MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-11-26 17:12:54+00:00
> but this is not executing a program. this interpreting markup to render some data in some format.

Yes, it's interpreting markup to render some data in some format but that does not preclude such interpretation from being the execution of a program.

> sometimes presenting data and programming are conflated

My point is that executing a program is not mutually exclusive with presenting data. I am not conflating these terms but rather the opposite; I am pointing out that they are separate concepts which do not necessarily conflict with each other.

> Handling form submissions, handling displaying select boxes etc, is all result of executing program that is browser itself. The input for that program is hypertext markup

Right, that "hypertext markup" is a program for the browser (another program) to execute. That seems like an accurate use of English. If this is where we draw the line then JS must not be a programming language because it's just some kind of "script text" that is the input for some other real program.

> Running embedded JS however is executing a program by webmaster.

I understand this is your perspective but you haven't drawn a clear line separating this from the execution of an HTML program. Running plain HTML in a browser, consisting strictly of the necessary components of a valid HTML document, is also executing a program (webmaster isn't necessary).
by hollowturtle | 2025-11-26 17:12:57+00:00
> 1rem is equal to the same number of pixels anywhere on a given page and, generally speaking, across pages on a given site.

That's not true, first of all the root font size might not be immediate to query and find out what it is, second it might change because of variables on the root or base font size might be percentage/rem based itself not necessarily in pixels and finally setting it in pixels doesn't take into consideration zoom levels, or OS-level font settings.

> REMs have been around and standard practice for 10 years.

I know but thanks for flexing it out, in fact I'm arguing that css is and has been bad for many years
by evanjrowley | 2025-11-26 17:13:21+00:00
GeneralMetadata.jl: JLL and Artifact Component analysis

I am glad Julia is exploring this route.

The Go ecosystem has achieved something amazing here with govulncheck[0] and I would love to see more programming languages introduce such capabilties. For those who are unaware, govulncheck provides a software component analysis (SCA) and dynamic/static applilcation security test (DAST/SAST) capability. It's directly supported by the Go project and so far I have not found this in any other ecosystem at a comparable level of integration.

Govulncheck reports known vulnerabilities that affect Go code. It uses static analysis of source code or a binary's symbol table to narrow down reports to only those that could affect the application. By default, govulncheck makes requests to the Go vulnerability database at https://vuln.go.dev. Requests to the vulnerability database contain only module paths with vulnerabilities already known to the database, not code or other properties of your program. See https://vuln.go.dev/privacy.html for more. Use the -db flag to specify a different database, which must implement the specification at https://go.dev/security/vuln/database.

Unlike Go, Julia is an interpreted language, so their approach to this challenge will be different and worth learning from.

[0] https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/vuln/cmd/govulncheck
by rozap | 2025-11-26 17:13:24+00:00
Now tell the AI to distill a bunch of user goals into a living system which has to evolve over time, integrate with other systems, etc etc. And deliver and support that system

I use Claude code every day and it is a slam dunk for situations like the one above, fiddly UIs and the like. Seriously , some of the best money I spend. But it is not good at more abstract stuff. Still a massive time saver for me and does effectively do a lot of work that would have gotten farmed out to junior engineers.

Maybe this will change in a few years and I'll have to become a potato farmer. I'm not going to get into predictions. But to act like it can do what an engineer with 20 years of experience can do means the AI brain worm got you or it says something about your abilities.
by hermitcrab | 2025-11-26 17:13:56+00:00
The failed UK NHS IT project, known as the National Programme for IT (NPfIT), cost the UK government over £10 billion and produced almost nothing of value. I'm surprised that didn't get a mention.

Again those bastards, Fujitsu, were involved. They even sued UK government and won £465 million settlement when their contract was cancelled. But, despite this and their complicity in covering up the failures of the Horizons posts office system, the UK government is still giving them fat contracts.

If senior managers can preside over a massive failure and walk away with a huge pension, there isn't much incentive for them to do better, is there?
by ottah | 2025-11-26 17:13:59+00:00
I 100% agree with the performance improvement goals, but I think the security claims are overblown, and overly cautious. I honestly don't understand the point of trying to implement the security boundary in the display manager. It solves one class of security issues, while breaking a lot of accessibility and automation. The display manager just shouldn't be enforcing rigid per processes security controls, that's better done further down the stack. Or at a minimum security controls should respect user freedom enough to let a user access normally restricted features, with out the all or nothing elevation to root. There's a middle ground here where we don't break the world, and they get their shiny security policies.
by pphysch | 2025-11-26 17:14:08+00:00
"Just build/produce more" (abundance) sounds fantastic if you are part of the upper classes who have been on the right side of wealth inequality trends. It allows us to avoid the issue of inequality. Just grow the pie!!

But surely you can see how this agenda is not appealing to most Americans who have been on the wrong side of wealth inequality? Even if you double the size of the pie, how do you convince them that their proportional slice of it won't halve in the same period? Because that HAS been their experience so far in the past ~50 years.

We do need to build more, but that has to also come with reform to be politically viable.
by nixpulvis | 2025-11-26 17:14:14+00:00
I try not to succumb to this attitude. Humans are remarkably able to build systems and technology to solve complex problems. The fact that we aren't making the needed changes now fast enough doesn't rule out that we might as it becomes more apparently necessary, or that some new plan will emerge which helps dramatically.

But we also cannot get complacent thinking that it's future generations problem. We need a breakthrough yesterday.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-26 17:14:15+00:00
I'm not sure how they can be compared, but of course the real world is highly predictable and repetitious (if you're looking at the right generalizations and abstractions), with brains being the proof of that. Brains are very costly, but their predictive benefit is big enough to more than offset the cost.

The difference between brains and LLMs though is that brains have evolved with generality as a major driver - you could consider it as part of the "loss function" of brain optimization. Brains that don't generalize quickly won't survive.

The loss function of an LLM is just next-token error, with no regard as to HOW that was achieved. The loss is the only thing shaping what the LLM learns, and there is nothing in it that rewards generalization. If the model is underparamized (not that they really are), it seems to lead to superposed representations rather than forcing generalization.

No doubt the way LLMs are trained could be changed to improve generalization, maybe together with architectural changes (put an autoencoder in there to encourage compressed representations ?!), but trying to take a language model and tweak it into a brain seems the wrong approach, and there is a long list of architectural changes/enhancements that would be needed if that is the path.

With animal brains, it seems that generalization must have been selected for right from the simplest beginnings of a nervous system and sensory driven behavior, given that the real world demands that.
by xp84 | 2025-11-26 17:14:29+00:00
> We already put more importance on handmade goods vs. factory-made, even if the latter is cheaper and better quality

I guess if 'importance' means sentimentality, however, the "factory-made things" industry certainly makes the vast majority of the money to be made in manufacturing. Handmade is a niche. I think the argument is that whether people prefer it or not, AI-generated content will have a major place in the marketplace for content because of its natural advantages. In other words, a movie heavily generated with AI won't win any Oscars but there is a world where such things would make a lot of money and some of that money would flow to OpenAI.
by threethirtytwo | 2025-11-26 17:14:32+00:00
This is technically random. The entire creationist argument is that complexity cannot come from randomness but evolution is the method in which it does.

Evolution is just a sort of way for low entropy structures to form from randomness. It’s still random all the way down.

The man is just trying to reconcile a belief in god with the scientific reality. He needs to bend the evidence to fit his identity he cannot bend his identity to fit the evidence because that could break his identity. The fact he commented here on this topic is sort of unhinged. It seems like the article presented evidence that is strikingly against his world view and he needed to justify something in order to prevent his identity from rearranging itself according to external reality.
by hvb2 | 2025-11-26 17:14:38+00:00
> A central database query didn’t have the right constraints to express business rules. Not only it missed the database name, but it clearly needs a distinct and a limit, since these seem to be crucial business rules.

In a database, you wouldn't solve this with a distinct or a limit? You would make the schema guarantee uniqueness?

And yes, that wouldn't deal with cross database queries. But the solution here is just the filter by db name, the rest is table design.
by williamdclt | 2025-11-26 17:14:45+00:00
> Yeah, I have a hard time believing that there’s a massive demand for AI-generated videos and images. Like, why would the news industry want to generate images and videos with AI? It’s not news. The advertising industry maybe, but even then it’s probably not your top brands that go full in on it. If you see that all of Apple’s adverts are generated with AI, it’ll probably lower your brand perception.

(disclaimer: I don't work in ad and don't know more about it than the next person)

Whether the end product (the ad) is AI-generated or not is almost irrelevant. The whole production chain will likely be AIfied: to produce one ad you need to go through many concepts, gather reference images/videos, make prototypes, iterate on all that, and probably a ton of other things that I don't know about... The final ad is 1 image/video, but there's been dozens/hundreds of other images/videos produced in this process. Whether the final ad is AI-generated or not, AI will almost certainly (for better or worse...) have a major place in the production chain.
by LudwigNagasena | 2025-11-26 17:14:57+00:00
I couldn't care less about that pseudo-Marxist mumbo-jumbo about fascists redefining truth. I feel happier and less alienated (to speak in author's terms) due to LLMs. And no rhetoric about control and power can change the fact that lots of software engineering tasks are outright boring for many people.

For example, I spent a bunch of dollars to let Claude figure out how to setup a VSCode workspace with a multi-environment uv monorepo with a single root namespace and an okayish VSCode linting support (we still failed to figure out how to enable a different python interpreter for each folder for Ruff, but that seems to be a Ruff extension limitation).
by rowanG077 | 2025-11-26 17:15:05+00:00
I think it's so interesting that people want to know something is created by AI to not consume it. Personally I don't care if something is made by AI or not. If I like it I like it. If not, then I don't. At this point at least I don't like bad usage of AI. But there has been some absolutely bangers of content created by AI. My previous background was AI generated for example.
by fragmede | 2025-11-26 17:15:10+00:00
> We do not need a million differen webshops, and the next CRUD application.

The thing about capitalism is that unecessary webshop isn't getting any customers if it's truly unecessary, and will soon be out of business. We can appreciate Ghostty, because why? Because the guy writing it is independently wealthy and can fly jets around for fun, and has deigned to grace us with his coding gifts once again? Don't get me wrong, it's a nice piece of software, but I don't know that system's any better.
by whoknowsidont | 2025-11-26 17:15:31+00:00
>.NET was a solid choice for backend builds before Node became so popular

The problem with the community is that this statement has been said for every version in every era despite how untrue it is lol. No matter what ills or blights .NET will put on your solution the developers will always sing its real or imagined praises.

This is the #1 reason I avoid interacting and working with .NET teams because it's still true to this day.

Honesty would go a long way.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-26 17:15:41+00:00
For the last year I've mostly only been dropping into YouTube just to see how bad it's become. Invidious isn't my favourite bit of software, but it is better than the stock youtube interface. Also, on my ChromeCast (yes, I know it's not supported anymore) the YouTube app will play an ad in the middle of a video and never return to the original video. Most of what I do is look around to find videos that look interesting then download them with yt-dlp so I can watch complete videos.

There's probably a market out there for video hosting that doesn't suck. I think a video search / discovery platform on top of Vimeo might be useful.
by dugidugout | 2025-11-26 17:15:41+00:00
If you read the grand parent, they seem to be denying a disruption is taking place industry wide. The adage was used to illustrate how complacency is blinded by the very conditions that enable it, and while this is unfalsifiable and not very conducive to discussion, "fear mongering" is a bit rich to levy.

Further:

> Our industry is being disrupted by AI... No wholesale turkey slaughter.

Is an entirely different position than the GP who is essentially betting on AI producing more jobs for hackers, which surely won't be so simple.
by yogsototh | 2025-11-26 17:15:43+00:00
I think there are a few movies that made me realize how much the space is vast, empty and adverse to life.

I think it would be nice for people to take a look at them:

- Aniara (2018)

- High Life (2018)

and maybe in a less artistic view:

- Powers of Ten (1977) yt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
by qwertox | 2025-11-26 17:15:44+00:00
What I don't understand is how Elon will ever compete with Chinese humanoid robot pricing and output. He's known for not caring about privacy, so there's no real difference between buying a Tesla one or a Chinese one. Both will look and listen into your home and transfer as much data as possible to their true owners.

He congratulates Jeff Bezos for New Glenn, and rightly so, but he's absolutely silent about the Chinese robots. One has to admit that they're already ahead of the US. This comes from a German who well recognizes how far behind Germany is in comparison to the US, in regards to any digital technology.
by mindslight | 2025-11-26 17:16:02+00:00
Given that there is very little interest in developing commons here on earth (especially new types of commons from whole cloth), the shape that "making uninhabitable planets habitable" would likely take is that of living in bubbles rather than some kind of broad-scale terraforming. This would intrinsically shape society towards top-down authoritarian control, rather than allowing for distributed individual liberty. In this light, Earth's bountiful distributed air, water, and wildlife should be viewed as a technological-society-bootstrapping resource similar to easily-accessible oil and coil stored energy deposits.
by marcodiego | 2025-11-26 17:16:05+00:00
Just one example: Around 2009 I met Thiago Vignatti. His master thesis was about improving X so it was easy to use in a multi-seat setup (2 monitors/keyboard/mouse) so a single computer could be simultaneously used by two people.

He later worked for Nokia, Intel and eventually his own startup related to VR.

During his time as a Google summer of code student, his project was to paralelize X code so it could run in multiple threads, making better use of modern hardware with many cores. His project failed. The reason: X code was so bad that paralelizing and making it thread-safe required so many locks that it ran slower! It was a better idea to start from scratch. I remember, at the time, taking a look at the source code and asking him why there was a X86 emulator built-in in X source code. His answer was that that was required to run some video BIOS on non-x86 computers, namely Sun workstations. That was the level of legacy code in X.

This is just an illustration of many problems X had. Vignatti was one of the X devs that migrated to wayland development. Many other core X devs did the same. People saying that X is fixable, that it can be improved or what else... These people may be right, but I trust X core developers more than these people when the subject is X development.
by simion314 | 2025-11-26 17:16:09+00:00
>Wayland was started primarily by those who were maintaining X11. There is almost nobody who is both capable of working on X11 and wants to work on it.

Isn't wayland just soem protocol? so did the ex X11 devs wrote soem specifications and then soem went to GNOME< some to KDE and others are just editing the specifications ?

I think the issue is that there is no wayland library that a DE can use so everyone is forced to implement it as part of the DE , so the end result is a lot of missing features and incompatibility.

I could be wrong, I still run Linux but I decided years ago to stop following the Linux drama, I will use Kubuntu LTS and hopefully when it drops X11 the Wayland implementation and the X11 fallback would be usable.
by aseipp | 2025-11-26 17:16:50+00:00
That whole dust up just ended up being some bugginess in their native EGL/Wayland backend, which was known, but it was amplified by some distros accidentally enabling the Wayland backend by default. A build setting triggered the default render path to use EGL, but if you just set GDK_BACKEND=x11 and force KiCad onto XWayland, everything works just fine. And those bugs have probably been sorted out in distros by now. See https://forum.kicad.info/t/not-the-selected-menu-under-wayla... for some details.

TL;DR their Wayland backend is incomplete, it accidentally got enabled for some users, run KiCad on XWayland instead until their EGL backend is ready.
by fngjdflmdflg | 2025-11-26 17:17:26+00:00
I don't think China wants to go to war with Japan. I just mean to explain why people are focusing on geopolitical tensions. And the answer is that those tensions do exist, and is partly why some countries are trying to become more self-sufficient to begin with. So discussion of it is valid, that is my main point. Now once we get into those discussions, they might not be as high quality or informed as in let's say a pure technology article, but that is to be expected.
by nine_k | 2025-11-26 17:17:31+00:00
* The unwrap() in production code should have never passed code review. Damn, it should have been flagged by a linter.

* The deployment should have followed the blue/green pattern, limiting the blast radius of a bad change to a subset of nodes.

* In general, a company so much at the foundational level of internet connectivity should not follow the "move fast, break things" pattern. They did not have an overwhelming reason to hurry and take risks. This has burned a lot of trust, no matter the nature of the actual bug.
by TomasBM | 2025-11-26 17:18:04+00:00
It's fair to worry about the geopolitics of borders and minority groups, but this does not have much to do with a company placing its headquarters in a middle country where maybe (former) members of a controversial state could also work.

People believe all kinds of weird things, and that includes Russians. In secular countries, you're free to believe in what you want, but that doesn't mean you will or should be taken seriously. What a random Russian person believes doesn't matter, unless they have power and it has an effect on others.

Switch Russian with any other ethnicity or nation in the world, and you will perhaps see why the rhetoric of mixing geopolitics and ethnic politics with company policy (or even your own relationships) is not the best.
by iFire | 2025-11-26 17:18:15+00:00
For example let's say you have a free and opensource 3d formats pipeline.

For a digital content creation tool studio (dcc) which has one tool (maya) and they use a intermediate format called (fbx) and you want to interchange a 3d avatar in Godot Engine.

If you want to amend the process to swap out maya with blender, you would need to understand how the fbx format works and also how maya, blender and Godot Engine works.

Sure you can outsource the library to an external project like assimp, but the moment a particular fbx is broken you basically start rewriting assimp. If the errors are close to 80% of the imported cases, you'd need to rewrite assimp.

Also fbx in Godot Engine is a reimplementation of FBX as there's no specifcation of FBX file format. This is similar to your vendor locked in description.

This isn't a typical enterprise data exchange process but maybe my change of the theme of the process can help.
by moralestapia | 2025-11-26 17:18:24+00:00
Same here, my rate keeps going up ...

I do see a shortage of entry-level positions (number of them, not salaries).

Going through the author's bio ... it seems like he's just not able to provide value in any of the high-paying positions that exist right now; not that he should be, he's just not aligned with it and that's ok.

I can see why he's desperate.
by lenerdenator | 2025-11-26 17:18:34+00:00
> IMO the key problem that OpenAI have is that they are all-in on AGI

I think this needs to be said again.

Also, not only do we not know if AGI is possible, but generally speaking, it doesn't bring much value if it is.

At that point we're talking about up-ending 10,000 years of human society and economics, assuming that the AGI doesn't decide humans are too dangerous to keep around and have the ability to wipe us out.

If I'm a worker or business owner, I don't need AGI. I need something that gets x task done with a y increase in efficiency. Most models today can do that provided the right training for the person using the model.

The SV obsession with AGI is more of a self-important Frankenstein-meets-Pascal's Wager proposition than it is a value proposition. It needs to end.
by tptacek | 2025-11-26 17:18:35+00:00
Cloudflare doesn't seem to have called it a "Root Cause Analysis" and, in fact, the term "root cause" doesn't appear to occur in Prince's report. I bring this up because there's a school of thought that says "root cause analysis" is counterproductive: complex systems are always balanced on the precipice of multicausal failure.