MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by andyjohnson0 | 2026-01-04 17:18:03+00:00
There is a lot in what you describe that goes substantially beyond what I had in that codebase. It was basically a set of idioms with some helper code for a few common functions. Having an opinionated, predefined hierarchy is a good approach - there were concepts similar to your app/worker/task in the codebase I dealt with, although the equivalent of worker and task were both (kind of, its been a few years) situated below app.

In the code I mentioned, a lot of use was made of multi-level arrays of structs, with functions being passed a pointer to a root data structure and one or more array indexes. This made function argument validation somewhat better than just checking for null pointers, as array sizes were mostly stored in their containing struct or were constant. I don't know if that corresponds to your 'handle' concept, but I suspect you're doing something more general-purpose.

There were simple reader/writer functions for DTOs (which were mostly stored in arrays) but no idea of an ORM.

Escaping using clone seems sound. The ability to expand scopes seems (if I understand it) powerful, but perhaps makes reasoning about the dynamic behaviour of the code harder. Having some kind of observability around this may help.

Refactoring wasn't a huge problem. The codebase was basically a statically-linked monolith, so dependencies were simplified. I think that having an explicit way to indicate architecture boundaries might be useful.

Overall, I suspect that if there are limitations with your approach then it may be that, while it simplifies 80-90% of a problem, the remainder is hard to fit into the architectural framework. Dogfooding some production-level applications should help.

Good luck. What you're doing is fascinating, and I hope you'll update HN with your progress.
by andreyandrade | 2026-01-04 17:18:26+00:00
I see current AIs as tools—a sophisticated lathe, not a thinking partner. The question isn't whether it "knows" anything.

The interesting question is: why does AI with correct information in its weights still give wrong answers? That's an engineering problem, not a metaphysics problem.

But here's what bothers me about the "AI doesn't truly know" argument: do we? When a senior dev answers "use Kubernetes" without asking about team size or user count, are they "comprehending" or pattern-matching on what sounds authoritative? The AI failure I described is identical to what I see in human experts daily.

Maybe the flaw isn't unique to AI. Maybe it's a mirror.
by lexicality | 2026-01-04 17:18:56+00:00
This sounds like my kind of hell. I actively enjoy going to work in a busy office and the primary reason to do so is to chat to my coworkers.

I literally cannot work in silence. The best place I ever worked was at one CCC congress where someone had set up a bunch of desks in the corner of one of the raves.

What even is the point of going in to the office if you're going to sit in silent ranks trying to increase shareholder value as much as possible without any breaks or distractions? Eugh.

Bonus: by the way "Trait 2" is written I know for sure that the author has never experienced real hyperfocus. True hyperfocus is something to be avoided at all costs. Writing code for 6 hours straight is a terrible experience and leaves you drained, physically uncomfortable and sometimes mildly injured if you were in a bad posture during that time.
by pigpop | 2026-01-04 17:18:57+00:00
This is exactly the issue that most people run into and it's literally the GIGO principle that we should all be familiar with by now. If your design spec amounts to "fix it" then don't be surprised at the results. One of the major improvements I've noticed in Claude Code using Opus 4.5 is that it will often read the source of the library we're using so that it fully understands the API as well as the implementation.

You have to treat LLMs like any other developer that you'd delegate work to and provide them with a well thought out specification of the feature they're building or enough details about how to reproduce a bug for them to diagnose and fix it. If you want their code to conform to the style you prefer then you have to give them a style guide and examples or provide a linter and code formatter and let them know how to run it.

They're getting better at making up for these human deficits as more and more of these common failure cases are recorded but you can get much better output now by simply putting some thought into how you use them.
by M95D | 2026-01-04 17:18:58+00:00
Sometime around 2000 someone decided that /bin and /sbin isn't enough to boot and mount the rest of the system, so they added further complexity: an initrd/initramfs that does the basic job of /bin and /sbin. They had to complicate the kernel build process, the kernel update, the bootloader, the kernel command line and for what? Just because they didn't want the kernel to have the storage drivers built-in?

So the /bin /sbin became redundant.

Sometime around 2020 someone observed that no current Linux can boot without /usr anyway. So what did they do? Move everything from /usr to / and drop the whole /usr legacy? Noooo, that would be too simple. Move / to /usr. And because that is still too simple, also move /bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin to /usr/bin, and then keep symlinks at the old locations because who's gonna fix hardcoded paths in 99% of all Linux apps anyway??

Oh, how I wish I was born in the '60s, when the world was still sane.
by inhumantsar | 2026-01-04 17:19:07+00:00
In the same stream he also said he moved house to get away from black people and "I'm not saying start a war or anything like that ... I'm just saying get away."

He's also questioned Holocaust numbers, claimed the Dilbert tv show was cancelled because he is white, predicted that Republicans would be hunted down after Joe Biden won the election, and tried treating his cancer with ivermectin.

Aggressive cancer like that is a shitty way to go and I feel for him, but let's not pretend he's a reasonable, well-adjusted person.
by patcon | 2026-01-04 17:19:08+00:00
easier for some brains than others, no? It's a sad loss of agency (for those whom it matters) to not be able to make such a simple choice to control the environmental conditions they are weak to

but i am genuinely glad for people who find that level of self-control readily accessible, that's just not me.

There's some interesting implications around the "default mode network" that's worth thinking about, and the sort of world we might be inadvertently bending toward [building] when everyone is constantly struggling to engage internal control mechanisms and depleting their ability to do other unconscious sorts of processing: https://archive.is/fYqtB
by jimmyl02 | 2026-01-04 17:19:24+00:00
Usually there are nuggets of wisdom in lists shared like this but I feel like every lesson shared here has immense value.

> "remain skeptical of your own certainty"
> "Model curiosity, and you get a team that actually learns."

These are two lessons that typically require battle scars to learn. For such big ideas to be summed into two sentences is pretty remarkable and puts to words lessons I wish I knew how to share. Amazing article, thanks for sharing!
by steve_adams_86 | 2026-01-04 17:19:32+00:00
Totally. A prominent feature of ADHD is a staggering lack of awareness of the ADHD, for example. Very little progress can be made when you externalize blame for a condition you aren't aware of and don't understand. Speaking from experience.

My worst features as a software developer have always been byproducts of neurodivergence and that lack of awareness.

There are also good features and I know I'm useful to have around for system design and development. I just wouldn't say I'm better. I'm complimentary to others, not better. That's why we build systems as teams.
by wrsh07 | 2026-01-04 17:19:41+00:00
I would say that many of the sentences in this essay are not worth reading. Most of them are of the form described, eg not x but y

Eg

> This suggests that the EM structure isn’t just an analogy — it’s the natural grain of the optimization landscape

I don't care if someone uses llm. But it shows a lack of care to do it in this blatant way without noting it. Eg at work I'll often link prompt-response in docs as an appendix, but I will call out the provenance

If you find those sentences to be helpful, great! I find it decreases the signal in the article and makes me skim it. If you're wondering why people complain, it's because sharing a post intended to be skimmed without saying, hey you should skim this, is a little disrespectful of someone's time
by greedo | 2026-01-04 17:19:44+00:00
Stalin's purges had absolutely nothing with removing any "5th Column." The White Movement was thoroughly defeated by 1921 as were the Mensheviks etc. Stalin purged his officer class because he was supremely paranoid. And while he killed many of the officers, many were sent to the gulags and recalled to service after the German invasion in 1941.

The entire concept of a 5th column is just fear-mongering by most countries who faced defeat due to their incompetence. And the term was used by countries to impose draconian controls and oppression.
by buremba | 2026-01-04 17:19:45+00:00
There is a big "WARNING: This is a beta. Work in progress" message in https://github.com/cloudflare/workerd

Specifically, half of the services operate locally, and the other half require CF services. I mainly use Claude Code to develop, and it often struggles to replicate the local environment, so I had to create another worker in CF for my local development.

Initially, the idea was to use CF for my side projects as it's much easier than K8S, but after wrestling with it for a month, decided that it's not really worth investing that much, and I moved back to using K8S with FluxCD instead, even though it's overkill as well.
by acntr_employee | 2026-01-04 17:20:02+00:00
> Its like riding the bus. There's nothing wrong with public transit, its just that its somewhere warm for poor homeless people to sit all winter, so its not very cool.

Public transport often is the best and most efficient way to move within a city where I live, or in places like London, Stockholm, Berlin or quite a lot of other European cities.

> Its a social class thing. Homeless people sit alone

Really? Anyone sitting alone is a homeless one? Anyone without a shitty Apple product is poor?

> Homeless people don't read

WTF. This one made me laugh out loud. You must not have had much contact to homeless people. I have had quite a few acquaintances in my lifetime being homeless, worked with them, did social work on the side. And I got to know so many different people with different interests. Yes, a few were the stereotypical homeless person depicted in mass media. A few were highly functional members of society, had a day job 9to5 - and still lived on the street. Many had read way more books than myself - and I am an avid reader.

What is it with this stereotyping of people.
by hebejebelus | 2026-01-04 17:20:03+00:00
Yes, I didn't do a great job of managing my language in that post (I blame flu-brain). In the case where _someone_ is going to be reading the code I output, I do review it and act more as the pilot-not-flying rather than as a passenger. For personal code (as opposed to code for a client), which is the majority of stuff that I've written since Opus 4.5 released, that's not been the case.

I'll update the post to reflect the reality, thanks for calling it out.

I completely agree with your comment. I think the ability to review code, architecture, abstractions matters more than the actual writing of the code - in fact this has really always been the case, it's just clearer now that everyone has a lackey to do the typing for them.
by BoorishBears | 2026-01-04 17:20:06+00:00
In your version of history Dart was always a great language... but Google was simultaneously too powerful for other vendors to allow Dart's to proliferate, but also too weak to sustain it themselves despite Chrome going on to do just that for many many web standards.

I'm sure that's a really cozy idea, but doesn't pass the "common sense" test: a bit like your random misuse of the term FUD.

-

The simple reality is it wasn't very good, so no one was rushing to use it, and that limited how hard Google could push it. ES6 made Javascript good enough for the time being.

Dart 1.x had a weak type system, and Dart 2 was adding basics Kotlin already had almost 2 years earlier: that was also around the time I first crossed paths with Flutter, and honestly Flutter by itself was also pretty god awful since it was slowly reinventing native UI/UX from a canvas.

(It was a lot like Ionic: something you used when you had a captive user-base that literally couldn't pick a better product. Great for Google!)
by kens | 2026-01-04 17:20:56+00:00
This reminds me of mid-1970s ASCII computer graphics, except more advanced and orders of magnitude faster. In particular, it brought to mind "Mandala" from the book "What to Do After You Hit Return", which was an amazing book in 1975, full of BASIC games and graphics programs that you could type in. If you want the vibe of early home computers, take a look at this book.

https://archive.org/details/Whattodoafteryouhitreturn/page/n...
by vessenes | 2026-01-04 17:21:06+00:00
Not a professional, but an avid researcher/reader.

These papers look promising, but a few initial strikes - first, the research itself was clearly done with agentic support; I'd guess from the blog post and the papers that actually the research was done by agents with human support. Lots of persistent give aways like overcommitting to weird titles like "Wind Tunnel" and all of the obvious turns of phrase in the medium post unfortunately carry on into the papers themselves. This doesn't mean they're wrong but I do think it means what they have is less info dense and less obviously correct, given today's state of the art with agentic research.

Upshot of the papers, there's one claim - each layer of a well trained transformer network allows a bayesian 'update' and selection of "truth" or preference of the model; deeper layers in the architecture = more accuracy. Thinking models = a chance to refresh the context and get back to the start of the layers to do further refinement.

There's a followup claim - that thinking about what the models are doing as solely updating weights for this bayesian process will get more efficient training.

Data in the paper - I didn't read deeply enough to decide if this whole "it's all Bayes all the way down" seems true to me. they show that if you ablate single layers then accuracy drops. But that is not news.

They do show significantly faster (per round) loss reduction using EM training vs SGD, but they acknowledge this converges to the same loss eventually (although their graphs do not show this convergence, btw), and crucially they do absolutely no reporting on compute required, or comparison with more modern methods.

Upshot - I think I'd skip this and kind of regret the time I spent reading the papers. Might be true, but a) so what, and b) we don't have anything falsifiable or genuinely useful out of the theory. Maybe if we could splice together different models in a new and cool way past merging layers, then I'd say we have something interesting out of this.
by burnt-resistor | 2026-01-04 17:21:26+00:00
It's been a while since I lived in Davis. One place I lived was around 5th & I a few blocks from the Co-op. Most of 5th street was pretty hazardous for cyclists because it was a main road through the center of town connecting to the highway. When I was there, it had a metric fucktons of cops who would follow everyone and issue bullshit tickets.
by schmuckonwheels | 2026-01-04 17:21:41+00:00
By default, Program Files is not writable by non-Administrators. This is likely done by some background service. Or they loosened the default file permissions (which would be dumb).

No reason this can't be done on Linux but since NT's security model is more flexible it's a lot easier to do so on Windows. You'd need to add dedicated users. (Running a Steam daemon as root would probably cause an uproar.)
by giardini | 2026-01-04 17:21:47+00:00
They don't say what is injected, calling it only a "gerozyme inhibitor". Original article appears to be:

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adx6649

Inhibition of 15-hydroxy prostaglandin dehydrogenase promotes cartilage regeneration Mamta Singla https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6408-1167, Yu Xin Wang https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8440-9388, Elena Monti https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3767-0855, Yudhishtar Bedi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1213-4116, [...] , and Nidhi Bhutani https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7494-5870

FTFA: "Both systemic and local inhibition of 15-PGDH with a small molecule inhibitor (PGDHi) led to regeneration of articular cartilage and reduction in OA-associated pain."

"PGDHi" is a name for both the process "15-hydroxyprostaglandin dehydrogenase inhibition" and any inhibitor.

This link(a PDF file) shows PGDHi's are powerful stuff:

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2025/04/17/202...

"PGDHi" could be prostaglandin-E2 (dinoprostone):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostaglandin_E2

which was used in:

https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/06/muscle-aging....
by coffeefirst | 2026-01-04 17:21:49+00:00
But this is a very different behavior than the nontechnical user expects.

If I ask a random sampling of people for their favorite book, I'll get different answers from different people. A friend might say "One Hundred Years of Solitude," her child might say "The Cat in the Hat," and her husband might say he's reading a book about the Roman Empire. The context matters.

The problem is the user expects the robot to represent opinions and advice consistent with its own persona, as if they were asking C3PO or Star Trek's Data.

The underlying architecture we have today can't actually do this.

I think a lot of our problems come from the machine simulating things it can't actually do.

This isn't hard to fix... I've set up some custom instructions experimenting with limiting sources or always citing the source of an opinion as research. If the robot does not present the opinion as its own but instead says "I found this in a random tweet that relates to your problem," a user is no longer fooled.

The more I tinker with this the more I like it. It's a more honest machine, it's a more accurate machine. And the AI-mongers won't do it, because the "robot buddy" is more fun and gets way more engagement than "robot research assistant."
by vladvasiliu | 2026-01-04 17:21:51+00:00
> Some things like Obsidian or Spotify are open on multiple Workspaces and multiple activities at the same time but only require a single instance.

Oh, you can do that? My first impression was that the activities were somehow completely separate, somewhat like profiles in firefox. Since I actually have stuff that isn't exactly context-related, specifically spotify, I thought it would be a pain to have to switch back and forth to interact with them.
by Aerbil313 | 2026-01-04 17:22:20+00:00
You don't have to leave your phone at home to be free of distractions. You can restrict your phone instead. I'm just a happy user, see techlockdown.com.

Their marketing is geared towards the p*rnography addiction crowd but from my own experience, it works equally well for those easily distracted by screens (I have ADHD).
by matkoniecz | 2026-01-04 17:22:29+00:00
>> Question can be marked as duplicate without an answer.

> No, they literally cannot.

You missed that people repeatedly closed question as duplicate when it was not a duplicate.

So it had answer, just to a different mildly related question.

LLM are having problems but they gaslight me in say 3% of cases, not 60% of cases like SO mods.
by jlarocco | 2026-01-04 17:22:32+00:00
It's ridiculous to say that AMD (previously ATI) has always been the better choice, and I don't think anybody who used the ATI drivers would agree with you. For years the only reliable way to get GPU acceleration on Linux was basically NVidia.

When AMD bought ATI they started work on the open source drivers and improved the situation, but they had already lost me as a GPU customer by that point.

Maybe now in the 2020s AMD has caught up, and I'll keep them in mind next time I buy a GPU, but I've been happy with NVidia for a long time.

It would be nice if the NVidia driver were in the kernel and open source, but the Debian package has just worked for a very long time now.
by rasmus-kirk | 2026-01-04 17:22:39+00:00
I buy games for my steam deck, only stopping to read up if they're "unsupported". Surprisingly, they seem to often STILL work in that case, this happened with Ghosts of Tsushima, which was unsupported because their online play didn't work (good riddance lol).

Never had an issue with any game running through proton. Only issue was Stardew Valley that couldn't play online. Turns out the Linux version (was default) had an unfixed bug, and choosing the Windows version with proton "Just Worked". Hilariously, "Win32 is the most stable Linux ABI"...
by wcfrobert | 2026-01-04 17:22:43+00:00
For me, cafes are essentially libraries; except cafes actually have reasonable opening hours. I can't get work done at home (too many distractions), so I switch up my environment to one where I am forced to work.

Go to any coffee shop in Palo Alto and Menlo Park, and you're bound to see students and tech workers sitting alone, typing away on their laptops. Even in LA, you'll see people editing videos and posting stuff on social media.

I think it's perhaps very American to go to cafes alone, especially if you are going there to get work done. Anecdotally, I had a French tennis partner back in 2022. One time, after our match, we went to a neighborhood cafe to chat and talk about life. He remarked to me how strange and foreign it is that Americans work so hard. He finds it stupid, even off-putting, that people work in cafes, which to him is a place to relax and socialize. He used slightly stronger language than stupid, so I didn't have the heart to tell him I plan to work in a cafe later that day. Maybe it's just a cultural thing.
by nostrademons | 2026-01-04 17:22:46+00:00
He led Chrome DevRel for many years - if you were learning about new web platform technologies circa 2010-2015 you probably ran across his writing.

The bio is cringe, but the important thing to realize about these professional-networking bios is that they are sales pitches, intended to sell a person (and specifically, their experience and connections) to a large corporation who will pay them even more money. An ordinary person, with ordinary authentic emotions, is not the intended audience. They're specifically selling to people whose job is to deal with bullshit.
by snaking0776 | 2026-01-04 17:23:12+00:00
This is a large claim to make without any evidence that is eerily reminiscent of historical arguments in favor of eugenics programs. Society thrives off of diversity and variations in thinking patterns. Dividing all people into either neurodivergent vs neurotypical or in your preferred terms “brain-damaged” vs “non-brain-damaged”is a vast oversimplification of the reality. Your claim about neurotypical people taking over society in the 20th century isn’t supported by evidence that suggests that genetic markers in humans for things like Autism Spectrum Condition are downsampled in humans relative to other species suggesting that human evolution has selected for some of the traits of what we classify as neurodivergence while balancing out the effects of some of those traits [1]. I’m not trying to say there’s anything wrong with neurodivergence (that’s how I’ve been classified) but this dichotomy is dumb. Everybody is neuro-divergent and what we define as neurotypical is societally defined. You’re just trying to flip the idea of what’s assumed to be a “good” person and that need to declare one group as better than the other is the actual problem. Please read more about the wider variability in cognition among humans before claiming that anyone in your preferred definition of “neuro-divergence” is superior to others.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/mbe/article/42/9/msaf189/8245036