MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Veserv | 2025-12-03 23:32:48+00:00
I am actually not talking about the lack of fat pointers. That is almost entirely orthogonal to my point. I am talking about the fact that what would be the syntax for passing a array by value was repurposed for automatically decaying into a pointer. This results in a massive and unnecessary syntactic wart.

The fact that the correct type signature, a pointer to fixed-size array, exists and that you can create a struct containing a fixed-size array member and pass that in by value completely invalidates any possible argument for having special semantics for fixed-size array parameters. Automatic decay should have died when it became possible to pass structs by value. Its continued existence continues to result in people writing objectively inferior function signatures (though part of this it the absurdity of C type declarations making the objectively correct type a pain to write or use, another one of the worst actual design mistakes).

Fat pointers or argument-aware non-fixed size array parameters are a separate valuable feature, but it is at least understandable for them to not have been included at the time.
by anon84873628 | 2025-12-03 23:32:50+00:00
Sounds similar to my problem. At some point my Microsoft account was linked with an old startup email as a backup. I've updated it to fully remove it and set my gmail as primary. Yet I am still receiving subscription/billing emails to that old address, which fortunately is being forwarded. The UI simply does not reflect reality.

When I contact Support I tell them the whole problem at the start. Then eventually an agent comes on and asks me a dumb question. If I don't respond quickly enough they close the chat and the whole process restarts.
by panarky | 2025-12-03 23:32:57+00:00
> It programs with the skill of the median programmer on GitHub

This is a common intuition but it's provably false.

The fact that LLMs are trained on a corpus does not mean their output represents the median skill level of the corpus.

Eighteen months ago GPT-4 was outperforming 85% of human participants in coding contests. And people who participate in coding contests are already well above the median skill level on Github.

And capability has gone way up in the last 18 months.
by jcranmer | 2025-12-03 23:33:01+00:00
> Given these numbers and the pathetic state of all the alternative game stores, they are ONE company before Google, Apple, Amazon, etc. that richly deserves some antitrust enforcement

So the thing about antitrust is that it's not the act of having a monopoly that is punishable, it's the act of using that monopoly unjustly that is punishable.

Apple's app store is a good example here--their stipulations on financial payments in apps starts to really cross the line into illegal product tying to me. Whereas what Valve has done to lock-in users to Steam is... um... you might at best point to actions they haven't taken, but fundamentally, the alternative game stores have failed because they've not really demonstrated any value proposition other than "redirect Valve's profits to us", which isn't a big motivation for consumers.
by harrall | 2025-12-03 23:34:20+00:00
I see this type of vulnerability all the time. Seen it in Java, Lua, JavaScript, Python and so on.

I think deserialization that relying on blacklists of properties is a dangerous game.

I think rolling your own object deserialization in a library that isn’t fully dedicated to deserialization is about as dangerous as writing your own encryption code.
by b_e_n_t_o_n | 2025-12-03 23:36:07+00:00
There just isn't much friction between having a few tabs open (maps, booking site, airplane site, google search) and a notepad. The friction of searching for an app, downloading it, and then learning how to use it is just higher.

So many products are like this - it sounds good on paper to consolidate a bunch of tasks in one place but it's not without costs and the benefit is just not very high.
by Smaug123 | 2025-12-03 23:36:35+00:00
Out of interest, was your intended answer "where you started, facing east"?

FWIW, Claude Opus 4.5 gets this right for me, assuming that is the intended answer. On request, it also gave me a Mathematica program which (after I fixed some trivial exceptions due to errors in units) informs me that using the ITRF00 datum the actual answer is 0.0177593 degrees north and 0.168379 west of where you started (about 11.7 miles away from the starting point) and your rotation is 89.98 degrees rather than 90.

(ChatGPT 5.1 Thinking, for me, get the wrong answer because it correctly gets near the South Pole and then follows a line of latitude 200 times round the South Pole for the second leg, which strikes me as a flatly incorrect interpretation of the words "move forward along the surface of the earth". Was that the "usual error they all used to make"?)
by infamouscow | 2025-12-03 23:37:01+00:00
Derision is legitimate way to change behavior when other avenues fail.

A reasonable person that's acting maliciously can be reasoned to stop their behavior.

An unreasonable person that's acting in good faith cannot be reasoned to stop their behavior because they are stupid.

If after attempts to reason with the unreasonable fail, it is not an insult or ad hominem attack to explain the person is acting stupidly.
by teaearlgraycold | 2025-12-03 23:37:40+00:00
I saw an ad for Lovable. The very first thing I noticed was an exchange where the promoter asked the AI to fix a horizontal scroll bar that was present on his product listing page. This is a common issue with web development, especially so for beginners. The AI’s solution? Hide overflow on the X axis. Probably the most common incorrect solution used by new programmers.

But to the untrained eye the AI did everything correctly.
by ofalkaed | 2025-12-03 23:38:11+00:00
I find trackers to be in the same category you put live coding into, probably DAWs as well, but many people do some amazing things with all three. In the more academic computer music world there is a fair amount of diversity in live coding where it is generally combined with algorithmic/generative techniques to rapidly create complexity and nuance. SuperCollider seems to have the most interesting output here, for me at least; I have seen little that really grabs me but they do show the capabilities of the process and I find that quite interesting. Improvisation and jamming is just not my thing, so live coding falls a bit short for me.
by RHSeeger | 2025-12-03 23:38:17+00:00
I feel like we're talking past each other.

I'm telling the bank "I want you to give $5 of my money to Bob". I'm not asking them to pass a message to Bob. The entire message is the instructions for the bank to give the $5 to Bob. The bank MUST be able to read that message in order to follow the directions. There's nothing to "leave encrypted" to treat the bank as a non-end of the E2EE.

You could presumably hide who Bob is by making it some kind of anonymous account thing... but that _still_ wouldn't leave any message encrypted. Because all of the information needs to have been decrypted for the bank to act on it.

For the Signal analogy to apply, there would need to be some message going to Bob. And there isn't... other than "We're giving you this $5 for OP", all of which is information in the original message that the bank needs to act on it.
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-03 23:39:53+00:00
I had a VP of a revenue cycle team tell me that his expectation was that they could fling their spreadsheets and Word docs on how to do calculations at an AI powered vendor, and AI would be able to (and I direct quote) "just figure it all out."

That's when I realized how far down the rabbit hole marketing to non-technical folks on this was.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-03 23:39:56+00:00
"As an IP attorney, this was jaw-dropping," Menkes said. "My sweet little son unwittingly created something that I spent over a decade of my life preventing others from doing."

His son engaged in the natural creativity process, which IP attorneys are paid to thwart.

Attorneys' ability to stifle creativity in bulk is made possible by powerful tools purchased by the IP industry - copyright laws.
by whatevaa | 2025-12-03 23:40:02+00:00
DLSS Transformer models are pretty good. Framegen can be useful but has niche applications dure to latency increase and artifacts. Global illumination can be amazing but also pretty niche as it's very expensive and comes with artifacts.

Biggest flop is UE5 and it's lumen/nanite. Reallly everything would be fine if not that crap.

And yeah, our hardware is not capable of proper raytracing at the moment.
by 56kbr | 2025-12-03 23:40:22+00:00
There's a development/playground deployment for local K8s (e.g. Minikube, KinD): https://github.com/NVIDIA/aistore/tree/main/deploy/dev/k8s.

For production you'd need a proper cluster deployed via Helm, but for trying it out locally that setup is easy to get running.
by peterldowns | 2025-12-03 23:40:27+00:00
At CloudX (https://cloudx.io) we’re building a new supply-side advertising platform for mobile publishers. Yes, it's ads, and yes, there's AI involved, so stop reading here if that's not interesting to you.

It's a gnarly infra problem with huge scale, combined with an interesting product space that we think legitimately benefits from tasteful AI automation. We're doing cool things with Nitro Enclaves to prove that our auctions are fair. And our founding team have done this before with great success, first at MoPub (sold to Twitter) and MAX (sold to AppLovin).

We're hiring (all remote) for:

- Senior Fullstack Engineer https://jobs.gem.com/cloudx/am9icG9zdDogum5THF3fORqb1eEupFQx

- Senior Infrastructure Engineer https://jobs.gem.com/cloudx/am9icG9zdDo4vl4A1sEcc7sDQf8ZYiqR

- Senior Android SDK Engineer https://jobs.gem.com/cloudx/am9icG9zdDqPAWu1cxr3PmEuuTIdliI6

- Senior iOS SDK Engineer https://jobs.gem.com/cloudx/am9icG9zdDpOy3Qmt1fLsOu4gKwtwWTz

Our philosophy is to keep the team small, well-paid, and productive. We deploy every day and our monorepo CI suite takes about a minute to pass.

The best way to apply is directly through those jobs pages but if you have other questions you're welcome to email me at peter@cloudx.io. I always post here on HN because it's where I got my career started back in highschool; I will personally make sure you get a response if you apply.
by pieisgood | 2025-12-03 23:41:01+00:00
Bad advice. If you're thinking this way and you don't think people will listen is it really better to just shut up? How about starting small and implementing fixes or starting with small refactors in the direction of a better code base? I have absolute autonomy at my current employer so it's a different world, I mostly ask for forgiveness rather than permission, but to just shut up? Weak.
by quesera | 2025-12-03 23:41:19+00:00
> Sure, that's where the votes take place.

Their job is not only in DC though.

They have significant responsibilities in two locations, which could be a 16-hour plane ride away from each other. It would be more expensive in many locations to get temporary housing for the months when their responsibilities were in their constituencies.

The back-and-forth would be extra burdensome for families (kids in school, partner with job, etc).

Also, House terms are only two years. They'd need to be prepared to disrupt their families' lives on ~60-days notice, every two years.

My understanding is that many Representatives, especially, keep their house at home, and rent in DC (often with other Reps as roommates).

None of this is insurmountable or particularly egregious. Many of us have had to do worse! But it selects against people with ordinary adult-responsibility lives, which I would argue are the kinds of people we want to select for as representation.
by scotty79 | 2025-12-03 23:41:28+00:00
Yeah, it helps a lot to make first steps, to overcome writers block, to make you put into words what you'd like to have built.

At one point you might take over, ask it for specific refactors you'd do but are too lazy to do yourself. Or even toss it away entirely and start fresh with better understanding. Yourself or again with agent.
by adriand | 2025-12-03 23:41:29+00:00
I’m starting to believe there are situations where the human code review is genuinely not necessary. Here’s a concrete example of something that’s been blowing my mind. I have 25 years of professional coding experience but it’s almost all web, with a few years of iOS in the objective C era. I’m also an amateur electronic musician. A couple of weeks ago I was thinking about this plugin that I used to love until the company that made it went under. I’ve long considered trying to make a replacement but I don’t know the first thing about DSP or C++.

You know where this is going. I asked Claude if audio plugins were well represented in its training data, it said yes, off I went. I can’t review the code because I lack the expertise. It’s all C++ with a lot of math and the only math I’ve needed since college is addition and calculating percentages. However, I can have intelligent discussions about design and architecture and music UX. That’s been enough to get me a functional plugin that already does more in some respects than the original. I am (we are?) making it steadily more performant. It has only crashed twice and each time I just pasted the dump into Claude and it fixed the root cause.

Long story short: if you can verify the outcome, do you need to review the code? It helps that no one dies or gets underpaid if my audio plugin crashes. But still, you can’t tell me this isn’t remarkable. I think it’s clear there will be a massive proliferation of niche software.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-12-03 23:42:11+00:00
Manslaughter would be more relevant than murder, but it's very rarely used as juries are very forgiving of drivers. Personally, I'd like any careless/dangerous driving charge to make use of a driving test examiner as an expert opinion and to declare whether the driving would be an instant fail on a driving test. Rather than the driving test being used as the minimum required competence for drivers, it often seems to be used as the pinnacle of most drivers' expertise.

Also, it's very rarely an "accident" with a road traffic collision - that implies that there was no fault involved with the collision and "just one of those things that happens". (I would consider an accident more like a tree suddenly falling or an undiagnosed medical condition).
by roncesvalles | 2025-12-03 23:42:14+00:00
I think I get your point: e.g. some part of your application absolutely needs the world's fastest NVMe as its local disk. Another part of your application just needs more cores from horizontal scaling. If you horiz scale to get more cores, you're also paying to put the world's fastest NVMe on each new machine.

Eh... I think you can achieve this in a simpler way with asymmetric scaling groups and smartly routing workloads to the right group. I feel like it's an ops/infra problem. There's no reason to constrain the underlying infra to be homogenous.
by diath | 2025-12-03 23:43:10+00:00
It's way harder to support Linux than Windows from a developer's perspective. Proprietary vs. open source drivers, approach to driver updates (rolling release vs. stable distros), 5 trillion incompatible glibc versions, X11 vs. Wayland etc, janky sound systems with varied support across Linux distributions (Pulse, Alsa, PipeWire), no ABI compatibility guarantee etc.
by kragen | 2025-12-03 23:43:30+00:00
A thing I didn't appreciate the first time I read Spencer-Brown's book is that he actually cites Sheffer's 01913 paper, and proves Sheffer's postulates within his system in an appendix. This situates him significantly closer to the mathematical mainstream than I had thought previously, however flawed his proof of the four-color theorem may have been.

Also, the axioms I cited above are written in his notation on his gravestone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._Spencer-Brown#/media/File:G... but I have evidently reversed left and right in my rendering of the DNF rewrite rule above. It should be:

─────┐ ────┐────┐ ─┐──┐│ → ─┐─┐│─┐─┐│ a│bc││ a│b││a│c││

His first statement of the first axiom in the book is a little more general than the version I reproduced earlier and which is inscribed on his gravestone; rather than his "form of condensation"

[][] = []

his "law of calling" is general idempotence, i.e.,

AA = A

although the two statements are equipotent within the system he constructs. Similarly, before stating his "form of cancellation"

[[]] =

he phrases it as the "law of crossing", which I interpret as

[[A]] = A
by bsder | 2025-12-03 23:43:44+00:00
> I'm just as confused as you are, honestly. It feels like we've seen the "ASIC for everything" campaign so many times over, and yet only FPGAs and CUDA typically find adoption in the industry.

That's because we don't need more digital. Digital transistors are effectively free (to a first approximation).

The axes that we need more of involve analog and RF. Less power consumption, better RF speed/range, higher speed PCI, etc. all require messy analog and RF design. And those are the expensive tools. Those are also the complex tools require genuine knowledge.

Now, if your AI could deliver analog and RF, you'd make a gazillion dollars. The fact that everybody knows this and still haven't pulled it off should tell you something.
by renewiltord | 2025-12-03 23:43:49+00:00
Something that people think will happen if you pay a guy a lot of money is that he will then not try to get more money. In fact, Martha Stewart insider traded for a few hundred k. She's worth half a billion.

A question to ask yourself is "How much money would I have to pay Trump as the President for him to not launch a cryptocoin in his name?"

And a similar question is "If we paid the dockworkers to stay home so that we could containerize, would the guys staying home consider themselves striking when we consider automating?"

There is an answer, and it seems that if you pay a guy who had a large appetite for money a lot of money it doesn't diminish his appetite for more money all that much.

Once you have paid him the Danegeld You never get rid of the Dane
by latchkey | 2025-12-03 23:43:52+00:00
SemiAnalysis made this a base requirement for being appropriately ranked on their ClusterMAX report, telling me it is akin to FAA certifications, and then getting hacked themselves for not enforcing simple security controls.

https://jon4hotaisle.substack.com/i/180360455/anatomy-of-the...

It is crazy how this gets perpetuated in the industry as actually having security value, when in reality, it is just a pay-to-play checkbox.
by kcplate | 2025-12-03 23:44:08+00:00
> Are getting funded somehow

They are getting funded because people are tapping into the zeitgeist, so the message is popular and presented in ways people find interesting and compelling. Money abounds whenever people are listening.

> the best scientists are getting deplatformed

Because they are not tapping into public mood or in a lot of cases simply unable to communicate effectively to the populace in a way that attracts platforming and financial interests. The sensible or realistic apocalypse stories just aren’t as sexy as the magical and supernatural ones.
by yearolinuxdsktp | 2025-12-03 23:44:26+00:00
Easy migration was promised but never delivered. Angular 2 was still full of boilerplate. “Migrating” an AngularJS project to Angular 2 is as much work as porting it to React or anything else.

So yes, people got burnt (when we were told that there will be a migration path), and I will never rely on another Google-backed UI framework.
by misnome | 2025-12-03 23:44:57+00:00
> Code from 2015 still compiles today

_Some_ code from 2015 still compiles today. Quite a lot of code from January 2024 won't compile today.

Turns out that in practice, the promise not to break code in the past isn't that strong, exceptions that break most of the ecosystem are "Acceptable", and the rust developers response is "Sucks for you, you'll just have to update". See:

[1] https://internals.rust-lang.org/t/type-inference-breakage-in...

[2] https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/127343#issuecomment...
by echelon | 2025-12-03 23:45:04+00:00
That's it.

We're in the "dial up era" of AI.

Unlike the smartphone adoption era where everything happened rather rapidly, we're in this weird place where labs have invented a bunch of model categories, but they aren't applicable to a wide variety of problems yet.

The dial up -> broadband curve took almost a decade to reach penetration and to create the SaaS market. It's kind of a fluke that Google and Amazon came out of the dial up era - that's probably what investors were hoping for by writing such large checks.

They found chat as one type of product. Image gen as another. But there's really not much "native AI" stuff going about. Everyone is bolting AI onto products and calling it a done day (or being tasked with clueless leadership to do it with even worse results).

This is not AI. This is early cycle WebVan-type exploration. The idea to use AI in a given domain or vertical might be right, but the tools just don't exist yet.

We don't need AI models with crude APIs. We need AI models we can pull off the shelf, fine tune, and adapt to novel UI/UX.

Adobe is showing everyone how they're thinking about AI in photoshop - their latest conference showed off AI-native UX. And it was really slick. Dozens of image tools (relighting, compositing, angle adjustment) that all felt fast, magical, and approachable as a beginner. Nobody else is doing that. They're just shoving a chat interface in your hands and asking you to deal with it.

We're too early. AI for every domain isn't here yet.

We're not even in the dialup era, honestly.

I'd expect the best categories of AI to invest in with actually sound financials will be tool vendors (OpenRouter, FAL, etc.) and AI-native PLG-type companies.

Enterprise is not ready. Enterprise does not know what the hell to do with these APIs.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-03 23:45:04+00:00
Given that older Linux builds of games consistently run worse than the Windows versions of those same games through Wine/Proton, I hope never.

Targeting Wine/Proton is the best of both worlds for everyone. Developers need to Just™ not use a few footguns that they mostly don't have reasons to touch anyway, and otherwise they don't need to change anything, while consumers get a game on that works just as well on Linux as on Windows.
by Jensson | 2025-12-03 23:46:03+00:00
> No, but I'd like to at least see conversation on how to improve the process. We aren't even at that point. We're just barely past acknowledging that it's even an issue.

The current hiring practices are a result of acknowledging what they did before didn't work. The current ones work well enough that people don't wanna change it, the only ones who wanna change it are engineers not the companies.
by kbelder | 2025-12-03 23:46:42+00:00
Relevant quote, for your own judgement:

At the New York Times’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday, Karp was asked about the worries over the unconstitutionality of the boat strikes.

“Part of the reason why I like this questioning is the more constitutional you want to make it, the more precise you want to make it, the more you’re going to need my product,” Karp said. His reasoning is that if it’s constitutional, you would have to make 100% sure of the exact conditions it’s happening in, and in order to do that, the military would have to use Palantir’s technology, for which it pays roughly $10 billion under its current contract.
by moefh | 2025-12-03 23:46:50+00:00
It's not intuitive, although arguably conforms to the general C philosophy of not getting in the way unless the code has no chance of being right.

For example, both compilers do complain if you try to pass a literal NULL to `f1` (because that can't possibly be right), the same way they warn about division by a literal zero but give no warnings about dividing by a number that is not known to be nonzero.