MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gary_0 | 2025-05-04 22:02:25+00:00
I think the blog post is arguing against a volley that happens all in one instant, requiring all the archers to synchronize perfectly. This seems pretty easy to argue against because while movies do it because it's dramatic and cool, it's harder to justify in actual combat situations (and the post goes into great detail on the pros and cons).

However, it seems a lot more reasonable to suppose that archers were sometimes told to hold until a given strategic moment. In that case, you might see something resembling a volley when, say, an advancing enemy reaches a particular position and the archers begin loosing. But I don't think that's what the post was talking about.
by quesera | 2025-05-04 22:03:22+00:00
I think it's important not to overlook Butch Vig though.

Are there Nevermind demos circulating? (Maybe an official release even, I've never looked)...

They were good songs, maybe even great songs. But I think I could name a dozen bands from the same period who had equally-good songs.

Butch Vig turned those good-great songs into anthemic stadium crashers. I'm not a huge fan of Butch Vig, I think he has a very heavy touch! But he met (or predicted) the moment on that record. The industry/audience moment at least, I don't think the band entirely wanted what they got!

Most people would never have heard those songs without Butch Vig. They would not be on any RS Top X lists.

Kurt might still have been a genius, but he'd have been sharing a tour bus with others. I wonder if he'd still be alive.
by krrishd | 2025-05-04 22:03:45+00:00
I mostly agree with the premise, but to point out something kinda funny: these complaints are basically identical to the ones I remember from a time I personally remember as the "heyday" of hackathons (early/mid 2010s).

I think:

- they've had this degree of fakeness for almost the entirety of their existence (as long as they've needed "sponsorship" / been 6+ figure events)

- at its best, there also was a scene/subculture _surrounding_ hackathons that did care about building genuinely "cool" / "impressive" things, had an earnest interest in actually starting something longer term (there are some really successful founders that "incubated" in the hackathon scene). these folks frequented hackathons, and eventually moved on as the scene saturated with careerism / they "grew up" professionally
Ask HN: What would you want from a diagrams-as-code editor?
by jbreckmckye | 2025-05-04 22:03:54+00:00
I'm thinking of taking on a new open source project. This would be a native desktop application distributed under something like GPL or MPL2.

As a software engineer I do a lot of architecture and process diagrams but I find existing web editors for things like D2 and Mermaid somewhat cumbersome. I was thinking of building a dedicated, native editor.

Some features I'm thinking of:

- autocomplete and macros for faster composition

- wizards for common diagram types

- save diagrams as editable PNGs / editable SVGs

- generate code for git "architecture" repositories

- create themes for diagrams

- offline documentation for language syntax

- generate diagrams from json (nodes / edges lists)

- some form of LLM assistant integration, e.g. to bootstrap diagrams with a prompt

What features would make something like this worth using, to you?
by amclennon | 2025-05-04 22:04:29+00:00
The "aha" moment for me came when I started writing a ticket for a junior engineer to work on. However, to satisfy my own curiosity, I gave the ticket to Cursor, and was able to get 90% of the way there (implementing a small feature based on a Figma design).

As it turns out, a well written ticket makes a pretty good input into an LLM. However, it has the added benefit of having my original thought process well documented, so sometimes I go through the process of writing a ticket / subtask, even if I ended up giving it to an AI tool in the end.
by Anamon | 2025-05-04 22:04:30+00:00
My experience is similar. I used to never find the "right time" to ask people to meet up. It got worse over time, because now it had been so long, I felt bad for not reaching out and maybe they didn't really want to keep in touch anymore anyway. Then I started more often consciously deciding to reach out anyway because the mythical right time isn't going to be next week either.

Everybody has the reaction you described. They all seeemed to be unhappily stuck in the same mindset I was, and nobody went ahead and tested the hypothesis.

It just takes one.

I live in a building with 25 apartments. Nobody really knew their neighbours. After I had been living there for almost five years, one tenant decided that everybody should meet for a barbecue in the yard and get to know each other. Now, we all know the people living next to us, we meet regularly for dinners or barbecues and chat. We have a WhatsApp group where we exchange news and favours. I'm almost sure that without this one person's initiative, most of us would still be strangers. Apparently, everybody thought it was a pity that we don't know each other better, but nobody else kicked things off until that one guy did and showed us that we all felt the same way.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-05-04 22:04:46+00:00
Now it's not math it's 'category theory' and that's dots and arrows and dots are anything.

At what point does the abstract description just not offer any useful insight anymore?

I'm surprised I hit a nerve with so many people.

A lot of people had very good explanations for why you're pretty far off in trying to say two things are the same.

Programming is much more like building a machine than any sort of straight math. There is state, there is interactivity, there is performance, there is IO and there are real world implications to all of it.

Saying they are the same is like saying gardening is plumbing just because you sometimes use a hose.
by buu700 | 2025-05-04 22:05:05+00:00
You're making a weirdly uncharitable assumption. I'm referring to information which I largely or entirely wrote myself, or which I otherwise have proprietary access to, not which I randomly cherry-picked from scattershot Google results.

Synthesizing large amounts of information into smaller more focused outputs is something LLMs happen to excel at. Doing the exact same work more slowly by hand just to prove a point to someone on HN isn't a productive way to deliver business value.
by palata | 2025-05-04 22:05:10+00:00
> there is 0 way of telling if the work is real or not

Talk to the student, maybe?

I have been an interviewer in some startups. I was not asking leetcode questions or anything like that. My method was this: I would pretend that the interviewee is a new colleague and that I am having coffee with them for the first time. I am generally interested in my colleagues: who are they, what do they like, where do they come from? And then more specifically, what do they know that relates to my work? I want to know if that colleague is interested in a topic that I know better, so that I could help them. And I want to know if that colleague is an expert in a topic where they could help me.

I just have a natural discussion. If the candidate says "I love compilers", I find this interesting and ask questions about compilers. If the person is bullshitting me, they won't manage to maintain an interesting discussion about compilers for 15 minutes, will they?

It was a startup, and the "standard" process became some kind of cargo culting of whatever they thought the interviews at TooBigTech were like: leetcode, system design and whatnot. Multiple times, I could obviously tell in advance that even if this person was really good at passing the test, I didn't think it would be a good fit for the position (both for the company and for them). But our stupid interviews got them hired anyway and guess what? It wasn't a good match.

We underestimate how much we can learn by just having a discussion with a person and actually being interested in whatever they have to say. As opposed to asking them to answer standard questions.
by onetimeusename | 2025-05-04 22:05:35+00:00
This often gets forgotten but by all appearances, Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS sec, facilitated mass migration illegally but avoided ever being called anti-democratic, authoritarian, or whatever else people are called for doing deportations. (So importations are more democratic than deportations I guess somehow??). No one gave him a mandate to do the CHNV program flying people in, to spend money building a highway in Panama, to grant parole to alleged asylum seekers, etc. It's surprisingly missing from all this passionate debate about authoritarians, populism, and the end of the rule of law.
by tgsovlerkhgsel | 2025-05-04 22:05:39+00:00
Is there any realistic free alternative for 3D (not 2.5D) parts?

You certainly won't want to use it for mass production, but for hobbyist use where getting the model and CAM config right, setting up the machine etc. are the biggest time sink and most parts are made in quantity 1, I found it acceptable.
by ddingus | 2025-05-04 22:06:18+00:00
If I were you, I would just start reconsidering my tech choices. And though it is not really a boycott, enough people doing it matters. Think of it like a biaore like a bias away from poor or dubious value propositions and toward better and higher value ones.

This all works a lot like TV and other home entertainment devices work. What can the device do without its remote?

I just repaired a really nice little CRT for retro computer and game system use. Fantastic set too. It is just about pixel perfect over the composite connection when running with a system with appropriate gaming / computing hardware.

One problem and you guessed it! This little set is damn near useless without it's remote! Listing are easily half as much or more!

You are right too. Digital locks are dumb.

The set can turn on, off, change channels, raise and lower volume and that is it!

So much is left! Picture, tint, color saturation level, aux input, sharpness.

And the initial setup, V-chip, language, region, and, and, and... you get the point!

Now, I always find a remote and or program a universal remote and also print out the user guide and service manuals for the TV and the programming guides for the remote.

Huge value, and it shows in my listing prices and just how close final sale ends up being.
by makeitdouble | 2025-05-04 22:06:23+00:00
On reviewing students' work: people exchange copies, get their hands on past similar assignments, get friends to do their homework , potentially each of them shadow the other in fields they're good at etc.

There always was a bunch of realistic options to not actually do your submitted work, and AI is merely makes it easier, more detectable and more scalable.

I think it moves the needle from 40 to 75, which is not great, but you'd already be holding your nose at student work half of the time before AI, so teaching had to be about more than that (and TBH it was, when I was in school teachers gave no fuck about submitted work if they didn't validate it by some additional face to face or test time)
by cplanas | 2025-05-04 22:07:22+00:00
Location: Barcelona, Spain Remote: Yes. Also open to hybrid.

Willing to relocate: no. More than happy to make periodic visits to any office, though.

Technologies: Ruby, Rails, Javascript

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16LgKHqECH5NDHnN_QCQtk-cXsEv...

Email: me[at]cristianplanas[dot]com

About me: Nice to meet you! My name is Cristian. Let me tell you why I think I’d be a great addition to your team. I have over 15 years of experience with Ruby. The highlight of my career is probably the decade I have spent at Zendesk, where I am one of the technical leaders of Support, their flagship product, as a Group Tech Lead and Senior Staff Software Engineer. My main focus is scaling the ticketing system and making sure it can handle massive workloads efficiently. That experience turned me into a bit of a Rails performance nerd—so much so that I wrote a book about it, Rails Scales!, published by Pragmatic Bookshelf (https://pragprog.com/titles/cprpo/rails-scales/). I’ve also had the chance to share my insights at conferences like RailsConf, EuRuKo, and RubyKaigi. You can check my talks in my profile in RubyVideo (https://www.rubyevents.org/speakers/cristian-planas).
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-04 22:07:36+00:00
I use Gemini pretty much exclusively for creative writing largely because the long context lets you fit an entire manuscript plus ancillary materials, so it can serve as a solid beta reader, and when you ask it to outline a chapter it is very good at taking the events preceding and following into account. It's hard to overstate the value of having a decent beta reader that can iteratively review your entire work in seconds.

As a side note, I find the way that you interact with a LLM when doing creative writing is generally more important than the model. I have been having great results with LLMs for creative writing since ChatGPT 3.5, in part because I approach the model with a nucleus of a chapter and a concise summary of relevant details, then have it ask me a long list of questions to flesh out details, then when the questions stop being relevant I have have it create a narrative outline or rough draft which I can finish.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-04 22:07:58+00:00
> You did not answer my question. Why do you think choosing alternative algorithm and breaking existing hash contract would be better?

But I don't think Java should go break all this stuff. I'm just explaining why - in fact - we might want some cryptographic properties for hash algorithms. It can be true both that Java made reasonable tradeoffs at the time (in the 1990s) and that you shouldn't copy those choices today.

There's a long list of things Java picked that in hindsight weren't a good idea and in many cases it would have been really hard to guess that when Java was invented - however today you should not choose what Java did. Biggest example: 16-bit char. Java was invented when UCS-2 might happen, and in that light a 16-bit char makes sense. A few years later it's obvious UCS-2 is not possible and so you're choosing UTF-8 or UTF-16 and that's easy, pick UTF-8. People who'd already bought into the 16-bit char, such as Microsoft and Sun's Java team, were stuck with UTF-16 as a booby prize.
by palata | 2025-05-04 22:08:20+00:00
Maybe it will get us to rethink the grading system. Do we need to grade them, or do we need students to learn things? After all, if they grow up to be incompetent, they will be the ones suffering from it.

But I know it's easier said than done: if you get a student to realise that the time they spend at school is a unique opportunity for them to learn and grow, then you're job is almost done already.
by notahacker | 2025-05-04 22:08:29+00:00
I point to issue polling because I'm pointing out the obvious fact that much of what he and his appointees actually done isn't the will of the public, no matter how much shouting about migration or egg prices during the election resonated with certain segments of it.

The fact that he has four years left to make appointments and executive orders and the public can't do anything about is an implementation detail of a republic, just as anti-democratic as similar quirks meaning that other presidents' appointees are around to thwart him in certain areas. Most of those decisions have absolutely nothing to do with issues that got Trump elected, but the rules let him get his way on many of them anyway. Contra populism: democracy /= the guy who got a plurality of the vote once getting his way on everything even when the rules and votes aren't in his favour.

I do think your sequence of posts is as good an indication of the difference between populism and popularity as we're ever likely to see though. Populism isn't about making political arguments that are popular, it's about making arguments of the form that if an ultraconservative Supreme Court of presidential appointees (three of them his) determines that part of Trump's bureaucracy sending legal migrants to foreign concentration camps without even deigning to provide a reason might not be constitutional, it's because "elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants...." even when the best available evidence suggests the public widely supports the court in this instance. Trump won a vote so anyone not deferring to him is guilty of overreach.
by staunton | 2025-05-04 22:09:10+00:00
> Because you want to pass on knowledge?

Arguably, that's not what teachers mainly do (to an ever increasing proportion).

Most knowledge is easily available. A teacher is teaching students to think in productive ways, communicate their thoughts and understand what others are trying to tell them. For this task, it's essential that the teacher has some idea what the students are thinking, especially when it's something original.
by derefr | 2025-05-04 22:09:56+00:00
That was not a good attempt at changing the style.

You can't just say "don't sound like an LLM." The LLM does not in fact know that it is "speaking like an LLM"; it just thinks that it's speaking the way the "average person" speaks, according to everything it's ever been shown. If you told it "just speak like a human being"... that's what it already thought it was doing!

You have to tell the LLM a specific way to speak. Like directing an image generator to use a specific visual style.

You can say "ape the style of [some person who has a lot of public writing in the base model's web training corpus — Paul Graham, maybe?]". But that coverage will be spotty, and it's also questionably ethical (just like style-aping in image generation.)

But an LLM will do even better if you tell it to speak the in some "common mode" of speech: e.g. "an email from HR", or "a shitpost rant on Reddit" or "an article in a pop-science magazine."
by MarcoDewey | 2025-05-04 22:10:28+00:00
Yes, this test-driven approach will likely increase generation time upfront. However, the payoff is more reliable code being generated. This will lead to less debugging and fewer reprompts overall, which saves time in the long run.

Also agree on the specification formality. Even a less formal spec provides a clearer boundary for the LLM during code generation, which should improve code generation results.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-04 22:10:48+00:00
In all the years I've used wireless dongled mice, I've never had an issue. And all my stuff is bottom of the barrel unbranded from eBay or Amazon.

Bluetooth mice and keyboards always have trouble pairing, or there's input lag, or sometimes I can't use them to wake the computer. And if you ever want to hold a startup key...
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-04 22:11:22+00:00
> The ridiculous thing is how Microsoft has failed to secure Windows from cheaters despite it being a problem for such a long time.

The problem is, it's gotten hard to do drivers for custom hardware on macOS as a result for everything that can't be done with libusb as a result - and it's also gotten harder to patch over deficiencies of macOS.

You can't have an OS that you can tinker around with and an OS that is secure from cheaters, software pirates and malware at the same time. Android is the best example - either you run an OS that passes Play Integrity/SafetyNet and is blessed by Google and thus can use games, Netflix, banking or a whole lot of other apps that require non-rooted phones these days, but you lose e.g. the ability to do an actual full-device backup, or you run a phone that's rooted or runs a custom OS (say, aftermarket once the manufacturer ceases providing even security updates) but you lose out on about 2/3rds of apps because they just refuse to run.
by sigotirandolas | 2025-05-04 22:11:23+00:00
For creative and professional writing, I found them useful for grammar and syntax review, or finding words from a fuzzy description.

For the structure, they are barely useful: Writing is about having such a clear understanding, that the meaning remains when reduced to words, so that others may grasp it. The LLM won't help much with that, as you say yourself.
by yupitsme123 | 2025-05-04 22:11:50+00:00
Your examples are still using subcontractors, which is what I'm saying is the problem. Someone is diffusing responsibility and adding a layer of complexity just so they can reduce their risk and skim a little off the top.

Most of this would go away if the guy who gives me the estimate and takes my money is the same guy who comes back to do the work later. Or if the guy delivering the pizza works for the company that sells me the pizza.

This is the way it was through the 1990s, but now everything is corporatized and sub-contracted out.
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-04 22:11:50+00:00
As someone who doesn't participate in those, your comparison seems poor to me. Like my mom asked a while back if I'd get into valorant with her and my sister on weekends sometime, but I'm not going to dual boot or buy another computer just for this game. Why do they require rootkits for casual play? It'd be like bicycle manufacturers subjecting you to drug tests and access to random home inspections to ride around your neighborhood.

If you need to protect competitive play, keep it to actual competitions/make it optional for free play. I'm not giving you unrestricted access to my brokerage account, all of my files, all of my emails/text messages, etc. (which root access on my computer has) so you can prevent cheating in a Sunday night video game.
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-05-04 22:12:34+00:00
Based on my experience, Hackathons are meant as networking events where you might put together some simple prototype. Usually people oversell whatever it is that they built, and they're using existing skills to rebuild some small part of a larger thing which they've already studied extensively outside of the event.

If a company is a big sponsor and they're offering an extra prize for using their tool then people will figure out a way to jam it into their project, but it's rarely the optimal choice. I think it has always been like this.

But if you really want to build something and there's a sponsor at the event you should ask them for lots of free credits or for some contact info in order to establish a longer-term sponsorship.
by ajb | 2025-05-04 22:12:59+00:00
Yeah those are good

What they should have done is a smaller project to roll up all the old legacy radios into SDR, leaving the new ones as custom silicon. That would have stood a decent chance of working, and then they could go for the more ambitious goals later . Problem is that it would not have got the people working on it into the exciting (and higher revenue) new radios.
by palata | 2025-05-04 22:13:20+00:00
> I would’ve at least had someone(thing) explain me how to write better.

I actually don't think that it is good at that. I have heard of language teachers trying to use it to teach the language (it's a model language, it should be good at it, right?) and realised that it isn't good at that.

Of course I understand the point of your message, which is that you feel your teachers were not helpful and I have empathy for that.