HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

darksaints

7,907 karma · joined October 26, 2012

submissionscomments
darksaints··on Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment?
As someone who kinda followed this debate for a while, I will point out that there is actually a large split down the middle of the on whether minimum wage increases decrease employment. And that split isn't actually due to ideological bias (which is the usual accusation), but rather methodology: almost all of the studies which confirm employment reductions use one methodology, and almost all of the studies which do not confirm employment loss use another methodology, and there is a large debate in econometrics as to how reasonable the assumptions are for each of the two methodologies.

One thing that always seems to be at a disconnect between the economic literature and policy makers is the economic context of the raise in wages. Even those economists that have bought in fully that minimum wage increases don't typically decrease employment will have several caveats to that statement, usually worded in the form of "small increases in the minimum wage". That is to say that there are often small inefficiencies in our current markets which allow employers to reduce wages in cartel-like fashion, and small increases in the minimum wage can claw some of that back in favor of the employees at the expense of employers' economic rents, but not at the expense of economic output. But large increases in the minimum wage absolutely can jump the shark, decreasing economic output by effectively making low margin sectors untenable entirely. If that weren't the case, we would be able to raise it infinitely without any negative effects, which is absolutely absurd (and unfortunately that is the takeaway that ideologues often get from reading abstracts).

A more useful economic model would go a step further than just saying "you can raise the minimum wage without harm to the economy", by incorporating econometric analysis which can accurately predict when and how much you can raise it without incurring economic harm.

darksaints··on Budget Car Buyers Want Automakers to K.I.S.S
I'm actually a huge fan of the extreme level of simplification that electric cars have to offer. They literally eliminate the need for thousands of high maintenance moving parts, and replace them with motors that can run hundreds of thousands of miles without service. Regenerative braking reduces brake wear and maintenance dramatically. 4 motor setups eliminate complex differentials and give you extremely high quality awd, traction control, and stability control, without any increase in mechanical complexity. You get better low-end torque output and smoother power curves. The only mechanical features that really remain the same are bearings and suspension components. Complexity still exists, it just has been offloaded to electronic complexity which has become orders of magnitude more reliable and capable in the last 4 decades.

So please, could we just have that? Just because it's easy for you to add internet connectivity doesn't mean I want it. I don't want my car to rat me out to megalomaniac dictators because my car company's psychotic CEO wants a sweetheart trade deal. I don't want my car to create data trails that will allow advertisers to see places that I frequently visit, regardless if that place is an oncologist or my friendly neighborhood dominatrix. I don't want my car to know my retinal data or fingerprints, to be controllable via my phone, or to tell me that my resting heart rate is. Just give me a car, and let me do the rest on my own.

darksaints··on Lidar-based GIS map of New Hampshire stone walls
I don't have much experience with lidar, but I do with machine learning based approaches with photographic data. There has been a massive explosion in the last 5-10 years in filtering and processing algorithm advances that can more readily clean up false positives and insignificant noise. I would assume the barriers to high quality data are quite a bit lower now.
darksaints··on Typed languages are better suited for vibecoding
Exactly this. The ability of LLMs to write code is going to strongly depend on the availability and quantity of training data. But agentic coding is more than just LLMs, it is also the various abilities that give feedback to the LLM to refine the resulting code...and that is something that strongly typed and statically typed languages do so much better than their weak/dynamic counterparts.
darksaints··on Typed languages are better suited for vibecoding
> In any case, you can easily get most of the benefits of typed languages by adding a rule that requires the LLM to always output Python code with type annotations and validate its output by running ruff and ty.

My personal experience is that by doing exactly that, the productivity, code readability, and correctness goes through the roof, at a slight increase in cost due to having to iterate more.

And since that is an actual language-independent comparison, it leads me to believe that yes, static typing does in fact help substantially, and that the current differences between vibe coding languages are, just like you say, due to the relative quantity of training data.

darksaints··on Typed languages are better suited for vibecoding
I feel like I have had just as much luck with LLMs writing Rust as I have had with Java, Kotlin, and Swift. Which is better than C++ and worse than Python. I think that mostly comes down to the relative abundance of training data for these types of codebases.

But that is all independent of how the LLMs are used, especially in an agentic coding environment. Strong/static typed languages with good compiler messages have a very fast feedback loop via parsing and typechecking, and agentic coding systems that are properly guided (with rulesets like Claude.md files) can iterate much quicker because of it.

I find that even with relatively obscure languages (like OCaml and Scala), the time and effort it takes to get good outcomes is dramatically reduced, albeit with a higher cost due to the fact that they don't usually get it right on the first try.

darksaints··on FBI seized $40k from Linda Martin without charging her with a crime
We have been suffering from this problem for nearly 50 years now, due to ineffective supreme court checks and balances in the face of psychotically expansive executive interpretation of the law in the era of the war on drugs.

Americans will only do the right thing after they have exhausted all other options. Slavery, women's suffrage, jim crow laws, police brutality, civil forfeiture, reproductive rights, health care...we always seem to be among the last nations on the planet to figure out how to do things correctly. It's almost like our constitution is fatally flawed and designed for oppression rather than freedom.

darksaints··on QUIC for the kernel
MacOS is a hybrid kernel, which has been becoming more microkernel-like over time, and they are aggressively pushing more and more things to userspace. I don't think it will ever be a full microkernel, but it is promising to see that happening there.

Ironic (in the alannis morrisette sense) that Apple has strictly controlled hardware AND OS-level software...if there's anybody out there that can possibly get away with a monolithic kernel in a safe way, it would be them. But Linux...where you have to support practically infinite variations in hardware and the full bazaar of software, that's a dumpster fire waiting to happen.

darksaints··on QUIC for the kernel
True, but the last time I checked (several years ago), the size of the portion of code that is not drivers or kernel modules was still 7 million lines of code, and the average system still has to load a few million more via kernel modules and drivers. That is still a phenomenally large attack surface.

The SeL4 kernel is 10k lines of code. OKL4 is 13k. QNX is ~30k.

darksaints··on Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++
I remember back when Rust was still in so much flux that there were regular discussions about syntax, and there was a proposal very similar to the syntax of carbon: square brackets for generics and type annotations, parens for indexing, etc. It was basically turned down because they wanted to win over C++ devs. I still wish it was the favored outcome...it looks so much cleaner and less jarring.
darksaints··on QUIC for the kernel
For the love of god, can we please move to microkernel-based operating systems already? We're adding a million lines of code to the linux kernel every year. That's so much attack surface area. We're setting ourselves up for a kessler syndrome of sorts with every system that we add to the kernel.
darksaints··on Diet, not lack of exercise, drives obesity, a new study finds
I have personal experience outrunning a bad diet as a division 1 swimmer. I was on a 7000 calorie a day diet, which was actually difficult to pull off, and I specifically had to supplement my diet with things like snickers bars and peanut butter cups just to stop losing weight. In fact, my dietary habits formed during this period of my life, where I was consistently below 10% body fat, continue to cause me trouble today in my less active state. Only by eating dramatically healthier have I been able to approach 20% body fat today.

Even beyond myself, I think you’re romanticizing how healthy the diets of extreme athletes are. I’ve been coached by and trained alongside Olympic athletes and most of them (not all of them) don’t give a single shit about things like healthy fats or micronutrients. Protein definitely, but everything else is noise. When burning that many calories, you are getting more than enough micronutrients, and it doesn’t really matter if the energy you end up burning is from fats or carbs, because it’s in and out the same day and never has a chance to be stored in the first place.

Body builders aren’t judged on athletic performance but aesthetics. It would make sense they care a lot more about diet, but it should be noted that they aren’t athletes and their entire regime is about building muscle, not using energy. It’s a completely different type of optimization.

darksaints··on Efficient Computer's Electron E1 CPU – 100x more efficient than Arm?
It kinda sounds like it, though the article explicitly said it's not VLIW.

I've always felt like itanium was a great idea but came too soon and too poorly executed. It seemed like the majority of the commercial failure came down to friction from switching architecture and the inane pricing rather than the merits of the architecture itself. Basically intel being intel.

darksaints··on Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python (2009)
Colleges becoming more vocational is a consequence of colleges becoming more expensive for students. If you are paying all of that money for college, you better get a good job out of it. I don't see that as a bad thing necessarily, but it would definitely be nice if we had better paths for those who want to end up in research.

I'd argue that SML (or derivative thereof) would make for a better teaching language, for both the lambda calculus aspect and the type theory aspect.

darksaints··on CO2 Battery
There are historical examples of entire villages around lakes suffocating during a limnic erruption.

I can't exactly find what sort of specs an installation of a large co2 battery might have, so it may be small beans relatively speaking, but that is still a lot of co2 in a very small area, and I certainly hope that both the engineers and regulators know what they're doing with it.

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

darksaints··on Two narratives about AI
This has been a huge frustration for me, but the wild thing is that we've built up so many tools over time that help humans only for AI coding tools to wild west it and not use them. The best AI coding tools will read docs websites, terminal error messages, write/run tests, etc. But we have so many better tools that none of them seem to use:

* profilers

* debuggers

* linters

* static analyzers

* language server protocol

* wire protocol analyzers

* decompilers

* call graph analyzers

* database structure crawlers

In the absence of models that can do perfect oneshot software engineering, we're gonna have to fall back on well-integrated tool usage, and nobody seems to do that well yet.

darksaints··on CARA – High precision robot dog using rope
He actually used steel cables for his initial prototypes, but steel cables have a problem with rolling fatigue that actually gets worse the larger the diameter...so if a tiny steel cable is not strong enough, you might actually have to change the gear dimensions (and therefore ratios) in order to not fatigue them.
darksaints··on CARA – High precision robot dog using rope
Spectra and Dyneema are both UHMWPE. They're different brand names (from Honeywell and DSM respectively) but chemically and mechanically the same, possibly with some small and insignificant differences due to manufacturing processes.
darksaints··on Facts don't change minds, structure does
Notice that the two reasons I mentioned don't hinge on changing anyones mind.

1 - They boost dopamine reward systems in people who get "social" validation of their opinions/persona as an influencer. This isn't something specific to propaganda...this is a well-observed phenomenon of social media behavior. This not only gives false validation to the person spreading the misinformation/opinions, but it influences other people who desire that sort of influence by giving them an example of something successful to replicate.

2 - In aggregate, it demoralizes those who disagree with the opinions by demonstrating a false popularity. Imagine, for example, going to the comments of an instagram post of something and you see a blatant neo-nazi holocaust denial comment with 50,000 upvotes. It hasn't changed your mind, but it absolutely will demoralize you from thinking you have any sort of democratic power to overcome it.

No opinions have changed, but more people are willing to do things that are destructive to social discourse, and fewer people are willing to exercise democratic methods to curb it.

darksaints··on Facts don't change minds, structure does
To add to your second point, those algorithms are extremely easy to game by states with the resources and desire to craft narratives. Specifically Russia and China.

There has actually been a pretty monumental shift in Russian election meddling tactics in the last 8 years. Previously we had the troll army, in which the primary operating tactic of their bot farms were to pose as Americans (as well as Poles, Czechs, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Brits, etc.) but push Russian propaganda. Those bot farms were fairly easy to spot and ban, and there was a ton of focus on it after the 2016 election, so that strategy was short lived.

Since then, Russia has shifted a lot closer to Chinese style tactics, and now have a "goblin" army (contrasted with their troll army). This group no longer pushes the narratives themselves, but rather uses seemingly mindless engagement interactions like scrolling, upvoting, clicking on comments, replying to comments with LLMs, etc., in order to game what the social media algorithms show people. They merely push the narratives of actual Americans (not easily bannable bots) who happen to push views that are either in line with Russian propaganda, or rhetoric that Russian intelligence views as being harmful to the US. These techniques work spectacularly well for two reasons: the dopamine boost to users who say abominable shit as a way of encouraging them to do more, and as a morale-killer to people who might oppose such abominable shit but see how "popular" it is.

https://www.bruegel.org/first-glance/russian-internet-outage...

darksaints··on Marines being mobilized in response to LA protests
The same exact lie was said about Tiananmen Square.
darksaints··on ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation
I sincerely hope people like you get sent to a Salvadoran torture gulag the next time you drive over the speed limit. Because we absolutely understand no circumstances can afford a breakdown in the rule of law.
darksaints··on ICE Deports 3 U.S. Citizen Children Held Incommunicado Prior to the Deportation
They deported a US Citizen. A child. Kept from contact from her US Citizen father.

If that’s the sort of way that you believe we should treat legal immigrants, you have no basis to claim any support for them.

darksaints··on Claude Code: Best practices for agentic coding
I would have thought so, but somehow no. I have a cursor subscription with access to all of those models, and I still consistently get better results from claude code.
darksaints··on Gemini 2.5 Flash
That’s all fine and dandy, but if you google anything related to llm agents, you get 1000 answers to 100 questions, companies hawking their new “visual programming” agent composers, and a ton of videos of douchebags trying to be the Steve Jobs of AI. The concept I’m sure is fine, but execution of agentic anything is still the Wild Wild West and nobody knows what they’re really doing.
darksaints··on Adipose tissue retains an epigenetic memory of obesity after weight loss
I kinda went down a rabbit hole a while back with certain treatments that can kill adipocytes, as there's actually some significant research backing both heat-generating and cold-generating treatments. They do kill fat cells, and they are flushed out of the body. But people who undergo such treatments do not lose fat. At best, these devices can reshape your fat, pulling it out of one area and distributing it more evenly in other areas.

The problem is that when you kill an adipocyte, it releases all of its triglycerides, which are then free to move around the blood stream. But when blood triglyceride levels are high and there isn't significant oxidation, other metabolic processes are triggered to start to store them. So you kill an adipocyte, release the triglycerides, which get reabsorbed into still living adipocytes, which now get engorged and then multiply again, replacing the fat cells that have been killed.

After learning quite a bit about these processes, I think these devices might actually be useful, not for losing fat, but by eliminating this sort of fat memory. In other words, they should be used after significant weight loss, because adipocytes are relatively empty and externally triggered apoptosis can kill the cells without releasing significant quantities of triglycerides which can be reabsorbed and trigger adipocyte mitosis. I think this would effectively reset that person to a state as if they had never been fat in the first place. Thoughts?

darksaints··on Bonobos use a kind of syntax once thought to be unique to humans
Writing is a new phenomenon. It's certainly a novel ability, but genetically we were around for a few million years before we even developed civilization, tens of thousands more before behavioral modernity, and only in the last 10k years have we developed writing. But other commenters have already said as much.

I would contest that what makes us unique is recursion as a general ability. In that sense, writing is a method of recursively building knowledge. But we also have it with spoken language, as we recursively build vocabulary and grammar into complex communication. We have it with tools, as we are the only species (at least as far as I know) that uses tools to make tools. We also seem to have it with our physical abilities: witness the constantly broken records in competition sports.

darksaints··on The Llama 4 herd
Racism is probably true, but the vast majority of the world is strongly ethnically homogeneous within country borders, so their racism isn’t as politically charged as ours is, because it’s simply not a matter of domestic policy for them.

LGBTQ matters have varying degrees of acceptance around the world and Europe and the collective west are in front of it all, but that downplays the fact that LGBTQ acceptance has been rising nearly everywhere in the world with the exception of fundamentalist religious states.

darksaints··on Serving Vector Tiles, Fast
Oh that’s interesting, and I’m actually kinda peeved by any database-connected system that caches responses by default. Caching should be reserved as a performance optimization with serious correctness tradeoffs.

Regardless, I don’t think caching came into play here, at least according to how I’m reading this repository. I would expect cold caches for everything.

darksaints··on Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU Kernel Deep Dive
It seems like the XNU kernel is architecturally super close to the Mach kernel, and XNU drivers architecturally work like Mach drivers, but just that they are compiled into the kernel instead of running in userspace as a separate process. And it seems like the only reason for doing so is performance.

That makes me wonder: how hard would it be to run the XNU kernel in something like a “Mach mode”, where you take the same kernel and drivers but run them separately as the Mach microkernel was intended?

I feel like from a security standpoint, a lot of situations would gladly call for giving up a little bit of performance for the process isolation security benefits that come from running a microkernel.

Is anybody here familiar enough with XNU to opine on this?

← PreviousPage 4 of 34Next →