MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zokier | 2026-03-04 09:52:49+00:00
> At this point, the question is: why keep files as blobs in the first place. If a revision control system stores AST trees instead, all the work is AST-level.

The problem is that disks (and storage in general) store only bytes so you inherently need to deal with bytes at some point. You could view source code files as the serialization of the AST (or other parse tree).

This is especially apparent with LISPs and their sexprs, but equally applies to other languages too.
by ftigis | 2026-03-04 09:52:54+00:00
> It is worth noting that this law also applies to non-web applications where the service provider supposedly being secured against is also the client software distributor; thus, the “end-to-end encryption” offered by Whatsapp and Signal, amongst other proprietary services, is equally bogus. (Both Whatsapp and Signal ban use of third party clients, and enforce this policy.)
by bob1029 | 2026-03-04 09:52:55+00:00
The biggest problem with recurrent spiking neural networks is searching for them.

Neuromorphic chips won't help because we don't even know what topology makes sense. Searching for topologies is unbelievably slow. The only thing you can do is run a simulation on an actual problem and measure the performance each time. These simulations turn into tar pits as the power law of spiking activity kicks in. Biology really seems to have the only viable solution to this one. I don't think we can emulate it in any practical way. Chasing STDP and membrane thresholds as some kind of schematic on AI is absolutely the wrong path.

We should be leaning into what our machines do better than biology. Not what they do worse. My CPU doesn't have to leak charge or simulate any delay if I don't want it to. I can losslessly copy and process information at rates that far exceed biological plausibility.
by KingOfCoders | 2026-03-04 09:53:33+00:00
Most software the companies I worked for that was put into production, was not verified. There were spotty code reviews, mostly focusing on "I would have done it differently" and a limited amount of unit tests with low test coverage and Heisenberg E2E tests, often turned off because, Heisenberg. Sometimes overworked, bottle neck, testers.

There is hope that with AI we get to better tested, better written, better verified software.
by pbs29 | 2026-03-04 09:53:42+00:00
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by pvaldes | 2026-03-04 09:53:58+00:00
You should aim to improve or replace this parts, not mimic it.

Ask yourself: why are they sampling those fishes? Most probably just to take two measures: Weight and size. Age is known and fixed so if you know the three values, you can use conversion grow tables to know if the fish is growing well or not. Measure and weight an object without touching it directly is yet a solved problem. Clove oil lasts only for a while so being faster than a human should be also an objective. Reducing the human exposure to cold with automated work is also a desired goal.

But sampling all the fishes or 60% of them shouldn't be necessarily your main objective, because statistical benefits and cons are unbalanced with a biggest sample. You just would skyrocket the risk for having a few decimals extra of precision. Small sample here is a feature, not a bug.
by happymellon | 2026-03-04 09:53:59+00:00
> I think this could go equally for Windows as well

Absolutely. Why are all the buttons centred on the task bar for Windows 11? Violation of so many design rules. Literally the worst part of MacOS they took there which contradicted other reasons for the design. Throwing the mouse to the corner for a start button no longer works. I could go on.

> I'm fairly new to Linux so I can't really form an opinion there.

Gnome is great if you want something that gets out of your way. Some folks lament that its not as UI feature rich as KDE, but for me thats a bonus. The minimal UI combined with concentrating on UI features such as better mixed monitor scaling, etc. Love it.

KDE is extremely flexible, and featureful. You don't like the Windows default look and feel, make it a dock. Make it similar to Windows 8. Go wild. Not my thing these days but I can completely understand the draw to not be beholden to other peoples design choices if they don't fit your style.

I haven't used XFCE for a long time, as it didn't keep up with my high resolution monitors. But it was fast and flexible, and I hear that they are addressing this stuff now.

i3 was great. I drifted away during the great Wayland migration when i had to upgrade my laptop, found a bunch of neat updates to Gnome for my hardware, and just haven't found the time to return.
by petepete | 2026-03-04 09:55:46+00:00
I use my 2019 X1C 7th Gen daily and it's been the best laptop I've owned by a mile. Never skipped a beat.

I immediately switched it to Fedora and everything worked out of the box except the fingerprint reader which started working a few weeks later after a firmware update (also handled effortlessly/perfectly within Gnome - and it still gets updates!)
by oblio | 2026-03-04 09:56:09+00:00
> Even without the physical excursions of peddling,

Physical exertion of pedalling :-)

Also, ebikes. Going slow. In non-hot climates people don't really sweat on bikes. Especially if the bike infra is good (so distances are short due to bike overpasses, bridges, tunnels, etc) and safe (so no stress due to avoid getting hit by cars).

> people don’t want to be exposed to the dirty outside air

Said "dirty air" is only dirty because of cars. Vicious cycle, catch 22.

> The rest of the western world has some work to do in those areas or some realities to face if they ever wanted to actually get on board with bicycling as transportation.

That's the real problem, and it's even worse, and it ties in with this:

> The want to move from one climate controlled setting to another including their transportation system.

Laziness/convenience. People don't really realize that convenience kills. Life is too comfortable and our bodies aren't made for being bored and comfortable 24/7. They can go crazy and do stuff like increase autoimmune attacks (and many other things, a lot of our internal systems function worse when not used).
by wolvoleo | 2026-03-04 09:56:31+00:00
Why is it so important though? Your employer is not you. I regularly bash on my own employer too :) Which is not Microsoft but also big.

I don't care about them or their goals, I'm just there for the money. And trying to not show it too much while I'm rolleyeing through corporate PR crap :) I used to be more aligned but with a recent leadership change and more sucking up to Trump I've lost a lot of my respect. But it's not really an impediment for working there. I just go through the motions.

Don't forget there is no team play, not really. They will dump you as soon as they see fit. All big publicly traded companies do. They care a lot more about their shareholders than they do allot you. The only goals that matter are your own, like supporting your family.
by Arkhaine_kupo | 2026-03-04 09:56:50+00:00
> The people complaining that AI isn't good enough yet don't grasp that neither are many who are in the profession currently.

I think the externalities are being ignored. Having time and money to train engineers is expensive. Having all the data of your users being stolen is a slap in the wrist.

So replacing those bad worekrs with AI is fine. Unless you remove the incentives to be fast instead of good, then yeah AI can be good enough for some cases.
by pwagland | 2026-03-04 09:56:57+00:00
This "receive heavy scrutiny" is part of the problem that is raised in the article though:

> You are friends with all the senior TLs, so can get them to review your code, but this is not a high-leverage use of time.

And then, tying back to ops comment, the engineer gets pinged for their bad metric, because of this additional review.
by pjmlp | 2026-03-04 09:57:26+00:00
Nowadays you can enjoy it on GCC, as it is now an officially supported frontend, after GNU Modula-2 got merged into it.

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-15.2.0/gm2

Even available on compiler explorer to play with, https://godbolt.org/z/ev9Pbxn9K

Yes, that was a common trend across all programming languages designed by him.

That is also how P-Code came to be, he didn't want to create a VM for Pascal, rather the goal was to make porting easier, by requiring only a basic P-Code interpreter, it was very easy to port Pascal, a design approach he kept for Modula-2 (M-Code) and Oberon (Slim binaries).
by jeroenhd | 2026-03-04 09:57:35+00:00
Plain Linux on phones is still quite bad. It's not unusable like it was a few years ago, but it's still not good enough to gain any traction. Jolla is trying, desperately, and it's not working, even with the ever growing anti-American sentiments.

For Motorola to partner with one of the Linux phone projects, someone would have to invest significant resources in mainlining the drivers, replacing blobs with open source drivers where feasible, and maintaining that code when new upstream firmware and drivers make it downstream with patches and fixes. Looking at postmarketOS, you can see it takes years of community effort to port a device to the point of becoming useful. Once the software is done, the hardware is outdated enough that Motorola won't be making any money on sales any more.

In theory all of this would be a lot easier if Qualcomm, MediaTek, and the other SoC manufacturers would take the burden of mainlining drivers upon themselves the way Intel and AMD do. With the recent high-end Qualcomm chips, the company does seem to put in some effort, but these companies simply don't care about Linux support.

GrapheneOS is an Android fork so of course they're partnering with an Android company. They also don't have the capacity to maintain their own kernel + security patches + drivers, which is why they rely on upstream maintenance (from Google, historically) with their own Android-level improvements to remain secure.
by yieldcrv | 2026-03-04 09:59:01+00:00
I dont currently have confidence in TDD

A broken test doesn’t make the agentic coding tool go “ooooh I made a bad assumption” any more than a type error or linter does

All a broken test does it prompt me to prompt back “fix tests”

I have no clue which one broke or why or what was missed, and it doesnt matter. Actual regressions are different and not dependent on these tests, and I follow along from type errors and LLM observability
by qsera | 2026-03-04 09:59:16+00:00
> don't operate on the textual description of a concept when they are doing their thing.

It could be mapping the text to some other internal representation with connections to mappings from some other text/tokens. But it does not stop text from being the ground truth. It has nothing else going on!

The "hallucination" behavior alone should be enough to reject any claims that these are at least minimally similar to animal intelligence.
by pembrook | 2026-03-04 10:00:56+00:00
I used to do that when HN was a more rational, thinking-man's place years ago.

It's been poisoned by the hysterical climate of US politics like everything else on the internet, so there are no thinking men left.

It's a lost cause. If I were to explain the situation rationally I would get downvoted for not cheering on the shooting of CEOs.

Upvote communities are all dead and dying. There are no more interesting conversations happening in them anymore.
by lou1306 | 2026-03-04 10:00:59+00:00
The concerns with giving the machine "a personality" or other human traits are mainly ethical, and cannot be swept under the "good engineering" rug so easily.

Consider this: your country starts basing its policy on a teleological view of history. It's good engineering for a society! Your KPIs are going up all the time, your country is doing great. But ten years down the road you have to iron out the underlying ethical issues on the streets of Stalingrad.
by gaigalas | 2026-03-04 10:01:20+00:00
The most important thing you need to understand with working with agents for coding is that now you design a production line. And that has nothing to do (mostly) with designing or orchestrating agents.

Take a guitar, for example. You don't industrialize the manufacture of guitars by speeding up the same practices that artisans used to build them. You don't create machines that resemble individual artisans in their previous roles (like everyone seems to be trying to do with AI and software). You become Leo Fender, and you design a new kind of guitar that is made to be manufactured at another level of scale magnitude. You need to be Leo Fender though (not a talented guitarrist, but definitely a technical master).

To me, it sounds too early to describe patterns, since we haven't met the Ford/Fender/etc equivalent of this yet. I do appreciate the attempt though.
by Galanwe | 2026-03-04 10:02:16+00:00
I fail to see the link between private conversations/DM and E2EE.

To quote a comment I made some time ago:

- You can call your service e2e encrypted even if every client has the same key bundled into the binary, and rotate it from time to time when it's reversed.

- You can call your service e2e encrypted even if you have a server that stores and pushes client keys. That is how you could access your message history on multiple devices.

- You can call your service e2e encrypted and just retrieve or push client keys at will whenever you get a government request.

E2EE only prevents naive middlemen from reading your messages.
by jeroenhd | 2026-03-04 10:02:21+00:00
That's not really sideloading, though. The stock recovery doesn't let you install apps or anything like that, it's meant for loading official versions of Samsung operating systems onto devices that got corrupted somehow.

You can probably try to use the stock recovery to flash a custom ROM, but I doubt it'll work. Custom ROMs rely on tools like TWRP or LineageOS Recovery for a reason.
by claud_ia | 2026-03-04 10:02:23+00:00
The TDD critique is real, but it's worth separating tests-as-specification from tests-as-verification. Post-hoc tests—written after the implementation—give agents nothing meaningful to work against; of course they'll just "fix" them. But tests written before the agent starts, encoding precise behavioral invariants (edge cases, failure modes, not just the happy path), act as actual constraints on the solution space. The pattern that works: write the tests as an unambiguous spec, then let the agent implement to green. The interesting side effect is that the human's job shifts toward writing rigorous behavioral specs rather than reviewing code—which is harder in a different way, but more durable.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2026-03-04 10:03:04+00:00
> In this era, "titles" aren't enough and you need verifiable proof of work with monetary returns in the millions and I favour those who just build things that make money without asking permission from a manager.

While I like this approach personally, it's worth noting that lots of companies will fire people like you say you want, particularly if their manager is threatened by them (or they're difficult to work with etc).
by claud_ia | 2026-03-04 10:03:19+00:00
The TDD critique is real, but it's worth separating tests-as-specification from tests-as-verification. Post-hoc tests—written after the implementation—give agents nothing meaningful to work against; of course they'll just "fix" them. But tests written before the agent starts, encoding precise behavioral invariants (edge cases, failure modes, not just the happy path), act as actual constraints on the solution space. The pattern that works: write the tests as an unambiguous spec, then let the agent implement to green. The interesting side effect is that the human's job shifts toward writing rigorous behavioral specs rather than reviewing code—which is harder in a different way, but more durable.
by Ygg2 | 2026-03-04 10:03:19+00:00
> React was an instant hit because it had the facebook brand behind it and everyone was tired of angular.

Ok, but why was everyone tired of Angular? Sure, web frameworks are examples of Fad Driven Development to the extreme, but Angular.js, was pure unmitigated ARSE.

Made ten bindings on a page? That's 100 cross connections. Made 100 two-way bindings? that's 10000 connections.

Clicked one way through fields A, B then started typing, they show same data. Clicked through fields A and C, now they are bound but B isn't. Clicked B then C, congrats all three of your bindings suddenly start filling in.

It was a combination of shitty performance scaling and unintuitive Angular data flow that primed everyone for React to take over.
by diacritical | 2026-03-04 10:03:20+00:00
Unfortunately from what I read a couple of times, including a month or so ago, GrapheneOS discourages and doesn't support rooting the phone for security reasons that seem vague to me and don't appeal to my need to actually own my phone and OS. You could still root it with some third party tools from what I know, but not having root as the default makes it less of a secure FOSS OS and more of a closed down toy.

As for payment apps and other crap that refuses to run if I, the owner and administrator of my own device, don't have admin access, I would just refuse to run it. What's next - websites refusing to work if I have root on my Linux desktop?
by claud_ia | 2026-03-04 10:03:33+00:00
The TDD critique is real, but it's worth separating tests-as-specification from tests-as-verification. Post-hoc tests—written after the implementation—give agents nothing meaningful to work against; of course they'll just fix them. But tests written before the agent starts, encoding precise behavioral invariants (edge cases, failure modes, not just the happy path), act as actual constraints on the solution space. The pattern that works: write the tests as an unambiguous spec, then let the agent implement to green. The interesting side effect is that the human's job shifts toward writing rigorous behavioral specs rather than reviewing code—which is harder in a different way, but more durable.
by Yizahi | 2026-03-04 10:04:37+00:00
I can understand this issue with low margin private businesses. But the LLM bots are now everywhere.

I call my bank and I must tell a dumb robot a description of my problem, which it then claims to not understand and fucking hangs up on me. Now I need to repeat like a parrot "operator, operator, operator" until that clanker resigns and connects me to an operator. And the issue is managing a specific account, so nothing in the FAQs was relevant. Bank has more than enough margins for human support.

Or another case - our government went all digital lately and we have main point of access to many stuff via an app/webportal. That service only has a very dumb and limited bot as a support, while service governs a lot of important functions. So instead I have to write comments under their Facebook marketing posts, then if I'm lucky some human spots them and then a real support writes me in a Facebook messenger. This is beyond infuriating. Government also has more than enough money to spend.

Same with other businesses with proper margins, like telco, automotive etc.
by vidarh | 2026-03-04 10:05:13+00:00
This is like saying people shouldn't need to be trained for a job.

There's no reason to expect a general purpose model to know what you want when you've not given it any training in what to do for your specific case.

And in this case, the models do far better than humans: Most humans can't just switch to copy arbitrary tone, just by giving them a page worth of text. We don't even need to actually train/fine-tune these models further - we just need to actually fully specify the task we give them to get them to write well.
by alsufinow | 2026-03-04 10:05:27+00:00
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by kreco | 2026-03-04 10:05:46+00:00
> They should just have no DM feature at all, then; make all messages publicly visible.

This makes no sense.

I can discuss something in a bar which is not a very private conversation, I wouldn't care if someone else hear what I'm saying. But I also don't want someone to record it and post it on the internet to be seen by the whole world.

Privacy is not just boolean you toggle somewhere.
by pvaldes | 2026-03-04 10:07:31+00:00
> The impact to open-water fisheries can be undone if the markets appreciate farm-raised fish for their quality.

Is not so simple. Marine Aquaculture needs huge amounts of wild fishes to feed the farm fishes. The more aquaculture you have, more pressure on some fisheries. Also less pressure on other, that in fact adds an extra of pressure to the first fisheries. China has increased its fleet in the last decades for that.

All this "fishes are sentient" stuff is toxic for your job. My advice is to avoid it like a plague. This people would be typically unable to keep a carnivore fish alive.