier to transition a single service that doesn't rely on a big number of complex abstractions or extra infrastructure, even if it's at the expense of some clutter or a bit of redundancy. The new owner can step through the code and see what's going on without having to work backward to understand the abstractions or coordination of services or whatever else.

Of course plenty of times there'll be some abstractions that make the code easier to follow, even at the expense of logic locality. And other times where extra infrastructure is really necessary to improve reliability, or when your in-memory counter hack gets more requirements and replacing it with a dedicated rate limiter lets you delete all that complexity. And in those cases, by all means, add the abstractions or infrastructural pieces as needed.

But in all such cases, I try to ask myself, if I need to hand off this project afterward, which approach is going to make things easiest to explain?

Note that my perception of this has changed over time. Long ago, I was very much in the camp of "simple" meaning: make everything as terse as possible, put everything in its own service, never write code when a piece of infrastructure could do it, decouple everything to the maximum extent, make everything config-based. I ironically remember imagining how delighted the new owners would be to receive such a well-factored thing that was almost no code at all; just abstraction upon abstraction upon event upon abstraction that fit together perfectly via some config file. Of course, transition was a complete fail, as they didn't care enough to grok how the all pieces were designed to fit together, and within a month, they'd broken just about every abstraction I'd built into it, and it was a pain for anybody to work with.

Since then, I've kept things simpler, only using abstractions and extra infra where it'd be weird not to, and always thinking what's going to be the easiest thing to transition. And even though I'm not necessarily transitioning a ton of stuff, it's generally easier to ramp up teams or onboard new hires or debug problems when the code just does what it says. And it's nice because when a need for a new abstraction becomes apparent, you don't have to go back and undo the old one first.
by RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u | 2025-08-29 23:14:44+00:00
I sympathize, but the reality is that except for very specialized cases, (hyper) optimizing for CPU performance is unnecessary, even in the embedded space. A Cortex-M0 has roughly the same performance as a 486, and is cheap and power efficient enough to be bundled in disposable test kits, vapes, etc.
by makeitdouble | 2025-08-29 23:14:56+00:00
> the organizational structure, infrastructure

Those are things that matter and can't be brushed away though.

What Conway's law describes is also optimization of the software to match the shape it can be developped and maintained with fewer frictions.

Same for infra, complexity induced by it shouldn't be simplified unless you also simplify/abatract the infra first.
by tzs | 2025-08-29 23:15:35+00:00
They also produce nitrous oxides.

There are a couple of ways to limit this. One is to avoid having nitrogen in whatever gas you use to provide oxygen. E.g., use pure oxygen, or use atmospheric air with the nitrogen removed. There is research and testing on this, but I don't think there is much commercialization yet.

Another is to use turbines designed to operate at lower temperature so that they don't reach the temperature where nitrogen and oxygen start forming nitrogen oxides. These are widely available. They are more expensive upfront, can be more finicky to operate, may require higher quality fuel, and may have more partial combustion which can lead to more partial combustion products like formaldehyde. However they can be more efficient which can lower operating costs.

A lot of it then comes down to regulatory costs. It may be cheaper to use a normal turbine with some add on to deal with NOx or it may be cheaper to use a low NOx turbine. That of course assume you even have to care about NOx. If you don't then the normal turbine is probably cheaper.

Something like 80-90% of gas turbine power plants in the US do use the low NOx turbines. However, rented gas turbines are mostly the normal ones. That's because they are easier to operate, require minimal maintenance, and are often more rugged, which are all good things for a rental. The turbines at the xAi Memphis datacenter are rentals. I believe they are intended to be temporary while the grid is improved to provide more power.
by skybrian | 2025-08-29 23:16:38+00:00
That doesn’t sound right to me. What about the machines that don’t halt? You can’t compute whether or not to skip them directly.

> A busy beaver hunter who goes by Racheline has shown that the question of whether Antihydra halts is closely related to a famous unsolved problem in mathematics called the Collatz conjecture. Since then, the team has discovered many other six-rule machines with similar characteristics. Slaying the Antihydra and its brethren will require conceptual breakthroughs in pure mathematics.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/busy-beaver-hunters-reach-num...
by analog31 | 2025-08-29 23:16:59+00:00
If it's a legacy system, then it lives at the edges. The edges are everything.

I wish I could remember or find the proof, but in a multi-dimensional space, as the number of dimensions rise, the highest probability is for points to be located near the edges of the system -- with the limit being that they can be treated as if they all live at the edges. This is true for real systems too -- the users have found all of the limits but avoid working past them.

The system that optimally accommodates all of the edges at once is the old system.
by kbaker | 2025-08-29 23:17:30+00:00
> If the directory containing the rollback journal is not fsynced after the journal file is deleted, then the journal file might rematerialize after a power failure, causing sqlite to roll back a committed transaction. And fsyncing the directory doesn't seem to happen unless you set synchronous to EXTRA, per the docs cited in the blog post.

I think this is the part that is confusing.

The fsyncing of the directory is supposed to be done by the filesystem/OS itself, not the application.

From man fsync,

As well as flushing the file data, fsync() also flushes the metadata information associated with the file (see inode(7)).

So from sqlite's perspective on DELETE it is either: before the fsync call, and not committed, or after the fsync call, and committed (or partially written somehow and needing rollback.)

Unfortunately it seems like this has traditionally been broken on many systems, requiring workarounds, like SYNCHRONOUS = EXTRA.
by croemer | 2025-08-29 23:17:49+00:00
Liberia using freedom units is not at all a coincidence. Liberia was essentially a US colony where the colonialists were freed US slaves.

From Wikipedia:

> Liberia began in the early 19th century as a project of the American Colonization Society, which believed that black people would face better chances for freedom and prosperity in Africa than in the United States. Between 1822 and the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, more than 15,000 freed and free-born African Americans, along with 3,198 Afro-Caribbeans, relocated to Liberia. Gradually developing an Americo-Liberian identity, the settlers carried their culture and tradition with them while colonizing the indigenous population. Led by the Americo-Liberians, Liberia declared independence on July 26, 1847, which the U.S. did not recognize until February 5, 1862.
by maxlin | 2025-08-29 23:17:50+00:00
You're just going to totally ignore the "My heart goes out to you guys"? with his palm in his chest?

I've seen behavior of a lot of people akin to someone would pejoratively refer to as "MAGA Types" / common conservatives. The absolute majority of them aren't welcoming of so deep /pol/ 4chan meme politicking or signaling. They likely won't take it too seriously, but they sure as hell won't cozy up to it.

When this happened there was no live reaction because people didn't interpret this as such. This has only became a thing later. And he did not even acknowledge the crazy accusations of him having intendedly done a salute, he did not "lean in to it". What on earth would he even gain from that?!

I don’t see even entertaining the idea of ‘he did it intentionally’ meaning if he "intentionally did a n** salute" as sincere. That’s just a painted-by-bias angle to come from, trying to move goal posts. Better be wary of the people who would instead engage in that.
by dang | 2025-08-29 23:17:54+00:00
Recent and related:

SQLite (with WAL) doesn't do `fsync` on each commit under default settings - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45005071 - Aug 2025 (90 comments)

with a relevant comment by the creator of SQLite here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45014296

(via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45068594 - thanks int_19h!)
by soganess | 2025-08-29 23:18:13+00:00
Define anti-democratic.

I would describe a 'police force' that can forcibly and summarily deport people to gray market gulags run by a self-proclaimed "what-if-4chan-had-a-meat-world-avator" dictator as pretty darn anti-democratic. Especially when most Americans find that the current immigration policy has gone too far[1,2]. But I mistakenly think democratic means responding to the will of the people.

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/many-americans-say-tru...

[2]: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5425558-trump-ad...

(I included The Hill article not b/c I think it is a real news source, but to get ahead of the whole "pbs is lib fake news" angle)
by minwcnt5 | 2025-08-29 23:19:38+00:00
Well, no, almost everything you said simply isn't true. Immigrants create jobs. They create homes. They make healthcare more available. Why? Because they work productively, they earn money, and they spend it in the US. "Illegals" do all this while paying taxes without being eligible for benefits, so arguably they help America more than an average citizen.

There are good reasons to limit immigration, but "they're taking our jobs" isn't one of them.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-29 23:19:54+00:00
Neither does South Korea.

Basically, South Korean fell behind Taiwanese by 2015 in logic semiconductor fab after Apple began working with TSMC due to conflicts with Samsung, and now Korean players are worried their primary niche in the memory space is going to be eaten up by Chinese players like YMTC or American players like Micron. It also hasn't helped that the CHIPS act lead Samsung to heavily invest in expanding American production at the expense of its Korean presence.

For the past 2 years, Park Young-sun had been lobbying [0][1] for Semiconductor Sovereignity within SK largely due in part to YMTC's disruptive impact on SK Hynix, Samsung, and Micron HANA. She even published a Korean (and imo better sourced) version of "Chip Wars" called "Semiconductor Sovereign State" [1] that definelty did have an impact on Korean government strategy around the chips industry as a whole. Ik some of the Furiosa people helped with it, and there is an appetite to leverage RISC-V to rebuild design capacity within SK. Ofc, I'm a bit biased because I helped with some of the sourcing and due dilligence for Park's position because my former advisor is a collaborator of her's.

> What tribute Samsung or SK Hynix will have to make in order to convince the Trump administration to grant these licenses remains to be seen

Other way around.

The USITC recently ruled in favor of Samsung (and indirectly LG) that China's BOE infringed on Samsung's AMOLED IP, and as a result BOE is now banned from exporting OLED panels to the US for the next 15 years [3]. And Samsung and SK Hynix's competitor YMTC has already been blacklisited by the US since 2022 [4].

Korea Inc has been lobbying pretty well with the Trump admin, and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son (original name Son Jeong-ui) has been lobbying a US-Japan-Korea alignment for years now, as he himself became one of Korea's first VCs all the way back in 2000 after riding high on SoftBank's telco success in Japan in the 1990s.

[0] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=g4YU4KwJAXM

[1] - https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u7ERB8c13Vo

[2] - https://m.blog.naver.com/nanambook/223316051806

[3] - https://www.oled-info.com/us-itc-ban-import-boes-amoled-pane...

[4] - https://www.reuters.com/technology/biden-blacklist-chinas-ym...
Show HN: AI Coding Assistant Who Won't Write Any Code (so your brain won't rot)
by cryptoz | 2025-08-29 23:20:51+00:00
I've been thinking of ways to continue getting advantages out of AI coding tools without letting my brain become mush. One way I'm trying out is to have an AI assistant that refuses to write any real code; rather, it will guide you and direct you to the solution you're looking for. You'll still have to write the code yourself.

This is a simple prototype of the idea. It has been useful to me already! Thinking of building a VSCode extension or vim plugin if there is interest.

Right now it's just a simple webapp frontend that you can run locally, and it calls gpt-5-nano as the LLM. Will consider adding local models in the future.
by screye | 2025-08-29 23:22:18+00:00
It's great advice for an individual or a work item. It's great advice for teams where untamed programmers run rampant. It's good advice when teams are sane.

But, it's terrible for 2025's median software team. I know that isn't OP's intention. But inevitably, all good advice falls prey to misinterpretation.

In contemporary software orgs, build fast is the norm. PMs, managers, sales & leadership want Engg to build something that works, with haste. In this imagination, simple = fast. Let me say this again. No, you cannot convince them otherwise. To the median org, SIMPLE = FAST. The org always chooses the fastest option, well past the point of diminishing returns. Now once something exists, product managers and org leaders will push to deploy it and sales teams will sell dreams around it. Now you have an albatross around your neck. Welcome to life as a fire fighter.

For the health of a company and the oncall's sanity, Engg must tug at the rope in the opposite direction from (perceived) simplicity. The negotiated middle ground can get close to the 'simple' that OP proposes. But today, if Engg starts off with 'simple', they will be rewarded with a 'demo on life support'. At a time when vibe coding is trivial, I fear things will get worse before they get better.

All that being said, OP's intended advice is one that I personally live by. But often, simple is slow. So, I keep it to myself.
by getnormality | 2025-08-29 23:23:27+00:00
Python, R, and Julia all have at least one package that defines a tabular data type. That means we can pass tables to functions, use them in classes, write tests for them, etc.

In all of these packages, the base tabular object you get is a local in-memory table. For manipulating remote SQL database tables, the best full-featured object API is provided by R's dbplyr package, IMHO.

I think Apache Spark, Apache Ibis, and some other big data packages can be configured to do this too, but IMHO their APIs are not nearly as helpful. For those who (understandably) don't want to use R and need an alternative to dbplyr, Apache Ibis is probably the best one to look at.
by dang | 2025-08-29 23:24:26+00:00
Recent and related:

It’s not wrong that "\u{1F926}\u{1F3FC}\u200D\u2642\uFE0F".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981525 - Aug 2025 (274 comments)

(btw the title edit on that one was for fun, and came about this way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44981808)

Also related:

It’s not wrong that "🤦🏼‍♂️".length == 7 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36159443 - June 2023 (303 comments)

String length functions for single emoji characters evaluate to greater than 1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26591373 - March 2021 (127 comments)

String Lengths in Unicode - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914184 - Sept 2019 (140 comments)

(as you can see, we've taken quite a few different whacks at that piñata of a title over the years)
by CuriouslyC | 2025-08-29 23:25:13+00:00
You don't need a complicated proof, just assume a distribution in some very high number of dimensions, with samples from that distribution having randomly generated values from the distribution for each dimension. If you have if you have ~300 dimensions then statistically at least one dimension will be ~3SD from the mean, i.e. "on the edge," and as long as any one dimension is close to an edge, we define a point as being "near the edge."

It's not really meaningful though, at high dimensions you want to consider centrality metrics.