MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Buttons840 | 2025-09-04 04:22:53+00:00
After many years of programming in other languages, I finally learned C, and came to realize that there aren't actually any compilers that implement all of the C spec. Even GCC and Clang have their grey areas and their bugs.

Before this, I had thought that C was a simple language. An idea propped up by articles likes this, as well as the oft touted fact that nearly every embedded system has a C compiler; no matter what you'll always have a C compiler.

This point was driven home by part of a blog post that simply states "you can't actually parse a C header"[0]. The blog makes a good supporting case for their claim. They link to a paper that says[1]:

> There exist many commercial and academic tools that can parse C.... Unfortunately, these parsers are often either designed for an older version of the language (such as C89) or plain incorrect. The C11 parsers found in popular compilers, such as GCC and Clang, are very likely correct, but their size is in the tens of thousands of lines.

And sure enough, in the OP linked blog post, they state they are only implementing a subset of the language. Of course, it still has value as a teaching tool; this is just a tangential fact about C I wanted to discuss.

[0]: https://faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/#you-cant-actua...

[1]: https://hal.science/hal-01633123/document
by SilverElfin | 2025-09-04 04:23:28+00:00
Not much of a trap at this point. China isn’t a rising power but a straight up peer competitor. That military parade is possible just a bunch of fake prototypes but it looked to me like China has come a long way. And their progress on energy, AI, robotics, and so on is pretty amazing. It’s too bad they’re led by an authoritarian government, and that’s what worries me about a world where they are a superpower.
by nomoreofthat | 2025-09-04 04:24:42+00:00
I honestly can’t tell whether this comment is satire or this site is just full of people who have no ability (or no interest) in understanding other people. You don’t need to be a psychologist or even have a good understanding of other people to recognize what a ridiculous suggestion this is. You just have to care a tiny little bit about other people. Is that really too much to expect?

Though given that the psychopath alleged-incestuous-rapist Sam Altman has been the top user on the site since literally day one I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised
by kotri | 2025-09-04 04:24:57+00:00
grok-3 model costs $15 on text output for every 1,000,000 tokens.

With one violation, it lost 3334 tokens.

Elon's Wikipedia article from its top to the end of Starlink section counts as 3088 tokens: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elon_Musk&oldid=1...
by lisbbb | 2025-09-04 04:25:05+00:00
I was talking about zirp in another thread and got downvoted. But yes, companies were taking out low/zero interest loans and hiring people in hopes of making 1-2% on it, which worked for awhile. It doesn't work at 4-5%, though. We can't pin our hopes to zirp anyways. But a lot of sketchy activities around investing were accomplished because of zirp.
by al_borland | 2025-09-04 04:27:26+00:00
Out of the box I was already disappointed. All their marketing shots showed a knit cover, which I know is a small aesthetic thing, but gave it a certain vibe. I looked all over the site before ordering to try and find confirmation or look at where to order it. I didn’t find it, so assumed it came with it and rolled the dice. It did not. They shipped some puffer jacket style sleeve it could be stored in instead. This was disappointing, as the tactile experience of using it went from something I thought would be the cozy image they were selling, to just another hard plastic tablet. It felt like bait and switch. I reached out to support, and talked to them again I some other forum. They said they updated the site to make it clear, but when I looked it was buried deep in an FAQ and their sales page still showed it in almost all the images (it’s still in a significant number of their marketing images, even though they said they couldn’t make it work).

But I felt bad sending it back over that, especially for a new company, so I figured I’d give it a fair shot.

I spent some time trying to use the default launcher and figure out its quirks. Eventually I got annoyed with it and installed a more traditional launcher. At this point it just turned into a generic Android tablet with a worse screen. Since I’m in the Apple ecosystem, it was a bit of an island, and generic tablets have never fit well into my workflow, I gave up on the iPad after those sat around too.

I did like the pen, mostly because it didn’t require any batteries or charging. The Apple Pencil needing to be changed makes it a non-starter for me, I find that experience to be awful. So props to Daylight for going the battery free route, like a normal pencil or pen would be.

The pen alone wasn’t enough for me. I don’t write that many hand written notes. And while I kind of liked that aspect, since it didn’t integrate with my other stuff, it wasn’t something I could really invest in, and wasn’t good enough to find a bunch of new cross platform tools to make it fit.

The novelty of the black and white screen wore off quickly. Outside of note taking, a lot of app and websites really lean on color to provide meaningful information that was all lost. The amber backlight I found hard to see, so adjusted it more white. There were some random buttons on the side of the tablet that didn’t seem to do anything. Maybe if I spent more time outdoors my perspective on the screen may have shifted, but I don’t. Overall it was very “meh”, for me.

If you want a general purpose tablet, an iPad Air is cheaper and better in almost every way. If you want it black and white, the iPad has a color filter for that. If you want a screen that works in bright sunlight and a pen that doesn’t need a battery, those are the two areas where the Daylight can one-up the iPad, but that person may be more of a Remarkable customer.
by tom_m | 2025-09-04 04:27:59+00:00
I think this is an important distinction too. It's not skill level or how fast you can code something. It's attitude. How you work with others. How you communicate (at all? Because many people don't raise their hand for help or clarification like at all). How motivated you are to learn and grow. How well you follow a process. Etc.

That's what makes an A player. I manage a bunch of programmers and I'll always hire and keep those who want to be there and want to learn over those with "skill." In fact, I find many junior engineers who outperform senior engineers. All the time. Because they're present. They're there. They care. They're careful. They learn. They're dependable and accountable.

I know it may sound silly, but it's really true and I think a lot of people are surprised.
by sdenton4 | 2025-09-04 04:28:35+00:00
These are perfectly consistent with what I'm saying. There is a market for labor, and if what you're selling is your credentials, you're in a flooded commodity market and will have a bad time.

Fact one says, yes, the beaten path is saturated. Fact two says that business leaders and politicians will happily look for the cheapest variety of the commodity available to them.

My point ultimately is that you'll have a better time if you don't act like a commodity.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-09-04 04:29:31+00:00
I am pretty sure that at scale, the savings is so great that this is when you will tolerate a worse experience for cheaper gear. Hence Google and Facebook pinching pennies.

The advantage of buying Dell (or IBM) is that if you aren't buying enough computers to have your own dedicated people, you get someone to take care of you. Dell may be able to get you stuff faster, but the Taiwanese shops are also very good at having an agile supply chain.
by QuiDortDine | 2025-09-04 04:29:41+00:00
I can't believe all these qualia questions have not evolved in centuries (or at least, the common discourse arond them hasn't). We all have similar rods and cones in our eyes. We have common kinds of color blindness. What other reasonable conclusion is there but that my red is your red? All the machinery is similar enough.

I suppose it's because people associate so much of who they are to the subjectivity of their experience. If I'm not the only one to see and taste the world as I do, am I even special? (The answer is no, and that there are more important things in life than being special.)
by somenameforme | 2025-09-04 04:30:28+00:00
Net income/profit is what matters, revenue is largely irrelevant. Your own date is a perfect example of this since Twitter somehow managed to lose a ton of money in 2020 when they did indeed see record revenue, probably owing to over-stuffed election coffers. X's user counts and EBITDA are at record levels. In 2024 it was $1.25 billion on $2.7 billion revenue, contrasted against 'old Twitter's' $0.68 billion on $5 billion revenue in 2021. [1]

[1] - https://archive.is/evLAL (WSJ archive)
by tombert | 2025-09-04 04:30:54+00:00
I have never played with GNUStep. By the time I actually started real work as a professional software person (2011) it was already kind of considered a joke, so I never bothered learning how to use it.

It bothers me a bit, though. Developing for desktop Linux is still a pain in the ass, and I really wish the Linux community had agreed on One Desktop Framework To Rule Them All, and I think GNUStep could have been that framework if the community had been willing to embrace it.
by k310 | 2025-09-04 04:33:46+00:00
But I thought he was reserving the area for a UFC match [0]

Do these tech CEO’s know what they’re in for? A cage match? Blood for the Emperor? The much-postponed Musk-Zuckerberg death match?

He’s sure staging a whole lot of events to take Epstein out of the news, but it’s not working. Blowing up ships, invading U.S. cities, having fighter jets fly low to the ground over the Epstein victims’ news conference … It seems to be having a Streisand Effect. [1]

[0] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-host-ufc-fight-white-h...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
by cookiengineer | 2025-09-04 04:33:48+00:00
It's much much worse in the Cybersecurity field. I wanted to share the anecdote here, too, because it's kind of fitting.

Somehow, in cyber, everyone believes that transformers will generate better answers than not to use the 10 most common passwords. It's like the whole knowledge about decision making theory, neural nets, GANs, LSTMs etc completely got wiped out and forgotten within less than 10 years.

I understand the awesomeness of LLMs while debugging and forensics (they are a really good rubberduck!), but apart from that they're pretty much useless because after two prompts they will keep forgetting if/elseif/else conditions, and to check those boundaries is the mission of the unlucky person that has to merge that slopcode later.

I don't understand how we got from TDD and test case based engineering to this bullshit. It's like everyone in power was the wrong person to be in that position in the first place, and that statistically no lead engineers ever will be a C-staff or SVP or whatever corporate manager level.

While the AI bubble is bursting, I will continue to develop with TDD practices to test my code. Which, in return, has the benefit of being able to use LLMs to create nice templates as a reasonable starting point.
by jamii | 2025-09-04 04:34:11+00:00
One of the dynamics is that people get older so they move into different buckets.

We can make the model way simpler to make it clearer. Say in 2020 we hired 1000 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo etc and then we didn't hire anyone since then. That was five years ago, so now we have 0 20-24yo, 1000 25-29yo, 1000 30-34yo etc and 1000 retirees who don't show up in the graph.

Each individual year we hired the exact same number of people in each age bracket, and yet we still end up with fewer young people total whenever hiring goes down, because all the people that got hired during the big hiring spike are now older.
by keepamovin | 2025-09-04 04:36:47+00:00
That reminds me of back when 12,500 years ago I could really shape a flint into a spear head in no time. Took me seasons to learn that skill from the Masters. Then Sky Gods came and taught people metal-fire. Nobody knows how to really chip and carve a point any more. They just cast them in moulds. We are seeing a literal split of skills in front of our eyes. People who know how to shape rocks deeply. And people who just know how to buy a metal tool with berries. I like berries as much as the next person, but give it a couple of years, they will be begging for flint tips back. I guarantee it. Those metal users will have no idea how to survive without a collective industry.
by protocolture | 2025-09-04 04:36:52+00:00
Sure but the argument against nuclear is always the same. Its hard right now.

The problem is that if you dont start correcting that hardness now, the next time you think you might need a nuclear industry, its still hard.

You need to train, grant experience and give money to professionals so they can exist to build stuff. It took the UK ~ 15 years to get started, then they were cranking them out like no ones business.

Think of it this way, in 15 years you can have something you might need, or you can guarantee you wont have it whether you need it or not.

Thing is its the same for all large infrastructure products. But only in nuke do we have people actively trying to prevent the industry from being created and maintained so they can use the unreadyness as an excuse.
by valianteffort | 2025-09-04 04:37:07+00:00
AI is barely a blip on why the job market is dead for entry level, and dying all the way up the ladder.

Every one of my engineer friends says the same thing. "My team is 80% indians" and more than half are not qualified for the job they have.

The whole thing is a fucking scam for them, every company, top to bottom. Recruiters, hiring managers, referrals, CEO's. All one thing in common.

I'll take my downvotes, I don't care, everyone here knows I'm right. And those with their head up their ass can enjoy getting replaced and spending years looking for another role.
by agrippanux | 2025-09-04 04:38:46+00:00
I love Zed but this has all the hallmarks of something being totally rushed out the door.

It works off the Claude Code SDK, which mean it doesn't support many of the built in slash commands - it doesn't support /compact, which is 100% necessary because when you use this implementation enough, you'll eventually get a "Prompt too long" error message with no ability to do anything about it. Since you can't see how far you are in the context window, it's a deal breaker, since you have to start a fresh chat and might run out of room before you can ask it to create a summary prompt for continuing.

There is no way to switch models that I can tell - I think it just picks up on your default model - and there is no way to switch to Plan mode, which has become absolutely crucial to my workflow.

I didn't see Zed picking up on problems reported in the IDE, it was defaulting to running 'tsc -b' in my directories.

At this point it's better to run a terminal inside Zed and work from there. The official response in the Zed Discord has been "talk to your local Anthropic rep" to get them to support Zed's Agent Client Protocol (ACP).
by fjfaase | 2025-09-04 04:41:50+00:00
It is about the problem of untying knots. For many complex knots it is not know what is the minimal number of steps that are needed to unty it. There was this idea that if a complex knot consisted of two knots for which it is known, that the number would be equal to the sum of the number of steps of the two knots. The article shows that that is not true by showing an example of a knot where the number is one less. This shows that there is no easy route for finding the number for ever larger knots.
by argomo | 2025-09-04 04:42:23+00:00
Maybe the article is dumbing it down too much, but the conclusion seems unsurprising. Why shouldn't a single unknotting do double-duty in some cases?

It feels akin to the classic trick of joining a tetrahedron to a square pyramid: 4 faces + 5 faces == 5 faces total!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rXIzUtLG2jE
by jcranmer | 2025-09-04 04:42:55+00:00
With all due respect, with a response like "What AI coding tools/models have you been using?" to a complaint that AI tools just don't seem to be effective, what difference does a reply to that even make? If your experience makes you believe that certain tools are particularly good--or particularly bad--for the tasks at hand, you can just volunteer those specifics.

FWIW, my own experiences with AI have ranged from mediocre to downright abysmal. And, no, I don't know which models the tools were using. I'm rather annoyed that it seems to be impossible to express a negative opinion about the value of AI without having to have a thoroughly documented experiment that inevitably invites the response that obviously some parameter was chosen incorrectly, while the people claiming how good it is get to be all offended when someone asks them to maybe show their work a little bit.
by pjmlp | 2025-09-04 04:43:21+00:00
There isn't a Safari monopoly,that isn't how it works by law, although many Apple hatters like to make it as if.

Blink is Blink, doesn't matter who puts the finishing paint after Google ships each new version.

Chrome is the new Internet Explorer, back in the day Microsoft got a lawsuit for similar practices.

By the way, Google just managed to sidestep just that,

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/09/google-wont-have-to-...

The Web isn't ChromeOS.
by volemo | 2025-09-04 04:44:08+00:00
I’m a big lover of the ecosystem and a heavy Emacs, but after several attempts I couldn’t get into Org mode: (1) it’s too complex and full featured, while my loose mind requires a strict and minimalistic system to be productive; (2) mobile support is quite lacking — yes, there’re beorg and Mobileorg, but they don’t do it for me for one reason or another.

So I’ve a custom GTD-like system build using iOS reminders, .md files, and a couple of scripts.
by valianteffort | 2025-09-04 04:44:17+00:00
How much do you pay as a percentage of your salary in taxes? In total of course.

I pay 30% in taxes for federal and state. House is paid off but taxes is about 3% my salary. My insurance is more than I need (I don't use it at all) and cost me less than 2% of my salary.

You can keep your socialized system, we are doing more than alright here mate. I got plenty of friends in Europe, England, Canada, and Australia all complaining about the same thing, wait times for care. I can see my doctor for basically anything inside of a couple weeks.
by LocalH | 2025-09-04 04:44:24+00:00
The same company that has a weird dichotomy between sometimes using other industry-standard data formats, but at times either succeeding (UMatic, Betacam, Professional Disc, Video8/Hi8) and sometimes failing (Betamax, Memory Stick) to have a dominant media storage standard. And sometimes they have products that accept industry standard formats (I have an older prosumer camera from Sony that supports SD, Memory Stick Pro Duo, and a proprietary flash format that is mostly used to record two formats at once, and they made plenty of VHS VCRs).
by protocolture | 2025-09-04 04:44:45+00:00
>but the point of repeating a study is to ensure you're being treated. if the government is paying for it, they aren't going to do an extremely expensive test for fun.

Welcome to Australias Medicare lmao. Visit > referral for test > Visit for test result is how GPs make money. They get a cut from the government at every step regardless of how much is billed to me directly. We arent far away from needing a royal commission to investigate how many of these yoyo visits are required.

>based on your description it sounds like you may have both ADHD and OSA, so I'm glad you're doing better

The OSA is real. The OSA is definitely mild and not extreme. It is also heavily influenced by sleep position and my jaw.

>custom appliance that reduces these risks.

The device was customised to my Bite profile. He had better options, but the 300 dollars was what I had. He had options up to 2k. He was also certified, as I had a referral to see him.

>more engineering than science? isn't engineering a science?

Engineering is applied science.

Not even my only medical issue fixed by visiting that professions engineer either tbh. I had a crown fail, and a dental engineer refitted it for 15 dollars, told me the cement he used would last 20 years and isnt made any more. 20 years later my toddler popped it out.
by wraptile | 2025-09-04 04:44:59+00:00
Really love Zed after working in it full time for a month now and pay their 20$ sub tier to support them even when I rarely use the LLM integration beyond the auto-complete.

At first I was very dismissive of it due to being Apple-first but they've turned it around with really good Linux support and it seems like Windows soon as well!
by com2kid | 2025-09-04 04:46:20+00:00
While working at HBO Max (200 engineers at launch of the original product) I talked to a recruiter at Disney+, where I was informed they had 2000 engineers.

So yeah, 80% sounds about right. :(

Since that time HBO Max was acquired into an org that was an order of magnitude larger. I was downsized out when they cut 20% or so off, but honestly they could have cut another 40% and been Just Fine if the architecture and infrastructure had been built properly.
by cyberax | 2025-09-04 04:47:00+00:00
And we had a power/Internet outage here after a heavy snowfall. My local bakery simply wrote down my credit card number and then did a card-not-present transaction later.

Contactless cards can also do offline transactions, without any Internet connectivity. We support that in our app via https://docs.stripe.com/terminal/features/operate-offline/co...
by atleastoptimal | 2025-09-04 04:47:03+00:00
Some people complain about AI but are using the free version of ChatGPT. Others are using the best models without a middleman system but still see faults, and I think it’s valuable to inquire about which domains they see no value in AI from. There are too many people saying “I tried AI and it didn’t work at all” without clarifying what models, what tools, what they asked it to do, etc. Without that context it’s hard to gauge the value of any value judgement on AI.

It’s like saying “I drove a car and it was horrible, cars suck” without clarifying what car, the age, the make, how much experience that person had driving, etc. Of course its more difficult to provide specifics than just say it was good or bad, but there is little value in claims that AI is altogether bad when you don’t offer any details about what it is specifically bad at and how.
by valianteffort | 2025-09-04 04:47:30+00:00
I don't know you or give a shit about you. You need to be a man and be accountable for your own life. Why are you expecting others to subsidize your mistakes?

You are weak and your life is the outcome of your own actions. You should have prepare for such a situation if you feared it was possible.

As for all the others, same thing, literally not my problem. You failed your family, why are you blaming the healthcare system.
by noduerme | 2025-09-04 04:48:21+00:00
Okay, but (1) we don't need to simulate physics faster than physics to make accurate-enough predictions to fly a plane, in our heads, or build a plane on paper, or to model flight in code. (2) If that's only because we've cleared out the trees and the Canada Geese and whatnot from our simplified model and "built the road" for the wheels, then necessity is also the mother of invention. "Hey, I want to fly but I keep crashing into trees" could lead an AI agent to keep crashing, or model flying chainsaws, or eventually something that would flatten the ground in the shape of a runway. In other words, why are we assuming that agents cannot shape the world (virtual, for now) to facilitate their simplified mechanical and physical models of "flight" or "rolling" in the same way that we do?

Also, isn't that what's actually scary about AI, in a nutshell? The fact that it may radically simplify our world to facilitate e.g. paper clip production?