MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by omnicognate | 2026-01-04 17:31:52+00:00
I've grown to dislike the term "neurodivergent". People seem to think of it as equivalent to "neurodiverse", which is a valid and useful term, but it is totally different, and problematic. The difference is that a population is "diverse" whereas an individual is "divergent".

To discuss the "neurodiversity" of a population is to recognise the enormous range of different aptitudes and ways of being across that group. It's an inclusive way of thinking and matches reality as I see it.

To describe an individual as "neurodivergent" is to imply a "normal" group from which that individual "diverges". It usually also implies a second "divergent" group to which they belong.

It's related to the "condition-isation" we also get in language, where you don't simply think a particular way but "have something". I don't merely struggle to imagine visual imagery, I "have aphantasia". I don't merely get annoyed by small, repetitive noises, I "have misophonia".

As a child, I was diagnosed with Tourette's Syndrome. I mostly grew out of it in my twenties, but I still 'tic noticeably at times. Back then my 'tics were severe, even extreme at times, and could be disruptive in lessons. (But no, while I did have vocal tics I did not "have coprolalia". Only around 10% of Tourettes "sufferers" swear compulsively, not that you'd think so based on the way it's portrayed in the media.)

To have a label attached to this "condition" helped in some ways: a particular teacher who was visibly annoyed by my vocalisations was more tolerant knowing I "had a condition" that caused them (although perhaps he himself should have been given dispensation as someone who "had misophonia"); drugs and therapy were tried, which didn't help but could have done.

However neither I nor my peers ever saw me as different to them, and these benefits could have accrued just as well without the label. Indeed, I've known plenty of people without the diagnosis who would have benefitted at least from a greater understanding that some of their behaviours are compulsive and difficult to manage.

Grouping symptoms into syndromes surely has some value in medical research, but a neurological syndrome like Tourette's or OCD or autism isn't like a hepatitis infection. The underlying mechanism isn't understood and the "symptoms" are things that are seen to a greater or lesser extent throughout the population. Drawing a sharp distinction between those who "have a condition" and those who "are normal" seems counterproductive.

The more "diverse" a population is, the less I think it makes sense to think of any individual within it as "divergent", and real-world human populations are incredibly neurodiverse.
by jkowall | 2026-01-04 17:31:53+00:00
The Author Disowned It: Years later, Eduardo Galeano admitted he lacked the economic training to write it and that the narrative was too simplistic.

Zero Sum Fallacy: It assumes the West is rich only because the South is poor. Modern economics rejects this idea. Wealth is created, not just stolen.

Ignores Local Failure: By blaming imperialism for everything, it absolves centuries of corrupt local leaders and bad domestic policies of any responsibility.

It’s a Manifesto, Not History: It cherry picks facts to fit a villain/victim narrative rather than analyzing complex geopolitical reality.

If only the global economies of the world were as simple as they were in the 70s.
by mike_hearn | 2026-01-04 17:33:40+00:00
What's wrong with V8?

You could also look at GraalJS. It's shipped as part of the Oracle Database, there's a security team, patching process etc. It's used in production by Amazon amongst others. It's got flexible sandbox features too.

https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/embed-langua...

The way it's written is good for security as well:

https://medium.com/graalvm/writing-truly-memory-safe-jit-com...

Disclosure: I sit next to the GraalVM team.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2026-01-04 17:33:51+00:00
Well, no, my exact argument is that there is a base system, even if it is composed of assorted components. If you install Debian (or whatever) on a machine, the software installed by the package manager ships as a unified release that has been adapted to work together. I think it's reasonable to call that the base OS. And then, separate from that base system that is managed by the package manager, the local admin my install things into /usr/local.
by asa400 | 2026-01-04 17:34:16+00:00
> I was reading about terminal text editors (em, en, vi, vim, neovim, etc.), and it's interesting how some of the software that "lasts" is more like Theseus' Ship. All the original components replaced over time, but the core concepts last.

There's probably a lesson about interfaces here. The thing itself is able to last and adapt if you're able to replace the components, and the components can be replaced if the interfaces between them are stable (or at least knowable, so you can change them and know what you're changing). A couple of the examples I can think of that try to do this are Linux and Clojure. Both have improved and added a ton over the years, but they've always focused on maintaining stable interfaces.
by zahlman | 2026-01-04 17:35:25+00:00
What you're missing is that random people who come to Stack Overflow to ask a question (of a sort that doesn't meet the site's standards) are not my "users". I don't care in the slightest about these metrics of "dead-ness", and showing them to me another hundred times will not change my mind about that.

Because from my perspective, it has never been about how many questions are asked per day, or how many ad impressions the site owners get. (I don't see a dime from it, after all.) From my perspective, way too many questions got asked. It is more than three times as many publicly visible and still-open questions, as there are articles on Wikipedia. For a scope of "practical matters about writing code", as compared to "any real-world phenomenon important enough for reliable sources to have written about it".

I am not trying to win the argument about what people want. I am only establishing that the goal is legitimate, and that people who share that goal should be permitted to congregate in public and try to accomplish something. I do not share your goals. The community is not like software, and "serving and adapting to users" does not benefit the people doing the work. We never arranged to have the kind of "users" you describe.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-04 17:35:46+00:00
> What a lot of people actually want from an LLM, is for the LLM to have an opinion about the question being asked.

The main LLMs are heavily tuned to be useful as tools to do what you want.

If you asked an LLM to install prisma and it gave you an opinionated response that it preferred to use ZenStack and started installing that instead, you’d be navigating straight to your browser to cancel plan and sign up for a different LLM.

The conversational friendly users who want casual chit chat or a conversation partner aren’t the ones buying the $100 and $200 plans. They’re probably not even buying the $20 plans. Training LLMs to cater to their style would be a mistake.

> LLMs do not have opinions.

LLMs can produce many opinions, depending on the input. I think this is where some people new to LLMs don’t understand that an LLM isn’t like a person, it’s just a big pattern matching machine with a lot of training data that includes every opinion that has been posted to Reddit and other sites. You can get it to produce those different opinions with the right prompting inputs.
by perihelions | 2026-01-04 17:35:46+00:00
Agreed, this is aggravated terror.

> "...German capital is blanketed in snow and temperatures are hovering around freezing..."

> "...The local district heating system, which transports heat around a pipe network in the area, is affected as it is powered by electricity..."

> "...particularly serious power outage affecting tens of thousands of households and businesses, including care facilities, hospitals..."
by rabf | 2026-01-04 17:35:50+00:00
There really isn't many concepts to get. `zpool` is like the device manager, use it define how your disks are grouped i.e. turn two disks into a mirror or striped array. `zfs` creates, sets properties on and manages the datasets on the zpool.

For Linux specifically I also reccomend https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/v3.1.x/.

ZFSBootmenu is a bootloader that is fully able to take advantage of all the ZFS features and it also has great documentation with installation guides for a range of distros. https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/v3.1.x/guides/fedora/uefi.ht...

I reccomend you just play around with it a bit first (you can just use some 1Gb test files instead of actual disks), its really just a lack of familiarity that scares people away.
by samiv | 2026-01-04 17:36:08+00:00
I wish people who ship crappy software didn't ship it and would let someone else ship something better instead.

It really sucks when the first mover / incumbent is some crappy half assed solution.

But unfortunately we live in a world where quality is largely irrelevant and other USPs are more important. For example these little weekend projects that become successful despite their distinct lack of quality

Linux kernel - free Unix.

JavaScript - scripting in browser

Python - sane "perl"

Today on GitHub alone you can probably find 100 more featured and higher quality projects than any of these were when they launched but nobody cares.
by Tagbert | 2026-01-04 17:36:21+00:00
It can be at first until you get used to it. You can observe your surroundings, make up stories about what is happening. Ask yourself questions. Listen to yourself.

This is a bit like excercise. When you first start, 30 minutes of exercise can be torture as your is out of shape and not used to the effort. Keep doing it and it feels better and you feel better.

Work on becoming a source of thoughts rather than a consumer of thoughts.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2026-01-04 17:36:47+00:00
I believe you may have the causality backwards: ignoring constituents is probably not how democracy works, yet that is what we see today, therefore what we see today must not be democratic.

How can they get away with ignoring their constituents? Well: gerrymandering has made it so that representatives can select their constituents (and their opponent's constituents, or lack thereof). They will remain in their post indefinitely, regardless of this carefully-selected minority of constituents wants, so long as they continue to bend the knee and kiss the ring for you-know-who.

If an existing politician already lacks both the moral compunction and a self-interested political survial motivation to say a thing is bad, then a letter from a minority-opinioned constituent of theirs won't change their mind.
by crashabr | 2026-01-04 17:37:59+00:00
This is the ultimate cope out: taking technology as a singular entity that evolved outside of human control and is simply commented on by passive observers who are simply "pessimist" or "optimist" about it instead of people whose lives are meaningfully impacted by it.

The trick to do so is to flatten human experience under the determinism of "efficiency" (which you euphemistically called "quality of life"). This way "optimists" can dismiss nuanced oppositions to a lack of regulations as "luddism" and fold together anti-vaxxers and AI skeptics, as if those are the same people, with the same motivations or arguments.

This also conveniently distracts from the fact that technological pessimism exists as a contrast to periods of technological optimism, which helps evade the question of what changed: after all, pessimists aways existed, as your link shows.

I would suggest unfolding the "pessimist" reductionism and questioning why AI skeptics are not stem-cell skeptics. This will probably help avoid arguments that sound very much like "the end justify the means".
by pguso | 2026-01-04 17:38:30+00:00
Hi

I put together a repository that explains and shows agents locally without frameworks, so you can understand what happens under the hood before using frameworks.

The repo builds one agent step by step across 10 lessons, starting from a single local LLM call and gradually adding:

* system prompts as constraints
* structured output (JSON contracts)
* decision routing
* tools
* an explicit observe → decide → act loop
* memory
* planning as data (not chain-of-thought)
* atomic actions
* dependency graphs (“Atom of Thought”)

There are no frameworks, no cloud APIs, no hidden reasoning, and everything runs locally with GGUF models.

I’d appreciate feedback, criticism, or pointers to things that are misleading or incomplete.
Repo: https://github.com/pguso/agents-from-scratch
by wduquette | 2026-01-04 17:38:40+00:00
“Cold-blooded software” concisely expresses something I’ve thought about for years. Modern software based on HTML/CSS and frameworks works great so long as maintenance is ongoing. But for software I write for myself, I much prefer cold-blooded software. I want to write it today and have it still work in five years, even if I haven’t done any maintenance. Professionally I work in an area with similar needs. Gonna be adding this term to my vocabulary.
by staticassertion | 2026-01-04 17:38:42+00:00
> First of all "security" is undefined.

No it isn't. Security boundaries exist and are explicit. It isn't undefined at all. Going from user X to user Y without permission to do so is an explicit vulnerability.

The kernel has permissions boundaries. They are explicit. It is defined.

> Second, nearly every bug can be be exploited in a malicious way,

No they can't.
by Aurornis | 2026-01-04 17:39:40+00:00
> But an LLM can create a fully formed counterfactual universe

This is a little too far into the woo side of LLM interpretations.

The LLM isn’t forming a universe internally. It’s stringing tokens together in a way that is consistent with language and something that looks coherent. It doesn’t hold opinions or have ideas about the universe that it has created from some first principles. It’s just a big statistical probability machine that was trained on the inputs we gave it.
by stevendgarcia | 2026-01-04 17:40:35+00:00
Great feedback!

You’re absolutely right — C and C++ give you the primitives to do this manually. If every developer followed the “stack first, heap only when necessary” discipline, and carefully used unique_ptr or avoided new/delete when possible, you could achieve much of the same safety and determinism.

The difference I’m aiming for is that these constraints aren’t optional — they’re baked into the language and compiler. You don’t rely on every developer making the right choice; instead, the structure of the code itself enforces ownership and lifetime rules.

So in your terms, instead of “doing dumb things is an error,” it’s structurally impossible to do dumb things in the first place. The language doesn’t just punish mistakes with foot-guns, it makes the safe path the only path.

This also opens up other possibilities that are really awkward in C/C++, like structured concurrency with deterministic memory cleanup, restartable scopes, and safe parallel allocations, without relying on GC or heavy reference counting.

I’d be curious: if C++ had a compiler that made stack-first allocation the default and forbade escapes unless explicit, would that solve most of the problems you’ve experienced, or are there still edge cases that would require a fundamentally different runtime model?
by simonw | 2026-01-04 17:40:53+00:00
The challenge with V8 is finding a wrapper for it that doesn't come with a big warning NOT to use it as a sandbox for untrusted code - here's the workerd one https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd?tab=readme-ov-file#war... and here's the PyMiniRacer section: https://bpcreech.com/PyMiniRacer/architecture/#security-goal...

I looked at GraalVM but was put off by the licensing situation: https://www.graalvm.org/22.3/reference-manual/embed-language...

> GraalVM Enterprise provides the experimental Sandbox Resource Limits feature that allows for the limiting of resources used by guest applications. These resource limits are not available in the Community Edition of GraalVM.

Part of my requirements for a sandbox are strong guarantees against memory or CPU exhaustion from poorly written or malicious code.
by astura | 2026-01-04 17:41:03+00:00
>In the past, my answers were often based on a piece of advice I myself got from Bengt Holmstrom: “when in doubt, choose the job where you will learn more.”

Weird advice, How does anyone know what job you'd learn more at? Anyways, when I was a young person the only requirement I had for my first job was would they be willing to hire me.
by kees99 | 2026-01-04 17:41:10+00:00
Poor promoting is totally a thing, yes.

However this particular Claude's failure mode isn't about poor prompting, it's about not knowing enough to confidently answer.

Try to prompt your way into getting instructions on how to successfully compile bash with fefe's dietlibc. There's just not enough relevant data in training set.

PS: I'm not complaining, and by no means I expect this sort of prompts to "work". My "use-case" is to understand if something obscure is a genuinely untrotted territory, or maybe totally doable, as in "here is github repo, you're welcome".

Back 3-5 years ago, best way to answer such things used to be to spend an hour or two googling and dredging through some old forum posts, or ask on SO and hope question wouldn't be closed as off-topic immediately. Now you can just ask LLM, and you get your answer after just a handful of back-and-forth. Even if sometimes the answer is this idiosyncratic "what's your use-case" thing.
by jcranmer | 2026-01-04 17:41:20+00:00
That entire conversation on comments is just wildly insane. Uncle Bob outright admits that he couldn't understand the code he had written when he looked back on it for the discussion, which should be an automatic failure. But he tries to justify the failure as merely the algorithm just being sooooo complex there's no way it can be done simply. (Which, compared to the numerics routines I've been staring out, no, this is among the easiest kind of algorithm to understand)
by graboy | 2026-01-04 17:41:26+00:00
I think maybe you are saying that there may be some way that the genes affect heart disease not through LDL, and therefore MR does not apply because the "exclusion restriction" [1] fails here? Or are you talking about a different assumption?

The cited study addresses this, which is why I pointed to figure 3. They argue that if genes were causing heart disease not through LDL in any meaningful way, you wouldn't expect such a clean dose-response consistency across different genetic variants - it would be more jagged.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendelian_randomization#Defini...
by hollandheese | 2026-01-04 17:41:44+00:00
>- No sudo, or at least no conflict between "Sudo is dangerous and can break your system" / "You need sudo to do routine things"

This is an unreasonable ask. No modern operating system will give you this. You have to escalate credentials on macOS and Windows as well. Typically Linux asks you LESS often than either macOS or Windows. This or I don't understand what you're asking here.

>- No CLI required to install software

Just use GNOME Software or Discover (KDE). They'll install anything on Flathub or in your distro's repositories. Use a different distro than Ubuntu though, since they are non-standard with using Snap instead of Flatpak.

>Lag-free pen experience

I have the same amount of lag in Windows as in Linux on my Surface Pro 9. What does need work is palm rejection, but you can disable the touchscreen while the pen is in use. Not the best.

>Good touch support

GNOME and GTK 3/4 apps are by far the best for this. Not quite as good as Windows though.

>Less fragile. I shouldn't have to worry about the PC booting up into a no-GUI terminal after I installed something, or edited a file. (See point 1; don't make me edit system files to do routine stuff like communicate with a USB device without sudo, if they can break the system)

?????? ?????? If you mess with system files on any system without knowing what you're doing you'll run into this problem with an OS.

>Let me open an application by double-clicking it

Double clicking what?

The executable file in your file manager? That works.

A desktop shortcut? Use a different DE than GNOME or install an extension that allows desktop shortcuts.
by randysalami | 2026-01-04 17:41:47+00:00
I agree strongly with this. My neurodivergence is a result of trauma. In some ways, I’m a broken person and my affinity with computers is a coping mechanism. Outsiders might see me as a successful person (and in some ways I am) but I will be saddled with this emotional debt for many years to come. When I was younger, I used to think so strongly of my condition, that it elevated me because it gave me the chance to achieve my dreams. Then I discovered the trap of covert narcissism.

It turns out that trauma unresolved doesn’t just get better because you make yourself stronger, smarter, and less approachable. Instead you make yourself an island, keep pushing others away, and you become miserable. A red flag is the idea of being “better” than someone, even if you are! A covert narcissist might to themselves think they are a better engineer than their coworker but because they are so “self-aware” be kind and accommodating. This is a tricky spot because that line of thinking still maintains an idea of inherent superiority and it festers.. all this to say is I think our field has a lot of traumatized engineers and I think being on computers and in your head playing God can be a breeding ground for narcissism, especially the covert form. I even think this is encouraged directly in the field with the way engineers get treated as unimpeachable and as superhuman in some companies (easier to manipulate and less qualms about exploiting their fellow man). Of course you have really smart people that are genuinely empathetic and humble but I think this is a dying breed in the field. And with these people, they can be very unassuming and go unnoticed on online discourse because they are so humble and self-aware.
by sebular | 2026-01-04 17:41:52+00:00
The way he animated points with an increasing z value made it click for me. Now, when I look at the formula it makes sense. The larger the value of z, the smaller your projected x and y will be. This checks out because things get smaller as they move farther away. Something that’s twice as far away will seem half as big.

The rotation formula eludes me.
by craftkiller | 2026-01-04 17:42:09+00:00
> I'm not switching to Wayland until my window manager supports it.

Looking at your github, it seems you use StumpWM. It seems they are also working on a wayland version under the name Mahogany. Development seems pretty active: https://github.com/stumpwm/mahogany

> I'll probably switch, grudgingly, to XWayland whenever X gets removed from Debian.

FWIW I think "wayback" is the project for this. It seems to be trying to use XWayland to run full X11 desktop environments on top of Wayland: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayback/wayback
by matsemann | 2026-01-04 17:42:21+00:00
Thinking they didn't keep up with the times or that they should've made changes is perfectly fine. It's the vitriol in some of the comments here I really can't stand.

As for me, I also don't answer much anymore. But not sure if it's due to the community or frankly because most low hanging fruits are gone. Still sometimes visit, though. Even for thing's an LLM can answer, because finding it on SO takes me 2 seconds but waiting for the LLM to write a novella about the wrong thing often takes longer.