MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fnord77 | 2025-12-08 04:02:26+00:00
> Other egregious deviations from standard practice were the number of global variables in the system. (A variable is a location in memory that has a number in it. A global variable is any piece of software anywhere in the system can get to that number and read it or write it.) The academic standard is zero. Toyota had more than 10,000 global variables.
by djoldman | 2025-12-08 04:02:37+00:00
I upvoted you.

This is a fundamentally interesting point. Taking your comment as HN would advise, I totally agree.

I think genAI freaks a lot of people out because it makes them doubt what they thought made them special.

And to your comment, humans have always used words they reserve for humanity that indicates we're special: that we think, feel, etc... That we're human. Maybe we're not so special. Maybe that's scary to a lot of people.
by sirponm | 2025-12-08 04:03:01+00:00
I don't know if I totally understand these theories but I think modern market anarchists would say that a "freed" (anti-capitalist) market does use prices, and further strips rent/interest/privilege to make those prices accurately reflect subjective cost of labor as well. A freed market would still need commons rules, democratic decisions, norms, hard constraints, which isn't a contradiction in the system. I've seen Carson synthesize marginalism and LTV, that marginal utility decides price in more short term and competition drives cost to labor over the long term, as under the distorting effects of capitalism, these two are further apart than they need be.
by RayVR | 2025-12-08 04:03:10+00:00
Are you a stream of words or are your words the “simplistic” projection of your abstract thoughts? I don’t at all discount the importance of language in so many things, but the question that matters is whether statistical models of language can ever “learn” abstract thought, or become part of a system which uses them as a tool.

My personal assessment is that LLMs can do neither.
by AnonC | 2025-12-08 04:03:22+00:00
> I would like to support Daring Fireball (a publication I read a lot) but the only way is to buy an ad slot for $11K which seems like a scam to both the viewer and the advertiser.

AFAIK, Daring Fireball never runs these tracking ad networks with tons of flashing and annoying ads. It does one tiny graphical ad on the web page and has a weekly sponsor post, both of which can be easily ignored. The graphical ad does not even appear in the full RSS feed.

To support Daring Fireball, you can use the links to the weekly sponsor if that product is of interest to you. Once or twice in a year or so, there may be posts with Amazon affiliate links (with full disclosure), which you can use if you want. Other than that, you can share the posts and have more people read it. That in turn could potentially help with the above mentioned aspects.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-12-08 04:04:10+00:00
Here in New Mexico there's a long tradition of flat-roofed adobe house construction; the materials are abundant and it insulates fairly well (by the standards of the 1700s). But the roofs always leak because snow and rain don't immediately run off. Yet even though we now have modern building materials readily available, a lot of faux adobe still gets built especially in wealthy neighborhoods.

We have a saying: "New Mexico is a place where poor people want to live in a modern house with a pitched roof and rich people want to live in mud huts."
by charleshn | 2025-12-08 04:04:16+00:00
> std::hardware_destructive_interference_size Exists so you don't have to guess, although in practice it'll basically always be 64.

Unfortunately it's not quite true, do to e.g. spacial prefetching [0]. See e.g. Folly's definition [1].

[0] https://community.intel.com/t5/Intel-Moderncode-for-Parallel...

[1] https://github.com/facebook/folly/blob/d2e6fe65dfd6b30a9d504...
by yosito | 2025-12-08 04:04:36+00:00
This has been my experience with almost everything I've tried to create with generative AI, from apps and websites, to photos and videos, to text and even simple sentences. At first glance, it looks impressive, but as soon as you look closer, you start to notice that everything is actually just sloppy copy.

That being said, sloppy copy can make doing actual work a lot faster if you treat it with the right about of skepticism and hand-holding.

It's first attempt at the Space Jam site was close enough that it probably could have been manually fixed by an experienced developer in less time than in takes to write the next prompt.
by ehnto | 2025-12-08 04:05:54+00:00
That is the "big issue" I have found as well. Not only are enterprise codebases often proprietary, ground up architectures, the actual hard part is business logic, locating required knowledge, and taking into account a decade of changing business requirements. All of that information is usually inside a bunch of different humans heads and by the time you get it all out and processed, code is often a small part of the task.
by calvinmorrison | 2025-12-08 04:06:08+00:00
That's what I think people don't really get about being poor. They _know_ they are cash strapped. and like a cash strapped business, managing cash flow is more important than log term investments.

They _know_ buying a small bottle of dish detergent is more expensive per oz, but buying in bulk would require a 15-16 week lead across all their purchase categories.
by tzury | 2025-12-08 04:09:00+00:00
I don't think this entire piece taught me anything new other than a speculation that "speculation is mounting that Tim Cook may be preparing to step aside as CEO" --

"speculation". "may be". "preparing".

The lagging behind the AI wave is known, and matter of fact, the "Liquid Glass" saga is not even mentioned while they focus on the Apple Vision glasses.

This is a great model for the poor low quality of journalism that became industry standard nowadays.

Yes, apple direction is questionable, and while it is mainly questionable because the of AI wave, well, the entire AI wave is questionable nowadays.

one more thing, the URL path has "/apple-tim-cook-leadership-changes" in it, suggests the title "what the heck" is most likely a newer version than the original one which they decided not to publish as is since it is not based enough.

Bottom line:

The template is:

* [company] + [AI] + [speculation] + [analyst quote about urgency].

It produces volume, not insight.
by aspenmayer | 2025-12-08 04:09:30+00:00
Yes, I’m familiar with the case. He was caught interfering with equipment on the MIT campus in order to additionally violate TOS of JSTOR, wasn’t he? He shouldn’t have expected to prevail in court, and I’m saddened by his decision to end his own life. That said, he did a whole lot more besides violating TOS, so I’m not sure how applicable his case is to the topic under discussion, strictly speaking.
by fbrncci | 2025-12-08 04:10:04+00:00
I can't wait for the days where LLM written articles are indistinguishable from real writing, so people stop complaining about this. I am giving that another 6 months. In a lot of cases its not just lazy prompt -> article, but rather text synthesis through LLMs -> article. But people will still complain /rant (bias: I run a blog with only AI written content, but a loyal audience).
by antonvs | 2025-12-08 04:10:27+00:00
> None of the macro systems in those languages are really equivalent to lisp macros.

Sure, but we’d hardly expect equivalence in such different languages.

I’ve written macros in all the languages I’ve mentioned, as well as Scheme’s syntax-rules and syntax-case, and in practice I don’t see some big advantage of any of them.

What actual useful macros do you write in Lisp, that would also be useful in one of those other languages, but can’t be expressed by their macro systems? Not saying it’s not possible to come up with theoretical examples, but what’s going to actually impact a programmer in those languages?

> If you really want static typing, Lisp macros are powerful enough to implement a full ML type system in userspace as a library.

On the other side of the fence, using Camlp5 you can implement Lisp or Scheme syntax and have OCaml run it directly. I did a toy implementation of that for Scheme years ago using Camlp4. You could easily implement syntax-rules macros in that environment. I enjoy games like that, but I don’t see much impact for real-world programming.

I think Coalton is cool, but I think you start to run into the limitations of Lisp syntax. I’d rather use Haskell to write that kind of code, it’s more concise. And to quote Paul Graham, succinctness is power. (PG does not endorse this message!)
by nitrix | 2025-12-08 04:11:03+00:00
That is correct.

int x, *p, arr[5], fn(), (*pfn)();

Using x, or dereferencing p, or subscripting the array arr, or declaring a function that can be called with fn, or dereferencing the function pointer pfn then calling it, all these things would produce an int.

It's the intended way to read/write declarations/expressions. As a consequence, asterisks ends up placed near the identifiers. The confused ones will think it's a stylistic choice and won't understand any of this.
by 3oil3 | 2025-12-08 04:11:09+00:00
There were a lot of non-optimal decisions, and statements were out of reality. The macPro is not the best. The M3 slower. A.I. acronym opportunity could have been leveraged differently. A mac is supposed to be comfortable, macOS 26 "Da hoe" initially lacked various elements that were expected. The current state of logs/logging in macOS is a paradise for an adversary but time-hogging for legitimate user. Shareholders use macs, and they trust teams that studied Nokia. New emojis have a relatively inelastic relationship with sales.
by dang | 2025-12-08 04:12:56+00:00
You've broken the site guidelines repeatedly in this thread and others lately. Crossing into personal attack is particularly unwelcome.

We ban accounts that post like this, and we've asked you more than once before, so that's not good. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules, we'd be grateful.
by frankest | 2025-12-08 04:13:13+00:00
I love how handy-wavy control attempts get from every direction, instead of addressing the real problem.

Society is cells and organs in the body of a country. All we want is a good neural system to take feedback back and forth to the brain, which that takes care of the body well, so it can compete and cooperate in an arena with other large bodies.

Communism is controlled by political influence and those who rise up don’t come down, even when they stop functioning in favor of the body. That means wounds start bleeding, organs deflect to other bodies, because they know nobody cares about them. The system runs out of blood, since the cognitive load of taking care off all cells and organs properly is too much for one or two cells that helm a party. Politics evolves to distrust so that brain trust that is supposed to take care of everyone inevitably shrinks and becomes paranoid and violent as it loses control.

Capitalism generates extra blood to all organs and cells that seem capable of helping the body get what it wants - great way to increase supply. This can cause hematomas as some areas get pumped up more than they can ever return even with over supply, but in general it works. Still, as an organ you are only wanted when you are useful. If you are too young to be useful or too old, the system may shed you, unless you have fat deposits.

Society wants to know that it will be allowed to produce at its absolute best and know that its offspring will not starve and will have a chance to produce too, and then when you lose your strength the body will not amputate you too early. Needs change too. the body can break a leg, get sick, get trauma. We need a nervous system that can understand the needs and feel pain if there is some somewhere, because pain can propagate, and defend against cancer and other social issues. The nervous system that can architect responses that benefit all. It’s all a feedback mechanism. We need better ones and that’s the opposite of putting people in power to do as they will for years without consequence.
by paultopia | 2025-12-08 04:14:41+00:00
As another commenter in this thread pointed out, pricing is the bare minimum for retail. We’re not talking about general sloppiness, we’re talking about misleading consumers on the basics of their transactions.

Yes, lots of businesses have thin margins. But the law (such as contract law and the laws against consumer fraud, which are implicated here) sets the things that a business can’t economize on in order to meet those margins. It’s the same as food safety: restaurants also run really thin margins, but they’re not allowed to store the meat on the counter because refrigeration is too expensive. If they do that, they get shut down by the health inspector.

Businesses “should” comply with consumer fraud laws for the same reason they “should” comply with health codes.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-08 04:15:13+00:00
Which projects are you referring to here?

Because in my experience, the projects that I can think of that switch to open core are those that are started by smaller businesses when a large multinational tech company starts to mess with their revenue streams.

In that case, I don't fault them in the slightest. As a matter of fact, I think these days it's now a sucker's bet to build a company around an open source product. Free software? Maybe. Source available or open core from the start? Possibly. A fully permissive license that in the outside chance my product is successful, suddenly puts me in competition with Amazon and Microsoft, so they can kill my business with my own software? Forget about it.
by coppsilgold | 2025-12-08 04:15:18+00:00
Is a brain not a token prediction machine?

Tokens in form of neural impulses go in, tokens in the form of neural impulses go out.

We would like to believe that there is something profound happening inside and we call that consciousness. Unfortunately when reading about split-brain patient experiments or agenesis of the corpus callosum cases I feel like we are all deceived, every moment of every day. I came to realization that the confabulation that is observed is just a more pronounced effect of the normal.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-12-08 04:16:06+00:00
“Everyone who does this work has depended on the records database that Ancestry controls,” said David Gurney, who runs Ramapo College’s Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center in New Jersey. “Without it, casework is going to be a lot slower, and there will be some cases that can’t be resolved at all.”

No where in here is there even a hint of acquiring the consent of the people who's data this is. Nor does the word consent appear in the article.

People who don't even think about getting consent are poor choices to be in positions of power or accountability.
by didibus | 2025-12-08 04:16:12+00:00
I think the missing piece is that "more expressive" languages do not automatically create more value at the team or company level.

Languages like Lisp, Clojure, Rust, Haskell, Erlang give strong engineers room to build powerful abstractions, but they also increase cognitive load and ramp up cost. In most orgs with churn and constant hiring, you do not get to enjoy "we built great abstractions and now we are fast". You live in "someone new is trying to understand what the last person did".

That is why hand holding and guard rails win. Not because Python or similar are technically superior, but because they support a commoditised, fungible workforce. Even if a wizard in a high dimension language is 2x more productive, that does not necessarily beat a slightly larger team in a mainstream language once you factor in turnover and ramp up. Companies mostly optimise for business impact, predictable delivery, and ease of staffing, not for maximising the ceiling of the top few programmers.

That said, at the individual level, as a programmer, you definitely can benefit from learning and mastering those added dimensions, even if you are to never use them again professionally, they expand your mindset.
by mmooss | 2025-12-08 04:16:39+00:00
> Literally no one is immune to the character-destroying nature of entitlement programs.

I personally know people who appear 'immune'. I find the issue is trauma, not 'character-destroying' - the uncertainty; the demoralizing nature; the experience living continually on a precipice, and seeing your kids, other dependants, and loved ones living that way. People are in a continual state of survival - of fight or flight, not of growth and health. Over a long term, that will injure anyone.

You can see the privileged atmosphere of HN in the comments, mostly from people with no contact with US welfare programs. It's like reading software development analysis from people who have no contact with that. (I have seen people on HN who do have experience, but they don't seem to be commenting.)
by gamerDude | 2025-12-08 04:17:43+00:00
I'm an LLMs are being used in workflows they don't make sense in-sayer. And while yes, I can believe that LLMs can be part of a system that actually does think, I believe that to achieve true "thinking", it would likely be a system that is more deterministic in its approach rather than probabilistic.

Especially when modeling acting with intent. The ability to measure against past results and think of new innovative approaches seems like it may come from a system that may model first and then use LLM output. Basically something that has a foundation of tools rather than an LLM using MCP. Perhaps using LLMs to generate a response that humans like to read, but not in them coming up with the answer.

Either way, yes, its possible for a thinking system to use LLMs (and potentially humans piece together sentences in a similar way), but its also possible LLMs will be cast aside and a new approach will be used to create an AGI.

So for me: even if you are an AI-yeasayer, you can still believe that they won't be a component in an AGI.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-12-08 04:17:50+00:00
>> You can’t make anything truly radical with it. By definition, LLMs are trained on what has come before. In addition to being already-discovered territory, existing code is buggy and broken and sloppy and, as anyone who has ever written code knows, absolutely embarrassing to look at.

> I don't understand this argument. I mean the same applies for books. All books teach you what has come before. Nobody says "You can't make anything truly radical with books". Radical things are built by people after reading those books.

Books share concepts expressed by people understanding those concepts (or purporting to do so) in a manner which is relatable to the reader. This is achievable due to a largely shared common lived experience as both parties are humans.

In short, people reason, learn, remember, and can relate with each other.

> Why can't people build radical things after learning ...

They absolutely can and often do.

> ... or after being assisted by LLMs?

Therein lies the problem. LLMs are not assistants.

They are statistical token (text) document generators. That's it.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-08 04:18:06+00:00
That is not the same thing at all. Unreachable means that entire branch cannot be taken and the compiler is free to inject optimizations assuming that’s the case. It doesn’t need to crash if the violation isn’t met - indeed it probably won’t. It’s the equivalent of having something like

x->foo(); if (x == null) { Return error…; }

This literally caused a security vulnerability in the Linux kernel because it’s UB to dereference null (even in the kernel where engineers assumed it had well defined semantics) and it elided the null pointer check which then created a vulnerability.

I would say that using unreachable() in mission critical software is super dangerous, moreso than an allocation failing. You want to remove all potential for UB (ie safe rust with no or minimal unsafe, not sprinkling in UB as a form of documentation).
by dreamcompiler | 2025-12-08 04:18:29+00:00
> Note to oligarchs: a post-apocalyptic world is no fun. Not even for you in your bunkers.

It's amusing to me that oligarchs don't seem to understand that if the economy goes to hell, their private security forces will just leave (or worse!). What do they think they will pay salaries with? Bitcoin? Do they really think an army of robot dogs is going to protect them?
by tibbar | 2025-12-08 04:18:58+00:00
It seems obvious to me that entities have emergent needs and plans and so on, independent of any of the humans inside.

For example, if you've worked at a large company, one of the little tragedies is when someone everyone likes gets laid off. There were probably no people who actively wanted Bob to lose his job. Even the CEO/Board who pulled the trigger probably had nothing against Bob. Heck, they might be the next ones out the door. The company is faceless, yet it wanted Bob to go, because that apparently contributed to the company's objective function. Had the company consisted entirely of different people, plus Bob, Bob might have been laid off anyway.

There is a strong will to do ... things the emerges from large structures of people and technology. It's funny like that.
by dawgzill4 | 2025-12-08 04:18:58+00:00
Tell us you didn't read the article without telling us you didn't read the article; the author says it's not the end of "work" but "jobs".

> with no reciprocal obligations.

The majority are coming around to feel office jobs making line go up are not sufficient reciprocal obligations relative to 12-13 year olds in textile factories ensuring you have clothing 996. So why value Excel and other keyboard experts?

By majority I mean the billions outside the US who have recovered from US imperialism of the latter 1900s and tire of being serfs for Wall-E culture of a smidge over 300 million.

When is the last time you did useful work for yourself rather than externalize it on Target?

How sad Americans have to grow up and live in reality and not some rhetorical hallucination induced by corporate propaganda.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2025-12-08 04:20:22+00:00
Daring Fireball has been doing the one ad a week in RSS with no tracking for over a decade. The sponsors must think they work.

You could always buy a Stratechery subscription - which is great by the way. Some of that money goes to Gruber for the Dithering podcast.

But Gruber is a famously self described bad business person for a content creator. He never tries to be an early reviewer when press embargoes are over for hardware. He claims to never look at his server logs and got rid of Google Analytics ages ago.

His podcast schedule is erratic.
by PhotonHunter | 2025-12-08 04:20:31+00:00
Was there ever a recall of the ECU, and if not, why did the UA events go away? Were UA events more common at higher elevations, where there would be more cosmic ray activity?

This story is like Baba Yaga, it comes out from the shadows to scare people every now and then, but Barr’s theory has the interesting property that the ECU would be cleared by the error and so there could never be evidence of the event as he postulated.
by Joker_vD | 2025-12-08 04:20:35+00:00
Raymond Chen has a whole "Introduction to IA-64" series of posts on his blog, by the way. It's such an unconventional ISA that I am baffled that Intel seriously thought they would've been able to persuade anyone to switch to it from x86: it's very poorly suited for general-purpose computations. Number crunching, sure, but anything more freeform, and you stare at the specs and wonder how the hell the designers supposed this thing to be programmed and used.