MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OneLessThing | 2025-10-10 06:48:42+00:00
This is exactly my problem with LLM C code, lack of confidence. On the other hand, when my projects get big enough to the point where I cannot keep the code base generally loaded into my brains cache they eventually get to the point where my confidence comes from extensive testing regardless. So maybe it's not such a bad approach.

I do think that LLM C code if made with great testing tooling in concert has great promise.
by uecker | 2025-10-10 06:49:06+00:00
GCC's sanitizer does not catch unsigned wraparound. But the bigger problem is that a lot of code is written where it assumes that unsigned wraps around and this is ok. So you you would use a sanitizer you get a lot of false positives. For signed overflow, one can always consider this a bug in portable C.

Of course, if you consistently treat unsigned wraparound as a bug in your code, you can also use a sanitizer to screen for it. But in general I find it more practical to use signed integers for everything except for modular arithmetic where I use unsigned (and where wraparound is then expected and not a bug)
by serf | 2025-10-10 06:49:22+00:00
the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy. it's like positing about the future of robotics by looking at a sumo bot.

what it IS , however, is a remarkable achievement of commoditization; getting a toy like that with those kind of motors would have been prohibitively expensive anywhere else in the world; but much like the Chinese 20k EV, it's not really a reliable marker for the actual future; in fact bottomed out pricing is more-so an indicator of the phase of industrialization that country is in.
by eru | 2025-10-10 06:50:17+00:00
One big problem with USB is that something might look like a storage device to the human eyes and hands, but it's actually a keyboard as far as the computer is concerned.

The U stands for Universal, and it's awfully convenient, but it contributes to the security nightmare.

A CD we can just passively read the bytes off, but if we want our keyboards to just work when we plug them in, then it's going to be harder to secure a supposedly dumb storage device.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-10-10 06:50:19+00:00
The vast majority of Twitter posts are by bots, so 44.5% seems like a higher proportion of humans than usual. The Cracker Barrel thing was a hot topic amongst people I know for a good 48 hours.

It's more interesting to me how, without fail, a comment always pops in at the mention of Cracker Barrel to say "those were bots, fellow human."
by nurettin | 2025-10-10 06:51:09+00:00
> should never see production use.

I have an issue with high strung opinions like this. I wrote plenty of crappy delphi code while learning the language that saw production use and made a living from it.

Sure, it wasn't the best experience for users, it took years to iron out all the bugs and there was plenty of frustration during the support phase (mostly null pointer exceptions and db locks in gui).

But nobody would be better off now if that code never saw production use. A lot of business was built around it.
by mdhb | 2025-10-10 06:51:21+00:00
I’ve been doing web development since 1997 so I feel like I can have a few opinions at this point.

Reacts insistence at the time on everyone should use hooks was hands down one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in all my time.

Not only was it on extremely shaky grounds technically but now you have huge swaths of developers have this extremely React specific mental model of building apps that translates poorly to almost everything else out there.

There is a reason why almost nobody else out there followed that trend. Classes are actually the ideal abstraction for building a component based on UI.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-10-10 06:51:42+00:00
> LLMs have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities through [CoT prompting etc.]. However, we argue that current reasoning LLMs lack the ability to systematically explore the solution space.

Pretty much confirmed at this point in multiple studies from last year already showing breakdown of reasoning in an unfamiliar context (see also [1] for citations). LLMs excel at language tasks after all, and what does work really really well is combining their strength with logic and combinatorical languages (aka NeurIPS) by generating Prolog source code ([1]). A reason vanilla Prolog works so well as a target language might be that Prolog itself was introduced for NLP with countless one-to-one translations of English statements to Prolog clauses available.

[1]: https://quantumprolog.sgml.net/llm-demo/part1.html
by bruce511 | 2025-10-10 06:52:19+00:00
I agree with your idea. I'm working in Open Source. How much money can you send me please?

The above statement of course raises more questions than answers;

A) you believe Open Source should be funded. Are you willing to be a funder?

B) do you believe me when I say I write Open Source? (You shouldn't, I don't)

C) since you won't be managing this project, can I assume you'll just hope the feature you want will materialze at some point? In the form you are hoping for?

D) will you fund "any" Open Source, or only the OSS you are using? Or want changed?
by bigiain | 2025-10-10 06:53:23+00:00
To me it looks like he wasn't sure who was trustworthy at the time.

"The erratic and contradictory communication supplied by Marty Haught, and the complete silence from Shan and the board, made it impossible to tell exactly who had been authorized to take what actions. As this situation occurred, I was the primary on-call. My contractual, paid responsibility to Ruby Central was to defend the RubyGems.org service against potential threats. "

and

"Given Marty’s claims, the sudden permission deletions made no sense. Worried about the possibility of hacked accounts or some sort of social engineering, I took action as the primary on-call engineer to lock down the AWS account and prevent any actions by possible attackers."

and

"Within a couple of days, Ruby Central made an (unsigned) public statement, and various board members agreed to talk directly to maintainers. At that point, I realized that what I thought might have been a malicious takeover was both legitimate and deliberate, and Marty would never “fix the permissions structure”, or “follow up more” as he said. Once I understood the situation, I backed off to let Ruby Central take care of their “security audit”. I left all accounts in a state where they could recover access."

> According to RC's timeline, the password reset happened on September 19, but Arko did not disclose the issue to RC until September 30.

The password reset happened on September 19, and "within a few days" he realised it was an intentional/malicious takeover, and he walked away knowing they had the means to recover their own access - no longer his monkeys, no longer his circus. The 30 Sep date was when he was asked by someone if he still had access, and he discovered he did, and let them know immediately.

That all seems way more likely to be true and feels more plausible than anything Ruby Central has published over the last month or so...
by opo | 2025-10-10 06:53:32+00:00
>>…Also, I heartily disagree that utility scale solar is obviously cheaper. Transmission and distribution costs are the biggest cost on the grid, and utility scale solar needs to pay for that whereas residential solar drives down T&D costs.

From the 2024 numbers the LCOE for utility solar was $29 - $92 and the consumer rooftop solar LCOE was estimated to be $122 to $284. Depending on the projects, utility solar was estimated to usually be somewhere around 3-10 time cheaper than rooftop solar. If the transmission and distribution costs could bring the low cost of utility solar anywhere near the very high cost of consumer rooftop solar, that would be very concerning as that $122 - $284 cost estimate also doesn’t cover any of the costs of firming intermittency. I have never heard anyone else implying the costs of distributing the electricity from new utility solar projects could increase the cost that much. The money that has gone to pay for net metering to subsidize those very high consumer rooftop costs should have gone to utility solar and grid storage projects - the goal is to decarbonize the grid and the money should be spent where it will do the most good.
by BrenBarn | 2025-10-10 06:53:48+00:00
No, it doesn't. That info from the website is a gross mischaracterization and seemingly an attempt at self-promotion. It's like saying that your building has walls and a ceiling and is therefore in the same league as Notre Dame de Paris and the Taj Mahal.

As an example, some of Corinthian's colleges (Heald College) were accredited by WASC. . . until they declared bankruptcy in the face of multiple fraud investigations and a $30 million fine.

The accreditation is an extremely low bar. In my view it is so low it is harmful because it totally fails to distinguish legitimate schools from shady ones. Accredited colleges run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous.

That's not to say the school that this article is from is bad. I don't really know anything about this school. But the fact that they tout mere accreditation as putting them on par with Stanford and that they can't correctly name the University of California, Berkeley does not inspire confidence. The fact that it is nonprofit is a plus, though, as the worst of the crap-but-accredited schools are for-profit ones.
by timschmidt | 2025-10-10 06:53:57+00:00
> the unitree r1 is effectively a useless toy

Only because it's not yet attached to a reasonable AI, which is my point. It's not going to do any heavy lifting, but it could easily do basic house chores like cleaning up, folding laundry, etc if it were. The actuators and body platform are there, and economies of scale already at work.

I guess some folks just can't or won't put 2 and 2 together to predict the near future.
Show HN: AI for Science – Curated Resources
by aiboost | 2025-10-10 06:54:51+00:00
I curated "Awesome AI for Science": a concise, categorized list of tools, papers, datasets and starter paths for researchers across biology, chemistry, materials, climate, etc.

Not runnable code — just curated links + short descriptions to help researchers find relevant resources quickly.

Repo: https://github.com/ai-boost/awesome-ai-for-science
by wgjordan | 2025-10-10 06:55:20+00:00
I think the biggest missing piece in the opposing accounts of this incident is how exactly the production-access removal was communicated. There's a huge gap between how the two posts are framing the clarity of the communications that happened on Sept 18:

> September 18 2025 18:40 UTC: Ruby Central notifies Mr. Arko, via email, of the board’s decision to remove his RubyGems.org production access, and the termination of his on-call services.

> Marty Haught sent an email to the team within minutes, at 12:47pm PDT [19:47 UTC?], saying he was (direct quote) “terribly sorry” and “I messed up”. [...] the complete silence from Shan and the board, made it impossible to tell exactly who had been authorized to take what actions. As this situation occurred, I was the primary on-call.

André also mentioned that he disclosed further remaining production access a few days ago, on Oct 5. Looking forward to Ruby Central's followup post-incident review for this subsequent incident, which they failed to address or mention at all in their initial publication.
by tonyhart7 | 2025-10-10 06:55:46+00:00
"could it be time to move away from java, and shift towards everything being a native binary?"

they literally do just that for fuchsia, but idk if google can pull this off tbh the tech DEBT is huge and massive undertaking that even google can be nervous

I mean this is their own fault too tbh, imagine windows that try to release every new release every year and try hard to add feature on top of that and it break down all API underneath

that's what happen to android and ios is
by aiboost | 2025-10-10 06:55:47+00:00
Thanks for checking the list — I’m maintaining this repo and will update it based on feedback.

Quick notes:

1. This is a curated index, not runnable code — entries have one-line descriptions and tags to help scanning.

2. If something’s missing or outdated, please open an issue or submit a PR with a 1–2 line description + link — I’ll review and credit contributors quickly.

3. I’m happy to add domain-specific starter paths if people suggest them here.

Thanks for any feedback or suggestions!
by ho_schi | 2025-10-10 06:57:29+00:00
Pushing the market :)

Valve releases Half-Live 3 exclusive as Linux port only. Announces that Windows port will follow at some time undefined time.

That pushes the market. A lot of angry people will become more angry and write posts on the internet. The rest grabs an ISO and decides, that the game matters more than Win11.

That’s not crazy. That is the daily business of Windows, XBox, PlayStation and Nintendo. They even decide deliberately making new games platform exclusive for the newest console, forcing gamers into expensive upgrades for new consoles (and weirdly these people are happy about spending 500 for it).

PS: The shares of Valve will not drop. Valve is - not a stock market company - it is privately owned. That’s the reason why we nice actions from Valve, over long terms. I cannot say what will happen with Microsoft shares.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-10-10 06:59:06+00:00
The benefits of allowing people to make money by starting businesses are a separate discussion. I only meant to say that insurance companies are already legally prohibited from making "insane profits".

But to answer your question, there are many people looking to invest their time and money into profitable enterprises. Because insurance is a good that is very beneficial for society, we want people to invest in making it a thing. Therefore, we set up a system where the people who invested in its creation get a tiny fraction of the benefit it generates. There are many areas of life where this works great, like providing food and shelter, and I guess it wasn't obvious that insurance would be an exception for some reason.
by bigiain | 2025-10-10 06:59:21+00:00
They were all spitballing ideas about how to recover from the DHH-driven dropping of corporate sponsorship dollars, and how too keep the support lights on.

I think an offer of covering all the 2nd level support costs in return for the right - that Ruby Central's own T&Cs grant - to monetise company usage stats, is a reasonable offer.

The "other side's" alternative was to steal ownership and control of a whole bunch of volunteer gem authors work at the behest of a different corporate sponsor who was clearly demonstrating they wanted to be able to not only throw their weight around and force policies and priorities on RubyGems/RubyCentral, but also to make it personal by explicitly calling for long term contributors to be removed entirely on a whim.
by cess11 | 2025-10-10 06:59:39+00:00
If you look at old math treatises from important historical people you'll notice that they use very different notation from the one you're used to. Commonly concepts are also different, because those we use are derived over centuries from material produced without them and in a context where it was traditional to use other concepts to suss out conclusions.

But you have a point, and it's not just "our industry", it's society at large that has abandoned the old in favour of incessant forgetfulness and distaste for tradition and history. I'm by no means a nostalgic but I still mourn the harsh disjoint between contemporary human discourse and historical. Some nerds still read Homer and Cicero and Goethe and Ovid and so on but if you use a trope from any of those that would have been easily recognisable as such by europeans for much of the last millenium you can be quite sure that it won't generally be recognised today.

This also means that a lot of early and mid-modern literature is partially unavailable to contemporary people, because it was traditional to implicitly use much older motifs and riff on them when writing novels and making arguments, and unless you're aware of that older material you'll miss out on it. For e.g. Don Quixote most would need an annotated version which points out and makes explicit all the references and riffing, basically destroying the jokes by explaining them upfront.
by rys | 2025-10-10 07:00:42+00:00
He does explain it in his blog post. He changed it after the erratic communication and actions of RC leadership, then after realising what they were really doing, left them to complete their “security audit”, assuming they’d discover it themselves and take appropriate action as part of that. That never happened (which is wild), so he let them know.

They still don’t seem to be in complete control or understanding of the infrastructure they forcefully took control of.
by mbStavola | 2025-10-10 07:00:46+00:00
No but he was seeking it, from the email in the RubyCentral article and directly from TFA:

> I have no interest in any PII, commercially or otherwise. As my private email published by Ruby Central demonstrates, my entire proposal was based solely on company-level information, with no information about individuals included in any way.

Here Andre is downplaying his ask of the logs. Even if Andre didn't get them, the logs were desired. Had Ruby Central acquiesced the logs would've been parsed and sold. Might not be an issue for you but I am frankly not interested in having any data shared or sold like this.
by mappu | 2025-10-10 07:01:19+00:00
Some languages like Odin, ISPC, and Jai all have annotations that can automatically transform AoS to SoA. A key benefit is you can easily experiment to see if this helps your application, without doing a major refactor.

In https://github.com/golang/go/issues/64926 it was a bridge-too-far for the Go developers (fair enough) but maybe it could still happen one day.
by velvet_thunderr | 2025-10-10 07:01:31+00:00
One of the Depression’s most indelible symbols was the apple seller. Photographs of men hawking apples on street corners have come to represent the lows to which once stable people fell during the economic crisis, which slashed the United States’ gross national product by nearly half and plunged up to 50 percent of the residents of some communities into unemployment.
by Earw0rm | 2025-10-10 07:01:49+00:00
"Bitch" by Lucy Cooke has a chapter dedicated to this if you're interested. It's pop sci but a great read and offers some new perspectives.

Menopause seems to be a biological adaptation to this - most mammals don't have it, they'll keep on having young until they're totally exhausted, and die not long after. Humans seem to be adapted so that women have a wild-type generation's worth (15-20 years) of useful lifespan post fertility.
by teekert | 2025-10-10 07:03:07+00:00
One wonders of the term "Appstore" may get them into trouble with a certain company... A certain company that has a history of protecting anything coming close to generic terms and images they claimed, one example: [0]

[0] https://www.macrumors.com/2019/05/01/apple-opposes-german-cy...
by Nab443 | 2025-10-10 07:03:07+00:00
Interesting, my path is a bit like the opposite. I tend to avoid categories of tools that abstract too much the problem in a "magic" way for the same reason: you can't easily understand what's going on behind the scene, and you have to dive in each time you enter a corner case. If you can't control what it is doing on each step, then you can't be sure it will be doing what you expect and this can become a mental effort that outweight the tool benefits.
by iancmceachern | 2025-10-10 07:03:58+00:00
As a hardware engineer I hear this a lot from software/electrical folks.

It's Moore's law that largely drove what you describe.

Moore's law only applies to semiconductors.

Gears, motors and copper wire are not going to get 10x faster/cheaper every 18 months or whatever.

10 years from now gears will cost more, they will cost what they cost now plus inflation.

I've literally heard super smart YC founders say they just assume some sort of "Moore's law for hardware" will magicallyake their idea workable next year.

Computing power gets, and will continue to get, cheaper every day. Hardware, gears, nuts, bolts, doesnt.
by uecker | 2025-10-10 07:04:31+00:00
I think the correct comparison is a sharp knife. It is extremely useful and while there is a risk it is fully acceptable. The idea that we should all use plastic knifes because there are often accidents with knifes is wrong and so is the idea that we use should abandon C because of memory safety. I follow computer security issues for several decades, and while I think we should have memory safety IMHO the push and arguments are completely overblown - and they are especially not worth the complexity and issues of Rust. I never was personally impacted by a security exploit caused by memory safety or know anybody in my personal vicinity who was. I know many cases where people where affected by other kinds of security issues. So I think those are what we should focus on first. And having timely security updates is a hell lot more important than memory safety, so I am not happy that Rust now makes this harder.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-10-10 07:04:47+00:00
Well it was a BIG model. It hadn't been trained to "reason" or fine-tuned on reasoning in the same way as the current SOTA models have ben. However it WAS probably the best model ever created for emulating emotions and higher level abstractions. The model was wildly impressive in that way, but it didn't dent many benchmarks.

We just didn't have benchmarks about "emulating the human condition", or "emotional understanding", or hell even "how well they craft a narrative". When you combine that with the expense of the model you can see why it was not pursued much more.

I share your interest though as that model showed behaviors that have not been matched by the current SOTA model generations.
by globular-toast | 2025-10-10 07:05:06+00:00
This is the way I like to think about problems. Essentially you start backwards from the problem and (hopefully) arrive at a solution. If at some point in the depths of abstraction you lose touch or forget what that original problem was, you've already failed.

Building infrastructure for the sake of infrastructure is a good example of being completely out of touch. The problem was there weren't enough trains at the right time to the right places. The bridge builders clearly weren't thinking about that.

In my work this often happens because of the XY problem. People ask for X, but in fact they need Y and X is just their proposed solution. This would be like people asking for a new train from Cambridge to London, but in fact they are really going to Oxford and were only using London to connect.

There are also assumptions that even the most pedantic people don't mention all the time. If people ask for more comfortable seats on trains, they implicitly also mean at the right time. They don't mean a comfortable seat at 2:00 in the morning that takes 3x as long to get there.

I've often thought some kind of daily meditation to remind yourself of what the problems are is useful. There are the "bedrock" problems (like the train timetable) that never change, and there is the specific problem you are trying to solve right now (like connecting Cambridge to Oxford). I think it's worth thinking about it every day lest you lose sight and build the bridge nobody needed.
by ketzu | 2025-10-10 07:05:42+00:00
Now I get it, thanks for the effort of clarifying. I thought it was a misunderstanding of a niche meaning of "privatized" but it turns out, english and german do not share that meaning. Unfortunately I can't edit the comment to change the word anymore.

It seems "privatization" in english is still a very murky word, even though it does not include this meaning :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization I'll try to stop calling deutsche bahn "privatized" in english.