MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rwmj | 2025-12-23 20:59:31+00:00
We had a lot problems embedding Ruby in a multithreaded C program as the garbage collector tries to scan memory between the threads (more details here: https://gitlab.com/nbdkit/nbdkit/-/commit/7364cbaae809b5ffb6... )

Perl, Python, OCaml, Lua and Rust were all fine (Rust wasn't around in 2010 of course).
by worik | 2025-12-23 20:59:37+00:00
this is a really bad idea.

A million lines of code per engineer per month, they say.

What a dreadfully bad use of excellent technology!

LLMs could help the review all that code, and help their programmers find problematic C or C++ code that could be fixed, or perhaps replaced with Rust.

What they are proposing is mindless foolishness. AI slop on an industrial scale

Rust is good. Rust is not magic
by roblabla | 2025-12-23 20:59:44+00:00
Linux (well, more accurately, X11), has had a SAK for ages now, in the form of the CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE that immediately kills X11, booting you back to the login screen.

I personally doubt SAK/SAS is a good security measure anyways. If you've got untrusted programs running on your machine, you're probably already pwn'd.
by simonw | 2025-12-23 21:00:20+00:00
I want to build features - both client- and server-side - where users can provide JavaScript code that I then execute safely.

Just having a WebAssembly engine available isn't enough for this - something has to take that user-provided string of JavaScript and execute it within a safe sandbox.

Generally that means you need a JavaScript interpreter that has itself been compiled to WebAssembly. I've experimented with QuickJS itself for that in the past - demo here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/quickjs - but MicroQuickJS may be interesting as a smaller alternative.

If there's a better option than that I'd love to hear about it!
by whazor | 2025-12-23 21:01:06+00:00
But economically, it is still much better to buy a lower spec't laptop and to pay a monthly subscription for AI.

However, I agree with the article that people will run big LLMs on their laptop N years down the line. Especially if hardware outgrows best-in-class LLM model requirements. If a phone could run a 512GB LLM model fast, you would want it.
by dimatura | 2025-12-23 21:02:10+00:00
About eight years ago I was trying to stream several videos of a drone over the internet for remote product demos. Since we were talking to customers while the demo happened, the latency needed to be less than a few seconds. I couldn't get that latency with the more standard streaming video options I tried, and at the time setting up something based on WebRTC seemed pretty daunting. I ended up doing something pretty much like JPEGs as well, via the jsmpeg library [1]. Worked great.

[1] https://jsmpeg.com/ (tagline: "decode like it's 1999")
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-23 21:02:21+00:00
You realize he just famously got in Apple’s “bad graces” this year with his “Something is rotten in Cupertino” post and for the first time in a decade they didn’t make an Apple executive available to be on his post WWDC live show?

Let’s not forget also that the EU first wanted to standardize on micro USB.
by slaw3 | 2025-12-23 21:02:37+00:00
All patents issued by the USPTO are public though. For you to get a utility patent you need to publicly share exactly what is done. This is supposed to be the reason patents exist in the first place. And in return for publicly sharing, you get exclusive rights for some period of time. In that regard there really isn’t any secrecy

Just because you have the patent does not mean you will win all infringement claims though, as you noted with those Newegg cases
by brailsafe | 2025-12-23 21:03:37+00:00
I've actually started taking the same approach—despite the content of my comment—just not with huge amounts of debt for things that only offer tenuous personal value. So, for me I've decided that it makes way more sense to fully commit to my long term relationship, and if it fails eventually, it won't be because I was trying to keep one foot out the door. That said, aside from automatic common law designation, marriage is not something I'm planning atm, even after many years.

> I Got myself liable for a 7k mortgage, about 80% of my take home.

That is... spicy. I guess context matters though, if you're already financially secure and the ongoing income would otherwise just be added to other investments, and the remaining 20% is enough to cover you, and if you're in a place that locks in your interest rate for the whole mortgage, then I could see that being less dramatic. Likewise if you're both working or stand to inherit something.

Additionally, a mortgage is one of those things where if you've consistently earned whatever income it is, then it's more a matter of being excessively cautious. I've probably only ever earned an income for half of my working life; year on year I might make zero or full-time income, and the economy (in Canada) is indeed tangibly precarious right now.

Broadly I agree though. I wouldn't be in the relatively good position I'm in now without a series of scary bets earlier, moving to a new city, trying harder at more ambitious career moves etc..

It's just that there have been multiple times where I've lost a job, couldn't find _anything_ to pay bills with for long enough that I've literally dropped all the way to zero financially, losing the rental, and needing to live out of a car, so those kinds of liabilities just don't (yet?) make any sense. My hunch is that for people who haven't had that experience, it's more of a major milestone that they're eventually going to do without a doubt in their mind, they just need the raw salary number
by agumonkey | 2025-12-23 21:03:48+00:00
beware, some cultures are territorial in nature and this kind of hard ownership will make people slap you if you ever try to improve things as they come.

i'm in the camp of improving things regularly without hesitation but again this can devolve. another way it can turn sour is when the team is made of people too different from each other. one improvement from someone pov is a waste or even a regression for others .. then it's a 'who decides here' conversation.

that said when you have a cohesive group all focusing on pushing in the same direction then it's bliss
by rasz | 2025-12-23 21:04:01+00:00
Funny how people know Fabrice for all the software stuff but none of the hardware antics:

played with implementing analog modem DSP in software in 1999 (linmodem is ~50-80% there, sadly never finished)

probably leading to

played with implementing SDR (again DSP) using VGA output to transmit DVB-T/NTSC/PAL in 2005

probably leading to

Amarisoft SDR 5G base station, commercial product started in 2012 - his current job https://www.amarisoft.com/company/about-us
by nine_k | 2025-12-23 21:04:03+00:00
Also consider translation to non-English languages, including different writing and syntax systems (e.g. Arabic or Japanese).

Some languages have tools for more or less straightforward skinning.

Clojure to Tamil: https://github.com/echeran/clj-thamil/blob/master/src/clj_th...

C++ to distorted Russian: https://sizeof.livejournal.com/23169.html
by spacechild1 | 2025-12-23 21:05:11+00:00
> it feels like it departs from what people know without good reasons.

Lua is a pretty old language. In 1993 the world had not really settled on C style syntax. Compared to Perl or Tcl, Lua's syntax seems rather conventional.

Some design decisions might be a bit unusual, but overall the language feels very consistent and predictable. JS is a mess in comparison.

> because it departs from a more Algol-like syntax

Huh? Lua's syntax is actually very Algol-like since it uses keywords to delimit blocks (e.g. if ... then ... end)
by azuanrb | 2025-12-23 21:05:24+00:00
You still need ridiculously high spec hardware, and at Apple’s prices, that isn’t cheap. Even if you can afford it (most won't), the local models you can run are still limited and they still underperform. It’s much cheaper to pay for a cloud solution and get significantly better result. In my opinion, the article is right. We need a better way to run LLMs locally.
by dijit | 2025-12-23 21:06:40+00:00
If juniors ignore guidance and advice, they stay in junior roles, handling simpler, less impactful tasks.

Everyone seeks career growth, but pushing for it too quickly often just leads to inflated titles without real substance.

It’s perfectly fine to remain a mid-level engineer for your entire career if it makes you happy; it’s solid, honest work that contributes meaningfully.
Plenty of people in their 60s have held the same job for decades, and that’s okay; it can be a path to genuine satisfaction.
by norir | 2025-12-23 21:06:46+00:00
I don't love a good deal of Lua's syntax, but I do think the authors had good reasons for their choices and have generally explained them. Even if you disagree, I think "without good reasons" is overly dismissive.

Personally though, I think the distinctive choices are a boon. You are never confused about what language you are writing because Lua code is so obviously Lua. There is value in this. Once you have written enough Lua, your mind easily switches in and out of Lua mode. Javascript, on the other hand, is filled with poor semantic decisions which for me, cancel out any benefits from syntactic familiarity.

More importantly, Lua has a crucial feature that Javascript lacks: tail call optimization. There are programs that I can easily write in Lua, in spite of its syntactic verbosity, that I cannot write in Javascript because of this limitation. Perhaps this particular JS implementation has tco, but I doubt it reading the release notes.

I have learned as much from Lua as I have Forth (SmallTalk doesn't interest me) and my programming skill has increased significantly since I switched to it as my primary language. Lua is the only lightweight language that I am aware of with TCO. In my programs, I have banned the use of loops. This is a liberation that is not possible in JS or even c, where TCO cannot be relied upon.

In particular, Lua is an exceptional language for writing compilers. Compilers are inherently recursive and thus languages lacking TCO are a poor fit (even if people have been valiantly forcing that square peg through a round hole for all this time).

Having said all that, perhaps as a scripting language for Redis, JS is a better fit. For me though Lua is clearly better than JS on many different dimensions and I don't appreciate the needless denigration of Lua, especially from someone as influential as you.
by jesse__ | 2025-12-23 21:06:47+00:00
By the authors definition, I've been writing perfect software for over a decade.

It's never required LLMs. In fact, I think the idea that "LLMs allow us to write software for ourselves" borders on missing the point, for me at least. I write software for myself because I like the exploratory process .. figuring out how do do something such that it works with as little friction as possible from the side of the user; who is of course myself, in the future.

I like nitpicking the details, getting totally side-tracked on seemingly frivolous minutiae. Frequently enough, coming to the end of a month long yak-shave actually contributes meaningful insight to the problem at hand.

I guess what I'm trying to say is "you're allowed to just program .. for no other reason than the fun of it".

As evidence for my claims: a few of my 'perfect' projects

https://github.com/scallyw4g/bonsai

https://github.com/scallyw4g/poof

https://scallywag.software
by grayhatter | 2025-12-23 21:06:56+00:00
> Battlefield 6 is a big one recently that if I had a gaming PC set-up I'd probably want to play.

We definitely play very different games, I wouldn't touch it if you paid me. So I'm sure we both have a bit of sample bias in our expected rates of linux compatibility. Especially since EA is another company like Adobe. Also, the internet seems to think they have a cheating problem. I wonder how bad it really is, and if it's worth the cost of the anti-cheat.

They're industry standard because they were first. Not necessarily because they were better. They do have a feature set that's near impossible to beat, not even I can pretend like they don't. I'm just saying, respect and fairness is more important to me, than content aware fill ever will be.

Also, doesn't the Adobe suite work on Linux?
by davkan | 2025-12-23 21:06:59+00:00
> We all fall into this trap, thinking we can do better than others.

I do not think we all have the level of hubris required to shit all over large governmental organizations as Musk did. I think maybe even the majority of people would say woah hold up let’s take look at what’s going on before tearing it down.

And of course that’s under the charitable assumption his actions weren’t malicious.
by groundzeros2015 | 2025-12-23 21:07:09+00:00
We spend a lot of time doing busy work that's part of the process but doesn't actually move the needle. We write a lot of code that manages abstractions, but doesn't do a lot. All of this busy work feels like progress, but it's avoiding the hard work of actually writing working code.

We underestimate how inefficient working in teams is compared with individuals. We don't value skill and experience and how someone who understands a problem well can be orders of magnitude more productive.
by ignoramous | 2025-12-23 21:08:30+00:00
> economically, it is still much better to buy a lower spec't laptop and to pay a monthly subscription for AI

Uber is economical, too; but folks prefer to own cars, sometimes multiple.

And how there's market for all kinds of vanity cars, fast sportscars, expensive supercars... I imagine PCs & Laptops will have such a market, too: In probably less than a decade, may be a £20k laptop running a 671b+ LLM locally will be the norm among pros.
by Arainach | 2025-12-23 21:09:11+00:00
If you have anything less than perfect vision and need any accessibility features, yes. If you have a High DPI screen, yes. In many important areas (window management, keyboard shortcuts, etc.), yes.

Here's one top search result that goes into far more detail: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1ed0j10/the_state_of...
by johannfalkes | 2025-12-23 21:09:29+00:00
I'm in the same camp. This article does an extremely detailed job of explaining the problems that people who've used a Windows or Mac desktop environment in the past have with the gnome UI.

The menus are the worst thing. We don't need hamburger menus on a desktop window, but gnome apps often have two of them, inconsistently, plus an "open" button.
by lanstin | 2025-12-23 21:09:30+00:00
1. those ingested logs are not logs for you, they are customer payload which are business criticial; 2. I've yet to see a Logging as a Service provider not have outages where data was lost or severely delayed. Also, the alternative to best effort/shed excessive load isn't 100% availability, it's catastrophic failure when capacity is reached.

Auditing has the requirement to be mostly not lost, but most importantly not being able to be deleted by people on the host. And for the capacity side, again the design question is "what happens when incoming events exceed our current capacity - all the collectors/relays balloon their memory and become much much slower, effectively unresponsive, or immediately close the incoming sockets, lower downstream timeouts, and so on." Hopefully, the audit traffic is consistent enough that you don't get spikes and can over-capacitize with confidence.
by rolfus | 2025-12-23 21:10:18+00:00
This resonates with me. I'm not a programmer, and before LLM's I could only make basic hello world apps and simple websites. Now I am developing my own versions of various apps that I've used but maybe have limitations that I've become frustrated with. For example, I didn't like how the fitness tracker Strava didn't allow me to customize audio announcements, so now I have my own (and in my own eyes) better version of Strava that I use instead. It's absolutely blowing my mind that this is possible and available today, and not some tech-optimists wet dream about an impossible future.
by illiac786 | 2025-12-23 21:10:37+00:00
the long term innovation outlooks are still better, so you benefit long term as well.

It’s just less obvious / measurable that immediate benefits.

And also, short term, isn’t it that other EarPods are getting better, rather than AirPods getting worse?

Medium term, I don’t think that Apple will stop innovating on AirPods just because of the EU market and this one feature not being exclusive to AirPods anymore. But it’s a possibility, I agree.
by deepsun | 2025-12-23 21:10:40+00:00
Agree, but for example, migration scripts are still often just a bunch of long .sql files (unless it's Liquibase with its own cross-DBMS XML syntax), or test/staging/benchmark schemas. Even today.

And subling commenters say that all you need is raw SQL and results mapping to your code. Which I did for a while, but found that mapping is a lot of copy-pasta with minor diffs, a burden to maintain. So it's easier to use a thin library like JOOQ for mapping, or use only the mapper part of a bigger ORM framework like Django/Hibernate.

And my argument is that it's easier to map to/from a concise strongly-typed ABI/API structs instead of one raw SQL string with its structure designed for human reading/writing, like SELECT before FROM. There are such ABI-s, but they are DBMS-specific, while SQL is less so.
by roblabla | 2025-12-23 21:10:47+00:00
Procmon won't show you every type of resource access. Even when it does, it won't tell you which entity in the resource chain caused the issue.

And then you get security product who have the fun idea of removing privileges when a program creates a handle (I'm not joking, that's a thing some products do). So when you open a file with write access, and then try to write to the file, you end up with permission errors durig the write (and not the open) and end up debugging for hours on end only to discover that some shitty security product is doing stupid stuff...

Granted, thats not related to ACLs. But for every OK idea microsoft had, they have dozen of terrible ideas that make the whole system horrible.
by BeetleB | 2025-12-23 21:11:18+00:00
> I know people also use *arr stack and jellyfin to setup their own library but my problem is that i never /know/ what to watch.

For people like me, knowing what to watch is never a problem. Getting time to actually watch it is.

I suggest finding a way to do your own curation.

For movies, you could just start with the IMDB Top 250 (pick at random). They used to have other lists (e.g. top non-English movies, etc), but I can't seem to find them any more.
by vsgherzi | 2025-12-23 21:12:26+00:00
The point he’s trying to make it’s that it’s become a default like react has. People pick things because they’re the default not because they’re the right tool for the job. Of course there’s less nuance in the article but I think there is something to be said about picking the right tool for the job and how it’s strangely not the norm in the field especially for web.
by wkjagt | 2025-12-23 21:12:36+00:00
I quit my big-tech job 4 years ago and it feels like that was just in time. I don't think I would enjoy the current way. I still program a lot, but as a hobby, and still thoroughly enjoy the craft. I sometimes ask chatgpt for a function name, but mostly stay away from ai. I do realize that I'm less and less employable as a software engineer though.
by DavidSJ | 2025-12-23 21:12:40+00:00
In some redacted documents, there is even an alphabetical word index at the end with a list of pages on which the words appear.

The redacted words are also redacted in the word index, but the alphabetically preceding and succeeding words are visible, as is the number of index lines taken up by the redacted word's entry, which correlates with the number of appearances of that word.

This seems like rather useful information to constrain a search by such a tool.
by sebmellen | 2025-12-23 21:13:31+00:00
The rage against Tailwind is absurd. Maybe it is overhyped but it’s an incredibly useful tool and framework; it also brings an enforced consistency that plain CSS doesn’t, which is especially helpful for responsive sites so that the page use feels consistent across platforms.

Compare these two sites:

1. https://justfuckingusetailwind.com/

2. https://fuckyouiwontusetailwind.com/

On mobile, the first site is infinitely more pleasant to use. It sells itself by comparison!
by guywithahat | 2025-12-23 21:14:09+00:00
I get the authors intent at angry humor (especially since it's a response to justfuckingusetailwind.com) but it does feel hypocritical.

I also think CSS frameworks will be here to stay so long as many of the big backend frameworks like Ruby on Rails and Elixir Phoenix use generators. If they're generating pages they may as well throw CSS in there, and I don't want them using custom CSS. If I'm building a static site though I certainly wouldn't use a framework, and I think the author is right in some regards
by grayhatter | 2025-12-23 21:14:33+00:00
> Want a button? Here's all you need:

> <button class="bg-sky-500 hover:bg-sky-600 active:bg-sky-700 text-white px-4 py-2 rounded-lg">Click me</button>

So, I avoid modern webdev, because... reasons.... but is the argument here, really, that this is better than. <button>click me</button> with the default styling applied to button { ... } in style.css?

Follow up question, wasn't the point of css so that you didn't have to write excessive html like this?
by jwkerr | 2025-12-23 21:15:10+00:00
I’m pretty tired of posts like this stating opinions as though they are objective truth, and using expletives to “get their point across”, seemingly because they can’t write a convincing argument for that opinion.

I know it’s intended to be funny (at least most of the time), but there’s usually truth under the expletives, I believe that humour factor has been lost.
by Sophira | 2025-12-23 21:15:23+00:00
I haven't used Tailwind, but as someone who regularly has to deal with CSS created by Tailwind, I have to wonder why they're even using CSS at all. It feels like going back to HTML 3.2 attributes. How is 'class="bg-white"' any better than 'bgcolor="white"'?

There is one thing that Tailwind is good for, and that's for making sure people can't override your CSS easily. Anybody who's ever used Stylus to override Tailwind-created CSS will know this pain.

(That said, I think this site is rather... abrasive. That doesn't help anybody.)

[edit: Also, in case it's not obvious, I'm not actually advocating for making sure people can't override your CSS. Please, please let me override your CSS.]
by lioeters | 2025-12-23 21:15:32+00:00
> consistent and predictable

That's what matters to me, not how similar Lua is to other languages, but that the language is well-designed in its own system of rules and conventions. It makes sense, every part of it contributes to a harmonious whole. JavaScript on the other hand.

When speaking of Algol or C-style syntax, it makes me imagine a "Common C" syntax, like taking the best, or the least common denominator, of all C-like languages. A minimal subset that fits in your head, instead of what modern C is turning out to be, not to mention C++ or Rust.
by K0nserv | 2025-12-23 21:16:36+00:00
You can do TURN using TLS/TCP over port 443. This can fool some firewalls, but will still fail for instances when an intercepting HTTP proxy is used.

The neat thing about ICE is that you get automatic fallbacks and best path selection. So best case IPv6 UDP, worst case TCP/TLS

One of the nice things about HTTP3 and QUIC will be that UDP port 443 will be more likely to be open in the future.
by nimonian | 2025-12-23 21:16:52+00:00
Mathematics is concerned with a lot more than arithmetic and computation. Beyond the most basic levels, a mathematician will profit greatly from being aware of this type of epistemological vocabulary and a strong sense of their underlying meaning. Whether reading or writing mathematics, we're constantly dealing with propositions, and correctly taxonomising those propositions can really help keep your mental workspace clean.

I do question the effectiveness (and accuracy) of this exercise, but its learning objectives I think are quite apt.