MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MarceColl | 2025-05-26 13:09:29+00:00
Yet another Japanese learning app[0], but something that is very useful to me, so I hope it will be useful for others as well. I struggle to deal with comprehensible input that interests me at this time. The best way to immerse yourself is with content that interests you but sometimes that content is a bit advanced. I'm building this to bridge the gap, you can upload or select content that interests you (or we can recommend you content that would be comprehensible input), and we'll generate short stories, set in the universe of the content you want to learn that will introduce new words you need to understand the original content every week. The words and sentences of these stories will then be reviewed using spaced repetition (using the Ebisu SRS algo as underlying model with some modifications).

[0] https://katarineko.com/
by stopthe | 2025-05-26 13:09:43+00:00
You may be striking the goldmine with this app. There's a lot of sentiment about the effects of tech on children and also parents spend money like no one else.

On a personal level I'm interested too. My son is too young, so we only watch youtube together, even then he's very susceptible to the attention-grabbing recommendations. "Theater mode" helps put the recommendations off-screen. "Don't recommend channel" helps a curate the feed a little bit.

But ideally I should be in control of the whole interface.
by cube2222 | 2025-05-26 13:11:01+00:00
I get a lot of value out of LLMs including for existing codebases and authoring / modifying code in them.

However, only maybe 10% of that is agentic coding. Thus, my recommendation would be - try non-agentic tools.

My primary workflow is something that works with the Zed editor, and which I later ported as a custom plugin to Goland. Basically, you first chat with the AI in a sidebar possibly embedding a couple of files in the discussion (so far nothing new), and then (this is the new part) you use contextual inline edits to rewrite code "surgically".

Importantly, the inline edits have to be contextual, they need to know both the content of the edited file, and of the conversation so far, so they will usually just have a prompt like "implement what we discussed". From all I know, only Zed's AI assistant supports this.

With this I've had a lot of success. I still effectively make all architectural decisions, it just handles the nitty-gritty details, and with enough context in the chat from the current codebase (in my case usually tens of thousands of tokens worth of embedded files) it will also adhere very well to your code-style.
by etra0 | 2025-05-26 13:11:45+00:00
I recently went through this effort and I'd say it's worth it. In particular, I've used the "Self-hosted LiveSync" plug-in + docker.io/oleduc/docker-obsidian-livesync-couchdb, and I setup all my infrastructure within a VPN (with Tailscale, this was pain-free).

I knew about using just git, but having Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android, it was just way easier to use this solution instead of fighting with git-like apps for each OS.
by mooreds | 2025-05-26 13:11:51+00:00
> OAuth forces the usage of JWT.

OAuth doesn't, OIDC does for the ID token[0]. OAuth, at least the inital RFCs, were released 3 years before JWT was defined. But many extensions of OAuth do require or support JWTs.

Either way, I'm just not sure the demand is there.

My employer has had an open issue for Pasteo[1] for years but hasn't seen much community support. Some other interesting comments here[2]. Looks like most of the implementations[3] are libraries rather than standalone auth servers.

0: https://openid.net/specs/openid-connect-core-1_0.html#IDToke...

1: https://github.com/fusionAuth/fusionauth-issues/issues/773

2: https://www.reddit.com/r/KeyCloak/comments/1e2h5w7/is_paseto...

3: https://paseto.io/
by 0xEF | 2025-05-26 13:12:39+00:00
> Any manufacturing process is subject to quality controls.

A few things on this illusion:

* Any manufacturer will do everything in their power to avoid meeting anything but the barest minimums of standards due to budget concerns

* QA workers are often pressured to let small things fly and cave easily because they simply do not get paid enough to care and know they won't win that fight unless their employer's product causes some major catastrophe that costs lives

* Most common goods and infrastructure are built by the lowest bidder with the cheapest materials using underpaid labor, so as for "quality" we're already starting at the bottom.

There is this notion that because things like ISO and QC standards exist, people follow them. The enforcement of quality is weak and the reach of any enforcing bodies is extremely short when pushed up against the wall by the teams of lawyers afforded to companies like Boeing or Stellantis.

I see it too regularly at my job to not call out this idea that quality control is anything but smoke and mirrors, deployed with minimal effort and maximum reluctance. Hell, it's arguably the reason why I have a job since about 75% of the machines I walk in their doors to fix broke because they were improperly maintained, poorly implemented or sabotaged by an inept operator. It leaves me embittered, to be honest, because it doesn't have to be this way and the only reason why it is boils down to greed and mismanagement.
by mooreds | 2025-05-26 13:13:26+00:00
Here's an interesting video from an identity conference a few years ago. The speaker is Brian Campbell who was one of the JWT spec authors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgKRGS6cQWw

Here's the video description:

> JWT is an IETF standard security token format that, due to perceived simplicity and widespread library availability, has been extremely popular in recent years. Despite that popularity (or maybe, in part, because of it), JWT has been heavily derided by reputable people in information security ("horrible standard", "RFC was made by monkeys", "Internet’s worst cryptography standard", "JWT is a disaster ... amazing how bad it is", "simplistic, complicated, and unsafe all at the same time", and "almost impossible to build a secure JWT library" ...give just a taste of the sentiment).

> The criticism has been substantiated and amplified by a steady stream of public vulnerabilities in libraries and deployments. Indeed there have been serious and legitimate security problems with JWT and many of them can be attributed directly to fundamental flaws in the specification itself that allowed, or even encouraged, such implementation mistakes. But is JWT irredeemably flawed? This session will endeavor to take a hard look at that very question (complete with the presenter's own sense of inadequacy and fear of culpability in JWT's flaws) with a review/overview of JWT fundamentals and a pragmatic look at each of the most common and/or biting criticisms and associated real-world vulnerabilities.
by Qwertious | 2025-05-26 13:14:33+00:00
People who downvote the above comment: please provide an actual response.

The comment isn't wrong about factories. Factories are far less productive than providing services (e.g. software), and per comparative advantage the US should be importing manufactured stuff and exporting highly labor-efficient services.

If the US expands its manufacturing without it being profitable to do so (profitable without state subsidies, I mean), that will be bad for the economy , because it will drive up the cost of labor for other stuff without an accompanying flow of profit into the economy to stimulate the demand to match said higher costs.
by dzonga | 2025-05-26 13:16:06+00:00
if you spend time on HN n on twitter - you would think LLMs are taking over. Next.js / tRPC whatever is running every backend - but then you realize it's just tech bros making noise.

I don't like java - but you gotta admire the staying power - virtually every corporation runs on it or a flavor of it for the more advanced startups running at scale.

for any backend running at scale - nothing touches JVM. n yeah LLMs ain't making a dent for AbstractFactoryBuilderClass thingies in java or the inverted inventor principles Java Architect Astronauts like to do.
by ravivyas | 2025-05-26 13:16:27+00:00
the notes app... there is none.

There will always be better apps, but you need to stick to an app with its flaws and limitations.

I have been through this rabbit hole... (paid for Bear, IAWriter, noteplan, FSnotes and probably more that I forget) and have just stuck to local markdown files and use VS code ... I even used LLMs to generate a tiny plugin to solve my micro needs.
by safety1st | 2025-05-26 13:16:32+00:00
I own the company, and the issue came to my attention in a 1:1 with an engineer last week. I can decide and communicate what the policy will be, and the matter will be settled.

The hard question as always is what constitutes a good policy!

What happened here was that a well-meaning and talented designer passed a Figma along to the dev team and the Figma included these Lottie things and a note about how to embed a chunk of js to display them. It caught the dev & myself off guard because neither of us had even heard of Lottie but I guess it might be getting popular with designers.

Considering that there actually seems to be an animated GIF embedded in the Figma file, I don't really know the intimate details of said designer's workflow and I think we just need to tell them "This Lottie player thing is not going on any website we produce, but an animated image certainly can, so is it prudent for you to alter your workflow? What is the optimal handoff step?"
by zajio1am | 2025-05-26 13:17:19+00:00
You ignore the administrative/legal barriers to any new project that greatly increased since that time, due to legislation pushed mostly by left. Today it is substantially harder to build anything, both for public and private sector (although private sector can push through by throwing more money at the problem).

> We don’t need to reinvent anything—we just need the political will to do what we already did once, and quite successfully.

We are in vetocracy, because cheapest way way to placate your political supporters is to give them power to veto what they do not want (instead of accomplish anything positive).

See https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/abundance-...
by vijucat | 2025-05-26 13:17:20+00:00
Not directly related, but an anecdote: well before AI, I was talking to a Portfolio Solutions Manager or something from JP Morgan. He was an MD at the firm and very full of himself. He told me, "You guys, your job is....you just Google search your problem and copy paste a solution, right?". What I found hilarious is that he also told me, "The quants, I hate that they keep their C++ code secret. I opened up the executable in Notepad to read it and it was just gibberish". Lesson: people with grave incompetence at programming feel completely competent to judge what programming is and should be.
by traceroute66 | 2025-05-26 13:17:32+00:00
> And those who, like you, find it to be an extremely finicky process that requires extreme amount of coddling to get average results at best.

I am very much in that category.

I would describe my experience as the old adage "why keep a dog and bark yourself".

And no, I don't buy into people who say you have to engage in "prompt engineering". That's bullshit. Let's face it "prompt engineering" is a synonym for "I have to waste time coming up with hacky workarounds to make this dumb LLM come up with something usable".

In the end, its always quicker and easier to do it myself. And unless you are fresh out of school, if you've got more than 10 minutes of coding experience, you will always do a better job than the LLM.

Every time a new LLM model comes out, I fall into the same old trap "oh well, this one must be better, surely" I say to myself.

And yet its always the same "you can't polish a turd but you can roll it in glitter" experience.

I'm sick and tired of LLMs hallucinating shit.

I'm sick and tired of LLMs inventing functions that have been available in stdlib for years.

I'm sick and tired of LLMs generating useless code with boilerplate subfunctions that just contain a single commented "implement it yourself" line.

On top of that LLMs are simply terrible for the environment, guzzling up all that electricity, producing nothing but hot air and bullshit results in return.

Basically I'm sick and tired of LLMs and all the LLM fetishists that surround them.
by Fuhrmanator | 2025-05-26 13:17:46+00:00
I sometimes imagine, even before LLMs, how much human-written code still matters, like the DNA that has survived evolution. It's got to be a super low percentage.

The trend with Autocomplete Industrialization (AI) is just speeding up the creation of shanty towns of code, as opposed to architecturally robust foundations. The survivability of code is dropping because of the Copilotz. But perhaps this rapidity of creating crude solutions will increase the chances of something truly significant?

p.p.s there are too many times "it's" should be "its" in that blog post to have been AI-generated. That's a different kind of irony IMO, especially since that's just tricky English syntax (the thing AI is supposed to be good at). Maybe the author used AI to come up with the snarky metaphors. I asked ChatGPT for a sarcastic meaning for AI that starts with Autocomplete :)
by close04 | 2025-05-26 13:18:33+00:00
I don't know what you mean with "the code it creates is deterministic" but the process an LLM uses to generate code based on an input is definitely not entirely deterministic.

To put it simply, the chances that an LLM will output the same result every time given the same input is low. The LLM does not operate deterministically, unlike the manufacturing robot who will output the same door panel every single time. Or as ChatGPT put it:

> The likelihood of an LLM like ChatGPT generating the exact same code for the same prompt multiple times is generally low.
by mc32 | 2025-05-26 13:20:19+00:00
It wasn’t till the late 1700s that patents became form of intellectual property, before that it was a form of granting economic monopoly. Some of these “patents” were for already existing things, to give the grantee a monopoly over the sale of a particular common item. In addition, patents as we understand them today as a form of intellectual property didn’t coalesce till mid to late 1800s.
by tlogan | 2025-05-26 13:21:15+00:00
At the end of the day, coding with AI is still coding.

LLMs need to get better at it - more precision, less hallucination, larger context windows, and stricter reasoning. We also need a clearer and more domain-specific vocabulary when working with them.

In short LLM will end up as one more programming language - but one that’s easier for humans to understand, since it operates using the terminology of the problem domain.

But humans will still need to do the thinking: the what-ifs, the abstractions, the reasoning.

That’s where AI becomes unsettling - too many people have been trained not to think at all.
by wdb | 2025-05-26 13:21:22+00:00
Yeah, I wished you could somehow pass the user's id token to the MCP server when you are calling a tool when implementing an AI model. You could then either let the mcp server fetch a token using the `token-exchange` endpoint. So that it can fetch the user info (e.g. user id)

For example, when you try to integrate with AI model that supports function calling in the backend and want to use MCP server to enhance the model.

I haven't figured that out yet. Maybe you would need to use Client-Initiated Backchannel Authentication Flow ?
by specialist | 2025-05-26 13:21:26+00:00
Ya, your situation is rough. Made many fold harder by today's isolating culture and technology.

Have you found any artists or creators to hang with?

Especially these days, artists have to be very tech savvy. I've always enjoyed helping others with their projects. (I possess the artistic talent of sea kelp rotting in the sun.)

In my experience, makerspaces have dabblers, not doers.
by __jonas | 2025-05-26 13:22:01+00:00
> Can we convert these Lottie things into animated GIFs or something

You might be able to convert them to SMIL (SVG Animations), which is still pretty well supported and does not require any JS dependencies:

https://github.com/bodymovin/bodymovin-to-smil

This is a repo by the original author of the lottie format, it's not super well maintained though, and it only supports limited animation features.
by berkes | 2025-05-26 13:22:05+00:00
Nor Chrome(ium)/Linux.

WebGPU is experimental in Firefox all platforms, but especially on Linux. Chrome on linux should have it, but I've not gotten it to work - might be chromium, might be a flag, or something else.

Here's more info on the status of WebGPU: https://github.com/gpuweb/gpuweb/wiki/Implementation-Status
by vijucat | 2025-05-26 13:22:10+00:00
Unpopular opinion: developers obsess about the format being Markdown. This is completely backwards. This is a hammer-sees-nail thing. You should care more about the UX. And that somewhere, someone wrote a parser for the file format. That's it. You don't have to understand every byte of it. It need not be readable text and it need not be version-control friendly. It should be a joy to use, be powerful, be easy to annotate images and pdfs. I bet none of the Markdown solutions do this as elegantly as OneNote or alternatives.
by zilian | 2025-05-26 13:22:25+00:00
This is such a sad comment. Indeed, the demographic situation was known and predictable in the 80's, and for instance in France we did nothing to plan around it.

So now the young generation is expected to pay longer and longer for retirees, who have a higher median revenue and a higher standard of life than the active workforce (per all studies). There is absolutely no way I'm working until 70 to finance errors from the past without a contribution from our current retirees' wealth. There is anyway no foreseeable future with work for everyone until 70 with our current technological progress unless you want to slave everyone in bullshit jobs. All of this is madness.
by rzwitserloot | 2025-05-26 13:22:42+00:00
Near the end, the post jumps to conclusions. It starts with 'there is a tariff difference - 2.5% vs 10%, on car imports from europe to the US vs the opposite direction' and then jumps to '... and this explains why there are way more european cars on the road in the US than vice versa'.

This jump is not a reasonable one to make. Car imports and exports are vastly more complicated than this. At best, the tariff situation is one small part of a multi-factor explanation for observed phenomenon, such as how US carmakers do not appear to care about european market demands for cars at all (they do not make many cars that are clearly targeted at the needs of european car buyers), whereas european carmakers make quite a few models specifically engineered for the US market, or at least, there is a real demand for them in the US. But I'm just guessing here - possibly the situation is explained much more simply:

US carmakers make cars that US consumers want to buy and which US culture wants to make. These cars so happen to be designs that almost nobody in the EU wants.

EU carmakers make cars that EU consumers want to buy and which EU culture wants to make. These cars so happen to be designs that a significant fraction of the US also wants to buy.

'fix' the tariff imbalance and I bet almost nothing happens to the relative amount of 'flow' of cars across the atlantic.
by zeeroman | 2025-05-26 13:22:44+00:00
This is interesting. I’ve been skeptical about AI code review tools, mostly because the ones I’ve tried either spam low-value suggestions or miss obvious context. But I gave Infinitcode a try on a recent PR (Python/Django project), and it actually gave a pretty solid summary and caught a couple things I missed on first pass — including an inefficient query I hadn’t optimized yet.

Still early, and I wouldn’t fully trust it on critical code, but as a “reviewing assistant” it’s already saving me time. Curious how it holds up on larger or more domain-specific codebases. Definitely worth keeping an eye on.
by never_inline | 2025-05-26 13:23:13+00:00
Give it context and copy paste the code yourself.

They're good at coming up with new code.

Give it function signature with types and it will give pretty good implementation.

Tell it to edit something, and it will lose track.

The write-lint-fix workflow with LLMs doesn't work for me - LLM is monkey brain edits unrelated parts of code.
by Hilift | 2025-05-26 13:23:17+00:00
> That just strikes me as an odd thing to say.

Is it though? It could be interpreted as an acknowledgement. Five years from now, testing will be further improved, yet the same people will be able to take over your iPhone by sending you a text message that you don't have to read. It's like expecting AI to solve the spam email problem, only to learn that it does not.

It's possible to say "we take the security and privacy of our customers seriously" without knowing how the code works. That's the beauty of AI. It legitimizes and normalizes stupid humans without measurably changing the level of human stupidity or the quality or efficiency of the product.

Sold! Sold! Sold!
by baalimago | 2025-05-26 13:23:20+00:00
I did something similar a few years back(press 'q' to see the individual particles move): https://lorentz.app/experiments.html

It's much simpler in design though. Each particle has a constant forward speed, and varying move-angle. For each step, it can either change it's turn-angle to be more left, or more right. The turn angle then determines how strong the 'glow' of a particle is. If it turns strongly to the left, the glow is strongly red. Vise versa for blue and right.

Then, for the upcoming iteration, the underlying point of the particle is evaluated by colour. If the colour the particle is under is red -> become more red. If it's blue -> become more blue. So this way, it's a dynamically shifting system where particles turn from blue to red depending on it's surroundings.

All calculations are made on the GPU. The positions are encoded into textures (last 3 positions to calculate current moving angle), then also the previous step's render.

Often particles becomes very isolated due to it's high turn, there are clusters. But then a huge pack of opposite-turners may come and disrupt this. Sometimes one colour wins.
by ben_w | 2025-05-26 13:23:52+00:00
Other way around.

We started with alchemy on the basis of what little evidence the ancient could observe, and over time their crude ideas, gathered enough evidence to become chemistry with 91 natural elements, and then physics to fill in the Technetium gap (the only unstable element lighter than Uranium).

By this point the physicists had replaced the four (western) elements of earth, air, fire, and water mixed in various proportions to create all things, with — coincidentally — four particles that make all that we humans directly experience: neutrons, protons, electrons, and photons, mixed in various proportions to create everything we can see and touch, and yes, allowing us to transmute lead into gold.

And then the physics got the standard model, and even then we still definitely don't know all of it. But it is science.

We may well still be in the alchemy days for "consciousness". Might be at the "arguing over the periodic table" stage.
by rzwitserloot | 2025-05-26 13:24:03+00:00
What a weird end to a fascinating article.

It's like I'm reading the words of a political prisoner. Everything in the first ~80% of it sets up for a conclusion of 'one-sidedly slapping a ton of tariffs on all the things and expecting this to lead to prosperity and the closing of deficits is sheer lunacy', and then ends with: "Well, what an interesting and possibly smart move, lets see how it works out!".