MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by p_ing | 2025-04-21 16:03:18+00:00
How will your tool distinguish clinical depression from other potentially more serious conditions such a Bipolar or Cyclothymia? Or even major depression from 'simple' depression?

What are you going to do from there? States (generally) require therapists to be licensed. Only doctor's can prescribe medication.

Just having an app track depression seems useless. "You're still depressed, Bob". Thanks, f-ing LLM.
by tikhonj | 2025-04-21 16:03:29+00:00
Two possibilities:

1. They're consciously trying to expand their brand and topics. Maybe it's a way to grow a broader audience or move "upscale" or something along those lines.

2. Somebody really wanted to do this, and the organization just ran with it.

Both are respectable options. I'd actually respect them more if it's option 2—building an organization to give enthusiastic people the space to do what they care about is one of the best ways to produce great, creative work. We need more places that are willing to do high quality things just because.
by unethical_ban | 2025-04-21 16:03:39+00:00
The author said that in the last line.

Highlight the part of the essay where he is claiming MS didn't have a right to do what they did.

The point of the article was that MS showed interest in his work, asked him about his designs. Said nothing about internal plans to fork it or use it. Then he shows up to a talk and sees them discussing his work.

Reading between the lines, it is 100% clear they didn't feel like telling him they planned to fork his software, and they danced around it. They didn't reach out to him afterward and say "thanks, we are building a fork and your free time was really useful".

The essay isn't claiming a legal issue. It's pointing out a substantial, practical issue with OSS that didn't exist nearly as prominently in the pre-cloud era: megacorps forking software and cutting out the OG developers.
Can't finish MVP: Chrome extension for retrieving human feedback on RAGs
by xanaxspandex | 2025-04-21 16:03:49+00:00
am I cooked?

I work on a RAG at a large company. The problem of not having enough human user feedback to quickly validate my evals (cheaply) is obvious to me. Enterprise users are constantly asking my team what they can do to improve our RAG since their leadership mandates the use of AI, but I don't have time to interview them and my eng leadership hasn't invested in robust observability for this tool.

I've vibe coded a non-working prototype so far. I've been turned down by 4 technical founders. I got a $12K quote from a reputable dev shop for finishing it to a working version. It's been 2 months and I still have my day job.

Should I just commit to teaching myself nodejs? Is this a sign I'm not cut out for this?
by sowbug | 2025-04-21 16:03:52+00:00
The study used a pen and touchscreen for the writing case, so this comment is a tangent. But there's a lot to be said for the memory-palace effect of physically placing words in a specific place on a specific piece of paper in a physical notebook. I might not perfectly remember what I wrote, but I absolutely remember where I wrote it. That's lost with digital notes.
by tstrimple | 2025-04-21 16:03:59+00:00
I have three kids (19, 13, 11) and I agree with them completely.

My son at 19 is building websites for companies, still deep into manga and video games but is started to get out more with the gym. He still lives with us, but essentially has his own life and seems to be doing well.

My 13 year old daughter is the one who loves to try everything. She's in dance, show choir, volley ball, tennis, violin, clarinet, etc. She even signs up for college for kids classes over the summer. All self motivated. Just yesterday her and her friends walked about 5 miles around town to different stores. She has her own phone.

My 11 year old is the smartest of the bunch. She has an amazing vocabulary and reading has always seemed to be "natural" for her. She's straining my policy of buying my children any books they want. She's bored of the advanced learning classes she's been put in. She also plays tennis and flute and cello. She learns her own crafts and sciency projects to try at home from TikTok. She will likely get a phone this year, but has an iPad.

All of them have had practically unlimited screen time since they were double digit ages. They are on TikTok and YouTube and SnapChat. They just have many other interests as well and it doesn't consume their lives. They manage their own bedtimes (within reason) and are responsible for getting themselves up and ready in the morning.

The only times we've forced them into activities is when they were too young to make those sorts of decisions for themselves. So all of my kids played soccer while young until they could suggest an alternative activity they would rather do more. They all started in music, until they could find other creative alternatives. None of them are screen zombies that so many HN posters swear is inevitable without banning things. I'm not sure where the panic is coming from, but leave me and my children out of it.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-04-21 16:04:06+00:00
I'd say one of the things you have suggested. Copying the license file from spegel into a SPEGEL_LICENSE file in the repository would be sufficient. So would be actually crediting the project properly in the README with something like "portions of this code were taken from the Spegel project, under the MIT license" with a following copy of the MIT license.
by MisterBastahrd | 2025-04-21 16:04:15+00:00
Christ welcomed the poor, prostitutes, lepers, and thieves into his fold. Many Catholics are like a lot of Evangelicals in that they're Christian in name only. Their political beliefs ARE their faith and their religious beliefs are just a convenient shield for their politics. They like to associate with the man, but have taken zero time to understand him. The only time Jesus was openly hostile in the entirety of the Bible was when there were people trying to make a profit in the Temple. Contrast that to people who will attend a megachurch but hate gay folks. Francis did not condone gay marriage. He simply said that if a gay couple comes to you for pastoral advice, that you love them and attempt to give them the help they need. But you'd think the dude was prancing around in rainbow underwear on camera with the way people reacted to his love and grace.
by palata | 2025-04-21 16:04:57+00:00
> This isn't a case where a new community member forked or copied code into their first open source project. This is one of the biggest companies in the world with a well-known history of taking and using OSS without proper attribution.

Next time you work in a big company and you feel that the legal department is a PITA and slows you down, remember how people react when they are not, like here :-).
by skydhash | 2025-04-21 16:05:47+00:00
> By building a high level abstract understanding of how things operate & then understanding how that abstractions need to be expressed. Writing code certainly is more concrete and can highlight mistakes like when there's a gap in your understanding vs spots where details matter more specifically.

The whole argument behind TDD is that it's easier to write code that verify something than actually implement the code. Because it only have the answer, not the algorithm to solve the question.

So for any code you will be writing, find the answers first (expected behavior). Then add tests. The you write the code for the algorithm to come up with the answer.

Static typing is just another form of these. You tell the checker: This is the shape of this data, and it warns you of any code that does not respect that.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-04-21 16:05:58+00:00
>That last part is actually the easiest

If it were, the median e.g. business analyst should be getting paid significantly more than the median software engineer. That's not what the data shows, however.

>I can genuinely say in all of my programming projects, I spent more time understanding the problem than writing code.

This is almost trivially true for anyone who understands the problem via writing code, though.
by Kubuxu | 2025-04-21 16:06:47+00:00
In case of deps, the dependency comes with its own LICENSE file.

In this case the code is essentially forked, integrated and intermingled, so that is why it should be in the LICENSE file.

If it was file or two, it would be fine to add a comment pointing to the license file in the repo, if it was a directory, or to copy it verbatim to that file. It all the copied code was in a directory then having it in directory would be fine.

In this case it looks like they took the original code and heavily modified it, so the simplest way to solve it is one LICENSE with both notices.
by pc86 | 2025-04-21 16:07:10+00:00
> Germany's free speech is markedly different from american free speech for obvious reasons.

Germany does not have free speech so yes it is markedly different.

> Corporations have free speech rights. Corporations aren't human beings.

I'm not talking about any legal framework around free speech. If I was, I'd be talking about the First Amendment or about a specific law or court case.
by f30e3dfed1c9 | 2025-04-21 16:07:46+00:00
I found all the beer-related terminology -- cask, keg, rack, Cellar, Caskroom, tap, bottle -- annoying and unhelpful and immediately disliked it back when it was new. I did use it a little for a while but not in a long time.

These days I use pkgin, which I like fine. Can't think offhand of when something I wanted wasn't available there. My impression is that homebrew has many more packages available, but apparently not any that I want.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-21 16:07:48+00:00
> Scientists are meant to be good at verifying and double-checking results

Verifying and double-checking results requires replicating experiments, doesn't it?

> similar to how journalists have to learn to derive the truth from unreliable sources

I think maybe you are giving journalists too much credit here, or you have a very low standard for "truth"

You cannot, no matter how good you are, derive truth from faulty data
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-21 16:07:56+00:00
It’s a lot more nuanced than that. Being in a data center doesn’t imply heavy network utilization. The caveat is clearly outlined in the article being workload based not deployment based. If you have a home machine doing network routing it would absolutely benefit from this. In fact I would say probably the vast majority of Linux installs are home network devices, just people don’t know it. Embedded Linux machines doing network routing or switching or IPS or NAS or whatever would benefit a lot from this. “Energy savings” can be seen as a green washing statement but on embedded budgets it’s a primary requirement.
by taeric | 2025-04-21 16:08:05+00:00
A thing I really like about pipelines in shell scripts, is all of the buffering and threading implied by them. Semantically, you can see what command is producing output, and what command is consuming it. With some idea of how the CPU will be split by them.

This is far different than the pattern described in the article, though. Small shame they have come to have the same name. I can see how both work with the metaphor; such that I can't really complain. The "pass a single parameter" along is far less attractive to me, though.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-21 16:08:44+00:00
> Certainly this does make the case of a theater-only-first release nearly impossible to pirate. But there aren't quite as many of those anymore, and all this DRM must be expensive, both in the hardware/software, and in the logistics. I guess they've found it's worth it, but... oof.

Yes, that's the entire point. There are still tons of theater releases, that's literally the entire business of cinemas. The cost of DRM is peanuts next to their revenue, it's absolutely worth it to them. Nothing "oof" about it.
by corytheboyd | 2025-04-21 16:08:44+00:00
I agree, they are very much exaggerating both time spent writing code, as well as the amount of time LLMs shave off. LLM coding very much does NOT take “near zero time,” I would argue that sometimes it can take the same amount of time or longer, compared against simply knowing what you are doing, with tools you know how to use, referring to documentation you know how to interpret, understanding the systems around, the business around, what team A and C need in two quarters so we better keep it in mind… etc.
by WindowsDev | 2025-04-21 16:08:47+00:00
Thanks for your feedback. The source code for my windows binary projects(and visual studio .SLN files too) are available for all my projects if you care to look close enough. The .exe are prepared for convenience and is fully reproducible. I am correcting that typo in that macos utility(I admittedly wasn’t ready to launch that one for public release or announcement, fixing now). I maintain that all my extensions are 100% legitimate and will improve the code clarity on my next releases.
by BeetleB | 2025-04-21 16:08:55+00:00
> The problem is that when a corporation like Microsoft does this, they harm our community

What is this "our community"? My releasing something under the MIT license doesn't mean I'm part of whatever community you're invoking. It means I'm releasing something with an MIT license. That's it.

I certainly don't want to give companies like MS a "pause" before they decide to fork my project. I'm explicitly telling them they can do that. I absolutely do not want them to be hampered by notions of "What will this action look like?"

Don't impose your values on other people's use of my software.
by Mawr | 2025-04-21 16:09:06+00:00
> What's more, superficially at least, it makes more sense to believe in a supreme, essentially divine creator than it does to believe visibly enormous complexity deriving from a mostly unknown nothing.

It can't make more sense to believe in one entirely made up thing vs another since they're both made up.

> I'd say that this more than anything has been responsible for virtually all cultures in history believing in supreme, divine creators of one kind or another vs no historical cultures that I know of believing in the universe springing from random chance and hand-wavey nothingness behind it.

Ascribing rationality to faith is an interesting supposition. It's all based on emotions, such as fear of death, on the side of the believers and greed on the side of belief-providers.

> Though, the idea of being the creations of a tremendously powerful and conscious being that created a universe hospitable to our use and for our potential given by all our evident cognitive and material tools seems to me a lot more plausible than being subject to an accidental existence in a gargantuan ice cream environment.

No, it just seems more comforting to you. That doesn't make it any more plausible.
by Tenoke | 2025-04-21 16:09:23+00:00
I'm not sure why you think it's harder to use them without sanitization - there is nothing inherent about checking the value in it, it's just a nice use.

You might have implemented the t-string to save the value or log it better or something and not even have thought to check or escape anything and definitely not everything (just how people forget to do that elsewhere).
by skydhash | 2025-04-21 16:09:23+00:00
The solution is always out there. The code is just an automated way to get it without the error prone way of humans doing manual calculations. But sometimes, your understanding is flawed, so the code you write is not the correct way to have the solution. Which is why you have to get actual correct answers (specs) before writing code.

Correctness is not embedded in software. It's embedded in the real world.
by tomsmeding | 2025-04-21 16:10:10+00:00
Interesting! My intuition was wrong. I neglected to fully appreciate that the list is memoised.

What's happening, if I'm not mistaken, is that the unevaluated tail of the list is at all times a thunk that holds a reference to the cons cell holding the previous list item. Hence this is more like `iterate (+1) 1` than it seems at first glance.
by jamesgeck0 | 2025-04-21 16:10:14+00:00
I like SilverBullet a lot; it's similar in philosophy to Obsidian. The biggest issue I had using it as a daily driver is that it's a website; there's no dedicated app. I like to have Obsidian hotkeyed as a toggle on cmd-' for instant access. As a Firefox user on macOS, I couldn't figure out a way to do that with SilverBullet, even with HammerSpoon scripting.
Ask HN: Is there an accepted name for writing browser-based user scripts?
by deanebarker | 2025-04-21 16:10:22+00:00
The type of development I mean is GreaseMonkey or TamperMonkey scripts -- or even browser plugins -- that modify and "hack" web pages after they've loaded in the browser.

Is there a name to refer to this type of thing? Is this an accepted or pseudo-discipline? I'm trying to find best practices around this, but it's hard when there doesn't seem to be a nomenclature around it.
by buildooor | 2025-04-21 16:10:40+00:00
It uses AI to auto categorize and learn over time.

So instead of seeing Chase & Bank of America give me a bunch of hard coded stuff I get secondary categories.

This is what I built. UI is already different and there's lots more to add, but from the get go I'm getting more insight.

https://imgur.com/a/ylp4DXx
by mpalmer | 2025-04-21 16:10:50+00:00
Events remain a useful technical mechanism to transmit state and data among application resources but they are a miserable experience for developers and operators alike. Events: - Put application state and data in dozens of queues that make the application prone to failures, race conditions and incorrect results - Force developers to think and program asynchronously which is more complex and time consuming than synchronous code - Require developers know more than just their portion of the code and application domain: they also need to understand how to work with queues, caches and event schemas - Make applications difficult to troubleshoot as there is no one place to understand the state and data for an application

I say this as someone genuinely interested in this pattern, and in software solutions like Skip: "events" aren't responsible for any of these problems; technical leads producing questionable system designs are.

On their own, additional dependencies won't solve problems inherent in the skills/experience/makeup of your team. Open source is great, but projects come and go, and newer ones come with more risk.

---

Side note: the only content on the homepage is a button that says "Skip Overview", which is very funny.
by jandrese | 2025-04-21 16:11:21+00:00
I have a feeling that people who got bogged down in step 3 were the kind of people who write a lot of wordy corporate boilerplate with multiple levels of abstraction for every single thing. AKA "best practices" type coding.

For me the most important part of a project is working out the data structures and how they are accessed. That's where the rubber meets the road, and is something that AI struggles with. It requires a bit too high a level of abstract thinking and whole problem conceptualization for existing LLMs. Once the data structures are set the coding is easy.
by kllrnohj | 2025-04-21 16:12:08+00:00
Sure it can, just look at France, it had over 70% electricity from nuclear in 2018.

Now sure the best time to have invested heavily in nuclear reactors was 30-40 years ago, but we still could today. The payoff won't be for 5-10 years, but wind & sun are never going to have continuous availability until we figure out space solar, after all.
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-21 16:12:20+00:00
Maybe understand the paper before making claims about its contents.

>"In principle, our attribution graphs make predictions that are much more fine-grained than these kinds of interventions can test."

Literally what I said. If the replacement model isn't faithful then you can't trust the details of the graphs. Basically stuff like “increasing feature f at layer 7 by Δ will raise feature g at layer 9 by exactly 0.12 in activation”

>"We found planned word features in about half of the poems we investigated, which may be due to our CLT not capturing features for the planned words, or it may be the case that the model does not always engage in planning"

>"Our results are only claims about specific examples. We don't make claims about mechanisms more broadly. For example, when we discuss planning in poems, we show a few specific examples in which planning appears to occur. It seems likely that the phenomenon is more widespread, but it's not our intent to make that claim."

The moment there were examples of the phenomena through interventions was the moment they remained valid regardless of how faithful the replacement model was.

The worst case scenario here (and it's ironic here because this scenario would mean the model is faithful) is that Claude does not always plan its rhymes, not that it never plans them. The model not being faithful actually means the replacement was simply not robust enough to capture all the ways Claude plans rhymes. Guess what? Neither option invalidates the examples.

Regards of how faithful the replacement model is, Anthropic have demonstrated Claude has the ability to plan its rhymes ahead of time and engages in this planning at least sometimes. This is started quite plainly too. What's so hard to understand ?

>"We only explain a fraction of the model's computation. The remaining “dark matter” manifests as error nodes in our attribution graphs, which (unlike features) have no interpretable function, and whose inputs we cannot easily trace. (...) Error nodes are especially a problem for complicated prompts (...) This paper has focused on prompts that are simple enough to avoid these issues. However, even the graphs we have highlighted contain significant contributions from error nodes."

Ok and ? Model computations are extremely complex, who knew ? This does not invalidate what they do manage to show.
by layer8 | 2025-04-21 16:12:48+00:00
The one thing that I don’t like about pipelining (whether using a pipe operator or method chaining), is that assigning the result to a variable goes in the wrong direction, so to speak. There should be an equivalent of the shell’s `>` for piping into a variable as the final step. Of course, if the variable is being declared at the same time, whatever the concrete syntax is would still require some getting used to, being “backwards” compared to regular assignment/initialization.
by paulcole | 2025-04-21 16:12:58+00:00
I don't do this at all. I find that being obsessed with optimizing prompts is exactly what's not needed at this stage of AI's development.

I just prompt as I go and find that the "cost" of prompting again to get a better output is lower than the cost of having some system for cataloging, maintaining, and versioning my prompts.

I might be wrong but I'm getting good results out of LLMs.
by rahimnathwani | 2025-04-21 16:13:10+00:00
Right. The core premise of this article makes no sense:

what if LLMs executed tool calls without going back to the client

An LLM can't execute tools. The only thing an LLM can do is output tokens. It's up to the calling code to decide what to do with those tokens. If an API provider enables its own tools, that doesn't mean the LLM is executing its own tools. It just means the API provider is executing tools instead of the API caller.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-21 16:14:02+00:00
> software developers and writers can be replaced by a machine but venture capitalists can't

Human Venture capitalists can in theory be held accountable for their actions, even if it does seem like they rarely actually are

AI venture capitalists cannot be held accountable, so they should not be allowed to exist

Accountability is important across all of human society

AI's utter lack of accountability is not an accident, it is an appealing feature for immoral people who love the idea of laundering their own responsibility through a machine

> If you are a VC, just try it. You might be surprised by the results and end up liking it. Who knows? AI is a friend

I am not a VC, and AI is not a friend