MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-04-21 21:43:07+00:00
A library writer ultimately has to decide if they accept both types. For a database cursor, do you take regular strings + parameter arguments and template strings? Or dedicate a new API to the idea?

cursor.execute(“select * from x where foo=?”, {foo=1}) # while also allowing cursor.execute(t“select * from x where foo={foo}”) #Vs cursor.executetemplate(“select * from x where foo={foo}”)

If ‘execute’ takes string and t-string, then I would consider it a problem to use a t-string without parameters. If there is a novel API just for t-strings, then you are implying widespread breaking changes as you have a schism between the two ways of providing parameters.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-21 21:43:57+00:00
Some employees aren't even verified!

I hear you. I haven't investigated every account that got the badge, but it feels to me like they picked people who are both technical and engaged with the protocol, so not entirely arbitrary. That naturally will have some correlation with "I know someone at bsky". I know I've seen accounts that I think are cooler than I am who didn't get verified yet! I'm sure they'll be expanding soon, which will dilute this sort of association.
by cloudnet-draw | 2025-04-21 21:44:01+00:00
Hey HN

I’m a Cloud Security Architect, and I built this tool to solve a very specific pain: every time I started a new project, I had to manually create a network diagram of the Azure environment — hubs, spokes, peerings, subnets, NSGs, UDRs, etc.

It was repetitive and error-prone. So I made CloudNet-Draw.

It’s a Python-based CLI that queries Azure via the API and outputs a .drawio file representing the full virtual network topology — no manual drawing required.

GitHub: https://github.com/krhatland/cloudnet-draw Blog: https://hatnes.no/posts/cloudnet-draw/

It’s free and open source — no telemetry, no cloud backend. Just Python and Azure SDK.

Would love to hear what you think, and happy to take feature ideas or feedback.

Thanks!
by sanderjd | 2025-04-21 21:44:28+00:00
I'm intrigued but confused by your comment. I think it could be done like this:

cur.executemany(t"INSERT INTO movie VALUES({data})")

Then the Template object would have a parameter that is a list, and it could turn that into the right number of "?"s to pass into the database driver along with the data.

What am I missing?
by ben_w | 2025-04-21 21:44:30+00:00
> Its the same middle schooler, nobody gave a time limit for how long it takes the middle schooler to solve the problem.

Yeah they do. If a middle schooler take 40 hours to solve a maths exam, they fail the exam.

> These AI models wont solve it no matter how much time spent, you have to make new models, like making new kids.

First: doesn't matter, "white collar jobs" aren't companies aren't paying for seat warmers, they're paying for problems solved, and not the kinds of problems 11 year olds can do.

Second: So far as I can tell, every written exam that not only 11 year olds but even 16 year olds take, and in many cases 21 year olds take, LLMs ace — the problem is coming up with new tests that describe the stuff we want that models can't do which humans can. This means that while I even agree these models have gaps, I can't actually describe those gaps in a systematic way, they just "vibe" like my own experience of continuing to misunderstand German as a Brit living in Berlin.

Third: going from 11 years old to adulthood, most or all atoms in your body will be replaced, and your brain architecture changes significantly. IIRC something like half of synapses get pruned by puberty.

Fourth: Taking a snapshot of a model and saying that snapshot can't learn, is like taking a sufficiently detailed MRI scan of a human brain and saying the same thing about the human you've imaged — training cut-offs are kinda arbitrary.

> No current model has demonstrated the ability to learn arbitrary white collar jobs, so no current model has done what it takes to be considered a general intelligence.

Both "intelligence" and "generality" are continuums, not booleans. It's famously hard for humans to learn new languages as they get older, for example.

All AI (not just LLMs) need a lot more experience than me, which means my intelligence is higher. When sufficient traing data exists, that doesn't matter because the AI can just make up for being stupid by being stupid really fast — which is how they can read and write in more languages than I know the names of.

On the other hand, LLMs so far have demonstrated — at the junior level of a fresh graduate of 21, let alone an 11 year old — demonstrated algebra, physics, chemistry, literature, coding, a hundred or so languages, medicine, law, politics, marketing, economics, and customer support. That's pretty general. Even if "fresh graduate" isn't a high standard for employment.

It took reading a significant fraction of the internet to get to that level because of their inefficiency, but they're superhumanly general, "Jack of all trades, master of none".

Well, superhuman compared to any individual. LLM generality only seems mediocre when compared to the entire human species at once, these models vastly exceed any single human because no single human speaks as many languages as these things let alone all the other stuff.
by saltcured | 2025-04-21 21:44:44+00:00
I'm trying to picture intersecting paths though. Does a faster moving black hole cause more or less damage to a target?

Imagine a black hole on the quite small end, intersecting the core of a planet. Unlike regular matter, it can't really produce bow shock through collisions, right? All the target matter in the direct path just "falls in" and in elastically reduces the black hole momentum a tiny bit?

Some matter outside the direct path could be accelerated towards the black hole but slingshot behind it, rather than into it. So this material could produce an impressive wake, with material spraying outward from the collision path and interacting with the remainder of the target.

But, all this visible chaos comes from gravity rather than more direct kinetic interactions, right? If the black hole is moving faster, doesn't the target's material gets less gravitational acceleration as it spends less time in the near field? So, if the blackhole is moving very fast, does it bore a smaller hole and have less interaction with the target? Or do other effects of relativity make this more convoluted to think about?

I'm imagining a cylindrical plug of a planet "instantaneously" disappearing, and then the remainder of the planet collapsing inward to fill the void, bouncing off itself, and ringing like a bell.
by permo-w | 2025-04-21 21:45:18+00:00
isn't it funny that half the time when you see criticism of LLMs it's almost like the words have been stolen from someone else?

the opinion you're parroting here completely misses the point of LLMs. their purpose is not to start artistic movements or liberally think for themselves and no one is claiming it is. their purpose is to accelerate information retrieval and translation and programming tasks, which they by and large are incredible at. even if they had the capacity to invent artistic movements, which in theory they most certainly do, starting an artistic movement is pretty much intrinsically a human thing, and it requires desire, inclination, trust and a grounding in the real world, such as it is. your "spark of ingenuity" is not lacking because of some issue or lack of creativity, it's lacking because it's not the point and no one wants it to be.

whether it is "cognition" or not is completely irrelevant to their purpose and use, and its a complete waste of time trying to litigate if it is or not because the word in itself is poorly defined. if you're trying to figure out if j=k but you can't define j or k, and you do know that k isn't a big factor in the usefulness of the system, then what is the point? is it jealousy? fear? I assure you, LLMs are not a threat to the special ingenuity of your mind

this opinion is the equivalent of watching the invention of the pocket calculator and complaining that it can't write calculus equations on a black board
by canucker2016 | 2025-04-21 21:47:24+00:00
In a reply from an Microsoft employee who's familiar with the situation, some group in Azure wanted support for some Azure-specific APIs. The spegel dev decided that was too far out of their wheelhouse, so they didn't want to add support in spegel for that Azure-specific API. The Azure subteam went ahead and added that support into their fork of spegel.

Other changes removed the spegel project's LICENSE and added in Microsoft's LICENCE file and copyrights on all files.

see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43755745
by gerdesj | 2025-04-21 21:47:43+00:00
As I said above, I'm not an expert. However, I read GEB on a whim when bored at school and I think it still informs my thinking 35 years later.

Move GEB up the reading list right now! The edition I initially read was hard bound and was quite worn. I bought and read it again about 20 years ago and found more treasures.

It is a proper nerd grade treatise for non experts who are interested in maths, music and art. Really: maths, music and art from a mostly mathematical perspective. Hofstadter's writing style is very easy going and he is a master of clarity without complexity.

I don't think you need any more Maths than you would get up to age 18 or so at school to understand the entire book and probably less. Even if you gloss the formal Maths the book still works.
by zahlman | 2025-04-21 21:48:27+00:00
> Then the useful part is the extra execute function you have to write

Well, no, the library author writes it. And the library author also gets to detect whether you pass a Template instance as expected, or (erroneously) a string created by whatever formatting method you choose. Having to use `safe(name)` within the f-string loses type information, and risks a greater variety of errors.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-21 21:49:14+00:00
At the protocol level, any account can verify any other account. If you have one, you can verify anyone you'd like right now. The NYT can verify any account, even ones from those organizations, or not even from a news organization.

The only difference is that Bluesky won't show a blue check for just any verification, only ones from accounts they trust. That's a social relationship, not a technical one, and so I'm sure if the NYT decided to go rogue, Bluesky would have them not be an input into the blue check any more.
by anonym29 | 2025-04-21 21:49:16+00:00
Trust the megacorporations.

Trust your government.

"It works well for everyone else, why are you being so weird by not doing what everyone else does?"

Grant the megacorporations control over your entire life.

Your government will protect you from the megacorporations.

"Self hosting? Open source? Linux? You're weird, just get an iPhone."

The megacorporations never make mistakes.

The government never makes mistakes either.

"What's wrong with you? Are you seriously too poor to afford an iPhone? Get a blue bubble already."

The megacorporations never lie to you, they never manipulate you.

Even if they tried, your trustworthy government would stop them.

This message brought to you by social conformity norms that are most certainly NOT subtly reinforced by the same billionaires and trillion dollar companies that benefit from them.

/s
by discoballz | 2025-04-21 21:49:33+00:00
"dimensional resonance" is not anything. That phrase does not mean anything. It's like a fake science phrase you'd see in Star Trek or something. Same with "neural phase feedback" and "entropy modeling". You just made these things up, they are not concepts that exist in the world.

"72-hour quantum coherence, 100,000 simulated qubits" -- a couple responses here. (1) I can simulate ANY number of qubits doing a trivial operation, that is not interesting (and I feel pretty sure you do not understand the situations under which a collection of qubits is computationally difficult to simulate). I have 24 GB of ram in my laptop, I can simulate an X^{\otimes 2^24} |0> operation! That's 2^24 qubits! (2) I can simulate a qubit with ANY amount of coherence, it's not real! Why is your fake simulated qubit limited to 72 hours of coherence? Just change the simulation so it's infinite. The hard part of decoherence is that it's difficult to control IN THE REAL WORLD. Simulating it as being small is totally irrelevant.

Finally, and I say this as if you didn't already know it: this entire thing was written by chatgpt or some other AI service. The metrics are not "real", they are hallucinations from chatgpt. Your "system" does not even exist. This entire document is fan-fiction.

I highly advise you to do something else with your life.
by btilly | 2025-04-21 21:49:33+00:00
The Peano Axioms lead to both the standard model of arithmetic (the integers that we want), and nonstandard models. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-standard_model_of_arithmet....

In that article you'll see references to "first order logic" and "second order logic". First order logic captures any possible finite chain of reasoning. Second order logic allows us to take logical steps that would require a potentially infinite amount of reasoning to do. Gödel's famous theorems were about the limitations of first order logic. While second order logic has no such limitations, it is also not something that humans can actually do. (We can reason about second order logic though.)

Anyways a nonstandard model of arithmetic can have all sorts of bizarre things. Such as a proof that Peano Axioms lead to a contradiction. While it might seem that this leads to a contradiction in the Peano Axioms, it doesn't because the "proof" is (from our point of view) infinitely long, and so not really a proof at all! (This is also why logicians have to draw a very careful distinction between "these axioms prove" and "these axioms prove that they prove"...)
by Qem | 2025-04-21 21:49:40+00:00
> humanity is almost certainly immune to extinction, there are too many of us

See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_pigeon

> The pigeon migrated in enormous flocks, constantly searching for food, shelter, and breeding grounds, and was once the most abundant bird in North America, numbering around 3 billion, and possibly up to 5 billion.

> A slow decline between about 1800 and 1870 was followed by a rapid decline between 1870 and 1890. In 1900, the last confirmed wild bird was shot in southern Ohio.
by brickfaced | 2025-04-21 21:49:57+00:00
Epic is known locally as an exploitative, abusive employer of software engineers. Work-life balance is poor, pay is mediocre for the industry, and skills with their in-house tools don't transfer outside Epic. They have an extensive non-compete clause with EXTREMELY aggressive enforcement:

https://isthmus.com/news/cover-story/opportunity-lost-epic-n...

They're also vehemently opposed to remote work, to the point that during COVID they tried to force employees back into the office in August, 2020 (!) in violation of a county public health order (!!!):

https://www.wpr.org/economy/workers-officials-urge-remote-wo...

Epic's Glassdoor reviews are terrible. Several personal friends each lasted less than a year at Epic out of college before finding new, better-paying employment elsewhere. Since Epic is privately owned and its founder and CEO has stated she'll never sell, its corporate culture will never change. It's better than no job at all but if you have other options, avoid.
by leptons | 2025-04-21 21:50:07+00:00
>People spend thousands of dollars on Apple devices

As long as the people cut off from the walled garden amount to less than a rounding error in Apple's bottom line, they simply don't care. They will only care when a judge forces them to care, as we had to find out the hard way in a class action lawsuit against Apple. We won, but they lost us as lifetime customers. My wife even owns Apple stock and refuses to buy anything else from them and warns others against it. They could have made it right for practically no cost to them, but they chose the dick move, and they were forced to pay out in the end anyway.
by gameman144 | 2025-04-21 21:52:03+00:00
> There is no “both sides” here

If there's ever a disagreement or debate about anything, then there are literally always two sides.

You might disagree that the thing that the other side is prioritizing is as important (e.g. the lives of fetuses vs. the right to bodily autonomy for women), or that the thing the other side believes is even right (e.g. people who believe in racial hierarchies and other literally racist ideologies), but that doesn't detract from the fact that two sides do, in reality, exist.

In my experience, it's way more effective determining the thing that the other side cares about, then finding common ground if that's something that you also care about -- from there, it's a lot easier to make the case that while both priorities are good, your priorities might be more justifiable.

Shutting down the other side by saying their viewpoint is invalid has been productive for me literally zero times in my life.

(On the topic, this was a thing that Pope Francis was exceptionally good at: he actually listened to the concerns of people and spoke with them where they were at, even those who he vehemently disagreed with).
by kordlessagain | 2025-04-21 21:52:11+00:00
The concept of “one” holds a dual role. It represents a countable unit: something you can put in a bowl and also stands for indivisibility itself. When you divide any quantity by an indivisible unit, you’re simply counting how many of those indivisibles fit within it. Then comes 2: the first number that is divisible, but only by itself and the indivisible one. That’s what makes it prime. A prime is a number divisible only by itself and by 1, the indivisible origin of all counting.
by neckardt | 2025-04-21 21:52:32+00:00
My first job out of college was working at Epic on MyChart. Great people, terrible code.

Epic’s main problem is a lack of clear internal code ownership. Everyone owns all the code. This means that even if you clean something up, someone on the other side of the company may come in and mess things up again.

This led to really defensive programming where developers would never refactor, they would simply add a new if case for their new functionality somewhere deep in the code, then prop drill the data down. This led to every core function having over a dozen parameters and hundreds of branches. It eventually became impossible to reason about. Cross team calls were just function calls rather than defined apis. This made it fast to develop code initially, but terrible to own long term. This mainly applies to their Mumps code.

While I was there I felt like Epic was beyond saving, but with a big push there may be something they can do:

1. Enforce some level of code complexity. Best practice is 40 lines per function and no more than 4 parameters per function. Epic probably shouldn’t shoot for that, but a 100 line limit and 6 parameters per function would already be a huge improvement.

2. Enforce strong code ownership. Epic has many people who are there for life, let them cook. Epic should segment off code to certain teams so those owners can fix it at their leisure. Cross team api calls should be clear API contracts. It would require some more discussions to get feature requests approved since not everyone can do anything anymore, but the code would gradually improve.

Epic is too important to fail. I hope things have started to improve since I left.
by tmiku | 2025-04-21 21:53:11+00:00
My small liberal arts college sent a lot of people to Epic (3-5 grads out of each year's class of ~550), including me - they are known for hiring lots of fresh grads with academic-STEM backgrounds who lack tech industry experience into their technical services and QA roles. I think the hiring dynamics for those non-developer technical roles are more favorable to Epic than those for full developers, and those people tend to make up more of a company's headcount overall.
by zahlman | 2025-04-21 21:53:30+00:00
No, it gives an error because `nonlocal foo` requests that the name `foo` be looked up in a closure, but `f` doesn't have such a closure (the `foo` defined outside the function is global instead). `nonlocal` is the same sort of keyword as `global` but for enclosing functions instead of the global namespace; see also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1261875 .
by Jensson | 2025-04-21 21:53:42+00:00
> Here's a question for you. If we take a model with open weights - say, LLaMA or Qwen - and give it access to learning materials as well as tools to perform training runs on its weights and dynamically reload those updated weights - would that constitute learning, to you? If not, then why not?

It does constitute learning, but it wont make it smart since it isn't intelligent about its learning like human brains are.
by epmatsw | 2025-04-21 21:53:49+00:00
The state of MUMPS has progressed a lot since this article was written, to the point where most MUMPS developers would probably only vaguely recognize this. Even the "MUMPS" they were using back in 2014 or so was really a higher-level dialect + higher-level framework (Chronicles) that was transpiled down to actual MUMPS. It was more like writing ES2015 + JSX or whatever and then actually executing ES3 + DOM operations.

Source: was on a team that was performance sensitive enough that I spent a lot of time in the actual transpiled MUMPS code that did look more like this article.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-21 21:54:19+00:00
Anecdotaly I need to move boxes and arrows around to solve my complicated problems, so pen and paper doesn't cut it either.

I used to do it in sequencing programs like PlantUML, but moved to draw.io -> figjam afterwards, with mouse and keyboard and stylus.

What you're used to and what features you need will heavily influenced the process I guess.
by steveklabnik | 2025-04-21 21:54:44+00:00
> Do they? I didn't observe any breaks when I did my DNS verification.

I went to one of my posts and clicked "copy link to post." that gives me an URL like this:

https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabnik.com/post/3lndppxy7xc2a

If I change my account to `steveklabniklol.com`, then this URL wouldn't work, as that url turns into

https://bsky.app/profile/steveklabniklol.com/post/3lndppxy7x...

See here for more: https://github.com/bluesky-social/social-app/issues/1221

> People are paying attention to the Display Handle and not the address one

I agree, and that's why people don't like changing it.

> it doesn't seem like Bluesky's implementation will do this

It does.
by silexia | 2025-04-21 21:55:08+00:00
A government that grows too large has to find things to do, and most often those things to do take away your freedoms. A government that is tasked with "solving a problem" most often solves that problem in a way that infringes on your rights.

Be very wary of big government and politicians who promise to miraculously solve all of your problems despite heading up a government that mostly poorly solves the problems it already has.
by EnPissant | 2025-04-21 21:55:28+00:00
Meanwhile, new construction in California is required by law to include solar panels, and builders can price them however they want. You will typically see prices of $27,000 for a 5.7 kWh system. You can also choose a lease if you wish, but it's the same as buying the panels, except with a much higher interest rate than including it in your mortgage.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-04-21 21:55:50+00:00
The great replacement thing has a racial component. It’s not “we’re bringing in immigrants to replace young workers” it’s “there’s a deliberate conspiracy by (((them))) to lower white birthrates while importing members of racial minorities.” I’ve seen plenty of crazy motherfuckers say things like the latter, and I’ve seen it hinted at by more moderate conservatives like Tucker.