MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cess11 | 2025-04-15 06:25:38+00:00
I think "maintainable" is carrying a lot of weight in there.

A lot of profitable or otherwise successful software has been built by people who reasonably couldn't be called software engineers or computer scientists or whatever academic title. With Excel, Access, VB, Delphi, Wordpress. I'm sure there's an astrologer somewhere that made OK money from a hack in Delphi or VB for divining the stars on a computer.

It shouldn't be called "vibe" coding, it seems more like glue coding, which some people have been doing and sometimes made careers out of for a very long time. Wordpress was for a long time the big thing in this area, it allowed (probably) millions of people to call themselves web designers and web developers without actually becoming competent in software design.

Many corporations selling software have developers that aren't much better than that. People that might do 'SELECT * FROM table WHERE foreign_id = ?' to check whether there exists any such row, or create full copies of data to add versioning to some product instead of keeping it as metadata, or generate and store hundreds or thousands of gigabytes of dumb data representing business processes (like bookings and such) for the coming century instead of inferring it from rules on the fly. The corporations where I've seen this are generally considered fine and good software companies by customers and competitors alike.

A new RAD, a new Wordpress, a new MICROS~1 Access or a new LotusNotes isn't particularly revolutionary. I suspect the 'hype' is more about getting people in IT to accept the technology as such and not revolt against the broader applications against other, non-technical, people; for control, disciplining, harassment, surveillance, war or whatever nefarious, tyrannical purpose.
by tombl | 2025-04-15 06:26:33+00:00
Fabrice does a great job at building these self-contained pieces of software which often grow to have lives of their own. As a lesser known example, JSLinux's terminal emulator was forked a few times and is now known as xterm.js, which has become the predominant web embeddable terminal emulator.

This all comes full circle, because now I'm building a true successor to JSLinux that's way faster because I've natively compiled the kernel/userspace to wasm, and of course I'm using xterm.js for the terminal emulation.

If you like buggy demos that probably shouldn't be shared yet, you should check out https://linux.tombl.dev, but note that it's currently just a busybox shell and nothing else, so I hope you're good with `echo *` instead of `ls`.
by nick_wolf | 2025-04-15 06:27:08+00:00
Hmm, yeah, that's a fair point. You're right, we're looking at the tool definitions – the descriptions, schemas, etc. – not the stuff that comes back after a tool runs.

It's tricky, because actually running the tools... that's where things get hairy. We'd have to invoke potentially untrusted code during a scan, figure out how to generate valid inputs for who-knows-what schemas, and deal with whatever side effects happen.

So, honestly, no solid plans for that right now. The focus is squarely on the static analysis side – what the server claims it can do. Trying to catch vulnerabilities in those definitions feels like the right scope for this particular tool.

I think that analyzing the actual results is more about a runtime concern. Like, something the client needs to be responsible for when it gets the data back, or maybe a different kind of monitoring tool altogether. Still feels like an open question where that kind of check really fits best. It's definitely a gap, though. Something to chew on.
by exodust | 2025-04-15 06:27:13+00:00
And here we go. SEOs scrambling to get "rewarded" in AI-driven search results. The article takes a swing at uncovering the secrets of "how to get your ideas included in more LLM responses."

In this case the LLM was spot on to flatten not reward! In no way is her idea an "original and innovative insight" as claimed. Something about a "multilingual SEO matrix", and the "coining" of that term. The LLM has seen it and noticed nothing special or original. Good LLM, have a biscuit!

Her idea is a breezy mash of existing concepts around multilingual SEO. Just because you're proud of your late-night SEO matrix chart, doesn't mean it should be elevated to epic status without time and consensus from others to evaluate usefulness.

> LLMs are incapable of attributing an original concept to its creator

This just isn't true. It might be for something you coined last week by mashing together existing concepts in the most unremarkable way imaginable. In time, valuable original concepts are indeed tied to their origins that AI knows about.
by drivingmenuts | 2025-04-15 06:27:43+00:00
This is neat, but, why not just run the USL script, rather than translating it to another language to run it there? Most of the target audience for this has the access to just work in whatever language needed and the few who don't, for reasons, probably are just going to write their scripts in the languages available to them.

Seems that being able to translate a script from one language to another language would be more useful.

This is a case where there were 111 problems. Now, there's 112.
by int_19h | 2025-04-15 06:27:51+00:00
Cook a meal, yes. "How you'd like it", no. You have to use the languages that have a large enough presence in its training set that it knows them well, and ditto for frameworks and libraries. Once you step out of that zone, quality rapidly plummets.

"Does it in seconds" is kinda true if you ignore the "supervised by you" part. That part - reading through the generated diffs to catch (sometimes very subtle) errors - can take a while.

And sure, you'd have the same problem with the intern. But the intern learns from you. The LLM will make the same mistakes again in the same circumstances. Yes, I know they do have memory now, but it my experience that RAG-based stuff is not particularly reliable. I suspect this might improve once hardware is fast enough that you can use a (smallish) helper LLM for RAG with reasonable perf, but we aren't quite there yet.
by nick_wolf | 2025-04-15 06:29:10+00:00
Thanks for the kind words – really appreciate you taking the time to look it over and get what we're trying to do here.

Yeah, combining the regex/pattern checks with having Claude take a look felt like the right balance... catch the low-hanging fruit quickly but also get a deeper dive for the trickier stuff. Glad that resonates.

Maintaining the core prompt quality as people contribute improvements... that's going to be interesting. Keeping it effective and preventing it from becoming a kitchen sink of conflicting instructions will be key. Definitely something we'll need to figure out as we go.
by rurban | 2025-04-15 06:30:22+00:00
This reporter Ben Fritz has no idea what he is talking about. It's never about the story. It's about known actors, from A to B to C, and then the genre. Then the trailer. Never about original stories.

The recent movies he is talking about are published in the dry season. And 7m box office is great for Drop, with not a single known actor. Who would go there? In these months until the summer blockbusters the studios crank out the cheap loosers and see what sticks. Not a single named title will stick. Everyone knew that before. That's why they got no budget and such a release date.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-15 06:30:50+00:00
> investment opportunities are gated based on wealth and income

Anyone can install robinhood on their phone and trade using their credit card.

> Financial policy is very specifically against people saving their money

No, it isn't. People who save money are terrified of risk. There's nothing stopping anyone from investing the money.

> that's why a certain level of inflation is considered desirable to mainstream economists

That's the excuse the government makes to inflate the money. You'll never see a politician point out the real reason for inflation. It's so they can spend it without raising taxes, but it does cause inflation, and inflation has to be blamed on something else. Anything but the truth.
by DyslexicAtheist | 2025-04-15 06:31:10+00:00
Everytime ChaCha/Poly come up I recall the ADRs of OTR documenting their rationale to switch from AES to ChaCha20 (see https://github.com/otrv4/otrv4/blob/master/architecture-deci...) - the document nicely highlights why AES might not always be the best tool for the job:

> We use ChaCha20 as the encryption stream cipher because it is faster than AES in software-only implementations, it is not sensitive to timing attacks and has undergone rigorous analysis ([3], [4] and [5]). We chose this over AES as future advances in cryptanalysis might uncover security issues with it, its performance on platforms that lack dedicated hardware is slow, and many AES implementations are vulnerable to cache-collision timing attacks [[6]].
by int_19h | 2025-04-15 06:32:02+00:00
Right, but that's exactly what static typing does in most cases - it provides model with more explicit context for what it's doing.

For the same reason, they tend to handle XML better than JSON - sure, both are trees, but XML is has redundancy, and that redundancy helps keep the model on the rails, so to speak.

I actually wonder if the perfect LLM language would be something a lot more like COBOL - not in a sense of being similarly high level, but rather verbosity. And perhaps also being closer to natural English, which is, after all, still a lot of its training set, especially for reasoning stuff. For query languages they seem to like SQL the most of all the things I've tried, and I strongly suspect that it's the same underlying cause.

Of course, a new language designed like that would have the fundamental problem that there's no existing corpus in such a language. Then again, if it is also designed such that one can reliably convert e.g. from Java to that language, then perhaps we can still pull that off.
by sipofwater | 2025-04-15 06:32:06+00:00
1. "Your Phone, Your Data: How to Safeguard Your Digital Life When Entering the U.S.": https://www.rnlawgroup.com/your-phone-your-data-how-to-safeg... (www.rnlawgroup.com/your-phone-your-data-how-to-safeguard-your-digital-life-when-entering-the-u-s/), https://web.archive.org/web/20250307234303/www.rnlawgroup.co... (web.archive.org/web/20250307234303/www.rnlawgroup.com/your-phone-your-data-how-to-safeguard-your-digital-life-when-entering-the-u-s/)

2. Is Your Password Secure? (IYPS) is a "password strength app that evaluates and rates your password's robustness, estimates crack time, and provides helpful warnings and suggestions for stronger passwords.": https://github.com/StellarSand/IYPS

3. Android KeePassDX can generate passwords and passphrases: https://github.com/Kunzisoft/KeePassDX

4. "Password Generator is a simple Android application which generates secure passwords.": https://gitlab.com/vecturagames/passwordgenerator

5. KeePassXC has a "Password Generator": https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide , https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc , https://keepassxc.org/download , https://github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/x11-pa... (github.com/termux/termux-packages/tree/master/x11-packages/keepassxc)

6. "keepassxc-cli is the command line interface for the KeePassXC password manager.": https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/blob/latest/docs... (github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/blob/latest/docs/man/keepassxc-cli.1.adoc), https://keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_command_line... (keepassxc.org/docs/KeePassXC_UserGuide#_command_line_tool), https://keepassxc.org

7. "Motorola moto g play 2024 Smartphone, Android 14 Operating System, Termux, And cryptsetup: Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) Encryption/Decryption And The ext4 Filesystem Without Using root Access, Without Using proot-distro, And Without Using QEMU": https://old.reddit.com/r/MotoG/comments/1jkl0f8/motorola_mot... (old.reddit.com/r/MotoG/comments/1jkl0f8/motorola_moto_g_play_2024_smartphone_android_14/)

8. "Avoid US or Take Burner Devices, Canadian Executives Tell Staff": https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-15/avoid-us-... (www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-15/avoid-us-or-take-burner-devices-canadian-executives-tell-staff), https://archive.is/GvBLF
by za3faran | 2025-04-15 06:34:02+00:00
The british were not there in 1899 when colonization was being prepared[1]. Jews coexisted with the native Palestinians before the british occupation[2][3], but this clearly is something else.

Palestinians are native to the area, they were not "brought in". This is something that is well known and established except among the deniers of history.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/BlTdfKy [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Bmm_We6xDU [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVMcqNOqdek
by Dracophoenix | 2025-04-15 06:34:30+00:00
> People are not avoiding long-term relationships, they are avoiding the baggage and fairly rigid assumptions that comes with state intervention in their relationships.

Unfortunately, avoiding paper marriage is insufficient to avoid such intervention in the state of Washington (with its Committed Intimate Relationship doctrine) or states where a cohabitant may be legally entitled to "palimony".
by blablabla123 | 2025-04-15 06:34:38+00:00
Actually even in the years before AI code generation started, I noticed an increase in code bases that seem very well architected and engineered. But once you start using the code for a week you notice it's full of bugs and the consistent architecture is just make believe. Surely this problem is getting way worse with generated code that is optimized to read like it's very well engineered
by rapnie | 2025-04-15 06:35:45+00:00
You might have a look at Librecast [0] which is a R&D project funded by Horizons Europe NGI0 programme via NLnet, aiming to the bring multicast to the current unicast internet and smoothen the transition of projects that adopt it. A great intro to multicast and Librecast is given in Brett Sheffield's 2020 LinuxConfAU talk "Privacy and Decentralization with Multicast" that is available on Peertube [1].

> To enable multicast on the unicast Internet we start by building an encrypted overlay network using point-to-point links between participating nodes. Once established, our overlay network can run whatever protocols we require, unimpeded by routers and middleboxes and which is resistant to interception, interference and netblocks.

[0] https://www.librecast.net/librecast-strategy-2025.html

[1] https://spectra.video/w/9cBGzMceGAjVfw4eFV78D2
by ExxKA | 2025-04-15 06:36:32+00:00
Clear and concise thinking, its the first time I have read someone cut through the hype and argue logically for what the next incremental steps are in making progress down this path of LLMs creating technology.

The first steam engines were too expensive and underpowered, the first cars were deatch traps when they actually ran. Dont lul yourself into the dream of a static world.

We see the wave coming, I will look for a way to surf it. Don't be the stunned sceptic waiting to feel the crush.
by popcorncowboy | 2025-04-15 06:36:47+00:00
> a red herring fueled by investor optics

Exactly. Plus we kind of want to believe it. The "extrapolate to infinity" bias writ large. It's seductive. Step 1: AI that genuinely does some amazing things. Step 2: handwave, but look out Step 3: Super Intelligence and AI that does it all. "This changes everything" etc. And there are just enough green shoots to go all in on this idea (and I mean cult-level all in).

In practice it plays out much closer to the author's sentiment. A useful tool. Perhaps even paradigm defining.
by vineyardmike | 2025-04-15 06:38:30+00:00
I agree the idea seems much better - and I think it's what a lot of big-shops are doing internally too. An earlier article [1] showed that internally, gemini has a python sandbox it uses to call other google services.

I'm guessing the main limitation is that it's harder to orchestrate, especially on clients.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43508418
by a2128 | 2025-04-15 06:41:23+00:00
It's placing instructions AND user query at top and bottom. So if you have a prompt like this:

[Long system instructions - 200 tokens] [Very long document for reference - 5000 tokens] [User query - 32 tokens]

The key-values for first 5200 tokens can be cached and it's efficient to swap out the user query for a different one, you only need to prefill 32 tokens and generate output.

But the recommendation is to use this, where in this case you can only cache the first 200 tokens and need to prefill 5264 tokens every time the user submits a new query.

[Long system instructions - 200 tokens] [User query - 32 tokens] [Very long document for reference - 5000 tokens] [Long system instructions - 200 tokens] [User query - 32 tokens]
by Implicated | 2025-04-15 06:42:28+00:00
Just as a data point...

I'm running a Meilisearch instance on an AX52 @ Hetzner (64GB DDR5 memory / NVMe / Ryzen 7 7700) dedicated to just meilisearch

- 191,698 MB in size - 13 indexes - ~80,000,000 documents

The primarily searched indexes have 5, 6 and 10 million records each. The index with 10 million records has 4 searchable attributes, 10 filterable attributes and 7 sortable attributes.

I don't have any idea what kind of search volume there is - the search form is public, the website it's on is displaying content relative to those 5, 6 and 10 million records (each having their own page) and the AI bots are having a field day crawling the site. I don't cache the search results, nor is cloudflare caching the resulting pages since the site is dynamic and records are _constantly_ being added.

So with all that said - here's the current top output:

top - 06:33:47 up 257 days, 12:10, 1 user, load average: 1.05, 1.18, 1.24 Tasks: 274 total, 1 running, 273 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie %Cpu(s): 5.8 us, 0.1 sy, 0.0 ni, 93.7 id, 0.3 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st MiB Mem : 63439.1 total, 403.6 free, 16698.8 used, 47065.0 buff/cache MiB Swap: 32751.0 total, 2.2 free, 32748.8 used. 46740.3 avail Mem

2747823 meilise+ 20 0 24.1t 52.0g 36.2g S 94.7 84.0 5w+5d /usr/local/bin/meilisearch --config-file-path /etc/meilisearch.toml

It's bored. Searches are fast. Doesn't need as much memory as the size of the index to be so.

The only hiccups I ran into were back before they introduces the batch indexing. Things were fine in testing/development but when I started _really_ loading the documents on production it was clear it wasn't going to keep up with the indexing - but then it just _never stopped_ indexing, CPU usage very high. I jumped into their discord, connected with someone on the team who I gave access to the server and they made a few adjustments - didn't fix, but helped. Then the next update basically solved the issue with the high CPU use. I still had issues when loading a lot of documents but found a Laravel package for batch indexing Laravel Scout-based indexes and the solved things for me. Then they released the batch indexing, I stopped using the Laravel specific batch indexer and it's been smooth sailing.

I'll be testing/playing with their vector stuff here shortly, have about 10mil of 60mil generated and a new server with a bunch more memory to throw at it.

Would recommend Meilisearch.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-15 06:43:51+00:00
> For query languages, at least, they seem to like SQL the most of all the things I've tried, and I strongly suspect that it's the same underlying cause.

The reason they like SQL more than other query languages is primarily that their training data has orders of magnitude more of it than any other query language, and that advantage is so huge that any other possible advantage would probably have comparatively negligible effect.
by paganel | 2025-04-15 06:44:05+00:00
Truth be told, the status quo, with 5-dollar packages clogging the USPS, was a DoS on-going thing in real life/physical form, there had been many posts in here detailing that. Yes, it will most probably negatively affect a lot of people who were relying on that DoS thing to carry on, and, yes, most probably the proposed charges are too high, but it was obvious that something needed to change.
by kazinator | 2025-04-15 06:44:28+00:00
TXR Lisp program:

(defvarl ch-name (relate (rlist 0..32 127) '#"NUL SOH STX ETX EOT ENQ ACK BEL BS \ HT LF VT FF CR SO SI DLE DC1 DC2 DC3 \ DC4 NAK SYN ETB CAN EM SUB ESC FS GS \ RS US SPC DEL" nil)) (defun print-row (ch) (format t "~,3d ~,02x ~,07b ~,03o ~a\n" ch ch ch ch (or [ch-name ch] (chr-num ch)))) (match-case *args* (@(require @(or @(with (`0x@{dig #/[\dA-Fa-f]+/}`) base 16) @(with (`0b@{dig #/[01]+/}`) base 2) @(with (`0o@{dig #/[0-7]+/}`) base 8) @(with (`@{dig #/\d+/}`) base 10)) (let ((val (toint dig base))) (if (<= 0 val 127) (print-row val))))) (() [mapdo print-row 0..128]) (@else (put-line "error in argument") (exit nil)))
by thinkingemote | 2025-04-15 06:44:35+00:00
Hollywood has lost something - the ability to connect with people. In a hundred years, film and cultural studies will look back at this period with fascination. The visual art world (e.g. painting) is the avant garde of culture and we saw this decades ago by the total disconnect from normal people e.g. "I don't get it", the abandonment of beauty "that's messy", the embrace of chaos "my kid could do that" and the priority of individualised isolated views "that's weird". In this meaningless soup the political, radical and critical become a form of stability for artists and so the art becomes a way of transmitting this as it's a) a thing the art can say with some kind of authenticity and b) a thing that art can say with other artists that's in common with each other.

But is it a simply a mirror of our lives now? Are our lives like these films? Do artists just tell it how it is?

Is life meaningless, un-authentic, chaotic, not-connected, isolated, algorithmically determined, ugly, full of negative emotion and a stage for competing political messages? I think there is some truth here, modern life can feel like that but the postmodern viewpoint can actually help us in that we can see that the film makers are being subjective. Their art is the interpretation of Hollywood not the actual world. Hollywood makes bad movies because the film makers view the world as a kind of modern hell, and so, as people live their lives and see that they have love and beauty, a sense of right and wrong and family around them or at least inside them, they cannot actually connect to this view of life. In that I have hope.
by amarcheschi | 2025-04-15 06:46:15+00:00
I'm attending a course with some goat professors, that aim to teach this kind of things. Chances are, given it's a small course you won't produce anything of real value, but the aim should be to analyze 3 datasets from 3 different neurodegenerative diseases, find some common markers and eventually make a ml model to better diagnose people with these diseases. It's not exactly easy, but given it's a real world problem it's extremely motivating

(we've been also allowed to use a university vm with 3tb of ram and that's nice)
by Defletter | 2025-04-15 06:46:40+00:00
Seems like most of the people in these comments have missed the point, as while I also lament the use of Electron, pasting one-liner scripts does not obviate the usefulness of this project. Clearly the point of this project is not just about setting up a simple webserver, but to provide a quick and easy gui to configure that webserver, and there's a fair amount that it allows you to configure. Your one-liner that does nothing but pipe static files as a response is not that. If that's all you need, great, then this project is not for you and that's okay.
by anothernewdude | 2025-04-15 06:46:42+00:00
Yes, and it created an actual problem that (knowingly or not) Trump was responding to - America essentially was getting further and further in debt to enable such high consumption.

I think we'll find that quite a bit of "American Exceptionalism" has been low interest borrowing. I'm not sure to what level, but I think anyone who relies on the S&P 500 as their only investment is going to be disappointed in the future decades of returns.