MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by phendrenad2 | 2025-12-30 16:07:51+00:00
This is going to be a bold claim but here goes.

This will never work, because it isn't a radical enough departure from Linux.

Linux occupies the bottom of a well in the cartesian space. Any deviation is an uphill battle. You'll die trying to reach escape velocity.

The forcing factors that pull you back down:

1. Battles-testedness. The mainstream Linux distros just have more eyeballs on them. That means your WINE-first distro (which I'll call "Lindows" in honor of the dead OS from 2003) will have bugs that make people consider abandoning the dream and going back to Gnome Fedora.

2. Cool factor. Nobody wants to open up their riced-out Linux laptop in class and have their classmate look over and go "yo this n** running windows 85!" (So, you're going to have to port XMonad to WINE. I don't make the rules!)

3. Kernel churn. People will want to run this thing on their brand-new gaming laptop. That likely means they'll need a recent kernel. And while they "never break userspace" in theory, in practice you'll need a new set of drivers and MESA and other add-ons that WILL breaks things. Especially things like 3D apps running through WINE (not to mention audio). Google can throw engineers at the problem of keeping Chromium working across graphics stacks. But can you?

If you could plant your flag in the dirt and say "we fork here" and make a radical left turn from mainline Linux, and get a cohort of kernel devs and app developers to follow you, you'd have a chance.
by alexfoo | 2025-12-30 16:08:01+00:00
> Blew my mind that there was a wire that went all the way to London from Australia!

Before the telegraph they used to do things wirelessly: https://www.brunningandprice.co.uk/_downloads/telegraph/tele...

(Not quite London to Australia though...)

In the late-1700s/early-1800s the Admiralty Telegraph was used to relay messages between London and Portsmouth (70 odd miles apart) using a semaphore type system with repeater stations every 10 miles or so.
by JosephjackJR | 2025-12-30 16:08:15+00:00
I’ve been thinking about a problem that keeps resurfacing as AI systems become more autonomous and long running, but doesn’t seem to be discussed much outside of implementation details.

Most AI systems today treat memory as ephemeral. Context is fetched from a remote store, used briefly, and discarded. Persistence is something you layer on later, usually via a network call to a database that sits outside the reasoning loop. This model works reasonably well when interactions are short lived and connectivity is assumed.

It starts to feel fragile when systems are expected to run continuously, survive restarts, operate offline, or reason repeatedly over long histories. In those cases, memory access becomes part of the critical path rather than a background concern.

What struck me while working on this is that many performance and cost problems people attribute to “scale” are really consequences of where memory lives. If every recall requires a network hop, then latency, reliability, and cost are inherently coupled to usage. You can hide that with caching and batching, but the constraint never goes away.

We’ve been exploring an alternative approach where persistence is treated as part of the hot path instead of something bolted on. Memory lives locally alongside the application, survives restarts by default, and is accessed at hardware speed. Once retrieval stops leaving the machine, a few second order effects emerge that surprised us. Cost stops scaling with traffic. Recovery stops being an operational event. Systems behave the same whether they are online, offline, or at the edge.

I’m very early in this commercially and building it with a co founder, but before locking in assumptions I wanted to sanity check the architectural framing with people here. Does this line up with how others see AI systems evolving, or do you think the current model of ephemeral memory plus remote persistence is still the right long term abstraction?

I’ve documented the architecture and tradeoffs of what we’ve built so far here for anyone who wants concrete details.

I’m much more interested in the discussion than the implementation itself.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-12-30 16:08:25+00:00
Capitalism is 100% a zero sum game and capitalists love to try to pretend that it’s not

The fact of resource extraction from society and externalities like pollution not being counted by capitalist because they “can’t count them “and just bundle them as externalities demonstrably destroy any concept of non-zero sum game

There are limited resources on the planet and that’s the sum.

If you want to take it even further the extraction pace is even more important than the total gross amount of resources because of inefficient allocation and distribution processes

So no the universe itself is zero some we’re not creating more Mattar and especially in the context of humans on earth the functional and numerical reality is zero sum
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-30 16:08:49+00:00
Exactly. If I had to characterize the general internet (read: what would and wouldn't raise an eyebrow in an average forum) in terms of political alignment, it'd probably be:

- anarchist 60s/70s
- libertarian-meritocracy 80s/90s
- capitalist-meritocracy-liberal 00s
- polarized liberal-globalist vs conservative-reactionary 10s
- polarized liberal-individualist vs conservative-statist 20s

That SA / 4chan (both of which were really post-90s) existed were in no way proof of an anti-liberal bent. Their very edgelordness was an implicit reveling in absolute freedom of expression (even if their later liberal-pro-censoring and alt-right splinter movements subsequently forgot that).
by toss1 | 2025-12-30 16:08:58+00:00
Very cool and helpful - I'll be using this a lot!

Interesting I discovered two new-to-me temperature symbols (℃ and ℉), but couldn't find the Alt-0176 ° generic degree sign that shows up on the MS Character Map app. I also found the There Exists symbol ∃ !! I'd been seeking for years; it was so useful since finding out about it in college logic courses... This will be even more useful when the Alt-code fields are all filled in! Thanks!
by thewebguyd | 2025-12-30 16:09:05+00:00
Except we are at a point now where you almost do have to sell on Steam. If you aren't already huge, you aren't going to gain much traction, if any at all, for your game outside of Steam.

I remember when Steam launched, it was rightfully met with hostility. Somehow Valve managed to completely win over gamers, and they do good work, but lets not forget that they are quickly approaching monopoly status. Just because someone could sell on some other store doesn't mean it would be profitable to do so because of Steam's userbase.
by roguecoder | 2025-12-30 16:09:14+00:00
The best "architects" serve as facilitators, rather than deciding themselves how software is built. They have to be reading the code, but they don't themselves have to be coding to be effective.

You don't need one until you've got 30-70 engineers, but a strong group of collaborative architects is the most important thing for keeping software development effective and efficient at the 30-1,000 engineer range.
by mapontosevenths | 2025-12-30 16:09:46+00:00
I agree 100%.

For some reason Gemini seems to be worse at it than Claude lately. Since mostly moving to 3 I've had it go back and change the tests rather than fixing the bug on what seems to be a regular basis. It's like it's gotten smart enough to "cheat" more. You really do still have to pay attention that the tests are valid.
by mamonster | 2025-12-30 16:10:16+00:00
Just look at qualifying exams for some PhD program in the relevant area.

For example, if we take abstract algebra (I assume you mean rings, groups and fields), I found this

https://www.math.kent.edu/~white/qual/

I had a look at for example the Aug19 one, 80% of the problems are doable for a 3rd year Bachelor student and close to what you would see in a term exam for the topic (except for the Galois stuff because AFAIK Galois theory is a separate optional course in most undergrad degrees).
by fancyfredbot | 2025-12-30 16:10:22+00:00
Weird, you shouldn't really need to list the things your study doesn't prove! I guess they anticipated that the study might be misrepresented and wanted to get ahead of that.

Their study still shows something interesting, and quite surprising. But if you choose to extrapolate from this specific setting and say coding assistants don't work in general then that's not scientific and you need to be careful.

I think the studyshould probably decrease your prior that AI assistants actually speed up development, even if developers using AI tell you otherwise. The fact it feels faster when it is slower is super interesting.
by easterncalculus | 2025-12-30 16:10:49+00:00
It's funny too because the show doesn't even need most of the screen real estate. The most impactful scenes are kept to the middle third of the screen so that they can be cropped in vertical video for edits on TikTok and Instagram. That's on top of the repetitive dialogue crutch, designed so that you don't even have to stop scrolling on your phone to follow the plot on your TV. It's all slop now.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-12-30 16:10:52+00:00
> The studies ( and they are many ) show that religious people give more.

I provided you a meta research covering several thousand cases. Feel free to provide yours.

> You were trying to argue about why religious people give more, now you abruptly switch course to saying they don’t.

Absolutely not - my point was that everybody gives the same, no matter the religiosity (and the research says so). Religious people just make it public. Why this is the case is left to them and their conscience.

If you want to have an informed discussion, you must be ready to face the numbers. But science and logical thinking is exactly the opposite of religion so if you are blinded by it, well that's it.

I have had numerous discussions over the years about religion (including a well-known radio program). Whenever it came to facts, suddenly there was a lot of hand waving and trying to move the discussion elsewhere.

But you are right - we got to a final point. Happy Christmas and New Year (yes, I am happy Christmas is there even though the religious part is irrelevant -- I like the family traditions)
by lII1lIlI11ll | 2025-12-30 16:10:53+00:00
Building PCs by hand nowadays is quite trivial. You don't need to set bunch of jumpers on the motherboard correctly, manually assign IRQs, etc. The peak "complexity" modern gamers deal with is correctly overclocking their gear without frying it or making the system unstable (which is mostly done in some nice GUI according to a youtube tutorial anyway).
by ragnese | 2025-12-30 16:11:02+00:00
> It's a good article but I think you need to start explaining structured concurrency from the very core of it: why it exists in the first place.

I disagree. Not every single article or essay needs to start from kindergarten and walk us up through quantum theory. It's okay to set a minimum required background and write to that.

As a seasoned dev, every time I have to dive into a new language or framework, I'll often want to read about styles and best practices that the community is coalescing around. I promise there is no shortage at all of articles about Swift concurrency aimed at junior devs for whom their iOS app is the very first real programming project they've ever done.

I'm not saying that level of article/essay shouldn't exist. I'm just saying there's more than enough. I almost NEVER find articles that are targeting the "I'm a newbie to this language/framework, but not to programming" audience.
by Analemma_ | 2025-12-30 16:11:06+00:00
Hyperscalers use various subsidiaries and shell companies to dodge taxes and keep the debt off their balance sheets so they can keep their AAA ratings, but ultimately the resulting datacenters are still entirely owned and operated in-house. Hyperscales do not and will not use any of these “DC as a service” startups, meaning those startups have to find customers elsewhere; the big question mark is whether enough of those customers exist.
by dahart | 2025-12-30 16:11:27+00:00
If TV settings offend you, you should be offended by anyone watching anything made for movie theater on a TV or iPad or - gasp - a phone, regardless of settings. And it should be offensive to watch with the lights on or windows open. ;)

To be fair, 24p is crap. You know and agree with that, right? Horizontal pans in 24p are just completely unwatchable garbage, verticals aren’t that much better, action sequences in 24p suck, and I somehow didn’t fully realize this until a few years ago.

A lot of motion-smoothing TVs are indeed changing framerate constantly, they’re adaptive and it switches based on the content. I suspect this is one reason kids these days don’t get the soap-opera effect reaction to high framerate that old timers who grew up watching 24p movies and 60i TV do. They’re not used to 24p being the gold standard anymore, and they watch 60p all the time, so 60p doesn’t look weird to them like it does to us.

TVs with motion interpolation fix the horizontal pan problem, so they have at least one thing going for them. I’m serious. Sometimes the smoothing messes up the content or motion, it has real and awful downsides. I had to watch Game of Thrones with frame interp, and it troubled me and it ruins some shots, but on the whole it was a net positive because there were so many horiz pans that literally hurt my eyeballs in 24p.

Consumers, by and large, don’t seem to care about brightness, color, or framerate that much, unless it’s really bad. And most content doesn’t (and shouldn’t) depend on brightness, color, or framerate that much. With some real and obvious exceptions, of course. But on the whole I hope that’s also something film school taught you, that you design films to be resilient to changes in presentation. When we used to design content for analog TV, where there was no calibration and devices in the wild were all over the map, you couldn’t count on anything about the presentation. Ever had to deal with safe regions? You lost like 15% of the frame’s area! Colors? Ha! You were lucky if your reds were even close to red.

BTW I hope you take this as lighthearted ribbing plus empathy, and not criticism or argument. I’ve worked in film too (CG film), and I fully understand your feelings. The first CG film I worked on, Shrek, delivered final frames in 8bit compressed JPEG. That would probably horrify a lot of digital filmmakers today, but nobody noticed.
by sevensor | 2025-12-30 16:11:57+00:00
> Our careers depend on LLMs not being able to solve complex problems so that we don’t risk/fear losing our careers

I think both this sentiment and the article are on the same wrong track, which is to see programming as solving well defined problems. The way I see it, the job is mostly about taking ill defined needs and turning them into well defined problems. The rest is just writing code. From this perspective, whether LLM prompting can replace writing code is only marginally relevant. It’s automating the easy part.
by WorldMaker | 2025-12-30 16:12:04+00:00
rerere is used automatically by git to cache certain merge conflict fixes encountered during a rebase so that you don't have to reapply them more than once rebasing the same branch later. In general, when it works, which is most of the time, it's part of what keeps rebases feeling easy and lightweight despite capturing in the final commit output sometimes a fraction of the data of a real merge commit. The rerere cache is in some respects a hidden collection of the rest of a merge commit.

In git, the merge (and merge commit) is the primitive and rebase a higher level operation on top of them with a complex but not generally well understood cache with only a few CLI commands and just about no UI support anywhere.

Like I said, because the rerere cache is so out-of-sight/out-of-mind that's why problems with it become weird and hard to debug. The situations I've seen that have been truly rebase-heavy workflows with multiple "git flow" long-running branches and even sometimes cherry picking between them. (Generally the same sorts of things that create "criss-cross merge scenarios".) Rebased commits start to bring in regressions from other branches. Rebased commits start to break builds randomly. If what is getting rebased is a long-running branch you probably don't have eyes on every commit, so finding where these hidden merge regressions happen becomes full branch bisects, you can't just focus on merge commits because you don't have them anymore, every commit is a candidate for a bad merge in a rebased branch.

Personally, I'd rather have real merge commits where you can trace both parents and the code not from either parent (conflict fixes), and you don't have to worry about ghosts of bad merges showing up in any random commit. Even the worst "criss-cross merge" commits are obvious in a commit log and I've seen have had enough data to surgically fix, often nearly as soon as they happen. rerere cache problems are things that can go unnoticed for weeks to everyone's confusion and potentially a lot of hidden harm. You can't easily see both parents of the merges involved. You might even have multiple repos with competing rerere caches alternating damage.

But also yes rerere cache problems are so generally infrequent that it might also take weeks of research, when it does happen, just to figure out what the rerere cache is for, that it might be the cause of some of your "merge ghosts" haunting your codebase, and how to clean it.

Obviously by the point where you are rebasing git flow-style long runnning branches and using frequent cherry picks you're in a rebase heavy workflow that is painful for other reasons and maybe that's an even heavier step beyond "rebase heavy" to some, but because the rerere cache is involved to some degree in every rebase once you stop trusting the rerere cache it can be hard to trust any rebase heavy workflow again. Like I said, personally I like the integration history/logs/investigatable diffs that real merge commits provide and prefer tools like `--first-parent` when I need "linear history" views/bisects.
by aisisiiaai | 2025-12-30 16:12:42+00:00
Even more important, those tests need to be useful. Often unit tests are simply testing the code works as written which is generally doing more harm than good.

To give some further advice to juniors: if somebody is telling you writing unit tests is boring, they haven’t learned how to write good tests. There appears to be a large intersection between devs who think testing is a dull task and devs who see a self proclaimed speed up from AI. I don’t think this is a coincidence.

Writing useful tests is just as important as writing app code, and should be reviewed with equal scrutiny.
by theshrike79 | 2025-12-30 16:12:45+00:00
LLMs are very good at first pass PR checks for example. They catch the silly stuff actual humans just miss sometimes. Typos, copy-paste mistakes etc.

Before any human is pinged about a PR, have a properly tuned LLM look at it first so actual people don't have to waste their time pointing out typos in log messages.
by travisgriggs | 2025-12-30 16:12:49+00:00
> Instead of callbacks, you write code that looks sequential [but isn’t]

(bracketed statement added by me to make the implied explicit)

This sums up my (personal, I guess) beef with coroutines in general. I have dabbled with them since different experiments were tried in C many moons ago.

I find that programming can be hard. Computers are very pedantic about how they get things done. And it pays for me to be explicit and intentional about how computation happens. The illusory nature of async/await coroutines that makes it seem as if code continues procedurally demos well for simple cases, but often grows difficult to reason about (for me).
by deaux | 2025-12-30 16:13:26+00:00
> The only reason I use Figma MCP is that my company uses Figma and has a dedicated Figma person. My opinion is that is just a bottleneck, and it would be easier to prompt AI to make whatever interface.

Here's where our opinions differ - I think replacing that Figma person with AI prompts will negatively affect product in a way that is noticeable to the end-user and effects their experience.

It does of course depend what kind of product you're making, but I'd say most of the time this holds.
by burnte | 2025-12-30 16:13:52+00:00
The problem with filmmaker mode is I don't trust it more than other modes. It would take no effort at all for a TV maker to start fiddling whit "filmmaker mode" to boost colors or something to "get an edge", then everyone does it, and we're back to where we started. I just turn them off and leave it that way. Companies have already proven time and again they'll make changes we don't like just because they can, so it's important to take every opportunity to prevent them even getting a chance.
by kstrauser | 2025-12-30 16:14:26+00:00
I've heard those objections, too. I do get that specific complaint: it's another step you have to do. That said, things like direnv and mise make that disappear. I personally like the activation workflow and how explicit it is, as you're activating that specific venv, or maybe one in a different location if you want to use that instead. I don't like sprinkling "uv run ..." all over the place. But the nice part is that both of those work, and you can pick whichever one you prefer.

It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out with __pypackages__ and friends.
by pants2 | 2025-12-30 16:14:51+00:00
This is very well said! Probably also why social media has become so "fake" - back in the early days of Facebook, friends would talk to each other like friends. But after my religious aunt started seeing the comments I was leaving on a friend's pics, let's just say that stopped pretty quick.

Now the only thing I would ever consider posting on Facebook is "What a beautiful day! Went for a great hike with my family and enjoyed nature."
by zahlman | 2025-12-30 16:15:12+00:00
> To make sure that the size checks cannot be separated from the copy itself we introduced a string copy replacement function the other day that takes the target buffer, target size, source buffer and source string length as arguments and only if the copy can be made and the null terminator also fits there, the operation is done.

... And if the copy can't be made, apparently the destination is truncated as long as there's space (i.e., a null terminator is written at element 0). And it returns void.

I'm really not sold on that being the best way to handle the case where copying is impossible. I'd think that's an error case that should be signaled with a non-zero return, leaving the destination buffer alone. Sure, that's not supposed to happen (hence the DEBUGASSERT macro), but still. It might even be easier to design around that possibility rather than making it the caller's responsibility to check first.
by fallat | 2025-12-30 16:15:14+00:00
I want to say, that your comment has been the most real, aligned thing I've read in this post's comments. The articulation of what I've also seen and felt is perfect. Whoever else passes by, THIS, is the truth. What dnw has written is the honest-to-god state of things and that it does not rob you of the passion of creating.
by ethbr1 | 2025-12-30 16:15:28+00:00
Sure, there are misogynistic cultures out there, but that doesn't justify it from a categorical imperative perspective.

If it's okay, then it's okay for all sexes. And I'm hard-pressed to name a world culture that's equally accepting and promoting of men-sexually-harassing-women and women-sexually-harassing-men.

Can you?

It feels like you're trying to make this an argument about statistics, when it's an argument about ethics and morality.
by aisisiiaai | 2025-12-30 16:15:41+00:00
A key point missing from a lot of the AI debate is how much work is useless. From as simple as a feature that’s never turned on to a more extreme version of a job that doesn’t need to exist.

We have a lot of useless work being done, and AI is absolutely going to be a 10x speed up for this kind of work.