skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah, the basic premise is off because LLM responses are regularly tested against ground truth (like running the code they produce), and LLMs don't get to carefully select what requests they fulfill. To the contrary they fulfill requests even when they are objectively incapable of answering correctly, such as incomplete or impossible questions.

I do think there is a degree of mentalist-like behavior that happens, maybe especially because of the RLHF step, where the LLM is encouraged to respond in ways that seem more truthful or compelling than is justified by its ability. We appreciate the LLM bestowing confidence on us, and rank an answer more highly if it gives us that confidence... not unlike the person who goes to a spiritualist wanting to receive comforting news of a loved one who has passed. It's an important attribute of LLMs to be aware of, but not the complete explanation the author is looking for.
What makes anyone think that anything in the universe is protected from the innate natural process of divide, conquer, exploit and hoard...

He makes very good points. But he missed one. We are destroying software(or anything else) by waiting till something goes wrong to fix it. ex: Software Security, US Food Standards and their relation to the health of it's citizens, etc...
> It’s one of the easiest tools for increasing my compensation.

This is the root problem. None of the problems the GP pointed up were created by software developer.

Now, if you want to know the consequences, it causes an entire generation of people that don't really know what they are doing because they never see the long-term consequences of their actions. But again, it's not the software developers that are causing this, nor are they the ones that should fix it.
If anyone watches a TV show with the assumption that they are getting an accurate view of history, then I wish them luck in life, since they will probably need it.
> But keeping skilled people is something that modern management philosophy (in tech, at least) doesn't seem to care about.

I’m a founder for 10 people and this is the first thing we think about. Except for low performers; except that youngsters need a variety of experience to be proficient at life; except that the team is not performing well(1). 25% or 30% increases for half the workforce are frequent.

(1) The biggest remark from management coaches is that giving raises lowers employee performance, which I can fully witness in my company. It’s not even good for morale. I’m just happy that people exit the company fitter and with a girlfriend, even a kid and sometimes a permanent residency, but business-wise I’ve been as good as a bad leader.

I’m reaching the sad conclusion that employees bring it upon themselves.
This probably plays into their desire to remain isolated. If every time some wanderer landed on their island a lot of their people died then it makes sense that they would not welcome anyone from outside.
> regular exercise and regular wake times, combined with no alcohol, help anyone's sleep.

It’s amazing to hear when someone makes positive lifestyle changes, sticks with them, and then reaps the benefits over time.

I always do my best to be supportive and encouraging when I hear people tell me about it in person, but I’m also amazed at how people talk about their lifestyles prior to some of these changes as if it was normal. I’ve heard multiple stories of people cutting out alcohol, which after some probing revealed that they were drinking at least 5 nights a week and often multiple drinks (by the medical definition of units of alcohol, not just number of physical containers) per night.

It’s common sense that changing these lifestyle habits will provide benefits over months and years, but I guess when you’re in the middle of those habits and some people around you are doing the same then it can feel normal.
I think it looks like both sides are making some pretty valid points here.

Those who are nervous about embracing Rust further are just fine. Rust is still a young language. It shows an awful lot of promise, but it isn't a magic cure for safety and security concerns, especially at the kernel level. It is entirely possible that Linux is a bad fit for the language, and the real way to get ta Rust kernel is for a team to come together and implement a kernel in Rust, from scratch, perhaps with POSIX compatibility.

On the flip side, Hector is entirely correct that the overall process of maintaining and improving Linux is incredibly baroque and grounded squarely in some tooling that just stinks in the modern ecosystem. It has worked for Linux for ages. It is also increasingly making working on Linux a specialized project space because nobody else manages projects like this. Hector is fine leaving if he finds that process two owners to be worth his volunteered time. And it is entirely possible that there will come a day when the value of the project itself is outweighed by the cost of interacting with the project and Linux will get supplanted in the common ecosystem by something else.

In short, Hector is probably making the right move here. If he wants to continue working on a problem like this, a new operating system might actually be the right solution.
The elites want you dead and your children dead. Do not listen to this madness.
Bingo—of course we use an LLM. No human is sitting there churning out demand letters by candlelight. The magic isn’t just in AI spitting out legal-ish text (any LLM can do that); it’s in making sure the letter is structured, state-specific, and actually persuasive—so you don’t accidentally send something that screams “I just copy-pasted this from the internet.”

As for the sender domain—right now, you download and send it yourself. No fake law firm theatrics, just a clean, well-structured letter that gets people to pay attention (and hopefully, pay up). The power move is sending it yourself and making them think you mean business.
“the inhabitants have to be closer to everything that is real and important on their island than we modern people will ever be and likely have”

They undoubtedly have their own absurd mythology describing their origins and the workings of the universe
This cracked me up. I love hearing those stories, also from my father, where he would talk about "we already did that in the 80's and it was called...", and then he would tell me about some obscure assembler tricks to patch binaries, in order to keep them compatible with some system I never heard about.

But still, I think we can do better. That story you shared highlights a gross inefficiency and diminishing of agency that comes from dependencies.
I think that’s part of the authors point. The article starts out by explaining a human phenomenon and then extending it to LLMs
> I just looked up Berkeley's rates now and they explicitly have an off-campus rate that is 25%, while the on-campus is 60%. Apparently the federal government was already capping off-campus at 25%!

Off-campus is capped because the grant is then paying for rent on the lab space from the private landlord. Universities don't charge research labs for power, cooling, rent, janitorial, Internet, etc. Maybe they will start now.
Thanks for the post, I enjoyed reading it.

There is a small typo in this sentence: "As long as we’re willing to say that Carbon is is about reducing the reliance on the C++ Standard Committee ...". There are two "is".
It's a brand-new account, but definitely of a spammer.
I don’t disagree, but commercial/trucking traffic is a big part of it too.
So in short: Poles did all the important parts, like actually breaking the code, Brits just throwed some money at the problem, helping to scale the Bombs.
Yep—no smoke and mirrors here. It’s an LLM-powered service. The form isn’t just window dressing; it makes sure you include the right details so you don’t end up sending a "kindly pay me back, please" email that gets ignored.

The real value? Structure, specificity, and making sure your demand actually sounds like something that lands with weight. Otherwise, you’re just asking nicely—and in the world of unpaid invoices, "nice" doesn’t cut it.
We moved that money upstream. That infrastructure of party committeemen and aldermen died with cities.

End of the day, it’s cheaper to sell politics like toothpaste than to build relationships.
I think the comment about newcomers bringing diseases that killed many of their people would explain why they don't welcome outsiders.
> People worrying about hair loss are neurotic.

I think it's a bit uncharitable to label people who are losing a physical feature they like as "neurotic". I agree it's not the end of the world (been shaving my head bald for 15+ years now and mostly like it better this way), but c'mon, just because you've made peace with your hair loss, it doesn't mean people who haven't are mentally defective.

> Those that take fin or dut after reading all their scary side effects must be super neurotic.

I don't think "neurotic" means what you think it means. I'd probably say "reckless".

I tried fin and dut in my 20s, and even though I was lucky and never saw those side effects, I do regret taking something like that without doing my homework first.
Yeah, I guess that's what he meant. In my mind, though, good "engineering" would also include good design, simplicity, etc.
I'm trying to imagine billionaire Jeff Bezos being happy to be told "by the way" after every interaction.

Who am I kidding though, the odds he's using Alexa is zero, eh?
My days of not trusting a single thing microsoft controls are certainly coming to a middle
Ah I got it. Thank you! I updated prompt for better text placement, and some models set it perfectly now. That's why I added model selector - you can get absolutely different results with different models
We've been here before.

In 2023 there were terrible wildfires in Greece. The media immediately jumped on it and claimed climate change was responsible. Anyone who questioned the narrative was a "climate change denier" or "conspiracy theorist"

Then, later on, we discovered there had been 79 arrests for arson. Obviously, the media barely covered this. Only on free speech platforms like X was the truth revealed, and now, it is also documented on Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Greece_wildfires

Today's "conspiracy theory" often turns out to be tomorrow's fact - so don't be so quick to judge Musk. He probably knows more about the wildfires than you do, given he runs a large network of hundreds of millions of users.
I don't see why not. I'll work on it. :)
He said

> (where this cancer explicitly is a cross-language codebase and not rust itself, just to escape the flameware brigade).

Where the cross-langauge in this case is Rust. Rust for Linux is creating a cross-language codebase. That means Rust for Linux is cancer.

> and not rust itself, just to escape the flameware brigade

is like when people say "I'm not trying to be rude, but" and then says an incredibly rude thing. Saying "I think this abstract idea is cancer, and you're the specific instance of this abstract idea, that doesn't mean I'm saying you are the thing" is incoherent.
(In)Security of the "Pass" password manager (2021)
The trick is a local first solution like Home Assistant and then use automations. No need to ask to turn on the lights; it just does it.
I don't assume in general that any of cloud services in the US are free of government surveillance either. Your only hope for any kind of privacy is self-hosting, and using certs issued by your own CA (I strongly suspect Let's Encrypt is a honeypot). Likewise I strongly suspect Proton Mail and Signal are both honeypots. Tucker Carlson was spied on when arranging his interview with Putin, even though he uses Signal. This likely bypasses the protocol - you don't get to examine the binary that's installed on your phone. It could contain all sorts of Five Eyes special sauce, as could iOS, and the companies won't even be able to tell you about any of it. It's safe to assume that all VPNs are tapped, too, unless you run your own.
There is implicit impact by engineering good systems and software. It's like hiring a plumber and telling them "you need to improve my house" rather than "you need to improve the plumbing in my house". When your objective as an engineer is so broad that you need to worry about customers and the product, then the engineering itself suffers... that said it might not suffer to the extent that it matters but that is the point here.

Bad software keeps happening because businesses can afford it, as well as hardware improvements. It's a combination of consumers not knowing what they are missing and hardware advancements allowing for bad software to exist.
Yeah, if certain folks had their way, wage theft would go from “illegal” to “just good business.” The reality? Companies will always push the limits when there’s no accountability. That $230M is just the tip of the iceberg—imagine how much goes unclaimed because people don’t know their rights or don’t want to fight.

That’s why tools like this exist. Because whether the system is working for you or actively trying to break you, knowing how to push back is half the battle.
I just completely ignore the My Documents toxic waste dump, and use a different place (with a shorter path) for files I actually care about. I might have created directory junctions to redirect one or two programs that hardcode their data location.
I found Tapestry through a Verge article, but had many of the complaints echoed elsewhere here. The same article mentioned Feeeed (iOS only - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feeeed-rss-reader-and-more/id1...). It's similar in spirit but I found it much more tailored to reading. There are several killer features for me:

1. First off, it defaults to a pretty good reader mode

2. Next, you can easily switch to an embedded browser view if automatic reader fails

3. Even better, your preference persists per-site, so you don't have to keep switching if the reader is broken for some reason

4. Feature I've not found anywhere else - the automatic reader mode appears to use the same session cookies etc. as the browser view. So you can actually get reader mode for sites that need a login.

5. Finally, the browser view applies automatic dark mode

Main thing that's missing is a mark-as-read-on-scroll.

Lastly, it's completely free! Author seems to just want to make a good reader app. I can't even find a tip jar link in the app.
I'm interesting in learning more. I don't see contact info in your profile.
As they should. That is how people maintain generations-long connections to ancestors and group history, whether it be an oral tradition in songs or stories or a set of written tales.
Because the software we are paid to write has an external purpose. As scale increases, supply chains lengthen, and roles specialize, inevitably more and more people are missing the forest for the trees—this isn't an indictment, it's an inevitable result of the pursuit of efficiency and scale at all costs. Many engineers would be happy to polish the thing that exists, perhaps adding complexity the form of scalability, modularity or reusability that isn't actually needed, and in fact may make it harder to adapt to broader changes in the ecosystem that the company operates in. "Impact" is just a suitably hand-wavy management buzzword to be used in lots of different situations where they deem ICs to not sufficiently taking the big picture into account.
You sound like an interesting fellow to converse with in line toward the gallows.
Same. I feel like it's almost a rite of passage of anyone who has built sideproject card games/hex games t think about building their own little engine (especially after spending time on red blob game's tutorials).
Same here, Hotline was just at the perfect time to have an (embarrassingly?) massive impact on my path. Less so the piracy aspect of it (though that sure opened my eyes to some possibilities with technology). I don't know if I would have got into Linux at all (at least not at such a young age) if I hadn't fallen into Badmoon (a popular? server at the time) and seen people in the user list with hx icons. Badmoon had a bit of a bad rap for silly things some of the members did, but as a 10-13 year old living in the sticks, meeting such an eclectic group (hackers, skaters, techies, artists) was revolutionary.
These are the idiotic contrived examples that made me dismiss every lecture on the value of hard work my K–12 teachers gave.
He probably has 10 actual people named "Alexa" just to cater to his every whim.
I agree with the point that precedence is arbitrary. The current version looks like this:

1 Escaped characters

2 []

3 ()

4 * + ? {m,n}

5 :

6 . (implicit concatenation)

7 |

I have some reasons to put it that way. I want : to be somewhat 'atomic'. If you think about '*' or '+' they can be lower in the table as well. Anyway, I will try to put : lower in the next version and see how it goes.
Oh, well, surprisingly, it seems this article hadn't been posted here yet?

Do enjoy the discussion, and, whatever you do, please don't let the apparent incongruity of "near miss" when it's clear that it should be "near accident" derail the conversation... (insert-innocent-smiley-here)
>Ads running the Super Bowl showing some of the outrageous theft are however going to be hard to ignore.

I was unaware of this. Searching around I see: "Musk Rumoured to Spend 40M on 5 Doge SuperBowl Ads"

Feel free to provide a better citation. This could be groundbreaking.
> I work for a utility scale storage company

Clearly not in any sort of engineering capacity given you wildly misused the second law of thermodynamics, which has nothing to do with potential energy, but the flow of heat from hot areas to cooler areas.

Second: energy density has nothing to do with how stable that energy is. 12lb of plutonium could level a city, but not if it isn't in an extremely precisely engineered device.

Third:potential energy and volume, you say?

Do you own a riding lawnmower in your garage? Those have about 2 or more gallons of gas, which is about 66 kWhr of energy.

Pour that out onto your garage floor, strike a match, and let me know how "sad" you are when your garage is leveled, your house structurally damaged, and you're dead in your neighbor's yard.

Do you have a gas grill, and do you keep a spare tank in the garage? 20lb of propane is equal to almost 130kWhr of energy.

Do you keep a 5 gallon jug of spare gas in your garage? 165 kWhr.

So. You were saying?
> Yes, I do think endlessly relitigating project decisions that have been made is inappropriate.

Will you feel this way when the ruling eventually comes down that the Rust for Linux experiment has been declared a failure? Referring to what is currently an experiment as a decision is a rather bold misrepresentation of the current state. You want to present Rust in the kernel as a foregone conclusion when the reality couldn't be further from that.

> It is not a technical stance. It is a project management one.

Unstable infrastructure becoming a bottleneck is project management? Maybe a working implementation of Coccinelle for Rust should have been among the criteria before the experiment should have been allowed to proceed. That would have precluded the years of furor this has otherwise caused.

> That is exactly why the maintenance burden is not his problem. He is under no obligation to take any additional work here.

This highlights the crux of the issue and the reason your bias is clouding your view of the issue objectively. You are operating on the belief and trust of the small amount of Rust developers. Reality is proving otherwise time and time again.
Technically, interestingly, if `bazel` were used as the build tool, it would avoid the straightforward ability to cross-contaminate the build executable with the test code...

Yeah, `bazel run test:...` would have access to the test files, but `bazel build xz:executable` would not (by default) be able to pull in extra shenanigans from the test files (and I think there's generally linting and formatting rules required by default with `BUILD.bazel` files, reducing another sneak-vectors)
Thread two years ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34477901
Yes with promotions, bonuses and overall good reviews, which are only marginally based on technical achievements (when it should be absolutely based on that).
I don't expect native mobile dev market to grow and was wondering how other disciplines like data is doing ;-)
Related. Others?

A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Teensy ELF Executables for Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32524007 - Aug 2022 (10 comments)

A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux (1999) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21846785 - Dec 2019 (22 comments)

A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux (2005) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11709247 - May 2016 (5 comments)

Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8745024 - Dec 2014 (13 comments)

The Teensy Files: Creating teensy ELF executables for Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8642734 - Nov 2014 (7 comments)

A Whirlwind Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5016434 - Jan 2013 (14 comments)

Tutorial on Creating Really Teensy ELF Executables for Linux - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=875077 - Oct 2009 (16 comments)

3998-byte executable reduced to 45 bytes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=68056 - Oct 2007 (10 comments)
Gh-128563: A new tail-calling interpreter for Python 3.14
I’m Arash, a real human who’s been burned by this exact problem—along with plenty of friends—so I built this as a free tool to help people avoid the same headache.

No data collection, no sneaky monetization, just a straightforward way to push back when someone’s trying to stiff you. If it helps, great. If not, at least you didn’t have to pay $400+/hr to find out.
As we all know though, low latency is often opposed to high throughput or efficiency. If the average person had to work one hour less each day but the toilets weren't spotless (but still clean enough), wouldn't that be a worthwhile trade?
There's a kind of hn comment that pops up very frequently - aspirational/delusional/out of touch: people repeating hype as truth that no one that actually lives in the space would repeat.

Stuff like this (lol I don't know a single serious C++ project using conan/vcpkg/etc), or that mojo has replaced all of Python/C/C++ (not will replace but has!), or that Rust has replaced C/C++, or the LLMs have obviated everything.

I have no clue how someone can both be so clueless and yet so sure.
Rwandan scientists develop local yeast for banana wine-makers
Sadly, many of those arbitrary policies are set by ... The Federal Government! As an example, NIH just added a huge new cybersecurity requirement for a bunch of their datasets.

Space, utilities and IT can be significant costs. There are also the standard costs of personnel for the people working under these grants (HR, Accounting, Purchasing, etc.) Add onto that the significant compliance requirements.

When the government hires a consultant, they usually pay 2-3x the salary of the consultant in per-hour costs. This rule limits them to 1.15x the salary of the employee.
Linux and Java has survived since 1995-1998, which is the dusk of times.

We swap JS frameworks constantly, but when we’ll reach a good paradigm, we’ll stick with it. At one point, React might be the final framework, or rather, one of its descendants.
Or maybe they rape and beat their woman, suffer from high infant mortality and often die excruciating deaths after moderate injuries like a broken arm or cut.
Funny or not, that interpretation holds too.