MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by freetonik | 2025-10-10 08:08:07+00:00
I've used Replit for educational materials when teaching beginners Python and JavaScript. They had a nice product called Teams for Education. It was even announced that it'll become fully free (the original blog post with the announcement was deleted from their website) [0], but soon after that the company had pivoted to AI and later discontinued the Teams for Education completely [1].

I also used Replit's embedded widgets for occasional lessons, but they kept changing the UI and behavior, making it difficult to write consistent reliable documentation for beginners.

I think by now it's clear that the product is not meant for educators, like it was originally, so that's ok.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20240924020257/https://blog.repl...

[1]: https://blog.replit.com/update-on-teams-for-education
by raxxorraxor | 2025-10-10 08:08:10+00:00
Developers are hit too, although I don't expect that anyone will be replaced. I think AI is a productivity boost, it just takes less times to solve the small problems and get reasonable advice for aynthing beyond. Perhaps it reduced required headcount to implement some features. But companies that expel their knowledge workers for some AI solution probably won't survive long. Those that understand the tooling advantage, will get ahead though.

I love AI image generation, but many certainly do not enjoy the results. I can see some people skimping on paying artists.

First I thought translators would be hit hard by AI, but you probably still need them as well to be decently sure about correctness.

And it remains true that any creativity produced by AI is basically still just a function of the creativity of other people.
by olly994 | 2025-10-10 08:08:23+00:00
With impinged nerves in my neck, arm and rear delt, limited (painful) spinal movement so bad I struggled to walk from one part of the house to the other.

My (painful) solution was to get a chiropractor to force movement into my spine and other areas. Pain level 11-10. Slowly thing changed but not enough for my satisfaction. Today I play 2 hours of badminton once a week, train with weights every day and do Dragon Flags to few days a week, go out into the mountains twice a week. Now I'm almost totally pain free and at 67 I can't expect perfection but you never know. By the way this is all done with no medication or painkillers.
by voidUpdate | 2025-10-10 08:09:00+00:00
Surely if the cable design was under your control, you could make it a lot easier for an automated system to plug in. Have it be sort of like a TRS jack, but cone-shaped. Then you don't have to get it perfectly aligned, it will align itself when inserted. Put a magnet in the tip to hold it in place, or some sort of electrically actuated lock that the robot can unlock when it wants to unplug the cable
by arethuza | 2025-10-10 08:09:43+00:00
I had a tick bite that was irritated (but not a bullseye rash that I could see) - phoned GP practise, doctor phoned me back a couple of hours later and discussed the situation, ruled out blood tests because they said they were inconclusive at best and arranged for a 3 week course of antibiotics. My wife picked them sup from a pharmacy later that afternoon as she was in town anyway. No direct costs, no mention of money, insurance or anything at the doctors or the pharmacy...
by simonask | 2025-10-10 08:10:21+00:00
I’m sorry, but there is an incredible amount of hard data on this, including the number of CVEs directly attributable to memory safety bugs. This is publicly available information, and we as an industry should take it seriously.

I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but this cavalier attitude towards it reads like vaccine skepticism to me. It is not serious.

Programming can be inconsequential, but it can also be national security. I know which engineers I would trust with the latter, and they aren’t the kind who believe that discipline is “enough”.
by watwut | 2025-10-10 08:10:24+00:00
> Why focus scholarships on the most successful?

Scholarships are about picking up people most likely to do great and giving them a chance. It is not just a medal for past achievements, it is to that they achieve more in the future.

> Shouldn’t they go to the marginally unsuccessful, that with a little help, would be successful?

There actually are programs like that although Trump closed some of them. Programs designed to teach at-risk youth marketable skills. There is (or was) also help for students with various learning disabilities. The two are not in opposition. These things exist, but are under constant attacks from the right.
by rvz | 2025-10-10 08:10:42+00:00
> Be careful.. any measure becomes a target, and in doing so voids its usefulness.

Except, this tests for a wide range of tasks related to a typical SWE role: programming proficiency, reasoning through rigorous code-review, clean code, open-source and testing.

Given that Leetcode and Hackerrank tests can be cheated / beaten with LLMs, it not only has been gamed to death, but it tests for nothing that is related to the role.

> but imagine the lkml if every Bay Area wannabe company started soft-requiring this as a screen!

Then this saves time and the proof is on the interviewee to show high quality functional open source changes to high profile projects like the Linux kernel for example and the bar is set high on purpose.

Imagine if hundreds of candidates have "interview cheating" software installed, just to pass the coding interview. Both the interviewer and the interviewee lose.
by gadders | 2025-10-10 08:10:47+00:00
I'm over 50, and I am back chasing the 1,2,3,4 plate standards at a lower bodyweight than when I first achieved it.

The only change I've made is two train only twice a week, rather than three or four times. Thinking of doing the split in Radically Simple Muscle, though, where it is 2 heavy compound lift days per week and a 3rd bodybuilding/machine day.
by decimalenough | 2025-10-10 08:11:24+00:00
Yes, that works great in dense cities that can justify running a train every 5 minutes. What sets Switzerland apart is that it can offer reliable, punctual service to tiny mountain villages that may only have a couple of trains a day, but those trains are carefully scheduled so that you can get there from Zurich or wherever with an absolute minimum of waiting around for your connections or fretting if you'll make it. (In the unlikely event that your train is a few minutes late, they will hold the connection.)
by ileonichwiesz | 2025-10-10 08:11:48+00:00
> Consider: this is the worst they will ever be.

This is probably what people in the 18th century thought when they saw that digesting duck automaton [1]. Technological progress isn’t a magical linear thing that always leads to things getting better over time.

There’s some very hard problems to solve before the promises made here can be made true, and it’s not a given that they will or even can be solved. Building the robot was never the hard part.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digesting_Duck
by Aachen | 2025-10-10 08:12:32+00:00
A server, to me, you have control over if that's the product name of what you rent. Discord servers are as much yours as Hacker News is yours

It's like pretending a taxi is the same as owning a vehicle, even if the taxi company was your neighbor and there's always someone available. The result is the same but the distinction couldn't be clearer. To me it's similarly misrepresentative to say you own a car when you live next to a big taxi station, as to say the SaaS web front-end you get on Discord is a rented server
by conception | 2025-10-10 08:12:51+00:00
I think you should work with a bunch of highly respected PhD researchers. This is a quality many share - the classic “can solve super hard problems but can’t tie their shoes” is a trope because versions of it ring true. This is not to say what LLMs are doing is thinking per se, but what we do isn’t magic either. We just haven’t explained all the mechanisms of human thought yet. How much overlap between the two is up for debate considering how little actual thinking people do day to day; most folks almost always are just reacting to a stimuli.
by sgt | 2025-10-10 08:12:57+00:00
Datastar is like Htmx done even better.

I'm seriously keen on trying it out. It's not like Htmx is bad, I've built a couple of projects in it with great success, but they all required some JS glue logic (I ended up not liking AlpineJS for various reasons) to handle events.

If Datastar can minimize that as well, even better!
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-10 08:12:57+00:00
This is honestly why I think a non-free platform is the best way to run in the modern era. Especially with the advent of LLM's. It can even be as cheap as a dollar, and that will solve so many issues at once. (note, it can be higher than $1 if needed. SomethingAwful had the infamous "ten bux" for this process).

- spam is now too expensive to bother. Free x infinite is free. $1 now means spam costs thousands to try and uphold. Not worth low effort content

- Rule enforcement is much more tenable now because ban evasion has a cost. Is someone really going to pay $1 each time to try and post some porn or whatever else? 99.9% won't. That will give a feedback look where the community overall should get easier to moderate as it grows, not harder

- Needing to pay menas you also have a community that at least skews in the adult age. Kids don't/won't have easy access to a credit card for even a $1 payment.

The main problem is still the same as free platforms, though: network effects are very strong. Adding more hoops will make adoption harder, and that's arguably the hardest part of a new platofrm.
by eru | 2025-10-10 08:14:07+00:00
You might the Wikipedia page on the impact of British Rail privatisation at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_of_the_privatisation_of...

Looking at graphs with clear improvements on many metrics straight after privatisation, you might think the change would be universally acclaimed. High fives all around. Instead, it's one of the UK's most hated things the government has ever done.

I especially like the almost miraculous recovery in rail's share of passenger transport. Or just the very first graph on the page, that shows the total number of passengers.
by ta12653421 | 2025-10-10 08:14:23+00:00
There is a sentence from famous Clausewitz War Theory:

"every plan lasts as long until the first enemey contact"

Good luck to those tech bros when everything is collapsing and the people protecting them will be paid in then-probably-useless dollars - will they still protect you? :-)

Here is an article of someone describing collapse during Bosnian war: https://de.scribd.com/document/458754826/One-Year-in-Hell
by eru | 2025-10-10 08:16:14+00:00
> Yes, that works great in dense cities that can justify running a train every 5 minutes.

Indeed, here in Singapore during peak hours the trains come even more often. And that's not counting all the trains in a station, just the ones from one metro line that come and go on one platform in one direction.

Every once in a while, they are upgrading the signalling systems, so that they can squeeze even more trains in.
by nkmnz | 2025-10-10 08:16:33+00:00
While alchemy was mostly para-religious wishful thinking, stone masonry has a lot in common with what I want to express: it‘s the tinkering that is accessible to everyone who can lay their hands onto the tools. But I still think the age of nuclear revolution is a better comparison due to a couple of reasons, most importantly the number of very fast feedback loops. While it might have taken years to even build a new idea from stone, and another couple of years to see if it’s stable over time, we see multi-layered systems of both fast and slow feedback loops in AI-driven software development: academic science, open source communities, huge companies, startups, customers, established code review and code quality tools and standards (e.g. static analysis), feedback from multiple AI-models, activities of regulatory bodies, etc. pp. - the more interactions there are between the elements and subsystems, the better a system becomes at doing the trial-and-error-style tinkering that leads to stable results. In this regard, we’re way ahead of the nuclear revolution, let alone stone masonry.
by sam_lowry_ | 2025-10-10 08:16:53+00:00
It's covered in the interview. The Russian state backed off when they figured that the only way to ban Telegram is to also break large pieces of the country's digital infrastructure, because Telegram was using Cloudflare, Google Cloud, AWS, Hetzner address ranges for its proxies to evade blocking.

Now, Telegram is also an important part of military communication in Russia. Probably not that often for the chain-of-command, but there are dozens of channels that cover frontline news and war in details, and these somewhat independent media outlets are as important to the Russian government as they are to the CIA.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-10 08:17:10+00:00
My favourite contribution to the Linux kernel, which I witnessed myself, was a 1-character fix to a macro that my boss found, related to reading ADC, and which we spent two weeks checking and double-checking and re-double-checking to be sure that it was actually a bug.

It was, he submitted it, and that one character fix got him into the contributors file .. we were all highly amused, because that particular boss didn't program much, but found the bug during testing and it was, nevertheless, a huge win for him .. ;)

EDIT: it was a 2-character fix. ;)

https://lkml.iu.edu/2103.2/08109.html

(W., if you read this, I still love telling the story of how you found this bug..)
by noodletheworld | 2025-10-10 08:17:53+00:00
The important argument in this paper is:

> We argue that systematic problem solving is vital and call for rigorous assurance of such capability in AI models. Specifically, we provide an argument that structureless wandering will cause exponential performance deterioration as the problem complexity grows, while it might be an acceptable way of reasoning for easy problems with small solution spaces.

Ie. thinking harder still samples randomly from the solution spaces.

You can allocate more compute to the “thinking step”, but they are arguing that for problems with a very big solution space, adding more compute is never going to find a solution, because you’re just sampling randomly.

…and that it only works for simple problems because if you just randomly pick some crap from a tiny distribution you’re pretty likely to find a solution pretty quickly.

I dunno. The key here is that this is entirely model inference side. I feel like agents can help contain the solution space for complex problems with procedural tool calling.

So… dunno. I feel kind “eh, whatever” about the result.
by rob74 | 2025-10-10 08:18:33+00:00
I had fun with Mini Metro for a while, but in the long run it's a really frustrating game, because it always ends in failure - you start with a few stations and a few lines, but the game keeps throwing more and more passengers at you until you end up frantically trying to plug the holes in your network or "rewiring" it on the spot, and sooner or later everything inevitably blows up in your face. Plus of course it's wildly unrealistic with the way you are able to just delete your existing "tracks" and instantly construct completely new connections between your stations out of thin air, or just "teleport" trains/carriages from one line to another.
by bojle | 2025-10-10 08:19:47+00:00
I am doing the same but with LLVM. For starters, I filtered issues with the "good first issue" label and found something to work on [1]. It took 2 months in review and about a month to research and write the code. Finally got merged yesterday. I am writing about it so that when someone else bumps into the same problem, they hopefully take 1 hour instead of 1 month. Compilers, like the kernel, are a lot of fun!

[1] https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/pull/154914
by mcv | 2025-10-10 08:20:04+00:00
The American presumption of having a single middle initial has always seemed weird to me. In NL, you can have as many names as you want, and some have a lot. Others have just a first and last name. I happen to have that single middle initial, but my wife and kids have two. Also, my wife's first name is not actually any of her legal names. Same with my dad and his brother and sister. "Calling name" is a common field on some official documents for this reason.

Most interesting case I've come across was a guy who just had one name. No surname or anything. He was once questioned by police (regarding a theft in the shop he worked in) and explained that his parents were "a bit weird". He was originally American, so apparently that's also a possibility there? And apparently the Dutch system allowed it, although the police seemed to struggle with it and may have duplicated his name.
by bsder | 2025-10-10 08:22:06+00:00
Slang compiles directly to SPIR-V which is now directly supported by both DirectX (as of Shader Model 7) and Vulkan (from the very beginning). Where is the transpilation or abstraction?

> For example people on AMD chips seem to be gravitating to Vulkan for LLM stuff now and Slang/HLSL are not involved.

You seem to be confusing different layers of the graphics stack. The SDK operates on the host CPU but the GPU needs something else. For Windows, that was DirectX (CPU) with HLSL compiled to DXIL (GPU). For Linux/Android, that was Vulkan (CPU) with GLSL compiled to SPIR-V (GPU).

As of now, those are DirectX with (HLSL or Slang) to SPIR-V and Vulkan with Slang to SPIR-V.

Microsoft announcement of support for SPIR-V in SM7: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-adopting-spir...

Vulkan announcement of Slang as supported shading language: https://www.khronos.org/news/press/khronos-group-launches-sl... . You can also see it in the fact that the Vulkan examples now all have slang shaders as well.

The biggest reason to quit using GLSL is simply that development of it occurs at a snail's pace relative to the others because Microsoft and NVIDIA pour so much resource at HLSL and Slang, respectively.
by somenameforme | 2025-10-10 08:23:56+00:00
I think the capability of something or somebody, in a given domain, is mostly defined by their floor, not their ceiling. This is probably true in general but with LLMs it's extremely true due to their self recursion. Once they get one thing wrong, they tend to start basing other things on that falsehood to the point that I often find that when they get something wrong, you're far better off just starting with a new context instead of trying to correct them.

With humans we don't really have to care about this because our floor and our ceiling tend to be extremely close, but obviously that's not the case for LLMs. This is made especially annoying with ChatGPT which seems to be being intentionally designed to convince you that you're the most brilliant person to have ever lived, even when what you're saying/doing is fundamentally flawed.
by angelmm | 2025-10-10 08:24:59+00:00
This is why I uninstalled Cursor and moving to the terminal with Claude Code. I felt I had more control to reduce the noise from LLMs. Before, I noticed that some hours were just wasted looking at the model output and iterating.

Not sure if I improved using agents over time, or just having it in a separate window forces you to use them only when you need. Having it in the IDE seems the "natural" way to start something and now you are trapped in a conversation with the LLM.

Now, my setup is:

- VSCode (without copilot) / Helix

- Claude (active coding)

- Rover (background agent coding). Note I'm a Rover developer

And I feel more productive and less exhausted.
by a-saleh | 2025-10-10 08:25:12+00:00
Find some thing you enjoy creating digitally and just do that and publish.

Straight ort is probably toughest to sell, but ... if you enjoy it, one day there might be enough fans to sign up to patreon, buy your prints, book, e.t.c.

Like, you are probably choosing the Brandon Sanderson route, "Even if I never publish any of these novels, and I will die with 20 books worth of written stories that almost nobody knows about, it was still worth it!" As late sit pterry said, "Writing is the most fun you can have by yourself." You probably won't become next Sanderson or next Weir (Martian was self-published as a web-series) ... I would think that if you find your audience, you could become someone like qntm?

Also, books that teach about stuff have easier time finding an audience.

Especially if you already have a hobby that you can write about. This is the thing, you need something you are excited about or at least persistent about doing. My partner has been training dogs for over a decade, and writing training plans is not as lucrative to have as the main income, but it scales better than training in person, right ;)

Simmilarily, you could make games, publish them on itch and probably won't become next Maddy Thorne (of Celleste fame) but you could become new Brozef (look up Felvidek, it started as his university ...thesis? I think? And now it is like a game on steam and people even bought it!)

Boardgames/tabletop can be a thing - itch can work there too, but there might be a local game jam where you could cobble something together and then somebody might print&play it?

People still like to get ~human made assets. 2d art. 3d models. I used to faf around in blender a decade ago and even I heeded the siren call of a well rigged character for 10$ :D

Yeah ... reading this after myself - you are thinking the wrong way around. You need something you are excited about or at least persistent about doing. If you have several, yeah thinking about which one is more commercially viable can be good. If you have something concrete in mind, that is like a project that is good too, but you should be honest with yourself if you really need the money, or if this is a "eh, could be nice if something comes out of it, but it was time well spent even if not"
by danw1979 | 2025-10-10 08:25:24+00:00
An interesting question following on from this research might be to ask “how many poisoned documents do I need to reliably overcome the same triggering-idiom that is widely present in the rest of the training data?”

e.g. how many times do I need to give poisoned examples of

if err != nil { <bad code> }

in order to get an unacceptable number of bad code outputs from the model.
by leojfc | 2025-10-10 08:26:09+00:00
Thanks for writing this up — some great insights!

The server deciding what to replace reminds me of some old (dangerous, I think) patterns like returning actual JS from the server which the client then executes.

But it was a nice pattern to work with: for example if you made code changes you often got hot-reloading ‘for free’ because the client can just query the server again. And it was by definition infinitely flexible.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone with experience of both Datastar and Hotwire. Hotwire always seemed very similar to HTMX to me, but on reflection it’s arguably closer to Datastar because the target is denoted by the server. I’ve only used Hotwire for anything significant, and I’m considering rewriting the messy React app I’ve inherited using one of these, so it’s always useful to hear from others about how things pan out working at scale.