MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rglover | 2025-04-03 23:48:58+00:00
Those are not my prompts. Those were the headings it put above the code it generated in its responses.

Even if my prompt was low-quality, it doesn't matter. It's confidently stating that what it produced was both tested and working. I personally understand that's not true, but of all the safety guards they should be putting in place, not lying should be near the top of the list.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-04-03 23:49:07+00:00
No. Research Universities are about Research. There are non governmental sources of funding for research, but they pale in comparison with government funding. If you want to make the case that the private industry should take on research, the problem is that there is no immediate profit in it. It can take decades, and few companies can invest decades of funding hoping for some eventual breakthrough. Moreover, in that model, research is slowed because companies are notoriously bad at sharing research with competitors. So you either create national research centers, or you use research universities.
by arctek | 2025-04-03 23:49:08+00:00
This is also why I think the current iterations wont converge on any actual type of intelligence.

It doesn't operate on the same level as (human) intelligence it's a very path dependent process. Every step you add down this path increases entropy as well and while further improvements and bigger context windows help - eventually you reach a dead end where it degrades.

You'd almost need every step of the process to mutate the model to update global state from that point.

From what I've seen the major providers kind of use tricks to accomplish this, but it's not the same thing.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-03 23:50:01+00:00
Sure, but my original comment was:

> Modern taste is more about more neutral-colored foundations with color accents.

Yes, there's no such thing as "objectively correct" when it comes to design. But it's where Western society currently is in terms of the design of public spaces including offices, how your realtor will advise you to redecorate when putting your home for sale, etc. And there are principles of modern design that, while not judgeable as correct/incorrect, are widely accepted as established.

So that's great you like to be bombarded with color, but I'm talking about an explanation for where society has been and how it's evolved with regard to color.
by om2 | 2025-04-03 23:50:13+00:00
Battery friendly because notifications can be coalesced by the OS and processed without having to fire up a full browser engine process and JS VM just to unpack the notification and post a visible notification.

Even in the case where the app needs local processing to show the best notification, having this as fallback removes the risk that the app misses the deadline to display a visible notification and therefore loses its push subscription (which is a behavior Chrome and Firefox have too).

We're also not removing classic Web Push, so web apps can deny themselves the benefits of Declarative Web Push if they don't like it.
by actionfromafar | 2025-04-03 23:51:11+00:00
Most Linux development is corporate now, WSL makes Linux easy to "use" without ever leaving Windows, and the lock-in-effect if you are using Office/Azure/Teams/BI/etc is almost perfect. You can't leave it, basically. Easier to start a new subsidiary from scratch using something else, than trying to migrate off the Total Microsoft Stack.
by snovymgodym | 2025-04-03 23:51:39+00:00
> Is there any reason to use VMS today other than for existing applications that cannot be migrated?

No, there is no reason to do a greenfield VMS deployment and hasn't been for a long time.

> I've heard its reliability is legendary, but I've never tried it myself.

I've heard the same things but I am doubtful as to their veracity in a modern context. Those claims sound like they come from an era where VMS was still a cutting-edge and competitive product. I'm sure VMS on vaxclusters had impressive reliability in the 1980s, but I doubt it's anything special today. If you look at the companies and institutions that need performance and high reliability today (e.g. Hyperscaler companies or the TOP500) they are all using the same thing: Linux on clusters of x86-64 machines.
by mlsu | 2025-04-03 23:52:50+00:00
The hypocrisy is obviously disgusting.

It also shows how, at the end of the day, none of the justifications for this intellectual property crap are about creativity, preserving the rights of creators, or any lofty notion that intellectual property actually makes the world a better place, but rather, it is a naked power+money thing. Warner Bros and Sony can stop you from publishing a jpeg because they have lawyers who write the rulebook. Sam Altman can publish a jpeg because the Prince of Saud believes that he is going build for corporate America a Golem that can read excel spreadsheets.
by carpo | 2025-04-03 23:52:56+00:00
I guess it depends why you're writing the code. I'm writing a local video library desktop app to categorise my home and work videos. I'm implementing only the features I need. No one else will use it, I'll be finished the first version after about 4 weeks of weekend and night coding, and it's got some pretty awesome features I never would have thought possible (for me). Without AI I probably never would have done this. I'm sold, even just for the reduction of friction in getting a project off the ground. The first 80% was 80% AI developed and the last 20% has flipped to 80% coded by me. Which is great, because this part is the meat of the app and where I want most input.
Show HN: Build a job leads database with Notion and Claude
by jhgaylor | 2025-04-03 23:52:59+00:00
I have been using Claude for so much lately. And so when I needed to build a list of leads for my job search I tried to get Claude to do it.

With computer use and a list of job boards I could get some results but I didn't think Claude was going to find my next job. Then I found an api that aggregates job boards and lets you search for jobs. They publish an openapi spec and Claude made me an MCP server in no time. You can find the mcp server here: https://github.com/jhgaylor/hirebase-mcp

The workflow is simple.

1. Make a database in notion with some fields to store information about the job.

2.Prompt claude to find jobs I'd be interested in, claude gathers context with playwright, searches hirebase for jobs, and updates notion with the results.

3. Repeat Step 2 until you have enough leads.

My prompts usually look like this:

"Find jobs that would be a good fit for the candidate described by https://jakegaylor.com/?hn=1 and update the notion database job search 2025 with the results".

My claude config installs playwright, notion, and hirebase mcp servers and can be found here: https://gist.github.com/jhgaylor/39243d71e03b49c775bd31e913f...
by _ph_ | 2025-04-03 23:53:26+00:00
Not forever. But 75 years after the death of the creator by current international agreement. I definitely think that the exact terms of copyright should be revisited - a lot of usages should be allowed like 50 years of publishing a piece of work. But that needs to be agreed upon and converted into law. Till then, one should expect everyone, especially large corporations, to stick to the law.
by davidblue | 2025-04-03 23:54:11+00:00
Love how absolutely engorged and broken this web page is to dramatically depict a style that - were the article actually just published in plain text - would be what... a millionth the size? Should have known better than to be surprised that the "source code" one can "download" and "look through" is in a goddamned PDF.

I do truly wonder if the fact that he was publishing a PDF as downloadable "code" even caused him any pause lol.
by dekhn | 2025-04-03 23:54:18+00:00
Schools don't want people who min-max for college acceptance. They want people who are genuinely excited to go to that school.

I don't think his essay was necessarily a deal-breaker if you read it as a "I learned from experience but need to get another kind of experience, one that you get at college". Still, it reads as colossally arrogant and I don't see an admissions officer having any problem rejecting him as a candidate.
by caseyohara | 2025-04-03 23:55:21+00:00
But you said "I can now whip up a serious contender to any SaaS business in a week".

Any SaaS business. In a week. And to be a "serious contender", you have to have feature parity. Yet now you're shifting the goalposts.

What's stopping you? There are 38 weeks left in 2025. Please build "serious contenders" for each of the top 38 most popular SaaS products before the end of the year. Surely you will be the most successful programmer to have ever lived.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-04-03 23:55:30+00:00
I always upvote Ben Eater's project(s).

I got his 6502 kit and worked through his YouTube videos to get it up and running with LCD display and all. I want to actually frame it and get it running, hanging on a wall.

If anyone is new to Ben, find a comfortable chair or couch, make some tea, take a breath, and begin your descent into his long-form breadboard series of nerd-splaining how a CPU works, beginning with basic logic gates.

His follow-on series is a little higher level. He's still at it with the breadboards but he allows that this time the CPU (a 6502) is already built for us. He then walks through how the address bus works, how to attach RAM, etc.

It makes me wish I could be transported back to the 70's when things could still be understood.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-03 23:55:32+00:00
I agree and I’d think we’d have a good time chatting about it.

To me, the concepts of self-determination and owning humans are in conflict. I think it’s appropriate and important to honor the gallantry and sacrifice individual soldiers.

But it’s important to appreciate that the Confederacy was explicit in its evil, and the labor of those soldiers in civilian life was cheapened by the aristocrats who founded the Confederacy to preserve their human property. And the (specious) ideals of self-determination were discarded as the demands of the first modern war demanded centralized control.
by tombert | 2025-04-03 23:57:40+00:00
Office has a port to Mac that is perfectly fine. Teams has a port to both Mac and Linux. Azure is a cloud service, but most of its development tools that I've used had Mac clients. I don't know anything about BI so I can't speak to that.

Office even has a web version that generally works fine. I ran it on Brave browser in Linux last week. Teams browser also works fine, I use it to talk to my parents.

I don't think your examples are good on this.
by Izikiel43 | 2025-04-03 23:58:49+00:00
> Remember all those people who are resentful (of course that word) towards degree-holders because they wish they had one themselves?

I think the fair comparison isn't they have a degree and I don't, it's they have a better life/savings/house/car than me, which is enabled in general by getting a degree, which becomes the common contention point.
by driggs | 2025-04-03 23:59:34+00:00
Kudos to the author for writing an academic thesis on distortion in music, but it sure reads like an academic thesis rather than a statement about art.

In contrast, I thoroughly enjoyed and resonated with this short conversation between Henry Rollins (Black Flag) and Don Was (President of the Jazz label Blue Note) about distortion in music:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p6_WCqaucc
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-03 23:59:36+00:00
I am not a software engineer. I don’t live on a coast. I grew up intermittently poor before I did well.

I am not unsympathetic to someone in the rust belt, anywhere really, who needs help. I don’t expect them to be a software engineer. We should provide robust social safety nets, guarantees of remote work in some fashion, whatever it takes to help these people live good lives until they retire or die. Tax me more, I insist. But, I don’t think that’ll make them happy nor what is on offer with this administration. It’s certainly not what they’re voting for. To reconfigure domestic manufacturing will take 5-10 years at least, and the evidence is robust the electorate is too unsophisticated and impatient for that.
by codedokode | 2025-04-04 00:00:39+00:00
> Copyright makes the legality of arXiv

Why? I thought that authors post the articles to arxiv themselves.

> It locks publicly funded research behind paywalls.

It is not copyright, it is scientists who do not want to publish their work (that they got paid for) in open access journals. And it seems the reason is that we have the system where your career advances better if you publish in paid journals.
by voidhorse | 2025-04-04 00:01:04+00:00
The main takeaway of this whole LLM chatbot nonsense to me is how gullible people are and how low the bar is.

These tools are brand new and have proven kinks (hallucinations, for example). But instead of being, rightly, in my view, skeptical, the majority of people completely buy into the hype and already have full automation bias when it comes to these tools. They blindly trust the output, and merrily push forth AI generated, incorrect garbage that they themselves have no expertise or ability to evaluate. It's like everyone is itching to buy a bridge.

In some sense, I suppose it's only natural. Much of the modern economy sustains itself on little more than hype and snake oil anyway, so I guess it's par for the course. Still, it's left me a bit incredulous, particularly when people I thought were smart and capable of being critical seemingly adopt this nonsense without batting an eye. Worse, they all hype it up even further. Makes me feel like the whole LLM business is some kind of ponzi scheme given how willingly users will schill for these products for nothing.
by philipkglass | 2025-04-04 00:01:09+00:00
I think you can get a life sentence for merely posting links to the library.

This isn't true in the United States. I would be surprised if it were true in any country. Many people have posted sci-hub links here, and to my knowledge nobody has ever suffered legal problems from it:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
by pdpi | 2025-04-04 00:01:10+00:00
Fundamentally, rules almost always come with compromises — for the sake of making rules understandable by humans, they have to be relatively simple. Simple rules for complex situations will always forbid some amount of good behaviour, and allow some bad behaviour. Many of society's parasites live in the space of "allowable bad behaviour", but there is a lot of value to knowing how to exploit the "forbidden good behaviour" space.
by userbinator | 2025-04-04 00:01:48+00:00
but on the other hand, having a rising browser engine might eventually remove this avenue for fingerprinting

If what I've seen from CloudFlare et.al. are any indication, it's the exact opposite --- the amount of fingerprinting and "exploitation" of implementation-defined behaviour has increased significantly in the past few months, likely in an attempt to kill off other browser engines; the incumbents do not like competition at all.

The enemy has been trying to spin it as "AI bots DDoSing" but one wonders how much of that was their own doing...
by siliconc0w | 2025-04-04 00:02:18+00:00
The limiting factor is power, we can't build enough of it - certainly not enough by 2027. I don't really see this addressed.

Second to this, we can't just assume that progress will keep increasing. Most technologies have a 'S' curve and plateau once the quick and easy gains are captured. Pre-training is done. We can get further with RL but really only in certain domains that are solvable (math and to an extent coding). Other domains like law are extremely hard to even benchmark or grade without very slow and expensive human annotation.
by fiddlerwoaroof | 2025-04-04 00:04:15+00:00
It’s worse in music: the folk music that came before recorded music had a long history of everyone borrowing and putting their own spin on someone else’s tune and, today, this is viewed as some kind of assault on the originator of the tune.

If companies can’t gatekeep our artistic culture for money, we’ll be better able to enjoy it.
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-04 00:04:50+00:00
The step of building up hydrocarbons by Fischer-Tropsch is capital intensive and requires an expensive machine which probably doesn’t become economical even with cheap syngas.

Anybody reasonable gives up and goes to some kind of single entity fuel like methanol or butanol or dimethyl ether. The aviation industry is the one exception but half of that is that if they did get serious about sustainable aviation fuel they’d suddenly realize they should have switched to methane long ago.
by ryankrage77 | 2025-04-04 00:04:58+00:00
> "resist the temptation to get better ratings from gullible humans by hallucinating citations or faking task completion"

Everything this from this point on is pure fiction. An LLM can't get tempted or resist temptations, at best there's some local minimum in a gradient that it falls into. As opaque and black-box-y as they are, they're still deterministic machines. Anthropomorphisation tells you nothing useful about the computer, only the user.
by nine_zeros | 2025-04-04 00:07:30+00:00
If other countries are sensible, they'd tax (er tariff) American software companies - because a large amount of software is less useful than goods.

A 20% tax on Facebook and Google isn't going to do anything. A 20% on Office 365 is meaningful but only until they find software alternatives from anywhere else in the globe.

As for the US, O365 will not be more expensive but the cost of producing O365 will be. It will be up to execs to determine if they want to pass the costs to the shrinking number of businesses or if they want to eat the cost of production at the expense of shareholders.

Either way, American society is going to eat the cost, either in loss of customers or in loss of 401k.
by ndiddy | 2025-04-04 00:07:51+00:00
Fun fact, GW-BASIC was a descendant of the original Altair BASIC. The "Translation created 10-Feb-83" headers on each source file refer to tooling Microsoft had that automatically translated the 8080 assembly to 8086 (it shouldn't be taken as a build date since they were manually modified after that point). Besides GW-BASIC, source code for the 6502 and 6809 rewrites of Microsoft BASIC were available up to this point (see https://www.pagetable.com/?p=774 and https://github.com/davidlinsley/DragonBasic) but I believe this is the first public release of the original 8080 BASIC code.
by userbinator | 2025-04-04 00:08:10+00:00
I'm always ambivalent about things like this showing up here. On one hand, it's good to let others know that there is still that bit of rebelliousness and independence alive amongst the population. On the other hand, much like other "freedom is insecurity" projects, attracting unwanted attention may make it worse for those who rely on them.

Writing a browser is hard, and the incumbents are continually making it harder.
by Peacefulz | 2025-04-04 00:08:35+00:00
Let me preface this with a disclaimer. The games I cheat on are mostly private servers of active games, that exist in defiance of the companies Terms of Service. Mostly RuneScape servers or other MMOs being privately hosted. Whatever that caveat may lend.

This is exclusively what it is for me. I don't care about the games I cheat on at all. The game is finding ways to cheat that the host can't combat. If I can't beat them, I find a new private server. To be fair though, those guys generally don't have the resources or know-how to battle cheating to the degree major companies can and I'm a noob so it's a learning environment for me as well.
by tzs | 2025-04-04 00:08:39+00:00
Sanders might impose tariffs, but he would be smart enough to realize that if trade deficits need to be reduced what matters is reducing the deficit on the aggregate trade, not reducing the deficits individually with each trade partner.

Trump is treating each country as a separate issue and wants to reduce the deficits with each of them. That's completely stupid because even if every country got rid of all trade barriers and protectionism there would still be deficits with some countries and surpluses with others because different countries need to import different things.

For example say country A needs some natural resource that they have no domestic supply of, so they import that from country B. A uses that to produce goods for their own use and for export.

Country B's biggest need is some other resource that they lack, so they use the money they get from selling their resource to A to buy the resource they need from C.

In this scenario A runs a trade deficit with B and there is nothing whatsoever wrong with this.

The whole freaking point of money is to make it so you can trade for goods without having to have goods of your own that the other party wants.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-04-04 00:09:55+00:00
These days aimbots are so sophisticated and able to include fuzzing, that it's virtually impossible to tell because they can mimic a player's movement, miss occasionally, etc.

About the only cheat you can really identify is glass-walling, because usually people who do it eventually slip up and aim/shoot perfectly at someone they plainly cannot see.
by mlsu | 2025-04-04 00:10:28+00:00
And not only that. People who do make a living producing creative stuff have to constantly monitor themselves for any hint of copyright infringement, because a copyright strike on their channel is existential. Even if the majority of the time the strike was total baloney. It makes it tough to create when you can be three strikesed or demonetized for playing something that sounds like a record label's melody for 20 seconds on your channel.
by photonthug | 2025-04-04 00:10:51+00:00
I don’t know about that, we seem to be so deeply into double standards for this stuff that we’ve forgotten they are double standards. If I aggressively scrape content from anywhere and everywhere ignoring robots.txt and any other terms and conditions, then I’ll probably be punished. Corporate crawlers that are feeding the beast just do this on a massive scale and laugh off all of the complaints, including those from smaller corporations who hire lawyers..
by pphysch | 2025-04-04 00:11:29+00:00
I'm skeptical that

1. Clearly define requirements

2. Clearly sketch architecture

3. Setup code tool suite

4. Let AI agent write the remaining code

Is better price-performance than going lighter on 1-3 and instead of 4, spending that time writing the code yourself with heavy input from LLM autocomplete, which is what LLMs are elite at.

The agent will definitely(?) write the code faster, but quality and understanding (tech debt) can suffer.

IOW the real takeaway is that knowing the requirements, architecture, and tooling is where the value is. LLM Agent value is dubious.