MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by positron26 | 2025-08-03 07:39:54+00:00
CL is a real language with an ecosystem. It is blazing fast and capable compared to Elisp. The debugging is amazing. I almost used it to build PrizeForge. The tooling in Elisp is not designed for serious people or doing serious things.

To understand why, we have to look at who has been gating its development. Long ago, the FSF began rationalizing the failures of their strategies and technology choices rather than seriously re-analyzing how reality had unfolded. If the Elisp runtime was slow, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that you weren't prioritizing your "freedom".

Guile Emacs exists. The reason that its own developers and other hands who have touched it don't want to try harder is because they know for a fact that getting anything merged into Emacs core means an utterly exhausting, soul-crushing slog where people who have made a profession of not changing their minds will demand to be convinced to change their minds.

Go hop over to the Lem Discord. They love doing things. They just want to program. It's such a massive breath of fresh air to be able to talk about technology and doing well instead of having this hand-wringing performative "freedom" signaling. It's like when church kids talk about doing something normal and have to make a little show of their loyalty to the cause before they can exercise their free will and judgement.

I want lab-grown meat, Year of the Linux Desktop, and synthetic biochemistry to get the microplastics out of my body. The FSF doesn't care. They don't care. They decided that success is bad and that dying on a hill is good. They want to force everyone to be backwards compatible with decisions they made thirty years ago as if it has any hope of revitalizing an ecosystem that they deny even exists.

I feel utterly and completely betrayed by the FSF and want as far away from them as possible. Technically, I find the prospects of Lem to be superior. I find political landscape not in favor of Guile Emacs and I fear that if Emacs users manage to obtain Guile, they will have also bought into another decade under the stifling leadership inside the dark recesses of a mailing list they don't know how badly they disagree with.
by collingreen | 2025-08-03 07:40:28+00:00
I'm getting my moneys worth having claude write tools. We've reached the dream where I can vibe out some one off software and it's great; today I made two different (shitty but usable!) gui programs in seconds that let me visually describe some test data. The alternative was probably half an hour of putting something together if my first idea was good. Then I deleted them and moved on.

It still writes insane things all the time but I find it really helpful to spit out single use stuff and to brainstorm with. I try to get it to perform tasks I don't know how to accomplish (eg. computer vision experiments) and it never really works out in the end but I often learn something and I'm still very happy with my subscription.
by kqr | 2025-08-03 07:40:33+00:00
Indeed. The "cones" used in the Nordics are diagonally striped bollard-like things[1]. As a local, I can tell whether the work is done by professionals not based on whether cones are present (they are), but it comes down to if they're turned the right way. (The lower part of the diagonal should point toward traffic -- the less serious contractors don't follow that rule.)

[1]: https://vkmedia.imgix.net/86qD1SWIAtgMMWi86U3gIV82t5U.jpg?au...
by aitechtutorials | 2025-08-03 07:42:14+00:00
I recently tested the open-source AI model Wan 2.2, which can generate cinematic video from a single image. I set it up inside ComfyUI using just 8GB VRAM and documented the full process. It includes model installation, workflow setup, and a fix for a missing dependency (sageattention) using Gemini CLI. I also ran a full test using a wolf image + prompt with motion effects.
by enobrev | 2025-08-03 07:42:26+00:00
I have a similar amount of engineering experience, was highly skeptical, and I've come to similar conclusions with Claude Code after spending two weeks on a greenfield project (TS api, react-native client, TS/React admin panel).

As I've improved planning and context management, the results have been fairly consistent. As long as I can keep a task within the context window, it does a decent job almost every time. And occasionally I have to have it brute-force its way to green lint/typecheck/tests. That's been one of the biggest speed bumps.

I've found that gemini is great at the occasional detailed code-review to help find glaring issues or things that were missed, but having it implement anything has been severely lacking. I have to literally tell it not to do anything because it will gladly just start writing files on a whim. I generally use the opus model to write detailed plans, sonnet to implement, and then opus and gemini to review and plan refactors.

I'm impressed. The progress is SLOW. I'd have gotten to the stage I'm at in 1/3 to 1/2 the time, likely with fewer tests and significantly less process documentation. But the results are otherwise fairly great. And the learning process has kept me motivated to keep this old side-project moving.

I was switching between two accounts for a week while testing, but in the end upgraded to the $100/month plan and I think I've been rate-limited once since. I don't know if I'll be using this for every-day professional work, but I think it's a great tool for a few categories of work.
by SomewhatLikely | 2025-08-03 07:44:14+00:00
I saw a very similar timely appeal here on Hacker News a few years ago and taught my son with this book at the age of 4. It has become my go-to comparison when prompting chat bots on what I want in a teaching material for other subjects. I listened to the entire article posted here and it makes me wonder if schools are getting something as foundational as reading wrong how can we trust the attention to research on anything else they're teaching? Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to pull my kid out of school but I'll dig a little deeper into how well he's learning. For math, we've been doing the Beast Academy books. It has gone... Okay. I like that they approach problems from many different ways which simulate the many different ways math is hidden in our interactions with the world. For my younger son I've recently started Teaching Your Child... because of how well it went for his brother but for math I may try something else to have a new data point. Something that occurred to me listening to the article is I wonder if certain skills are learned much faster with one on one instruction like the book has you do. Our schools pretty much never teach that way out of efficiency, though home schools often do. It may not be true for most subjects though or home school students would be so far ahead by college and that's not the impression I have.
by Woodi | 2025-08-03 07:44:52+00:00
If abandonware of Win11 UI means Win12 then maybe I like that direction :)

On the other hand it it is smpossibility that MS is working on something better, right ? They probably plan some worse UI prison...

ASCI was [business] enforced by some EU project, POSIX - the same and probably there are more examples of such things so we just need some sanity __OS with UI__ project from someone...
by Sesse__ | 2025-08-03 07:45:30+00:00
You can run stateless DHCPv6, i.e., without handing out prefixes. It's a fairly normal situation that clients choose their own addresses from prefixes handed out via RA, but that they get auxiliary configuration (such as UEFI boot, or DNS servers before RDNSS was a thing) from DHCPv6. You'd probably need to make sure there was an RA on the network hinting about a DHCPv6 server (the “Other” flag), though.
by imtringued | 2025-08-03 07:45:45+00:00
Well, it's more like fruits and vegetables. The author proposed a normalized inner product as replacement for the standard inner product.

It's not an activation function, because it has the learnable weights of a linear projection (mat vec multiplication) and the clamping properties of an activation function all in one.

My personal issue with the proposal is that it essentially doubles the amount of memory needed on-chip.

Yat-Product GEMMV now needs to store the running total of the inner product and the norm of the input vectors. That's a big cost increase for something that might not improve performance all that much.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-08-03 07:47:31+00:00
Genuinely not yet convinced. The CEO of windsurf said the goal for the next year was to get agentic coding to the reliability and maturity that it can be used in production for mature codebases. That rhymes true.

I use autocomplete and chat with LLMs as a substitute for stack overflow. They’re great for that. Beyond that, myself and colleagues have found AI agents are not yet ready for serious work. I want them to be, I really do. But more than that I want our software to be reliable, our code to be robust and understandable, and I don’t want to worry about whether we are painting ourselves into a corner.

We build serious software infrastructure that supports other companies’ software and our biggest headache is supporting code that we built earlier this year using AI. It’s poorly written, full of bugs including problems very hard to spot from the code, and is just incomprehensible for the most part.

Other companies I know are vibe coding, and making great progress, but their software is CRUD SaaS and worst case they could start over. We do not have that luxury.
by prmoustache | 2025-08-03 07:49:02+00:00
I am familiar with black ice hving lived a large part of my life in Switzerland. Black ice usually involve having temperatures swinging around zero + rain. It doesn't happen if you are at -10°C.

Also. Finland has a long history of maintaining both dirt roads all year and ice roads in the winter on top of body of water so I guess drivers are much more used to them. It is also a relatively flat country.
by cornholio | 2025-08-03 07:50:02+00:00
Well, a dolar is still a dollar and they need to sell on the same energy market. It's well understood that fission projects have become economically infeasible because they are dominated by capital costs, and the risks these projects come with are not compatible with the decades required for economic breakeven.

Everything we know about current approaches to fusion seem to indicate they will have the same economic problems. The scaling factors of confinement, power and reaction rates push towards immense reactors with vacuum chambers the size of apartment buildings, massive superconducting magnets etc. hence the ITER project spiraling out of control trying to build one just big enough that at least have a fair chance of achieving engineering breakeven. The basic plasma physics works the same for Helion, and the best triple product they achieved places them two orders of magnitude behind tokamaks, albeit with much less capital.

So when and if the best approaches to fusion succeed, it looks like they will yield these massive plants that share the costs problems of fission. While they won't be able to meltdown, the regulatory constraints will be very similar, the intense neutron flux will activate the structure of the reactor and poses similar proliferation and decommissioning concerns, there is radiological risk to the civil population in the form of Tritium leaks etc.

And unlike fission, which is very well understood and mature, fusion plants will be much riskier economically, on par with the attempt to introduce fast fission breeders into commercial service, which notoriously failed.

So while the physics is indeed very different, we know enough to compare fusion and fission economically, and the outlook is very bleak.
by Nevermark | 2025-08-03 07:50:04+00:00
> Most of the time there isn't anything to discuss or dig in to.

Yes. It took humans centuries, millennia, or a couple hundred millennia, depending on how we think about it, to slowly, as a group of millions of people, develop the systematic checks and filters on our thinking that we call mathematics and science.

The surprise is having inherited that, some of us think checking our own beliefs this way is natural. We are healthy skeptics of ourselves.

That many people honestly (and I believe it is generally honest) don't "get it", don't understand how easy it is, for each of us to fool ourselves, is the unsurprising thing.

We did not evolve to discover solid truths. Just to navigate natural and social environments full of correlations, unlikely ever to be well understood, and statistically survive. Natural "beliefs" were/are simply imprinted correlations, adopted heuristics, or social identification, that upon being fixed, let us stop wasting time rethinking the incomprehensible. The pinnacle of innovation until recently.
by throwaway413121 | 2025-08-03 07:51:23+00:00
As someone who has lost data myself, i'm really sorry this happened to you. I refrained from commenting on your article originally, but you seem stuck in a mental state blaming AWS for deleting your "backups" that you established with "best practices".

But you need to be aware that you never had backups in the way most sysadmins mean. If i need a friend to take care of a loved one while i'm away, and my backup plan is having the same person take them care of them but in a different house or with a different haircut, that's no backup plan: that's bus factor = 1.

Backups mean having a second (or third, etc) copy of your data stored with a 3rd party. Backup assumes you have an original copy of the entirety of the data to begin with.

From this point, and i'm sorry it bit you like this, but you never followed any good sysadmin practices about backups and disaster recovery. I have no idea what AWS best practices say, but trusting a single actor (whether hardware manufacturer or services provider) with all your data has always been against the 3-2-1 golden rule of backups and what happened to you was inevitable.

Blame AWS all you want, but Google does exactly the same thing all the time, deleting 15-years-old accounts with all associated data with no recourse. Some of us thought the cloud was safe and had all their "cross-region" backups burn in flames in OVH Strasbourg.

We could never trust cloud companies, and some of us never did. I never trusted AWS with my data, and i'm sorry you made that mistake, but you may also take the opportunity to learn how to handle backups properly in the future and never trust a single egg basket, or whatever metaphor is more appropriate.

Good luck to you in the future!
by rhubarbtree | 2025-08-03 07:51:44+00:00
Your bad experience is because AI can’t really reason in general. It gets some kinda reasoning via a transformer, but that’s nothing like the reasoning that goes into the problem you described.

LLMs are great at translation. Turn this English into code, essentially. But ask it to solve a novel problem like that without a description of the solution, how will it approach it? If there’s an example in its training set maybe it can recall it. Otherwise it has no capability to derive a solution.
by notTooFarGone | 2025-08-03 07:53:44+00:00
This is the most "p-hacking" thing ever. If you take a hundred US cities over 20 years you have 2000 data points. The probability of outliers to cherry pick from is quite high. Doesn't mean that jersey is not doing things right but please don't act like it's the shining example of vehicular safety.

It's not comparable to Nordic countries at all.
by lisper | 2025-08-03 07:54:20+00:00
> search is a fairly simple control loop

That's like saying that Darwinian evolution is simple. It's not entirely wrong, but it misses the point rather badly. The thing that makes search useful is not the search per se, it's the heuristics that reduce an exponential search space to make it tractable. In the case of evolution (which is a search process) the heuristic is that at every iteration you select the best solution on the search frontier, and you never backtrack. That heuristic produces a certain kind of interesting result (life) but it also has certain drawbacks (it's limited to a single quality metric: reproductive fitness).

> Beam search is an example of TTC in this modern era.

That's an interesting analogy. I'll have to ponder that.

But my knee-jerk reaction is that it's not enough to say "put reactivity and deliberation together". The manner in which you put them together matters, and in particular, it turns out that putting them together with a third component that manages both the deliberation and the search is highly effective. I can't say definitively that it's the best way -- AFAIK no one has ever actually done the research necessary to establish that. But empirically it produced good results with very little computing power (by today's standards).

My gut tells me that the right way to combine LLMs and search is not to have the search manage the LLM, but to provide search as a resource for the LLM to use, kind of like humans use a pocket calculator to help them do arithmetic.

> If LLMs are coming up with effective search formulation for "open-ended" problems, that would be a big deal.

AFAICT, at the moment LLMs aren't "coming up" with anything, they are just a more effective compression algorithm for vast quantities of data. That's not nothing. You can view the scientific method itself as a compression algorithm. But to come up with original ideas you need something else, something analogous to the random variation and selection in Darwinian evolution. Yes, I know that there is a random element in LLM algorithms, and again I don't really understand the details, but the way in which the randomness is deployed just feels wrong to me somehow.

I wish I had more time to think deeply about these things.
by loa_in_ | 2025-08-03 07:55:16+00:00
Poland lives in the era of fight against pathological alcoholism. With the advent of modern heavy machinery like forklifts (as opposed to truck beds and strong arms and backs), many workplaces became hostile towards alcohol where previously alcohol was just part of workplace culture. This lead to a huge fallout of people who either became functional alcoholic outside of work or became jobless and miserable.
Why did Anthropic chose an anus for Claude's logo?
by xucian | 2025-08-03 07:55:30+00:00
there is nothing in this world that will convince me this is not the case.

the shape - check

the animation of opening and closing - check

was discussed before, but I don't see any reasonable explanation, only "I think it is"/"I don't think it is". ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1ersfxj/claude_says_its_logo_is_definitely_not_a_butthole

the possibilities are: 1. making fun of us; 2. extreme narrow-mindedness

I can't imagine how 2 could be true, given the magnitude of their product
by throwaway413121 | 2025-08-03 07:55:31+00:00
> The architecture was built assuming infrastructure within AWS might fail.

From what i gather it was not. Or did you have a strategy for a 0-warning complete AWS service closure? Just imagine AWS closing their doors from one day to the next due to economic losses, or due to judicial inquiries into their illegal practices: were you really prepared for their failure?

The cloud was never data living in tiny rain droplets and swimming across the earth to our clients. The cloud was always somebody else's computer(s) that they control, and we don't. I'm sorry you learnt that lesson the hard way.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-08-03 07:55:37+00:00
C++11 was for me the first version of C++ where the expressiveness justified the extra complexity relative to C. It was when I finally committed to using C++ instead of C for systems code. In the same sense, C++20 is qualitatively better than C++11 in every way and dramatically reduces the complexity of C++11 while adding many features C++11 needed.
by comex | 2025-08-03 07:56:16+00:00
You can write a parser for an IDL, but you can’t reasonably write a parser for C++. So you have to move the definition of whatever types of methods or fields you want to reflect on into the IDL, instead of defining them natively in C++. (Or worse, have separate definitions in both the IDL and C++.) Which tends to be cumbersome – especially if you want to define a lot of generic types (since then the code generator can’t statically determine the full list of types). It can work, but there’s a reason I rarely see anyone using this approach.
by burger_account | 2025-08-03 07:56:19+00:00
I’ve done that right before the market downshift in 2023. I’ve spent 3 months doing nothing, travelled to a bunch of cities that I’ve never been to, did tons of works in my own projects (both open and closed source), and actually managed to launch one that is still going.

Honestly, this in-between period was one of the most personally rewarding times I’ve ever had in my career, I was feeling great, I was waking up in the morning and coding for a hour before I even had coffee, I had good humor for such a long stretch of time that even people I don’t talk to daily started to notice.

But, despite that, actually looking for a new job was soul crushing. I had a spreadsheet to track applications, and the rows just kept piling up, interviews were not happening, when they were happening I got ghosted dozens of times, when I didn’t get ghosted, the code interviews were absolutely ridiculous is all sorts of ways, even I passed code testings companies paused hirings, when I finally got to the last step they’d say culture didn’t align. I got a job after 7 months and 137 applications. It was TERRIBLE, the feeling of hopelessness, the feeling that there is no future, the feeling that your entire 20+ year career is useless and the fear you’ll never find a job again. I don’t wish that on anyone.

In the end there are bills to be paid, and you can’t stay unemployed forever, so the reality means you have to thread this carefully. It sounds counterproductive and it is hard, but concentrate less on work, spend time doing things you want, and do not go out for interviews just yet. On top of having a shitty job, you’ll also have shitty evenings because you’ll get to this same soul crushing realization of mine.

Do the minimum acceptable at work, cut hours, take vacation, whatever that keeps you employed, and spend any energy you have left doing things you want. Workout, that pet project that hadn’t seen any love, binging Netflix, whatever you mind tells you to do. As long as it doesn’t get worse than it is, it is a win. You are going to leave the company anyway (either voluntarily or not), might as well stockpile some money if you can. The goal is to get better _despite_ the shitty job, to improve yourself while you are still getting paid.

Also important: go looking for social support, like lunch with friends and old coworkers, therapy, some meetups on subjects you have interest, whatever you can to talk to people. Mildly venting off helps, just make sure to not overdo and also listen.
by 9rx | 2025-08-03 07:56:42+00:00
> more to do with it than helicopter parenting.

Yes, fear of being sued was the ultimate death of all that stuff, but, to be fair, helicopter parenting is a manifestation of what is the same fear (e.g. "What if someone calls CPS?"). You are ultimately talking about the same thing.

> when it’s pretty obvious that they don’t actually want to spend time with each other.

Which too no doubt stems from the very same fear again. Hard to want to spend time with other people when you have to continually look over your shoulder. Most people show love, compassion, and kindness, but there is always that one person who is ready to go atomic at the drop of a hat that ruins it for everyone else.