MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by david-gpu | 2025-09-24 08:34:30+00:00
To be frank, this has been a rather disappointing conversation.

I gave some quick guidance for newbies with some broader context to help them, only to have somebody dismiss everything I said because they didn't pay any attention to what was written.

Next time, please do read what you reply to, especially if you are going to be dismissive. What a waste of everybody's time. I was hoping to learn something new. Bleh.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-09-24 08:34:50+00:00
A few other ugly quirks in Linux:

- It doesn’t respect the user’s configured fonts. - Clipboard support is inconsistent. - The GTK4 UI is quirky, and has silly slow animations in situations which don’t make sense.

The first two sound like more serious issues, and I’m surprised that others haven’t found them dealbreakers.
by pabs3 | 2025-09-24 08:35:09+00:00
You aren't allowed to control the software running on the baseband or SIM card, even with GrapheneOS on Pixel, or FLX1. With the PinePhone you can control the ARM processor within the baseband, but you can't control the Hexagon processor.

https://github.com/the-modem-distro/pinephone_modem_sdk/
by KevinMS | 2025-09-24 08:35:23+00:00
> Citation needed.

[7 Software Failures Due To Lack Of Testing That Rocked The World](https://www.appsierra.com/blog/software-failures-due-to-lack...)

> Hiring people who think bloom filters are "exotic" to work on a distributed system could certainly doom that project to failure regardless of how diligently tested it is.

Citation needed.

> Edit: to reframe it a bit differently: you can always add more tests. you can't fix the problems you don't even know you have due to lack of thorough understanding of the problem domain.

The problem domain is never the data structure or algorithm.
by hk__2 | 2025-09-24 08:35:32+00:00
Have you worked with TypeScript? I’m working with both every day and I’m always frustrated by the limits of the 'type' system in Python- sure it’s better than nothing but it’s so basic compared to what you can do in TypeScript. It’s very easy to use advanced generics in TypeScript but a hell to do (sometimes outright impossible) in Python.
by bheadmaster | 2025-09-24 08:35:43+00:00
> Semantic symbolic computation on natural languages still seams like a great way to bring reasoning to computers, but LLMs aren't doing that.

But they do close a big gap - they're capable of "understanding" fuzzy ill-defined sentences and "infer" the context, insofar as they can help formalize it into a format parsable by another system.
by ggeorgovassilis | 2025-09-24 08:35:57+00:00
Unfortunately the installation experience on Android has been getting worse. In the beginning a website could prompt the user for installing the app offline, then it became a semi-heuristic thing when the browser would trigger that even, now you have to do it through an entry in settings. Also, if you've installed multiple browsers, it's a dice roll which browser will be used to launch the app.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-09-24 08:37:24+00:00
Good observation. Those could very well be the only considerations for some people.

Maybe a good part of this is the risks and responsibilities without a co-operative village to grow families interactively.

What if the lingering problem is one of scale, that has not yet been solved?

Remember this whole thing is from a 90-year old and the smaller the village, the fewer the population of any one age group.

It's really making people think about all kinds of things all over the ball park.

If it's a small enough village you can't end up with a crowd of 1st graders ever, for instance, so age segregation as we know it for any years at a time has no similarity, and across-the-board people of all ages are part of the same group more so. Which means for one thing, if there is a 90-year old among the village, almost every one would be familiar with interacting with them routinely, as they were all growing up no less. An overwhelmingly more abundant number of adults would effectively be taking care of the children from start to finish, compared to how widespread adult influence is not intentionally minimized today, but ends up that way with same-age peers being more influential and naturally less mature.

Counter-intuitively it may even be that humanity, in the body of each family itself, thrives better when there remains satisfying group support for community focus more so than separate individual cocoons, which today are each more like on their own in rapidly changing times.

The villages humans mainly evolved to thrive in are about the opposite of what we have now in the big city.

It's also a good reminder that those of us who are a lot closer to 90 than we are 20 have still got a lot to learn.

So no quitting or you'll never be as wise as this letter shows.
by piva00 | 2025-09-24 08:38:30+00:00
Hilarious how true this can be, at some point I worked at a place that had three different competing setups for data workflows, with completely different stacks in all the possible ways: different programming languages, data stores, pipeline orchestrators, etc.

An absolute mess of technologies that no single person could make sense, backfilling when something went wrong could need 5-10 people to coordinate.

The running joke was that the data engineering department was trying to compete with the frontend devs on how fast they could throw a whole architecture out for a new fad.
by cladopa | 2025-09-24 08:39:19+00:00
We have been doing this for decades. I was hired to correct and train speech recognition and OCR programs like 20 years ago. A friend of mine corrected geolocated tags.

In the history of AI systems you basically had people inputing Prolog rules in "smart" systems or programmers hardcoding rules is programs like ELIZA or Generalised Problem Solvers.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-09-24 08:39:29+00:00
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.

I though the steam deck would be the reason why developper start building their game for linux, but it seems like it's a bigger issue than just making a "linux file". Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ?

I really have no idea how much more work it is but assumed it would be straight forward.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-09-24 08:39:31+00:00
What does "it works" mean to you? For me, that'd be deterministic behavior, and your description about brute forcing LLMs to the desired result through a feedback loop with tests is just that. I mean, sure, if something gives the same result 100% of the time, or 90% of the time, or fuck it, even 80-50% of the time, that's all deterministic in the end, isn't it?

The interesting thing is, for something to be deterministic that thing doesn't need to be defined first. I'd guess we can get an understanding of day/night-cycles without understanding anything about the solar system. In that same vein your Ksplice GCC bug doesn't sound nondeterministic. What did you choose to do in the case of the observed Ksplice behavior? Did you debug and help with the patch, or did you just pick another compiler? It seems that somebody did the investigation to bring GCC closer to the "same result 100% of the time", and I truly have to thank that person.

But here we are and LLMs and the "90% of the time"-approach are praised as the next abstraction in programming, and I just don't get it. The feedback loop is hailed as the new runtime, whereas it should be build time only. LLMs take advantage of the solid foundations we built and provide an NLP-interface on top - to produce code, and do that fast. That's not abstraction in the sense of programming, like Assembly/C++/Blender, but rather abstraction in the sense of distance, like PC/Network/Cloud. We use these "abstractions in distance" to widen reach, design impact and shift responsibilities.
by lou1306 | 2025-09-24 08:40:01+00:00
Yes, in the sense that they can be formalised as such. Given n tokens t1..tn, a transformer computes the probability p(t') that every token t' has of being the next. Each of these probabilities are arcs from a state t1..tn to another state t1..tn,t' weighted by p(t').

And since the context window is bounded, this is guaranteed to be finite-state, and all states are transient except those where the window is saturated.
by gwd | 2025-09-24 08:40:03+00:00
> HTMX says just return a re-rendered form with the error messages. MESH says make the form a component with its own endpoint.

HTMX can do the same thing: you can do `hx-trigger="changed delay:500ms"`, and make an endpoint for that component that will do validation, update an error message status area (adding or removing an error as appropriate), and even potentially enable / disable the "submit" button.

It seems to me that the main difference in approach is whether the "source of truth" for the state of the page is on the client or the server. HTMX is designed to be flexible (which is one of TFA's complaints actually), but its primary vision is HATEOAS (Hypertext as the Engine of Application State); which to my understanding of reading HTMX's documentation, is meant to mean that everything important about the client state should be kept on the client; the server should be able to be entirely reactive. What I see skimming through MESH (and data-star.dev) is that the "source of truth" is on the server.

Not an authority in this area, so happy to be corrected on all those points. But I am in the middle of building a dynamic query form using HTMX, trying to design it with HATEOAS principles, so it is something fresh in my mind at any rate.
by lerno | 2025-09-24 08:40:08+00:00
It is well known that Swift set out in design without any prior knowledge of the language it was replacing (Objective-C), with only the most junior in the team having used it to any greater extent.

Instead Swift was designed around the use-cases the team was familiar with, which would be C++ and compilers. Let's just say that the impedance between that and rapid UI development was pretty big. From C++ they also got the tolerance for glacial compile times (10-50 times as slow as compiling the corresponding Objective-C code)

In addition to that they did big experiments, such as value semantics backed by copy-on-write, which they thought was cool, but is – again – worthless in terms of the common problem domains.

Since then, the language's just been adding features at a speed even D can't match.

However, one thing the language REALLY GETS RIGHT, and which is very under-appreciated, is that they duplicated Objective-C's stability across API versions. ObjC is best in class when it comes to the ability to do forward and backwards compatibility, and Swift has some AWESOME work to make that work despite the difficulties.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-24 08:41:33+00:00
The Lancet just released a study on this exact question. [1] From 1971 to 2021, "unilateral, economic, and US sanctions" were associated with some 564,258 deaths per year, disproportionately affecting children under 5, who are most sensitive to disruptions in healthcare or food. That's 1,544 deaths per day - for 30 years.

By contrast as of August 31st 2025, the UN has assessed a total of 14,116 civilian deaths in Ukraine [2], about 10 per day, in one of the largest land wars in quite some time, and one where military casualties are certainly in the millions. War will always be with us - it's simply the final stage of irreconcilable differences. But I think sanctions will go down as one of those things people look back at wondering how we could ever do that to each other. Again I think the parallel with random forms of torture before execution are apt. One can support the death penalty and be completely disgusted by drawing and quartering. It's just unnecessary sadism and cruelty that serves no purpose.

For some related comic relief I recommend this skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h242eDB84zY

[1] - https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langlo/article/PIIS2214-1...

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain...
by globular-toast | 2025-09-24 08:42:21+00:00
One of the most difficult things in relationships is when each person thinks they are "doing the right thing" for the other, but it comes across as completely the opposite.

It reminds me of a relationship I had once which didn't work out for many reasons, but one thing in particular stood out: how we each expected to ask and receive help.

She would expect me to see that she needed help and just jump in. When no help was forthcoming she would just get more and more frustrated and annoyed that I wasn't helping. She treated me how she wanted to be treated: if she thought I needed help she'd just jump in and try to help.

But I was also treating her how I wanted to be treated. I don't like it when people just jump in and help. I want to figure things out for myself and if I want help I'll ask for it. So by each treating each other how we wanted to be treated we just annoyed each other constantly. It turns out the "golden rule" doesn't actually work; you can't just assume people are the same as you.

The invitation thing is similar. Some people will take "no" as a rejection. They know that if they say no then it means no, so they assume the same for others. But sometimes no really means "not this time, but please ask again". I have heard some people being really explicit when saying "no", like "sorry, I can't make it this time but I really want to join you so please invite me next time".
by delis-thumbs-7e | 2025-09-24 08:43:13+00:00
Industrial revolution caused a massive shift from fairly self-sustained agrarian communities to living horrible poverty in urban factory and mining towns, just look up numbers of children deceased during work in the 19th Century England. It did not make everyone poorer - it made plenty of people helluva lot richer - but it did increase the number of those in poverty and the effects of their destitude. The mega rich capitalists class greated by the industrialisation replaced the old aristocrats being able to buy goverments and leaders to do their bidding, smashing worker’s rights and unions created to defend the workers from the effects of industrial capitalism with police violence, William Hearst and the like were able to essentially control public opinion since they owned the newspapers…Sound familiar? We are not entering an era descriped on an utopian scifi, but just returning to the good old 19th century.

Except I still doubt whether AI is the new Spinning Jenny. Because the quality is so bad and because it can’t replace human’s in most things or doesn’t necessarily even speed the prodiction in a sognificant way, we might just be facing another IT-bubble and financial meltdown, since US seems to have but all of the eggs in a one basket.
by rsynnott | 2025-09-24 08:44:23+00:00
I mean, the ones who were actually _writing_ a C compiler, sure, and to some who were in performance critical spaces (early C compilers were not _good_). But normal programmers, checking for correctness, no, absolutely not. Where did you get that idea?

(The golden age of looking at compiler-generated assembly would've been rather later, when processors added SIMD instructions and compilers started trying to get clever about using them.)
by honzabe | 2025-09-24 08:44:44+00:00
> so what can they do even? And if the answer really is nothing, then how can they be responsible?

I think I need to clarify what I mean by "responsibility". Many people confuse "you are responsible" with "you did this" or "it is your fault", but this is not exactly true. Let's say I am an alcoholic. I believe alcoholism is an affliction (some people might not agree with that, but that's another discussion - let's ignore that for now and assume it is an affliction). Therefore, I believe it is not my fault that I am an alcoholic - It was just bad luck that I was born that way. Yet, it is my responsibility to control my alcoholism. If I hurt someone while under the influence, I have to bear the consequences. Some might argue it is not entirely fair, and I would agree. But in my view, it is the closest we can get to fair. I have a better chance of controlling my alcoholism than some random person whose kids I might have killed while driving under the influence.

Alcoholism is an extreme example, but if you think about it for a while, being responsible for something that is not your fault is common. I see Russians responsible in the same way. Citizens of a state share collective responsibility for what their state is doing. And the fact that an individual might not be able to do anything about it does not change that.

> Your second argument - that this is acceptable collateral damage - makes more sense, but it requires demonstrating that there is some connection between the specific measures and "making it harder".

Why? This is not a court of law, where you have to prove guilt to inflict punishment. Sanctions are not a punishment (which is also why I do not like arguments about collective punishment used in this discussion and elsewhere). They are an attempt to pressure a state to stop causing harm. And if that attempt is based on somewhat reasonable assumptions (which, in the case of Russia and Iran, I think it is), I am fine with it.

And let's not forget it is a relatively peaceful attempt. Nazi Germany was "persuaded" by literally destroying them to the point of unconditional capitulation. And many people who had nothing to do with Hitler died. In an ideal world, they would not have, because it was not their fault and they could not do anything, but the problem is that we only have very crude ways of dissuading states from causing harm.
by shakow | 2025-09-24 08:45:03+00:00
> I'd be at a loss to think of an example of an engineer who's been publicly pilloried (having been highly regarded for great work) for the failings of their company. Perhaps you could cite and example?

Because these guys and gals are not famous enough to warrant large coverage, and because the phenomenon is unfortunately so widespread that noone is going to cover every case.

https://endofaspecies.com/oped/the-harassment-of-game-develo...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2621gzvkdo

https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/zoe13c/passionate_...

https://www.gameshub.com/news/news/video-games-developers-gd...

https://www.xfire.com/authorities-investigating-death-threat...

https://f1000research.com/articles/11-1518
by sim7c00 | 2025-09-24 08:45:25+00:00
honestly, normal.php is not a valid php file. i do understand that it might bypass some checks if say normal.php was somehow flagged as a valid / benign file but in all honesty that would be really bad sec product u wanna swap with something that more intelligently classifies files... additionally, most products these days also use sha1, sha2 and sometimes things like ssdeep to have multiple hash variants to check. this ensures that any collisions will be mitigated as it's not known yet to make 1 file match on all of these different types of hashes, despite collisions being possible in a number of them for sure.

if normal.php had actual php code in there, being really 'normal' as the name implies, this would be much more severe / interesting because it might be more easy to convince modern security products it's actually a benign file.

Currently if it would be analysed, it would be flagged as suspicious simply because its not a valid file. and really, it dont need to be php, it could be any valid file format as long as it's an actually file that has benign behavior or contents.

plaintext might be easier to generate, but you'd need it to be 'executable' format or something interpretable like a script to have it actually stored in databases marking files as malicious or benign. matching filetype with the malicious file, in a valid form that does actual benign behavior would be 'best'.

don't take me wrong tho. still fun to see these things and honestly props, if it bypasses anything that's always a 'nice result' :)
by JdeBP | 2025-09-24 08:46:20+00:00
It probably will not catch on, I suspect. Wiktionary lacks the word completely, it appears, not even its Hungarian flavour having it, giving an indication of how obscure it is going to be when non-native speakers try to look it up.

* https://hu.wiktionary.org/wiki/zutty

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Hungarian_words_Z

Francophones are going to be thinking of something else. (-:

* https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/zut
Show HN: Read-only AI coding assistant
by msvana | 2025-09-24 08:47:56+00:00
I am a bit conservative when it comes to using AI to write code for me. However, I want to use AI to chat about my code - something like ChatGPT that sees my local files. So I started working on FileChat.

FileChat is still quite new, and any feedback is appreciated. Please file an issue if you find a bug or have a feature suggestion.
by dominikhudzik | 2025-09-24 08:49:27+00:00
hi, I’ve noticed that many job offers here require a US work visa. https://news.ycombinator.com/jobs

I don’t have one, but I’ve been working successfully for startups remotely. Services like Deel already cover contracts, compliance, and payments globally. www.deel.com

By the way — I’m currently looking for new opportunities in business automation and AI agents, also open to roles as Head of Process / Operations. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dominikhudzik/
by dkersten | 2025-09-24 08:49:36+00:00
Of course they don’t, it would be crazy to say they would support all the different possible distros and configurations that people might run, when the majority of users are in steam deck. But that doesn’t mean it won’t run, just that if you have issues, they don’t promise to fix them. Seems reasonable to me.

BG3 already ran well enough on Linux, so I imagine this will only make it run better, official support or not.
by iainmerrick | 2025-09-24 08:51:15+00:00
Is Python really the first choice of output code? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't know the answer and I don't know where to look to find out.

I would have assumed it might be JS and more specifically React -- isn't that what you often get if you ask an LLM to "make an app that does such-and-such"?

(Experimental anecdata: I just asked Gemini to write an app and it gave me a single HTML file with embedded JS, no TS or React, Tailwind for CSS.)

(Edit to add: then I asked it to "write some code" instead of "write an app", and this time it went with Python.)
by shortercode | 2025-09-24 08:52:24+00:00
I would assume the issue is all the variation in different distros. Plus the driver/hardware combinations. While some setups would just work they don’t see it as worth spending the time doing the validation/patching required. The steam deck is 1 device to test, with a single software stack. Much easier to target, and with a known customer base. Which brings up the other issue that they would be unlikely to make their money back on a general Linux release. Companies have cited this as a reason for not doing macOS releases in the past and based on the last steam survey Linux usage is in a similar ballpark (2.6% vs 1.8% for Mac ).

Despite all this I think it’s still a move in the right direction.
by rtpg | 2025-09-24 08:52:57+00:00
> Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ?

You can install Steam on Debian.

I think the value here is that with Steam being the "approved launcher" you offload a lot of "distro weirdness" over to Valve. The value of a standalone build seems fairly low for most game devs.