MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kldg | 2025-05-16 16:28:01+00:00
I've run into this a few times and did just that. It hallucinates a js or python or micropython package, I get annoyed trying to find or use it because it lacks features I explicitly stated I needed, or it just doesn't exist, and then make it write the whole thing for me from scratch. I don't use ChatGPT anymore (the model they have on the free tier has become terrible in the past few months), but Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview free through AI Studio (ex-API) is generally up to the task here.

Most recently when this happened, I made it write an SF2 loader/parser/player and a MIDI parser/"relay" library compatible with it for javascript to use in a WebGL game. It's familiar enough with ABC notation that you can have it write a song and then write a converter from modified ABC notation to MIDI, too. It can generate coordinates for a xylophone model with individual keys in WebGL with no fuss and wire it up to the SF2 module to play notes based on which key was struck. We can do things like switch out instruments on tracks, or change percussion tracks, or whatever, based on user interactions without fuss.

It's not worth setting up a whole repo for and documenting, because when I make something with it, I inherently prove making it is trivial.
by hackthemack | 2025-05-16 16:29:04+00:00
I am not sure. C# came long after Java already made inroads into the Enterprise space. It was a different time.

I would say that many things in IT are not chosen on technical merits alone. You have people that do not want to accrue any blame. Back then, by choosing what IBM endorses or what Microsoft endorses, you absolve yourself of fallout from if and when things go wrong.

Back in the 90s, it felt like IBM, Redhat, Sun kind of, sort of, got together and wanted to keep Microsoft from taking over the Enterprise space by offering Java solutions.
by proberts | 2025-05-16 16:29:06+00:00
There's no question that it's tougher now to get into the U.S., whether from Canada or another country via pre-clearance or via a land crossing, and there can be significant differences among airports and land crossings. Canadians are unique because they are visa exempt and CBP feels particularly emboldened to reassess their admissibility every time they enter. The keys are to avoid bad pre-clearance offices and land crossings and even more importantly to carry the right paperwork, which varies depending on the specific status being sought. There is also a huge difference between seeking entry as a visitor versus seeking entry as a worker with a visa, with the former much more challenging now.
by lysace | 2025-05-16 16:29:28+00:00
https://archive.is/5mKBo

> To see why it is so difficult to restrict access to AI chips, consider Johor, a part of southern Malaysia once better known for its palm-oil plantations. Located just across the border from Singapore, the region has become a hub for data centres. Land and electricity are cheap, and permits easier to obtain than in the city-state. All the big American cloud providers—Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle—have set up shop. According to Knight Frank, a property consultancy, Johor’s total data-centre capacity (built, under construction or planned) grew from 10 megawatts in early 2021 to more than 1,500 megawatts by 2024.

> Johor also provides a convenient back door into China. Big Chinese firms such as ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, have rented capacity there. Leasing cloud capacity in Malaysia allows companies like it to gain access to chips that cannot be imported into China.

Reminds me of how I used to rent Alibaba servers in HK to make our service available in PRC without an ICP license. That was almost a decade ago though.
by vqv | 2025-05-16 16:29:31+00:00
It’s pretty fundamental in a variety of multivariate statistical methods. If the rows of X are multi variate observations, then XX’ is the Gram matrix (of dot products). This can be used in clustering and regression. If the columns of X are (centered) multivariate observations, then XX’ is a scalar multiple of the sample covariance matrix. This is used in PCA.

But in large scale applications you may not want to store XX’ but instead are interested in computing products of the form XX’ v on the fly.
by breadwinner | 2025-05-16 16:29:45+00:00
Some statically checked languages and tools can catch potential data races at compile time. Example: Rust's ownership and borrowing system enforces thread safety at compile time. Statically typed functional languages like Haskell or OCaml encourage immutability, which reduces shared mutable state — a common source of concurrency bugs. Statically typed code can enforce usage of thread-safe constructs via types (e.g., Sync/Send in Rust or ConcurrentHashMap in Java).
by overu589 | 2025-05-16 16:30:02+00:00
One could ask, without consciousness (as a feedback loop) would the Universe flit into and out of existence without anyone noticing?

And to answer, what information and intelligence do for us is to achieve most optimal resolve (iteratively).

If we are ignorant and confused waste and attrition takes the best of everything, when we are wise and prudent we conserve and invest potential, creating more potential.

Therefore yes; wisdom and prudence capacitates, conserves, and perpetuates potential (of existential being). Let’s call that objective “good”, and “bad” whatever squanders it (“potential”).
Show HN: Automatically generate a README file for your GitHub repository
by vmath20 | 2025-05-16 16:30:32+00:00
GitRead is an open-source developer tool that utilizes recent advances in large context window LLMs to automatically generate README files.

You can input any public GitHub repository, and it will automatically generate a README file for the codebase within 1-2 minutes.

I created this because I would often spend 1-2 hours writing up a perfect README file for each of my projects, and I thought generating them using an AI tool would make the process smoother.

I was inspired to create this project by GitIngest as well as the recent success of other tools like GitDiagram and DeepWiki.
by IXCoach | 2025-05-16 16:30:34+00:00
Its a total of about 30 snippets, avg 6 paragraphs long, that I have to inject. for each role switch it goes through i have to re inject them.

its a pain but it works.

Even TDD it will hallucinate the mocks without management. and hallucinate the requirements. Each layer has to be checked atomically, but the text expander snippets done right can get it close to 75% right.

My main project faces 5000 users so I cant let the agents run freely, whereas with isolated projects in separate repos I can let them run more freely, then review in gitkraken before committing.
by louison11 | 2025-05-16 16:30:51+00:00
The standard for employment-based permanent residency (green card) is extraordinarily high. As in, would likely place you in the top 1-5% of the most successful people in the country. That, or you have to invest $800k and create 10 jobs.

No other country in the world requires foreigners to be significantly more qualified than its own population. You can move to France with a regular paying job no problem or just a few thousand euros in savings. Impossible in the US. You have to be extraordinary (they literally call their criteria, "extraordinary abilities") or you have to make top 5% money (so if you work in tech, that would be at least $500k-1M/year in many cases).

The only other way is to get married. This means there is a massive discrepancy between the qualifications of self made immigrants, versus those simply lucky enough to fall in love. It's pretty unfair, but that's how it works. But that's also the reason so many immigrants are so successful in the US, the bar is so high, that it creates a massive motivation to succeed to become eligible for the criteria.
by atemerev | 2025-05-16 16:30:58+00:00
https://rjimmigrationlaw.com/resources/o-1-visa-update-new-e...

"USCIS now permits separate legal entities, such as corporations or limited liability companies (LLCs) owned by the beneficiary, to file O-1 petitions on their behalf. This change provides a significant advantage for entrepreneurs and self-employed professionals."

I am interested if it actually works in practice.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-05-16 16:31:07+00:00
God, everyone has one of these stupid stories, don't they? For me, it was some moron at a Wordpress sweatshop who pointed out that the way to find the number of parameters of a function was through (a now deprecated and unsupported!) arity property.

OK, great. 16 years into my career, and I've never needed to count the number of parameters of a JavaScript function. And if you needed to, that wasn't going to be the property you'd read anyway.
by nkrisc | 2025-05-16 16:31:12+00:00
Wow, I’m on my phone and the slight upwards motion that each paragraph does as it scrolls into view is almost instantly nauseating. I had to close the tab after reading only the first two paragraphs (and scrolling down the page to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating).

First time I’ve had motion sickness from reading while not actually moving. Well done Google designers, that’s impressive.

Reader mode to the rescue.
by nathan_compton | 2025-05-16 16:31:31+00:00
Very neat but what an Albatross Python is, especially in the AI era. It is clearly the best language to choose for many applications given the network effects and the fact that AI can program it so effectively, but I really wish we weren't locked into it. So many better, more fun, more tight, languages out there.

And all this effort to eek out performance. Get off my lawn etc.
by yodsanklai | 2025-05-16 16:32:38+00:00
Because I've seen it with my own eyes on multiple occasions. Students studying for selective examinations (medicine, law, maths) routinely work more than 10 hours a day. I've also seen closely very successful academics who worked a lot.

And frankly, 5 hours a day isn't that much. It's perfectly fine is some people wants work life balance, but you will do more by working more, and if you're ambitious, it's hard to avoid putting the hours at some critical moments in your life.
by nrmitchi | 2025-05-16 16:32:42+00:00
Hey Peter! I'm going to pose a question that I think is tangential, but still related.

With genAI and LLMs making way into every profession, how much of an impact have you seen on the immigration law side? Have these style of tools made your job easier, or are they adding more confusion and uncertainty?

Given the rapidly changing landscape (on the immigration side; what is valid today may not be valid tomorrow, and everything seems kind of up to the best guess of the practitioner) do you see these tools (potentially) causing more harm than good (to specific individual cases)?
by bradly | 2025-05-16 16:33:18+00:00
Before I attempted, I had no idea. I hadn't ran any AI models locally and I don't follow this stuff too closely, so I wasn't even sure if I could get something usable on my M1 MacBook Air. I went in fairly blind which is why the Ollama Docker installer was so appealing to me–I got to hold off fighting Python and Homebrew until I had a better sense of what the tool could provide.

After my attempt, I think chat is performant enough on my M1. Code gen was too slow for me. Image generation was 1-2 minutes for small pixel art sprites, which for my use case is fine to let churn for a while, but the image generation results were much worse than ChatGPT browser gives me out of the box. I do not know if poor image quality is due to machine constraints or me not understanding how to configure the checkpoint and models.

I would be interested to hear how an M3 or M4 Mini handles these things as those are fair affordable to pick up used.
by Intermernet | 2025-05-16 16:34:15+00:00
Is the correct term "Expedites", or "Expeditions"? Legal terminology seems to break language rules... The term for some (plural) things being expedited would be expeditions, but it seems from your response that, in legal terms, this would be expedites. This doesn't sound right. No source I could find agrees with the term "Expedites" as "plural of expedite". It generally returns something on the lines of "A third-person singular simple present indicative form of the verb "expedite.""
by tavavex | 2025-05-16 16:35:02+00:00
Some people despised the XP UI when it first came out to a lot of fanfare. To this day, "Fisher-Price UI" is strongly associated with it.

Most people seem to think that whatever design language they got used to at a certain age was the obviously superior choice for all ages.

I think the biggest issue of modern UI design is that a lot of the software with it is poisoned by metric-chasing and mass data collection that megacorps love. But on a deeper level, most modern UX designers are vastly better than the average person working on UIs in the 90s. All the horrendous stuff from the 90s got forgotten, leaving behind only the fond memories of Windows 9x and similar.

I'm much younger than you, and I get liking the 9x design only in the sense that this was the last time when MS did a clean-slate design and redesigned everything in the system to be consistent, as opposed to them juggling like 6 different design languages for the sake of backwards compatibility and their apparent fear of not making something new. But as a design.. well, "all components must be the exact same shade of grey, look identical and have as little hierarchy as possible" isn't the peak of design, imo.
by frollogaston | 2025-05-16 16:35:50+00:00
What reliance did you have in mind? All sorts of calls in Python can release the GIL, so you already need locking, and there are race conditions just like in most languages. It's not like JS where your code is guaranteed to run in order until you "await" something.

I don't fully understand the challenge with removing it, but thought it was something about C extensions, not something most users have to directly worry about.
by ben_w | 2025-05-16 16:36:08+00:00
Fairly easy. The language itself is an improvement, the hardest part was the correct use of ?, ??, and !, which isn't that hard.

Lots of the kind of mistake one can make in ObjC and only notice at runtime, get caught at compile time in swift.

The frameworks are more of a mess: SwiftUI is something I want to like, but mostly gets in the way. There's now too many different ways to do background tasks, all promising to solve everything.

But you can still use UIKit and GCD, and I prefer to when I can.
by isk517 | 2025-05-16 16:37:11+00:00
Unfortunately all I can offer is another 2nd hand story I saw posted recently on some social media site or message board. It was a person complaining about how they were being passed up for promotion and not receiving praise from management like their more lazy coworkers despite working 12+ hours a day plus putting in time on the weekends. They were baffled by the fact that once they said 'screw it' and started only putting in the time expected of them that their work started being praised by management. The replies were pretty universal in the opinion that once the person stopped burning themselves out by working all the time they then started producing work that was better than merely acceptable.
by proberts | 2025-05-16 16:37:25+00:00
Big tech is risk averse and avoids pursuing O-1s unless there's no other option and the candidate/employee is highly valued. But I haven't seen any change yet in the adjudication of O-1 petitions. Nearly all our O-1 petitions still get approved and when we receive a Request for Additional Evidence (or RFE), the issues raised are the same issues that were raised before January 2025.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-16 16:37:35+00:00
A million thanks to everyone who’s worked on those error messages. More than any other language I’ve ever used, Rust goes to great lengths to explain exactly you did wrong, with enough context to demonstrate it, and an explanation of why it’s wrong, pointers of where to learn more about it, and how to fix it.

Yes, Rust has some inherently tricky parts that require programmers to really understand them before they can write it effectively. However, it goes out of its way to teach those concepts more than I realized it was possible for a compiler to do.
by meisel | 2025-05-16 16:37:46+00:00
Is this like the Karatsuba algorithm, where it's theoretically faster but not actually faster when run on real hardware?

Btw, it's worth noting that if you know that the result will be symmetric (such as is the case for X * X^T), you can make things faster. For example in cuBLAS, cublas*syrk (the variant optimized for when the result is symmetric) IME isn't faster than gemm, so what you can do instead is just do smaller multiplications that fill in one of the two triangles piece by piece, and then copy that triangle to the other one.
by latexr | 2025-05-16 16:37:49+00:00
I think it’d be a good idea to stop and think if this is healthy.

We know excessive use of social media, being glue to a screen, and having so little down time is bad for mental health. We also know LLMs are unreliable and their output requires verification.

And now we’re making projects for a machine to help us remain distracted while another machine is busy making up garbage. Wouldn’t that time be better spent exploring context so you at least have better information when reviewing the LLM output? Or even just staring out the window and letting thoughts settle?

I understand in the end it’s just a silly game (I assume; it requires logging in so I didn’t even try it) but there is a specific motivation behind it and I believe it’s worth thinking if it is positive. I’m also wondering about the decision of building something based on a show whose premise every episode is “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus” (though I haven’t watched that episode yet).
by anentropic | 2025-05-16 16:38:38+00:00
TBH I don't immediately hate what they've done design-wise.

I just wish they'd support it properly...

My current work project is using the M2 iteration, I guess to have a consistent look and feel across web + Android apps.

But the closest thing to an officially supported MD component lib for web now is Angular-Material. That has some M3 support I believe.

But not useful if you don't use Angular. And notable that the "web" pages for MD point to the incomplete and not updated Web Components project instead.

It's like this massive and massively profitable company laid off the... I dunno it must only be like 1-3 people? ...who were producing this useful thing. I don't understand the reasoning.

FWIW on the 3rd party side https://www.beercss.com/ looks to be carrying the flag quite nicely (I haven't used it yet).
by nrmitchi | 2025-05-16 16:38:40+00:00
Also not a lawyer, but wanted to second what jsbg said.

I've been through this process many times, and I would always say yes and then mention with the recruiter (even if I had to explain that the process was basically "asking politely for permission at the border").

The underlying question that employers really care about is "will you be legally allowed to accept a job offer without unexpected expenses or delays". Even if you file through USCIS (and not petition at the point of entry), you can (should) have an answer in 14 days and ~2k in fees, which is 1) a drop in the bucket for any hiring budget, and 2) not impactful to a hiring timeline.
by nkrisc | 2025-05-16 16:38:44+00:00
As a UX designer, I assure you there are still some of us that are cynical about all this BS.

In my experience, the one thing that people care about feeling when using some GUI is that they are on the right track and are closer to accomplishing whatever task they are performing.

I’ll say this though, the UX designers who speak in flowery bullshit like that tend to get noticed more and climb the career ladder, because it’s what everyone wants to hear. It’s this kind of stuff that made disillusioned me and made me hate the work.

I think some really do believe it, and I think others will just say whatever they think someone wants to hear.
by fourside | 2025-05-16 16:39:04+00:00
> You still need to do a lot of work to get it production ready, but it's as if you have an infinite number of junior engineers at your disposal now all working on different things.

One issue with junior devs is that because they’re not fully autonomous, you have to spend a non trivial amount of time guiding them and reviewing their code. Even if I had easy access to a lot of them, pretty quickly that overhead would become the bottleneck.

Did you think that managing a lot of these virtual devs could get overwhelming or are they pretty autonomous?
by kens | 2025-05-16 16:39:17+00:00
> Binary multiplication has not changed in millennia. Ancient Egyptians were using the same binary integer multiplication logic 5 millennia ago as ALUs do today.

It turns out that multiplication in modern ALUs is very different. The Pentium, for instance, does multiplication using base-8, not base-2, cutting the number of additions by a factor of 3. It also uses Booth's algorithm, so much of the time it is subtracting, not adding.
by wddlz | 2025-05-16 16:39:23+00:00
Related to this: Here is some recently published research we did at Microsoft Research on generating UX for prompt refinements based on the user prompt and other context (case study: https://www.iandrosos.me/promptly.html, paper link also in intro).

We found it lowered barriers to providing context to AI, improved user perception of control over AI, and provided users guidance for steering AI interactions.
by strangescript | 2025-05-16 16:39:29+00:00
it feels like openai are at a ceiling with their models, codex1 seems to be another RLHF derivative from the same base model. You can see this in their own self reported o3-high comparison where at 8 tries they converge at the same accuracy.

It also seems very telling they have not mentioned o4-high benchmarks at all. o4-mini exists, so logically there is an o4 full model right?
by alephnerd | 2025-05-16 16:39:57+00:00
> Parts of Poland were annexed by the soviets and became part of Ukraine and Belarus

I don't want to touch that hot potato, but that region was extremely diverse, with a large Belarusian, Lithuanian, Yiddish (before WW2 sadly), German, and Ukrainian speaking populations. I don't think any ethnic group had an actual definitive majority in that region until after WW2.
by MBCook | 2025-05-16 16:40:23+00:00
Right. It wasn’t the only or the biggest.

I was trying to get across it was one of the juggernauts of the day. A program normal people knew about if you knew the names of any computer programs.

Perhaps it was the most popular for home users, I don’t know. I was far too young in its heyday.

As productivity software went though it was BIG.
by throwaway2037 | 2025-05-16 16:41:58+00:00
I thought EU has a civil right to a basic bank account. (Please correct me if wrong.) Literally, if you are a convicted violent criminal, they cannot deny you for basic bank account (after released from jail). If sex work is legal and these rejections are actually happening (this is the Internet after all), I cannot believe that a Belgian law firm has not taken the case on pro-bono to sue a bunch of national banks that refuse to open accounts for sex workers. Again, if the rejections were true, it would be easy to build a case. Sure, you might be rejected at lower court levels, but then you can climb (after many years) to the European Court of Justice. I am sure they will agree: These legal sex workers have the civil right to bank in any EU jurisdiction where they are a legal resident.

I just Googled for: sex workers denied bank accounts in belgium

And found this: https://www.coe.int/en/web/commissioner/blog/2024/-/asset_pu...

> Since summer 2023, a new law has extended labour rights also to sex worker employees, including rules around working hours and payment, the right to refuse clients and the mandatory availability of emergency buttons in every room. The new law also decriminalises third parties, who will no longer be penalised for opening a bank account for sex workers or renting out accommodation, and it allows sex workers to advertise their services.

To be fair: Your comment was true in the past. It looks like there has a been a recent turn of events.