MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jillesvangurp | 2025-04-20 10:54:25+00:00
Exactly. I've been using the chat gpt desktop app not because of the model quality but because of the UX. It basically seamlessly integrates with my IDEs (intellij and vs code). Mostly I just do stuff like select a few lines, hit option+shift+1, and say something like "fix this". Nice short prompt and I get the answer relatively quickly. Option+shift+1 opens chat gpt with the open file already added to the context. It sees what lines are selected. And it also sees the output of any test runs on the consoles. So just me saying "fix this" now has a rich context that I don't need to micromanage.

Mostly I just use the 4o model instead of the newer better models because it is faster. It's good enough mostly and I prefer getting a good enough answer quickly than the perfect answer after a few minutes. Mostly what I ask is not rocket science so perfect is the enemy of good here. I rarely have to escalate to better models. The reasoning models are annoyingly slow. Especially when they go down the wrong track, which happens a lot.

And my cost is a predictable 20$/month. The downside is that the scope of what I can ask is more limited. I'd like it to be able to "see" my whole code base instead of just 1 file and for me to not have to micro manage what the model looks at. Claude can do that if you don't care about money. But if you do, you are basically micro managing context. That sounds like monkey work that somebody should automate. And it shouldn't require an Einstein sized artificial brain to do that.

There must be people that are experimenting with using locally running more limited AI models to do all the micromanaging that then escalate to remote models as needed. That's more or less what Apple pitched for Apple AI at some point. Sounds like a good path forward. I'd be curious to learn about coding tools that do something like that.

In terms of cost, I don't actually think it's unreasonable to spend a few hundred dollars per month on this stuff. But I question the added value over the 20$ I'm spending. I don't think the improvement is 20x better. more like 1.5x. And I don't like the unpredictability of this and having to think about how expensive a question is going to be.

I think a lot of the short term improvement is going to be a mix of UX and predictable cost. Currently the tools are still very clunky and a bit dumb. The competition is going to be about predictable speed, cost and quality. There's a lot of room for improvement here.
by or_am_i | 2025-04-20 10:54:28+00:00
Analogy would have been correct if prompting didn't influence the output (which I hope you agree is not the case).

And yes, the model keeps changing under you -- much like a horse is changing under a jockey, forcing them to adapt. Or like formula drivers and different car brands.

You can absolutely improve the results by experimenting with prompting, by building a mental mode of what happens inside the "black box", by learning what kinds of context it has/does not have, how (not) to overburden it with instructions etc. etc.
by Sesse__ | 2025-04-20 10:54:41+00:00
It's a US thing. Europeans just write 1/cos(x) instead of treating it as a special thing with its own name. The Americans have sec, csc, and a bunch of others I never bothered to learn. It doesn't seem to add all that much to me? (Of course, it's a bit hypocritical since I gladly use tan(x).)
by os2warpman | 2025-04-20 10:55:41+00:00
>Can Google afford to fire them all?

Google can't afford to not fire them all.

Anything that hinders or even questions the moneymaking machine is evil.

If Google was a single, conscious, self-aware living entity it would consider dissent among the humans who make up its cells to be a cancer.

For every employee that is fired, or quits, there are ten people carving "FAANG FAANG FAANG" into their chest with a knife as some form of ritual summoning, hoping their wounds heal before the interview so they don't get blood on the white seats of the white Model S they're going to buy after getting hired.
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-04-20 10:59:52+00:00
Leave?

I started with vanilla Emacs a couple of years ago, ran C-h t, did that for an hour or two, and began editing joyfully and it hasn't stopped. Picked up new stuff when the need arose.

However, if you want everything looking sexy and modern from the start and you're a cool kid, give this 30 minutes and see what you think:

https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs
by tester756 | 2025-04-20 11:01:49+00:00
I think this distribution works for almost everything, for example league of legends:

Being in diamond 5~ (top 1% back in the days) meant that you were significantly better than people in silver, gold, platinum.

But the gap between you top 1% (e.g diamond 5 50lp) and top 0.3% diamond 1 was bigger than the gap between gold (top 30%) and you top 1%
Show HN: Generate a Fog Of War map from Google location data locally in browser
by eamag | 2025-04-20 11:02:54+00:00
I've created a Fog Of War map based on my data export using python in 30 minutes, and decided to build a web app to make it easier for others. Then I spent a whole day trying to figure out how to do it in JS, why it's way slower (https://github.com/Turfjs/turf/issues/2851), how to optimize it (I tried Rust wasm but had too many problems with bindings for geo), then trying to deploy it as a static page but had too many problems with next.js error pages and awaits.

This version is still alpha, doesn't collect your data, built with next.js and deployed to cloudflare pages like this https://developers.cloudflare.com/pages/framework-guides/nex...
by seanalltogether | 2025-04-20 11:02:57+00:00
> The ECDLP involves finding the integer k such that P = k * G, where P is a point on the curve, G is a known point (the generator point), and k is the ephemeral key. The difficulty of this problem is what makes ECC secure.

I feel like I'm missing something in the example below this statement. I can type in 'hello world' and there is no P on the curve in the graph if I zoom it out, just a bunch of points that seem disconnected from the curve itself.
by fhd2 | 2025-04-20 11:04:34+00:00
This. If there was some stability in the space, you could empirically develop good practices that probably beat naive practices. But since everything changes every couple of months and since you'll usually want to try different models on an ongoing basis, I found I'm doing just fine with a very small bag of tricks.

Sure, by definition, prompting is a skill. But it's a skill that really isn't hard to learn, and the gap between a beginner and a master is pretty narrow. The real differentiator is understanding the domain you're promoting for deeply, e.g. software development or visual design. Most value comes out of knowing what to ask for, and knowing how to evaluate the results.
by or_am_i | 2025-04-20 11:04:38+00:00
A lot of the same kind of skill goes into prompting AI and delegating work to other humans. Delegation requires building intellectual empathy for the task recipient, giving them an instruction they can verifiably follow. It requires building trust, and more often than not requires a certain degree of trial/error/watching others work before one can delegate reliably. A lot goes into delegation, and much of this stuff is hard! It's also hard to be delegated to -- especially by someone you haven't worked with before, what is it that they mean when they ask for "more sparkles in the UI" or "I tried C and it didn't work"? Can I guess their background to meet them where they are? The list goes on.

In some ways it's easier to delegate to an AI because you don't have to care for anyone's feelings but your own, and you lose nothing but your own time when things don't go well and you have to reset. On the other hand, when the delegation does not go well, you still got yourself to blame first.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-04-20 11:07:10+00:00
That level of physical supremacy reminds me of Melvyn Downes: a guy who fellow SAS operators describe as a "machine" and a "physical specimen". The Royal Marine Commandos send a Physical Training Instructor to USMC OCS and those guys are always beasts. I can't wrap my brain around what Melvyn can do, and how his muscles don't melt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL7FQEIWpDI&t=318s
by teekert | 2025-04-20 11:07:31+00:00
Story time: My parents bought an anti motion sickness thing. It was a rubber band with metal core hanging from the car’s chassis to the ground.

It worked for my brother! But at some point I asked my parents: but how can this work then!? What does it do with “motion “?

My parents told me to be silent and later, when my brother couldn’t hear, told me it was just to release static electricity but they told my brother it was against motion sickness and him believing that made it work for him.

At the time this was pretty shocking to me.
by littlestymaar | 2025-04-20 11:08:18+00:00
The concept of “airspace” is purely a legal one and exits only if your country has an air force able to enforce it (see how Israel has absolute control over Lebanese airspace), any country with anti-sattelite technology could at its disposal could declare that their airspace goes up to the geostationary orbit or even above.

Of course it would complicate the use of satellites a lot, but given their military importance it's likely that this will happen at some point when the tech is ready (by tech I mean a way to stop foreign satellites from operating without causing Kessler syndrome)
by notarobot123 | 2025-04-20 11:09:35+00:00
Our information ecologies aren't so straightforward as to always ensure the most rational ideas will always out-compete the irrational.

I agree that it's hard to see your own ideological commitments without seeing alternatives. Yet allowing any and all ideologies the same opportunities to compete for public attention is clearly problematic. You don't want to wait until flat-earth theories and holocaust denial go fully mainstream to start to nuance your no-standards policy.
by z3t4 | 2025-04-20 11:09:37+00:00
This is one reason I like watching the olympics, because not everyone is professionally paid to be there. Versus for example a diamond league stadium where everyone on the starting line got paid to show up. I especially like to watch the first heats on the 100m where the top sprinters like to show off, usually by jogging the last 10-20m of the race.
by jerf | 2025-04-20 11:10:03+00:00
Fair, but I think we can classify that under "unsafe" and ignore it under normal circumstances. I can also say things like "Go doesn't have pointer arithmetic" with a straight face, even though unsafe permits pointer arithmetic just fine. If you're programming with that routinely, you're out of the bounds of my advice for architecture anyhow. Whether for good or bad reasons would be left as an exercise for the architect in question.
by shakna | 2025-04-20 11:10:08+00:00
I was speaking two languages at two years old, and debating political systems by ten. I'm not really sure that talking is actually that hard, depending on your cultural background. The more diverse, the easier you may find it to convey incredibly complex concepts. I'm not an outlier - I'm a boring statistical point.

I've heard plenty of overly complicated explanations of what a monad is. It's also not a complicated concept. Return a partial binding until all argument slots are filled, then return the result of the function. Jargon gets in the way of simple explanations. Ask a kid to explain something, and it will probably be a hell of a lot clearer.

The more experience you have, the harder it often is to draw out something untainted by that experience to give to someone else. We are the sum of our experience, and so its so darn easy to get lost in that, rather than to speak from where the other person is standing.
by latexr | 2025-04-20 11:12:30+00:00
Consistent, professionally made, beautiful, diverse, free, open-source icons packs are plentiful.

So why pay for AI icons of unknown quality which may not even look to be of the same family? It feels to me someone who is budget-constrained or doesn’t want to spend the money already has more than enough options, and those who need something distinct will hire a designer anyway. I don’t see who this person in the middle that you’re targeting is.

Of course, nothing wrong with building this for fun, but you seem to be trying to make a business out of it, and I don’t understand who the customer is supposed to be.*

* Yes, for sure someone is going to pay for it, there is always someone who’ll spend money on anything, especially if it says “AI” or “blockchain”, or whatever the tech in vogue is, but doesn’t seem enough for a real market when AI image generators are themselves a dime a dozen.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-04-20 11:12:44+00:00
What do you mean by "science" in this context? For example, both biology and anthropology are sciences, but biology can tell us that people evolved from apes, while anthropology can tell us that a specific tribe believes that they were created by a flying serpent. Both of them are sciences, both of them can talk about the same topic (the origin of humans), but they take a completely different perspective on the topic.

Is the "transgender science" you talk about more like biology, i.e. describing how things are, or more like anthropology, i.e. describing what some (sub)cultures believe? Those are not the same things.
by crispyambulance | 2025-04-20 11:13:25+00:00
> The ECDLP involves finding the integer k such that P=k⋅G, where P is a point on the curve, G is a known point (the generator point), and k is the ephemeral key. The difficulty of this problem is what makes ECC secure.

I am trying to match up the statement above with the visualization directly below it where they show the generator point, G, on the curve. The plot shows k, the ephemeral key, as another point-- but it's NOT an integer, k is a point! And then there's a Q, which is the public key, and that's not described in the paragraph above at all. Nor is P shown in the plot.

I don't get it?
by reisse | 2025-04-20 11:13:42+00:00
This seems like a fairly bad example to compare with?

These runners do not even look like amateurs. Look how the best of the bunch still does the novice mistake of decelerating _before_ the finish line. They're just regular people asked for "let's try to run a 100m sprint". It doesn't take an Olympic champion to get a 3+ seconds lead in such competition.

The above-average track runner would look the same in this video. And the Olympic champion might have an 1s+ lead on them, which is still a lot, but not as lot as in this video (at least they will both fit in the camera).
by pron | 2025-04-20 11:13:47+00:00
Not only is there nothing here that approximates a "solution" to an unsolvable problem, but that there are more programs you can decide the more time you simulate them is the actual statement of generalised halting theorems. Indeed, this is literally how they are summarised: "Informally, these theorems say that given more time, a Turing machine can solve more problems." [1]

When someone says that you can, in practice, sort-of get around the halting theorem by noting you can solve more problems given more time, do you see how it's not an approximation of a "solution" that gets around any theorem but the very point of the theorems? If you see you can solve more things in more time you are observing the halting theorem and its generalisations at work, not getting around them in practice.

But that's not the end of things because now we can ask what it means to "get around" or "approximately get around" a theorem that basically says that you can buy a bike for $50 but you can't buy a car for that price. Saying, "I don't mind riding a bike" is clearly not getting around anything, but saying "most people wouldn't mind riding a bike" could, indeed, be a way to state that the limitations of the theorem don't affect many people in practice. But such a statement also isn't true.

If someone wants to claim that in practice we rarely come across intractability where it matters, that would, indeed, be interesting, but I also don't think it's true. So if someone wants to say that most problems that are interesting in practice are decidable, that may well be true, but even Turing realised that decidability isn't a very interesting property. Decidability was replaced by tractability in the 70s, as halting was replaced by the more general and precise time hierarchy in 1965. We more precisely discovered that not only are there problems that cannot be solved in any time bound, but that there are problems that can be solved in 2^N that cannot be solved in N steps.

And if someone wants to say that we don't frequently come across intractable problems in practice, then that is not true.

If anything, the limits we run across in practice are more constrained than the known theoretical ones. Even though we have yet to prove a hierarchy between P and NP, and even between P and PSPACE, we do find it much harder, in practice, to solve problems that are complete in NP than problems known to be in P, and problems that are complete in PSPACE are harder in practice than those that are complete in NP.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_hierarchy_theorem
by Ikatza | 2025-04-20 11:14:53+00:00
It's hardly about a company having a "right" to stop you from saying anything, it's about what your reaction to life events says about you.

If you get fired and your reaction is to go to your blog and whine about losing email access and not being able to deliver a talk that you had prepared for x time I, as a prospective employer, am going to draw some conclusions about your personality that won't help you get the job I'm offering.
HKP: A Legally Enforceable System for Ethical Employment
by Chakrabarti | 2025-04-20 11:15:06+00:00
The Helix Kallol Protocol (HKP) is a new, legally enforceable framework that combines Proof-of-Ethics (PoE) video contracts, attrition penalties, and AI-driven risk forecasting to hold employers accountable and reduce labor exploitation—starting with India's gig economy.

Unlike Glassdoor reviews or HR audits, HKP introduces court-admissible audiovisual contracts, biometric validation, and sector-adjusted penalties for unjustified attrition. It also offers an AI-powered dashboard for workers, predicting exploitation risks based on real-time ethics data.

Core Components:

PoE Video Contracts with biometric validation.

Attrition Penalty Units (APUs): quantifiable fines based on turnover risk.

Ethical Concord Nexus: a transnational compliance registry.

AI Risk Shield: pre-employment analytics for jobseekers.

Why it matters: Current labor protection systems are mostly reactive and fragmented. HKP offers a proactive, scalable model combining blockchain security with legal enforceability—designed to align with national codes like India’s Code on Wages 2024.

Would love feedback, thoughts, or collaborators—especially from the blockchain, labor law, or AI ethics communities. You can get the full article on Desci Nodes. The novelty content score is 97%
by marci | 2025-04-20 11:15:13+00:00
and to test it here (it might be very loud!):

CTRL+SHIFT+I and in the console

let o, a=new AudioContext(); document.addEventListener("mousedown",function(){ if (o) {o.stop(); o = undefined} else{ o=a.createOscillator(); o.type="sine"; o.frequency.value=100; o.connect(a.destination);o.start()} })

If you click anywhere it will start/stop.
by RestartKernel | 2025-04-20 11:16:06+00:00
> This extension is a static browser-side script which leverages React's dynamic rendering and live component updating mechanisms. At runtime, it waits for the DOM to finish loading, then injects content into a dedicated element (#__oled). Using ReactDOM.createRoot, it mounts a themed layout component that wraps the core UI, enabling declarative reactivity and efficient DOM updates.

Why does a global theme need to load React? More importantly, why does a code repository contain minified, if not obfuscated, code?

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FreelanceProgrammingServic...
by bob1029 | 2025-04-20 11:19:04+00:00
I've developed a new mental model of the LLM codebase automation solutions. These are effectively identical to outsourcing your product to someone like Infosys. From an information theory perspective, you need to communicate approximately the same amount of things in either case.

Tweaking claude.md files until the desired result is achieved is similar to a back and forth email chain with the contractor. The difference being that the contractor can be held accountable in our human legal system and can be made to follow their "prompt" very strictly. The LLM has its own advantages, but they seem to be a subset since the human contractor can also utilize an LLM.

Those who get a lot of uplift out of the models are almost certainly using them in a cybernetic manner wherein the model is an integral part of an expert's thinking loop regarding the program/problem. Defining a pile of policies and having the LLM apply them to a codebase automatically is a significantly less impactful use of the technology than having a skilled human developer leverage it for immediate questions and code snippets as part of their normal iterative development flow.

If you've got so much code that you need to automate eyeballs over it, you are probably in a death spiral already. The LLM doesn't care about the terrain warnings. It can't "pull up".
by jerf | 2025-04-20 11:19:06+00:00
Since I meant this just as a "how I do it" post I suppose I forgot the disclaimer that I'm not particularly claiming to have invented anything or to be the first. Indeed to a large degree I consider myself just to be following the grain of Go and hardly doing anything myself.

That said, after some quick googling around, I don't think I feel bad not knowing what Yourdon design is, as it seems to be somewhat proprietary and behind paywalls, so it's hard for me to tell if there's much similarity. Certainly it has a lot of stuff I tend to eschew; lots of references to diagrams and state charts and such. I tend to prefer a more "agile but wait before you panic I mean 'original' agile not 'scrum' or whatever other abomination it was turned into", my formal method is more based around exploring the design space with extensive unit tests and code rather than that sort of up-front design.
by cheschire | 2025-04-20 11:20:50+00:00
Well there's very little "common" cultural influence these days. It used to be that you could see a significant episode of a TV show and EVERYONE was talking about it the next day in the office. Now you're lucky if you can even find one person that has seen the show you're even talking about, let alone if they are "caught up" on it since many people prefer to buffer a few episodes while they watch other things.