MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hansvm | 2025-12-04 04:17:29+00:00
In context (embedded programming, which in retrospect is still too big of a field for this comment to make sense by itself; what I meant was embedded programming on devices with very limited RAM or other such significant restrictions), "baggage" is the fact that you don't have many options when converting async high-level code into low-level machine code. The two normal things people write into their languages/compilers/whatever (the first being much more popular, and there do exist more than just these two options) are:

1. Your async/await syntax desugars to a state machine. The set of possible states might only be runtime-known (JS, Python), or it might be comptime-known (Rust, old-Zig, arguably new-Zig if you squint a bit). The concrete value representing the current state of that state machine is only runtime-known, and you have some sort of driver (often called an "event loop", but there are other abstractions) managing state transitions.

2. You restrict the capabilities of async/await to just those which you're able to statically (compile-time) analyze, and you require the driver (the "event loop") to be compile-time known so that you're able to desugar what looks like an async program to the programmer into a completely static, synchronous program.

On sufficiently resource-constrained devices, both of those are unworkable.

In the case of (1) (by far the most common approach, and the thing I had in mind when arguing that async has potential issues for embedded programming), you waste RAM/ROM on a more complicated program involving state machines, you waste RAM/ROM on the driver code, you waste RAM on the runtime-known states in those state machines, and you waste RAM on the runtime-known boxing of events you intend to run later. The same program (especially in an embedded context where programs tend to be simpler) can easily be written by a skilled developer in a way which avoids that overhead, but reaching for async/await from the start can prevent you from reaching your goals for the project. It's that RAM/ROM/CPU overhead that I'm talking about in the word "baggage."

In the case of (2), there are a couple potential flaws. One is just that not all reasonable programs can be represented that way (it's the same flaw with pure, non-unsafe Rust and with attempts to create languages which are known to terminate), so the technique might literally not work for your project. A second is that the compiler's interpretation of the particular control flow and jumps you want to execute will often differ from the high-level plan you had in mind, potentially creating more physical bytecode or other issues. Details matter in constrained environments.
by TZubiri | 2025-12-04 04:19:14+00:00
Because Facebook has a budget for R&D, which works out to several salaries, and React is one of the biggest technical assets they have, so it's someone full time job to develop features and new versions of React to increase the moat and stock value of Meta.

It works out because it keeps a workforce of React Developers on their feet, learning about the new features, rather than doing other stuff. It's like SaSS for developers, only instead of paying a monthly subscription in cash, you have to pay a monthly subscription in man-hours.
by bitwize | 2025-12-04 04:20:02+00:00
What Valve hasn't announced yet, but which has leaked, is "Lepton", a fork of Waydroid they're working on to enable Android gaming for Steam—in particular, getting Oculus Quest games going on the Steam Frame.

The future actually looks pretty good for indie gaming development on the Android platform, Google's shenanigans notwithstanding.
by abustamam | 2025-12-04 04:20:07+00:00
When I worked for a consulting firm some years back I randomly got put on a project that dealt with payment information. I had never had to deal with payment information before so I was a bit nervous about being compliant. I was pointed to SOC2 compliance which sounded scary. Much to my relief (and surprise), the SOC2 questionnaire was literally just what amounted to a survey monkey form. I answered as truthfully as I could and at the end it just said "congrats you're compliant!" or something to that effect.

I asked my my manager if that's all that was required and he said yes, just make sure you do it again next year. I spent the rest of my time worrying that we missed something. I genuinely didn't believe him until your comment.

Edit: missing sentence.
by 0manrho | 2025-12-04 04:20:29+00:00
What is there to sell? The brand itself has value I guess, but that "Direct Access" goes out the door the second they sell it, so there's no value specifically in that to anyone else.

Crucial is primarily a Marketing and Support company, they didn't really make anything although there was a small engineering team that did DIMM/Module binning, but mostly contracted out heatsinks to glue to Micron DIMMs. On the SSD side of things, they used Phison controllers with Micron flash, just like pretty much any other consumer SSD that isn't Samsung or SK/Solidigm.

Corsair, Gskill, Geil, etc don't buy components from Crucial, they get them Micron. Crucial closing their doors has no bearing on that as far as we can tell.

They probably considered dumping it on some Private Equity firm or something, but likely decided to keep the IP in case they decide to resurrect it in the future should the market landscape change.

It sucks that they're winding down crucial, but it makes sense. Frankly I'm surprised they didn't pull the trigger sooner, and by sooner I mean years sooner.
by avadodin | 2025-12-04 04:20:45+00:00
I do not deeply disagree with your statement but I do not see the two as exclusive.

I think distributed public ownership placed in a corporation ruled as proposed here provides a chance to harvest residual good decisions from a citizen/shareholder who cares as opposed to having a single decision derived from some other issue a majority of citizens favor.

Unless you're talking about doing away with any kind of voting but Communism doesn't exactly have a stellar track record.
by wcoenen | 2025-12-04 04:21:10+00:00
The map of planned data centers shows how badly the UK needs to split its single pricing zone for electricity.

There should be more incentive to build data centers in the north, where there is plenty of renewable power but limited capacity to transport that power south.

Germany also has a single pricing zone and a similar north/south problem. It causes expensive curtailment and redispatch operations whenever the grid cannot physically transport the power from north to south the way it was traded.
by Turskarama | 2025-12-04 04:24:03+00:00
It actually is somewhat a limit of the technology. LLMs can't go back and modify their own output, later tokens are always dependent on earlier tokens and they can't do anything out of order. "Thinking" helps somewhat by allowing some iteration before they give the user actual output, but that requires them to write it the long way and THEN refactor it without being asked, which is both very expensive and something they have to recognize the user wants.
by eru | 2025-12-04 04:25:10+00:00
Yes, it's hard, and I'm not sure there are general strategies that always work.

It's fundamentally the same problem that the company is trying to solve when they interview you, just the other way 'round.

Some ideas: observe and ask in the interviews and hiring process in general. See what you can find out about the company from friends, contacts and even strangers. Network! Do some online research, too.

Btw, lots of the cliché interview questions ("What are your greatest weaknesses?" etc) actually make decent questions you can ask about the company and team you are about to join.
by zeroonetwothree | 2025-12-04 04:25:28+00:00
> People need to remember that the ability of AI in code generation today is the worst that it ever will be

I've been reading this since 2023 and yet it hasn't really improved all that much. The same things are still problems that were problems back then. And if anything the improvement is slowing down, not speeding up.

I suspect unless we have real AGI we won't have human-level coding from AIs.
by tptacek | 2025-12-04 04:26:08+00:00
I didn't say Medicare For All was bad. I said a large cohort of existing insured people would be worse off under it. Those are different claims. Whether or not I think it's good has nothing to do with whether or not what I said was correct.

What I think is funny about this is, if I had left a one-line comment saying "this CEO's story about his health insurance costs tells me we all need M4A", nobody would have blinked. Instead, I made a somewhat skeptical observation about it, and got messages demanding I "show my work", or like this one, about how you "reject my thinking".

If people understand and strongly support the policy, they should probably make a point of not being totally bumfuzzled by arguments about it!
by EgoIncarnate | 2025-12-04 04:26:53+00:00
MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL). https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...
by zarzavat | 2025-12-04 04:27:50+00:00
No, it's not collusion to ask for more money from OpenAI if you hear that they are trying to buy 40% of the world's supply. Increased demand leads to higher prices, that's normal.

OpenAI, by doing simultaneous deals, hid the true demand from the suppliers, thus lowering their price and raising everyone else's.
by duskdozer | 2025-12-04 04:29:23+00:00
Looks like you don't have to choose between Boeing and Google! https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/25/22243138/google-union-alp...

Though yes, I'm not sure if that union still exists now. The point is that you do not have to prefer working at every company that has a union over every company that does not have a union. It's enough to prefer having a union over not having a union at any company you do work for.
by rayiner | 2025-12-04 04:30:27+00:00
The point is that H1B is marketed as selective immigration of highly skilled immigrants, but in practice it enables mass migration. Whether you think mass migration is a good thing is a different, and irrelevant, point. If you put "our immigration policy should enable the formation of places like Little Bangladesh" it would lose handily at the ballot box.

(By the way, Bangladeshi Americans are poorer than the average American: "In a 2013, NPR discussion with a member of the Economic Policy Institute and co-author of the book The Myth of the Model Minority Rosalind Chou who is also a professor of sociology. One of them stated that 'When you break it down by specific ethnic groups, the Hmong, the Bangladeshi, they have poverty rates that rival the African-American poverty rate.'" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladeshi_Americans)
by brightly-salty | 2025-12-04 04:30:50+00:00
You might find mlatu-6[0] interesting- it’s convertible to SKI calculus but concatenative (like Forth) rather than applicative. It’s actually a subset of Mlatu, a language I created for similar reasons to explore “how low can you go.”

[0]: https://esolangs.org/wiki/Mlatu-6
by adamisom | 2025-12-04 04:31:09+00:00
Personally, I don't understand how LLMs work. I know some ML math and certainly could learn, and probably will, soon.

But my opinions about what LLMs can do are based on... what LLMs can do. What I can see them doing. With my eyes.

The right answer to the question "What can LLMs do?" is... looking... at what LLMs can do.
by cubefox | 2025-12-04 04:31:10+00:00
Interesting that he came to this conclusion (CoT should be done in latent space) well before the release of OpenAI's o1, which made explicit CoT reliable in the first place. At the time the blog post was written, CoT was only achieved via a "reason step by step" instruction, which was highly error prone compared to modern o1-like reasoning. (And before InstructGPT/ChatGPT, it was achieved by prompting the model with "let me reason step by step".)
by steveklabnik | 2025-12-04 04:31:21+00:00
Sure, you can absolutely build systems with the actor model, even some embedded or bare metal cases. But Erlang isn't written in Erlang. I'm talking about the languages that you implement Erlang in.

Yes, I think "entirely without a runtime" in the colloquial sense is what I mean. Or "replace C" if you want.
by nilkn | 2025-12-04 04:31:39+00:00
No, that's not what I wrote, and it's not the correct conclusion. What I wrote (and what you, in fact, also wrote) is that in reality we generally do not actually need provably correct software except in rare cases (e.g., safety-critical applications). Suggesting that human review cannot be reduced or phased out at all until we can automatically prove correctness is wrong, because fully 100% correct and bug-free software is not needed for the vast majority of code being produced. That does not mean we immediately throw out all human review, but the bar for making changes for how we review code is certainly much lower than the above poster suggested.
by somenameforme | 2025-12-04 04:32:03+00:00
The Chinese guqin [1] tends to defy this trend. The somewhat surprising thing is that it's extremely pleasant and relaxing to listen to even for somebody who did not grow up with it. You'd think the acharacteristic playing patterns for it would be jarring to a foreign ear.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ninn-CfAMy8
by tw04 | 2025-12-04 04:32:16+00:00
> At $249/month the market adoption will crash resulting in somewhere in the middle pricing that the market can bear

Or much like what is going to happen with Alexa, it just dies because the cost of the service is never going to align with “what the market can bear”. Even at $75/mo, the average person will probably stop being lazy and just go back to doing 10 minutes worth of searching to find answers to basic questions.
by dhampi | 2025-12-04 04:32:57+00:00
I don't understand the analogy.

If I'm using an MCMC algorithm to sample a probability distribution, I need to wait for my Markov chain to converge to a stationary distribution before sampling, sure.

But in no way is 'a good answer' a stationary state in the LLM Markov chain. If I continue running next-token prediction, I'm not going to start looping.
by EgoIncarnate | 2025-12-04 04:33:36+00:00
MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL). https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...
by wavemode | 2025-12-04 04:34:35+00:00
You surely must be referring to Rust, the only multithreaded language with async-await in which data races aren't possible.

Rust is lovely and all, but is a bad example for the performance side of the argument, since in practice libraries usually have to decide on an async runtime, so in practice library users have to launch that runtime (usually Tokio) to execute the library's Futures.
by EgoIncarnate | 2025-12-04 04:36:08+00:00
MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL). https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...
by bigyabai | 2025-12-04 04:36:09+00:00
You're basically confirming the parent's suspicions. Nvidia has supported Wayland since their 550 series drivers, for the last two years desktop Linux has run fine on damn near every supported card.

You're not speaking for the "average user" here, you're speaking for yourself. We have a benchmark for what the average user thinks about Linux, and it's called a Steam Deck. You know what those users never mention? X11, Wayland, Xwayland or any of the stereotypical 2012-era boogeymen you're complaining about.

It's almost as if... you haven't used Linux in years. I won't accuse you outright, but my suspicions are mounting. (posted from an RTX 3070 on Wayland)
by musebox35 | 2025-12-04 04:36:10+00:00
I think this is more about mechanistic understanding vs fundamental insight kind of situation. The linear algebra picture is currently very mechanistic since it only tells us what the computations are. There are research groups trying to go beyond that but the insight from these efforts are currently very limited. However, the probabilistic view is very much clearer. You can have many explorable insights, both potentially true and false, by jıst understanding the loss functions, what the model is sampling from, what is the marginal or conditional distributions are and so on. Generative AI models are beautiful at that level. It is truly mind blowing that in 2025, we are able to sample from the megapixel image distributions conditioned on the NLP text prompts.
by 0manrho | 2025-12-04 04:36:58+00:00
That's because the SSD business was little more than a carbon copy of most other consumer non Samsung or SK/Solidigm brands. They've been phison controller with some cheap NAND flash with a different coat of paint for generations now, or in the case of the portable/external ones, that plus a 3rd party enclosure and IO module that they'd contracted out. In terms of hardware, this sub-business-unit was no more "Micron" than Corsair is (Support may be a different story). Enterprise SSD's and Consumer ones diverged years ago, and today are about as different from one another as GPU's are from CPU's.

The only real difference between Crucial RAM and Micron's unbuffered RAM was which brand's sticker they put on it, with some binning and QA on the higher-end enthusiast SKU's and a heatsink. This sub-business-unit was almost entirely redundant to Micron.

> And the days of being able to easily swap memory modules seem numbered, anyway.

I keep seeing people say this in threads across platforms discussing this news, and it baffles me. Why?
by simianwords | 2025-12-04 04:37:47+00:00
What a strange thing to say.. ChatGPT is not a skill, its just a tool. It helps much faster and better than google searching. Why the fuss about it?

Would you say the same to someone using Google?

"Sure, maybe Google can be considered a life skill, but you need others compiled into your brain to fall back on when it fails. If Google is the only skill you have, what do you do if your phone gets stolen?"
by EgoIncarnate | 2025-12-04 04:38:12+00:00
MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL). https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...
by EgoIncarnate | 2025-12-04 04:39:01+00:00
MinIO had a de facto CLA. MinIO required contributors to license their code to the project maintainers (only) under Apache 2. Not as bad as copyright assignment, but still asymmetric (they can relicense for commercial use, but you only get AGPL). https://github.com/minio/minio/blob/master/.github/PULL_REQU...
by chatmasta | 2025-12-04 04:39:10+00:00
Thousands of developers still use PHP… and even more users… Wordpress (43% of web), Facebook (billions of users), Wikipedia (billions of users)…. all PHP.

htmx is a a toy, mildly amusing to play with, built on an insecure foundation that bypasses basic browser security controls and hands a blob of JavaScript to a bunch of backend developers who can’t be bothered to learn it because they think they know better…

No serious project uses htmx and none ever will, because it becomes an unmaintainable mess by the third developer and second year of development.
by butvacuum | 2025-12-04 04:41:27+00:00
Ruled out the monitor(s)? There's been cases where they've backfed power, and they certainly backfeed EMI as well. And, it could also be tied to FPS- assuming gsync/free sync.

If you have a multimeter its probably worth double checking if the case is low resistance grounded to the end of the cord. I'm assuming you have checked already, but as a shock hazard it bares repeating.
by bigiain | 2025-12-04 04:41:54+00:00
I saw Amon Tobin about 15 years back. Still one of my favourite shows ever - and I see a _lot_ of shows.

And year, your music tools/instruments constrain you. There are only so many music genres you can reasonable play or compose on an acoustic guitar. Or an oboe. Or modular synths. I suspect it's _possible_ to compose and play altrock or country music using live coding instead of a guitar - but why would you?
by sfink | 2025-12-04 04:43:00+00:00
Yes, they do. In fact, imperfect teachers can sometimes induce more learning than more perfect ones. And that's what is insidious about learning from AI. It looks like something we've seen before, something where we know how to make it useful and take advantage even of the gaps and inadequacies.

AI can be effective for learning a new skill, but you have to be constantly on your guard to prevent it from hacking your brain and making you helpless and useless. AI isn't the parent holding your bicycle and giving you a push and letting go when you're ready. It's the welded-on training wheels that become larger and more structurally necessary until the bike can't roll forward at all without them. It feeds you the lie that all you need is the theory, you don't ever need to apply it because the AI will do that for you so don't worry your pretty little head over it. AI teaches you that if something requires effort, you're just not relying on the AI enough. The path to success goes only through AI, and those people who try to build their own skills without it are suckers because the AI can effortlessly create things 100x bigger and better and more complex.

Personally, I still believe that human + AI hybrids have enormous potential. It's just that using AI constantly pushes away from beneficial hybridization and towards dependency. You have to constantly fight against your innate impulses, because it hacks them to your detriment.

I'd actually like to see an AI trained to not give answers, but to search out the point where they get you 90% of the way there and then steadfastly refuse to give you the last 10%. An AI built with the goal not of producing artifacts or answers, but of producing learning and growth in the user. (Then again, I'd like to see the same thing in an educational system...)
by Turskarama | 2025-12-04 04:43:41+00:00
They didn't actually fix this until a couple of months after they publicly revealed that this was the reason the game was so big and a lot of people pointed out how dumb it is. I saw quite a few comments saying that people put it on their storage HDD specifically because it was too big to fit on their SSD. Ironic. They could have got their own data quite a bit earlier during development, not nearly two years after release!
by jmb99 | 2025-12-04 04:43:51+00:00
As someone currently dealing with pricing changes for DDR5 volume contracts (admittedly, only ~30k DIMMs, but still), those contracts are a lot less rigidly priced than we (engineering) realized at the time - “agreed price” is a lot more... flexible... until the pallet is delivered. Especially because our contract is with our manufacturer who has their own contract with a DIMM manufacturer who has their own contract with the DRAM manufacturer. DRAM is substantially more like a spot market than the average consumer would expect (at least at my volumes). The same is true for my HDDs (~100k unit/year contract) and my CPUs (10k unit/year contract). At least for HDDs our contract quantities are getting honoured (and we actually still have Seagate and WD fighting for our business), which I’ve heard hasn’t been the case for smaller orders.