MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 03:50:08+00:00
> Note that the "safepointing" logic is exactly the same thing that's needed in refcounting to atomic replace a field.

No it's not, not even close.

> This article glosses over what I consider the hardest part - the enter/exit functionality around native functions may that block (but which must touch the allocator).

Yeah, that part is hard, and maybe I'll describe it in another post.

Look for `filc_enter` and `filc_exit` in https://github.com/pizlonator/fil-c/blob/deluge/libpas/src/l...
by jdmg94 | 2025-09-05 03:50:08+00:00
I used to work at Amazon, 3-day RTO was not nice but tolerable, 5-day RTO made half of our senior staff leave. my commute to the office wasn't so bad, but my friends had to drive 1+ hours to the office and then pay $26/day for parking which you only get 50% reimbursed.

Amazon touts "frugality" as one of their core tenets but its hard to reconcile frugality with all the expenses of going to the office.
by starchild3001 | 2025-09-05 03:50:17+00:00
I get the sentiment, but I think declaring scaling "dead" is premature and misses the point.

First, let's be honest about GPT-5. The article cherry-picks the failures. For 95% of my workflow -- generating complex standalone code, summarizing and finding issues in new code, drafting technical documentation, summarizing dense research papers -- it's a massive step up from GPT-4. The "AGI" narrative was always a VC-fueled fantasy. The real story is the continued, compounding utility as a tool. A calculator can't write a poem, but it was still revolutionary.

Second, "scaling" isn't just compute * data. It's also algorithmic improvements. Reasoning was a huge step forward. Maybe the next leap isn't just a 100x parameter increase, but a fundamental architectural shift we haven't discovered yet, which will then unlock the next phase of scaling. Think of it like the transition from single-core to multi-core CPUs. We hit a frequency wall, so we went parallel. We're hitting a density wall with LLMs, the next move is likely towards smarter, more efficient architectures.

The fever dream isn't superintelligence. The fever dream was thinking we'd get there on a single, straight-line trajectory with one single architecture. The progress is still happening, it's just getting harder and requires more ingenuity, which is how all mature engineering fields work.
by greggman65 | 2025-09-05 03:52:09+00:00
My best friend in high school, John Alvarado, and I, loved the game BoulderDash. John reproduced the algorithm for it in Action!

https://github.com/greggman/rockfall/blob/main/ROCK4.ACT

I've since ported that code multiple times. Once to Gameboy (unshipped, it was just for learning when I was hired to make a gameboy game). Once to C. Once to Java for a feature phone software interview. A couple of years ago to JavaScript

https://greggman.github.io/rockfall/
by NathanKP | 2025-09-05 03:52:09+00:00
I just ended an eight year stretch of working for AWS. I quit in order to move out of the United States to New Zealand, so indirectly I quit over RTO. I wanted to work outside of a US hub city, even if it would have required relocating to AWS New Zealand and taking a resulting pay decrease that would have saved the company significant money to get the same amount of work from me.

Acquisition and retention of good talent is absolutely a major issue for AWS. Don't get me wrong, I still like AWS a lot, even all it's frequently chaotic mess, but I'll probably wait until Amazon starts its Satya era before I'd consider reapplying to work there.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 03:52:12+00:00
It works reliably.

LLVM is engineered to be usable as a backend for type-safe/memory-safe languages. And those flags are engineered to work right for implementing the semantics of those languages, provided that you also do the work to avoid other LLVM pitfalls (and FilPizlonator does that work by inserting aggressive checks).

Of course there could be a bug though. I just haven't encountered this particular kind of bug, and I've tested a lot of software (see https://fil-c.org/programs_that_work)
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-09-05 03:53:00+00:00
As mentioned by other commenters, a reason for the FT's dominance in particular is because sine, cosine, and complex exponentials are the eigenfunctions of the derivative operator. Since so many real-world systems are governed by differential equations, the Fourier Transform becomes a natural lens to analyze these systems. Sound waves are one (of many) examples.

And there's another good reason why so many real-world signals are sparse (as you say) in the FT domain in particular: because so many real-world systems involve periodic motion (rotating motors, fly's wings as you noted, etc). When the system is periodic, the FT will compress the signals very effectively because every signal has to be harmonic of the fundamental frequency.
by don_quiquong | 2025-09-05 03:53:45+00:00
People who pirate in the year 2025 are almost definitely going to be spending more on music (physical media, merch, tickets, etc) than the average Spotify subscriber. This was true ~20 years ago and given the ease of Spotify and the relative pain of pirating, I would imagine it's even moreso the case today. And even if they spend half a Spotify subscription on music, that's more money going to artists than a Spotify subscription giving them carte blanche access to most music.
by pizlonator | 2025-09-05 03:56:04+00:00
Some programs run as fast as normally. That's admittedly not super common, but it happens.

Some programs have a ~4x slowdown. That's also not super common, but it happens.

Most programs are somewhere in the middle.

> for the use-cases where C/C++ are still popular

This is a myth. 99% of the C/C++ code you are using right now is not perf sensitive. It's written in C or C++ because:

- That's what it was originally written in and nobody bothered to write a better version in any other language.

- The code depends on a C/C++ library and there doesn't exist a high quality binding for that library in any other language, which forces the dev to write code in C/C++.

- C/C++ provides the best level of abstraction (memory and syscalls) for the use case.

Great examples are things like shells and text editors, where the syscalls you want to use are exposed at the highest level of fidelity in libc and if you wrote your code in any other language you'd be constrained by that language's library's limited (and perpetually outdated) view of those syscalls.
by ketozhang | 2025-09-05 03:58:55+00:00
I think your argument focuses a lot on the scenario where you already have cleaned data (i.e., data warehouse). I and many other data engineers agree, you're better off with hosting it on SQL RDBMS.

However, before that, you need a lot of code to clean the data and raw data does not fit well into a structured RDBMS. Here you choose to either map your raw data into row view or a table view. You're now left with the choice of either inventing your own domain object (row view) or use a dataframe (table view).
by cantrevealname | 2025-09-05 03:59:00+00:00
The 20 countries that Anthropic won't do business with:

Afghanistan Belarus Central African Republic China Congo, Democratic Republic of Cuba Eritrea Ethiopia Iran Libya Mali Myanmar Nicaragua North Korea Russia Somalia Sudan Syria Venezuela Yemen

I took their list here[1] and diff'ed it with Wikipedia's list of sovereign states.

They don't accept the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the Republic of Congo is OK. There are indeed two Congos with ridiculously similar names, and apparently the one that calls itself democratic is the bad one.

Anthropic is fine with Taiwan.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/supported-countries (They give two lists, one for API and another for Claude.ai, but the lists are identical.)
by opello | 2025-09-05 03:59:25+00:00
The point is that the automation system is better in some ways and far, far worse in others. And of course to also highlight that reducing the human in the loop to visual sensors is unreasonably reductive.

An interesting question might be if the automation system can be evaluated against the human perceptual system, or amalgamation of systems. This seems like an exceedingly difficult premise to evaluate though, given the varied and dynamic nature of the real-world driving environment.
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-05 04:00:18+00:00
She’s right, and I say that as someone who doesn’t always agree with her. Intel has been a sinking ship riding on momentum and past success, while a stagnant team of employees draw paychecks on the way down to irrelevance. I know this is a cynical description but the reality is their products aren’t competitive and their moat doesn’t really exist in a world where many companies can build great chips. And most employees there don’t care about this terrible end to a once great company.

America taking a stake in this company instead of investing in new startups or in breaking up anticompetitive industries is a bad decision by this administration. It doesn’t do much to make America strong for a world where it competes with China and India.
by citizenpaul | 2025-09-05 04:01:58+00:00
I'm a crypto disappoin-ic. Seems like humans simply cannot un-shackle themselves from central control no matter how low the bar. The second crypto got steam the scammers, criminals and con artists were on it so fast fly's would be embarrassed by their shameless dive into feces.

Long term I'm still more optimistic on crypto than AI. I think part of the problem with crypto is it needs to be around longer than some government money to prove to people it has staying power. Only then will financial people start doing things like recommend a small crypto stash for your retirement just in case. The average person is not going to make the necessary critical mass move into crypto without some sort permission saying its ok and not going to risk all their money or jail time.
by kcsrk | 2025-09-05 04:03:51+00:00
I am the author of the talk here o/.

This talk is a _subjective_ take on how the OCaml programming language evolves, based on my observations over the last 10 years I've been involved with it. My aim/hope is to demystify the compiler development process and the tradeoffs involved and encourage more developers to take a shot at contributing to the OCaml compiler.

Happy to answer questions, but also, more importantly, hear your comments and criticisms around the compiler development process, ideas to make it more approachable, etc.
by treesknees | 2025-09-05 04:04:04+00:00
Mistakes can occur. I worked on a large software project that came very close to shipping a release with a significant portion of vendor licenses, such as curl, missing. A developer had made a change to the build step that collected the licensing. During testing, the licensing command displayed as a “wall of text”, and QA didn’t notice that it was only one-third of its normal length. I was simply looking for something and noticed the missing licensing attributes.

In my opinion, especially if you weren’t involved in the original import of the vendor software or libraries, this is something that’s easily overlooked.
by Sn0wCoder | 2025-09-05 04:05:08+00:00
Thanks for the link. Its always helpful to have new ways to describe tech dept. The term is too overloaded and most people roll their eyes when hearing it since it can be used to describe anything from real issues to things that are fine but you just do not like for whatever reason. Look forward to reading the section on what issues are worth paying down and those that are fine to live with. Its not any easy decision to make, but having concrete examples is always a bonus. For .99 cents pre-ordered a copy and if there is going to be a real book would love to have it sitting on my desk. It could sit next to Software Estimation by Steve McConnell ;) Cheers!
by bellis444 | 2025-09-05 04:05:36+00:00
Hey folks! I open-sourced Noto, a tiny local-first chat companion. It talks to an LLM running in LM Studio (OpenAI-compatible) and stores light, per-handle “memory” in a local SQLite DB. It’s meant for casual journaling/check-ins—not therapy—and it’s easy to tweak. What it is Flask backend + simple HTML/JS chat UI (choose your handle in the UI)

Per-handle history & lightweight memory

Minimal crisis-language guardrails

Token-gated debug endpoints

Optional Cloudflare Tunnel if you want to expose it remotely

This is the MVP—feedback welcome! (Links in the first comment.)
by MBCook | 2025-09-05 04:06:16+00:00
From my reading you can’t say “throws(MyError, BadError, ThirdError)”. So you only have two options. You could use a non-checked throws like before, but we’re assuming you want it checked.

Since you can only put one name between those parenthesis, the only way to do all three would be to have a base class and list that. Or at least that’s my understanding.

However if you do that and there’s a fourth type called UnwantedError, that’s also valid to throw even though you don’t want to.

It’s an interesting limit. I didn’t follow this feature, though I remember hearing about it, so I don’t know why that choose was made.
by bawolff | 2025-09-05 04:07:15+00:00
FWIW, i don't think of my comment as a criticism, Wikipedia is beautiful because of what it is. We should celebrate it as it is.

In my view it is very much the journey towards an unatainable goal that makes Wikipedia so inspiring. The Wikipedian's themselves admit it is a work in progress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_work_...

I think that's part of what makes Wikipedia beautiful.

In some ways it makes me think of the religious monolouge from the tv show babylon5 https://youtu.be/JjnpTcvGvts?si=6jdzDxVXOt--LNHC
by tehsuk | 2025-09-05 04:08:16+00:00
I'm thinking about what this post explains more clearly than I can:

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/16/the-lethal-trifecta

Seems to me that these kind of systems, by design, tick all three boxes. I've had many discussions with people that let agent systems read and act on their incoming email for instance, and I think it's utter insanity from a security perspective.
by jaggs | 2025-09-05 04:08:32+00:00
OK, so I've been browsing around and bookmarked it for when I'm off the phone.

First thoughts

1. Gorgeous interface. Bad... Really clunky to navigate around, especially on mobile. Each post takes multiple seconds to parse and access, where it should be MUCH shorter IMO.

2. Too much functionality scattered around the interface drowns out the key items.

For example, you've buried the Follow (Subscriptions?) function in amongst a bunch of other less important things like Cred Desk and Notifications.

It makes things confusing.

3. I'm not sure what the purpose of the Article Cred slider is at the top of the Front page. That's the most important space on your app, and you've given it over to something confusing and probably not so valuable?

Why not use that to section to highlight the top 3 functions people will want to use? Maybe News Stream, Subscriptions and Favorites or something?

Just my first impressions. Gorgeous app, but I probably won't just it until it comes with a super condensed mode so I can scan rapidly like I do HN and Reddit old.
by bongodongobob | 2025-09-05 04:08:56+00:00
Now ask how much global distribution used to cost. It's $40/yr right now with Spotify. That alone makes Spotify a massive boon for artists. Any bedroom artists complaining about Spotify just don't understand the industry at all. It's a performance art and always will be. If you can't get people to come to your shows or don't even play shows, well, look inward.
by thevagrant | 2025-09-05 04:09:04+00:00
Solution for my kids was buy or borrow whatever books they show interest in.

If they like reading comics, then get a stack of comics.

I allowed them to stay up later (if they want) but the condition is that time only can be used for reading. They really enjoyed that and it helped.

In time they traded the comics to fiction novels and their reading ability kept improving. They now get books from the library on their own and read quite a lot for their age. No parental pressure needed, they are addicted.
by rfrey | 2025-09-05 04:09:50+00:00
> Any knowledge is composed from imperfect abstractions, the edge cases of which we don't know.

That is a pretty concrete epistemological statement. Is it true?

That's not just a game, or a "gotcha". Any discussion about "truth" eventually ends up with the question of what it means to know something, a subject about which you seem to be fairly confident.
by will4274 | 2025-09-05 04:11:26+00:00
I don't know how much you know about the Washington Redskins naming controversy. There's little doubt that "redskin" is a slur today - Native Americans say so, and it's kind of up to them. The status in the 17th and 18th century is a bit less clear IMHO.

Wikipedia says (or said, I guess - I haven't checked) that it unambiguously *was* a slur then too. As evidence, it cites a study of 17th century literature that notes redskins were more likely to be villains than heros in a small sample of 80 books and a diary entry about a sign outside a small town that said "Indian / Redskin scalps - $1" or some such. I don't recall the details.

The point is there wasn't one cited source that showed redskin specifically was a slur, only general evidence that white settlers were racist against Native Americans. Clear WP:SYNTH violation.

Tried to make my own changes, got immediately reverted. Tried to start on the talk page, got totally filibustered by two editors who has the page and a hundred other racism adjacent pages on their watchlist and whose edit history was basically just those handful of pages. Started reading about internal wikipedia boards I could appeal to. Stopped and logged off.

Once you start noticing things like that and start double checking, you find such minor distortions in a lot of political adjacent Wikipedia pages.

Another good example is to grab five super murderous left wing dictators and five super murderous right wing dictators and read the summary section. Use a pen or a highlighter and classify each sentence as positive, negative, or neutral.
by anthem2025 | 2025-09-05 04:11:41+00:00
It’s not just the RTO, it’s the way they handled it.

Telling people they can go ahead and plan their lives around working remotely only to aggressively flip flop on it is colossal disrespect. It’s just a giant fuck you to every employee.

I didn’t want to work for Amazon before but I consider them a joke now.
by unsungNovelty | 2025-09-05 04:12:13+00:00
> The technology has also led students to focus on external results at the expense of internal growth.

But this has already been the case. We have all been running behind numbers for so long. Nobody gives a damn about actually learning.

I started learning after I got my first job. Started focusimg on literature, arts and languages a lot more after I started working. AI only amplifies this to the next level.

There are certain aspects like disciplinary and on time scenarios which I can agree with. But the education system has not been about education since for a long time. Sure, premium institutions had something going on. But maybe that is what will be takenover by AI as well?
by gyomu | 2025-09-05 04:12:55+00:00
I feel very grateful that I live in a country where the social contract between the government and its constituents has guaranteed extensive, affordable public transit and biking infrastructure for everyone.

I do feel quite sorry for people living in countries where that is not the case, often due to extensive lobbying from car manufacturers — and as a result are subservient to the severe constraints of car ownership.

Having lived in such an area earlier in my life, my quality of life was absolutely worse off for it, and having to bike on roads only suited to motor vehicles in the southern US summer heat to go grocery shopping or go to school did induce anxiety, yes.
by Sherveen | 2025-09-05 04:13:11+00:00
This makes a tremendous amount of sense. Most people are so bad at using AI for productive purposes -- but outside of eng, most AI fluency is actually hot garbage. People just haven't gained an understanding or appreciation for the degree of quality and capability they can achieve.

And once they can use it and get visible results, those orgs are ripe for large amounts of AI product adoption.

Only downside to the OAI version will be that it's OAI specific.
by positron26 | 2025-09-05 04:15:21+00:00
Given that, in the back of every customer's mind, across all segments, they cannot allow one vendor to have or exert too much control, it is a wonder why any company would seek to own a platform to such an extent. The better and more integrated you get, the more of a risk you become.

And of course I'm speaking on the context of what I'm building, not the world we're in. There are plenty of platforms that are more important than what they platform. I believe it was Bill Gates that said the value of all the things on the platform must exceed the platform itself. We have some inversions at present that are ripe to undergo Rayleigh–Taylor instability.
by anotherhue | 2025-09-05 04:16:07+00:00
I think we're witnessing the evolution of the one-liner.

Most of these have extremely limited scope, and are probably not going to be invested in long term as software requires, they're throwaway.

Which is exactly what horrible find to xargs to inline perl was.

I personally feel less annoyed by this vibe mania when I think of them this way.

Note: two of them seem at face value to be equivalent to gpg or imagemagick CLI calls but hyper (over IMO) specialised.
by SchemaLoad | 2025-09-05 04:16:47+00:00
It's always more tedious than that. You have to pick all these libraries, install and set them up, build login pages, etc. Stuff that is all simple work but takes ages. I've never used an LLM for it but it seems like the kind of work that should be easy enough to automate and would save a week of setting everything up if it worked.
by bee_rider | 2025-09-05 04:17:00+00:00
You think it is the first half. You’ll realize later on that really you need a totally different structure to write the book. You’ll try to refactor the whole thing, but some obstinate subset of the original readers will insist on using the original index. In the interest of backwards compatibility, you’ll jam the new structure into the margins (so they can keep their precious index).

It’s text-debt.
by ggm | 2025-09-05 04:18:02+00:00
"calling out" is what I am reacting to I think. Firstly, it feels very performative because what isn't happening is the "calling out" of Amazon, Azure/Microsoft, all the other cloud choices. All of them. Oracle, SAP, you name it. And, its doubly performative because people are going to step outside, spend money with stripe (cloud hosted) on coffee (traded by shipping companies using cloud companies) in clothes bought from people using cloud companies.

Choosing who to attack like this, is choosing to ignore the other 99% of the world equally tied up. All the cloud helps the war in Gaza, backs Netanyahu, indirectly or directly. Taking their money to be overt about government PR? Why is that materially worse than the other thing?

I get it. IBM helped the holocaust. It happened. Google is helping a modern day collective-punishment on people. It's similar. But without over-doing it. so is the maker of your sausages, clothes, your coffee, the phone company, Intel...

Qatar house the leadership of Hamas. I am not hearing people call for the boycott of the airline. I dislike moral relativism and whataboutery, but the situation here is complicated and simple at the same time. Both Hamas, and Netenyahu are evil and need to be condemned. Google cannot take money from Hamas because of US law. Do you think google would decline to take $45m from the government of Pakistan on principle? or Afghanistan? or dare I say it, China?

Netenyahu continues to call all journalists who report on the war antisemitic. I don't stop reading them. he repudiates the work MSF do. I continue to fund them. Haaretz reports regularly on the evils of the settler movement. read them.

Complaining about googles $45m income is not particularly helpful. De-googling won't help.