MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by behnamoh | 2025-10-20 02:23:30+00:00
Why is it that languages like this don't scale? It's not the first time I see a powerful language that got forgotten. Other examples include SmallTalk and Common Lisp (tiny community).

It is because some languages are "too powerful"? What does that say about our industry? That we're still not that advanced of a specie to be able to handle the full power of such languages?

I say that because it seems languages that are "dumbed down" seem to absolutely dominate our world (Python, Ruby, JS, etc.)
by anigbrowl | 2025-10-20 02:24:21+00:00
If you made it to the end, you may have noticed that the bulk of the story is lifted from a book, which accounts for a change in tone. If someone buys or borrows a book and sits down to read the whole thing, they're expecting a different style of writing from a newspaper article. Also, this is very obviously a weekend magazine article aiming to satisfy a combination of intellectual interest, reader vanity, and curiosity.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-10-20 02:25:49+00:00
>It may be learning, but it’s still not an intrinsic goal, nor is it driven by an intrinsic goal.

That depends on what we mean by “intrinsic.” In biology, goals are not mystical. They emerge from feedback systems that evolved to keep the organism alive. Hunger, curiosity, and reproduction are reinforcement loops encoded in chemistry. They feel intrinsic only because they are built into the substrate.

Seen that way, “intrinsic” is really about where the feedback loop closes. In humans, it closes through sensory input and neurochemistry. In artificial systems, it can close through memory, feedback, and reinforcement mechanisms. The system does not need to feel the goal for it to exist. It only needs to consistently pursue objectives based on input, context, and outcome. That is already happening in systems that learn from memory and update behavior over time. The process is different in form, but not in structure.

>Nowhere did I say that they aren’t useful or disruptive to labor markets, just that they aren’t intelligent in the way we are.

You are getting a bit off track here. Those examples were not about labor markets; they were about your earlier claim that “LLMs fail.” They clearly don’t. When models are diagnosing medical cases, writing production code, and reasoning across multiple domains, that is not failure. That is a demonstration of capability expanding in real time.

Your claim only holds if the status quo stays frozen. But it isn’t. The trendlines are moving fast, and every new model expands the range of what these systems can do with less supervision and more coherence. Intelligence is not a static definition tied to biology; it is a functional property of systems that can learn, adapt, and generalize. Whether that happens in neurons or silicon does not matter.

What we are witnessing is not imitation but convergence. Each generation of models moves closer to human-level reasoning not because they copy our brains, but because intelligence itself follows universal laws of feedback and optimization. Biology discovered one route. We discovered another. The trajectory is what matters, and the direction is unmistakable.
by lmm | 2025-10-20 02:26:05+00:00
> You can't audit open source vendors either.

You can audit a lot of Debian's infrastructure - their build systems are a lot more transparent than the overwhelming majority of software vendors (which is not to say there isn't still room for improvement). You can also skip their prebuilt packages and build everything on your own systems, which of course you then have the ability to audit.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-10-20 02:26:51+00:00
And beanie babies, right? Speculative bubbles like Bitcoin grow until there are no more greater fools to pay off the people at the top of the pyramid. Then as people realize they can't fool someone else to buy their beanie baby for more than what they paid for it, the price quickly drops to 0. Bitcoin has the added benefit that North Korea can take it from you without getting access to your closet.
by waterTanuki | 2025-10-20 02:27:50+00:00
> Many companies are already getting direct value out of AI.

Source that immediately refutes this claim: https://www.artificialintelligence-news.com/wp-content/uploa...

> Despite $30–40 billion in enterprise investment into GenAI, this report uncovers a surprising result in that 95% of organizations are getting zero return
by kop316 | 2025-10-20 02:27:52+00:00
That's addressed right here:

https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1o9i0or/bitlo...

The Reply: https://old.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1o9i0or/bitlo...

"Thanks, but I tried that already. There's just one key there and that's for the Windows boot drive. I tried the key on the drives but it didn't work."
by hufdr | 2025-10-20 02:28:27+00:00
Although this advice is quite comprehensive, I think it assumes that you've already kept up with the pace of the course. In some schools, the curriculum moves so fast that students are thrown into problem sets before they’ve even grasped the basics. I’d love to see how he would advise someone who's already fallen behind and trying to catch up. For many people, that’s the more realistic situation.
What would you differently, if you could redesign Linux userland from scratch?
by signa11 | 2025-10-20 02:29:10+00:00
Prompted from a similar discussion at lobsters (and i am copying the text verbatim)

If we kept Linux the kernel exactly as it is today, but redesigned everything in userland from scratch (the init system, the filesystem hierarchy, the shell, libc, packaging, configuration, dbus, polkit, PAM, etc.), what would you do differently, and why?

here is the link to the original lobsters post: https://lobste.rs/s/ko5i9y/if_you_could_redesign_linux_userland_from
by dataflow | 2025-10-20 02:29:46+00:00
> I think the whole idea that a build system just fetches resources from outside of the build environment is fundamentally broken

I think your phrasing is a bit overbroad. There's nothing fundamentally broken with the build system fetching resources; what's broken is not verifying what it's fetching. Audit the package beforehand and have your build system verify its integrity after downloading, and you're fine.
by jhgg | 2025-10-20 02:30:05+00:00
Risk of deadlock is real if you have processes calling each-other in a cyclic way. e.g. process A sends GenServer call to process B, that then sends a GenServer call to process A to in order to handle the original call. However, process A is busy waiting on B to reply to it's initial call.

This is rarely a problem in practice however.
by kop316 | 2025-10-20 02:30:13+00:00
Heh, I have to use Windows 11 at work, and one day it just decided to delete all of my local files. To add insult to injury, for whatever reason it left all of the files that were in the Recycle Bin.

My only saving grace was that I recently started to use the business' OneDrive, so I only lost a couple days worth of data.
by q534 | 2025-10-20 02:30:38+00:00
Last week I built a small browser game — or maybe a thought experiment. It started as a curiosity about how probability feels when you live it instead of just calculating it.

You start a simulated life. Every second, a random event might end it. There’s no strategy, no goal, no progress bar. Just a silent question:

how long would you last if life were reduced to chance?

It was loosely inspired by that classic Quora scenario:

“You press a button and receive $100 million, but a random person dies instantly.” Except this time, you’re the random person.

After a few runs, I realized I wasn’t really playing anymore — I was just watching, waiting. And that waiting became the point.

Sartre once said we are “condemned to be free.” This simulation doesn’t offer choices, only outcomes — but somehow it still feels like freedom.

You can try it here: https://probability.games/games/death-simulator

It’s not meant to be morbid, just an experiment in what randomness feels like when it’s personal.
by NL807 | 2025-10-20 02:30:50+00:00
>IMHO the actor model is great until you need to share something across processes

Incidentally that's what actors are designed for, passing data and being able to mutate their state without use of explicit synchronisation. You either copy or transfer ownership of data from one actor to the next via message passing. Actual sharing should be only done if the data in question is globally immutable.
by jrowen | 2025-10-20 02:31:20+00:00
In my experience I don't really see the word empathy being weaponized like you describe (in actual good-will conversation, as opposed to a generalized social media blast). My first instinct is to believe that you may very well lack empathy for reacting in such a way, but it's also possible that some individual[s] did unfairly or harshly use it to shame you.

But this just seems like any kind of disagreement on cultural expectations for interpersonal interactions. Some people will value what they call "empathy" more than others. We can't really say in the general case whether anyone levying these terms is doing so fairly or not, and all one can do is try to route around or find common ground with people that don't...empathize...with their methodologies. If that ends up being most people, then you (the royal you) may be an outlier (or "psycho" in the parlance of our times) and that's gonna be a tough road.

In other words, how is "telling somebody that they lack empathy" that much different from "accusing someone of failing to consider other people's values and enquiring about what those values are"?
by jcranmer | 2025-10-20 02:31:47+00:00
> While 10 LOC vs 50 LOC doesn’t matter, when commas enter the number, it’s a safe bet that things have gone off the rails.

There are times when even a 1,000 LOC function is the better solution. The best example I can think of involve a switch statement with a very high branch factor (e.g., 100), where the individual cases are too simple to break out into separate functions. Something like the core loop of an interpreter will easily become a several-thousand line function.
by soupy-soup | 2025-10-20 02:31:51+00:00
Reading through those quotes, I get the impression that Stallman doesn't understand why underaged people can't give consent to people considered adults by the legal system. It falls in line with his other misunderstandings or lack of awareness on social issues.

He's right that young people have agency and can make informed decisions about themselves, but fails to recognize the social pressures that means that young people often aren't in a position to say no, or even understand that they can can say no. There are financial, social, and even legal power imbalances between minors and non-minors that make it impossible to assert that certain interactions are consentual, even if they aren't of a sexual nature. It's these power imbalances that are the issue, not whether or not a young person has enough factually to understand what they are consenting to. Interactions like this are abuses of the power that adults have over children, and that's a big part of what makes them so disturbing.
by hnburnsy | 2025-10-20 02:32:25+00:00
For all those complaining about empty units, it's this a good thing? This small patch of real estate (it is a narrow skyscraper at 15:1 with a footprint square base with each side measuring 93.5 feet) is generating millions in property tax revenue without having to 'service' its residents, with no additional children to educate, no additional drivers on the streets, and no additional people in the parks.

Also recommend watching the B1M video on this that others have recommended.
by mrheosuper | 2025-10-20 02:32:28+00:00
I've also had a lot of fun with those cheap MCUs, for 20 cents, it's kind of insane value: 32-bit core with dma, enough flash and memory to do most of basic stuff, decent peripheral (ADC, timer, i2c, spi, uart). Recently i made an audio spectrum on the cheap ssd1306 screen).

And the surprising thing is its IDE is based on Visual Studio Code, not Eclipse like other vendors (Yeah you, i talking to you, ST), so it's much sleeker.
by musicale | 2025-10-20 02:33:09+00:00
Incompatible communication styles (turn-taking vs. constructive overlapping) can be frustrating. Turn-takers may consider overlappers to be rude and aggressive and try to stop the overlap, which overlappers may in turn consider rude and aggressive; yet full-duplex is more efficient than half-duplex and even basic ACKs are important for reliable communication.

Unfortunately Zoom is 1/N-duplex, which ruins it for everyone.
by garganzol | 2025-10-20 02:33:11+00:00
The only kind of person who would say that they hate virtualization is a hardware vendor. Because of conflict of interests.

In this light, Broadcom, a hardware vendor, who buys a popular virtualization product does a "smart" move - it supposedly eliminates the very thing that eats away their profits. But it only looks smart to the vendor itself. For everyone else, the move looks unprofessional and incompetent.
by array_key_first | 2025-10-20 02:33:16+00:00
You eventually run out of jobs.

Every time we progress with new tech and eliminate jobs, the new jobs are more complicated. Eventually people can't do them because they're not smart enough or precise enough or unique enough.

Each little step, we leave people behind. Usually we don't care much. Sure some people are destined to a life of poverty, but at least most people aren't.

Eventually though even the best of the humans can't keep up, and there's just nothing left.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-10-20 02:33:59+00:00
It's a great device. Power efficient, standard x86_64 Intel so great Linux support, lots of expansion options for USB and M.2.

Making a carrier board for the Mu is definitely not for beginners though. It's got loads of high speed I/O lines. Even actual engineers find high speed PCB design daunting. Also, the functions of those HSIO lines are hardcoded into the firmware. You need special BIOS builds for a board with PCIe or USB 3. Change too much stuff and you're going to have to ask the manufacturer to support your configuration.
by moomoo11 | 2025-10-20 02:35:22+00:00
What’s the complexity of your project? If you’re not a developer and it’s a simple project, I’d say do notion pages.

If devs like it I’m sure they will contribute to make a legit docs site for it.

Good way to start imo that has zero friction (for you) and I wouldn’t personally mind it since you get public URL’s.

Or use Codex or CC to make a markdown site hosted on GitHub io
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-10-20 02:36:08+00:00
I think you misunderstand what they are saying - doing a good job of fine tuning is difficult.

Training an LLM from scratch is trivial - training a good one is difficult. Fine tuning is trivial - doing a good job is difficult. Hitting a golf ball is trivial - hitting a 300 yard drive down the middle of the fairway is difficult.
by AlotOfReading | 2025-10-20 02:36:37+00:00
Are you thinking of the Taklamakan? People wander around the Gobi as a way of life. It's not quite as extreme as you're painting it.

In any case, the traditional routes for the northern silk roads passed south of these walls through the Hexi corridor, at least until the Mongol period when many of them rerouted through the Orkhon valley north of the Gobi. Separate from the silk roads, there was a lot of trade/conflict between the northern Chinese states and the various Mongolian polities like the Liao. Managing that was both economically and existentially necessary for the border states like the xixia.

Also, nomads usually moved to the tax collectors instead of the other way around. More practical that way.
by dhx | 2025-10-20 02:37:59+00:00
There's a few obvious gaps, seemingly still unsolved today:

1. Build environments may not be adequately sandboxed. Some distributions are better than others (Gentoo being an example of a better approach). The idea is that the package specification specifies the full list of files to be downloaded initially into a sandboxed build environment, and scripts in that build environment when executed are not able to then access any network interfaces, filesystem locations outside the build environment, etc. Even within a build of a particular software package, more advanced sandboxing may segregate test suite resources from code that is built so that a compromise of the test suite can't impact built executables, or compromised documentation resources can't be accessed during build or eventual execution of the software.

2. The open source community as a whole (but ultimately in the hands of distribution package maintainers) are not being alerted to and apply caution for unverified high entropy in source repositories. Similar in concept to nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers.[1] Typical examples of unverified high entropy where a supply chain attack can hide payload: images, videos, archives, PDF documents etc in test suites or bundled with software as documentation and/or general resources (such as splash screens in software). It may also include IVs/example keys in code or code comments, s-boxes or similar matrices or arrays of high entropy data which may not be obvious to human reviewers how the entropy is low (such as a well known AES s-box) rather than high and potentially undifferentiated from attacker shellcode. Ideally when a package maintainer goes to commit a new package or package update, are they alerted to unexplained high entropy information that ends up in the build environment sandbox and required to justify why this is OK?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing-up-my-sleeve_number
by whoisthemachine | 2025-10-20 02:39:59+00:00
For those interested, funding gaps only really became a thing in the 1970's, during Ford's administration [0]. It wasn't until a new interpretation of the Anti-Deficiency Act of 1880 that they became known as "shutdowns" in 1980 [1]. So a relatively recent phenomenon.

Hilariously, prior to that law, the executive branch would overspend early in the year, forcing more spending from congress in order to meet their contracts [2].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_shutdowns_in_the_Un...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antideficiency_Act#Provisions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coercive_deficiency
by chris_armstrong | 2025-10-20 02:40:12+00:00
This resonates. I spent a fair bit of time thinking about library design for an OCaml library that didn’t directly expose more complicated language features (like functors and first class modules) where they weren’t needed.

(I presented on it recently: https://www.chrisarmstrong.dev/posts/icfp-wrapup-2025-10-18)
by hibikir | 2025-10-20 02:40:42+00:00
In your typical large company, there's always enough nebulous process as to minimize personal accountability for any decision that is made. There might be a decision maker in practice, but there will be enough wide meetings and committees so that the groups as a whole can make bad decision, or a very immoral decisions, with minimal risk of consequences for anyone involved. Raising tough questions in those rooms is a good way to not make friends, and end up isolated in an unimportant position after the next semi-anual reorg.

Even in companies with a strong CEO who is, in fact, lording over everyone, mechanisms will be built to make sure said CEO's bad decisions were group decisions, and that most of the people around him agreed.
by alexjplant | 2025-10-20 02:41:10+00:00
> the console had some interesting constraints that made development tricky

The ones that come to mind are the tiny 4KB texture cache, high memory latency (thanks Rambus), and inefficient RCP microcode. The N64 could have been so much more with a few architectural tweaks but developers liked the Playstation much better on account of its simplicity despite it being technically inferior in most respects.
by imoverclocked | 2025-10-20 02:41:13+00:00
Cyclomatic complexity is not equal to LOC and cyclomatic complexity of a switch can be seen as adding just 1 to its enclosing function. Either way, LOC is still not a great metric while cyclomatic complexity approaches a better one.

In my experience, there are very few places where something can't be broken up to reduce cognitive overhead or maintainability. When a problem is solved in a way as to make it difficult to do then maybe it's better to approach the problem differently.
by cam_l | 2025-10-20 02:41:34+00:00
It does have tabs, you are probably just stuck on an old version because windows update broke.

The only feature that windows maybe kinda does better is the preview pane, but even then, it regularly loses certain file types and in the latest update it started taking 5 seconds or more just to render a text file.

Anyway, still doesn't come close to Dolphin.
by mindslight | 2025-10-20 02:42:19+00:00
We're talking like a couple hundred pounds. Push back on the top, pop in two 2x4's (one under each side, lengthwise, not across), then let it down and walk it forward.

I just changed the casters on my 42U rack, without moving (or shutting down) any of the machines. Now that required some deliberateness.
by ashton314 | 2025-10-20 02:42:45+00:00
> Whenever you message another process and need a reply there is a risk of deadlock.

There are edge cases, sure, but I have yet to encounter a deadlock after 7 years of professional work with Elixir.

> I didn't find any primtives in OTP for handling this

See `GenServer.call/2`. This covers 99% of call/return patters in distributed systems. I take it you haven’t written much (any?) Elixir because you would have found this function.

> The actor model doesn't really offer any benefit over other models while bringing significant downsides.

Actors are a way better abstraction for pretty much any application-level code I can think of. I say this having written Go, Rust, and Elixir. What downsides are you talking about specifically?

> Plus, there are major downsides to using an unpopular platform like Erlang/BEAM.

The BEAM is popular. At least 3 different serious languages use it. What down sites are you waving your hands up here?
by pixl97 | 2025-10-20 02:43:03+00:00
I think most users that have not ran the systems themselves really have no clue how bad spam really is. It can quickly spiral to the point were 99.9% of the incoming posts on a system are spam, porn where it doesn't belong, or otherwise illegal content. Simply put even if you as the user filter 99.5% of the spam the system is still majority spam.

IP blocks and initial filtering typically make a massive difference in total system load so you can get to the point that the majority of the posts are 'legitimate'. After that bot filtering is needed to remove the more complex attacks against the system.