MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Tiny Python+Preact tool for debugging agents
by michaelgiba | 2025-04-04 01:42:04+00:00
Hello HN,

I wanted to share a project I have been working on recently called "plomp". It is intended to be a drop-in way to gain visibility into python programs which are prompting LLMs many times or using complicated contexts while remaining unopinionated on how you are doing the prompting.

Basically you add some instrumentation to your program via decorators or small function calls and it produces a visualization of the program execution.

Personally, I am not particularly interested in using a heavy-duty orchestration or chaining framework for managing context, chaining prompts (Langchain etc.) and I typically just interact directly with the LLM providers via their clients or standard HTTPS. I had noticed that having this layer for debugging would be useful for some of my other side projects so I decided to pull it out into something standalone.

https://github.com/michaelgiba/plomp

Let me know what you think
by api | 2025-04-04 01:43:05+00:00
Let’s say I write a book or record an album and there is no copyright. How do I get paid?

Musicians I suppose can tour, which is grueling but it’s something. Authors, programmers, actors, game studios, anything that’s not performed live would immediately become non-viable as a career or a business.

Large corporations would make money of course, by offering all you can eat streaming feeds of everything for a monthly fee. The creators get nothing.
by bobbiechen | 2025-04-04 01:43:47+00:00
"Did you know elephants have a noise that means 'There are bees here, let's leave immediately'? Why don't humans?" (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/04/100427093106.h...)

"Yes, humans also have a noise like that. It's the sentence 'There are bees here, let's leave immediately.'"
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-04-04 01:44:14+00:00
How would Bill Gates copy source code from a 36-bit minicomputer with 32 kilowords (no byte addressing) of memory and a time-sharing operating system to a 8 bit microprocessor with a completely different instruction set and 4 kilobytes of memory and no operating system, just bare metal? Even if he and Allen had had the source code for BASIC-10, which you haven't provided evidence of, it would be closer to a reimplementation than a port.

And DEC was in Massachusetts, Bill Gates went to high school in Washington. That would be one hell of a road trip to dig into DEC's trash.
by kortilla | 2025-04-04 01:44:16+00:00
That doesn’t matter. In modern forex markets you can convert 50 million yen to USD. Do a trade with another country for EUR or whatever. Then convert it back to USD the same day.

These markets are extremely liquid and the longer term trends of the USD value are irrelevant because players can move in and out so quickly. They can even preemptively take short positions or buy options on futures markets to completely derisk an event while holding USD.

This is why “petrodollar is good” analysis in modern forex is completely off-base. At this point it’s become a great flag to indicate someone who doesn’t understand forex and trade at all.

Of all of the things valuable to the US, the petrodollar is about as far down as renaming the Gulf of Mexico the gulf of America.
by echelon | 2025-04-04 01:44:29+00:00
> I would prefer we have cheaper pianos, samples and microphones instead of worthless music-copying models.

There are lots of ML models that produce instrumentals and vocals that are incredibly useful for practicing musicians.

The popular and well-known Suno and Udio are pop culture toys. They also find use with content creators who don't have time to learn how to make music. (Not everyone can learn and master everything. We have to let some of our creative desires slip or we'd never be able to accomplish anything.)
by julianeon | 2025-04-04 01:44:33+00:00
Maybe now, post-AI.

But if you'd asked this question in 2015 or earlier, everyone would have said Disney -> pro-patent, average people & indie devs -> anti-patent. Microsoft was famously pro-patent, as were a number of nuisance companies that earned the label "patent troll."

Honestly, this idea of "patents to protect the people" would've come across as a corporate lawyer trick pre-2015.
by wildzzz | 2025-04-04 01:44:57+00:00
My T420 absolutely cooks my lap. It was retired a couple years ago (alongside my X60 tablet and X200 tablet) and I bought a maxed out X280 used to replace it. I bought it brand new for school but switched over to the lightweight X60 tablet so I could quickly do homework on the go. I upgraded to the X200 when Quartus II stopped supporting 32bit processors. Both were bought for $100 on eBay back when that's all the money I had from slinging pizza after school. I grabbed the X280 for $200 when I realized how chunky, hot, and slow the T420.

That x280 is going to last me a long time. It's a perfectly capable home laptop with an i7 and 16gb of memory. I recently dropped in a new 1TB nvme drive so other than the integrated graphics, it's the best. I'm still able to play games on it, I recently got through Splinter Cell: Blacklist with the specs set at like medium. It's not going to play a modern AAA but anything at least 5 years older than the laptop runs fine enough.
by pdw | 2025-04-04 01:45:05+00:00
The printout is dated 10-SEP-75 and is labeled "VERSION 3.0 -- MORE FEATURES TO GO".

Curiously this isn't the oldest extant version of the source code. The Harvard archives have a copy of version 1.1, printed on 30 April 75. http://altairbasic.org/other%20versions/ian.htm
by lurk2 | 2025-04-04 01:45:34+00:00
> You are confusing the actual accounts with the surrounding article.

The first one is hearsay from a dead guy and the other one is a creative writing project. If you had these accounts handy from reputable sources, you would have posted them from the reputable sources. This is not the standard of commentary expected of this forum.

> Look, Trump has been claiming that he graduated first in class, but never provided any evidence.

The articles I have read on the subject suggest that this claim is impossible because he would have been on the honor roll and does not appear there. This tells me that he’s either delusional, misinformed, or a liar. It doesn’t tell me he doesn’t understand economics.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-04 01:46:09+00:00
Very few supplier industries run with a 54% margin such that the supplier can eat that and stay in business, so less orders is better than more orders that lose money on each order. For many products the margins even at the end are in the single to low double digits. This means costs go to consumers, which practically translates to inflation and decreased spending, which leads to stagnation etc. The analysis that this will stifle game makers is pretty likely true, and I see no future where the economics of that moves supply chains state side in our life time.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-04-04 01:47:08+00:00
Brown just got targeted next, after releasing a statement that it would "not compromise on academic freedom". We're about to find out how true that is or not. But if universities don't start fighting back, they will all find themselves in the same boat as Columbia -- and ultimately regret it.

The US's universities are one of its greatest assets, if not the greatest. The repercussions of this are highly damaging.
by mrbonner | 2025-04-04 01:48:19+00:00
Is this what happens with Call of Duty? My observation is I would play very good for a couple of days, often 1st or 2nd player in the 12 people group. Then, next few days I am placed with a bunched of assumed cheaters (seemingly seeing thru wall, headshot but not dead, jump slide then shoot mid air with a gamepad...).
by jim-jim-jim | 2025-04-04 01:49:20+00:00
If I paint a picture on a physical canvas, I can charge people to come into my house and take a look. If I bring the canvas to a park, I'm not entitled to say "s-stop looking at my painting guys!"

If you're worried about your work being infinitely reproduced, you probably shouldn't work in an infinitely-reproducible medium. Digitized content is inherently worthless, and I mean that in a non-derisive way. The sooner we realize this, the richer culture will be.

Really all content is worthless. Historically, we've always paid for the transmission medium (tape, CD) and confused it for the cost of art itself.
by blooalien | 2025-04-04 01:50:34+00:00
> Like vibe coding, it works very well if you know what you are doing (emphasis mine)

This is true of so very many things involving computers (and tools in general, really) and LLMs are no exception. Just like any tool, "knowing what you are doing" is the really important part, but so many folks are convinced that these "AI" things can do the thinking part for them, and it's just not the case (yet). You gotta know what you're doing and how to properly use the tool to avoid a lotta the "foot-guns" and get the most benefit outta these things.
by russellbeattie | 2025-04-04 01:51:37+00:00
In the mid 70s you got a badly mimeographed copy of the schematics and a bag of parts.

In the late 70s to early 80s you got a programming manual, but you had to save your programs on cassette tapes.

In the late 80s, you got glossy manuals which showed you how to turn on the computer, hook up a printer and load a program from DOS.

In the early 90s, the manuals were plain paper, smaller, and had instructions on how to use a mouse, and explained what a window is. Plus the mail-ins.

Mid-90s (CD-ROM "multimedia machines") you got a sheet of paper which told you to load the interactive tutorial from the included CD.

Late 90s you got 5000 hours of AOL. Plus another CD filled with co-branded crapware like CorelDraw Lite for Dell.

2000s+ crapware pre-installed, driver CD and a warranty card.

So really, the time period with the included programming manual was just a few years. And mostly all you did is print Hello World over and over again on the screen. So don't be too jealous.
by duxup | 2025-04-04 01:51:57+00:00
I think the NBA has a sort of social media style negativity meme culture that is just feeding on itself. It's bizarre. It's even more bizarre that the NBA and it's media partners seem to WANT this to continue.

The media meta surrounding the NBA is very negative. Old players hating on new players, new players hating on old players. Media hating on everyone, all with flimsy arguments and sometimes with no argument at all. It's unbearable, and the negativity is unlike any other major American sport.

So it almost doesn't matter what they're talking about it, someone has a lot of negativity about everything.

Orgs like ESPN, and others seem to just feed it as if they don't know what else to do. Draymond Green, a player with some serious behavioral issues and numerous suspensions (and he should have more than that), was made a guest commentator last playoff season ... a completely inexplicable choice, but apparently everyone was ok with it.

I don't know why, but with the NBA everyone involved seems to "WANT" this.
by skissane | 2025-04-04 01:51:59+00:00
> This is wrong, Linux had plenty of momentum before RedHat specifically was purchased by IBM.

I’m not defending their overall argument, but I don’t think they are talking about the 2018 Red Hat acquisition, rather IBM’s 2000 announcement they were investing a billion dollars in Linux: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/ibm-to-spend-1-billi...

IBM has been a big contributor to Linux long before buying Red Hat
by arandomusername | 2025-04-04 01:52:06+00:00
> Do you think that better wages and working conditions in underdeveloped countries are a goal (or even just side-effect) of Trumps policies? How is that achieved?

No. It will make labour in US competitive where you have labour laws. Consumers will pay the fair market price for products rather than relying on abusing labour in poor countries.

> I don't see a coordinated effort to expand the domestic arms industry that is pushing for those tariffs.

It's not about creating military industry. It's about creating a manufacturing industry which can be converted into war effort if needed. It's also about self reliance. It's also about creating meaningful jobs that actually create something (as opposed to the wall street where you have upper class just extracting wealth from the working man).
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-04 01:52:47+00:00
You'll find many leftists that agree. The flubbing of so many social issues while moving with the exactitude of a striking cobra to maintain their stock-trading rights, disrupt upstart progressive campaigns, and shield financial markets from the concequences of their own actions, has lead many to recognize that we might be getting KSed. They walk the walk, yeah, just a different one from what you figured just a moment ago. Duckstep? No, the other fowl play.
by kristianp | 2025-04-04 01:52:57+00:00
I've watched a few games recently and I don't see them being dominated by 3's. Sure you notice a few from beside the straight line, but it's still an enjoyable game to watch. What puts me off is the number of ads and the distracting constantly-updating bar along the bottom of the screen on ESPN. It really distracts and makes it harder to concentrate on the action. When ESPN first came to Disney+, for the first few days they didn't have the ads and bar implemented yet and you could enjoy watching the game distraction free. Now I've really noticed the burden that all those distractions take on my ability to concentrate. Especially for those who have a trace of ASD and/or ADHD.

https://archive.is/xDgMU
by codebje | 2025-04-04 01:52:59+00:00
Here's one paper covering the derivation of a typed functional LALR(1) parser in which derivations are given explicitly in symbolic language, while proofs are just prose claims that an inductive proof is similar to the derivation:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=Hinze%2C%20R.%2C%20Paterson%2C%20R.%3A%20Derivation%20of%20a%20typed%20functional%20LR%20parser%20%282003%29

Here's one for the semantics of the Cedille functional language core in which proofs are given as key components in symbolic language with prose to to tie them together; all theorems, lemmas, etc are given symbolically.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.04709

And here's one introducing dependent intersection types (as used in Cedille) which references formal machine-checked proofs and only provides a sketch of the proof result in prose:

https://doi.org/10.1109/LICS.2003.1210048

(For the latter, actually finding the machine checked proof might be tricky: I didn't see it overtly cited and I didn't go looking).
Show HN: Jetelina v3.0 Has Arrived
by onoke | 2025-04-04 01:53:00+00:00
Yay, Jetelna v3.0 has been released.Jetelina has quite unique functions, the primary is handling multi database at once in using webapis, the secondly is perfectly controlling with key typing, and of course more. The v3.0 has been impremented in using MongoDB; then it can use Postgre/Mysql/redis and mongo at once, some stats functions, and improved the usage. Visit the site.
by pcj-github | 2025-04-04 01:55:45+00:00
This resonates with me. I feel like AI is making me learn slower.

For example, I am learning Rust, for quite awhile now. While AI has been very helpful in lowering the bar to /begin/ learning Rust, it's making it slower to achieve a working competence with it, because I always seem reliant on the LLM to do the thinking. I think I will have to turn off all the AI and struggle struggle struggle, until I don't, just like the old days.
by hanson108 | 2025-04-04 01:56:35+00:00
Researchers at NTU Singapore have developed mycelium-bound insulation tiles inspired by elephant skin, aiming to offer a sustainable alternative to synthetic materials. These tiles mimic how elephants cool themselves in hot climates by using wrinkled skin to retain moisture. The biodegradable composite is highly porous, making it an effective insulator with thermal properties comparable to conventional options—potentially lowering energy use in hot, humid environments.
by marssaxman | 2025-04-04 01:57:13+00:00
Gates showed his true colors right up front with the "Open Letter to Hobbyists", and pursued the rest of his career in like fashion. It's not just about Microsoft versus open source: many of us already resented their strong-arming, dominance-oriented, rent-seeking, ownership-hungry monopolistic approach to computing before the free software movement had really gotten going, or the term "open source" had even been invented.
by narcraft | 2025-04-04 01:58:45+00:00
I wish to one day derive financial benefit from hitting myself with a hammer for 8 hours a day. Should we construct a legal apparatus to guarantee that I am able to do so?

Edit: the point I want to illustrate is that we do not get to choose what others value, or to dictate what is scarce and no one is entitled to make a living in a specific way even if they really want to
by bdangubic | 2025-04-04 01:59:03+00:00
Draymond Green, a player with some serious behavioral issues and numerous suspensions (and he should have more than that), was made a guest commentator last playoff season

he is a character :) funny and charismatic, good on TV and generally in media and will likely have a better broadcasting/media career than his bball playing career. randy moss was similar as a player and is now on TV all the time. the way they were both playing doesn’t represent either off the court…
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 01:59:23+00:00
I wonder if the baby boom depends on who wins the war. If people are happy about the outcome, their finances are improving, and they are full of hope for the future it'd be easy to start families. If people aren't happy with the outcome, if they are suffering, if they have to live under more restrictions or a worse economy I doubt as many people will be comfortable bringing children into the world.
by brucehoult | 2025-04-04 02:00:00+00:00
Note that even the "Update" video is nine years old.

Also note that yes it's a computer, but it has 16 bytes of memory to hold both the program and the program's variables.

BYTES. Not KB, not MB, not GB. Bytes.

The demo Fibonacci program is pretty much the most complex thing you can do with it.

But it is in fact a genuine von Neumann computer. And understandable.
by marc_abonce | 2025-04-04 02:02:41+00:00
That's pretty much what futurist Luigi Russolo predicted back in the 1910's:

> This musical evolution is paralleled by the multipication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front. Not only in the roaring atmosphere of major cities, but in the country too, which until yesterday was totally silent, the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.

> For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the “Eroica” or the “Pastoral”.

Based on this idea it should be no surprise that, for example, heavy metal riffs were invented by a factory worker[2] or that the first techno music scene started in Detroit[3].

[1] Luigi Russolo. The Art of Noises: https://www.ubu.com/papers/russolo.html

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Iommi#Factory_accident

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_techno
by harry8 | 2025-04-04 02:03:18+00:00
The government threatening legislation unless a company censors in line with the government's wishes is wrong and a violation of the 1st am.

Your excuses & justifications, maga's, no different when it comes to the health of the 1st am.

"Because it's THEM, they're worse! They're the baddies! You can't compare this evil thing to their evil thing which is so much worse!"

FIRE have non-partisan credibility. Maybe see what they think.
by kazinator | 2025-04-04 02:03:21+00:00
Distortion of monophonic tones (single notes/voices) became accepted in the mainstream quite rapidly because the circuits used to produce it quickly improved, informed by feedback (no pun intended) from musicians.

Nobody hates ugly sounding distortion more than he or she who practices 5 hours a day with it.

Single note distortion, at its best, is a harmonically rich sound which shares something with bowed instruments and reed woodwinds.

Nasty sounding single distortion has not gained complete mainstream acceptance. Musicians who do that on purpose will remain niche, even today. From time to time, such nasty sounds make appearances in mainstream pop, but only as a kind of "cameo". The statement is, "we are inserting this ugly thing here specifically for its idiosyncratic effect, haha! But only a few seconds, we promise".

Distortion (other than perhaps mild distortion) has never been fully accepted in roles where the multiple voices of a complex harmony part would be distorted together.

Nowhere was that better seen than in jazz/rock fusion, which accepted ragingly distorted guitars for solo work, but not so much for the rest of the music: except, of course, in passages where the guitars provide the "sound of rock": distorted fourths and fifths and whatnot, or double stop bluesy cliches and whatnot.

The music best known for distortion and that couldn't exist without distortion (and a lot of it) is of course heavy metal, which is a big landscape of styles and sounds.

In metal, the harmonies from an individual guitar part tend to consist of only a few notes. The clean chord is transformed into something else, which perhaps cannot be described in music notation. Complexity comes from the distortion. Distortion includes the sum and difference products, which relate to the tonality and scale of the music in unsual ways. Those notes are not identified. If notation is used at all, the underlying clean notes are notated: e.g. C-F# tritone on the A and D strings, over open E bass. Heavy metal uses syncopated and alternating rhythms to separate bass notes from upper notes in three and four note chords. This is not only to create rhythmical excitement, but to better separate the notes.

The notes of a distorted chord are also easier to for the ear to identify if they are introduced separately as a lasciare suonare arpeggio; that's a thing in metal.

Harmonic textures are also created by combining distorted guitar parts. Using two lead guitars originated in rock, with groups like Wishbone Ash. Multitrack recording allows an unlimited number of parts to be layered.
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-04 02:03:51+00:00
Like I said, depending on an agency's interpretation of how Bostock's reasoning could be applied to a different law is not protection in the modern Trump administration. This is like you saying that Bostock protects trans people via Title 9 because of the Biden admin's interpretation of Title 9.... which was undone by the Trump administration.

Federal legislation, or at least clear jurisprudence, is needed for this protection to meaningfully stick.
by tired-turtle | 2025-04-04 02:03:57+00:00
> Modern programming already is very, very far from strict obedience and formal symbolism

Difficult to sort this out with what follows.

Consider group theory. A group G is a set S with an operator * that supports an identity, closure, and an inverse. With that abstraction comes a hefty amount of power. In some sense, a group is akin to a trait on some type, much like how a class in Java can implement or extend Collection. (Consider how a ring ‘extends’ a group.)

I’d posit frameworks and libraries are no different in terms of formal symbolism from the math structure laid out above. Maybe the interfaces are fuzzy and the documentation is shoddy, but there’s still a contract we use to reason about the tool at hand.

> I’m not manually managing memory, parsing HTTP requests byte-by-byte

If I don’t reprove Peano’s work, then I’m not really doing math?