MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Open-lmake, a scalable, reliable build system with auto dep-tracking
by cd_fr91400 | 2025-05-03 16:11:24+00:00
Hello Hacker News,

I often hear people saying "all build-systems suck", an opinion I have been sharing for years, and this is the motivation for this project. I finally got the opportunity to make it open-source, and here it is.

In a few words, it is like make, except it can be comfortably used even in big projects using HPC (with millions of jobs, thousands of them running in parallel).

The major differences are that: - dependencies are automatically tracked (no need to call gcc -M and the like, no need to be tailored to any specific tool, it just works) by spying disk activity - it is reliable : any modification is tracked, whether it is in sources, included files, rule recipe, ... - it implements early cut-off, i.e. it tracks checksums, not dates - it is fully traceable (you can navigate in the dependency DAG, get explanations for decisions, etc.)

And it is very light weight.

Configuration (Makefile) is written in Python and rules are regexpr based (a generalization of make's pattern rules).

And many more features to make it usable even in awkward cases as is common when using, e.g., EDA tools.

Give it a try and enjoy :-)
by jazzypants | 2025-05-03 16:11:37+00:00
This is not news for people who already know how to code. The problem is that there are tens of thousands of people who have no idea what they're doing, yet they evangelize their hollow victories to anyone willing to listen.

Worse yet, there are grifters like levelsio who will pretend like it's great because they know that's what their followers want to hear.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-03 16:11:54+00:00
I mean, that's so vague that it can be said about anything: Some people think X is positive and will buy the product and some people think X is negative and won't buy the product. Pretty obvious.

The purpose of food labels is to increase safety, transparency and honesty around the contents of food. Companies who oppose safety, transparency or honesty and/or produce products with questionable contents will oppose labels and companies who support safety, transparency and honesty will support them. I don't know many end-consumers who oppose labels themselves. But they will oppose products that contain questionable ingredients, so transparency is bad for companies that produce those products.
by wslh | 2025-05-03 16:12:24+00:00
This, and I'd add that one underrated upside of angel investing (and being LP of funds) is access to real, unfiltered information about the startup and the market. That's often far more insightful than the "everyone is crushing it" narrative you see in the media. In the article, the author mentions that she found other ways to get that info.
by dcrazy | 2025-05-03 16:12:39+00:00
If this is true, it’s a big problem. A human therapist is bound to a code of ethics and laws. Their patients are in an intentionally vulnerable position—therapy only works when you are completely honest with your therapist and are open to their suggestions. If challenged, a human therapist can explain their reasoning for pursuing a line of questioning, and defend themselves against accusations of manipulation. A large language model can’t do any of that, nor can any of the people who trained it. The LLM can pretend to explain its reasoning, but it has no conviction, no morals, and no fear of consequence. It’s just a black box of statistics.
by Etheryte | 2025-05-03 16:13:12+00:00
It's hard to give this take serious thought when just today I built a bunch of utility software I'd been putting off due to lack of time and domain specific knowledge, all by working together with an LLM. Takes some time and back and forth, but it works and does the things I need. It doesn't need to get everything right nor to get it right the first time, humans don't tick either of those boxes either. The value add is already clearly there and it's most likely going to improve over time.
by jeffwass | 2025-05-03 16:13:16+00:00
Are you me? I have the same issue, when I see someone not in my immediate circle and out of context, say on the street, it takes me some time to recall their name from my jumbled memory.

If there’s context (eg I go to another department at work, or see my child’s friend with their parent) I can get their name easier. But that barrier for being out of context can be difficult to surmount.

I’m curious if you also find yourself having trouble to remembering other names when in conversation (eg what was that politician called, what’s that city name, it begins with an F…)

Usually it’s proper nouns that I have trouble recalling. It’s almost like I need an Anki to refresh my mental DRAM and keep things recallable.
by lxgr | 2025-05-03 16:13:22+00:00
Yes, which makes it a particularly bad idea to run unencrypted metadata over satellite connections if it can be avoided – and that's the case for communication between data centers, arguably.

That might change once lasers or extremely tight radio beams can be used for ground stations, but for the latter you'd still need to make sure that nobody can get reasonably close to your ground stations, which might be possible for remote military bases, but probably not for AWS data centers.
by rocqua | 2025-05-03 16:14:42+00:00
The Netherlands has private garages do the yearly recertification inspection (APK here). There was a recent rise in 'remote inspections' where the garages had figured out tricks to avoid spot checks. This involved tricks like 'file the inspection very close before 17:00' or 'file the inspection result right before an actual true inspection' because apparently spot checks look at the last inspection.

They noticed the tricks as patterns, and are handling it. My point is, there is an incentive for private garages to do fraud here.
by layer8 | 2025-05-03 16:14:46+00:00
We were talking about typewriters, which don't have a file format at all. Nevertheless, it might not be stored as ASCII code 9 in Word anymore (though it originally did), but it is entered and behaves like a tab stop on a typewriter, and is called a tab character: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/documentformat....
by amos-burton | 2025-05-03 16:15:02+00:00
... consider you are equally fantasist, if i were to search i would found many pieces of articles on your website that says that climate change is bad; really bad; agreed; yet, here you are, polluting against all the claims you are pretending. I am not advocating for you to socially suicide yourself, i perfectly understand, i also pollute much beyond what the words I use really mean. It is a thrilling feeling to be at edge of this cliff. it is deranged. this is yet a perfectly valid description of our situation. deal with that. confront.
by drysine | 2025-05-03 16:15:22+00:00
>Haha famously western Al Jazeera.

Qatar is an ally of the US and hosts the largest American military base in the Middle East .

>And the BBC, where if you say something critical of the government you fall out a window.

You don't fall out of the window in Russia if you are busy waging propaganda war against (not so) Great Britain.

>I am glad we finally got to the point where you claim that the global consensus is wrong.

There is no such thing. The US and its allies comprise only 10-15% of global population.
by heavyset_go | 2025-05-03 16:15:28+00:00
> Looks like banning books in school is not enough, now they want to ban the sale of some books.

The irony, and insincerity, in this is ripe because book ban proponents would scream that they weren't "book bans" because they only wanted to ban books at school and not elsewhere.

Turns out they want to ban books everywhere, just like their critics said.
by behnamoh | 2025-05-03 16:15:36+00:00
I wonder if Apple ever followed up with this: https://github.com/apple/ml-ane-transformers

They claim their ANE-optimized models achieve "up to 10 times faster and 14 times lower peak memory consumption compared to baseline implementations."

AFAIK, neither MLX nor llama.cpp support ANE. Though llama.cpp started exploring this idea [0].

What's weird is that MLX is made by Apple and yet, they can't support ANE given its closed-source API! [1]

[0]: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/issues/10453

[1]: https://github.com/ml-explore/mlx/issues/18#issuecomment-184...
by WhatIsDukkha | 2025-05-03 16:16:00+00:00
European consumers seem to not want factory farms that produce such low quality food that it needs to be CRISPRed (as is the case with this story) just to be kept alive long enough.

I also am in that camp, I don't want to eat pork raised in unsanitary conditions and then sold to me at top dollar (because lying/obscuring about sourcing).
Show HN: Codecrush – AI Documentation Generator
by lummm | 2025-05-03 16:16:28+00:00
Hi, sharing something I've been working on for a while. CodeCrush runs locally and points to an LLM of your choice - so self-hosted, OpenAI, whatever you're comfortable with. It uses the LLM to extract the information it needs to build a knowledge graph over a codebase, and leverages that knowledge graph to build documentation over important sections of the codebase it identifies. You can also do more targeted documentation generation by giving it a prompt.
by lxgr | 2025-05-03 16:17:21+00:00
Yes, so all in all for satellite vs. fiber in backbone applications, I'd say that it's a wash (or slight win for fiber) when it comes to security, and a definitive win for fiber when it comes to jamming resistance.

In the field it's a completely different story, of course – you can't always pull fiber (although it does appear in unexpected scenarios, such as fiber-operated UAVs or torpedoes).
by ajkjk | 2025-05-03 16:17:57+00:00
It's a much-needed idea but... such an awkward way to do it. Only Java would be okay with an actual language feature using words like "orElseGet". And personally I suspect there's an inverse correlation between feature usage and how semantically awkward it is... it just feels like a mistake to even consider using an inelegant feature unless it's out of complete necessity.

It should really be something like

public stable logger = () -> new Logger(/* .. */).

Where the JDK hides the details of making sure the value is only created once, basically like the classholder idiom but under the hood. I'm sure there are reasons why they're not doing it that way, but ... it's definitely what the language needs to be able to do.

Incidentally, I've always appreciated for python PEPs how they list all of the obvious complaints about an issue and explain methodically why each was determined not to work. The JEPs don't seem to reach quite the same candor.
by chii | 2025-05-03 16:18:53+00:00
> this is just what it predicted to be most fitting from it's training data

and your own prediction, from your own brain, is doing something quite similar i would imagine.

The mechanism behind how it works is irrelevant. The results can be judged on its own. People used to judge chess engines as tho they are just merely searching and trying every possibility, and it's not "really playing chess", like humans' intuitions. And yet, by just doing searching and almost brute force, it produces a better chess game than any humans can.

And LLM are still in the early days. It's only been around for less than 3 years.
by dismalaf | 2025-05-03 16:18:57+00:00
Dunno, on one hand, I think LLMs are somewhat of a dead end. We trained them on all human knowledge, and they're still not great. Useful enough, but a tad underwhelming versus the hype.

On the other hand, with all the money flooded into AI, all the hardware that's been produced and bought, it's reignited the entire AI industry (that mostly died in the 80's) and there is a chance for innovation beyond LLMs.
by seadan83 | 2025-05-03 16:18:58+00:00
You point out the "is a" relationship, not the "is" relationship, they are different. [0]

Find examples with two singular nouns and just the word 'is'.

The phrase in question: 'Math is language' is an example, or something like 'food is love' is too. I concede you could interpret those last few sentences with poetic license to be read more like: "A is a form of B", or "A is a B" - though that is not what was written and this is not a place to expect that much poetic license.

*edit*: a minute later, thought of a good example. "ice is water". True that "ice is a form of water", but strictly speaking no, "ice is not water". I'll concede there could exist an implied "is a", or an implied "is a form of", but that is poetic license IMO.

[0] Google AI summarized it pretty well: google "logical "is a" vs logical "is"

> In logic, "is" typically represents an equality relation, while "is a" (or "is of the type") represents an inclusion relation. "Is" indicates that two things are the same or identical, while "is a" indicates that one thing is a member of a larger class or set of things
by techpineapple | 2025-05-03 16:19:46+00:00
One thing implied or embedded in Andrej Karpathy’s description, that I think explains the difference between influencers experience vs lay people’s experience, and is not propagated in others description of vibe coding, is that one of the essential pieces of vibe coding is that you can’t care too much about the outcome. Like if you have a specific feature in mind, the LLM might not understand how to generate it, so you might just have to skip it.
by accrual | 2025-05-03 16:20:07+00:00
Enjoyable to see another minimal static blog and the discussion around it.

Since we're chatting about our static site generators - I've been working on mine for a few months and naturally spend way more time on the generator than the content. ;) Mine is written in TypeScript and I'm targeting HTML 4.01 Strict for compat with old browsers.

It started pretty simple, just walk a directory of .md files and output .html, but it now has RSS, Atom, tags, a "latest" page, sitemap, stats, table of contents, SEO features, etc.

It's been fun - a nice "easy" project to slowly polish over time and to gradually grow my TS skills.
by jsheard | 2025-05-03 16:21:35+00:00
It was two months ago, and the prediction was 90% of code written by AI in 3-6 months, and ~100% in 12 months. Maybe he will be right but in a cursed monkey's paw sense where the amount of high quality code stays about the same, but that becomes a rounding error compared to the amount of barely functional spaghetti code being churned out by agents.

Similarly ~100% of written word will probably be penned by LLMs soon if not already, but that doesn't necessarily mean the writing is any good, only that LLMs can type really fast for pico-pennies on the dollar.
by BriggyDwiggs42 | 2025-05-03 16:21:40+00:00
I don’t think it’s the consequence of most individuals’ preferences. I think it’s just the result of disproportionate political influence held by the wealthy, who are heavily incentivized to maximize working hours. Since employers mostly have that incentive, and since the political system doesn’t explicitly forbid it, there aren’t a ton of good options for workers seeking shorter hours.
by gcha | 2025-05-03 16:21:52+00:00
Been tweaking on building Cloi its local debugging agent that runs in your terminal

cursor's o3 got me down astronomical ($0.30 per request??) and claude 3.7 still taking my lunch money ($0.05 a pop) so made something that's zero dollar sign vibes, just pure on-device cooking.

The technical breakdown is pretty straightforward: cloi deadass catches your error tracebacks, spins up a local LLM (zero api key nonsense, no cloud tax) and only with your permission (we respectin boundaries) drops some clean af patches directly to ur files.

Been working on this during my research downtime. If anyone's interested in exploring the implementation or wants to issue feedback FRFR
by ndriscoll | 2025-05-03 16:22:13+00:00
Yep, and this can be used to e.g. make a basically static site template and then do an include for `userdata.xml` to decorate your page with the logged in user's info (e.g. on HN, adding your username in the top right, highlighting your comments and showing the edit/delete buttons, etc.). You can for example include into a variable `<xsl:variable name="myinfo" select="document('userdata.xml')"/>` and then use it in xpath expressions like `$myinfo/user/@id`. Extremely simple, good for caching, lightweight, very high performance. Easy to fail gracefully to the logged out template. You basically get your data "API" for free since you're returning XML in your data model. I will never understand why it didn't take off.

XML includes are blocking because XSL support hasn't been updated for 25 years, but there's no reason why we couldn't have it async by now if resources were devoted to this instead of webusb etc.
by parpfish | 2025-05-03 16:22:33+00:00
Not OP, but I use AI tools and sometimes it’s great, sometimes they’ll distractingly lead you in circles, and other times they completely shit the bed.

Luckily, I’m using AI tools to do things that I am capable of doing without AI so I can tell which path I’m going down pretty quickly.

So, letting experts augment their skills with AI is something that can work depending on the specific task. The nice thing is that an expert is able to see errors pretty quickly and determine that this task is a mismatch for the AI.

The problem is that AI is being sold as a magic solution so people never need to develop expertise in the first place. Blind trust in a system that is often confidently incorrect will lead to problems
by lucasoshiro | 2025-05-03 16:24:55+00:00
I'm not a ML guy, but when I needed to train a NN I thought that the my Mac's ANE would help. But actually, despite it being way easier to setup tensorflow + metal + M1 on Mac than to setup tensorflow + cuda + nvidia on Linux, the neural engine cores are not used. Not even for classification, which are their main purpose. I wouldn't say they are wasted silicon, but they are way less useful than what we expect
by randcraw | 2025-05-03 16:25:01+00:00
> It's got me wondering: do any of my hard work actually matter?

I recently retired from 40 years in software-based R&D and have been wondering the same thing. Wasn't it true that 95% of my life's work was thrown away after a single demo or a disappointingly short period of use?

And I think the answer is yes, but this is just the cost of working in an information economy. Ideas are explored and adopted only until the next idea replaces it or the surrounding business landscape shifts yet again. Unless your job is in building products like houses or hammers (which evolve very slowly or are too expensive to replace), the cost of doing of business today is a short lifetime for any product; they're replaced in increasingly fast cycles, useful only until they're no longer competitive. And this evanescent lifetime is especially the case for virtual products like software.

The essence of software is to prototype an idea for info processing that has utility only until the needs of business change. Prototypes famously don't last, and increasingly today, they no longer live long enough even to work out the bugs before they're replaced with yet another idea and its prototype that serves a new or evolved mission.

Will AI help with this? Only if it speeds up the cycle time or reduces development cost, and both of those have a theoretical minimum, given the time needed to design and review any software product has an irreducible minimum cost. If a human must use the software to implement a business idea then humans must be used to validate the app's utility, and that takes time that can't be diminished beyond some point (just as there's an inescapable need to test new drugs on animals since biology is a black box too complex to be simulated even by AI). Until AI can simulate the user, feedback from the user of new/revised software will remain the choke point on the rate at which new business ideas can be prototyped by software.
by llbeansandrice | 2025-05-03 16:25:07+00:00
What an absurd straw man. Moving the needle away from “large portions of the population are a few paychecks away from being homeless” does not constitute “the devil’s playground”.

Where’s all of the articles that HN loves about kids these days not being bored anymore? What about google’s famous 20% time?

Idle time isn’t just important, it’s the point.
by XCSme | 2025-05-03 16:26:26+00:00
I recently started using it, and as an experienced developer, I love it.

It's really easy to automate tasks and schedule things.

For example, I connected it to my UXWizz MySQL database, asked the AI in UXWizz to give me a query with the funnel conversions for today (visits/pricing/checkout/sales) compared to last week, copied that into n8n and made it send me an emoji-formatted daily Telegram message.

I am now using it to implement an AI chat-bot/support ticket responder, and I'm planning to migrate a Node.js auto-poster to it, so I can easily change the schedule/model/content of the post without having to edit any code.

I like that it has good documentation for integrations. For example, I was testing Google Ads, and I want to do conversion tracking without adding the Google JS to my page. Again, I used an MySQL connection to my UXWizz analytics dashboard to select the gclid for all visits that lead to a conversion event, then with n8n I upload those daily to a Google Sheet, which is then used by Google Ads to properly track conversions. The Google Sheet integration is not trivial (you need Google Cloud account, create an app, create oauth login, etc.), but the n8n docs were clear enough to follow and up-to-date enough to work.
by dimal | 2025-05-03 16:27:04+00:00
I would guess that for every app that was vibe coded and made $80k in revenue, there are thousands of attempts that went off a cliff or into a wall, generating $0 revenue and wasting a human’s time. So it’s just survivorship bias. Sure, it’s possible to make something useful, but you will probably fail.

I’m using AI to increase my productivity, but whenever I’ve vibe coded (not intentionally, just by getting caught up in the dumb vibes) I’ve regretted it. I’ve ended up with a tangled mess.