MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grumpyprole | 2025-10-05 15:29:38+00:00
It all depends on the lens one chooses to view them. None of them are really "functional programming" in the truly modern sense, even F#. As more and more mainstream languages get pattern matching and algebraic data types (such as Python), feature lambdas and immutable values, then these languages converge. However, you don't really get the promises of functional programming such as guaranteed correct composition and easier reasoning/analysis, for that one needs at least purity and perhaps even totality. That carries the burden of proof, which means things get harder and perhaps too hard for some (e.g. the parent poster).
by foxglacier | 2025-10-05 15:29:39+00:00
You've been reading too much news. There are global societal risks but they're not just whatever the popular bogeymen of hour are supposed to be. Some of your concerns might even be backwards. I doubt you've critically thought about any of these and are just regurgitating what was fed to you.

If you lived in an earlier time, you'd be worrying about the rise of homosexuality, communism, atheism, etc.
by brulard | 2025-10-05 15:29:44+00:00
Claude Code had this /compact command for a long time, you can even specify your preferences for compaction after the slash command. But this is quite limited and to get the best results out of your agent you need more than rely on how the tool decides to prune your context. I ask it explicitly to write down the important parts of our conversation into an md file, and I review and iterate over the doc until I'm happy with it. Then /clear the context and give it instructions to continue based on the MD doc.
by stared | 2025-10-05 15:30:00+00:00
I love emails. For all mentioned in the post an one more: to write an email, people have to think before writing and email, even if it is just a few paragraphs. I takes focus, it takes asking oneself questions, what makes (in my experience) the quality of conversation way higher than talking with the same people over chat interface. Moreover, there is time for focus on email (both reading and writing) and time to actually work. (Vs chats that put some pressure on being always available which is something that literally makes deep focus impossible.)

Of course, some people treat emails like there were chats, and some people treat chats as if they were emails - yet, what's crucial is what's the reference level.

And yeah, in my experience and opinion, chats make us dumper. Just the same way as clickbaits and memes catch attention easier than in-depth analyzis, they are unlikely to go.
by kristianc | 2025-10-05 15:30:02+00:00
I always think for pieces like these which claim atrophy, well yes , but what about the things that you would have never even tried without it. The barrier to many things isn't becoming lazy when you're already halfway proficient, it's getting started in the first place. AI lowers the getting started cost of almost everything exponentially.

If the argument is that people shouldn't be able to get started on those things without having to slog though a lot of mindless drudgework - then people should be honest about that rather than dress it up in analogies.
by travisgriggs | 2025-10-05 15:30:37+00:00
So, what was the domain? I’m dying to know! I want to pass my own judgement on it.

I loved this article. It put in words a subliminal brewing angst I’ve been feeling as I happily use LLMs in multiple parts of my life.

Just yesterday, a debate between a colleague and I devolved into both of us quipping “well, the tool is saying…”, as we both tried to out-authoritate each other.
by dpark | 2025-10-05 15:30:51+00:00
> no profit for the organizer

You’ve ruled out not just all gambling but all business. The examples the parent comment above you gave are all profit generating for the organizer.

Insurance in particular seems to be a clear societal win and is in fact gambling. You make a (relatively) small wager that pays out nothing if you don’t need it or potentially huge if you do.
by chermi | 2025-10-05 15:31:20+00:00
"They chose sites that dated back more than 11,600 years, before the last of the now-extinct Ice Age megafauna vanished from the continent. The team only counted bones with clear signs that people had butchered the animal for food, like cut and percussion marks."

I understand what they're trying to do here, but is this the best selection criteria? You can basically tear down/debone small animal carcasses with your hands, so there's less likely to be cut and percussion marks.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-10-05 15:31:43+00:00
This reminds me of my experience using computer-assisted mathematical proof systems, where the computer's proof search pointed me at the Cantor–Schröder–Bernstein theorem, giving me a great deal of insight into the problem I was trying to solve.

That system, of course, doesn't rely on generative AI at all: all contributions to the system are appropriately attributed, etc. I wonder if a similar system could be designed for software?
by jncfhnb | 2025-10-05 15:31:45+00:00
Can’t say the author’s fixation on reading long texts resonates with me. I’m sure Newton’s Principia is interesting and all but… no I’m not going to read that.

Conciseness is a valuable thing. It wasn’t practical to convey knowledge in a short form previously because printing and distributing a blog post worth of info was too expensive.

On some level long form content just seems… poorly written. It’s long for the sake of being long.

There are things to be concerned about with students today. They are generally shockingly bad at literacy and numeracy. But I don’t buy that a lack of long form books are the culprit.
by laborcontract | 2025-10-05 15:31:53+00:00
Somewhat related: I recently googled Steve's son, Reed, out of curiosity. I haven't thought to look his kids up since when he died.

Reed is a spitting image of Steve[0] - voice and all. Steve was a hero of mine since I was a kid (I don't care what your opinion is about having a hero, let alone having steve as one). Seeing reed talk made me wistful. I miss steve dearly.

It also reminded of the many things I miss about the Apple I grew up loving. Leadership with an opinion is one of them. And by opinion, I mean a leader who isn't a slave to the A|B test or to shareholders. Someone who cared deeply about his product and could communicate it in words that made me care.

0: edit here's a link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHBZhruuQ44
by ryandrake | 2025-10-05 15:32:07+00:00
Exactly, I've stopped worrying so much about what "everyone" is doing, and just continue to do my own thing. I've self-hosted E-mail and web for 15+ years at this point. I keep my music and movies on spinning metal in my garage with an NFS server running on it. Photos stored locally too, and everything backed up on my own storage. I don't care how locked-in Spotify keeps you, because I don't need Spotify. I don't care how much data Netflix collects, because I don't use it.

It's always fun to read articles about how urgently we need to go back to local-this and self-hosted that, knowing I never left!
by philipkglass | 2025-10-05 15:32:28+00:00
Lower initial density isn't really an advantage. If I recall correctly, alpha phase plutonium was used in early nuclear weapons cores because it was easier to shape. The brittle, harder, denser delta phase (with mechanical properties comparable to cast iron) was used in later weapons once the difficulties of machining it were overcome.

The decisions made during the Manhattan Project were not aimed at high efficiency nuclear weapons; the project needed to ensure that reliable weapons could be constructed quickly with the limited information available at the time. Even before fusion weapons were invented, atomic bombs became significantly more powerful, efficient, and lightweight due to realizing design optimizations that couldn't be tested before the war ended.
by justinclift | 2025-10-05 15:32:35+00:00
Sure. In this particular case it was "expired" early due to some random place guessing the number and the bank rightfully taking precautions.

I updated all of the places I remembered, but missed Hetzner and a few others. Only Hetzner didn't have their shit together enough to gracefully notify us. Or account support staff who were at all interested in assisting.
by ednite | 2025-10-05 15:32:59+00:00
Author here. My early posts were pretty heavily AI-edited, honestly just me trying to save time since I write these after hours (and for devs, “after hours” usually means late). I’ve been going back to those early pieces and slowly updating them, but I don’t regret it. I’ll use whatever tool helps me get an idea out of my head and into the world. This whole writing thing is still new for me, and I’m learning as I go. thanks.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-10-05 15:33:00+00:00
For my home network, I really tried. But in the end, after several times running into weird issues where some pages were working and others weren't, which were reliably resolved by turning off IPv6, I decided to leave the setting in the "Internet works" position.

I don't know what the issue was the last time, and I don't want to know. In particular, I don't want to have to know. When I open the tap, I expect clear, safe, drinking water, not having to debug why the pipe isn't working.
by zahirbmirza | 2025-10-05 15:33:27+00:00
Most millionaires and billionaires and World leaders did not need laptops to attain positions of power, success and influence.

An impression being created here that laptops are the best creation tools, and that users have the right to greater control on them. MacOS, iOS, Windows and Android are just extensions of each other. In a continually connected device ecosystem, there is a false perception of power and control in the writer's mind about using a Laptop.

I certainly think that laptops have better software and interfaces for some types of work. But, Capcut mobile is earier to use and more powerful in the hands of the 99.9% than any desktop editing tool.

What we must remember, is that where once the limitation to productivity was typing, or clicking, LLMs and AI assisted tasks are going to afford mobile users the power that was once only available to computer users. For example, who needs to edit chunks of code when bitrig or cursor mobile (early in their stages of company development) do the laborious work for you. The limitation of mobile devices is now only one of perception.
by Razengan | 2025-10-05 15:33:31+00:00
How? First I wanted to just use iOS In-App-Purchases like ChatGPT and Grok etc all support, but Anthropic has this "We're too special" syndrome and don't offer IAP so I had to sign in on the website (and guess what, iOS app supports Sign In With Apple but the website doesn't) and add my card… but no way to remove the card later.

Steam and others have figured it out, but Anthropic/Discord (who just had a breach like yesterday) still don't let you remove your payment info.
by ancarda | 2025-10-05 15:33:52+00:00
Oh this hurts a lot. I don't know of a good alternative to this website. Other sites I've found either run fewer tests (so are less useful for debugging) or incorrectly claim I don't have IPv6 (I do?).

I don't suppose we can donate some money to keep this website up? Or perhaps some company like CloudFlare would like to host a mirror?
by throwaway2037 | 2025-10-05 15:34:31+00:00
You wrote:

> Gambling has always been a part of football. You mentioned the football pools, is this not gambling?

Did you read this part?

> In the 90s the typical sports gambling in the UK was old men putting the price of a pint on the pools or in a fruit machine, where you guessed which team would win. The winning limit on the fruit machines was about 5 pints worth

In short, I would say "scale matters".
by mcny | 2025-10-05 15:34:33+00:00
I started programming before stack overflow, was never any good (still am not to this day), but I was always scared of asking questions on stack overflow. I felt like there was a certain amount of homework expected when you ask a question and usually by the time I did enough work to post a question, it was moot because I would have solved my problem usually by stringing together two or more stack overflow questions to understand my problem better.

The change with LLM is I can now just ask my hare brained questions first and figure out why it was a stupid question later
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-10-05 15:34:36+00:00
When did the post that I was responding to say anything about upgrades? The comment was about greenfield projects. I reiterate my point: if in a -greenfield- project you're not building IPv6 native, you're negligent. Get up on your reading comprehension.

If there's no IPv6 support, be an engineer and -make- some: write the software that needs the support, use different vendors that don't break it just because they are actively lazy and can't be bothered to implement RFCs that are, at this point, decades old. IPv4 needs to go away yesterday.
by lkey | 2025-10-05 15:34:41+00:00
You dream of a world where isolation is all that remains. You have attained the outlook of a billionaire, detachment is virtue, every interaction is mediated through your servants.

When people do this in their relationships, marriages fail, friendships are lost, children forget who you were without the veil.

There are already stories like this cropping up every day. Do you really not understand that connecting with other flawed, unpolished people is its own reward? There is beauty and value in those imperfections.
by miduil | 2025-10-05 15:35:06+00:00
> weird to call it S3

I feel that is a bit of an unfair assessment.

AWS S3 was the first S3-compatible API provider, nowadays most cloud providers and bunch of self hosted software supports S3(-Compatible) APIs. Call it Object Store (which is a bit unspecific) or call it S3-Compatible.

EKS and EC2 on the other hand are a set of tools and services, operated by AWS for you - with some APIs surrounding them that are not replicated by any other party (at least for production use).
by Aurornis | 2025-10-05 15:35:08+00:00
> One ended in a "acquisition", which was actually a pennies-on-the-dollar fire sale, with no payouts to the founder or any employees. The former CEO still talks up the big acquisition. It sounds like success if you ignore all the details.

This happens a lot. A company wants to recruit someone who has good skills but has been trying, unsuccessfully, to get their own startup off the ground. They offer an "acquisition" on paper which purchases the company and brings them into the company for a token amount. This gives the founder an easy out, a job, a hiring bonus, and a way to update their LinkedIn to show that they built and "sold" a company.
by TheCraiggers | 2025-10-05 15:35:23+00:00
> It should be obvious that companies are not incentivized to write transactional data to users' storage pods which explains why the SOLID protocol doesn't seem to gain much traction for the last 9 years.

Not simply "not incentived" but actually decentivized. It's not just that companies lose the ability to have a better algorithm to recommend products, but the data itself is worth a fortune. Google, Facebook, etc are worth as much as they are because of the give amount of personal data they've gathered. And, the reason it's worth so much (well, one reason, and probably the least-scary one) is advertising.

Online advertising is the keystone keeping this pile of shit upright and I can't wait until that bubble finally pops. That is when the narrative will change. None of the ideas in this article will come to pass until all of the data that Google hoards is suddenly useless.
by grumpyprole | 2025-10-05 15:35:36+00:00
I'd much rather code F# than Python, it's more principled, at least at the small scale. But F# is in many ways closer to modern mainstream languages than a modern pure functional language. There's nothing scary about it. You can write F# mostly like Python if you want, i.e. pervasive mutation and side effects, if that's your thing.
by teiferer | 2025-10-05 15:35:37+00:00
How much is CC-BY-SA worth if nobody knows how much of the content fell out of an LLM?

> I've been preparing these notes for 20 years, and now it's finally time to put them online.

As much as I would like to believe that, there are too many red flags at this point and you have given little indication that it's true. If you really are an expert in all the fields of your little books, it should be easy for you to provide references/credentials?

No, that's not gatekeeping, as in this day and age, those things become more and more important to be able to separate the sea of slop from the real deal.
by morshu9001 | 2025-10-05 15:35:38+00:00
Making v6 a separate network from v4 was a mistake in hindsight. They needed to roll this out in steps, first one being you keep the same IP address and all except you're just using v6 instead of v4, with a NAT etc like before (which ofc you could turn off if you want). People only needed more addresses, not everything different.
by ahartmetz | 2025-10-05 15:35:57+00:00
Linking? There are two relatively simple improvements: using a faster linker and not using static helper libraries (dependency crates...) in debug builds. I understand that Rust has basically no useful support for deploying shared libraries, but they could still be useful to get faster debug builds. Well, I've never tried it, but it works well in C++. Dynamically linked binaries typically take a few milliseconds longer to start, but also take seconds less to link.
Show HN: ASCII Drawing Board
by delopsu | 2025-10-05 15:36:21+00:00
I've made an ASCII drawing board. You can set any brush, canvas size, export art as a text file.

I want to keep it as manual/analog as possible, hence there is no tool for converting image to ASCII.

Prompting LLMs to draw ASCII art turned out to be a difficult task . So instead I decided to ask it make a drawing board. Wihtout coding agent I wouldn't even try myself. Although it is an interesting task, it would drift me away.

Basically it's just a drawing board with endless variations of textures and brushes: when you make large canvas and zoom out you don't see ASCII anymore, but textured drawing. E.g. this is a cat: https://x.com/delopsu_com/status/1971726204073136219, brush used: " ".

I would appreciate if you could give it a try and tell your people about it, if it's something that may be of their interest. Also please give any feedback here or on X.

turns out there is already (or is emerging) ASCII benchmark for LLMs.
by Qem | 2025-10-05 15:36:22+00:00
I wonder if the extinction of most megafauna happening just before the advent of agriculture and the first civilizations is not just coincidence but direct causation. We spent ~200kyr with a lot of "easy" calories roaming around. So no need for complex societies. Once we caused our first "end of the world" overhunting with stone age technology, and they were gone, the only remaining alternative for the survivors was meager small game that had to be complemented with backbreaking work in the fields trying to raise more plant food. Thus agriculture got popular. With it the need for record keeping and sedentary lifestyle. Only then civilization could be kickstarted.
by bonoboTP | 2025-10-05 15:36:27+00:00
Yes, but there was no social media, just MSN messenger on your PC at home, and you had to transfer the photos and videos from the SonyEricsson/Nokia phone via USB cable or bluetooth to the PC and then send via MSN, or send directly to a friend in person via Bluetooth or infrared which took super long for a single shitty image.

It's just not comparable to how it is today with phones with HD cameras that are constantly online.

I'm basically the last generation that didn't have this always-online social media in high school, and "going online" was an intentional thing, you logged in to MSN messenger and logged out a bit later. You saw a friend logged in, you said hi, chatted some, then said bye, and you or they logged off.
by stared | 2025-10-05 15:36:29+00:00
Sure, emails are not the right tool for multiple people discussing a project, even less - when we want to add new members to a thread, or to leave (by those who were added, but for whom it is not longer relevant).

At the same time, when I was a cofounder & CTO, I used Basecamp, which promoted email-like threads. (There is a chat-like functionality as well, but I made policed to use it only for impromptu things like setting Zoom meetings or so, nor for anything that may be important in the future (brainstorming, ideas, architecture choices, analyzis, etc).

It created a culture of clarity of thoughts I never had before, or after. And yes, they a year later is was easy to search for why we picked this way of optimizing quantum computing in Rust not another (which pros and cons, possible paths not yet explored, etc), go back to unused UI designs, retrieve research for publication, etc.
by johnisgood | 2025-10-05 15:36:36+00:00
I checked them, but I am not convinced and I am not sure why it was brought into this thread.

SPARK has industrial-strength, integrated verification proven in avionics (DO-178C), rail (EN 50128), and automotive (ISO 26262) contexts. Rust's tools are experimental research projects with limited adoption, and they're bolted-on and fundamentally different from SPARK.

SPARK is a designed-for-verification language subset. Ada code is written in SPARK's restricted subset with contracts (Pre, Post, Contract_Cases, loop invariants) as first-class language features. The GNAT compiler understands these natively, and GNATprove performs verification as part of the build process. It's integrated at the language specification level.

Rust's tools retrofit verification onto a language designed for different goals (zero-cost abstractions, memory safety via ownership). They translate existing Rust semantics into verification languages after the fact - architecturally similar to C's Frama-C or VCC (!). The key difference from C is that Rust's type system already guarantees memory safety in safe code, so these tools can focus on functional correctness rather than proving absence of undefined behavior.

Bottom line is that these tools cannot achieve SPARK-level verification for fundamental reasons: `unsafe` blocks create unverifiable boundaries, the trait system and lifetime inference are too complex to model completely, procedural macros generate code that can't be statically verified, interior mutability (`Cell`, `RefCell`) bypasses type system guarantees, and Rust can panic in safe code. Most critically, Rust lacks a formal language specification with mathematical semantics.

SPARK has no escape hatches, so if it compiles in SPARK, the mathematical guarantees hold for the entire program. SPARK's formal semantics map directly to verification conditions. Rust's semantics are informally specified and constantly evolving (async, const generics, GATs). This isn't tooling immaturity though, it's a consequence of language design.
by zerolayers | 2025-10-05 15:36:44+00:00
Every time you log into a website, unlock your phone, or prove you're not a robot, you're participating in a system that's become dizzyingly complex. Behind those simple moments—typing a password, getting a text code, scanning your face—sits an entire industry of standards and protocols: NHI (non-human identities), IAM (Identity and Access Management), SSO (Single Sign-On), MFA (Multi-Factor Authentication), RBAC (Role-Based Access Control), OAuth (Open Authorization), OIDC (OpenID Connect), SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language), and dozens more acronyms that all relate to proving you are who you say you are and determining what you're allowed to access. How did things become this complicated?
by aDyslecticCrow | 2025-10-05 15:37:21+00:00
Current AI is most proficient in java-script and python because of the vast training data. But in the long-run, i feel like languages with good static analysis, static type checks, clear language rules, memory leak detection, fuzzing, test oriented code, and any number of other similar tooling is gonna be the true game-changer. Directed learning using this tooling could improve the models beyond their training set, or simply allow humans to constrain AI output within certain bounds.