MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xg15 | 2025-10-31 09:56:08+00:00
I get the idea behind NaN != NaN, but has there ever been any instance where this design decision has made practical code better instead of becoming a tripping hazard and requiring extensive special casing?

I'm also not a fan of the other property that NaN evaluates to false for all three of <, > and =, even though I don't have a good idea what to do otherwise.

I think as programmers, we usually assume that "not (a > b)" implies "a <= b" and vice-versa and often rely on that assumption implicitly. NaN breaks that assumption, which could lead to unexpected behavior.

Consider something like this (in JS) :

function make_examples(num_examples) { if (num_examples <= 0) { throw Error("num_examples must be 1 or more"); } const examples = []; for (let i = 0; i < num_examples; i++) { examples.push(make_example(i)); } // we assume that num_examples >= 1 here, so the loop ran at least once and the array cannot be empty. postprocess_first_example(examples[0]); // <-- (!) return examples; }

If somehow num_examples were NaN, the (!) line would fail unexpectedly because the array would be empty.
by jstummbillig | 2025-10-31 09:56:18+00:00
What do most people do, when the power goes out?

We usually try to figure out how to build reliability/redundancy in step with what we require to function as a society under most circumstances without taking outsized losses.

When things go worse than anticipated, we take the hit, try to recover and maybe learn to strengthen the system afterwards. I would rate us roughly okay-ish at that, mostly because I don't know what to compare it to, since we are the only species to do it at this level to my knowledge.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-10-31 09:56:40+00:00
But then I need it to do the web order as well finding the correct products so things get delivered.

After that I need it to tell how to organize the bag into the fridge.. Ideally I'd have meta AI glasses or similar to that.

I can use ChatGPT once for doing all that, but then I need it all automated and a fluid experience.

My ADHD brain doesn't trigger dopamine for doing the same thing twice.
by leiroigh | 2025-10-31 09:57:23+00:00
Yes. O(1) snapshots are awesome! Persistent datastructures are a monumental achievement.

But that comes at a performance price, and in the end, you only really need persistent datastructures for niche applications.

Good examples are: ZFS mostly solves write amplification on SSD (it almost never overwrites memory); and snapshots are a useful feature for the end user. (but mostly your datastructures live in SRAM/DRAM which permit fast overwriting, not flash -- so that's a niche application)

Another good example is how julia uses a HAMT / persistent hash-map to implement scoped values. Scoped values are inheritable threadlocals (tasklocal; in julia parlance, virtual/green thread == task), and you need to take a snapshot on forking.

Somebody please implement that for inheritable threadlocals in java! (such that you can pass an O(1) snapshot instead of copying the hashmap on thread creation)

But that is also a niche application. It makes zero sense to use these awesome fancy persistent datastructures as default everywhere (looking at you, scala!).
by sothatsit | 2025-10-31 09:58:50+00:00
What do you mean by reasoning?

If you mean solving logic problems, then reasoning LLMs seem to pass that bar as they do very well programming and maths competitions. Reasoning LLMs can also complete problems like multiplying large numbers, which requires applying some sort of algorithm where the results cannot just be memorised. They also do this much better than standard pre-trained LLMs with no RL.

So, that makes me come back to this question of what definition of reasoning do people use that reasoning models do not meet? They're not perfect, obviously, but that is not a requirement of reasoning if you agree that humans can reason. We make mistakes as well, and we also suffer under higher complexity. Perhaps they are less reliable in knowing when they have made mistakes or not than trained humans, but I wouldn't personally include reliability in my definition for reasoning (just look at how often humans make mistakes in tests).

I am yet to see any serious, reasoned, arguments that suggest why the amazing achievements of reasoning LLMs in maths and programming competitions, on novel problems, does not count as "real reasoning". It seems much more that people just don't like the idea of LLMs reasoning, and so reject the idea without giving an actual reason themselves, which seems somewhat ironic to me.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-10-31 09:58:52+00:00
I'm gonna plug my favorite note on this topic: https://ericlippert.com/2008/09/10/vexing-exceptions/

Both snippets suffer from being too limited. The first, as you point out, catches too many exceptions. But the second.... What happens if the email address is taken? That's hardly exceptional, but it's an exception that the caller has to handle. Your natural response might be to check if the email address is taken before calling register, but that's just a race condition now. So you really need a result-returning function, or to catch some (but probably not all) of the possible exceptions from the method.
by Razengan | 2025-10-31 09:59:19+00:00
Is it bad form to make feature requests and give feedback on a downtime post? I don't care. I just want this to reach Anthropic's eyes.

Please let us:

* Sign in with Apple on the website

* Buy subscriptions from iOS In App Purchases

* Remove our payment info from the website

* Give paying subscribers an easy way to get actual support

As a frequent traveller I'm not sure if some of those features are gated by region, because some people said they can do some of those things.
by int_19h | 2025-10-31 09:59:27+00:00
If Hamas only targeted Zionists, that would be a reasonable take, but their actions - including the October massacre - and their propaganda target Jews in general.

Nazis in the West are actually divided quite a bit on this. Old-school Nazis were often anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian; some even converted to Islam from going down that path (e.g. Johann von Leers, Ahmed Huber). Support for Israel and Jews as "more white" than Arabs is a more recent phenomenon, and those two groups often fight each other.
by lkuty | 2025-10-31 09:59:40+00:00
Haha the translation is so funny. But I confess, as a native french speaker, I could not code in that language. It is so weird because I am used to english for coding now. Sometimes I write my variable names in french and I think I even used accented letters one time. What is worse, is that I tend to mix english and fench variable names in my code, but anyway english is way more common in the code base.
by LogicHound | 2025-10-31 10:00:55+00:00
There is a huge amount of syntactic sugar that has been added over the years that doesn't do whole lot IMO. It is often imported from other languages (usually JavaScript and/or Python).

e.g. Just a very simple example to illustrate the point

if (customer != null) { customer.Order = GetCurrentOrder(); }

vs

if (customer is not null) { customer.Order = GetCurrentOrder(); }

Is there really any benefit in adding "is/is not"? I would argue no. So I categorise that as being of "dubious benefit" and there are many similar small features, keywords etc. that get added each release where they might save a few lines of code somewhere but I've never seem them used that often.
by fsloth | 2025-10-31 10:01:25+00:00
Yes!

That said the input space of supported problems is quite large and you can configure the problem parametrs quite flexibly.

I guess the issue is that what the model _actually_ provides you is this idiot savant who has pre-memorized everything without offering a clear index that would disambiguate well-supported problems from ”too difficult” (i.e. novel) ones
by Panzerschrek | 2025-10-31 10:03:43+00:00
Thanks for suggestions!

> A snippet on the home page

What kind of code snippets could you suggest? Posting something trivial like a hello world program isn't particularly useful, I think.

> how to pronounce

There is for now no correct way to pronounce Ü. Maybe because it's not named in spoken language but only in written form. But assuming how this letter is used in natural languages, you can use a pronunciation from these languages.

> highlight important features

I have a comparison table mentioning features which I find necessary and useful. Maybe it isn't detailed enough?
by Razengan | 2025-10-31 10:03:46+00:00
If designing your hypothetical ideal language, what are some intuitive/cute keywords you would choose for mutables/immutables?

`let` is so 2020. `const` is too long. `static` makes me fall asleep at the keyboard. `con` sounds bad. How about

`law`?

law pi = 3.142 (heh typing on Mac autocompleted this) law c = 29979245 law law = "Dredd"

or `set` or `once` or `make`?
by vkou | 2025-10-31 10:03:56+00:00
I don't think you understand how legislatures around the world work, if you think this wouldn't be gamed to absurdity.

Important bills generally don't go to a vote unless everyone involved knows exactly how many votes they are going to get. Your proposal won't actually stop anything that a majority wants passed from passing - as long as a minority can't get ahead of them by poisoning the bill.

Bills are not single-issue. Any bill - even the best - can be trivially tanked by attaching a bunch of awful garbage to it. You are giving a single person (or whatever the minimum quorum is for putting a bill to vote) the power to kill, for years, progress on any issue - by putting forward their own version that's saddled with crap.

This would immediately be abused to disastrous effect.

You will end up with a complete farce, with the minority trying to outdo itself by coming up with the worst possible bills imaginable, that happen to include slivers of a majority's agenda. It's completely ass-backwards way to approach any decisionmaking process - because you are effectively giving multi-year issue veto power to any member of a legislature that's willing to embarass themselves by proposing garbage (that they don't actually want passed).

Or, worse yet, the majority will take the bait, and pass the bad bill anyway (because if they don't vote for it now, they won't get the chance to revisit the issue for years).
by theshrike79 | 2025-10-31 10:04:08+00:00
"passion" here means "be excited about the subject", which usually (neurospicy people exluced naturally) automatically brings up feelings from the speaker in a "this is cool and I want to share it" kind of way.

If I want to listen to someone read a slide deck word for word in a monotone voice, I can have an AI do it. I'd much rather read a blog post at that point though.
by hdgvhicv | 2025-10-31 10:04:45+00:00
It’s the episode

https://screenrant.com/it-ycrowd-controversy-graham-linehan-...

Many classic tv shows have episodes and themes which are bad today. Star Trek has a lot of 60s attitudes — Mudds Women for example.

I choose to see them as signs at how far society has progressed. Or regressed in the case of trans.

In the 90s the U.K. TV soap “corronation street” - watched by about 30% if the population each week - had a trans character. The character had very little controversy.ant the same time everyone loved Dane Edna. And Mrs Merton.

But today those shows would be far more controversial.

On the flip side, Brookside had a pre watershed lesbian kiss and it was major amounts of outrage.
by gf000 | 2025-10-31 10:04:50+00:00
As mentioned, second-hand is also an option. But my price was actually from Hungary with world-record VAT included, so not sure if you really couldn't find/order it for around that price.

Also, the basic premise is that you can buy a decent Pixel phone for an affordable price, not that it has the very best price/value out of any device. I would also wager that the Pixel 8 has massively better cameras than a Samsung A16, so not apples to oranges.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-10-31 10:05:39+00:00
Throughout the 20th century, Jews fled Russia, Germany, and every nation in the Middle East due to persecution.

That's not the fault of palestinians, and so it does make zionists 'fair game' through a pro-palestinian lens.

On the other hand, it does make it hard to say either side is in the wrong.

And I don't attach significance to which side nazis support today. There are far-right movements who claim to support gay rights, too. It's meaningless.
by d1sxeyes | 2025-10-31 10:05:51+00:00
Yeah I’m not sure why they picked these animals specifically. Seems like there would be some interesting data for big creatures (hippos, rhinos, elephants, whales), or unusually slow ones (tortoises, sloths).

Nothing on this chart surprises me, with the exception of salmon but that’s purely because I don’t really have any preconceptions about how efficient swimming is, beyond it feeling harder than walking in a human form.

Salmon is also a weird one to pick given their breeding method, you’d expect them to perhaps have some unusual adaptations as result of needing to swim hard upstream from time to time.
by pshirshov | 2025-10-31 10:06:02+00:00
Promise<Result<number, string>>

everywhere or

type EitherT[F[_], E, A] = F[Either[E, A]]

and then

def dosomething(): F[String, Number]

?

Isn't this beautiful: https://github.com/7mind/distage-example/blob/develop/bifunc... ?
by skydhash | 2025-10-31 10:06:21+00:00
The problem with hackish solution is that they get put in places they don’t belong. In other professions, there’s regulation in place to prevent these kind of shortcuts.

Also, if you have ever worked with anyone trying to get specifications worked out, you’ll see that most people (including devs) rely on intuition rather than checklists and will always forget to tell you something that is critical.

The thing is that cost of changes in the business can be a simple memo. But for software that usually means redesign.
by endymion-light | 2025-10-31 10:06:24+00:00
Pure efficiency in locomotion is a terrible measure, is a person on a bicycle more efficient traversing a forest?

Trying to say that a dog is incredibly unefficient is misleading at best - especially when we're trying to make a statement about nature's most efficient traveller.

It's the classic physics issue - you are ignoring air resistance, but in this case you are ignoring everything other than a perfectly paved road.
by fsloth | 2025-10-31 10:06:26+00:00
I guess we mean here ”usefull reasoning” instead of the idiot-savant. I mean it’s a fair ask since these are marketed as _tools_ you can use to implement _industrial processes_ and even replace you human workers.

In that I guess the model does not need to be the most reasonable intepreter of vague and poorly formulated user inputs but I think to improve a bit at least, to become usefull general appliances and not just test-scoring-automatons.

The key differentiator here is that tests generally _are made to be unambiguously scoreable_. Real world problems are often more vague from the point of view of optimal outcome.
by emmanol | 2025-10-31 10:06:51+00:00
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by akimbostrawman | 2025-10-31 10:07:06+00:00
That makes no sense. If you don't trust your government anything but E2EE is compromised from the get go. "But they could seize your device" is not an argument against but for mandatory E2EE because it moves the responsibility from the server you have no control over to your device that you do.

>There is no security without anonymity.

You don't understand what these words mean. You can be surveilled 100% by bodyguards and cameras to be secure but have 0% anonymity (or privacy).
by moffkalast | 2025-10-31 10:07:57+00:00
Afaik there are two types of attention, cross and self attention. It's quadratic becase you have to process one set of tokens with another, like calculating a matrix product. Originally designed for translation, you'd take tokens in one language on one side and the other language on the other, then compute the relevance of each word with each other which the model then uses further to more accurately generate the translation.

With self attention you compute every token in a sequence with every other token in that same sequence, figuring out which word references which other word (e.g. "George is sitting in the park. He's reading a book.", "He" would correlate with "George", letting the model know what it refers to). Of course these are also trained layers so what the model thinks correlates with what and how that info is used in the DNN perceptron part is depends wholly on the training process.

There is no free lunch with this and with only 1/4 of layers having it, the model will perform significantly worse at identifying relevant info and likely decohere a lot compared to having it on every layer. But since you get rid of the quadratic complicity, it'll be much faster. Think "I'm doing 1000 calculations per second and they're all wrong" meme. So far there have been lots of attempts at doing linear-ish attention (e.g. Google doing the sliding window hackery that only computes a part of the vectors and hopes for good locality, mamba combinations with RNNs, Meta removing positional encodings in attention in the trainwreck that was LLama4, etc.) and they've mostly failed, so the holy grail is finding a way to make it work since you get the best of both worlds. The top performing models today all use fully quadratic attention or combine it with sliding windows in some layers to claw back some speed in long context scenarios at the cost of some accuracy.
by flaie | 2025-10-31 10:08:15+00:00
Good article.

Maybe you could look up the Try monad API (Scala or Vavr works in Java + Kotlin), by using some extra helper methods you can have something probably a little bit lighter to use.

I believe your example would look like the following with the Try monad (in Java):

public UserDTO register(UserRegistrationRequest registrationRequest) { return Try.of(() -> authService.userExists(registrationRequest.email)) .filter(Objects::isNull, () -> badRequest("user already exists")) .map(userId -> authService.register(registrationRequest.email, registrationRequest.password)) .get(); }

The login() function would be using the same pattern to call authService.verify() then filtering nonNull and signing the JWT, so it would be the same pattern for both.
by csin | 2025-10-31 10:08:53+00:00
No I think we are on the same page.

The people who specialized in non-software domain, and wrote their own projects, are amazingly talented.

They are not specializing in 1 field. They are so smart, they've managed to specialize in 2 fields.

I bet you they also suck at UI design. And wrote projects like Handbrake.

It's totally understandable.

I don't expect them to have the time to specialize in THREE fields. There is an opportunity cost to everything.
by com2kid | 2025-10-31 10:09:09+00:00
> One of the things I hate about my 30s is that I'm focused on money now and it feels like I'm not living the life that I want. It just feels like I'm preparing for death.

FAANG job at 22. Save up 25k a year for 4 years, that is 100k. You'll already retire at 56 with over 1.5M in the bank. It isn't perfect but it is a lot better than what most people do.

Really all you need to do as a programmer is max out 401k and maybe throw another 10k a year into savings on top of that.

I worked at MSFT for a decade and I would have retired at 40 if I hadn't spent 3 years trying to run a startup after my time at Microsoft.

This includes international travel every year, and 2 domestic vacations.
by zenmac | 2025-10-31 10:09:17+00:00
>Those with a conservative mindset will think of humans as fundamentally flawed, misguided creatures that need to be contained and steered so they don’t veer of the path, which they are naturally inclined to; while those with a liberal mindset consider humans to be inherently kind and only misguided by circumstances and their environment.

It is also this mindset of wanting to micromanage things/people in hope for better performance. Those are the usually the ones pushing for scanning people's private messages. People like Stalin and Mao would love stuff like that. The urge to micro-manage is a very band-aid type of solution and not dealing with complexity of the situation.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-31 10:09:35+00:00
>I suspect in practice the spicy pagers would tend to be tracked quite closely by the intelligence agencies.

Because these people totally wouldn't cut and run and leave someone else holding the bag if things went wrong. /s

Kinda like how the CIA spent the 90s quasi-protecting Al-Qaeda in an effort to penetrate the organization only to cut and run and be all "hey, FBI, y'all might want to look into these guys we really think they're up to something serious" in summer of 2001.

Say an operation was called off. I give it 50% odds between them finding a way to buy the devices to keep them from getting out into public vs 50% chance they just abandon them.

>, but I'd hardly say operation grim beeper was playing fast and loose with how precisely the terrorists were targeted ultimately.

I generally agree but I absolutely foresee some random company in the region having 1/3 of their laptops go boom because they bought tampered shit that "got out". Best case someone opens one up for service, goes WTF, snaps a picture, internet amplifies, it gets back to the OEM and the "questionable" lots are ID'd.

> but it doesn't seem all that likely that random consumers

The angry pagers were being bought under the guise of legitimate companies. I find it very hard to believe that some gravel pit or factory who needed 20 and bought 200 on a "we pay you for 250 basis" didn't have their 20 go poof while sitting on the charging shelf in the office or whatever.

This whole thing is just too "meta targeted" for my taste in the same way that "signature strikes" were. It's not like these organizations lack the capacity to kill people the old fashioned way, heck it might even be cheaper.