MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by msm_ | 2025-05-06 15:46:10+00:00
Who are you shouting at?

Going back to the topic of the discussion, making sudo more resilient prevents a whole class of possible bugs (see CVE-2021-3156). You may not like sudo, but it is very commonly used to manage access, prevent accidental errors, or improve accountability on Linux servers and workstations. It is not going away. Therefore, improving sudo is a worthwhile goal and a thing to be celebrated.
by conductr | 2025-05-06 15:46:35+00:00
That’s all great but, how?

First, recognize that if you’re in the situation at the beginning of the article. A dev, banging out tasks that don’t quite move the needle or seem important towards actually achieving any milestones. It’s possible thats by design, your the random job site broom sweeper cleaning up at the end of the day (construction metaphor). It’s also likely your management/leadership is failing you. They’re failing by not prioritizing your work. You need to know what larger goals exist and are politically important to the organization and then what tasks you can do to accelerate that goal achievement. This is what your manager should be doing. If they’re not, and you just work on a random list or todos, start pushing them for prioritization in every 1 on 1 and every checkin or whatever touchpoint you have. Make sure you understand what other higher level goals the prioritized work supports so you know where to fill in gaps and can be proactive and mention when you think something is off track (eg “hey boss, I’m working on X but it seems somewhat redundant to Y, can we merge these as a cohesive solution?”)

Once you get this part down, you start learning the decision makers in the company (or the highest ones you have some access to) and you start getting their opinions on what projects are higher priority or more crucial to the business. If you can build rapport with a few of these people and make sure you’re contributions are known and appreciated towards things they find valuable and important, your career will start to progress fast(er) in almost every aspect.

When these people eventually leave for a new gig, you want to be the ones they try to poach. If they stay and get promoted, you want to be the ones they think of for their new initiatives.
by 7402 | 2025-05-06 15:46:48+00:00
I think a lot of people don't understand statistics, which may make it hard for doctors to choose how to communicate things, even if they do have important knowledge that could be helpful.

I once asked a doctor how long a relative might have to stay in intensive care:

A: Oh, I couldn't possibly say.

Q: Do you think he might be home in 3 or 4 days?

A: Oh, no, not that soon.

Q: So it might even be as long at 3 weeks?

A: I highly doubt it would be that long.

Q: So a reasonable estimate might be 1-2 weeks?

A: Oh, I couldn't possibly say.

I started the conversation having no idea whatsoever how long it would be, but I ended up with a good feel for a time estimate along with error bars.
by crat3r | 2025-05-06 15:47:14+00:00
Fair, but I am seeing so much talk about how it is completing actual SDE tickets. Maybe not this model specifically, but to be honest I don't care about generating dummy data, I care about the claims that these newer models are on par with junior engineers.

Junior engineers will complete a task to update an API, or fix a bug on the front-end, within a couple days with lets say 80 percent certainty they hit the mark (maybe an inflated metric). How are people comparing the output of these models to that of a junior engineer if they generally just say "Here is some of my code, what's wrong with it?". That certainly isn't taking a real ticket and completing it in any capacity.

I am obviously very skeptical but mostly I want to try one of these models myself but in reality I think that my higher-ups would think that they introduce both risk AND the potential for major slacking off haha.
by rhet0rica | 2025-05-06 15:47:23+00:00
Looks like it's a special font provided by https://github.com/jdan/98.css (Which has come a long way in the past couple of years, despite still being 0.1.x)

Although there is a CSS rule for manipulating how fonts are anti-aliased, it was never standardized, and Firefox doesn't implement the vital no-smoothing option: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/font-smooth

Maybe with enough retro revivals it will receive attention.
by toast0 | 2025-05-06 15:47:24+00:00
I've been in plenty of department stores with windows though. And I don't think I've been to any that drew a false sky on the ceiling. Many stores and malls have skylights too, although when they're the translucent ones, they might be also uplit, so you might not notice it's dark outside.

I think there's at least a difference of degree, but I think it's more than that.
by smeg_it | 2025-05-06 15:47:44+00:00
I'm sorry for the late reply, but I wanted to thank you for the reply. I did a quick scan of genode on wikipedia. I've heard of it and might have seen articles over the years, but it says it's a framework and it kinda says it was built for study. You kind of hit on my point. Microkernels have been around for many years, but there has never really been enough resources put in to make them viable for general desktop use, except for Minx but that was proprietary. From what I read, it wasn't made open source until too late.
by thefourthchime | 2025-05-06 15:47:57+00:00
This is a really interesting idea! I'll be honest, it took me a minute to really get what it was doing. The GitHub page video doesn't play with any audio, so it's not clear what's happening.

Once I watched the video, I think I have a better understanding. One thing I would like to see is more of a breakdown of how this solves a problem that just a big model itself wouldn't.
by SpaceNugget | 2025-05-06 15:47:58+00:00
Yea so you have to add the compiled queries to your back-end to be able to get them on prod, which is what you came out swinging against with a somewhat strongly worded to level comment berating people who choose to not use graphql for having to deal with. Exactly what you just described doing is what the parent comment expected you were doing.
by myself248 | 2025-05-06 15:48:02+00:00
Oh yeah. It snapped me out of immersion the first time too.

But upon reflection, I find it forgivable, because if you think about what it would've taken to make it accurate, and then enough narrative to explain it to the fraction of the audience not up on the technical details, you've got a recipe for 15 minutes of yawns.

The story is no more or less valid for that directorial shorthand, and it could easily be replaced with an authentic scene if you really wanted to. It would break the pacing but not the plot.
by johnnyjeans | 2025-05-06 15:48:19+00:00
Because they explain nothing and aren't useful for building new insights. It's not a direct verification of the existence or lack-of-existence of a thing with given properties. It relies on rules lawyering in a very specific logic to say something with basically no substance. Allowing it causes more problems for automated proofs than they solve, so long as your domain only deals with finites (which all real-world domains do exclusively.)

They're also generally much easier to create than constructive proofs, which makes them a convenient go-to for lazy academics.
by linksnapzz | 2025-05-06 15:48:39+00:00
I worked at UCSD in one of the "temporary" classroom/offices next to the Eucalyptus Point dining hall. We had a family of raccoons under ours for several years, which I blamed on the questionable shoring and piers that supported those.

In addition, one of my co-workers was heavy enough such that he could deform the floor in one just by standing up and walking around, so much so that pens/markers would roll off nearby desks as he went past.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-06 15:49:05+00:00
I couldn't agree more. It really is important for developers careers to learn at least a bit of business speak, and try to learn how to frame problems in ways that business people understand and care about

At the end of the day, most decisions at a business come down to a cost versus benefit, assuming that the business is behaving more or less rationally

Most business people in my experience also view the software itself as an expense, not an asset. I find that software devs do not understand that. "What do you mean the software is a cost center. This whole business sells software, how can we make money without software?"

This isn't how many business types view it. The software doesn't matter to them at all. They would love if they could just sell nothing, so their costs would be zero and their profit margin would be infinite. That is the actual dream

It's not rational but you gotta understand that sales doesn't sell on rational, they sell on vibes, good relationships, bribes, whatever they can get away with.

Trying to be rational when selling puts you on too level of a playing field with other sellers, so they pursue other angles
by HelloImSteven | 2025-05-06 15:49:16+00:00
Apple's documentation used to be quite good—many useful guides, thousands of technical notes, development books quarterly—it's really a shame that they've turned their back on that. Their old docs leaned toward being overly detailed, which some complained about at the time, but I'd much prefer that over near radio silence.

Apple's also been deleting more and more of its old documentation. Much of the it can only be found on aging DVDs now, or web/FTP archives if you're lucky. Even more annoying is how some of the deleted docs are _still_ referenced modern docs and code samples.
by hashmak_jsn | 2025-05-06 15:49:24+00:00
Good point — just to clarify, the "279x" number isn’t about parallel deletes. The parallel test runs a mix of operations (insert, query, update, delete) across multiple threads. Each thread works on its own document range to simulate a real-world concurrent workload (like telemetry ingestion).

SQLite (even in WAL mode) hits write lock contention under concurrency, while AnuDB (using RocksDB) handles concurrent writes better due to its design.

Also, AnuDB supports indexing via an API using RocksDB's prefix extractor, so it’s not just a key-value store — basic filtering is supported.

Appreciate the feedback — will revise the post to make this clearer!
Show HN: MCPBar – Open-Source Package Manager with Open Registry for MCP Servers
by jdeng | 2025-05-06 15:49:27+00:00
I've built MCPBar (https://www.mcp.bar), an open-source CLI tool that brings npm-like package management to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem, solving the fragmentation problem for AI tools.

What is MCPBar?

- A package manager for discovering and installing MCP servers (which connect AI models to tools/APIs)

- Uses a standardized mcp.json manifest format (similar to package.json) (link: https://github.com/in-fun/mcpbar/blob/main/doc/proposal.md)

- Works across multiple MCP clients like Claude, Cursor, and Windsurf

- Includes an open registry with standardized metadata for MCP servers

Why I built it:

The MCP ecosystem is growing rapidly but lacks standardization. Each AI client implements MCP differently, making discovery and installation frustratingly manual. MCPBar creates a decentralized-yet-standardized approach to package management for AI tools.

Technical highlights:

- Decentralized registry pattern inspired by npm and ESM imports

- Manifest files contain standardized metadata and installation instructions

- Cross-platform support (works on macOS/Windows/Linux)

- Simple CLI interface: mcpbar install github/github-mcp-server

Try it:

npm install -g mcpbar

mcpbar search github # Find GitHub-related MCP servers

mcpbar install github/github-mcp-server # Install a GitHub MCP server

GitHub: https://github.com/in-fun/mcpbar

Project site: https://www.mcp.bar

I'd love feedback on the manifest format, the CLI interface, and whether this approach makes sense for the evolving MCP ecosystem. Are there other features you'd want this to support?
by koakuma-chan | 2025-05-06 15:50:14+00:00
No, it's just bad. I've been writing a lot of Python code past two days with Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview, and all of its code was like:

```python

def whatever():

--- SECTION ONE OF THE CODE --- ... --- SECTION TWO OF THE CODE --- try: [some "dangerous" code] except Exception as e: logging.error(f"Failed to save files to {output_path}: {e}") # Decide whether to raise the error or just warn # raise IOError(f"Failed to save files to {output_path}: {e}")

```

(it adds commented out code like that all the time, "just in case")

It's terrible.

I'm back to Claude Code.
by osrec | 2025-05-06 15:50:24+00:00
A less evolved sense of humility (as I originally put it) does not equate to stupid. They are far from stupid - they are ruthless consumers of every scrap of advantage they can get, including the best education, food, clothes to name but a few things. They believe they deserve that advantage.

In fact, they see the person who can't afford lunch as stupid - after all, an intelligent person should at least be able to get lunch - it's so easy! What they don't realise is how much each person is impacted by their own starting position in life (which, I believe to be random), and how that in turn impacts where they are now.

Many "privileged" people lack empathy, because they believe the tables can never turn. They don't even want to entertain the thought. They believe their privilege is a birthright. In some cases, they are probably correct; they will enjoy privilege for their entire lives. But in exceptional circumstances, they will be caught out, and their opinion will undoubtedly change.

So, it's not stupidity, it is willful ignorance. History is full of such examples, some more chilling and devastating than others.
by loeg | 2025-05-06 15:50:37+00:00
> Northwestern scientists identified that piperacillin, an antibiotic in the same class as penicillin, effectively cured mice of Lyme disease at 100-times less than the effective dose of doxycycline.

Would be nice if it translates to humans.

> The authors argue that piperacillin, which has already been FDA-approved as a safe treatment for pneumonia, could also be a candidate for preemptive interventions for those potentially exposed to Lyme (with a known deer tick bite).
by emporas | 2025-05-06 15:50:39+00:00
It works very well (99.9%), when the problem resides at a familiar territory of the user's knowledge. When i know enough about a problem, i know how to decompose it into smaller pieces, and all (most?) smaller pieces have been already solved countless of times.

When a problem is far outside of my understanding, A.I. leads me towards a wrong path more often than not. Accuracy is terrible, because i don't know how to decompose the problem.

Jargon plays a crucial role there. LLM's need to guided using as much correct jargon of the problem as possible.

I have done this for decades on people. I read a book at some point that the most sure way for people to like you, is to speak to them in words they usually use themselves. No matter the concepts they are hearing with their ears, if the words belong belong in their familiar vocabulary they are more than happy to discuss anything.

So when i meet someone, i always try to absorb as much of their vocabulary as possible, as quickly as possible, and then i use it to describe ideas i am interested in. People understand much better like that.

Anyway, the same holds true for LLM's, they need to hear the words of the problem, expressed in that particular jargon. So when a programmer wants to use a library, he needs to absorb the jargon used in that particular library. It is only then that accuracy rates hit many nines.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-05-06 15:51:05+00:00
I don't think social media is inherently toxic — I remember early time-based social media feeds and problems felt a lot smaller (though of course audiences were smaller). Even looking back at livejournal as social media, things were sometimes dramatic, but also a lot different.

Maybe it's impossible to make monolithic social media non-toxic because of all the levers also required to make it profitable via engagement.

It's very hard to distinguish social media from the algorithms that certainly reward toxic behavior today. You can look at Mastodon as a possible less-toxic counter-example, but we're now in a place where the audience demographics diverge so it's hard to be certain either way.
by techpineapple | 2025-05-06 15:51:17+00:00
These seem like mostly custscene graphics and not gameplay graphics? Good vibes, but I'm curious how much of a living world it is when you're in it.

Also, curious how they'll manage the synergy between 80's and modern vibes. The graphics/music are clearly going for the 80's Miami vice vibes, but most of the characterizations seem modern, and I assume the cars will be a combination?
by codebolt | 2025-05-06 15:51:22+00:00
I've found they do a decent job searching for bugs now as well. Just yesterday I had a bug report on a component/page I wasn't familiar with in our Angular app. I simply described the issue as well as I could to Claude and asked politely for help figuring out the cause. It found the exact issue correctly on the first try and came up with a few different suggestions for how to fix it. The solutions weren't quite what I needed but it still saved me a bunch of time just figuring out the error.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-05-06 15:51:29+00:00
Even Wikipedia says Whataboutism can be completely deserved in some cases.

It is absolutely deserved here - Apple built a 100 foot tower, and it's grown hairy over the last few decades. Linux built 7 30 foot towers without stairs in the same timeframe; but yelling about the overgrowth on the 100 foot tower is still somehow defensible.

If they can't build their own towers correctly, they have no right to act like the main tower was built worse than their own.

(Edit, posting too fast: For the complaint that Apple has money, Linux does too. 90%+ of work on Linux comes from corporate sponsorship, and has since 2004 when it was first counted. They are fully capable of doing better.)
by noworriesnate | 2025-05-06 15:52:56+00:00
I’m glad that the status quo works for you, but it doesn’t work for most people which is why there is so much upheaval right now. It’s screwed up that our society makes raising children so hard. It’s screwed up that our society is so low trust. Those are two things that were much better when we were setting the west and it’s worth exploring how we can return somewhat to those times.

By the way, I don’t think anyone wants to return fully to those times. The question is, on what ways can we return and get the maximum benefit for our people? That is a conversation worth having.
by kragen | 2025-05-06 15:52:56+00:00
Well, possibly it isn't. Possibly LLMs are limited in ways that humans aren't, and that's why the staggering advances from GPT-2 to GPT-3 and from GPT-3 to GPT-4 have not continued. Certainly GPT-4 doesn't seem to be more powerful than the largest nuclear weapons.

But OpenAI isn't limited to creating LLMs. OpenAI's objective is not to create LLMs but to create artificial general intelligence that is better than humans at all intellectual tasks. Examples of such tasks include:

1. Designing nuclear weapons.

2. Designing and troubleshooting mining, materials processing, and energy production equipment.

3. Making money by investing in the stock market.

4. Discovering new physics and chemistry.

5. Designing and troubleshooting electronics such as GPUs.

6. Building better AI.

7. Cracking encryption.

8. Finding security flaws in computer software.

9. Understanding the published scientific literature.

10. Inferring unpublished discoveries of military significance from the published scientific literature.

11. Formulating military strategy.

Presumably you can see that a system capable of doing all these things can easily be used to produce an unlimited quantity of nuclear weapons, thus making it more powerful than any nuclear weapon.

If LLMs turn out not to be able to do those things better than humans, OpenAI will try other approaches, sooner or later. Maybe it'll turn out to be impossible, or much further off than expected, but that's not what OpenAI is claiming.
by gavin-1 | 2025-05-06 15:53:07+00:00
"long Lyme" isn't well defined, but you're probably thinking of chronic lyme [1]. This article refers to PTLD.

The distinction matters. Chronic lyme is quackery that encourages people to pursue aggressive long-term antibiotic treatment for a non-existent persistent bacterial infection. Often these are people who have never been infected with Borrelia in the first place.

The article directly contradicts the persistent (undetectable) bacterial infection "chronic lyme" theory.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronic_Lyme_disease
by malthaus | 2025-05-06 15:53:09+00:00
communication is probably the most important skillset in any organisation and 9 months of interim work is not sufficient enough for you to realize it.

so this reads like any other salty engineer who thinks he's smarter than everyone in the org, business people are useless and if only he would yield decision power, all issues would be solved immediately.

but guess what, it's usually not true and that mindset is usually not good to collaborate with either.
by nullc | 2025-05-06 15:53:09+00:00
I really disliked hackers when it came out, except for the sound track. Never saw it again until some twentieth anniversary watch party, and from that distance saw it for what it was and found it amusing. ... I still wouldn't call it a great movie, but enjoyable enough or at least I now get why people like it.

Certainly far better than The Net, as low of a bar as that is.
by stackskipton | 2025-05-06 15:53:45+00:00
Sure, if you are using single binary output language like Golang, Rust, C or .Net/Java self contained, containers are overkill if you are not using container management system.

However, Ruby, Python, JS/TS, Java/.Net are all easier inside a container then outside. Not to say it's not doable, just hair pulling.
by conrs | 2025-05-06 15:54:05+00:00
I've had a very hard time with the Product Manager discipline. From the books and podcasts like Lenny's, it all makes perfect sense, but it seems like in practice it is as you described - they've inserted themselves in between and often don't represent either side well. It's lead me to develop product management skills myself, which are honestly incredibly useful in avoiding wasted effort. But it does make me wonder whether the dichotomy is worth it or if product management should be part of a senior engineer's skillset.
by preommr | 2025-05-06 15:54:45+00:00
Elaborate, because I have serious doubts about this.

If we're talking about just slapping on tailwind+component-library(e.g. shadcn-ui, material), then that's just one step-above using no-code solutions. Which, yes, that works well. But if someone didn't need customized logic, then it was always possible to just hop on fiverr or use some very simple template-based tools to accomplish this.

If we're talking more advanced logic, understanding aesthetics, etc. Then I'd say it's much worse than other coding areas like backend, because they work on a visual and ux level beyond just code which is just text manipulation (and what llms excel at). In other words, I think the results are still very shallow beyond first impressions.
by mgw | 2025-05-06 15:55:01+00:00
This has also been my biggest gripe with Gemini 2.5 Pro. While it is fantastic at one-shotting major new features, when wanting to make smaller iterative changes, it always does big refactors at the same time. I haven't found a way to change that behavior through changes in my prompts.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet is much more restrained and does smaller changes.