MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-02 18:43:43+00:00
Its very rare imo that computational problems emerge fully formed & ready to be tackled like proofs.

Usually even deciding what the problem is is in part an art, requires an act of narrativization, to shape and form concepts of origin, movement, and destination.

A good problem solver has a very wide range of abstract ideas and concepts and concrete tools they can use to model and explain problem, solution, & destination. Sometimes raw computational intellect can arrive at stunningly good proposals, can see brilliant paths through. But more often, my gut tells me it's about having a breadth of exposure, to different techniques and tools, and being someone who can both see a vast number of ways to tackle a situation, and being able to see tradeoffs in approaches, being able to weight long and short term impacts.
by szszrk | 2025-05-02 18:43:45+00:00
Check for vulnerabilities in dependencies and do the same thing they described in this post, just with... meaningful feedback.

I'm more an infra guy, and such scans are actually absolutely awesome. I see everything in my k8s clusters, all java/python dependencies that need attention.

I'm more surprised how anyone can run an app for more than 2 weeks with no high severity vulnerabilities. I guess mobile doesn't have the same attack vectors, but still
by MassPikeMike | 2025-05-02 18:43:48+00:00
This is great and has a lot of early historical perspective that I had never seen chronicled before.

But it is necessarily limited in the amount of album covers it can feature from what many would consider to be their heyday, the 1950s through the 1970s.

If you just want to feast your eyes on a lot of great album covers from that period, pick up a copy of the "Album Cover Album" [1] or one of its six (!) follow-ups. Designers Storm Thorgerson (who worked with Pink Floyd) and Roger Dean (who worked with Yes) created these incredibly lush books, with album covers printed nice and large in vivid color, organized in a really insightfully thematic way. A bit more speedy than your average used book, but not by much. Highly recommended, good for hours of reverie.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5304267-album-cover-albu...
by janalsncm | 2025-05-02 18:44:32+00:00
It’s not really a separate question imo. We want to know whether computer code or prompts are better for programming things like vending machines.

For LLMs, interpretability is one problem. The ability to effectively apply fixes is another. If we are talking about business logic, have the LLM write code for it and don’t tie yourself in knots begging the LLM to do things correctly.

There is a grey area though, which is where code sucks and statistical models shine. If your task was to differentiate between a cat and a dog visually, good luck writing code for that. But neural nets do that for breakfast. It’s all about using the right tool for the job.
by godelski | 2025-05-02 18:44:39+00:00
Please reread my comment in full. I'm willing to bet we disagree on the definition of math. I'll strongly insist that the one I'm using is common among mathematicians. If you'd like to retort by saying it's about semantics then congrats, we're on the same page (and can be verified by reading you sibling comments and/or my replies to some of them)
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-05-02 18:44:44+00:00
There's a great book from the late 70s / early 80s called "Threaded Interpretive Languages" by R. G. Loeliger. It's apparently up on the Internet Archive for free and worth a look if you're interested in threaded interpreters. I nano-blogged it at: https://www.bi6.us/CO/N/20250427.HTML#/043002
by dismalaf | 2025-05-02 18:45:28+00:00
Notwithstanding Puritanism like "language is maths" or "logic is maths" I definitely agree.

I learned to program when I was a kid and my maths skills were super basic. Programming can almost be distilled to something as basic as "if this, then do that", plus "do this x times". Then read API documentation and call functions that do what the docs say.

With just this basic understanding you can create a lot of stuff. The maths is obviously the foundation of computation, but to be a programming language user and build stuff, you don't actually need to understand most of it.

In university I did eventually do some math-y stuff (econ degree so prerequisites in stats, maths and even CS) and it helps with certain stuff (understanding graphics programming, ML and LLMs, plus knowing maths on its own is useful), but I still don't feel it was strictly necessary. Language and basic logic is enough IMO.
by ASalazarMX | 2025-05-02 18:45:38+00:00
I tried it with a Gemini personality that uses this kind of attack, and since that kind of prompt strongly encourages it to provide a working answer, it decided that the fleas were a metaphor about botnet clients, and the walls were my network, all so it could give an actionable answer.

I inadvertently made a stronger yes-man.
by deeThrow94 | 2025-05-02 18:46:12+00:00
> We don't call this recursive... it's just incrementing x

That's not a recursive function as it's written, but you could certainly consider it a form of symbolic recursion. This just isn't a very useful characterization in an iterative/imperative context. You could frame incrementing as recursive, though—this is just peano axioms/church encoding.
by RankingMember | 2025-05-02 18:46:16+00:00
They are hiring, but the reason they can't find people isn't because there aren't people out there willing to do the job if it's fairly compensated. The problem is that trucking has lost a ton of upside over the last few decades, particularly after the Motor Carrier Act of 1980. Drivers are often paid per mile instead of per hour, which means long unpaid periods waiting for loads or stuck in traffic.
by flaminHotSpeedo | 2025-05-02 18:46:29+00:00
> At which point they'll make sure their branch is only useful on their server

Can you think of any examples where they've done that? They certainly could, but I can't think of any times they have actually rug-pulled like that, and the motive to do so seems tenuous too. In order for Amazon to do something like this they would need established market dominance, as well as a belief that some new player will hurt their market share enough to justify alienating the FOSS community.
by jchw | 2025-05-02 18:46:34+00:00
For Norm, just the crude nature of a lot of his jokes felt like something that was very "American", at least certainly in the 90s and 2000s. His delivery, on the other hand, always felt fairly unique to me. It's also possible I just mistook characteristics of Canadian comics as being those of American comics by simply not realizing how many popular comedians are Canadian.
by vegadw | 2025-05-02 18:46:34+00:00
I'm a furry (Been for ~10 years, actually going to a big con in a week) but not a Therian. I too sometimes find some of the Therians a bit, uh, eccentric. But I think it's worth clarifying that most (I think) don't literally believe themselves to be part animal or werewolves or whatever, I think it's usually a spiritual thing, where they so strongly identify with the animal that it's part of how they act and see themselves.

I, personally, find that actually more understandable (as someone that isn't in the group) than I do, say, most religions and their belief in a higher power. That's not to in an attempt to offend or belittle either group (or the overlap, religious Therians), just a view from my particular perspective where it's really no more strange than anything else people do. If it makes them happy, lets them connect with others, etc. who am I to judge?

There are, of course, outliers that literally believe themselves to be shapeshifters or whatever, but, okay? As long as its not impacting their day-to-day too much, many of them are still probably mentally more healthy than a lot of other people.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-02 18:46:35+00:00
The higher healthcare costs go, the more having a kid is like playing a reverse-lottery, but with way higher odds of "winning" than the real lottery. A kid with major chronic health problems means even those otherwise doing financially OK will be fucked, permanently. That's it, the whole rest of your life just got a ton harder and worse. You've gotta have a lot of money before that stops being a serious concern.

It's also the case that kids tend to eat disposable income up to a pretty high level, with spending that's not strictly necessary but is damn hard not to do if you can afford it. How many parents with the money to choose between living in a good school district and a cheaper, so-so one, pick the so-so one? It's gotta be very few of them. This scales all the way up to: how many parents who can afford $100,000+/yr to send two kids to prestigious boarding prep schools, don't? These things radically change the probability tables for your kids' entire lives for the better, and it's damn hard not to spend that money if you can do it. Then you wonder with every little bump and hurdle if you're harming your kid by being tight with money. This extends to things like daycare choices, healthcare choices (let the nasty cut leave a big scar, or spend a few hundred dollars at urgent care for stitches...), all kinds of stuff.
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-05-02 18:47:15+00:00
Yeah, no. I'm getting my passport today. I've started looking at what's required to get a skilled work visa.

My personal line is when the admin starts imprisoning and renditioning people that don't agree with them, and we basically heard a congressional committee make approving comments about that this week. If it starts happening, well, time for me to cash out and move abroad.
by satvikpendem | 2025-05-02 18:47:33+00:00
I stopped using ChatGPT and started using Gemini, both for some coding problems (deep research, amazing to pull out things from docs etc) and for some personal stuff (as a personal therapist as you say), and it is much more honest and frank with me than ChatGPT ever was. I gave it a situation and asked, was I in the wrong, and it told me that I was according to the facts of the case.
by fao_ | 2025-05-02 18:47:51+00:00
It's entirely realistic. Shutting down people who waffle on with no investigation is very easy just by asking how they reached those conclusions and asking to see the data. For the private venue sphere, it's entirely reasonable to collectively deplatform people who spread misinformation — just look at what happened with Richard Spencer after one or two venues cancelled on him.

It starts with having a spine. Which, I get many people aren't used to having, sure, but.
by diggan | 2025-05-02 18:48:32+00:00
I dunno, I feel like most people (probably not the typical HN user though) don't even think about their feelings, wants or anything else introspective on a regular basis. Maybe having something like ChatGPT available could be better than nothing, at least for people to start being at least a bit introspective, even if it's LLM-assisted. Maybe it gets a bit easier to ask questions that you feel are stigmatized, as you know (think) no other human will see it, just the robot that doesn't have feelings nor judge you.

I agree that it probably won't replace a proper therapist/psychologist, but maybe it could at least be a small step to open up and start thinking?
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-05-02 18:48:47+00:00
You know? Depending on the hardware you have, you could download a bootable image of Genode, put it on a USB-keychain, and 'sculpt' it from there, in 'live' mode, without touching whatever you have installed on that system. Some, or even most people developing it using it as their daily driver. By means of a ported Virtual Box, and running anything mot covered under that.

I'm not using it more, because I didn't want to touch my installation, because it flies like a mad bat out of hell :-)

But having a look, clicking around, while having the documentation available, trying things, enjoying it, can be done easily by live-booting it from USB.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-02 18:48:55+00:00
This looks really cool but wouldn't this be better as an MCP server? It feels like it's mixing too many concepts and can't be plugged into another system. What if I want to extend my agent to use this but I already have MCP servers tied in or I'm going through another OpenAI proxy-type thing? I wouldn't want to stack proxies.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-02 18:48:55+00:00
Yeah, I was worried it might come off as sarcastic or something. Hopefully the original commenter doesn’t take it that way, or reads this follow up. Unfortunately, adding stuff like “honestly” often makes a comment look even more sarcastic. It is a real pain.

But yes, I am expressing honest admiration—it was a bad move on the part of the teacher I think, which the poster seems to have overcome!
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-05-02 18:49:08+00:00
It seems like the difference is between a cultural understanding and a legal one. The legal bar to be considered German is citizenship, which is what is being discussed in the context of a political party's official policy.

It would be an extreme view to say a person who immigrated to Germany and recently attained citizenship has more German ancestry than someone who was born in Germany to parents who were born in Germany but I don't think anyone is saying that. The point is just that "unequal German" doesn't make sense because German is referring to citizenship; it's either "German" or "not German", never "German, but lesser".
by jvanderbot | 2025-05-02 18:49:57+00:00
I get this over and over on every issue where "math" becomes "guidance". Let me try to bridge by restating:

Math truth is not always good policy guidance.

It is true that CI==CO. It must. It is not true that telling someone that CI==CO is a good way to get them to manage their weight, because (as mentioned) it's hard to measure and (as I added) even if you measure correctly, you _reduce likelihood of compliance_ by ignoring appetite effects when you call all calories equal.

I think we agree, just trying to find the right words anyway.
by CrimsonCape | 2025-05-02 18:50:04+00:00
Logically, users have to learn the name of the tool before performing any sort of geographical associations (which menu, symbol, etc to find the tool).

There is no faster discoverability than O(log(N)) search using the letters of the name as a lookup.

The biggest failure of modern operating systems is failing to standardize this innate reality.

Windows,Linux,etc should have 1. keyboard button to jump to search box 2. type 1-2 letters and hit enter. Operating systems and applications should all have this kind of interface.

The most ironic apps have a ribbon named something like "Edit" but then the most used "edit" command lives in an unrelated ribbon.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-05-02 18:50:05+00:00
Yeah borrow checker errors in Rust fed to an LLM inevitably lead to the thing just going in circles. You correct it, it offers something else that doesn't work, when notified of that it gives you some variant of the original problem.

Usually when you come to an LLM with an error like this it's because you tried something that made sense to you and it didn't. Turns out those things usually "make sense" to an LLM, too, and they don't step through and reason through the "logic", they just vibe off of it, and the pattern they come back to you with is usually just some variant of the original pattern that led you to the problem in the first place.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-02 18:50:19+00:00
Rich people that eschew fame are largely ignored and rarely talked about. Just like the local rich person that takes private jets to their family vacations every three months, but drives a fully loaded, but unassuming, Toyota is not going to be noticed next to the one driving a purple Lamborghini.

But there probably is something to be said about people that pursue power or money endlessly. That their insatiable need for more money and power could be seen as proxies for a need for validation, so the need to seek out validation online (and to aggressively lash out at criticism) would be just another manifestation of that.

If you are born poor, then maybe you end up telling tall tales at the bar and falling for every get rich quick scheme out there because you cant imagine being wrong. If you are born on third base because of daddy’s emerald mine or real estate company, then you tell your tall tales to millions of people.
by TheDcoder | 2025-05-02 18:50:51+00:00
Location: India Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: Depends on pay Technologies: Rust, C, JavaScript, Lua, Shell, Python, PHP etc., always open to learning more Résumé/CV: Upon request via e-mail Email: TheDcoder@protonmail.com GitHub: github.com/TheDcoder

I am a freelance developer looking for stable work in the traditional job market, I have almost 10 years of experience with software development and programming, always curious and willing to learn more, quite a fast learner (if I say so myself). I prioritize writing good and maintainable code while being pragmatic when needed, can adapt to constraints of a project and lead a team of developers.

I have worked on complex projects as one-man team as well as led a few developers on projects which I started initially. Finally I put a special emphasis on communication to make sure everyone is on the same page and are moving on the right track.
by serial_dev | 2025-05-02 18:51:24+00:00
This system sounds extremely complicated.

> the copious amount of tiering of math classes seemed to indicate to me that either we're really bad at teaching math to 80% of people, or only 20% of people will be able to handle precalculus

Or maybe it indicates that the people designing this system should be fired? Job security through complexity?

(Or maybe I’m just biased by the system I know… I’m just asking questions)
by vel0city | 2025-05-02 18:51:37+00:00
I used to drive this route every few months for many years. Lots of seas of warehouses at the edge of both of these metro areas. I-45 is in pretty good shape with a lot of recent overhauls over the last decade along the whole path. You don't need to do any difficult overpasses or interchanges. 99% of this is just stay in the right lane and drive straight. You could almost do this with just adaptive cruise control. Which I mostly did a few times, just turn on cruise control and stay in the lane and you're there in a few hours.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-02 18:51:49+00:00
I used to agree with that, until I read this article. I would always use the IDE's default and "not care" as long as the code was consistent.

The problem with tabs is that they render as different widths in different contexts. For example, Visual Studio shows them as 5 spaces, but Github shows them as 8.

Puts me firmly in the spaces camp now.
by deeThrow94 | 2025-05-02 18:52:07+00:00
I agree that there's enormous value in carving out mathematics from other linguistic reasoning, but I don't see defining as something as mathematic rather than linguistic is generally useful. You use the same skills to look for incoherency in both situations, but human language is generally expected to be incoherent on some level.

Besides, a lot of what people mean when they say they're bad at math is that they're bad at arithmetic, which is honestly understandable.
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-05-02 18:52:21+00:00
At SkySat we eventually realized our satellites were going to be in orbit beyond their projected service lifetime. We started brain-storming ideas for what you could do with a satellite that may fall out of the sky any day and probably has degraded batteries and solar panels.

My suggestion was to add a jurisdiction-neutral bitcoin wallet and bittorrent peer. Maybe Eric Schmidt is thinking the same thing?
by Groxx | 2025-05-02 18:52:22+00:00
Mobile has unbelievably smaller attack vectors due to the hefty sandboxing, as long as you're doing normal things and not including a bunch of janky ad libraries. You're largely just contacting APIs you control and not running arbitrary code, and there's no outside connections coming in at all - lots of extremely bad CVEs are completely irrelevant in that context.

Sure, you can bend your scope to make them relevant... but if you've got someone who can control your system in ways you didn't build by bypassing the OS protections, they already have control of the device and can do darn near anything. If you haven't protected from that, and it's frequently not possible, many other protections are meaningless.

Your backend though has to handle this kind of malicious-modified-client scenario, as well as random connections from code you don't control at all.

(This is not true for all apps of course, but for B2B stuff? Most small companies? Frequently valid)
by itchyjunk | 2025-05-02 18:53:03+00:00
For a subset of topics, "AI" is already what I prefer to interact with over humans. At times, it's nicer to start with "AI" and kind of ground my messy thoughts before interacting with people and that works better than directly starting with a person.

I'm also starting to come across people who say "You should ask these types of questions to AI first" answer. But this is no different than people who preached "lmfgt" kind of religiously. Even when I prefer to start with humans, some humans prompt me to start by prompting AI.
by michaelmrose | 2025-05-02 18:53:32+00:00
It is tempting to consider the replacement for a lively evolving market of good options is just the best option only better for all the labor focused on a singular end but in fact the likely result of a singular option is most of that labor that literally only exists because of the interest in doing ones own thing just ceases to exists and is lost.

What persists never had the privilege of benefiting from ideas taken from all those other now non-existent projects and is on the whole mediocre.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-02 18:53:44+00:00
One funny anecdote: I once did a similar cleanup on a codebase that was mostly spaces, but a few tabs slipped in. (I just did a find and replace on \t -> " ")

Suddenly, one unit test broke. On closer inspection, whoever wrote it put a tab character into a string. I changed the test to use \t.
by dyauspitr | 2025-05-02 18:54:03+00:00
It’s not as lucrative anymore because the trucks are effectively speed limited, location constantly tracked and hours micromanaged. Some setups even have a front facing and in cabin driver facing camera recording at all times. Also, they are paid per mile so the many hours they spend at the loading and unloading stations are effectively unpaid.

It’s not as lucrative to the folks that enjoyed pretty much total freedom outside of the start and end points.
by whodidntante | 2025-05-02 18:54:15+00:00
I will give you that, sometimes fox news is like a ChatGPT hallucination. And the ads are unbearable - my pillow and vegetable pills.

This is more than made for by the interviews - Trump, Vance, Harris, Zelensky, the doge team, etc.

Speaking of unbearable, NPR's "soft stories" are invariably about someone's sob story. Ok, I get it, there are a lot of hard luck stories out there, but they seem to relish in misery.

All in all, neither are great, but none of the mainstream media are. I do like "All in" podcasts :-)
by mjr00 | 2025-05-02 18:54:30+00:00
Distribution services like Distrokid, CDBaby, Tunecore etc will handle the mechanical license for covers. As long as you don't change the lyrics or melody, a cover will remain a cover, even if you change a genre from metal to country. The "derivative work" carveout is to protect people from changing the lyrics to e.g. something offensive and the original rights holder being unable to do anything about it.

That being said, your idea isn't original; there's already a flood of automated AI-generated cover songs being pushed onto Spotify, and they + distributors are (allegedly) starting to actively combat this.
by gregschlom | 2025-05-02 18:54:36+00:00
Absolutely awesome! I know nothing about music production but I want to play with it just for fun. Maybe a very simplified, web-based version for people who just to play a bit? Would be awesome.

Congrats on the hard work and the launch, in any case!

Edit: I see you have a demo mode, that's great! Exactly what I was looking for