MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stuffn | 2025-12-23 16:41:53+00:00
Software engineers are desperate to have their work be like machining aircraft parts.

It’s a tool. No one cares about code quality because the person using your code isn’t affected by it. There are better and worse tools. No one cares whether a car is made with SnapOn tools or milled on HAAS machines. Only that it functions.

We know there is no long term merit to this idea just looking back at the last 40 years of coding.
by blucaz | 2025-12-23 16:42:19+00:00
Maintaining separate upstream sources and downstream patches does provide value. Maybe not to you, but it does.

For example, it's trivial from a web browser with a couple of clicks to go and find out all the downstream changes to a package. For example to see how glibc is currently customized in debian testing/unstable you can just navigate this webpage:

https://sources.debian.org/src/glibc/2.42-6/debian/patches

If everything gets merged in the same git tree it's way harder. Harder but doable with a rebase+force push workflow, which makes collaboration way harder. Just impossible with a merge workflow.

As an upstream maintainer of several project, being able to tell at a glance and with a few clicks how one of my projects is patched in a distribution is immensely useful when bug reports are opened.

In a past job it also literally saved a ton of money because we could show legal how various upstreams were customized by providing the content of a few .debian.tar.gz tarballs with a few small, detached patches that could be analyzed, instead of massive upstream trees that would take orders of magnitude more time to go through.
by markus_zhang | 2025-12-23 16:43:13+00:00
I don't really know what I would do. I'll probably find some other jobs that I don't need to talk to other people very often, but there are not many of these. I don't care too much about salary because I can always scale back to backbone lifestyle.

Maybe a janitor/security job or a bus driver job suits me well. Neither requires a huge amount of training, and neither requires a lot of brain activity so I can preserve my brain cells for hobby programming. Both have a non-trivial number of job openings too, especially for janitors/securities.
by jgerrish | 2025-12-23 16:43:18+00:00
I haven't explored the BEAM ecosystem much. And this post actually got me motivated enough to try it out.

The more programming languages we play with, the better we become as engineers. We learn the different design decisions that go into each language. And we learn the language of Computer Science itself.

Plus, Advent of Code!

So I finally got everything installed. But then I realized there are no easily accessible offline docs. I don't have Internet service at home. So I have to grab service when I can make it out.

So it looks like mix can download offline hexdocs, but I don't have elixir installed. And there's a hexdocs_offline dev package for Gleam. But it errors out on "gleam/dynamic does not have a 'from' value.

Maybe it's a "teaching moment" about the basics of the language. But I have to run out to another appointment now, so these teaching moments don't always help.

Anyways, I guess I'll dive in after the holidays and just wget the tour or get some well regarded projects for reference. I'm actually still really excited with all the functional features.
by JamesSwift | 2025-12-23 16:44:03+00:00
Well to be fair, nix packages (as in the actual packages and not the modules/services) also mostly just extract archives. I mean the entire system is built on the assumption that 'config && make && make install' is how the thing is built.

Then nix layers way more nicety on top by offering modules, but nothing prevents you from ignoring all that and just using installing packages.
by simonw | 2025-12-23 16:44:36+00:00
I had to look up the painkiller v.s. vitamin distinction - I hadn't heard that one before. Evidently it's common startup folklore these days but I think it was first popularized by Don Dodge in 2006, here's the post via the Internet Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20060329104930/https://dondodge....
by opello | 2025-12-23 16:45:02+00:00
> The pictures are alarming; we should include them. But what does the analysis add?

The analysis shows another way in which the government is trying to be secretive about how it's treating people that were within its borders and subject to its laws and protections. I can only hope someone pointed this out because the question suggests a baffling level of ignorance despite the message overall sounding like some reasonable feedback on the story, despite coming far too late in the process to be considered reasonable.
by BizarroLand | 2025-12-23 16:45:20+00:00
This is like telling people to learn how to draw by only looking at the masters' paintings in person instead of tracing and imitating from possibly stolen but otherwise cheap books at home.

I would say to at least just read what the AI does and ask it questions if you don't understand what it did. You can interactively learn software development from AI in a way that you cannot from a human simply because it won't run out of patience even if it will lie to you.

The results depend mostly on how you use it.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-12-23 16:46:08+00:00
There is no "may be subject to local regulations and laws" (quoting from the project page); operating such a rig is flatly illegal in any civilized country. RF regulations are enforced by authorities at the national level and you can bet that if they have to go to the trouble of tracing down the RF signal from this (very easy to do), they will be bringing the legal equivalent of a can of whoopass with them. And they will not be mollified by claims of personal use.

Again, the project you forked from literally tells users never to attach an antenna; they have enough RF knowledge to know a tiny bit of signal can go a very very long way. You clearly do not.
by jcalvinowens | 2025-12-23 16:46:16+00:00
> In modern times, the bandwidth saved by Nagle is rarely worth the latency cost.

I actually took some packet dumps and did the math on this once, assuming any >=2 non-mtu-sized segments from the same flow within 10ms could have been combined (pretty conservative imo). The extra bandwidth cost of NODELAY amounted to just over 0.1% of the total AWS bandwidth bill, which, while negligible, was more than I expected.
by xp84 | 2025-12-23 16:46:22+00:00
For the verification experts: (and forgive me because I have almost zero of the math understanding of this stuff)

> This makes formal verification a prime target for AI-assisted programming. Given that we have a formal specification, we can just let the machine wander around for hours, days, even weeks.

Is this sentiment completely discounting that there can be many possible ways to write program that satisfies certain requirements that all have correct outputs? Won’t many of these be terrible in terms of performance, time complexity, etc? I know that in the most trivial case, AI doesn’t jump straight to O(n)^3 solutions or anything, but also there’s no guarantee it won’t have bugs that degrade performance as long as they don’t interfere with technical correctness.

Also, are we also pretending that having Claude spin for “even weeks” is free?
by misnome | 2025-12-23 16:46:56+00:00
Oh christ, absolutely this. We spent some time evaluating FPGA for our purposes and ended up GPU instead (algorithms we running can be adapted to strength of either).

The concepts are easy enough but learning the toolsets are an exercise in frustration… the documentation/onboarding is either nonexistent or extremely unhelpful, and getting past the stage of “the entire thing doesn’t work because you misclicked a button in the gui several hours ago”. In theory everything can be scripted, usually in TCL, but this is also unstable and seems liable to break every different version of the toolsets.

Alongside Xilinx, we also looked at Altera/Intel OneAPI/dpcpp and this seemed promising until we realised we were encountering so many toolchain/actual compiler bugs that nobody else could have been actually using this, except the oneapi cloud platform that seemed it had been hotpatched to fix some of the issues. In the end, after selling us some compatible cards they dropped the OS and card from support. I guess this taught us not to trust Intel!

We decided teaching to Juniors would be an exercise in frustration unless hiring explicitly for, and decided to go the GPU route.
by mgr86 | 2025-12-23 16:47:24+00:00
Wow, they throw some serious spars at these duodecimal people:

> the problem is that Latin uses base ten, so bases larger than ten end up with names that put a bit too much of an emphasis on their relationship with decimal: undecimal, duodecimal, tridecimal, etc. people who like base twelve like to call it "dozenal" instead of "duodecimal" for this exact reason. these names are simply too biased in decimal's favor. ideally, every base should have a unique name that reflects its properties, rather than trivial information about its size.
by tracker1 | 2025-12-23 16:47:24+00:00
I saw a video of someone who bought one of these (iirc from Home Depot limited sale)... and it definitely looks impressive, though a few minor flaws. I've seen a handful of R2D2s at conventions over the years, and they're always pretty cool... while a BB8 might be technically more impressive, I just don't care for the character nearly as much.
by iamacyborg | 2025-12-23 16:47:38+00:00
You can just strap the watch to the handlebars, no?

There’s also a mode where you can extend the display from your watch to a bike computer, for instances where you’re doing a multisport activity (or just want to record on a single device).

https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2019/06/garmins-triathlon-extend...
by riskable | 2025-12-23 16:47:57+00:00
...and "the fix" that companies usually resort to is "use it or lose it" policies (e.g. you lose your role/permission after 30 days of non-use). So if you only do deployments for any given thing like twice a year, you end up having to submit a permissions request every single time.

No big deal, right? Until something breaks in production and now you have to wait for multiple approvals before you can even begin to troubleshoot. "I guess it'll have to stay down until tomorrow."

The way systems like this usually get implemented is there's an approval chain: First, your boss must approve the request and then the owner of the resource. Except that's only the most basic case. For production systems, you'll often have a much more complicated approval chain where your boss is just one of many individuals that need to approve such requests.

The end result is a (compounding) inefficiency that slows down everything.

Then there's AI: Management wants to automate as much as possible—which is a fine thing and entirely doable!—except you have this system where making changes requires approvals at many steps. So you actually can't "automate all the things" because the policy prevents it.
by axus | 2025-12-23 16:48:06+00:00
Mobile customers are a kind of second-class citizen for McDonalds, though they have instructed the drive-through salespeople to always lead with "Will you be using the mobile app today?". MCD uses location tracking to only submit the mobile order once you are in range of the store.

Should probably add that in-store customers are third-class citizens; drive-through orders without customization get priority.
by DiscourseFan | 2025-12-23 16:48:52+00:00
Literally the exact thing I tell new hires on projects for training models: theory is far less important than practice.

We are only just beginning to understand how these things work. I imagine it will end up being similar to Freud’s Oedipal complex: when we failed to have a fully physical understanding of cognition, we employed a schematic narrative. Something similar is already emerging.
by vips7L | 2025-12-23 16:49:08+00:00
> curious how D's reference compiler (DMD) compares to the LLVM/GCC front-ends

On my machine (an old i7-8700), dmd performs rather poorly. 3.5 seconds.

dmd -O leibniz.d
Measure-Command { ./leibniz.exe } | select -expand TotalMilliseconds
3535.823

Comparatively ldc runs in 943 milliseconds:

ldmd2 -O leibniz.d
Measure-Command { ./leibniz.exe } | select -expand Totalmilliseconds
943.21

I'm sure there is compiler switch magic that I don't know about that could improve them.
by guiambros | 2025-12-23 16:49:10+00:00
oh hi!

If you're an OMSCS student, most courses offer the download through Ed or Canvas. Usually it's a big zip file under the first lesson, but I've seen some available in the shared Dropbox. I've seen this for GIOS, ML4T, ML, and a few others. Or you can just reach out to the TAs.

If you're not a student, then it gets a bit tricky. Some courses are available as YouTube playlists or on Coursera, but then it becomes a hassle to download and piece together hundreds of individual files.

Feel free to drop me a note (email in my profile), or open an issue on github.
by simonw | 2025-12-23 16:50:13+00:00
> Never mind six months; with AI, "you" can "build" something small and useful that works in six minutes. But "you" almost certainly didn't learn anything, and I think it's quite questionable if "you" "built" something.

I think you learned something critically important: that the thing you wanted to build is feasible to build.

A lot of ideas people have are not possible to build. You can't prove a negative but you CAN prove a positive: seeing a version of the thing you want to exist running in front of you is a big leap forward from pondering if it could be built.

That's a useful thing to learn.

The other day, at brunch, I had Claude Code on my phone add webcam support (with pinch-to-zoom) to my https://tools.simonwillison.net/is-it-a-bird is-it-a-bird CLIP-in-your-browser app. I didn't even have to look at the code it wrote to learn that it's possible for Mobile Safari to render the webcam input in a box on the page (not full screen) and to have a rough pinch-to-zoom mechanism work - it's pixelated, not actual-camera-zoom, but for a CLIP app that's fine because the zoom is really just to try and exclude things from the image that aren't a potential bird.

(The prompts I used for this are quoted in the PR description: https://github.com/simonw/tools/pull/175)

> Can I get that with AI? You bet. And probably even better, in some respects. But I have to deliberately choose to. It's way too easy to just grab the exact answer I wanted and be on my way.

100% agree with that. You need a lot of self-discipline to learn effectively with AI. I'd argue you need self-discipline to learn via other means as well though.
by latexr | 2025-12-23 16:50:39+00:00
> As far as I understand they also cover the financial risk should there be a problem with the connection.

You have to pay for the service, though, and if you’re already flying Ryan Air, cost is probably a factor.

The service used to be free, and while it was a bit frustrating to go through it, it did save me once. On the other hand I have a friend who, upon me telling my positive story with Kiwi support, told me her negative one. So your mileage may vary.

It’s still a good first site to check to get a general idea of what’s available where, though.
by codegeek | 2025-12-23 16:51:33+00:00
Another one from a fellow bootstrapper. I have been doing it for 10+ years with a small team as well. Haven't hit the same revenue as them but still a very good business and has provided me everything I have for last 10 years keeping 100% full control. It is really really hard to do it over such a long period and admire anyone who has done it even better than I have.
by fn-mote | 2025-12-23 16:52:43+00:00
I don’t agree with this.

If you’re in a place that wants dollars or euros because their currency is “bad” (volatile or unable to freely exchange for dollars), they prefer dollars. You can tell because you get a better than official exchange rate.

I have to say I’ve never been somewhere that the currency was so volatile the settlement date mattered. Carrying local currency would be part of your risk? This could only come up in the almost-all-digital-currency modern world.
by someguyiguess | 2025-12-23 16:52:50+00:00
My thoughts exactly. The $100 Claude subscription is the sweet spot for me. I signed up for the $20 at first and got irritated constantly hitting access limits. Then I bought the $200 subscription but never even hit 1/4 of my allocation. So the $100 would be perfect.

And this is for hobby / portfolio projects.
by seec | 2025-12-23 16:52:52+00:00
I agree a lot.

China is very good at industrialising stuff because they are very obedient and efficient on matters that are already known. Once the west has identified a worthwhile endeavor, they are quite quick at reproducing and churning out copies efficiently.
Sometimes they improve on it slightly but their game is mostly about making it cheaper.

This can readily be seen in the smartphone market. They have all the industrial base, large supply of engineers and large amount of cash. Yet they are unable to make a truly defining product once you remove the price out of the equation.
The first reason to buy a Chinese smartphone is lower price otherwise people still prefer to go with Apple, Google or Samsung. There are small details that make those devices generally just better; even when the Chinese manage to do better in a particular dimension, overall the western designed devices are just better.
They have tried increasing price (at least MSRP, to make their devices look more expensive) but there is no way one would pay Apple/Samsung prices for their smartphone. I actually think this is why smartphone haven't trended down on price much lately, the Chinese are trying to capture the design/engineering part of the pie but with limited success. Meanwhile, since competiton has reduced, the major western player can feel content selling the same stuff without reducing price.

And yes the private sector is quite developed but to me it seems like it is largely devoted to fulfill western needs because that's were the real money is. When they manage to do something special, there is always an enormous western influence, either through education (chinese who studied abroad) or via direct involvement of western people inside their business.

For the big projects, they are relying a lot on technology transfer from the west, buying the IP with consulting from western companies and then copying what they learned at scale.

I think a lot of people still don't understand what a profond influence having a communist mindset has. It looks successfull to them because they manage to afford a good lifestyle thanks to their massive industries but that is downstream of all their copying/mimicking the western inventions.

Western societies should think about what they are doing when they transfer their knowledge to this country on the cheap, because it strenghten them and China isn't a nice player in general.
by layer8 | 2025-12-23 16:53:15+00:00
With double-entry bookkeeping, the only way an error can slip through is if you make the same error on both sides, or else they wouldn’t be balanced. A similar thing is true for testing: If you make both an error in your test and in your implementation, they can cancel out and appear to be error-free.

I don’t quite agree with that reasoning, however, because a test that fails to test the property it should test for is a very different kind of error than having an error in the implementation of that property. You don’t have to make the “same” error on both sides for an error to remain unnoticed. Compared to bookkeeping, a single random error in either the tests or the implementation is more likely to remain unnoticed.
by jaredklewis | 2025-12-23 16:54:02+00:00
Sorry what regulation in particular are you thinking about here? There’s no logical anti-trust angle I can think of.

I mean of course I think the outcome here is bad, but I’m struggling to think of a kind of regulation that could have prevented it that isn’t completely insane.

Edit: Listen everyone, it sucks, but there's no "one weird trick" where you can have a congress, judiciary, and executive branch dominated by Republicans, that then governs like Democrats. This isn't a "regulation" problem. It's a "roughly half the country wanted this" problem. Adding more regulations is not going to suddenly make the FTC act right; we have thousands of regulations already on the books and if they wanted to do something, they could.
by tim333 | 2025-12-23 16:54:11+00:00
I admit to bias in that I don't see aggressive dictatorships and peaceful democracies as equivalent. The Cuban missiles were a problem because of that in a way that Ukraine being democratic isn't.

Ironically the Russian Federation is probably creating much more of an existential threat against itself by invading Ukraine. Before it was doing fine, now a good part of the globe opposes it and the economic sanctions and loss or Russian lives may cause it some issues.
by pjdesno | 2025-12-23 16:54:32+00:00
I've got to say, there's nothing more infuriating than standing in front of a register while everyone behind the counter is busy working on online orders that won't get picked up for quite a while, as evidenced by their repeatedly calling out names for the online orders waiting forlornly at the end of the counter.

(this is at a campus Dunkies where there's no drive-through, and I have a hard deadline to start my lecture. If there's no line at the register, and I've got five minutes before class starts in a room down the hall, it shouldn't take a logistical genius to get me a regular coffee in time for class)
by nartho | 2025-12-23 16:54:41+00:00
This is a bit more complex that you make it sound, and I'm wondering this is on purpose.

- Submission based magazines, who pay their writers, like Clarkesworld for example, are being flooded with LLM generated submissions. Those have been automated by people who hit every magazines multiple times with the hope that one makes it through and make a few bucks. This made the work of reviewer absolute hell, their volume of work multiplied by 10.

- The same is true with music, fake bands are being created and the music submitted to streaming platform with the hope that it will generate some kind of passive income

- Etsy shops are absolutely filled to the brim with bad AI slop, the whole platform became barely usable anymore

The same thing is absolutely true with software. You make is sound like it's a few hobbyist that are using AI tools to solve problems and that evil engineers are gatekeeping them because they want to be the only one mastering the arcane arts, but that's overly simplistic and frankly, intellectually dishonest, even if you set aside the fact that at some point one of those vibe coders is going the bite more that they can chew and expose their users, the vast majority of them is looking at making money easily, that means flooding the market with subpar software in hope to generate some money. Just browse a few of the vibe coders subreddits or discord channel to see that it's mostly what is being discussed.

And, I know I'm not the only one that noticed that over reliance on LLMs has some bad consequences on people, especially juniors. Yes it can be used properly in a productive way, but a lot of people don't bother. Make fun of people who are worried about it all you want, but for all the good gen AI will bring, there absolutely will be an enshitification of about everything. I won't even talk about the golden opportunity it is for scammers and malicious agents. I don't know if it'll be worth it, possibly ? But there will be a price to pay.
by oofbey | 2025-12-23 16:55:00+00:00
This attitude is of course very common and I just don’t understand it. Like when I read news from the other political party - it’s just confusing to me.

Are they scared for their jobs? Angry that their hard earned skills are getting devalued? Genuinely concerned about copyright violations in LLM training? Or just don’t want the world to change? (Kids get off my lawn!)