MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xEF | 2025-04-11 08:20:51+00:00
Not OP, but if you are asking for your own reference or projects, I've found this "prompt flow" to be very effective:

https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/

The reasoning models seem to respond quite well to the "ask me one question at a time, building on my previous answer" for the sake of coming up with a solid blueprint for the project, then build from there. I used this method to make a nice little inventory/rma tracker for my job using Rails 8, and it got me MVP in a matter of hours, with most delays being just me refining the code on my own since some of it was a bit clunky. I used o3 mini to generate the initial prompts, then fed those to Claude.

The hallucinations/forgetfulness was relatively minor, but if I did not have prior Ruby/JS knowledge, I doubt I would have caught some of the mistakes, so as much as I was impressed by the method outlined in the blog post, I am not at all saying that someone with no knowledge of the language(s) they wish to use is going to create a great piece of software with it. You still have to pay attention and course correct, which requires a working understanding of the dev process.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-11 08:21:06+00:00
It's the other way around - it's racist if you're a US American, because in USA every problem is somehow ultimately called or blamed on racism.

Elsewhere in the world, we'd all it xenophobia, or Indophobia if one has something against Indian people specifically.

Though in this case, it's driven primarily by economic stereotypes, coming from the country becoming a cheap services outsourcing destination for the West, so there should be a better term coined for it. The anti-Indian sentiment in IT seems to be the services equivalent of the common "Made in China = cheap crap" belief, and because it applies to services and not products, it turns into discriminating people.
by n4r9 | 2025-04-11 08:21:41+00:00
Yeah true, in France the SNCF [0] both maintains and operates the railways. In most other EU countries (and the UK) the railway infrastructure is maintained and developed by a state-owned organisation and operated by a mixture of state-owned and private operators. In fact there are quite strict EU rules about tendering out railway services, which is one of the few things I dislike about it.

Note that France has had true high-speed rail (>200kph) since the 80s, and the newer lines allow speeds exceeding 320kph. Denmark does not have any rail exceeding 200kph. The Netherlands has had high-speed rail since 2009, though I'm not sure if it's used by private operators.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF
by casebash | 2025-04-11 08:22:39+00:00
Authors of original paper: Samuel G. B. Johnson, Amir-Hossein Karimi, Yoshua Bengio, Nick Chater, Tobias Gerstenberg, Kate Larson, Sydney Levine, Melanie Mitchell, Iyad Rahwan, Bernhard Schölkopf, Igor Grossmann
by Mawr | 2025-04-11 08:24:01+00:00
The Python version is straightforward to read and understand to a programmer of any language. The Ruby version is an idiosyncratic symbol soup.

If I were tasked to modify the Python version to say, handle the case where `item` is an int, it would be immediately obvious to me that all I need to do is modify the `match` statement with `case int() as i:`, I don't even need to know Python to figure that out. On the other hand, modifying the Ruby version seems to require intimate knowledge of its syntax.
by MrBuddyCasino | 2025-04-11 08:25:44+00:00
That was a well written essay with a non-sequitur AI Safety thing tacked to the end. His real world examples were concrete, and the reason to stop escalating easy to understand ("don't flood the neighbourhood by building a real dam").

The AI angle is not only even hypothetical: there is no attempt to describe or reason about a concrete "x leading to y", just "see, the same principle probably extrapolates".

There is no argument there that is sounder than "the high velocities of steam locomotives might kill you" that people made 200 years ago.
by notachatbot123 | 2025-04-11 08:25:59+00:00
> Or helping a blind person go hiking, helping avoid tree roots and describing the beautiful scenes they’re in.

"If only you could see, then you could appreciate the beauty of the scenery! Let me describe what are missing out on. I hope your sub-standard experience, as rated by sighted people, is sufficiently adequate to you. May I list more short-comings of your existence in comparison to able people?"
by palata | 2025-04-11 08:26:19+00:00
> What alternatives have you used which made you feel so enlightened?

I didn't mean to seem like I feel so enlightened.

My experience is that when not using systemd, I regularly get screwed by what I would call the "imperialist culture" of systemd, for lack of better words: it doesn't feel like you can relatively easily extract subcomponents of systemd and use it standalone. And more and more projects depend on a particular subcomponent of systemd, meaning that they require systemd.

So it's not so much that I believe systemd is technically worse than the alternatives. It's more the philosophy that I don't like.
by yapyap | 2025-04-11 08:26:34+00:00
> However if we are counting on AI researchers to take the advice and slow down then I wouldn't hold my breath waiting. The author indicated they stepped away from a high paying finance job for moral reasons, which is admirable. But wallstreet continues on and does not lack for people willing to play the "make as much money as you can" game.

I doubt OP is counting on it, it is moreso expressing what an optimal world would look like so people can work towards it if they would feel like it or just to put the idea out there.
by blitzar | 2025-04-11 08:28:42+00:00
> Data -> TfL live tube data

> *You will regret using this data. You will regret using this API.*

> It serves data from individual arrivals boards, which all spell stations differently

> It has a load-balancer that regularly returns data that is older than the data returned in the previous request.

Won't someone think of the Ai overlords who will take care of all this for us in the future. A bit of consistency goes a long way.
by Propelloni | 2025-04-11 08:30:52+00:00
Fun part is, the USA and some other nations of 1947 realized that free markets needed some kind of "universal arbiter" to curb such shenanigans and brought the World Trade Organization (originally GATT, WTO since 1995, not affiliated with the UN) on the way. Most of you probably heard of it.

Virtually all the world's nations are voluntary members. Sure, many criticize it for being a tool of the USA and other western nations to browbeat other nations into shape (e.g. China). There is merit to this claim, but obviously it is not so clear-cut. However, it can't be denied that the WTO has been a tremendously useful tool for the USA and its allies to shape world trade. Somehow the 45th president of the USA thought the USA would get the short end of the stick here and started to obstruct WTO proceedings in 2018. The WTO has lost a lot of its influence since then, removing a powerful tool from the USA's arsenal.

Make of it what you want.
by anon-3988 | 2025-04-11 08:31:53+00:00
Except you don't treat them that way. You feel sorry about your old self. You feel sorry for other people, even though you cannot prove that they even "exist". You care about future you even though it doesn't exist.

Unless you don't.

I agree with your conclusion that because that is the reality of life, the only time worth spending is right now.
by cedws | 2025-04-11 08:32:56+00:00
We made heavy use of systemd and its related components on a fleet of a few thousand edge devices and it worked great for us. Occasionally, we would run into bugs or confusing behaviour and have to dig through GitHub issues, but that was far outweighed by the problems it took care of for us.

systemd does a lot more than just init. You can preach about whatever alternative inits all you like, but they don't do even 10% of what systemd does.
by dkersten | 2025-04-11 08:33:13+00:00
You’re absolutely right. But my point still stands, too, which is that despite being irreversibly dependent on supply chains, doesn’t mean we are redundant. We still need people at all levels of the supply chain.

Maybe it’s fewer people, yes, but it’ll take quite a leap forward in AI ability to replace all the specialists we will continue to require, especially as the less-able AI makes messes that need to be cleaned up.
by nearbuy | 2025-04-11 08:33:25+00:00
No one here claimed the AI models made something truly new.

The commenter flessner asserted it couldn't, despite having no way to demonstrate it. They are passing off faith as fact.

Assuming someone did want to show AI models can make new stuff...

> How could you possibly know that? Could you prove that an image wasn't copying from images in its training data?

This isn't even that hard. You just need to know what images are your training data when you train your model. A researcher with a small grant could do this.
by rcxdude | 2025-04-11 08:35:03+00:00
The scan as you shop thing seems to be pretty heavily audited, which really removes the point of doing it, since it just slowed things down. I think when I tried it I put up with it for about 4 out of the first 6 shops winding up slower than just going through the self-checkout or a regular one because of the extra faff.
by af78 | 2025-04-11 08:36:19+00:00
Biden's Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was definitely viewed as protectionist. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_Reduction_Act#Relati...:

> ... some were concerned about the law's provisions favoring American industry. ... the chairman of the 2023 G20 meeting in India, called it "the most protectionist act ever drafted in the world", asking American officials, "You believed in market forces and now you do this?" Other countries have begun to create their own similar laws. China requested WTO dispute consultations with the United States.

> 27 European Union finance ministers have expressed "serious concerns" about the financial incentives of the Inflation Reduction Act, and are considering challenging it. They have listed at least nine points in the legislation, which they say could be in breach of World Trade Organization rules. They were opposed to the subsidies for consumers to buy North American-assembled electric cars, as EU officials believe the subsidies discriminate against European carmakers. One EU official told CNBC that, "there is a political consensus (among the 27 ministers) that this plan threatens the European industry" and its supply of raw materials. In February 2023, the European Commission announced it would propose the "Net Zero Industrial Act", similar to the IRA, in turn putting pressure on the United Kingdom and South Korea.
by thawawaycold | 2025-04-11 08:36:27+00:00
Lol, i hadn't even checked the status (or existence, even) of ST's US factories. I've just known the company for a good amount of years having worked with their products for several projects and thus already knew that the biggest portion of their factories and offices is spread across France and Italy (whence their venture originally started from), so to present it as a Swiss company just underlined a very poor knowledge of the topic IMHO
by jpc0 | 2025-04-11 08:37:29+00:00
> Preferably, you should use a single <h1> per page—this is the top level heading, and all others sit below this in the hierarchy

From the MDN docs on headings and paragraphs [0].

Yet this article is unclearly stating that it isn't preferred but required seeing as the places it semantically makes sense to use multiple H1 tags in a page will now log warnings to developers ( article, aside, nav etc .. )

The article mentions confusion yet the defacto documentation on the web encourages the confusion by not being more specific...

0. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn_web_developme...
by InDubioProRubio | 2025-04-11 08:38:14+00:00
I still wonder when we will see the emergence of evolutionary adapted life to this. Bacteria able to diggest plastic. Mikrobial lifeforms using plastic as a sort of shield from detection ("think of a dissease") using mayflylarva like structures made of microplastics to shield from detection by white blood cells. I also curious wether misfiring defense detection due to plastic residue is responsible for allergic reaction disease on the rise in recent years. It would start where the plastic arrives- in the colon.
by TheDong | 2025-04-11 08:38:39+00:00
My read for that was "a human could, reasonably, count one-by-one the number of engineers if they were all arrayed in front of them", while a human can't reasonable count "one, two, three" and get to a million.

I would say that a number humans can reasonably count to is about ~15,000, maybe 25k, assuming you're limited to about 15 hours of counting. Any number over about 100k is simply a number humans are incapable of counting up to from one.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-11 08:38:50+00:00
My preference for local TLDs is just .x because it takes less time to enter on mobile devices. An example is www.x or video.x.

Yes, it does require a cert for TLS and that cert will not be trusted by default. I have found that with OpenSSL and a proper script you can spin up a cert chain on the fly and you can make these certs trusted in both Windows and Linux with an additional script. A script cannot make for trusted certs in Safari on OSX though.

I figured all this out in a prior personal app. In my current web server app I just don’t bother with trust. I create the certs and just let the browser display its page about high risk with the accept the consequences button. It’s a one time choice.
by palata | 2025-04-11 08:39:00+00:00
> systemd does a lot more than just init. You can preach about whatever alternative inits all you like, but they don't do even 10% of what systemd does.

I didn't mean to preach about alternative inits.

My personal criticism of systemd is that it tries to take over everything, limiting the choice.

I want to have a choice, that's all. And systemd doesn't do anything to help there.
by motoxpro | 2025-04-11 08:39:05+00:00
I have no idea if this will be as big as an iPhone, but the early iPhone apps and development followed a similar trajectory. Viral flashlight apps and others that then got integrated into the OS, similar to API wrappers and viral photo makers of today getting swallowed up by the next model update.

In terms of what problems it solves, I would imagine that will be up to the developers/companies to come up with the Uber/Airbnb/Tiktok, that the iPhone enabled, that AI enables. Same as any platform.
by n_ary | 2025-04-11 08:39:54+00:00
Here is a different take. The GenAI is just another revenue stream for big players with scale or resources.

At work, I was tasked with building some magical agentic stuff, working on it for a while, I realized that, HN shouts, oAI/xAI/Google/Amazon/Anthropic have no moats, there are oss models available. The actual fact is, the moat is the access to scale of resources(GPUs, power infra, network), which is very difficult to build for random joe's startup.

You must always rent a model access from one of these players(even OpenRouter delegates), and that is the exact moat.

GenAI solves problems of having more generalized solutions, so instead of a super customized secret sauce solutions for your product as competitive edge, you now build magic prompts for GenAI to take the same input and hopefully with enough GenAI ingesting the same data and coming to consensus, you get a reasonably useful output that previously your custom solution was capable of. Since you no longer have a custom solution, you now pay off the GenAI operators(the real moat of GenAI for all operators hosting it). In the process,you also sacrifice your competitive edge of that super secret IP and relying heavily on GenAI prompting correctly and numerous verification in each step with enough automation, which of course again costs money.

GenAI is the new hammer of visionary leadership and executives (a hefty amount of money has been burned to campaign and PR to convince these people) to use it everywhere, so the operators can ensure that they make some profit from the amount of money they sank on it. If you super impose the "AI" of current year to "Apps" in 201x era, where everything must have an "app", you'll suddenly realize that we've seen the same before and of course most apps need cloud... and as clouds have costs, apps became more subscription model instead of previous 200x era buy once, use forever.
by pjc50 | 2025-04-11 08:40:19+00:00
(paywalled, commenting on above the fold section)

> There are thus no European Rasputins pumping untold millions into political campaigns, getting pride of place at leaders’ inaugurations or their own new-minted government departments to run

I think this is underselling the very real risks of European-style fascism, driven by the same social media and other forces, just because it doesn't exactly resemble Musk. But it does seem like the crisis is now compelling the cozy ""centre"" to actually do something, like re-armament and actually prosecuting politicians for their financial fraud. Not just Le Pen but previously things like Wirecard.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-04-11 08:40:30+00:00
Whether you care about number of users or not, there's value in considering whether what you're doing is actually advancing the cause of Free Software or not.

GCC today has a very interesting license term, the GCC Runtime Library Exception, that makes the use of runtime libraries like libgcc free if-and-only-if you use an entirely Free Software toolchain to compile your code with; otherwise, you're subject to the terms of the GPL on libgcc and similar. That is a sensible pragmatic term, and if they'd come up with that term many years ago, they could have shipped libgccjit and other ways to plug into GCC years ago, and the programming language renaissance that arose due to LLVM might have been built atop GCC instead.

That would have been a net win for user freedoms. Instead, because they were so afraid of someone using an intermediate representation to work around GCC's license, and didn't do anything to solve that problem, LLVM is now the primary infrastructure people build new languages around, and GCC lost a huge amount of its relevance, and people now have less software freedom as a result.
by brickfaced | 2025-04-11 08:40:38+00:00
Land of the free, where police raid your home at dawn over mean tweets:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...

https://archive.ph/hETjp

Not a one-off, either:

https://nypost.com/2025/02/21/world-news/germans-cant-insult...
by pjmlp | 2025-04-11 08:40:54+00:00
Given how much any kind of peripheral used to cost in the 8 bit home computer days I imagine how much that hurted.

All my stuff on those days were equally Christmas or birthdays gifts, or having to save up during months.

My first Assemblers were a mix of hand translating opcodes into DATA code blocks, and then I upgraded to hexdump editors, never managed to acquire a proper 8 bit Assembler, and during the first year of PC, MS-DOS debug was the only way.

My first Assembler was also A86/D86 shipped on a 5 inch floppy in a book I think from Sybex, no longer certain.
by bayindirh | 2025-04-11 08:41:18+00:00
> But that's not my vision of how open source should work.

Exactly. I expect a modular fork of systemd when people get annoyed enough. I still don't understand why people treat systemd as the second coming of the Christ.

Disclosure: I'm managing large number of servers for the last 20 years. Don't tell me that init scripts were bad. I won't buy it. Don't tell me systemd is fast, again, I won't buy it.
by ben_w | 2025-04-11 08:41:20+00:00
> It's a simple formula based on balance of trade.

"Simple" is why it put 10% on an island with no humans and no manmade structures separately to the country which owns that island, and also tariffed another island that's technically British but which the British leased to the US military.

"Simple" isn't what you want to decide a complex trade policy for a complex economy.

> That's an absurdly biased point of view.

Hello, I'm in one of those foreign allies. We are, in fact, laughing at USA for shooting itself in the foot like this. On the other hand, the bit where Trump is also refusing to rule out military force to annex some of us? We take that seriously.

> Not much. They didn't actually "trust" us before. I'm not sure how you'd measure that anyways.

We used to hold the US in high regard. "Leaders of the free world" etc.

But also, relatively stable economic position, stable currency, reliable government that repaid debts, etc.

Even though Trump 1 happened, we knew it would come to an end, and we thought you would finally be over it — especially given how it ended.

Now, we don't. And many of us will be looking to China as a more reliable (for us) trading partner.
by Hojojo | 2025-04-11 08:41:20+00:00
I've experimented with making it more explicit in one project I'm working on where 99% of it is written by AI, but the chat logs from Roo Code are way too verbose. Ideally, I could export a version of the chat with my prompts and metadata about which lines were changed, then I could commit that with the rest of the changes. I have every chat associated with changes made solely with AI in a chat folder named similarly to the commit, but the chats themselves are just impossible to read, so I haven't committed any of them.
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-11 08:41:46+00:00
Systemd has more in common with launchd than SMF to be fair. SMF very much is a product of another time. Completely fine when we were dealing with workstations whose configuration was mostly static and not expected to change but very much unfit to the environment systemd operates nowadays.

Systemd uses a dependency graph by the way. There is little magic. Provided you have properly setup what depends on what, everything will boot just fine and it’s somehow resilient enough than even if you messed up somewhere there is a good chance it manages to bring everything up after some hiccups.
by snehk | 2025-04-11 08:42:15+00:00
> Yet to many Europeans the idea that free expression is under threat seems odd. Europeans can say almost anything they want, both in theory and in practice.

A journalist in Germany was just sentenced to seven months for posting a meme of a politician where she holds up a sign saying "I hate free speech".

https://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/nancy-faeser-afd-...
by TeMPOraL | 2025-04-11 08:42:38+00:00
I personally don't want to see "a whole new generation of startups". GenAI, LLMs in particular, are a powerful tool for the users precisely because they are general.

After all, what is the business of such startups of the "AI age"? It's using the AI models on the backend, where users can't reach, to sprinkle some magic onto features. But as a user, I don't want your product to use AI as a tool, I want your product to be a tool the AI uses. The former keeps power away from users, the latter gives it back to them.
by DrSiemer | 2025-04-11 08:42:42+00:00
So many articles and comments claim Ai will destroy critical thinking in our youths. Is there any evidence that this conviction that many people share is even remotely true?

To me it just seems like the same old knee-jerk luddite response people have to any powerful new technology that challenges that status quo since the dawn of time. The calculator did not erase math wizards, the television did not replace books and so on. It just made us better, faster, more productive.

Sometimes there is an adjustment period (we still haven't figured out how to deal with short dopamine hits from certain types of entertainment and social media), but things will balance themselves out eventually.

Some people may go full-on Wall-E, but I for one will never stop tinkering, and many of my friends won't either.

The things I could have done if I had had an LLM as a kid... I think I've learned more in the past two years than ever before.