MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ACCount37 | 2025-12-07 09:27:35+00:00
Broadly, yes.

The groundwork for this kind of "matching" process is: sourcing odd versions of the obscure tooling that was used to build the target software 20 years ago, and playing with the flag combinations to find out which was used.

It helps that compilers back then were far less complex than those of today, and so was the code itself. But it's still not a perfect process.

There are cases of "flaky" code - for example, code that depends on the code around it. So you change one function, and that causes 5 other functions to no longer match, and 2 functions to go from not matching to matching instead.

Figuring out and resolving those strange dependencies is not at all trivial, so a lot of decompliation efforts end up wrapping it up at some "100% functional, 99%+ matching".
by throwawayqqq11 | 2025-12-07 09:28:21+00:00
Easier access does lower the bar for amateurs and increase the risk of damage but these are two separate things.

GP said architects should anticipate bad actors and i'd add a "no matter their size". Putting the chokolate milk high up the shelf helps as long as children are small and dumb. Security by too-high-cost only effects poor, lone and unimaginative actors.
by yard2010 | 2025-12-07 09:30:46+00:00
I thought about it - a quick way to verify whether something was created with LLM is to feed an LLM half of the text and then let it complete token by token. Every completion, check not just for the next token but the next n-probable tokens. If one of them is the one you have in the text, pick it and continue. This way, I think, you can identify how much the model is "correct" by predicting the text it hasn't yet seen.

I didn't test it and I'm far from an expert, maybe someone can challenge it?
by klauserc | 2025-12-07 09:30:56+00:00
The best way to get an LLM to follow style is to make sure that this style is evident in the codebase. Excessive instructions (whether through memories or AGENT.md) do not help as much.

Personally, I absolutely hate instructing agents to make corrections. It's like pushing a wet noodle. If there is lots to correct, fix one or two cases manually and tell the LLM to follow that pattern.

https://www.humanlayer.dev/blog/writing-a-good-claude-md
by wjnc | 2025-12-07 09:31:42+00:00
To defend OP somewhat: his throw out should be someone else’s pre-owned and then we are square.

Not in defense: This is a customer who sees itself as an ultra pro user that only wants the best on all dimensions regardless of economics. Nice that there are about a few hundred of these customers in the world. This is a market that doesn’t exist and frankly, give this customer their wish and they only have other or more wishes.
by relistan | 2025-12-07 09:32:34+00:00
Way back, Perl got off the ground really because, in contrast to the C compilers of the era, code written on one Unix ran on the others, usually unmodified. In my first jobs, where we had heterogeneous mixes of commercial Unixes, this was unbeatable. It also wrote like higher level shell, which made it easy to learn for systems people, who really were the only ones that cared about running things on multiple platforms most of the time anyway.

As things became more homogeneous, and furthermore as other languages also could do that “one weird trick” of cross platform support, the shortcomings of both Perl and its community came to the fore.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-07 09:32:38+00:00
Stallman has been right so many times, usually decades ahead of time. On each hype cycle when most of us were bewildering at the latest shiny thing, Stallman was spelling out exactly how companies would use it to exploit us. And I'm not talking about obvious garbage with zero upside like crypto and IoT, I'm talking about more subtle hype that actually did have a degree of upside, like the cloud or javascript for example. I think he deserves a little bit more respect than that. I'm not saying "lets suspend our critical thinking and just follow whatever RMS says", I'm saying "this guy has been decades ahead of time in the most fundamental matters like morality and justice, lets give his quirkness a little leeway".
by rendall | 2025-12-07 09:33:11+00:00
Thanks for sharing your experience That sounds really unsettling to go through. I’m glad things have improved for you, but episodes that feel psychotic can be important to look into, since there can be many possible causes, not all of them related to food. If you ever feel comfortable doing so, talking with a medical professional could help make sure nothing else is going on in the background. Everyone’s body is different, and you know your experience best. I just hope you can get clarity and support so things keep moving in a good direction.
by em500 | 2025-12-07 09:33:33+00:00
This essay seems to be missing the main primary references for literate programming:

https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/cs257/archive/literate-programm...

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/lp.html

Knuths intention seems clear enough in his own writing:

Literate programming is a methodology that combines a programming language with a documentation language, thereby making programs more robust, more portable, more easily maintained, and arguably more fun to write than programs that are written only in a high-level language. The main idea is to treat a program as a piece of literature, addressed to human beings rather than to a computer.

and

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs: Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do, let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.
by skinnymuch | 2025-12-07 09:34:18+00:00
Would you consider a “charity” for Nazis or for an org that has killed and maimed tens upon tens of thousands of children to be a good thing or even charity?

The listed criteria for what they evaluate is not what the issue is. Did you check Charity Navigator? An org that focuses on abusing kittens will be evaluated as good by them as long as its governance is by the books.

Wikipedia regardless is not something that should be cited directly when it comes to anything remotely political.
by jalapenos | 2025-12-07 09:34:26+00:00
One wonders then for what...

If the money holders no longer need plebs for anything because AIs can do it all, what role do the plebs play? Why give them any of the money, and therefore what value has money?

Are they reduced to say gladiators and pornstars, observed for entertainment by the AI-owning class, in exchange for enough food to live
by viraptor | 2025-12-07 09:35:46+00:00
It's such a silly idea that whatever is simulating us would be in any way similar or care about what's possible in our universe. It's like a game of life glider thinking it can't be simulated because someone would have to know what's beyond the neighbouring cells and that's impossible! But the host universe just keeps chugging along unimpressed by our proofs.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-07 09:36:57+00:00
There's no reason such a laptop can't be repairable. Sure, it may be harder to do, but that's the tradeoff you choose when buying such a device.

The main obstacles to repairability in such devices are intentional: part serialization, lack of documentation, and so on. Those don't help making the device any more compact or easier to manufacture, it's pure greed.

Address those problems and you can happily have your ultra-slim, tightly integrated laptop. It may be slightly less repairable, but as long as repair isn't intentionally being prevented, life will find a way.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-12-07 09:36:58+00:00
I think it’s really revealing to see so many folks defending views like “hunter gathering was better” and “the past wasn’t dickensian.”

I remember the first time I encountered the former view from a person, they were an artist living in London and a communist. I nearly spat out my beer when he told me that hunter gathering was a better life for humans.

It seems to be some kind of desire to rage against progress, because industrialisation brings many downsides e.g, pollution climate change etc. Maybe because they hate the rich and powerful capitalists that rule the world.

But what they always miss from their arguments is a clear conception of just how incredibly privileged and fortunate they are to be born into an industrialised society. People are very very bad at appreciating what they are given, it seems to be an innate human trait to exhibit breathtaking ingratitude for what already is. We’re pretty good at anticipating and appreciating the new, but if it’s already there then, like a spoilt child living in a luxury home, we take it for granted.

I think one solution to this problem is to remove as many comforts from your life, temporarily. For example, for a week in winter don’t use your heating or hot water. For me, it was travelling to poor countries and living without potable or warm water, decent transport, good food, etc. that made me grateful (at least for a while).
by uecker | 2025-12-07 09:37:04+00:00
I plan to be writing C for the next decades even for new projects, because I think it is a great language, and I appreciate its simplicity, fast compilation times, stability, and portability.

I am happy if people are excited about Rust, but I do not like it too much myself. Although I acknowledge that it contains good ideas, it also has many aspects I find problematic and which why I do not think we should all switch to it as a replacement for C.
by thristian | 2025-12-07 09:37:15+00:00
In 1983, AT&T released the fifth version of Unix, called "System V". Part of the release was an ABI specification for how the different parts of the system would talk to one another. Notably, the main portion of the spec described portable things like the file-format of executables, and the details for each supported platform were described in appendixes.

The SysV ABI is still used to this day, although the specification itself has withered until only two chapters remain[1], and CPU vendors still publish "System V ABI appendix" documents for platforms that System V's authors could not have dreamed of[2].

C as an interface is going to be around for a very long time, like POSIX and OpenGL and the SysV ABI standard. C as an actual language might not - it might wind up as a set of variable types that other languages can map into and out of, like what happened to the rest of the SysV ABI specification.

[1]: https://www.sco.com/developers/gabi/latest/contents.html

[2]: https://wiki.osdev.org/System_V_ABI#Documents
by hakky54 | 2025-12-07 09:37:42+00:00
A CLI tool to extract server certificates. Changes for this new version are:

- Added support for: - wss (WebSocket Secure) - ftps (File Transfer Protocol Secure) - smtps (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol Secure) - imaps (Internet Message Access Protocol Secure) - Bumped dependencies - Added filtering option (leaf, intermediate, root) - Added Java DSL - Support for Cyrillic characters on Windows
by Madmallard | 2025-12-07 09:37:48+00:00
I wrote an entire multiplayer game in XNA that I've tried repeatedly to get LLMs to translate to javascript

it's just utterly hopeless how bad they are at doing it

even if I break it down into parts once you get into the stuff that actually matters i.e. the physics, event handling, and game logic induced by events, it just completely falls apart 100% of the time
by skissane | 2025-12-07 09:37:56+00:00
> The idea in the article would refute the inductive step.

No it doesn't. The article describes a proof that it is impossible for a computer to simulate this physical universe with perfect accuracy; but, that's not actually a problem for Nick Bostrom's simulation argument. For the simulation argument to work, you don't need to simulate the universe with perfect accuracy – just with sufficient accuracy that your simulated people can't distinguish it from a real one. And this proof isn't about "ability to simulate a universe to the point the simulated people can't tell that it is a simulation", it is about "ability to simulate a universe with perfect accuracy". So the proof isn't actually relevant to that argument at all.
by bamboozled | 2025-12-07 09:38:22+00:00
I sheltered at the base of these things once, we reached the summit and the wind became quite intense. It was too cold and windy to get our skins off to ski down. We couldn’t see anything either. We huddled in the hollows that formed around the downwind side around the base and got changed over and then Ski’d down. In hindsight it probably wasn’t dangerous as we were dressed for it, but it was scary, the wind was truly formidable. We lost a few items that flew away.

They are enormous in real life and it’s amazing the trunks don’t break as they sway in the wind.

Worth seeing in real life if in the area.
by icemelt8 | 2025-12-07 09:38:35+00:00
> I’m typing this blog on a HP ZBook Ultra G1a 14. Question to HP, who names this crap? Why do these companies insist on having the most confusing product lineups and names.

The reason is that they are not serious companies, this is why anything other than a real macbook and with a real macOS is not worth having spent time on.
by jasonvorhe | 2025-12-07 09:38:35+00:00
Who cares about a single or two Yachts. Ukraine likely made 100 billion USD disappear and there were many people expecting just that. Just like some of the "donated equipment" started showing up on all sorts of black markets once it was shipped to Ukraine. It's just the obviously controlled media in Europe that stopped mentioning Ukraine's corruption issues right after February 2022.

Obviously I can only be a Putin-loving propaganda bot for saying such things.
by bazoom42 | 2025-12-07 09:39:22+00:00
As far back as we have written records, we have the notion that people in past were better and more honest and the present day is corrupted.

Classical antiquity had the notion of a lost golden age and a heroic age in past, while later times considered the classical antiquity as the lost golden age. Victorians romanticized the middle ages, while we romantisize the victorians.

It is just easier to see the flaws and imperfections in the present. And there is the survivorship bias: Quality products and buildings survive, while low quality crap is destroyed and lost. The swords survive but the pointy sticks are lost. The good music survive but the crap is forgotten.
by mschuster91 | 2025-12-07 09:39:38+00:00
> They send current pulses down the line to detect stuck switches, since stuck switches can cause collisions.

That's not done in any European rail network I am aware of. The switches have, well, switches that confirm if the mechanical end positions have been reached, but there is no confirmation by current pulses on the actual rails themselves.

> Also, the pulses are conducted through the wheels and axles of any trains, so they can use resistance and/or timing to figure out where the trains are.

That technology is, at least in Germany, being phased out in favor of axle counters at the begin and end of each section, partially because axle counters allow speed and direction feedback, partially because it can be unsafe - a single locomotive braking with sand may yield a false-free signal when sand or leaves prevent the current passing from one rail to the other.
by nehal3m | 2025-12-07 09:42:06+00:00
Part of their magic is the integration with the operating system in the form of gestures. Their UI for discovering those used to be stellar; every gesture had a little video preview. Right now I'd describe it as just okay. Check the 'trackpad gestures' section in system settings, or this: https://support.apple.com/en-us/102482
by ares623 | 2025-12-07 09:42:23+00:00
Yeesss this is what I’ve been (semi-sarcastically) thinking about. Historically it’s one author and one reviewer before code gets shipped.

Why introduce a second reviewer and reduce the rumoured velocity gained by LLMs? After all, “it doesn’t matter what wrote the code” right.

I say let her rip. Or as the kids say, code goes brrr.
by simonask | 2025-12-07 09:42:34+00:00
It's fine as long as the graph of references is immutable, or is unidirectional/acyclic with unique ownership.

If you have backreferences or "parent pointers", you need `Arc<Mutex<...>>` or `Rc<RefCell<...>>`, and then you run into trouble as you encounter the same node multiple times while traversing the graph, because you cannot hold a mutex lock or mutably borrow `RefCell` twice in the same call stack.

The solution with much less resistance in Rust is to go for a data-oriented representation. If you really need an actual graph of objects, separate the node data from the topology metadata, and refer to the nodes using an ID or index. (As an extra bonus, this also gives you much better cache locality.)
by emsign | 2025-12-07 09:43:04+00:00
For specific music Discogs.org is a very good marketplace. It's not free, it's a second hand marketplace, people don't give away things, but prices aren't worse than retail except for actually rare collector's stuff. But I've used it a lot to fill in the gaps in some artists' discography. Also older CDs are usually mastered with a bigger dynamic range, so they sound better on music hardware with a functioning volume knob. ;) So I much prefer buying original CD releases versus re-releases of an album on CDs anyway.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-07 09:43:15+00:00
> I wager that it's a status thing.

Yes, it's a form of signaling. It's like a milloinaire showing "I have so much money that I can dump 10k on a Rolex and not even think about it", or a billionaire showing "I have so much money I don't even need to dump 10k on a Rolex to show how much money I have". These guy's version is "I'm so technically accomplished, that I can tell you I don't know X basic thing and you'll interpret it as a sign of my genius".

That's ok. In our society we attribute too much importance on money, I don't mind if the likes of Stallman and Linus get a bit more fanhood from the wider society than they currently do.
by wiseowise | 2025-12-07 09:45:08+00:00
> The case against complex UI hides the fact that nobody wants to take their time to learn a piece of software anymore. Attention spans are so short, if the system doesn't do all the thinking for you, why bother with it? We are just moving the human laziness through another layer of indirection. The fact never changed in the past 30 years: some domains are complicated and you need smart people on both ends who can bridge the gaps. The dream has always been the same with nocode, lowcode and whatever, it doesn't change this fundamental flaw.

This has nothing to do with laziness or attention span. 20 years ago you'd have maybe a dozen programs tops to juggle and they were much better designed, because they were made by people who actually use the software instead of some bored designer at FAANG sweatshop who operates on metrics. Now you have 3-5 chat clients, 20 different web UIs for everything on 3 different OSs, all with different shortcuts. And on top of that it CONSTANTLY changes (looking at you Android and material 3).

5 things deserve knowing in-depth: browser (not a specific website, but browser itself), text editor, Spreadsheet application, terminal and whatever else software you use to put a bread on your table.

For any VCs that seriously think I'll invest non-trivial amount of time into learning their unique™ software – you're delusional. Provide shortcuts that resemble browser/vim/emacs/vscode and don't waste yours and my time.
by sunshine-o | 2025-12-07 09:45:11+00:00
> The didnt invest for decades, so structures in the background to handle all those additional young recruits are no more existing.

Yes but remember that was the point.

The career and trained militaries were spending most of their time schooling young people and were not focusing on capabilities. This is why most countries put an end on that nonsense.

So right now you can be sure an enormous amount of personnel in the German army switched focused on running this new "Voluntary service". A voluntary service which will produce at best 1% of workable soldiers.

This makes no sense.
by pmontra | 2025-12-07 09:45:16+00:00
Most likely that photo would have been on film in 2002. Shoot it, then wait to shoot all the pictures on the roll, bring the roll to a shop, get the prints, either scan the screenshot or mail it, with a stamp. A Polaroid would cut most of the wait time to zero. Anyway, still a lot of trouble compared to a few years later.

By the way, I think RMS doesn't have a mobile phone even now. Somebody's else could have taken a picture for him. Phones with cameras were not common back then because what would you do with it on GSM?
by watwut | 2025-12-07 09:45:24+00:00
> because almost no one had the money to decorate intentionally

Poor people always decorated and still do. There is basically no larger human culture where decorations dont take a place. The only ones I can think of are small religious orders that dont decorate to deprieve themselves.

You go to any poor area and see dirt, mess, issues and people showing off decorations in their houses or on themselves.
by anonymous908213 | 2025-12-07 09:45:36+00:00
Whether you trust the word of the journalist has little relation to the story. The "socially acceptable lower threshold of trust" is not static for all stories; it changes depending on the stakes of the story.

Non-consequential: A photo of a cat with a funny caption. I am likely to trust the caption by default, because the energy of doubting it is not worth the stakes. If the caption is a lie, it does nothing to change my worldview or any actions I will ever take. Nobody's life will be worse off for not having spent an hour debunking an amusing story fabricated over a cat photo.

Trivially consequential: Somebody relates a story about an anonymous, random person peddling misinformation based on photos with false captions on the internet. Whether I believe that specific random person did has no bearing on anything. The factor from the story that might influence your worldview is the knowledge that there are people in the world who are so easily swayed by false captions on photos, and that itself is a trivially verifiable fact, including other people consuming the exact photo and misinformation from the story.

More consequential: Somebody makes an accusation against a world leader. This has the potential to sway opinions of many people, feeding into political decisions and international relations. The stakes are higher. It is therefore prudent not to trust without evidence of the specific accusation at hand. Providence of evidence does also matter; not everything can be concretely proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. We should not trust people blindly, but people who have a history of telling the truth are more credible than people who have a history of lying, which can influence what evidence is sufficient to reach a socially acceptable threshold of trust.
by ekjhgkejhgk | 2025-12-07 09:46:33+00:00
Nah, I think he's right, it's signaling.

I think Linus and Stallman don't have disdain for "civilians". I think Linus in particular has deep disdain for people who pretend to be competent and then are not up to scrutiny; but he doesn't have those blowouts with dumbasses that he doesn't work with.

On the other hand, someone who strikes me has having universal disdain is Carmack.
by dcanelhas | 2025-12-07 09:47:48+00:00
I think the selfishness here is related to being fine with generating a pile of electronic waste that becomes a problem for everyone else, as long as he can avoid carrying a few ounces extra.

It's hard to recycle electronics, because separating materials that are chemically bonded together is very labor intensive and isn't worth it from the price of aluminum, copper, lithium, etc alone.

It would have to cost more to dispose of a laptop for this to work out financially.