MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-04-07 16:33:02+00:00
> We spent 40 years moving the goal posts on what constitutes AI.

Who is "we"?

I think of "AI" as a pretty all-encompassing term. ChatGPT is AI, but so is the computer player in the 1995 game Command and Conquer, among thousands of other games. Heck, I might even call the ghosts in Pac-man "AI", even if their behavior is extremely simple, predictable, and even exploitable once you understand it.
by kragen | 2025-04-07 16:33:16+00:00
Yeah, I always struggle with how to describe what Xerox invented GUIwise. Sutherland's SKETCHPAD in 01963 had an interactive CAD graphical user interface with windows, icons, and a pointer—but no menus, overlapping windows, or desktop, and not much text (it slowed the display list redraw down a lot). NLS had white backgrounds, hypertext, and a mouse, but still no command menus or WYSIWYG editing or overlapping windows. You issued textual commands to make edits to the displayed text. What I'm using now to write this is recognizably "the same thing" as Smalltalk-76 in a way that Smalltalk-76 wasn't the same thing as Smalltalk-72 or NLS or Sketchpad.

So, "the desktop GUI"? But Smalltalk-80 didn't have a desktop in the sense of a place to represent your files with icons, even if Star did. WYSIWYG? Direct manipulation? But Shneiderman's #1 example of "direct manipulation" is Emacs.

But it's also recognizably "the same" as medieval manuscripts in many ways!
by jimsojim | 2025-04-07 16:33:21+00:00
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

This book has stayed with me for years. It's a quiet, deeply reflective journey about self-discovery, the search for meaning. What resonated most was this idea that true understanding can't be taught—it must be lived and experienced.

It’s a short read, but one that invites you to slow down. Each time I return to it, I take away something new depending on where I am in life.
by casey2 | 2025-04-07 16:33:50+00:00
The backstory is that she illegally entered from mexico but CBP is in the US, Mexico won't take her back so ICE has to arrange deportation. Unsurprisingly there are no return flights from bumfuck border town to Germany so she is detained (and interrogated, her Instagram shows her giving tattoos to people in mexico) and sent to San Diego and detained until ICE arranges a flight. ICE prioritizes mass deportations so a single person likely gets put at the back of the queue.

A sane border would just block illegal entrance. But pretending that ICE should be optimized for single person expedited deportation is just stupid. While in CBP you may not be allowed to contact your lawyer the 60 days she was in ice custody was completely fair game, but she didn't for some unknown reason.
by 9rx | 2025-04-07 16:34:38+00:00
In C, you mean?

You clearly can in Go. How would you deal with exceptions otherwise? You can even get silly with it:

func main() { try(func() { throw("Oops") }).catch(func(e any) { fmt.Println("Caught:", e) }) }

https://go.dev/play/p/Y1-w9xUXIcO
by jajko | 2025-04-07 16:34:39+00:00
Sure if you build and restrict your life around no car, then its doable. Very restricted.

Also that part about cost being cheaper ain't true - I have that half tariff. For going somewhere, anywhere, its the same cost (+ saving tons of time). Taking family of 4... you do the math.

There is reason why there are so many cars everywhere. Families with kids usually have 2. Basically everybody has at least 1. If what you said is true people wouldn't be buying and using them constantly.
by ebiester | 2025-04-07 16:35:18+00:00
So, I absolutely agree here that an engineering manager has to have the insight to tell truth from catastrophising on both sides. At the same time, I've seen sales orgs drive a department into the ground where everything comes to a screeching halt. I've seen times where that "feature X" is vaporware. Times when feature X is possible there because of different architecture choices. Newer entrants who learned from the older entrants. Features that look great for smaller customers that can't scale.

And all of those might be plausible answers. As you'd agree, nuance is key here. However, that is all from the department or product head. Now consider the CEO's perspective that has 8 equally loud voices all clamoring for resources.

My point is that it might not be disrespect but rather a management team that is trying to navigate competing priorities and economic realities.
by djwatson24 | 2025-04-07 16:35:33+00:00
Marc feeley wrote “using closures for code generation” way back in 1987. Everything old is new again!

It’s quite nice and only a small bit more code than an ast interpreter - but not as fast as a luajit- style tail calling bytecode vm, nor a baseline jit like copy and patch. It works wonders in languages that support closures though.

https://www-labs.iro.umontreal.ca/~feeley/papers/FeeleyLapal...
by cashsterling | 2025-04-07 16:35:41+00:00
My unpopular opinion, as someone who worked in vaccine development and biotech manufacturing for a lengthy portion of my career, is that:

- vaccination should be a personal choice... no one has the right to compel anyone to get injected with anything. Full stop.

AND

- we need to raise the level of scientific and medical rigor applied to vaccine development, manufacturing, vaccine administration, and ongoing monitoring / pharmacovigilance so that people will feel comfortable taking vaccines.

The fact is that different quality and risk/benefit rules are applied to vaccines versus other injected drugs and this is not okay (read up on the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act passed on 1986, why it was passed, and how vaccines are tested for efficacy and safety versus other injected drugs).

Under normal circumstances, the COVID mRNA vaccines should have failed the clinical trial requirements for human safety. There were far too many adverse events in the clinical trials and many, many people were harmed by these mRNA vaccines (with quite a few deaths). The NIH & FDA largely swept this under the rug and refused to investigate or fund adequate investigation. Unfortunately, that entire episode has seriously harmed people's faith in the government and has negatively influenced people opinions on vaccine safety.

This is very disappointing because there are a lot of highly effective vaccines with excellent safety profiles when administered properly... vaccines almost everyone should receive. But the average citizen can't tell the difference and I don't blame them if they don't trust the government to protect them at the moment.
by ForOldHack | 2025-04-07 16:36:36+00:00
In my very first Astronomy class, just a few years after voyager, I did a report on that record, based on a cartoon: "Send more Chuck Berry."

It is an extraordinary piece of work of human history: THank you Astronomer Carl Sagan, Linda Salzman Sagan, Frank Drake, Ann Druyan, Jon Lomberg, and others.
by benatkin | 2025-04-07 16:36:43+00:00
LLMs don't support zip files?

Here's the XML format: https://github.com/wildberry-source/open-repoprompt?tab=read...

Edit: after a web search, it seems not. One thing that would be nice in these projects would be to mention that it's just due to limitations, rather than suggest that the plain text is more natural to the LLMs. Also to the LLM and chat platforms, please don't add arbitrary restrictions to guide usage, if a zip file is too big reject it because it's too big, not because it's a zip.
by nradov | 2025-04-07 16:36:46+00:00
I never claimed that changing database file formats was easy, but IBM had already increased the size limit once before from 4GB to 64GB. So obviously increasing it further could have been done. Unfortunately IBM leadership never saw Domino as anything more than a platform for small internal corporate IT applications so they didn't care about fixing the limitations; it was a total failure of vision.

IBM didn't provide any tools for horizontal sharding either. We had to roll our own, which was a huge expense and made every part of the application far more complex. And it actually made reliability worse; because displaying incomplete data was not acceptable to customers, if any one database got corrupted then everything failed.
by sega_sai | 2025-04-07 16:36:52+00:00
One thing that is exciting in the text is an attempt to go away from describing whether LLM 'understands' which I would argue an ill posed question, but instead rephrase it in terms of something that can actually be measured.

It would be good to list a few possible ways of interpreting 'understanding of code'. It could possibly include: 1) Type inference for the result 2) nullability 3) runtime asymptotics 4) What the code does
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-07 16:36:52+00:00
I havent tried the mirrorless cameras but on dslr canon is great ux imo. Everything you need to adjust on the fly is easy. Its usually controlled with a dial that can change the parameter it adjusts with a modifier button. Saving you what might be yet another dial on like a fuji xt5.

But even then once youve metered a scene how often do you adjust iso on the fly? Hardly ever. Fixed iso, aperture priority, center dot focus and metering, off to the races.
by jplusequalt | 2025-04-07 16:37:31+00:00
Reading that thread, it's depressing to see the amount of people @grok to summarize an article of maybe 3/4k words. I think it's disgusting that these same companies that have wrestled our attention spans from us the last 15 years, are now pushing "companion AIs" to quicken the rate at which we consume content on their platforms.
by teddyh | 2025-04-07 16:37:38+00:00
> If your work isn’t clearly connected to company profit, your position is unstable

In my experience, only salespeople are clearly connected to profit. Everyone else is percieved as a cost.

> In other words, you’re probably depending on a kind-hearted manager (or CEO) who personally values your work.

Yes, this is the position for everybody except salepeople. Which means, in turn, that focusing your efforts to make the company profitable, as the articles advocates, is a grave mistake. You should focus on making your immediate manager profitable and successful. (For those who are fresh out of school, this is often a wildly different goal.)

The only situation in which the article’s advice makes any sense is if your immediate manager is also the company owner, who benefits personally and immediately if the company’s profits go up.
by remus | 2025-04-07 16:38:55+00:00
Indeed. Relevant quote from the article:

"The Commission said previously that the simplification plan will focus on reporting requirements for organizations with less than 500 people, but will not touch the “underlying core objective of [the] GDPR regime.”

Adjustments could include limiting requirements to keep records of data processing activities, or reforming how businesses provide data protection impact statements — two rules seen as overly cumbersome to smaller firms."

Sounds pretty sensible to me.
by woodrowbarlow | 2025-04-07 16:39:04+00:00
ahh, ideally i'd say learning them in any order is fine but unfortunately since the zig ecosystem is not mature yet that means you'll find yourself using C libraries from zig fairly often.

so, yes, i agree learning zig is a great idea for new independent projects but (at the current stage) be prepared to also learn at least enough about C to use C libraries (return type conventions, raw enums, c-style strings, inflexible allocators).
by bobthepanda | 2025-04-07 16:39:35+00:00
It is until it is not.

Chinese working hours are mostly long to balance out low productivity. This worked for Japan until it did not; Japanese growth stalled until Japanese workers were poorer than Taiwanese or South Koreans by some measures. And China is racing fastest towards demographic collapse, particularly in its largest, most productive cities by. People 60 and older make up 37% of the population in Shanghai, and there the TFR is 0.6.
by collingreen | 2025-04-07 16:39:38+00:00
A problem is those people would then need to identify their dissatisfaction as a result of these haphazard cuts and policies, which will be directly contradicted by propaganda telling them this is actually proof we need to cut even more.

If the government services are being intentionally crippled so that people are unhappy with them then things are going exactly to plan and won't lead to any mass "realizations" of our mistakes.

Even if the current administration ISNT intentionally trying to cause harm and trauma (despite direct quotes posted in this thread saying they are) then the American people will end up with a choice to either cut the last bits of broken government or pay (way) more taxes and try to rebuild them.

I fear we will collectively pick the former and put our heads in the sand about the damage unregulated private companies will do when put in a position like that (like today's internet utilities, private power companies, the for-profit prison nightmare, health insurance companies denying 90% of claims using software they know is wrong, and the defense mega contractors).

I wonder how far it will go. These folks seem to like following the cliche of taking cautionary tales and reading them like manuals so maybe we'll have snowcrash style corporate 'burbs and private police armies soon.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-07 16:39:55+00:00
> Most systems do log user input though, and "proper validation" is an infamously squishy phrase that mostly acts as an excuse

That's my point: if you start adding constraints to a vulnerability to reduce its scope, high CVE scores don't exist.

Any vulnerability that can be characterised as "pass contents through parser, full RCE" is a 10/10 vulnerability for me. I'd rather find out my application isn't vulnerable after my vulnerability scanner reports a critical issue than let it lurk with all the other 3/10 vulnerabilities about potential NULL pointers or complexity attacks in specific method calls.
by elashri | 2025-04-07 16:40:04+00:00
I have some question that is relevant that the author or someone knowledgeable and have tried those might answer.

Does XML work better when feeding context to LLM or plain text or something like json? Did anyone try or have a theory about difference (as an input to the LLM not about processing the files/folders)?

Also wouldn't this be a good WASM usage or even just plain webpage? I know that processing large codebases like chrome/Linux would be better served via something else like Go program but would this even be useful? The context window of our best models is the real limit here and not the serialization speed of the context. using RAG is different league and out of consideration here of course.

I liked repoprompt [1] features during beta test but they then moved to $200 price tag which is hard for me to justify for my use case. Also it is Mac only and I mainly develop on Linux which is why I think something like webapp or WASM will be the more suitable option. I maybe wrong on several points here but no problem, I welcome any correction or explanation

[1] https://repoprompt.com
by windhaven | 2025-04-07 16:40:09+00:00
The issue with that is that ZIP codes don’t map physical locations, they map the hierarchy of how the mail system does routing down to each post office and were introduced in the 1960s [0].

As a result, doing something “from the start” wouldn’t involve baking in comparability with the quirks of a piece of software written decades later, and you’d also have issues with, for example, single zip codes spanning multiple states.

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_Code
by doctorpangloss | 2025-04-07 16:40:18+00:00
The problem with rsync is that it is ridiculously slow.

IFileOperation (Windows) and FileManager (macOS) will do the most performant copy supported by the underlying FS.

Enabling CRC checks is a checkbox in SMB and ReFS - rsync's content matching step is redundant to a modern SMB share on a modern Windows Server. Windows to Windows, IFileOperation will be like 1.5-8x faster throughput with lower CPU usage than rsync, and maybe 1.2-3x faster than doing a file copy using vanilla golang.

And if you don't care about the operating systems that actually use all the complex filesystem metadata, if you only care about Linux, then you only need openrsync or simpler programs.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-04-07 16:40:25+00:00
Why do you store your webserver's logs? My reading of the GDPR (I am not a lawyer) is that it strongly encourages site owners to store the very minimum amount of data about visitors - something that I wholeheartedly agree with.

Server logs are useful for debugging the site but also contain potentially identifying information (IP addresses) so I have my site delete them after 48 hours.

User submitted comments are obviously required for the usage of your site, so you are in the clear there.
by mikrl | 2025-04-07 16:40:26+00:00
Look at that, our luxury beliefs collide!

Mine, lax and libertarian, perhaps too unconcerned with traditional gender roles and stereotypes.

Yours, worried and authoritarian, focused on an imaginary moral panic propagated by reactionary Internet forums.

So, which luxury belief costs more? Mine might require a transition to single user bathrooms, yours depriving a gender minority of liberty…
by aaronmdjones | 2025-04-07 16:40:52+00:00
Even direct control over the generated assembly (C does not provide this; only writing assembler does, and only if you don't do things like LTO) is not sufficient.

Modern CPUs do all sorts of weird things. Assembly instructions can be executed out of order. Your conditional jump instruction can be speculatively executed before the condition's truth is known. Fetches from main memory can be reordered.

Even more wildly, copying the contents of one register to another is often a no-op. Yes, that's right; the following code:

mov edx, eax

... does next to nothing on some modern CPUs. All it does sometimes is set an internal note to the effect of "later references to edx should read/write eax instead", until that note is cleared by some other operation.

You can write your assembler with the best of intentions as to how it should behave, only to discover that the CPU does things entirely differently. You still end up getting the same observable result out of it, but any timing and order of operation guarantees went out the window decades ago.
by 3vidence | 2025-04-07 16:41:41+00:00
Anyone else get the sense there is less vibes involved in vibe coding than people let on?

As in there is probably a significant amount of intervention at each step that they just gloss over at the end.

I did my own experiment in vibe coding over the weekend and the AI assistant just kept getting things wrong.

Maybe I've chosen the wrong framework or language for AI idk.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-04-07 16:42:08+00:00
>The issue is entirely subsidies at this point.

Which is a moot point because European manufacturers also received insane subsidies form their governments in the past.

The issue is China has been innovating in EVs hardcore for 15+ years while European manufactures kept pushing diesels and cutting costs with their suppliers and were only making EVs to shut up the green hippies, but were never committed to them, and now they've been caught with their pants down unable to compete on price nor on technology.

They got fat, lazy and complacent thinking their brand names would carry them.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-07 16:42:13+00:00
The one for my 2016 era fuji is crap. Camera remote. Usually the connection fails between my phone and the cameras own wifi network it connects to but this failure takes a good 2 minutes to happen. So many artificial software limits with this camera, some removed in newer versions. Why can’t this one tether though? It is literally a digital camera no?

Anyone know of any fujifilm firmware jailbreaks fwiw?
by lproven | 2025-04-07 16:43:17+00:00
I know.

Most of why DOS, Windows, OS/2, WinNT and all of Windows 11 and Windows Server today are how they are -- the name-dot-three-letter-extension filenames, the directory structure, drive letters, the basic commands, the config file formats, all of it -- owes to ancestry in DEC OSes.

Gary Kildall worked with DEC minis. He wrote CP/M in PL/M, designing it to be a DEC-like OS for the new Intel 8080.

DR did great. Became big. It was very slow with CP/M-86 for the new 8086. So, Tim Paterson of SCP wrote his own tiny OS in assembler that used the documented public CP/M API, but the disk format from Microsoft Standalone Disk BASIC. (That's now called "FAT".)

MS licensed it, and later bought it, and renamed it MS-DOS.

MS-DOS is a reproduction of a reproduction of a DEC OS.

Mostly TOPS-10.

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/why-does-windows-really-use-bac...

TOPS-10 ran on the PDP-10, the big brother of the PDP-6, which is the direct ancestor of the PDP-7 on which UNIX was built.

Some effort went into OS/2 and some of that influenced NT. NT was build with an input of code from the big brother of the PDP-11 OS. No wonder it's DEC-like: it's got direct DEC ancestry on one side and indirect on the other. It's the offspring of 2 cousins.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-04-07 16:44:12+00:00
> For example, they are dismal at math problems that aren't just slight variations of problems they've seen before.

I know plenty of teachers who would describe their students the exact same way. The difference is mostly one of magnitude (of delta in competence), not quality.

Also, I think it's important to note that by "could be solved by high school / talented middle school students" you mean "specifically designed to challenge the top ~1% of them". Because if you say "LLMs only manage to beat 99% of middle schoolers at math", the claim seems a whole lot different.
Show HN: VSCode as MCP Server
by acomagu | 2025-04-07 16:44:15+00:00
I built a VSCode extension that turns your editor into an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, letting you seamlessly integrate advanced AI-assisted coding features from tools like Claude Desktop. It supports real-time code diagnostics, command execution within VSCode terminals, built-in browser previews, and even relay tools from other MCP extensions like GitHub Copilot. Feedback welcome!
by rebeccaskinner | 2025-04-07 16:44:37+00:00
> While it's possible to bake in this particular inductive bias (repetitive actions might be useful), they decided not to (it's just not that interesting).

What's interesting to me about this is that the problem seems really aligned with the research they are doing. From what I can tell, they build a system where the agent has a simplified "mental" model of the game world and it uses to predict actions that will lead to better rewards.

I don't think what's missing here is teaching the model that it should just try to do things a lot until they succeed. Instead, what I think is missing is the context that it's playing a game, and what that means.

For example, any human player who sits down to play minecraft is likely to hold down the button to mine something. Younger children might also hold the jump button down and jump around aimlessly, but older children and adults probably wouldn't. Why? I suspect it's because people with experience in video games have set expectations for how game designers communicate the gameplay experience. We understand that clicking on things to interact with them is a common mode of interaction, and we expect that games have upgrade mechanics that will let us work faster or interact with high level items. It's not that we repeat any action arbitrarily to see that it pays off, but rather that we're speaking a language of games and modeling the mind of the game designers and anticipating what they expect from us.

I would think that trying to expand the model of the world to include this notion of the language of games might be a better approach to overcoming the limitation instead of just hard-coding the model to try things over and over again to see if there's a payoff.