MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vindarel | 2025-05-04 21:07:20+00:00
false premises, false conclusions, and bad good ideas in-between.

> I was surprised by the absence of a quickstart page to help me set up a simple server

what about https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/web.html ?

Also I think that the READMEs of Mito (ORM) and Djula (templating) and easy-routes (routing) are very good. Heck, Djula's documentation is excellent. Double heck, even Caveman's README, which the author uses, has a good and sufficient getting-started page.

Oh, I understand, the author uses Clack/Lack… where Hunchentoot is much better documented.

there are of course more blog posts, some videos. I invite any blogger to consolidate community resources.

More recent: https://web-apps-in-lisp.github.io/

ps:

> ;; If the template is not already compiled, it is compiled, and stored in TEMPLATE-REGISTRY.

won't that prevent the template to compile changes? I suggest to follow Djula's doc.

> I would add a way to invalidate the cache automatically if a template changes.

yeah. So don't do that ;)

(also +1 to Jach's remarks and explanations)

> I created a macro that ensure the table gets created correctly

hummm… I'd suggest to leave the migration step explicit.

> some database helpers to perform a few CRUD actions on the db.

I felt the need for CRUD helpers too when defining Mito classes. However those four ones are only similar functions with same parameters but another name :]

(defun db-add (instance) "Inserts a model instance into the database." (insert-dao instance))

> I would say that there are better languages for developing modern web apps.

Burn this article with fire ;)

You don't need to need extraordinary clever needs to use CL. You benefit about it during development, deployment, and the application lifecycle.

time-saving error handling? You can use it 100x times a day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jBBS4FeY7XM

simple "scripts", data-munging applications for B2B? You can do it easily in CL, and save yourself sanity during development, deployment, etc. https://lisp-journey.gitlab.io/blog/running-my-4th-lisp-scri...

One caveat: have some experience with the language.

> since hot reloading has already been implemented in all high-level languages

nope you can't compare hot reloading with image-based development.

Please just don't compare anything or induce "better languages for modern web apps" with Python…

> shout-out to Alive which is the only Common Lisp extension for VSCode that implements the REPL with features similar to what SLIME and SLY bring to Emacs.

please don't forget SLIMA for Atom/Pulsar which has even more features than Alive, or the Sublime one, or Vim, or the Intellij one, or… https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/editor-support.ht...
by ineptech | 2025-05-04 21:07:40+00:00
Relatedly, there was a major controversy at work recently over the propriety of adding something like this to a lengthy email discussion:

> Since this is a long thread and we're including a wider audience, I thought I'd add Copilot's summary...

Someone called them out for it, several others defended it. It was brought up in one team's retro and the opinions were divided and very contentious, ranging from, "the summary helped make sure everyone had the same understanding and the person who did it was being conscientious" to "the summary was a pointless distraction and including it was an embarrassing admission of incompetence."

Some people wanted to adopt a practice of not posting summaries in the future but we couldn't agree and had to table it.
by vindarel | 2025-05-04 21:09:40+00:00
yeah the author does too much (and un-necessary stuff). To keep his stack just use the Caveman library has he does:

(defparameter *web* (make-instance '<app>)) @route GET "/" (defun index () (render #P"index.tmpl"))

https://github.com/fukamachi/caveman/ (I like Mito and Djula, I'd go with Hunchentoot rather than Clack which is famously undocumented)
by aledalgrande | 2025-05-04 21:09:40+00:00
I've seen this comparison a few times already, but IMHO it's totally wrong.

A compiler translates _what you have already implemented_ into another computer runnable language. There is an actual grammar that defines the rules. It does not generate new business logic or assumptions. You have already done the work and taken all the decisions that needed critical thought, it's just being translated _instruction by instruction_. (btw you should check how compilers work, it's fun)

Using an LLM is more akin to copying from Stackoverflow than using a compiler/transpiler.

In the same way, I see org charts that put developers above AI managers, which are above AI developers. This is just smoke. You can't have LLMs generating thousands of lines of code independently. Unless you want a dumpster fire very quickly...
by palata | 2025-05-04 21:09:49+00:00
> "But I can't if it's not..." So what? Ok then don't sell it.

Interestingly, when it's coming from TooBigTech, apparently they're happy to say "But we can't make viable LLMs if we don't abuse copyright" (yes, they said it). And apparently it works.

Not that I disagree with your point, though: nobody is owed a business selling OSS.
by crustycoder | 2025-05-04 21:10:07+00:00
Yes, but:

"Although most people think of twisters striking ‘Tornado Alley’ in the US, the UK actually has more tornadoes per area than any other country."

https://www.manchester.ac.uk/about/news/new-map-of-uk-tornad...

It's just they are small, and short lived.
by agentbrown | 2025-05-04 21:11:33+00:00
Some thoughts:

1. “When copying another person’s words, one doesn’t communicate their own original thoughts, but at least they are communicating a human’s thoughts. A language model, by construction, has no original thoughts of its own; publishing its output is a pointless exercise.”

LLMs, having being trained using the corpus of the web, I would argue communicate other human’s thoughts particularly well. Only in exercising an avoidance of plagiarism are the thoughts of other human’s evolved into something closer to “original thought” for the would-be plagarizer. But yes, at least a straight copy/paste retains the same rhetoric as the original human.

2. I’ve seen a few advertisements recently leverage “the prompt” as a means to resonate visual appeal.

i.e a new fast food delivery service starting their add with some upbeat music and a visual presentation of somebody typing into a LLM interface, “Where’s the best sushi around me?” And then cue the advertisement for the product they offer.
by dostick | 2025-05-04 21:12:19+00:00
All countries still use electoral systems where people are elected to represent the causes and views. And parties to organise those people and views. It’s ineffective and prone to corruption and subjectivity of representatives and money interests beginning with influence on elections. Solving of any issue can be delayed indefinitely if representatives don’t feel like it’s urgent.

In computer age it’s long overdue to have a modern system with people directly voting for issues and causes and not represented by any middlemen.
by doright | 2025-05-04 21:13:00+00:00
This only came to light after the study had already been running for a few months. That proves that we can no longer tell for certain unless it's literal GPT-speak the author was too lazy to edit themselves.

Teachers will lament the rise of AI-generated answers, but they will only ever complain about the blatantly obvious responses that are 100% copy-pasted. This is only an emerging phenomenon, and the next wave of prompters will learn from the mistakes of the past. From now on, unless you can proctor a room full of students writing their answers with nothing but pencil and paper, there will be no way to know for certain how much was AI and how much was original/rewritten.
by necovek | 2025-05-04 21:13:07+00:00
Unfortunately, the video is a far cry from carrying all the representative information: there is no way you can capture your full emotions as you are working through a problem, and where did you get your "eureka" moments unless you are particularly good at verbalising your through process as you go through multiple dead-ends and recognize how they lead you in the right direction.

And reviewing video would be a nightmare.
by rayiner | 2025-05-04 21:13:40+00:00
I didn’t know this was something europeans did, because it’s alien to how americans historically have used the term. During the founding, there were explicit debates about democracies versus republics. The Democratic party originated as what europeans might call a “populist” party. And over time we changed the original constitutional structure to make it more democratic and less of a republic (such as direct election of senators).

> 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.

But the biases of people are legitimate, while the biases of the elites are illegitimate. If the people vote for mass deportations, for example, the only job of the elite should be to figure out how to do it efficiently while protecting legally recognized rights (but not trying to undermine the policy by invoking protecting rights as a pretext). As usual, the scandinavians have figured this out.
by Gravityloss | 2025-05-04 21:13:40+00:00
I used to work in this field decades ago. It was relatively straightforward. You could see it with your plain eyes in the EEG, but also you could calculate metrics from it. One really fun way was to listen to the sped up EEG signal when a person is put into anesthesia. It sounded like you went underwater.

The key thing is that when people are given muscle relaxants, you need an independent method to measure consciousness directly.

I haven't followed this in decades so it's a total surprise to me if it isn't mainstream yet.

You could buy a module for your anesthesia monitor for this, no need to use a separate device.
by doikor | 2025-05-04 21:14:08+00:00
But it does lower the amount of cheaters as the consequences are bigger. Also makes manual banning/moderation much more cost effective as the bans actually stick.

At the end of the day the goal isn't 0 cheaters but having few enough that the chance of your match being ruined by one is 1 or 2% instead of 10 or 20%
by btilly | 2025-05-04 21:15:13+00:00
It would be like a reverse gravitational slingshot, in a different way.

There is no way to capture with just 2 bodies - it would have to leave on gthe same hyperbolic orbit that it arrived on. However if it drove by and had a close enough interaction with a third body, like Jupiter, it could lose angular momentum to the planet, resulting in entering an orbit around the Sun. Further gravitational interactions with planets could then smooth that orbit out over time.

Alternately this could be the more straightforward scenario of interstellar object hits planetoid, they merge, and the new combined object is now in orbit.
by mikem170 | 2025-05-04 21:15:51+00:00
> Obamas biofuels come to mind triggering the arab spring by raising bread prices.

Why do you call them "Obama biofuels" when biofuel mandates were passed while Bush was president?

Standards for biofuels appeared in the Energy Policy Act of 2005 [0] (mandating 4 billion gallons of biofuel by 2006, 7.5 billion by 2012) and the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 [1], aka the Clean Energy Act of 2007 (mandating 36 billion gallons of biofuel by 2022). Bush signed both laws.

I assume that corn-state representatives were pushing for more biofuels, since farmers want to sell more corn, regardless of how green anything is, or is not. At the time Obama was one of many in congress, both Democrats and Republicans, who voted in favor of these laws.

I would agree with you that biofuel production exacerbated food supply issues leading into the Arab Spring.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Independence_and_Securi...
by afavour | 2025-05-04 21:15:57+00:00
Well of course. But well thought out and well written communication (which admittedly is rare) is an opportunity to actually think through what you’re telling people. How does point A relate to point B? As you read through what you’ve written do you realize there should be a point A.1 to bridge a gap?

It’s like math homework, you always had to show your working not just give the answer. AI gives us an answer without the journey of arriving at one, which removes the purpose of doing it in the first place.
by kaliszad | 2025-05-04 21:16:01+00:00
This seems like a case of insufficient leverage and negotiation. This is of course easy to say after the problem is described. Freelancers and small companies need to be really good at negotiation or accept that they will have a higher risk of losing a lot of money, time and energy on somewhat unnecessary fuck-ups.

Most of the moving I have personally done was with people that someone knew and it worked out reasonably well. We have done most of the packing and these guys have mostly just done the loading/ unloading. The only other thing was taking apart and putting together the bed, table etc. This worked well enough even between Zurich and Prague and cost slightly over $1,000.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-05-04 21:16:19+00:00
> "Prioritize material and psychological well being of citizens"

Of which citizens, by what measure and in what direction? Up or down? "Quo bono" is never answered. Well, it's clear if you look at the charts - the curves never change direction regardless of who's in charge.

> "letting voters try whatever a large majority want to be tried"

Washing hands with the will of the voters is demagogy. Trump promised stopping the U war in 24 hours, bringing prices down and unseen prosperity from day one but all that was replaced by "it was a joke" and endless "necessary pain" (for you, not him). The spin now is that the voters elected a person, not his promises, and if he lied and joked... it's voters' fault. As if there was ever a choice without jokers in it.
by rcxdude | 2025-05-04 21:18:22+00:00
This attitude is a bit alien to me. At the level I play games (which is in the range of like 90% of gamers), my opponents are basically anonymous, and someone obviously cheating and someone smurfing has about the same effect of ruining the fun. The points mean nothing except maybe to measure my own improvement at the game. If someone's cheating and I can't tell them from the other players, I don't care.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-04 21:20:28+00:00
Paying the "toll" here by prefacing my comment with "LLMs are a remarkable achievement with real-world utility; I use Copilot etc" blah blah.

But I've reached a point of disillusionment with the current "hype cycle." I'm not even advocating for "grass-fed organic hand-written" code or whatever, but for some reason the hyper fixation on automating writing and programming with the mixed results is just kind of gross to me.

It's really turned me off of "programmer culture" and makes me question the future of all this, especially as a vocation.

Maybe it says something about me, it just all strikes me as "cheap." Dunno.
by doikor | 2025-05-04 21:20:30+00:00
One thing to note is that Microsoft is planning some kind of kernel anti tampering system in future that hopefully will give us user level anti cheats that actually work. Though some will very likely see this as some kind of "we don't control our computers anymore" move.

https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-...

> “On Demand” Vanguard

> "As was foretold, a future will eventually arrive where we can rely on the security features of Windows to protect its own kernel, instead of protecting it from boot with a driver. This will allow us the opportunity to start our anti-cheat services when the game client runs, provided the end-user has opted into all of these features. We’ll have more communication on this topic early next year, but if you’re on Windows 11 and on relatively recent hardware, we wanted to let you know that you won’t have to tolerate the taskbar icon forever (even though we worked very hard on Vanguard’s logo)."

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/2024/11/19/windo...

> "To help our customers and partners increase resilience, we are developing new Windows capabilities that will allow security product developers to build their products outside of kernel mode. This means security products, like anti-virus solutions, can run in user mode just as apps do. This change will help security developers provide a high level of security, easier recovery, and there will be less impact to Windows in the event of a crash or mistake. A private preview will be made available for our security product ecosystem in July 2025."
by alextousss | 2025-05-04 21:20:45+00:00
Incredible article, learned quite a lot. To me, a very good supplementary reading would be Structures by J. E. Gordon [1]. Helped me grasp a lot of the mechanical design notions necessary for that sort of work.

[0]: https://archive.org/details/StructuresOrWhyThingsDontFallDow...
by rscho | 2025-05-04 21:20:53+00:00
While the theory about pain in kids was certainly wrong, you are lacking some context about what 'safe' used to mean, and what it means nowadays. In the 80's, kids were under halothane and long-acting paralysis drugs which, especially in cardiac patients, are really dangerous. Halothane is now discontinued, as are many other common drugs from this time. Theories do not spring out in isolation. The evolution of technology, biological understanding and new pharmacology have all contributed to allow new opinions as incremental changes made old theories more and more evidently obsolete. Doctors 50 years from now will also wonder how we could be so stupid in 2025.
by johnea | 2025-05-04 21:21:37+00:00
> It’s the sense of authorship. The idea that you can read something and know who wrote it—and whether they meant it

This quote from the short prose at the beginning of this article expressed one of my major concerns with LLM generated prose.

And specifically, why I don't want LLM generated text as a substitute for web search results.

Since LLM generated prose is a statistical aggregation of web crawling, there is no ability to assess the author's position, or opinions, and how they might affect the author's writing. This removes a major tool in evaluating any potential biases in the writing.

This article itself may have been written by an LLM. But the statement that LLM generated prose eliminates an ability to assess a human's position on a topic is still valid.

Just another step in loosing touch with objective reality. Contrary to popular opinion, perception is NOT reality... It's only an idea inside a person's head, while the overwhelming majority of reality is outside of our liter of jello...
by satisfice | 2025-05-04 21:22:56+00:00
If you present your AI-powered work to me, and I suspect you employed AI to do any of the heavy lifting, I will automatically discount any role you claim to have had in that work.

Fairly or unfairly, people (including you) will inexorably come to see anything done with AI as ONLY done with AI, and automatically assume that anyone could have done it.

In such a world, someone could write the next Harry Potter and it will be lost in a sea of one million mediocre works that roughly similar. Hidden in plain sight forever. There would no point in reading it, because it is probably the same slop I could get by writing a one paragraph prompt. It would be too expensive to discover otherwise.
by necovek | 2025-05-04 21:23:19+00:00
I think they summed it up well in the section "Why do we write, anyway?" — they nowhere claimed it was vital for students' success in a robotic class. On the contrary as they title a subsection there with "If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing *badly*" (emphasis mine) — so what they are looking for is to peer into the author's mind and their original thoughts.

The implication there is that this is acceptable to pass a robotics class, and potentially this gives them more information about students' comprehension to further improve their instruction and teaching ("...that they have some kind of internal understanding to share").

On that second point, I have yet to see someone demonstrate a "smart, professional programmer use LLMs" in a way where it produces high quality output in their area of expertise, while improving their efficiency and thus saving time for them (compared to them just using a good, old IDE)!
by mncharity | 2025-05-04 21:23:48+00:00
An Emulith page[1] has a Lilith hardware manual[2]. There's a brief Comdex Emulith demo.[3]

[1] http://pascal.hansotten.com/niklaus-wirth/lilith/emulith/ [2] http://pascal.hansotten.com/uploads/lilith/docu/Lilith_hardw... (pdf; 20 MB) [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ob0lznzkykc
by hnbad | 2025-05-04 21:23:55+00:00
You're describing direct democracy. For an alternative with fewer downsides consider liquid democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy

If you like the general idea behind this and would like to see it in a bottom-up organizational structure rather than an established state, consider democratic confederalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_confederalism
by troupo | 2025-05-04 21:23:57+00:00
So. Three different SDKs.

No idea what any of those SDK names mean. But sure enoough searching will bring up all three of them for different combination of search terms, and none of them will point to the "recommend only using <a random name that is indistinguishable form other names>"

Oh, And some of these SDKs (and docs) do have a way to use this functionality without the SDKs, but not others. Because there are only 4 languages in the world, and everyone should be happy using them.
by btilly | 2025-05-04 21:24:17+00:00
No, it is the case.

Look for the comment in the article, after passing to a subsequence if necessary. The ultrafilter produces the necessary subsequence for any question that you ask, and will do so in such a way as to produce logically consistent answers for any combination of questions that you choose.

That is why the ultrafilter axiom is a weak version of choice. Take the set of possible yes/no questions that we can ask as predicates, such that each answer shows up infinitely often. The ultrafilter results in an arbitrary yet consistent set of choices of yes/no for each predicate.
by sillysaurusx | 2025-05-04 21:25:00+00:00
Then your friend spent 20 years not needing math skills. If someone spent years doing something useless to them for two decades, we wouldn’t call them efficient. But for some bizarre reason, we celebrate it as a point of honor in academia.

One counter argument to yours is that when you do need the skills, you can learn them later. It’s arguably easier than it has been at any point in human history. In that context, why front load people with something they hate doing, just because their parents think it’s a good idea? Let them wait and learn it when they need it.
by rlpb | 2025-05-04 21:25:21+00:00
> You trademark your software’s name and use the law to force distributions to not package unless concessions are granted.

It isn't clear if this behaviour is legally enforceable. Distributions typically try to avoid the conflict. But they could argue that "we modified Firefox to meet our standards and here is the result" is a legally permitted use of that trademark. To my knowledge, this has never been tested.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-05-04 21:25:27+00:00
I don't know where we are on the LLM innovation S-curve, but I'm not convinced that plateau is going to be high enough for that. Even if we get an AI that could do what you describe, it won't necessarily be able to do it efficiently. It probably makes more sense to have the AI write some traditional computer code once which can be used again and again, at least until requirements change.

The alternative is basically https://ai-2027.com/ which obviously some people think is going to happen, but it's not the future I'm planning for, if only because it would make most of my current work and learning meaningless. If that happens, great, but I'd rather be prepared than caught off guard.