MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-23 18:08:22+00:00
The catch is: does anyone actually read this stuff? I've been taking meeting notes for meetings I run (without AI) for around 6 months now and I suspect no one other than myself has looked at the notes I've put together. I've only looked back at those notes once or twice.

A big part of the problem is even finding this content in a modern corporate intranet (i.e. Confluence) and having a bunch of AI-generated text in there as well isn't going to help.
by kubb | 2025-04-23 18:08:39+00:00
> When I use AI to build software I feel like I can create almost anything I can imagine very quickly.

In my experience there is a vague divide between the things that can and can't be created using LLMs. There's a lot of things where AI is absolutely a speed boost. But from a certain point, not so much, and it can start being an impediment by sending you down wrong paths, and introducing subtle bugs to your code.

I feel like the speedup is in "things that are small and done frequently". For example "write merge sort in C". Fast and easy. Or "write a Typescript function that checks if a value is a JSON object and makes the type system aware of this". It works.

"Let's build a chrome extension that enables navigating webpages using key chords. it should include a functionality where a selected text is passed to an llm through predefined prompts, and a way to manage these prompts and bind them to the chords." gives us some code that we can salvage, but it's far from a complete solution.

For unusual algorithmic problems, I'm typically out of luck.
by quantadev | 2025-04-23 18:09:07+00:00
I answer about things I'm interested in and know about. I don't know about any breaches of Nostr protocol, because I quit all Nostr work 2 years ago.

About IFPS hashing... I'm a very experienced IFPS developer myself (2 years of it). I always argued the 'variable hash algorithm' aspect of IPFS was just an unnecessary complexity and that SHA256 should've been hard-coded into the whole thing. As per usual, the IPFS team went with the more complex approach, just like they did when they over-engineered ATProto in the same way by the SAME developer.

But the main reason Nostr cannot fit into IPFS is slightly more nuanced than the actual hash algo. Fiatjaf made the decision NOT to take the hash of the FINAL JSON object itself, and so no matter what hash algo he had used, it was never going to cleanly fit into IPFS without each Nostr message being 'wrapped' with some IPFS wrapper, necessarily resulting in an DIFFERENT hash. So there's two different layers to the incompatableness.

EDIT: Going deeper into the weeds: If social media messages are shorter than 256K (the default chunker size of IPFS) I think you can end up getting a SHA256 directly out of it, so there WAS the potential to use IPFS with Nostr in that way, except for the fact that Fiatjaf didn't hash the FINAL JSON, but hashed parts of it.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-23 18:09:18+00:00
> to become a cog that will be the first to be replaced

With that framing, I suppose "vibe-coding" would be in a similar realm to "button pushing" or "lever pulling" or "handle cranking".

There's often a transitional period where the task exists and needs to be done... but without enough human thought and judgement it's only temporary, and ends when it becomes cheap enough to hook up a motor or actuator.
Ask HN: Can an open-source and paid Mac app be a sustainable business?
by endore8_ | 2025-04-23 18:09:18+00:00
I have an existing Mac app, with around 10k daily active users, but struggle to scale it further.

To me, it looks like an era of open-source, because more and more companies open their codebases. I started to think if that could be a chance to attract a new audience, but I am afraid to lose it all to forks and pirate copies.

My main competitor is not open-source and is a paid app. Plus, there is an open-source competitor that is free but asks for donations.

I would appreciate any thoughts on this. Perhaps someone has gone through it already?
by DrillShopper | 2025-04-23 18:09:53+00:00
Homeschooling: where someone unqualified to teach every subject toughs through it and there are absolutely no standards

School choice: How we get taxpayers to pay for your kid's private and/or religious education

I'm okay with 1 if you admit that you can't teach your kids every subject, and get help where you can, but 2 is unacceptable.
by daxfohl | 2025-04-23 18:10:27+00:00
But, email?

Sounded like a cool idea on first read, but when thinking how to apply personally, I can't think of a single thing I'd want to set up autoreply for, even drafts. Email is mostly all notifications or junk. It's not really two-way communication anymore. And chat, due to its short form, doesn't benefit much from AI draft.

So I don't disagree with the post, but am having trouble figuring out what a valid use case would be.
by danielbln | 2025-04-23 18:10:36+00:00
I enjoy Claude as a general purpose "let's talk about this niche thing" chat bot, or for general ideation. Extracting structured data from videos (via Gemini) is quite useful as well, though to be fair it's not a super frequent use case for me.

That said, coding and engineering is by far the most common usecase I have for gen AI.
by adityaathalye | 2025-04-23 18:10:36+00:00
Jack Rusher's recent interview is well worth reading too (the "stop writing dead programs" guy).

> On the need to sustain your creative drive in the face of technological change

> https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/multi-disciplinary...

nb. I recently submitted it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43759204
by bee_rider | 2025-04-23 18:10:47+00:00
Mars is just a big dead rock really. The “self-sustaining tin cans” are the way to go IMO. We can learn how to do that in orbit around Earth (where aborting the mission isn’t automatic death), and then go colonize the asteroid belt, where the resources are just sitting there floating in space.

Mars offers: gravity, but the wrong amount. Air, but not enough. Sand and dust, but not the kind that grows anything, just the kind that gets in your filters. Also it is toxic. Not much magnetic field.
by sanderjd | 2025-04-23 18:10:59+00:00
Totally. I think the comparison between the two is actually very interesting and illustrative.

In my view there is significantly more there there with generative AI. But there is a huge amount of nonsense hype in both cases. So it has been fascinating to witness people in one case flailing around to find the meat on the bones while almost entirely coming up blank, while in the other case progressing on these parallel tracks where some people are mostly just responding to the hype while others are (more quietly) doing actual useful things.

To be clear, there was a period where I thought I saw a glimmer of people being on the "actual useful things" track in the blockchain world as well, and I think there have been lots of people working on that in totally good faith, but to me it just seems to be almost entirely a bust and likely to remain that way.
by simonw | 2025-04-23 18:11:46+00:00
GitHub Pages runs everything through a Fastly CDN. You can tell like this:

curl -i https://simonw.github.io/

I get this:

HTTP/2 200 server: GitHub.com content-type: text/html; charset=utf-8 permissions-policy: interest-cohort=() last-modified: Wed, 16 Nov 2022 21:38:29 GMT access-control-allow-origin: * etag: "63755855-299" expires: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:20:50 GMT cache-control: max-age=600 x-proxy-cache: MISS x-github-request-id: 3D02:22250F:11BEDCA:123BE7A:68092D2A accept-ranges: bytes age: 0 date: Wed, 23 Apr 2025 18:10:50 GMT via: 1.1 varnish x-served-by: cache-pao-kpao1770029-PAO x-cache: MISS x-cache-hits: 0 x-timer: S1745431851.518299,VS0,VE110 vary: Accept-Encoding x-fastly-request-id: 0df3187f050552dfde088fae8a6a83e0dde187f5 content-length: 665

The x-fastly-request-id is the giveaway.
by rzwitserloot | 2025-04-23 18:12:32+00:00
> Technically, the first amendment applies only to state actors, not private entities.

That's probably not what the person you're responding to is talking about.

Americans have this unfortunate tendency to harp on and on about 'free speech' in contexts where the first amendment obviously does not apply, or, even more intriguingly/ironically, where the first amendment pretty clearly states the exact opposite.

For example, if some non-government-owned platform (such as a social network) bans a user, and that user says "My free speech rights are being infringed".

Whereas what the 1A actually states is the exact opposite: That platform has the right to ban that user, and the government is constitutionally restrained: If the government were to make a law that forces this social network to unban this user, that'd be the 1A violation.

Then there are only 3 options:

1. That user wildly misunderstands free speech. And given how common this is, 'most americans' is perhaps [citation needed] but the sentiment is understandable. It's not just that "My free speech!" is so common, it's also that articles about some incident pretty much never talk about this. Lawyers, legal wonks, legal podcasts that sort of thing - they talk about it, but, niche audience.

2. The meaning of 'free speech' in the sentence 'this social network has banned me; my free speech is being infringed' is not referring to 1A but to the concept as a general principle; a principle that is orthogonal, or even mutually exclusive with, the definition of 'free speech' the way 1A intends it.

3. They know exactly what 1A means but they are lying through their teeth in order to get some internet group ragin' going on.

If we make a habit of assuming good intentions, the nicest choice is option 2.

The somewhat famous "Section 230" covers part of this, and explains some of the pragmatic reasoning behind MCAC v Halleck: If you hold private companies responsible for having infringed free speech rights, then private companies are going to bend over backwards making clear they are not going to moderate. Anything. For any reason. Legal reasons, you see.
by gh0stcat | 2025-04-23 18:12:44+00:00
And if you're not doing it to get a job, it's either much better or worse, though I suspect worse. The other buckets are likely that you're doing it to learn something new (which you won't retain anything and thus it's a waste of time) or you are only interested in the end product, which will be subpar compared to comparable professionally developed products. It's hard to see a good use case for "vibe coding" beyond viral examples like the flight simulator game made by an influencer.
by mrtksn | 2025-04-23 18:13:25+00:00
Totally, the Spaniards are on the edge against EU for forcing Apple to allow competing services on %25 of the smartphones they use. Madrid is pouring police force into Barcelona as we speak as the Catalans started burning cars on the streets against the unelected bureaucrats threatening them to give App Store alternatives to every 4th smartphone. Unjustified violence by the police is being reported against people who don't want to know about cheaper payment options. The situation is considered stable at this point but I don't think that EU will survive if Apple pulls out of EU. The president of the EU commission was caught mumbling at the mic "Ich hoffe, Apple ruft nicht an oder blufft, sonst ist alles verloren." which roughly translates to "I hope Apple doesn't call or bluff or all is lost" in Bavarian.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-23 18:13:45+00:00
There is a disturbing overlap between the things LLMs are most helpful with... and the things that are arguably deficiencies with root-problems to be fixed in the realm of framework/library design, project onboarding, or documentation.

If it's really "boilerplate", nobody should need to get a half-regurgitated approximation out of a statistical model.

Instead there should be a default implementation someone can choose until they need to customize, or a generator-script as part of the project, etc. Sometimes what people want is already right there in the docs, but nobody bothered to look.
by fitsumbelay | 2025-04-23 18:13:47+00:00
This post reminded me how much I enjoy doodling with notebooks and UIs like observable and hacks like this -- https://gist.github.com/kahole/651990b888c19b84d5700422daa96.... In a really roundabout way, notebooks take me back to using crouton on my Chromebook and opening a terminal in a browser tab. Also just discovered Deno's Jupyter kernel and feel rather set for good times ...
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-23 18:13:51+00:00
>The trouble is that if some weirdness happens because of the edit, you've got to handle it even if you say it would be reasonable to assume that it's outside of being supported.

What? No. What even are you suggesting? Hell, games with OFFICIAL MODDING SUPPORT still require you submit bug reports with no mods running.

Editing game files has always been "you are on your own", even editing standard Unreal config files is something you wont get support for, and they are trivial human readable files with well known standards.

>One of the anecdotes from Titan Quest

Any actual support for this anecdote? Lots of games have anti-piracy features that sneakily cause problems, and even could fire accidentally. None of those games get a reputation for being buggy. Games like Earthbound would make the game super hard and even delete your save game at the very end. Batman games would nerf your gliding ability. Game Dev Tycoon would kill your business due to piracy.

None of these affected the broad reputation of the game. Most of them are pretty good marketing in fact.
by darth_avocado | 2025-04-23 18:13:57+00:00
Why didn’t Google ship an AI feature that reads and categorizes your emails?

The simple answer is that they lose their revenue if you aren’t actually reading the emails. The reason you need this feature in the first place is because you are bombarded with emails that don’t add any value to you 99% of the time. I mean who gets that many emails really? The emails that do get to you get Google some money in exchange for your attention. If at any point it’s the AI that’s reading your emails, Google suddenly cannot charge money they do now. There will be a day when they ship this feature, but that will be a day when they figure out how to charge money to let AI bubble up info that makes them money, just like they did it in search.
by markscheck | 2025-04-23 18:14:03+00:00
Hey there, I'm attempting to make a particleos VM, and have run into a few different issues. I now know more than I ever known about mkosi, and have gotten that working. My issue following the directions on github is after mkosi -B -f I get Unknown setting Profiles. Is there a Discord where I can ask a group or such. I would love to test this out. Thanks
by ay | 2025-04-23 18:14:20+00:00
Absolutely true about focusing too much on tech solutions, it’s often a very tricky problem that is best solved at non-technical layer.

To your other points: I find that people who are addicted never heed the warnings, they just get annoying. Just occurred to me: wonder if the addiction is to some extent internalization of the habit; so that fighting the habit becomes fighting oneself….

About HN being less addictive than the others: that is arguable :-) though it is much less driven by pure emotions than the other forms of exchange, indeed !
by Kumzy | 2025-04-23 18:14:26+00:00
Hello, OP there, I have many use cases that fall outside of FastAPI or web apps in general, and this pattern allows me to consolidate that logic in a re-usable way.

We also have SQLSpec[1] (Work in progress) that could maybe a better use case for you with raw SQL

1. https://github.com/litestar-org/sqlspec
by blaze33 | 2025-04-23 18:15:20+00:00
> The “ideology of technological salvation”

On this point, 20+ years ago I had a chat with my uncle who managed a factory of rubber thingies for the car industry. I asked him what he thought of climate change: "Oh well, if it's ever an issue we'll just invent something to fix it, like carbon-sucking machines or whatever!".

I take issue with this mindset where innovation is the cure-all silver bullet. Not because it says that technological progress can help (it can!), but because it also implies that there's nothing really wrong with everything else we do and that we shouldn't have to think if we had a hand in the endless crises we see.

Don't tell me about a future where Earth is such a dystopian wasteland that going to Mars looks like the right choice. I don't want to build penthouses for the few billionaires that actually enjoy the place. The best place on Mars is still worse than the worst place on Earth.

Tell me about the future where Earth is seen as a wonderful spaceship, where we learned to live in peace and where we have a good thing going on such that going elsewhere to see what's possible is appealing!
by 3np | 2025-04-23 18:15:35+00:00
Meanwhile, my last big employer "couldn't motivate the expense" of a hardware upgrade for the most productive dev on the team (who spends a large part of their time waiting for CI jobs and builds) of <1/4 of their monthly pay. That should be a no-brainer and paid off itself quickly.

I do not believe that corps make rational decisions around these matters.
by godelski | 2025-04-23 18:15:38+00:00
> because Apple has repeatedly indicated that they want to remove it

That's not a reason to not use it. There's absolutely zero reason for me to have two copies of an exact same Python version (e.g 3.11.4). There is rarely reason to have a differing subversions (3.11.3 vs 3.11.4).

> is present in `uv`

Are you guessing or do you know? Try it out. Prove me wrong.

I said they search for versions on your system and link if found. Seriously, look into it

> disk space is cheap

That's not correct. It's a thing you need to consider when you have to compromise but not an infinite resource. But there's something cheaper than storage: infrequently scanning the system!

The problem is when everyone thinks this way then space is no longer cheap (especially with Apple!)

Tragedy of the commons

In fact it's a big reason I live in the terminal. Because even on a modern M2 air that bloat creeps in. My system is fast and snappy. I have plenty of storage. But this isn't true if I didn't. The creep still happens in these programs but their nature lessens the blows and the likelihood that people care about these things increases.
by 999900000999 | 2025-04-23 18:16:08+00:00
Apple would need to make an ongoing commitment.

Either monetarily, or with personnel. What I would have really liked to see is for them to not only fix issues relating to their own products, but to help Godot as a whole. Maybe, even add Swift as a scripting option without a hard requirement of owning a Mac.

This looks like a one time "gift" of high maintenance code. It's not like when Microsoft assisted with C# support. I don't need to buy a Windows PC or a $3500 Microsoft headset to make use of that.

It's also really rude to just open a giant PR without a discussion first.
by Koshcheiushko | 2025-04-23 18:16:23+00:00
Last week, I accidentally deleted my files. I'm very happy that those were not extremely important ones. But that taught me a big lesson. Now, I saw this post. I found this trick very helpful.

But most HNers probably know this and are using it or something better. I wanted to share in case it's valuable for someone out there.
by bluGill | 2025-04-23 18:16:45+00:00
But that isn't writing for me, it is taking notes for me. There is a difference. I don't need something to write for me - I know how to write. What I need is someone to clean up grammar, fact check the details, and otherwise clean things up. I have dysgraphia - a writing disorder - so I need help more than most, but I still don't need something to write my drafts for me: I can get that done well enough.
by nopelynopington | 2025-04-23 18:17:27+00:00
In Ireland the creation of a national Irish language TV station is definitely credited with helping keep the language alive, and it is practically the same language. Gaelic language TV in Scotland would also have an audience here, and the two channels might even cooperate in programming.

I can easily see a gritty noir Gaelic language cop show taking the world by storm.

Fís Eireann (Screen Ireland) is another success story. Although they fund Irish filmmaking in any language, there have been a slew of very well received Irish language films lately. Most notably An Cailín Cúin (The Quiet Girl) which made history this year as the first Gaelic film to be nominated for an academy award for best foreign language film.
by ragequittah | 2025-04-23 18:17:47+00:00
I think the last few years are a good example of how this isn't really true. Covid came around and everyone became an epidemiologist and public health expert. The people in charge of the US government right now are also a perfect example. RFK Jr. is going to get to the bottom of autism. Trump is ruining the world economy seemingly by himself. Hegseth is in charge of the most powerful military in the world. Humans pretending they know what they're doing is a giant problem.
by dvt | 2025-04-23 18:17:52+00:00
> Is anyone doing it this way?

I'm working on a way of invoking tools mid-tokenizer-stream, which is kind of cool. So for example, the LLM says something like (simplified example) "(lots of thinking)... 1+2=" and then there's a parser (maybe regex, maybe LR, maybe LL(1), etc.) that sees that this is a "math-y thing" and automagically goes to the CALC tool which calculates "3", sticks it in the stream, so the current head is "(lots of thinking)... 1+2=3 " and then the LLM can continue with its thought process.
by LPisGood | 2025-04-23 18:17:55+00:00
My first thought is that there is surely an Integer Linear Programming approach that can solve this within a few seconds using some very advanced solver like Gurobi.

These solvers can very often find the globally optimal solution - and prove that this solution is optimal - much faster than exhaustive search.

Of course they do use a smart exhaustive search by applying branch-and-bound as described in this article, but advanced solvers use, among other things, branch-and-cut where cutting planes in the solution space are generated, as well as a variety of other approaches.

One interesting thing however is that GPUs are still not particularly applicable for solvings Mixed Integer Linear Programs to sufficient accuracy. There are things like PDLP that can use GPUs to solve these problems, but they are restricted to something like 1e-4 accuracy whereas the state of the art is more like 1e-9.
by jerkstate | 2025-04-23 18:18:16+00:00
Me too, I’m using Roo Code and have substantially updated the system prompt to describe the project standards, correct way to restart the services and inspect the logs, specific hints about the frameworks im using and how to use DI and patterns, like think about what kind of code it’s writing and where to put it in the project structure, admonitions not to do certain things it would otherwise do (like in Python it’s common for it to generate code to import inside of functions which can cause runtime errors). I’m experimenting with a tree sitter MCP to see if I can make it aware of the structure of the entire project in a more compact way without all of the code in the context window, we will see where that goes.

Anyways, a year or two ago, the state of the art models couldn’t do math, and the image models couldn’t render hands or text, and those problems are broadly fixed, and I pretty much expect vibe coding to dramatically improve in the next year or two.