MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jacquesm | 2025-11-03 21:58:54+00:00
This should not be downvoted, this sort of error is indeed a very easy one to make when dealing with the C pre-processor.

> Some of these are wrong to[o] <- that needs an extra 'o' > due to not having brackets. <- that one is fine > So it's just extremely lazy to[o]. <- that needs an extra 'o' too

'to' comes in two versons, 'too' and 'to', both have different meanings.
by noir_lord | 2025-11-03 21:59:17+00:00
Napier was on the cutting edge of certain kinds of IC engines for a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napier_Sabre (1938).

Powered the absolute monster that was the Tempest (up to the Mk 2 - they did have reliability issues they never quite solved but 3000+HP out of an engine that weighs barely more than a tonne dry will do that)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Tempest

Was happy to see the name re-used for our upcoming fighter.

We also called the Eurofighter the Typhoon and the (WW2) Typhoon (also a Sabre engine) was the predecessor of the Tempest - it started as a re-wing of the Typhoon but enough changes where made to give it a new name.

Just a devastating superprop in its day.
by keybored | 2025-11-03 21:59:27+00:00
Please spare us the typical

- Look at people using identity-focused reasoning with politics

- It’s research!

- That’s the same as those <programming language tropes>

- Because I have some anecdotes about that

But the person making the argument couldn’t be falling for the same thing? Nope.[1]

Maybe it would be nice to have more objective metrics. So what’s that?

> We need a framework that makes the invisible costs visible. One that lets us have the economic conversation instead of the identity conversation. One that works whether you’re choosing your first language or evaluating a migration.

> Our industry has never really had that framework… Until now.

I better Stay Tuned.

[1] Those irrational people: making arguments. Me, the rational one: also making arguments, but mine are correct.
by nearbuy | 2025-11-03 21:59:28+00:00
> But doesn't this rely on the same thing you suggest we don't have, which is a working and definable definition of consciousness?

No, it's like saying we have no indication that humans have psychic powers and can levitate objects with their minds. The commenter is saying no human has ever demonstrated the ability to figure things out that aren't Turing computable and we have no reason to suspect this ability is even theoretically possible (for anything, human or otherwise).
by hnlmorg | 2025-11-03 21:59:55+00:00
> using various modern command line tools that insist on printing emojis in their output

Ugh. Unpopular opinion this but I personally find this practice repugnant. Same for when used in git commit messages, CI/CD task names and other such places. It just cheapens the quality of the product in my opinion

Graphical characters and symbols like ticks I’m fine with. I have no objection to people wanting to make the terminal pretty. But emojis in software feels like juvenile - like signing a formal letter with your gaming handle.
by lemnossos | 2025-11-03 22:00:10+00:00
The amount of people around me who take these soundbites at face value is quite depressing. I feel like I am going insane. I intensely dislike what the world is becoming, and I have now idea how to avoid the consequences.

It just looks like in a few years most people and organizations will be simple LLM lackeys just asking a chatbot what to do every hour of everyday then going to bed and repeating it.

I think this is the goal. No one involved actually believes in "AI". All they need is for ever more people and teams to just become dependent on whatever software nightmare they pull out of the mountain of GPUs they're hooking up.

At this point, it is not a bubble, it doesn't matter if there will be something valuable at the end or not. They're trying to become inescapable and it is working.
by mlrtime | 2025-11-03 22:00:53+00:00
>I know that when I've done the opposite; gone from a very performance oriented car to a random person's SUV, I've felt extremely unsafe

Which two cars? I've gone from a 911 to a BMW X5 and the X5 was just as fun for what it was. They are completely different cars, I'm not sure what you would expect and why you judge others.
by lairv | 2025-11-03 22:01:04+00:00
For those curious here are the actual keywords (from https://docs.python.org/3/reference/lexical_analysis.html?ut... )

Hard Keywords:

False await else import pass None break except in raise True class finally is return and continue for lambda try as def from nonlocal while assert del global not with async elif if or yield

Soft Keywords:

match case _ type

I think nonlocal/global are the only hard keywords I now barely use, for the soft ones I rarely use pattern matching, so 5 seems like a good estimate
by hurrckplgbd | 2025-11-03 22:02:11+00:00
I don't have a problem with people doing that as long as they don't pretend that every other commenter holds the same contrary opinion and that the downvotes indicate they're too sensitive to discuss such things, or other similar rationalizations. If you want to leave some drive-by snark without rationalizing it as being about other people, it's not my favorite kind of comment but I'm not going to object to it either.
by mamcx | 2025-11-03 22:02:37+00:00
> I cannot agree that programming language choice is a primary driver in a product's success or failure....

This and similar are common ideas for the people that never see the real whole world of programming, and maybe have the fortune of be in the "startup" circles.

I see the opposite, and is very good predictor to know how bad a product or a team is, using the programming language AND the main DB engine, but that is because I live in the world of "enterprise" code where for example:

* I'm called to do a rewrite

* I see the screenshot of the main app

* I guess correctly was made with vb (first big alarm) (how I know: I never see in my circle anybody that do vb, php, c, c++ anything resembling a sane UI. BTW just the use of colors was enough to guess)

* I worry, but confirm, that use Access as the main db

* I discover that part of the data was ALSO in a excel file, that is used with the equivalent of "joins", and was not surprised to see things like this

Even without knowing more about the people that do it, that is far enough signals to guess much.

BTW, there are very good predictors, if Use: MySql, MonGo, Php, Js (almost whatever you wanna add here in terms of frameworks), VB, Perl, Android (aka: Java android and android itself without using iOS alongside), is likely terrible. Then Java or C# taking turns how much worse, but not as bad as the ones before. I sweat if somebody say it use C or C++. Probably enough to straight refuse to take the project.

Any use of not-obscure tech in this sector and is a good predictor to be more or less not-that-bad.

BTW: Also complex infra and related boilerplate is now probably a stronger predictor after some langs like python, go, typescript and more modern java/kotlin/c# has spread (and also more pg and much less nosql, but too much "cloud")
by imiric | 2025-11-03 22:02:48+00:00
> And then my next windmill that I'm looking at is variable-sized text in the terminal. So when I'm catting a markdown file, I want to see the headings big.

Is this something people actually want?

One of the reasons I enjoy using the terminal is because the text is of a fixed size and monospaced. Even colors and bold text can be distracting at times. I certainly don't want my terminal to render Markdown...

I imagine the feature could be disabled, but still. I'm all for improving terminal UIs, but let's not turn them into a web browser.
by bri3d | 2025-11-03 22:02:58+00:00
> Tool choice matters. In fact I can hardly process how anyone can be an engineer and think that it doesn't, let alone how they can think it's some sort of engineering wisdom to claim that it doesn't matter what tools you use to do a project

Just to be clear, I wasn't trying to claim this; tooling certainly matters, at the very least, for the happiness and welfare of an engineering team! But, the article tries to claim things like "choosing a programming language is the single most expensive economic decision your company will make" and outside of a few extreme edge cases, I just can't agree with that particular thesis. Even the examples of bad decision-making you pose in your sibling comments, like writing a database in Go or "almost failing" by using sketchy niche datastores, are actually examples of this exact thing: these projects made huge engineering mistakes only to achieve some level of success as a business. Would they have been more successful if they made better engineering decisions? Possibly, but again, language and framework just was not the most important decision or factor driving an outcome.

I'm not saying that means we shouldn't care about making good engineering choices; there are easy ways to do things and hard ways to do things, and certainly I'm going to advocate for and work with people and at companies that favor the easy ways to do things. But when it comes to overall outcomes, I'll stand by having seen far more projects sacrificed to analysis paralysis, rewrites, rewrite-related hand wringing, and language/tooling hubris than sabotaged by poor language and framework choices.
by the_pwner224 | 2025-11-03 22:03:40+00:00
Except it's more than capable of solving novel problems that aren't in the training set and aren't a close match to anything in the training set. I've done it multiple times across multiple domains.

Creating complex Excel spreadsheet structures comes to mind, I just did that earlier today - and with plain GPT-5, not even -Thinking. Sure, maybe the Excel formulas themselves are a "98% match" to training data, but it takes real cognition (or whatever you want to call it) to figure out which ones to use and how to use them appropriately for a given situation, and how to structure the spreadsheet etc.
by ACCount37 | 2025-11-03 22:03:59+00:00
Quantum effects are weird, and poorly understood, and are just about the only thing in the known universe that isn't deterministic.

Human mind is weird, and poorly understood, and isn't deterministic - or, at least, most humans like to think that it isn't.

No wonder the two are intuitively associated. The two kinds of magic fairy dust must have the same magic at their foundation!
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-11-03 22:04:15+00:00
Your project was also really nice to play around with. I think it was one of the few which actually had an interesting idea including (blink), (copy.sh)

I generally preferred copy.sh more to be really honest. I have actually used it sometimes as a poor man's qemu. If I may ask, what are your thoughts on copy.sh as I found that its performance on busybox or (tinycore linux with gui) was so brilliant (the only downside was that the internet speed was abysmally slow, like for me really really slow.)
by IncreasePosts | 2025-11-03 22:04:17+00:00
This is an alt history story idea I've had rattling around in my head for years. It starts off in 1492 with a dejected Columbus complaining about Isabella and Ferdinand not seeing his vision.

Jump cut 300 years later to 1776, when Europeans first learn about the New World - when an Aztec galley lands in Cornwall.
by kevstev | 2025-11-03 22:05:20+00:00
At my last job I took over eng at a Series B startup, and my (non-technical) CEO was an ill tempered type and pretty much wanted me to tell him that the entire tech stack was shit and the previous architect/pseudo head of eng was shit, etc. And I was like no... some tradeoffs were made that make a ton of sense for an early stage startup, and the great news is that you are still here and now have the revenue and customer base to start thinking in terms of building things for the next 3-5 years, even though some of things are starting to break. And even better, nothing was so dire that it required stopping the world, we could continue to build and shore up some of the struggling things at the same time.

He seemed to really want me to blame everything on my predecessor and call some kind of crisis, and seemed annoyed by my analysis, which was confusing at the time. But yeah, there are absolutely tradeoffs you make early in a startups life, you just have to know where to take shortcuts and where you at least leave the architecture open to scaling. My biggest critique is that they were at least a year, if not two, past the point where they should have left ultra scrappy startup mode that just throws things at the wall and started building with a longer view.

I have also seen a friend build out a flawless architecture ready to scale to millions of users, but never got close to a product fit. I felt he wasted at least 6 months building out all this infra scaffolding for nothing.
by voidhorse | 2025-11-03 22:05:27+00:00
Nice write up!

When I see stuff like this, personally, I don't try to understand it, as code like this emerges from basically three motivations:

- The other person wanted to write in some other more (functional|object oriented|stack) language but couldn't, so they did this.

- The person couldn't be bothered to learn idioms for the target language and didn't care about others being able to read the program.

- The person intentionally wanted to obfuscate the program.

And none of these are good reasons to write code in a particular way. Code is about communication. Code like this is the equivalent to saying "I know the grammatical convention in English is subject-verb-object but I feel like speaking verb-object-subject and other people will have to just deal with it"—which, obviously, is a horrible way to communicate if you actually want to share ideas/get your point across.

That all said, the desire to have logic expressed more compactly and declaratively definitely resonates. Unfortunately C style verbosity and impurity remains dominant.
by arcticbull | 2025-11-03 22:05:36+00:00
People tend to equate this to the railroad boom when saying that infrastructure spending will yield durable returns into the future no matter what.

When the railroad bubble popped we had railroads. Metal and sticks, and probably more importantly, rights-of-way.

If this is a bubble, and it pops, basically all the money will have been spent on Nvidia GPUs that depreciate to 0 over 4 years. All this GPU spending will need to be done again, every 4 years.

Hopefully we at least get some nuclear power plants out of this.
by runarberg | 2025-11-03 22:05:53+00:00
The vast majority of the dot-com comparison that I personally see are economic, not technological. People (or at least the ones I see) are claiming that the bubble mechanics of e.g. circular trading and over-investments are similar to the dot-com bubble, not that the AI technology is somehow similar the internet (it obviously isn’t). And to that extent we are in the year 1999 not 1995.

When this article are claiming both sides of the debate, I believe only one of them are real (the ones hyping up the technology). While there are people like me who are pessimistic about the technology, we are not in any position of power, and our opinion on the matter is basically a side noise. I think a much more common (among people with any say in the future of this technology) is the believe that this technology is not yet at a point which warrants all this investment. There were people who said that about the internet in 1999, and they were proven 100% correct in the months that followed.
by cgriswald | 2025-11-03 22:06:29+00:00
No. From the PEP:

Where <mode> can be: "normal" (or unset): Only explicitly marked lazy imports are lazy "all": All module-level imports (except in try blocks and import *) become potentially lazy "none": No imports are lazy, even those explicitly marked with lazy keyword When the global flag is set to "all", all imports at the global level of all modules are potentially lazy except for those inside a try block or any wild card (from ... import *) import.
by Mond_ | 2025-11-03 22:07:35+00:00
No, I just don't think you have identified a problem in the first place. You've complained a lot, but you've not even been specific enough to point at a single concrete thing! You've been so lacking in specifics I don't even know if you'd prefer Ocaml, Go, or Python-style syntax over Rust! Like, I can't tell since all you've said is that you don't like it, without even telling me how you don't like it or what you prefer!

You say "over-complicated". I disagree, my impression is that is mostly about as complicated as it needs to be to solve the problems it is trying to solve.
by crazygringo | 2025-11-03 22:07:46+00:00
> the overwhelming majority of input it has in-fact seen somewhere in the corpus it was trained on.

But it thinks just great on stuff it wasn't trained on.

I give it code I wrote that is not in its training data, using new concepts I've come up with in an academic paper I'm writing, and ask it to extend the code in a certain way in accordance with those concepts, and it does a great job.

This isn't regurgitation. Even if a lot of LLM usage is, the whole point is that it does fantastically with stuff that is brand new too. It's genuinely creating new, valuable stuff it's never seen before. Assembling it in ways that require thinking.
by maxdo | 2025-11-03 22:08:44+00:00
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by jacquesm | 2025-11-03 22:08:58+00:00
Not necessarily. Sometimes the rot goes so deep that there is really no way out.

And the C pre-processor has figured prominently in more than one such case in my career. And it was precisely in the kind of way that is described in TFA.

For something to be doable it needs to make economic sense as well and that's the problem with nightmare trickery like this. Initially it seems like a shortcut, but in the long run the price tag keeps going up.
by throwaway150 | 2025-11-03 22:09:21+00:00
Good grief! Are we really so insufferable as software developers that we can't just appreciate a brilliant article about the work of a remarkable computer scientist without nitpicking every supposed "bad practice"?

The whole point of the piece seems completely lost on some readers. Yes, we all know that #define $(a,b) if(a)b;else is questionable. I don't need a crash course on C macros in the comments, thank you. The author already acknowledges that Whitney's style is controversial. Do we really need to keep rehashing that point in every comment, or can we finally focus on how all this unconventional code fits together beautifully to form a working interpreter?
by tsimionescu | 2025-11-03 22:09:49+00:00
> If you need two things to happen at the same time in sync with each other no matter if they are separated by billions of miles, then you need faster-than-light travel, or some magic [1]

This makes no sense as written - by definition, there is no concept of "at the same time" for events that are spacelike separated like this. Quantum entanglement allows you to know something about the statistical outcomes of experiments that are carried over a long distance away from you, but that's about it (there's a simpler version, where you can know some facts for certain, but that one actually looks just like classical correlation, so it's not that interesting on its own).

I do get the point that we don't know what we don't know, so that a radical new form of physics, as alien to current physics as quantum entanglement is to classical physics, could exist. But this is an anti-scientific position to take. There's nothing about consciousness that breaks any known law of physics today, so the only logical position is to suppose that consciousness is explainable by current physics. We can't go around positing unknown new physics behind every phenomenon we haven't entirely characterized and understood yet.
by yepguy | 2025-11-03 22:10:13+00:00
A good chunk of the social events I attend are coordinated mainly through very busy group chats, and then announced with Instagram stories (yes really, even though they disappear after 24 hours). I'm not really in a position to change that either, so I'd rather get the 1 update from Instagram than sift through hundreds of group chat messages.

I agree with you in principle, though. There are better tools for all of this that they just won't use.
by coppsilgold | 2025-11-03 22:10:41+00:00
Looks like they put in some effort. You will get better results by having this type of anticheat baked into the engine from the very beginning and requiring a GPU on the server.

What I had in mind is having a primitive physics simulation with point clouds (+ velocity smearing) for entities and geometries for surfaces. You will be able to to do many more checks this way.
by egonschiele | 2025-11-03 22:11:10+00:00
I think this is a reasonable expectation. I'm writing about the dot product and there is a geometric visualization for dot products, so it's fair to expect that. As I said in this comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45802969) I focused on teaching the reader the bare minimum they would need to know to get to matrix multiplication.

I use illustrations for a lot of other things though. I use them to pace my posts, to call out things that are especially important, to reinforce written ideas with images, and to give the reader's eye a place to rest.

If you are looking for graphs, this video about the dot product from 3B1B may be more your speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyGKycYT2v0
by simonw | 2025-11-03 22:11:36+00:00
Yeah, the short-lived GPU deprecation cycle does feel very relevant here.

I'm still a fan of the railroad comparisons though for a few additional reasons:

1. The environmental impact of the railroad buildout was almost incomprehensibly large (though back in the 1800s people weren't really thinking about that at all.)

2. A lot of people lost their shirts investing in railroads! There were several bubbly crashes. A huge amount of money was thrown away.

3. There was plenty of wasted effort too. It was common for competing railroads to build out rails that served the same route within miles of each other. One of them might go bust and that infrastructure would be wasted.