MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by viraptor | 2025-05-28 13:54:26+00:00
The bigger the system, the more bigger the probability aspect gets too. What are the chances of losing at the data copies at the same time, what are the chances is all slots being full and the new connection dropped, what are the chances of data corruption from bitrot? You can mostly ignore that in toy examples, but at scale you just have chaos and money you can throw at it to reduce it somewhat.
by nottorp | 2025-05-28 13:54:40+00:00
The problem with statements like yours is that everyone praises the LLM for doing things they (the humans praising) can do in their sleep.

You sound like you've done that CSV to SQL a lot of times, are subconsciously aware of all the pitfalls and unwritten (and perhaps never specified) requirements and you're limited by just your typing speed when doing it again.

I can use LLMs for stuff I can do in my sleep as well.

I move that even for you or me, LLMs ain't worth much for stuff we can't do in our sleep. Stuff we don't know or have only introductory knowledge of. You can use them to generate tutorials instead of searching for them, but that's about it.

Generating tutorials is good, but is it good because a LLM did it or because you can't find a good tutorial by searching any more?
by emptysongglass | 2025-05-28 13:55:13+00:00
For one, because the suttas all state multiple times, directly, with no room for interpretation, that you shouldn't harm others.

>All

>tremble at the rod,

> all

>are fearful of death.

>Drawing the parallel to

> yourself,

>neither kill nor get others to kill.

>

>All

>tremble at the rod,

> all

>hold their life dear.

>Drawing the parallel to

> yourself,

>neither kill nor get others to kill.

— Dhammapada 129–130

>A disciple has faith in that teacher and reflects: 'The Blessed One in a variety of ways criticizes & censures the taking of life, and says, "Abstain from taking life." There are living beings that I have killed, to a greater or lesser extent. That was not right. That was not good. But if I become remorseful for that reason, that evil deed of mine will not be undone.' So, reflecting thus, he abandons right then the taking of life, and in the future refrains from taking life. This is how there comes to be the abandoning of that evil deed. This is how there comes to be the transcending of that evil deed.

— Samyutta42.8

And on and on and on. [1] You would absolutely expect other humans, who might live by codes with no such prohibitions, to behave differently.

[1] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/nonviolence.html
Ask HN: Am I old?
by zwilderrr | 2025-05-28 13:55:25+00:00
I don't think I'm old, but I get great joy in writing a simple utility function by hand, without ai. Just yesterday I wrote a function that removes the ending punctuation from a string, if present, and adds a period instead. I also wrote onDone, onSubmit, and onCancel handlers using more than my tab key.

Yet it seems to me that this is quickly becoming the stuff of an older generation, of people who move slowly, of a dying breed who care about silly things like craft and form.

Don't get me wrong--I'm all over AI, especially at work where speed also counts. But there's something so satisfying in writing code without AI that it makes me wonder if, in fact, I'm quickly becoming irrelevant.
by pavlov | 2025-05-28 13:56:21+00:00
I vaguely recall there was an early-1980s microcomputer Forth that only supported 3-letter identifiers. You could use longer variable names if you wanted, but the parser just silently truncated them, so "TYPE" and "TYPOGRAPHY" would both refer to "TYP" internally.

This sounds like a very onerous limitation, so the company's ads had copy that consisted only of three-letter words, to make the case that it's not so bad after all...

(I'm guessing the engine used four bytes to store a reference, and it needed one byte for other metadata.)
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-05-28 13:56:23+00:00
You can ask the why, but if it provides the wrong approach, just ask to make it what you want it to be. What is wrong with iteration?

I frequently have LLM write proposal.MD first and then iterate on that, then have the full solution, iterate on that.

It will be interesting to see if it does the proposal like I had in mind and many times it uses tech or ideas that I didn't know about myself, so I am constantly learning too.
by rxliuli | 2025-05-28 13:56:23+00:00
Based on devalue, I wrote a new JS serialization library called devaluex, which supports asynchronous serialization and plugins. Through plugins, it supports types like Blob, Stream, Error, Request, Response, etc. It is still quite rudimentary at the moment and is mainly used for communication serialization between browser extension Content Script and Background, as JSON.stringify does not support many types. I previously tried seroval (the SolidJS base library) and devalue (the Svelte base library). The authors support more features and use eval (very cleverly) for deserialization. Unfortunately, eval cannot be used in some environments (such as browser extensions). Although the authors also support a JSON mode, its performance is not as good as devalue, so I ultimately chose to wrap devalue.
by SOLAR_FIELDS | 2025-05-28 13:56:47+00:00
These “horse dewormer” sentiments always seem to ignore the fact that this has been a safe, well recognized, frontline pharmaceutical application for anti parasite use cases in humans worldwide since the late 1970’s. The act of spreading these sentiments is almost as bad for education of the general populace as encouraging people to take ivermectin for COVID.
by pj_mukh | 2025-05-28 13:56:54+00:00
Don't care if a computer program has special privileges or not, that's irrelevant. It's a tool, and it has the potential to make a whole host of processes and people's lives easier, and no one, not you, not an internet mob, not a council of elders has the right to preemptively stop those real-world tests based on vibes.

So getting to the bottom of what is actually stealing or not will be important (we can't just unilaterally declare it so), and AFAICT if a user misuses it to regenerate copyrighted material that particular user is at fault, not the tool itself.
by viraptor | 2025-05-28 13:57:06+00:00
> An LLM is not a tool in that sense – it’s not reproducible.

LLMs are perfectly reproducible. Almost all public services providing them are not. The fact that changing the model changes the output doesn't make it not reproducible, in the same way reproducible software packages depend on a set version of the compiler. But you can run a local model with zero temperature, set starting conditions and you'll get the same response every time.
by gus_massa | 2025-05-28 13:57:13+00:00
From the research paper:

> When water droplets reach a certain size, the system reaches a steady state. As the volume of voids decreases with increasing ϕPE, the growth and coalescence of water droplets are slowed down.

That does not break the current laws of physics.

Form the press release:

> these films could be integrated into passive water harvesting devices for arid regions

I asume "harvesting" mean we can collect the water and drink it or use to irrigation or something interesting. Not just absorbing it like silica, even if the unusable water is visible.

Passive as using the day-night temperature different to collect water: It has been done.

Passive as a continue stream of running water: It breaks the second law of thermodynamics.
by supplied_demand | 2025-05-28 13:57:23+00:00
==most experts agree this is a likely hypothesis==

Oddly, I find the lab leak discussion proves the exact opposite point. No truth has been found in the matter, hence even your use of words like "most experts", "likely", and "hypothesis." If anything, the insistence that it is a lab leak is proof that evidence isn't needed for some people to make a grand conclusion.

Just look at the performative (not informative) website [0] the current administration created to spread this theory. It focuses on things like lockdowns, social distancing, and mask mandates, which obviously have nothing to do with the lab leak theory.

When you view this website, which side does do you think is trying to create a narrative? It even seems to oppress information that doesn't support their view. Seems like pure propaganda to me.

[0] https://www.whitehouse.gov/lab-leak-true-origins-of-covid-19...
by saadshahd | 2025-05-28 13:57:31+00:00
I joined a global fintech 3 years ago, our public pages are built using nextjs, the content is baked in the code. We do lots of localisation and personalisation.

Finding puck was a massive turn around point. It made us realise it's possible to construct complex layouts visually then attach copy/media to it to reach the complex set of pages we used to maintain manually.

Even though puck looks like it's in early stages. I feel safe about using it in production because it's modular and open for extension. It solves one core problem perfectly and enables users to elevate the editing experience with custom fields, overrides and resolving logic. Can't recommend it more. Unlike Sanity/Payload-Visual/Contentful-Studio/Builder.io which offer visual editing features but closed source some behind enterprise plans for a large chunk of money. Puck is open source, free to use, flexible base.
by saltwatercowboy | 2025-05-28 13:57:45+00:00
UK real wages stagnated directly in line with the 2008 financial crisis [1]. Enough has been written about 'too big to fail' that I don't need to rehash it, but ascribing guilt to the workers of a chronically underpaid and historically innovative nation doesn't feel right.

[1] Office of National Statistics via BBC: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/2560/cpsprodpb/13FD8/p...
by clarionbell | 2025-05-28 13:58:12+00:00
People, in general, have only very vague idea of what rest of the world is like. In this case, this leads to incredible number of misconceptions about eastern religious traditions in general, and Buddhism in particular.

Anyone who thinks that Buddhism makes people somehow incapable of violence should look up history of Indochinese peninsula. Despite the fact it's one of the most Buddhist areas in the world, local kingdoms had no problem fighting each other, just like those in Europe or anywhere else.
by nyrikki | 2025-05-28 13:59:04+00:00
> I use LLMs for annoying shit that used to take an inordinate amount of time. For example an analyst gives me a CSV, it has some data clean up issues, eventually it needs to become a series of SQL inserts.

The CSV to SQL for analysts problem is a data integrity problem that is domain specific and not tool specific.

Remember that a 'relation' in relational databases is just a table, specifically named columns and tuples (rows).

A CSV is also just tuples (lines), but obviously SQL also typically has multiple normalized tables etc...

Typically bad data is worse than missing data.

For analysts, missing data can lead to bias and reduced statistical challenges, but methods exist and it can often be handled.

Bad data, on the other hand, can be misleading, deceptive and/or harmful. An LLM will be its very nature, be likely to produce bad data when cleaning.

The risk of using an LLM here is that it doesn't have context or nuances to deal with that. Data cleaning via (sed,grep,tr,awk), language tools or even ETL can work....

I promise you that fixing that bad data will be far worse.

But using it in a red-green-refactor model may help with the above, but you will actively need to be engaged and dig through what it produces.

Personally I find it takes more time to do that than to just view it as tuple repacking...and use my favorite tools to do so.

Data cleaning is hard, but it is the context specific details that make it so.
by Mtinie | 2025-05-28 13:59:16+00:00
Your stationary plane example highlights a divide I've seen across my work experience in different domains; teams defaulting to ML when fundamental engineering would work better.

I'm curious: do you think there's any amount of high-quality data that could make the learning-based approach viable for orientation estimation? Or would it always be solving the wrong problem, regardless of data volume and delivery speed?

My sense is that effective solutions need the right confluence of problem understanding, techniques, data, and infrastructure. Missing any one piece makes things suboptimal, though not necessarily unsolvable.
by dezgeg | 2025-05-28 14:00:12+00:00
That's not a nice workflow from pipelines/CI point of view.

Let's take for example a service 'foobar' that depends on in-house library 'libfoo'. And now you need to add a feature to foobar that needs some changes to libfoo at same time (and for extra fun let's say those changes will break some other users of libfoo). Of course during development you want to run pipelines for both libfoo and foobar.

In such 'super module' system it gets pretty annoying to push changes for testing in CI when every change to either libfoo or foobar needs to be followed by a commit to the super repo.

In a monorepo that's just another Tuesday.
by _carljm | 2025-05-28 14:00:17+00:00
ty also implements gradual set-theoretic types, and can represent "ranged" dynamic types (as intersections or unions with Any/Unknown). We don't currently refine dynamic type based on all uses, as suggested here, though we've considered something very much like this for invariant generics.

In your example, wouldn't `none()` be a type for `x` that satisfies both `Integer.to_string(x)` and `Atom.to_string(x)`? Or do you special-case `none()` and error if it occurs?
by twak | 2025-05-28 14:01:00+00:00
i agree; but perhaps also it is the difference between managers and SWE? The former (SWE team leaders included) can see that engineers aren't perfect. The latter are often highly focused on determinism (this works/doesn't) and struggle with conflicting goals.

Through a career SWEs start rigid and overly focused on the immediate problem and become flexible/error-tolerant[1] as they become system (mechanical or meat) managers. this maps to an observation that managers like AI solutions - because they compare favourably to the new hire - and because they have the context to make this observation.

[1] https://grugbrain.dev/#:~:text=grug%20note%20humourous%20gra...
by amiga386 | 2025-05-28 14:01:25+00:00
Firstly, the WTD makes mandatory a number of things that cannot be opted out from. The only thing opt-outable is the maximum of 48 hours work per week on average, and it is left to member states to legislate how that opt-out works (should they choose to have the opt-out at all).

In the UK, to pick a specific example, it is a combination of some workers not being allowed a choice of opt-out (e.g. healthcare workers, self-employed, "gig workers"), some union workers derogating that right to their unions collective bargaining... but for every other worker, the 48 hours is the law. You cannot mandate it in a contract. You can't advertise a job where you set the hours and those hours are on average over 48 hours per week. It's not a valid job and you are immediately in breach of statutory law.

https://www.acas.org.uk/working-time-rules/the-48-hour-weekl...

https://www.acas.org.uk/working-time-rules/jobs-with-differe...

> Any particular relevant cases I can lookup?

You'll have to look at member states cases, it's on them to define how the opt-out works.

One example: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/61123e81e90e0... "In respect of the 48 hour week the claimant had not signed an opt out and as such if the claimant was working in excess of 48 hours average across the week then her right was being infringed. It is not in dispute that this is a statutory right capable of protection."

UK's Employment Rights Act 1996 section 101A: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/18/section/101A
by iand675 | 2025-05-28 14:01:32+00:00
I mean this nicely, I don't really feel like anything on the landing page besides one paragraph is actually helpful to readers understanding what problem you're trying to solve.

I think it'd be useful to focus on this more:

> Voiden turns your API definitions and docs into dynamic, purpose-built interfaces — no fixed UI, no rigid templates. Everything is composed in one place and rendered down to Markdown, tailored to the API it serves.
by naming_the_user | 2025-05-28 14:01:48+00:00
People tend to care when they feel that they are being given a good deal.

In my experience (UK), people are usually more pleasant in smaller towns, and I ascribe that to, well, the cost of living is lower relative to their wage, they probably have a decent flat or a small house at least, maybe a car, etc.

In London if you work in a coffee shop then you either have a well off partner or you are in some shoebox counting your pennies to make the bus fare, your life is just stressful and you don't feel like an equal to the person on the other side of the counter.
by tremon | 2025-05-28 14:02:17+00:00
Maybe a nitpick, but there is no European Declaration of Human Rights. To unweave the web of confusingly similarly named documents:

1) The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights [0] which was written by the United Nations (with Eleanor Roosevelt as the committee chair). As a Declaration, the document itself has no legal weight, and the US has only ratified three out of nine core treaties that are based on it. One of them is the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [1], which does seem applicable here. Before rejoicing however, consider that the other two treaties that the US has ratified are the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination [2] and the United Nations Convention Against Torture [3] -- so don't expect any miracles here.

[0] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICCPR

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICERD

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCAT

For reference, ACLU fact sheet from 2013 about the US' track record on human rights: https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/121013-human... (PDF)

2) The European Convention on Human Rights [4], which is both a document and a court where human rights violations can be tried. Its jurisdiction is all members of the Council of Europe [5], which is broader than just the European Union (even Russia used to be a member, but was kicked out after the invasion of Ukraine). The EU requires all members to ratify the ECHR as one of the conditions of membership.

[4] https://www.coe.int/en/web/human-rights-convention/

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_europe

For reference, the text itself: https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/Convention_ENG (PDF)

3) The EU itself has a Charter of Fundamental Rights [6] which covers the same topics. From what I could find, the main reason for the name change is that the EU fundamental rights are broader than the international human rights, so this avoids confusion when discussing either in international contexts.

[6] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=LEGISSUM...

For reference, explore the Charter: https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/title/title-i-dignity
by piva00 | 2025-05-28 14:02:41+00:00
What would be the basis of that though?

Just thinking about every point in my life where I ended up in "who cares?" was due to concerns outside of my control/power. When I feel I have some agency, power, and/or recognition it just naturally follows that I will care (in varying degree but I will care somehow); even if not for the larger organisation I will care about my immediate peers/team.

If I'm not paid enough, or I don't have agency, or I don't feel heard and my point is proven later (multiple times), or a superior is an asshole, so on and so forth, I naturally end up in "who cares?" after some beating.

Of course, it's all personal experience/anecdotal evidence, but in general I don't think most people just turned the "who cares?" mode on and wage stagnation followed, it seems to be much rather the opposite, you take away safety, money, agency, and any other aspect that might make a job more fulfilling and the only natural progression is people disengaging from the activity.
by lolinder | 2025-05-28 14:02:50+00:00
Monorepo doesn't mean any of those things, nor does a polyrepo setup prevent any of them except for bazel.

It sounds like you worked in a dysfunctional organization that happened to use a monorepo. Their dysfunctions are not inherent in the monorepo model and they would have found other ways to be dysfunctional if not those.
by rxliuli | 2025-05-28 14:02:54+00:00
I want to be able to understand your point. For those who enjoy programming, writing code is indeed a pleasure. I spent the whole day today writing a JavaScript serialization package, and even though I know someone has already done it, I am still willing to write a new one for my specific scenario. On the other hand, I think that although AI seems friendly to newcomers (inexperienced developers), it is actually more friendly to experienced developers because you can have AI help you complete some tasks and then review them yourself. Inexperienced developers have difficulty accurately pinpointing problems when they encounter issues, causing AI to keep going in circles and hitting walls.
by DanielVZ | 2025-05-28 14:02:56+00:00
Independent from history people will form a simplistic view of Buddhism at face value and will form expectations accordingly. Of course I’d expect them to behave differently if all I’ve heard about them is that all life is sacred and that they don’t even kill bugs, live a life of contemplation, etc. That’s why they are expected to behave differently.

But yeah you are right that in the end based on history you can’t expect them to behave any differently.
by emptysongglass | 2025-05-28 14:04:10+00:00
> The premise that Buddhism is anti-violence feels like a misunderstanding on itself.

Buddhism is anti-violence. I can't believe I need to make this argument here. Folks, if you're going to make statements, please do your research first. [1]

> Gananath Obeyesekere, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at Princeton University, said that "in the Buddhist doctrinal tradition... there is little evidence of intolerance, no justification for violence, no conception even of 'just wars' or 'holy wars.' ... one can make an assertion that Buddhist doctrine is impossible to reconcile logically with an ideology of violence and intolerance" [2]

[1] https://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/study/nonviolence.html

[2] https://books.google.dk/books?id=iAy5jsBAF0oC&pg=PA181&redir...
by ioslipstream | 2025-05-28 14:04:41+00:00
As a developer my most important tools are a computer with working keyboard, monitor, and mouse. Everything else is secondary. A notebook and pen falls somewhere below cpu, gpu, hard drive, ram, reliable internet, etc.

I agree with parent comment of notebook and pen being pure romanticism. I mean, heck, I'd rate Obsidian or some other back linking note software as more important than a notebook and pen. A sticky note and pen would be even more important than a notebook and pen.
by codethief | 2025-05-28 14:04:54+00:00
> You can easily host and manage your own package repository.

Sure, it's not hard but it's work nonetheless, plus you'll incur the costs of maintaining that infrastructure indefinitely. Compare that to creating a Dockerfile which uses https://github.com/reproducible-containers/repro-sources-lis... to fully pin its package sources and calling it a day.
by DrillShopper | 2025-05-28 14:05:35+00:00
A large endowment requires more management, so you bring in a finance department to manage it. With what metric are those employees going to be evaluated, given that there is always going to be someone who will want the stability of a government job? It's not going to be "just maintain, don't worry". It's going to be "who can get us the most ROI?".