MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by procaryote | 2025-12-14 08:27:05+00:00
> or they had other requirements that necessitated microservices

Scale

Both in people, and in "how do we make this service handle the load". A monolith is easy if you have few developers and not a lot of load.

With more developers it gets hard as they start affecting eachother across this monolith.

With more load it gets difficult as the usage profile of a backend server becomes very varied and performance issues hard to even find. What looks like a performance loss in one area might just be another unrelated part of the monolith eating your resources,
by lelanthran | 2025-12-14 08:27:38+00:00
> Doesn’t Epic charge a 5% royalty for any games developed on Unreal Engine regardless of where or how the money is collected or what app store it’s installed from?

"Royalty". It's common to charge a royalty when allowing someone to distribute your copyrighted property.

> Why can’t Apple collect fees for any apps that are built on their software AND hardware?

Because that's not a royalty - you aren't distributing Apple's copyrighted property when you send someone an iPhone application.[1]

When you send someone your game built on Unreal Engine, you are sending them Epic's copyrighted property.[2]

-------------------------

[1] If people could side-load iPhone apps, that is. I don't believe that they can.

[2] If you sell someone code to your game and tell them to to download Unreal Engine, then compile and/or link it against Unreal Engine themselves, then sure, Epic won't get a dime. But your customer might still have to pay for that, depending on whether Epic makes single-user no-sale licenses free (I believe they do).
by hansmayer | 2025-12-14 08:29:10+00:00
Ever heard of service dogs? Or police dogs? Now tell me, when will LLMs ever be safe to be used as assistance to blind people? Or will the big tech at some point release some sloppy blind-people-tool based on LLMs and unleash the LLM-influencers like yourself to start gaslighting the users into thinking they were "not holding it right" ? For mission and life critical problems, I'll take a dog any day, thank you very much!
by xelxebar | 2025-12-14 08:29:57+00:00
> I'm not entirely convinced it actually helped me as a "tool of thought"

This is so real. I had the same issue and was only able to break through by collabing with professional APLers. It's very non-ideal for the curious autodidacts.

I'd love to share, hone, and flesh out what the Tool of Thought looks like in practice with interested others. For anyone here to whom that sounds fun, feel free to reach out. Contact info is in my profile.
by vasco | 2025-12-14 08:30:42+00:00
This is the no true scottsman fallacy of mental health. Oh my god if only you knew how worse it can get.

Like you have no comparison, maybe what makes you despair and consider suicide won't make anyone else even budge. The same way you have no way of knowing if I see more or less intense green color, you cannot tell someone they haven't suffered enough.
by Anamon | 2025-12-14 08:31:52+00:00
From my own experience (having maintained legacy human codebases and now and then toying around with LLM coding) there's a quite fundamental difference between the types of slop, though.

Bad human code often has antipatterns, missing sanity checks, terrible data structures, bad naming, convoluted flows, etc. but you can usually deduce the intent behind the code. It's pretty obvious where it's bad and why. And if you can get to the mental model that guided the development, you can figure out how to rewrite it.

LLM code has all of those problems, but on top of that, there's no underlying mental model to deduce, much less a consistent one. This, in my experience, makes the slop go from horrible but possible to fix and refactor, to beyond repair and in need of not just a complete rewrite, but an entire new architecture from scratch.
by Peteragain | 2025-12-14 08:31:59+00:00
Thanks for the reference and I stand corrected. And yes I had looked at it a long time ago and will give it another read. But I think it is saying that RNNs are a means of approximating a statistical property of a collection of text. That property is what we today think of as "completion"? That is, glorified auto complete, and not "distributed representations" of the world. Would you agree?
by yolkedgeek | 2025-12-14 08:33:53+00:00
I've been using this solution for about 4 days now. It's not meant to be used as your main monitor. I use it only when I want to read something I or someone else has written. I think it's also good for simple writing too. But if I try to use it as my main monitor, browsing the web, writing code, etc. it will become a real headache because of the latency.

One huge plus is that it isn't *just a monitor*. because of the VNC connection, I just pick up my tablet and roam around the office while reading something, even making tiny edits, It can be also used as a great drawpad. I use it to explain things to my coworkers, since drawing freehand diagrams, shapes and text isn't very easy with a mouse.
by troupo | 2025-12-14 08:34:48+00:00
They are working towards "the real thing", whatever your definition of real is.

BTW in the 90s people tried to come up with a type system for Erlang, and failed:

--- start quote ---

Phil Wadler[1] and Simon Marlow [2] worked on a type system for over a year and the results were published in [3]. The results of the project were somewhat disappointing. To start with, only a subset of the language was type-checkable, the major omission being the lack of process types and of type checking inter-process mes-sages. Although their type system was never put into production, it did result in a notation for types which is still in use today for informally annotating types.

Several other projects to type check Erlang also failed to produce results that could be put into production. It was not until the advent of the Dialyzer [4] that realistic type analysis of Erlang programs became possible.

https://lfe.io/papers/%5B2007%5D%20Armstrong%20-%20HOPL%20II...

--- end quote ---

[1] Yes, that Philip Wadler, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Wadler

[2] Yes, that Simon Marlow, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Marlow

[3] A practical subtyping system for Erlang https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/258948.258962

[4] https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/dialyzer/dialyzer.html
by eimrine | 2025-12-14 08:36:00+00:00
My favorite phone battery hack is to solder some extra li-pol battery in parallel to the original one. The phone eventually becomes 2 times thicker of course but I do not consider the phone as the status symbol like a watch or a jacket. This is just a damn thing which is here to supply me with some connection. I hate powerbanks because they burn significant portion of extra energy for step-up converting.
by Seattle3503 | 2025-12-14 08:36:29+00:00
> Yeah. that's a bad thing right? Maintaining backward compatibility to the end of time in the name of safety.

This this is what I don't get about some comments in this thread. Choosing internal backwards compatibility for services managed by a team of three engineers doesn't make a lot of sense to me. You (should) have the organizational agility to make big changes quickly, not a lot of consensus building should be required.

For the S3 APIs? Sure, maintaining backwards compatibility on those makes sense.
by yolkedgeek | 2025-12-14 08:36:30+00:00
It's text on the E-ink screen mostly, be it in the browser, a plain text file, Logseq, Obsidian etc. But sometimes simple writing can be done too. I wouldn't suggest writing code because of the high latency.

Most of my work is reading rather than writing so when I want to read something I use the E-ink screen.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-14 08:37:15+00:00
You don't, but business executives aren't the kind to easily admit they got conned - and if they're getting close to that stage, a nice dinner or golfing session paid by the vendor's representative generally alleviates those feelings very well.

Engineers who started their career during the cloud craze and don't know anything else are also not the kind to rock the boat, lest the cash cow dies and their whole "investment" in their career becomes useless.
by hshdhdhj4444 | 2025-12-14 08:37:24+00:00
I suspect $260mm wouldn’t just solve all those problems for a single university, but for all Universities across the nation, assuming the software is being written with an open ethos and to benefit all universities like suggested by the OP.

This reminds me of how a small team of U.S. seniors provided WiFi to basically the entire D1 football stadium for our college (at a time this hadn’t been done before), for < $10k (we used the grant to buy whatever we couldn’t get used from various departments), had it working in what may have been a first for a college stadium of that size, only for it to be completely scrapped and the university spending tens of millions to replace it with a new commercial system that didn’t even work as well and had a higher per game support fee than the cost of running our entire system for the whole season.

Unrelated to this (but maybe still explaining why), the college president was suspected of having sent contracts to “friends” who had significantly overcharged the university for years.
by vasco | 2025-12-14 08:38:30+00:00
People who abandon their kids don't really have anything to teach you. There's isn't much worse you can do. But in this case Anthony did that also:

> Anthony Bourdain paid a $380,000 settlement to actor Jimmy Bennett in 2018 to silence allegations that Asia Argento had sexually assaulted him in 2013, when Bennett was 17 and Argento was 37

Great role model. People see a guy that looks cool and says edgy shit and that's it, he is now a great person, lol.
by econ | 2025-12-14 08:39:47+00:00
If you buy them in bulk for employees they get progressively cheaper. It also matters how many customers you can serve vs how many you have and what you spend to get one customer into your store. If you spend 500 per day to get 100 customers into your brick and mortar store you can also give/spend 500 in discounts to get 100 more. If only 60% redeems the card the other 40% is profit. ETC
by hansmayer | 2025-12-14 08:40:33+00:00
> One of us is misleading people here, and I don't think it's me.

Firstly, I am not the one with an LLM-influencer side-gig. Secondly - No sorry, please don't move the goalposts. You did not answer my main argument - which is - how does a "tool" which constantly change its behaviour deserve being called a tool at all? If a tailor had scissors which cut the fabric sometimes just a bit, and sometimes completely differently every time they used it, would you tell the tailor he is not using them right too? Thirdly you are now contradicting yourself. First you said we need to live with the fact that they are un-predictable. Now you are sugarcoating it into being "a bit unpredictable", or "not as nearly unpredictable". I am not sure if you are doing this intentionally or do you really want to believe in the "magic" but either way you are ignoring the ground tenets of how this technology works. I'd be fine if they used it to generate cheap holiday novels or erotica - but clearly after four years of experimenting with the crap machines to write code created a huge pushback in the community - we don't need the proverbial scissors which cut our fabric differently each time!
by specproc | 2025-12-14 08:40:40+00:00
Jeez, gimme a break. The US is rounding up people on the streets, the UK throwing terrorism legislation at pensioners, don't get me started on Israel.

Russia is an oppressive and dangerous regime, sure, but in 2025, there's nothing particularly special about it on human rights and censorship.

In the context of Western censorship of a global resource, Yandex makes a load of sense.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-14 08:41:58+00:00
> It can hose your memory all it wants, it can just only do so within the confines of the sandbox.

True, although as I understand it the WASI component model at least allows multiple fine-grained sandboxes, so it's somewhere in-between per-object capabilities and one big sandbox for your entire program. I haven't actually used it yet so I might be wrong about that.

> so you'll probably have to wait ten years to get something comparable from WASI

I think for many WASI use cases the capability control would be done by the host program itself, so you don't need OS-level support for it. E.g. with Wasmtime I do

WasiCtxBuilder::new() .allow_tcp(false) .allow_udp(false) .allow_ip_name_lookup(false)

But yeah a standard WASI program can't itself decide to give up capabilities.
by Defletter | 2025-12-14 08:42:40+00:00
Have you never encountered a generalisation in your entire life?

EDIT: Fun tidbits:

- Sheila Jeffreys thinks that "any woman who takes part in a heterosexual couple helps to shore up male supremacy by making its foundations stronger".

- Janice Raymond thinks that "all transsexuals rape women's bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves".

- Germaine Greer published a book of some 200 pictures of young boys "to advance women's reclamation of their capacity for and right to visual pleasure".

Truly the height of second-wave feminism right here.
by IshKebab | 2025-12-14 08:44:48+00:00
You wouldn't be able to get quite as fine-grained. One memory per object is probably horrifically slow. And I don't know about Fil-C, but CHERI at least allows capabilities (pointers with bounds) to overlap and subset each other. I.e. you could allocate an arena and get a capability for that, and then allocate an object inside that arena and get a smaller capability for that, and then get a pointer to a field in that object and get capability just for that field.
Ask HN: How to noise cancel out a specific annoying sound?
by artur_makly | 2025-12-14 08:45:02+00:00
Across the street from my new apt, there's a commercial garage alarm/beep that gets triggered every time a car leaves and enters - is there a way to cancel that sound? it's driving me nuts.

I'm assuming AI will need to be involved?

If I had the time, I'd DYI it..but for now I need a solid solution. thanks
by SXX | 2025-12-14 08:46:03+00:00
My point is: presidents are not delivered to your country by president delivery alien space ship. A lot of people voted for him and this is a fact. You cant just blame everyone of them for being dumb or racist. If you dont like their choice that means you should starting to do something about it.

Authorithorianism also not just happen - it take years to build and destroy institutions. It took 20 years to build fascist regime in my country.

Sorry for not making it clear enough.
by andriamanitra | 2025-12-14 08:46:03+00:00
> If they are enemy combatants you are allowed to follow up and ensure they have been killed

Not true. Launching an attack on shipwrecked enemy is a blatant violation of the Geneva conventions. [1, Chapter II Article 12] It's also prohibited by DoD's own guidelines. [2, page 1071, section 17.14]

It's not a question of whether or not what happened was illegal, it's a textbook example of a war crime. It's a matter of whether or not the justice system still has enough power to identify who is responsible and hold them accountable.

[1] https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/assets/treaties/370-GC-II-EN....

[2] https://media.defense.gov/2023/Jul/31/2003271432/-1/-1/0/DOD...
by arionmiles | 2025-12-14 08:47:47+00:00
Cursor replaced their CMS because Cursor is a 50-people team shipping content to one website. Cursor also has a "Designers are Developers" scenario so their entire team is well versed with git.

This setup is minimal and works for them for the moment, but the author argues (and reasonably well enough, IMO) that this won't scale when they have dedicated marketing and comms teams.

It's not at all about Cursor using the chance to replace a department with AI, the department doesn't exist in their case.
by nicolix | 2025-12-14 08:47:53+00:00
cannabis in many varieties and cannabinoids especially the most significant naturally made potentially cheaply sourceable receptors' agonist compound delta-9-thc, when taken not occasionally, in increasingly large quantities, in extracted purified forms, at high molar concentrations (up to and over 5-10 µM) have demostrated - albeit not in many clinical settings despite numerous studies since 1974 have confirmed such potential usage - a strong antiproliferative, antineoplastic, antitumor, anticancer activity.
by achaeus | 2025-12-14 08:48:05+00:00
Okay, I like Rust, really... But, I totally agree it's not just about memory safety.

<rant> Rust gives you: Memory safety (mostly), No use-after-free, double-free, buffer overruns in safe Rust.

It does not give you: logic/protocol/cryptographic correctness, supply-chain integrity, side-channel resistance, malicious dependency immunity, auditability, reduced attack surface, or reduced complexity.

In other words, Rust solves one class of bugs extremely well. It solves none of the hard ones.

I get it, memory corruption bugs are Loud, measurable, easy to point at, and easy to sell to management.

That's why they dominate the narrative.

My biggest issue/concern is the dependency explosion problem.

Classic C Example: - ~N lines of code - A small number of carefully curated libraries - Mostly static linking - Painful to write - Painful to maintain - Possible to audit

Rust rewrite: - Core project + - 50 direct dependencies + - 300 transitive deps + - 900 crates total + - Thousands of maintainers you have never met + - GitHub accounts that may disappear tomorrow + - Build scripts executing arbitrary code at compile time

Security claim: "Memory safe!" Reality: Attack surface inflation by 1–2 orders of magnitude

You've traded: "I might screw up a pointer"

for: "I trust a thousand strangers, their CI pipelines, their update hygiene, their threat models, and their long-term incentives."

...

Rust’s memory-safety guarantees are genuinely valuable, especially for new development. Where I become skeptical is when a rewrite significantly expands the dependency graph. At that point, the security model shifts from "local reasoning enforced by the compiler" to "transitive trust in a very large supply chain". That trade-off isn't always acknowledged, and in some contexts, especially high-assurance systems, it deserves more scrutiny.

</rant>
by lostmsu | 2025-12-14 08:48:37+00:00
I believe these are SIMD. Tensor cores require MMA family of instructions. Ask me how I know. :)

https://github.com/m4rs-mt/ILGPU/compare/master...lostmsu:IL...

Good article: https://alexarmbr.github.io/2024/08/10/How-To-Write-A-Fast-M...
by throwaboat | 2025-12-14 08:48:41+00:00
I'd like to point to tabs in browsers as a problem area. Ctrl + T is a problem.

I'll set the scene that I think most of us have experienced: you're working on a project. You start down the rabbit hole of research to find a solution to something. Maybe you find it quickly somehow. But this case, you don't. The problem is too big for an easy answer and instead requires synthesis and reflection.

Eventually, after opening 50 tabs and only closing the immediately useless stuff, you find that you need to circle back up the problem solving chain. The problem is that you have 45 tabs open and no method to the madness that is clearly visible.

This further compounds if you're trying to solve a new problem with an existing set of tabs that haven't been cleaned out from the last problem.

Nowhere in this process is the UX leading you to solving a problem.

My half-baked solution is to allow for the user to enter "research mode". When a new tab is opened, the browser halts the user and prompts for what they found on the last tab that led them to opening this new tab. When the user leaves research mode, any leafs left should also prompt for a summary or omitted as irrelevant. Then, once all the tabs have been accounted for, a report can be generated which shows all the URLs and the user's notes. Bonus points if allows generation of MLA / APA citations automagically. Further bonus points if I can highlight sections of text / images while in research mode to fill my new tab questionnaire as I go.
by kstenerud | 2025-12-14 08:49:51+00:00
The idea is to have an 80/20 build system:

For the 80% of use cases, you have homogeneous build commands that are the same across projects (such as a makefile with build, clean, test, etc). This calls the real (complex) build system underneath to actually perform the action. You shouldn't need to type more than 15 keys to make it do common things (and you CERTAINLY shouldn't need to use ANY command line switches).

Then for the other 20% of (complex) use cases, you call the underlying build system directly, and have a document describing how the build system works and how to set up the dev environment (preferably with "make dev-env"). Maybe for self-bootstrapping systems like rust or go this isn't such a big deal, but for C/C++ or Python or node or Java or Mono it quickly becomes too bespoke and fiddly.

Then you include tests for those makefile level commands to make sure they actually work.

There's nothing worse than having to figure out (or remember) the magical incantation necessary to build/run some project among the 500 repos in 15 languages at a company, waiting for the repo owner to get back to you on why "./gradlew compileAndRun" and "/.gradlew buildAndRun" and "./gradlew devbuild" don't work - only to have them say "Oh, you just use ./gradlew -Pjava.version=11 -Dconfig.file=config/dev-use-this-one-instead.conf -Dskipdeploy buildAndDeploy - oh and make sure ImageMagick and Pandoc are installed. They're only used by the reports generator, but buildAndDeploy will error out without them". Wastes a ton of time.
by imtringued | 2025-12-14 08:50:09+00:00
The third party shared library doesn't know your company exists. This means the third party dependency doesn't contain any business or application specific code and is applicable to any software project. This in turn means it has to solve the majority of business use cases ahead of time and be thoroughly tested to not break any consumers.

The problem has fundamentally gone away and reduced itself to a simple update problem, which itself is simpler because the update schedule is less frequent.

I use tomcat for all web applications. When tomcat updates I just need to bump the version number on one application and move on to the next. Tomcat does not involve itself in the data that is being transferred in a non-generic way so I can update whenever I want.

Since nothing blocks updates, the updates happen frequently which means no application is running on an ancient tomcat version.
by reincoder | 2025-12-14 08:50:18+00:00
We operate servers for the purpose of measuring the internet using a wide variety of methods. We have more than 1,200 of these servers distributed across 530 cities, running not only ping but traceroute and many other types of active measurements.

In addition to active measurement and research, there are many other sources of data we use. Also, we are actively investing in R&D to develop new sources. Adding just 300ms of latency at the end of an IP address would simply appear as noise to us. We have dozens of locations, hints cut through the noise.

We welcome people to try to break the system. Perhaps it is possible to dupe this system.
by ehnto | 2025-12-14 08:50:31+00:00
Both human and AI should be able to understand the "way we do things around here" by reading the existing code. I could spend an hour telling someone how to write idiomatic code, and they will forget all of it until they actually do some work and see the codebase.

When Claude reads a significant portion of my codebase into context it should be suggesting idiomatic changes. Even if it doesn't initially read a bunch of the codebase to figure out a solution, it should definitely then be trained to do so explicitly to understand the coding standards. Just like a decent dev would do on their own.