MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alganet | 2025-10-24 22:17:57+00:00
The Mythical Man-Month focuses on a simple idea.

It can be summarized as "adding more workers to a project does not speed things up, that's a myth".

It's in the title of the book. It's a good book.

The entire IT field is about to test that idea in a massive scale. Can lots of new automated workers speed things up? We'll see.
by g-b-r | 2025-10-24 22:18:00+00:00
> > for example, trying something and then reverting it shows that you did explore it > > True, those things tend to go into the documentation itself, checked into the codebase itself instead of being somewhat hidden inside the git history. Usually I end up having both a "Open Problems" (things yet to solve) and a "Tried X, this is why it didn't work" section somewhere in the documentation.

That's good, and yes, if that repository history really wouldn't add anything it's fine to squash everything

> > it's also possible to place the old stuff in another repository > > Yes, before the process I initially described, I usually leave a copy intact with the full-full history, but that's not what I published, just kept as an archive.

Ok, I meant a public repository though
by GMoromisato | 2025-10-24 22:18:19+00:00
If we're going down this road, then I claim programmers are more skilled than engineers or doctors.

90% of engineers are not inventing new things--they are merely applying codified knowledge (which they didn't create) to a new location or instantiation. In contrast, every new program is unique in the world (if it were not then it wouldn't need to be written--you'd just copy/fork/download the program).

And don't get me started on doctors. More than 40,000 Americans die each year from medical errors[1]. You really think the casualty rate from programmers--with all our mistakes--can beat that? I don't think so.

So, yeah, maybe surgeons are not the right model. Maybe surgeons could learn a thing or two from programmers.

-------------

[1] https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/medical-errors/...
by stuffn | 2025-10-24 22:18:44+00:00
Shadow IT is about to make a major comeback.

Nothing a little rpi nano running some lightweight VPN and some clever glue code couldn't fix. It isn't terribly difficult to slip into an IDF unnoticed and your IT department is probably disgruntled enough you could work them for a few months and get them to look the other way, anyway.

Really though this is all very exhausting. The media, controlled exclusively by corporate interests, has come up with all kinds of terms to disparage people. Just doing your job and getting by is "quiet quitting", etc. For those that didn't RTO you are probably getting railroaded.

I despise what I read here from pro-RTO posters because they miss the point. The great propaganda dispensed to us that "being the office was necessary" was proven wrong, without loss of generality, during COVID for nearly every cube farm job. It surprised no one when billions of dollars were spent buying news coverage about how RTO "harmed collaboration" and all kinds of other things. If going back to the office is such an amazing productivity boost why do you need nanny software? The answer is simple and we all have known it. It's only about control. We know that majority of capital for VCs comes from extortion level rates for multi-year leases of office buildings. VCs, too, are frauds. All of them. VCs control the C and Vs, C and Vs control the tax cattle.

It's bullshit of the highest order. All corporate work is just a pyramid scheme in different clothes. The sociopaths who run companies (of which I believe anyone who makes it to V or C level displays two or more sociopathic traits) do not like it when their reality distortion field falls apart.
by sgarland | 2025-10-24 22:19:14+00:00
I’m by far not an expert on it (my wife is, she teaches Montessori), but AFAIK what you observed was because it isn’t viewed as play, but as work - as in school work. All of the activities are called “works,” and they’re taken very seriously.

Part of this is, I think, to teach responsibility; for example, if a student gets a work out, they’re expected to put it back exactly how they found it. Montessori classrooms are incredibly well-organized, with everything having its (labeled) place.
by didibus | 2025-10-24 22:19:25+00:00
> while academic classes (reading, math, science, geography, history, &c.) were by ability

My issue with this is that it just is selection bias, telling you nothing about how good the method is at teaching.

Does placing by ability actually helps student learn and score better? Or it's just that those who are good and bad already get divided up, and we know not why some are good and others are worse?
by aschmelyun | 2025-10-24 22:20:08+00:00
While not an outright solution to the fact that they _are_ expensive, if you don't care about them being second hand or a little older you can score a pretty good deal on sites like eBay.

For instance, TM-T88V printers can do more but cost around 3x as much as the one I got, a TM-T88IV which is the older version. Not perfect, but beats the like $200 price tag brand new.
by scuff3d | 2025-10-24 22:20:10+00:00
It's not an insult when it's true. I don't think you've made one comment that actually added something useful. I did my best to reply to what was there, but you didn't give me anything to work with. Your last comment was so unrelated there was no where left to go.

If you have something actually relavent to say you're welcome to say it.
by kromem | 2025-10-24 22:21:07+00:00
With ChatGPT the memory feature, particularly in combination with RLHF sampling from user chats with memory, led to an amplification problem which in that case amplified sycophancy.

In Anthropic's case, it's probably also going to lead to an amplification problem, but due to the amount of overcorrection for sycophancy I suspect it's going to amplify more of a aggressiveness and paranoia towards the user (which we've already started to see with the 4.5 models due to the amount of adversarial training).
by ValdikSS | 2025-10-24 22:21:09+00:00
I wrote a CUPS (Linux) printer driver for Xiqi cheap ($10) Chinese label printers if anyone interested

https://github.com/ValdikSS/printer-driver-funnyprint

I use it to print barcodes, and it's very handy compared to serious enterprise printers: it's lightweight, battery-powered, and works over Bluetooth.
by p_l | 2025-10-24 22:21:26+00:00
The biggest models are same size as biggest IBM Power machines, i.e. 2 four-post racks connected together.

You then need liquid cooling connection, power (iirc the racks can contain internal UPS). You're still left with need for storage which can go from a shelf to maaaany racks, related networking gear (ethernet and FiberChannel) and that's it, but a lot of it would be common to any serious enterprise DC.
by stahtops | 2025-10-24 22:21:58+00:00
> The tax savings were relatively small for many families, however. The middle fifth of earners got about a $780 tax cut last year on average, according to the Tax Policy Center.

> The top 20 percent of earners received more than 60 percent of the total tax savings, according to the Tax Policy Center; the top 1 percent received nearly 17 percent of the total benefit, and got an average tax cut of more than $30,000. And that’s not even factoring in the law’s huge cut to corporate taxes, which disproportionately benefit the wealthy households that own the most stock.

Don’t be part of the problem Marcus. The reality is cutting taxes for the poor by $2/day, for the rich by $80/day, and telling everyone they got a tax break with a straight face… while you simultaneously cut services, issue policies that cause inflation, and levy taxes domestically on the poor through tariffs is the republican way!
by rpcope1 | 2025-10-24 22:22:18+00:00
> And it is always important to make a distinction between the abstractions proper to the formalism and the object of study. A common fallacy involves reifying those abstractions into objects of the theory, at least implicitly.

I agree 100% and feel like I have seen a lot of people in physics kind of fall into this trap. The model is not the thing itself.
by Sesse__ | 2025-10-24 22:22:26+00:00
Well, again, different problem constraints, different solutions. Seemingly that tool can handle larger sets than gperf (although it claims gperf stops at a couple hundred, which is an exaggeration; try it with the first 1000 lines of /usr/dict/words and it's nearly instant, and with the first 10k it needs 35 seconds or so), but it also says the runtime is even slower. My goal was to have faster runtime, not handle more keys. YMMV.
by Brian_K_White | 2025-10-24 22:22:54+00:00
systemd is my hammer having it's own opinions about what nails I hit & where & into what & why.

I want a nail only driven half in and at some crooked angle, that's my business.

It's not my hammers job to agree or disagree that it's a bad nail hammering job as far as it knows. I don't wantto have to convince it of the validity of a use-case it didn't think of before, or thought of and decided it doesn't agree to support.

I just want that crude coat hanger and I don't care who else likes it or doesn't like it or who else thinks I should buy an actual coat hanger and attach it in some way that someone else approves of.
by tobinfekkes | 2025-10-24 22:23:03+00:00
I was debating whether to specify which one, but then decided I would leave ambiguous.

Frankly, they're both great. I think I have more of an affinity to Portal 1, not because it's "better", but because it was first. That was a very distinct moment in my memory when the game mechanics "click" at the beginning, and you realize what's going on and there's no other game world like it.
by emptysongglass | 2025-10-24 22:23:03+00:00
How does that back up your point?

You are not making an argument, you are just making assertions without evidence and then telling us the burden of proof is on us to tell you why not.

If you went walking down the streets yelling the world is run by a secret cabal of reptile-people without evidence, you would rightfully be declared insane.

Our feelings and desires largely determine the content of our thoughts and actions. LLMs do not function as such.

Whether I am arguing with a parrot or not has nothing to do with cognition. A parrot being able to usefully fool a human has nothing to do with cognition.
by michaelt | 2025-10-24 22:23:19+00:00
> I'm not sure why the swapsies plan is unreasonable?

Imagine a route with 6 planes a day, 2 hours apart. The first flight of the day develops a problem that'll take 3 hours to repair.

Is it better to delay one plane by 3 hours; pay 200 passengers compensation; and waste 3x200=600 person-hours?

Or to delay six planes by 2 hours; pay no compensation as only 3+ hour delays get compensation; and waste 6x2x200=2400 person-hours?
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-10-24 22:23:30+00:00
You don't need general intelligence to make good memes to keep people scrolling through Instagram.

You don't need general intelligence to make a decent coding tool like Cursor.

You don't need general intelligence to improve SERPs.

You don't need general intelligence to sell a subscription for a decent AI assistant.

There's tons of value already added without anything general.
by thiht | 2025-10-24 22:24:24+00:00
That’s just not true. Every coworker I know who use Linux[1] have occasional issues with webcams, mics, Slack notifications, whatever. It’s all fixable and this kind of inconvenience can be worth it when balanced with the perceived advantages, but saying driver issues are a thing of the past is just a lie.

[1]: I’ve seen these issues on Dell (XPS 13), Thinkpads, and HP laptops
by mikeocool | 2025-10-24 22:25:45+00:00
> It's possible that Apple/Swift's mindshare among developers will lead to a significant number of apps shipping the Swift version for Android even if it means using Apple's UI

It doesn’t sound like this release includes bringing SwiftUI or UIKit to android, so unless you did a ton of work to replicate it (ala flutter) using Apple’s UI on android probably still isn’t really possible.
by palata | 2025-10-24 22:26:21+00:00
> The most important question for every cross platform framework is what happens to the UI?

I kindly disagree. The first feature I want from a cross-platform framework is that it lets me write a native UI. That's why I like KMP: I can just share a framework with an iOS app built with SwiftUI.

Sharing business logic makes a lot of sense in a ton of cases and has been done forever (C/C++/Rust/Go libraries, etc). Sharing UI in complex apps, in my experience, always ends up being a "write once - debug everywhere" nightmare.

What KMP (and I'm hoping Swift for Android) bring is the possibility to share a Kotlin (respectively Swift) library instead of sharing code with C/C++/Rust/Go. So that an Android/iOS team can keep using Android/Swift without having to introduce a third language for sharing logic.
by imiric | 2025-10-24 22:27:35+00:00
Those are browser automation tasks. Most of them can be done with Playwright/Puppeteer/Selenium.

I don't see why a browser should have to support AppleScript specifically. The Chrome DevTools Protocol and WebDriver BiDi are the standard protocols for interacting with browsers programmatically. Firefox supports WebDriver BiDi. Just use any tool that supports it, or talk to it directly. Maybe AppleScript can do that, I wouldn't know.
by msteffen | 2025-10-24 22:27:59+00:00
Given all the money spent on trying different educational models to achieve better outcomes, it's really gratifying to see a result suggesting that improvement is actually possible. I have a lot of teachers in my family and they tend to take the perspective that education is an engineering problem rather than a research problem. That is, any apparent progress is due to extra funding or filtering students or the like.

> "Those costs do not include anticipated savings from improved teacher morale and retention, a dynamic demonstrated in other data."

That seems like some kind of supportive evidence as well. Teachers should logically be happier when working inside a system optimized for teaching efficacy!

Personally: we put our child in a Montessori preschool because we liked its emphasis on self-directed learning (I kind of think all learning has to be self-directed on some level. Even a lecture requires you to listen to and think about the lecture, instead of something else). We later moved him to a Reggio Emilia program for non-pedagogical reasons (there were problems with the building that the Montessori school was in). They're definitely different—in Montessori, he mostly played on his own, and in Reggio we now see him in pairs and groups all the time. I have no idea which is better, but his teachers at the Reggio school seem to like it.
by kragen | 2025-10-24 22:28:15+00:00
You're right; I wonder why they operate supercritical steam turbines at 600° instead? https://direns.minesparis.psl.eu/Sites/Thopt/en/co/cycles-su... https://www.mdpi.com/2673-7264/5/1/1 https://www.modernpowersystems.com/analysis/is-700-c-steam-t...

Oh, apparently because of "dramatic improvements in power plant performance":

> Starting with the traditional 2400 psi / 1000 F (165 bar / 538 C) single-reheat cycle, dramatic improvements in power plant performance can be achieved by raising inlet steam conditions to levels up to 4500 psi/310 bar and temperatures to levels in excess of 1112 F/600 C. It has become industry practice to refer to such steam conditions, and in fact any supercritical conditions where the throttle and/or reheat steam temperatures exceed 1050 F/566 C, as “ultrasupercritical”.

https://www.gevernova.com/content/dam/gepower-new/global/en_...

Anyway, those are the plants that Standard Thermal wants to sell their product/service to. And once the hot dirt falls below 600°, it can no longer heat the water to 600°. So I think they have to be aiming far above that temperature, which is also why heating element reliability is a challenge and why the clays in the soil are firing (a phenomenon which only happens at 600° for the lowest-firing terra-cotta clays, more typically requiring 1000°–1400°).
by MrJohz | 2025-10-24 22:28:31+00:00
There are other reasons as well. The body responsible for enforcing a particular law can choose not to enforce it, thereby rendering the law useless. Or a law can become obsolete by changes in technology or society - the original law legislates something that just doesn't happen any more, say. Laws can also be written to handle a specific event that only occurs once. Once that event has passed, the law might as well not exist. It doesn't need to be repealed because it just doesn't apply any more.

In addition, laws are typically regularly amended to handle new societal developments, to clarify wording, or to fit better with other laws or changes in attitudes. A law that has gone 150 years without being amended at all is probably a law that falls into the categories above and is obsolete.

Of course, all this is getting somewhat off-topic, but the point is that laws absolutely can become outdated and unmaintained, either deliberately or by happenstance. And the inverse is also true: most laws that people deal with regularly are kept up-to-date to ensure that they still reflect the needs and wills of the society they're being used in.
by jongjong | 2025-10-24 22:30:54+00:00
For CRUD applications with real-time updates, I find that updating individual fields as opposed to overwriting the entire record works sufficiently well. It can be dome relatively cheaply using WebSockets. Would be overkill to use HTTP to update individual fields (as each request carries redundant headers) but WebSocket frames are very lightweight. I've built a serverless platform on this principle and it helps to simplify the frontend components.
by phpnode | 2025-10-24 22:31:02+00:00
Your claim was that they explicitly support fascism. That doesn't seem to be the case at all. What you seem to mean instead is: They financially support a popular open source project called Omarchy, which is built by DHH, and you believe DHH to be a fascist.

You're welcome to your opinion, and I have zero insight into whether DHH is a fascist or not, but by no means is that explicit support for fascism! It's not just exaggeration, it's actually a lie.

If you buy a machine from Framework you might indirectly support a project which is maintained by someone whose opinions you dislike.

If you buy a Lenovo machine you will contribute to the revenue of an authoritarian government that will use some of that money to perpetuate human rights abuses against its own citizens, and maybe the citizens of your own country too one day.

Which is the most moral choice here in your opinion?
by palata | 2025-10-24 22:31:21+00:00
I have been sharing code between Android and iOS for a long time. Sharing the UI has always been a nightmare for non-trivial apps.

What makes sense to share is complex libraries, and usually I have been doing that with C/C++/Rust libraries. But it means that the team now deals with Kotlin, Swift and one (or more) of those "sharing" languages.

What I believe KMP and Swift for Android bring is that teams will be able to share libraries in Kotlin/Swift, so that they can keep writing in their preferred language without having to introduce C/C++/Rust.

I believe this approach is vastly superior to any kind of framework that tries to share the UI. Mobile devs, in my experience, want to use the native tools: Kotlin for Android and Swift for iOS.
by spot5010 | 2025-10-24 22:31:23+00:00
The scenario the author describes is bound to happen more and more frequently, and IMO the way to address it is by evolving the culture and best practices for code reviews.

A simple solution would be to mandate that while posting coversations with AI in PR comments is fine, all actions and suggested changes should be human generated.

They human generated actions can’t be a lazy: “Please look at AI suggestion and incorporate as appropriate. ”, or “what do you think about this AI suggestion”.

Acceptable comments could be: - I agree with the AI for xyz reasons, please fix. - I thought about AIs suggestions, and here’s the pros and cons. Based on that I feel we should make xyz changes for abc reasons.

If these best practices are documented, and the reviewer does not follow them, the PR author can simply link to the best practices and kindly ask the reviewer to re-review.
by kromem | 2025-10-24 22:31:29+00:00
A number of the Claudes have pretty good 0-shot awareness of my post history from just my username.

Though nothing like grok 4, which probably has a better memory of it than I do, and will even regularly name drop a certain post from years ago in conversations.

It's a huge time saver though, and means I can even in a fresh context establish a rapport with a model extremely quickly. Just a few years earlier than I was expecting that level of latent space fidelity to occur.

Like, sure we can add memory features for context management, but anyone with a post history should probably *also* keep in mind that there's literally years worth of memory on tap for interactions with models, and likely at ever higher fidelity and recall. Latent spaces are wild.
by dathinab | 2025-10-24 22:32:08+00:00
The problem is /var/lock is still used for various system root components.

Which includes services like lvm2, dmraid and audio drivers.

So you need at least a different /var/lock for "root" and every one else.

So you now can either fix all the root tooling to use a different lock folder. Which would break a lot of things.

Or you break a very small number of very old tools which (mostly) decided to neither use use flock (from 1996) nor follow the XDG spec (XDF_RUNTIME_DIR) from 2003.

So kinda obvious choice what way to go with ;), it just should be coordinated better and communicated better.

And yes you want quotas on tempfs on XDF_RUNTIME_DIR, without question. At least for a system more robust against misbehaving programs.

To be clear a lot of this security concerns have been irrelevant/ignored with thread models from the 2000th. But times (sadly) have changes and you shouldn't just blindly trust user space programs anymore. Even if we ignore malicious programs just thing about all the bugs AI will sneak in. And honestly I'm worried that Desktop Linux will fail to adopt to this changes. Server Linux is clearly adopting, but also more in the non-gnu Linux ecosystem while the more FSF/GNU parts of Linux seem mostly stuck in a past which doesn't look like it will have a future :/. This sucks without question but I just don't see a future without a lot of supply chain attack and AI coding induced crazy misbehavior of user space programs.

PS: Even if you just want a steam deck with the same degree of robustness as console (i.e. a game going rogue will have a hard time to hang the console fully not matter what it does, i.e. you can always press the menu button and close/kill it) you need this kind of subtle changes. And many other.
by DicIfTEx | 2025-10-24 22:32:28+00:00
Ah my mistake, I linked to the docs for `pg_dump` (which has long had the `format` option) rather than `pg_dumpall` (which lacks it).

Before Postgres 18 was released, the docs listed `format` as an option for `pg_dumpall` in the upcoming version 18 (e.g. Wayback Machine from Jun 2025 https://web.archive.org/web/20250624230110/https://www.postg... ). The relevant commit is from Apr 2025 (see link #0 in my original comment). But now all mention has been scrubbed, even from the Devel branch docs.
by alaskalol | 2025-10-24 22:32:45+00:00
For Alaska, that is not accurate. They did a complete migration off any on premise data center around 2023 for Sabre* there are on prem DC for other things but not for GDS.

Hawaiian uses Amadeus, so also not any intergration issue.

What happens and why Alaska usually has the most issues in October is it's PIP season, some people got culled. Also some new hires too.

This specific ITS though pushed through a change without proper CM/CAB earlier this week. But that's all I can write