MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How are you using probabilistic AI in your deterministic code?
by QueensGambit | 2025-04-23 22:08:12+00:00
Most people I know are using AI APIs as if they're deterministic - like calling a sorting algorithm. But in my experience, when you rely on AI in a critical step of a workflow, a wrong result can trigger a domino effect across the entire system.

I wrote about that butterfly effect here [1]. Curious how others are handling this in multi-step AI workflows. Whats worked for you? Any lessons learned from failures?

[1] https://manidoraisamy.com/developer-forever/post/the-butterfly-effect-in-agentic-workflows.anc-b855d56e-d986-44e1-ab65-b4e23142dc08.html
by myk9001 | 2025-04-23 22:09:09+00:00
Got it, you're talking about workers getting ahead as a category -- no objections to that.

I doubt the displaced computers managed to find a better job on average. Probably even their kids were disadvantaged since the parents had fewer options to support their education.

So, who knows if this specific group of people and their descendants ever fully recovered let alone got ahead.
by arjonagelhout | 2025-04-23 22:09:21+00:00
A little while back, I had a conversation with a colleague about sorting entries by "updated at" in the user interface, and to my surprise this was not added by the backend team.

Many of these "we are going to need it"s come from experience. For example in the context of data structures (DS), I have made many "mistakes" that I do correctly a second time. These mistakes made writing algorithms for the DS harder, or made the DS have bad performance.

Sadly, it's hard to transfer this underlying breadth of knowledge and intuition for making good tradeoffs. As such, a one-off tip like this is limited in its usefulness.
by mickelsen | 2025-04-23 22:10:46+00:00
Yeah, I usually don't keep reservations for an entire trip either, just the first couple of days if it's a longer stint. And usually the border people in all the countries I've been -including the US- only care about that, that you will be at least staying at the first place you state. You can change your plans later, that's normal, but given the extra scrutiny now, I'd avoid anything that could give them the chance of prying further.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-04-23 22:10:47+00:00
1. DOGE employees access data they were not supposed to.

This fairly clear.

The story says that DOGE attained access to an account that had huge permissions into what it could see and alter. The person or persons from DOGE may have downloaded 10GB of data. The person may have used this in a manner that is illegal. Or it is illegal to start with. With the understanding that POTUS may or may not be allowed grand such access. (I dont think POTUS can)

2. DOGE employee downloaded code that could be used to use a huge pool of IP addresses, from AWS to bypass forms of throtheling. 3. The code was badly written. 4. The person is a racist

How would a person from DOGE use "unlimited" number of IP adderssess from AWS to hammer and automaticlay screenscape webpage, benefit from it when it came to copying extremly sensetive data from an internal National Labor Relations Board database?

Did 10.000 sessions authenticate to the database at the same time, using AWS UP addresses and scraped the data?

Something is pretty broken if the system with extremly sensetive data is available from external IPs -and- allowing a single account to login 10.0000 times to concurrently scrape data off the interal database?

Of are they saying that this code was adapted to use 10.000/100 IP addresses internal to National Labor Relations Board and scrapes using those?

The automation later noted makes a lot more sense to aid the work.
by cortesoft | 2025-04-23 22:10:52+00:00
It isn’t apathy, it is rationality. Why would I spend a ton of time fighting against a problem that is a minor inconvenience to me? I have a lot of important things going on in my life, and a limited amount of time and energy to do things. It isn’t rational for me (or most people) to spend a bunch of time, money, and effort fighting against legalized gambling.

There literally isn’t enough time in the day for me to fight against everything, so you pick and choose where to spend your energy.
by ryansolid | 2025-04-23 22:10:52+00:00
Yeah it is an interesting one. There is definitely a slowdown due to the amount of wrapping that happens. These sort of libraries tend to put component in component in component etc.. so there is a lot of prop iteration, Object.keys calls in Object.keys calls etc which when used with proxies can add up a bit. The tricky part is no one actually knows how slow these libraries are in say React. My suspicion they are slow there as well but maybe not as stark of a difference because of how fast Solid to begin with comparatively.

People who use Solid tend to measure stuff like this where as those who use React might have already reconciled themselves to performance issues.
by Clubber | 2025-04-23 22:11:02+00:00
>In capitalism, outside a few select industries like journalism, as long as it's legal you can - and should - do anything to maximize profits.

Honestly, if you were around watching the news 30+ years ago, you would notice a stark difference in how news is covered then versus today. You can't really blame them, they are doing what they can to survive, but coverage today much more tabloid than news.

I would say the "fake but accurate," was the death knell, but it might have been sooner.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy
by parasubvert | 2025-04-23 22:11:07+00:00
Siri on visionOS is actually quite refreshing for its speech to text, it is almost entirely on device and very low latency, with much more accuracy than you see on iOS. The combination of a keyboard, trackpad, Siri, hand and eye tracking is incredibly high information rate input for me and it’s what I use for most of the day for the past eight months or so.
by snthpy | 2025-04-23 22:11:20+00:00
I think the best term is "function composition", but with a particular syntax so pipelining seems alright. Method chaining is a common case, where some base object is repeatedly modified by some action and then the object reference is returned by the "method", thus allowing the "chaining", but what if you're not dealing with objects and methods? The pipelined composition pattern is more general than method chaining imho.

You make an interesting point about debugging which is something I have also encountered in practice. There is an interesting tension here which I am unsure about how to best resolve.

In PRQL we use the pipelining approach by using the output of the last step as the implicit last argument of the next step. In M Lang (MS Power BI/Power Query), which is quite similar in many ways, they use second approach in that each step has to be named. This is very useful for debugging as you point out but also a lot more verbose and can be tedious. I like both but prefer the ergonomics of PRQL for interactive work.

Update: Actually, PRQL has a decent answer to this. Say you have a query like:

from invoices filter total > 1_000 derive invoice_age = @2025-04-23 - invoice_date filter invoice_age > 3months

and you want to figure out why the result set is empty. You can pipe the results into an intermediate reference like so:

from invoices filter total > 1_000 into tmp from tmp derive invoice_age = @2025-04-23 - invoice_date filter invoice_age > 3months

So, good ergonomics on the happy path and a simple enough workaround when you need it. You can try these out in the PRQL Playground btw: https://prql-lang.org/playground/
by awesome_dude | 2025-04-23 22:11:47+00:00
Laws are only as strong as the enforcement.

One of the things that is being exposed by the current administration is that, even though the Judiciary is an arm of the government, and supposed to provide a check on the Executive, the reality is that the Executive has the power to pardon anyone it sees fit, voiding the power of the judiciary (the argument is that the ultimate power lies with the voters who can pass their judgement on the Executive, and its use of its powers, by voting them out, hopefully)
by talles | 2025-04-23 22:12:23+00:00
I can't picture a single situation in which an AI generated email message would be helpful to me, personally. If it's a short message, prompting actually makes it more work (as illustrated by the article). If it's something longer, it's probably meaningful enough that I want to have full control over what's being written.

(I think it's a wonderful tool when it comes to accessibility, for folks who need aid with typing for instance.)
by xnx | 2025-04-23 22:12:26+00:00
It continues to baffle me that Google gets harassed by the courts for being a better actor in almost every area it participates.

Open source Android vs. closed iOS

Install apps from any source on Android vs. total restriction on iOS

Switch default app for browser (and many other things!) vs. No choice but Safari tech on iOS

Easy switch of search provider in Chrome vs. countless dark patterns pushing Edge and Bing on Windows
by golnageinc | 2025-04-23 22:12:33+00:00
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by saratogacx | 2025-04-23 22:12:57+00:00
When I look at the situation with AI I think that the insistence that it is in every product under the sun is also going to turn into one of the drivers slowing it's adoption as a method to replace people.

When something is sold as a magic tool that a decision maker is able to not be directly exposed to, they can go and trust the hype. Low-code/No-code were magic tools to make line workers into software Devs.

With LLM's and "AI all the things" being put in front of everyone's faces even decision makers are exposed to the wrinkles and can draw on their own experience of "would I hire Gemini or Co=pilot, the thing that struggles to follow seemingly simple instructions, to run my business" you start getting more speculation into the mystical powers of this human replacement machine.

With an opinion on AI being useful for low-risk activities but needing heavy supervision for stuff that matters, the calculous changes when considering handing that system the responsibility to deliver your paycheck.
by quesera | 2025-04-23 22:13:18+00:00
Yikes, I'd strongly discourage unfiltered ingress PAT to your desktop machine.

I know you have acknowledged the decision to entrust nginx with all of your personal data and tax records and bank statements and legal documents and browser history and GitHub credentials and ssh private keys and so on.

But it's still madness. You are one oversight, accident, or bug away from total pwnage.
by eurekin | 2025-04-23 22:13:33+00:00
I have come across a significant number of non engineers wanting to do, what ultimately involves some basic CAD modelling. Some can stall on such tasks for years (home renovation) or just don't do it at all. After some brief research, the main cause is not wanting to sink over 30 hours into learning basics of a cad package of choice.

For some reason they imagine it as a daunting, complicated, impenetrable task with many pitfalls, which aren't surmountable. Be it interface, general idea how it operates, fear of unknown details (tolerances, clearances).

It's easy to underestimate the knowledge required to use a cad productively.

One such anecdata near me are highschools that buy 3d printers and think pupils will naturally want to print models. After initial days of fascination they stopped being used at all. I've heard from a person close to the education that it's a country wide phenomena.

Back to the point though - maybe there's a group of users that want to create, but just can't do CAD at all and such text description seem perfect for them.
by dietr1ch | 2025-04-23 22:13:46+00:00
> Are they flogging a dead horse?

Not exactly. There's a lot of C++ code that still can't be rewritten into cool languages overnight without risking correctness, performance and readability.

I'm always happy to see C++ pushing itself and the compiler backends as it benefits the victims of lame codebases and also the cool kids using the improved compiler backends.
by AlienRobot | 2025-04-23 22:14:00+00:00
I see. That's a bit ironic. Cookies use useful because you don't need to use URL query parameters all the time. So what they are doing is taking the session token that would be sent in the Disqus domain cookie and storing it as an embedder's cookie, then using Javascript to put the cookie data in URL's / requests. In fact, "cookie" is probably not even a good method to do this since it will get send in embedder's requests. You could just use localstorage for it.

I've always found the negative effects of 3P cookies, the creepiness of being logged in on every site and ads following you around, to be symptoms of other problems (using the same browser profile for everything you do, a culture of not paying for websites so they have to rely on ads for monetization), so I'm not sure if this is a great solution to the actual problems.

But I guess it does make the internet better for the average person.
by petekoomen | 2025-04-23 22:14:16+00:00
Agreed! As i mentioned in the piece I don't think LLMs are very useful for original writing because instructing an agent to write anything from scratch inevitably takes more time than writing it yourself.

Most of the time I spend managing my inbox is not spent on original writing, however. It's spent on mundane tasks like filtering, prioritizing, scheduling back-and-forths, introductions etc. I think an agent could help me with a lot of that, and I dream of a world in which I can spend less time on email and finally be one of those "inbox zero" people.
by golemiprague | 2025-04-23 22:14:18+00:00
I don't see anything wrong with what they did, they basically got admin accounts so they can peak into the system and used some libraries from github. What is the problem here? Got a feeling it is just politically motivated, people are not happy that the Trump administration is actually doing something to make systems more efficient and stop money waste of tax payers. I am sure they will make some mistakes along the way and I am sure not every "saving" is actually saving but when you look at so many systems and so much money some errors are expected.
by abe_m | 2025-04-23 22:14:25+00:00
I agree. I think a major hindrance to the current pro CAD systems is being stuck to the feature history tree, and rather low level features. Considerable amounts of requirements data is just added to a drawing free-form without semantic machine-readable meaning. Lots of tolerancing, fit, GD&T, datums, etc are just lines in a PDF. There is the move to MBD/PMI and the NIST driven STEP digital thread, but the state of CAD is a long way from that being common. I think we need to get to the data being embedded in the model ala MBD/PMI, but then go beyond it. The definition of threads, gear or spline teeth, ORB and other hydraulic ports don't fit comfortably into the current system. There needs to be a higher level machine-readable capture, and I think that is where the LLMs may be able to step in.

I suspect the next step will be such a departure that it won't be Siemens, Dassault, or Autodesk that do it.
by paulpauper | 2025-04-23 22:14:25+00:00
I have noticed more downvoting in general of comments compared to pre-2022 or so, and it's not like it's trollish or bad responses being downvoted. It's an eggshell thing. Comments even get downvoted when there are replies in agreement. It's not a left-right thing. Even apolitical stuff gets downvoted. Comments about health, obesity, diet tend to get a lot of downvotes if they question conventional wisdom (obesity rates at record highs, yet any commentary or advice that deviates from convention or expertise is downvoted even these experts with their generic advice cannot actually help the majority of people lose weight).
by apical_dendrite | 2025-04-23 22:14:38+00:00
https://www.bu.edu/sph/news/articles/2025/tracking-anticipat...

https://www.impactcounter.com/dashboard?view=table&sort=inte...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01191-z

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/usaid-funding-sav...

This is just USAID. It's not even considering the cuts to HHS or other agencies.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-23 22:15:39+00:00
The pittance we pay to support things that benefit all humanity have never prevented us from investing in the US.

You don't need to put the federal government in a wood chipper to make the US better, and in fact you often need the federal government to make the US better, like with social security, food stamps, medicaid, the interstate, railroads, most of our infrastructure, the internet, microchips, etc.

In fact, if you want the best infrastructure, why wouldn't you end up importing that? Most of humanity is not a US citizen. "The best" human at something will only rarely be american.

Meanwhile this admin has done nothing to improve things for americans, so stop carrying water for their horse shit.

People love the meme of a runway full of F35s and saying "We are about to demonstrate why the US doesn't have socialized medicine" and it has always been a lie. We can EASILY afford 3k F35s, 13 aircraft carriers, AND healthcare. We've been paying more for healthcare than countries with socialized medicine this whole time.
by klibertp | 2025-04-23 22:16:00+00:00
I tried using CL this year for a new version of my personal static site (blog) generator.

Yes, it's incredible and still an alien technology in some respects. Native AOT compilation at the level of functions with hot swapping - and without any ceremony, always available in the IDE - is one of them. As the OP writes at the end, only Smalltalk and Erlang come close.

But, when viewed objectively, in 2025 CL is quite behind in some aspects:

- Only one commercial IDE offers a true graphical debugger. Both SLIME and SLY (I'm not sure about stickers) fall behind JS or Python environments.

- Asynchronicity is based on explicit callbacks or callbacks wrapped in promises (and some macros). No async/await, no coroutines. Since writing async code is harder, people default to sequential code and a thread pool. For IO-bound apps, this unnecessarily adds synchronization problems that would be mostly avoided in single-threaded concurrency.

- Tiny ecosystem of libraries. Due to the stability (or stagnation) of the language, a lot of old code still works, but even with this, finding what you need on Quicklisp can be challenging.

- The stdlib is old, crufty, and quirky. It's also very small by today's "batteries included" standards. Initiatives like CL21 or CIEL try to alleviate this somewhat.

- Even in SBCL, the type system is limited compared to MyPy, TypeScript, or TypedRacket.

- Bolting packages (module system) on top of symbols leads to some problems in practice.

- The progress in CL development is severely hampered by the set-in-stone standard, small pool of users, and the need to reconcile 10 different implementations.

It's still a nice tool for many uses, and the interactive development is indeed comfortable and productive. Still, if nothing significant happens, I don't think CL will have a chance to gain popularity again. Up until now, a successor language was hard to justify - despite some shortcomings, CL was still a language from the future. Now that future is largely here already, so the shortcomings become more and more glaring. There's SICL, but it'll take another decade (if at all) before we can expect results from that.

I'm now looking at Jank and Gerbil with some expectations, though I think I'll stick with CL in my current project.
by bsder | 2025-04-23 22:16:19+00:00
> it makes such a low amount of sense that you're inevitably going to get your students extremely confused if they are paying any attention at all.

Normally because you encounter this with the Bernoulli experiment about blowing over paper causing lower pressure, or the experiment where a spoon or ping pong ball gets pulled into running water. Both of which also turn out to not be Bernoulli's principle (it's Coandă effect)!

The first question I asked as a kid was "So then why can planes fly upside down?" and flummoxed the entire room.
by calibas | 2025-04-23 22:16:45+00:00
We're going off on tangents here, I only brought this up to reinforce the idea that a pixel is not a little square.

And I guess I should have explicitly stated that I'm not talking about high-DPI displays, subpixel rendering obviously doesn't do much good there!

My point is simply this, if you don't treat pixel like discrete little boxes that display a single color, you can use subpixels to effectively increase the resolution on low-DPI monitors. Yes, you can use greyscale antialiasing instead, you will even get better performance, but the visual quality will suffer on your standard desktop PC monitor.
by sleepyguy | 2025-04-23 22:17:05+00:00
Nothing is going to turn this train wreck around. Tesla vehicles are dated, uncomfortable, fit and finish are questionable. Cyber truck sales are falling off a cliff, and his competition is killing it. These vehicles, including robots, are just hardware. The Chinese are light years ahead, and the whole thing is just not going to end well for the company at these valuations, and this isn't even addressing the fact that he is the face of MAGA along with Trump.

The best thing Musk can do is disappear, maybe go to Mars or something for a while...
by wat10000 | 2025-04-23 22:17:48+00:00
I hear you. I get it enough to know it’s needed, but actually doing it can be hard. LLMs can be nice for that.

Being too flowery and indirect is annoying but not impolite. If you overdo it then people may still get annoyed with you, but for different reasons. For most situations you don’t need too much, a salutation and a “I hope you’re doing well” and a brief mention of who you are and what you’re writing about can suffice.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-23 22:17:52+00:00
> Solving problems for real people. Isn't the answer here kind of obvious?

No. There are a thousand other ways of solving problems for real people, so that doesn't explain why some choose software development as their preferred method.

Presumably, the reason for choosing software development as the method of solving problems for people is because software development itself brings joy. Different people find joy in different aspects even of that, though.

For my part, the stuff that AI is promising to automate away is much of the stuff that I enjoy about software development. If I don't get to do that, that would turn my career into miserable drudgery.

Perhaps that's the future, though. I hope not, but if it is, then I need to face up to the truth that there is no role for me in the industry anymore. That would pretty much be a life crisis, as I'd have to find and train for something else.
by worik | 2025-04-23 22:18:08+00:00
This is nonsense, continuing the same magical thinking about modern AI

A much better analogy is not " Horseless Carriage" but "nailgun"

Back in the day builders fastened timber by using a hammer to hammer nails. Now they use a nail gun, and work much faster.

The builders are doing the exact same work, building the exact same buildings, but faster

If I am correct then that is bad news for people trying to make "automatic house builders" from "nailguns".

I will maintain my current LLM practice, as it makes me so much faster, and better

I commented originally without realising I had not finished reading the article