MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bob1029 | 2025-04-29 17:46:43+00:00
> There is no waiting. You just do it. In no universe can you justify using a vulnerable log4j version.

I agree.

We had been doing interop with a Java process from C# to access some document processing functionality during the log4j incident. The library we were using depended on log4j and had a clear resolution at the time, but there was a big perception problem in our client base (i.e., non-technical people that we must suffer in order to continue doing business).

Our solution to the resulting paranoia was to remove Java from our stack altogether. It was a big pain in the ass to find an alternative, but it was definitely worth it from a customer service perspective. Our clients were very happy with this approach and it saved us from a lot of messy meetings that other vendors were sucked into.
by bhouston | 2025-04-29 17:46:48+00:00
> Given that autism is highly heritable, most experts are sceptical of the idea that environmental factors could drive a major increase in the numbers

But we do know that age of fathers does drive increase autism rates - thus while there is likely a genetic component, there are degradations related to age that further increase the risk: https://www.thetransmitter.org/spectrum/risk-of-autism-spike...
by layman51 | 2025-04-29 17:46:58+00:00
Using the decal as a clue is funny because what if there was a street scene where that happened to be misleading? For example, I had seen that a Sacramento County Sheriff car got to Europe and I guess it now belonged to a member of the public who is driving it with the original decals still attached. I wonder how the LLM would reason if it sees the car as “out of place”.
by tejaskumthekar | 2025-04-29 17:47:14+00:00
Applying for the O-1A visa requires satisfying at least 3 out of 8 criteria, and one of the most approachable is “judging the work of others.” But actually getting credible judging opportunities—and tracking them—is tedious and unstructured.

When I was working on my petition, I spent way too much time manually searching for hackathons and competitions, writing cold emails, and organizing responses. It felt like a bad CRM built in Google Sheets.

To solve this, I built https://judging.exalien.club — a lightweight tool to discover relevant events, apply to judge, and track your outreach. It also generates email drafts tailored for each event.

I originally built this just to help myself, but figured it might save others some time too.

Would love feedback—or to hear how others handled this part of their O-1A process.
by anonymars | 2025-04-29 17:47:16+00:00
It might be due to phantom/imperceptible input. I have this with a bunch of similar flight sim peripherals.

I ended up getting one of those USB hubs with switches to disable the ports.

That was a saga in itself: it had a firmware issue where 3 of the 7 ports didn't work right. Apparently it's two 4-port hubs in a trenchcoat.

They had a firmware update but apparently it had a virus in the loader app so they pulled it, you needed to contact support to get the new firmware. Their support insisted on sending me a replacement hub instead, which of course didn't work. And then a second time, I'm pretty sure, and only then did they send me a new firmware update which solved the issue.

Well. Anyway. Those hubs are theoretically good so you can avoid the wear on the USB connectors.

But I guess the theme of bad QA is a common one. This wasn't an Amazon alphabet soup brand Chinese special, either.
by echelon | 2025-04-29 17:48:09+00:00
I think this is incredibly cool. As with many things, the good cases will outnumber the bad.

This was always possible, it just wasn't widely distributed.

Having a first class ability to effectively geocode an image feels like it connects the world better. You'll be able to snapshot a movie and find where a scene was filmed, revisit places from old photographs, find where interesting locations in print media are, places that designers and creatives used in their (typically exif-stripped) work, etc.

Imagine when we get this for architecture and nature. Or even more broadly, databases of food from restaurants. Products. Clothing and fashion. You name it.

Imagine precision visual search for everything - that'd be amazing.
by tpdly | 2025-04-29 17:48:10+00:00
You totally missed the point.

Critics: CAHSR is a bad idea and should be killed.

Author: Here's the story of how hard it is to build this novel type of large scale infrastructure, especially when people don't strongly support it.

The dysfunction is real, but the actual point was, "How much of this dysfunction and how much was just what you get with half-assed support?"

You're interpretation of that "no track has been laid" quote betrays that you aren't evaluating this fairly. You really don't understand that laying rocks and steel on a path is easier than building whole bridges and viaducts.
by andai | 2025-04-29 17:48:33+00:00
They are fundamentally mathematical models which extrapolate from data points, and occasionally they will extrapolate in a way that is consistent with reality, i.e. they will approximate uncharted territory with reasonable accuracy.

Of course, being able to tell the difference (both for the human and the machine) is the real trick!

Reasoning seems to be a case where the model uncovers what, to some degree, it already "knows".

Conversely, some experimental models (e.g. Meta's work with Concepts) shift that compute to train time, i.e. spend more compute per training token. Either way, they're mining "more meaning" out of the data by "working harder".

This is one area where I see that synthetic data could have a big advantage. Training the next gen of LLMs on the results of the previous generation's thinking would mean that you "cache" that thinking -- it doesn't need to start from scratch every time, so it could solve problems more efficiently, and (given the same resources) it would be able to go further.

Of course, the problem here is that most reasoning is dogshit, and you'd need to first build a system smart enough to pick out the good stuff...

---

It occurs to me now that you rather hoped for a concrete example. The ones that come to mind involve drawing parallels between seemingly unrelated things. On some level, things are the same shape.

I argue that noticing such a connection, such a pattern, and naming it, constitutes new and useful knowledge. This is something I spend a lot of time doing (mostly for my own amusement!), and I've found that LLMs are surprisingly good at it. They can use known patterns to coherently describe previously unnamed ones.

In other words, they map concepts onto other concepts in ways that hasn't been done before. What I'm referring to here is, I will prompt the LLM with some such query, and it will "get it", in ways I wasn't expecting. The real trick would be to get it to do that on its own, i.e. without me prompting it (or, with current tech, find a way to get it to prompt itself that produces similar results... and then feed that into some kind of Novelty+Coherence filtering system, i.e. the "real trick" again... :).

A specific example eludes me now, but it's usually a matter of "X is actually a special case of Y", or "how does X map onto Y". It's pretty good at mapping the territory. It's not "creating new territory" by doing that, it's just pointing out things that "have always been there, but nobody has looked at before", if that makes sense.
by jibal | 2025-04-29 17:48:54+00:00
One needs to be more than "reasonably skeptical" and merely not "low intelligence gullible" to be a competent TT judge--it requires skill, experience, and understanding an LLM's weak spots.

And the "customer service voice" you see is one that is intentionally programmed in by the vendors via baseline rules. They can be programmed differently--or overridden by appropriate prompts--to have a very different tone.

LLMs trained on trillions of human-generated text fragments available from the internet have shown that the TT is simply not an adequate test for identifying whether a machine is "thinking"--which was Turing's original intent in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" in which he introduced the test (which he called "the imitation game").
by sltkr | 2025-04-29 17:49:02+00:00
It crashed for me:

Uncaught TypeError: Cannot read properties of null (reading 'type') at $80b91fc9d2f468ec$export$4abc8fab4139dfcd (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:406898) at $c692b767326c99ec$var$PieceHandler.getMoveableSquares (index.e2b13a6c.js:4:4373) at index.e2b13a6c.js:4:13557 at oQ (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:60912) at o0 (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:61761) at oZ (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:60941) at Object.useState (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:72377) at Object.q (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:10352) at $a2d3bef833187ce9$export$474cd6ee072cf5a4 (index.e2b13a6c.js:4:12305) at oF (index.e2b13a6c.js:1:58673)
by tmoertel | 2025-04-29 17:49:03+00:00
> > I dislike the “intuition doesn’t work, profile your code” mantra because it seemingly says profiling is a viable replacement for theoretical calculations, which it isn’t.

> This seems like a nonsensical statement to me. How could measuring be a substitute for thinking/analyzing/predicting/forming a plan?

I believe the mantra “intuition doesn’t work, profile your code” is understood to mean “don't rely on your intuition alone; profile your work.” It's a warning that when it comes to performance optimization, intuition is often unreliable, so you need to supplement your mental model with actual data if you want to avoid big mistakes.

I don't know why the author of the blog post is interpreting the mantra literally, as if it claims intuition is obsoleted by profiling.
by spwa4 | 2025-04-29 17:49:05+00:00
The whole point of using economic metrics like GDP is that they are NOT politicized. You can argue to what extent that succeeded. Probably not 100%.

But your suggestion is to increase politicization of GDP: change the figure to push a certain view on economic activity, as opposed to what the theory says, what's practical, and what actually happens in real life (even if the government pays a group of people to dig a hole, and another group to fill the hole back up, that's still economic activity and should be counted).

That's moving things entirely in the wrong direction.
Show HN: Auto-fix your GitHub PR issues with Proton for FREE
by qualtrixAg | 2025-04-29 17:49:08+00:00
Hey HN!

We just launched Proton, a GitHub app that listens to PR review comments and suggests code changes to address them. It creates a new PR based on top of your working branch, so you can simply review and merge.

How is it different from other AI code review tools? Others focus on pointing out issues, whereas Proton focuses on addressing them. Although some of them can also suggest fixes, they tend to only work on nearby lines or within a single file. But real-world feedback often involves cross-file changes like “Let’s extract this to a separate component”, or “We should follow the same pattern of doing things in file X, Y and Z”. Proton has full repo context, so it can handle these kinds of feedback.

Want to see it in action? Here’s a short demo: https://youtu.be/zDEfw-R2jWc, and there’s the PR shown in the demo video: https://github.com/proton-codes/demos/pull/2

It’s free, takes two clicks to install, and works out of the box. Here’s the install link: https://github.com/apps/proton-app

We'd love to get some early users and hear your thoughts — reply here or email us at [support@proton.codes](mailto:support@proton.codes)

Cheers!
by olyjohn | 2025-04-29 17:49:41+00:00
You must have had one of the better ones. Most of them were literally not usable.

Even YouTube was pretty choppy on most of these things. And the screen resolution so bad that web browsing was terrible on them. A lot of dialog boxes wouldn't even fit on the screen, leaving you stuck and unable to change settings or even save files in a lot of situations. The drives were slow in most of them too.

Not to say that they couldn't be better, but they were rated poorly because most of them really were trash.
by thro1 | 2025-04-29 17:49:57+00:00
It's confabulated. (With AI?) - The missing word is: transclusion.

Actually, what we have here instead: memex.tech as a simulacrum of the Memex Opposite.

What Memex is indeed (not fake): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memex

- something like discussed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18635123 (Getting to Xanadu) (WiP never ended)
by graemep | 2025-04-29 17:49:58+00:00
I already knew, but rapid downvotes on HN which is relatively rational surprised me.

There was a lovely radio interview of Neil Kinnock (former leader of the British Labour Party) many years ago in which he described the reactions of some Americans to him being a socialist (and not the British equivalent of the Democrats). One woman said "You can't be socialists, you're too nice".
by mossTechnician | 2025-04-29 17:50:19+00:00
That's interesting. It makes you think about searching. It makes you think about the limits, it makes you think about the fact you already paying them for the privilege, it occupies just a little bit of your mind.

It's a clever trick, kind of like how Amazon knows that if you subscribe to their Prime service, you might think about Amazon when you're about to buy something online.
by jvvw | 2025-04-29 17:50:27+00:00
I'm Master level at Geoguessr - it's a rank where you have to definitely know what you are doing but it isn't as high as it probably sounds from the headline.

Masters is about 800-1200 ELO whereas the pros are 1900-2000ish. I'll know the country straight away on 95% of rounds but I can still have no idea where I am in Russia or Brazil sometimes if there's no info. Scripters can definitely beat me!
by sorcerer-mar | 2025-04-29 17:51:21+00:00
> Chevron deference specifically applied when agencies tried to expand powers in ways that were not reasonably within their mandate

Not true. And I mean literally definitionally not true. Chevron deference only applies (definitionally) when the agency's interpretation is reasonable.

With Chevron deference, if a regulated entity challenged a rule, the court applied a two part test:

Part 1. Is the matter resolved unambiguously by legislation? If yes: legislation wins. If no: proceed to Part 2.

Part 2. Is the agency's interpretation of the legislation reasonable? If yes: the agency's rule wins. If no: the rule is bad.

Without Chevron deference, if a regulated entity challenges a rule, it works this way:

Part 1. Is the matter resolved unambiguously by legislation? If yes: legislation wins. If no: proceed to Part 2.

Part 2. What's the court's opinion on the matter? That's the rule for this particular instance of the problem, with effectively zero binding authority on other instances of similar problems (e.g. a case on Compound x1 will have no bearing, a priori, on a virtually identical Compound x1.1)
by niuzeta | 2025-04-29 17:51:40+00:00
I've been using Kagi since they first appeared here on hackernews, and I cannot be more impressed with them. The value proposition is crystal clear, and I know what I am getting. I love the customability, and I like that I'm paying for _search_. I'm getting the 2005-2007 Google vibes from them.

I'm wearing my Kagi shirts to tech meetups and I do recommend it to my friends. I wish there would be a better way for me to "refer" a friend, but I like how straightforward they are.

I do recommend Kago. It's a good service and you get what you pay for.
by FrinkleFrankle | 2025-04-29 17:52:09+00:00
Mate. This guy is a software engineer and taking time out of his day to help a client on a forum and explaining why this might happen.. And is also taking the user input back to his employer to hopefully find a way to improve the user experience.

It's also not a scam. If you sign up for a trial that tells you you'll be charged at the end and don't bother to notify yourself.. That's 100% legal, 100% expected and 100% on you. You can argue that it's not a great customer experience.. But again, the engineer understands that.
by jaredklewis | 2025-04-29 17:52:27+00:00
The cited statistics is in reference to time saved (as a percent of work hours), not a reduction in paid working hours.

But more generally, my comment is not absurd; it's a pattern that has played itself out in economic history dozens of times.

Despite the fact that modern textile and clothing machinery are easily 1000x more efficient than weaving cloth and sewing shirts by hand, the modern garment industry employs more people today than that of middle age Europe.

Will AI be the same? I don't know, but it wouldn't be unusual if it was.
by spwa4 | 2025-04-29 17:52:27+00:00
He's a plagiarist, a fraud: he claims other's work as his own, and that goes from extremely petty to very large lies. From Fraudulently claiming he's good at "Path Of Exile" to him being Tesla's designer, to him having designed the SpaceX rocket engines.

In all cases research has found: he's lying. He has essentially no technical contributions, not even to his original firm, X (the bank).

Him claiming otherwise makes him a fraud, and a plagiarist.
by hinkley | 2025-04-29 17:53:29+00:00
Small functions need special attention not just because they show up as leaf nodes everywhere but also because they are difficult for profilers to account properly. You get two functions listed as each taking 4% of CPU time, and one could easily be taking up twice as much compute as the other. The sort of memory pressure that small functions can generate can end up scapegoating a big function that uses a large fraction of memory because it gets stuck with cold cache or lots of GC pressure from the piddly functions fouling the nest.

One of my best examples of this, I had a function reported as still taking 10% of cumulative run time, after I’d tweaked it as much as I could. But I’d set up a benchmark that called a code path a deterministic number of times and this function was getting called twice as much as it should. I found two sibling methods asking the same question and rearranged them so the answer came as an argument and nixed the duplicate call. I reran the benchmark and instead of getting a reduction of 5% (10/2), I got 20%. That was all memory pressure.

The worst memory pressure I ever fixed I saw a 10x improvement by removing one duplicate call. Now, there was a quadratic part of that call but it was a small enough n that I expected 3x and hoped for 4x, and was as shocked as anyone when it went from 30s to 3s with one refactor.
by AtNightWeCode | 2025-04-29 17:54:39+00:00
Agree with this. But not what I concluded from OP. Architectural decisions from the start is where most optimizations should happen. I remember from school some kids that did this super optimized loop and the teacher said. Do you really have to do that same calculation on every iteration?

But, in the real world. Code bases are massive. And it is hard to predict when worlds collide. Most things does not matter until they do. So measuring is the way to go I believe.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-29 17:54:51+00:00
> No it isn’t. Fake work, synchronization, and context switching are all separate problems

Context switching is a problem because it...kills velocity. Fake work is a problem because it kills velocity. You're saying it's time that could be better spent elsewhere, but trying to make it sound wider. I disagree with the premise.

Synchronization is a new word, unrelated to what you originally wrote.

> How many times have you gone back to address review comments and introduced a regression because you no longer have the context in your head?

Never? I am not unable to code in a branch after a few days away from it. If I were, I would want reviews for sure! Maybe you have had reviews where people are suggesting large, unnecessary structural changes, which I agree would be a waste of time. We're just looking for bug fixes and acceptably readable code. I wouldn't want reviewers opining on a new architecture they read about that morning.
by Merad | 2025-04-29 17:54:55+00:00
You know, I bought a MBP as a personal machine 6 months ago - my first Mac - and this post made me realize that I couldn't even tell you what its desktop looks like. I'm sure I saw it a few times when I was doing initial setup, but I don't remember anything about. I used to do things like set custom wallpapers, but probably around 10 years I pretty much stopped using the desktop entirely.
by jerf | 2025-04-29 17:55:07+00:00
The syntactic sugar being asked for in this case is awfully thin. I definitely put this in the class of "stop pining for it and just use what's there".

If the poster wants to particularize this to C++ because C++'s syntax can't support it in any reasonable manner, that's fine, but that's a C++ problem, not a "Programming languages..." problem. Which would be perfectly understandable and I'm not really complaining, more clarifying that most of the rest of the world can just rub together three or four existing constructs in a pretty reasonable manner to get this.
by anonymars | 2025-04-29 17:55:11+00:00
My absolute favorite, though, is my monitor. Alienware OLED. But their stupid app, which installs itself automatically thanks to that well-thought-through Windows feature nowadays despite my removing it -- if that's installed, the monitor won't go to sleep. Which is really great for an OLED monitor.

That one, it seems if I disable the "software device" in device manager, it stops installing itself. But how do you release and force install a companion app for a monitor that will burn it out? It comes with a 3-year warranty that covers OLED burn-in...
by euroderf | 2025-04-29 17:55:45+00:00
> In most cases you're talking 50-60 years of "legacy" (still running, still working, still updated) code, and replacing a system that has evolved for half a century is not an easy undertaking, at least not if you plan on getting it 100% right the first time.

This seems like an application area in desperate need of applied A.I.: Analyze a codebase and replicate it (for the first few iterations at least) in the new target language.

Isn't there research on this ? Or am I full of balonie ?
by jzb | 2025-04-29 17:57:24+00:00
The thing is, subscriptions do add up. Lots of folks are carrying a bunch of $10 a month subscriptions that individually are no big but when added up start tacking on $100-$200 a month to their bills.

I'm a big proponent of paying for things instead of using ad-supported things, so I don't mind paying for Kagi -- but I also have subscriptions and other monthly payments that make me think hard before signing up for a new one. $10 a month for Kagi, $10 for a webcomic Patreon, $5 for a musician's Patreon, $10 a month to support Mastodon.social, $10 a month to Internet Archive, and an assortment of other monthly (or yearly) subs/payments... plus streaming, plus ... it adds up.

Ideally if more people were supporting these things the monthly charges could be less -- e.g., if Kagi had more users their monthly could be $5 instead -- but pricing and getting people to pony up is hard.