MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toast0 | 2025-09-29 04:14:50+00:00
Do they? I put together two quick and dirty nonsense test programs this is option2:

int main (void) { for (int i = 0; i < 1000000000; ++i) { asm volatile ( ".intel_syntax\n" "mov eax, edi\n" "sar eax, 31\n" "add edi, eax\n" "xor eax, edi\n" :::); } return 0; }

option1 has the extraneous mov ecx, eax, and then add with ecx.

I confirmed with objdump -d that the assembly hadn't been touched and that the loops were the same. On my otherwise mostly idle dual L5640 system and pinned to a single cpu (just in case), option1 consistently runs in 3.14 seconds and option2 consistently runs in 3.15 seconds.

Adding an extra zero, both option1 and option2 runs in 30.94-30.95 user seconds. The extraneous move doesn't seem to cost any actual time.
by tailspin2019 | 2025-09-29 04:16:17+00:00
I’m a bit surprised that this of all things has received over 2m signatures already and yet we (the UK) have been passing far more dangerous legislation recently where the general public didn’t seem to care.

I wonder if it’s because “ID cards” is an issue that has been around for some time and is perhaps more easily understood than other erosions of privacy and freedoms that are a more subtle.
by peab | 2025-09-29 04:17:09+00:00
I saw a coworker using chatGPT the other day - they were in marketing, and trying to access a dashboard. One of the filters used a list of IDs, sperated by commas. I watched as she repeatedly copied a list of IDs from a spreadsheet into chat gpt, asking for them to be comma sperated, then into the filter.

There are loads of use cases like this that will most definitely be solved by local LLM.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-09-29 04:17:26+00:00
Investment in dark fiber was intentional and continues to this day. Almost all of the cost for laying fiber is in getting physical access to where you want to put the fiber underground. The fiber itself is incredibly cheap, so every time a telecom bothers to dig up mile upon mile of earth they overprovision massively.

The capital overhang of having more fiber than needed is so small compared to other costs I doubt the telecoms have really regretted any of the overprovisioning they've done, even when their models for future demand didn't pan out.
by shruubi | 2025-09-29 04:19:54+00:00
As someone who was the victim of a lot of bullying myself, this article is a very mixed bag for me.

For one, I like the idea of creating some degree of systems of support to try and prevent things like school shootings from happening by stopping them before they get too far.

On the other hand, unless there are more details missing from this article, it really seems like the only person who got any degree of punishment is the student who was being bullied.

You know what stops bullies that doesn't involve shooting them? Ruthless consequences for their actions. Schools love to talk about their 'zero tolerance' policy for bullying, but if there are no consequences outside of a teacher telling the bully to stop, then that is definitely less of a 'zero tolerance' policy and more of a 'mostly tolerated' policy. Zero tolerance means immediate suspensions, expulsions, supporting police reports for physically violent bullying etc.
by maxglute | 2025-09-29 04:19:55+00:00
Bureaucrats with some numeracy skills that can focus on (rather career incentives depend on) hitting central gov quantifiable KPIs and managing public sentiment is about as close to being on engineering spectrum in terms of governance vs demographic systems where governance is referendum on incumbants ability to sell electoral rhetoric (and frequently fail) every X years.

> there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs.

Of course there would, that's how you know cold blooded technocrats are at work. Fucking over irrelevant SOEs and iron rice bowl jobs is sterotypical based analytic trade off. Mind you there's plenty of engineer type doing policy work in the west, they just have a much more sclerotic legal layer to jump through, and frequently, don't.

Go survey 100 diasphora Chinese who lived in PRC and west and ask them how the systems differ.
by tdeck | 2025-09-29 04:20:02+00:00
Sometimes a function's input or return type can vary depending on the execution path? Also, inserting print statements is often not practical when working on web backend software which is kind of a big thing nowadays. If you can run the service locally, which is not a given, dependencies get mocked out and there's no guarantee that your code path will execute or that the data flowing through it will be representative.
by scuff3d | 2025-09-29 04:20:21+00:00
Everyone knows Haskell is only used for white papers :p

Yeah it's workable, and better than nothing. But it's not better than having an actual static type system.

1. It's optional. Even if you get your team on board you are inevitably going to have to work with libraries that don't use type hints

2. It's inconsistent, which makes sense given that it's tacked onto a language never intended for it.

3. I have seen some truly goofy shit written to make the linter happy in more complex situations.

I honestly think everything that's been done to try to make Python more sane outside outside scripting or small projects (and the same applies to JS and TS) are a net negative. Yes it has made those specific ecosystems better and more useful, but it's removed the incentive to move to better technology/languages actually made to do the job.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-09-29 04:20:32+00:00
It did. The War on Terror was so bad for the political actors who took part in it in the US (and by ripple effect in Europe), that they were trounced by Obama, who is still the highest approved US President in the 21st century.

Trump won, partly by saying the War on Terror was a disaster and the Republicans were disasters. He distanced himself from a right wing which had done the same thing, made itself irrelevant to the mainstream with performative patriotism while we actually lost lives and trillions of dollars in a quagmire people didn't want about 1-2 years into it.

Whoever brings the left back will have to distance themselves from the party in a similar way
by onion2k | 2025-09-29 04:25:16+00:00
I run AI locally and it's a really useful tool, but I'm aware that it'll always be constrained to work on data embedded in the model, that I have locally, or that I can access via some sort of API integration. That makes it much less useful for a lot of tasks than a cloud-based tool that can give me insights into a pool of data that I can't see into directly. AI integrated into a SaaS app will usually have more value than a local model simply because specific and targeted information is better than general information.
by blakepelton | 2025-09-29 04:26:48+00:00
The phrase makes sense to me. To add some more smoke to an already hazy vernacular:

The line between HLS synthesis and RTL synthesis can be blurred if the HLS tool performs some amount of RTL synthesis work. For example, this paper proposes that HLS tools could map C expressions down to LUTs (before pipelining).

https://rzhao01.github.io/papers/dac2015.pdf
by userbinator | 2025-09-29 04:27:16+00:00
The correct name is Fernflower, not FernFlower.

I found this amusing, from a Java perspective. The 3-character command-line options are also very "not Java-ish". However, since this one is also written in Java, a good test is if it can decompile itself perfectly and the result recompiled to a matching binary; much like how bootstrapping a compiler involves compiling itself and checking for the existence of the fixed-point.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-09-29 04:29:49+00:00
What in the world are you talking about. Please specify how lack of types helped you in your aforementioned scenario.

I don't think it's a lack of curiosity from others. But it's more like fundamental lack of knowledge from you. Let's hear it. What is it are you actually talking about? Testing a subset of a library halfway though a refactor? How does a lack of types help with that?
by dmichulke | 2025-09-29 04:30:42+00:00
I have the same issue with "15 minutes before" instead of "2025-09-29 01:13:30".

(Which is wrong once the site doesn't update)

Needless to say, those are all "features" dumbing us down in the long run.

A philosophical side question: I want to opt out of this but I can't. So is this is case where my peers are limiting my intellectual development? I.e. preventing me from a) doing the time calculations in my head, b) writing my software such that is uses leading zeros?
by abalashov | 2025-09-29 04:31:10+00:00
> The real problem we should be discussing is, how do we convince students and apprentices to abstain from AI until they learn the ropes for real.

That's just it. You can only use AI usefully for coding* once you've spent years beating your head against code "the hard way". I'm not sure what that looks like for the next cohort, since they have AI on day 1.

* That is, assuming it's nontrivial.
by dlcarrier | 2025-09-29 04:31:55+00:00
I'm convinced that most office work exists for social reasons, not for practical reasons. Just like every other office technology before, AI is going to replace workflows like that (and this: https://xkcd.com/763/) but it won't have an end effect on the total number of office workers, because they weren't really needed in the first place, and ebb and flow due to cycles of elite overproduction, not productivity.
by somenameforme | 2025-09-29 04:33:38+00:00
> "Once AI can reliably translate fuzzy natural language into precise and accurate code, software development will simply die as a profession."

One-shotting anything like this is a non-starter for any remotely complex task. The reason is that fuzzy language is ambiguous and poorly defined. So even in this scenario you enter into a domain where it's going to require iterative cycling and refinement. And I'm not even considering the endless meta-factors that further complicate this, like performance considerations depending on how you plan to deploy.

And even if language were perfectly well defined, you'd end up with 'prompts' that would essentially be source codes in their own right. I have a friend who is rather smart, but not a tech type - and he's currently working on developing a very simple project using LLMs, but it's still a "real" project in that there are certain edge cases you need to consider, various cross-functionality in the UI that needs to be carried out, interactions with some underlying systems, and so on.

His 'prompt' is gradually turning into just a natural language program, of comparable length and complexity. And with the amount of credits he's churning through making it, in the end he may well have been much better off just hiring some programmers on one of those 'gig programming' sites.

------

And beyond all of this, even if you can surmount these issues - which I think may be inherently impossible - you have another one. The reason people hire software devs is not because they can't do it themselves, but because they want to devote their attention to other things. E.g. - most of everybody could do janitorial work, yet companies still hire millions of janitors. So the 'worst case' scenario would be that you dramatically lower the barriers to entry to software development, and wages plummet accordingly.
by whatshisface | 2025-09-29 04:34:05+00:00
The EU age verification system for the web is currently planned to rely on the Android/iOS anti-tampering device controls: https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-doc-technic.... None of the plans to achieve China's level of internal control over communication can work without banning all user-administrated devices from the web, so I guess that's what you can expect next.
Ask HN: Should LLMs have a "Candor" slider that says "no, that's a bad idea"?
by mikebiglan | 2025-09-29 04:35:16+00:00
I don’t want a “nice” AI. I want one that says: “Nope, that's a bad idea.”

That is, I want a "Candor" control, like temperature but for willingness to push back.

When candor is high, the model should prioritize frank, corrective feedback over polite cooperation. When candor is low, it can stay supportive, but with guardrails that flag empty flattering and warn about mediocre ideas.

Why this matters • Today’s defaults optimize for “no bad ideas.” That is fine for brainstorming, but it amplifies poor premises and rewards confident junk. • Sycophancy is a known failure mode. The model learns to agree which gets positive user signals which reinforce. • In reviews, product decisions, risk checks, etc, the right answer is often a simple “do not do that.”

Concrete proposal • candor (0.0 – 1.0): probability the model will disagree or decline when evidence is weak or risk is high. Or maybe it doesn't have to be literal "probability". • disagree_first: start responses with a plain verdict (for example “Short answer: do not ship this”) followed by rationale. • risk_sensitivity: boost candor if the topic hits serious domains such as security/finance/health/safety. • self_audit tag: append a note like “Pushed back due to weak evidence and downstream risk” that the user can see.

Examples • candor=0.2 - “We could explore that. A few considerations first…” (gentle nudge, still collaborative) • candor=0.8 + disagree_first=true - “No. This is likely to fail for X and introduces Y risk. If you must proceed, the safer alternative is A with guardrails B and C. Here is a minimal test to falsify the core assumption.”

What I would ship tomorrow • A simple UI slider with labels: Gentle to Direct • A toggle: “Prefer blunt truth over agreeable help” • A warning chip when the model detects flattery without substance: “This reads like praise with low evidence.”

Some open questions • How to avoid needless rudeness while preserving clarity (tone vs content separation)? • What is the right metric for earned praise (citation density, novelty, constraints)? • Where should the risk sensitivity kick in automatically vs be user controlled?

If anyone has prototyped this, whether some prompt injection or an RL signal, I'd love to see it.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-09-29 04:36:56+00:00
Ragging (esp. in STEM places; often violent; no slapping, et cetera, was not even considered violent) was a pathetic menace where I live. It is still not eradicated, but has shrunk to something so little that it is not a norm anymore or a right passage for seniors. How did it shrink? When seniors started getting expelled – no quarters given if ragging was proven.

Yup, cracking the toughest of entrance exams here after toiling for years in school (sometimes after) and going to those colleges and then getting kicked out (often with a piece of paper that ensured you didn't get admission elsewhere either) just because you couldn't resist harassing/abusing/attacking/hurting freshers who had just entered college did the trick. Before that? Threats, warnings, and policy-making just on paper did zilch. It was literally a national move sort of - coming right from the top, forcing states to act.. etc.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-09-29 04:36:59+00:00
"Ponzi scheme" isn't a legal term, the specific SEC claims are all about fraud. But the point of calling it that is to emphasize that there was very little underlying business value to be honest about. I don't think there's any point in picking apart the story for the few parts that might have been legal if they were properly disclosed - if the SEC's allegations are correct, many of those parts would have only existed in the first place as tools to help disguise the fraud.
by lollisoft | 2025-09-29 04:38:24+00:00
Read more on my product page and download version 1.3.5. Try out the code generators there as well and give me feedback.

What do you think is possible with model driven software development?

Here you see some code generator I am developing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97l8Af_mxV4&list=PL2la87Xd94...
by maxglute | 2025-09-29 04:39:28+00:00
>When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Well that's ultimately central to the technocrat thesis, PRC's systemic benefit is is they can change the measure to get ahead / reset good hards / campbells law. Their moving metric is "live". The problem with democracies is votes are the immutable metric and it's very hard to reform voting, well gerrymandering... etc but that's still generational efforts.
by elcritch | 2025-09-29 04:39:36+00:00
> Irish, Manx and Scottish Gaelic form the Goidelic languages, while Welsh, Cornish and Breton are Brittonic. All of these are Insular Celtic languages,

Yeah though Brythonic and Goidelic both are considered to inherit from Insular Celtic. So it’s not completely off base.

My fiancé is Welsh but only speaks a few words. Despite many Welsh not speaking it now there’s more active Welsh speakers than Irish Gaelic speakers!

I spent some time in North Wales last summer where it’s still commonly spoken. It’s fascinating to hear Welsh. It’s not related to any Germanic or French or others so there’s little vocabulary shared with English aside from some loan words. Even the phonetics are quite strange sounding compared to other European languages.

https://www.translationdirectory.com/articles/article2577.ph...
by tjwebbnorfolk | 2025-09-29 04:40:17+00:00
Ok so you're saying it's "ageist" to point out that marriage between 7-year-olds is a bad idea. Fine.

But is saying that's "ageist" have any purpose in that context? None whatsoever.

Words don't always have meaning. Sometimes they are just stuck in places where they serve no purpose in order to irritate people.
by userbinator | 2025-09-29 04:40:30+00:00
And neither of those two ultimately help the humans who are actually looking for something. You have a finite amount of time to spend on optimising for humans, or for search engines (and now LLMs), and unfortunately many chose the latter and it's just lead to plenty of spam in the search results.

Yes, SEO can bring traffic to your site, but if your visitors see nothing of value, they'll quickly leave.
by dragonwriter | 2025-09-29 04:41:01+00:00
> You're then creating a Protocol for every single function that could rely on some duck typing.

No, you are creating a Protocol (the kind of Python type) for every protocol (the descriptive thing the type represents) that is relied on for which an appropriate Protocol doesn’t already exist. Most protocols are used in more than one place, and many common ones are predefined in the typing module in the standard library.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-09-29 04:42:33+00:00
Knowing hard requirements up front can be critical to building the right thing. It's scary how many "temporary" things get built in top of and stuck in production. Obviously loose coupling / clear interfaces can help a lot with this.

But an easy example is "just build the single player version" (of an application) can be worse than just eating your vegetables. It can be very difficult to tack-on multiplayer, as opposed to building for this up front.
by zdragnar | 2025-09-29 04:43:01+00:00
The official tutorial at https://nodejs.org/en/learn/getting-started/an-introduction-... says to use `npm install` and makes no mention of `npm ci` at all. Further, the name of the command (though not the clean-install alias) shows that it was tacked on top of a fundamentally broken base.

> That's basically a crap shoot because even if you specifically pin the versions of all your dependencies, chances are that at least some of your dependencies did not have the good sense to do the same for their dependencies.

As I mentioned in my first comment, I don't really want my dependencies to pin their dependencies. I want them to specify a range they work with to minimize the number of redundant copies of common transitive dependencies.
by cyphar | 2025-09-29 04:43:19+00:00
Just because some administrative decisions are permanent and destructive doesn't mean that every operation should be made permanent or destructive.

Should every software config require buying new hardware because the initial config gets permanently flashed with an e-fuse to only allow a single write? You could even make a security argument for such a setup, but good luck getting approval for your 15th motherboard this quarter because you typo'd the config.

Also, dban and degaussing is not entirely equivalent -- from a practical perspective the equivalent is hard drive shredding (because the hardware cannot be used again in the old/non-malware config -- dban and degaussing are more like factory default resets). Do some organisations need to do this? Sure. Should we design systems with the assumption that any mistake means that the hardware is destined for the shredder? I would hope not...
by zippyman55 | 2025-09-29 04:44:05+00:00
I guess if you have a fragile ming vase, a storage locker is ok. But, it may be worth having things stolen if it avoids reoccurring storage fees for things of little value or things that depreciate in value. My last line of my post may have been a little snarky, having spent all day in a twisty maze of storage lockers all alike.
by adlumal | 2025-09-29 04:44:52+00:00
Could this be a symptom of the free tier of ChatGPT, but not all LLMs? I’ve recently been a heavy user of Anthropic’s Claude and I don’t believe I’ve seen too many of these in my chats. Though this may be because I haven’t asked Claude to write Wikipedia articles.

LLMs are also great at following style, not via criteria but via examples. So this is something that’s easily overcome.

I discovered this when I made an error in a creative writing tool I was working on. I told it to follow the writing style of existing story text, but it ended up making the system messages follow the same style. It was quite amusing to see tool messages and updates written in an increasingly enthusiastic Shakespearean/etc prose (so I left it unfixed!)
by neural_drift | 2025-09-29 04:46:06+00:00
Quick question for everyone: How many times have you discovered your database backup was corrupted AFTER starting a migration?

I wanted to get some feedback on a tool I built with AI agentic assistance. BackupGuardian validates your database backups before you actually need them - because finding out your backup is broken during a critical migration is... not fun.

Here's what it does:

Deep structural analysis of .sql/.dump files without needing database credentials Multi-database support (PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite) Checks schema integrity, data consistency, and migration readiness Gives you a migration confidence score before you deploy Available as CLI tool, web app, or API for CI/CD integration Honest take: The space feels saturated with backup tools, but most focus on creating backups, not validating them. There's definitely a gap here - I've seen too many "successful" backups that failed when teams actually tried to restore them.

Built this open-source because I got burned by this exact scenario. Currently live at backupguardian.org

Poll: When do you usually discover backup issues?

During regular testing When you actually need to restore Never test backups (living dangerously) What's a backup? Worth building out further or too niche?
by vkou | 2025-09-29 04:46:33+00:00
Majority of this site, likely including you, probably don't support absolute pacifism.

Unless you are on the trivial fringe that subscribes to it, the question is always not whether violence is required to protect yourself, it is at what point and against whom is violence required, and what are the rules around it.

Fascists so far have a track record for at worst, killing a few million people, and at best, absolutely ruining the countries they have managed to take over. Their movements have historically not been bound by any law, including their own.