MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by didip | 2025-05-03 16:38:35+00:00
It is overrated.

I tried three times, just for fun, to start a decent-sized projects from start to finish without interventions. All failed. The AI can't seem to have far enough horizon to see the projects to completions.

AI needs a super well defined scoped, for example: an IDE companion or logo generator or writing a specific Class implementation, to thrive.
by skydhash | 2025-05-03 16:38:46+00:00
My best workflow to date is to generate snippet of code when you know a lot of the domain, but don’t want to go through the docs. Especially with languages like python. Even then, you get nonsensical stuff. But it can be great for quickly locating source material in the docs. Kinda like looking at a reference implementation to get the technique.

But it is slower than someone that is knowledgeable about the library and languages unless you don’t care about correctness.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-03 16:38:56+00:00
not like that. i do not care about math in that post.

"good" language leads to "good" and logical thinking in every area of human endeavor.

so it can also be true that "bad" language leads to "bad" thinking. you are making mistakes, making bad conclusions, which can be avoided just by using "proper" language. why make life harder.

that applies for "everything" from "marketing vs scam", to even philosophy itself,

edit: we live in complex world, stacking complexities on top of complexities, so being "20% wrong" in one layer of complexities, can lead to totally opposite result in another layer.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-05-03 16:39:06+00:00
In my experience, the credit card example is _usually_ solved in a practical way which is still somewhat bad, but allows the person to at least get a card: They abbreviate one or both names in some way for the card.

As crappy as the system with its max length for people's names, it's common to allow first initial + surname. It also works very badly for non ASCII names - to my understanding, I _think_ people in East Asia just have to use romanisations if they want to have a Mastercard. This all sucks, but it's a bit more than "the card design" - it's quite fundamentally baked in to how the whole system works. There aren't a lot of systems out there which are based on more aged and legacy technology than card networks.
by biophysboy | 2025-05-03 16:39:17+00:00
I did a biophysics PhD, and I do think the main value of AI in academia will be rapid bespoke scripting. Most of my code in grad school was little one-off scripts to perform a new experiment or show a new result. The code is not really the goal; in fact, it is frequently annoying and in the way of your actual goal. I would've killed for a tool that could style my figure for a talk, or perform a rolling average on a time trace.
by kevinventullo | 2025-05-03 16:39:25+00:00
LLM’s are very good at style transfer, like turning a piece of writing into a poem or whatever. I’ve found this to be helpful with respect to coding style as well.

E.g. I still kind of write python as if I was writing C++. So, sometimes I’ll write a for loop iterating over integer indexes and tell the LLM “Hey can you rewrite this more pythonically” and I get decent results.
by master_crab | 2025-05-03 16:39:41+00:00
100%. In fact, this exact scenario is playing out in the cattle industry.

Screwworm, a parasite that kills cattle in days is making a comeback. And we are less prepared for it this time because previously (the 1950s-1970s) we had a lot more labor in the industry to manually check each head of cattle. Bloomberg even called it out specifically.

Ranchers also said the screwworm would be much deadlier if it were to return, because of a lack of labor. “We can’t fight it like we did in the ’60s, we can’t go out and rope every head of cattle and put a smear on every open wound,” Schumann said.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-05-02/deadly-sc...
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-03 16:40:35+00:00
I did some Googling and there doesn't seem to be an epidemic of 3DS game carts failing, I can find a few isolated reports but that feels as expected to me.

It also sounds like you can extend the lifespan my making sure to boot up your cartridge in a 3DS every so often, because Nintendo gave them an error correction routine: https://gbatemp.net/threads/nintendo-switch-3ds-cartridge-li...
by overfeed | 2025-05-03 16:41:26+00:00
> I guess it's been a long time since I worked in an environment which did not use an "only merge to main after passing CI"

It's the same for me, but some integration bugs still escape the notice of unit tests. Examples from memory: a specific subset users being thrown into an endless redirect due to a cookie rename that wasn't propagated across all sub-systems on the backend, multiple instances of run-time errors that resulted from dependency version mismatches (dynamic loading), and a new notification banner element covering critical UI elements on an infrequently used page - effectively conflicting CSS position. In all these cases, the CI tests were passing, but passing tests don't mean your software is working as expected in all cases.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-05-03 16:41:49+00:00
LLMs are a calculator for language, but not for reasoning.

When you realize that language and reasoning are in fact two separate skills, only one of which an LLMs is good at, they make much more sense.

Until now, language skill and reasoning skill have been correlated - people with greater skill using language are usually better skilled at reasoning. Put another way, we typically discount poorly written material regardless of it's actual content.

LLMs turn this on its head - great at language, poor at reasoning. So the crutch, the heuristic, we used before no longer applies. We MUST recognize that language ability and reasoning ability are now independent.
by giraffe_lady | 2025-05-03 16:43:31+00:00
Are the pigs healthy? I think the sibling comment got to the heart of this a lot more directly.

There's an economic reward for keeping the pigs healthy enough to be harvested while spending the least amount of money on their environment. If this lowers the threshold for "healthy enough", or allows them to survive in an even worse, cheaper to maintain environment, that could introduce or exacerbate human health risks even if this change itself cannot.

There is also the animal welfare element, that has resonance to a lot of people. I am by no means a vegetarian, do not in principle object to killing animals for food. But the sheer scale of animal suffering in our food system gives me pause. I am reluctant to accept innovations that would allow us to increase the degree of suffering in exchange for an increase in output or decrease in price.
by gradientsrneat | 2025-05-03 16:43:56+00:00
To each their own. I love a mechanics-heavy game from time to time, but (and this is not NMS-specific) sometimes I want a more laid-back experience and/or just appreciate the game engine.

That's not to say there can't be both. The real disappointments for me are high base system requirements, lack of modding support, and lack of native Linux support. They are related. IMO a sandbox really shines when it maximizes the creative potential of its users, to the extent the engine's computational limitations allow for it.
by grumpyprole | 2025-05-03 16:43:57+00:00
Well said. I guess such ignorance is not that surprising given that most "programming" today is glueing code together with scripting languages. This is really just a form of configuration. It certainly requires domain knowledge and a tolerance for digital bureaucracy, but not always maths. I do wish schools would do a better job of teaching that the entire fabric of western civilization rests upon mathematics.
by WhatIsDukkha | 2025-05-03 16:44:19+00:00
The alternative to radiation is mixing less poop into your meat etc.?

You understand that the majority of "food science" is designed to allow increasingly lazier and sloppier food handling and allowing it to still be palatable/not kill too many people right?

Don't fall into the "lower cost" idea either, being lazier and sloppier means higher corporate profits and not lower consumer prices (for worse food).

Compare the grass fed/ranged (produced on farms 1/10th the size of the US equivalent) BigMac in Germany versus the one you get anywhere in the US, which do you think is healthier and tastier? They are basically the same price to the consumer mysteriously...
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-03 16:44:34+00:00
The Switch is a portable device, so this "slow media" would have to be some form of solid state memory. And unfortunately, cheap flash memory tends to also have a short self life. That doesn't exactly help with preservation!

All else being equal, I'm happy Nintendo went with the more expensive media, even if it means some smaller titles likely won't be available physically. (In my eyes, a key card does not count as a physical release.)

I'm mostly just happy the key cards are clearly labeled so I can avoid buying them...
by _bin_ | 2025-05-03 16:44:53+00:00
Well to start, you're really, really good at rust :)

I'm not sure. I've begun advocating for people, when they write blogposts etc., to dump and attach their conversations (unless precluded by security/privacy) so those of us who seem to get worse results can see if there are "tricks" or styles to it we miss. If you're amenable to it, this would be doubly helpful from someone who knows the language so extremely well!
by ggeop | 2025-05-03 16:45:28+00:00
Hi HN! This is my first post in the community, and I’m excited to share a little project I built. :-)

## The back story A few months ago, I started a personal GitHub project for my curiosity about LLM and how to learn a Text-to-SQL system from the ground up. The goal was simple: let users query any data source (e.g. DB) using only text prompts. Today, this kind of workflow is everywhere, especially in Python, where the LangChain framework dominates, but I wanted to learn all the pieces myself and define my own architecture.

## The project Backend: Pure Python, with adapters for any data source and pluggable support for open-source or commercial LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, etc.). I’ve been leaning toward Google Gemini for its free API tier (limited), which is great for experimentation.

Frontend: A simple web UI that lets you enter free text queries, browse the results in a table, and export them as CSV or JSON. (Disclosure: I used Claude to help me design the UI—frontend work isn’t my forte, and I wanted something polished enough to demo)

In summary with Data Dialogue, you can:

- Write plain-English questions about your data - See the automatically generated SQL and the query results side by side - Download the results for further analysis or reporting

## Why I’m Posting I’m sharing this repo to see if it catches your interest. If you’re curious about Text-to-SQL, LLM-driven data tooling, or building things from scratch without a framework like LangChain, I’d love your feedback—or even better, your contributions! Let’s learn together and push the boundaries of what small teams can do in this exciting era of LLMs.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/ggeop/DataDialogueLLM
by doright | 2025-05-03 16:45:42+00:00
I think it is more complicated than just a matter of being correct or not. Common advice in some creative professions is "don't bother trying to do X for a living, you'll never make it." The point of the advice is not whether or not it is literally correct and the person is better off not bothering - in the general case, it's probably true. The point is that it acts as a filter for those not motivated enough. It's a backhanded sort of test implicitly presented to the aspirant.

Someone who really, really wants to make a billion dollar startup against all odds is going to ignore your advice anyway. In fact, they would ignore any AI's advice on the topic as well. But that kind of arrogance is precisely what's required to be able to pull it off. Someone who quits the moment an AI tells them "don't do it" was not cut out to accomplish such a goal to begin with.

And maybe in the end the startup will only be worth a couple million dollars, but the hubris to believe they could go even further would be what got them that far at all. So "can build a billion dollar startup" ended up being false, but something else was gained in the end.
by _dark_matter_ | 2025-05-03 16:47:16+00:00
Yes I very much have those problems. It's strange because I'm objectively a good engineer, but semantic retrieval is very difficult for me. It has been my entire life.

When I was a kid I did a round of testing for ADHD, and one of the tests is category fluency. Basically they gave me a category (e.g. Breakfast foods) and told me to say as many words in that category as I could in 60 seconds. I failed miserably; the administrator told me it was essentially as bad as people with severe cognitive deficiency. I just haven't worked about it since then! (Except with names!!)
by e40 | 2025-05-03 16:47:24+00:00
I was on mobile earlier and couldn't add:

I saw Bill Haast do his daily show at the Serpentarium in Miami, FL in the mid-70's. It was a thing to behold. The main building was a square with a courtyard. He would come out with a large bag and dump the King Cobra out on the grass. We, the audience, were on the perimeter of the grass, probably no more than 15' from the snake. Once out of the bag, the snake would immediately raise up and look at Bill. It was a large one, too, probably 15' long, maybe more. The body was thick. He would hypnotize it, grab it just behind the neck, drag it over to the "milking station" which looked like a bar in the basement of a home, and milk the venom from the snake.

The entire thing took about 10 minutes and he narrated the entire time.

I loved that place and watching him inspired me to get a Boa. Pet stores were full of them, sadly, and FL is reaping the ecological devastation they (and Pythons) have wrought over the last 5 decades.
by lotsofpulp | 2025-05-03 16:47:25+00:00
That is called equity (at least in the USA).

> Granting full access to work-created value” means the owners (investors, CEO, etc.) would split profits among workers rather than keep the profits for themselves.

This is remuneration, the reward in exchange for your effort/wares/risk.

In this case, the artist would have had to ask taxpayers (or the taxpayers’ representatives) to sell them a piece of the taxpayer’s equity. Or some type of royalty/revenue sharing agreement.

Obviously, that was not going to happen for a small time artist (that kind of stuff is reserved for well connected people when it comes to government assets).

But the second best option the world has come up with is public equity markets, where the common people can invest and gain access to equity, which is also very liquid.
by _bin_ | 2025-05-03 16:47:36+00:00
Semi-controversial headline but I think the point is fair. It doesn't yet produce results that meet a spec well. It's fine for scripts because if it insists you do it the bot's way, that's fine. If it uses the wrong library, whatever. And so on.

I'm going to keep shilling this until people start doing it: I'd love to see everyone who says he's vibecoded something non-trivial and posts/blogs about it start dumping and attaching his full chats to it. This would really help people to understand what's hype/exaggeration and what's real, and would help others be better at the real part.
by ramoz | 2025-05-03 16:47:45+00:00
> Vibe coding is now a burgeoning tech movement. Will it last? Only time will tell.

Was this vibe-blogged?

'Vibe coding' is here to stay and the future of software development is assistant-led interfaces. I pair program daily with Claude Code on a distributed systems & a handful of other apps as needs arise. Most of my work is puppeteering, as well as careful directing. & I can't sit blindly, but we're producing valid software at pace I've never experienced in my career; with additional bandwidth to do some leisure activities in real time without losing productivity, vibing.
by seadan83 | 2025-05-03 16:48:00+00:00
> A common use of be is to express set membership rather than identity

Google for "logical "is a" vs logical "is"".

Google AI answers this:

> "is" typically represents an equality relation

Rest is from the AI response:

In logic, "is" typically represents an equality relation, while "is a" (or "is of the type") represents an inclusion relation. "Is" indicates that two things are the same or identical, while "is a" indicates that one thing is a member of a larger class or set of things.

Logical "is" (equality):

Meaning: "A is B" means that A and B are the same thing, or have the same properties. Example: "The Eiffel Tower is in Paris" (the Eiffel Tower and the thing in Paris are the same thing).

Logical "is a" (inclusion or type):

Meaning: "A is a B" means that A belongs to the category or class of things that are B. Example: "A dog is an animal" (dogs are a type of animal).
by jldugger | 2025-05-03 16:48:08+00:00
I'm nearly wrapping up Sydney Dekker's book _Just Culture_, and Allspaw has a few pages in it. And preceding that is a section titled "blame-free is not accountability-free."

Accountability under Dekker's restorative justice model means providing a complete record of what happened, so the justice system can focus on who was harmed and who needs to repair that harm. In some ways I think they can end up mirroring the typical punitive justice system, when the person who needs to repair harm matches what we would call a guilty party in other circumstances. But the idea is not to lie about what happened! It's to expand the network of causality beyond a simple thought terminating "Bob did it" so we can address the systemic problems that led to Bob doing the wrong thing.

> Not necessarily with "punishment" (what does that even mean in a professional context)

A few options depending on profession:

1. Demotion 2. Pay cuts or fines 3. Firing 4. Loss of certification, thus preventing this person from ever working in the field again 5. Jail time, preventing this person from even being in society for some time, perhaps forever.

Dekker's book is full of examples of professionals facing all of the above consequences. If you don't think these punishments are applied to the SRE community Allspaw addressed when originally describing "blameless postmortems" then you probably want to read the all time highest upvoted post to /r/cscareerquestions, "Accidentally destroyed production database on first day of a job, and was told to leave, on top of this i was told by the CTO that they need to get legal involved, how screwed am i?"[1]

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/6ez8ag/a...
by IshKebab | 2025-05-03 16:48:24+00:00
No, there's a very very long tail of tasks that are too niche for a proper tool to exist for but it would be annoying effort to figure out yourself.

My most recent example of this: write a script to delete all git branches that point to HEAD.

Go ahead see how long it takes you to figure out the command for that, because it took me under 60 seconds with AI.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-05-03 16:48:48+00:00
If you could throw your endless todo list of side projects at an LLM, and can see at least some of them implemented overnight effortlessly, why not? You can still take credit because you had the idea in the first place and went through the effort to write it down and describe it well enough to be achievable. It's definitely more fun especially if you have limited hobby coding time.
by boulos | 2025-05-03 16:48:57+00:00
"Post surrender" is misleading. https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2022/05/06/did-the-japanese-... has good coverage of what's known here. There were definitely factions within Japan that wanted to surrender, but there doesn't appear to have been a formal attempt.

As is, there was an attempted coup to overthrow the government due to the first (conditional) surrender.
by jonasmalaco | 2025-05-03 16:49:00+00:00
The intent behind these mentions was to "promote the use of Copilot" and "showcase Copilot usage scenarios in a variety of different ways".

These are quotes from resolved comments in the review to a similar but slightly earlier PR[1], from the same author, to the one that introduced the specific mention referred to in the issue[2].

And that's why these suggestions to use Copilot probably don't belong in the docs: their intent was to promote a product.

(To be fair, in the first comment quoted above the reviewer asks that the Copilot section be moved to the end of the document, prioritizing teaching the user about the actual feature the article was about).

One additional problem, already pointed out by others, is that Copilot seems to be the only AI tool showcased in the docs. Besides suggesting the intent of these suggestions is purely promotional, this reflects poorly on an organization that should be independent from Microsoft.

[1] https://github.com/dotnet/docs/pull/42357 [2] https://github.com/dotnet/docs/pull/42625
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-03 16:49:23+00:00
> It seems they would have assumed it's a long cloud or something like that.

I don't see why. The Chinese called it a river. The Greeks called it a circle. The Romans called it a road.

The English appear to have called it a girdle: https://www.etymonline.com/word/Milky%20Way

> in Middle English also Milken-Way, Milk-white girdle, and Milky Cercle.

["Milken-Way" is a direct translation of the Latin name, and "Milky Cercle" is a direct translation of the Greek name. Girdle is less easy to explain.]

> The ancients speculated on what it was; some guessed it was a vast assemblage of stars (Democrates, Pythagoras, even Ovid)

I don't think there are any texts attributed to Pythagoras, but we might have a text that says he thought so, or that the Pythagoreans thought so.
by pdntspa | 2025-05-03 16:49:33+00:00
It sounds like these advanced skills might be needed to build the platforms that the dropouts build on top of. But I agree that, as a professional programmer of 20 years with a 4-year business degree from a state school with a weak math background (and also as someone with a talent for writing and language), I have very little need for advanced math in my day-to-day.