MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: As an eng leader, how useful is AI-generated internal documentation?
by hsiYwko | 2025-04-05 20:09:39+00:00
Hi HN!

This past weekend, I built a tool called GitSummarize, it's an open-source ai-powered documentation tool.

Given any public GitHub repository it generates high-quality documentation from the codebase using Gemini 2.5 Pro. Specifically, it tries to extract the tribal knowledge, business logic/rules embedded within codebases.

Pro Tip: You can replace "hub" with "summarize" in any repository URL to access its documentation.

I created this because there was a steep learning curve to understanding some of the open-source codebases out there while getting started with contributing. Having detailed documentation would have been super helpful in those situations.

This project was heavily inspired by GitIngest and GitDiagram so make sure to check those out as well!

Give it a try and I would appreciate any feedback! Would also love to know how useful this would be to developers or engineering leaders for their teams?
by Someone | 2025-04-05 20:10:18+00:00
I don’t know whether it’s reasonable, but

> Allocation requests don’t always succeed. s_alloc_vgpr sets the Scalar Condition Code (SCC) to indicate success, or clears it on failure.

So, you can do a binary search:

- set result to zero.

- try to allocate 512. If that succeeds, add 512 to result

- try to allocate 256. If that succeeds, add 256 to result

- try to allocate 128. If that succeeds, add 128 to result

...

- try to allocate 1. If that succeeds, add 1 to result (you’ll want to stop at the granularity at which registers are allocated)

- free ’result’ registers

(This isn’t race-free)
by Viliam1234 | 2025-04-05 20:10:21+00:00
> Well......now everyone can see how quickly state power can turn malevolent, and why the Right to Bear Arms matters.

I still don't see how people are today using 2A to defend themselves against the redcaps.

When the state power turns malevolent but many of your neighbors are happy about it, your gun is not going to overthrow the regime (because those neighbors have guns, too).
by atombender | 2025-04-05 20:10:30+00:00
My understanding is that the difficulty is knowing the client disconnected. Postgres doesn't know until it tries to write the result to the stream. That's the core team's explanation in this [1] ancient thread, at least.

I don't know why Postgres can't write keepalive messages while executing the query; speculating here, but it's possible that the architecture is synchronous and doesn't support doing anything with the connection while the query is executing. It's an old threading model where one process is started per connection.

I could have sworn I had read about a new configuration option introduced in Postgres 14, but I can't find anything about it.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/e09785e00907280622v9b1...
by gcp123 | 2025-04-05 20:10:34+00:00
As someone who's worked in marketing for 15 years - across big agencies in New York and running growth for startups - there's an uncomfortable truth to this piece. The industry has quietly become something darker than when I joined.

Modern advertising doesn't just sell products, it sells our own attention back to us at a premium. What started as "connecting products to people who need them" has warped into engineering digital environments that hack our baseline neurological responses.

The most disturbing part is that most people inside the machine know it. I've sat in rooms where we've explicitly designed systems to maximize "time on site" by exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities. The language we use internally is more clinical than predatory, which makes it easy to avoid moral questions.

What's wild is how this piece frames advertising as a relatively recent phenomenon. It's right - for 99% of human history, we made purchasing decisions based on community knowledge and direct information, not carefully engineered psychological triggers that follow us around.

Sure, banning all advertising sounds extreme, but it's worth asking: what would we actually lose? Product information would still exist. Reviews would still exist. Word-of-mouth would still exist. We'd just lose the sophisticated machinery designed to bypass our rational decision-making.

The "free speech" counter-argument has always struck me as disingenuous. Nobody believes they have a constitutional right to interrupt your dinner with a telemarketing call.
by jlcases | 2025-04-05 20:10:43+00:00
That's great to hear! Building that semantic structuring module, especially with a MECE approach, would significantly enhance the pipeline's value for complex downstream tasks like knowledge graph creation or advanced RAG systems.

The challenge often lies in defining the right hierarchical taxonomy and relationship types for diverse document domains. If you're exploring approaches, principles from enterprise knowledge management and structured ontologies might offer useful parallels.

Excited to see how this evolves! It addresses a critical gap in the ML data preparation landscape.
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-05 20:11:43+00:00
What is the deeper relationship between trade deficits and (federal) budget deficits? The explanations Noah gives could almost exactly be applied to budgetary deficits - its all Klarna.

If you run a trade deficit, does that also mean you necessarily have a budgetary deficit? Can you have a balanced budget and a trade deficit - and if you can, do you still care about the trade deficit?

Do you care about trade deficits with individual countries or blocks, if you're balanced overall?
I built Schedify – The one and only scheduling solution you can rely on
by samocodes | 2025-04-05 20:12:20+00:00
Hey devs

After way too many “I’ll finish this next week” moments, I finally shipped something — it’s called Schedify.

Basically, it lets you schedule webhooks to fire at any time you want — in 5 minutes, 5 hours, or 2 years. No more cron jobs, background workers, or janky delay hacks. Just drop in a URL, a time, and a payload — and Schedify handles the rest.

I built it 'cause I needed a simple way to delay events between services without spinning up a bunch of infra.

If you’ve ever needed to: - Send a reminder email later - Trigger a future event across services - Build anything that waits to do stuff

If you’re curious or wanna try it out, I’d be hyped to share access — just drop a comment or DM!
by AlienRobot | 2025-04-05 20:12:27+00:00
People are limited by their tools.

The author believes that plain text should encode bold, italic, etc., because that's all they had exposure to. Were the text written today, they would claim emojis belong in unicode as well.

Most social media don't support it, but on Tumblr, for example, you can specify the color of the text and even choose a different font. I think there was some other social media that allowed you to have animated effects on the text as well, but I forgot the name.
by ossopite | 2025-04-05 20:12:46+00:00
ROT13

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V guvax guvf ubyqf bayl vs s naq t ner cher (be znlor whfg vs t vf cher?). fb znlor vs lbh vtaber hafnsr bcrengvbaf va unfxryy vg'f gehr? vg'f pregnvayl abg gehr va s#/bpnzy. vzntvar gung s vf sha _ -> 0 naq t vf sha _ -> arkg_vag_sebz_zhgnoyr_pbhagre (). gura sznc frg (t . s) qbrfa'g punatr gur fvmr bs gur frg juvyr sznc (sznc frg s) t cebqhprf n fvatyrgba frg.
by halffullbrain | 2025-04-05 20:13:11+00:00
The Eclipse Compiler for Java [1] is a notable exception, architected around incremental compilation, an API for “live” AST manipulation, and a layered non-batch approach to when to invoke various analysis steps.

The LSP for Java [2] used in eg. VSCode’s Java plugins, builds on this API.

But, no, I haven’t seen a generalized approach to this architecture discussed in literature.

1: https://github.com/eclipse-jdt/eclipse.jdt.core 2: https://github.com/eclipse-jdtls/eclipse.jdt.ls
by vessenes | 2025-04-05 20:13:12+00:00
I’m excited to try these models out, especially for some coding tasks, but I will say my first two engagements with them (at the meta.ai web interface) were not spectacular. Image generation is wayyy behind the current 4o. I also ask for a Hemingway essay relating RFK Jr’s bear carcass episode. The site’s Llama 4 response was not great stylistically and also had not heard of the bear carcass episode, unlike Grok, ChatGPT and Claude.

I’m not sure what we’re getting at meta.ai in exchange for a free login, so I’ll keep poking. But I hope it’s better than this as we go. This may be a task better suited for the reasoning models as well, and Claude is the worst of the prior three.

Anyway here’s hoping Zuck has spent his billions wisely.

Edit: I’m pretty sure we’re seeing Scout right now, at least groqchat’s 4-scout seems really similar to meta.ai. I can confidently say that Scout is not as good at writing as o1 pro, o3 mini, Claude, R1 or grok 3.
by hollerith | 2025-04-05 20:14:02+00:00
300 murders per year.

The FBI maintains murder statistics for most policing jurisdictions in the US. Many of them are under 2 per 100,000 per year: Sunnyvale, CA; Hercules, CA; Novato, CA, Brookline, MA; the Twin Cities. The rate in Beverly, MA, is 0.946.

Japan's rate is 0.4.
by grishka | 2025-04-05 20:14:16+00:00
You can already block 99% of ads on devices you own. I haven't seen an internet ad in ages. I forget that websites have them.

That said, I don't think it's appropriate to outlaw all advertising. It should still be allowed in places where you'd be open to it anyway: in stores and other places where you spend money anyway, and in specialized publications that exist for people who intentionally want to be advertised to.

However, for when you're buying something, upselling (any questions by the seller that may result in you buying something you didn't intend to buy originally) should be illegal. It feels very insulting to me.
by liendolucas | 2025-04-05 20:14:36+00:00
> I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by...

Honestly, you couldn't have said that any better. I always think exactly about that. Where we are today, the technology that we have at our disposal, and yet this whole machinery working 24hs non-stop to put these consumption ideas on our heads, cheap propaganda and useless stuff to manipulate us like puppets. Really disgusting.
by paxys | 2025-04-05 20:15:01+00:00
How does OpenAI make money from AI? The vast majority of the planet isn't paying them $20/month, and it is likely that they will never recover training and inference costs just from subscription fees. Frying GPUs to generate Ghibli images is getting them a negligible amount of added revenue.

Now think of Meta and their suite of products which already generate $160B+/yr from advertising. Every extra minute they can get a user to spend on Facebook or Instagram, this number goes up. Think about how much money Meta will make if the next viral AI moment happens in their products.

TL;DR: AI -> engagement -> ads -> revenue.
by gcp123 | 2025-04-05 20:15:16+00:00
I can’t stop thinking about this article. I spent a long time in ad tech before switching to broader systems engineering. The author captures something I've struggled to articulate to friends and family about why I left the industry.

The part that really struck me was framing advertising and propaganda as essentially the same mechanism - just with different masters. Having built targeting systems myself, this rings painfully true. The mechanical difference between getting someone to buy sneakers versus vote for a candidate is surprisingly small.

What's frustrating is how the tech community keeps treating the symptoms while ignoring the disease. We debate content moderation policies and algorithmic transparency, but rarely question the underlying attention marketplace that makes manipulation profitable in the first place.

The uncomfortable truth: most of us in tech understand that today's advertising systems are fundamentally parasitic. We've built something that converts human attention into money with increasingly terrifying efficiency, but we're all trapped in a prisoner's dilemma where nobody can unilaterally disarm.

Try this thought experiment from the article - imagine a world without advertising. Products would still exist. Commerce would still happen. Information would still flow. We'd just be freed from the increasingly sophisticated machinery designed to override our decision-making.

Is this proposal radical? Absolutely. But sometimes the Overton window needs a sledgehammer.

P.S. If you are curious about the relationship between Sigmund Freud, propaganda, and the origins of the ad industry, check out the documentary “Century of the Self”.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-05 20:16:16+00:00
I wish I worked a simple manual labor job like a supermarket. It's just hard to make a living wage, savings, retire, pay for unexpected high costs for transportation or health care, and I wouldn't be able to travel. Otherwise it would be great. Stacking boxes all day? Helping customers with their bags? Doing inventory? Checking people out at the register? A simple job where I don't have to sit in a chair, can plan, organize, do rote manual tasks, socialize, and help people? Sign me up. Heck I might even do it part time when I retire.
by oftenwrong | 2025-04-05 20:16:42+00:00
I've had the misfortune of working on "enterprise" software where avoidance of "hard-coding" went so far that the core system did almost nothing other than exist as a way to plug in mutable functionality. All in the name of not having to re-build, or to re-deploy, and being able to tell the customer that no code changes would be required, even though the "configuration" was practically code, and required many of the things that code might require, like qualified configuration developers, test suites, and detailed deployment plans. Truly madness. In the era of software as a service via internet, software is more "soft" than it has ever been. You can change it and deploy it to production any time you please.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-04-05 20:17:25+00:00
Simply make it illegal to base the choice of what ad to show on any data derived from the person accessing the content. The same content accessed by different people from different locations should have the same ad probability distribution. You can still do old-school targeting by associating static content with certain types of ad a priori, as long as the shown content is independent of the user and not generated from any user data.
by nickysielicki | 2025-04-05 20:18:31+00:00
It scales depending on the dataset you want exposure on and the compute you have available, so any specific time box is kind of meaningless if you don’t know the rest of the inputs that went into it. The llama 3 paper went into a lot of this and how these decisions were made (see section 3 and onward): https://ai.meta.com/research/publications/the-llama-3-herd-o...

tl;dr: llama 3 was 54 days, but it’s more complicated than that.
by fpgaminer | 2025-04-05 20:19:12+00:00
The benchmarks are awful. No disrespect to the people who worked to make them, nothing is easy. But I suggest going through them sometime. For example, I'm currently combing through the MMMU, MMMU-Pro, and MMStar datasets to build a better multimodal benchmark, and so far only about 70% of the questions have passed the sniff test. The other 30% make no sense, lead the question, or are too ambiguous. Of the 70%, I have to make minor edits to about a third of them.

Another example of how the benchmarks fail (specifically for vision, since I have less experience with the pure-text benchmarks): Almost all of the questions fall into either having the VLM read a chart/diagram/table and answer some question about it, or identify some basic property of an image. The former just tests the vision component's ability to do OCR, and then the LLM's intelligence. The latter are things like "Is this an oil painting or digital art?" and "Is the sheep in front of or behind the car" when the image is a clean shot of a sheep and a car. Absolutely nothing that tests a more deep and thorough understanding of the content of the images, nuances, or require the VLM to think intelligently about the visual content.

Also, due to the nature of benchmarks, it can be quite difficult to test how the models perform "in the wild." You can't really have free-form answers on benchmarks, so they tend to be highly constrained opting for either multiple choice quizzes or using various hacks to test if the LLM's answer lines up with ground truth. Multiple choice is significantly easier in general, raising the base pass rate. Also the distractors tend to be quite poorly chosen. Rather than representing traps or common mistakes, they are mostly chosen randomly and are thus often easy to weed out.

So there's really only a weak correlation between either of those metrics and real world performance.
by nurettin | 2025-04-05 20:19:19+00:00
I'm going to wear the tinfoil hat: a firm is able to produce a sought-after behavior a few months later and throws people off. Is it more likely that the firm (worth billions at this point) is engineering these solutions into the model, or is it because of emergent neural network architectural magic?

I'm not saying that they are being bad actors, just saying this is more probable in my mind than an LLM breakthrough.
by cosmos0072 | 2025-04-05 20:19:47+00:00
Compiling an expression to a tree of closures, and a list of statements to a slice of closures, is exactly how I optimized [gomacro](https://github.com/cosmos72/gomacro) my Go interpreter written in go.

There are more tricks available there, as for example unrolling the loop that calls the list of closures, and having a `nop` closure that is executed when there's nothing to run but execution is not yet at the end of the the unrolled loop.
by piokoch | 2025-04-05 20:20:00+00:00
Voyagers are the greatest technical achievement of human kind. Keeping in the space a piece of hardware run by a computer with power of today's car keys, in the hostile environment, outside freaking solar system is something that is the most amazing thing we have witnessed so far.

Kudos to all the people who made it happen and kept going this project, we owe them, as a humanity, really a lot.

Voyagers will keep flying across Milky Way, maybe they will last longer the the Earth itself, as the witnesses of our civilization.
by ok123456 | 2025-04-05 20:20:06+00:00
> Y’all have gotta give up the TikTok bullshit and read some books.

I have a book for you that predates the "TikTok bullshit." It's called "The Fateful Triangle" by Noam Chomsky. He portrays internal Isreali thought and political currents in the early '80s, which are more or less unchanged 40+ years later. In particular, the dichotomy between the "doves" of the left who want an apartheid state with a pacified Palestinian population to live in townships whose purpose is to provide cheap labor, and the "hawks" who outright called for the Lebensraum policies that we're seeing today in the illegally occupied territories of the, as Menachem Begin called them, "beasts walking on two legs," remains unchanged.

As for Medicare for All, I don't know of anyone who has had a positive experience using the American for-profit, multi-payer healthcare system. What is the alternative bumper sticker for keeping the status quo? "I <3 Getting my claims denied" or maybe "I DON'T want to shoot the CEO"?
by johnea | 2025-04-05 20:20:55+00:00
To jump onto the "comment having nothing to do with the article" pile:

1) I wonder how many of those chargers are tesla? (not the elon windmill tilting argument, but) These chargers are not compatible with many EVs. In my opinion, the well integrated charging network is the single biggest tesla technical advantage, but not much help to many other types of cars.

2) Also, the need to "run the app" for each specific charger vendor, and often a requirement to keep a cash balance on that app account, is a major impediment to easy "public" charger usage. I've never _ever_ seen a gas station that required me to "be a member" to pump gas 8-/ California, at least, should outlaw this restriction. A person should be able to plug in the CC and charge.

3) WRT charger compatibility with a car: I also don't see why "public" chargers don't offer a standard 240v outlet. Then any car's portable charger brick could be plugged in regardless of fast charge compatibility with that charger. This wouldn't provide fast charging, but it would allow pretty much any car to be plugged into pretty much any charger.

4) Almost this entire comments page is dedicated to the "road trip" scenario. My guess would be that for most people this amounts to less than 1% of total miles driven in any given year. For appt dwellers, access to "public" charging is a daily requirement, but for anyone living in a house, it's not. I've owned my used EV for ~9 months, and I've never charged anywhere except my house. I have a gas car I use for long trips, which I hope to replace with a plug-in hybrid eventually. And quite frankly, an EV with a 300+ mile range is enough for a typical vacationer to drive for a full day, and then stay in a charging friendly location.

The idea that people leave their house and need to drive 500 miles, for their commute, is a super minuscule portion of the population. Fixating on that produces invalid conclusions.
by Nextgrid | 2025-04-05 20:21:37+00:00
I find it curious that so many separate components are used (that presumably aren't cheap, as they target a low-volume, pretty niche industry).

It seems to me that most of these can be replaced by any computer with an analog audio output (and since this is Jeff Geerling we're talking about, it can be a Raspberry PI)?

Maybe put two and use the "silence detector" box to automatically switch between them in case one goes down?

In fact, I wonder if a custom board can be designed with 2 separate stages (each powered by a compute module and DAC) and some circuitry to do the silence detection and switching, with some GPIO lines going back to each to inform them of which one is being the chosen one for the final audio output. This would effectively condense this whole thing into a single box. But not being a broadcast engineer, I'm just talking out of my ass here, maybe there's a good reason they're doing things they way they do.
by peterfirefly | 2025-04-05 20:22:32+00:00
One of the tricks was that exceptions/traps/interrupts were handled in a neat way.

The microcode looked at the first instruction of the handler. If it was an old instruction, a backwards compatible stack frame was created. If it was a new instruction, a new-style stack frame was created.

Data General published a couple of papers about their new 32-bit architecture.