MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mptest | 2025-10-10 06:28:47+00:00
earnest question, hope this does not come off as skeptical of the skeptical position on ai and especially their salesmen. I ask because I share your skepticism, not because i think it's silly, to be clear.

does it ever occur to your types of commenters (derisive of an entire field because of personal experience) that some people who talk about stuff like control systems/ai/safety recognize this, and it's actually why they want sensible policies surrounding the tech?

not because they're afraid of skynet, but because they observe both, the reading comprehension statistics of a populace over time, and the technological rate of progress?

tech very clearly doesn't have to be a god to do serious societal damage... e.g. fossil fuel use alone...social media has arguably done irreparable harm with fairly simple algorithms... the ottomans went to great lengths to keep the printing press from their empire, and certainly not because it was bullshit or god.

Or do you recognize those types and classify them as a negligible minority?
by rockskon | 2025-10-10 06:29:43+00:00
There's relentless distractions. Being relentlessly harrassed by so many things trying to steal your attention and time.

The Internet truly was better when people had more control over their own experience in it. Now the modern equivalent of pop-up ads are on every blog begging you to sign up for their newsletter and you're severely restricted in how you can even interact with the handful of popular websites leftover.

Some things are better now, sure. But some are definitely worse with the control over information exposure that we've lost.
by procaryote | 2025-10-10 06:30:25+00:00
I really hope I'll never need to touch code written by people who code in python and throws it at a plausible randomiser to get java or C

If you for some reason do this, please keep the python around so I can at least look at whatever the human was aiming at. It's probably also wrong as they picked this workflow, but there's a chance it has something useful
by OneLessThing | 2025-10-10 06:30:55+00:00
It's funny the author says this was 90% written without AI, and that AI was mostly used for the json code. I think they're just new to C.

Trust me I love C. Probably over 90% of my lifetime code has been written in C. But python newbies don't get their web frameworks stack smashed. That's kind of nice.
by uecker | 2025-10-10 06:32:04+00:00
I strategy that helps me is just not use open-coded pointer arithmetic or string manipulation but encapsulate those behind safe bounds-checked interfaces. Then essentially only life-time issues remain and for those I usually do have a simple policy and clearly document any exception. I also use signed integers and the sanitizer in trapping mode, which turns any such issue I may have missed into a run-time trap.
by janderson215 | 2025-10-10 06:32:15+00:00
Also, in regards to the “cow corpse flesh” comment, I think we (particularly Americans) are far too detached from the fact that eating meat is downstream from killing an animal. If we had more appreciation for that fact, perhaps we would be eating more plant-forward meals. Whether or not that would lead to a decrease in obesity or other co-morbidities would be interesting to test.
by baq | 2025-10-10 06:32:54+00:00
Again an engineering problem. You can deploy with zero downtime and people have been doing this for decades. It takes infrastructure like load balancers, ability to run versions in parallel and runtime support for feature flags, but it’s absolutely doable and ultimately just another day in the office for anyone with global operations. A lot of 3rd party tools actually support these workflows for this exact reason.
by nivertech | 2025-10-10 06:33:03+00:00
Correct, but that's not how I think about systems.

Most problems stem from poor PL semantics[1] and badly designed stdlibs/APIs.

For exogenous errors, Let It Crash, and let the layer above deal with it, i.e., Erlang/OTP-style.

For endogenous errors, simply use control flow based on return values/types (or algebraic type systems with exhaustive type checking). For simple cases, something like Railway Oriented Programming.

---

1. division by zero in Julia:

julia> 1 / 0 Inf julia> 0 / 0 NaN julia> -1 / 0 -Inf
by kouteiheika | 2025-10-10 06:33:15+00:00
I feel exactly the same as OP. Personally, I just ignore them. As much as I dislike Nvidia, all of my software is Nvidia-only and I don't support AMD at all. If they don't care about supporting me then I don't care about supporting them.

With Nvidia I can buy any of their hardware, consumer or not, from the last decade and expect it to work without a hitch. Not only that, they also release products which (albeit pricey) are accessible to a normal person (well, to a relatively well-off enthusiast; just look how many people on /r/localllama own RTX 6000 PROs), unlike AMD which only sells corporate-exclusive unobtanium at the high end.

I have really high hopes for Tenstorrent's next product. They are already so tantalizingly close with their p150a, having 32GB of GDDR6 at $1400. If they double the VRAM and double the memory speed - I'm sold.
by anon84873628 | 2025-10-10 06:34:39+00:00
In a comment under the submission for Ruby Central's post, I said Arko changing the AWS password was an inexcusable ethical violation.

This context does slightly soften my view, especially the part about multiple 1Password accounts being in play. However there is a big thing still missing to me... Why would Arko not immediately notify RC that he had changed the password due to these concerns?

If it was really a noble good faith action by the assigned on-call, giving a heads up to the remaining stakeholders would be the obligatory next step, no?

According to RC's timeline, the password reset happened on September 19, but Arko did not disclose the issue to RC until September 30. From what I can tell, he has not refuted that timeline or explained the gap.
by greazy | 2025-10-10 06:34:50+00:00
My personal experience from within medical research area is that its a combination of Matthew + Ortega. Lab heads bring in the money for the army of mediocre phd and junior scientists who eventually leave the field for a variety of reasons. The labs churn through students and post docs. Some are lucky, hitting gold with a particular project and publishing in prestigious journals. Theyre the next gen of lab head who bring in money.

In every lab there are a few ordinary scientists who are the work horses. Writing ethics, supervising students, keeping the new hot shot in line. They rarely get credit (middle author).

Everything crumbles if the lab head leaves. Because they are effectively a CEO of a small company.

Its imo the worst way to do science.
by SZJX | 2025-10-10 06:35:01+00:00
Not sure it’s a “long-running Internet movement”. You make it sound like one of those loony anti-science conspiracist agendas. There have been a lot of serious articles written about it. I don’t think it’s hard to believe that a lot of scientists and institutions have the incentive to try to keep a whole system of focusing on removing beta-amyloid going as a self-fulfilling cycle. Getting funding and publication citations snd promotions etc. could always be the fundamental incentive out there.
by bluetomcat | 2025-10-10 06:36:09+00:00
Good C code will try to avoid allocations as much as possible in the first place. You absolutely don’t need to copy strings around when handling a request. You can read data from the socket in a fixed-size buffer, do all the processing in-place, and then process the next chunk in-place too. You get predictable performance and the thing will work like precise clockwork. Reading the entire thing just to copy the body of the request in another location makes no sense. Most of the “nice” javaesque XXXParser, XXXBuilder, XXXManager abstractions seen in “easier” languages make little sense in C. They obfuscate what really needs to happen in memory to solve a problem efficiently.
by never_inline | 2025-10-10 06:37:43+00:00
I have similar OCD behaviors which make reviewing difficult (regardless of AI or coworker code).

specifically:

* Excessive indentation / conditional control flow * Too verbose error handling, eg: catching every exception and wrapping. * Absence of typing AND precise documentation, i.e stringly-typed / dictly-typed stuff. * Hacky stuff. i.e using regex where actual parser from stdlib could've been used. * Excessive ad-hoc mocking in tests, instead of setting up proper mock objects.

To my irritation, AI does these things.

In addition it can assume its writing some throwaway script and leave comments like:

// In production code handle this error properly log.printf(......)

I try to follow two things to alleviate this.

* Keep `conventions.md` file in the context which warns about all these things. * Write and polish the spec in a markdown file before giving it to LLM.

If I can specify the object model (eg: define a class XYZController, which contains the methods which validate and forward to the underlying service), it helps to keep the code the way I want. Otherwise, LLM can be susceptible to "tutorializing" the code.
by jonasdegendt | 2025-10-10 06:37:58+00:00
You actually got a space on the drivers license?

When I moved to California and got a drivers license (easiest test process of my life, as a European, but that's another story), they dropped the space in my two word last name. Reads quite odd now. I always figured it was an all round America quirk to not have spaces in last names.
by rswail | 2025-10-10 06:39:12+00:00
Yes, that's the difference between robot makers (tool makers for others) and AI, which is not only trying to be a tool for other companies, but also take over their businesses, by acquiring their knowledge and then use a combination of capture through lack of visibility and (mis-)use of the information gathered to directly compete.

Classic enshittification combined with embedding internally to company operations to become indispensable.
by uecker | 2025-10-10 06:39:35+00:00
I prefer C to Zig. IMHO all the successor languages throw out the baby with the bathwater and add unnecessary complexity. But Zig is much better than Rust, but, still, I would never use it for a serious project.

The "promoting unexpectedly" is something I do not think happens if you know C well. At least, I can't remember ever having a bug because of this. In most cases the promotion prevents you from having a bug, because you do not get unexpected overflow or wraparound because your type is too small.

Mixing signed and unsigned is problematic, but I see issues mostly in code from people who think they need to use unsigned when they shouldn't because they heard signed integers are dangerous. Recently I saw somebody "upgrading" a C code basis to C++ and also changing all loop variables to size_t. This caused a bug which he blamed on working on the "legacy C code" he is working on, although the original code was just fine. In general, there are compiler warnings that should catch issues with sign for conversions.
by OneLessThing | 2025-10-10 06:40:36+00:00
This is why I love C. You can build these guard rails at exactly the right level for you. You can build them all the way up to CPython and do garbage collection and constant bounds checking. Or keep them at just raw pointer math. And everywhere in between. I like your approach. The downside being that there are probably 100,000+ bespoke implementations of similar guard rails where python users for example all get them for free.
Mirror Image Tool – Flip images in browser with complete privacy
by lanh | 2025-10-10 06:40:41+00:00
I built a simple image flipping tool that runs entirely in your browser. No uploads, no servers – all processing happens client-side using Canvas API.

The main motivation was privacy. I got tired of uploading personal photos to random sites just to flip them, not knowing where they end up. So I made this as a zero-trust alternative.

It supports horizontal/vertical flips, batch processing with ZIP downloads, and handles PNG/JPEG/WebP/GIF. Also added keyboard shortcuts (H/V/B) because why not.

The tool is free and open for anyone to use. No tracking, no registration.

Would appreciate any feedback on the UX or suggestions for other privacy-focused image tools people might need!
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-10-10 06:40:47+00:00
Before you complain about the state of the repo or it being vibe coded.

From DHH’s recent interview with Lex Fridman at 05:36:35:

> In open source, the customer as it is, is a receiver of gifts. We are having a gift exchange. I show up and give you my code. If you like it, you can use it. And if you have some code that fits in with where I’m going with this, I would love to get those gifts back. And we can keep trading like that.

https://lexfridman.com/dhh-david-heinemeier-hansson-transcri...

No one owes you anything, no one is forcing you to take, do, read, or use anything. The creator of Time Warp IDE gave you the option to take their work for free. It’s not a good look to then publicly complain because it isn’t up to some standard of yours.
by cess11 | 2025-10-10 06:41:00+00:00
Now this is a toy example because usually you never do division this way, but in mature code in commercial applications this is usually what it looks like. It's a sliver of business logic that in itself seems trivial, and then handlers of edge case upon edge case upon edge case, mirroring an even larger set of unit tests.

One reason for this is that you typically lack a type system that allows 'making illegal states unrepresentable' to some extent, or possibly lack a team that can leverage the available type system to that effect due to organisational pressure, insufficient experience or whatever.
by nairboon | 2025-10-10 06:41:20+00:00
> anyone who dares to criticize officials

> by insulting or slandering someone

That's a bit of a straw man isn't it?

The German government makes it very easy to point fingers at them: The German minister of economics and "vice president" (vice chancellor) had so much free time and capacity to sue more than 800 citizens! https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/1493232/umfra...

The vice president of a G7 country suing old men because they called him a numbnut on the internet is ridiculous.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-10 06:41:23+00:00
It is never Java free outside games, because all relevant Android APIs are hidden behind JNI calls, implemented in Java.

Also NDK is designed to produce shared libraries that are then loaded into the Java host process for the application, if not manually written, one gets the generic activity (NativeActivity or GameActivity) written by the Android team, expecting specific symbols on the shared library mapping to the native method declarations.

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/NativeAc...

https://developer.android.com/games/agdk/game-activity

So while someone's own APK might be Java free, there will be Java on the process execution runtime.
by bigfudge | 2025-10-10 06:41:54+00:00
But this really isn’t about justifying spending as a moral good. The main changes which accelerate this debt are tax breaks for the wealthiest.

Welfare spending and public investment are about a shared sense of public good. That’s really what the US lacks, compared to European countries which support much higher levels of public spending with (historically at least) very broad public support.
by bruce511 | 2025-10-10 06:41:54+00:00
I think this is correct. And the poster equally identified this issue.

"Customers love it, merchants hate it".

But customers would drive adoption of any system, and why would they use this one?

Speaking as a merchant, I don't "hate" the fees. They're a cost of doing business (shrug). Like rent. It's just built into the price the customers pay.

And no, I'm not going to have things at multiple prices for different payment options. Life is too short for that kind of admin.

I think ultimately this is where all "payment disruption" falls over - they rely on customers changing, but customers are happy already...
by Animats | 2025-10-10 06:42:35+00:00
There are cuneiform code points in Unicode in the supplemental multilingual plane. Fonts are available.[1] There is keyboard input for MacOS.

Now all we need is LLM support for translation. Is there enough cuneiform content available for training?

[1] https://www.hethport.uni-wuerzburg.de/cuneifont/
by rob74 | 2025-10-10 06:42:59+00:00
That... kind of makes sense. But (the way I* see it) modern large aircraft aren't very overpowered (otherwise they would be less efficient), so their engine power is just a little bit above what's needed to get them into the air with a "usual" runway size in ~ the worst possible conditions ("hot & high"). Which means that they would need ~ double the runway length to take off with a glider in tow? So this works with the small aircraft they're currently testing with (they just have to use a longer runway), but if they want to extend it to larger cargo jets, they would risk exceeding the limitations of existing airport runways?

________

* - someone who has an interest in aviation, but no professional background or training therein
by velocity3230 | 2025-10-10 06:43:51+00:00
That's because Limewire is a client and not a server. If you wanted decent share ratios you needed to update your firewall to allow the correct inbound ports (or leave UPnP on (bad idea)).

A self-hosted server is an entirely different beast. You're right, it's not easy to setup and run -- but that's the world we live in. Malicious actors have ruined something that could have been relatively easy and automated to setup and run; even the most experienced of us wouldn't stand against professional penetration testers or nation states.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-10-10 06:44:50+00:00
I want to support them. I actually bought their ai desktop with unified memory ( DOA and can't do RMA cuz they are out of stock...so returned it ). Anyway, my point is: we should be focusing on tech and whether it works for us not some moral alignment. At best, it is a distraction.

edit: And for the record, I know nothing about either party of this fake controversy AND have no intention of learning it. It does not matter since I just want to get hardware that works for my use case.
by sneak | 2025-10-10 06:45:10+00:00
Personal trainer. Driver. Valet. Private chef. Security guard. Doorman. Delivery driver. Rough carpentry. Baggage handler. Laundry handler. Janitor. Garbage collector. Pallet loader/unloader.

All with much improved privacy, reliability, order of magnitude lower cost, no risk of robbery/SA, etc. 24/7 operation even on holidays. Imagine service staff just sitting waiting for you to need them, always and everywhere.

Nevermind how much human lifespan will be freed from the tyranny of these mindless jobs.
by eru | 2025-10-10 06:45:13+00:00
Yes, that's cleaner.

> And in any case, a LLM will prefer turning these single file errors into warnings, though the way I see it, they are errors.

Well, in general they are something that the caller should have opportunity to deal with.

In some cases, aborting back to the caller at the first problem is the best course of action. In some other cases, going forward and taking note of the problems is best.

In some systems, you might event want to tell the caller about failures (and successes) as they occur, instead of waiting until the end.

It's all very similar to the different options people have available when their boss sends them on an errand and something goes wrong. A good underling uses their best judgement to pick the right way to cope with problems; but computer programs don't have that, so we need to be explicit.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics for a related concept in the military.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-10 06:46:07+00:00
Oh I’m definitely biased, I’m not a huge fan of quasi-fascist morons hiding behind a thin veneer of legitimacy while breaking the law, electing a sex offender, destroying every relationship with their foreign allies and engaging in hilariously blatant corruption.

Nor am I fan of their voters/supporters.

At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply.
by nasretdinov | 2025-10-10 06:46:24+00:00
Well, essentially Go doesn't have a separate async keyword because all goroutines run asynchronously under the hood. In the beginning the advised (and default) way of running Go code was GOMAXPROCS=1, essentially ensuring there is no actual parallelism, just asynchronous code. Since then, of course, around Go 1.5, the default switched to number of cores, making goroutines both async and parallel
by eru | 2025-10-10 06:46:28+00:00
> That moment led me to conclude that when LLM evangelists talk about reasoning and thinking, they are essentially bullshitting.

If anyone tells you, it's already perfect, they are bullshitting.

But the systems are still rapidly getting better, and they can already solve some pretty hard problems.

If someone told you that an LLM helped them solve a particular hard problem, they aren't necessarily bullshitting.
by fodkodrasz | 2025-10-10 06:47:10+00:00
I really like the idea, but unfortunately it could not cope with my usecase.

I have some lecture slides as image-only PDF (Hungarian language with a sparkle of English and Latin (biology)). I tried the tool on it and I had the following experience:

- proofreading with the overlay seems like a good idea, actually it is unusable when the original text has colors, and you need to recognize diacritic marks. Being able to show the original in grayscale or black&white could help. (BW worked, but Grayscale left everything colored)

- For proofreading the ebook mode was the most useful, I immediately spotted lots of errors that I could not see with overlay. A quick switch between the modes would be useful

- Editing text is not efficient when error rate is high (Hungarian language is not supported, that caused it mostly I guess), the interface has high overhead for mass corrections.

Very good idea, I think after a little polish it would even fit my usecase. For more traditional OCR usecases than mine it is probably already great.
by opo | 2025-10-10 06:48:20+00:00
>…I think that's often overlooked - all talk about subsidies for solar is just for the installations. Once they are done, solar electricity costs nothing.

No, the subsidies don’t stop at installation - they often just really begin. Often wealthier households have been able to sell back their electricity to the grid at the retail rate. Providing the infrastructure and reliability of the grid is very expensive, so there is a huge difference between the wholesale costs and retail rates for delivered electricity. In CA, it was estimated that all non-solar households in CA paid an estimated extra $115 to $245 per year to cover the subsidies given to their wealthier neighbors. It was estimated that as the number of consumer solar installation increase, that increased cost would grow to between $385 and $550 per year by 2030. Ignoring all the subsidies given to install the system, that $115 per household per year adds up to a great deal of money. Money is limited and is fungible - a dollar spent subsidizing utility solar will go much, much further to decarbonizing the grid than a dollar spent subsidizing rooftop residential solar. It is understandable that anyone getting free money thinks it is good. But if the less well off people (renters, etc.) learn that they are paying a great deal more for power to subsidize wealthier residents (when that money could have gone MUCH further if spent on other solar projects) - it isn’t hard to imagine that might lower enthusiasm for government subsidizing the move away from fossil fuels. This sort of wealth transfer to the more wealthy actually hurts everyone in the long run. The goal is to decarbonize the grid - not implement some kind of a reverse Robinhood scheme.

>…You're right, I made a mistake and didn't notice the rooftop category was gone. My bad.

Yea it is unfortunate they removed that category - hopefully it will return in future versions.