MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kentonv | 2025-04-14 04:33:36+00:00
> But if there was only a simple mechanism and a precomputed lookup table, it doesn't feel intelligent.

I think a flaw of the argument is that the way it is framed makes it sound like the system is simple (like a "lookup table") which tricks people's intuitions into thinking it doesn't sound "intelligent". But the actual algorithm implemented by the "Chinese room" would in fact be insanely complex. In any case, I think Searle's intuition here is simply wrong. The system is in fact intelligent, even if it's just a series of lookup tables.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-04-14 04:34:35+00:00
In my experience, all worthy date/time libraries use time zone IDs from the "tz database". Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database

Searching the list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones

I cannot find an entry for "Pacific Standard Time" nor "Vancouver/Canada", but I can see: "America/Vancouver".
by nothrabannosir | 2025-04-14 04:37:14+00:00
Not to sound like a shill but Nix solves this very elegantly: tests are just a special kind of build (usually with a synthetic output like "echo ok > $out") and can therefore be "cached" like any other build. But because build recipes are deterministic, and Nix uses sandboxed, pure build environments, "caching" is just a special case of "uploading build artifacts". Meaning your cache = build artifact server ("binary store"), and it's shared between everyone (CI, build farm, dev laptops, ..), again because build recipes are deterministic. Meaning: if your laptop (or VM) is the same architecture as your CI you can just run your CI steps locally and push that to the shared store, and your CI will now automatically see the tests have already been run and not run them again. And vice-versa. Across all branches and all collaborators who share that same cache.

This is all deterministic and doesn't require any human in the loop: the test result is hashed by all of the inputs, so you never accidentally spuriously pass a test locally which shouldn't have.

It requires almost no setup at all. There are SaaS which make this basically turnkey (cachix, nixbuild.net, garnix, ..). Getting your app to build in Nix in the first place, though? Years of tears.

Nix lives in this group of tools where "easy things are hard, hard things are easy", and this is a classic example.
by danpalmer | 2025-04-14 04:38:21+00:00
Sure, but try creating a list of maps with string keys and values that can be ints, strings, lists, or maps, or protos for that matter.

I've recently been writing quite a lot of unit tests for SQL, and the biggest pain point is setting up the state of your data, because SQL is just not an ergonomic language in which to do that. Mostly I've just ended up writing YAML describing the rows I want in a database (and I use proto fields in DBs so some nesting there), and using a utility that converts that can load that YAML as a table.
by kqr | 2025-04-14 04:39:23+00:00
I don't remember the details of their arguments, but Graeber and Wengrow think this is a misleading image. IIRC one of their main thrusts was that over long periods of history, groups of humans have adopted and abandoned stationary agriculture at will, as conditions indicate.

I suppose that makes us as domesticated as e.g. lions or chimpanzees, which have been known to e.g. share food with humans ("work for them") in the wild but it's not their reason for existence.
by danpalmer | 2025-04-14 04:39:49+00:00
> Remote CI runners are fantastic for repeatable builds, comprehensive test suites, and parallelized execution. But many apps don't need all that. Maybe yours doesn't either.

My reading of that is that if you need repeatable builds, comprehensive test suites, and/or parallelised execution, then this is not the tool for you.

I think a checkbox, suggested in another comment is a worse implementation.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-04-14 04:40:00+00:00
In theory, you'd think so.

In practice, due to the phenomenon described here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43662738, it's less relevant than you think. Specifically at Google, there have been reports of high performers, recently promoted with excellent ratings before and after the promotion, getting the sack.

In my experience, people who do good work do so because they enjoy the work and feel motivated, not due to any kind of performance management system or threat. Destroy the joy or motivation, and you've just destroyed a large part of the performance of these self-driven people.

People often talk about "10x engineers", but not how it's possible to destroy a 10x engineer and turn them into a (let's be generous) 2x engineer, and I think capricious layoffs are a great way to do just that.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-04-14 04:40:39+00:00
Reading this post and comment section makes me shake my head. This looks like a near clone of Java JSR-310 (new date/time APIs), which was headed by the original author of Joda Time (Stephen Colebourne). Java 8 (and JSR-310) was released in 2014 -- 11 years ago(!). Amazingly, Python has suffered with their date/time libs this whole time with very little concerted effort to create new date/time APIs in the standard library. It's pathetic. I know I will be downvoted for this post, but I don't care. The Python standard library has so many of these awful weaknesses that other languages handle better. Except for machine learning R&D, I never recommend to use Python for any enterprise project except trivial ones. You are walking into a double trap of (1) weak types and (2) weak standard library.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-04-14 04:41:21+00:00
"I'm told this comes as a shock to my managers and other Chrome team leaders. I'm told it's not based on merit"

If your manager is shocked by one of their team being laid off, the manager is probably next.

Of course the OP was told it wasn't based on merit, or any other arguable-in-court characteristic.

But it was. Someone decided Google was better off this way, or that OP was better off working somewhere else.
by hajile | 2025-04-14 04:42:30+00:00
Scripting languages would be (usually interpreted) languages for doing small snippets of code. Examples would be bash, Applescript, python, etc.

Application languages are generally managed/GC'd languages with JITs or AOT compilation for doing higher-performance apps. Examples would be Java, Go, Ocaml, Haskell, etc.

System languages are generally concerned with portability, manual memory layout, and direct hardware access as opposed to managed APIs. Examples would be C/C++, Rust, Zig, Pascal, etc.
by gizmo686 | 2025-04-14 04:43:19+00:00
How do LLMs promise to "understand". Broadly speaking, AI/ML can be divided into two groups: mimicary, which is given a corpus of assumed good data and attempts to generalize it, and reinforcement learning where the AI is given a high level fitness function and set loose to optimize it.

The current generation of LLM falls pretty heavy in the mimicary family of AI.
by arisbe__ | 2025-04-14 04:45:37+00:00
And how many out-of-box variables have they had patients control for? If it's less than 25 I think medicine has been hijacked by the consumer wanting to not participate in the medical-inquiry process.

I could solve the issue with perhaps 1000-5000 serious patient-subjects, a small amount of funding and a friggen smart phone app.

Also a non-corrupt government should seem to want to lower healthcare costs. But just because politicians say that doesn't mean much because the incentives of government too are poisoned. They don't in practice (and in sum) want to lower healthcare costs. Why would you think that?

It's self-sacrifice that is needed. Most medicine will collapse in my lifetime, and the professionals, politicians and lobbyists brought this upon themselves (and unfortunately us).
by danpalmer | 2025-04-14 04:46:19+00:00
PR templates are optional, many tools bypass them, my previous company tried using them and couldn't make processes stick with them because people used various tools to create PRs.

I'd argue that depending on PR templates, vs depending on devs having the signoff tool installed, is a pretty similar level of moving parts.

However perhaps more important than moving parts is failure modes. The failure mode of this tool is that your PR is blocked from merging until you run the tool. The failure mode of the PR template is that you never realise you missed the checkbox.

> for a tool where the goal is really just to let the developers assert that they've run some tests, it's surely a lot more complicated than it needs to be, no?

I think the point is to have the right amount of friction. Too little, as mentioned above, and you don't realise when you've lost the protection from the process. To me this is a good solution exactly because it gives you a little bit of friction (but not much and cheap).

Solutions with less friction include: just write in the PR description that you ran the tests, or just know that you ran the tests but don't write it down anywhere. I'd suggest that the safety nets provided by these options are less useful because they have less friction.
by wyldfire | 2025-04-14 04:46:22+00:00
Funny coincidental timing - I just played HHGTTG a couple of times last night for the first time in thirty+ years or so.

I first played the game, way back - prior to having read the novel. It was mind-blowing. I had no idea what was going on but I got a real sense that it could be pretty funny if I did. So I read the novel eventually, and it was as good as I expected. I don't think I'd gone back to play the game until this week, though.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-04-14 04:46:30+00:00
It may be a bet that AI will reduce the need for developers. Even if it can only write boilerplate, boilerplate still has to be written and is time consuming, so if it were to remove 20% of time that needs to be sunk into a project, the work of 5 people can now be done by 4 (less if you account for the reduced coordination overhead).

Whether these savings actually play out and whether management has accurate expectations and metrics remains to be seen, given messaging that makes it sound like AI saves huge percentages of time, when it at best saves huge percentages of something that's actually only a small percentage of day to day work.
by flomo | 2025-04-14 04:46:57+00:00
Yeah, "mobility opportunities". I recognize the issues, and the lack of easy answers, so I think I'm only "touchy" about is simplistic solutions.

European car commuter rates are almost identical to USA's. But I know little about the details, so don't really have any commentary, other than not all of Europe some glorious bike/transit boogie utopia. (And some ppl get "touchy" about that.)
by t-writescode | 2025-04-14 04:46:58+00:00
We have it, it's called the WARN Act [0]

Any company with more than 100 employees that does the "you were laid off today, but you'll be paid for the next 2 months" thing is following the WARN Act

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_Adjustment_and_Retraini...
by serial_dev | 2025-04-14 04:48:09+00:00
> apps as a weird Tech People affectation

Maybe I never had the right luxury brand car, but I still see it as such.

If I want to have an app for my car, I’m my opinion that car failed me to provide with a simple, convenient driving experience.

I want to get in the car, check if it’s charged / filled up enough, check for errors (as a routine, but there shouldn’t be any), and drive.

If I need to change anything (AC, light, volume) I should be able to do it without having to take my eyes off the road.

What features do you like so much that you consider them “invaluable”?
by xyst | 2025-04-14 04:48:50+00:00
In this neoclassical/neoliberal economy where the only thing that matters is "delivering value for the shareholders" and profits for the billionaire class. I am not surprised. A bit jaded, honestly.

I have only started my career in the past 10 years and have seen this story unfold time and time again across many companies. Big, small, or medium company. It doesn't matter.

You. Are. Expendable.

I will say the problem is much more pronounced when it's a publicly traded American company; or a company that was recently acquired or funded by private equity, "angel investment", or a vulture capitalist firm.

Folks. Our industry needs a trade union to protect our interests. We cannot keep relying on billionaire class to "do right by us" because quite frankly. They do not give a shit.
by wruza | 2025-04-14 04:48:52+00:00
Poor guy but honestly he's stuck in 2000s, not even in pre-AI 2020s. Comparing yourself to the channels or "low effort" studios is pointless because they win through marketing, not content. There's a thousand, if not a million, losers in this game per one winner who makes a buck and doesn't pay you extra. You're not an exclusive. And no one wants to buy effort really, people are fine with mspaint memes cause everything done properly was just a gatekeeped waste of resources. Good production is akin to a diamond or a traditional japanese craft. People value it because they were told it's a must and a noble attribute. New people see through this and refuse to participate in this culture. There is good production, but it only gets employed in hundreds of millions of views sorts of situations.
by madjidbr | 2025-04-14 04:49:02+00:00
Hey HN, I’ve always found it annoying to jump between exchanges just to check live cryptocurrency prices—especially when I just want a fast, clean view of the top coins without distractions.

So I spent a few hours building a minimalist site that shows real-time crypto rates with no fluff, popups, or login walls: https://cryptorates.io/

It pulls data live and focuses on simplicity (no ads, no widgets, just raw numbers). The idea is to have something you can keep open in a tab and glance at throughout the day, or even use as a lightweight reference when building something crypto-related.

Would love feedback if anyone finds it useful or has suggestions!
by vunderba | 2025-04-14 04:49:04+00:00
I disagree - a generic suggestion to use a "reflection to defeat Dorian" isn't at all the same thing as standing up two mirrors to create a hall of mirror effect on a magic mirror that "ages" the world around it. The key difference is in the level of specificity.

Furthermore, the true test of the LLM would have been to devise both deciding to use a "Dorian Gray" type creature along with an appropriate mechanism for its demise.

IMHO, you've guided it by posing that this monster exists within the world. I'd like to see an entire campaign devised by an LLM - no guidance necessary. I don't know what small model you are using (mistral, vicuna, etc) but try asking it to create a list of monster based encounter/puzzles.

This is why I think the current batch of LLMs aren't really capable of being more than an assistant at best for writing. Interestingly I actually think AI dungeon released back in 2019 was far more capable in this regard and IIRC used a significantly older model - GPT 2.0.
by ajb | 2025-04-14 04:49:49+00:00
Because rats will keep at it for longer. These particular rats are probably bigger than some tiny dogs, but a rat is a forager, so it can be motivated to keep this up for hours. This behaviour is not so close to what a dog needs to do to eat, so it would do it to please but lose motivation eventually.

Well that's what I remember reading some years ago anyway. I guess a dog would keep going if you made a fuss of him, but you don't want to go over to the middle of the minefield to do that.
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-14 04:49:51+00:00
Not necessarily. Cybernetics was specifically the study of systems, so that part can also be taken as an appeal to the experts in the matter.

Generally the point of this observation is specifically about human systems, either designed or evolved. The observation stems from the fact that it's (a) impossible to ascertain what the true intention of a human that designed a system was (they may be publicly lying about it, or even privately, it even to themselves), and (b) any complex enough system has been influenced and possibly "warped" by many more than one human, so the original unique intention, whatever it was, isn't the sole guiding principle behind it.

So, if analyzing a system, rather than trying to dig into its creators' history or anything like that, it's best to just look at what the system is doing and consider that its true current purpose.
by doodlebugging | 2025-04-14 04:50:32+00:00
I live near DFW. I found the link to those reports and noticed that every one of them is from Dallas County. There are none from Tarrant County (Fort Worth is in Tarrant County) or the surrounding counties. This whole metro area is quite large taking all or part of several counties.

For this to be useful to anyone in that region it should include reports from the region, not just from one county. Dallas is not Fort Worth is not Dallas.
by bruce511 | 2025-04-14 04:50:41+00:00
Its interesting to see how developers get into a mindset, based on their life experience.

What we're seeing here is 40 year old code compile and run with minimal effort. Largely because the C language has respected backwards compatibility.

Yes, there were breaking changes along the way, but they were trivial to resolve in hours. And (more interesting) the author believed that to be true and so persevered.

I saw this recently as well. I run a lot of programs on Windows. Many are 32 bit, written in the 90s for Windows 95, or 98. They all still run. Microsoft bends over backwards to keep things compatible.

I also get to write a lot of web API clients. I tell customers that it won't work forever. Web APIs are constantly changing. The service (especially Google) will change something soon to break it.

The people building those APIs are expecting only currently-maintained apps to run. They have no concept (or experience) of 40 or 30 year old code "just running". Crumbs, if you get 5 years out an API client you're doing well.
by noosphr | 2025-04-14 04:51:28+00:00
Who ever gets AI to be able to search the whole corpus of human knowledge. I'm not just talking about web pages, I'm talking every book, every scientific paper, every news paper, every piece of text stored somewhere.

I've build RAG systems that index tokens in the 1e12 range and the main thing stopping us from having a super search that will make google look like the library card catalogue is the copyright system.

A country that ignores that and builds the first XXX billion parameter encoder only model will do for knowledge work what the high pressure steam engine did for muscle work.
by jeswin | 2025-04-14 04:53:47+00:00
> MCP servers can run (malicious code) locally.

I wrote an MCP Server (called Codebox[1]) which starts a Docker container with your project code mounted. It works quite well, and I've been using it with LibreChat and vscode. In my experience, Agents save 2x the time (over using an LLM traditionally) and is less typing, but at roughly 3x the cost.

The idea is to make the entire Unix toolset available to the LLM (such as ls, find), along with project specific tooling (such as typescript, linters, treesitter). Basically you can load whatever you want into the container, and let the LLM work on your project inside it. This can be done with a VM as well.

I've found this workflow (agentic, driven through a Chat based interface) to be more effective compared to something like Cursor. Will do a Show HN some time next week.

[1]: https://github.com/codespin-ai/codebox-js
by wtallis | 2025-04-14 04:53:48+00:00
> it could be an extremely capable server. If not for the minuscule SSD.

You can get adapters from Apple's custom slot to a standard M.2 form factor, allowing you to use a modern M.2 NVMe drive. As long as you have already installed the firmware update that adds support for NVMe in addition to the AHCI protocol originally used by that machine, there shouldn't be any issues putting in one of today's relatively cheap multi-TB drives. The Mac Pro didn't have the physical space limitations that made some SSD adapters problematic for the laptops.
by jdminhbg | 2025-04-14 04:54:48+00:00
I would say the place where I differ is here:

> I want to get in the car,

I don't want to have to get in the car to do any of this. I'm able to get the climate control started in the car by saying out loud "Hey Siri, warm up car" (a shortcut I set up exposed by the Tesla app). The location is always up-to-date so if my wife is driving the kids in it, I can see their current location and ETA. I want to be able to open the door without unlocking the car manually. I want to be able to close the trunk remotely if I carried in a load of groceries. Etc.

None of this is some kind of alien technology that Tesla invented, but rather the vast majority of legacy car manufacturer apps are just total garbage piles that were outsourced to some low-bidder somewhere. It shouldn't be that hard.
by lenkite | 2025-04-14 04:55:08+00:00
Yes, lots of people got fired for claiming those in the Covid days. The selective memory of the majority opinion here on HN is deeply distressing, but understandable due to blind tribal support for the democratic party.

Large swathes of people were first identified for being antivax when they self-registered under the religious exemption scheme and then were harassed and fired. It was cunningly done with the media paying no attention.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-14 04:55:09+00:00
Does authoritarianism and over policing cause their QoL to rise while ours is debatable? Their middle class is rising, ours is nearly dead. Their years of salary to purchase a home is decreasing, ours is almost a full lifetime. We have more people per capita in prison than they do. We have rising obesity rates. Rising chronic illness rates. We are now surveiling our own populations social media to find reasons to kick them out just like they do.

So please let me know how locking up more people and paying an economic underclass to clean our streets will help us achieve all those goals? Crime, I get it, but how is what you claimed going to solve our health and financial issues?
by 9rx | 2025-04-14 04:55:34+00:00
> If your program has runtime errors then that means you can deploy it to production and catch your errors in production.

That questions: Why are you allowing your programs to be deployed when tests are failing? This is not a realistic scenario in the real world. Yes, you can invent contrived hypotheticals all day long, but it is meaningless. We've been clear that we are referring to practical settings.

But, but, what if there is a bug in your compiler that sees the runtime error slip through??? Who gives a shit? In some imaged world it may be possible, but it is not realistic. Not worth talking about.

> I’m referring to the fact that you don’t need a complex type system to design a language that will absolutely never have any runtime errors. You’re going off on a tangent here

What you are referring to is clear, but it cannot be considered in a vacuum. The alternative is to see the program keep trodding along, but do the wrong thing. In that case who cares if the program crashes instead? You're getting incorrect behaviour either way.

What you actually need is assurances that the program won't do the wrong thing top to bottom. That requires either a complete type system or, more realistically in the real world, testing. If you go the testing route, you'll know about any runtime errors when you run your tests.

> Honestly it seems that you haven’t just not written enough go.

There is nothing unique to Go here. Many popular languages suffer the same problem. But, if we want to place extensive Go experience as a requirement to speak to this then we have to defer to your experience. Perhaps you can choose an example of where you wrote code in Go that produced a runtime error, show us your tests, and explain how the condition evaded your checks and balances? – I'm fascinated to learn how your code ran perfectly while under test but then blew up in production.