MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by buu700 | 2025-05-04 20:59:08+00:00
I think the author has a fair take on the types of LLM output he has experience with, but may be overgeneralizing his conclusion. As shown by his example, he seems to be narrowly focusing on the use case of giving the AI some small snippet of text and asking it to stretch that into something less information-dense — like the stereotypical "write a response to this email that says X", and sending that output instead of just directly saying X.

I personally tend not to use AI this way. When it comes to writing, that's actually the exact inverse of how I most often use AI, which is to throw a ton of information at it in a large prompt, and/or use a preexisting chat with substantial relevant context, possibly have it perform some relevant searches and/or calculations, and then iterate on that over successive prompts before landing on a version that's close enough to what I want for me to touch up by hand. Of course the end result is clearly shaped by my original thoughts, with the writing being a mix of my own words and a reasonable approximation of what I might have written by hand anyway given more time allocated to the task, and not clearly identifiable as AI-assisted. When working with AI this way, asking to "read the prompt" instead of my final output is obviously a little ridiculous; you might as well also ask to read my browser history, some sort of transcript of my mental stream of consciousness, and whatever notes I might have scribbled down at any point.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-05-04 20:59:10+00:00
Something I just realized that might be germane to this little discussion: I am European, not American.

We often use the word "democracy" as the vast eco-system underlying and upholding modern liberal societies in general, not just the elected parts. Whether that's correct use of the word - I suspect you think it's not - I leave open for discussion. If you want I can use the narrow definition in which case we are mostly in agreement.

Judges should exercise due caution and be mindful of their obvious biases.

However, this works both ways. Officials cater to their often not so well-informed electorate and this group, The People, is as susceptible to biases - if not more - as the so called elites are. Both should exercise restraint and be mindful of their biases, not just the judiciary. It takes a populist to claim The People are always right.

As you can tell I am also very much an amateur. I suggest you don't approach me as someone who has studied political science because I'll have a hard time keeping up.
by lelanthran | 2025-05-04 20:59:21+00:00
> You don't need an SPA to handle incrementing a counter. If a page needs dynamic behavior you add JS to it, whether it's just adding an in-memory counter or an API call to store and retrieve some data. It's not difficult to write JavaScript.

I agree with this. Sprinkle in the JS as and when it is needed.

> The problem with SPAs is that they force having to maintain a JS-driven system on every single page, even those that don't have dynamic behavior.

I don't agree with this: SPAs don't force "... having to maintain a JS-driven system on every single page..."

SPA frameworks do.

I think it's possible to do reasonably simple SPAs without a written-completely-in-JSX-with-Typescript-and-a-5-step-build-process-that-won't-work-without-25-npm-dependencies.

I'm currently trying out a front-end mechanism to go with my high-velocity back-end mechanism. I think I've got a good story sorted out, but it's early days and while I have used my exploratory prototype in production, I've only recently iterated it into a tiny and neat process that has no build-step, no npm, and no JS requirement for the page author. All it uses is `<script src=...>` in the `<head>`, with no more JS on the rest of the page.

Very limited though, but it's still early days.
by sawyna | 2025-05-04 20:59:22+00:00
My personal daily experience with this! I first used vertexai APIs because that's what they suggested, that Gemini APIs are not for production use.

Then there comes the Google.generativeai. I don't remember the reason but they were pushing me to start using this library.

Now it's all flashy google.genai libraries that they are pushing!

I have figured that this is what I should use and this is the documentation that I should look for, because doing a Google search or using an LLM gives me so many confusing results. The only thing that works for sure is reading the library code. That's what I'm doing these days.

For example, the documentation in one of those above libraries say that Gemini can read a document from cloud storage if you give it the uri. That doesn't work in google.genai library. I couldn't figure out why. I imagined maybe Gemini might need access to the cloud storage bucket, but I couldn't find any documentation as to how I can do that. I finally understood that I need to use the new file API and that uri works.

Yes, I like Gemini model they are really good. But the library documentation can be significantly simpler.
by cyanic | 2025-05-04 20:59:38+00:00
Location: Europe Remote: Preferred (any timezone) Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Go, Python, JavaScript, C, C++, Bash, HTML/CSS, SQL, ES6+, PHP, GNU/Linux, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, GraphQL, gRPC, Docker, Docker Compose, Git, CI/CD, Flask, FastAPI, Node.js, React, Next.js, Grafana, Prometheus, Kafka, Elasticsearch, Redis, KVM, Kubernetes, Nomad, Digital Ocean, Scaleway, AWS, GCP Résumé/CV: Upon request Email: hired at codecyanic dot com

Hi, I'm a backend-focused generalist software engineer with over 10 years of experience. My expertise is in Go and Python backend development, as well as JavaScript frontend development. I have a strong experience in technical leadership and driving projects from inception to completion.

I've founded multiple business, so I also have experience that comes from wearing many hats like Product Management, UI/UX Design, Customer Success and QA.

I'm looking for a remote opportunity, either full-time or part-time, but I'm also open to relocation (especially Southeast and East Asia).

If you'd like to see my work, check out https://gitfront.io. I wrote the frontend, backend and did the design.
by cameldrv | 2025-05-04 20:59:39+00:00
After hearing so many horror stories of stuff not being delivered on time, being damaged, or even held hostage for extra payment, when I did a cross country move, I just hired local movers to load and unload the truck and I drove it myself. It took a few days, but I had full control of the process and I was never handing over all of my stuff to some random company.
by dang | 2025-05-04 21:01:31+00:00
Related. Others?

Elvish, expressive programming language and a versatile interactive shell - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40316010 - May 2024 (114 comments)

Elvish Scripting Case Studies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39549902 - Feb 2024 (1 comment)

Elvish is a friendly interactive shell and an expressive programming language - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24422491 - Sept 2020 (49 comments)

Elvish: a shell with some unique semantics - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17987258 - Sept 2018 (1 comment)

Elvish 0.11 released - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16174559 - Jan 2018 (1 comment)

Elvish: friendly and expressive shell for Linux, macOS and BSDs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14698187 - July 2017 (86 comments)

Elvish – An experimental Unix shell in Go - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090534 - July 2014 (75 comments)
by necovek | 2025-05-04 21:01:34+00:00
> We just made this with AI, and I'm pretty sure you don't want to see the raw inputs unless you're a creator:

I am not a creator but I am interested in generative AI capabilities and their limits, and I even suffered through the entire video which tries to be funny, but really isn't (and it'd be easier to skim through as a script than the full video).

So even in this case, I would be more interested in the prompt than in this video.
by cortesoft | 2025-05-04 21:01:37+00:00
Because you want to pass on knowledge? I am not saying there aren't ANY situations where a teacher cares about what their students think, but the example given isn't really one of those times. The question is not one that has many opportunities for original thought; it is a basic question that everyone who knows the answer will answer similarly. The entire purpose is to ascertain if the person understands what was taught, it isn't meant to engender a novel response.
by XorNot | 2025-05-04 21:01:50+00:00
The problem on Linux is that hard links are exactly what you don't want.

If hard links from the get go were copy on write, then I suspect content defined storage would've become the standard because it would be easy.

Instead we have this construct which makes it hard and dangerous (hard links hide data dependencies) on most Linux filesystems and no good answers (even ZFS can't easily handle a cp --reflink operation, and the problem is it's not the default anyway).
by btilly | 2025-05-04 21:01:57+00:00
I'm not a big fan of using nonstandard analysis for this. We're assuming the existence of arbitrary answers that we cannot ever produce.

For example, which function is eventually larger than the other?

(1 + sin(x)) * e^x + x (1 + cos(x)) * e^x + x

In the ultrafilter, one almost certainly will be larger. In fact the ratio of the two will, asymptotically, approach a specific limit. Which one is larger? What is the ratio? That entirely depends on the ultrafilter.

Which means that we can accept the illusionary simplicity of his axiom about every predicate P(N), and it will remain simple right until we try to get a concrete and useful answer out of it.
by nikanj | 2025-05-04 21:02:11+00:00
The older code is, the more people probably have at least a passing understanding of it - just by virtue of osmosis and accidental exposure. A thorough rewrite means only the person who wrote is is familiar with it.

Of course you can start a code review policy and make sure everyone at the dev team has gone through all of the code that gets written, but that becomes a ludicrous bottleneck when the team grows
by leoc | 2025-05-04 21:02:11+00:00
Dan Olsen ("Folding Ideas") actually uploaded a video about KDP spamming, "Contrepreneurs: The Mikkelsen Twins" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw , in September 2022 just before ChatGPT 3 hit. Basically the whole turnkey infrastructure to automatically turn a prompt into a Kindle book was in full operation by then, just with human ghostwriters on Web portals in place of LLMs.
by vindarel | 2025-05-04 21:02:17+00:00
I also hear "programmable chips", does that count? Example:

- [Barefoot Networks](https://www.barefootnetworks.com/)

- "we use Lisp (via Allegro CL’s Enterprise class development environment) in the design of our Intel Tofino series of programmable switch chips"

- article on [Franz Inc networks](https://allegrograph.com/press_room/barefoot-networks-uses-franzs-allegro-cl-to-drive-artificial-intelligence-in-networks/), some words [on reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/oq884e/how_do_you_use_lisp_at_work/h6d8xcw/), and a [youtube video](https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/oq884e/how_do_you_use_lisp_at_work/h6d8xcw/).
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-05-04 21:03:36+00:00
Your reading of my point is very strange. When I said “best practices” I clearly meant the most commonly repeated best practices. If I cast doubt on those best practices then clearly I intend to replace them with other best practices that I think are better, and that’s what I did. And suggesting better practices doesn’t imply that I think people should blindly follow them.

> Most people seemingly advocating for non-React are actually saying to start simple and add the complexity where and when it’s needed.

In my experience that’s actually not the case. That might be what people claim, but in my professional experience some people really don’t like frontend work and they try to avoid frontend frameworks because they think it’ll make their work more tolerable, but what usually happens is they start out “simple” but pretty quickly product requirements come in that are hard to do without some framework, then there’s a scramble to add a framework or hack it into some parts of the app.
by ImJamal | 2025-05-04 21:03:56+00:00
That is how Flatpak works right now? If you read the article you can read about two different ways of handling it, runtimes and deduplication.

The problem is the applications have to use the exact same version of a library to get the benefits. With traditional package managers they usually only have 1 version available. With Flatpak you can choose your own version which results in many versions and as such they do not share dependencies. If distros had multiple versions of libraries you would end up with the exact same problem.
by pdimitar | 2025-05-04 21:04:04+00:00
Addressing this requires me being interested in all the details (which would get me half way there on the road to being a contributor, which I'm not aiming at). I was responding to the central point of the article + ranted a bit.

I'm simply getting annoyed by the low effort that is put in such prominent open-source software.

And here I am, working in my corner on a soon-to-be-released open-source library that will likely see 100 users for a year at most... agonizing on increasing test coverage that actually paid off and it uncovered bugs and I fixed them. And enlisted LLMs and professional acquaintances to minimize or eliminate memory copying in the FFI part of the code...

...and a very prominent open-source software maintainers have not even bothered to start looking at the lowest-hanging fruit: reducing disk usage.

That frustrated me and I expressed it.
by ab071c41 | 2025-05-04 21:04:04+00:00
Location: Seacoast, NH

Remote: Remote is preferred

Willing to relocate: No

Experience in: Most VMware vSphere infrastructure, CI/CD, Ansible, PowerShell/PowerCLI, Windows Systems Administration, incident management, Azure

Wants to go towards: web development (full stack or backend), Kubernetes, DevOps roles that are code/infrastructure heavy, Ansible, Linux, Cloud

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aaron-longchamps/

Email: comical.styler.7l@icloud.com

Other ways to get in touch: https://alongchamps.carrd.co

--- Hey! I'm an infrastructure engineer that is looking to make a change into web development or Kubernetes. Both of those are things I've picked up in my home lab to learn and I'm also a fan of self-hosting my own cloud services. I also picked up blogging last year and will occasionally write about things I'm working on over there.
by FinnLobsien | 2025-05-04 21:04:20+00:00
Yes, I mean that's true. But the idea that Aunt Sally writes a Kindle ebook in her kitchen is idealizing the self-publishing world.

Even human writing for Kindle eBooks was mostly not Aunt Sally's passion project, but someone who hired an overseas writer for a short ebook on whatever topic is popular in SEO.

Yes, LLMs supercharge that and set the cost of creation to zero, so it's a different ball game. But even before that, self-published ebooks were largely garbage by marketers.
by satisfice | 2025-05-04 21:05:17+00:00
If your premises and assumptions are sufficiently corrupted, you can come to any conclusion and believe you are being rational. Like those dreams where you walk around without pants on and you are more worried about not having pants than you are about how it could have come to be that your pants kept going missing. Your brain is not present enough to find the root of the problem.

An LLM is not unbiased, and you would know that if you tested LLMs.

Apart from biases, an LLM is not a reliable oracle, you would know that if you tested LLMs.

The reliabilities and unreliabilities of LLMs vary in discontinuous and unpredictable ways from task to task, model to model, and within the same model over time. You would know this if you tested LLMs. I have. Why haven’t you?

Ideas like this are promoted by people who don’t like testing, and don’t respect it. That explains why a concept like this is treated as equivalent to a tested fact. There is a name for it: wishful thinking.
by doikor | 2025-05-04 21:05:17+00:00
> Players never get rid of the cheaters completely

> The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.

Obviously the goal never has been to have 0 cheaters. Just from the detection side you need to delay the bans, let in some of the previously detected cheats again, etc to keep the cat and mouse game going on (make it harder to A/B test your cheats)

https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617

> Worse still, is that we actually have to let them back in. When we outright “block” a cheating method, we are technically providing the cheater an instantaneous surface to iterate against, allowing them to A/B test their cheats until they find something that is actually undetected at that layer.

> unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers

If you think it is an issue then don't play their game. Very few companies are willing to go through the effort as it is actually quite a lot of work just from the security vulnerability aspects alone (and you also have to effectively detect the cheats too)
by jazzyjackson | 2025-05-04 21:05:30+00:00
Your argument pays no attention to how economic behavior changes due to existence of UBI, ie, how many people choose to work less and thus drop out of the pool of people paying in.

It doesn’t really make sense to me to live in a world where people are given money by the government while simultaneously expected to pay taxes. Its a high overhead when the same could be achieved by printing money and handing it out to everyone equally (which acts as a redistribution of wealth same as taxing the rich and paying credits to the poor, since it devalues the dollar as more supply is added)
by twodave | 2025-05-04 21:05:44+00:00
They’re inherently very different activities. Refactoring a file assumes you’ve made a ton of choices already and are just following a pattern (something LLMs are actually great at). Building a front-end from nothing requires a lot of thought, and rather than ask questions the LLM will just give you some naive version of what you asked for, disregarding all of those tough choices.
by quesera | 2025-05-04 21:05:57+00:00
It turns out that when you give the power of distribution to ordinary humans, you get a lot of crap.

Blogs, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit.

HN. USENET. Printing press. Papyrus. :)

Third parties are rightly derided as parasitic, but they also have a useful role.

Imprints, publishers, media corporations, record labels, etc ... the blessing of the brand used to mean something.

I'm split on whether we've lost more than we've gained, though. Some days I'm ready to delete the Internet.
by ctkhn | 2025-05-04 21:05:59+00:00
> The model produces better work. Some of my peers believe that large language models produce strictly better writing than they could produce on their own. Anecdotally, this phenomenon seems more common among English-as-a-second-language speakers. I also see it a lot with first-time programmers, for whom programming is a set of mysterious incantations to be memorized and recited.

AI usage is a lot higher in my work experience among people who no longer code and are now in business/management roles or engineers who are very new and didn't study engineering. My manager and skip level both use it for all sorts of things that seem pointless and the bootcamp/nontraditional engineers use it heavily. Our college hires we have who went through a CS program don't use it because they are better and faster than it for most tasks. I haven't found it to be useful without an enormous prompt at which point I'd rather just implement the feature myself.
by Vox_Leone | 2025-05-04 21:06:04+00:00
OpenSCAD is an underrated but powerful modeling tool, especially for developers and engineers who appreciate precision and code-driven design. It has a low barrier to entry — the syntax is simple, yet expressive — and with just a bit of practice, you can build tight, parametric models that are incredibly robust.

One of its standout features is the `hull()` function, which computes the convex hull of multiple shapes. When used skillfully, `hull()` becomes more than a geometric operation — it’s a design primitive that lets you smoothly bridge components, create enclosures, and generate complex organic forms without manual sculpting. It's like having a smart “connective tissue” for your model.

If you're comfortable with code and want exact control over your 3D prints or CAD designs, OpenSCAD delivers precision with minimal overhead. It rewards clean thinking and composability — making it ideal for rapid prototyping, parametric part libraries, and even mechanical design.
by tbalsam | 2025-05-04 21:06:37+00:00
As someone who's done a fair bit of architecture work -- both are important! Making it either or is a very silly thing, both are the limiting factor for the other and there are no two ways about it.

Also, for classification, MaxPooling is often far superior, you can learn an average smoothing filter in your convolutions beforehand in a data-dependent manner so that Nyquist sampling stuff is properly preserved.

Also, please do smoothed crossentropy for image class stuff (generally speaking, unless maybe data is hilariously large), MSE won't nearly cut it!

But that being said, adaptive stuff certainly is great when doing classification. Something to note is that batching does become an issue at a certain point -- as well as certain other fine-grained details if you're simply going to average it all down to one single vector (IIUC).
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-04 21:06:51+00:00
>I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, which is made by Apple with their net profit margin of 24.3% for Q4 2024.

Apple's margins are so high because the margins of their suppliers are so low (used to work for one of them) with some used to have suicide nets at their factories. Apple is an exception worldwide when it comes to HW margins, not the norm.

>They can afford to have a little extra employees to cover fucking sick leave.

Shareholders care more about line going up then about the welfare of the workers.