MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ACCount37 | 2026-03-14 13:45:22+00:00
"Any serious usage" starts at "it just works".

JSON just works. Every language worth giving a damn about has a half-decent parser, and the syntax is simple enough that you can write valid JSON by hand. You wouldn't hit the edgy edge cases or the need to use things like schemas until down the line, by which point you're already rolling with JSON.

XML doesn't "just work". There are like 4 decent libraries total, all extremely heavy, that have bindings in common languages, and the syntax is heavy and verbose. And by the time you could possibly get to "advanced features that make XML worth using", you've already bounced off the upfront cost of having to put up with XML.

Frontloading complexity ain't great for adoption - who would have thought.
by IAmGraydon | 2026-03-14 13:45:35+00:00
I don’t think the founders made a mistake. They understood the weaknesses in their system and were very open about the fact that it wouldn’t always be smooth sailing. Thomas Jefferson famously said: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.

Liberty isn’t a constant state, but a dynamic cycle. Even 250 years ago, they knew that a guy like Donald Trump would come along.
by oofoe | 2026-03-14 13:45:48+00:00
If you don't want to start completely from scratch, may I recommend you take a look at the VideoBrain? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VideoBrain_Family_Computer (only language ever available for it was APL/S -- "structured" APL.)

Also, the "Decker" Hypercard-alike has a K-inspired language that is pretty nice. (Yes, much more modern, but still feels a bit like something "of that era".)
by __mharrison__ | 2026-03-14 13:47:07+00:00
Great writeup.

I've been in the pandas (and now polars world) for the past 15 years. Staying in the sandbox gets most folks good enough performance. (That's why Python is the language of data science and ML).

I generally teach my clients to reach for numba first. Potentially lots of bang for little buck.

One overlooked area in the article is running on GPUs. Some numpy and pandas (and polars) code can get a big speedup by using GPUs (same code with import change).
by chirdeeps | 2026-03-14 13:47:14+00:00
The biggest thing that surprised us: the constraint shifts from intelligence to reliability the moment agents start modifying shared systems. In a PoC, a wrong action is a failed experiment. In production, it's a corrupted customer record, a duplicated invoice, or a deployment that can't be unwound.The specific properties you need before going live that most frameworks don't give you out of the box:
1. Idempotency — can every agent action be safely retried without duplicating side effects?

2. Rollback semantics — if a multi-step workflow fails, what unwinds?

3. Authority boundaries — what can each agent do without human approval, and what requires sign-off?

4. An authoritative action history — when something goes wrong, can you reconstruct exactly what happened and why, without stitching together logs from five different systems?

Most teams discover these requirements after the first production incident. The teams that define them in an execution layer before going live have a much smoother transition.
Keen to check out what you will be sharing in the session.
by charlie0 | 2026-03-14 13:47:52+00:00
At lot of this isn't true in practice because we live in an async word. Perfect example is giving bad news. So much dancing verbal dancing around it when people really know the answer.

The best team I've ever worked on had little social cushioning. This doesn't mean people were being mean to each. The directness of everyone on that team was great because we could work towards resolving issues quickly and without any fluff. This also allowed us to find the best solution.
by ahmed-fathi | 2026-03-14 13:48:02+00:00
A decade on systems that couldn't fail didn't teach you syntax it taught you consequences. That's rarer than any skill on your resume.
You need harder problems and primary sources not more material. Kleppmann's Designing Data-Intensive Applications if you're going data. Ousterhout's A Philosophy of Software Design if you're going engineering. Then pick one system you respect, read its internals, and form opinions.
The next level of growth doesn't come with a syllabus. You have to construct it yourself. That's not a gap. that's what senior actually means.
by manarth | 2026-03-14 13:48:27+00:00
I can understand a certain amount of switching in the basket - e.g. a washing machine or dishwasher was once a "luxury good" in a market such as USA, but is now (for the most part) an everyone-appliance.

Interesting to consider the alternative case though, an "everyone basket item" becoming a "luxury good".

Democracy, maybe? But I don't think they've put that in the CPI basket - yet! :-P
by doubled112 | 2026-03-14 13:48:34+00:00
I prefer wired ones, mostly playing devil’s advocate here.

Every pair of cheaper earphones or earbuds I’ve had fail have failed due to the cable.

We switched my oldest to a pair of BT headphones because he seems incapable of keeping track of the cord. It gets caught, he pulls, and something has to give. Longest lasting set he had in 2025 was BT.
by mrtksn | 2026-03-14 13:48:56+00:00
It seems like something will have to give and no party is ready to give, therefore IMHO more escalation is ahead. US and Israel appear to have revitalized and legitimized Iran's murderous islamic regime so they don't seem to like will fold.

Put yourself in their shoes and consider that you don't like your government much and your country has been attacked by someone unserious and not trustworthy with open interests of taking away the resources of your country together with a nation that recently exterminated 100K people who are mostly civilians and their leader is due for trail for war crimes and genocide. In the case of their victory, do you consider what follows really will be a better deal than what you got with your government? I don't think that the majority will say yes to this. Iran isn't going to give, they will take the pounding until the attackers can't do it anymore. It's huge country(as much as France, Germany and Spain combined) with 90M people, they can take a lot of pounding.

Put yourself in Israel's shoes, you have great ambitions and you don't hold yourself from waging wars and killing however many people you like, the population doesn't punish you and you do all that on someone else's dime. Would you hold back? I don't think so, Israel isn't going to give.

Put yourself in US shoes, for some reason you are fully invested in Israel's ambitions, you are powerful and rich and the population doesn't really punish you for wars no matter the outcomes. The elections are years away, you can enrich yourself and people around you with betting on markets with insider information, you can profit from this in so many ways and if you want to feel good about yourself you can expose yourself only to people who like you no matter what you do and if you stop now you will be a loser and it wouldn't change what people say to you and my reduce your importance. So no, I don't think that US, specifically trump will give.

If no one is giving, the only way forward is escalation. Troops on the ground, nuclear attacks, attempt of genocide through starvation, chemical attacks - I think everything is on the table.

From what I read, it seems like USA will attempt and maybe take with ground operation some island on the Iran shores that is apparently very important infrastructure. Do you think that Iranians will be like "oh no, the buffoon and the genocidals took over our highly lucrative pipeline terminal, maybe we should give the rest of our resources to them and let them govern us"? I don't think so, which means later there will be large scale ground operation - unless someone stops Trump or Netanyahu.
by palata | 2026-03-14 13:49:23+00:00
While I do agree that UI changes like Liquid Glass are absolutely ridiculous (feels like designers must justify their existence), I don't feel like the UI is "getting eroded". Actually the smartphone UI has been stable for years now. If it works, I don't see a reason to change.

Obviously smartphones tend to converge to something that is seen as optimal. Just like cars did. There was a wide variety of cars in the beginning, and now really all cars are pretty much the same.

I know that there is a lot of talk about the side loading, but I am absolutely convinced that normies couldn't care less. For those who care, we need alternatives. And with GrapheneOS (allowing side loading) partnering with Motorola, I think we are in a pretty good place. Same with Pixels: don't like the whole AI stuff? Just install GrapheneOS.

Finally, I wouldn't say that "Samsung absolutely dominates the space" by selling 25% of Android phones. There are quite a few Android manufacturers representing the remaining 75%, which is a lot healthier than e.g. browsers.
by xandrius | 2026-03-14 13:49:30+00:00
Alright so I 100% understand you, and now I know I'm not totally crazy.

I think because I used to play on private servers, I don't have that long-standing connection to a group, which is probably what keeps many people still there. But yeah, I'd jump on a WoW 2 but the gameplay and quest system is so outdated that just doesn't give me good vibes anymore.
by steve-atx-7600 | 2026-03-14 13:50:08+00:00
Strongly disagree. You think you’d be able to prompt your way through creating an app with even half the feature set of Microsoft word, for example? I would be very time consuming to be able to think through how the app should work for many use cases you care about or didn’t think about. This time isn’t free. Now consider having to do this iteration across many apps you depend on. And, count on introducing regressions when your next prompt is incompatible with existing features. If you are not retired, this is a huge ongoing time sync.
by jfengel | 2026-03-14 13:50:24+00:00
He's not exactly in their camp. I hate to invoke Hanlon's Razor because a lot of what he does is malice rather than stupidity, but on Russia he has been inconsistent in a way that doesn't suggest that he's just following orders.

If he really wanted to just give up Ukraine, he could have. It's not as if he's afraid to piss off our allies. There's no 4D chess going on.

He likes Russia. He admires their strongman. He wants to be one too. He doesn't want to just give up Ukraine, but neither does he care what happens to it. Like Putin he's happy just to make everyone else deal with his random behavior.

He has a ton of advisers with conflicting goals. Some of them really do want to take down Russia, or prolong its involvement in Ukraine to distract them. Any explanation for this war is the sum of those conflicting advisors.

It's often said that he does whatever the last person in the room wants. I don't think it's quite true, but it's not way to understand how his contradictory actions come about.
by lb1lf | 2026-03-14 13:50:54+00:00
There's one (related) difference - an LP can hold approx. 45 minutes of music, a CD can hold 80-ish (The original spec called for 74, but I think the most I've seen on a single disc is 82-ish minutes).

Unless an artist is very disciplined, that means what would be a decent album at 40 minutes worth of music in LP days would be half an album today.

Again, this is a shortcoming in people, not in the medium itself - after all, a stellar 40-minute album can be released on CD, too.

I have heard expressed many times, though, the expectation that a CD should be 'full' in order to be a proper product - or, for that matter, the artist can be less severe in the cutting room, seeing as 'Oh, we've got room for that one, too
...'

I'd much rather have a condensed album which is mostly great than the same songs mixed with as many tunes which ought have been left in the archives pending a 'Collector's edition', 'Complete outtakes' or similar.

Then again (again!), at least a CD lets you skip the filler and listen only to the good stuff - at the risk of losing some of the recording artist's vision. Which, again, is a matter of (lacking) self-discipline. The LP raises the bar for skipping songs, hence forcing us weak souls (I count myself among them!) to listen to the full work, as the artist intended.

Or, at least as the artist intended before 'new release' meant uploading a new song to streaming services, making the album - as a somewhat cohesive collection of songs - a niche product.

Apropos nothing, the latest album I bought is a CD which arrived in the mail today, and it clocks in at 55 minutes and 20 seconds. Picked up a handful of LPs last week, though.
by luma | 2026-03-14 13:51:07+00:00
bunnie your book "Hacking the XBox" taught me how to get started on reversing electronics, took the fear out of the process, and replaced it with fun. Thanks for the multi-decades long effort you've made to make these tools available and accessible and approachable, your contributions to the hacker community are immeasurable and I cannot say thank you enough.

Thanks man!
by diffuse_l | 2026-03-14 13:52:15+00:00
That's if you parse the into a DOM and work on that. If you use SAX parsing, it makes it much better regarding the memory footprint.

But of course, working with SAX parsing is yet another, very different, bag of snakes.

I still hope that json parsing had the same support for stream processing as XML (I know that there are existing solutions for that, but it's much less common than in the XML world)
by xandrius | 2026-03-14 13:52:21+00:00
As a side note, I absolutely cannot imagine being upset of having a machine lasting long.

Sure it's nice the shiny new thing but has capitalism infiltrated people's mind that much? All my previous laptops died on me several times and became frankestein's monsters before I let them rest for a final time (to be often repurposed to other family/friends' machines).
by d_burfoot | 2026-03-14 13:52:38+00:00
Gah, don't take advice about doing a PhD from the dude who had the best possible academic experience! The vast majority of people who've gone through the PhD grinder have had radically worse outcomes than Karpathy. It's like taking advice about starting a cult from Joseph Smith.

(This is not to say you shouldn't do it. Just get info and advice from a less biased source).
by johnisgood | 2026-03-14 13:52:39+00:00
You are right, I was wrong. I think anthropomorphizing LLMs to begin with is kind of silly. The whole "LLMs are closer to people than to machines" comparison is misleading, especially when the argument comes down to output variability.

Their outputs can vary in ways that superficially resemble human variability, but variability alone is a poor analogy for humanness. A more meaningful way to compare is to look at functional behaviors such as "pattern recognition", "contextual adaptation", "generalization to new prompts", and "multi-step reasoning". These behaviors resemble aspects of human capabilities. In particular, generalization allows LLMs to produce coherent outputs for tasks they were not explicitly trained on, rather than just repeating training data, making it a more meaningful measure than randomness alone.

That said, none of this means LLMs are conscious, intentional, or actually understanding anything. I am glad you brought up the seed and determinism point. People should know that you can make outputs fully predictable, so the "human-like" label mostly only shows up under stochastic sampling. It is far more informative to look at real functional capabilities instead of just variability, and I think more people should be aware of this.
by rahimnathwani | 2026-03-14 13:53:35+00:00
"With Bluetooth, only Apple addresses this in a very limited manner with a lock in to specific models and up to 2 devices and no video calls or live audio support."

The Bose mobile app also allows me to use two pairs of Bose headphones on a single device, but still only 2 devices and AFAICT only for media consumption.
by mschuster91 | 2026-03-14 13:53:36+00:00
> In such scenarios, debond the generator's ground from neutral

eeeeep. Please for the love of all that is holy, CONTACT AN ELECTRICIAN before messing around with that - or before creating a ground bond where none should be (i.e. TT grid [1]). You may end up endangering yourself if you do not exactly know what you are doing - in the case of TT, you get ground potential difference current from other parts of the grid flowing to ground via your generator's bond.

Also, take great care if your grounding is provided via municipal water service, or if your original grounding rod has dried out to the point it's ineffective.

Let me repeat: LET ELECTRICIANS DEAL WITH GROUNDING AND SURGE PROTECTION. Floating grounds and improper ground connections CAN BE LETHAL OR POSE A SERIOUS FIRE RISK.

AND YES THAT INCLUDES "ISLAND" SCENARIOS OR EMERGENCY POWER INPUTS (e.g. via CEE plugs and transfer switches).

[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/TT-System
by mailops | 2026-03-14 13:53:37+00:00
We ran controlled tests using email tracking pixels across Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook clients to see whether recipient IP addresses are exposed when images load.

Results were interesting:

• Gmail loads images through Google proxy infrastructure
• Apple Mail Privacy Protection hides the user IP
• Outlook clients load images directly from the recipient device

This means Outlook can expose the user's IP and approximate location through image requests.

The study explains the testing setup and includes example request traces.
by hnfong | 2026-03-14 13:53:44+00:00
> can tell in an instant whether or not the document is correct

Speaking of "correctness"... It seems to me people almost never mention that while schema verification can detect a lot of issues, in the end it cannot replace actual content validation. There are often arbitrarily complicated constraints on data that requires custom code to validate.

This is analogous to the ridiculous claim that type checking compilers can tell you whether the program is correct or not.
by dijit | 2026-03-14 13:53:46+00:00
Regarding point 1 specifically, there were so many people seriously miffed at the “man after midnight” time-based easter egg that I would be careful with that reasoning.

Open source doesn’t always mean reproducible.

People don’t enjoy the thought of auditing code… someone else will do it; and its made somewhat worse with our penchant to pull in half the universe as dependencies (Rust, Go and Javascript tend to lean in this direction to various extremes). But auditing would be necessary in order for your first point here to be as valid as you present.
by loloquwowndueo | 2026-03-14 13:53:51+00:00
It stinks of LLM - sections with headers beginning with “The”, a lot of “it’s not just X, it’s Y” etc etc.

The content is good and interesting though. Just hard to wade through with all the thorny LLM bushes getting in the way.

Looks like the author had a draft with the core content and ideas and asked an LLM to embellish it. Maybe because author wasn’t confident in their writing skills? Whatever the reason, I’d honestly prefer something human-written.
by __mharrison__ | 2026-03-14 13:54:00+00:00
I wasn't around when we moved to that stack from assembly. I didn't experience the mourning then.

Most folks I hang out with are infatuated with turning tokens into code. They are generally very senior 15+ years of experience.

Most folks I hang out with experience existential dread for juniors and those coming up in the field who won't necessarily have the battle scars to orchestrate systems that will work in the will world.

Was talking with one fellow yesterday (at an AI meetup) who says he has 6 folks under him, but that he could now run the team with just two of them and the others are basically a time suck.
by HenryMulligan | 2026-03-14 13:54:08+00:00
I'm sure, like any metal at an industrial scale, it is profitably recyclable. But that is beside the point. This is akin to asking: "My car's engine just threw a rod and is seized. Is it recyclable?" Hopefully you see in this analogy that the car (engine) costs way, way more than the sum of its parts (the constituent metals).
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2026-03-14 13:54:14+00:00
Thanks, but where do they say that? I can only find this instance of "different" (as in "differentiable") in their article:

Because the execution trace is part of the forward pass, the whole process remains differentiable: we can even propagate gradients through the computation itself. That makes this fundamentally different from an external tool. It becomes a trainable computational substrate that can be integrated directly into a larger model.
by toast0 | 2026-03-14 13:54:42+00:00
As of now, the post you're replying to says "bugs that regularly happen ... in prod"

Now, if it crashes every 10 years, that is regular, but I think the meaning is that it happens often. Back when I operated a large dist cluster, yes, some rare crashes happened that never got noticed or the triage was 'wait and see if it happens again' and it didn't happen. But let it crash and restart from a known good state is a philosophy about structuring error checking more than an operational philosophy: always check for success and if you don't know how to handle an error fail loudly and return to a good state to continue.

Operationally, you are expected to monitor for crashes and figure out how to prevent them in the future. And, IMHO, be prepared to hot load fixes in response... although a lot of organizations don't hot load.
by graemep | 2026-03-14 13:54:44+00:00
There are a number of links to the author's related writings: http://silas.psfc.mit.edu/monopolizingknowledge.net/links.ht...

The one on Maxwell is particularly interesting, as his religion lead to strong political positions as he was influenced by a Christian Socialist:

"Maxwell did not adopt Maurice's theological positions as a whole[11], but he did become convinced of one of Maurice's key tenets, that the dehumanization of the working class in an industrializing society was to be prevented by a cooperative approach in which workers were given greater influence though education. Maurice and his friends set up Working Men's Colleges, and Maxwell, seeing this as a vital Christian service, taught Working Men's classes weekly till at least 1866. "

http://silas.psfc.mit.edu/Maxwell/
by cosmic_cheese | 2026-03-14 13:54:46+00:00
> I'm sure the teams responsible have "objective" "data" which "proves" it's the right direction, but the reality of it is often the opposite.

In my experience all manner of analytics data frequently gets misused to support whatever narrative the product manager wants it to support.

With enough massaging you can make “objective” numbers say anything, especially if you do underhanded things like bury a previously popular feature three modals deep or put it behind a flag. “Oh would you look at that, nobody uses this feature any more! Must be safe to remove it.”
by sillywabbit | 2026-03-14 13:55:05+00:00
I used to value this sort of communication. Sometimes I still do. Some feedback I got once that seems relevant to anyone who prefers this style:

----

Key takeways:

1. People are more important than code.

2. People have a right to work in an environment free of perceived hostility.

3. There is a legitimate reason for the perception and hard work may be
necessary to understand why this is.

Ask yourself these questions periodically during a conversation:

1. Am I listening to the other person?

2. Is there an equal amount of give and take or is my primary objective to make someone understand my point of view?

3. Does the person want to understand what I am saying?
by palata | 2026-03-14 13:55:21+00:00
Always the same thing: companies optimise for profit.

Why do websites suck? Because companies don't make more money by making decent websites. Why do mobile apps lag on your 4 years old phone? Because 95% of people have a newer phone, so the company doesn't care about you: you will buy a new phone soon anyway.

We are not chasing fast hardware, we are chasing profit.