MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fma | 2025-04-19 21:18:29+00:00
It's fine for tooling or weekend project. I did it on an internal tool. It's got so much functionality now though, that Cursor struggles. It was great when I had a blank project, needed x, y, z and it went off and did It's thing. The moment the project got bug and need modifications, it is better that I do it myself.

Also I am a backend engineer. I don't know what kind of code it's producing for my front end. I just hit accept all. But seeing how it does the backend code and having to prompt it to do something better (architectural, performance, code reuse) I have no doubt the front end of my pool is a pile of poop.

I fear that management will see these small quick gains and think it applies to everything.

I'm of the opinion now, that vibe coding is good if you are familiar with the code & stack and can ensure quality. You don't want to give it to a product owner and have them try to be an engineer (or have a backend dev do front end, vice versa).

Just my opinion.
by master_crab | 2025-04-19 21:18:54+00:00
He could have been copying General Kurt Hammerstein. Paraphrasing here:

There are four kinds of military officers: smart and lazy, smart and hard working, dumb and hardworking, dumb and lazy.

Keep the dumb and hardworking away from any high level position. They actively make things worse. Dumb and lazy are useful for simple tasks with oversight. Smart and hardworking are excellent for high level staff and analyst positions.

The Smart and Lazy should be saved for high level command. They expend only the energy necessary to get the job done and then focus on the next important task.
by jvanderbot | 2025-04-19 21:19:09+00:00
I tell my kids they can have letter cookies if they pick a word that starts with the letter, and can have 5 treats if they ask for 4 but know what "plus one means" or can have 4 if they recite "2 plus 2 equals ... ".

They're 3, so I don't expect that to scale, but I'm hoping it's normal reward-for-knowledge by the time we get report cards.
by aucisson_masque | 2025-04-19 21:19:25+00:00
It's interesting but so far there is no definitive proof it's happening.

People are jumping to conclusions a bit fast over here, yes technically it's possible but this kind of behavior would be relatively easy to spot because the app would have to make direct connections to the website it wants to scrap.

Your calculator app for instance connecting to CNN.com ...

iOS have app privacy report where one can check what connections are made by app, how often, last one, etc.

Android by Google doesn't have such a useful feature of course, but you can run third party firewall like pcapdroid, which I recommend highly.

Macos (little snitch).

Windows (fort firewall).

Not everyone run these app obviously, only the most nerdy like myself but we're also the kind of people who would report on app using our device to make, what is in fact, a zombie or bot network.

I'm not saying it's necessarily false but imo it remains a theory until proven otherwise.
by deltaknight | 2025-04-19 21:20:27+00:00
Yes correct, sorry forgot to reply to this chain. I've confirmed it works correctly on MacOS, Linux, and Windows under WSL (with the artefacts from the latest release). However, running directly under Windows has this issue where the terminal becomes unresponsive, and also only outputs a single line. I'm tracking the issue here: https://github.com/JustAman62/undercut-f1/issues/14 if anyone wants to know when Windows support is working.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-04-19 21:21:13+00:00
I think this erratic manner of trying to find the correct way is the issue. I am currently nearing my 2nd year at a company A in my industry, and while I did know they all kinda suck in their own special way, I honestly had no idea it was this bad until I had to try to make this craziness somehow work for us. Even if there are standards, I do not see people following them. Last year, the one girl, who did seem to try to follow some common sense approach, got fired for effectively using common sense against big boss wishes.

What I am saying it is a mess from beginning to end and I am honestly not sure if there is one factor that could solve it..
by _bin_ | 2025-04-19 21:21:15+00:00
I am saying precisely what I said: it is wrong to do. Not all that which is legal is moral, nor is all that which is illegal immoral. The state is an enforcer of the social contract and a monopolist of violence, not an arbiter of morality.

I believe people do plenty of immoral things but do not necessarily believe we ought to use that state violence to prevent or punish them. Adultery, for instance, is one of the more contemptible choices one can make, and yet goes unpunished by the state. Some jurisdictions don’t even consider it strongly in divorce proceedings.
by danenania | 2025-04-19 21:21:27+00:00
I built Plandex[1] to try to enable a more sustainable approach to vibe coding. It writes all of the model's changes to a cumulative version-controlled sandbox by default, which in my experience helps a lot to address many of the points raised in the article. While there are still categories of tasks I'd rather do myself than vibe code, the default-sandbox approach makes it feel a lot less risky to give something a shot.

On another note, a related but somewhat different technique that I think is still under-appreciated is "vibe debugging", i.e. repeatedly executing commands (builds, tests, typechecks, dependency installs, etc.) until they run successfully. This helps a lot with what imo are some of the most tedious tasks in software development—stuff like getting your webpack server to startup correctly, getting a big C project to compile for the first time, fixing random dependency installation errors, getting your CloudFormation template to deploy without errors, and so on. It's not so much that these tasks are 'difficult' really. They just require a lot of trial-and-error and have a slow feedback loop, which makes them naturally a good fit for AI.

I put a lot of focus on execution control in Plandex in order to make it helpful for these kinds of problems. It's built to be transactional—you can apply the changes from the sandbox, run pending commands, and then roll back all changes if the commands fail. You can do this repeatedly, even letting it continue automatically for some number of tries until the commands succeed (or you hit the tries limit). While there are some limitations to the terminal modality in terms of UX, I think this is an area where a CLI-based agent can really shine.

1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-04-19 21:21:39+00:00
“Philosophers are still grappling with the idea that life and death may not be the only states of being.”

Death isn’t a state of being. It is the absence of being. When something dies, it ceases to be. It loses its identity as the thing it was. That’s why, strictly speaking, when something dies, what we are left with is not a body, as only a living thing is or has a body, but the remains of what was once alive. So, in the case of rotifers, if they are alive, either they are hibernating or suspended, or reanimation really is the instantiation of a new rotifer. I am curious what kind of metaphysics these philosophers are leaning into, or why “living thing” entails the actual function of respiration, metabolism, etc. and not just the potential for these things, for example. A rock has no potential for these, but a desiccated rotifer does. (Modern philosophy has a problem dealing with potentiality, so this is not necessarily surprising.)

“At the time, fear of excommunication or condemnation by the Roman Catholic Church for publishing scientific observations that challenged Church doctrine impacted communication about new scientific findings.”

The perennial boogeyman of the Enlightenment. Publishing scientific findings did not get you excommunicated. Indeed, fundamental to Catholicism is the recognition that reason and faith cannot contradict. If a scientific finding could or would authentically contradict Catholic doctrine, then Catholicism would be undermined and there would be no meaning to excommunication. (Some will point to the punishment of Giordano Bruno, but he wasn’t charged for his scientific findings —— he was a crackpot —— but for his heretical theology. Others will bring up Galileo, but again, he wasn’t excommunicated and the whole affair concerned a decades-long conflict of a personal or political nature that Galileo himself enjoyed provoking and which ended with a cozy house arrest in his old age at a time when Protestants were burning witches in Northern Europe.) A tiresome cliche. Frankly, I’m not sure how rehydrated rotifers and tardigrades are supposed to threaten Catholic doctrine. Because someone used the word “resurrection”? So what? Sloppy thinking.
by pinewurst | 2025-04-19 21:23:20+00:00
Note you have to use their crappy gateways (modem/router/AP) or else. In theory you can use them in bridge mode thus bypassing them having an active AP in your house, etc, but the reality is a bit harder (not getting promised performance, stealth returns to router mode). And if you think you're avoiding those awful yearly calls, there's even more pressure now to switch to them for cellular service, joy.
by ben_w | 2025-04-19 21:23:26+00:00
If that was true when you were an infant, you're part of an extreme minority.

You would not have survived more than a few weeks past birth in the absence of modern medical interventions — well, that part at least was true for most of us — but specifically an inability to process milk as an infant is very rare, precisely because "mammary" is what puts the "mam" in "mammal".
by alephnerd | 2025-04-19 21:24:05+00:00
> if Canada did not intentionally cultivate Trump admin. insiders, does that excuse Trump being monstrous to them

Absolutely not. The Trump admin is treating some of our closest allies horribly. That said, there was no reason not to prepare and cultivate relations in case a second Trump admin was formed.

> American Right's virulent hatred for Indians, who they see as parasitic, simply for coming to work in the US on H1Bs

Visas don't matter for the Indian right either (the National Conservative movement). It sucks horribly for the Indian diaspora, but they can't vote in Indian elections so they don't matter to Indian policymakers.

To understand how Trump or Orban or Modi administrations work and think, we need to deep dive into their own ideology (and lack of ideology). Understanding the Stephen Millers, George Birnbaums, and Amit Shahs is critical to understanding the administrations they manage.
by yellowapple | 2025-04-19 21:24:43+00:00
Probably a good time as any to replace it with something purpose-built anyway. A Raspberry Pi with a directional microphone and a custom app feeding said microphone data to a service like AudD or ACRCloud could readily do the trick without any of Android's extra baggage - though I do wonder how effective those services would be at detecting songs amid a bunch of background noise like Bop Spotter does via Shazam.
by badmonster | 2025-04-19 21:25:32+00:00
Hi! Thanks for sharing this amazing work. I’m curious about the scalability and performance of PiLiDAR when deployed on large-scale outdoor datasets. Have you benchmarked it on datasets like SemanticKITTI or nuScenes? If so, could you share any insights on runtime, memory usage, and how well it generalizes beyond the indoor scenes used in your paper?
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-19 21:25:41+00:00
The electrical example is particularly interesting because it's generally legal to DIY things on a house that you simultaneously own and live in. Many (not sure if all) US states even have laws preventing insurance from forbidding such (although they can generally deny coverage after the fact if the incident can be shown to stem from your DIY work).

There also exist mixed zoning areas where you can run a business that hosts customers on site out of your house.

Presumably the big differences are incentives and scale. Scale wise, more building occupants justifies more regulation. In terms of incentives, there's probably less inclination to cut corners and be reckless with a structure that your entire family lives in.

I think I'm going to blame zoning on this one long before I take issue with electrician apprenticeships.
by contravariant | 2025-04-19 21:25:55+00:00
That's a gross oversimplification. Virilisation is a complex process with many factors.

If you're still human if you're born without legs then clearly neither genetic or developmental traits determine someone's humanity.

So at what point do we call someone a woman born without a uterus? When a 'normal' pregnancy would have resulted in them having a uterus? When different genetics would have resulted in them having a uterus? Or when she herself complains that she lacks a uterus?
by SCdF | 2025-04-19 21:28:43+00:00
> The first kind of quality is the only kind that matters in the end.

Yes. But the first kind of quality is enabled with the second kind.

Until we live in a faultless closed loop[1], where with AI "the entire application can be rewritten just as easily as making a small change." you still need the second kind.

[1] and it's debatable if we ever will
by simonw | 2025-04-19 21:29:20+00:00
I wrote about this last month: "Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding" - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/

Vibe coding is when you don't review the code at all. If you're using LLMs to help you write code but you're actually reviewing what they produce (and iterating on it) that's not vibe coding any more.

This battle is almost certainly lost already, but dammit I'm gonna keep fighting anyway!

Salty version: https://bsky.app/profile/simonwillison.net/post/3ll2rtxeucs2...

> Feels like I'm losing the battle on this one, I keep seeing people use "vibe coding" to mean any time an LLM is used to write code

> I'm particularly frustrated because for a few glorious moments we had the chance at having ONE piece of AI-related terminology with a clear, widely accepted definition!

> But it turns out people couldn't be trusted to read all the way to the end of Andrej's tweet, so now we are back to yet another term where different people assume it means different things

I found out this anti-pattern where a newly coined term loses its definition as it spreads more widely is called "semantic diffusion": https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/23/semantic-diffusion/
by csdvrx | 2025-04-19 21:29:51+00:00
> run ZFS scrub (or equivalent) every 6 months

zfs in mirror mode offers redundancy at the block level but scrub requires plugging the device

> All error correction has a limit. If too many errors build up, it becomes unrecoverable errors

There are software solutions. You can specify the redundancy you want.

For long term storage, if using a single media that you can't plug and scrub, I recommend par2 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive?useskin=vector) over NTFS: there are many NTFS file recovery tools, and it shouldn't be too hard to roll your own solution to use the redundancy when a given sector can't be read
by otherme123 | 2025-04-19 21:29:57+00:00
>It never makes sense to use tariffs for economic reasons. It just does not work.

This week two USA companies from which I bought some products from Europe sent me an email explaininig how they have to rise their prices due to tariffs, as they need to import from China for now.

Guess who will be faster: these companies finding an alternative supplier in the US that match China quality-price, or I finding an alternative supplier from China? They just admited that they are buying from China anyways.
by LWIRVoltage | 2025-04-19 21:31:57+00:00
A Veracrypt style hidden OS profile that is forensically invisible would be a better option - This would allow one to enter a password and give another "profile" or OS- that unlike current alternate profile stuff- would be solid against Cellebrite and GreyKey snooping into the device, and it'd be impossible to tell there was a hidden user/etc on it
by ycombinatrix | 2025-04-19 21:32:01+00:00
>The great advantage of crontab entries in a modern environment that supports /etc/cron.d is that they're much simpler to deploy and use.

I have found the opposite to be true on NixOS e.g. I set up a systemd timer to update ddns every 15 minutes but only to run when the network interface is up.
by chfritz | 2025-04-19 21:32:09+00:00
As I describe before here https://www.linkedin.com/advice/0/heres-how-you-can-stay-ahe..., many roboticists overlook the need for JavaScript in their skill set and tech stack. This is because of the evolution of robotics projects and companies: first you build a prototype and only then do you deploy and scale your fleet. The first part is hard and doesn't require any JS. But the second part is even harder and requires a ton of JS, because without web-tooling you won't be able to operate efficiently. This offers a great opportunity for roboticists to distinguish themselves from others be mastering JS for both the backend (rosnodejs, rclnodejs) and the front-end (React, Transitive Robotics). This sets you apart from both "regular" roboticists and from "pure" web developers.

What I'm trying to say: robotics is a very broad field and your current full-stack skills are needed just as well. And while working on those aspects of the robotics stack you can learn about the rest if you want. But you don't even have to to progress in your career in the robotics industry.

If you want to work on something specific, you can try to build a capability ("full-stack app") on Transitive, the open-source full-stack framework for robotics we've built that works with any robots, esp. ROS ones: https://github.com/transitiverobotics/transitive. Oh and of course learn ROS along the way.
by toasterlovin | 2025-04-19 21:32:12+00:00
FWIW, the most egregious issues you’ve mentioned about your upbringing are physical and mental abuse and there are already mechanisms for the state to intervene in those cases and nobody in this thread is arguing against those. Now it so happens that your abusers also limited your access to information, but it’s not actually clear there’s anything wrong with that, which is why we’re arguing about it, but it’s certainly the case that the fact that you were physically and mentally abused as a kid is orthogonal to whether or not the state should intervene in matters of mere access to information.
by Retric | 2025-04-19 21:32:42+00:00
Human brains aren’t limited to the standard human body plan. People born with an extra finger have no issues operating that finger just as well as people with the normal complement of fingers. Animal experiments have pushed this quite far.

If your AI has an issue because the robot has a different body plan, then no it’s not AGI. That doesn’t mean it needs to be able to watch every camera in a city at the same time, but you can use multiple AGI’s.
by ben_w | 2025-04-19 21:33:13+00:00
I was born as a baby, but I sure 'aint one now.

Here's another one for you, given how many people care about XX/XY as a distinction of gender: Humans have 46 chromosomes, but by this definition, about 0.6–1.0% of live births from human mothers are of individuals who aren't human.

Language is a tool we use to create categories, don't let language use you. Insisting that everything in reality must conform to the categories that language already has, is mistaking the map for the territory.
by nisa | 2025-04-19 21:33:49+00:00
I think you (or me, please correct me if that's the case) misunderstood something here - this is a diy lidar scanner for data acquisition - these datasets are mostly created using rgba cameras and the point clouds are later created with some post processing step.

So it's not a model for processing data but rather a hardware hack for having a real lidar - as in real depth data.

You can throw anything you like on it.
by simonw | 2025-04-19 21:34:37+00:00
Saying that Andrej Karpathy is "an AI researcher, but not a software engineer" isn't a very credible statement.

If you read to the end of his tweet, he specifically says "It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-19 21:34:50+00:00
The nexus of stupidity in our Republic has less often been the Senate; I’m unkeen to mess with it.

The House is a mess. So is SCOTUS. My proposal for the latter is redefining the Supreme Court as one drawn by lot from appellate judges for each case. This not only solves the appointment lottery. It also incentivises expanding the judiciary, which we need to do, and removes the modern perversion which is the Supreme Court just not bothering with controversial cases.

Most importantly, the edits to SCOTUS can be done by the Congress. The edits to the House can be done by the states. (EDIT: Nah.) Senate requires a Constitutional amendment; that window isn’t open at this time.
Show HN: A persistent drop-in replacement for functools.lru_cache
by knowsuchagency | 2025-04-19 21:37:17+00:00
The functools.lru_cache (or functools.memoize) function in the standard library is fantastic for what it does. I wrote this library to provide the same interface while allowing the caching mechanism to be any database supported by SQLAlchemy or Redis.
by codemac | 2025-04-19 21:37:50+00:00
It's not about forcing your kids to "do math", but to excel at important skills far before the benefits of being good at that skill matter.

The amount of homework/study per day that maximizes math scores on tests is significant, 1+ hours/school day by the time they're in middle school, with it helping even more for those who are starting out poor at math[0]. You'll note the referenced study doesn't even max out progress for any group - meaning most could have studied more and improved more.

I don't know any kids that voluntarily did an hour or more of solely math study per day. I know plenty that were forced, and ended up loving math or other technical fields as adults.

As a parent of young kids, obviously I haven't gone through high school yet - but I don't think many children who reach their potential in math, english, music etc will have no pressure from their parents.

[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8025066/
by luckylion | 2025-04-19 21:38:28+00:00
I think that's mostly that they don't care about having malicious bots on their networks as long as they pay.

GCE is rare in my experience. Most bots I see are on AWS. The DDOS-adjacent hyper aggressive bots that try random URLs and scan for exploits tend to be on Azure or use VPNs.

AWS is bad when you report malicious traffic. Azure has been completely unresponsive and didn't react, even for C&C servers.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-19 21:40:13+00:00
Shouldn't we take into account that the industry is also famous for being a monetization path for bloggers, pundits and grifters, for whom a book deal means jackpot; combined with a minimum word count pushing authors/ghost writers to pad their work to reach an average page volume ?

I mostly read non-fiction, so the landscape is probably grimmer, but actual good books aren't that many, and I feel that has been a common wisdom for centuries. Except we're trying push that fact under the carpet as already fewer people are buying books.
by dwroberts | 2025-04-19 21:40:16+00:00
> fetal microchimerism

This is just a fact of reality for any women that have children though.

Eg male chromosomes from fetuses being found in women’s brains: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3458919/

(I don’t think this is believed to be unusual or an example of ‘containment failure’ of the womb)