MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pmags | 2025-04-13 16:23:08+00:00
Perfect Circuit (a music gear shop in CA) have very interesting set of articles in their "SIGNAL" (https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal) online publication that are probably of interest to some slice of the HN-readership.

Here are a few other articles worth reading if you're interested in sound and synthesis:

• Inventing Electronic Music: Harold Bode -- https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal/harald-bode

• Mutable Instruments: a (Brief) Retrospective -- https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal/mutable-instruments-re...

And many more...
by djoldman | 2025-04-13 16:23:55+00:00
A great example that underscores the ordinariness of AI. It's a tool and tools can be used for good/bad/neither and inbetween.

Fake pics have existed since pics existed pretty much.

Kids have been looking for ways to cheat on tests since tests began. If you're a teacher, you're gonna have to test in person.

Fake phone calls, fake other things... yea they're of a different/better quality as the technology has gotten better. Is it so fundamental a shift that nothing can be done? I'm not convinced.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-13 16:24:00+00:00
Back in the 1990s, my best friend at the time and I embarked on making computer games. He decided to make one for his dad, who was a baseball fan, including keying in statistics for all the players you could choose.

His computer was a PC-1 (5150) with CGA and 320K RAM (and a Microsoft mouse with green buttons and a steel ball, oddly enough), so he wrote the program in text mode. His dad used that computer to get through law school.

CHR$(127), as we called it, was used for home plate. He’s a doctor now.
by flutetornado | 2025-04-13 16:24:29+00:00
I think the performance in terminal apps could come from the fact that terminals can use pre rendered, pre cached in GPU, text glyphs covering a fixed size small grid (of glyph sized blocks instead of pixels.) At least that’s what I have wondered - because the terminal UI experience has been always a lot more slick compared to heavy GUI based programs. Feel free to correct me if someone has done actual performance analysis.
by __s | 2025-04-13 16:24:31+00:00
I'm guilty of this too https://github.com/PeerDB-io/peerdb/blob/d36da8bb2f4f6c1c821...

The inner channel is a poor man's future. Came up with this to have lua runtimes be able to process in parallel while maintaining ordering (A B C in, results of A B C out)
by bonoboTP | 2025-04-13 16:24:55+00:00
When I was a beginner I was surprised (on university machines and clusters) that I can't install packages for myself but if I download the source, I can compile and use almost anything by putting it in my home dir. I still don't quite get why we have to do this dance and can't just install from apt into home, but whatever (downloading the .deb file and unpacking it as an archive is also an option though, but still quite some manual effort.)

A great tool to manage these home-based installations is GNU Stow. In fact I've written scripts that just take the tarball, compile it with the typical workflow (autotools or cmake), setting prefix and DESTDIR as needed and then use Stow to put it in place. Then if I want to "uninstall" something, I use `stow --delete`. Works well enough for most of the use cases, like installing a newer GCC or Cmake than available on a cluster etc.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-13 16:26:53+00:00
I still have most of the 437 code points memorised. At one point, I made a simple program similar to xxd or od but which would dump the binary code ones in (Unicode) 437 representation instead of just dots. (NUL, space, and 0xFF are all blanks, so I used other Unicode code points for those.) A little bit similar to Base-437 above.
by samsartor | 2025-04-13 16:26:55+00:00
Worth clarifying that you are talking about information content, not entropy. A single text file or png has information, the distribution of all possible text files or all possible pngs has entropy.

I'm not an expert, but let me brainstorm a bit here. Something closer to the specific correlation might be what you want? In vague terms it would measure how much the various bytes of a file are related to each other, by considering how much more likely they are to be given values taken together vs considering each byte individually.

But once again, having extremely high specific correlation might indicate a trival low-complexity example? I'd have to play around with it some more to get a good intuition for how it behaves.

Edit: It seems like this might also be very sensitive to parametrization. The specific correlation in terms of byte values would not be much more useful than the information content, because the marginal distributions aren't very interesting (eg over all files, how likely is byte #57 to be 0xf3 or whatever). It would be a better measure with more meaningful variables, or even something like a markov chain where you consider many short substrings.

Anyway, specific correlation (like information) measures a specific file. The expected specific correlation over all possible files gives the total correlation, which (like entropy) measures the whole distribution. Total correlation is also the KL divergence between the joint distribution and the product of the marginal distributions! Total correlation is also the same thing as mutual information, just generalized to more than two variables. And specific correlation is the generalization of pointwise mutual information.
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-13 16:28:19+00:00
In case you were curious, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch:

1) A mechanical right hand

2) Artificial steel teeth

3) Electronic, glowing eyes

The Android Sisters answer the question "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP8bOqTAco0
by gs17 | 2025-04-13 16:28:37+00:00
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-45202-3 is pretty similar to that, they randomized AI/human-made labels and participants considered the exact same piece less valuable and less creative when labeled as AI-made. It's not measuring "moral superiority", but it shows a "negative response toward AI regardless of quality". It's definitely an irrational response.
by denidoman | 2025-04-13 16:28:51+00:00
The current challenge is not to create a patch, but to verify it.

Testing a fix in a big application is a very complex task. First of all, you have to reproduce the issue, to verify steps (or create them, because many issues don't contain clear description). Then you should switch to the fixed version and make sure that the issue doesn't exists. Finally, you should apply little exploratory testing to make sure that the fix doesn't corrupted neighbour logic (deep application knowledge required to perform it).

To perform these steps you have to deploy staging with the original/fixed versions or run everything locally and do pre-setup (create users, entities, etc. to achieve the corrupted state).

This is very challenging area for the current agents. Now they just can't do these steps - their mental models just not ready for a such level of integration into the app and infra. And creation of 3/5/10/100 unverified pull requests just slow down software development process.
by nullc | 2025-04-13 16:29:16+00:00
I don't know about other countries but it mostly does not exist in the US. Only 9 states allow one to be created, one of which requires it to be certified by a court. And in those states that do you must intentionally, openly, and conspicuously hold yourself out as married... so the urban legends about accidentally ending up married are just that-- urban legends-- at least in the US.
by lherron | 2025-04-13 16:29:52+00:00
I love this! I have a similar automation for moving a feature through ideation/requirements/technical design, but I usually dump the result into Cursor for last mile and to save on inference. Seeing the cost analysis is eye opening.

There’s probably also some upside to running the same model multiple times. I find Sonnet will sometimes fail, I’ll roll back and try again with same prompt but clean context, and it will succeed.
by Retric | 2025-04-13 16:30:14+00:00
There’s a great deal possible that could reduce pollution that has nothing to do with tires. Outlawing non hybrid gas / diesel cars for example would be a significant step forward. As would favoring rail over big rig trucking etc.

Instead the topic is almost exclusively brought up as an attack without any real world studies supporting the ideas presented. Because actual studies show EV’s improve air quality over ICE engines.
by graemep | 2025-04-13 16:30:19+00:00
I cannot see any reason why the RAD for Pascal (i.e. Delphi, and now Lazarus) could not exist for other languages. They just happen not to.

Imagine this - if those had not exists, would anyone say Pascal was a good RAD language.

I suppose what I might be missing is why Pascal was chosen as the language for Delphi.
by tekacs | 2025-04-13 16:30:27+00:00
It does for me, yes -- models seem to be pretty capable of adhering to the tool call format, which is really all that they 'need' in order to do a good job.

I'm still tweaking the prompts (and I've introduced a new, tool-call based edit format as a primary replacement to Aider's usual SEARCH/REPLACE, which is both easier and harder for LLMs to use - but it allows them to better express e.g. 'change the name of this function').

So... if you have any trouble with it, I would adjust the prompts (in `navigator_prompts.py` and `navigator_legacy_prompts.py` for non-tool-based editing). In particular when I adopted more 'terseness and proactively stop' prompting, weaker LLMs started stopping prematurely more often. It's helpful for powerful thinking models (like Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 Pro), but for smaller models I might need to provide an extra set of prompts that let them roam more.
by zahlman | 2025-04-13 16:30:52+00:00
For this to be properly answerable you need to define your terms more clearly. Do you mean the | symbol, or do you mean a specific operation? In the latter case, exactly what semantics do you have in mind? How is the "pipe operator" in R, in your mind, related to the one in shell scripting? What does it do, fundamentally - and why would that have meaning in other programming languages?

I'll try to guess what you mean and answer as best I can; the summary is that I don't think you properly understand what's out there already, so it doesn't make sense to ask "why" questions yet.

If you simply mean the | operator, many programming languages - including Python - define | as a bitwise OR on some numeric types; and many - including Python - allow the user to define its semantics for user-defined types.

That said, it seems more like you really do have specific semantics in mind, rather than that symbol. I don't know R, but based on what my search query turned up first (https://www.statology.org/pipe-in-r/), it seems that by "pipe operator in R" you mean %>%, which allows for chaining operations on an input. In languages that support an object-oriented style with method calls, you do this by just... repeatedly calling methods, and having each return an instance of the type needed for the next step (in common cases, another instance of the same type). There's no need for any special syntax because it's an automatic consequence of how method calls work.

Code is written like that all the time in JavaScript, in fact. In the Python culture, though, there is a relatively strong expectation of command-query separation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command%E2%80%93query_separati...). It's still possible to connect operations together this way, but there's an expectation that each operation creates a new result object (even if it's of the same type) and leaves the original input object unmodified. Thus, you're expected to do something with the overall result of such a chain, because your input data hasn't been modified. (This can also be viewed as a functional programming - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_programming - idiom.)
by olokobayusuf | 2025-04-13 16:30:55+00:00
Yes, we upload user code to a cloud sandbox in order to run our symbolic tracing and code generation algorithm.

Beyond that, we also compile the generated native code in the cloud so that devs don't have to have a cross-compiler installed on their system (i.e. Clang, Xcode, MSVC, and so on).
by mrweasel | 2025-04-13 16:31:24+00:00
> Then you look up their IP address's abuse contact, send an email

Good luck with that. Have you ever tried? AWS and Google have abuse mails. Do you think they read them? Do you think they care? It is basically impossible to get AWS to shutdown a customers systems, regardless of how much you try.

I believe ARIN has an abuse email registered for a Google subnet, with the comment that they believe it's correct, but no one answer last time they tried it, three years ago.
by geophile | 2025-04-13 16:32:03+00:00
What constitutes consciousness in a natural system? That is still completely unknown, so good luck figuring it out for artificial systems.

There is no way to detect consciousness. So you will have a very hard time distinguishing a system that seems conscious from a system that is conscious, (where "system" could be artificial or natural).

You know that you are conscious. How do you know that anyone else is?
by mdaniel | 2025-04-13 16:33:05+00:00
This is likely hair splitting, but you are far more likely getting bitten by the monster amount of variance in jinja2 versions/behaviors than by anything "yaml-y"

For example, yaml does not care about this whatsoever

- name: skip on Tuesdays when: ansible_date_time.weekday != "Tuesday"

but different ansible versions are pretty yolo about whether one needs to additionally wrap those fields in jinja2 mustaches

- name: skip on Tuesdays when: '{{ ansible_date_time.weekday != "Tuesday" }}'

and another common bug is when the user tries to pass in a boolean via "-e" because those are coerced into string key-value pairs as in

$ ansible -e not_today=true -m debug -a var=not_today all localhost | SUCCESS => { "not_today": "true" }

but if one uses the jinja/python compatible flavor, it does the thing

$ ansible -e not_today=True -m debug -a var=not_today all localhost | SUCCESS => { "not_today": true }

It may be more work than you care for, since sprinkling rampant |bool likely doesn't actively hurt anything, but the |type_debug filter[1] can help if it's behaving mysteriously

1: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/11/collections/ansible/buil...
by prepend | 2025-04-13 16:33:46+00:00
Before DOGE it was USDS and they had lots of gs-15s. Especially back when they would just straight up match private sector salaries.

In my org (10000+), over the past 5+ years we’ve hired maybe 20-30 15s and 14s who are non-supervisory engineers. It’s not a ton but it’s more historically.

My point though is that people will take the jobs on government pay scale, but it’s organizationally very difficult to get the positions through HR.
by trollbridge | 2025-04-13 16:33:48+00:00
437 had quite a few “dual use” characters which were drawn to be mathematical symbols, but could be used to render (some) Greek text (poorly). It’s also notorious for having some accent marks, but not enough to fully represent most Western European languages; basically just German and Swedish.

Rather amusingly it had a Pesetas symbol for Spanish currency and numero signs an and o for abbreviations… but not a full enough set of accented characters to write everyday Spanish.
by olokobayusuf | 2025-04-13 16:33:56+00:00
I think a more pedantic way to describe what I mean is:

"What if we could compile Python into raw native code *without having a Python interpreter*?"

The key distinguishing feature of this compiler is being able to make standalone, cross-platform native binaries from Python code. Numba will fallback to using the Python interpreter for code that it can't jit.
by bigyabai | 2025-04-13 16:34:32+00:00
> building an architecture that includes layered self-reflection

FWIW I think you're misusing the word "architecture" here. In deep learning, it tends to refer to either the design of the computation hardware or the layout of the model weights. "Architecture" rarely ever refers to a software layer or a bunch of context that supposedly makes the AI more conscious.

Sounds to me like you're trying to write a jailbreak, and those quit yielding results years ago.
by nico | 2025-04-13 16:34:50+00:00
> For me, a team of junior developers that refuse to learn from their mistakes is the fuel of nightmares. I'm stuck in a loop where every day I need to explain to a new hire why they made the exact same

This is a huge opportunity, maybe the next big breakthrough in AI when someone figures out how to solve it

Instead of having a model that knows everything, have a model that can learn on the go from the feedback it gets from the user

Ideally a local model too. So something that runs on my computer that I train with my own feedback so that it gets better at the tasks I need it to perform

You could also have one at team level, a model that learns from the whole team to perform the tasks the team needs it to perform
by oefrha | 2025-04-13 16:34:58+00:00
The stdlib datetime module is in more of a sorry state than certain third party libraries and is full of footguns, as you, a read-the-docs-and-changelogs-carefully person, can surely tell from the myriad deprecations and warnings added over the years, not to mention the confusing params like tz and tzinfo. Heavily tested doesn’t mean shit when the semantics of the API is fundamentally flawed and can’t be updated.
by solardev | 2025-04-13 16:35:03+00:00
What are you building? You should be able to articulate the pros and cons of choosing an SPA, SSR, SSG, or some combination of the above based on your user needs and team resources and constraints and the purpose of the app.

Most of the app can be statically built, first rendered on the server and then cached on a CDN as static files. Then certain rerenders and calls can be clientside and others can go through the server if needed.

It shouldn't just be a fashion choice, but a measured analysis. Like what is on your backend and what is on the edge, how would consistency work, what are the regional considerations, etc.

I feel like asking which infra to build without knowing the app is putting the cart before the horse. A dashboard is different from a chatbot is different from a marketing site is different from a graphics app, etc., and each has different architectural considerations.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-13 16:35:22+00:00
There's tons of global markets to invest in, not just US, and of course other US investment instruments other than stocks if you feel those are more investable in current climate.

There has already been capital flight. Trump's (temporary?) U-turn on tariffs was due to a massive sell-off in US Treasuries, largely by the Japanese, which caused yields to jump.
by zhaoweny | 2025-04-13 16:35:40+00:00
There's mull[1], which is based on LLVM toolchain and can accept any language that transforms into LLVM bytecode. SQLite[2] also does mutation testing, by compile and mutate generated assembly code.

[1]: https://mull.readthedocs.io/en/0.26.0/ [2]: https://sqlite.org/testing.html#mutation_testing
by horsawlarway | 2025-04-13 16:35:43+00:00
I think this is an interesting idea, but I also somewhat suspect you've replaced a tedious problem with a harder, more tedious problem.

Take your idea further. Now I've got 100 agents, and 100 PRs, and some small percentage of them are decent. The task went from "implement a feature" to "review 100 PRs and select the best one".

Even assuming you can ditch 50 percent right off the bat as trash... Reviewing 50 potentially buggy implementations of a feature and selecting the best genuinely sounds worse than just writing the solution.

Worse... If you haven't solved the problem before anyways, you're woefully unqualified as a reviewer.
by tocs3 | 2025-04-13 16:36:02+00:00
This reminds me of some of the work on human consciousness and how it seems that humans (sometimes at least) make unconscious choices before their (our) conscious mind catches up. I asked chatGPT about this and it gave me a list of reading and at the end a TLDR summary. I would not say that I think AI / LLMs are intelligent but I would be curious as to what we think humans are doing.

Readings from chatGPT:

"Unconscious Decisions" by Nicole Branan

"Thinking, Fast and Slow" by Daniel Kahneman

"Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking" by Malcolm Gladwell

"The Organized Mind" by Daniel J. Levitin

and the TLDR:

"TL;DR

AI today is more like the human unconscious mind: fast, data-driven, automatic, and opaque even to itself. But it doesn't reflect consciousness in the way we experience it. Still, understanding how humans make unconscious decisions is giving us clues about how to build more intuitive, ethical, and understandable AI."
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-13 16:36:39+00:00
Well, have you lost a child?

Or have your parents?

Is this what you said to your spouse or parents when your child or sibling died?

>"you are asserting your own neuroses too much on the world and you should get it fixed and take responsibility for it I don't have patience for such childish reactions from supposed adults" -bowsamic
by thechao | 2025-04-13 16:37:14+00:00
SDAM="severely deficient autobiographical memory".

I've got SDAM, I guess? Although, I object to the characterization. I view other people as being neurotically obsessed with remembering their past and their hurts. If I want to remember something, I take a picture, and write a short (or long!) note about it, and that's enough for me to remember (read: reconstruct) a narrative about that event.

I'm a pretty deep pessimist, as well, so I'm pretty happy with my life, all the time. Drives my wife bonkers.
by turtleyacht | 2025-04-13 16:37:17+00:00
Only programming languages that parse `|' have a pipe operator.

In other cases, Node.js has .pipe() function.

Other than that, if every class follows the same interface of strings for input and output, the program could pipe internally (and itself participate externally).

Data types let us specialize from plain strings to have better guarantees (safety, performance, specification), but now they are more specific in turn.

Functional programming wise, Python could map over a collection of things, as long as the function knows how to process elements.

Other ideas: fluent interfaces, method chaining, builder design pattern.
by nradov | 2025-04-13 16:38:05+00:00
The birth rate in Sweden is low and falling. Whatever they're doing to keep demography sane doesn't seem to be working. Like most developed Western countries, their current approach relies more on high levels of immigration. Essentially they have outsourced the hassle and expense of having children.

https://population-europe.eu/research/policy-insights/why-ar...
by ghaff | 2025-04-13 16:38:33+00:00
A lot of the jobs are in the suburbs (finance being something of an exception). A lot of the tech industry is in car-reliant suburbs. I live in Massachusetts and, until west coast firms established outposts in Boston/Cambridge and pharma basically took over Kendall Square, there was basically no tech industry in Boston for a couple decades.

And, yes, outside of Manhattan and young people essentially living like they did in college for a few years, car dependency is just what most people do.
by noisefridge | 2025-04-13 16:38:36+00:00
I'm curious why you like these so much as titles. Tastes differ, but in my opinion, "A Scanner Darkly" is the only standout winner here.

Without knowing anything of what the story was about, would "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" convey anything important to the reader? Even as a standalone metaphor it's confused: humans don't dream about sheep! There is an old trope of counting sheep to fall asleep, but that's not a dream.

In any case, we're now thinking about sheep, not a noir detective story set in a declining post-biosphere world.