MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by xianshou | 2025-05-19 21:58:55+00:00
Both Google and Microsoft have sensibly decided to focus on low-level, junior automation first rather than bespoke end-to-end systems. Not exactly breadth over depth, but rather reliability over capability. Several benefits from the agent development perspective:

- Less access required means lower risk of disaster

- Structured tasks mean more data for better RL

- Low stakes mean improvements in task- and process-level reliability, which is a prerequisite for meaningful end-to-end results on senior-level assignments

- Even junior-level tasks require getting interface and integration right, which is also required for a scalable data and training pipeline

Seems like we're finally getting to the deployment stage of agentic coding, which means a blessed relief from the pontification that inevitably results from a visible outline without a concrete product.
by nickjj | 2025-05-19 21:59:02+00:00
It's still ok even without systemd. Technically systemd is disabled by default, you have to turn it on with systemd=true in /etc/wsl.conf.

I can't find a definitive source with an open ticket but if you Google around for "WSL 2 systemd delay startup" you'll find assorted folks talking it about with a number of different reasons.

I just went by my end results of there is a delay with systemd enabled and no delay with it disabled.
by zackify | 2025-05-19 21:59:55+00:00
I thought this was another vercel shill, and cheating up the hackernews ranks LOL

But I tried it today and it’s pretty nice. A few bugs with user creation and custom fields with the beta oauth2 plugin. But overall very solid abstraction that will save lots of time.

Google sign in was a breeze too.

The migrations do not pick up nullable being true for custom fields though, and I see someone else already reported this.

Direct oauth registration works, most everything I need is here!
by bamboozled | 2025-05-19 22:00:09+00:00
I like updating documentation and feel that it's fairly important to be doing myself so I actually understand what the code / services do?

I use all of these tools, but you also know what "they're doing"...

I know our careers are changing dramatically, or going away (I'm working on a replacement for myself), but I just like listening to all the "what we're doing is really helping you..."
by grumpymuppet | 2025-05-19 22:00:51+00:00
If you are interested in programming language theory (think language design) then, yes. In some sense, this kind of stuff is impossible to avoid.

If you're an engineer focused on shipping product, probably not. It's not TERRIBLY useful for most day to day coding tasks.

I would argue some understanding of theory is absolutely necessary if you want to make any significant tide change in CS. It's just that most people won't (myself included).
by johncalvinyoung | 2025-05-19 22:00:51+00:00
I wish this article recognized that there is a cost to maintaining the grid, both in transmission infrastructure, but also in maintaining the dispatchable generation capacity to smooth out solar's variability. As frustrating as this policy change sounds for consumers, I can see the case that the utility has variable && fixed costs related to net metering that warrants a sub-retail rate of exchange. In point of fact, roughly the rate that Dominion is willing to pay for solar energy in commercial PPAs.

The SREC situation is more complicated. I'm not familiar with Virginia's program, but I could see a case that Dominion doesn't deserve those credits... or one that says if they're building/operating their grid around accepting rooftop solar, some of those tax credits should accrue to their operations. I don't know. I wonder if commercial PPAs also transfer credits in exchange?
by w10-1 | 2025-05-19 22:01:15+00:00
Funny how he seems to get so close but miss.

It's an anthropocentric miss to worry about AI as another being. It's not really the issue in today's marketplace or drone battlefield. It's the scalability.

It's a hit to see augmentation as amputation, but a miss to not consider the range of systemic knock-on effects.

It's a miss to talk about nuclear weapons without talking about how they structured the UN and the world today, where nuclear-armed countries invade others without consequence.

And none of the prior examples - nuclear weapons, (writing?) etc. - had the potential to form a monopoly over a critical technology, if indeed someone gains enduring superiority as all their investors hope.

I think I'm less scared by the prospect of secret malevolent elites (hobnobbing by Chatham house rules) than by the chilling prospect of oblivious ones.

But most of all I'm grateful for the residue of openness that prompts him to share and us to discuss, notwithstanding slings and arrows like mine. The many worlds where that's not possible today are already more de-humanized than our future with AI.
by jmyeet | 2025-05-19 22:01:30+00:00
I'm a strict atheist but am generally neutral on religion. It depends on the output.

What people should know is that even within a religion like Christianity there are vast differences between sects. Jesuits are not Southern Baptists, for example.

A lot of texts from antiquity were preserved by the Catholic monastic tradition through the Middle Ages. Theology in the Roman Catholic sense has always been treated as an academic discipline.

Evangelicism arose primarily in the US as a byproduct of "manifest destiny" combined with no access to academic theologians. Sects popped up based on "plain" readings of religious texts. Put another way: it's almost entirely vibes-based.

But none of this really matters because religion is never the reason for a conflict such as this. Religion is simply the veneer applied to motivate the masses. The actual motivations are always materialist. In this case that means a settler colonial project to disrupt a region of strategic improtance.
by latentsea | 2025-05-19 22:01:30+00:00
Sentence cards are great and necessary for learning grammar (during which you will learn some vocab too). After that can just focus on pure vocab.

I did the exact same Korean deck as my wife at the exact same time. It was wild comparing our stats in real-time. It would take me 10 ~ 12 seconds to do the same sentences that it would take her 30 ~ 35 seconds.
by keybored | 2025-05-19 22:01:55+00:00
> I can think of three axes along which we might plot these intelligences. One is how much we matter to them. At one extreme we might put dragonflies, which probably don’t even know that we exist. A dragonfly can see a human if one happens to be nearby, but it probably looks to them as a cloud formation in the sky looks to us: something extremely large and slow-moving and usually too far away to matter. Creatures that live in the deep ocean, even if they’re highly intelligent, such as octopi, probably go their whole lives without coming within miles of a human being. Midway along this axis would be wild animals, such as crows and ravens, who are obviously capable of recognizing humans, not just as a species but as individuals, and seem to know something about us. Moving on from there we have domesticated animals. We matter a lot to cows and sheep since they depend on us for food and protection. Nevertheless, they don’t live with us, and some of them, such as horses, can actually survive in the wild after jumping the fence. Some breeds of of dogs can also survive without us if they have to. Finally we have obligate domestic animals such as lapdogs that wouldn’t survive for ten minutes in the wild.

Hogwash. The philosophy+AI crossover is the worst AI crossover.
Show HN: I enhanced Soundex to correctly handle multi-word strings
by ogora | 2025-05-19 22:02:07+00:00
Hello HN.

I built Flookup Data Wrangler, a powerful Google Sheets add-on for data cleaning without writing single line of code.

Traditional Soundex is designed for single words like "John" and "Jonny", making data cleaning comparisons between such strings straightforward. However, typical Soundex outputs cannot be used to handle multi-word or reordered string comparisons like "John Doe" vs "Doe Jonny", as this would produce inaccurate results.

To address this, I modified the Soundex algorithm to support multi-word and reordered strings by adding a helper function that re-encodes the output into a format that can be used for accurate text-to-text comparisons. The optimisation keeps overhead minimal, ensuring negligible impact on performance.

By leveraging this enhancement, Flookup users can do the following:

+ Fuzzy matching and merging

+ Duplicate highlighting and removal

+ Extracting a list of unique values

... all based on the sound the strings or parts of the strings make (as pronounced in English).

I would love feedback, especially from those into data cleaning (which I'm guessing is everyone).

If you are curious to give it a try, here is a quick start guide: https://www.getflookup.com/get-started
by candiddevmike | 2025-05-19 22:02:18+00:00
You're the product here, though.

EDIT: legal link doesn't work here (https://jules-documentation.web.app/faq#does-jules-train-on-...)

> No. Jules does not train on private repository content. Privacy is a core principle for Jules, and we do not use your private repositories to train models. Learn more about how your data is used to improve Jules.

It's hard to tell what the data collection will be, but it's most likely similar to Gemini where your conversation can become part of the training data. Unclear if that includes context like the repository contents.

https://jules.google.com/legal
by bigfatkitten | 2025-05-19 22:02:23+00:00
New South Wales Police in Australia had a similar occurrence a few years ago, where an officer tased a 95-year-old dementia patient holding a knife while hobbling along with a walking frame. She died.

The officer was charged and found guilty of manslaughter. He was sentenced in March to 425 hours of community service. The prosecution has appealed the sentence as inadequate.

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/former-nsw-police-office...
by cjbgkagh | 2025-05-19 22:03:10+00:00
It's a long list right, most doctors will think you're just being a hypochondriac, that's what they told me and my family for decades. A general distrust of doctors might as well be another comorbidity.

It certainly sounds like a TNXB subtype of hEDS, this is an unofficial subtype, I read about the theory here on HN many years ago and ran with it. With an IQ that high I would take a guess that you have 2 TNXB SNPs. I'm happy to share more details on what has been figured out about these specific genes, I'll add an email address to my account.

I don't think the IQ points have been lost forever, I think I've recovered to my peak and possibly surpassed it with carful management of the meds. I think the general case of child prodigies burning out is simply a case of them not being able to get effective treatment and not an unavoidable innate quality.

Sugar is is still a tough one for me, it tends to give me headaches rather quickly which does make it easier to avoid it, but the desire for candy is always there.
Ask HN: Don't You Mind That LLMs Are Mostly Proprietary?
by dakiol | 2025-05-19 22:03:29+00:00
I'm not sure if it's just me getting older or what, but something strikes me as odd about the future of programming and software engineering: LLMs are impressive, but you have to pay to use them. I can't recall another core tool or technology in the software industry—something central not just to the field, but to the world—that isn't free or open source. Think TCP/IP, the Linux kernel, Postgres, Git, ffmpeg, qemu, Latex, Kubernetes, and so on. Sure, there's plenty of proprietary software out there, but it's not the backbone of the internet or the computing industry.

Now, LLMs have the potential to become part of that backbone, yet nobody seems particularly concerned that they’re not open source (I'm talking about GPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini). I know there are open source alternatives, but they’re not nearly as capable—and it seems most people here are perfectly fine using and paying for the proprietary ones.

I don’t like a future where I have to pay for every token just to write a program. And don’t tell me, "Well, just don’t use LLMs"; they’re going to become what Linux is today: ubiquitous.
by lexokoh | 2025-05-19 22:03:48+00:00
Thank you for the thoughtful pushback. This is exactly the kind of discussion I was hoping for.

I totally agree that FOSS + support can be a great model in the right context. We’re definitely not trying to reinvent DRM or lock users out of their own systems without recourse.

Here’s how we think about it:

Many developers building self-hosted tools try to monetize in good faith, especially when selling to large enterprises. But they often lose control over renewals, never-ending trials, and multiple unlicensed deployments. The current model: Send a zip or Docker file and hope, just doesn’t scale.

Kage isn’t about locking software down. It’s about helping developers protect and grow the value of what they’ve built, without needing to write custom scripts or chase invoices. Think of it more like Stripe or Terraform Cloud for licensing and compliance, not DRM or spyware.

That said, false positives are a real risk, and we’ve designed Kage to be graceful by default:

- Licenses include grace periods, pre-expiration alerts, and non-blocking modes.

- You can configure what happens when a license expires from “notify only” to “disable premium features” or “shut down in sandbox environments.”

- It’s all transparent and developer-controllable.

We’re also open-sourcing key parts of the platform (CLI tools, SDKs, deployment templates) to make it auditable and community-driven. Our goal is to give developers more tools, not take control away from users.

Would love to hear more about what a fair and developer-friendly enforcement system looks like to you (or others here). We’re building this for developers first, and that means getting it right.
by sureglymop | 2025-05-19 22:03:54+00:00
Windows in a vm with a passed through GPU is really nice. Although still pretty niche these days it's easier than it used to be. It also works with a single GPU, e.g. on a laptop.

I personally have a desktop PC with an AMD GPU and then another Nvidia GPU that I pass through to windows hosts. I have a hook that changes the display output and switches the inputs using evdev.
by nobody9999 | 2025-05-19 22:04:24+00:00
> WSL1 (the original magic syscall translation vision).

Actually, the OG "magic syscall translation" is Cygwin[0], which dates back to 1995[1].

[0] https://cygwin.com

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin

Edit: Fixed prose.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-19 22:04:26+00:00
Rights violation videos is a genre on YT because of the many examples use of force incidents are more prevalent in the US after the introduction of badge cams. Examples: TCRL and WTPU. Doesn't seem to be as any in the UK or EU. Is there an equivalent to FOIA in the UK or EU to get access to police badge/dash cam footage?
by Herodotus38 | 2025-05-19 22:04:36+00:00
It should be patient dependent. Screening everyone is not currently thought to be useful but those with risk factors should be screened after a discussion of risks/benefits. Your father having prostate cancer (especially if he was diagnosed before age 65) is a risk and I would advocate for it, especially if it something you are worried about and you understand that sometimes a PSA can be falsely elevated in benign conditions, which may mean you get a biopsy that ultimately wasn’t necessary, and the potential risks that could have.

For a good short overview: https://www.cancer.gov/types/prostate/psa-fact-sheet

And read “is the PSA test recommended…”
by claytonjy | 2025-05-19 22:05:34+00:00
anyone have any tips for testing actions locally, rather than workflows?

Despite the name, act is really only for the latter. You can try to test a local action by putting it in a workflow and calling that, but if you do a checkout in your workflow that will overwrite the mount of your local code into the act container, meaning you’ll get the version from the remote branch instead. Depending on the action, you may not be able to comment out the checkout step while testing.
by mikemerrill | 2025-05-19 22:06:25+00:00
We (an open community of AI researchers at Stanford, Anthropic, UW, and more) just released Terminal-Bench, a new open-source framework for evaluating how well AI agents perform in terminal environments. Given how much we all use the terminal and how many new AI terminal assistants are emerging, we wanted to create a rigorous way to test their capabilities.

What we found: The best commercial agents (using models like GPT-4, Claude, Gemini) score less than 20% on our benchmark tasks. Even with their impressive capabilities, these agents struggle with: - Chaining multiple terminal commands together - Reasoning over long command outputs - Acting independently within sensible limits - Executing tasks safely

What's in Terminal-Bench: - Docker-containerized environments for consistent testing - Hand-crafted tasks covering data science, networking, security, and more - Human-verified solutions and test cases - Support for different integration methods

Want to get involved? We're looking for contributors to help expand the benchmark with new challenging tasks. If you've got scenarios where current AI agents fail in the terminal, we'd love to include them!

Check out our website: https://tbench.ai Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/6xWPKhGDbA

What terminal tasks do you wish AI agents could handle better?
by somethingsome | 2025-05-19 22:06:40+00:00
Honestly, in academia you have good hands too, just not every lab. As in business, you also have not so good businesses.

Giving it to academia can 10x the result, but yes research is risky, that's why it's important it is founded externally.

Companies that profited from research in academia are very happy.

Overall I agree, the current European strategy is not optimal, for both Industry and academia.
by beatboxrevival | 2025-05-19 22:07:20+00:00
I think they are suggesting that you can focus on the code that you want to write - whatever that is. Especially since the first line is, "Jules does coding tasks you don't want to do." I took the first image as being someone working on the computer. Or, take back your time doing whatever you want - e.g. cycling, table tennis, etc.
by ClumsyPilot | 2025-05-19 22:07:41+00:00
> The money should be returned to private hands where it belongs and those individuals should be the ones to decide how to invest their own capital

This is not a meaningful statement

‘Returning money in private hands’ does not result in more startup investment, it’s not in the culture to do this.

The money will be put into real estate, bonds, or whatever.

Look at London - it has as much wealth as NewYork or LA but all the money just piles up in real estate or Fintech.

But outside those niches? Good luck getting a farm-tech startup funded, no-one will take a punt.

So it falls to the government to try and kickstart something. As flawed as it may be.

Then they put together a competition for funding that basically feels like a school exam
by hagbard_c | 2025-05-19 22:07:42+00:00
Sweden currently has 65000 shelters [1] with space for about 7 million [2] people while the population has risen to more than 10 million people. According to MSB (Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap or 'civil protection and preparedness authority') no new shelter has been built since 2002 and 'no new shelters are being built at this moment - in their FAQ about the subject the answer to the question 'Can I build a new shelter' is 'No, at the moment no new shelters are being built in Sweden, it is up to the government to decide whether the current threat level mandates the construction of new shelters'. This only goes for public shelters - one of the 65000 mentioned above - and people are free to build their own shelters so it is hard to say how many shelters there actually are.

[1] https://msbgis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/nearby/index.htm...

[2] https://www.riksbyggen.se/bostad/kopa-bostadsratt/lagar-och-...
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-19 22:07:45+00:00
The only angle I can think of is the technology of badge cams. I'm just wondering though, across Western country, if there is uniform access to footage or if some/most countries place obstacles in the way of retrieving it.

In the past, hacker culture was intent on preserving personal dignity and privacy rights and checking the power of the government. It seems like that era has waned.
by pessimizer | 2025-05-19 22:08:16+00:00
Imagine thinking the US just started sending people to torture prisons now. We had a worldwide network of black sites just to torture people, destroyed all the videotapes, pardoned all the torturers, and made the person who destroyed the tapes the head of the CIA a few years later.

> once you start defying lawful orders, people are going to be scared that this same power can be used against them.

I feel like people only born yesterday could say this. There has been a bipartisan push for an Executive unfettered by the legislature since 9/11, and extreme partisans just point at each other. You're both right.
by gusgus01 | 2025-05-19 22:08:25+00:00
At least in New York state, they've recently tried to deal with this discrepancy while still keeping the incentive to install solar. There's a flat rate fee for all electricity customers to be hooked up to the grid to support grid infrastructure. There's also an additional fee to those that have solar panels called the Customer Benefit Contribution that is based off your generation to help fund energy efficiency projects and low-income programs.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-05-19 22:09:22+00:00
> I don't think it was unreasonable to be very skeptical at the time.

Well, that's back rationalization. I saw the advances like conducting meta sentiment analysis on medical papers in the 00's. Deep learning was clearly just the beginning. [0]

> Who would've thought (except you)

You're othering me, which is rude, and you're speaking as though you speak for an entire group of people. Seems kind of arrogant.

0. (2014) https://www.ted.com/talks/jeremy_howard_the_wonderful_and_te...
by dakiol | 2025-05-19 22:09:56+00:00
I don't think that's the solution. Proprietary LLMs will just keep growing, and it doesn't seem like the open source alternatives are gaining much traction. I guess it's because you need a lot of money to train high-quality LLMs (tons of energy, maybe?). Besides, as stated in the title of this post, us, as software engineers, the collective, don't seem to mind much the current state of things as far as I can tell.
by vondur | 2025-05-19 22:10:22+00:00
Not sure why OP’s comment was flagged I think it’s pretty accurate. The government significantly increased the money supply in the 1970s, which contributed to rising inflation. Around the same time, immigration increased, and more women entered the workforce. As a result, maintaining the lifestyle that was once achievable on a single income began to require two incomes. This increased competition for jobs and contributed to wage stagnation. Then by the late 90's after NAFTA had taken hold, hundreds of thousands of good union manufacturing jobs were lost to Mexico. It's only gotten worse since then.
by diggan | 2025-05-19 22:11:24+00:00
> Google’s ability to offer inference for free is a massive competitive advantage vs everyone else:

Haven't tried Jules myself yet, still playing around with Codex, but personally I don't really care if it's free or not. If it solves my problems better than the others, then I'll use it, otherwise I'll use other things.

I'm sure I'm not alone in focusing on how well it works, rather than what it costs (until a certain point).