MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vee-kay | 2025-12-29 19:48:01+00:00
You must be surprised to learn that most of the personal/SOHO PC users use Windows as the default OS.

In fact, Microsoft and Intel made a cutthroat monopoly of the PC market by their long-term WinTel nexus (MS Windows optimized to run better on Intel CPUs, Intel CPU PCs being sold with MS WINDOW by default), until AMD upped the ante and stole the race by being first on the block with releasing x64/x32 bit processor so Microsoft chose to ditch Intel for AMD to usher in the new era of 54-bit Windows OSes.

AMD still dominates in server market and GPU market (where it has been innovating harder and giving better VFM than nVidia and Intel), so still struggling to dominate the PC market (PC assemblers/stores get better lucrative deals from Intel to sell Intel-based PCs, that's why we find fewer AMD-based PCs for sale in shops/stores.

And that doesn't bode well for PC users/customers. Because that WinTel+nVidia nexus will choose MS Windows over Linux any day.

As for why more RAM is needed, you must be again surprised to know that most people play video games on PCs and mobiles rather than expensive consoles.

But even casual gaming needs adequate RAM and some vRAM. Even heavy duty office work (e.g., opening/editing big Excel files or complex PDFs) is a problem in low-end PC. Engineering students and workers need to do complex CAD/CAM work on their PCs. Artists (including musicians) need to use powerful software tools to do design and art work. All these needs mandate more RAM (16GB at the minimum) because most of these tools need MS Windows (or alternatively, expensive Mac PCs, assuming MacOS has alternative apps to suit such needs).

After failing to beat AMDs versatility and VFM performance in the CPU & GPU market, nVidia and Intel have insteaf pivoted to AI to regain their stranglehold on the market. Their AI NPUs are dominating the PC market this year, but those new PCs are bad for the types of specific needs listed above.

This is also why Microsoft and its allies ensured that most video games are not ported to Linux (and Mac), until Valve finally started to change that status quo by focusing on Linux gaming (but out of self interest, as its money-maker Steam store became too heavily dependent on Microsoft for gaming).

So yeah, more RAM and better CPUs & GPUs please!
by epistasis | 2025-12-29 19:48:07+00:00
Oh this is beautiful and I'm so glad it's been reposted because I missed it the first time.

Flamegraphs seem so much more interpretable and informative than the other plots there, at least to me personally. And I never would have thought to use them for this, because usually when I need to clean out disks or take care of storage it's time sensitive and I want to spend the minimum time figuring things out, and poor viz is enough to accomplish the goal.

An ongoing falmegraph of disk usage over time would be super helpful for many systems I'm working with right now.
by kibwen | 2025-12-29 19:48:16+00:00
Sure, but let's be clear: it's a tradeoff. If every program reserved as much memory at startup as needed to service 100% of its theoretically-anticipated usage, the amount of programs we could run in parallel would be drastically reduced. That is to say, static allocation makes OOM conditions dramatically more likely by their very nature, because programs are greedily sitting on unused memory that could be doled out to other processes.
by lysace | 2025-12-29 19:48:26+00:00
German Wikipedia was taken down twice (for "privacy", not piracy though). Still "illegal information". In the latter case about a former Stasi worker turned leftist member of parliament.

https://www.theregister.com/2006/01/20/wikipedia_shutdown/

The German Wikipedia site was taken down by court order this week because it mentioned the full name of a deceased Chaos Computer Club hacker, known as Tron. A Berlin court ordered the closure of the site on Tuesday after it sided with the parents of the German hacker, who wanted to prevent the online encyclopedia from publishing the real name of their son. A final ruling is expected in two weeks' time.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090129160045/https://cyberlaw....

By virtue of an interim injunction ordered by the Lübeck state court dated November 13, 2008, upon the request of Lutz Heilmann (Member of Parliament – “Die Linke” party), Wikipedia Germany is hereby enjoined from continuing linking from the Internet address wikipedia.de to the Internet address de.wikipedia.org, as long as under the address de.wikipedia.org certain propositions concerning Lutz Heilmann remain visible.
by janalsncm | 2025-12-29 19:49:14+00:00
The problem with the stock market is, even if you know with 100% certainty that EM is lying and Tesla is overvalued, you only can cash in that knowledge if the stock price makes contact with reality.

In fact even if every single shareholder in Tesla knows that the price is unsustainable they can still hold out for a greater fool for years. To a large extent you are betting on what the crowd will do, not what the company will do.
by nneonneo | 2025-12-29 19:49:29+00:00
Even calling uninitialized data “garbage” is misleading. You might expect that the compiler would just leave out some initialization code and compile the remaining code in the expected way, causing the values to be “whatever was in memory previously”. But no - the compiler can (and absolutely will) optimize by assuming the values are whatever would be most convenient for optimization reasons, even if it would be vanishingly unlikely or even impossible.

As an example, consider this code (godbolt: https://godbolt.org/z/TrMrYTKG9):

struct foo {
unsigned char a, b;
};

foo make(int x) {
foo result;
if (x) {
result.a = 13;
} else {
result.b = 37;
}
return result;
}

At high enough optimization levels, the function compiles to “mov eax, 9485; ret”, which sets both a=13 and b=37 without testing the condition at all - as if both branches of the test were executed. This is perfectly reasonable because the lack of initialization means the values could already have been set that way (even if unlikely), so the compiler just goes ahead and sets them that way. It’s faster!
by bvan | 2025-12-29 19:49:30+00:00
Agree. Just like writing with pen and paper facilitates the thought process, so does coding. Typing out code facilitates logical thought and forces you to mind the details. Not to mention the inherent learning process.

Hand-holding an LLM cheats me of all these things, along with the uneasy feeling there is unexplored ordnance in there somewhere which will eventually go boom.

To each his or her own.
by thunkle | 2025-12-29 19:49:55+00:00
Doesn't matter what we want or how we feel. Product, C-suite, Customers just want software as fast and as cheap as possible. They don't care about the code and the craft. If that's the case then we have to use AI if we want to stay marketable.

I wonder if customers even appreciate the organic artisanal labels that some sites are putting up e.g. https://play.date/games/diora/
by vips7L | 2025-12-29 19:50:00+00:00
> Handling JSON as a basics for language?

Yes, even Mark Reinhold admitted that in the last "Ask the Architects" interview.

>null restricted type will come with valhalla

Will they? It's been 10+ years of Valhalla. Why is a compiler construct even behind project Valhalla? Kotlin has showed you don't need it to do them.

> string templates had a try

Yes they were over engineered and they failed to deliver a basic feature.

> Java is not a small language that you can throw features around, they have to take into consideration final goal of it and decades of development.

Yes I agree, but it shouldn't take YEARS to ship anything. 11 years for a JSON api?! Come on.
by shitter | 2025-12-29 19:50:10+00:00
I share the author's perspective that LLMs are not fun for programming. I don't use them to generate code, save for small snippets to demonstrate some concept or do something rote that I wouldn't enjoy writing myself.

However - and maybe I'm just an easily entertained simpleton - I find them really fun for exploring those random, not trivially Google-able questions that pop into my head on a daily basis, technical and otherwise. Most of my chats with ChatGPT begin with questions of this form. I keep my critical thinking cap on during the dialogue and always verify the output if it's to be used for anything serious, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the process.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-12-29 19:50:24+00:00
Can't say I agree strongly, but I get OOP's frustration.

It's just a tool, misuse of the tool can very much not be fun. When it's forced on you, most things tend to not be fun.

But I am having lots of fun with LLMs, their application as well as assisting me with coding. What used to be a frustrating scour of the internet for solutions and examples is now a question away to an LLM. The not-so-fun things I used to dread, I'm letting the LLM tackle it. Most of the code I write could probably be written by an LLM, but I am choosing to write the code specifically because it is fun, and because maintaining LLM generated code is not so fun.

I think this is a case of people taking extremes. Extremes are usually not a good thing. Don't over use or over depend on LLMs, but use them with moderation, letting them do things they shine at. Don't create solutions that are looking for problems (with any tool, not just LLMs). Don't fall for the deceptive traps of nostalgia, or be stuck in "back in my day".

It goes both ways too, don't tell someone used to vim and nano to start using cursor.sh!

I like driving sports cars in the desert, very fun. I hate driving anything in traffic. It's all about context.

The internet can be very toxic at times, and very user-hostile at others. It can also be great. I like HN for example, as I'm sure many of you do. I don't like visiting gizmodo or some ad-trodden site, or toxic sub-reddits. LLMs are similar, there are and will be terrible LLM usages (truly, think of slaughterbots and LLMs being used by autonomous attack drones), but also fun and great usages.
by Leynos | 2025-12-29 19:50:28+00:00
Use review bots (CodeRabbit, Sourcery and Codescene together work for me). This is for my own projects outside of work, of course. I use Terragon for this. 10 parallel rust builds would kill my computer. Got a threadripper on its way through, so superset sounds like something I need to give a go.
by bonesss | 2025-12-29 19:50:33+00:00
In light of OpenAI confessing to shareholders there’s no there there (being shocked by and then using Anthropics MCP, being shocked by and then using Anthropics Skills, opening up a hosted dev platform to milk my awesome LLM business ideas, and now revealing that inline ads a-la Google is their best idea so far to make, you know, make money…), I was thinking about those LLM project statistics. Something like 5-10% of projects are seeing a nice productivity bump.

Standard distribution says some minority of IT projects are tragi-bad… I’ve worked with dudes who would copy and paste three different JavaScript frameworks onto the same page, as long as it worked…

AirFryers are great household tabletop appliances that help people cook extraordinary dishes their ovens normally wouldn’t faster and easier than ever before. A true revolution. A proper chef can use one to craft amazing food. They’re small and economical, awesome for students.

Chefs just call it “convection cooking” though. It’s been around for a minute. Chefs also know to go hot (when and how), and can use an actual deep fryer if and when they want.

The frozen food bags here have AirFryer instructions now. The Michelin star chefs are still focusing on shit you could buy books about 50 years ago…
by curtisblaine | 2025-12-29 19:51:06+00:00
Well, censorship has been recentky applied to Palestine Action supporters too (they're routinely arrested in the UK, and they're normally far leftists), so it's not only nazis. The thing that makes hate speech laws safe and fuzzy is that they're initially applied to restrict the speech of your enemies. Then the tide changes, and the same laws get applied against you and your friends.
by dragonwriter | 2025-12-29 19:51:17+00:00
> The Electoral College strengthens democracy by enabling local-election-observation to be a highly effective safeguard against fraud and voter demoralization.

The Electoral College is a bigger source of voter demoralization than anything that exists in any modern representative democracy which doesn't have the Electoral College. (FPTP by itself is bad, but even other systems have FPTP, don't have nearly the degree and persistence of voter demoralization seen in the US.)

Like, I can see how one might utter this sentence in an alternate universe where the US was the only approximation of representative democracy that ever existed and where every commentary was purely theoretical with no concrete comparisons to make, but in the actual world we live in, where there are plenty of concrete alternatives and whole bodies of comparative study, it is beyond ridiculous.
by wayy | 2025-12-29 19:51:24+00:00
It seemed to me the author was simply sharing his own lived experience, which happens to be a bit contrarian to the popular hype around LLMs. It may seem courageous for some but I can see a world where the author didn't think twice about writing down his thoughts in 15 minutes and publishing on his own personal site. Perhaps it comes naturally to people who have been around this industry longer
by kibwen | 2025-12-29 19:51:26+00:00
Those guidelines are quite clear that they're written specifically in the context of the C programming language, and may not make sense in other contexts:

"For fairly pragmatic reasons, then, our coding rules primarily target C and attempt to optimize our ability to more thoroughly check the reliability of critical applications written in C."

A version of this document targeting, say, Ada would look quite different.
by pjmlp | 2025-12-29 19:51:27+00:00
I hope you get to learn Portuguese well enough that my fellow country folks never force themselves to speak any other language, in case you happen to visit us, if not, oh well.

I am fluent in several European languages and dialects, human languages is second nature alongside learning programming languages.

As for entitlement, the expectations on international trains crossing borders aren't the same as local trains, which I left out from the comment, it was an ICE after crew change.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-12-29 19:51:29+00:00
Should have taken the KVB/SWB line 16 from Cologne HBF to Bonn Bad Godesberg Rheinalle/BF instead, and the bus line 855 from there to Meckenheim BF, or so :)

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnwagen_B#/media/File:K... / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinuferbahn / https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtbahnstrecke_Bonn%E2%80%93... )
by Khadija_rehman | 2025-12-29 19:51:30+00:00
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by whalesalad | 2025-12-29 19:51:32+00:00
I just abandoned AT&T (finally) and transitioned to US Mobile (on VZW) in about 10 minutes thanks to eSIM. New iPhone's don't even work with a regular sim card any longer.

Seems like most of the complaints in here re: eSIM are around how a specific carrier deals with it and less about the technology itself?
by benlivengood | 2025-12-29 19:51:49+00:00
In the long run I think it's pretty unhealthy to make one's career a large part of one's identity. What happens during burnout or retirement or being laid off if a huge portion of one's self depends on career work?

Economically it's been a mistake to let wealth get stratified so unequally; we should have and need to reintroduce high progressive tax rates on income and potentially implement wealth taxes to reduce the necessity of guessing a high-paying career over 5 years in advance. That simply won't be possible to do accurately with coming automation. But it is possible to grow social safety nets and decrease wealth disparity so that pursuing any marginally productive career is sufficient.

Practically, once automation begins producing more value than 25% or so of human workers we'll have to transition to a collective ownership model and either pay dividends directly out of widget production, grant futures on the same with subsidized transport, or UBI. I tend to prefer a distribution-of-production model because it eliminates a lot of the rent-seeking risk of UBI; your landlord is not going to want 2X the number of burgers and couches you get distributed as they'd happily double rent in dollars.

Once full automation hits (if it ever does; I can see augmented humans still producing up to 50% of GDP indefinitely [so far as anyone can predict anything past human-level intelligence] especially in healthcare/wellness) it's obvious that some kind of direct goods distribution is the only reasonable outcome; markets will still exist on top of this but they'll basically be optional participation for people who want to do that.
by johnfn | 2025-12-29 19:52:11+00:00
I find this interesting for two reasons.

1. LLMs inspire and clearly strike a certain type of chord in people that other technology does not. For instance, can you imagine a post called "Rust Is Not Fun" at the top of HN? Or even replace "Rust" with technology that has some fans and some haters, like "PHP Is Not Fun". Can you ever imagine that finding equivalent traction? Why would you even write a post called "Skateboarding Is Not Fun"? I just did a search across HN and the only other thing I saw being called not fun that actually got traction was... Twitter.

2. The post makes two points about why LLMs are wrong, and I (as someone who gets a lot of mileage out of LLMs) pretty strongly disagree with both.

a) You can't get better at using LLMs ("Nurturing the personal growth of an LLM is an obvious waste of time")

This seems almost objectively false to me? I have gotten substantially better at prompting and using LLMs after about 6 months of daily use. I think at a higher level of abstraction with LLMs than I would when working directly with code, and this is a different type of thinking that requires effort and practice to develop. An LLM doesn't solve all problems you could ever have, it just allows you to think at a higher level of abstraction.

Previously I might convert one 300 LoC file from JS to TS (or whatever) and call it a day. Now, in the same amount of time, I might do 10. But obviously just asking the LLM to commit that doesn't cut it because I might have broken something, so I need to think of some way to get the LLM to verify that I haven't broken anything, so maybe I'd first get it to build some unit tests to my specifications, or a couple of linter rules, or something else tailored to the problem at hand. This is the "thinking at a higher level of abstraction" and I tend to find it an interesting puzzle. It's a very different type of thinking then the "how am I going to refactor this single file", but it ends up being pretty enjoyable.

b) "For me, the joy of programming is understanding a problem in full depth"

I suspect that this is why a lot of people are frustrated with LLMs. I empathize here more than with part a). I mean, sure, I like digging into complex systems - it's fun and rewarding. But... and I feel this will be controversial, but I feel like this isn't really the most meaningful part of coding. Isn't the "complex problem solving" mostly a side-effect of the thing which is really the important thing (and the thing I like much more), which is delivering software that people enjoy and use? And while LLMs do a good bit of heavy lifting on the first, I don't find that they are capable at all of solving the second - which means that coding is just as fun for me as ever. In fact, probably more so, since I feel like I can iterate and build ideas faster for users.
by jdeibele | 2025-12-29 19:52:21+00:00
I've ridden on Amtrak trains. The door for the passenger compartments is in the middle of the observation cars, the oval on the lower level is the window on the door. You can see 3 of them on the 3 cars. The crew would put out a step at stops which was helpful considering the age of most of the passengers.

Up top are seats and maybe a lounge, below are bedrooms, bathrooms, and storage. There's a spiral staircase to change levels.

The locomotive has steps right outside the wheels with handrails.
by autoexec | 2025-12-29 19:52:33+00:00
I'd rather spend my time designing and writing code than spending it debugging and reformatting whatever an LLM cobbled together from stack overflow and github. 'Design, architecture, problem solving, etc' all takes a backseat when the LLM barfs out all the code and you have to either spend your time convincing it to output what you could have written yourself anyway or play QA fixing its slop all day long.
by linsomniac | 2025-12-29 19:53:20+00:00
>usually a mile or so into a walk

My place for that is in the shower.

I had one of those shower epiphanies a couple mornings ago... And I fed it into a couple LLMs while I was playing a video game (taking some time over the holidays to do that), and by the afternoon I had that idea as working code: ~4500 LOC with that many more in tests.

People keep saying "I want LLMs to take out the laundry so I can do art, not doing the laundry while LLMs do art." This is an example of LLMs doing the coding, so I can rekindle a joy of gaming, which feels like it's leaning in the right direction.
by sometimes_all | 2025-12-29 19:53:29+00:00
> I'm assuming the rest of your comment is written by AI because it sounds like AI, so I'm not going to bother responding to that.

Should I also assume that you're going to just dismiss stuff you do not want to talk about as "written by AI"? Nothing I wrote was AI-generated. I have better stuff to spend AI tokens on than HN comments, of all things.

I also believe that the downvoting people have a bent towards the "orientalist woo", but it's not as unfounded as you think it is.

> ancient philosophies that are not held by any practicing Hindu today

You'd be surprised as to how much these ancient philosophies (or whatever translations/strains people ascribe to) still hold fort. I've seen people debating them in Indian management classes, and hold them as closer to fact instead of ancient opinions.
by tmcw | 2025-12-29 19:53:32+00:00
Unironically this: isn't writing on paper more fun than typing? Isn't painting with real paint and canvas more satisfying than with a stylus and an iPad? Isn't it more fun to make a home-cooked meal for your family than ordering out? Who stomps into the holiday celebration and tells mom that it'd be a lot more efficient to just get catering?

Isn't there something good about being embodied and understanding a medium of expression rather than attempting to translate ideas directly into results as quickly as possible?
by carlmr | 2025-12-29 19:53:42+00:00
>Higher incomes have historically been a symptom of productivity

If I go to Zürich I get a burger for 30Fr that I can get in Southern Germany for 15€ and in Berlin for 8€. That is with roughly the same quality.

I'd say past productivity leads to network effects and investments in one area that boost local salaries and decouples them quite strongly from current productivity.

My previous company had a per-dollar extremely unproductive location in silicon valley. The people there weren't at fault. You don't magically become more productive because you live next to SF.