MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by adrian_b | 2025-10-15 09:52:14+00:00
This is a good summary of the history, but there is one small error.

The sentence "Hoare seems to have independently come up with the idea of sum and product types." is not true.

C.A.R. Hoare has first described his proposals in November 1965, in "Record Handling". This followed after a year the proposal of John McCarthy from October 1964, "Definition of new data types in ALGOL x".

Hoare and McCarthy were colleagues in the committee for designing a successor of ALGOL 60, where both proposals have been discussed and Hoare has taken explicitly the concepts of product types and union types (sum types) from McCarthy.

However, instead of using the "Cartesian" keyword used by McCarthy, Hoare has used the older keywords "record" and "record class", taken from COBOL 60, because "record class" and "Cartesian" really were the same method of deriving a new type. The term "record class" of Hoare was shortened to "class" in SIMULA 67, from where "class" has been taken by all object-oriented programming languages.

The proposal of Hoare was explicitly based on the proposal of McCarthy, on COBOL 60 and on the concept of pointers previously introduced in the languages CPL and Euler. However, like in those 2 languages, Hoare used the term "references" for pointers. The term pointer was used for the first time by IBM one year later, when they have added to PL/I a part of the features proposed by Hoare.

To records (named structures in PL/I), record classes (= product types), unions (sum types) and references (named pointers in PL/I) from his predecessors, Hoare has added a few new concepts, e.g. null pointers, enumerations (named finite sets), the operator "new", constructors and destructors (not named such). Overloaded operators had already been proposed by McCarthy.
by brailsafe | 2025-10-15 09:52:21+00:00
I find them useful for a few tasks that I'd procrastinate on and delay anyway, but for others, it would honestly be faster for me to just apply my skills without getting to an LLM review mode. I've found that using an LLM poisons my flow in a way that is a bit draining, whereas if I just put the work in to maintain context in my head, it's faster and more enjoyable.

Things like low-risk documentation, updating and creating unit tests along with fixing them in agent mode, describing how some code works etc.. are all at least a little useful for me.
by nchmy | 2025-10-15 09:52:25+00:00
Thanks for confirming. I don't know that it has to be framed as a "business perspective" though. I'm a solo dev for a non-profit project, so ignoring the 5% is just a matter of pragmatism.

I most defintiely do not care about tinkerers, and in fact would generally classify them as something akin to attackers. I just want to allow as many people to use the app as possible, while keeping things simple and secure.
by labarilem | 2025-10-15 09:52:27+00:00
I'm building a manually curated catalog of games made by the HN community. Currently the collection has data up to the end of 2022. The plan, of course, is to gather all data up to today and then keep updating the collection. You can browse the catalog at these addresses:

- https://hackernews.games/

- https://hn-games.marcolabarile.me/
by tankenmate | 2025-10-15 09:52:35+00:00
Somewhere auth needs to be done, somewhere, somehow, and some when. And this is done with cookies (be it CSRF, auth token, JWT, etc). There has to be some form of mechanism for a client to prove that a) it is the client it claims it is, and therefore b) it has the permission to request what it needs from the server.

And, the server shouldn't trust the client "trust me bro" style.

So, at the end of the day it doesn't matter whether it is a "rose by another name", i.e. it doesn't matter whether you call it a CSRF token, auth token, JWT, or whatever, it still needs to satisfy the following; a) the communication is secure (preferably encryption), b) the server can recognise the token when it sees it (headers (of which cookies are one type), etc), c) the server doesn't need to trust the client (it's easiest if the server creates the token, but it could also be a trusted OOB protocol like TOTP), and d) it identifies a given role (again it's easiest if it identifies a unique client (like a user or similar)).

So a name is just a name, but there needs to be a cookie or a cryptographically secure protocol to ensure that an untrusted client is who it says it is. Cookies are typically easier than crypto secure protocols. Frankly it doesn't really matter what you call it, what matters is that it works and is secure.
by pjmlp | 2025-10-15 09:52:40+00:00
Only for those not following history of graphics chips.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TMS34010

> The TMS34010 can execute general purpose programs and is supported by an ANSI C compiler.

> The successor to the TMS34010, the TMS34020 (1988), provides several enhancements including an interface for a special graphics floating point coprocessor, the TMS34082 (1989). The primary function of the TMS34082 is to allow the TMS340 architecture to generate high quality three-dimensional graphics. The performance level of 60 million vertices per second was advanced at the time.

Like these, there were several others other the IBM PC own history.
by gwd | 2025-10-15 09:53:17+00:00
But it's worse than that. Even if in theory the system could be fixed, we don't actually know how to fix it for real, the way we can fix a normal computer program.

The reason we can't fix them is because we have no idea how they work; and the reason we have no idea how they work is this:

1. The "normal" computer program, which we do understand, implement a neural network

2. This neural network is essentially a different kind of processor. The "actual" computer program for modern deep learning systems is the weights. That is, weights : neural net :: machine language : normal cpu

3. We don't program these weights; we literally summon them out of the mathematical aether by the magic of back-propagation and gradient descent.

This summoning is possible because the "processor" (the neural network architecture) has been designed to be differentiable: for every node we can calculate the slope of the curve with respect to the result we wanted, so we know "The final output for this particular bit was 0.7, but we wanted it to be 1. If this weight in the middle of the network were just a little bit lower, then that particular output would have been a little bit higher, so we'll bump it down a bit."

And that's fundamentally why we can't verify their properties or "fix" them the way we can fix normal computer programs: Because what we program is the neural network; the real program, which runs on top of that network, is summoned and not written.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-15 09:53:29+00:00
Well yeah, but that's in part a problem with always-on doorbell cameras. On paper they're illegal in many countries (privacy laws, you can't just put up a camera and record anyone out in public), in practice the police asks people to put their doorbell cameras in a registry so they can request footage if needs be.

Anyway, I get wanting to see who's ringing your doorbell in e.g. apartment buildings, and that extending to a house, especially if you have a bigger one. But is there a reason those cameras need to be on all the time?
by vladvasiliu | 2025-10-15 09:54:00+00:00
Sure, I'm all for paying taxes if you get good services in return.

But what kills me is when buying stuff from the US and paying whatever import taxes are required on top of shipping, and VAT on top of all that, you still end up cheaper.

Taking GP's example, shipping, taxes on the product + shipping won't end up more than doubling the initial price.

Hell, things are so ridiculous that a while ago I bought an Italian-made[0] tripod and gear head from BH in NY. Had it shipped by UPS (large and heavy parcel, so not cheap), paid taxes on the complete price, and it was still way cheaper than buying locally from France.

--

[0] It pretends to be actually made in Italy, not only an Italian brand off-shoring production to Asia.
by dingdingdang | 2025-10-15 09:54:08+00:00
>> to perform up to Apple's typical standards of polish and control.

>i no longer believe they have kept on to the standards in general.

One 100% agree with this, if I compare AI's ability to speed up the baseline for me in terms of programming Golang (hard/tricky tasks clearly still require human input - watch out for I/O ops) with Apple's lack of ability to integrate it in even the simplest of ways.. things are just peculiar on the Apple front. Bit similar to how MS seems to be gradually loosing the ability to produce a version of Windows that people want to run due to organisational infighting.
by franga2000 | 2025-10-15 09:54:39+00:00
You can't boycott a bank, they all do the same shit and you need to have one.

With a government, however, you can go through your MPs, use administrative procedures to lodge complaints, etc. They also don't have Visa/Mastercard forcing them into attestation, it's usually just because the contractor thought it made things More Secure™.
by sofixa | 2025-10-15 09:54:41+00:00
> Deaths, US has 1111 and Europe 662, more than half of which happened in what's more accurately described as a terrorist attack rather than a school shooting (the Beslan school siege [1]).

A terrorist attack where the anti-terrorist special forces used tanks and thermobaric missiles against the school premises, killing many hostages in the process and giving plenty of warning to the terrorists to kill even more. A horrific event all around.
by tryhavana | 2025-10-15 09:54:56+00:00
Havana is an AI-powered student recruitment tool designed to significantly boost enrollment for educational institutions. It solves the critical problem of overwhelmed admissions teams struggling to engage thousands of potential students efficiently, many of whom are unresponsive or unqualified.

Havana provides 24/7, lifelike, and multilingual communication with prospective students via calls, texts, and emails, instantly responding to inquiries and ensuring no lead goes cold due to slow follow-up. It proactively revives dormant leads in your CRM, turning past investments into new opportunities. By automating the qualification process, Havana ensures human advisors only spend time on high-potential students, drastically improving efficiency.

This service is for admissions directors, VPs of enrollment, and international recruitment managers who need to hit ambitious growth targets, reduce staff burnout, and scale their outreach without proportional budget increases. Havana integrates seamlessly with existing CRMs, empowering human recruiters to focus on building relationships and closing enrollments, making their jobs more fulfilling and productive.
by nchmy | 2025-10-15 09:57:20+00:00
I don't think this is accurate. As your parent comment said, Csrf defenses (tokens, origin/Sec-Fetch-Site) serve a different purpose from Auth token/jwt. The latter says that your browser is logged in as a user. The former says "the request actually came from a genuine action on your page, rather than pwned.com disguising a link to site.com/delete-account.

You're conflating the two types of Auth/Defense.
by Rebuff5007 | 2025-10-15 09:58:05+00:00
What exactly is the point you are making?

It is very reasonable to think that our attention (in the form of editorialized reporting, or funded initiatives) is being spent on actual material problems affecting most people, and this article is claiming this is a gap here... which I, and maybe many others think is valuable.

> how many times can you write the same thing "american's are fat"?

Until its less of a problem? Like any difficult problem in the world, you can keep coming at it from different ways, use the latest / most effective tools of the day, look for new opportunities, etc, etc.
by aitchnyu | 2025-10-15 09:58:16+00:00
Looking at the points you made and examples, I would cobble a similar tool with Django, writing only CLI commands with no HTTP endpoints. And most LLMs are already fluent in Django.

- Schemas and relationships live in models.py, actual data is persisted in Sqlite - I can dump to JSON or XML with Django utils for LLMs - Query engine can simplify reuse Django syntax, like `Firm.objects.get(owner_name__like="john", date__gt=2015)`, fetch related names, aggregate subqueries - Format as tables
by justinclift | 2025-10-15 09:59:46+00:00
It's very likely worth trying ComfyUI on it too: https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI

Installation instructions: https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI#nvidia

It's a webUI that'll let you try a bunch of different, super powerful things, including easily doing image and video generation in lots of different ways.

It was really useful to me when benching stuff at work on various gear. ie L4 vs A40 vs H100 vs 5th gen EPYC cpus, etc.
by AIorNot | 2025-10-15 10:00:00+00:00
Consider this: In the movie, the Truman show: Truman is living on a giant hollwyood soundtage with thousands upon thousands of cameras following his every move allowing the TV Audience to subjectively experience his life - his life is writ large on the minds of billions of people- but it is only one life.

Now imagine instead- If the Universe is conscious, instead of that being one big conscious observer looking down; perhaps instead we (each of us humans, animals etc as life act as living observers) living our first person subjective perspectives like a multitude of cameras for the universe to experience itself on Earth

And we can imagine that happening at all scales simultaneously across all living worlds and other forms of mind throughout the cosmos, ie consciousness as first person observers might be as innumerable as the number of stars in the sky, and these living perspectives or subjective cameras are dotting the whole immensity all unify to provide the universe with an eye on itself in infinite perspective ..

Doesn't that make up for humans being puny tiny lifespans - we (our insignificant bodies) are just disposable cameras for consciousness
by cc81 | 2025-10-15 10:00:29+00:00
Maybe Linus has a point

>"It looks like the IT security world has hit a new low," Torvalds begins. "If you work in security, and think you have some morals, I think you might want to add the tag-line: "No, really, I'm not a whore. Pinky promise" to your business card. Because I thought the whole industry was corrupt before, but it's getting ridiculous," he continues. "At what point will security people admit they have an attention-whoring problem?"

https://www.techpowerup.com/242340/linus-torvalds-slams-secu...
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-15 10:01:04+00:00
Compared to Cambodia, sure, but it's an international crime gang, with this particular one being just one branch. I wonder if this was their biggest hoard or if they had more?

Really poor financial management to have all that money concentrated that much though. It either means they dropped the ball bigly, or this is spare change for them... although Bitcoin's market cap is $2.24 trillion at the moment, $15 billion is a significant chunk of that.
by nchmy | 2025-10-15 10:01:34+00:00
I'm confused. In my mind, you only really need to keep the server secure, as that's where the data is. Auth cookies and csrf protections (eg Sec-Fetch-Site) are both used towards protecting the server from invalid requests (not logged in, or not coming from your actual site).

What are you referring to when you talk about keeping the browser secure?
by ifwinterco | 2025-10-15 10:01:53+00:00
I literally said that: 1. It's way worse in the US 2. It still happens in Europe

That seems also like what you're saying?

Edit: It is true that in the UK this is pretty much unheard of since handguns were banned after Dunblane (it is literally impossible to get a handgun legally, Team GB pistol shooters have to train abroad).

So yes to be fair that kind of very extreme approach does seem to work so far
by Festro | 2025-10-15 10:01:57+00:00
Starfleet officers often perform tasks that we would called programming. Most often its engineers doing so (a term we use for programmers now!)

B'elanna Torres reprograms a Cardassian ship's computer. The Doctor is a holographic program coded by a Starfleet researcher. Multiple ship's crew across shows and seasons code their own holodeck 'programs'. Chief O'Brien makes computer subsystems to house a sentient computer program. Spock often dealt with computers and analysed them in ways akin to software analysis, including breaking a program by feeding it paradoxical information.

Star Trek may not call anyone a programmer by name, but clearly the science and engineering officers are proficient programmers to varying degrees.
by B1FF_PSUVM | 2025-10-15 10:02:00+00:00
I went looking for pictures (in the photo the box looked like a tray to me ...) and found an interesting piece by Canonical touting their Ubuntu base for the OS: https://canonical.com/blog/nvidia-dgx-spark-ubuntu-base

P.S. exploded view from the horse's mouth: https://www.nvidia.com/pt-br/products/workstations/dgx-spark...
by arnaudsm | 2025-10-15 10:02:08+00:00
This is exciting, exceptionally the firmware & binary blob foundations that are the biggest roadblock.

Concerning the UI, I wish we had another attempt at a web-based mobile OS. FirefoxOS was too early, but APIs are much more mature now, and WASM offers great performance for low-level stuff. I might work on this full time when I retire.
by YokoZar | 2025-10-15 10:02:25+00:00
While it's true that preventing cancer means you're likely to die in a few years of heart disease, and preventing heart disease means you're likely to die in a few years of cancer, solving both will add dramatically more than both effects combined to both life and healthspan.

Those really are the big two - as the graphs in the article show, the next biggest things are much smaller and much less likely to get you, which means you live a lot longer and healthier.
by Zababa | 2025-10-15 10:02:41+00:00
Yeah that's a good point and the sibling comment seems to be pointing in the same direction. You could take a look at Steve Yegge's beads (https://steve-yegge.medium.com/introducing-beads-a-coding-ag..., https://github.com/steveyegge/beads) but the writeup is not super detailed.

I think your last point is pretty important, that all that we see is done by experienced people, and that today we don't have a good way to teaching "how to effectively use AI agents" other than saying to people "use them a lot, apply software engineering best practices like testing". That is a big issue, compounded because that stuff is new, there are lots of different tools, and they evolve all the time. I don't have a better answer here than "many programmers that I respect have tried using those tools and are sticking with it rather than going back" (with exceptions, like Karpathy's nanochat), and "the best way to learn today is to use them, a lot".

As for "what are they really capable of", I can't give a clear answer. They do make easy stuff easier, especially outside of your comfort zone, and seem to make hard stuff come up more often and earlier (I think because you do stuff outside your comfort zone/core experience zone ; or because you know have to think more carefully about design over a shorter period of time than before with less direct experience with the code, kind of like in Steve Yegge's case ; or because when hard stuff comes up it's stuff they are less good at handling so that means you can't use them).

The lower bound seems to be "small CLI tool", the higher bound seems to be "language learning app with paid users (sottaku I think? the dev talks on twitter. Lots of domain knowledge in japanese here to check the app itself) ; implementing a model on pytorch by someone that didn't know how to code before (00000005 seconds or something like this on twitter, has used all these models and tools a lot); reporting security issues that were missed in cURL", middle bound "very experienced dev shipping a feature faster and while doing other things on a semi mature codebase (Ghostty)", middle bound too is "useful code reviews". That's about the best I can give you I think.
by tankenmate | 2025-10-15 10:02:42+00:00
There's server security and there's client security. From what I've seen in these comments people are focused on the client security and are either a) ignoring server security, or b) don't understand server security.

But the server security is the primary security, because it's the one with the resources (in the money analogy it's the bank).

So yes, we do want to secure the client, but if the attacker has enough control of your computer to get your cookies then it's already game over. Like I said you can have time bounded CSRF tokens (be they cookies or whatever else, URL encoded, etc who cares) to prevent replay attacks. But at the end of the day if an attacker can get your cookies in real time you're done for, it's game over already. If they want to do a man in the middle attack (i.e. click on a fake "proxy" URL) then having the "secure" flag should be enough. If the server checks the cookie against the client's IP address, time, HMAC, other auth attributes, will then prevent the attack. If they attacker takes control of your end device, you've already lost.
by Waterluvian | 2025-10-15 10:03:03+00:00
I’m still not sure what exactly the trucker protest people wanted (before they got co-opted by a bunch of additional groups with all their additional grievances). It was the U.S. requiring Canadian truckers to be vaccinated and have documentation if they wanted to cross the border. The federal government was responsible for making these documents available for truckers who wanted to do so.
by alex-moon | 2025-10-15 10:03:47+00:00
Fascinated by the cluster of Australian, British and South African. As an Australian living in UK, I hear an enormous difference between these accents - even just in the British ones, the Yorkshireman and the Geordie stick out like a sore thumb to me - the narcissism of small differences perhaps. Interestingly, my partner, who is from England, often says, of various Australians we hear (either on TV or my friends), that they sound British to her. I, meanwhile, can pick an Australian from very few words. What are we hearing differently? It is a mystery to me.
by furyg3 | 2025-10-15 10:04:21+00:00
I can imagine that there could be a case of parallel construction to build a case to get a specific desired outcome. I also think that if you're right and this is an example of a 'mild' case of mismanaged assets it's still pretty egregious.

I find the even milder circular financing of deals like nVidia investing in OpenAI to be concerning.