Agingcoder

The increase is massive ( I’ve heard x5 over existing contracts in some places )

To some extent it’s not that they don’t live up to the hype - rather that the gains are hard to measure.

Llms have spared me hours of research on exotic topics actually useful for my day job However, that’s the whole problem - I don’t know how much.

If they had a real price ( accounting for OpenAI losses for example) with ChatGPT at 50 usd/month for everyone, OpenAI being profitable, and people actually paying for this, I think things might self adjust and we’d have some idea.

Right now, we live in some kind of parallel world.

I sometimes wonder whether there’s an eu vs us difference here. At least when it comes to tv, I found the hard way ( a long time ago ) that the amount of ads Americans are exposed to is simply unbearable. This extends to youtube and similar services.

Now, everything is global - so are we looking at European users or American users complaining ? If an American user says it’s an unbearable, then it’s unusable. If a European user complains… it depends ( and these days, it’s at least to me unusable, but I obviously can’t speak for everyone)

I like these bugs. They’re intricate, technical puzzles, that can take weeks to figure out. You need a proper strategy to figure them out, cannot rely on simple tactics, and when you finally understand what’s going on, it’s immensely satisfying.

This, and now there’s pernosco which makes everything much easier.

Now, under pressure, this is going to be a nightmare unless you have a high tolerance to stress.

The fake anonymity journalists often give to sources (‘Richard D , from small town X, aged 34, works as a carpenter specializing in 16th century house renovation’) is something I find rather striking.

What’s not clear to me though is whether they’re deliberately tricking their source, or whether they genuinely don’t understand that their source is not anonymous when they give that many details.

Fair question. Location primarily ( nothing in France ), and I’m not sure how ‘we’re looking for people who enjoy doing that kind of thing’( I very much do ) relates to the actual job offers, ie what job offer should I actually apply to.

My background is not networking ( it’s math then hpc then broader stuff ) but I keep stumbling on similar problems ( including a beautiful one related to intel NICs a few years ago which led be into a rabbit hole of ebpf and kernel network layer and which surfaced later on the cloudflare blog), and the only tech company with which this seems to be a regular occurrence is cloudflare. Their space is a bit unknown to me so I guess I’m having a hard time projecting something onto the job offers.

I’d happily chat to someone working for cloudflare though - I guess this would help me understand what it is that actually happens over there. I guess I’m a bit intimidated by this unknown yet really good looking world :-)

Excellent article as always from the cloudflare blog - engineering without magic infrastructure and ml. One day I will apply !

Compiler bugs are actually quite common ( I used to find several a year in gcc ), but as the author says, some of them only appear when you work at a very large scale, and most people never dive that far.

I think at least slow and expensive compilers back in the days, the defense and aerospace stigma, and in more recent times a common misperception that it’s closed source. And it’s never been cool stuff.

And yes you’re right, it’s a very good language.

I don’t understand how you can get the same kind of reliability with C than with Spark - process or not, a formal proof is a formal proof. That’s much harder to get with C.

I don’t want to use google anymore - bad search results, too many ads.

You’re really saying that there is no starvation , and plenty to eat in Gaza ? ( I won’t debate the technical meaning and definition of the word famine, which I didn’t use ) There are enough Israelis who confirm this , and they’re hardly antisemitic.

This is disturbing. You seem to imply that there are legitimate reasons to starve an entire population, which is to me so repulsive that you’re not even allowed to consider entering that territory.Under that reading, once you’ve crossed that line, how can you actually win a media war ?

The Israeli military itself debunked it I think . The us said the same thing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un...

Is there any way to starve people deliberately, and win a media war ? I’m not sure this has anything to do with Muslim vs Jewish population sizes.

I love your answer.

It’s honest, and actually typical of this kind of problem space where what’s possible exceeds what was expected.

It reminds me of what coders did with older atari st machines to achieve overscan and a whole bunch of other tricks. The manuals explicitly stated that some things were not possible or would cause machine resets … except that there was a way.

For the first time in a long time I don’t feel that old on hn ( and I do HPC so have a strong interest in the topic ) :-)

I’m really enjoying the discussion here - thanks everyone.

There was a fundamental difficulty with ‘given a sufficiently smart compiler’ if I remember well revolving around automatic parallelization. You might argue that given enough time and money it might have been solved, but it’s a really hard problem.

( I might have forgotten)

Yeah I gave up when I realized I didn’t understand what problem he was trying to solve

For 2) I guess that if you know you will die with high probability, you will search for ( if at all possible) an alternative treatment ( which might have side effects but at least you’re alive ) ?

I think there’s a naming difficulty : the council of the European Union is the upper chamber, while the European council is not !

How is this related to democracy ?

No I strongly dislike this game too. It’s too hard, I don’t like the movement which feels ‘rigid’ , and it’s super gloomy and depressing.

I enjoyed Ori, Monster Boy, or Prince of Persia the lost crown a lot more.

To me it’s not a meme, it’s a reference to a very famous letter by dijkstra regarding goto statements.

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

Turbo pascal 3 is back !

Thanks - I should have done my homework, but didn’t expect things to be so clear cut.

I found this about Jordan Lasker https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/07/cremi...

Quote ‘Yet another possibility is that Romania has an undersampled ethnic group that overperforms, but whose schools aren’t tested very well. The only group this might be is Romanian Jews’

Let’s say that there are probably many ways of interpreting this sentence, but I can’t find any nice one. I understand this as ‘it makes sense for a group with skin color X and hair color Y to be better at school’ followed by ‘it must be Jews’.

What am I missing ?

Yes I had knl at some point . I tried it, tuned my code to work ok it, and since many optimizations carrried on to regular xeons … ended up buying Xeons.

I’m not sure why what he's saying is so outlandish to many ( at least to some of the papers he’s quoting ): we’re in a world which looks increasingly like the cold war all over again, and my immediate reaction when I saw the headline was ‘ah yes China this makes sense’. We’re not talking private capital - it’s national interests being pushed, for long term reasons, and probably a bit late.

Now I’m European so this seems obvious to me, coming from a culture of high government intervention but I might be very wrong!

I want one for gaming , that is silent, provides high end graphics, and takes little space ( Mac mini or studio size ideally ). I’m essentially willing to pay extra for a specced up gaming console.

I still haven’t been able to find something that fits the bill - the hardest part to get information on is noise, since most people don’t seem to care about it or just play with headphones. I understand that such a product is hard to build, with a direct tension between power, space and noise.

What has never been clear to me is whether such a market even exists and I’d tend to say no, even if the market seems to be changing rapidly with amd apus ( we’re far from a 5080 , but it seems to be a step in the right direction ).

This can be mitigated by learning other technical fields ( infrastructure, security, etc ) and using your technical knowledge to steer things in the right direction - but yes, you’re otherwise right and I understand your point of view.