MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TheAtomic | 2025-10-26 14:56:31+00:00
Have no fear, I logged in and tested this ... almost.

Logged in with f'g G, picked an "experience," waited 30 sec to load(!) then picked 8 sec run from 4 / 8 / 12 sec...

"Not enought credits." Hmm. Somehow I thought it was a demo but I guess, yeah.

TL/DR: Nowhere close to ready for prime time.
by kmoser | 2025-10-26 14:57:38+00:00
> Many “Oopsie woopsie”-style errors are a fallback message that appears in unexpected errors - since the developer doesn’t expect it to happen, it could be dangerous to reveal application context as part of the error.

In my experience most of those "oopsie woopsie" error messages are an attempt to seem less techie and/or lack of desire to provide meaningful information to the user.

The main thing users really want to know: did they mess up, or did the system mess up? And what should they do next: try again? Contact support? That basic information is not only usually lacking, but providing it to the user would not threaten system security.
by sejje | 2025-10-26 14:58:11+00:00
I think my best single bit of advice is: think it through.

Decide why you're doing things. You'll be able to pull off things you never expected, with a some deep thought and a good plan. Plan your career, your finances. If it's your thing, plan what kind of person you'll meet and share a life with. Plan to maintenance your relationships.

Plan for problems, and disasters, because you will have many. Friends will die, plans will fail, money will be lost. A little planning will help you survive those storms.

Take pictures of yourself and what you're doing. I wish I had more.
by hansvm | 2025-10-26 15:00:43+00:00
They exist, but they're not that common (give or take the "expected" numerical deviations based on the order of summation and whatnot, which can both be nontrivial and propagate error further).

Something I recommend doing, the best time being the start of the project and the second best time being now, is adding numerical gradient checking tests to all operations. You will make mistakes in your kernels from time to time, and it's valuable to know at a glance where those mistakes are.

Mind you, it's possible to write both the forward pass and the backward pass in a way that's wrong but compatible. An additional layer of checks I like to add is a dead-simple implementation of all algorithms -- no vectorization, no fancy blocking or re-orderings, nothing. Compare results to the simple implementation.

It sounds like a lot of work, but writing an optimized kernel is much slower than the numerical gradient checking and the simple kernel, and given how in numerical code it's basically impossible to identify the source of a bug without doing the equivalent of all of those checks, it only takes one bug in the whole project for the effort to pay off.
by zdragnar | 2025-10-26 15:01:38+00:00
That same CEO would likely also push to have all of the things including no bugs, then complain people aren't productive enough when arbitrary and unrealistic deadlines aren't met.

Source: my personal experience. Very few of the managers who can code that I've worked with were better than any of the ones who couldn't, and those who did actively code while managing were universally worse.
by righthand | 2025-10-26 15:01:57+00:00
This is for livestock farming, I was specifically discussing agricultural farming.

In general though, the easy rule of living and eating non-mega farmed food and sustainable living is to “eat aware”:

My other advice is a one-size-fits-all food equation, which is, simply, to know where it came from. If you can't place it, trace it, or grow it/raise it/catch it yourself, don't eat it. Eat aware. Know your food. Don't wait on waiters or institutions to come up with ways to publicize it, meet your small fishmonger and chat him or her up at the farmer's market yourself. [0]

[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-pescatores-dilemma_b_2463...
by badsectoracula | 2025-10-26 15:02:37+00:00
> The prompt used to create the code should also be provided. The LLM-generated code should be clearly marked.

I have a feeling the people who write these haven't really used LLMs for programming because even just playing around with them will make it obvious that this makes no sense - especially if you try to use something local based that lets you rewrite the discussion at will, including any code the LLM generated. E.g. sometimes when trying to get Devstral make something for me, i let it generate whatever (sometimes buggy/not working) code it comes up with[0] and then i start editing its response to fix the bug so that further instructions are under the assumption it generated the correct code from the get go instead of trying to convince it[0] to fix the code it generated. In such a scenario there is no clear separation between LLM-generated code and manually written code nor any specific "prompt" (unless you count all snapshots of the entire discussion every time one hits the "submit" button as a series of prompts, which technically is what the LLM using as a prompt instead of what the user types, but i doubt this was what the author had in mind).

And all that without taking into account what someone commented in the article about code not even done in a single session but with plans, restarting from scratch, summarizing, etc (and there are tools to automate these too and those can use a variety of prompts by themselves that the end user isn't even aware of).

TBH i think if FSF wants to "consider LLMs" they should begin by gaining some real experience using them first - and bringing people with such experience on board to explain things for them.

[0] i do not like anthropomorphizing LLMs, but i cannot think of another description for that :-P
by seba_dos1 | 2025-10-26 15:03:30+00:00
Of course it could, but that doesn't yet mean it should. A checked-out ref is considered to be in-use and not to be manipulated (unless done in tandem with HEAD), not just by "git push" but also other tools like "git branch". It's consistent and, IMO, less surprising than what you propose. It could be an optional behavior configured by receive.denyCurrentBranch, though I don't see a good use-case for it that isn't already handled by updateInstead.
by metadope | 2025-10-26 15:03:44+00:00
I am elderly and I am an addict. But my screen addiction is only a small part of my lifelong problem. The real, root cause, my major malfunction, is an ongoing aversion to reality, a constant urge and willfulness to escape, an addiction to fantasy and an increasing willingness to indulge myself.

I am not alone in this.

Yes, my first screen addiction was probably the NTSC broadcasts from a black & white childhood, but all those paperbacks counted too, Heinlein and Fleming and MacDonald et al.

Even my early career as a software engineer was motivated by a self-indulgent escape from reality. I preferred the small world of intense coding in 6510 cycle shaving loops, to the expansive reality that surrounded my basement. The outside world went on without me as my screen addiction grew all the way to 640x400.

Now people enjoy an escape into the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe). I've been living there since the print versions were only 12 cents each.

Nowadaze everybody I know have become as addicted as I've always been. But is it a problem for society? Or is shared fantasy the actual basis on which our society is built?
by dr_coffee | 2025-10-26 15:03:49+00:00
Amazing that this can be achieved at such a low cost. The DVD optical pickup is truly a marvel of engineering, incorporating fairly complicated optics into such a small space. The focusing lens additionally has a electromagnetically controlled suspension system for adjusting the focus, so in theory you should be able to achieve z positioning of the microspheres as well. It would be great if the red dvd laser could be filtered out and the microscopic fluctuations of the trapped particle could be imaged with the camera to estimate the trap stiffness.

A similar optical pickup made of optical components from newport or thorlabs would run you a few thousand dollars, whereas these dvd optical pickups can be had for $10-20.

Here is another great paper (and accompanying youtube video) that shows optical trapping, atomic force microscopy, and even imaging with a dvd optical pickup.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acssensors.8b00340

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bqujaldaCQ
by 1718627440 | 2025-10-26 15:04:30+00:00
Incrementation direction is orthogonal to up/down. When I disassemble a program, the addresses are all over the place and not ordered.

> That means smaller addresses are at the top and larger addresses are at the bottom.

No, my mental model is the exact opposite and this matches the jargon out there.

> also matches what you see in the terminal in /proc/<pid>/maps

I think of this as a sorted list, not as a display or description of a model.

When I drive on a road, I think of think of things on the road near me to have lower addresses in my coordinate system and things further away as having higher addresses. When I write a list of things I see, this will be from left-to-right then from top-to-bottom on a sheet of paper, because it is a list that follows the writing directions of my language/script. When I look at a traffic sign things nearer to me will be at the bottom and things far away at the top, because that's the agreed-upon mental model of a road. When I look at my navi, things near me will be in the center and things far away from me at the edge of the display.

When I write down points in the first sector of the coordinate system, I might order things according to the x-coordinate ascending top-to-bottom. That doesn't mean I would draw the axis inverted.

The correspondence of physical addresses to position is entirely non-linear and also three dimensional so there is no natural top and bottom especially when we are talking about virtual addresses.

When I get taught a new concept I want to get to know the model everyone uses. I will not like a teacher, that tells me a different ordering which is different from how everyone else does it, because this the output of some random command on some random OS, which actually shows a list, not a graph of a memory model. (Sorry that's harsh, of course I still appreciate didactic simplification.)

Maybe the issue is that you consider the stack to be so important to determine the model of the whole process space. When I would draw a stack on it's own, I DO draw it from top-to-bottom. But when I draw a whole process space, I do not, because everything else is mapped/allocated from bottom-to-top. When you invert the direction of the mental model, yes the stack now grows from bottom-to-top. But no, the other things are now allocated from top-to-bottom instead. This are more things: the text, libraries, mmap'd files, and most-used thing: the heap are all allocated inverted now. And the most important thing, the index for all that: the addresses now are allocated from top-to-bottom.
by jmclnx | 2025-10-26 15:04:56+00:00
Same here. But one other thing to add for new responses about "Why NetBSD", the rump kernel.

Years ago I had to get a very old document off of a DOS diskette. So I tried:

* On Linux: accessing the diskette would cause a panic or a reboot or massive read failures.

* FreeBSD: panics all the time

* NetBSD: panics. But then I remembered it had rump. So I said, why not try that. Started up rump, got a few code dumps, but after a some tries I got a bit over 90% of the document off of the diskette. The main system had no issues with the rump kernel crashing.

So that alone is worth the "price of admission" :)
by nullc | 2025-10-26 15:04:58+00:00
> The amount of profit they make is decided by the state regulators

Which set things up so the money PG&E makes is a linear function in the money PG&E wastes. -- the regulations set a fixed profit margin, so to make more money PG&E need simply waste more money and pass the cost onto the public which is exactly what they are doing.
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-26 15:05:02+00:00
Thanks a lot for the pointers, I think I've done a similar approach to what you suggest, lots of tiny (relative) tests for each step in the process, and doing sort of sanity checking between the naive stuff I first wrote which works and which does inference correctly, and the new kernel which is a lot more performant, but currently incorrect and produces incoherent outputs.

I'll try to replace bits by simplified versions though, probably could help at least getting closer to knowing where the issue is.

Anyone have more debugging tips I'd greatly appreciate it! Nothing is too small or "obvious", as I'm about to lose my mind more or less.
by dijit | 2025-10-26 15:05:26+00:00
"BSD" doesn't really exist as far as I'm aware. It was a proprietary operating system made at Berkeley for studying OS design.

OpenBSD/FreeBSD/NetBSD are open source continuations of the source-available 4.4-BSDlite code (removing AT&T proprietary extensions iirc).

OpenBSD follows BSD principles but focuses on code clarity and security.

FreeBSD tries to be very flexible, putting user-experience over security. (it has to be noted that OpenBSD is very usable, but lacks a lot of nice features like ZFS and DTrace that FreeBSD supports).

NetBSD is all about being incredibly lean and portable. NetBSD will run on basically anything, even things that Linux and other *BSD's have no hope of running on.
by zbrozek | 2025-10-26 15:05:45+00:00
Ultimately the California Legislature and the CPUC (and therefore the governor who appoints them) are at-fault for rates. PG&E is a regulated monopoly, and in-theory the regulators are supposed to drive value for ratepayers. But our regulators simply do not care and do not perform. The legislature has larded a bunch of redistribution onto rates, and burdened the regulator with a bunch of conflicting goals.

The regulator has no accountability to anyone and just rubber-stamps everything the utilities put in front of them, allowing them to skimp on opex (maintenance) in order to turn everything into capex with cost-plus guaranteed profit. This incentivizes making everything as expensive and as brittle as possible.

Either we need to restructure the market to be more competitive, or we need to restructure the regulations and the regulator to be more performant and responsive to ratepayers. We're suffering a ruinous misalignment of incentives and the best the legislature can think of to fix it is to make it cheaper for the IOUs to borrow money.
by jrmg | 2025-10-26 15:06:39+00:00
NetBSD is a powerful force for sustainability. Foundation's commitment to running on a vast array of hardware—new and old—helps reduce e-waste. Old laptops and single-board computers that would otherwise be in a landfill are given new life as robust firewalls, file servers, or even retro-gaming machines, all thanks to NetBSD.

Emotionally I like this - but thinking more dispassionately, these systems use, by modern standards, a huge amount of power. I wonder if, for many (most?) of them, it whould not be more environmentally responsible to replace them with modern, less power-hungry devices.
by uecker | 2025-10-26 15:07:16+00:00
This is not a study but a review article, so it seems you are bit confused. The point is very simply and confirmed by many studies: The increased risk from COVID when unvaccinated is much higher than the risk from myocarditis caused by the vaccine in rare cases. And no, I do not see how the paper made the mistake you claim. It compared the increased risk for getting myocardities after the shot to the reduced risk from COVID (and these risks also include myocarditis caused by COVID which is also know to be more severe).
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-10-26 15:07:51+00:00
Huh, that's interesting, I'm not too familiar with US law, so not surprising I didn't know that :) Time to lookup if it works similarly in my country today, last time I was involved with anything slightly related to it was almost two decades ago, and at that point we (as a company with legal consul) made choices that assumed public info was OK to use, as it was public (paraphrased from memory), but might look differently today.

Thanks for adding the additional context!
by nixpulvis | 2025-10-26 15:09:17+00:00
Depends a lot on the culture. I used to work for a small team of about 10-15 engineers and the CTO was a good person. He would write code about as much as the rest of us. He was just the leader, engi 0. So we treated his code reviews similarly. It was actually nice giving him review because asking questions would be met with more business context and would be a good way to learn about the development process.

Any good engineer will be grateful you find issues in their work, especially if you help track down solutions.

Of course, the CTO depending on AI to solve things may be less like that, IDK. Or even before AI I knew the type. I once gave a new CTO a whitepaper to read in private to understand some of the direction I was taking a project, and he basically flipped out. So YMMV.
by fakedang | 2025-10-26 15:11:07+00:00
The best part about the crypto market is that it's completely unregulated. No centralized governing authority means none of the protections that are typically afforded to equities exist. HFT quickly jumped on the opportunity and now makes a killing on it, us included. Plus with every consumer trading app now enabling crypto trading, the number of suckers in the overall pool has been significantly expanded.
by dijit | 2025-10-26 15:11:09+00:00
You know, I wonder about that.

The cost of creating new computers has got to be pretty high to the environment (I've heard 85% of lifetime carbon emissions from computers are from the manufacturing process), and I strongly suspect that we don't take that into consideration since we greenwash ourselves by forcing China to do our dirty work, chastising them for it, and then patting ourselves on the back for buying "more energy efficient chips".
by dahart | 2025-10-26 15:11:14+00:00
> The one thing I can think of is “organization-wide architecture oversight”, which is a pretty toxic role to assign.

I don’t know that I understand what you mean by toxic or why, but I’ve only ever seen the architecture overseer kind of thing in pretty small companies. In big companies, where there are multiple VPs of engineering and product management, that feels like the only time CTO even makes sense, and I expect they need to be setting vision and deciding where to invest (i.e. setting budgets) sometimes handling legal issues. In such large companies I’ve never seen a CTO providing architecture oversight, let alone coding. They might mandate the use or avoidance of some tech for reasons of corporate politics, but they are never in the trenches.

Having been a founding engineer in a startup where I was called CTO and mostly wrote code, I feel like this is a ‘cute’ thing we do, using C-level role names for everyone in a 3 person company. I didn’t feel like a real CTO, or VP, and I feel like using C-level names for roles in startups and small companies is a little goofy and awkward. A lot of people seem to like inflated role titles, and VCs seem to like having someone in key roles who can both lead well and take all responsibility and blame. I feel like ideally the name CTO shouldn’t be used until it’s needed, which isn’t until there are enough devs to need managers, and enough managers to need VPs and enough VPs to need a CTO. If that were the case, then the possible things on the list of CTO responsibilities is a lot smaller and more definable than if we say CTO can be anything including the 2nd founder who’s more interested in coding than pitching or marketing.
by Smaug123 | 2025-10-26 15:11:27+00:00
It's mostly a rather dense engineering textbook, but it contains lots of things I found insightful. I most particularly remember a segment like "We make things more reliable by adding more layers of Swiss cheese, on the assumption that failure modes are uncorrelated and it's only when all the failures take place that the system breaks. But this doesn't work when the system is being attacked by an intelligence, because an intelligence will explicitly correlate failures."

The book is very much designed for Google-scale systems, though: everything is assumed to be microservices, for example.
Show HN: Pass certifications faster for adult learners
by bud-123 | 2025-10-26 15:11:39+00:00
5 months ago, I dropped a Show HN for this platform. I received a ton of private feedback and did an overhaul to increase depth and clarity. The true purpose is to give adult learners the tools they need to pass certification exams quickly and in a structured space they can revisit. I'd appreciate more technical and design feedback that could improve the quality of my platform. Please share things you like, dislike, and whatever else you believe could overall make this better for everyone.

Built with Supabase, Next, TypeScript, and GCP.

- Bud
by indigodaddy | 2025-10-26 15:12:16+00:00
EDIT, looks like I didn’t click on the “image editing” tab when I went to the site, so I guess take the rest of my below comments criticizing the terminology with a grain of salt…

“Image editing” is a curious term, as it appears the site/topic is actually all about generating new images. The term in my mind should be for actual editing of existing, real, images, Eg “remove the coffee table” from this living room photo after uploading the image. I’ve found the actual “image generation” models to be bad at this because they introduce too many artifacts that weren’t in the original, which makes sense because they are really geared for creating images out of thin air.

Multimodal models like qwen3-vl-30b-a3b, however, seem to do quite well with editing existing images without trying to constantly add in new things or trying to change the image in ways that you don’t want, as if it’s trying to do the “lets just generate a new image” thing. imagegpt.com is also good for editing existing images, but not sure what model they are using on the backend.
by Lord-Jobo | 2025-10-26 15:12:50+00:00
The idea that a corporation, a private entity, can flex so much influence over our government is a direct threat to the entire model of government that has lead to America's greatest successes.

There is a triangular structure, where government, corporations, and labor all keep each other in check. The balance between these three represents the golden age of America in many metrics, although attributing that age to JUST this balance is silly.

Happiness, income inequality, trust in institutions, etc. all of it follows this trend. Even life expectancy is dropping! Literacy rates are declining!

Why? A huge part is that this balance is completely shattered. Labor has almost no influence, with corporations consuming 80% of it. Now we are rubbing up against a true fueudal Corporatocracy and the tip of the spear is not shy about that (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel)

>"It’s just how business is done"

I will not just roll over and accept this. It's worse than it ever has been, and the last time it got bad we had a severe economic collapse that led to starvation in the streets. How will it go next time, with the core problem being 100x larger and globally networked? Maybe we should address the problem before catastrophe?
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-10-26 15:13:24+00:00
Texas has rooftop solar, but it doesn't have the same incentives as California, and in fact, the Texas grid itself has a million little different franchises that repackage Centerpoint and/or Texas and New Mexico Power generated electricity with different usage plans you have to renew annually to semi-annually.

Our dear leader has been busy decimating small businesses that rely on federal incentives to build renewable power generation lately. This hit particularly hard in Texas.

The boss move is buying a plan with cheap to free electricity at night in exchange for a ludicrous day rate, bonus points for buying batteries to self-consume and/or charge at night as needed.

Going strictly by the numbers, it's a judgment call as to whether it's "worth it" or not, but the power independence for doing so is fantastic IMO YMMV. My Maslow hierarchy may not match yours.