MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bmacho | 2025-11-25 17:59:37+00:00
Nah. Goodhart's law is literally just "if you play a matrix game don't announce your pick in advance". It is not a real law, or not different from common sense. (By matrix game I mean what wiki calls "Normal form game[0]", e.g. rock-paper-scissors or prisoner's dilemma.)

In education, regarding exams, Goodhart's law just means that you should randomize your test questions instead of telling the students the questions before the exam. Have a wide set of questions, randomize them. The only way for students to pass is to learn the material.

A randomized standardized test is not more susceptible to Goodhart's law than a randomized personal test. The latter however has many additional problems.

[0] : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal-form_game
by QuercusMax | 2025-11-25 17:59:53+00:00
I think part of it is that reading code isn't a skill that most people are taught.

When I was in grad school ages ago, my advisor told me to spend a week reading the source code of the system we were working with (TinyOS), and come back to him when I thought I understood enough to make changes and improvements. I also had a copy of the Linux Core Kernel with Commentary that I perused from time to time.

Being able to dive into an unknown codebase and make sense of where the pieces are put together is a very useful skill that too many people just don't have.
by crote | 2025-11-25 17:59:58+00:00
> It disregards the importance of ports. Even if an architecture isn't widely used, supporting multiple architectures can help reveal bugs in the original implementation that wouldn't otherwise be obvious.

The problem is that those ports aren't supported and see basically zero use. Without continuous maintainer effort to keep software running on those platforms, subtle platform-specific bugs will creep in. Sometimes it's the application's fault, but just as often the blame will lie with the port itself.

The side-effect of ports being unsupported is that build failures or test failures - if they are even run at all - aren't considered blockers. Eventually their failure becomes normal, so their status will just be disregarded as noise: you can't rely on them to pass when your PR is bug-free, so you can't rely on their failure to indicate a genuine issue.
by adwn | 2025-11-25 18:00:14+00:00
> You guys seem to be assuming transpiling to C means it must produce C that DTRT on any random C compiler invoked any which way on the other side, where UB is some huge possibility space.

Yes, that's exactly what "translating to C" means – as opposed to "translating to the very specific C-dialect spoken by gcc 10.9.3 with patches X, Y, and Z, running on an AMD Zen 4 under Debian 12.1 with glibc 2.38, invoked with flags -O0 -g1 -no-X -with-Y -foo -blah -blub...", and may the gods have mercy if you change any of this!

Do you see the problem?
by major505 | 2025-11-25 18:00:14+00:00
IS funny because thanks to efforts from companies like Valve, Linux seens to finally been receiving the recognition it deserves, Rust evangelists and weirdos who claim morality superiority to the rest of mortals, are going to put everything to loose, because of this obsession of rewriting tools that actually work for many years without bigger issues, just so they can say their language is superior.

IF there was some glaring problems with tools like sudo, sort, apt, and you have a superior version, sure, go ahead. But this is clearly not the case. Sometimes the rust version is just the same, or even inferior, but people are ready to plunge into destruction just to say their distro have the latest and greatest. Its just vanity.

Maybe the conspiracy theories that big tech finance the crazy incopetent people from in position of power in open source projects that they no longer can compete, in order to destroy them from the inside, is not that far fetched.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-11-25 18:00:23+00:00
I'd assume the Circus Maximus was rowdier, given that chariot racing was "team" based (greens vs blues, etc), with betting evolved, and I imagine the action was a lot more exciting than the spectacle of seeing yet another public execution (death as bestias) from the nosebleed seats, or animal "hunt". During the french revolution the public executions (guillotine beheadings) sound like somewhat of a snooze-fest with the old ladies doing their knitting in the front (Les Tricoteuses).

From what I've read I wouldn't call games at the Colloseum formal, other than the senators (seated in the front) apparently having to wear togas. There were more (class-based) levels of seating, and restictions on women, but the Circus Maximus also reserved the best seating for the equestrians.
by zamadatix | 2025-11-25 18:01:28+00:00
100 GB is less than a game download, it's actually running it that's a tough sell. That said, the linked blog post seems to say the optimized model is both smaller and greatly improved the streaming approach from system RAM, so maybe it is actually reasonably usable on a single 4090/5090 type setup (I'm not at home to test).
by nacozarina | 2025-11-25 18:01:29+00:00
managing software requirements and the corresponding changes to user/group/process behaviors is by far the hardest part of software development, and it is a task no one knows how to scale.

absent understanding, large companies engage in cargo cult behaviors: they create a sensible org chart, produce a gannt chart, have the coders start whacking code, presumably in 9 months a baby comes out.

every time, ugly baby
by lifeformed | 2025-11-25 18:01:54+00:00
This is the exact kind of thinking that leads to this in the first place. The idea that a human relationship is, in the end, just about what YOU can get from it. That it's just simply a black box with an input and output, and if it can provide the right outputs for your needs, then it's sufficient. This materialistic thinking of other people is a fundamentally catastrophic worldview.

A meaningful relationship necessarily requires some element of giving, not just getting. The meaning comes from the exchange between two people, the feedback loop of give and take that leads to trust.

Not everyone needs a romantic relationship, but to think a chatbot could ever fulfill even 1% of the very fundamental human need of close relationships is dangerous thinking. At best, a chatbot can be a therapist or a sex toy. A one-way provider of some service, but never a relationship. If that's what is needed, then fine, but anything else is a slippery slope to self destruction.
by prmph | 2025-11-25 18:01:56+00:00
Are you equating success with adoption or use? I would say there are lot's of software that are widely used but are a mess.

What would be a competitor to linux that is also FOSS? If there's none, how do you assess the success or otherwise of Linux?

Assume Linux did not succeed but was adopted, how would that scenario look like? Is the current situation with it different from that?
by sunshowers | 2025-11-25 18:01:57+00:00
I understand what you mean, but you're saying has not been true for me in practice. Mutexes absolutely are used to uphold invariants in a way that &mut T is much less often.

There's something to be said here about what I've sometimes called the cancellation blast radius. The issues with cancellation happen when the data corruption/invariant violation is externally visible (if the corrupt data is torn down, who cares.) Mutexes make data corruption externally visible very often.
by corysama | 2025-11-25 18:02:25+00:00
Note that the pre-sorting wasn't just for drawing. It was for loading as well. The PS1 only had 2MB of RAM and a 2X CD-ROM with a seek time of a 1/4 second or more depending on the distance traveled by the drive head. So, straight-line physical layout of data to be loaded throughout the level was critical.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-25 18:02:30+00:00
> While hardware folks study and learn from the successes and failures of past hardware, software folks do not.

I guess that’s the real problem I have with SV’s endemic ageism.

I was personally offended, when I encountered it, myself, but that’s long past.

I just find it offensive, that experience is ignored, or even shunned.

I started in hardware, and we all had a reverence for our legacy. It did not prevent us from pursuing new/shiny, but we never ignored the lessons of the past.
by antonvs | 2025-11-25 18:02:35+00:00
That was probably a mischaracterization on my part. I wouldn't consider rewriting almost everything useful that's currently in C or C++ to be over the top. That would be a net good.

Posts that say "I rewrote X in Rust!" shouldn't actually be controversial. Every time you see one, you should think to yourself wow, the software world is moving towards being more stable and reliable, that's great!
by lenerdenator | 2025-11-25 18:03:25+00:00
> I think people way over-index Python as the language for data science. It has limitations that I think are quite noteworthy. There are many data-science tasks I’d much rather do in R than in Python.1 I believe the reason Python is so widely used in data science is a historical accident, plus it being sort-of Ok at most things, rather than an expression of its inherent suitability for data-science work.

Python doesn't need to be the best at any one thing; it just has to be serviceable for a lot of things. You can take someone who has expertise in a completely different domain in software (web dev, devops, sysadmin, etc.) and introduce them to the data science domain without making them learn an entirely new language and toolchain.
by suddenlybananas | 2025-11-25 18:03:35+00:00
Saying that Chomskyan linguistics 'only works on a few languages' is such a ridiculous claim that only is stated by people who haven't engaged with generative linguistics since the 1960s. There's enormous work on typologically diverse languages such as Japanese, Salish languages, Greenlandic, Basque, Gungbe or Kwa. I can provide references if you'd like.
by unethical_ban | 2025-11-25 18:03:37+00:00
I agree with your concerns but I am not sure that it is all or nothing, in the way that encryption security is, for example.

I think that agitprop campaigns are identifiable by the organizations on which they operate, and that site operators should consider that akin to spam and delete it.

Of course I do not advocate an actual firewall. We saw Instagram and the US try to censor the carnage in Gaza, and "allies" like Israel have acknowledged their desire to control the information space to suit their narrative.

Thank you for a real response.
by duped | 2025-11-25 18:03:53+00:00
> let v = Vec::new(); // Crap, I want to specify the type of Vec

This kinda implies you've gone wrong somewhere. That doesn't mean there aren't cases where you need type annotations (they certainly exist!) but that if `Vec::new()` doesn't compile because the compiler couldn't deduce the type, it implies something is off with your code.

It's impossible to tell you exactly what the problem was, just that `<Vec<T>>::new()` is not code that you would ever see in a Rust codebase.
by fransje26 | 2025-11-25 18:03:54+00:00
"Worse" won't even start to describe the economical crisis we will be in once the bubble bursts.

And although that, in itself, should be scary enough, it is nothing compared to the political tsunami and unrest it will bring in its wake.

Most of the Western world is already on shaky political ground, flirting with the extreme-right. The US is even worse, with a pathologically incompetent administration of sociopaths, fully incapable of coming up with the measures necessary to slow down the train of doom careening out of control towards the proverbial cliff of societal collapse.

If the societal tensions are already close to breaking point now, in a period of relative economical prosperity, I cannot start to imagine what they will be like once the next financial crash hits. Especially one in the multi trillion of dollars.

They say that humanity progresses through episodes of turmoil and crisis. Now that we literally have all the knowledge of the world at our fingertips, maybe it is time to progress past this inadequate primeval advancement mechanism, and to truly enter an enlightened age where progress is made from understanding, instead of crises.

Unfortunately, it looks like it's going to take monumental changes to stop the parasites and the sociopaths from making at quick buck at the expense of humanity.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-11-25 18:04:46+00:00
Something like this has a very limited shelf life as a product. What users need from chat is very user specific, trying to be the one chat to rule them all is not gonna end well, and as models get more capable each chat experience is going to need to be more customized.

Something like this could have a nice future as an open source chat framework for building custom UIs if it's well made and modular, but that isn't gonna work well with a SaaS model.
by pcarolan | 2025-11-25 18:04:51+00:00
As I'm on vacation, I took a couple days to put together an idea I've had bumping around in the back of my head for a while. What if you could write pure ruby methods and ask an llm to figure out all the implementation details to return the response to any method call?

The library leans hard on ruby's magical (hence the name) `method_missing` which has always impressed me with its simple cleverness.

This is my first open source project, so please leave feedback and be kind.

Many thanks in advance,

:Pat
by JuniperMesos | 2025-11-25 18:05:16+00:00
> The main problem with rust is that the community around it has embraced all the toxic traditions of the js/node ecosystem, and then some. Cargo is a terrifying nightmare. If you could install regular rust dependencies with "apt install" in debian stable, that would be a different story! But no. They want the version churn: continuously adding and removing bugs, like particle/anti-particle pairs at the boundary of a black hole.

Something I didn't appreciate for a long time is that, the C/C++ ecosystem does have an npm-like package management ecosystem - it is just implemented at the level of Linux distro maintainers DDD deciding what to package and how. Which worked ok because C was the lingua franca of Unix systems.

But actually it's valuable for programmers to be able to specify their dependencies for their own projects and update them on a schedule unconnected and uncoordinated with the OS's releases. The cargo/npm model is closer to ideal.

Of course what is even better is NixOS-like declarative specification and hashing of all dependencies
by tgv | 2025-11-25 18:05:34+00:00
Small neural networks are absolutely horrible at producing syntactically valid output. BTW, English is a very simple language to get right. Even a Markov model with some depth can achieve fairly good looking English. But other languages, even from the same family, already have features which require much deeper syntactic "knowledge." So the base-line isn't "looks like an English sentence," since children can and do learn other, more complicated languages with the same ease.

Show me a tabula rasa neural network that can learn those structures from the input a child gets, and you could be right. However, if you have to impose architectural constraints on the network, you'll have lost.
by pessimizer | 2025-11-25 18:05:37+00:00
I think the problem for people is the traditional problem that a lot of people have had with a lot of languages since C took off: it doesn't look like ALGOL, and doesn't have the semantics of ALGOL.

The reason python looks like procedural pseudocode is because it was designed to look like procedural pseudocode. Rust is not just a new skin over ALGOL with a few opinionated idioms, it's actually different - mostly to give hints of intention to the compiler, but I don't even think it started from the same place. It's more functional than anything imo, but without caring about purity or appearance, and that resulted in something that superficially looks sufficiently ALGOL-like to confuse people who are used to python or Kotlin.

> I genuinely believe that languages ought to start with "newbie friendliness", and would love to hear challenges to that idea.

In conclusion, I think this is a red herring. Computer languages are hard. What you're actually looking for is something that is ALGOL-like for people who have already done the hard work of learning an ALGOL-like. That's not a newbie, though. Somebody who learned Rust first would make the same complaint about python.
by akavi | 2025-11-25 18:05:50+00:00
Hmmm, that doesn't seem right. I'm having a hard time finding an actual consumption number, but I am confident it's well below 50%.

The top 10% of households by wage income do receive ~50% of pre-tax wage income, but:

1) our tax system is progressive, so actual net income share is less

2) there's significant post-wage redistribution (social security/medicaid)

3) that high income households consume a smaller percent of their net income is a well established fact.
by RaftPeople | 2025-11-25 18:06:07+00:00
> While hardware folks study and learn from the successes and failures of past hardware, software folks do not

I've been managing, designing, building and implementing ERP type software for a long time and in my opinion the issue is typically not the software or tools.

The primary issue I see is lack of qualified people managing large/complex projects because it's a rare skill. To be successful requires lots of experience and the right personality (i.e. low ego, not a person that just enjoys being in charge but rather a problem solver that is constantly seeking a better understanding).

People without the proper experience won't see the landscape in front of them. They will see a nice little walking trail over some hilly terrain that extends for about a few miles.

In reality, it's more like the Fellowship of the Rings trying to make it to Mt Doom, but that realization happens slowly.
by jewayne | 2025-11-25 18:06:50+00:00
> It really is a type of growth that would be dare say impossible to duplicate without kids.

Perhaps, but as a childless adult who had to take over my parents' affairs as their physical and cognitive health declined, I marvel at the wonderful hits of dopamine parents get as they watch their children grow. It's an adorable perspective on life that I didn't get to share as my mother gradually forgot who she was.
by panick21_ | 2025-11-25 18:06:57+00:00
A few point.

You are right that money is XOR. But cycling takes people of roads and improves the overall system while being very cheap. Also, you don't need dedicated super dutch style infrastructure to encurrage cycling. Making it safe for walking and cars to interact, ALSO makes it much, much better for cycling. Its a mistake in thinking that 'cycling' infrastructure is only dedicated cycling lanes. Encuriging cycling almost always pays off, in pretty every systematic measurment ever done on the topic. And if you reach Dutch level it pays of a gigantic amount. Its really low investment high return.

Cycle lanes actually look empty often because they are so much more efficent. They have done some studies on paths that were always empty and the threwput is usually not as bad as people think. To be sure the place you are refering to could be totally empty, it happens, but its not the norm even in the US.

Also, of course in a lot of places, specially in the US where they are really bad at cycling infratructure, they believe that all it takes is for one road to have a cycle lane and then magically people on bikes show up. They just want to get in on the 'hype' and were pressured to 'do something'. You need to actually be able to reasonably safely go from A to B between places that are vaguly useful. Dedicate cycling lanes make sense in places where there is no alterantive and you need cars to go resonably fast. But generally its more about your car infrastructure and how fast and dangerous your cars are. Improving cycling always goes hand in hand with making cars less dangerous, and that always pays off.

It takes some up front investment and actual planning, but its not like that infrastructure is worthless after a few years. Cycle lanes once built basically never get destroyed, so putting it in speculatively while having a long term plan makes a lot of sense.
by eviks | 2025-11-25 18:07:05+00:00
this is a macOS release, ios is already past 1, it's 1.4.0 Though I've made the mistake of updating it following this announcement, and now I couldn't even type the url since the url bar didn't jump up to be on top of a keyboard. After a few restarts it does jump up, but it's still positioned incorrectly, either too high or too low depending on the keyboard So yea, unfortunately, not reliable yet...
by GuB-42 | 2025-11-25 18:07:28+00:00
Source: https://www.novonordisk.com/news-and-media/news-and-ir-mater...

Ongoing study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39780249/

Usual rant to news outlets: Cite your damn sources! (if they are public, which is the case here). This is a web page, not printed paper, web pages support links, links are not just for ads!
by Zak | 2025-11-25 18:07:51+00:00
> I don't see any problem with it being "locked down", in the sense that it doesn't sound any worse than Chrome OS or Android.

I think the problem is that it further normalizes computers where users don't have the final say. The more normarized systems like that are, the more likely app developers (and even websites, if something like web environment integrity were to be normalized) are to lock out users on systems that aren't so restricted.

I wish I didn't have to care what kind of computers most people use, but in reality, it matters what's popular.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-11-25 18:07:52+00:00
That was a funny period of time because you could very transparently see the clear application of a corporate team that was tasked with improving the “startup speed KPI”.

During that time IE startup time went from a dozen or so seconds to also instantaneous. It was even faster than chrome sometimes. But that was just the startup. The application wasn’t ready to accept any user input or load anything for another 10 or 15 seconds still. Sometimes it would even accept input for a second then block the input fields again.

It’s the same mentality all those insanely slow webapps do when they think some core react feature for a “initial render” or splash screen etc will save them from their horrific engineering practices.
by jerf | 2025-11-25 18:07:54+00:00
Nothing. Word is getting around about how to do this. I anticipate that in another couple of years it'll have diffused to everyone, except the constant crew of new younglings who have to find out and be told about it from their older siblings and such.

"AI detection" wasn't even a solution in the short term and it won't be going forward. Take-home essays are dead, the teachers are collectively just hoping some superhero will swoop in and somehow save them. Sometimes such a thing is possible, but it isn't going to happen this time.
by elpakal | 2025-11-25 18:08:17+00:00
Alright let's say im tasked with building a fancy AI-powered research assistant and I need onyx or Vercel's ai-chatbot sdk. Why would I reach for onyx?

I have used vercel for several projects and I'm not tied to it, but would like to understand how onyx is comparable.

Benefits for my use cases for using vercel have been ease of installation, streaming support, model agnosticity, chat persistence and blob support. I definitely don't like the vendor lock in, though.
by biff1 | 2025-11-25 18:08:20+00:00
Well, if you are making the assertion, which you implicitly seem to be, you must first define thought. Is a word == thought? And of correlations, we all know the adage about correlation and causation. Not that I would make the counter argument, that thought is not encoded by electrical signals, but I would bet you aren’t totally correct. Do you think there will be no future paradigm shifts?