MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joelreymont | 2025-11-27 06:14:44+00:00
I'm the author of the PR.

No, I'm not AI or bot, etc. Yes, my resume is genuine and is even more weird than what was listed (see https://joel.id/resume). Oh, and I live in Kyiv.

As for the PR itself, it was a PR stunt that I regret now as the code works and solves a real problem (at least for me!). I'll probably redo it, once I have spare Claude $$$ which I'm using for other projects now (https://joel.id/build-your-dreams/).

My motivation was to use the free $1000 of Claude credits for there greater good, as well as to try to push AI to its limits. It has worked out splendidly so far, my regrettable dumping of that huge PR on OCaml maintainers notwithstanding. For example, I'm having Claude write me a Lisp compiler from scratch, as well as finish a transpiler.

Last but not least, I think AI will write your next compiler and I write about it here https://joel.id/ai-will-write-your-next-compiler/

P.S. I'll try to answer the questions while I'm waiting for my Claude daily limits to reset...
by Veserv | 2025-11-27 06:14:52+00:00
Your argument is lacking nuance, declaring that the criticism being levied here must be a simple binary.

The specific error they are criticizing is extremely egregious, akin to builder declaring a house without a roof complete. “failing and deserving to be called a monkey” is a criticism being levied against a 0/100 level mistake, not a mere minor mistake as you are claiming.

While it might be desirable to use less colorful language, it is frankly challenging to express the sheer level of grossly incompetent organizational ineptitude on display here in a reviewed and delivered product actively causing negative customer impact for literal years which is trivially fixed and yet has been ignored.

Customers of Github should be infuriated that Github gleefully foists such utterly defective software upon them. It is hard to get that across in dispassionate writing.
by blackqueeriroh | 2025-11-27 06:15:53+00:00
> Does Steve Jobs deserve any respect for building the iPhone then?

No. Because he didn’t build it. He didn’t even have the idea for it. He gets respect for telling a lot of people “no” and for saying “not this” and “not that,” for being an excellent editor, but he does NOT get any credit for building m the iPhone.

That was thousands of other people.

By the way, what does being an editor look like?

It looks a lot like telling an LLM, “no, not that. Not that either. Try it this way. Mmm, not quite. Here, let me show you a sketch. Try something like that. Yes, that’s it!!”
by jovantho | 2025-11-27 06:16:07+00:00
As far as I know, it's not really on the app developers, after a while Apple requires them to switch to a newer "target" build if they want to push out an update. Currently, the minimum target iOS version if you're submitting an app to the app store is iOS 18.

And additionally, even if there once was a compatible version, Apple only lets end users download it if they have previously purchased/downloaded the app.

In my opinion, this is almost fully Apple's fault
by pabs3 | 2025-11-27 06:16:46+00:00
> 1. Security - Any program using X11 can read keystrokes ...

IIRC: this isn't quite correct, there was an extension called XACE that can block this. Probably Xorg didn't implement it and desktops didn't have support for it though.

https://www.x.org/archive/X11R7.5/doc/security/XACE-Spec.htm...
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-27 06:17:30+00:00
Linus losing is temper over a contributor messing up is not the same as calling people who maintain a free service (github - unless Zig was paying) monkeys. Correct me by all means, but did Linus call someone a personally denigrating name like that?

Either way, I like linux but I've avoided operating systems like freebsd and openbsd for less, so I agree. I've said plenty enough against Linus when he did lose his temper and started cussing at people.

And to be clear, I consider people who defend him (and in this case Andrew) far worse of an individual than the original offenders. People mess up, they're led astray by being put in positions of leadership and authority. That I get, and that's why i'm calling him out here. If he was random person, I wouldn't have bothered. But the enablers and defenders are the real problem. I hope you're not one of them. If you are, I consider you people responsible for every single work place bullying and toxic environment out there. People do great things without being classless uncivilized bullies.
by anigbrowl | 2025-11-27 06:18:23+00:00
Thank you, this was far more informative.

Because political advocacy is a passionate business, people sometimes forget basic tents of communication and end up publishing jeremiads that are only comprehensible to people who already agree with them, while failing to convert anyone else to their cause. I quite agree about the overreach of the French state here, but on first encounter I couldn't make head or tail of what their passionate opponents were arguing about.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-27 06:19:29+00:00
Backdoors can be called bugs. They could introduce a backdoor and fix it a CVE in the next release and no one would the wiser.

I don't defend Linus either, but I don't consider him calling someone a monkey or dehumanizing people either. If he has, please send me the lkml archives, I've been on the fence with going full on Apple anyways :)
by tmikaeld | 2025-11-27 06:19:39+00:00
HBM stacks multiple DRAM dies vertically on top of each other (typically 4-12 layers). It’s very different from DDR, especially during manufacturing because it has to be integrated with custom chips. Afaik, this isn’t available to Chinese foundries.. yet.

Thus, they have DDR available. Specifically, theyre using LPDDR5 so far.
by fy20 | 2025-11-27 06:19:48+00:00
> pay me for the privilege to work

This is basically how services like Uber Eats work in my country. The basics of it are foreign students want to earn extra income by working a few hours per week. This is allowed on a student visa, but it's limited hours, so real businesses like restaurants or bars don't usually want to hire students.

First of all you need a means of transport. There are small companies that will rent to you - on a weekly basis - an electric bike or a 20 year old Toyota Prius that is barely legal to drive (we have strict technical inspections here, so it's not that bad). They handle all the maintenance and insurance, you just pay your money and get a vehicle.

Next up you probably can't use your drivers license from home here to drive, as once you have a residence visa you need a local license. Many people just risk it, but if you want to do it legally you need to have a minimum number of lessons with an instructor and then pass the test. The test is only in the local language, so if you don't speak it (zero chance as a student that's been here 3 months), you need to hire a translator to accompany you on your test. They may or may not help to ensure your answers are correct. (You can only exchange a driver's license from other EU countries)

Finally you need a worker account on the delivery service, and the bag. You can register as self employed, file all the documents, go through the training course. That will take time, plus I think they are not always looking for new people due to high demand from workers. So you can skip all that and just rent an account from someone else, and hope they pay you at the end of the day.

So there is an entire industry dedicated to helping people earn a side income. I'm surprised the delivery services themselves don't start getting involved in this as it is a lot of money they are leaving on the table - although most of it has a questionable legal status.
by no_time | 2025-11-27 06:20:08+00:00
lol same. All my parts arrived except the 804. The supply chain for these cases appears to be imploding where I live (Hungary). The day after I ordered it either went out of stock or went up by +50% in all webshops that are reputable here.

I’m still a bit torn on whether I made the good call of getting 804 or the 304 wouldve been a enough for a significantly smaller footprint and -2 bays. Hard to tell without seeing them in person lol.

Are you satisfied with it? Any issues that came up since building?
by DeathArrow | 2025-11-27 06:21:01+00:00
I wonder how many consumer level HDDs in RAID5 will take to saturate a 10Gbps connection. My napkin math says that from 1,250 MB/s we can achieve around 1,150 MB/s due to network overhead so it means about 5 Red Pro/ Ironwolf Pro (reading at about 250–260 MB/s each) in RAID5 to saturate the connection.
by blackqueeriroh | 2025-11-27 06:21:23+00:00
> If you want a space where weird hacker values and doing stuff for the pure joy of discovery reign, gatekeep harder.

That’s not what was said. What they said is that they wanted more people doing things for the pure joy of discovery, and to make that happen, everyone needs to have more free time and less financial stress or be able to make fun stuff WAY faster, like with LLMs!
by somenameforme | 2025-11-27 06:21:31+00:00
It also just occurred to me in our discussion that you may have missed the fundamental point. The study used ad spend as a proxy for ads viewed. This is because measuring exactly how many ads people see, let alone over time, is impossible to measure, but it's undoubtedly increasing with a sharp exponential, largely thanks to the internet.

Ad spend works as a passable proxy for it, and is likely understating the impact in modern times since advertising has become cheaper than ever, again thanks to the internet. So ad spend is going up at the same time that the number of ads per spend is increasing, at a rate substantially faster than during their study period.
by godelski | 2025-11-27 06:21:39+00:00
> Won't scaling laws apply to it anyway?

Yes, of course. Scaling Laws will always apply, but that's not really the point[0]

The fight was never "Scale is all you need" (SIAYN) vs "scale is irrelevant" it was "SIAYN" vs "Scaling is not enough". I'm not aware of any halfway serious researcher that did not think scaling was going to result in massive improvements. Being a researcher from the SINE camp myself...

Here's the thing:

The SIAYN camp argued that the transformer architecture was essentially good enough. They didn't think scale was all you needed, but that the rest would me minor tweaks and increasing model size and data size would get us there. That those were the major hurdles. In this sense they argued that we should move our efforts away from research and into engineering. That AGI was now essentially a money problem rather than a research problem. They pointed to Sutton's Bitter Lesson narrowly, concentrating on his point about compute.

The SINE (or SINAYN) camp wasn't sold. We read the Bitter Lesson differently. That yes, compute is a key element to modern success, but just as important was the rise of our flexible algorithms. In the past we couldn't work with such algorithms because of lack of computational power, but that the real power was the algorithms. We're definitely a more diverse camp too, with vary arguments. Many of us look at animals and see that we can do so much more with so much less[2]. Clearly even if SIAYN were sufficient, it does not appear to be efficient. Regardless, we all agree that there's still subtle nuances in intelligence that need working out.

The characteristics of the scaling "laws" matter but it isn't enough. In the end what matters is generalization. For that we don't really have measures. Unfortunately, with the SIAYN camp also came benchmark maximization. It was a good strategy in the beginning as it helped give us direction. But we are now at the hard problem with the SINE camp predicted. How do you do things like make a model a good music generator when you have no definition of "good music"? Even in a very narrow sense we don't have a half way decent mathematical definition of any aesthetics. We argued "we should be trying to figure this out so we don't hit a wall" and they argued "it'll emerge with scale".

So now the cards have been dealt. Who has the winning hand? More importantly, which camp will we fund? And will we fund the SIAYN people that converted to SINE or will we fund those who have been SINE when times were tough?

[0] They've been power laws and I expect them to continue to be power laws[1]. But the parameters of those laws do still matter, right?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBluLfX2F_k

[2] A mouse has on the order of 100M neurons (and 10^12 synapses). Not to mention how little power they operate on! These guys can still our perform LLMs on certain tasks despite the LLMs having like 4 orders of magnitude more parameters and many more in data!
by quanto | 2025-11-27 06:22:57+00:00
> when I can get away with it I'd prefer to prove things with real numbers and assume magically they transfer to floating point.

True for some approaches, but numerical analysis does account for machine epsilon and truncation errors.

I am aware that Inria works with Coq as your link shows. However, the link itself does not answer my question. As a concrete example, how would you prove an implementation of a Kalman filter is correct?
by testdelacc1 | 2025-11-27 06:23:56+00:00
God this entire thread is just people defending him as “a breath of fresh air” and “just using human language”. There is something in people that makes them enjoy seeing others belittled like this. A complete lack of empathy, because no one would like to be treated this way themselves, but are perfectly happy seeing others treated this way. One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.

This reminds me of when Linus Torvalds would lose his shit now and then and launch gratuitous personal attacks at people who had made mistakes. Comment sections would be filled with folks laughing at Linus’ latest victim. “Couldn’t be me, I would never make this mistake”. Even Linus admits he was wrong to treat people this way and he’s taken time off to work on himself and become a better person. But there is still no shortage of people who enjoy seeing pain inflicted on others, nor people larping as a younger Linus.
by bitwize | 2025-11-27 06:24:35+00:00
Not really Ruby per se, but Extreme Programming, TDD, and all of the mid-2000s OO-hipster methodology stuff that accompanied Ruby/Rails back in the day. His thesis is that if you just adopt XP, like you're supposed to, that translates smoothly to programming with LLMs because you can have the LLMs fearlessly take incremental steps, supported by extensive testing, and directly oversee the work exactly the same way you would do pair-programming with a human junior programmer.
by Tor3 | 2025-11-27 06:26:06+00:00
And count Planck time instead of seconds.. it's not as impossible as it may sound. You'll need more than 128 bits but less than 256 bits even if the epoch is the Big Bang (I can't recall exactly how many bits are needed, but I did the math once, some years ago). And it'll be compatible with alien or future time systems too, in case what we call a second (currently defined by caesium-133 periods) changes.
by pabs3 | 2025-11-27 06:26:46+00:00
I found Xorg crashyness depends on how shitty your drivers are. Agreed that merging the components is a bad idea. Under KDE, there is more of a split, kwin does compositing and WM stuff, and plasmashell does the shell and other UI bits. In theory they don't need to all be in one process either. I also found that kwin crashing doesn't bring down apps these days, haven't tested that theory with X11 Xwayland apps though. Also see my other comment about Arcan for proper crash resilience.
by Jach | 2025-11-27 06:26:59+00:00
Sometimes those people aren't realizing that they're making things worse, they're just in a depressive spiral and can't see the other end, or see how much good is still being generated while other things are temporarily worse, or see that different tradeoffs have been made to make things worse in some ways and better in others. Just as people can delude themselves that they're always making a positive impact, people can delude themselves that they're making a negative one. The latter tends to be more costly, though, which can sure be annoying to those with a bias for a more cynical or pessimistic outlook...

Trying to ascribe positive/negative impact to strangers isn't usually a useful exercise, even if you have enough data to make a solid case. It can be cathartic -- imagine a different world where programmers making things worse would screw off and go do something else that's not programing! (I have a similar imagining, like of a world where programming is done by those who love it even outside of work -- even though I've worked with and helped hire excellent engineers who only treated programming as a job, they weren't my favorite to work with, and some were very much not excellent.) The best you can hope for is to trigger some self-reflection, and I do think that's important on an individual level. It's better to not make the world uglier, if you notice yourself doing so, and it's not just a distortion of your thinking, then you should probably stop, do something else, or figure out if it's at a level that you can compensate. A Richard Stallman quote I like:

"The straightforward and easy path was to join the proprietary software world, signing nondisclosure agreements and promising not to help my fellow hacker....I could have made money this way, and perhaps had fun programming (if I closed my eyes to how I was treating other people). But I knew that when my career was over, I would look back on years of building walls to divide people, and feel I had made the world ugly."
by BrenBarn | 2025-11-27 06:27:15+00:00
It's good advice, but I don't think it's sufficient anymore. I'm quickly losing faith in any kind of "vote with your dollars" argument that by not using the app you can pressure the company to provide a functional website. The big players are too big now and they are close to being able to create and control their own customer base rather than having to woo them. I don't see a positive future without radically stricter laws and enforcement (as in, if a company is conditioning any service on tracking, they're fined in the double-digit percentages of gross annual revenue). These bad actors will not change unless they're bludgeoned into doing so.
by joelreymont | 2025-11-27 06:27:21+00:00
People complaining about AI stealing code may not realize that OxCaml is a fork of the code that AI is modifying. Both forks have the same license and there are people working on both projects.

AI did paste Mark's copyright on all the files for whatever reason but it did not lift the DWARF implementation from OxCaml and paste it into the PR.

The PR wasn't one-shot either. I had to steer it to completion over several days, had one AI review the changes made by the other, etc. The end result is that the code _works_ and does what it says on the tin!
by sfink | 2025-11-27 06:27:49+00:00
Except that the outage would still have happened without that .unwrap(). So go ahead and build those features, they sound useful, but don't think that they'd save you from a failure like this.

As the poster here said, the place to build in features that would have prevented this from happening is the DB schema and queries. 5NF would be onerous overkill here, but it seems reasonable to have some degree of forced normalization for something that could affect this much.

(Requiring formal verification of everything involved here would be overkilling the overkill, otoh.)
by tsimionescu | 2025-11-27 06:28:37+00:00
How is it not? In the not so distant past of the 1930s there were political parties advocating for the mass killing of people with disabilities, or at least the sterilization of those with heritable disabilities. There have been real campaigns in that period that did this type of forced sterilization, especially in some mental hospitals. You'll still find people espousing such beliefs, thankfully at the fringes for now.

Accessibility is the opposite position of that - but it's by no means a universally accepted good, unfortunately, especially when it requires extra effort to implement.
by tristanj | 2025-11-27 06:28:37+00:00
No, it is because doors take up a lot of space. A typical door is 3 feet wide, and requires 7-14 feet of empty space to operate [0]. You can't place any furniture, toiletries, or luggage racks in this space. For a typical hotel room of 300sq feet, this "dead space" represents 3-5% of the room. Removing the door allows hotels to decrease the size of each room, and fit more rooms on each floor, increasing profit.

This is why many newer hotels choose to sliding doors, which barely take up any space, or just remove doors entirely.

[0] For a door of r=3 feet, A door swings a minimum of 90 degrees, which takes 3.14 * 3*2 / 4 = 7.065 sq feet at a minimum to 14.1 sq feet to operate.
by petersellers | 2025-11-27 06:29:48+00:00
> All I am saying is it is their project, their blog. They can be however much rude they want to be on their website. It's their website, their lines and their boundaries.

That's funny, because if that is true he violated his own code of conduct: https://ziglang.org/code-of-conduct/#safe-constructive-only

> I do but I decline to share it here

The point is that everyone has different lines for what they consider to be "acceptable" or not. That is exactly the reason why codes of conduct exist - it's an attempt to find a common denomiator so that it can help foster a community where people can feel included without feeling like they are being attacked or insulted.
by kragen | 2025-11-27 06:30:00+00:00
Not much of a terminal without a monitor, is it? Or is its output entirely audio?

I'm curious what the physical size of the machine is. Is it GPD MicroPC-sized or are we talking about a normal laptop? 100g or 10kg?

When I worked in a call center I learned to use the Data General terminal's keypad to type in people's credit card numbers as fast as people could say them. I would not want to use this keypad because I wouldn't be able to use my right hand on it, and that's the hand that knows the keypad. Then again, I don't do that much numeric data entry these days.

What's the ⌘ "interesting feature" key for?
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-27 06:30:48+00:00
> no one would like to be treated this way themselves

I'd like to be treated this way if I am doing really stupid things. If I am doing the kind of stupid things GitHub is doing, I'd rather someone call me out as a monkey so that I know I f-ed up.

I know calling "monkey" is not professional but my expectation of professional treatment stops at my office with my colleagues and at a few other places. I don't expect the whole world to be professional to me. I can take some bloke on the internet calling me a monkey if that helps me to introspect and make things right.

If they're nice about it and choose professional words to tell me I'm being stupid, that's great. But if they cannot and they call me "monkey", I'll take that too. I'd rather have the feedback in whatever words they can muster than not have the feedback at all.
by novoreorx | 2025-11-27 06:32:00+00:00
I do feel that GitHub's product development has been less exciting in recent years, but that's natural for any maturing platform. While I can't judge whether there are fewer talented people involved, I've noticed they haven't increased mistakes, and the platform continues to grow. It would be unfair to overlook the hard work that goes into maintaining GitHub and shipping new features (even if some of those features aren't to everyone's taste). I'm grateful for GitHub and hope it continues to thrive. Peace.