MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by neRok | 2025-05-17 15:31:12+00:00
I've recently started asking the free version of chat-gpt questions on how I might do various things, and it's working great for me - but also my questions come from a POV of having existing "domain knowledge".

So for example, I was mucking around with ffmpeg and mkv files, and instead of searching for the answer to my thought-bubble (which I doubt would have been "quick" or "productive" on google), I straight up asked it what I wanted to know;

> are there any features for mkv files like what ffmpeg does when making mp4 files with the option `--movflags faststart`?

And it gave me a great answer!

(...the answer happened to be based upon our prior conversation of av1 encoding, and so it told me about increasing the I-frame frequency).

Another example from today - I was trying to build mp4v2 but ran in to drama because I don't want to take the easy road and install all the programs needed to "build" (I've taken to doing my hobby-coding as if I'm on a corporate-PC without admin rights (windows)). I also don't know about "cmake" and stuff, but I went and downloaded the portable zip and moved the exe to my `%user-path%/tools/` folder, but it gave an error. I did a quick search, but the google results were grim, so I went to chat-gpt. I said;

> I'm trying to build this project off github, but I don't have cmake installed because I can't, so I'm using a portable version. It's giving me this error though: [*error*]

And the aforementioned error was pretty generic, but chat-gpt still gave a fantastic response along the lines of;

> Ok, first off, you must not have all the files that cmake.exe needs in the same folder, so to fix do ..[stuff, including explicit powershell commands to set PATH variables, as I had told it I was using powershell before]. > And once cmake is fixed, you still need [this and that]. > For [this], and because you want portable, here's how to setup Ninja [...] > For [that], and even though you said you dont want to install things, you might consider ..[MSVC instructions]. > If not, you can ..[mingw-w64 instructions].
by shawnz | 2025-05-17 15:31:46+00:00
Sometimes I like to put the conditional logic in the callee because it prevents the caller from doing things in the wrong order by accident.

Like for example, if you want to make an idempotent operation, you might first check if the thing has been done already and if not, then do it.

If you push that conditional out to the caller, now every caller of your function has to individually make sure they call it in the right way to get a guarantee of idempotency and you can't abstract that guarantee for them. How do you deal with that kind of thing when applying this philosophy?

Another example might be if you want to execute a sequence of checks before doing an operation within a database transaction. How do you apply this philosophy while keeping the checks within the transaction boundary?
by bsenftner | 2025-05-17 15:32:09+00:00
If you are worried about being rude when dealing with misunderstandings, you waste a lot of time coddling your audience. The author describes their highly emotional inability to effectively communicate with an LLM, I point out the issue is a lack of communications skill, and you call that as rude? How else to describe this issue? Effective communications and using LLMs is the issue.

The piece is not that well written, it has large amounts of assumptions that need to be clarified if that information were to be used within an LLM prompt. Very few people, developers included, appear to understand the concept of LLM context construction and management. It is barely even a topic. I suspect because the software engineering professional, as a whole, are composed largely of weak communicators, and the zietgiest of understanding how to use LLMs is truly and genuinely not there. To grasp LLM usage, it is very much "literature calculus", a term or concept not out yet at all.
by tialaramex | 2025-05-17 15:32:32+00:00
Yes the core thing everybody actually wants is the constant time cryptographic primitives, and it's not at all practical to attempt those in a high level programming language like C or Rust, they're always raw machine code, or - which is less awful to work with - assembler. So yeah it's roughly the same code in all of the projects you mentioned - the correct machine code for a high quality ChaCha20 implementation on x86-64 is the same if the rest of your TLS implementation is C (OpenSSL) or Rust (rustls) or like, hand written Perl (please tell me nobody did this)

Although of course the Rust compiler has no way to inspect this ChaCha20 primitive and check it is memory safe, we can "vouch" for it, and these primitives have been eyeballed by a huge number of people since they're so widely used so it feels as reasonable as the claim that ChaCha20 itself works, which has been considered by plenty of cryptanalysis experts from government and industry.

Pretty much everything else is Rust, so the bit-twiddling inside a DER implementation to parse certificates is Rust, the TLS handshake implementation is Rust, and so on.
by steve25537 | 2025-05-17 15:32:36+00:00
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by mistercow | 2025-05-17 15:34:04+00:00
I think we need to find a way to teach without grades. That is, we do know how to teach without grades at younger levels, and many schools do it successfully.

The problem is that eventually you need to measure for placement, and Goodhart’s Law kicks in and destroys the enjoyment of learning. It’s very hard to be intrinsically motivated when the external pressure dominates.

The fact that “study for the test” is basically synonymous with “study” for most people is indicative that we’re doing something extremely wrong in education.
by tacker2000 | 2025-05-17 15:34:23+00:00
“Tech” in this sense means engineers creating internal company tools in order to maximize efficiency, so this is just a cost center, that is building custom LLm tooling. No IP is being built or sold here.

Therefore I can understand the approach of combining it with HR in this case, since efficiency also means replacing humans with machines and saving costs there. Now that AI is getting big they can think of more areas where human work is getting superfluous.

The question is how far this can go and how much human labor they can turn into LLM responses.
by karencarits | 2025-05-17 15:35:28+00:00
That's not the point. While there is a temperature setting and randomness involved, you can still benchmark and experience significant differences in the output between models and generations. I thus provided more details and the full output to make it easier for people to assess the context of the comment I replied to

When someone uses the same tools as I do but seem to experience problems I do not have - these kind of posts often describes how bad LLMs are or how bad Google search is - I get a bit confused. Is it A/B testing going on? Am I just lucky? Am I inattentive to these weaknesses? Is it about promoting? Or what areas we work in? Do we actually use the same tools (i.e., same models)?
by bradlys | 2025-05-17 15:35:51+00:00
Yeah, it’s weird. Software engineers are mostly just doing whatever gets them paid.

End of the day, they’re laborers and they have no choice on what is being built. It’s not like most people in software are making enough to own a home in SV on their own anyway. It’s still a dual (tech) income (or big windfall) market.
by photonthug | 2025-05-17 15:36:49+00:00
> The executive part, it seems to me, might quite adequately be replaced by an AI.

To understand who is going to be replaced by AI and in what order, I think you have to stop reasoning based on what is possible or effective or a good fit and just think more about the politics of power, moats, who benefits from distribution of responsibility /liability, etc.

Executives and lawyers will absolutely be the last jobs standing even if it might seem like they could be the first on the chopping block.. reverse is true for software engineers.
by gwern | 2025-05-17 15:37:01+00:00
It would be more convincing if they did an exhaustive enumeration and verified that for every possible 3x3 Life the learned NN was correct. How do I know looking at a speckled screenshot that it is exactly correct and there's not a little floating point error somewhere or something like that which results in 1 edge-case being slightly off? If the only testing is '100 Life games for 100 steps', that isn't water-tight. (While if you do exhaustive enumeration, well, it has to be correct, because the NN is deterministic and fixed and there's no way for it to go wrong then.)
by spaceport | 2025-05-17 15:37:41+00:00
Having worked in HR as the only tech role in the past, HRIS, I can say w/o doubt this is a low value add move to the tech dept. However the free food stream from temp and external agencies to HR is legit insane and the quality top notch so hopefully they can share with the tech dept

Also just to say it if you don't know it, HR is the biggest "rules for thee, not for me" group in your org. Everything bad you have ever imagined, it's worse.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-17 15:39:53+00:00
The point here was that he cheated. He made things up and as soon as he was asked about methodology he pretended not to hear the question, slowed down, started to sprinkle “likes” everywhere, etc.

The question is more about how good of a cheater he is. Not very good as keeping a story straight takes up a considerable amount of effort and speech suffers.
by sgarland | 2025-05-17 15:40:19+00:00
Unless you have a much more regimented code review process than anywhere I've seen, "a random person" can impact prod quite easily by introducing a bad query into the app. Since ORMs are rampant, it's probably heavily obfuscated to begin with, so they won't even see the raw SQL. At best, they'll have run it on stage, where the DB size is probably so tiny that its performance issues go unnoticed.
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-17 15:40:27+00:00
Making decisions is the least important job of a CEO. Decisions are like ideas: cheap and plentiful.

As with ideas, what really makes a company work is execution. That takes people. Even with AI, it’s still people who are directing the AI, and connecting its work to the parts that AI can’t do yet. Which means the number one job of a CEO is recruiting, retaining, aligning, and inspiring people.

So the internal and external jobs of a CEO in 2025 are really mostly the same job: communicating a vision and getting people to execute it. It’s not that different for staff vs investors.

To be more specific, the split you propose is really like 5% / 95% in favor of the soft skills. Any decision that can be made with data and analysis is already being made one or more levels below the CEO. That shift happened years ago with the rise of ERP software.
by bsenftner | 2025-05-17 15:41:04+00:00
Don't nit pick on my use of the term "attempt", I'm describing how the words used in a prompt generate the context that then generates the reply. In this specific human language context my use of "attempt" is describing the LLMs choice of words in it's reply. I know there is no "attempting" as a human would "attempt". I'm paraphrasing and alluding rather than writing a formal and complex essay.
by eqvinox | 2025-05-17 15:41:17+00:00
Sure, but this isn't "anyone" doing advanced programming, it's the LLM doing it. The humans get skill in using LLM, not programming, and whether this new skill will make anyone wealthy is an open question.

(Also, just by market logic, rare skills in demand are always paid more; I'm not sure why you're calling it an "exclusion". The education system in a lot of places might have that function, but that's a separate issue not helped by LLMs writing SQL?)
by codetrotter | 2025-05-17 15:41:34+00:00
If the sentence is too short it might be possible to guess.

It’s not going to consist of random bytes.

Imagine for example that a high profile celebrity accused of murder has successfully defended himself in court and on that day he tweets:

I have something to reveal, but I won’t be telling you until the year 2135. Sha256 73fa194342af6b6e355e129fafd9b19d2a63589b1e3c6e2b5d94a7ca1b3e25f6

If this happens to be a short sentence related to recent events, don’t you think someone will figure out what he wrote pretty soon?
by quantadev | 2025-05-17 15:41:44+00:00
As long as MCP "just works" (and it does) and is relatively simple enough, then simply by being first, rather than being best, is what made it successful.

It's already gone so viral it's practically entrenched already, permanently. Everyone has invested too much time saying how much they love MCP. If we do find something cleaner it will still be called MCP, and it will be considered a 'variation' (new streaming approach maybe) on MCP rather than some competitor protocol replacing it. Maybe it will be called 'MCP 2.0' but it will be mostly the same and retain the MCP name for decades to come, I think.
by toss1 | 2025-05-17 15:43:56+00:00
>>Ideally, they wouldn't change it more than, say, nine months out

So, the system is highly unresponsive compared to adjusting a toll +/- a small amount for changing conditions

The system is also completely unresponsive to time-of-day issues, so e.g., if they want to dampen traffic in 11:30-15:30...

>> free passes associated with counters tied to license plates Right, another entire kludge system to attempt to accommodate a weakness, and then it only works for one-offs. Nevermind the week-long events that often bring people into the city, which now need yet another work-around...

>>traffic violations ...What's the difference?

The difference is a bill for a $9 toll vs a $150 violation for driving in the congestion zone on a forbidden day.

Yes, a toll is different from a violation. OFC, if you fail to pay the toll, it can turn into a violation, but that is NOT the same thing

>>go easy Right, which reduces the effectiveness of the entire system because the abusers will game it even more to take advantage while the poor people will get hammered even more.

I love technology, but I also know that adding ever more complex tech to "solve" a problem is often a bad solution. In this case, it will literally not even help the poor people, and will help significantly the people with two cars.

If you want to work better for low-income people, just scale the congestion tolls to the value of the cars; those are already only one lookup away from the license plates. E.g., the basic toll is $9, but for cars over $100K value, it scales proportionally.

Now you aren't handing out traffic ticket violations to people who must come in on the 'wrong' day.
by PlanetIrata | 2025-05-17 15:43:57+00:00
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by WhyNotHugo | 2025-05-17 15:44:28+00:00
> 1. Maybe it's time to drop the crazy runtime generation and have something statically discoverable, or at least a way to annotate the typing statically.

That, and duck typing, are one of the biggest things that make Python what it is. If I have to drop all that for type checking and rewrite my code, why would I rewrite it in Python?
by quantadev | 2025-05-17 15:45:35+00:00
Not to complain but this "introduction" would've been better if it was just a simple tool to add numbers to make an LLM able to solve "What is 10 + 50?" using a remote tool. By solving a complex problem you've just added unnecessary complexity. Everyone would've already known how to extend a function call to solve some other set of problems. Sure it made the intro more "impressive" as an actual accomplishment, but seems like counterproductive impressiveness bordering on just showing off. lol. Nice work tho. I was impressed.
by notahacker | 2025-05-17 15:46:29+00:00
Suspect more obvious factors are that men are far less likely to be home during the daytime when inspectors visit, and also more likely to admit they've had a TV for years or let the inspector in if he asks nicely...

(FWIW I'm had a visit shortly after I'd moved in with five other guys before, and avoided prosecution by simply asking how to pay...)
by tmpz22 | 2025-05-17 15:46:53+00:00
Is it me or is the grammar of this article really poor:

> If the user is a technical analyst or a developer asking a vague question, giving them a reasonable, but perhaps not 100% correct SQL query is a good starting point

> Out of the box, LLMs are particularly good at tasks like creative writing, summarizing or extracting information from documents.

I don't -think- this was written by an LLM, but it really pulls me out of the technical article.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-17 15:46:57+00:00
> Kids are social creatures, I don't think the interaction from AIs is going to be so overwhelming

The problem is Alexa is a very basic and kids get bored with it. Chat based AI mimics human conversation a lot better and people will be spending a lot more time with it, using it for homework, relationship advice, therapy, as an imaginary friend, at work etc.

I heard of cases of psychologists discussing conditions negatively reinforced by ChatGPT, can’t recall any such stories about Alexa or Siri for instance.

Interacting so much with the system , it’s inevitable that humans will start to pick up its quirks.
by lynndotpy | 2025-05-17 15:47:21+00:00
Have you used Rust before? As a user, the speed and safety is nice. But as a developer, Rust projects are easier to hack on and contribute to.

That's kind of the whole appeal of Astral. I know Python better than Rust, but it's a lot easier for me to hack on Rust projects. The whole appeal of Astral is that they want to bring Rust-quality tooling to Python.
by cge | 2025-05-17 15:49:38+00:00
>On the server, however, NixOS is an incredibly good choice, and it's what I'm currently using to build my VPS on

NixOS is also often a terrible choice for servers. I once had the misfortune to be part of a multi-user server running on NixOS. The idea made sense: users could all have their own versions of software installed. In practice, it was a disaster: NixOS seems to fundamentally assume that all users have root access.

Many ordinary processes ended up involving administrator involvement. Want to change your shell? Contact the administrator. Password? Contact the administrator. Add or remove an SSH key? Contact the administrator; hopefully you don’t do anything like use per-device keys. Run a user service? Contact the administrator, who might also need to do all the configuration for you. Numerous options that would be user-configurable in other distributions ended up in configuration.nix. And looking or asking for help online was an exercise in frustration: the idea that I wasn’t able to use sudo or edit configuration.nix seemed completely foreign.

Fortunately, we were able to switch everything over to Debian. This had the advantage of both actually working for normal user accounts, and still letting people use Nix, arguably with fewer problems.

I do expect someone may reply with some poorly (or un-) documented approach to handling these problems, perhaps using unstable and experimental features, but that tendency in itself was a considerable frustration in using Nix.
by GMoromisato | 2025-05-17 15:49:42+00:00
I'm working on GridWhale (https://gridwhale.com).

It's not a true OS--but it's a platform on top of an arbitrary number of nodes that act as one.

The cool thing is that from the program's perspective you don't have to worry about the distributed system running underneath--the program just thinks it's running on an arbitrarily large machine.
by AdmiralAsshat | 2025-05-17 15:51:00+00:00
> That math is why many book apps like those from Bookshop, Kobo and Barnes & Noble’s Nook haven’t typically let you buy e-books and audiobooks from their iPhone or Android apps. Instead, you must leave the app, buy from the bookstore’s website and hop back into the app to read or listen to it.

Not accurate, at least for Kobo. They accepted Google's billing system, so buying from the Kobo app on Android hooks into your Google Wallet billing method and works without an issue.

It does mean you can't use Kobo gift cards towards purchases made on your phone, but you can always pop onto the website to do that.

I'm actually really glad that Kobo just did that, even if Google is taking a ridiculous cut. Anecdotally I'm buying way more impulse books on Kobo (i.e. a book on sale for $2.99 or less) since they got the app working with Google Wallet.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-17 15:51:10+00:00
I love the use of reusable non-LLM code for the "happy path" and only using the LLM to create a workflow or repair it.

One area for improve seems to be the checkboxes/radio buttons (possibility other input types?) given the demo didn't pick up on that (it did make the same selections but it didn't recognize this was a multiple-choice input). It might be useful to have a step before creating the JSON where it asks the user some follow up questions like, "Here are the inputs I found and my understanding of their data type". And then go through each input asking for a default value and maybe even clarification on "Should we even prompt for this?" (Example, always select country X).

I wonder if, for workflow repair purposes, it would be helpful to, at recording time, save more contextual information about the fields you are filling/clicking on. "This a country selector", "This is the birthdate field", etc. So that if the xpath/css/etc fails you can give the LLM doing the repair work a description of what it's looking for.

I'm excited to see more efforts in QA testing with things like this. Brittle e2e tests are the bane of my (limited) automated experience and the ability to auto-heal and/or deal with minor deviations would be wonderful.
by Retric | 2025-05-17 15:51:30+00:00
I’m glad you got a chuckle out of that, it was intended to be humorous while also countering your argument.

> I’d you want to call or barter through abstraction I can’t stop you

I was calling it money, but it’s really a spectrum. Is a coupon for a free burger money? What about gift cards?

IMO, it’s money when it’s worth more than the underlying commodity. Stamped coins were a net benefit by being of known purity and promissory notes benefited by being easy to transport. So people mostly didn’t melt the coins down or exchange the notes because easy of trade is inherently valuable on its own. At the other end wasting time exchanging or melting it down is a net cost.

Which in a roundabout way means using money is never barter. Non fiat money has a separate floor on value, but the actual value is generally set the same way fiat money is.