MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Dylan16807 | 2025-12-19 22:59:32+00:00
I question that math. Erasure coding needs less than half as much space as replication, and imposes pretty small costs itself. Maybe we can say the difference is irrelevant if storage prices will drop 4x over the next five years? But looking at pricing trends right now... that's not likely. Hard drives and SSDs are about the same price they were 5 years ago. The 5 years before that SSDs were seeing good advancements, but hard drive prices only advanced 2x.
by dpark | 2025-12-19 23:00:13+00:00
It’s illuminating and sad to piece together the picture of what you actually want. You mention dictatorship being better than democracy and then talk about “polycentric law” which seems to basically be sovereign citizen stuff. And then you trot out Weaver who was specifically under siege for refusing to appear on charges of dealing illegal arms to white suprematists.

You don’t have a problem with democracy. You’re just a white supremacist. You want a white dictator so you don’t have to worry about the voting rights of minorities or whites who might be sympathetic to minorities.
by toast0 | 2025-12-19 23:00:16+00:00
It's not really wrong. For something like redis, you could potentially fork and the child gets stuck for a long time and in the meantime the whole cache in the parent is rewritten. In that case, even though the cache is fixed size / no new allocations, all of the pages are touched and so the total used memory is double from before the fork. If you want to guarantee allocation failures rather than demand paging failures, and you don't have enough ram/swap to back twice the allocations, you must fail the fork.

On the other hand, if you have a pretty good idea that the child will finish persisting and exit before the cache is fully rewritten, double is too much. There's not really a mechanism for that though. Even if you could set an optimistic multiplier for multiple mapped CoW pages, you're back to demand paging failures --- although maybe it's still worthwhile.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-12-19 23:01:01+00:00
Yes, heavily, because of the use of adjectives and repeating the points.

Here, I'll emphasize the words that elicit the tone:

> After some basic reversing of the Tapo Android app, I found out that TP-Link have their entire firmware repository in an open S3 bucket. No authentication required. So, you can list and download every version of every firmware they’ve ever released for any device they ever produced: [command elided] The entire output is here, for the curious. This provides access to the firmware image of every TP-Link device - routers, cameras, smart plugs, you name it. A reverse engineer’s candy store.

Highlighting (repeatedly) the ease and breadth of access is a basic writing technique to illustrate the weakness of a security system.
by kahlonel | 2025-12-19 23:02:40+00:00
Embedded software developer here, with very minimal professional hardware design experience. I mostly write nostdlib C, and never use malloc. I write peripheral drivers from scratch even if there’s an “SDK” for it. I spend almost 40% of my time reading documentation, 30% scribbling state machines, 15% writing code and 15% testing it on hardware. LLMs don’t help me much. I use them to write scripts for me to parse my stdout and find patterns. For breakfast, I fight EEs to prove their hardware doesn’t work. I have exploded hardware setups for the products I’m developing for on my desk. JLink is the favorite thing in my aresenal. Even the slightest latency on my text editor annoys the shit out of me, which is why I don’t use IDEs.
by fragmede | 2025-12-19 23:02:54+00:00
Where's the beautiful human generated code? There's the IOCCC but that's the only code comleo that's a competition based on the code itself, and it's not even a beauty pageant. There's some demo scene stuff, which is more of a golf thing. There's random one-offs, like not-Carmack's inverse square, or Duff's device, but other than that, where're the good code beauty pageants?
by justsomehnguy | 2025-12-19 23:04:05+00:00
Heh, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007814

But yes, while there is a heavy skew to the web tech., there are enough of people who do the things.

Currently I'm roped to my old hat of a typical SMB sysadmin and.. there are not fun 5hings for the profession.
by jmkni | 2025-12-19 23:04:10+00:00
I'm not sure what the answer is, but honestly I think it's good you are asking these questions, we all should be.

All of us are getting these AI tools chucked at us by our managers and being told to do "do AI"...how? Why??

We're in the same boat, we have access to all of the models, all of the tools, the AI budget is there, what the fuck do we do with it?
by spankalee | 2025-12-19 23:04:22+00:00
When the web came out it itself was new technology that excluded some older machines. Lynx kind of worked (I used it!) but it was a poor substitute, especially once `<img>` showed up.

You want to platform to be able to make progress and not be frozen in amber by what we had at some "magical" year when things were in some Golidlocks powerful enough but not too complex state. Especially since a lot of progress lately has been fixing long-standing inconsistencies and obvious gaps.

The cost of that is that yes, neither my Apple IIe or my Micro Pentium 90 run the modern web... one day my MBP M1 won't either.
by kenjackson | 2025-12-19 23:04:47+00:00
It does attack the supply chain. It attacks the provider of documentation. It's an attack on the documentation supply chain.

It would be like if you could provide a Windows Update link that went to Windows Update, but you could specify Windows Update to retrieve files from some other share that the malicious actor had control of. It's the same thing, except rather than it being a binary rather it is documentation.
by advisedwang | 2025-12-19 23:05:11+00:00
The GDPR (in art 32) only requires that "the controller and the processor shall implement appropriate technical and organisational measures to ensure a level of security appropriate to the risk". I expect it's quite common for a company to get hacked even if they meet that level. I think the parent comment was imagining that any leak is automatically fined, regardless of whether the company had met some security requirement.
by miiiiiike | 2025-12-19 23:05:18+00:00
Yeah, there was a years long debate that effectively ended with: “We held a vote that you weren’t aware of and decided that masonry was out. If you cared, you should have participated in the vote that you were not aware was happening. It’s too late to change it.”

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yikbSQ6tvlE
by igor47 | 2025-12-19 23:05:46+00:00
But again, it's only associated with tech millionaires because reporters make the association to helpfully enable their readers to hate stuff! Engaging negative emotions -- you know, the thing modern media does best!

In my mind, EA is associated with Peter Singer and William MacAskill, some of the most powerful voices in contemporary philosophy, people whose work inspired me to think morally about my own choices, and who beyond being academics safe in their ivory towers founded a practical movement which has saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

I am doggedly pursing this thread because it encapsulates everything that's wrong with our modern times. We must regain the ability to organize into movements, otherwise those tech bosses we both dislike will rule us each separately. We must uplift moral courage, standing by convictions, and doing doing good in the world, otherwise the forces of nihilism (such as Trumpism) will destroy all that we hold dear, including the ability to hold things dear. We must make common cause, and not get torn apart by the narcissism of small differences. We must popularize doing good, and I don't see anyone else doing as, ahem, effective a job as EA.

I'm not the one tribalizing the topic! I'm not even a member of any EA club or group! I just want to end the casual hate, like what's exhibited in TFA. Why is it so hard to acknowledge that the movement on the whole has done more good than harm, even if some questionable individuals have used the movement as a cover for bad choices?
by barfoure | 2025-12-19 23:06:16+00:00
I disagree with this article and what it attempts to do: frame the acquisition using a conjecture. The only thing to “believe” are the authors reasons - which are flimsy, because they are the very thing we need to be critical of.

I don’t know why the acquisition happened, or what the plans are. But it did happen, and for this we don’t have to suspend disbelief. I don’t doubt Anthropic has plans that they would rather not divulge. This isn’t a big stretch of imagination, either.

We will see how things play out, but people are definitely being displaced by AI software doing work, and people are productive with them. I know I am. The user count of Claude Code, Gemini and ChatGPT don’t lie, so let’s not kid ourselves.
by nphardon | 2025-12-19 23:06:37+00:00
This seems wild to me; would lovvvvve to peak at your codebase.

I'm in old school tech in the semiconductor industry. I do a heavy hybrid of pair-coding / vibe coding with my LLM in VsCode, 8 hours a day, across a wide spectrum of tasks. I am always working in C, alternating between implementing a new algorithm, testing, correcting, and analyzing some new technical algorithms either from literature or in house, and then refactoring old bad code written by EE folks 30 years ago (like 100+ line for loops). But I handle all unit tests myself and all code commits myself. I need to get my bot running the unit tests.

I would not be surprised if less than 1/4 my colleagues use an llm agent.
by ecshafer | 2025-12-19 23:07:03+00:00
Yes. The active passive citizen distinction is an important aspect of representative democracy. This was foundational per the federalist papers and the enlightenment at large. Kant enunerates the active vs passive distinction in “Doctrine of Right” and “Theory and Practice”. The US has many issues largely stemming from moving away from active citizen distinctions. If I were to have it my way we would raise the requirement and burden of both voting and office to eliminate the passive citizens from having as much say, and the leaches in office.
by rssoconnor | 2025-12-19 23:09:10+00:00
Sure, I get that most humans aren't programmers, but the thrust of the article here is defending the position that "AI Can Write Your Code. [It Can’t Do Your Job.]" However, this task is literally the sort of code that I write. So if AI cannot do the above task, then AI cannot (yet) write my code.

I don't know what other programmers are doing, but a lot of my time is spent on tasks like this.

Here's another random task: Write an analytic ray - cubic Bézier patch intersection routine based on the based on the "Ray Tracing Parametric Patches", SIGGRAPH 82 paper. This is a task I did as part of my final project for my undergraduate graphics class.

These are both straightforward tasks to take well-described existing algorithms from literature and implement them concretely. Very few design choices to consider. In theory it ought to be right up the alley for what AI is supposedly good for.
by quickthrowman | 2025-12-19 23:09:17+00:00
‘Telematics’ is not how the word ‘insurance’ is spelled. Anyone that owns an uninsured car or home that cannot afford to replace a total loss or hundreds of thousands of dollars in medical bills in the case of a major accident is negligent. Anyone without wealth lacking health insurance is negligent.

Having sensor logs of the space temp and CO2 ppm in your house when it’s burning down isn’t going to help you at all.

Car telemetry might help diagnose car issues, but I’m not aware of manufacturers using it that way, I’ve heard plenty about selling location data and driving habits.

Constantly monitoring your heart rate and blood pressure sounds like a good way to develop hypochondria.
by alexfoo | 2025-12-19 23:09:45+00:00
A friend once asked me to do some pen-testing on a machine he was running on his home network. He said I'd need to come round to his house to do this as he didn't want to provide access to the machine via the Internet. Fair enough.

When he opened his front door the conversation went something like this:

Him: "Ah hello, thanks for coming round to do this. It should be fun, come in and we can get started." Me: "OK, but I'm already done." Him: "What?" Me: "I'm done. I've already got root on the machine and I left a little text file in root's home directory as proof." Him: "What? But ... what? Wifi?" Me: "Nope. Let me in and I'll explain how."

The short story is he had an PoE IP-based intercom system on his front gate. I remembered this from when he was going on about his plans for his home network setup and how amazing PoE was and how he was going to have several cameras etc. I also remember seeing the purple network cable sticking out of the gate pillar whilst the renovation work was being done and the intercom hadn't yet been installed.

I'd arrived 45 minutes early, unscrewed the faceplate of the intercom system and, with a bit of wiggling, I got access to a lovely Cat-5 ethernet jack. Plugging that into my laptop I was able to see his entire home network, the port for the intercom was obviously not on its own VLAN. Finding and rooting the target machine was a different matter but those details are not relevant to this story.

I suppose I got lucky. He could have put the IoT devices on separate VLANs. He could have had some alerting setup so that he'd be notified that the intercom system had suddenly gone offline. He could have limited access to the important internal machines to a known subset of IPs/ports/networks.

He learned about all of the above mitigations that day.

I've always wondered just how many people have exposed their own internal network in a similar way when trying to improve their external security (well, deterrent, not really security) but configuring it poorly.
by dctoedt | 2025-12-19 23:09:56+00:00
> [GIF has a hard G]

Glad I preserved a tweet that commented on a subheadline at The Verge from when the creator of the GIF died:

Subheadline from The Verge: "It's pronounced 'jif'"

Tweet: "I guess he's with jod now"

https://toedtclassnotes.site44.com/#orgdf3fc45
by anonymous908213 | 2025-12-19 23:10:08+00:00
You mentioned a used model that is over 5 years old as an example of "a new computer", and "1k" as "not expensive for consumers". It is honestly impressive how well you undermined your own point.

> If enough consumers aren't able to use the website, then business wouldn't use it.

I sincerely doubt any business owner would approve of losing even 10% of their potential users/customers if they knew that was the trade-off for their web developer choosing to use this feature, but there are disconnects in communication about these kinds of things -- if the web developer even knows about compatibility issues themselves, which you would expect from any competent web developer, but there are a whole lot of incompetent web developers in the wild who won't even think about things like this.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-12-19 23:10:11+00:00
I’m still not clear if it’s going to deliver the unique layers to you?

If you set a variable layers of 5 for example will it determine what is on each layer, or do I need to prompt that?

And I assume you need enough VRAM because each layer will be effectively a whole image in pixel or latent space… so if I have a 1MP image, and 5 layers I would likely need to be able to fit a 5MP image in VRAM?

Or if this can be multiple steps, where I wouldn’t need all 5 layers in active VRAM, that the assembly is another step at the end after generating on one layer?
by magmostafa | 2025-12-19 23:10:24+00:00
We've found success using a hybrid approach with LLMs in our codebase:

1. Context-aware prompting: We maintain a .ai-context folder with architecture docs, coding standards, and common patterns. Before asking the LLM anything, we feed it relevant context from these docs.

2. Incremental changes: Rather than asking for large refactors, we break tasks into small, testable chunks. This makes code review much easier and reduces the "black box" problem.

3. Test-first development: We ask the LLM to write tests before implementation. This helps ensure it understands requirements correctly and gives us confidence in the generated code.

4. Custom linting rules: We've encoded our team's conventions into ESLint/Pylint rules. LLMs respect these better than prose guidelines.

5. Review templates: We have standardized PR templates that specifically call out "AI-generated code" sections for closer human review.

The key insight: LLMs work best as pair programmers, not autonomous developers. They're excellent at boilerplate, test generation, and refactoring suggestions, but need human oversight for architectural decisions.

One surprising benefit: junior devs learn faster by reviewing LLM-generated code with seniors, compared to just reading documentation.
by cldellow | 2025-12-19 23:11:00+00:00
Ha, what a coincidence. Just today I was reading a three year old Stackoverflow discussion about this [1].

It prompted Laurenz to submit the documentation patch that is cited in the article. In the discussion of the patch itself, people seem to conclude that it's a good improvement to the docs, but that the behaviour itself is a bit of a footgun. [2]

[1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/73951604/autovacuum-and-...

[2]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/Y8cQJIMFAe7QT73/%40mom...
by dabockster | 2025-12-19 23:12:20+00:00
> I think Firefox has a sizable minority of users that are aware of its importance

Agreed.

> and would donate for "a fucking browser".

Hard disagree. Especially when you consider that much of Firefox's use likely comes from countries that tend to opportunistically freeload whenever they can. Idk if your donation-only idea would even work for the US and Canada alone.
by Delk | 2025-12-19 23:12:44+00:00
For what it's worth, my computer science degree also had courses and projects that included requirements analysis, breaking down the problem, and elements of software engineering methodology and project management. (I believe we had a course titled "software engineering" even though the university doesn't award engineering degrees.)

I suppose in some schools computer science programmes might be fairly distinct from engineering ones. However, it seems that in lots of places a bachelor's in computer science is rather an generalist degree that covers lots of (mostly software) tech topics and some CS theory.

I'd still have trouble calling myself a software engineer, though, since I don't technically have an engineering degree, even though in lots of places my job might be described as such.

I also don't know a single programmer/developer whose job is distinct from field 2.
by clbrmbr | 2025-12-19 23:13:47+00:00
Heavy but manual Claude Code usage, always with —dangerously-skip-permissions which makes it an entirety different experience.

I learned a lot from IndyDevDan’s videos on YT. Despite his sensationalism, he does quick reviews of new CC features that you just have to see to understand.

Claude Code has replaced my IDE, though I do a little vim here and there.

My favorite is Claude’s ability to do code archeology: finding exactly when & where who changed what and why.

You do need to be careful of high-level co-hallucination though.
by LeoPanthera | 2025-12-19 23:14:04+00:00
You mean the latest masterpiece of fantasy storytelling from Lucasfilms™ Brian Moriarty™? Why it's an extraordinary adventure with an interface of magic, stunning high-resolution, 3D landscapes, sophisticated score and musical effects. Not to mention the detailed animation and special effects, elegant point 'n' click control of characters, objects, and magic spells. Beat the rush! Go out and buy Loom™ today!
by acdha | 2025-12-19 23:14:09+00:00
> Is this increasing complexity in the Web layout world worth it? Anyone who wants to use this is going to drop support for older browsers (and, in so doing, older machines that can't run newer OSes and newer browsers).

If you’ve been at this for a while, it’s important to remember that browsers update a lot faster than they used to. Anchor positioning came out last year, for example, and all of the major browsers support it by now. Very old devices are a problem but security is purging those out faster than used to be the case.

We also have better tools for progressive adoption since you can easily query for things like CSS feature support. In this demo, they didn’t implement fallbacks but in most real sites you’d have something like a basic grid layout which is perfectly serviceable for the fraction of users on old Firefox releases.
by mattmanser | 2025-12-19 23:14:40+00:00
Yes, I do have a map of the code in my head of any code base I work on. I know where most of the files are of the main code paths and if you describe the symptoms of a bug I can often tell you the method or even the line that's probably causing it if it's a 'hot' path.

Isn't that what we mean by 'learning' a codebase? I know my ability is supercharged compared to most devs, but most colleagues have it to some extent and I've met some devs with an even more impressive ability for it than me so it's not like I'm a magic unicorn. Ironically, I have a terrible memory for a lot of other things, especially 'facts'.

You can sorta make a crappy version of that for AI agents with agent files and skills.
by UniverseHacker | 2025-12-19 23:14:46+00:00
There are a few free apps that will teach it, I have used the “Advanced Buteyko” ios app.

If you demand extensive peer reviewed medical evidence of some specific quantified outcome before doing any activity in life you will miss quite a lot of valuable things that can’t be easily quantified or measured, or funded academically. There is however actually a lot of medical research on breathwork like this, they just will use the technical terms for what you are actually doing instead of a name like Buteyko.
by belter | 2025-12-19 23:15:05+00:00
"Jeffrey Epstein Advised Sergey Brin With Tax Shelter" - https://www.wsj.com/finance/jeffrey-epstein-advised-sergey-b...

"Google Co-Founder Sergey Brin, Ex-Wife Vacationed On Epstein Island" - https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/google-co-founder-sergey-bri...
by TallGuyShort | 2025-12-19 23:15:11+00:00
It's more efficient anyway because the inference is what everyone will use for forecasting. Researchers will be using huge amounts of compute to develop better models, but that's also currently the case, and it isn't the majority of weather simulation use.

There's an interesting parallel to Formula One, where there are limits on the computational resources teams can use to design their cars, and where they can use an aerodynamic model that was previously trained to get pretty good outcomes with less compute use in the actual design phase.
by gryzzly | 2025-12-19 23:16:02+00:00
I have a close friend who got her pretty hardcore asthma and nasal issues under control over last year. Her quality of life improved dramatically after doing this thing – I tried some basic first exercises and I felt there is some practical resemblance to breathing meditation. Anyway, I am planning to get more into it and would definitely recommend it if you upper respiratory issues have strong negative effects on your life.
by dabockster | 2025-12-19 23:16:43+00:00
> It is a wonderful world fill of variety, choice and diversity

Desktop Linux is a dysfunctional dumpster fire that cyber bullies anyone that even suggests building code to a specific OS.

Remember that Linux is just the kernel, not the whole OS. The fact that a program written for Ubuntu, for example, can even run on another Linux based OS is a happy coincidence and should not be an expectation.