MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alwillis | 2025-12-01 00:23:50+00:00
> Then why wouldn't it eventually be able to tell if I'm using 2 or 4 spaces and format my code accordingly?

It's not that an agent doesn't know if you're using 2 or 4 spaces in your code; it comes down to:

- there are many ways to ensure your code is formatted correctly; that's what .editorconfig [1] is for.

- in a halfway serious project, incorrectly formatted code shouldn't reach the LLM in the first place

- tokens are relatively cheap but they're not free on a paid plan; why spend tokens on something linters and formatters can do deterministically and for free?

If you wanted Claude Code to handle linting automatically, you're better off taking that out of CLAUDE.md and creating a Skill [2].

> What? Why would that be a reasonable assumption/prediction for even near-term agent capabilities? Providing it with some kind of local memory to dump its learned-so-far state of the world shouldn't be too hard. Isn't it supposed to already be treated like a junior dev? All junior devs I'm working with remember what I told them 2 weeks ago. Surely a coding agent can eventually support that too.

It wasn't mentioned in the article, but Claude Code, for example, does save each chat session by default. You can come back to a project and type `claude --resume` and you'll get a list of past Claude Code sessions that you can pick up from where you left off.

[1]: https://editorconfig.org

[2]: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/skills
by immibis | 2025-12-01 00:24:15+00:00
There's plenty they could do. Nobody knows what it is, but it exists. And maintaining a curated knowledge base never had very much to do with what brought people to the site, but they still don't seem to get that.

Could be conflicts of interest involved too. For a while it seemed someone was getting paid at least a little to close every Israel question on politics.se.
by YmiYugy | 2025-12-01 00:24:38+00:00
> I hear the complaints from the tech giants already: "But we bought too many GPUs! We spent billions on infrastructure! They have to be put to work!"

> Not my problem.

I don't know about the author specifically, but the bubble popping is a very bad thing for many people. People keep saying that this bubble isn't so bad because it's concentrated on the balance sheet of very deep pocketed tech companies who can survive the crash. I think that is basically true, but a lot is riding on the stock valuations of these big tech companies and lots of bad stuff will happen when these crash. It's obviously bad for the people holding these stocks, but I these tech stocks are so big that there is a real risk of widespread contagion.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-01 00:25:46+00:00
This book as well as Kochenderfer's earlier book "Decision Making Under Uncertainty"[0] are some of my favorite technical books (and I wouldn't be surprised to find his newest book, "Algorithms for Decision Making", also fell into this category).

The algorithm descriptions are clear, the visualizations are great, and, as someone who does a lot of ML work, they cover a lot of (important) topics beyond just what is covered in your standard ML book. This is especially refreshing if you're looking for thinking around optimization that is not just gradient descent (which has been basically the only mainstream approach to optimization in ML for two decades now).

I've known a few people to complain that the code examples are in Julia, but, as someone who doesn't know Julia, if you have experience doing quantitative programming at all it should be trivial convert the Julia examples to your favorite language for implementation (and frankly, I'm a bit horrified that so many people "smart" people interested in these sorts of topics seem trapped into reasoning in one specific language).

Optimization is such a rich field and should be of interest to any computer scientist who would describe themselves as "interested in solving hard problems" rather than just applying a well known technique to a specific class of hard problems.

0. https://web.stanford.edu/group/sisl/public/dmu.pdf
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-01 00:26:14+00:00
> I bet Apple doesn't conveniently change settings in favor of data collection on a regular basis

Not to the level of Microsoft, but initially Apple Intelligence would default to on and you'd have to disable it (thankfully it needs to download gigabytes worth of ML models, which gives you a few minutes after initial OS install to toggle it off before it activates). For a while after every OS update you'd also have an onboarding screen that would try to pitch it to you with an option to "skip" in the fine print (I don't want to "skip", I want a "fuck off forever" option personally).
by circadian | 2025-12-01 00:26:24+00:00
There's some funny comments going on in this thread. Understandably so. What could be more divisive an issue than AI on a silicon valley forum!?

As a brit, I found it to be a really great documentary about the fact that you can be idealistic and still make it. There are, for sure, numerous reasons to give Deepmind shit: Alphabet, potential arms usage, "we're doing research, we're not responsible". The Oppenheimer aspect is not to be lost, we all have to take responsibility for wielding technology.

I was more anti-Deepmind than pro before this, but the truth is as I get older it's nicer to see someone embodying the aspiration of wanton benevolence (for whatever reason) based on scientific reasoning, than to not. To keep it away from the US and acknowledge the benefits of spreading the proverbial "love" to the benefit of all (US included) shows a level of consideration that should not be under-acknowledged.

I like this documentary. Does AGI and the search for it scare me? Hell yes. So do killer mutant spiders descending on earth post nuclear holocaust. It's all about probabilities. To be honest: disease X freaks me out more than a superintelligence built by an organisation willing to donate the research to solve the problems of disease X. Google are assbiscuits, but Deepmind point in the right direction (I know more about their weather and climate forecasting efforts). This at least gave me reason to think some heart is involved...
by dekhn | 2025-12-01 00:26:25+00:00
Right now techniques that exist and used now are mostly around target discovery (identifying proteins in humans that can be targeted by a drug), protein structure prediction and function prediction. Identifying sites on the protein that can be bound by a drug is also pretty common. I worked on a project recently where our goal was to identify useful mutations to make to an engineered antibody so that it bound to a specific protein in the body that is linked to cancer.

If your goal is to bring a drug to market, the most useful thing is predicting the outcome of the FDA drug approval process before you run all the clinical trials. Nobody has a foolproof method to do this, so failure rates at the clinical stage remain high (and it's unlikely you could create a useful predictive model for this).

Getting even more out there, you could in principle imagine an extremely high fidelity simulation model of humans that gave you detailed explanations of why a drug works but has side effects, and which patients would respond positively to the drug due to their genome or other factors. In principle, if you had that technology, you could iterate over large drug-like molecule libraries and just pick successful drugs (effective, few side effects, works for a large portion of the population). I would describe this as an insurmountable engineering issue because the space and time complexity is very high and we don't really know what level of fidelity is required to make useful predictions.

"Solving the protein folding problem" is really more of an academic exercise to answer a fundamental question; personally, I believe you could create successful drugs without knowing the structure of the target at all.
by Nextgrid | 2025-12-01 00:27:47+00:00
> AI products not working

Are Microsoft's AI products built into the OS any better?

It may very well be that the reason Apple got such bad press for their AI efforts is that people genuinely wanted to try them and hoped they'd be good, where as nobody wants to try Microsoft's and already expects it to be bad, thanks to their stellar reputation since Windows 8.
by sehugg | 2025-12-01 00:28:03+00:00
I've implemented Atari 2600 library support for both LLVM-MOS and CC65, but there are too many compromises to make it suitable for writing a game.

The lack of RAM is a major factor; stack usage must be kept to a minimum and you can forget any kind of heap. RAM can be extended with a special mapper, but due to the lack of a R/W pin on the cartridge, reads and writes use different address ranges, and C does not handle this without a hacky macro solution.

Not to mention the timing constraints with 2600 display kernels and page-crossing limitations, bank switching, inefficient pointer chasing, etc. etc. My intuition is you'd need a SMT solver to write a language that compiles for this system without needing inline assembly.
by malloryerik | 2025-12-01 00:28:50+00:00
Late comment but if technology brought down the price of food then people could spend less on food, more on other good and services. Or the same on higher quality food. You don't need an increasing population for that. The improvement in agriculture could mean some farmers would have to find other work. So you can have economic growth with a stagnant or falling population. And you can rather easily have economic growth on a per-capita basis with no overall GDP growth, like is common in Japan today.

About the farmer needing to change jobs, in the interview that is the subject of this thread Ilya Sutskever speaks with wonder about humans' ability to generalize their intelligence across different domains with very little training. Cheaper food prices could mean people eat out or order-in more and then some ex-farmers might enter restaurant or food preparation businesses. People would still be getting wealthier, even without the tailwind of a growing population.
by foxheadman | 2025-12-01 00:31:17+00:00
I'm glad to see boot security prioritisation, and to see some of the fundamentals revisited, and scripts replaced with languages that contributors want to write in (NixOS leans heavy towards Rust).

As the project doc notes:

> This radical solution is only really feasible and/or interesting for appliances (i.e. non-interactive) systems.

https://pad.lassul.us/nixos-perlless-activation

> stops almost all attack vectors

Can you explain a bit more about this? Is the idea that verity protects the integrity of the nix store, and then the boot process only runs binaries that don't expose any sort of arbitrary code functionality?

I agree with https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/267982#issuecomment-... that the MITRE attack vector link doesn't help understanding much. Is the right idea: removing attack vectors is useful? (I agree.)
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-12-01 00:31:43+00:00
Have they started to use per-domain certificates for this, or can anyone who finds the origin bypass the check by creating their own (different) Cloudflare domain and pointing it at your origin?

Edit: Looks still the same by default, but at least they're (somewhat obscurely) documenting the issue and providing the option to use a custom cert now...

https://developers.cloudflare.com/ssl/origin-configuration/a...
by quesera | 2025-12-01 00:32:04+00:00
The truth is that FreeBSD doesn't want casual users, though.

The Linux (Ubuntu, etc) install experience leads to a usable desktop. Heck, the installer disc boots to a usable desktop.

Also no unsophisticated users even know the name of their favorite DE. Or what a DE is.

Requiring a text login and a shell command, even one as simple as "pkg install KDE" is a big ask for a casual user these days. Also, that command line will probably fail. :)

I write these things as a very big fan of FreeBSD! I think not catering to casual users keeps FreeBSD in a better technical place overall, but Linux is obviously much more popular. This carries risks too.
by immibis | 2025-12-01 00:32:21+00:00
I've recently found myself having to pay for a few things online with bitcoin, not because they have anything to do with bitcoin, but because bitcoin payments actually worked and Visa/MC didn't!

For all the talk in the early days of Bitcoin comparing it to Visa and how it couldn't reach the scale of Visa, I never thought it would be that Visa just decided to place itself lower than Bitcoin.

Kind of the same as Windows getting so bad it got worse than Linux, actually...
by fhrhfhfhdj | 2025-12-01 00:32:26+00:00
The only thing worse than popping the AI bubble is trying to inflate it even larger with a government bailout. The longer the government tries to protect the bubble, the more extreme and destructive the level of capital misallocation is going to become. They should have popped it years ago before we were trying to build nuclear reactors to keep our internet chatbots from taking down the power grid.
by bsder | 2025-12-01 00:32:38+00:00
Yeah, the 6809 is just ridiculously good to learn assembly language on. Motorola cleaned up all the idiocies from the 6800 on the 6809.

The attention the 6502 get is just because of history. The advantage the 6502 had was that it was cheap--on every other axis the 6502 sucked.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-01 00:33:11+00:00
My experience has been "little progress" is related to the fact that, while AoC is insanely fun, it always occurs during a time of year when I have the least free time.

Maybe when I was in college (if AoC had existed back then) I could have kept pace, but if part of your life is also running a household, then between wrapping up projects for work, finalizing various commitments I want wrapped up for the year, getting together with family and friends for various celebrations, and finally travel and/or preparing your own house for guests, I'm lucky if I have time to sit down with a cocktail and book the week before Christmas.

Seeing the format changed to 12 days makes me think this might be the first time in years I could seriously consider doing it (to completion).
by venturecruelty | 2025-12-01 00:35:00+00:00
>You don't like some features being added to products so you want laws against adding certain features?

Correct, especially when the features break copyright law, use as much electricity as Belgium, and don't actually work at all. Just a simple button that says "Enabled", and it's off by default. Shouldn't be too hard, yeah? You can continue to use the slop machine, that's fine. Don't force the rest of us to get down in the trough with you.
by TZubiri | 2025-12-01 00:35:11+00:00
Knowing what rules not to follow and what isn't a risk is important to know where to invest energy.

Tech and non tech users have a budget to spend on IT Sec, so if you impose a lot of useless or marginally useful rituals along with the useful prophylaxis, the user will be forced to drop some of the measures, so it's better to drop some rules early on by policy rather than letting users decide what good practices to avoid.
by nico | 2025-12-01 00:35:47+00:00
> Claude often ignores CLAUDE.md

> The more information you have in the file that's not universally applicable to the tasks you have it working on, the more likely it is that Claude will ignore your instructions in the file

Claude.md files can get pretty long, and many times Claude Code just stops following a lot of the directions specified in the file

A friend of mine tells Claude to always address him as “Mr Tinkleberry”, he says he can tell Claude is not paying attention to the instructions on Claude.md, when Claude stops calling him “Mr Tinkleberry” consistently
by magicalhippo | 2025-12-01 00:35:54+00:00
The DDoS improvements[1] reads like it was a fun adventure.

This series is the result of careful analysis of UDP stack, to optimize the receive side, especially when under one or several UDP sockets are receiving a DDOS attack.

I have measured a 47 % increase of throughput when using IPv6 UDP packets with 120 bytes of payload, under DDOS.

[1]: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.18-DDoS-Improvement
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-12-01 00:36:00+00:00
> The introduction of ads was seen as crazy, yet nobody stopped using Google.

Where is this revisionist history coming from? The introduction of ads to Google was not seen as "crazy", in fact it was basically seen as inevitable. And when Google did introduce ads, they were generally praised because ads were highlighted and clearly separated in a different color (yellow) at the top and right rail. Of course, that slowly eroded until ads were nearly indistinguishable from organic results and took up the entire first page, but when they launched I don't remember anyone being surprised that Google added ads.
by keyringlight | 2025-12-01 00:36:57+00:00
Another aspect to "just work" is it'd be great if component vendors mentioned the state of linux support. For example with motherboards it's expected that there will be windows drivers and tools there for all the functionality, but while the source of software support is different under linux from looking at a random product page it's a big question mark on which one is wise to buy to get the best experience or if full/partial support is available now or soon. Even for Asus gear which I'm aware has efforts going on for linux (or just their laptops? just their ROG branded laptops?) there's precious little mention of it on product pages to confirm the status.
by glenstein | 2025-12-01 00:37:03+00:00
The purpose is (1) deep space observation of our most plausible colonization target outside of the solar system and (2) ramping up a fault tolerant maintenance corridor for generation ships or whatever best alternative paradigm takes the place of generation ships.

What's weird here is that a lot of the criticisms just zoom in on one of the logistical steps and randomly assume it would be executed the worst way possible. I honestly don't know what distance threshold counts as necessary redundancy in this case, but if it's not 1AU (which seems too small imo), then substitute the steelmanned optimal distance and criticize that.

Suppose instead of one-time flybys it's the first half of a long trip to and from, gravity assisted by the major celestial objects of the Alpha Centauri system. I don't want to suggest that it's currently anything like a final draft, but there's ways to steelman these proposals instead of going for the low hanging fruit.

Being a philosophy major didn't convey many practical benefits to me, but one thing I did gain from it was never forgetting the importance of charitable interpretation and steelmanning.
by default-kramer | 2025-12-01 00:37:06+00:00
> But, unless you have some way of enforcing that access between different components happens through some kind of well defined interfaces, the codebase may end up very tightly coupled and expensive or impractical to evolve and change

You are describing the "microservice architecture" that I currently loathe at my day job. Fans of microservices would accurately say "well that's not proper microservices; that's a distributed monolith" but my point is that choosing microservices does not enforce any kind of architectural quality at all. It just means that all of your mistakes are now eternally enshrined thanks to Hyrum's Law, rather than being private/unpublished functions that are easy to refactor using "Find All References" and unit tests.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-12-01 00:38:03+00:00
It always seemed odd to me that a persistent minority of HN readers seem to have no interest in recreational programming/technical problems solving and perpetually ask "why should I care?"

It's totally fine not to care, but I can't quite get why you would then want to be an active member in a community of people who care about this stuff for no other reason than they fundamentally find it interesting.
by bigiain | 2025-12-01 00:39:03+00:00
Do you have any good references/example/docs/keywords about the difference between setting up and running "a fully pull-based Ansible system" compared to "centrally-controlled push-based systems"? I'm fairly certain I'm doing what you'd call "centrally-controlled push-based Ansible", but I'm in the planning stages of formalising and operationalising our ongoing configuration management policies, SOPs, internal docs, and dev training - I'd love to know just how I'm "doing it wrong"...

(Note: we are not even in the same universe as Cloudflare, fleet size wise. Think perhaps a few dozen hosts, not thousands or tens of thousands. We've only just barely embraced the "cattle, not pets" stage here.)
by rootusrootus | 2025-12-01 00:40:19+00:00
It's a little alarming to hear from people whose managers have actually told them they expect 10x as much output. How could any competent person, no matter how optimistic, think it works that way? I guess the answer is in my question.

I'm thankful at the moment that I work for a boring company. I want to leave for something more interesting, but at least I can say that our management isn't blowing a bunch of money on AI and trying to use it to get rid of expensive developers. Heck, they won't even pay for Claude Code. Tightwads.
by bsder | 2025-12-01 00:40:26+00:00
Sure, as long as you stick to digital and purchased IP.

If you can get a "library" from somewhere (like the one Google released from Skywater), then you can use static timing analysis on the interconnect between the library blocks. Performance metrics will all be mediocre, but it will be relatively quick to design and cheap to produce if you have sufficient volumes. This is why so many of the RISC-V processor implementations suck.

If you want to design analog, RF, or high-speed, then the expensive tooling is required. You need especially need DRC and extraction (parasitics from passives, transistor numbers, etc.) for proper analysis and design.
by TimeBearingDown | 2025-12-01 00:40:26+00:00
Only the root of the root filesystem is /

The point is that any filesystem can be chosen as the OS’s root.

The root of all other filesystems - there could be multiple per drive - is where you tell the filesystem to be mounted, or in your automounter’s special directory, usually /run/media, where it makes a unique serial or device path.

* clarity
by stavros | 2025-12-01 00:40:38+00:00
I installed Bazzite on a NUC, and what it did was really sell me on getting a Steam Machine. Bazzite works well enough, but it has a few small bugs (e.g. performance degrades if I run Gamescope), and my NUC is old and underpowered. The general Steam experience, though, is fantastic.

It's basically a PC console, except it's not locked down to hell, and I already own hundreds of games for it. I'm very excited for the first-party hardware. If it's anything like the Steam Deck, I'm going to love it.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-12-01 00:41:08+00:00
To answer your question, the links mean that it has achieved compliance with the laws of the governments of the other countries it operates in, no more than that.

Your geopolitical insinuation is interestingly monofaceted, however. Ignoring the many domestic pressures at the time which are relevant (such as vote share in arms-producing districts), the 2016 action by the US (1) acted as a small hedge against any gains in regional power by China, Egypt, France, Germany, India, Iran, Israel, Jordan, Oman, Russia, Turkey or the United Kingdom (such as market share or diplomatic point-scoring) while (2) simultaneously implying to MBS that, in the short term (2-5 years), he was on his own with respect to Iran and (3) moderately reinforcing the carefully cultivated political aesthetic of U.S. impulsivity and violence.

All three of those modest goals were achieved and were later undermined by unforced errors elsewhere. Alternatively, one could consider that those goals were achieved to build up a reserve of political capital that could be expended to permit the unforced errors elsewhere.