MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 9rx | 2025-12-22 20:46:33+00:00
They're nothing special, but were designed for a particular CPU and expose the details of that CPU. And since we were talking about C specifically, not a bunch of other random languages that may have did similar things...

While most modern CPUs are designed for C and thus share in the same details, if your CPU is of a different design, you have to emulate the behaviour. Which works perfectly fine — but the question remains outstanding: Where does the practical line get drawn? Is 6502 assembler actually a high-level language too? After all, you too can treat it as an abstract machine and emulate its function on any other CPU just the same as you do with C pointers.
by the_af | 2025-12-22 20:46:53+00:00
> If they have children, barring some violent circumstances, then they've already participated in designing their life.

This is not the kind of design we're discussing here; "not having children" is usually a privileged, informed decision which most people are not in a position to make. It's certainly very far from "designing your career". Regardless, a lot of people don't have much choice here either, through a system conspiring on denying them choices (see: anti-abortion and anti-sex education lobbies, a health care system that conspires against their free time and energy, etc).

There's an illusion of choice, especially to us pontificating from our privileged lives, but no real choice.

> But sure - no one is denying that some folks exist [...] their agency is significantly diminished.

Most folk, not some.
by embedding-shape | 2025-12-22 20:47:00+00:00
> Supports tool calling in OpenAI-style format

So Harmony? Or something older? Since Z.ai also claim the thinking mode does tool calling and reasoning interwoven, would make sense it was straight up OpenAI's Harmony.

> in theory, I could get a "relatively" cheap Mac Studio and run this locally

In practice, it'll be incredible slow and you'll quickly regret spending that much money on it instead of just using paid APIs until proper hardware gets cheaper / models get smaller.
by afavour | 2025-12-22 20:47:27+00:00
I think you need to show the working a little on a statement like that. Some immediate questions that come to mind:

- how many US citizens do these labs hire for every immigrant scientist they employ? There are support roles at all levels, all the way down to custodian. What jobs are lost when these grants are denied? A lot of this work will (hopefully!) continue, just in other counties. Now those countries get to employ their citizens instead.

- are the youth unemployed compared to previous levels? Are these unemployed youths able to do the jobs the immigrants do?

The US doesn’t take in skilled immigrants as a favor to the rest of the world or something. Other countries educate their citizens to a high level then the US poaches them and has them contribute to growing the US economy. It’s the story of countless Silicon Valley startups so it’s especially surprising to see this sentiment on HN!
by mnorth | 2025-12-22 20:47:29+00:00
I'll add that there a couple key architectural choices in here aimed at problems I care about other than replay complexity:

1) This kind of technology IMO should be as easy to use as a task queue, so I've built it with Postgres as the only dependency. Most of the implementation is in Rust and invoked via native interfaces from the host language, which will allow the project to scale to support multiple languages without rewriting it for each.

2) I've seen teams struggle to understand when durable execution should replace simple background tasks. Reasonably, they would prefer not to maintain and monitor both a task queue framework and a platform for durable execution. But durable workflows are too heavy an abstraction for most background jobs, so you end up needing both. As I see it, durable execution is effectively just an orchestration layer for background tasks. My ideal would be that a platform could allow you to queue both simple tasks and complex workflows, and unify the scheduling capabilities and observability of both. So I'm doing that.
by meowface | 2025-12-22 20:48:02+00:00
Did you read the next sentence?

America has often stomped on the ideas it claims to fight for but to say it has never attempted to realize it is very silly and itself just reflexive anti-America propaganda. Look at FDR's words and actions during and after WWII, look at Eisenhower, look at Carter, look at JFK, imagine a future trajectory where Al Gore won that election.

America has sometimes done the exact opposite of helping other countries become healthy democracies - but they also very obviously have sometimes in fact helped other countries become healthy democracies. America's staunch pro-liberty pro-democracy stance is a big part of why the immediate aftermath of WWII led to Europe becoming a mostly democratic, stable quasi-union.

I am saying it's a gray area but that at least on paper America says nice words. You're just saying it's all bad.
by kvuj | 2025-12-22 20:48:02+00:00
I think you're being disingenuous. The author could have made this tutorial for the 90% of people that do not have these concerns. Time isn't free and projects people work on in their spare time shouldn't have these snarky comments in response.

> Am I being harsh? Well where's the tutorial that teaches people how to do it properly? Where do people actually learn the right way if not here?

I would love to read your blog post on how to do so! After all, since you seem to imply that time is free for everyone, you shouldn't have any problem making that blog post.
by whimsicalism | 2025-12-22 20:48:27+00:00
I am certain that they used a tool. As I said, I normally do not complain and typically engage on the merits -- but these have been among the top comments on every front page article I've read today and it gets tiresome! To me, if you cannot invest enough effort to remove the pretty obvious cues, why am I investing the effort in reading the comment?

After seeing your reply, I looked at their comment history which makes it even more obvious imo.
by gardncl | 2025-12-22 20:48:54+00:00
US deploys nuclear energy at over $10/watt meanwhile solar and wind are deployed around $2/watt (for levelized cost of electricity) including battery storage which means they are deployed for roughly the same cost as natural gas (so, direct competitors).

Don't let comments like this fool you, nuclear is far from being competitive with natural gas. Even in countries like south korea that can deploy nuclear the cheapest it's still $3/watt roughly.

Good news? Net new solar and wind plants can come "online" in less than two years. Net new natural gas takes four years. Part of why 95% of new energy deployed last year were renewables in the US, not just the subsidies.
by tomp | 2025-12-22 20:49:01+00:00
They're not self-immolating.

They're being torched down.

It's a solution. No other solution has worked, or been proposed.

Remember Brendan Eich? He was excommunicated because of a personal political view, allegedly because "he lost trust of the community". So yeah, being right-wing is faux-pass in tech and academia, therefore the left has no argument against people being defunded / fired because of personal political opinions. But we're talking here (see my other post) is institutional far-left policy (DEI meaning explicit racism and sexism against white men). No wonder they have totally lost trust of the community (like half the US), to be seemingly beyond reform, up for restarting from scratch.
by zephen | 2025-12-22 20:49:33+00:00
All true.

But also:

> It just turns out that homoiconicity is not hugely useful the large percentage of the time that you don't need metaprogramming,

It turns out that metaprogramming, like anything else, has many possible levels, and that for the shallower levels, Python's reflection, magic methods, and metaclasses suffice without too much heartburn.
by exasperaited | 2025-12-22 20:49:43+00:00
> Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones?

Oh indeed, but what I am referring to is the "knife crime in London" comparator that right-wing gun groups use. Knife crime in London is not as bad as knife crime in any comparable US city. It's about 40% as bad as New York and only 10% as bad as Dallas.
by imiric | 2025-12-22 20:49:47+00:00
I don't understand. You're highlighting a project that implements an "agent" as a counterargument to my claim that the bulk of improvements are from "agents"?

Sure, the models themselves have improved, but not by the same margins from a couple of years ago. E.g. the jump from GPT-3 to GPT-4 was far greater than the jump from GPT-4 to GPT-5. Currently we're seeing moderate improvements between each release, with "agents" taking up center stage. Only corporations like Google are still able to squeeze value out of hyperscale, while everyone else is more focused on engineering.
by flir | 2025-12-22 20:49:50+00:00
I googled my country, the USA, and the two European countries I have most experience of. I didn't cherry pick anything, I just stopped.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/191137/reported-forcible...

I don't know what to tell you, except to say the messiness of the data goes to underline how poorly sourced your claim is.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-22 20:49:54+00:00
When C was invented, K&R C, it was hardly lower level than other systems programming languages that predated it, since JOVIAL in 1958.

It didn't not even had compiler intrisics, a concept introduced by ESPOL in 1961, allowing to program Burroughs systems without using an external Assembler.

K&R C was high level enough that many of the CPU features people think about nowadays when using compiler extensions, as they are not present in the ISO C standard, had to be written as external Assembly code, the support for inline Assembly came later.
by tavavex | 2025-12-22 20:50:05+00:00
> it reflected the previous political power sensibilities

It reflected the sensibilities of the people who were actually running the libraries and whose entire jobs was comprehending and choosing books based on what they know about their field. Now, it reflects the sensibilities of politicians from up above who are likely to know less than nothing about literature, but are important enough to scream "Nonono, you can't just do that!" and be obeyed. It's not exactly a fair trade.

> if we really wanted to do things right, any book in a school library should be no less than a hundred years old. This way, no current politics.

Thinking that all politics is categorically bad is a very strange viewpoint that I could never wrap my head around. It's especially prevalent in the US. Politics, the methods of organizing and running society, impacts absolutely every facet of our lives. Not understanding politics and not being exposed to it leaves one with an incomplete view of how humans work, and how to maneuver around human irrationality to get things done. What's worse is that giving people nothing but century-old books will just teach them about what was "current politics" a hundred years ago, leaving people with heaps of knowledge on how people lived and thought in a completely alien world, and no real objective information on how radically different the current day is, and why.
by mpalmer | 2025-12-22 20:50:29+00:00
Yes, I would say this is harsh.

Primarily because OP actually did call out accessibility as a concern. That is the opposite of teaching the reader to ignore people who use a11y features. Nor is it OP's responsibility to teach their readers anything they don't care to.

And yeah, where are the tutorials you'd like to see? That could have been a more constructive thing for you to share yourself instead of demanding it from no one in particular.
by geerlingguy | 2025-12-22 20:50:35+00:00
A lot of organizations also colocate timing equipment near the actual clocks, and then have 'dark fiber' between their equipment and the main clock signals.

Then they disperse and use the time as needed.

According to jrronimo, they even had one place splice fiber direct between machines because couplers were causing problems! [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46336755
by vablings | 2025-12-22 20:50:49+00:00
So why make the cuts in the first place? There are so many things that could have been changed like getting rid of ALARPA for actual scientifically backed methods other than pointless gratitude's of X dollars for X industry. If the Trump admin truly believed in move fast and break things why is nothing moving

More power is always good (see china being 1# in solar, nuclear and wind lol), and it's known that the cost of energy directly correlates with growth right now there is no excuse for cutting any federal workers in the energy industry.
by reissbaker | 2025-12-22 20:51:08+00:00
s/Sonnet 3.5/Sonnet 4.5

The model output also IMO look significantly more beautiful than GLM-4.6; no doubt in part helped by ample distillation data from the closed-source models. Still, not complaining, I'd much prefer a cheap and open-source model vs. a more-expensive closed-source one.
by salty_frog | 2025-12-22 20:51:13+00:00
Id be keen to read/hear more about the experiment you've been undertaking as I too have been thinking the impact on the design/architecture/organising of software.

The focus mainly seems to be on enhancing existing workflows to produce code we currently expect - often you hear its like a junior dev.

The type of rethinking you outlined could have code organised in such a way a junior dev would never be able to extend but our 'junior dev' LLM can iterate through changes easily.

I care more about the properties of software e.g. testable, extendable, secure than how it organised.

Gets me to think of questions like

- what is the correlation between how code is organised vs its properties?
- what is the optimal organisation of code to facilitate llms to modify and extend software?
by gbacon | 2025-12-22 20:51:25+00:00
> … but it’s not like you can wait around to find that perfect opportunity forever, right?

> Some times you have to find something and work …

Rather than waiting for a perfect choice, I read Hamming as reminding us that are making choices all the time and cannot avoid doing so. Even not choosing, e.g., staying in a less-than-ideal role, is a choice. Given that we have no choice but to choose, Hamming suggests knowing up front where we want to go in the long term and biasing choices in that general direction.

Swizec mentioned Cal Newport elsewhere[0], and Newport’s recommendations around lifestyle-centric career planning provide an interesting bridge between your comments about occasionally needing to weather a storm and Hamming.

Some view titles, particular projects, or certain roles to be worthwhile goals in themselves. “I just graduated law school, so I want to make partner at a big NYC law firm” is a goal that a motivated new attorney might set. Does that career goal serve her if she despises traffic, subway travel, and apartment living? Newport advocates beginning with a vision of an ideal lifestyle and working backward from there by setting career goals to achieve the desired lifestyle.

Where he may be in a conflict with Hamming is warning people about what he calls the grand goal theory, of which the fresh law school grad aiming at partner shows the pitfalls. Hamming’s advice will help you go far. Newport warns that if you’re going to go far, be sure it’s in the direction you want to go.

In the case you mentioned of someone who is long-term unemployed, having a job that produces income is certainly nearer to any Hamming career goal and any Newport ideal lifestyle than that person’s present circumstance of draining savings or, worse, accumulating debt for basic living expenses.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46354790
by jtbaker | 2025-12-22 20:51:57+00:00
no symptoms. first identified the lesion a few years back and it hadn't changed over a few subsequent appointments. exam this year, it had grown a small amount 5mmx5mm to 6mmx8mm - still considered small, but the change was enough for the Drs to recommend treatment. I have been treated by Dr. Dan Gombos[1] at MD Anderson and received excellent care.

[1] https://faculty.mdanderson.org/profiles/dan_gombos.html
by throw0101d | 2025-12-22 20:52:01+00:00
> Meanwhile China runs away with all the clean energy tech (solar, wind, batteries, etc, etc.) while we hold to fossil fuels to save less than 200,000 jobs.

If you're talking about coal miners, David Frum joked / observed that there are more yoga instructors in the US than coal miners:

* https://www.sfgate.com/columnists/article/Yoga-teachers-vs-c...
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-22 20:52:01+00:00
In my experience this is a substantial difference in the ability to really get performance in LLM related engineering work from people who really understand how LLMs work vs people who think it's a magic box.

If your mental model of an LLM is:

> a synthetic human performing reasoning

You are severely overestimating the capabilities of these models and not realizing potential areas of failure (even if your prompt works for now in the happy case). Understanding how transformers work absolutely can help debug problems (or avoid them in the first place). People without a deep understanding of LLMs also tend to get fooled by them more frequently. When you have internalized the fact that LLMs are literally optimistized to trick you, you tend to be much more skeptical of the initial results (which results in better eval suites etc).

Then there's people who actually do AI engineering. If you're working with local/open weights models or on the inference end of things you can't just play around with an API, you have a lot more control and observability into the model and should be making use of it.

I still hold that the best test of an AI Engineer, at any level of the "AI" stack, is how well they understand speculative decoding. It involves understanding quite a bit about how LLMs work and can still be implemented on a cheap laptop.
by johnwheeler | 2025-12-22 20:52:52+00:00
No, I said palliative care. That's to ease suffering. So you're telling me we should forego cancer treatments for young cancer patients so 80-year-olds can get hip replacements? Is that what you think? Are you crazy? I never said just let people die. That's insane. It's about cost. In America, they don't just give healthcare for free, like wherever you probably live. I wish they did.
by bayindirh | 2025-12-22 20:52:55+00:00
Allowing US style gun proliferation creates a chicken and egg problem:

How can you prevent these rape gangs from accessing the same weapons? They are not caught, prosecuted and banned from obtaining guns? Even if they are, there will be more guns to steal and circulate in either case.

The answer is laws, but you say they are not working perfectly. So rape gangs will be armed rape gangs next.

When I visited Stockholm ~17 years ago, all shops were displaying valuable items in steel cages anyway (e.g.: TVs were "locked" in heavy-duty steel frames to prevent "removal"), so the problem runs older than the immigration policy gained momentum.
by bakies | 2025-12-22 20:53:04+00:00
# Country CO2/capita CO2 total (2022) Population
- ------------- ---------- ---------------- ----------------
1 China 8.89 12,667,428,430 1,425,179,569
2 United States 14.21 4,853,780,240 341,534,046
3 India 1.89 2,693,034,100 1,425,423,212

To save others the google search I did
by asim | 2025-12-22 20:53:30+00:00
It's quite interesting because it makes me wonder how we make it efficient and predictable. The human language is just too verbose. There must be some DSL, some more refined way to get to the output we need. I don't know whether it means you actually just need to provide examples or something else. But you know code is very binary, do this do that. LLMs are really just too verbose even in this format right now. That higher layer really needs a language. I mean I get it. It's understanding human language and converting it to code. Very clever. But I think we can do better.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-12-22 20:53:55+00:00
Even if it is a pretense, it is pretty obvious that this would allow ship-borne drones to use the wind farms as an effective screen. Putting radar platforms beyond the wind farms that are as capable as the existing land-based radars would be quite expensive in both capex and opex. Some of the existing land-based radars would likely need to be moved, ideally. No one was really thinking about this type of threat a decade ago.

That said, Democrats have also been trying to stop offshore wind farms for years (e.g. Vineyard Wind), so there is probably bipartisan support.
by tzs | 2025-12-22 20:53:55+00:00
Even if you don't care much about your own privacy, sharing too much or too widely can lead to a loss of privacy for everyone.

Much of privacy law is based on a "reasonable" expectation of privacy. What counts as "reasonable" can change depending on what people in general believe it to be.

Here's an essay [1] by an appeals court judge from 2012 for some more on this.

[1] https://www.stanfordlawreview.org/online/privacy-paradox-the...
by nosianu | 2025-12-22 20:54:04+00:00
You have a gigantic confounder of general progress, much of it technological.

Just recently I made a post here in some thread to point out that even wein backwards East Germany made huge gains - my grandfather, born early 20th century, lived much, much better even by the end of the GDR compared to when he was born in the Weimar Republic.

Especially food became a non-issue in the modern world, productivity increases were gigantic. The Haber-Bosch process, very important at the start of that development, was not a US invention, nor contingent on anything US related.

It would be hard to disentangle US influence, but one can assume even if the US had not become so dominant, much of those developments would still have taken place, lifting up much of the entire world.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-22 20:54:11+00:00
I watched the video and read the article. (I wish I didn't; I love cats. I've known some wonderful bodega cats myself.)

But I'll bet I already have a mode that makes me want to drive away from people I don't know who are acting weird around my car.

I mean: I've got options. I can fight, flee, or hang out and investigate.

But I'm human -- I'm going to make what ultimately turn out to be poor decisions sometimes. I will have this condition until the day I die, and there isn't a single thing I can do about it (except to choose to die sooner, I guess).

So to posit an example: I'm already behind the wheel of my fleeing-machine with an already-decided intent to leave. And a stranger nearby is being weird.

I've now got a decision to make. It may be a very important decision, or it may instead be a nearly-meaningless decision.

Again, I've got options. I may very well decide that fighting isn't a good plan, and that joining them in exploring whatever mystery or ailment they may perceive is also not a great idea, and thereby decide that fleeing is the best option.

This may be a poor choice. It may also be the very best choice.

I don't know everything, and I can't see everything, and I do not get to use a time machine to gain hindsight for how this decision will play out.

(But I might speculate that if I stopped to investigate every time I saw a nearby stranger act weird at night in neighborhoods with prominent security gates that I might have fewer days remaining than if I just left them to their own devices.)