MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-16 19:31:00+00:00
> The definition of code quality is irrelevant to my argument

Understand. Nevertheless, human engineers may deliberately choose certain level of quality and accept certain risks (quality of output is not direct measure of professionalism, so the question wasn’t pointed at your skill) — it‘s good that AI is matching your expectations, but it’s important to understand what are they for your projects.
by dogma1138 | 2025-04-16 19:31:42+00:00
The value right now is learning which prompts work, which strategies work, what is the sweet spot in terms of model size, is it better to run a model that costs 10 times more per token vs smaller inferior models that might need have 3 attempts at it, what are the best RAG and other enrichment strategies etc.

You can only really get that when you have a large market share.

When your IDE makes a call to OpenAI they get to see only half the picture they don’t know how the user reacts to the output.

So there is a lot of value in being in the client loop also and seeing the full picture.
by actsasbuffoon | 2025-04-16 19:31:50+00:00
Meanwhile even the highest ranked models can’t do simple logic tasks. GothamChess on YouTube did some tests where he played against a bunch of the best models and every single one of them failed spectacularly.

They’d happily lose a queen to take a pawn. They failed to understand how pieces are even allowed to move, hallucinated the existence of new pieces, repeatedly declared checkmate when it wasn’t, etc.

I tried it last night with Gemini 2.5 Pro and it made it 6 turns before it started making illegal moves, and 8 turns before it got so confused about the state of the board before it refused to play with me any longer.

I was in the chess club in 3rd grade. One of the top ranked LLMs in the world is vastly dumber than I was in 3rd grade. But we’re going to pour hundreds of billions into this in the hope that it can end my career? Good luck with that, guys.
by lolinder | 2025-04-16 19:31:55+00:00
This is why I've always considered the weights-vs-source debate to be an enormous red herring that skips the far more important question: are the weights actually "Open" in the first place?

If Llama released everything that the most zealous opponents of weights=source demand they release under the same license that they're currently offering the weights under, we'd still be left with something that falls cleanly into the category of Source Available. It's a generous Source Available, but removes many of the freedoms that are part of both the Open Source and Free Software Definitions.

Fighting over weights vs source implicitly cedes the far more important ground in the battle over the soul of FOSS, and that will have ripple effects across the industry in ways that ceding weights=source never would.
by snailmailman | 2025-04-16 19:32:21+00:00
Maybe its hypocritical. But I have no issues with blocking ads on youtube on my PC, since 95%+ of the ads I see on youtube mobile are blatantly breaking Youtube's own TOS, if not breaking actual laws. I shouldn't be seeing these advertisements anyway if Youtube actually enforced their own policies. But I assume they'd rather advertise scams than miss out on a single empty ad spot.

I'm surprised Youtube hasn't faced any legal consequences for all the scams they allow to advertise on their platform. As far as I could tell, the ad I saw for a gun that was "easy to sneak past security" and "no license required" was up for well over a month, and I'm not convinced Youtube actually took it down. I saved that one, and as far as I can tell, the video ad url is still up, but now requires a sign in to view the video.
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-16 19:32:41+00:00
JetBrains has outlasted most of the fully open source IDEs out there. Open source IDEs tend to suck and be abandoned after a while because there's no incentive to keep maintaining it, and it's expensive. See: NetBeans, Eclipse.

AFAIK the only IDEs in wide use today are open-core, like JetBrains' IDEs.
by hinkley | 2025-04-16 19:33:12+00:00
This is even showing up a bit in tech now. The number of places that expect some articulation Venn diagram of skill sets is too high.

There are too goddamned many stacks to expect that your best hire is going to already have used everything you’re using. There are people who have used everything, but you’re mostly going to be hiring flakes if you look for those, not Right Tool for the Job types.
by 9rx | 2025-04-16 19:33:40+00:00
Perhaps. But,

1. People usually have distinct characteristics (e.g. eyes, nose mouth arranged in a certain way), so there is rarely confusion as to whether or not something is a person. What has cast your doubt?

2. Nothing, person, computer, or otherwise is upset with Wikipedia in this thread. I suspect that, emphasized by the non-response, nothing has ever been upset with Wikipedia in any time or place. What would there be to be upset about, even if only theoretically?
by blackbear_ | 2025-04-16 19:33:59+00:00
If X is normal and centered around 0, then the average of 1/X does not exist (math speak for "is infinity" in this case). In these cases Monte Carlo simulations are not reliable because they give high variance estimates (math speak for "the histogram varies run by run").

The actual distribution of 1/X is fairly interesting, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverse_distribution#Recipro...
by SaagaSocials | 2025-04-16 19:34:19+00:00
Cursor is quite good. I think it's a powerful combination with MCP tools and rules to basically automate everything you do. MCP tools with Jira and GitHub are absolutely fantastic. Rules to make documentation and create current files form a really strong combo.

However, there's a lot of competition in this space, and I need multi-agents or agents to operate independently on my GitHub. That's still a little ways to go. For example, if I have a database of failed unit tests, I'd like to kick off agents independently on each one instead of going through them one by one to fix those tests. There are other potential applications as well. For instance, it's really fantastic for fixing linting errors.
by mlsu | 2025-04-16 19:35:32+00:00
Yes, China.

The policy should be collaboration with China. 50/50 state subsidized joint ventures with Chinese corporations on EVs, raw materials refining, solar panels and batteries, etc. At the same time, a gradual and predictable tariff in those targeted areas. All of this, with the explicit consent and collaboration with the Chinese government. You could kill 2 birds with one stone and focus these policies on green energy and energy independence -- lessening the effects of climate change.

That is what you would do, if you really cared about bringing manufacturing back.

As of today, there is absolutely no off-ramp. The Dem policy is basically trump lite with respect to China. We are moving in lockstep towards making them a geopolitical adversary, and for what?
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-16 19:35:48+00:00
I agree that elections alone aren't enough, but the question of whether you expect a chance to reset in 4 years affects a lot of strategic calculations. If you expect Trump will face democratic accountability in 2026 and 2028, it makes sense to focus on things like tariffs that a lot of voters will find mildly uncomfortable. If you don't, any energy you spend on things that don't produce mass mobilization is wasted.
by aaaja | 2025-04-16 19:36:08+00:00
This is an inaccurate narrative of sex in that it doesn't take into account other sexually reproducing species.

More specifically: not all species have an XY chromosome sex-determination system (see ZW or temperature-based systems), not all species have the same anatomy for sexual reproduction (consider egg-laying species), and other species have different sex hormones (for example insects have a hormonal system unique from mammals).

The biologist perspective of sex is to consider gametes (sex cells) as the basis. Two types, with one type (female) larger than the other (male). All other understanding relevant to the exact mechanism in each species is built upon this.
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-04-16 19:36:31+00:00
Thanks a lot for the feedback, point taken!

Wrt deployment: the system has a control plane (on Bauplan AWS, never see any data, just auth and metadata), and data planes for customers (single tenant, private link, Soc2 compliant and all that).

If by hosting you mean "move the data plane to my cloud", that is entirely possible but not as recommended as the managed offering: in the end, the only dependency we have are off-the-shelf VMs in which we install our binary - and your bucket of course, but that is yours.

If you mean "installing the control plane on my cloud", that is not in the cards at the moment, unless a very special deployment is needed.

My suggestion - before complex deployment discussion - is always super simple: try it for free on public datasets and decide if you like it; running the quick start takes three minutes, just send over your email for access.

If you do like it, we can have a discussion on deployment, which has never been a blocker before.
by ziddoap | 2025-04-16 19:36:40+00:00
>Where do I admit this? About fines? Yes, fines don't work.

Yes, about fines. From your post: "Ah, yes, fines for companies are not enough. I agree."

>they would lose 100% of revenue.

We can't get the government to enforce this when tens of millions of records are leaked publicly, this absolutely will not happen for failure to report a vulnerability. If you have any idea of how to make it happen, please, lets immediately apply it to breaches and then figure out how to apply it to failure to report vulnerabilities.

>We just need agreement on the certification globally.

As far as I am aware, there is no certification (one which is legally required to obtain a job) on the planet that is globally recognized. But I would be happy to be proven wrong here.

>but we don't need agreement on the punishments globally.

Which will end up with some countries not willing to charge 100% loss of revenue, causing a mass exodus of companies from any country which does charge 100%, thus making the solution untenable.

ICANN is an interesting example, but it's not a certification. The scale (and thus administration, compliance, etc.) is very different.
by MPSFounder | 2025-04-16 19:37:03+00:00
Side note: is there any eink monitor someone recommends? I have a macbook pro, a macbook air and a remarkable pro. The Remarkable pro (has colors) flickers way too much. My macbook pro also uses miniled which dries my eyes. It is using PWM I figured (work laptop, so I used it docked). I want an eink monitor with no flickers, that is easy on the eyes. The macbook air screen is great compared to the macbook pro (does not use PWM). I thought I don't need color on the eink monitor, but syntax highlighting helps ... Maybe I am just getting old ha, but I sit in front of monitors for 10-12 hours a day
by kragen | 2025-04-16 19:37:14+00:00
Probably what you want to check out is Oberon, which is a modern PC built basically from scratch, along with an operating system that compares to Windows, Linux, or MacOS, built originally not by a single person but by maybe a dozen people. It's capable enough that it was the daily driver for numerous students during the 80s; the earliest versions of it were built in-house by necessity because graphical workstations weren't a product you could buy yet. Wirth's RISC CPU architecture avoids all the braindamage in things like the Z80 and the 80386. I think that, with their example to work from, a single person could build such a thing.

Oscar Toledo G. also wrote a similar graphical operating system in the 01990s and early 02000s, working on the computers his family designed and built (though using off-the-shelf CPUs). You can see a screenshot of the browser at http://www.biyubi.com/art30.html and read some of his reflections on the C compiler he wrote for the Transputer in his recent blog post at https://nanochess.org/transputer_operating_system.html.

There's a lacuna in the recursivity of Wirth's system: although he provides synthesizable source code for the processor (in Verilog, I think) there's no logic synthesis software in Oberon so that you can rebuild the FPGA configuration. Instead you have to use, IIRC, Xilinx's software, which won't even run under Oberon. Since then, though, Claire Wolf has written yosys, so the situation is improving on that front.

CP/M is interesting because it's close to being the smallest system where self-hosted development is bearable; the 8080 is just powerful enough that you can write a usable assembler and WYSIWYG text editor for it. But I don't think that makes it a good example to follow. We saw this weekend that Olof Kindgren's SeRV implementation of RISC-V can be squoze into 5900 transistors (in one-atom-thick molybdenum disulfide, no less) https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/04/researchers-build-a-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43621378 which is about equivalent to the 8080 and less than the Z80. And Graham Smecher's "Minimax" https://github.com/gsmecher/minimax is only two or three times the size of SeRV and over an order of magnitude faster.

There's no reason to repeat the mistakes Intel made in the 01970s today. We know how to do better!
by immibis | 2025-04-16 19:37:46+00:00
If you agree to the law, then saying the people tasked with enforcing the law can affect you because you agreed to it is an argument that has some merit.

If you didn't agree to the law, then the people tasked with enforcing the law can affect you for a different reason: because they can. The natural state of things is basically that people can just hurt each other because they want to, and who's going to stop them? And "anyone" includes the police, and "any reason" includes "because their boss told them to enforce the law on you regardless of some-platonic-version-of-you is some-platonic-version-of-bound by the some-platonic-version-of-law"
by evdubs | 2025-04-16 19:37:52+00:00
> I'm assuming your statement would be meant to apply to other common languages without s-expressions, but maybe I've misunderstood.

It was meant for C specifically. Take a JSON document. Define it in C. Here's what I see on a random cJSON GitHub project:

https://github.com/DaveGamble/cJSON/blob/master/README.md#ex...

Now do that in JavaScript:

const jsonDoc = { "name": "Awesome 4K" ... }

Now make the equivalent jsonDoc in Lisp with s-expressions:

(define json-doc (hash "name" "Awesome 4K" "resolutions" (list (hash "width" 1280 "height" 720) (hash "width" 1920 "height" 1080) (hash "width" 3840 "height" 2160))))

The C approach is the approach you'd similarly take in many languages where you create the HashMap, then create the Array, then populate them. Of course, you could "cheat" in many languages by first making a string and then calling the JSON library's `parse` on the string. But, this is different than JavaScript where you can directly create the JSON document. In Lisp, you are always writing s-expressions, both for data and code.

> What's something that is made significantly easier by an s-expression than by arrays/tables?

An s-expression is a form of syntax. Even though it is a "list", the s-expression (list 1 2 3) is an actual list. It's not like you're taking the idea of arrays and tables and replacing it with a list. It's like you're taking the idea:

// Create a List in Java var l = new ArrayList(); l.add(1); l.add(2); l.add(3); // Print the List in Java System.out.println(l); // Prints [1, 2, 3]; // Can we construct a List from the String "[1, 2, 3]"? Is there a fromString() or similar for a Java Object?

And replacing it with the idea:

// Create a List in Lisp (define l (list 1 2 3)) // Print the List in Lisp (println l) // Prints (list 1 2 3) // Can we construct a List from the String "(list 1 2 3)"? (eval (read "(list 1 2 3)"))

What about dates? What if we want rationals? What if we want to use a binary-search-tree-map instead of a hash?

// Create a Date in JavaScript const date = new Date() // Print the Date in JavaScript console.log(date); // Prints Wed Apr 16 2025 00:00:00 GMT ... // Can I JSON.parse that string and receive a date?

Lisp:

// Create a Date in Lisp (define d (today)) // Print the Date in Lisp (println d) // Prints (date 2025 4 16) // Construct a Date from the String "(date 2025 4 16)" (eval (read "(date 2025 4 16)"))

The Lisp examples are simplified, but that is the idea.

> To make s-expressions language-agnostic, wouldn't you need libraries in the languages to convert between the s-expression as it exists in some specification, and the language's native data structures?

Yes.

> This doesn't sound all that different from JSON at this point, or a much more complex specification that defines the representation of all kinds of types, like dates.

Correct. It would just be like JSON and whatever bits are standardized are what would be handled.
by lxgr | 2025-04-16 19:38:06+00:00
It gets even weirder with Llama 4: https://www.llama.com/llama4/use-policy/ [Update: Apparently this has been the case since 3.2!]

> With respect to any multimodal models included in Llama 4, the rights granted under Section 1(a) of the Llama 4 Community License Agreement are not being granted to you if you are an individual domiciled in, or a company with a principal place of business in, the European Union. This restriction does not apply to end users of a product or service that incorporates any such multimodal models.

This is especially strange considering that Llama 3.2 also was multimodal, yet to my knowledge there was no such restriction.

In any case, at least Huggingface seems to be collecting these details now – see for example https://huggingface.co/meta-llama/Llama-4-Scout-17B-16E-Inst...

Curious to see what Ollama will do.
by thih9 | 2025-04-16 19:38:09+00:00
The information is there, although you need to follow a link:

> Potter's body was (…) sliced into 27,000 slices in 63-μm increments, individually scanned during a period of 60 working days. Because the technology used in the Visible Human project significantly improved since its launch in 1993, much more detail will be available in Potter's scans: images from the two previous donors were based on 1,000 μm sections for the male subject and 300 μm for the female subject.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Potter

Then again, I only meant that Wikipedia has some extra data - not that it has everything from the article (it doesn’t).
by margalabargala | 2025-04-16 19:38:36+00:00
The single use of AI to generate that video of Trump licking Elon Musk's feet, used significantly more power than this change will cause to be used over the next decade.

It's great to be environmentally conscious, but if reducing carbon emissions is your goal, complaining about this is a lot like saying that people shouldn't run marathons, because physical activity causes humans to exhale more CO2.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-04-16 19:38:48+00:00
Greenfield. It’s an interesting question though, if on today‘s project some model will perform better tomorrow because of more reference data. I would expect LLMs to lag behind on latest technology, simply because their reference data has more older examples and may not include latest versions of platforms or frameworks. I have seen LLMs breaking on basic CRUD tasks because of that.
by mbessey | 2025-04-16 19:38:56+00:00
Performance of the p-System is definitely an issue on the Apple II, especially in the "OS" interface and editor, which is all interpreted. But running applications built on it wasn't half-bad.

It's also important to remember that to a large extent, Apple Pascal on the Apple II and other late 1970s home computers wasn't competing with sophisticated native-code compiler suites, but with interpreted BASIC and with assembly language.

Pascal was vastly more-productive than writing in Assembler, and much faster in execution than Apple BASIC. It even had reasonable support for integrating assembly routines for places where you really needed the speed.

The p-System was A LOT more usable on the HP Motorola 68k workstations I used it on. Those were more than adequately fast for the sort of software we were writing for them in 1985.

Thanks for the link to cuneiform, I think I read that paper once, long ago. Will definitely check it out.
by dang | 2025-04-16 19:38:58+00:00
Previous examples of this for anyone curious:

NIH.gov DNS servers down, making PubMed, BLAST, etc. unreachable [fixed] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43229201 - March 2025 (385 comments)

Mozilla site down due to "overdue hosting payments" [fixed] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226089 - March 2025 (102 comments)

Ask HN: Stripe Atlas messed up my 83B election what do I do? [fixed] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40825802 - June 2024 (3 comments)
by smu | 2025-04-16 19:39:10+00:00
To provide some additional context to OP.

In the CRA, there’s (among others):

- reporting of actively exploited vulns or severe incidents to a national cert

- reporting obligation of vulns to the provider of that vulnerable code

- mandatory vulnerability disclosure policy (to receive vuln reports)

- obligation to provide security updates and alert customers when a vuln has become known

We’ll see how well this is all followed, but from a security perspective these are all good ideas.
by deaddodo | 2025-04-16 19:39:36+00:00
Man, I remember learning that the VCS/2600 had successors well after there time and was like "gee, I wonder how powerful those were". The difference between a 2600 and 5200 is a small step up, and the 5200 to 7800 is damn near imperceptible:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKMXi1lAVow

Atari just never did....anything. It's so obvious in retrospect why the died.
by hnburnsy | 2025-04-16 19:40:33+00:00
>We don’t have the infrastructure to manufacture

It is really that hard. Look what happened in Arizona. TSCM brought the most complex semiconductor chip making supply chains to the US on a vacant piece of land in NW Phoenix in about 4 years. And it wasn't just TSMC that invested in the Arizona site, but also companies like Linde ($600M), APS ($100M), Sunlit Chemical ($100M), Air Liquide ($60M), and Chang Chun ($300M).

Maybe others can comment, but are semiconductor chips the most complex thing to manufacture in the world? Not sure but the Arizona TSMC supply chain proves it can be done.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-16 19:40:50+00:00
Currently being certified has no value, not to Open Source, not to Closed Source, since companies are clearly doing fine without it. So it's hard to see them paying extra for it.

We've had professional certifications for years. Novell, Citrix, Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, they all make money selling certification to naive users. Anyone who's bothered knows they don't really mean much.

But hey, if you think there's demand, set up a body and give it a go. Personally I think it's a waste of time, but if you can get enough companies to care, and enough developers to pay, you'll have a nice business.

Herding cats sounds easier.
by Finnucane | 2025-04-16 19:40:54+00:00
Sunbeam, in the mid-20th century, was king of the kitchen. I have, and still use routinely, a c. 1960 Sunbeam CG-1 waffle iron. But only because the thermostat on my even older Sunbeam W2 gave out. I admit that I tend to use my full-size Kenwood stand mixer instead of the Sunbeam Mixmaster Jr that's in the drawer, though that still works.