MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rramadass | 2025-11-15 01:42:07+00:00
The author is obviously inspired by Alexander Stepanov's book From Mathematics to Generic Programming (which he links to at https://www.fm2gp.com/). Stepanov's basic thesis is that all problems can be modeled in (abstract) Algebra i.e. by defining "objects and operations on objects" following structures like Groups/Rings/Fields/etc. and it is from this vantage point that we should start problem-solving.

He explained this in his first book Elements of Programming (now freely available at https://www.elementsofprogramming.com/) and then simplified the basic ideas into the above book. In his interviews he often mentions George Chrystal's Algebra books as foundational. These are the ideas that he used to implement STL in C++.

Also related (maybe?) is Paul Halmos and Steven Givant's book Logic as Algebra. MAA review at https://old.maa.org/press/maa-reviews/logic-as-algebra
by thaumasiotes | 2025-11-15 01:42:15+00:00
> The US military (hell just about every army on the planet) spends a lot of money and effort into developing field rations that are palatable enough for infantry sections on the move to eat in it's entirety.

Why? That's not even a real concept. If you want everyone to like everything they have, you can't do that without letting them trade away the stuff they hate.
by sfifs | 2025-11-15 01:42:47+00:00
> Normally, suspected drug smugglers should be interdicted, boarded, and inspected.

Wouldn't any smuggler have drugs in a case weighted by stones ready to dump the second they think they're being interdicted? You wouldn't find anything and possible smugglers would have both liberty and equipment try again.

I suspect there's no easier deterence without boots on ground regime change (ie. Police yourself + develop the region economically) other than essentially shooting at suspiciously behaving craft. I also suspect all the various solutions have been game theorized to death in millitary thinktanks and war colleges and have been known for decades - they just decided to bite the bullet now.

Piracy on the east coast of Africa was a huge problem problem until countries sent navies to shoot the boats out of water if they were behaving suspiciously. I believe some countries were ready to bomb ports towns but it thankfully it didn't get that far before local strongmen got the message.
by tomhow | 2025-11-15 01:43:10+00:00
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by w10-1 | 2025-11-15 01:43:13+00:00
Seems great: I looked at two largish code bases I'm familiar with, and learned something each time.

But is this just a summary for the impatient, or can it reduce the effort for developers writing docs?

Docs have always been the mirror of code, and thus hard to get and keep right. Can we do without the mirror, or parts of it?

Does it work when you haven't written documentation for your code? Let's say one is fanatical about writing such clear code that names are sufficient to convey what's happening (i.e., no documentation and no comments). Does it work?

If not, does it work when there are only (clear) comments?

Does it tell you when documentation, comments, or code is unclear or missing?

I.e., I'd like it to go beyond summarization to fill easy gaps and point developers to the hard ones.

The marketing blurbs on point are not helpful.
by snickerbockers | 2025-11-15 01:44:38+00:00
uhhh can it? I've certainly not seen any evidence of an AI generating something not based on its training set. It's certainly smart enough to shuffle code around and make superficial changes, and that's pretty impressive in its own way but not particularly useful unless your only goal is to just launder somebody else's code to get around a licensing problem (and even then it's questionable if that's a derived work or not).

Honest question: if AI is actually capable of exploring new directions why does it have to train on what is effectively the sum total of all human knowledge? Shouldn't it be able to take in some basic concepts (language parsing, logic, etc) and bootstrap its way into new discoveries (not necessarily completely new but independently derived) from there? Nobody learns the way an LLM does.

ChatGPT, to the extent that it is comparable to human cognition, is undoubtedly the most well-read person in all of history. When I want to learn something I look it up online or in the public library but I don't have to read the entire library to understand a concept.
by somekyle2 | 2025-11-15 01:45:36+00:00
Even 15 years ago or so when Guido was still there I recall being told "we aren't supposed to write any new services in Python. It starts easy, then things get messy and end up needing to be rewritten." I recall it mostly being perf and tooling support, but also lack of typing, which has changed since then, so maybe they've gotten more accepting.
by beeflet | 2025-11-15 01:46:38+00:00
Almost all of the work in making a new operating system or a gameboy emulator or something is in characterizing the problem space and defining the solution. How do you know what such and such instruction does? What is the ideal way to handle this memory structure here? You know, knowledge you gain from spending time tracking down a specific bug or optimizing a subroutine.

When I create something, it's an exploratory process. I don't just guess what I am going to do based on my previous step and hope it comes out good on the first try. Let's say I decide to make a car with 5 wheels. I would go through several chassis designs, different engine configurations until I eventually had something that works well. Maybe some are too weak, some too expensive, some are too complicated. Maybe some prototypes get to the physical testing stage while others don't. Finally, I publish this design for other people to work on.

If you ask the LLM to work on a novel concept it hasn't been trained on, it will usually spit out some nonsense that either doesn't work or works poorly, or it will refuse to provide a specific enough solution. If it has been trained on previous work, it will spit out something that looks similar to the solved problem in its training set.

These AI systems don't undergo the process of trial and error that suggests it is creating something novel. Its process of creation is not reactive with the environment. It is just cribbing off of extant solutions it's been trained on.
by 9rx | 2025-11-15 01:47:17+00:00
> Though, what that has to do with a lone farmer getting fat off his own produce, I have no idea.

Me neither as it has never happened. Said farmer was typically burning around 4-6,000 calories per day. If eating butter and fatty meats as suggested, we're talking a pretty significant time commitment just for maintenance, never mind pushing yourself over the time. You can't exactly guzzle down a slab of meat like it is a Coca-Cola. If you wanted to start packing on the pounds, ignoring the challenge of even just getting that much food down your gullet in the first place, when would you actually find time raise the animals in order to provide that much food?

It has always been possible if you have a lot of help, sure. Even the aforementioned bag of chips was made from scratch by a group of people — unless we're counting the need to invent the universe, I suppose. That's probably not what earlier comments were talking about, though.
by tptacek | 2025-11-15 01:47:24+00:00
I don't understand the framing you have here, of Rust being an asymptote of language capability. It isn't. It's its own set of tradeoffs. In 2025, it would not make much sense to write a browser in Go. But there are a lot of network services it doesn't really make sense to write in Rust: you give up a lot (colored functions, the borrow checker) to avoid GC and goroutines.

Rust is great. One of the stupidest things in modern programming practice is the slapfight between these two language communities.
by acdha | 2025-11-15 01:47:56+00:00
Nazis are bad because they deny other people’s freedom to exist.

That LGBTQ flag doesn’t say straight people are wrong or shouldn’t exist. Literally all it’s saying is that people are welcome to exist publicly as their true selves. The odds are high that those kids know someone who falls under that umbrella, and this is an age appropriate way to say that’s okay just as straight people’s mating habits are discussed at the level of “mommy and daddy loved each other so much they got married and had you”.
by baubino | 2025-11-15 01:47:56+00:00
> Just look at the recent iOs 26 release. I am not convinced that any of the actual functional changes warranted a release or that they needed to be released at that point if a new release was needed. New software to justify new phones.

And this is why the subscription model just doesn’t make sense for most businesses. I pay for a newspaper subscription because there is literally a brand new newspaper each day. A magazine subscription yields an entirely new set of articles every month. I pay for subscription access to data that is continuously updated. The subscription model makes sense for a product that is created anew on a regular basis. It doesn’t make sense for most software companies that are producing static software. What they are calling ‘subscriptions’ are really just rentals for their static products that get minimal surface changes to justify the ongoing rent charge. I’d much rather just pay a flat fee for the static software and upgrade it when I’m ready for the new features.
Show HN: Tf-dialect: Teach AI agents your org's Terraform standards via MCP
by iacguy | 2025-11-15 01:48:28+00:00
Hey HN - I am working on a terraform automation tool [1] and have been observing that a lot of our users are now using coding agents in their workflows, even for infra tasks. Obviously, this means a lot of terraform is being generated by coding agents, and while this is great for greenfield setups, most teams already have conventions in place.

My colleague was speaking to a friend earlier today, who mentioned that they've heard from people who "never wanted to touch TF starting to use it because AI is making it easier for them."

This led me to think that we need to make it easy for folks to use their agents to generate context aware IaC, and we need to be the best tool to run that agent generated IaC.

In the process of this thought exercise I vibe coded tf-dialect. Would love to learn how the community uses coding agents to manage infra and if something like this would be useful.

[1]: https://digger.dev
by tomhow | 2025-11-15 01:50:00+00:00
Please don't fulminate or make personal attacks on HN, no matter who or what you're replying to. The guidelines make it clear we're aiming for something better here, and we've had to ask you several times to try harder to observe them. We eventually have to ban accounts that keep commenting like this.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by beeflet | 2025-11-15 01:50:02+00:00
Were they the best of the best? or were they just at the right place and time to be exposed to a novel idea?

I am skeptical of this claim that you need a 140IQ to make scientific breakthroughs, because you don't need a 140IQ to understand special relativity. It is a matter of motivation and exposure to new information. The vast majority of the population doesn't benefit from working in some niche field of physics in the first place.

Perhaps LLMs will never be at the right place and the right time because they are only trained on ideas that already exist.
by zer00eyz | 2025-11-15 01:50:21+00:00
I write a lot of Go, a bit of Rust, and Zig is slowly creeping in.

To add to the above comment, a lot of what Go does encourages readability... Yes it feels pedantic at moments (error handling), but those cultural, and stylistic elements that seem painful to write make reading better.

Portable binaries are a blessing, fast compile times, and the choices made around 3rd party libraries and vendoring are all just icing on the cake.

That 80 percent feeling is more than just the language, as written, its all the things that come along with it...
by Brian_K_White | 2025-11-15 01:51:20+00:00
That is how illustrations work. If someone doesn't see something, you amplify it until it clubs them over the head and even an idiot can see it.

And sometimes of course even that doesn't work but there has always been and always will be the clued, clue-resistant, and the clue-proof. Can't do anything about the clue-proof but at least presenting the arguments allows everyone else to consider them.

This fixation on the reverence due a spouse is completely stupid and beside the point of the concept being expressed. As though you think there is some arbitrary rule about spouses that is the essense of the problem? The gift-for-spouse is an intentionally hyberbolic example of a concept that also exists and applies the same at non-hyperbolic levels.

The point of a clearer example is you recognize "oh yeah, that would be wrong" and so then the next step is to ask what makes it wrong? And why doesn't that apply the same back in the original context?

You apparently would say "because it's not my wife", but there is nothing magically different about needing to respect your spouses time vs anyone else's. It's not like there is some arbitrary rule that says you can't lie to a spouse simply because they are a spouse and those are the rules about spouses. You don't lie to a spouse because it's intrinsically wrong to lie at all to anyone. It's merely extra wrong to to do anything wrong to someone you supposedly claim to extra-care about. Lying was already wrong all by itself for reasons that don't have anything special to do with spouses.

This idea that it's fine to lie to and waste the time of everyone else, commandeer and harness their attention of an interaction with you, while you just let a robot do your part and you are off doing something more interesting with your own time and attention, to everyone else who isn't your spouse simply because you don't know them personally and have no reason to care about them is really pretty damning. The more you try to make this argument that you seem to think is so rational, the more empty inside you declare yourself to be.

I really can not understand how anyone can try to float the argument "What's so bad about being tricked if you can't tell you were tricked?" There are several words for the different facets of what's so wrong, such as "manipulation". All I can say is, I guess you'll just have to take it on faith that humans overwhemingly consider manipulation to be a bad thing. Read up on it. It's not just some strange idea I have.
by gcanyon | 2025-11-15 01:51:56+00:00
> So that is essentially the ceiling in terms of accuracy.

I think this is mistaken. I remember... ten years ago? When speech-to-text models came out that dealt with background noise that made the audio sound very much like straight pink noise to my ear, but the model was able to transcribe the speech hidden within at a reasonable accuracy rate.

So with handwritten text, the only prediction that makes sense to me is that we will (potentially) reach a state where the machine is at least probably more accurate than humans, although we wouldn't be able to confirm it ourselves.

But if multiple independent models, say, Gemini 5 and Claude 7, both agree on the result, and a human can only shrug and say, "might be," then we're at a point where the machines are probably superior at the task.
by kami23 | 2025-11-15 01:53:20+00:00
Claude Code keeps coming out with a lot of really nice tools that others haven't started to emulate from what I've seen.

My favorite one is going through the plan interactively. It turns it into a multiple choice / option TUI and the last choose is always reprompt that section of the plan.

I had switch back to codex recently and not being able to do my planning solely in the CLI feels like the early 1900s.

To trigger the interactive mode. Do something like:

Plan a fix for:

<Problem statement>

Please walk me through any options or questions you might have interactively.
by zapzupnz | 2025-11-15 01:54:52+00:00
The article never once says "public locker room", it merely says "locker room". These are, presumably, parts of private establishments such as pools, saunas, gyms, etc. That is, one has to make the conscious choice to enter such an establishment.

Even if it's a publicly-funded establishment such as, say, a municipal swimming pool, the conscious choice to enter into such a place versus walking through an open street aren't comparable.
by rvz | 2025-11-15 01:56:46+00:00
> The author is a Principal Engineer at DeepSeek.

The title is even more meaningless given that such a suggestion sounds totally at fundamental odds with today's state of the art compilers which need to be deterministic.

Replacing today's compilers, linkers and assemblers with LLMs (which are fundamentally stochastic preditcion models) for the use-case to compile software (not just generating correct code syntax) makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

> Their formal education/background is in ML however.

Maybe whoever this person is should read up on what the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect is.

Ask any compiler author on this very suggestion and they will question if this person is really a "Principal Engineer".
by ulfw | 2025-11-15 01:56:57+00:00
And? So what?

Who forced 'the west' to do that? American and European companies lived well this way for decades. Buying from and selling to China has been highly profitable. In fact Germany is doing terribly right now as China is buying LESS than before. So the answer is to do... erm... even less trade?

Trumpian anti-globalist idiocy is growing in people's minds like a brain cancer
by giraffe_lady | 2025-11-15 01:57:00+00:00
Ah interesting, thanks for answering.

I've been in the situation of being instructed to pull unredacted logs for a subpoena before when I really did not think it was appropriate. I was just an IC but I talked to a lawyer about it. Since the company I worked for was not willing to fight it, my options were pull the logs, quit the job, or possibly catch a contempt charge.

It seems like everyone who is not the CEO or maybe the legal dept has much more constrained choices in this situation. I also wonder if the timeframes matter here, how much things may have changed in two decades. My experience with it was only a couple years ago, and I was surprised they chose not to fight it but presumably they know more about the chances of success than I do.
by buu700 | 2025-11-15 01:58:52+00:00
Yeah, there are lots of unknowns and valid reasons to be pessimistic or optimistic. I lean toward cautious optimism based on the information that is available, but of course no one knows the future until it happens.

Just to clarify, Orion is one site, not a particular generator model. Orion working would be the green light to build and ship more generators, not a sign that they'd need to go back to the drawing board on an "Orion v2".

re: opex, we do have some idea of what it will be. We know that deuterium is cheap, we know that fusion produces low waste, we know that extensive safety protocols to protect against meltdown are not required, we know that preventing theft of fissile materials is not a security concern, and we know that these machines are substantially automated. We may not have precise balance sheets, but it's also not entirely opaque or mysterious.

I'm not sure the examples of historical China and Japan apply. They didn't invent coal power and then decide not to use it (although Japan was nevertheless fairly quick to industrialize). Fusion as of now seems likely to reach commercialization first in the US, and there's currently a lot of demand for power here with insufficient supply to meet projected growth. It's a very different market from when we were actively shipping our high-power-consumption industries overseas.

I don't agree that breakthroughs happen "rarely". I mean, we wouldn't be here in this thread without the massive breakthrough of useful LLMs, which were considered sci-fi before ChatGPT's release less than three years ago; fusion had the breakthrough of ignition at NIF just a few days after that; and we're only in the position of considering solar and batteries as a competitive energy source due to many small breakthroughs that have occurred in recent history. Breakthroughs happen all the time, but we quickly forget their significance and let them become boring.
by rzerowan | 2025-11-15 02:00:11+00:00
"Wetware" as it were , i remeber some research article some time back where they grew some kind of 'brainlets' and had them functional as far as memory was concerned[1]. Would be a interesting to see how that tech would progress while incororatd in the current silicon/photonic devices for input/output. Downside would be the durability of the organic matter and replacement.

[1] https://sciencesensei.com/scientists-created-thinking-brain-...
by drdaeman | 2025-11-15 02:00:46+00:00
Screen sharing? Hold on, those extra-advanced features could wait. Microsoft should focus first on message delivery (notifications may be delayed for hours), showing media in chats (picture and videos fail to show most of the time) and just opening conversations correctly from notifications (message from a person opens a group chat, sometimes that forks a conversation, leading to loss of history). That’s the very basics for every messaging app, and even those don’t work properly.

(This is about official Windows and iOS Teams apps. I haven’t yet tried any GNU/Linux options.)
by tomhow | 2025-11-15 02:02:11+00:00
As someone who reads the discussions for hours each day, whenever this trope "anything even remotely critical of [blah] is flagged" it seems always to actually be an example of the opposite of what it's purporting to prove.

These kinds of comments get flagged because (a) flamebait and political/ideological battle is against the guidelines and longtime users know that very well, and (b) those sentiments about particular figures have been expressed so often for so long that they're now considered completely uninteresting.

The purpose of HN is curious conversation about interesting topics, in which we hope to learn something new. Saying the same critical things about the same people year after year is antithetical to that, and is not the kind of thing people value HN for, even if they've agreed with the sentiment for years. People who are comfortable with their views about the world don't need to say – or read – the same things over and over.
by FreakLegion | 2025-11-15 02:03:29+00:00
They are now, although to be clear there was (is?) nothing nefarious going on, just people not understanding that public submissions are available to VirusTotal's paying users. These days VT has private scanning, too, but the issue was always one-offs from random finance or investor relations teams.

It's come up here and there in security, too, e.g. in https://www.directdefense.com/harvesting-cb-response-data-le....