MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tpoacher | 2025-09-09 12:19:47+00:00
Partially agree, but only for a very narrow definition of what is a contract, which again is the problem stated above.

A good contract system may in fact rely on type-safety as part of its implementation, but types do not necessarily cover all aspects of contracts (unless you're referring to the full gamut of theoretical generalisations of things like dependent types, substructural types, constraint logic programming, etc), and are also not necessarily limited to things that only apply at compile-time.
by Timpy | 2025-09-09 12:19:55+00:00
I think this guide is nice, and having a variety of articles like this is great so everybody can look at the different ideas and find what's right for them.

I would urge people to consider going a little bit further than this guide, consider not using your phone as a reading device. Imagine deciding to sit down with a physical book, but keeping your phone nestled on the opposite page as you read. It would be a lot nicer to read without interruption, without being exposed to notifications at all times. Sure there are going to be use cases where the phone is more convenient, but I think sacrificing convenience is worth it.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-09-09 12:20:06+00:00
I've got a decade or so of professional assembly language programming experience. [1] It's a useful skill even when not programming in assembly. An assembly language programmer generally understands the machine better than most, and very occasionally the ability to inspect compiler output is useful.

This transition really feels like that. If the metaphor holds (and who knows if it will).

1: the transition will take longer than people expect. I was programming assembler well into the 90's. AI is at the level compilers were in the 50's, where pretty much everybody had to understand assembler.

2: the ability to understand code rather than the spec documents AI work from is valuable and required, but will be required in smaller numbers than most of us expect. Coding experience helps make better spec sheets, but the other skills the original post espouses are also valuable, if not more so. And many of us have let those skills atrophy.

[1] 10 years is questionable. Is being paid $100 for a video game with ~100 hours of work put into it professional work? I have about 3 years of work doing assembly for an actual salary.
by bgwalter | 2025-09-09 12:20:28+00:00
The question isn't whether this future arrives. Looking at the money and talent flowing into AI development, it's inevitable. The question is whether you'll be ready when it does, and whether you'll be working on the parts of product development that actually matter in that world.

And there it is: inevitable. The whole article is written in a pseudo-religious manner, probably with the help of "AI" to collate all known talking points.

I think the author is not working on anything that matters. His company is one of a million similar companies that ride the hype wave.

What matters is real software written before 2023 without "AI", which is now stolen and repackaged.
by wodenokoto | 2025-09-09 12:21:26+00:00
> I won't go into this either, but you can take a look at the summary of "donations" some other friends linked to here: https://intel.arkm.com/explorer/entity/61fbc095-f19b-479d-a0...

>Pretty low impact for an attack this big. Some of it seems to be people mocking the malware author with worthless transfers.

I believe this is the section. As far as I understand the link, it's about $500. I don't understand how you read if a donation is a worthless mockery donation.
by atomtamadas | 2025-09-09 12:21:28+00:00
Until there's no AI that can either directly generate machine code or generate hardware itself we can be sure that AI has a shallow intelligence: it simply learned to imitate the work of developers by learning from countless code examples and then guessing the most likely correct answer.

At least this is good material to imagine some funny future sci-fi scenarios like compiler developers optimizing for AI generated code similarly to how hardware developers sometimes optimize for code generated by some dominant compiler's output. In the far future anthropologists discovering dead programming languages inside long untouched AI generative pipelines and trying to decipher them :)
by rcxdude | 2025-09-09 12:22:09+00:00
It was more or less treated as the least-pejorative way of saying 'non-magic-aware' (in a similar-ish sense to 'Gentile'), but it seems like there's no way to have at least a little bit of negative implication given what it's denoting, and there's absolutely a sense that most wizards and witches consider themselves superior to the muggles.

Whereas 'mudblood' was specifically a slur against those of mixed heritage.
by whatevaa | 2025-09-09 12:22:11+00:00
Good luck competing with youtube. They are something called natural monopoly. Even if you get the technicals right, networks effects will kick in. You would need to bring in something revoliutonary to get people to move. Or youtube to fuck up something really badly.

And getting the technicals right won't be easy. Video delivery is not text. Will need dedicated datacenters if you ever get popular and want to keep prices under control. It's expensive.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-09-09 12:22:37+00:00
Say you want to quit sugar or smoking. Would you still buy cigarettes or chocolate and carry it around in your pocket everywhere you go because you should rely on willpower to beat the addiction? Very few people do that because you become vulnerable when your willpower is at it's weakest.

Usually it works better to exercise willpower to constrain your future self's available actions. For example, by not buying chocolate or cigarettes when you are at the store.

The same principle applies to your phone. Use your willpower to constrain what your future self can do with it.
by evelant | 2025-09-09 12:22:41+00:00
The pattern I came up with is similar to event sourcing but with some CRDT and offline-first concepts mixed in. By using logical clocks and a client side postgres (pglite) it doesn't have to keep the entire event history for all time and the server side doesn't have to process actions/events at all beyond storing them. The clients do the resolution of state, not the server. Clients can operate offline as long as they like and the system still arrives at a consistent state. AFAIK this is different than most event sourcing patterns.

At least in my thinking/prototyping on the problem so far I think this solution offers some unique properties. It lets clients operate offline as long as they like. It delegates the heavy lifting of resolving state from actions/events to clients, requiring minimal server logic. It prevents unbounded growth of action logs by doing a sort of "rebase" for clients beyond a cutoff. It seems to me like it maximally preserves intentions without requiring specific conflict resolution logic. IMO worth exploring further.
by MrDresden | 2025-09-09 12:22:52+00:00
Facebook/Meta has shown time and time again that it can't be trusted with data privacy, full stop.

No amount of internal auditing, externally verified and stamped with approval for following ISO standards theater will change the fact that as a company it has firebombed each and every bridge that was ever available to it, in my book.

If the data has the potential to be misused, that is enough for me to equate it as not secure for use.
by germandiago | 2025-09-09 12:23:22+00:00
Poor the people/assistants that make mistakes when they have to fit, intrgrate and modify all AI-written code.

My experience is always that there is a complexity threshold at which things start to take longer, not shorter, with the use of AI. This is not one-off scripts or small programs. But when you have systems that touch a lot of context, different languages and parts of the stack, IA sucks for how to design that code except for probably some advice or ideas. And even there it does not always get it right.

Give any AI any atypical problem and you will see it spit big hallucinations. Take the easy ones and then, yes you are faster, but those can and have been done 1 million times. It is just a bounded (in complexity) accelerator for your typical, written many times code. Give it assembly to optimize, SIMD or something with little documentation and you will see how it performs. Bad.

It is the tool for one-off scripts, scaffolding and small apps. Beyond that, it falls short.

It is like a very fast start with a lot of tech debt added for later.
by steveBK123 | 2025-09-09 12:23:37+00:00
> looks less and less like the right choice with every passing month

It does seem like for at least the last 3-5 years it's been pretty clear that Intel x86 was optimizing for the wrong target / a shrinking market.

HPC increasingly doesn't care about single core/thread performance and is increasingly GPU centric.

Anything that cares about efficiency/heat (basically all consumer now - mobile, tablet, laptop, even small desktop) has gone ARM/RISC.

Datacenter market is increasingly run by hyperscalers doing their own chip designs or using AMD for cost reasons.
by doublerabbit | 2025-09-09 12:23:50+00:00
Actually thanks for a good analogy of it.

Retrospectively I am way over it, twenties is always emotional driven. Facebook was new and everyone flocked to it like sheep. So what can you expect.

I saw this all unfolding at the time as it is now. Watching the decay of it all is the perk in return I guess.
by anorwell | 2025-09-09 12:23:55+00:00
Thanks, makes sense. I found the benchmark src to see it's not fsyncing, so only some of the files will be durable by the time the benchmark is done. The benchmark docs might benefit from discussing this or benchmarking both cases? O_SYNC / fsync before file close is an important use case.

edit: A quirk with the use of NFSv3 here is that there's no specific close op. So, if I understand right, ZeroFS' "close-to-open consistency" doesn't imply durability on close (and can't unless every NFS op is durable before returning), only on fsync. Whereas EFS and (I think?) azure files do have this property.
by josephg | 2025-09-09 12:24:23+00:00
Yeah; this has been a known thing for at least the 15 years I’ve been working in the collaborative editing space. Strong eventual consistency isn’t enough for a system to be any good. We also need systems to “preserve user intent” - whatever that means.

One simple answer to this problem that works almost all the time is to just have a “conflict” state. If two peers concurrently overwrite the same field with the same value, they can converge by marking the field as having two conflicting values. The next time a read event happens, that’s what the application gets. And the user can decide how the conflict should be resolved.

In live, realtime collaborative editing situations, I think the system just picking something is often fine. The users will see it and fix it if need be. It’s really just when merging long running branches that you can get in hot water. But again, I think a lot of the time, punting to the user is a fine fallback for most applications.
by PaulHoule | 2025-09-09 12:25:10+00:00
Yes, and the bottoming steam turbine is 1/3 the size of a steam turbine rated for the full power output so… radical capital cost reduction.

It isn’t just the turbine but the heat exchangers, in a PWR the ‘steam generators’ are water-water heat exchangers that are usually larger in volume than the reactor vessel. Many LMFBRs had two stages of heat exchangers (sodium-sodium and sodium-water) even larger heat on the water though SuperPhenix has relatively affordable secondary heat exchangers and never had them catch on fire.
by FridayoLeary | 2025-09-09 12:25:15+00:00
In the UK the improvement was so massive that socialism died and Labour had to reinvent itself as a centrist party in order to stay alive. Thames water is horribly mismanaged and the rail as well is overpriced but i don't trust nationalisation to fix the problems. The government can simply cover up issues by providing subsidies.

Again if any politicians today were half the person Thatcher was things might actually get done. Even Blair might be an improvement.
by andrewstuart | 2025-09-09 12:25:31+00:00
There’s tons of YouTube videos for Halloween maker stuff. Just search for Halloween maker.

Toby Horrorboy is great:

https://youtube.com/@tobyhorrorboy

Search YouTube for “Furby Hacking”.

Buy some used Fur Real animatronic toys for a few bucks from Facebook marketplace and hack on them with your kids.

Make a spooky UFO scavenger hunt in the park with electronic gadgets.
by codehotter | 2025-09-09 12:25:34+00:00
I appreciate that you're demystifying this, but you are downplaying the difficulty of keeping 4 tallies with perfect accuracy for 100 steps while processing new inputs every 300ms. That produces demands on working memory and parallel processing that probably exceed the capabilities of our linguistic systems.

The claim is not that the algorithm is complicated, but that the abacus training helps in execution by involving visuospatial brain areas instead. Your argument is like saying training methods for track athletes are all equally effective because running is simply putting one foot in front of the other quickly.
by dncornholio | 2025-09-09 12:25:45+00:00
I can e-mail my doctor and have a response within 2 days. He is not working alone, but has multiple assistants working. This is a normal doctors office that everyone is required to have in the Netherlands.

E-mails and communication is completely free of charge.

We all know that Google and LLM's are not the answer for your medical questions but that they cause fear and stress instead.
by sombragris | 2025-09-09 12:26:11+00:00
> they heard I was an electrical engineer

Just an add to what has been said. This might be because they heard you are an electrical engineer. I really don't know your qualifications, but here (in Paraguay), electrical engineering is a different degree than electronical engineering.

You might be versed in electronics as your primary field, but since they heard you are an electrical engineer, they thought you could check out the facility's electrical wiring setup.

Thus, if you do mainly electronics, you might want to present yourself here (in Paraguay) as an electronics/electronical engineer.
by idiotsecant | 2025-09-09 12:26:18+00:00
You're approaching this with the nuance of a child. Yes, nuke regulation is burdensome, and yes it is necessary because nuke can have quite severe failures when failures occur. The solution is not to dogmatically suppose that one of those two basic facts is false. It's to engineer around the problem by making many exact copies of the same design, reducing the amount of regulation that needs to be applied on a per unit basis. That's what small modular reactors are. Certify once, build many.
by orochimaaru | 2025-09-09 12:26:26+00:00
In a way the author is right. AI apps will be like hersheys - uninspiring junk. Personally I don’t eat hersheys. If I need chocolate I have good Swiss or Belgian brands that are much better.

Coming back to software - I believe the author is correct. We will be able to standardize prompts that can create secure deployments and performant applications. We will have agents that can monitor these and deal with 95% of the issues that happen. The other 5% I have no clue. Most of what industry does today needs standarized architecture based on specs anyway. Human innovation via resume driven design generally overcomplicates things.
by const_cast | 2025-09-09 12:26:35+00:00
They don't even need to spin up their own channels, they can just continue to use existing channels and encrypt their messages.

I mean, if youre in the business of CSAM surely you don't mind encrypting a zip and emailing it or putting it on Google drive or whatever. Its trivial, requires next to zero technology knowledge.

Its inconvenient, sure, which is why we don't currently do that. But I'm sure the CSAM distributors don't care. Why would they?
by styanax | 2025-09-09 12:26:41+00:00
We're partially there, under Storage is an option allowing you to set how long to keep messages and I've set mine to one year. Possible: forever (default), 1y, 6mo, 30d - and it works, my old chat messages (not the whole chat, just individuals) are properly culled over time.

Edit: in context, Google Messages has none of these features and I have friends still married to Google Voice who send me tons of pics. Culling SMS requires using a third party tool to export and re-import etc. leagues behind Signal. None of it's backed up without the same third party tools as well and no built in image management.
by KaiserPro | 2025-09-09 12:26:48+00:00
congratulations, you now have 8x the debt, breaks the legal requirements for decarbonising the grid, diverts money away from uprading the grid from where its needed, and pisses off the most of the locals. Then you discover that all your fresh water is by the coast, so you now also need to build huge water moving infrastructure.

you might as well just do this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Contour_Canal and spend the rest of the money building homes.
by jwr | 2025-09-09 12:27:13+00:00
I love it. But in the spirit of today's Internet, you should make this message an obnoxious pop-up that requires dismissal with a tiny "X" button that is dark-grey-on-black and placed tactically so as to be the least accessible. The touch target on touch devices should be tiny and slightly off. The pop-up should also fail completely on iPads, covering all the content with a dark overlay but giving the user no way to proceed.
by mid-kid | 2025-09-09 12:27:29+00:00
> Tearing (graphical glitches) is terrible, especially if you’re doing screen sharing.

Download and run "picom" (its default configuration is good), or any other compositor. This is the way to get graphical acceleration for regular windows on X11, and fix tearing.

> Scaling stuff is a total mess, a mess that you can mostly get to work, but you’ll need to set four different environment variables and run a gsettings daemon and set these three properties and add this file to this location and that one to that and modify your Chromium flags and I probably even forgot a couple of steps.

I just modify ~/.Xresources with the "Xft.dpi: 120" for 1.25x scaling. All apps I care about pick this value to scale the UI with (chrome, firefox, telegram, Qt as a whole, etc). Notable exceptions being java apps.

See: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/HiDPI#X_Resources https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Xorg#Setting_DPI_manually
by antonly | 2025-09-09 12:28:33+00:00
This is a really shallow and unfounded take. Sad to see this here.

This particular issue is imho mostly related to a lack in investment in water infrastructure (reservoirs and pipes). I don't see how migrants factor into this equation (not to mention that the "free money" given to migrants is scarcely a drop in the bucket). Please spread your hatred elsewhere.
by komali2 | 2025-09-09 12:28:37+00:00
If you're going to assume my age, I'll go ahead and assume your race, because I can't imagine why someone would support think Ronald "Strapping young bucks" Reagan, President of "School desegregation is a bad thing," steered the USA in a good direction. The same guy that opposed the voting rights act? The guy that didn't want an MLK day because people weren't acknowledging the 'reality' of the man? The guy that vetoed the civil rights restoration act?

Mr. savings and loans crisis? The guy that tripled the national debt?

The epically failed war on drugs guy? That guy improved the united states?
by fredrikholm | 2025-09-09 12:28:49+00:00
Sweden's conservative government are pressuring building regulators to re-evaluate whether "all rooms require windows" in order to make the construction of apartments cheaper.

"Perhaps a better plan would be to replaces cranes with horses and ropes such that we can once again afford windows" was my first thought when I read that in my turn of the century starter apartment with giant windows in every room.

Like, GDP and productivity has tripled since that apartment was last renovated, let alone constructed. The idea that we can't afford a 20th century living standard anymore is nothing but absurdist propaganda.
by GuB-42 | 2025-09-09 12:28:52+00:00
> We're the last generation of people who translate ideas into code by hand. Our children will describe what they want and watch it appear on screen, the same way we describe what we want to search engines and watch results appear.

Describing what you want is programming! Code is great for that because it is more precise and less ambiguous than natural languages.

The part about search engines is missing a key element. When you do a search engine search or query a LLM, you interact with the system, using your own brain to interpret and refine the results. The idea with programming is having the machine do it all by itself with no supervision, that's why you need to be extra precise.

It is not so different from having a tradesman build you something. If you have a good idea of what you want and don't want to supervise him constantly, you have to be really precise with your request, casual language is not enough. You need technical terms and blueprints, in the same way that programmers have their programming language.
by kragen | 2025-09-09 12:29:38+00:00
It's correct to point out that you could end up in a situation where your "big" cores are all heavily loaded and your "small" cores with less instructions are all idle. That's unavoidable if your whole workload needs the AVX512 instructions or whatever, but it could be catastrophic if your OS just mistakenly thinks it does. But that doesn't seem unavoidable; see my comments further down the thread.
by josephg | 2025-09-09 12:29:47+00:00
Can you give some examples?

In my experience, 95% of applications are handled just fine by the sort of JSON types built in to Yjs or automerge. The problems I hear people complain about are things like performance, size on disk and library ergonomics. And the long tail of features - like ephemeral data support and binary assets.

But data mapping seems mostly fine?

I know of a couple of exceptions. Arbitrary nested tree reparenting can be a nightmare. And there aren’t many good rich text implementations out there.

What problems are you actually running into?
by aurareturn | 2025-09-09 12:30:21+00:00
The 1 trillion dollar package the board is offering Musk is a joke. They need to find a new CEO.

It's an attempt to rally the stock. It's tied to a $8.6 trillion valuation. It's basically a stunt for the public.

Problem for Tesla is that Musk is the reason it has a 200 P/E ratio (and increasing at that). Without Musk, they are likely to go all the way down to a 15 P/E or less ratio in my opinion because they're decreasing in growth. That'd make them go from being worth $1 trillion today to just $75 billion instantly.

I don't own TSLA but it could crash the market if it drops that low.
by tdi001 | 2025-09-09 12:30:30+00:00
For complete animatronics kits, have a look at https://www.bottango.com/pages/kits They are not cheap, but very educational.

You could buy a HalloWing from Adafruit and build something around it: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3900

Many Halloween effects can be done with a simple wiper motor: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBxc0fj-UUayo01ei0B7wQ

Also very popular for instructions: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKKBTwYyVYxkpa0_9pqQ13A Steve Koci, the creator, has sadly passed away, but his book "The Ultimate Guide To Do It Yourself Animatronics" might be worth a look.