MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by slowmovintarget | 2025-05-07 14:18:10+00:00
Sounds similar to gptel[1] for Emacs. It provides a solid foundation for more complex compositions like gptel-aibo[2] or mcp.el [3].

Yours is the full agent, though... Nice.

[1] https://github.com/karthink/gptel

[2] https://github.com/dolmens/gptel-aibo

[3] https://github.com/lizqwerscott/mcp.el
by ivell | 2025-05-07 14:18:16+00:00
>Pakistan is not a military dictatorship

I think here we are looking into a textbook style definition. But for all practical purposes, military rules Pakistan. It is well understood by its own citizens, especially post-Imran Khan.

>But a lot of countries are terrorist supporting, and the world is happy to negotiate with them.

Would like to understand which countries you mean. No one is negotiating with Iran nowadays. India also was willing to negotiate in the past, not anymore it seems.

Support for terrorism as a state policy is to put pressure without major impact to the aggressor nation. The aggressor is in an advantageous position. Terrorism is low cost high impact (non material, but psychological). There is not much leverage for the suffering country here. So negotiations are not long lasting.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-07 14:18:25+00:00
I'm just a regular user. I don't care at all about the grand philosophy and ideals of my terminal.

All I know is that ZSH works with 100% of tasks and scripts I need and fish does not. Therefore, I get pissed at fish and it's a bad terminal. Who cares if fish is built on fresh new philosophy and this week's language du jour if it doesn't work?

I'm using the tool that works the way it's supposed to. I don't care if it works because it's using standards from 50 or 500 years ago because that is totally and completely disjoint from being a good tool
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-05-07 14:18:34+00:00
Maybe once all of this is a bit more mature we can just get down to the minimal subset of features that are really important.

I’d love a nvim plugin that is more or less just a split chat window that makes it easy to paste code I’ve yanked (like yank to chat) add my commentary and maybe easily attach other files for context. That’s it really.
by megaman821 | 2025-05-07 14:19:34+00:00
What is a fair way to compare then? If rich Asians kids from the "best" school perform the same as the rich Asians from the "worst" school and poor Native American kids from the "best" school perform same and poor Native American kids form the "worst" school, and the only differences between the best at the worst school is the proportion of each demographic, what does that say about the quality of the shcool?
by kevmo314 | 2025-05-07 14:19:36+00:00
> is it possible you and the other party have (perhaps significantly) different mental models of the domain—or maybe different perspectives of the issues involved?

Yes, however typically if that's the case they will respond with some variant of "ChatGPT mentioned xyz so I started poking in that direction, does that make sense?" There is a markedly different response when people are using ChatGPT to try to understand better and that I have no issue with.

I get what you're suggesting but I don't think people are being malicious, it's more that the discussion has gotten too deep and they're exhausted so they'd rather opt out. In some cases yes it does mean the discussion could've been simplified, but sometimes when it's a pretty deep, technical reason it's hard to avoid.

A concrete example is we had to figure out a bug in some assembly code once and we were looking at a specific instruction. I didn't believe that instruction was wrong and I pointed at the docs suggesting it lined up with what we were observing it doing. Someone responded with "I asked ChatGPT and here's what it said: ..." without even a subsequent opinion on the output of ChatGPT. In fact, reading the output it basically restated what I said, but said engineer used that as justification to rewrite the instruction to something else. And at that point I was like y'know what, I just don't care enough.

Unsurprisingly, it didn't work, and the bug never got fixed because I lost interest in continuing the discussion too.

I think what you're describing does happen in good faith, but I think people also use the wall of text that ChatGPT produces as an indirect way to say "I don't care about your opinion on this matter anymore."
by bombcar | 2025-05-07 14:20:10+00:00
But unless you control for it very, very carefully, you end up with results like "free and reduced lunch programs cause kids to do worse" - which isn't supported by the evidence, because there may be other factors that coincide with those who are eligible for them.

You'd have to do something like take the high-performing SF district and give half the students, randomly selected, free lunches.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-07 14:20:35+00:00
Why are they "ints" ? One of the first things we realise, in both C++ and Rust, is that we mostly don't want these primitives like "int", we want our own user defined types, and Rust is better at that in practice.

In the C and C++ people tend to actually write the file descriptor will be an int, and the timeout will be an int, and the user account number will be an int, and the error code will be an int... because the language doesn't help much when you don't want that.

In the Rust people actually write the file descriptor will be an OwnedFd (from the stdlib) and the timeout will be a Duration (from the stdlib), and user account number might be their own AcctNo and that error code is maybe MyCustomError

This is a language ethos thing, C++ got string slices after Rust despite the language being much older. String slices which are a really basic central idea, but eh, C++ programmers a decade ago just had char * pointers instead and tried not to think about it too much. Still today plenty of C++ APIs don't use string slices, don't work with a real duration type, and so on. It's technically possible but the language doesn't encourage this.

What C++ does encourage is magic implicit conversion, as with this f64 versus i64 case.
by duxup | 2025-05-07 14:20:39+00:00
Most of the physics / concepts seem to be WWII naval conflict based-ish.

Makes sense considering the original movie (episode IV) inspiration for the final battle was WWII Arial combat documentary footage. The rest of the film fits that as well with the Falcon's cockpit design and so on.

Most of all though it makes for more fun / interesting battles.
by FabHK | 2025-05-07 14:21:02+00:00
There's another approach for doing this: generate a random number between 1 and 2 (they all have the same exponent) and then subtract 1 (that's the default implementation in Julia [0]). But I think it also just gives you 2^53 different numbers.

So, between .5 and 1 you miss out on every second representable number, between 0.25 and .5 you miss out on 3/4 of them, and so on.

I guess for many cases that's good enough, but the article seems like a nice improvement.

ETA: Lemire has some thoughts on this [1] and links to what might be a prior solution [2]. Vigna (of xoroshiro fame) writes about it at the bottom of [3] and also links to [2]. So, presumably the implementation described in the article is faster? ("There have been some past attempts to fix these flaws, but none that avoid a huge performance penalty while doing so."

EDIT2: BTW, one of the things I love about HN (well, the world, really) is that there are people that care deeply that we can uniformly sample floats between 0 and 1 correctly, and all of them, and do it faster.

[0] see https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/master/stdlib/Random...

rand(r::AbstractRNG, ::SamplerTrivial{CloseOpen01_64}) = rand(r, CloseOpen12()) - 1.0

[1] https://lemire.me/blog/2017/02/28/how-many-floating-point-nu...

[2] https://mumble.net/~campbell/2014/04/28/uniform-random-float

https://mumble.net/~campbell/2014/04/28/random_real.c

[3] https://prng.di.unimi.it
by mdaniel | 2025-05-07 14:21:03+00:00
My experience has been than complaining into HN does not result in changes to software. Have you submitted a profiling dump to YouTrack?

I have a lot of sympathy for someone trying to make an IDE (or any introspection tooling) because the number of ways humans can come up with to organize or author code is unlimited. So, I'm sure they would welcome feedback on "hey, watch out, modeling templates using this mechanism has bad perf in this IDE component"
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-07 14:21:10+00:00
If you have an architecture office and the power goes out, do you have your workers give up on using AutoCAD and go to the drafting boards and slide rulers till the power comes back up? What's the point of going backwards with technology? You'll be outcompeted by those who embrace modern technology.

I'm not aware of any modern engineering profession that doesn't use electronic crutches regularly. Nobody knows absolutely everything in their heads. We're paid for critical thinking , not to have everything memorized just in case the internet is out. Even before the internet, SW devs had stacks of books on their desks they'd reffer to often.

Remember when IBM wanted to pay devs per line of code written? Yeah, exactly. I see the skills being problem solving, not writing code.
by epidemiology | 2025-05-07 14:21:15+00:00
Wow this is an excellent point and really undermines the article conclusions. We should always be looking at unadjusted scores as well as a whole series of adjusted scores with a variety of methods.

Just grabbing one highly adjusted score and drawing conclusions solely off of that is not enough. It's really only giving you one piece of a very complex puzzle in the case of something like education scores.

Observational stats in social sciences turns out to be a lot like epidemiology and strongly held conclusions are hard won.
by freehorse | 2025-05-07 14:21:17+00:00
I tried the agent mode with sonnet 3.7 (not the thinking one). When it started trying to create a file, it kept getting a "Failed to connect to API: 400 Bad Request" error. After a few attempts to create files, it "touch"ed a file and tried to edit this, which also failed. It checked permissions with "ls -la", then it tried to "cat" the code into it but failed because of syntax errors (to do with quoting). Then it tried nano(?!?!) and failed, and then it started "echo"ing the code into the file chunk by chunk, which started working. After 4 chunks it got an error and then it made the following chunks smaller. It took it a dozen "echo"s or so.

While the initial 400 error is a bummer, I am actually surprised and admire its persistence in trying to create the file and in the end finding a way to do so. It forgot to define a couple of stuff in the code, which was trivial to fix, after that the code was working.
by diggernet | 2025-05-07 14:21:18+00:00
Friendly reminder that despite articles constantly saying "Real ID is required" as if no other option exists, the Real ID requirement only applies to using a driver's license or state issued photo ID. There is a long list of other acceptable forms of ID[1].

In particular, a passport remains the ultimate form of ID, usable for anything.

[1] https://www.tsa.gov/travel/security-screening/identification
by jasonlotito | 2025-05-07 14:21:32+00:00
Two important caveats.

1) DEI does include rural American white culture, Christian conservative culture, and all the rest...

2) ...except for people who want to eliminate people. Sorry, but you can't make room for someone that wants to end your existence. And there is a non-insignificant number of MAGA that want, support, and promote doing just that.

> Why can't they extend this to their own country?

We do. We literally do. We literally think our country can be better than it is. If you don't see this, you are blinding yourself.

> You don't win friends or change peoples' minds by mocking and bashing people. That just makes them double down out of spite.

> They know they are mocked as dumb, in-bred, ignorant, bigoted, small minded, etc.

The irony.

Edit: I also find it interesting that as much as the is opposed to DEI, they still support it. They just pretend they don't. Heck, even now the government is still supporting DEI initiatives with Trump's approval. It's crazy.
by cyberlurker | 2025-05-07 14:21:56+00:00
What if the reason is external to the school? Hmm, what has changed between 2004 and 2024?

We have devices and experiences that are medically classified as addictive. It can also be home life stuff, it’s kind of a difficult time for a lot of people.

We could have the best trained and supported teachers in the world, but they are up against completely different challenges.

I’m not saying we can never fire anyone. But you suggesting that if we don’t like an outcome we get rid of someone without understanding the entire problem is plain dumb.
by armchairhacker | 2025-05-07 14:22:13+00:00
But it's unfair to believe someone wants you dead just because of their origin.

There are millions (probably tens of millions) of rural Southerners. Many don't want you dead, but vote red because they don't feel accommodated. Many vote blue.

Moreover, when somebody grows up around people who hate a certain group, it's human nature that they'll also develop hatred. What do you do with those people?

I believe the best you can do if pacify them, and convert those whose hatred isn't ingrained. Acknowledging people and accepting the non-hatred parts of their culture is an easy way to reduce the motivation to kill you, and convert those on the fence, without giving leverage. Funding is another way, and while it can give leverage (because adversarial groups shift their own funding towards aggression), I believe if done carefully, the decrease in hatred will outweigh the increase in power, making aggressive efforts overall less effective.
by jsiepkes | 2025-05-07 14:22:20+00:00
> The LGPL is specifically designed to allow proprietary applications to link to open-source libraries without requiring the proprietary application’s source code to be released, provided certain conditions are met.

It's not that simple. The LGPL says that one must basically be able to make modifications to the opensource library, rebuild the library and be able to reintegrate this new library in the existing application. And you, as a developer using an LGPL library, need to make this "possible". What this practically means, is open to interpretation. This is also why lawyers (and companies) don't like the LGPL, because it contains even more of this "open to interpenetration" text than the GPL.
by peterldowns | 2025-05-07 14:22:41+00:00
> “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends,” he said in the interview with podcaster Dwarkesh Patel.

Is this true? I don't believe this AT ALL. No way that the average American would say they only have 3 friends, that's beyond low.
by NegativeK | 2025-05-07 14:22:47+00:00
I'm going to paint with a fairly broad brush here, for which I apologize. But it lines up with the majority of the politically outspoken people I'm referring to. For context, I grew up in the south. I also regularly disagree with my liberal friends when they categorize Southern conservatives as brainwashed idiots.

But (here's the but): When I lived in the South, I heard a _lot_ of abject vitriol toward liberal elites, ivory tower academics (Piled Higher and Deeper, ho ho ho), and antisemitism occasionally dog whistled (but often just blunt racism) as anti-banker or anti-world order. You can throw in more things, like Civil War denialism and using racial slurs at the workplace in front of people of the target race with no recourse.

I currently live in a metropolitan area of a swing state. When I hang out with a group of friends that's politically outspoken and conservative, I'll hear what I think lines up with liberal shit talking. Comments that would be outright insulting in the presence of the other party, refusal to actually consider the opposition's site, etc. I do think that rhetoric is harmful to democracy, and I am so very tired of liberals I agree with and conservatives I disagree with echoing jabs and talking points.

But it doesn't compare with the vitriol I heard when living in the deep south. I refuse to live in a place where it's okay for the stranger cutting your hair to drop a nasty racial slur during inane chit-chat. I don't know how the hell you woke embrace a group that has so much hate toward your party and your politicians.
by lolinder | 2025-05-07 14:22:55+00:00
Can you clarify what exactly you mean by the idea that adjusting for gender, age, race, and ethnicity makes this less impressive?

Generally speaking in order to evaluate the success of a school system you really do want to adjust for the demographics that that school has to deal with, so you don't attribute the effects of, say, private tutors to the public school system. It would be really unfair to judge teachers in the Bronx for their inability to compete on raw scores with teachers in upper Manhattan.
by AIoverlord | 2025-05-07 14:22:56+00:00
Would be interesting to know what hardware generations are completly useless today due to other issues like this.

Linux packages no longer being available, sourcecode missing, CPU features missing, etc.

Windows 11 also kills quite a lot of hardware.

I had to upgrade my working laptop because my 4k display broke the GCP console when doing a screenshare (GCP Console became very slow when doing screensharing).

I had to upgrade my CPU when upgrading my camera because the RAW Fileformat of my new campare made my old high end CPU so much slower, it was crazy (i guess the new size broke cache line alignment or whatever, it wasn't slow with the older files).

My high end CPU from 6 years ago, i just replaced it with a new CPU (for less money than 6 years ago) and the CPU is double the performance.

I used a older system of mine on a hacker event for file sharing and other hacker experiments and redid the same thing with a better system. All the issues disappeared i had regarding performance.

Doing this now for 20 years, hardware is a lot more commodity than i thought.
by recroad | 2025-05-07 14:22:57+00:00
This article seems like a very long-winded and complicated way to say that we should write tests. Am I missing something here? Wouldn't most developers write tests when creating algorithms, let alone something relating to finance as tax calculations? Yes, you should reproduce a defect by writing a failing tests first.

Where I hoped/thought this piece would go was to expand on the idea of error-prone[1] and apply it to the runtime.

https://github.com/google/error-prone
by dentemple | 2025-05-07 14:23:36+00:00
Statistics can also be gamed, and this article reeks of it.

As other commenters are saying, Mississippi children's actual achievement rates are still bottom of the barrel. So while they might be statistically doing better, they're not actually doing better at the moment.

That's not to say that things can't turn around, or that this newfound investment into education might not bear fruit very soon.

But the OP made the choice not to address any of these issues; therefore, the article doesn't seem to have been made in good faith relative to the HN community's expectations.
by bombcar | 2025-05-07 14:24:14+00:00
I would say that the point is that you can't just look at one datapoint, especially if there are other things affecting it.

The most obvious case of this is comparing private vs public schools, where the private schools can be selective and kick out anyone who doesn't perform or they don't like, but the public schools have to accept everyone by law.

Obviously failing anyone who cannot read from getting to 4th grade will greatly improve 8th grade reading scores.
by silverlake | 2025-05-07 14:24:37+00:00
If you look at the full table of NAEP scores, you see the differences are not that much. 8th grade reading is 245(WV)-266(MA). That's 20 point spread, where NAEP goes to 500 pts. A 4% difference between the best and worst state is insignificant. They all suck because they are at 50% of the scale.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-07 14:24:54+00:00
Indeed, I am stuck with the pool because it was there when I bought the house and filling in the pool can be detrimental to the value of the property (it is a disclosure item when selling). Therefore, I must continue to service the pool to maintain the value of the property. Had the property not had a pool when I acquired it, I would not have installed one.
by resters | 2025-05-07 14:25:44+00:00
Fair point, but how much billable legal work requires that caliber of skill? I'd argue that 80% of it could probably be done with an o3 or o4 caliber model with some safeguards built into the pipeline and perhaps a bit of specialized training or MoE guardrails, human review, etc.

I think the mistake people make is misunderstanding the slope of the S-curve and instead quibbling over the exact nature of the current reality. AI is moving very fast. A few years ago I'd have said that at most 25% of legal work could fall to AI.

Note that this massive change happened in less time than it takes to educate one class of law school grads!
by lemontheme | 2025-05-07 14:25:45+00:00
Unless something's changed, every AI-backed language server I've tried in Helix suffers from the same limitation when it comes to completions: Suggestions aren't shown until the last language server has responded or timed-out. Your slowest language server determines how long you'll be waiting.

The only project I know of that recognizes this is https://github.com/SilasMarvin/lsp-ai, which pivoted away from completions to chat interactions via code actions.
by Epa095 | 2025-05-07 14:25:55+00:00
This is the relevant part:

>If you statically link against an LGPLed library, you must also provide your application in an object (not necessarily source) format, so that a user has the opportunity to modify the library and relink the application.

And is this easy? I don't know much about how this works, but would it be trivial for unity to distribute a version of unity with statically linked LGPL libraries where you can also easily relink?
by Retric | 2025-05-07 14:26:01+00:00
If it were that simple we’d already have AGI.

Just really think about what you just said, sure spend 5% of the time is on the bits nobody on earth has any idea how to accomplish that’s how people will approach this project. Organizationally the grunt work is a trivial rounding error vs the completely unbound we’ve got no idea how to solve this problems bits.
by emorning3 | 2025-05-07 14:26:10+00:00
I would be concerned that I'd get out of school and not get a job because I don't actually know anything.

But I wouldn't blame students if they're not preparing for interviews and jobs. Because in this world having a job seems like a recipe for being poor. Instead, maybe students are just going to prepare to get ahead, in any way possible. And they'll go to a university to network and such.

Personally I doubt that's gonna work out well, but I'm old what do I know.
by 6P58r3MXJSLi | 2025-05-07 14:26:12+00:00
I'll give you an example.

Americans (US citizens) eat 114 kg (or 251 pounds) of meat yearly on average.

Chinese eat on average 42kg (or 93 pounds) of meat. It's almost 1/3 (actually it's 37%).

Americans are over eating, Chinese are slightly under eating.

Chinese are more or less eating the same amount of meat a domestic cat eats in the USA.

Which is kinda revealing of how much in the west we abuse of the system.

So if the meat consumption was spread among all countries equally, but most of all correctly, Americans would eat a lot less, while Chinese would eat just a bit more.

It's the same with emissions, some countries are over emitting, it's not about spreading them equally, it's about stopping the abusers.