MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by manquer | 2025-12-16 22:48:14+00:00
OP means to say he has many jobs in the merge queue that the runners are always busy 24/7.

This is not uncommon in some orgs - less number of concurrent runners, slow builds, loads of jobs because of automation or how hooks for the runners are setup.

In the context of discussion that doesn't matter, OP's point distills to that they use minimum of 720 hours / month of orchestration time or some multiple of that on self hosted runners running 24x7.

Github will now charge $84 extra per month for single self-hosted runner running 24x7 - i.e. that is the cost for 43,200 build minutes for only their orchestration alone.

In a more typical setup that is equivalent to say 5 self-hosted running running ~4.5 hours a day(i.e 144/hours/runner/month)
by sfn42 | 2025-12-16 22:48:25+00:00
Just because you won't use it doesn't mean it's not useful. Lots of programmers use math. Lots of programmers use DSA knowledge on a daily basis - and if you aren't you're probably writing bad code. I see a lot of O(n^2) code or worse making apps slow for no reason. Pretty basic stuff that most people don't understand despite taking a whole class on it.

Sure I learned lots of stuff I've never used. Like relational algebra. But I also learned lots of stuff I use a lot, and it's unlikely I'd have studied most of that stuff on my own. During my degree I also had time and opportunity to pursue lots of other topics outside the mandated course material, you're not limited to what they force you to learn.

So sure if you have the motivation, discipline and resourcefulness to learn all that stuff on your own go right ahead. Most people aren't even close. Most people are much better off with a degree.
by mindcrash | 2025-12-16 22:48:35+00:00
Sounds familiar!

Everybody now is like "Hey, we can take something like Kubernetes which is open source and is backed by a worldwide community, and you know like OpenStack which is open source and is backed by a worldwide community and we can build our own computing platform and deploy services and online communities and stuff on top of that"

And I was like "Wait, you guys are realizing that NOW?!? I've been an activist and part of a movement urging you all to try and be less dependent on US Big Tech and focus more on decentralization for YEARS"

Like you I am really happy things seem to get rolling now, though :)
by defrost | 2025-12-16 22:48:38+00:00
What nonsense.

We work in agricultural and mining and have done, in my fathers case, since 1935.

Admittedly he started with horses, bullocks, and kerosene fueled tractors, but hey, we understand engines, how to keep them running, and a host of tangential factors that roll alongside; recovery, survival, first aid, fire fighting, bush mechanics, etc.

Vehicles are maintained, used within their limits, regularly checked before long trips, and routinely clock up 750,000 - 1,300,000 km before being replaced.

To date no transmissions have been burnt out. Multiple long distance trips on sealed and unsealed roads have been taken across the length and breadth of Western Australia - it's reasonably tough country.

As a pro-tip, if you're burning out transmissions pulling loads on a regular basis, I'd suggest parking up to take load facing downhill (and chock the wheels to be safe). That way, when you start up under load you have the advantage of a downhill rolling start. That'll help to prevent spinning tyres, getting bogged, and undue strain on the transmission. If you're not doing it already consider starting off in a low gear rather than relying on an automatic transmission to select for you.

You do understand, I trust, that there's a perfectly usable 6-cylinder class between a stupidly oversized rarely needed V-8 and the woefully under powered 4 cylinder?

We have trucks, we've just spent the last month on district harvest, and we're dropping a modular house in place later this afternoon (GMT+8) - by trucks we mean prime movers + trailer trains (usually two, sometimes three), nine tonne tippers, ex-military scrabblers that can carry 5-tonne of water up bush tracks (fire control) and the like.
by mmooss | 2025-12-16 22:48:40+00:00
I think this is a great insight and great leadership.

While the for-profit world, and many others, have embraced extremes of predatory capitalism, contempt for users, and disinformation, Mozilla has a fantastic opportunity to compete on its unique capabilities:

It's not under pressure to adapt that business culture - no private equity, Wall Street, etc. pushing it; its culture is antithetical to those things; and its culture has always been geared toward service to the community and trust.

The insight and leadership is to find this word, which hasn't been used much (I think many in business or politics would laugh at it), is incredibly powerful and a fundamental social need, and is clear guidance for everyone and every activity at Mozilla and for customers.

Imagine using a company's products and not having to think about them trying to cheat you.
by smileybarry | 2025-12-16 22:49:15+00:00
That still doesn't escape ACR, AFAIK. These "smart" TVs still capture screenshots from HDMI inputs.

That's one of the reasons I only buy Sony for years now. ACR & the like are opt-out at the first terms/privacy screen, and you can even go into Android/Google TV settings and just disable the APK responsible. (Samba something-something)
by ChristopherDrum | 2025-12-16 22:49:16+00:00
No no, I was just blindsided by my own feelings when I read that and thought it was kind of funny. Judging from the inexplicable downvoting that comment received (?!) apparently that wasn't clear. I always enjoyed Mastermind, though there is a line of attack on the solution that can render it a little boring. It still maintains a bit of a Wordle-like pleasure.
by ianstormtaylor | 2025-12-16 22:49:22+00:00
I agree with you to a degree. I considered that as a reason as well, and "meeting people where they are" in communication design is something I think about a lot.

But if using an approachable format to deliver an alternative message was the strategy, I think we'd see a few places where the author tried to stretch the format slightly, to give a few core ideas more chance to resonate. In which case it could have been a masterful use of an antithetical format, to prove and point and enrich the message.

Instead, since the entire post conforms, it feels much more like an internalized autopilot, or purposefully manipulative technique.
by bkettle | 2025-12-16 22:49:46+00:00
I think formal verification shines in areas where implementation is much more complex than the spec, like when you’re writing incomprehensible bit-level optimizations in a cryptography implementation or compiler optimization phases. I’m not sure that most of us, day-to-day, write code (or have AI write code) that would benefit from formal verification, since to me it seems like high-level programming languages are already close to a specification language. I’m not sure how much easier to read a specification format that didn’t concern itself with implementation could be, especially when we currently use all kinds of frameworks and libraries that already abstract away implementation details.

Sure, formal verification might give stronger guarantees about various levels of the stack, but I don’t think most of us care about having such strong guarantees now and I don’t think AI really introduces a need for new guarantees at that level.
by ElevenLathe | 2025-12-16 22:49:49+00:00
Falsifying your tax return statements is not the same as a simple refusal to pay. By doing that, you are indicating that you agree to the legitimacy of the taxes in general, but would prefer to lie about whether you should personally pay them or not. These people were also all given their day in court, and convicted of actual crimes in fair trials where they had adequate representation. If this is your idea of "violence", then I don't know what to say.
by roadside_picnic | 2025-12-16 22:49:53+00:00
I very much agree, and believe using languages with powerful types systems could be a big step in this direction. Most people's first experience with Haskell is "wow this is hard to write a program in, but when I do get it to compile, it works". If this works for human developers, it should also work for LLMs (especially if the human doesn't have to worry about the 'hard to write a program' part).

> The next step up from that is a good automated test suite.

And if we're going for a powerful type system, then we can really leverage the power of property tests which are currently grossly underused. Property tests are a perfect match for LLMs because they allow the human to create a small number of tests that cover a very wide surface of possible errors.

The "thinking in types" approach to software development in Haskell allows the human user to keep at a level of abstraction that still allows them to reason about critical parts of the program while not having to worry about the more tedious implementation parts.

Given how much interest there has been in using LLMs to improve Lean code for formal proofs in the math community, maybe there's a world where we make use of an even more powerful type systems than Haskell. If LLMs with the right language can help prove complex mathematical theorems, they it should certain be possible to write better software with them.
by voxleone | 2025-12-16 22:50:00+00:00
Perfect lines and squares don’t exist as physical objects, sure, but geometry is less about material perfection than it’s about relationships. Nature constantly approximates geometric regularities because physics imposes them: energy minimization gives spheres, space-filling gives hexagons, angular momentum gives spirals.

Life didn’t need 4.5 billion years to “invent” geometry; geometry constrained life from the beginning. We only invented the formal language to describe it.
by wtallis | 2025-12-16 22:50:11+00:00
You don't really seem to be trying to fairly describe the problem.

With Pocket, Mozilla forced it on everyone, then two years later they bought the service, then many years later they eventually killed it for everyone. They didn't even try the approach of making it an opt-in extension that users could install if they desired. The unoffensive strategy was obvious all along, and they just didn't choose that route. The concerns of Mozilla partnering with and promoting a proprietary service were easily anticipated, and the solution (buying Pocket) was clearly an option since they did that step eventually.

Yes, Mozilla may be in a hard place trying to diversify and find success with their other ventures. But they're clearly making plenty of unforced errors along the way.
by smileybarry | 2025-12-16 22:50:42+00:00
"All of the big TV makers" except Vizio which is owned by Walmart, of course, who happens to do ACR and ad targeting:

> In August 2015, Vizio acquired Cognitive Media Networks, Inc, a provider of automatic content recognition (ACR). Cognitive Media Networks was subsequently renamed Inscape Data. Inscape functioned as an independent entity until the end of 2020, when it was combined with Vizio Ads and SmartCast; the three divisions combining to operate as a single unit.[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vizio
by RaulOnRails | 2025-12-16 22:51:00+00:00
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by kazinator | 2025-12-16 22:51:08+00:00
Curiously enough, Hepburn romanization fixes some ambiguities in Japanese (Japanese written in kana alone) while introducing others.

The ō in Hepburn could correspond to おう or おお or オー. That's an ambiguity.

Where does Hepburn disambiguate?

In Japanese, an E column kana followed by I sometimes makes a long E, like in 先生 (sen + sei -> sensē). The "SEI" is one unit. But in other situations it does not, like in a compound word ending in the E kana, where the second word starts with I. For instance 酒色 (sake + iro -> sakeiro, not sakēro).

Hepburn distinguishes these; the hiragana spelling does not!

This is one of the issues that makes it very hard to read Japanese that is written with hiragana only, rather than kanji. No word breaks and not knowing whether せい is supposed to be sē or sei.

There are curiosities like karaage which is "kara" (crust) + "age" (fried thing). A lot of the time it is pronounced as karāge, because of the way RA and A come together. Other times you hear a kind of flutter in it which articulates two A's.

I have no idea which romanization to use. Flip a coin?
by simonw | 2025-12-16 22:51:11+00:00
Something I find helps a lot is having a template for creating a project that includes at least one passing test. That way the agent can run the tests at the start using the correct test harness and then add new tests as it goes along.

I use cookiecutter for this, here's my latest Python library template: https://github.com/simonw/python-lib
by jameslk | 2025-12-16 22:51:32+00:00
> As the verification process itself becomes automated, the challenge will move to correctly defining the specification: that is, how do you know that the properties that were proved are actually the properties that you cared about? Reading and writing such formal specifications still requires expertise and careful thought. But writing the spec is vastly easier and quicker than writing the proof by hand, so this is progress.

Proofs never took off because most software engineering moved away from waterfall development, not just because proofs are difficult. Long formal specifications were abandoned since often those who wrote them misunderstood what the user wanted or the user didn’t know what they wanted. Instead, agile development took over and software evolved more iteratively and rapidly to meet the user.

The author seems to make their prediction based on the flawed assumption that difficulty in writing proofs was the only reason we avoided them, when in reality the real challenge was understanding what the user actually wanted.
by plainOldText | 2025-12-16 22:51:33+00:00
I guess it’s time to learn OCaml then.

It appears many of the proof assistants/verification systems can generate OCaml. Or perhaps ADA/Spark?

Regardless of how the software engineering discipline will change in the age of gen AI, we must aim to produce higher not lower quality software than whatever we have today, and formal verification will definitely help.
by DoctorOetker | 2025-12-16 22:51:47+00:00
the point is that even with 100% INefficient solar panels the pyramidal sides can be made to have an arbitrarily large area, and due to convexity of the pyramid each infinitesimal surface element of the radiating sides can emit the full hemisphere, so given any target temperature, we can design the pyramid sharp enough (same base, different height, so that heat absorbed is constant and heat emitted must equal it in steady state, then by basic thermal radiation math, the asymptotic temperature it will settle at can be made arbitrarily close to temperature of the universe, by making the pyramid sharper.)
by jameshilliard | 2025-12-16 22:52:15+00:00
> The US wielding the sanctions banhammer the way they have been recently will only weaken its power over time and create opportunity for economic rivals like China.

China is not party to the Rome Statute, just like the US and Israel, I would expect they would retaliate against the ICC if the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Xi Jinping.

> Every time they (mis)use it they create incentive for people to create alternatives to the US financial system.

I think the ICC has much bigger credibility issues trying to impose jurisdiction over conflicts involving countries that are not parties to the Rome Statute.
by jstummbillig | 2025-12-16 22:52:35+00:00
I find the long-term memory concepts with regards to AI curiously dubious.

On first glance, of course it's something we want. It's how we do it, after all! Learning on the job is what enables us to do our jobs and so many other things.

On the other hand humans are frustratingly stuck in their ways and not all that happy to change and that is something that societies or orgs fight a lot. Do I want to convince my coding agent to learn new behavior, conflicting with existing memory?

It's not at all obvious to me in how far memory is a bug or a feature. Does somebody have a clear case on why this is something that we should want and why it's not a problem?
by ahtihn | 2025-12-16 22:52:39+00:00
> Given that the models will attempt to check their own work with almost the identical verification that a human engineer would

That's not the case at all though. The LLM doesn't have a mental model of what the expected final result is, so how could it possibly verify that?

It has a description in text format of what the engineer thinks he wants. The text format is inherently limited and lossy and the engineer is unlikely to be perfect at expressing his expectations in any case.
by prefrontal | 2025-12-16 22:52:55+00:00
Many thanks - appreciate the kind words. Thanks also for always working to work with care in your science. It makes all the difference.

Among other challenges, when we first submitted the poster to the Human Brain Mapping conference we got kicked out of consideration because the committee thought we were trolling. One person on the review committee said we actually had a good point and brought our poster back in for consideration. The salmon poster ended up being on a highlight slide at the closing session of the conference!
by 1970-01-01 | 2025-12-16 22:53:15+00:00
The implementation detail is that we keep finding them! After this, it couldn't locate a seahorse emoji without freaking out. At some point we need to have a test: there are two drinks before you. One is water, the other is whatever the LLM thought you might like to drink after it completed refactoring the codebase. Choose wisely.
by vunderba | 2025-12-16 22:53:26+00:00
Thanks! A highly configurable Previz2Image model would be a fantastic addition. I was literally just thinking about this the other day (but more in the context of ControlNets and posable kinematic models). I’m even considering adding an early CG Poser blocked‑out scene test to see how far the various editor models can take it.

With additions like structured prompts (introduced in BFL Flux 2), maybe we'll see something like this in the near future.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-16 22:53:37+00:00
Takes like these do not account for the value you gained by using the software in the meantime. Here are 2 scenarios:

1) company uses exclusively free software, spends more time dealing with the shortcomings of said software than developing product, product is half baked and doesn't sell well, company dies.

2) company uses proprietary but cheap/free (as in beer) software that does the job really well, focuses on developing product, product is good and sells well, company how has a ton of money they could use to replicate the proprietary product from scratch if they wanted to.

A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. A pragmatic approach like scenario 2 ends up earning enough money that can be used to recreate the proprietary software from scratch (and open-source it if you wanted to).

In this case the problem isn't even the proprietariness of the software, it's the fact that companies are reliant on someone else hosting the software (GH being FOSS wouldn't actually change anything here - whoever is hosting it can still enforce whatever terms they want).

FOSS alternatives already exist, it's just that our industry is so consumed by grifters that nobody knows how to do things anymore (because it's more profitable for every individual not to); running software on a server (what used to be table stakes for any shop and junior sysadmin) is nowadays lost knowledge. Microsoft and SaaS software providers are capitalizing on this.
by defrost | 2025-12-16 22:53:48+00:00
Seems like a specious hypothetical, as a peer comment pointed out most people in light residential construction don't need US style "trucks" (oversized cars), in my experience there are a number of people that have trailers who live in apartments - alongside other two car / two bay families.

Ultimately if you're serious about contracting work of any kind, or even just craft glass blowing / wood working, etc, you get a workshop in a light industrial area or a rural block with space for sheds, drive ways, loading ramps, car sized LNG tanks, etc.
by bikenaga | 2025-12-16 22:54:13+00:00
Abstract: "Wildfire activity has increased dramatically in the western United States over the last three decades, having a significant impact on air quality and human health. However, quantifying the drivers of trends in wildfires and subsequent smoke concentrations is challenging, as both natural variability (NV) and anthropogenic climate change (ACC) play important roles. Here, we devise an approach involving observed meteorology and vegetation and a range of models to determine the relative roles of ACC and NV in driving burned area across the western United States. We also examine the influence of ACC on smoke concentrations. We estimate that ACC accounts for 33 to 82% of observed total burned area, depending on the ecoregion, yielding 65% of total fire emissions on average across the western United States from 1992 to 2020. In all ecoregions except Mediterranean California, ACC contributes to a greater percentage of burned area in lightning-ignited wildfires than in human-ignited wildfires. On average, ACC contributes 49% to smoke PM2.5 concentrations in the western United States from 1997 to 2020, and explains 58% of the increasing trend in smoke PM2.5 from 2010 to 2020. Northern California and areas in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho experience the greatest smoke concentrations attributable to ACC, averaging 40 to 66% of total PM2.5 over 2010–2020. Our work highlights the significant role of ACC in degrading air quality in the western United States and identifies those regions most vulnerable to wildfire smoke and thus adverse health impacts."
by adolph | 2025-12-16 22:54:18+00:00
> Laotians smile the 3rd most, but are also among the angriest

From "Be Careful Where You Smile: Culture Shapes Judgments of Intelligence and Honesty of Smiling Individuals"

Although numerous studies confirm that positive perceptions of smiling individuals seem to be universal, anecdotal evidence suggests that in some cultures the opposite may be true. For example, a well-known Russian proverb says ‘Улыбкa, бeз пpичины - пpизнaк дypaчины’ (smiling with no reason is a sign of stupidity). The Norwegian government humorously explains nuances of Norwegian culture by indicating that when a stranger on the street smiles at Norwegians, they may assume that the stranger is insane

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4840223/
by mirashii | 2025-12-16 22:54:27+00:00
> Do library authors have to test against every type checker to ensure maximum compatibility?

Yes, but in practice, the ecosystem mostly tests against mypy. pyright has been making some inroads, mostly because it backs the diagnostics of the default VS Code Python extension.

> Do application developers need to limit their use of libraries to ones that support their particular choice of type checker?

You can provide your own type stubs instead of using the library's built-in types or existing stubs.
by daheza | 2025-12-16 22:54:33+00:00
If the US actually cared about retaining jobs for the people they would enforce ratios of onshore / offshore with heavy taxes if companies did not reach that ratio.

Companies don't want to pay US salaries, cost of living in the US are not going down, costs of engineering talent in India is cheaper, you can hire 2 devs for the cost of 1 US dev. Why would you ever have any US engineering devs?

It won't change organically unless the costs of India engineers goes up or the costs of US engineers goes down.