MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by js8 | 2026-02-02 07:06:26+00:00
I don't really follow what you're saying, so I'll keep it short. I have used Claude Opus 4.5 for coding and it certainly has knowledge and can reason.

You're wrong on reliability. Humans are also quite unreliable, and formal reasoning systems in silico can actually fail too (due to e.g. cosmic rays), the probability is just astronomically low.

And in engineering, we know quite well how to take a system that is less than 50% unreliable and turn it into something with any degree of reliability - we just run it over and over and verify it gives identical results.

And Claude Code (as an LLM harness) can do this. It can write tests. It can check if program is running correctly (giving expected result). It can be made to any degree of reliability you desire. We've crossed that 50% threshold.

The same happens when models are learning. They start with heuristics, but eventually they'll learn and generalize enough to learn whatever formal rules of logic and reasoning, and to apply them with high degree of reliability. Again, we've probably crossed that threshold, which is confirmed by experience of many users that models are getting more and more reliable with each iteration.

Does it make me uneasy that I don't know what the underlying learned formal reasoning system is? Yes. But that doesn't mean it's not AGI.
by mettamage | 2026-02-02 07:08:26+00:00
Rigor helps for better insights about data. That can help for entrepreneurship.

What also can help for entrepreneurship is having a bias for action. So even if your insights are wrong, if you act and keep acting you will keep acting then you will partially shape reality to your will and bend to its will.

So there are certain forces where you can compensate for your lack of rigor.

The best companies have both of those things by their side.
by LoveMortuus | 2026-02-02 07:08:48+00:00
Baseless accusations, because what bothers night people in the morning, bothers morning people in the night.

The only real difference is how much you care about how your actions impact the environment and people around you.

I wake up early, because I work early, I don't make any sound, my flatmate (I rent a room from the company) works late and always stays up late, they make so much noise that they keep waking me up to the point that I had to report them to the company.

It doesn't matter if you're a night or a morning person, what matters is, are you considerate or not.
by sparkie | 2026-02-02 07:09:42+00:00
I was disappointed when MS discontinued Axum, which I found pleasant to use and thought the language based approach was nicer than a library based solution like Orleans.

The Axum language had `domain` types, which could contain one or more `agent` and some state. Agents could have multiple functions and could share domain state, but not access state in other domains directly. The programming model was passing messages between agents over a typed `channel` using directional infix operators, which could also be used to build process pipelines. The channels could contain `schema` types and a state-machine like protocol spec for message ordering.

It didn't have "classes", but Axum files could live in the same projects as regular C# files and call into them. The C# compiler that came with it was modified to introduce an `isolated` keyword for classes, which prevented them from accessing `static` fields, which was key to ensuring state didn't escape the domain.

The software and most of the information was scrubbed from MS own website, but you can find an archived copy of the manual[1]. I still have a copy of the software installer somewhere but I doubt it would work on any recent Windows.

Sadly this project was axed before MS had embraced open source. It would've been nice if they had released the source when the decided to discontinue working on it.

[1]:https://web.archive.org/web/20110629202213/http://download.m...
by Mae_soph | 2026-02-02 07:09:57+00:00
This article reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of Bayesian statistics by the author, when they say "for the sake of simplicity, let's call it a wash and assume the odds are the same". Because the odds ratio is key in statistics.

You cannot just go "this chance is very small and so is this chance therefore we can assume them to be similar". That's just wrong. The chance that the data we see happens if there are aliens is a lot smaller than the chance of the data given that are none. Yes, both are very small but that does not mean the odds ratio can be assumed to be 1. As the author illustrates, this incorrect reasoning breaks the usefulness of Bayesian statistics.

As for an example let's say that you claim to be using magic to win the lottery, which I don't believe. Now, the lottery happens and the winning number is 4529640, which is not yours. The probability of that number winning is small regardless of these initial hypotheses. If we follow the reasoning in the article we may say that that means because both chances are small this gives us no information on these hypotheses, which is clearly wrong.
by wbobeirne | 2026-02-02 07:09:58+00:00
I can't speak to your use case, but for past projects I've not only wanted to share types but actual logic. For instance, if you want instantaneous validation on the frontend, while applying the same logic on the backend with submitted data. In many instances that would be simple and maybe even serializable, but in my case I was working with architectural data that had extremely detailed logic for what was and was not valid.
by SkiFire13 | 2026-02-02 07:10:15+00:00
> It shows a remarkably consistent curve for AI completing increasingly difficult coding tasks over time.

I'm not convinced that "long" is equivalent to "difficult". Traditional computer can also solve tasks that would take extemely long for humans, but that doesn't make them intelligent.

This is not to say that this is useless, quite the opposite! Traditional computers shown that being able to shorten the time needed for certain tasks is extremely valuable, and AI shown this can be extender to other (but not necessarily all) tasks as well.
by giardini | 2026-02-02 07:10:38+00:00
HOAs are a legal framework designed for condominium (and other) domains where some parts of the property are owned in common. Without HOAs, I fail to see how condominiums could thrive. And condominium domains are everywhere! So there is no possibility whatsoever of them being eliminated in our current legal system.

The problem in this instance was that running a generator creates fire and/or electrical hazards. Those dangers are mitigated by the condominium domain's insurance. The insurers may not provide coverage if a single owner violates the policy. Two examples:

a) Snow is falling, accumulating and melting on an area which the generator wires are laid. One side of the circuit wiring is bare and a tenant, while holding onto a (grounded) steel banister, steps into a puddle of water that the generator wire crosses. No one else is present: the tenant is electrocuted and his semi-frozen body found half a day later, still leaning on the banister. Who is liable?

b) The generator malfunctions and catches fire. B/c it is inside a back porch area, the fire spreads quickly to the condominium unit and thence to surrounding units. Due to a higher than normal volume of calls and the icy roads being difficult to navigate, the fire department is slow to respond. Once they do respond, they find some water supply lines are frozen, further slowing them in their attempts to contain the fire and requiring extra units to be fielded, even further increasing their response time. Who is liable?

In both cases the legal liability probably lies with the condominium unit owner who runs the generator. If the HOA fails to notify the unit owner or fails to takes steps to shut the generator down, the legal liability may include the HOA.

Not surprisingly, very few people buy additional insurance that covers them when they make mistakes (a so-called "umbrella policy" does this sometimes, among other things) in judgement as happened here. Normally one would install such a generator ahead of time and provisions for safety as well as responsibility and liability insurance would be made well ahead of time.

The correct (and IMO easier) thing for the woman to do would have been to move to a hotel/motel/warming center/etc. After all, she had the wherewithal to procure and install a generator on her porch, a task that surely took hours or days to complete.

In sum, this is simply another condo owner sob-story. Condo buyers sign a legal agreement and, as soon as they break that agreement and are notified by the HOA, they cry to the media.

Having once been president of an HOA in a condominium, my own ideas, which include public hangings by edict as punishment for HOA agreement violations, might seem archaic, but they would do a lot to tame the madness of condo owners and calm the economic path of most HOAs.
by ekelsen | 2026-02-02 07:10:39+00:00
I also don't have access to the spec, but the people writing Rust do and they claim this: "IEEE makes almost no guarantees about the sign and payload bits of the NaN"

https://rust-lang.github.io/rfcs/3514-float-semantics.html

See also this section of wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NaN#Canonical_NaN

"On RISC-V, most floating-point operations only ever generate the canonical NaN, even if a NaN is given as the operand (the payload is not propagated)."

And from the same article:

"IEEE 754-2008 recommends, but does not require, propagation of the NaN payload." (Emphasis mine)

I call bullshit on the statement "specifically binary operations combining two NaN inputs must result in one of the input NaNs." It is definitely not in the spec.
by teaearlgraycold | 2026-02-02 07:10:57+00:00
Your analogy does not apply. Remember the old saying?

> If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

I think you’re taking my analogy too literally. I just mean they help you go faster. When building software you have a huge advantage in that there is very little risk in exploring an idea. You can’t hurt yourself in the process. You can’t waste materials. You can always instantly go back to a previous state. You can explore multiple options simultaneously with a favorable cost to doing so.

You don’t have to let your standards drop. Just consider AI coding an interactive act of refinement. Keep coding manually where you meet too much resistance. Accept the LLM can only do so much and you can’t often predict when or why it will fail. Review its output. Rewrite it if you like.

Everything always has a chance of being wrong whether or not you use AI. Understand an AI getting something wrong with your code because of statistical noise is not user error. It’s not a complete failure of the system either.

It’s a mega-library that inlines ether an adjustment of a common bit of code or makes up something it thinks looks good. The game is in finding a situation and set of rules which provide a favorable return on the time you put into it.

Imagine if LLMs were right 99% of the time, magically doing most tasks of a certain complexity 10x faster than you could do them. Even when it’s wrong you will only waste so much time fixing 1% of the AI’s work. So it’s a net positive. Find a system that works for you and lets you find something where it makes sense to use it. Maybe 50% of the time and 3X faster than you makes it make sense.

In some domains you can absolutely learn some basic rules for AI use that make it a net positive right away. Like as a boilerplate writer, or code-code translator. You can find other high success likelihood tasks and add them to the list of things you’ll use AI for. These categories can be narrow or wide.
by NitpickLawyer | 2026-02-02 07:11:02+00:00
> AI agents don't seem to have sped up the corporate process at all.

I think there's a parallel here between people finding great success with coding agents vs. people swearing it's shit. But when prodded it turns out that some are working on good code bases while others work on shit code bases. It's probably the same with large corpos. Depending on the culture, you might get such convoluted processes and so much "assumed" internal knowledge that agents simply won't work ootb.
by raw_anon_1111 | 2026-02-02 07:11:22+00:00
If this was condoned by the US Supreme Court explicitly, this was the law of the United States that anyone anywhere could be discriminated against based on the color of their skin.

The federal army - ie run by the US was officially segregated until 1948 but it really was through the late 50s.

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order...

The GI bill run by the federal government was discriminatory

https://heller.brandeis.edu/news/items/releases/2023/impact-...
by jsattler | 2026-02-02 07:11:42+00:00
Some years ago, I was at a conference and attended a very interesting talk. I don't remember the title of the talk, but what stuck with me was: "It's no longer the big beating the small, but the fast beating the slow". This talk was before all the AI hype. Working at a big company myself, I think this has never been more true. I think the question is, how to stay fast.
by nathanhammond | 2026-02-02 07:11:52+00:00
You both are in violent agreement and it is amusing to see in the wild.

As an 外國人 who learned Cantonese as an adult (I moved to HK) I'm jealous of the quantity and quality of materials that exist for learning (not Cantonese). That being said, there are _enough_ materials so it's nowhere near as rough as e.g. Shanghainese.

My opinions on hard language reduces to "is this the first language you're learning from a particular language family?" If so, it's hard to learn. But "is ontologically hard" isn't something that I think is really worth ranking. Any four year old can speak their mother tongue just fine.

But the perception of "hard to learn" did work in my favor for learning Cantonese: as a 鬼佬 who speaks Cantonese I was given lots of latitude to be bad while learning because of that perception. And now I could go back and learn Mandarin now and it would be _much_ simpler than the task that I had in learning Cantonese.

That being said I still write in 口語. Slowly learning 書面語 as I read more and more of it.
by bigbuppo | 2026-02-02 07:11:54+00:00
For starters, I would say Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide is a good choice. Though really, the important take away is to know your target audience. There are a few other gems over on xmlpress.net that are also worth a look.

Next, read the sort of things you want to write, then try writing the things you want to write. It's really that simple!
by AlexeyBelov | 2026-02-02 07:11:58+00:00
But this is antithetical to what Reddit is. It's not like StackExchange websites, where the whole point is to create a database of canonical questions and answers. Reddit doesn't have some basic forum functionality by design.

I've once talked to a person connected to someone at Reddit Inc, and they indirectly confirmed this (in retrospect it was very obvious).
by microtonal | 2026-02-02 07:12:22+00:00
I think that’s a very idealistic view of FOSS that is detached from reality. In the late 90s and early 00s we were fighting the crypto wars, making DeCSS illegal, DMCA, EUCD. There was a lot of infighting between free software and open source proponents. Many FSF campaigns were very political. I got bashed by some other FOSS people I knew in ~2006 for using and contributing to CentOS because it was Red Hat-based (evil empire or whatever).

The difference is that social media is amplifying things a lot more and there is a culture of destroying people in public (made easier by social media amplification).

It’s really the same issue as outside FOSS, social media creates stronger bubbles, more extremes, more grifters, and more amplification of crap.
by kl01 | 2026-02-02 07:13:07+00:00
I've always felt that the Canvas API is one of the most underrated built-in tools in the JavaScript ecosystem, it is literally the unsung hero of GSAP and every worthwhile animation lib. Most modern web games reach for heavy engines like Phaser or PixiJs so I wanted to see how far I could push a project using just the native 2D context.

Therefore, I created this 3d/isometric game to sort of push the limits of what you can accomplish w/ raw Canvas API. If the folks at claude code can use React for monospace terminal results, I sure can for a silly browser tower defense game lol.

Why focus on something so "outdated" or old? imo, in an era of giga node_modules folders, I just find something incredibly satisfying about working directly with the browser’s drawing surface. Using the Canvas API allowed for ZERO dependencies; the rendering engine is entirely native, so you have no external library bloat, just requestAnimationFrame and ctx calls.

I was also able to granularly improve performance (in most aspects): the game loop and render pipeline are manually handled (this is where the react part of the equation comes in), so it’s easier to optimize sprite batches and particle effects without the overhead of a generic engine. however there are still interesting cases handling hundreds of projectiles and enemy entities simultaneously while maintaining a smooth 60fps. this can be more optimal!

I had total granular control of the creation process; literally every pixel, animation frame, and collision check is written from scratch. So are the towers, enemies, and heroes. I implemented my own coordinate systems and pathfinding logic rather than relying on a black box.

Admittedly, there is nothing insanely revolutionary or groundbreaking here. This is a passion project by a dev who does not typically make games, just frontends. Just a little food for thought for the idea that less, may be more.
by Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe | 2026-02-02 07:13:31+00:00
Don't you think that with UBI some people could flat out refuse to be squeezed by the supermarket owner and decide to make their own grocery association not motivated by greed and so less subject to inflation? I know of several projects like this where people give their own time for free to work in that low price supermarket. It's not even registered as a company but as a public benefit association. With UBI and inflation I have no doubt this kind of thing would pop up and limit inflation.
by ongy | 2026-02-02 07:13:59+00:00
Agreed, this year was a bit light on questions.

OTOH, 80% of the reason I go to talks is to see if the person has interesting things to say and grab them after the talk for a chat.
I.e. it sucks for the remote experience, but I think for on-site it's fine to just talk more.

Gets harder if you consider the talks the main attraction, but I really see them more as hooks to talk to people about interesting topics.
by handoflixue | 2026-02-02 07:14:55+00:00
Your comment impacted me, so I assume you'll post an apology for this deeply problematic behavior of yours?

Plenty of times the fault is with the apartment, etc.: if the reasonable noise of me living disrupts my neighbors, that's bad design. Different people work different shifts - I don't see why the morning person should have to hold off on a morning shower just because the plumbing wakes up their neighbor, nor why the night-shift worker should have to hold off on doing laundry just because that wakes the morning person up.
by globular-toast | 2026-02-02 07:16:32+00:00
UK is so densely populated that something like this affects a LOT of people. Also people's "back yards" are tiny enough as it is. Small changes have a big impact and people living in such cramped spaces are living in constant fear of that.

If you happen to come across any part of HS2 in some random village you've never heard of it's quite incredible the impact it's having on the locals. Locals who live miles away from the nearest station and therefore unable to use the line, by the way.

We also have very little wildlife left and we don't really want to live in concrete jungles.

Suffice to say, it's not difficult to see why it's like this in the UK if you actually come and see.
by maremmano | 2026-02-02 07:17:29+00:00
I’m on version 8.8.8, which says a lot.

This time I unfortunately have to move on from Notepad++. Vibes have been negative for a while but out of inertia (and because there weren't obvious alternatives) I never pulled the trigger. Now it's time. The trust is gone.

Thanks NP++ for being free and useful for so many years.

Can anyone suggest a solid alternative on Windows? I'm fine with Linux and macOS but I have to keep a Windows machine around for some legacy, win only, software.

Maybe Sublime Text could be an option? At this point I'd rather pay for something lightweight, fast, and probably better.

I don't like tooling that increases my exposure to bad state actors (whatever state they're from).
by swores | 2026-02-02 07:18:27+00:00
I agree that crosswords often include cultural references that lean towards certain demographics / assuming particular education, and that can feel exclusionary if you don’t share that background - and there's even an argument to suggest snobbery might be behind those choices.

But I disagree that that makes it for snobs. Snobbery is more about an attitude of looking down on others or their tastes, whereas knowing Latin or being a fan of opera is really just about exposure.

Sure, there exist some (too many) opera fans who would say something like "it's real art compared to pop or hip hop being low class trash", but that's not a defining part of liking opera and plenty of people who like opera aren't snobs. Ironically it's a different form of snobbery (sometimes called reverse snobbery though personally I hate that term), to dismiss anyone who learned Latin or who likes opera as being a snob!
by empressplay | 2026-02-02 07:19:25+00:00
While large language models don't have enough nuance for AGI, there is some promise still in multi-modal models, or models based purely on other high-bandwidth data like video. So probabilistic token-based models aren't entirely out of the running yet.

Part of the problem with LLMs in particular is ambiguity -- this is poisonous to a language model. And English in particular is full of it. So another potential that is being explored is translating everything (with proper nuance) to another language that is more precise, or by rewriting training data to eliminate any ambiguities by using more exact English.

So there are ideas and people are still at it. After all, it usually takes decades to fully exploit any new technology. I don't expect that to be any different with models.
by decodebytes | 2026-02-02 07:20:18+00:00
Good question - and the answer is no, they cannot escape.
nono uses Landlock (Linux) and Seatbelt (macOS) - these are kernel-level security mechanisms. When a sandbox is created:

All child processes inherit the restrictions - if the agent spawns Python, Bash, or compiles and runs a binary, that process is equally sandboxed There is no API to remove or expand the sandbox - once restrict_self() (Landlock) or sandbox_init() (Seatbelt) is called, the restrictions are permanent for that process tree.
by thaumasiotes | 2026-02-02 07:20:27+00:00
> Inter + ferire = to strike one another. Makes sense.

I guess, but I don't really think of interfering as a mutual thing. I see interfere more like intervene or interpose, where the subject of the verb inserts himself between two other things. (As, in the example above, "my" neighbor places himself into the middle of the relationship between me and my television.)

If I'm interfering with you, it is not necessarily the case that you are also interfering with me. And it certainly couldn't be said that "we are interfering [end of sentence]" in the same way that it could be said "we are fighting".

The use of with to mark an indirect object does tend to suggest that the sense of the verb was more mutual at an earlier point, though.