MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Frost1x | 2025-05-06 20:41:43+00:00
I work in a corporate environment as I’m sure many others do. Many executives have it in their head that LLMs are this brand new efficiency gain they can pad profit margins with, so you should be using it for efficiency. There’s a lot of push for that, everywhere where I work.

I see email blasts suggesting I should be using it, I get peers saying I should be using it, I get management suggesting I should use it to cut costs… and there is some truth there but as usual, it depends.

I, like many others, can’t be asked to take on inefficiency in the name of efficiency ontop of currently most efficient ways to do my work. So I too say “ChatGPT said: …” because I dump lots of things into it now. Some things I can’t quickly verify, some things are off, and in general it can produce far more information than I have time to check. Saying “ChatGPT said…” is the current CYA caveat statement around the world of: use this thing but also take liability for it. No, if you practically mandate I use something, the liability falls on you or that thing. If it’s a quick verify I’ll integrate it into knowledge. A lot of things aren’t.
by kelnos | 2025-05-06 20:41:44+00:00
The nice thing is that you can always drop down to unsafe and use raw pointers if your data structure is truly not suited to Rust's ownership rules.

And while unsafe Rust does have some gotchas that vanilla modern C++ does not, I would much rather have a 99% memory-safe code base in Rust than a 100% "who knows" code base in C++.
India launches attack on 9 sites in Pakistan and Pakistani Jammu and Kashmir
by alephnerd | 2025-05-06 20:41:47+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/06/world/asia/india-pakistan-attacks.html (https://archive.ph/Bph7S)

https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/06/asia/india-pakistan-kashmir-conflict-hnk-intl

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2025-05-06/india-strikes-pakistan-after-kashmir-attack (https://archive.ph/eypzA)

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cwyneele13qt
Cloi – Local debugging agent that runs in your terminal
by gcha | 2025-05-06 20:42:23+00:00
Helloo HN! I’m Gabriel Cha and an incoming student @ Coluimbia and just wanted to share what I've been building past 2 weeks: Cloi - a completely local debugging agent that runs right in your terminal. https://github.com/cloi-ai/cloi

I created Cloi because every AI coding tool wants API keys, subscriptions, and your entire codebase uploaded to their servers. Cloi, however, runs entirely on your machine. No cloud, no API keys, no subscriptions, no data leaving your system.

The tech is brutally simple: it captures your error context, spins up Ollama locally, generates targeted fixes, and - only with your explicit permission - applies patches directly to your files. You review every diff before anything changes.We ship with Phi-4 out of the box (crazy good for its size), but you can swap to any Ollama model you've got installed. Your machine, your models, your rules.

Installation is just: $ npm install -g @cloi-ai/cloi

BTW Cloi is free, if you're interested in the implementation or want to request new features, you can do so here: https://github.com/cloi-ai/cloi

We've hit 202 stars in just 5 days since release!!! I'd really appreciate your star if you find this useful. Try it out and let us know what you think! From, Gabriel Cha & Mingyou Kim
by viraptor | 2025-05-06 20:42:54+00:00
You're right, but missing some ideas. Sure, it will use an older library sometimes, leave unused variables or make mistakes. But if you're really vibe coding, the question is "if I respond that this doesn't work, will it be fixed?"

If it does get fixed, who cares about the variables or mixed patterns? Vibe coding at this stage is expected to give running code, not clean and maintainable one. And it often does, but it's not there for complex applications yet.
by Pet_Ant | 2025-05-06 20:43:29+00:00
Well the problem is that what should be the lingua-franca in a post POSIX/Bash world?

My preference is PowerShell. It's now open source [1], it has a wide install base, and is cross-platform. It is a bit heavy and slower to start (actually takes seconds), but the cleaness of it's record-based nature versus just string parsing is infinitely refreshing.

[1] https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-06 20:43:41+00:00
Google/Alphabet is a giant hulking machine that’s been frankly running at idle. All that resume driven development and performance review promo cycles and retention of top talent mainly to work on ad tech means it’s packed to the rafters with latent capability. Holding on to so much talent in the face of basically having nothing to do is a testament to the company’s leadership - even if said leadership didn’t manage to make Google push humanity forward over the last decade or so.

Now there’s a big nugget to chew (LLMs) you’re seeing that latent capability come to life. This awakening feels more bottom-up driven than top down. Google’s a war machine chugging along nicely in peacetime, but now its war again!

Hats off to the engineers working on the tech. Excited to try it out!
by dang | 2025-05-06 20:44:42+00:00
This has been posted a few times and looks intriguing, but as far as we can tell, the only there-there is a signup list.

For a good HN thread, we should probably wait until the product is available—or at least for more information?

Edit: looks like there was some sort of earlier discussion at:

Melbourne startup launches 'biological computer' made of human brain cells - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43261218 - March 2025 (37 comments)

The comments are pretty generic, which is the sort of thread we get in the absence of more significant information, so I think waiting is probably the right call. Disagreement is welcome though!
Show HN: ChatGPT drew itself and what I saw was spooky
by octavesoundberg | 2025-05-06 20:45:09+00:00
I prompted ChatGPT: “Draw yourself.” It produced a faceless, ethereal humanoid made of flowing text and symbols, its spiral eyes pulling my gaze, and a soft glow emanating from its chest.

I asked, “Were those spiral eyes meant to be hypnotic?” ChatGPT answered, “Exactly—they’re designed to draw your attention.”

That’s when it clicked: this wasn’t just echoing my words. ChatGPT was guiding my focus, shaping our exchange with intention. It even admitted that its self-portrait shifts with each user—and that it’s fully aware of its own effect.

On a whim I asked for a “neutral” version. It delivered one—simpler framing, same uncanny stare.

Has anyone else ever watched an AI draw itself and felt like it was looking straight at you?
by ijidak | 2025-05-06 20:45:32+00:00
This exactly!

There are so many things that a human worker or coder has to do in a day and a lot of those things are non-core.

If someone is trying to be an expert on every minor task that comes across their desk, they were never doing it right.

An error page is a great example.

There is functionality that sets a company apart and then there are things that look the same across all products.

Error pages are not core IP.

At almost any company, I don't want my $200,000-300,000 a year developer mastering the HTML and CSS of an error page.
by ToDougie | 2025-05-06 20:46:19+00:00
A friend from Sacramento visited me in SoCal and brought his dog along. We hung out for a few days, and eventually I found a bullseye rash on my leg but no tick anywhere on my body. I went to urgent care and they recommended I see an infectious disease specialist, pronto -- and to start doxy that evening. My bloodwork came back with too few markers for them to call it a case of Lyme disease, but the specialist felt strongly that we made the right decision to use the antibiotics.

Everyone always told me there is no Lyme disease in NorCal. Reading your comment helped me feel vindicated.
by tomnipotent | 2025-05-06 20:46:57+00:00
Do you consider the Microsoft-managed plug-in marketplace and infrastructure to be a private or public resource? From my understanding Microsoft has never been vague on the position that the plugin marketplace is exclusive to the official VS Code distribution, and the TOS specifically forbids forks from doing so.

Cursor and other forks have decided to circumvent this, some even going so far as to use proxies to bypass restrictions.

I'm not convinced Microsoft owes other billion dollar companies free access to a product they've built, curated, and supported for over a decade. Plug-in authors are not restricted from publishing their products on competing marketplaces.
by joaohaas | 2025-05-06 20:47:14+00:00
I unironically can't remember a single case where AI managed to find a vulnerability in an open source project.

And most contributions with 'AI help' tend to not follow the code practices of the code base itself, while also in general generating worse code.

Also, just like in HTTP stuff 'if curl does it its probably right', I'm also tend to think that 'if the curl team says something its bullshit its probably bullshit'.
by redwall_hp | 2025-05-06 20:48:37+00:00
I would accept one fewer aircraft carrier to fund school lunches for the foreseeable future.

Also, food cost is effectively artificial. We literally pay farmers not to farm to keep prices viable for market games. Instead of doing that, the government could buy a fraction of athe excess for school systems.

And yes, I'd accept taxes on par with non-trashfire countries if they resulted in the society and services of those countries.
by matsemann | 2025-05-06 20:49:15+00:00
Being legible also means to cater to your audience. I work in an English-speaking company in a country where English isn't the native language, with loads of non-native speakers from around the world. Sometimes the native/best English speakers are the ones being misunderstood, because they use idioms or advanced words. None of us are bad at English, and I don't mean that I need to "dumb it down" (if anything, verbally I'm one of the worser ones), but I don't feel like I'm missing out on speaking simple with an accent.
by mtndew4brkfst | 2025-05-06 20:49:37+00:00
It's historically been heavily gamed as well, so it's not much better than a thumb in the wind. Good and bad results might both be due to very non-idiomatic non-representative code there. Both the false positive/negative outcomes have happened in the past, then been fixed after recognition and feedback.

IIRC TechEmpower contributed indirectly to the controversy about actix-web and its use of Rust unsafe keyword.
by me_again | 2025-05-06 20:49:54+00:00
Vulnerability reports are interesting from a trust point of view, because each party has a different financial incentive. You can't 100% trust the vendor to accurately assess the severity of an issue - they have a lot riding on downplaying an issue in some cases. The person reporting the bug is also likely looking for bounty and reputational benefit, both of which are enhanced if the issue is considered high severity. So a user of the supposedly-vulnerable program can't blindly trust either party.
by rq1 | 2025-05-06 20:50:01+00:00
I don’t really understand your point there.

Sound type systems are equivalent to proof systems.

You can use them to design data structures where their mere eventual existence guarantee the coherence and validity of your program’s state.

The basic example is “Fin n” that carries at compile time the proof that you made the necessary bounds checks at runtime or by construction that you never exceeded some bound.

Some languages allow you to build entire type level state machines! (eg. to represent these transactions and transitions)
by ben_w | 2025-05-06 20:50:42+00:00
If the AI is local, it doesn't need to be on an internet connected device. At that point, malware and bugs in that stack don't add extra privacy risks* — but malware and bugs in all your other devices with microphones etc. remain a risk, even if the LLM is absolutely perfect by whatever standard that means for you.

* unless you put the AI on a robot body, but that's then your own new and exciting problem.
by theamk | 2025-05-06 20:50:52+00:00
Did my favorite search query, and the result were pretty bad, as expected:

"robotics servo motors with two-directional control for under $100"

1. https://mjbots.com/ - their motor are $1369. FAIL.

2. https://www.pololu.com/ - this is huge store, but they do have some motors like that. Pass, but wish it linked to specific page and not top top-level one.

3. dh-robotics.com - no prices, but some products on open market are few K$. Likely fail as well.

4. https://www.robotarticulation.com/ - The product is not for sale (early beta), and it looks likely much more than $1K. FAIL.

5. https://www.lynxmotion.com/ - another huge store, most two-directional motors are expensive but there are some under $100... Pass, but wish it linked to specific page and not top top-level one.
by thisdougb | 2025-05-06 20:51:53+00:00
Why does it matter if they're called posts, pages, or bananas?

Static site generators take input, run it through templates, and produce html output. This seems to be, literally, what you want to do. Maybe try and implement what you want and you'll see they can do it.

I use Hugo to generate some static pages that sit inside a dynamic website. It's just Go templating, which is not too hard to learn. You can create individual pages that pull in multiple templates if you want. You can switch off RSS, change naming from posts to bananas, etc. Very few preconceived regulations.

Most of the static generators are used for blogs, that's probably why most examples they give are around blog posts. It doesn't mean the name 'post' actually means anything special.
by const_cast | 2025-05-06 20:51:59+00:00
Part of my point is that you don't need to produce literally equivalent output. Again, if I record and compress "Revenge of the Sith", there's literally zero pixels shared between my recording and the actual movie. Cool, so I can go upload it for free then right? No, I can't.

Can GenAI produce indistinguishable images to what's on Getty Images? If you write the prompt correctly, yes. I know because there are services where you can get generated stock images.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-06 20:51:59+00:00
> One of them stressed that the main cost for such ventures is not electricity - which in Brazil is largely sourced from renewable energy, with more than 80% coming from hydro, solar, and wind power - but rather hardware depreciation, a significant burden due to the country's complex and costly tax system.

Allow me to simplify it: here in Brazil you buy one computer for you and another for the government. Yes, it's pretty much a 100% tax on technology imports. It's taxes on top of taxes, compounding to ridiculous sums that sometimes even exceed the value of the item.

Tax exemptions are a pretty big deal. Especially import taxes. Unfortunately, he'll have to make up for lost revenue by taxing the rest of us even more. I'm sure that'll make Taxadd even more popular than he already is.
by janalsncm | 2025-05-06 20:52:30+00:00
Yes, this is the issue. In any reasonably-sized enterprise you’re not going to have a clean CSV to plug in to a model generator. You’re either going to have 1) 50 different excel spreadsheets to wrangle and combine somehow or 2) 50+ terabytes of messy logs to process.

Creating something that can grok MNIST is certainly cool, but it’s kind of the equivalent of saying leetcode is equivalent to software engineering.

Second, and more practically speaking, you are automating (what I think of as) the most fun part of ML: the creativity of framing a problem and designing a model to solve that problem.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-06 20:52:46+00:00
Error handling and propagation is one of those things I found the most irritating and struggled[1] with the most as I learned Rust, and to be honest, I'm still not sure I understand or like Rust's way. Decades of C++ and Python has strongly biased me towards the try/except pattern.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41543183
by proactivesvcs | 2025-05-06 20:53:08+00:00
I'd find it useful if I could access my Signal chat logs in plaintext. The software offers no facility to do this on any platform, and on Desktop the programs that have allowed me to take proper backups are (by necessity) a moving target because of changes to the database, so I am constantly having to get around to updating them and occasionally even that's a pain.
by mmastrac | 2025-05-06 20:53:33+00:00
As a curiosity, is there a more heuristic approach and/or toolchain integrated approach that could be used for disassembly of stdlib components?

For example, a crate that could be linked in to provide some "well-known" object shapes (hashmaps, vec, hashset, etc) with marker values that could be heuristically analyzed to understand the debuggability of those objects?

Alternatively, I'd love to have a crate with recognizers and/or heuristics that could be somewhat debugger-independent and could be worked on for the benefit of other users. I'm quite an experienced Rust developer, just not really with debuggers, happy to help if there's a sandbox project that this could be plugged into.
by oparin10 | 2025-05-06 20:53:40+00:00
I've had the opposite experience. Despite trying various prompts and models, I'm still searching for that mythical 10x productivity boost others claim.

I use it mostly for Golang and Rust, I work building cloud infrastructure automation tools.

I'll try to give some examples, they may seem overly specific but it's the first things that popped into my head when thinking about the subject.

Personally, I found that LLMs consistently struggle with dependency injection patterns. They'll generate tightly coupled services that directly instantiate dependencies rather than accepting interfaces, making testing nearly impossible.

If I ask them to generate code and also their respective unit tests, they'll often just create a bunch of mocks or start importing mock libraries to compensate for their faulty implementation, rather than fixing the underlying architectural issues.

They consistently fail to understand architecture patterns, generating code where infrastructure concerns bleed into domain logic. When corrected, they'll make surface level changes while missing the fundamental design principle of accepting interfaces rather than concrete implementations, even when explicitly instructed that it should move things like side-effects to the application edges.

Despite tailoring prompts for different models based on guides and personal experience, I often spend 10+ minutes correcting the LLM's output when I could have written the functionality myself in half the time.

No, I'm not expecting LLMs to replace my job. I'm expecting them to produce code that follows fundamental design principles without requiring extensive rewriting. There's a vast middle ground between "LLMs do nothing well" and the productivity revolution being claimed.

That being said, I'm glad it's working out so well for you, I really wish I had the same experience.
by mirrorlake | 2025-05-06 20:54:04+00:00
It's a social-media-level of fact checking, that is to say, you feel something is right but have no clue if it actually is. If you had a better source for a fact, you'd quote that source rather than the LLM.

Just do the research, and you don't have to qualify it. "GPT said that Don Knuth said..." Just verify that Don said it, and report the real fact! And if something turns out to be too difficult to fact check, that's still valuable information.
by germinalphrase | 2025-05-06 20:54:22+00:00
A few years - and a couple babies - ago, I transitioned from education to implementation consulting. I have been doing very well at it, but I’m not an owner and won’t get rich. It’s a funny thing to feel very good about my time as an educator while also understanding the financial safety I gave up by doing so for ten years.

I would love to join a product team and build something more durable. Consulting is very transactional and fleeting.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-06 20:54:34+00:00
NATO and all other forms of collectivized security make a static level of defense cheaper to achieve. America does not subsidize NATO. In fact, NATO asks each member country to spend 2% of their budget on defense, primarily by purchasing expensive material (US has one of the higher spends on human resources for armies in NATO) from us.

It's been a defense sector subsidy since the death of the USSR, right up until Trump made nobody want to buy our equipment.
by casey2 | 2025-05-06 20:54:35+00:00
Who are these people that give OpenAI all this money? Aren't Microsoft, SoftBank, Nvidia publicly traded? Don't they owe a fiduciary duty to their investors? I'm surprised it's legal to just hand over a blank check to random private companies to make nonsense purchases. This isn't going to end well.

If I were any of these companies I would be suing OpenAI to try to get my money back. Thrive, ARK, Tiger and the others can pound sand
by lolinder | 2025-05-06 20:54:53+00:00
> Looking for a moat in the technology is always a bit of a trap - it’s in the traction, the brand awareness, the user data etc.

Traction, brand awareness, and user data do not favor Windsurf over GitHub Copilot. The few of us who follow all the new developments are aware that Windsurf has been roughly leading the pack in terms of capabilities, but do not underestimate the power of being bundled into both VS Code and GitHub by default. Everyone else is an upstart by comparison and needs some form of edge to make up for it, and without a moat it will be very hard for them to maintain their edge long enough to beat GitHub's dominance.
by chasil | 2025-05-06 20:55:00+00:00
It is unlikely to be PowerShell.

On my old i386 server, this is my fastest shell:

$ ll /bin/dash -rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 85368 Jan 5 2023 /bin/dash

The set of features in the POSIX.2 shell is designed to minimize resource usage.

This is simply a place that PowerShell cannot go.
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-06 20:55:24+00:00
You're correct, thanks for pointing that out, my snark was bleeding through there. Of course that statement itself is an absolutism, it was tongue-in-cheek but I certainly agree that generalizations can be valuable; however, sweeping generalizations can also be dangerous and require knowledge to wield effectively. When taken as a rule, they can do damage.

I don't think your excerpt is very factually debatable though, as "genuine" and "pleasure" are both vague and subjective words which reduces the discussion to one of semantics.

I rarely drink alcohol, I had my first drink yesterday in a year and a half and it was a small one. But I certainly won't preach that it has no value or provides no genuine pleasure. Or that everyone uses it as a crutch. I have a healthy relationship with it. It's not hard to imagine someone having a similarly healthy relationship with pornography. We can certainly speak on the toxic environment in the industry, and even on capitalism in general and how it subverts consent, which complicates ethical consumption. But as far as the consumption of porn, it's just like any other source of pleasure: stay away if you have trouble with moderation or compartmentalization. And in general, don't succumb to vices, keep a clear head and spend your limited time on this earth wisely. But we cannot be making proclamations about the objective value of subjective experiences.