MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by brabel | 2025-11-19 07:56:02+00:00
Yes, I always thought it was wrong to use unwrap in examples. I know, people want to keep examples simple, but it trains developers to use unwrap() as they see that everywhere. Yes, there are places where it's ok as that blog post explains so well: https://burntsushi.net/unwrap/ But most devs IMHO don't have the time to make the call correctly most of the time... so it's just better to do something better, like handle the error and try to recover, or if impossible, at least do `expect("damn it, how did this happen")`.
by solumunus | 2025-11-19 07:56:25+00:00
I tried switching to Zed and switched back less than 24 hours later. I was expecting it to be snappier than VS Code and it wasn’t to any significant degree, and I ran into several major bugs with the source control interface that made it unusable for me.

People dunk on VS Code but it’s pretty damn good. Surely the best Electron app? I’m sure if you are heavily into EMACS it’s great but most people don’t want to invest huge amounts of time into their tools, they would rather be spending that time producing.

For a feature rich workhorse that you can use for developing almost anything straight out of the box, it within minutes after installing a few plugins, it’s very hard to beat. In my opinion lot of the hate is pure cope from people who have probably never really used it.
by antonvs | 2025-11-19 07:56:42+00:00
Ok, so there’s a clear pattern emerging here, which is that you think we should do much more to manage our use of technology. An interesting example of that is the Amish. While they take it to what can seem like an extreme, they’re doing exactly what you’re getting at, just perhaps to a different degree.

The problem with such approaches is that it involves some people imposing their opinions on others, “for their own good”. That kind of thing often doesn’t turn out well. The Amish address that by letting their children leave to experience the outside world, so that their return is (arguably) voluntary - they have an opportunity to consent to the Amish social contract.

But what you seem to be doing is making a determination of what’s good for society as a whole, and then because you have no way to effect that, you argue against the tools that we might abuse rather than the tendencies people have to abuse them. It seems misplaced to me. I’m not saying there are no societal dangers from LLMs, or problems with the technocrats and capitalists running it all, but we’re not going to successfully address those issues by attacking the tools, or people who are using them effectively.

> In the past, empires bet their entire kingdom's on the words of astronomers and magicians who said they could predict the future.

You’re trying to predict the future as well, quite pessimistically at that.

I don’t pretend to be able to predict the future, but I do have a certain amount of trust in the ability of people to adapt to change.

> that's all an llm is, a plagiarism laundering machine

That’s a possible application, but it’s certainly not all they are. If you genuinely believe that’s all they are, then I don’t think you have a good understanding of them, and it could explain some of our difference in perspective.

One of the important features of LLMs is transfer learning: their ability to apply their training to problems that were not directly in their training set. Writing code is a good example of this: you can use LLMs to successfully write novel programs. There’s no plagiarism involved.
by Pooge | 2025-11-19 07:57:53+00:00
Costs to architect systems that serve millions of request daily have gone down. Not up.

Hell, I would be very curious to know the costs to keep HackerNews running. They probably serve more users than my current client.

People want to chase the next big thing to write it on their CV, not architect simple systems that scale. (Do they even need to scale?)
by DeathArrow | 2025-11-19 07:57:57+00:00
>That’s cheaper than a brand-new nuclear power plant would cost, but it’s a hefty premium over wind, solar, and geothermal, according to a comparison of energy costs from Lazard.

Nuclear is more expensive because there are extensive regulations. "Green" energy not only does not face so many regulations but it benefits from incentives.

Also, when comparing nuclear with "green" energy, most studies don't take into account the costs of energy storage.
by torginus | 2025-11-19 07:58:21+00:00
It's weird that Linux people are still seething to this day that the reason for Linux's lack of success on the desktop comes from the unfair pushing of Windows, when it's clear that Microsoft has been barely putting any effort into Windows, and gutting development save for AI stuff.

I'm sure Microsoft would be perfectly fine ditching Windows as long as they could keep pushing Teams, Azure AD and Office 365 to companies.

It's crazy how no one actually competently working towards a shared goal is invested in the desktop OS game any more.

Linux people still have some fire left in them, but lack organization and shared vision to deliver a high quality product in a timely manner. macOS is the best contender, but other than pushing weird mobile-driven UX design and locking down the OS, the macOS of today hasn't changed that much from the OS X of 20 years ago.
by jaredklewis | 2025-11-19 07:59:09+00:00
There’s a (positive or negative) correlation between birth rates and dozens of factors, because over the period birth rates have been falling, the world has changed dramatically. Issue is we don’t know what is causal. education also correlates with all kinds of other factors like income, type of work, marital status, and political views, meaning birth rates are also likely correlated with all of these factors.
by woodpanel | 2025-11-19 07:59:55+00:00
Interesting that you imply I said anything about race. I didn’t.

Never mind that the reason people point out the last two elections is that they show statistical anomalies - which is by itself proving my point. The data is clear on this.

But further it runs counter to simple game theory.

If a Country, governed by Party A, enacts a law, prohibiting Nazis from immigrating, but Party B undermines that law in municipalities they rule in (by providing „sanctuary cities“, stopping law enforcement on such matters entirely, providing services including legal help for naturalization, and more things) basically stretching the timeframe as long as possible for illegal Nazis to be present in the country, so that they either become eligible Nazi voters locally (by residence status), naturalized Nazi citizens eventually or at least have Nazi offspring with a citizenship title – then obviously the Nazis are going to vote for the party that allowed that to happen (Party B), and against that party that tried to stop this (Party A).

And this will (decreasingly with each generation) be true for their Nazi offspring as well.
by throwup238 | 2025-11-19 07:59:55+00:00
There could also be incentives beyond the loan or political pressure we’re not privy to. Such pressure is part of the reason Boeing ended up acquiring McDonnell Douglass even though it wasn’t exactly the financial best move for Boeing. If the US government is serious about restarting its nuclear industry then this is a small first step to build up the skills for building new reactors or refurbishing old ones.

It’s not really that farfetched, either. If the government expects a conflict in the next few decades, solar build out might become much more expensive or impossible since our domestic production might not be enough to support NATO’s growth.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-11-19 08:01:03+00:00
I had this case too, in a very big company. They were very aggressive.

We put a ban on their products and the company was coming back for years trying to get a business, this case was always handy to send an answer.

The problem is not that they wanted us to pay for a few installations (individual decisions of some employees), but that they immediately went nuclear with legal, threatening us with the court if we do not buy an enterprise license for everyone. It pissed us off.

The funny thing is that we somehow discovered their products this way and should that just said "you have a few installs of our products, wanna talk?", they would have had a great deal with much more installs
by Frieren | 2025-11-19 08:01:18+00:00
> Nobody can really know what things will look like in 10 years,

100% true. Do not invest trillions on such an uncertainty in the long term is always a bad investment.

> but if you have the capital to deploy and any conviction at all that this might be a sea-change moment, it seems foolish to not pursue it.

Gamblers argument: "But what if this is the winning ticket?"
by mroche | 2025-11-19 08:01:51+00:00
Blender gives you two paths for extension: a) fork it and layer your changes directly onto the app, or b) you create a plugin via the Blender Python API.

For vendors, the former is obviously a no-go. The latter has the issue of be throttled by Python, so you have to effectively create a shim that communicates with an external library or application that actually performs compute intensive tasks.

Most (if not all) industry DCCs provide a dedicated C++ SDK with Python bindings available if desired.
by fodkodrasz | 2025-11-19 08:02:00+00:00
You ignore the fact that these datacenters also operate at night and in windless times.

PV did get spectacularly cheaper, but is not a panacea.

Nuclear is great fit for constant load, for example a cloud datacenter where relatively constant utilization is also a business goal and multiple incentives are in place to promote this. (eg. spot pricing to move part of the load off from peaks)
by BlackFly | 2025-11-19 08:02:19+00:00
> it's essentially a checked exception without a stack trace

In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice...

You can't throw a checked exception in a stream, this fact actually underlines the key difference between an exception and a Result: Result is in return position and exceptions are a sort of side effect that has its own control flow. Because of that, once your method throws an Exception or you are writing code in a try block that catches an exception, you become blind to further exceptions of that type, even if you might be able to or required to fix those errors. Results are required to be handled individually and you get syntactic sugar to easily back propagate.

It is trivial to include a stack trace, but stack traces are really only useful for identifying where something occurred, and generally what is superior is attaching context as you back propagate which trivially occurs with judicious use of custom error types with From impls. Doing this means that the error message uniquely defines the origin and paths it passed through without intermediate unimportant stack noise. With exceptions you would always need to catch each exception and rethrow a new exception containing the old to add contextual information, then to avoid catching to much you need variables that will be initialized inside the try block defined outside of the try block. So stack traces are basically only useful when you are doing Pokemon exception handling.
by nickm12 | 2025-11-19 08:02:25+00:00
Thanks for taking one for the team. I had zero expectations for Clean Code second edition after reading Uncle Bob's dialogs with John Ousterhout. I thought Ousterhout bent over backwards to give Uncle Bob the benefit of the doubt and discuss the tradeoffs and Bob just dug in on his bizarre dogmatic approaches.

https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code/blob/m...
by lloeki | 2025-11-19 08:02:52+00:00
> The rest of the world is on WhatsApp and doesn't even know what RCS messaging is.

Absolutely _not_ the case here (France), the overwhelming default is SMS (and now RCS). Sure people use WhatsApp but also Telegram just as much these days, but in both cases it's _not the default_.

Maybe because it's been, I don't know, one to two decades that SMS have been unlimited in even the most basic plans.

Also RCS Just Works here, I've seen my non-Apple contacts move to RCS over time as they got OS or phone upgrades.

I'd blame NA carriers, which, from afar, seem to have a habit of screwing up in so many ways.
by arghwhat | 2025-11-19 08:04:59+00:00
The board falsely accused someone of a crime. The board members must take responsibility of that decision, which involves their interactions being evidence in claims of said crime. That responsibility is part of what it means to lead something.

It's a little gross it had come to that, but ugh. Sure rebble did good for the community, but that past tense is important. Now they're trying to do bad, and that cannot be justified. Accusations require a defense, so here we are.

The Pebble community is not and never was Rebble. I briefly used Cobble as an open source project, and used their app store mirror that they decided to host to download the same old apps and watch faces I used while Pebble lived, but I was not using a Rebble watch. The open source apps I want were never Rebble apps. No one expected Rebble to be anything than infrastructure life-support, but as no one thought the dream of new life in Pebble was never going to happen, it was the light we swarmed.

Now the life support task has ended with an appreciation for their efforts, and Rebble starts acting like a company running a smearing campaign trying and make up IP ownership and justification for royalties.

Rebble no longer represents any of the community, just a misguided and greedy board. What the community wanted now exists, so that is where we have gone.
by spanktank35 | 2025-11-19 08:05:12+00:00
Think about it. The chatbot has found itself in a scenario where it appears to be acting maliciously. This isn't actually true, but the user's response has made it seem this way. This lead it to completely misunderstand the intention of the instruction in the system prompt.

So what is the natural way for this scenario to continue? To inexplicably come clean, or to continue acting maliciously? I wouldn't be surprised if in such a scenario it started acting malicious in other unrelated ways just because that is what it thinks is a likely way for the conversation to continue
by vasvir | 2025-11-19 08:06:19+00:00
Been there done that. At least for life science / health publications. The article is spot on.

Not sure if there is value of that approach in other more rigorous fields but in health for sure it does. The knowledge in health science is generally fragmented and a way to connect islands of knowledge has the potential to unlock a lot of value.

If you would like to see how this article ideas are applied in a playful manner in a web application you can visit: https://www.biovista.com/vizit/
by trashtester | 2025-11-19 08:07:26+00:00
As technology changes over history, governments tend to emerge that reflect the part of the population that can maintain a monopoly of violence.

In the Classical Period, it was the citizen soldiers of Rome and Greece, at least in the west. These produced the ancient republics and proto-democracies.

Later replaced by professional standing armies under people like Alexander and the Ceasars. This allowed kings and emperors.

In the Early to Mid Medieaval time, they were replaced by knights, elites who allowed a few men to defeat commoners many times their number. This caused feudalism.

Near the end of the period, pikes and crossbows and improved logistic systems shifted power back to central governments, primarily kings/emperors.

Then, with rifles, this swung the pendulum all the way back to citizen soldiers between the 18th and early 20th century, which brought back democracies and republics.

Now the pendulum is going in the opposite direction. Technology and capital distribution has already effectively moved a lot of power back to an oligarchic elite.

And if full AGI combined with robots more physically capable than humans, it can swing all the way. In principle a single monarch could gain monopoly of violence over an entire country.

Do not take for granted that our current undertanding of what the government is, is going to stay the same.

Some kind of merger between capital and power seems likely, where democratic elections quickly become completely obsolete.

Once the police and military have been mostly automated, I don't think our current system is going to last very long.
by elevatortrim | 2025-11-19 08:07:39+00:00
> I would love to examine Stockfish play that seemed extremely counterintuitive but which ended up winning.

If you want to see this against someone like Magnus, it is rare as super GMs do not spend a lot of time playing engines publicly.

But if you want to see them against a normal chess master somewhere between master and international master, it is every where. For e.g. this guy analyses his every match afterwards and you frequently here "oh I would never see that line":

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLp7SLTJhX1u6zKT5IfRVm...

(start watching around 1000+ for frequently seeing those moments)
by lloeki | 2025-11-19 08:07:54+00:00
I (and GP given their use of capitalised Symbol) was talking about Ruby symbols, which for the most part are more equivalent to their object_id than to their textual representation.

What I mean by "integer" is not "pointer", it's "natural number", in the sense that there exists only one `1` vs you can have multiple textual "foo" strings.

So it's more useful to think of symbols as natural numbers which you don't know nor care the actual value of, because as a human you only care about the label you have attached to it, but you do care about its numberness property of it conceptually existing only once.
by misja111 | 2025-11-19 08:08:45+00:00
I asked Gemini to solve today's Countle puzzle (https://www.countle.org/). It got stuck while iterating randomly trying to find a solution. While I'm writing this it has been trying already for 5 minutes and the web page has become unresponsive.

I also asked it for the best play when in backgammon opponent rolls 6-1 (plays 13/7 8/7) and you roll 5-1. It starts alright with mentioning a good move (13/8 6/5) but continues to hallucinate with several alternative but illegal moves. I'm not too impressed.
by btreecat | 2025-11-19 08:08:55+00:00
> The poor quality of FreeCAD is the main reason my 3D printer is collecting dust. As a Linux-only user the proprietary alternatives mostly aren't available to me, and FreeCAD is bad enough that I'd rather not do CAD at all. The Ondsel fork was looking promising for a while, but sadly that died off.

I've only ever used openSCAD, Freecad, and on shape.

And for me, Freecad had increased my use of my 3d printer, originally built in 2016.

Cad has a specific workflow, which is true regardless of the tool. Sticking to the right order of operations goes a long way to having a positive XP as does some basic intro tutorials.

It's not a tool you can bumble around and figure out easily, even with XP in similar tools.
by morshu9001 | 2025-11-19 08:09:02+00:00
I'm not ignoring this question, I'm just not familiar with Zed and don't know how native it feels. Maybe Vscode is quicker to modify in the future as needed (esp if Google already uses it), or Antigravity is better in ways than Zed, or Zed just has a more skilled team than Google.

Also I'm used to vim and sensitive to lag, so I always hated vscode, but seems a lot of people don't notice or something. And when you're using AI for 90% of the loc, it matters less.
by antonvs | 2025-11-19 08:09:57+00:00
> because leaders in the space also keep saying it?

They have a lot of reasons for saying that, including to give themselves cover in the event of a crash.

What’s happening now is a classic land grab. You’re always going to get inflated prices in that situation, and it’s always going to correct at some point. It’s difficult to predict when, though.
by btreecat | 2025-11-19 08:10:36+00:00
> LibreOffice, GIMP, FreeCAD and Inkscape all have their quirks (and bugs), but they're probably seen as features by their core users so they won't change.

I wouldn't say that, there's bugs in Freecad that drive me bonkers but I would be dishonest if I said it hadn't gotten more stable and better supports my Nvidia card today compared to previous releases
by pjmlp | 2025-11-19 08:11:28+00:00
From where I stand, Ruby has much more interesting work going on JIT land than Python.

Much of the Python stuff, is actually about rewriting Python tools into Rust due to its interpreter slowness and no one caring about PyPy, now apparently there is even a PEP to rewrite CPython!

https://discuss.python.org/t/pre-pep-rust-for-cpython/104906
by mroche | 2025-11-19 08:11:57+00:00
> And these "most people" who are scared of a Python API? Weak! It should have been a low level C API! ;-)

I wouldn't frame it as "scared". The issue is that at a certain scene scale Python becomes the performance bottleneck if that's all you can use.

> You pick a (stable) version, and use that API. It doesn't change if you don't. If it truly is a _major_ project, then constantly "upgrading" to the latest release is a big no-no (or should be)!

This is fine if you only ever have one show in production. Most non-boutique studios have multiple shows being worked on in tandem, be it internal productions or contract bids that require interfacing with other studios. These separate productions can have any given permutation of DCC and plugin versions, all of which the internal pipeline and production engineering teams have to support simultaneously. Apps that provide a stable C/C++ SDK and Python interface across versions are significantly more amenable to these kinds of environments as the core studio hub app, rather than being ancillary, task specific tools.
by self_awareness | 2025-11-19 08:12:12+00:00
Actually I wasn't able to do it also with Bebbo's GCC fork.

Never used Nim before so I might be doing something wrong though.

I wish retro Amiga had Rust support. I've briefly skimmed what would be necessary to do, based on the rust-mos (Rust for commodore-64 fork), but I'm too weak in LLVM internals to actually do it.
by piva00 | 2025-11-19 08:12:16+00:00
I think Germany has a high amount of users on Signal, it's quite interesting seeing the stats about messaging apps in different countries, it's very fractured internationally while being very consistent inside borders.

I for one fucking hate that most of Sweden uses FB Messenger, it's the clunkiest of them all, and since I don't like using it all I constantly miss important messages from friends from not having the app installed and checking Facebook once in a blue moon :/
by Maxion | 2025-11-19 08:12:41+00:00
That is what ISPs do these days. Most botnet members don't end up spamming a lot of requests, usually just a few before they are blocked.

The issue with DDOS is specifically with the distributed nature of it. One single bot of a botnet is pretty harmless, it's the cohesive whole that's the problem.

To make botnets less efficient you need to find members before they do anything. Retroactively blocking them won't really help, you'll just end up cutting off internet for regular people, most of whom probably don't even know how to get their fridge off of their local network.

There's not really any easy fix for this. You could regulate it, and require a license to operate IoT devices with some registration requirement + fines if you don't keep them up to date. But even that will probably not solve the issue.
by schnitzelstoat | 2025-11-19 08:13:25+00:00
Yeah, like imagine if the LLM's don't advance that much, the agentic stuff doesn't really take off etc.

Even in this conservative case, ChatGPT could seriously erode Google Search revenues. That alone would be a massive disruption and Google wants to ensure they end up as the Google in that scenario and not the Lycos, AltaVista, AskJeeves etc. etc.