MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mattlondon | 2025-09-30 14:17:47+00:00
We use the various instruction .md files for the agents and update them with common issues and pitfalls to avoid, as well as pointers to the coding standards doc.

Gemini and Claude at least seem to work well with it, but sometimes still make mistakes (e.g. not using c++ auto is a recurrent thing, even though the context markdown file clearly states not to). I think as the models improve and get better at instruction handling it will get better.

Not saying this is "the solution" but it gets some of the way.

I think we need to move away from "vibe coding", to more caring about the general structure and interaction of units of code ourselves, and leave the AI to just handle filling in the raw syntax and typing the characters for us. This is still a HUGE productivity uplift, but as an engineer you are still calling the shots on a function by function, unit by unit level of detail. Feels like a happy medium.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-30 14:18:09+00:00
> In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employer?

Of course. If you don’t see that, you’re missing the point.

In your world, is there such a thing as a bad employee? Or do you assume all employees are inherently good and do appropriate work for their pay and don’t need constant performance management to simply do their job?

In my posts I’m not talking about all juniors. I’m talking about a problematic subset. You seem to be assuming I’m generalizing to all of them. I am not. This is a phenomenon specific to a subset of juniors that is unfortunately a repeated pattern where they all share some very common and obvious characteristics. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to break them out of that mindset and have them join their much happier peers, but to be honest once someone is that deep into the cynical mindset it’s hard to wake them out of it.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-30 14:18:58+00:00
And then India will enforce it's Digital Services Act, as will the European Union, as will other countries with significant services exports.

On top of that, the foreign subsidiaries of companies are that - subsidiaries. They can be converted or spun out into autonomous or entirely independent organizations that own IP and decisions, thus bypassing the "strategy" you mentioned. This is why the India subsidiaries of most conglomerates like Hyundai, LG, Suzuki, Siemens, and others have been IPOing in the India for the past few years.

Finally, I'm in cybersecurity. Our entire pipeline is in Israel, the CEE, and India because there is no hiring pipeline aside from a smattering of veterans from cybersecurity MOSes.

We wouldn't have outsourced if we had the right talent pipeline in the US, but universities and state and local governments failed us, while other countries abroad worked to attract FDI, ensured industries had a say in designing curriculum, or made sure to provide tax credits.

It's the same reason Hollywood shifted to London and automotive manufacting to Ontario and Mexico.

There's a reason Wiz was founded in Israel and not America.
by remix2000 | 2025-09-30 14:19:38+00:00
Reading the kernel mailing lists wrt/ bcachefs, it looked more like a cattle prod than an olive branch to me… Kent didn't do nothing other maintainers don't do except make one filesystem that doesn't get irrecoverably corrupted on brownout.

I'm just sorry for the guy and perhaps a little bit sorry for myself that I might have to reformat my primary box at some point…

Also unrelated, but Sun was a very open source friendly company with a wide portfolio of programs licensed under GNU licenses, without some of which Linux would still be useless to the general public.

Overall, designing a good filesystem is very hard, so perhaps don't bite the hand that feeds you…?
by jfarmer | 2025-09-30 14:19:45+00:00
From John Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct, the fallacy that "Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned."

“The fallacy in these versions of the same idea is perhaps the most pervasive of all fallacies in philosophy. So common is it that one questions whether it might not be called the philosophical fallacy. It consists in the supposition that whatever is found true under certain conditions may forthwith be asserted universally or without limits and conditions. Because a thirsty man gets satisfaction in drinking water, bliss consists in being drowned. Because the success of any particular struggle is measured by reaching a point of frictionless action, therefore there is such a thing as an all-inclusive end of effortless smooth activity endlessly maintained.

It is forgotten that success is success of a specific effort, and satisfaction the fulfillment of a specific demand, so that success and satisfaction become meaningless when severed from the wants and struggles whose consummations they arc, or when taken universally.”
by bombcar | 2025-09-30 14:20:12+00:00
Linus did tell him to take a hike, and this is exactly what this is.

Perhaps as BDFL he let it slip a few too many times, but that's generally the way you want to go - as a leader, you want to trust your subordinates are doing the right thing; which means that you'll get burned a few times until you have to take action (like this).

The only other option makes you into a micromanager, which doesn't scale.
by jkhe | 2025-09-30 14:20:22+00:00
Memory copy (memcpy) is a pervasive but major performance bottleneck across all modern operating systems and apps, eating up to 66% of cycles in some benchmarks. We introduce Copier, a novel first-class OS service that fundamentally re-architects how memory is copied.

Instead of traditional synchronous (blocking) copy, Copier offers coordinated asynchronous copy, enabling applications to overlap computation with data movement using novel programming primitives, hiding copy latency.

As an OS service, Copier can also: - Fully utilize hardware (like AVX2 and DMA) via a specialized dispatcher, delivering higher throughput than existing kernel or library functions. - Absorb redundant copies across privilege levels (user-space to kernel and back) by maintaining a global view, drastically accelerating I/O-intensive workloads.

In practice, Copier achieves up to 1.8x latency speedup for Redis.

This shows memory copy doesn't have to be a performance tax—it can be a managed, efficient service.
by squigz | 2025-09-30 14:20:23+00:00
Someone will say that that person shouldn't be bringing any sort of politics into it, so they should be removed, no CoCs needed for that.

Then someone will point out that they might have this stuff on their Github profile, or website. They're free to do so, of course. But it would be wrong to remove them for that, right? But then any trans contributor that sees this crap is what, forced to work with them anyway?
by potato3732842 | 2025-09-30 14:20:28+00:00
You don't understand. Museums are a business, a nonprofit and often subsidized business, but still a business. The public is less served and engaged and exited per visit/hour/etc seeing pristine vehicles from behind a rope in an air conditioned building. Letting the public visit these things in the most ideal setting (which is typically whatever is closest to operating conditions) and ideally interact with, walk through and touch them is what builds appetite for further museum funding, expansion, etc.

After decades of environmental wear from outdoor display it can be moved inside, assuming there's enough public interest to justify that. The degradation of visitor experience at that point is acceptable because the item is older, more "historical" etc. The restoration of the item and subsequent redisplay itself then generates further public interest and/or revenue (especially in the modern age of Youtube and the like).

People need to interact with the stuff that their parents or their parents parents remember in order to get exited about (and fund) preserving the (best of) stuff that nobody alive has any connection to. You need to let patrons today sit in the Huey grandpa served in order to get the money to restore the Ford Trimotor nobody alive has much connection to. This is the same situation but bigger. The fact that the shuttles were a national prestige project and their location is a subject of national politics may cause emotion to mask things but on a 10+yr timeline the reality is the same.

This is something that maritime museums have long since figured out.
by squigz | 2025-09-30 14:20:37+00:00
In my experience, it absolutely does help. But everyone has their own experiences.

> should see why you removed them, and again, a made-up "contract" will not be needed.

It's not a matter of the action being transparent, it's the motivations. Sometimes, it's not clear to community members why the action was taken, if there's no CoC or rules. "They're being an asshole" is a lot more subjective than "They were breaking the rules"

> It's ok to stand up for yourself and simply say, without pointing to a document you just put in your repo, that: "John Doe was behaving poorly, and I don't want to deal with him, I banned him, you don't need to like it, but it's my decision". Just my 2c.

Sure, this might work for a small community or group, but the fiasco with Nix seems to suggest this isn't the case at a certain size. Some people apparently want accountability and transparency from their moderators.

> Just my 2c... I don't want to add more procedures to my open source projects or voluntary organizing. I'm doing it because I like it, not because I want to pretend I'm at a townhall meeting.

Great! That's fine! Not every community needs such things. Some do.
by Tazerenix | 2025-09-30 14:22:07+00:00
The practical experience of doing mathematics is actually quite close to a natural science, even if the subject is technically a "formal science* according to the conventional meanings of the terms.

Mathematicians actually do the same thing as scientists: hypothesis building by extensive investigation of examples. Looking for examples which catch the boundary of established knowledge and try to break existing assumptions, etc. The difference comes after that in the nature of the concluding argument. A scientist performs experiments to validate or refute the hypothesis, establishing scientific proof (a kind of conditional or statistical truth required only to hold up to certain conditions, those upon which the claim was tested). A mathematician finds and writes a proof or creates a counter example.

The failure of logical positivism and the rise of Popperian philosophy is obviously correct that we can't approach that end process in the natural sciences the way we do for maths, but the practical distinction between the subjects is not so clear.

This is all without mention the much tighter coupling between the two modes of investigation at the boundary between maths and science in subjects like theoretical physics. There the line blurs almost completely and a major tool used by genuine physicists is literally purusiing mathematical consistency in their theories. This has been used to tremendous success (GR, Yang-Mills, the weak force) and with some difficulties (string theory).

————

Einstein understood all this:

> If, then, it is true that the axiomatic basis of theoretical physics cannot be extracted from experience but must be freely invented, can we ever hope to find the right way? Nay, more, has this right way any existence outside our illusions? Can we hope to be guided safely by experience at all when there exist theories (such as classical mechanics) which to a large extent do justice to experience, without getting to the root of the matter? I answer without hesitation that there is, in my opinion, a right way, and that we are capable of finding it. Our experience hitherto justifies us in believing that nature is the realisation of the simplest conceivable mathematical ideas. I am convinced that we can discover by means of purely mathematical constructions the concepts and the laws connecting them with each other, which furnish the key to the understanding of natural phenomena. Experience may suggest the appropriate mathematical concepts, but they most certainly cannot be deduced from it. Experience remains, of course, the sole criterion of the physical utility of a mathematical construction. But the creative principle resides in mathematics. In a certain sense, therefore, I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed. - Albert Einstein
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-30 14:22:16+00:00
> The Youtube settlement is his money…

… obtained via the power and threat of the public office. There's a good reason all these suits started getting settled only after he regained office.

> I'm not sure why you linked his net worth gain…

Because he's growing his wealth via the Presidency far greater than $20M he's "donating" out of someone else's pocket?
by n8m8 | 2025-09-30 14:22:35+00:00
So far the only thing I’ve noticed is that it made me confirm that it should do a 10 minute task “manually” because it “would take 2 or 3 hours”

It was a context merging task for my unorganized collection of agents… it sort of made sense, but was the exact reason I was asking it to do it… like you’re the bot, lol
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-09-30 14:23:05+00:00
I suppose in their defense, culturally, the UK hasn't respected many borders apart from their own so this really isn't anything new.

Zing aside, I'd be thrilled to see whatever prosecutor or litigator or whatever they call them over there bring a case against a US based company for hosting content in the US, geoblocking the UK, a UK resident using a VPN to bypass that block, and making the case that that is somehow the US company's fault.
by DowsingSpoon | 2025-09-30 14:23:06+00:00
Just two days ago, I asked Claude Code (running as a restricted non-admin user) to generate a unit test. I didn’t look too closely at exactly what it wrote before it ran it for me. Unbounded memory use locked the system up so hard it stopped responding to all user input. After a few minutes, the machine restarted automatically. Oof.
by petercooper | 2025-09-30 14:23:14+00:00
I'm not disagreeing with your broader point but:

So in effect it becomes an exercise of "can you fool the human into thinking this is a plausible thing Hemingway would've said". ... There's something unsettling that so many people cannot seem to cut clearly through this illusion.

Modern culture, at all scales, is largely based upon such exercises. We rarely know exactly what something (whether a person, organization or entity) truly stands for, with messages often boiled down, contextualized, or re-interpreted through others or through simulations.

People go to theme parks and enjoy rides simulating the wild west and meet characters who resemble, but aren't, their favorite characters from TV (which themselves are a fabrication based upon other, real things). Many cultural (heck, also religious) experiences are an exercise in humans entering into a suspension of disbelief and thinking something is plausible when it has little relation to the original thing it symbolizes. Indeed, the comforting thing about AI may be that at least we can see that process taking place more clearly with it.
by exDM69 | 2025-09-30 14:23:19+00:00
Maybe worth venturing into the embedded land? There are some pretty cool Rust embedded projects (e.g. embassy) which are sort of best of both worlds. You get to do low level hardware tinkering (which arguably requires a systems programming language) and you get a sort of batteries included environment where you can use all the nice Rust high level features (memory safety, async, etc).

Easier to get started with than OSdev and less gruesome legacy hardware details to study to get stuff done.

Next time I need some lights blinking or actuators actuating I'm gonna do it with Rust and rp2040+.
by _heimdall | 2025-09-30 14:23:22+00:00
That seems reasonable, but I'm not sure if we really know yet. If current models are given direction and control to change how the next model is trained or architected it seems plausible that they could stumble into such a breakthrough.

The current LLM approach makes huge assumptions, including that training only on text prediction is enough to simulate true intelligence. That may or may not be a valid assumption, but it could be enough for the LLM to make one seemingly small change that ends up running away from us faster than we would realize.
by ceejayoz | 2025-09-30 14:23:33+00:00
Sure sounds like you're trying to "justify a preconceived opinion".

> The public is less served and engaged and exited per visit/hour/etc seeing pristine vehicles from behind a rope in an air conditioned building.

The Smithsonian's responsibility is, in part, to many, many future generations of the public.

> Letting the public visit these things in the most ideal setting (which is typically whatever is closest to operating conditions)…

Again, that's either a hangar, or space. "Outside" is the spot it spent the least time, and visitors don't hugely appreciate a vacuum chamber from the inside.

> The degradation of visitor experience at that point is acceptable because the item is older, more "historical" etc.

That's essentially the opposite of how these things work.

> This is something that maritime museums have long since figured out.

Some indeed have! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Rose_Museum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_submarine_U-505 etc.
by theultdev | 2025-09-30 14:23:54+00:00
> There's a good reason all these suits started getting settled only after he regained office.

Yes, because as Google admitted, the Biden administration was the one instructing them to do so, of course the suits started after the Biden admin.

-- edit --

Source: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/google-admi...

Full letter from Google: https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-j...
by spcebar | 2025-09-30 14:24:51+00:00
Having worked in the world of e-commerce, there are genuinely good companies run by good people making genuinely good products that no one knows about, and one of the ways they try and get people to know about their products is advertising. In one case, this is a product that replaced something already in your home, it's materially better, and it's materially cheaper in the long term. How do you create an ad for that that doesn't sound like a lie?
by dysoco | 2025-09-30 14:24:58+00:00
As an Argentinian, Israel/Netanyahu are generally well received (because of many people with Jewish heritage) by people in the center/right, even people in the left spectrum will be reticent about criticizing if they come from a Jewish family. The echo chamber is very real if you only watch right-leaning TV channels for example (most of them).

Pure speculation from now on, but afaik Guillermo lives in the USA, and as the CEO of an international company I'm also surprised he's so tone deaf but it's not the only example (i.e. check Galperin's Twitter feed). I don't think it's about sending a message I think Guillermo probably follows Argentinian media/politics and fell for the echo chamber, he also wanted to look cool/important for Milei.
by maxlin | 2025-09-30 14:25:39+00:00
At least some of the OSS drama still is just purely code-based these days...

The dev acted out of line for kernel development, even if _kind_ of understandable (like with the recovery tool), but still in a way that would set a bad precedent for the kernel, so this appears to be good judgement from Linus.

Hope the best for Bcachefs's future
by atonse | 2025-09-30 14:25:47+00:00
This is the prompt (I copied it verbatim either from Reddit or HN, don't remember, sorry to the original author for the misattribution):

> Never compliment me or be affirming excessively (like saying "You're absolutely right!" etc). Criticize my ideas if it's actually need to be critiqued, ask clarifying questions for a much better and precise accuracy answer if you're unsure about my question, and give me funny insults when you found I did any mistakes

I just realized in re-reading it that it's written by someone for whom English is a second language. I'll try to rewrite it and see if it works better.

I have it in my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. But it still has never done that.
by wiether | 2025-09-30 14:25:58+00:00
It appears that you are mixing things here.

It's not about "hosting a website", it's about providing services.

If you provide services, like selling a newspaper, in the UK, you need to respect their laws, or you will suffer the legal implications of not doing so.

And regarding the accountability, it refers to the fact that imgur USED TO provide services in the UK:

> We have been clear that exiting the UK does not allow an organisation to avoid responsibility for any prior infringement of data protection law, and our investigation remains ongoing.

Companies providing services outside the UK can infringe all the UK laws they want, the UK doesn't care.

But as soon as you decide to provide services in the UK, you have to follow the law. And, as they explain in the article, if you break the law, stopping to provide services in the UK will not absolve you for your past wrongdoings.
by crubier | 2025-09-30 14:26:03+00:00
I agree "enforce" is a poor choice of words. It does not need to be "enforced" using state violence if any consumer can access facts with such transparency. What's missing today is this level of transparency with which the market will just naturally benefit to producer of sane and safe goods in a much more natural way.

Also, speaking of the "more free market in the US", my answer is that you don't hate capitalism, you hate crony capitalism.
by seanhunter | 2025-09-30 14:26:21+00:00
You already need to care depending on what you are serving, and this has been the case for at least 20 years to my knowledge.

The most obvious example of this is websites from the UK or Europe which operate any kind of gambling. [1] This may well be legal (based on licensing) in their jurisdiction, but they still need to restrict access to prevent US people from accessing the service or they will be breaching the US's gambling laws.

Likewise many US firm geofence access for EU residents out of fear of GDPR.

People hosting news sites have often had to geofence to prevent UK residents from accessing their site if they are hosting any kind of reporting of UK court cases that are under embargo or matters that are subject to one of the UK's famous "Super injunctions" [2]

[1] eg this guy was on the board of a listed UK company operating as far as they were concerned entirely legally who was arrested in NYC https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/sep/14/gambling.mo...

[2] eg In the "Ryan Giggs" super injunction case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_British_privacy_injunctio...
by quietbritishjim | 2025-09-30 14:26:21+00:00
The previous poster is correct for a very slightly different definition of the word "model". In context, I would even say their definition is the more correct one.

They are including the random sampler at the end of the LLM that chooses the next token. You are talking about up to, but not including, that point. But that just gives you a list of possible output tokens with values ("probabilities"), not a single choice. You can always just choose the best one, or you could add some randomness that does a weighted sample of the next token based on those values. From the user's perspective, that final sampling step is part of the overall black box that is running to give an output, and it's fair to define "the model" to include that final random step.
by qcnguy | 2025-09-30 14:26:33+00:00
How is that not understanding a hypothetical? Seems they understand it just fine, what they're saying is they don't have the needed knowledge/confidence to answer the question.

Not understanding a hypothetical would go like this:

"How would you troubleshoot X?"

"Why, is X broken?"

"No, but imagine it was broken."

"If it's not broken why are you asking me that"