MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by api | 2025-12-23 17:16:16+00:00
I don't entirely disagree, but also note that the extreme wealth of both these guys is at least partly a result of state spending not pure private market forces.

Oracle has always had a huge presence in government. Large companies too, but Federal use has really helped keep them afloat as open source and competing products that are far cheaper have eaten their lunch.

For Musk the case is even more extreme. Tesla's early growth was bankrolled by EV credits and carbon offsets, which were state programs, and SpaceX is a result of both Federal funding and direct R&D transfer from NASA to SpaceX. The latter was mostly uncompensated. NASA just handed over decades of publicly funded R&D.

These two would probably be rich without the state, but would they be this rich?

The same was true back in the original Gilded Age. The "robber barons" were built by railroad and other infrastructure subsidies.

However I do agree that private wealth beyond a certain point begins to pose a risk to democracy and the rule of law. It's a major weakness in libertarian schemes that call for a "separation of economy and state." That's a much, much harder wall to maintain than separation of church and state. Enough money can buy politicians and elections.
by newppc | 2025-12-23 17:16:33+00:00
Yea quite devious, in a weird way I suppose the dark patterns also serve as an IQ test that favors younger tech-literates who are familiar with web patterns and are also on a budget (though not all).

I used Ryanair a lot while studying abroad in Europe and the €20 flights were real if you jumped through the hoops, which was quite magical.

I once had a flight booked to Paris, but it landed in an airport 2 hours outside of Paris and the train/bus would’ve been 2x the flight cost, so being short of money I just didn’t take the trip and lost €20 :)
by xp84 | 2025-12-23 17:16:36+00:00
Very true, but the other half is to ensure you don’t use a card with a foreign transaction fee, which will cost you 3-4%. There are free cards like the Amazon Prime Visa that don’t have it, but that fee is very common.

The other thing I hate to see is people using the currency conversion desks at airports, or buying foreign currency from their banks in advance of trips. They give you awful rates.

Assuming you’re traveling to a civilized country, just stick your card in an ATM when you land and pull out the cash you need. Good banks don’t even charge their own ATM fee, so your total cost is the $3-4 that the ATM owner charges, and you get a pretty fair rate.
by arethuza | 2025-12-23 17:16:41+00:00
The advantage of Ryanair and a lot of the other low cost carriers is that they do a lot of point to point flights between regional hubs - for example we flew Edinburgh to Marrakesh with them a few years back which was fine and I think they were the only airline offering direct flights. Going via Heathrow, Gatwick or CDG would have been a nightmare and we were only going for a few days.
by hypeatei | 2025-12-23 17:16:47+00:00
Peel it back even more: how does any State not fall victim to monied interests? This is usually handwaved away by socalists in the sense that everything is handled by "independent commissions" that can totally not be corrupted.

The solution is really to keep the scope of government small so that any corruption isn't detrimental to the populace, and they can handle it in the next election.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-12-23 17:16:52+00:00
How is this emotionally driven? It seemed like a dispassionate presentation of factual material to me.

Of course, no presentation of facts is without bias of some sort (if only via their choice of which facts to present), so don't ever stop thinking critically. But flagging/censoring any presentation of facts (even biased) never helps, regardless of your viewpoint. If you disagree, write or promote a thoughtful take that explains why.

I'm politically very conservative, and I'm super grateful for this. The intense political polarization in the US tends to allow party-line adherence on either side to substitute for accountability to the truth, and that is a disaster regardless of which side is currently in power. Whatever side you're on, please have the guts to hold your side's leaders accountable to the truth, not just the opposite side's leaders. We will all suffer if just one side fails to do that.
by georgemcbay | 2025-12-23 17:17:22+00:00
The code's functionality is immediately obvious to me as someone who works a lot with graphics coordinate systems.

I'm sure the code would be immediately obvious to anyone who would be working on it at the time.

Comments aren't unnecessary, they can be very helpful, but they also come with a high maintenance cost that should be considered when using them. They are a long-term maintenance liability because by design the compiler ignores them so its very easy to change/refactor code and miss changing a comment and then having the comment be misleading or just plain wrong.

These days one could make some sort of case (though I wouldn't entirely buy it, yet) that an LLM-based linter could be used to make sure comments do not get disconnected from the code they are documenting, but in 1990? not so much.

Would I have used longer variable names for slightly more clarity? Today, sure. In 1990, probably not. Temporal context is important and compilers/editors/etc have come a long way since then.
by 1123581321 | 2025-12-23 17:17:35+00:00
At Starbucks, I usually just get a cup of black coffee. Often the barista dispenses it as I'm paying, skipping the queue of orders to be made. However, sometimes I get my coffee cup put into the queue. When this happens, starting this year, it seems they'll carry it out to my table. Before that, they'd put it into the queue of orders which could take awhile. It seems partially barista dependent and partially whether they need to rebrew. I've found that asking for "whatever's brewed" doesn't help; they don't want to pick a blend.

Interesting to think about. Local coffee shop baristas are more transparent about what's brewed and enjoy taking the opportunity to recommend a certain roast or origin if I'm not picky. However, their systems fall down when they're unexpectedly busy.

My local cafe that does both coffee and sandwiches (dine-in, to go and catering) is possibly the worst, not taking orders until they feel caught up on the sandwiches. You can end up waiting 10+ minutes just to get a cup of coffee. From a queueing/distribution perspective, they should be taking those orders constantly and letting them pile up so they have more information about what they need to make and they can reduce the mean wait time. On the other hand, their baffling system is charming and the people placing large orders love the attention and spend way more money than I do. :)
by lentil_soup | 2025-12-23 17:17:39+00:00
What's going on on this thread? why are so many people defending Ryanair? I understand it's cheap and you get what you pay for but to defend this race to the bottom and scammy UX is so weird. Why do we need to simp for companies like this? It's great to have cheap options but we can also expect more from life. I'm sure we all here know how to navigate the dark patterns on the website but millions of people don't, so we just don't care anymore? Do we just shrug and go "as long as I get a cheap flight"?
by onion2k | 2025-12-23 17:17:56+00:00
the implication was that a highly motivated and competent software engineer put a lot of effort into making sure that the project meets a reasonable standard of quality and will probably put some effort into maintaining the project

That is entirely an assumption on the part of the reader. Nothing about someone saying "I built this complicated thing!" implies competence, or any desire to maintain it beyond building it.

The problem you're facing is survivorship bias. You can think of lots of examples of where that has happened, and very few where it hasn't, because when the author of the project is incompetent or unmotivated the project doesn't last long enough for you to hear about it twice.
by sorrow17 | 2025-12-23 17:18:34+00:00
Yeah, for a lot of users who control the exported source code, rewriting model to use control flow ops, or simply removing the control flow code is a viable option and solvable. For some other users who want to export the model as-is, the option is either using the (deprecated) torchscript, or just move on and use torch.compile and run your model in Python.
by fauigerzigerk | 2025-12-23 17:19:17+00:00
Not much, but infinitely more than now.

If someone puts weeks and months of their time into building something, then I'm willing to take that as proof of their motivation to create something good.

I'm also willing to take the existence of non-trivial code that someone wrote manually as proof of some level of competence.

The presence of motivation + competence makes it more likely that the result could be something good.
by lelanthran | 2025-12-23 17:19:18+00:00
> We always could. That has been true since the days we programmed computers by plugging jumper wires into a panel.

That's news to me, and I'm an ancient greybeard in development.

If you have a team of 1x f/time developer and 1x f/time tester, the tester would be spending about half their day doing nothing.

Right now, a single developer with Claude code can very easily overwhelm even a couple of testers with new code to test.
by aerostable_slug | 2025-12-23 17:19:26+00:00
Much is being made of the revelations of the segment. I didn't see any.

Footage of CECOT is widely available as are interviews with former inmates. They allege effectively the same thing as what was claimed here by the accused TdA member. The Salvadoran administration is proud of CECOT and gleefully shows it off, including (as was shown in the segment) the solitary confinement cells.

There were no secrets revealed, nothing particularly new, and most importantly, nothing novel about the case of the accused TdA member. HN is acting like this segment revealed particularly damaging facts and therefore will be urgently scrubbed, but I'm not seeing anything new at all. I think the sentiment that the segment will be censored and we all have to run out and seed it is a bit hyperbolic. You can't try to hide CECOT's conditions when the people who run the prison happily give tours and show off what one might think they'd hide (punishment cells, for example).

There is no smoking gun, but more importantly there's nothing new in the segment that you can't already see in segments on Youtube. In fact, 60 Minutes used other people's footage of CECOT, not their own. Seed this all you want, but I don't think there's going to be a big push to make it go away. It reveals nothing that hasn't already been widely seen.
by makeitdouble | 2025-12-23 17:19:32+00:00
To add to that, the roles also need to be identified.

When some obscure thing breaks you either need to go on a quest to understand which are all the roles involved in fixing it, or send a much vaguer "let me do X and Y" request to the approval chain and have them figure it out on their end.

And as the approval agents aren't the ones fixing the issue, it's a back and forth of "can you do X?" "no, I'm locked at Y" "ok. then how about now ?"

Overprovisioning at least some key people is a fatality.
by pizlonator | 2025-12-23 17:19:33+00:00
They are not interchangeable. The semantics are observably different. Therefore, RC is not GC.

Reference counting gives you eager destruction. GC cannot.

GC gives lets you have garbage cycles. RC does not.

I think a part of the GC crew reclassified RC as GC to try to gain relevance with industry types during a time when GC was not used in serious software but RC was.

But this is brain damage. You can’t take a RC C++ codebase and replace the RC with GC and expect stuff to work. You can’t take a GC’d language impl and replace the GC with RC and expect it to work. Best you could do is use RC in addition to GC so you still keep the GC semantics.
by Gathering6678 | 2025-12-23 17:19:37+00:00
I have to emphasise that this is all my personal feeling and experience: I used to think these people and their actions actually mean something, and could lead to a different future. I was uncertain of this future, but willing to try.

Seeing recent US politics makes me reconsider: if this is democracy, or at least what it could very well turn out to be, is it really something I would want in my own country? I know my answer would be no.

Honestly, nowadays, if given the choice of "one person one vote" for the head of state tomorrow, I would strongly oppose such an idea and prefer the status quo.

Given such sentiment, I really don't care about these people and their campaigns anymore.
by bpt3 | 2025-12-23 17:19:57+00:00
Businesses have no issue with their suppliers making reasonable margins as long as the value offered is acceptable or better.

I'd rather know a supplier is healthy than scraping by. I just got an email from one of mine saying that they aren't doing great, so please buy as much as possible before the holidays? I'm now making sure I'm not overly dependent on them for anything, which I'd rather not spend time doing if I didn't need to.
by anonymousDan | 2025-12-23 17:20:08+00:00
I will always fly Ryanair ahead of other low cost carriers in Europe as unlike easyJet for example they don't overbook. The most painful experience I've had was to arrive at an airport with a young family and get all the way to the easyJet flight gate to be told the flight is overbooked. And unlike the US where this starts an auction it's basically tough luck. Should be outright fraud in my opinion.
by anovikov | 2025-12-23 17:20:26+00:00
When they removed most of the seating and rearranged things in a way that made people understand that sitting there for prolong periods was no longer welcome, and at the same time made their coffee available as nespresso capsules, what was the point of going there anymore? To eat shitty sugar-laden, calorie-heavy desserts? On GLP-1 i can't get a bit of those anymore.
by docjay | 2025-12-23 17:21:09+00:00
My friend, I've said only what I've said. Past my casual "that's not really how murders play out", through the comma, sits "special name”, which isn't "the general population." Serial killer, serial murderer, and spree killer aren't synonyms for general population. The mere existence of those terms gave you all the information you needed to determine that they’re distinct from the general population and simple “murderer”, and my mention of them should have implied my understanding of the same.

Your assertions in every comment so far have been fully balanced on what you ‘feel like’ should be the case, not on known facts. I’ll give you an example:

“quite plausibly already happened thousands of times throughout the course of Flock's existence.”

‘
FBI monograph, July 2008: "Serial Murder: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives for Investigators"

https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/reports-and-publications...

Introduction on page 1:
"Serial murder is a relatively rare event, estimated to comprise less than one percent of all murders committed in any given year."
‘

The FBI used to classify serial murder as 3+ murders with a cooling off period between them, but that resulted in too few cases to bother studying, so by the time of the quoted statement they had reduced it to 2+ separate murder events. Seems like it fits our discussion.

In 2008 there were 16,465 homicides, so if we take “less than 1%” to be a healthy 0.5% that would be ~82. Even if you assume every year spawns a fresh new set of 82 serial murderers then Flock would have needed to contribute to catching every single one this century in order to meet the minimum requirements for “thousands.”

Of course there’s no way of telling if the murderer you caught would have become a serial murderer if not caught, so here’s where your intuition can be helpful. Take the 82, spread them around the country in densities that you ‘feel’ are appropriate. Do the same for the density of Flock cameras. Then use the same rigor when guessing at how many of the 82 just got witnessed committing a murder, and their license plate was noted, and they happen to transit an area with Flock camera license plate readers in the future while still driving the same car. Feel your way through to how many of them might be caught, then intuit what it would take to catch “thousands.”
by the__alchemist | 2025-12-23 17:21:14+00:00
Very cool on on the business model details! I love this model of doing it for multiple reasons.

One thing I am confused on that is tangential to the main topic: What does this (SAAS?) service do? It looks like it might be a middle ground between Heroku and Wordpress? A GUI website builder of some sort with an integrated database, and tool for editing articles or other content with a web UI?
by dreadnip | 2025-12-23 17:21:18+00:00
Using Claude to submit PRs to huge open source projects is stupid, for sure.

But if I need a quick tool, like a secret Santa name picker, I’ll just have Claude build it, push it to a repo, link the repo on some PaaS and have a working, deployed app in 20 minutes. No ads, no accounts & no signing up to random websites. I can build it exactly like I want it and include fun Easter eggs for my family.

Building it myself would take 2-3 hours, and the code quality would be drastically better, but that just doesn’t matter.
by grayhatter | 2025-12-23 17:21:21+00:00
> Your naive feel good attitude (and you're not alone in it, that crap permeates white collar western society) is exactly the problem and being all emotional about it only worsens your ability to reason about it.

It's not a feel good attitude. I'm only objecting to your shallow take arguing that the commoditization of human life is reasonable. (i.e. touch grass) Similar to how you're concerned, exclusively, with the numbers you think you can count. That attitude of dehumanization has never resulted in good things things for society and humanity. That's the trade off I'm suggesting is important to consider when trying to make up numbers as you are. I'm not arguing that an absurdly low max speed is better. I'm arguing that it's small minded to try to count like that.

> You can value a whole life loss higher than man hours. You can value a child more than the elderly. You can make all sorts of adjustments like that but they do not change the fundamental math of the problem.

I wouldn't make any adjustments like that. The value or importance that exists with a human life, the case example, being a person that cares for others, and is cared about by others. Can't be reduced into a value that's translatable to man hours. I'd trade hours with some people for minutes with others. Just because time is something you can quantify, and you like that you can count it. Doesn't make it more better or important.

To be clear, I'm not saying your math is wrong, I'm saying you're wrong to believe it applies. (in such a simplistic manner.) You can use the math to decide how you're going to make tradeoffs given known input values; how much can my city pay for safety equipment to protect people. But you can't make up some adjacent math and say, this car's design is wrong because it didn't kill the correct number of people... err I mean, the correct number of man hours.
by ch4s3 | 2025-12-23 17:21:48+00:00
> Then you haven’t looked. There are endless examples of qualified people explaining the actual risks and benefits of vaccines in clear and honest terms.

Yes there's plenty of that in some places, like tiktok or the NYT. I mean that people need to actually address it in places where people who are engaging in anti-vaxx content will see it and engage with it. There was a successful example a few years back where public health officials engaged with Chabad community leaders in Brooklyn and got them to encourage everyone to get measles vaccines, but it think this is all too rare.
by reissbaker | 2025-12-23 17:21:50+00:00
The parser is a small part of running an LLM, and Zai's format is superior to Harmony: it avoids having the model escape JSON in most cases by using XML, so e.g. long code edits are more in-domain compared to pretraining data (where code is typically not nested in JSON and isn't JSON-escaped). FWIW almost everyone has their own format.

Also, Harmony is a mess. The common API specs adopted by the open-source community don't have developer roles, so including one is just bloat for the Responses API no one outside of OpenAI adopted. And why are there two types of hidden CoT reasoning? Harmony tool definition syntax invents a novel programming language that the model has never seen in training, so you need even more post-training to get it to work (Zai just uses JSON Schema). Etc etc. It's just bad.

Re: removing newlines from their old format, it's slightly annoying, but it does give a slight speed boost, since it removes one token per call and one token per argument. Not a huge difference, but not nothing, especially with parallel tool calls.
by aidenn0 | 2025-12-23 17:22:30+00:00
See also Regehr's example[1] where a formally verified C compiler generates incorrect output because of an inconsistent value in <limits.h> (TL;DR: The compiler can pick whether "char" is signed or unsigned. Compcert picked one, but the linux system header used the other for CHAR_MIN and CHAR_MAX).

1: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/482 there were many issues here, not just with compcert
by vilos1611 | 2025-12-23 17:22:38+00:00
I respectfully disagree.

The issue isn't the names themselves, it's the locality of information. In a 3-deep nested loop, i, j, k forces the reader to maintain a mental stack trace of the entire block. If I have to scroll up to the for clause to remember which dimension k refers to, the abstraction has failed.

Meaningful names like row, col, cell transform structural boilerplate into self-documenting logic. ijk may be standard in math-heavy code, but in most production code bases, optimizing for a 'low-context' reader is not an anti-pattern.
by MarkMarine | 2025-12-23 17:22:45+00:00
This is an aside because I agree with the author’s core point, but spelling, grammatical errors, and typos actually imply something authored by a human now. This sentence:

“It affects point number 1 because AI-assisted programming is a very natural fit fot specification-driven development.”

made me smile. Reading something hand made that hadn’t been through the filters and presses of modern internet writing.
by jeffrallen | 2025-12-23 17:23:51+00:00
As an experiment, I gave the source zip file to Claude and told it to make a WASM version of the app, by translating the Pascal to Go.

It nailed it, first try.

I cannot, unfortunately, share a link to the website it created because of the license.

LLM translations of historical software to modern platforms is a solved problem. Try it, you'll see.

I used https://exe.dev/ and their Shelley agent to drive Claude. Give it a try, it is jaw dropping.
by thisisit | 2025-12-23 17:23:52+00:00
A long whataboutism and defending points which were never made.

"What about EU? European governments, despite having more money to spend, spent less on science, and are taking back grants faster than Trump." where have we seen this? Oh yes, the RW who talk about EU "offloading" science to US.

I understand this makes for good TV content where the focus is to shift goalposts to new topic.

I didn't make the points about brain drain or whether US will remain ahead. I only pointed out is that the real reason WH is doing this and those on the right gleefully clapping along. People defend this in bad faith. There is no way to know if this is going to be net positive. Numbers look fine on paper but the cost of say private biased research unchallenged by neutral public research might erase the gain. I am fine if I am proven wrong in 4 years and things remain unchanged.

But yeah, Biden something something and Trump something something.