News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

aranchelk

Having to audibly name the religion/ethnicity of beneficiaries of charities is a pretty wild requirement for a US charity.

That may have been the judge’s framing, but it seems off from what I typically expect from mainstream US news.

The fact that the organization is Jewish is stated prominently in the article, but I’m not entirely sure why that’s relevant. Many charities in the US have religious affiliations.

The adult matchmaking etc, that deviates substantially from their advertising.

Re:Three Inverse Laws of AI on Tuesday May 05, 2026 @01:29PM (#48025702)
Anthropomorphizing is likely a mistake, but Daniel Dennett’s idea that the most straightforward (possibly only practical) way to create the external appearance of consciousness is a real internal consciousness does float around in my thoughts.

I haven’t yet seen any convincing appearance of one in an LLM, but I think if skeptical people don’t keep an eye out for the signs, we may be the last to see it.

He also wrote about the idea of the intentional stance: even if you’re quite sure these systems don’t have real conscious intent, viewing them as if they did may give you access to the best part of your own reasoning to understand them.

Re:Agentic Patterns on Sunday January 04, 2026 @08:28PM (#46494348)
Tool Use Steering via Prompting. I’ve seen that work well also, but I don’t know if I’d quite call it an architectural pattern.
Re:Agentic Patterns on Sunday January 04, 2026 @08:02PM (#46494179)
Yes, agentic search over vector embeddings. It can be very effective.
Re:Is Software the UFOlogy of Engineering Disciplines? on Friday November 07, 2025 @11:10AM (#45847867)
I’ve seen several of these discussions on HN, they’re never particularly illuminating. What always seems to missing:

* Perspective of what it’s like working in other engineering disciplines.

* A clear and shared definition of what “engineering” is.

* Experiences shared by people who do apply significant math and science to their software authorship.

Re:Monoid-Augmented FIFOs, Deamortised on Wednesday August 20, 2025 @01:26AM (#44958889)
That and also why start with multiplication? String concatenation, addition, list concatenation all make more intuitive sense to a working programmer.

What's a straightforward way to combine a bunch of numbers? Just keep multiplying them to get a resulting volume in an ever-higher dimensional space.

Re:I tried every todo app and ended up with a .txt file on Monday August 11, 2025 @03:42PM (#44868575)
I was also dissatisfied with existing task tracking apps, and built my own:

t-do.com

There are still many rough edges, but it’s extremely useful. One of the best features that a text file has that very few apps support is unlimited sub-task nesting, and that’s a core feature of T-Do.

Re:Lens: Lenses, Folds and Traversals on Friday July 04, 2025 @02:56PM (#44466989)
I disagree. There are many operators that you’ll never use but if you memorize (^.), (.~), and (%~), you’re pretty much set for a lot of real-world software development.

Per Kmett’s original talk/video on the subject, I can confirm my brain shifted pretty quickly to look at them like OOP field accessors. And for the three above, the mnemonics are effective:

“^.” is like an upside down “v” for view.

“.~” looks like a backwards “s” for setters.

“~%” has an tilde so it’s a type of setter and “%” has a circle over a circle, so it’s over.

I’ll also add that my experience in recent versions of PureScript things get even nicer: visible type application lets you define record accessors on the fly like:

foo ^. ln@“bar” <<< ln@“baz”

“.” Is unfortunately a restricted character and is not the composition operator like Haskell, but I alias “<<<“ with “..”

The pretty obvious question with the above is: why don’t you just write “foo.bar.baz”. In my case I use a framework that uses passed lenses for IoC, but I think “%~” is always nicer and less repetitive than the built-in alternative.

It’s wild how much the green color grading used in the film made the daytime location shots look un-Californian.
Re:Cloudflare Investigating Incident on Thursday June 12, 2025 @02:35PM (#44261278)
After many tries I also got into the dashboard, but it's not that usable, constant error pop-ups.
Re:Cloudflare Investigating Incident on Thursday June 12, 2025 @02:26PM (#44261120)
Seems to be affecting functionality of their "Verify you are human" dialogs as well as Workers.
Customers of those services have a lot of considerations, as long as Nvidia doesn’t undercut the prices too much, I think no.

Getting more developers creating more models that can then be run on those services will likely expand business for all of those vendors.

I really appreciate the integrated fingerprint reader in these cases. I usually run with my laptop screen closed (with external monitor) but open it specifically to authenticate in system dialogs.
Ah, that’s a painful situation.
Not to quibble, but VSCode (and GitHub for that matter) are part of my tooling, not part of any of my stacks.

To me the former is tolerable, the latter is not.

Re:CINC Is Not Chef on Friday April 04, 2025 @04:08PM (#43587127)
Did anyone ever tell them they lost? Are you volunteering?
> 2. Implementation Language doesn’t matter

> I’m controversially writing our autorouter in Javascript. This is the first thing people call out, but it’s not as unreasonable as you might expect. Consider that when optimizing an algorithm, you’re basically looking at improving two things:

> Lowering the number of iterations required (make the algorithm smart) Increasing the speed of each iteration

It may be true in this domain, I wouldn’t know, but applied to software engineering in general IMO it would be a massively incorrect assumption to say choice of language doesn’t affect speed and needed number of iterations.

It’s not just the syntax. Regex isn’t directly composable (unless you just mash together strings). They cannot define nested structures, I.e. no recursion. They can’t maintain context.

We don’t need better language tools. Better parsers can, and already have, been implemented in libraries.

I’d have a look at parser combinators.

Re:But good sir, what is electricity? on Sunday February 23, 2025 @11:08PM (#43155760)
> We don’t have philosophically satisfying insights into the universe at subatomic scales. We have quantum mechanics: a set of equations that are good at predicting the behavior of elementary particles, but that don’t line up with our intuition about the macroscopic world.

Our analogies and intuitions are based off of our macroscopic experienced reality, this seems to be an entirely emergent phenomenon based on those strange behaviors described by quantum mechanics. If those insights ever do come, I don’t believe they’ll correspond to anything prewired into our brains or experienced in our lives, and will never be remotely satisfying.

Right on! I’m using PureScript with an Elm-like framework.
> Frontend development is a nightmare world of Kafkaesque awfulness I no longer enjoy

> Objects are extremely good at what they're good at. Blind devotion to functional is dumb.

Blind devotion to anything in engineering is dumb, but if you go full functional on the frontend it’s definitely not “Kafkaesque”

Maybe the author meant gradual static typing?
Re:Haskell: A Great Procedural Language on Sunday January 19, 2025 @01:52PM (#42760250)
In practice it only detracts a little bit. You can enable GHC extensions project-wide and there are alternate standard libraries (preludes) that are more modern.

If you want a language that is very Haskell-like without the historical baggage or the laziness, PureScript is very good. It’s main compile target is JavaScript, so it’s built for different use cases.

How is this not the top comment?
Re:F*: A proof oriented general purpose programming language on Wednesday December 25, 2024 @08:24PM (#42512486)
Anyone coming from a Haskell background, there’s some interesting (though possibly dated) info here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/76k1x0/what_do_you...

Older »