MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tharant | 2025-05-06 21:19:31+00:00
Is it possible that what happened was an impedance mismatch between you and the engineer such that they couldn’t grok what you told them but ChatGPT was able to describe it in a manner they could understand? Real-life experts (myself included, though I don’t claim to be an expert in much) sometimes have difficulty explaining domain-specific concepts to other folks; it’s not a flaw in anyone, folks just have different ways of assembling mental models.
by 85392_school | 2025-05-06 21:20:10+00:00
It sounds like they have yet to focus on products yet. Loosely quoting https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43907634:

> So the search should work best for people, companies, papers, high quality written content.

> Types of searches Websets doesn't currently do well at: products, content that requires authentication/permissions to access, and non-English content
by lurk2 | 2025-05-06 21:21:22+00:00
> In E.M. Forster’s short story The Machine Stops, he paints a future where a vast machine handles every aspect of human life. People live isolated lives, fully dependent on the machine. They don’t know how it works. They only know how to ask it for things. When the machine breaks down, society collapses. No one remembers how to fix it.

I used to think about this in math class. I could figure out what to do with my calculator most of the time, but I didn’t have any intuitive sense of how things worked. The sine, cosine, and tangent functions are still just black boxes to me, I have no idea what they actually do or how I would calculate their values. I often daydreamed about finding myself on a desert island, needing to make use of trigonometry to rebuild civilization, but not being able to find the angles that I needed.

Lots of other skills are lost this way. I don’t know how to join wood or sew a stitch, but I do know how to operate a nail gun and work a sewing machine. I couldn’t fix either device, but if I couldn’t find anyone to fix them and couldn’t obtain new ones, I would likely have bigger problems to worry about. Most people will only ever need to view these devices as black boxes; the benefits of specialization generally offset the costs introduced by abstraction, absent major market disruptions (e.g. supply chain breakdowns, changing regulatory frameworks, etc.). Most people in human history have spent their lives as generalists on a farm. This hedges the individual against a lot of risk (the generalist can likely always find some work to do), but the real strides in risk management are made by specialists living in urban settlements.
by narcindin | 2025-05-06 21:21:27+00:00
Reminds me of a demo I played 10 years ago called swap box turbo. Designed for two players, it is a simple platformer where you and your partner swap positions and momentum every 3 seconds.

You can play it single player too and have an experience similar to this.

https://www.freeindiegam.es/2012/12/swap-box-turbo-nifflas/
by LinXitoW | 2025-05-06 21:21:37+00:00
Sure, you can emulate some of the features and hope that everyone using your library is doing it "right". Just like you could just use a dynamic language, tag every variable with a type, and hope everyone using your library does the MANUAL work of always doing it correct. Guess we don't need types either.

And while we're at it, why not use assembly? It's all just "syntactic sugar" over bits, doesn't make any difference, right?
by chubot | 2025-05-06 21:21:42+00:00
I think everyone agrees with you, and they did back in say 2016 when I started https://oils.pub

They also agreed with you in the early 1990's. There are some quotes from Richard Stallman, David Korn (author of AT&T ksh), and Tom Duff (author of rc shell) here lamenting Bourne shell:

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2019/01/18.html#slogans-to-exp...

A problem with using a Bourne shell compatible language is that field splitting and file name generation are done on every command word

nobody really knows what the Bourne shell’s grammar is

---

But there is a "collective action" problem. Shell was the 6th FASTEST growing language on Github in 2022: https://octoverse.github.com/2022/top-programming-languages

I imagine that, in 2025, there are MORE new people learning POSIX shell/bash, than say any other shell here: https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Alternative-Shell...

Because they want to get work done for the cloud, or embedded systems, or whatever

Also, LLMs are pretty good at writing shell/bash!

---

Oils is designed to solve the legacy problem. OSH is the most bash-compatible shell in the world [1]:

https://oils.pub/osh.html

and then you also have an upgrade to YSH, a legacy-free shell, with real data structures: https://oils.pub/ysh.html

YSH solves many legacy problems, including the exact problems from the 1990's pointed out above :-)

So to the extent that you care about moving off of bash for scripting, you should probably prefer OSH and YSH to Brush

It looks like Brush aims for the OSH part (compatible), but there is no YSH part (dropping legacy)

(I may run Brush through our spec tests to see how compatible it is, but looking at number of tests / lines of code, I think it has quite some distance to go.)

[1] e.g. early this year, Koichi Murase rewrote bash arrays in OSH to use a new sparse data structure, which I mentioned in the latest blog post. Koichi is the author of the biggest shell program in the world (ble.sh), and also a bash contributor.

https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell...
by egorfine | 2025-05-06 21:23:10+00:00
> you need to use the grep flag instead of piping into grep

I don't. It's the journalctl that does. And it can absolutely fuck off with everything and all of it.

Log files must be in form of text files. This worked for decades and there is no foreseeable future where this stops working or ceases to be a solution for OS log collection.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-06 21:23:33+00:00
> Let me unequivocal: you can spend 30-40 years at a company doing absolutely nothing while getting paid for it.

Maybe this was true for 40 years from the 70s to the 2000s, or maybe even the 80s-10s, but I don't think this is true anymore

Certainly not in software engineering, in a world run by JIRA
by firesteelrain | 2025-05-06 21:23:38+00:00
I am not wrong - you can be imprisoned and you are breaking the law for being an illegal inmigrant trying to enter the US illegally. Illegal immigrants or asylum seekers are not fellow citizens

It’s not hateful to be a law abiding citizen. Please stop using hyperbole and using those words because it’s wrong and you have no evidence. It’s an ad hominem attack which isn’t allowed on HN
by josefresco | 2025-05-06 21:24:22+00:00
This is kind of... "a thing". Not exclusive to this statue:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3993542/Cemetery-st...

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/9qeu4a/the_penis_on_...

https://www.pipeaway.com/statue-rubbing-good-luck-or-bad-tas...
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-06 21:24:48+00:00
> AIs aren't intended to be used as calculators though?

Then why are we using them to write code, which should produce reliable outputs for a given input...much like a calculator.

Obviously we want the code to produce correct results for whatever input we give, and as it stands now, I can't trust LLM output without reviewing first. Still a helpful tool, but ultimately my desire would be to have them be as accurate as a calculator so they can be trusted enough to not need the review step.

Using an LLM and being OK with untrustworthy results, it'd be like clicking the terminal icon on my dock and sometimes it opens terminal, sometimes it might open a browser, or just silently fail because there's no reproducible output for any given input to an LLM. To me that's a problem, output should be reproducible, especially if it's writing code.
by Arnavion | 2025-05-06 21:25:15+00:00
Explicit allocators do work with Rust, as evidenced by them already working for libstd's types, as I said. The mistake was to not have them from day one which has caused most code to assume GlobalAlloc.

As long as the type is generic on the allocator, the lifetimes of the allocator don't appear in the type. So eg if your allocator is using a stack array in main then your allocator happens to be backed by `&'a [MaybeUninit<u8>]`, but things like Vec<T, A> instantiated with A = YourAllocator<'a> don't need to be concerned with 'a themselves.

Eg: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=nightly&mode=debug&editi... do_something_with doesn't need to have any lifetimes from the allocator.

If by Zig-style allocators you specifically mean type-erased allocators, as a way to not have to parameterize everything on A:Allocator, then yes the equivalent in Rust would be a &'a dyn Allocator that has an infectious 'a lifetime parameter instead. Given the choice between an infectious type parameter and infectious lifetime parameter I'd take the former.
by Coeur | 2025-05-06 21:26:49+00:00
update: thanks for the clarifications!

Unfortunately the article does not answer what the button does, which is quite relevant.

Does it send the user to the amazon website (which would be allowed under the new rule)? Or does it complete the purchase inside the app using the credit card Amazon has on file for the user without paying Apple anything (which would be quite the affront towards Apple)?
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-05-06 21:26:55+00:00
They calculated that, by offsetting the cost of production through byproduct uses or sales, the resulting sugar could be sold for as low as 28 cents per pound, making it competitive with low-cost imported sugar.

Not in the US. Americans pay double global sugar prices so as to protect the corn lobby.

Regardless, the economics could still be there if this is truly waste trash. The article did not mention how the cellulose is currently used. Animal feed? Mulch? Landfill? I guess there is somebody who pays something for access to the material.

Edit: mangled the phrasing
by Volundr | 2025-05-06 21:27:03+00:00
> What is the practical difference you're imagining between "consistently correct guess" and "knowledge"?

Knowing it's correct. You've just instructed it not to guess remember? With practice people can get really good at guessing all sorts of things.

I think people have a serious misunderstanding about how these things work. They don't have their training set sitting around for reference. They are usually guessing. Most of the time with enough consistency that it seems like they "know'. Then when they get it wrong we call it "hallucinations". But instructing then not to guess means suddenly they can't answer much. There no guessing vs not with an LLM, it's all the same statistical process, the difference is just if it gives the right answer or not.
by egorfine | 2025-05-06 21:27:05+00:00
> Look at the output of `systemctl cat docker.service`

No. Either the initsystem works in a straightforward way or it doesn't. As soon as we need special commands to just get an impression of what's happening with the service, this init system can - again - fuck off with all that unnecessary complexity.

Init must be simple.

Unfortunately it isn't anymore. Unfortunately, systemd will not fuck off, it's too late for that. Unfortunately we now have to deal with the consequences of letting LP & co do what they did.
by hedora | 2025-05-06 21:27:08+00:00
I do this occasionally when it's time sensitive, and I cannot find a reasonable source to read. e.g., "ChatGPT says cut the blue wire, not the red one. I found the bomb schematics it claims say this, but they're paywalled."

If that's all the available information and you're out of time, you may as well cut the blue wire. But, pretty much any other source is automatically more trustworthy.
by dewster | 2025-05-06 21:27:42+00:00
There are 50 or so kits spread out all over the world, some in the hands of the world's best Thereminists, which has been quite gratifying. But the project has been in a bit of a hiatus while I do more R&D, and the current tariff situation isn't exactly filling me with enthusiasm. Enclosures and antennas have been a burden for some, a wine box build is probably your best bet. I don't mind supplying hand-wound coils and any guidance you may need. My contact info is on the support page.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-06 21:27:45+00:00
Yeah I really dislike the whisperiness of this voice "Lasinya". It sounds too much like an erotic phone service. I wonder if there's any alternative voice? I don't see Lasinya even mentioned in the public coqui models: https://github.com/coqui-ai/STT-models/releases . But I don't see a list of other model names I could use either.

I tried to select kokoro in the python module but it says in the logs that only coqui is available. I do have to say the coqui models sound really good, it's just the type of voice that puts me off.

The default prompt is also way too "girlfriendy" but that was easily fixed. But for the voice, I simply don't know what the other options are for this engine.

PS: Forgive my criticism of the default voice but I'm really impressed with the responsiveness of this. It really responds so fast. Thanks for making this!
by xur17 | 2025-05-06 21:28:12+00:00
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by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-05-06 21:28:56+00:00
A more interesting link is https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/issues?q=l... IMO. Glancing down that list, a lot of them aren't what I would personally view as major problems (ex. "rustup is inappropriate for security critical software" - maybe it is, but that's not a specific exploitable bug), but I would suggest https://github.com/trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs/issues/575 as a potentially interesting looking example.

> I apologize, I do not bookmark these issues, but maybe I should start doing that?

Yes. If you want to point out problems, it really helps if you can point at specifics.

> In any case, you will find logic bugs which may raise the question "is it really worth the rewrite?".

There's a cost/benefit question, but note that the mere presence of some bugs doesn't make a rewrite worthless.
by dhosek | 2025-05-06 21:29:13+00:00
Generalizing from my own experience, it’s easier for me to understand a non-native Spanish speaker than a native Spanish speaker and I would guess that the same applies with ESL speakers. One thing I found really fascinating is that even though I’d never studied French¹, I actually had an easier time understanding a conversation between my ex-wife and her aunt in French than when they spoke Spanish in which I was functional (my skill in the language has gone up a great deal since then so that I now read fluently, and speak and listen reasonably well, albeit less well than I would like).

⸻

1. Thanks to my kids studying French on Duolingo and my joining them, I can no longer say that I’ve never studied it.
by nicce | 2025-05-06 21:29:22+00:00
That would hit the Google One revenue if people would use alternatives…

But also, it must have something to do with law enforcement. On the other hand, Google may say that forensic investigation of phone is harder (if no jailbreak), but on the otherhand it is easier to hand over the data behind the scenes from the remote cloud.

Backups are not E2EE by default (user can enable, so they have an argument), so in most cases law enforcement can access WhatsApp messages, SMS messages and anything else without a problem. Many people don’t think about this, and defaults matter.
by metalrain | 2025-05-06 21:31:08+00:00
If there would be massive EMP that fried all chips around me, I would be for short while somewhat useless.

Most of what I've done is in software, I could not build computer from electronic parts, not even full adder from memory. Maybe I could read some schematics, but most measurement devices use chips as well, it would very difficult.

I think preparation should be skills, useful in any environment.
by sophacles | 2025-05-06 21:31:29+00:00
Why? In 2025 we have tooling available for most every editor that will annotate that information into the display without needing them present in the file. When I autocomplete a function name, all the parameters are there for me to fill in, and annotated into the display afterwards. It seems like an unnecessary step to reify it and force the bytes to be present in the the saved file.
by averageRoyalty | 2025-05-06 21:31:32+00:00
Maybe I missed this, but isn't the underlying concept here big news?

Am I understanding this right? It seems that by reading areas of the brain, a machine can effectively act as a rendering engine with knowledge on colour, brightness etc per pixel based on an image the person is seeing? And AI is being used to help because this method is lossy?

This seems huge, is there other terminology around this I can kagi to understand more?
by hedora | 2025-05-06 21:32:38+00:00
The vast majority of developers are 10-100x more likely to find a security hole in a random tool than spend time improving their reputation on a bug bounty site that pays < 10% their salary.

That makes it extremely hard to build a reputation system for a site like that. Almost all the accounts are going to be spam, and the highest quality accounts are going to freshly created and take ~ 1 action on the platform.
by dhosek | 2025-05-06 21:32:40+00:00
I’ve seen some online quizzes that based on regional variations in accent (does root rhyme with foot or boot?) and vocabulary (what do you call a sweet fizzy beverage) that did a great job of locating where my Facebook friends back in the day grew up. It got me a bit off largely because while I grew up in Chicago, I had spent most of my adult life in Los Angeles so I tend to prefer “freeway” to “expressway” (changing that answer moved me from Rockford to Chicago).
by staticman2 | 2025-05-06 21:32:40+00:00
Yes my suggestion is that negations can work just fine, depending on the model and task, and instead of avoiding negations you can try other promoting strategies like emphasizing what you want at the beginning and at the end of the prompt.

If you think negations never work tell Gemini 2.5 to "write 10 sentences that do not include the word the" and see what happens.
by rglover | 2025-05-06 21:33:05+00:00
I sympathize with the nihilism, but having built tools that do just work as described, I've found that the problem is mostly rooted in a culture obsessed with novelty. And not novelty with a point (a truly better solution comes out), but novelty for novelty's sake (something new to talk about that's "popular" in dev circles, even if it's junk).

The only way to build solid things is to start with the POV that they need to exist and be stable long-term. You have to give a shit about simplicity, stability, performance, backwards compatibility, etc. You have to teach people what you know and form professional opinions around why you do or do not go with the crowd (and stand behind them, even under pressure from those who don't "know how").

If you commit to that (and I mean commit long-term, not for a year but decades), you can build things that don't break constantly, don't require constant maintenance, and don't drive you insane.
by dmitrygr | 2025-05-06 21:34:25+00:00
App Store revenue was a significant source of income for Apple. Money that paid for development of iPhone and iOS. I don’t know what sort of idiotic thinking it takes to imagine that they won’t need to find another way to recapture that money. It will probably come in the form of higher costs for development licenses, or hardware. For example, absolutely nothing stops them from charging you for using the SDK. No one said it had to be free.

Everyone screaming about how happy they are about this seem to be ignoring the fact that Apple is not a charity
by i_have_an_idea | 2025-05-06 21:34:51+00:00
Not sure why this is being downvoted, but it's absolutely true.

If you're using these models to generate code daily, the costs add up.

Sure, I'll give a really tough problem to o3 (and probably over ChatGPT, not the API), but on general code tasks, there really isn't meaningful enough difference to justify 4x the cost.
by breuleux | 2025-05-06 21:35:32+00:00
> I've been contested that the second Gödel incompleteness theorem "can't be applied like this to the brain" but I stubbornly insist yes, the brain implements _some_ formal system and it can't understand how that system works

I would argue that the second incompleteness theorem doesn't have much relevance to the human brain, because it is trying to prove a falsehood. The brain is blatantly not a consistent system. It is, however, paraconsistent: we are perfectly capable of managing a set of inconsistent premises and extracting useful insight from them. That's a good thing.

It's also true that we don't understand how our own brain works, of course.
by victorantos | 2025-05-06 21:36:06+00:00
This is classic OpenAI - acquiring competitors rather than innovating internally. They're desperately trying to keep up with competition from Anthropic and Microsoft's GitHub, but throwing money at the problem is hardly a creative solution.

What's especially rich is the timing - right after OpenAI backpedaled on their restructuring plans due to "public pushback" (read: Sam Altman making yet another governance blunder). Now they're dumping billions into a tool that's essentially the same thing everyone else is building.