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status_quo69on We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians

What does an advance in music even look like? Shifting tastes for pop music? Or new techniques? New music theory? Or just experimentation?

Considering all music is subjectively influenced by the culture in which it's born (see the difference between Asian traditions of music, European traditions of music, African traditions, and traditions of the Americas) not even all of those have a given structure that is present today like the typical 4/4 and have polyrhythmic and multitonal structures by design. The fact that everything on the radio has converged towards 4/4 165bpm major chord progressions is evidence of that cultural phenomenon.

status_quo69on Plan mode is dead

I use fable 5.1 (tried opus but it lied to me 3 times in quick succession and ignored me in another)

This is weird to ask because I feel like of course the model isn't omniscient? Isn't the whole point of iterating on a plan to assess impact, risk, know your (the user) variables, user impact, product impact, etc for making a change? I cannot count the times even in the past few months where I start a conversation with my C suite because their desired outcome would have a potential negative impact elsewhere for other products or users.

Is this just not something that comes up at Anthropic?

status_quo69on Rails World 2026 Opening Keynote [video]

Rails dev here, still using it, still plan on using it, use agents, don't see them making food gun decisions with rails apis just code.

Rails comes with the console by default, so production inspection of a bug is something the ai can do without a ton of bs to be set up, and that console can be forced to be auditable (using standard gems) or read only (using flags).

I used to love rust, still do sorta, but yeah I think this is really not a good argument against a tool that operationally is better at most things at being observed or poked or prodded or tested in production

status_quo69on Ask HN: How do you interview devs in a post-AI world?

The same way we did before. Very very simple code submission (most people using AI use it even though we call out we're going to ask them later to modify later without AI tools writing code for them) then pairing interview where we ask some basic "are you actually at the level you say you are" question, then ask them to extend their program submission with:

- engineers on the call as pairing assistants - google, ai tools, whatever for libraries, syntax, etc. we tell the candidate directly that it's impossible for us to gsther signal on how they think about problems if they ask Claude to just whip them up a solution - the expected output - their own unit test suite

Every candidate that has submitted an ai submission thus far has failed because they have literally no idea where to go. I've interviewed dozens at this point. I'm not saying "they're unfamiliar with the structure", I'm saying "they cannot actually break down the problem even verbally".

It doesn't matter their pedigree or past experience on their resume, if they used AI to generate they don't seem to be able to resurrect the skills that actually matter for the thing, engineering and product work.

Note because I know folks hate code submissions. It's not hard. We give a CSV with 3 columns, 10 lines. Do some basic mapping and some structuring, some basic data modeling. We only expect about 1 actual class or struct. Then unit tests and it should run in the terminal. Max submission length with verbosity has been a java program at something like a hundred lines total if that, most folks complete the submission in an hour or two. Extension is that we modify one of the rules and extend the CSV by 5 lines.

I seem to still be getting good signal from this, since the engineers that I've hired off of this have been fantastic with or without AI tooling immediately in their hands during the day.

status_quo69on We must pace the frontier

I agree with the idea that it's not probable but I do think it's important to point out-- we only need these elements to run with the bandwidth they have and the token rate because we want to see things in human-scale time. But slow things down to a 1tok/sec doesn't matter to this hypothetical anti-aligned LLM. Time is, after all, relative, and it's not like LLMs give a shit how long something takes. They don't have squishy stupid organs that fail after a certain amount of time, or those pesky glands that emit impatience hormones.

But yeah you're not going to be able to shard out the terabytes of Fable weights that are needed to run inference without addressing some fundamental physics problems.

status_quo69on We must pace the frontier

> For one, you will need billions worth of compute.

This one is easy to answer, every single house already has one of these (or multiple): https://www.tomsguide.com/news/millions-of-cheap-android-tv-...

Hell, put an app on the app store (or dozens of apps on the app store) and youve got a massive network of computers with tons of resources right there if you can get past the scans and reviews.

Or doorbell cameras or IP cameras or or or or or

There's a lot of shitty stuff connected on the internet that up until now has been a feasible target for hackers but still required "effort" to set up and get things going. Not hard to imagine a self replicating slime mold of a botnet running on every device held by a Grandpa Joe because they thought "Candy Rush" is what they wanted to download

"Persistent botnet" here does not need to be the full-sized LLM, nor does it need to run at full scale inference to be a huge pain in the ass.

status_quo69on Driver accused of DUI tracks missing laptop to Illinois State trooper's house

Two things can be true: - police should enforce the law to reduce or address crime or infractions - police should have a standard of enforcement that corresponds with the way the court system should operate, which is that the state carries the burden of proving the crime

The right to demand a blood test or other mechanism of having the state own the burden of proof might be inconvenient but it's integral to a fairly operating system, just like the right to demand a lawyer or representation.

status_quo69on MinIO repository is no longer maintained

I've been looking into rclone which can serve s3 in a basic way https://rclone.org/commands/rclone_serve_s3/

status_quo69on How I fell in love with Erlang

This is such a conflicting comment for me because I agree with so much but also have so many quibbles. That said I think that the other comments cover most things, I'll just comment on b: I don't think this is a problem that a language should solve or needs to solve, since there is a new flavor of the week of network protocols every few years. off the top of my head

- REST (mentioned, but what kind of REST? Rails style REST? Just plain http resource endpoints? - GraphQL (mentioned) - gRPC - SOAP - JSON-RPC - Thrift - CGI (ok not really in the same category as the above) - Some weird adhoc thing someone created at 3am for "efficiency"

I'm actually fine with most languages deferring to their respective communities, maybe building on core libs like https://www.erlang.org/docs/17/apps/inets/http_client to handle the transport layer.

As an aside, funnily enough you can get JVM <-> BEAM interop via https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/jinterface/jinterface_users_... I don't necessarily recommend it but it's possible

status_quo69on Doing Rails Wrong

Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe you're interpreting this as if the rails app needs the same amount of is that exists in the described vite solution.

But in reality if you're using hotwire you can get away with almost no JavaScript at all comparatively. That's why stimulus is in vanilla js generally, it's meant for sprinkling behavior onto the dom vs controlling the dom.

So if you don't have a js framework that needs to control the whole Dom and doesn't need a gigantic optimization step or tree shaking or typescript or whatever, you can get away with a whole lot less than it you embraced those frameworks that _do_ want to own the dom wholesale.

status_quo69on The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review

You can and should break that up because I'm probably going to want to see screenshots to ensure that the branding changes make sense in context and everything looks consistent.

How would you do this? You'd either

1. Create N pull requests then merge all of them together into a big PR that would get merged into mainline at once 2. Do the same thing but do a bit of octopus merging since git merge can take multiple branches as arguments. Since most source control strategies are locked down, this isn't usually something that I can tell my juniors to do

The point of breaking things down like this is to minimize reviewer context. With bigger PRs there's a human tendency to try and hold the whole thing in your head at once, even if parts of the pull request are independent from others.

status_quo69on Past, present, and future of Sorbet type syntax

One thing that I've wondered is why sorbet didn't choose to use the stabby lambda syntax to denote function signatures?

  sig ->(_: MyData) { }
  def self.example(my_data)
    ...
  end

Obviously this opens up a potential can of worms of a dynamic static type system, but it looks sufficiently close enough to just ruby. My opinion is that sorbet doesn't lean into the weirdness of ruby enough, so while it has the potential to be an amazingly productive tool, this is the same community that (mostly) embraces multiple ways of doing things for aesthetic purposes. For example you could get the default values of the lambda above to determine the types of the args by calling the lambda with dummy values and capturing via binding.

Personally having written ruby/rails/c#/etc and having been on a dev productivity team myself, I say: lean into the weird shit and make a dsl for this since that's what it wants to be anyways. People will always complain, especially with ruby/rails.

status_quo69on Statewide fluoride ban for tap water passes in Florida

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2925001/

Not everyone has impeccable brushing habits and reducing cavities is a net benefit to public health like sanitation departments. I would be more interested to see a source as to why you think there's no benefit to fluorinated water when there are studies that are a quick search away for fluorinated water.

status_quo69on DOGE puts $1 spending limit on government employee credit cards

Not sure why you're being confrontational? I'm not the OP but it's clear there's some misunderstanding

The quote is: - neat - plausible - wrong

"Just get rid of the cancer" is - neat because it sounds obvious and tidy - plausible because we can and do cut out cancer - wrong because it ignores the nuance that cutting into a patient's body can have massive impacts on long term health. It can also be wrong because certain cancers have no tumor sites.

status_quo69on TrunkVer

Generally agree with your points about how semver isn't really necessary. I suppose the benefit here would be that dep management tools like dependabot could automatically raise pull requests when a new version is released, which would be pretty cool. If only my peer engineers actually paid attention to dependency updates.

As an aside, instead of an auto incrementing build number I'd suggest the git sha since it's: 1. Already there and points to a specific version of the code in the repo 2. Globally unique 3. Can assist with reproducible builds (i.e. 6afed54 was acting weird, let's build it locally and take a look) 4. Gives you an easy diff target to dump "release notes". Just diff to the previous and dump the merge commit messages.

status_quo69on Optimize Database Performance in Ruby on Rails and ActiveRecord

If you're encountering these problems at scale where scale is up to the reader, I can promise you that you're already writing SQL. You might have already started from the beginning by writing direct SQL, because that's something that rails also allows you to do against a model. Apart from juniors, I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually said that they wanted to avoid writing SQL in all cases. The reality is that it's far more useful and efficient to burn cpu time than dev time, and ORMs general tend towards the latter than the former in the favor of generally being a fair bit more legible (depending on the writer).

status_quo69on Show HN: Kameo – Fault-tolerant async actors built on Tokio

I actually went through this exact exercise recently, but this library didn't show up in my searches for a good rust actor framework, so take that with a grain of salt. It looks very similar to the interface provided by actix at first blush, not sure how supervision works. My take is that most of these frameworks tend to solve with the same(ish) solution, so pick the one that has the best api. I liked ractor, although not having &mut self eventually wore me down. I swapped a small side project to use Stakker instead and while at first the macros intimidated me, the implementation really impressed me in terms of performance and API characteristics. It really feels like there's just enough there and no more.

status_quo69on Can ketones enhance cognitive function and protect brain networks?

This is somewhat anecdotal as well, but what I find interesting reading this is that a possible treatment for epilepsy that's tried is the keto diet. Going through this with a family member now, the doctors have recommended only if the first line medicine doesn't work because it's such a pain in the ass to maintain if you're not fully into the world of meal prep (doc's words, not mine).

status_quo69on Go, Containers, and the Linux Scheduler

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65551215/get-docker-cpu-...

Been a bit but I do believe that dotnet does this exact behavior. Sounds like gunicorn needs a pr to mimic, if they want to replicate this.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/issues/8485

status_quo69on Elixir and Phoenix can do it all

Elixir is strongly typed, elixir is not statically typed

status_quo69on A petabyte of health insurance prices per month

We do have this in a way with healthcare.gov, since the marketplace allows consumers to view multiple insurers rather than those tied to their jobs. However these plans are still pricey, I put in some dummy data with a higher than average income (60k) and got plans at 280 per month at the bottom of the barrel. Seems to me like it's a good step in the right direction but the marketplace doesn't have an actual market driving force to reduce prices even with the 11 million plans selected for 2023. Having worked in healthcare billing processing software, this lines up, insurance companies really don't give a shit about reducing prices to compete since consumers at the point of billing are always a captive audience (if you don't have it and you have an emergency, you're fucked)

status_quo69on Microsoft Freezes Salaries for 2023

It's not secretly a salary cut, it's an explicit salary cut relative to the cost of living and everything else. After all, your money is worth less now than it was a year ago if there's no cost of living increase? I'm sure the initial circumstances of salary negotiations for a position took into account current economic factors. I'm much less likely to want to stick around at a company that cannot compete with living expenses with a general 2% increase YoY. That screams stiff/cheap or that the company is on the cusp of folding.

status_quo69on Biggest industries burn through $7.3T of natural capital a year

Should the opposite should also hold true then, we should dismiss staunch capitalists that continue to believe in that economic theory in spite of the atrocities perpetuated by most capitalist societies against people in adverse conditions? Seems a bit knee jerk to dismiss things wholesale.

status_quo69on Nobody wants to teach anymore

> This is against the site's rules.

I apologize, that was a knee jerk reaction because I've never seen the assertion that 2+2=4 is racist before, only that math can be used inaccurately (purposefully or by accident) in racial contexts. I was a bit taken aback by the assertion and should have engaged differently.

> Funny how you build up a straw man. I never claimed any of that.

This isn't a straw man, I'm not building up some contrived argument here; the original comment was that "2+2=4 is racist" is a rallying cry for [some not insignificant number of math teachers].

> For example the Wall Street Journal. And hundreds of similar articles.

I did find this Opinion while googling, and read the parent Op-Ed (https://www.wsj.com/articles/california-leftists-try-to-canc...) and then followed through to the framework but I just don't see anything about the manual they were talking about in that Op-Ed in the works cited (seems like all references to the manual have since been removed). So I dug up the wayback machine on the page to see the context in which they were using the "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction" manual.

> A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction (https://equitablemath.org/) is an integrated approach to mathematics that centers Black, Latinx, and linguistically diverse students in grades 6–8, addresses barriers to mathematics equity, and aligns instruction to grade-level priority standards. The Pathway offers guidance and resources for immediate use in planning their curriculum, while also offering opportunities for ongoing self-reflection as they seek to develop an anti-racist mathematics practice. The toolkit “strides” (above) serve as multiple on-ramps for educators as they navigate the individual and collective journey from equity to anti-racism. It is a collection of resources to help grades 6–8 Black, LatinX, and linguistically diverse students thrive in mathematics education.

Ok so generally seems like they're recommending the usage in primarily POC or mixed classrooms where the considerations for teaching might be a bit different due to a multitude of factors.

Now digging into the manual a bit, the titles are definitely inflammatory but the content is honestly fairly humdrum (quotes taken from the first chapter https://equitablemath.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/11...)

• Teach rich, thoughtful, complex mathematics. • Teach rigorous mathematics, understanding that rigor is characterized as thorough, exhaustive, and interdisciplinary. • Use mistakes as opportunities for learning. • Recognize mistakes as miscommunicated knowledge. • Allow for engagement in productive struggle • Teach students of color about the career and financial opportunities in math and STEM fields. • Encourage them to disrupt the disproportionate push-out of people of color in those fields. • Invite leaders and innovators of color working in STEAM fields to meet your students. • Rely on teamwork and collaboration as much as possible. • Teach mathematics through project-based learning and other engaging approaches. • Provide multiple opportunities for students to learn from and teach each other. • Intentionally include mathematicians of color. • Expose students to mathematicians of color, particularly women of color and queer mathematicians of color, both through historical examples and by inviting community guest speakers. • Teach students of color about their mathematical legacy and ancestral connection and mastery of math. • Honor and acknowledge the mathematical knowledge of students of color, even if it shows up unconventionally. • Give rightful credit to the discovery of math concepts by mathematicians of color. Reclaim concepts attributed to white mathematicians that should be attributed to mathematicians of color.

Which all seems fairly reasonable here to my eyes. I will 100% agree with any assertions that the titles are very standoffish and even straight up accusatory but the content of the manual really seems like something good teachers should strive for. So to conclude I don't think that 2+2=4 is racist is really a rallying cry, the literature cited everywhere seems to talk mainly towards the teaching methodologies employed.

status_quo69on Nobody wants to teach anymore

> The rallying cry seems to be that "2+2=4 is racist".

Source? This is such a wild claim it has to be made up. A cursory google search brings this article: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/teaching-math-throu...

Which is distilled down to "teachers teach math in a way that is topical to the current environment, such as BLM protests which is really nothing new. You might disagree with it, sure, but to say that this is "the wokes" teaching 2+2=fish, that's frankly ridiculous.

In fact, the only thing I can find reporting on "2+2=racist" is this Washington Examiner article deriding a math teacher from NYC for her tweets (article here: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/math-professor-claim...) which sounds _awful_ but it's a single person tweeting, and it seems to be in relation to using "math is pure and objective so it always must be neutral" as a defense for situations where data/statistics/algorithms presented show a clear bias. Which I think generally is an agreed upon phenomenon-- depending on the sampling and interpretation of the data, folks can come to _wildly_ different conclusions, especially if data was accidentally omitted.

Best example of this phenomenon is facial recognition software, which can perform very badly when deviating from the sample data. https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2019/12/nist-study-eva...

> For one-to-one matching, the team saw higher rates of false positives for Asian and African American faces relative to images of Caucasians. The differentials often ranged from a factor of 10 to 100 times, depending on the individual algorithm. False positives might present a security concern to the system owner, as they may allow access to impostors.

...

> However, a notable exception was for some algorithms developed in Asian countries. There was no such dramatic difference in false positives in one-to-one matching between Asian and Caucasian faces for algorithms developed in Asia. While Grother reiterated that the NIST study does not explore the relationship between cause and effect, one possible connection, and area for research, is the relationship between an algorithm’s performance and the data used to train it. “These results are an encouraging sign that more diverse training data may produce more equitable outcomes, should it be possible for developers to use such data,” he said.

All the other sources I found on google were either think tanks, facebook posts, or spam sites.

ETA: even in the most pessimistic reading of those tweets, I'm personally hard pressed to find that one person tweeting means that all math teachers everywhere are trying to take math down to "2+2=racist"

status_quo69on Kubernetes is a red flag signalling premature optimisation

Having very recently done this (almost, another dev had half time on it) solo, It's not _too_ terrible if you go with a hosted offering. Took about a month/month and a half to really get set up and has been running without much of a blip for about 5 months now. Didn't include things like dynamic/elastic scaling, but did include CD, persistent volumes, and a whole slew of terraform to get the rest of AWS set up (VPCs, RDS, etc). I'd say that it was fairly easy because I tinkered with things in my spare time, so I had a good base to work off of when reading docs and setting things up, so YMMV. My super hot take, if you go hosted and you ignore a ton of the marketing speak on OSS geared towards k8s, you'll probably be a-ok. K8s IME is as complex as you make it. If you layer things in gradually but be very conservative with what you pull in, it'll be fairly straightforward.

My otherhot take is to not use helm but rather something like jsonnet or even cue to generate your yaml. My preference is jsonnet because you can very easily make a nice OO interface for the yaml schemas with it. Helm's approach to templating makes for a bit of a mess to try and read, and the values.yml files _really_ leak the details.

status_quo69on Supreme Court Overturns Roe vs. Wade

Because that's a reactive punishment that does absolutely nothing to help out the woman who might be carrying a fetus post rape, not to mention the fact that rape is already illegal and a rapist isn't exactly going to be deterred by the fact that there's illegality involved. The issue of abortion also touches upon things like ectopic pregnancies where the woman can/will die if an abortion is not performed.

status_quo69on Report: 90% of nurses considering leaving the profession in the next year

We already have decent (not always great but decent enough) government provided healthcare for the elderly through Medicare. So in fact, we've completely avoided your example already and said "yep, all life has value if you're eligible for medicare".

Of course resources are finite, nobody ever argues that they're infinite. But we treat healthcare as if there's a constant scarcity of medicine with how much is charged because there's a constant urge to squeeze even more profits out of patients who probably have only 2 choices- pay for the medicine or die.

status_quo69on My self-hosting infrastructure, fully automated

Some people just like to tinker and try other things even if it's overkill. I have a k8s cluster on DO to host shitty side projects, it's pretty nice to just `kubectl apply -f manifest.yml` and be done with it, especially since I'll probably wind up tearing everything I just set up anyway.

status_quo69on Tips for a Healthier Postgres Database

Like a lot of other complex systems, there's a lot of tweaking you can do in the config, but generally postgres works out of the box pretty well. There's a few gotchas on setup (postgres has a very conservative default configuration for things like memory usage and parallelism), but it's still pretty good.

I'd say the biggest footgun is really not knowing about the process per connection limitation, which is why the article mentions pg bouncer. Everything else in the article is pretty geared towards setting your db up for monitoring so you can head off issues.