MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ryandv | 2025-11-14 07:27:28+00:00
For, on the one hand, there is the real world, and on the other, a whole system of symbols about that world which we have in our minds. These are very very useful symbols; all civilization depends on them; but like all good things they have their disadvantages, and the principle disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality, just as we confuse money with actual wealth; and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, our images of ourselves, *with* ourselves. Now of course, reality, from a philosopher's point of view, is a dangerous word. A philosopher will ask me, what do I mean by reality? Am I talking about the physical world of nature, or am I talking about a spiritual world, or what? And to that I have a very simple answer. When we talk about the material world, that is actually a philosophical concept - so in the same way, if I say that reality is spiritual, that's also a philosophical concept - and reality itself is not a concept. Reality is - [...] ... and we won't give it a name.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJYp-mWqB1w

See also: "the TAO that can be named is not the true TAO;" or, Crowley in Konx om Pax on the "fools who mistake names for things."
by abustamam | 2025-11-14 07:28:43+00:00
While I agree that all art is kinda shitty in its own way (IMDB has sections dedicated to breaks in continuity and stuff like that), experienced filmmakers would be good at hiding the shittiness (maybe with a really clever action sequence or something).

It's only a matter of time before we get experienced AI filmmakers. I think we already have them, actually. It's clear that Coke does not employ them though.
by Lio | 2025-11-14 07:29:38+00:00
Alienation from labour is a perfect description.

I once worked for a start up that got taken over. In the process all retained staff lost their options.

I don’t think the options were really worth that much so I guess we were supposed to just be happy we still had our jobs.

The pettiness of it though just sucked the life out of the work for me. I found it very hard to concentrate and very hard to give a shit about anything after that.

It’s a massive indicator that it’s time to move on.
by ssl-3 | 2025-11-14 07:29:55+00:00
The vote that is never cast is absolutely worthless. You're correct.

(I vote every single time unless my ballot would simply be empty. I'd like to say "I'll see you at the polls!" but that is seemingly a lost cause -- it's apparent that only one of us has any chance at all of imparting any change at this level, and that this person is not you.

But you do you. The folks who aren't nihilists will do what we can to steer the ship without your help.)
by Pooge | 2025-11-14 07:32:09+00:00
Java Concurrency in Practice[1] has always been recommended by my colleagues. I'm about halfway through it and I think it makes the concepts pretty clear. Even if you move away from Java one day, I think the investment is not lost at all. Then you could ask your favorite LLM to create concurrency exercises once in a while to practice.

[1]: ISBN 978-0321349606
by johnisgood | 2025-11-14 07:32:10+00:00
We had bots in Tremulous which is an old ioquake3 fork, there was no AI involved, worked fine. See https://github.com/cmf028/CoW-Tremulous.

Unvanquished (https://unvanquished.net) became the new "Tremulous" (different engine, etc.), also has bots.

Read more about it here: https://wiki.unvanquished.net/wiki/Bot_design

- navigation, which is done with a combination of A* or Dijkstra and navmeshes

- decision, which is done with the paradigm of behavior trees

- computer vision, to complete what navmeshes can not provide

Despite the term "computer vision", it is still not AI.

I will quote the "Navigation" and "Computer vision" section from the site I linked above:

> All bots should be able to reach any part of the map that does not require special training.

> Bots should be able to detect any enemy in their FoV. It would be nice to have bots not being too good at finding hidden buildables on the roof. This makes hiding eggs unfun and next to impossible in the current state. Unless they are placed outside of a navmesh, in which case bots are totally unable to discover them.

There is a pull request that implements the use of "beacons" for bots which is used to locate buildables: https://github.com/Unvanquished/Unvanquished/pull/2683

There was no "computer vision" in the Tremulous bots, FWIW.

In Tremulous, they used waypoints only, so has nothing to do with AI either.

Bots in Unvanquished are quite human-like and there are plans to add personalities (if they did not add them already) and there is no AI there either.

TL;DR: You can have bots that work quite damn well and human-like without AI/ML.
by baq | 2025-11-14 07:32:57+00:00
> The idea that people occasionally throw around that C is more 'simple' and less 'complex' than C++ or Rust and therefore it leads to more maintainable or easy to understand code is, IMO, completely bogus.

This, this, this.

C compilers are simple, but the C language is not, and let’s not even talk about C++.
by generuso | 2025-11-14 07:34:11+00:00
One of their patents describes exactly that -- driving a hardened stud into the softer metal of the deck, essentially by using a gunpowder actuated nail gun:

https://patents.google.com/patent/US20240092508A1/en

They have also included a way to disconnect the stud from the leg afterwards, such that the deck can be tidied up conveniently after the rocket had been removed. This is a neat idea -- the damage to the deck should very localized, and the rocket gets secured quickly and without putting human welders at risk.
by Anonyneko | 2025-11-14 07:34:57+00:00
Anecdotal, but a year ago we lost the whole RAID array in a rented Hetzner server to some hardware failure.

In a way, I think it doesn't matter what you use as long as you diversify enough (and have lots of backups), as everything can fail, and often the probability of failure doesn't even matter that much as any failure can be one too many.
by MrJohz | 2025-11-14 07:37:00+00:00
I don't really agree with their argument, though. Pretty much all the features that Babel deals with are syntax sugar, in the sense that if they didn't exist, you could largely emulate them at runtime by writing a bit more code or using a library. The sugar adds a layer of abstraction, but it's a very thin layer, enough that most JavaScript developers could compile (or transpile) the sugar away in their head.

On the other hand, C to Assembly is not such a thin layer of abstraction. Even the parts that seem relatively simple can change massively as soon as an optimisation pass is involved. There is a very clear difference in abstraction layer going on here.

I'll give you that these definitions are fuzzy. Nim uses a source-to-source compiler, and the difference in abstraction between Nim and C certainly feels a lot smaller than the difference between C and Assembly. But the C that Nim generates is, as I understand it, very low-level, and behaves a lot closer to assembly, so maybe in practice the difference in abstraction is greater than it initially seems? I don't think there's a lot of value in trying to make a hard-and-fast set of rules here.

However, it's clear that there is a certain subset of compilers that aim to do source-to-source desugaring transformations, and that this subset of compilers have certain similarities and requirements that mean it makes sense to group them together in some way. And to do that, we have the term "transpiler".
by Jweb_Guru | 2025-11-14 07:37:11+00:00
> Graydon was ejected out of his own language

That's not what happened at all. Graydon voluntarily stepped down because he didn't want to be in the role of BDFL. It's true that he wasn't a huge fan of the "C++-ification" of the language, but he wasn't pushed out or anything, and definitely could have stayed on steering the project as long as he wanted to. I think there are a number of other languages that would have benefited from a similar approach, actually.
by throwaway132448 | 2025-11-14 07:37:15+00:00
Only small parts of the semiconductor industry at the very cutting edge even remotely resemble that. And that’s technology with outcomes (I.e. process nodes) that are genuinely new and have never been done before. What’s being accomplished now in space are outcomes that were accomplished before PCs existed, so the idea of it being insurmountable R&D doesn’t hold. It’s very telling that the only “commercially viable” launch providers are billionaire trophy assets with induced demand from a heavy slice of government sponsorship and self dealing.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-11-14 07:37:28+00:00
> At this point they had to convince Claude—which is extensively trained to avoid harmful behaviors—to engage in the attack. They did so by jailbreaking it, effectively tricking it to bypass its guardrails. They broke down their attacks into small, seemingly innocent tasks that Claude would execute without being provided the full context of their malicious purpose. They also told Claude that it was an employee of a legitimate cybersecurity firm, and was being used in defensive testing.

Guardrails in AI are like a $2 luggage padlock on a bicycle in the middle of nowhere. Even a moron, given enough time, and a little dedication, will defeat it. And this is not some kind of inferiority of one AI manufacturer over another. It's inherent to LLMs. They are stupid, but they do contain information. You use language to extract information from them, so there will always be a lexicographical way to extract said information (or make them do things).

> This raises an important question: if AI models can be misused for cyberattacks at this scale, why continue to develop and release them? The answer is

Money.
by baq | 2025-11-14 07:37:58+00:00
> to implement a self-balancing binary tree in Rust, you need to first understand reference counting, `RefCell`, and ownership semantics. In C, you just need to know what a struct is and what a pointer is.

It is misguided to say that recursive data structures should be easy to write. They are difficult to reason about and the Rust compiler is right to point this out. CS is not engineering, you should be writing those trees with a pencil on a piece of paper as Dijkstra intended, not in C.
by rfonseca | 2025-11-14 07:38:42+00:00
(disclaimer: I work at Microsoft, but am not directly involved with Durable Functions)

Being a library is a pretty interesting feature! Correct, Durable Functions allows you to write task-parallel orchestrations of task-parallel 'activities' (which are stateless functions), and these orchestrations are fully persistent and resilient, like DBOS executions. It also has the concept of 'Entities', which are named objects (of a type you define) that "live forever", and serialize all method invocations, which are the only way to change their private state. These are also persistent. The Netherite paper [1], section 2, describes this model well.

So, there seems to be a pretty close correspondence between DBOS steps and DF activities, and between workflows and orchestrations. I don't know what the correspondence is to DF entities is in the DBOS model.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
by Doxin | 2025-11-14 07:39:29+00:00
I think the reason take so much offense at e.g. pugs is because they don't need to be bred that way. Where I'm at a law was passed making it illegal to breed dogs with congenital conditions. As a result basically all the pugs you see here have a bit of a snout as do all the boxers. Crucially this didn't change the breeds personality perceptibly, and it only changes the look the tiniest of bit. In trade you get dogs that are visibly happier and have more energy.

A neighbor in particular previously had two french bulldogs with no snout. They'd spend all day panting and snoring. Once they passed away they got new ones, now with snout. They spend all day running and jumping instead.
by littlestymaar | 2025-11-14 07:40:21+00:00
Rust is good, don't get me wrong, but bound checks are still reason why you occasionally need unsafe to get the maximum performance, because not everything can be expressed as an iterator where bound checks are automatically eliminated.

If you check Wuffs repo, you'll see benchmarks very favorably comparing to rust implementations.

And it's not surprising, wuffs is to spatial safety what the borrow checker is to temporal safety. And regarding spatial safety rust is kind of like where C++ is in terms of temporal safety: it has the choice between unsafe or runtime check hopping that a large fraction of them will get eliminated by the compiler.
by reissbaker | 2025-11-14 07:40:51+00:00
Yup. K8s is a bit of a pain to keep up with, but Chef and even Ansible are much more painful for other reasons once you have more than a handful of nodes to manage.

It's also basically a standard API that every cloud provider is forced to implement, meaning it's really easy to onboard new compute from almost anyone. Each K8s cloud provider has its own little quirks, but it's much simpler than the massive sea of difference that each cloud's unique API for VM management was (and the tools to paper over that were generally very leaky abstractions in the pre-K8s world).
by dammod | 2025-11-14 07:41:45+00:00
If/When AI gets to the point where it can consistenly beat human players in video games, it will be worldwide news when it first happens, and then the novelty will wear off. See: Chess still going strong.

For the video game market in general, AI will be used by players largely where there are financial incentives (MMO market, CS:GO Skins, etc.), but usage of an AI will most often be socially viewed just like usage of any other performance improvement/script/hack: As a crutch.
by defrost | 2025-11-14 07:42:54+00:00
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotelling%27s_law

The US electoral system was essentially doomed to iteratively spiral into two blocs, neither of which significantly represent a sizable chunk of the US population.

It's the unfortunate emergent behaviour of a system set up hundreds of years ago by founders opposed to Kings, little kings, and dominant Party politics.

Had they the means to model iterative dynamic systems and the time to do so, they might have chosen better, instead Franklin noted that it was "good enough for now" (then) and that without attention and upkeep would slide into despotism.

My own great grandparents went with a Washminster system, a hybrid of UK and US governance, with elections that evolved to avoid First Past the Post as a nod toward greater choice and keeping the bastards honest (a once popular minority party slogan here).

Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game Rules?
by estearum | 2025-11-14 07:44:05+00:00
You are once again, simply wrong.

Myo- and pericarditis are both dramatically more serious normally. This is actually not true of the instances caused by the COVID vaccines.

And no, if you’re concerned about myo- and pericarditis from the vaccines, you should be aware that the same disorders are caused by COVID itself at a much higher rate and more serious instances.

Sorry about what happened to your wife, but the fact that infrequent events do happen to specific people (in the case to your wife) does not make those events more frequent than they actually are.
by yowlingcat | 2025-11-14 07:44:06+00:00
I observe this compulsion a lot and in my opinion, it's almost always coming from resentment driving ego in an attempt to compensate for insecurity and self-loathing, which ultimately ends up misdirected towards others. It's almost always accidentally entertaining, but sadly ends up diminishing rather than elevating discourse.

To refute GP's point more broadly -- there is a lot in /applied/ computer science (which is what I think the harder aspects software engineering really is) that was and is done by individuals in software just building in a vacuum, open source holding tons of examples.

And to answer GP's somewhat rhetorical question more directly - none of those professions are paid to do open-ended knowledge work, so the analogy is extremely strained. You don't necessarily see them post on blogs (as opposed to LinkedIn/X, for example), but: investors, management consultants, lawyers, traders, and corporate executives all write a ton of this kind of long-form content that is blog post flavored all the time. And I think it comes from the same place -- they're paid to do open-ended knowledge work of some kind, and that leads people to write to reflect on what they think seems to work and what doesn't.

Some of it is interesting, some of it is pretty banal (for what it's worth, I don't really disagree that this blog post is uninteresting), but I find it odd to throw out the entire category even if a lot of it is noise.
by Jweb_Guru | 2025-11-14 07:44:59+00:00
Your best guess is that the true rate is 20x higher than the observed rate? This seems unlikely to me given the number of samples (outside of systematic biases towards certain types of memory safety bugs that probably apply to C++ code too). 10 per hundred MLOC is closer to what I would have guessed too, but that is because I've historically been very conservative with my assumptions about the memory unsafety rate per unsafe LOC being similar to that of C++. The evidence here suggests that the true rate is probably much lower than that.
by pbowyer | 2025-11-14 07:45:45+00:00
> Otherwise, there will be far easier solutions at lower scale.

Which solutions do you have in mind?

- VPS with software installed on the host

- VPS(s) with Docker (or similar) running containers built on-host

- Server(s) with Docker Swarm running containers in a registry

- Something Kubernetes like k3s?

In a way there's two problems to solve for small organisations (often 1 server per app, but up to say 3): the server, monitoring it and keeping it up to date, and the app(s) running on each server and deploying and updating them. The app side has more solutions, so I'd rather focus on the server side here.

Like the sibling commenter I strongly dislike the configuration management landscape (with particular dislike of Ansible and maintaining it - my takeaway is never use 3rd party playbooks, always write your own). As often for me these servers are set up, run for a bit and then a new one is set up and the app redeployed to that (easier than an OS upgrade in production) I've gone back to a bash provisioning script, slightly templated config files and copying them into place. It sucks, but not as much as debugging Ansible has.
by dfabulich | 2025-11-14 07:45:47+00:00
I think we might be on the same page at last.

The last refuge of the Cartesian is always, "My argument is correct in an ineffable way that I couldn't possibly write down."

"Cogito ergo sum" presents itself as a self-evident deduction, the one guaranteed universally agreeable truth, but, when you investigate it a little… oh, well, it's really more of a vibe than an argument, and isn't "logical argument" really a monkey-mind distraction from the indescribable lightness of existence?

Mu, indeed.
by CraigJPerry | 2025-11-14 07:46:18+00:00
At 650tb it's not a memory bound problem:

working memory requirements

1. Assume date is 8 bytes 2. Assume 64bit counters

So for each date in the dataset we need 16 bytes to accumulate the result.

That's ~180 years worth of daily post counts per gb ram - but the dataset in the post was just 1 year.

This problem should be mostly network limited in the OP's context, decompressing snappy compressed parquet should be circa 1gb/sec. The "work" of parsing a string to a date and accumulating isn't expensive compared to snappy decompression.

I don't have a handle on the 33% longer runtime difference between duckdb and polars here.
by solatic | 2025-11-14 07:47:53+00:00
> Go's performance advantages are basically irrelevant in an AI agent, as execution time is dominated by inference time

Inference time is only the bottleneck if you are running a single agent loop, for a single consumer, with a single inference call being made at a time.

If you are serving a bunch of users, handling a bunch of requests, not all of which result in inference calls, some of which may result in multiple inference calls being made in parallel in independent contexts, you start to understand that concurrency matters a lot.

Might as well start with a language that helps you handle that concurrency instead of a language that treats it (asyncio) as a bastard edge case undeserving of first-class support.
by Aloisius | 2025-11-14 07:48:13+00:00
> A trade secret algorithm supports the idea that it would have been made anyway

Made and kept secret. If the leak never happened (like it hasn't for other RSA trade secrets), we may not know the algorithm to this day. No one could have built upon it. We may have spent years trying to reinvent the wheel rather than trying to improve upon it.

> how widespread was it before that leak

It was one of the most popular stream ciphers in the world, due to it's speed and the fact it could be exported, and it helped launch RSA as a company.
by noduerme | 2025-11-14 07:48:25+00:00
Huh. This gets complicated. I wasn't making an appeal to religion... my perception was that "moloch" was understood by non-religious socialist-leaning people to mean the god of money or capitalism (which seems to comport with what you're saying). But it has a separate meaning as a vengeful deity from the bronze age that demands sacrifice and which is used as an example in Abrahamicreligions for why you shouldn't worship other deities. I was pointing out that the alternative to a "moloch" health care system would be a "religious" one - by which I guess I meant a Judeo/Christian/Islamic one, but it serves a few separate meanings, like, one which isn't at its core capitalistic, or one which doesn't sacrifice children.

All I was trying to say was that the organizing ideology of such a system (healthcare) doesn't matter as much as having enough people committed to and working within the system. A capitalist version may work better than a communist one, e.g. at developing new approaches to disease, or serving more people in more tailored ways, as long as the incentive structure exists to bring enough people into the workforce so that each practitioner is not overwhelmed.

TL;DR I was playing along with the "moloch" reference, although clearly it means different things to different people.
by nicholasbraker | 2025-11-14 07:49:24+00:00
Let's hope a decision on an alternative platform is made quickly (although I am sceptical due to the bureaucratic maze of NATO procurement). The current AWACS-platform (E-3A) still uses old engines which are loud, smokey and not as efficient. Neighbouring communities deserve a quieter platform as well as NATO needs a potent airborne early warning platform. European technology is not an issue (Thales, Leonardo etc. make great modern AESA based radars). Also interoperability of data between NATO members used in the C2 chain is not an issue.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-11-14 07:50:00+00:00
I can attest to this.

I don't remember what channel but recently I have been into dexter and I have been watching a lot of dexter related content on youtube and I once think that I saw either down-right AI generated or very LLM-y style video / channel in general. Like, the way they speak etc. felt very AI generated imo.

Nobody questioned it in the comments.

I genuinely started wondering what is the point of AI generated content when people will find out its AI and then reject it or shame them etc. but I think that either I believed that humans in general would detect it more often or maybe the fact that people would start using AI in very sneaky ways maybe to not be labelled AI slop while still being very AI assisted.

I don't have problem with AI assistance but I just feel this hate when an AI generated voice speaks AI generated text which I recognize due to the patterns like

"It isn't just X, Its y" and the countless others examples.