MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-17 06:30:21+00:00
Yes, there's a podcast with the post-training lead for L3 where he mentions this. Lemme try and find it.

edit: found it. The money quote is here, but I really recommend the entire podcast since it's full of great tidbits and insights.

> Thomas [00:33:44]: You mean between supervised fine-tuning like supervised fine-tuning annotation and preference annotation? Yeah. So 100% to RLHF. In fact, that's quite interesting. You start for Llama 2 with a pre-trained model and you have to have an instruction model to chat model. Otherwise, like the model is just like continue finishing sentences. So you need that to start RLHF. So we had to annotate like 10,000 examples. What did we do for Llama 3? You start with a new pre-trained model and then you want, before starting the RLHF, to have now a chat model, which is not too bad. The option one was, let's do human annotation again, like SFT stage. But in fact, by the principle I said before, the annotation would be actually worse than Llama 2. So what we did is that we generated all the data on the prompts with Llama 2 and we applied like basically the last round of Llama 2 we had to kick off and start Llama 3 post-training. So Llama 3 post-training doesn't have any like human written answers there basically, almost. It's just leveraging pure synthetic data from Llama 2.

https://www.latent.space/p/llama-3
by jchw | 2025-05-17 06:31:18+00:00
Epic Games sure is proving to be a formidable opponent, but they might be getting a little optimistic with thinking that Fortnite will be allowed to return to the App Store; after all, while they have been squabbling over App Store policies, I don't think any of the rulings imply that Apple still can't keep specific titles banned from the App Store at their discretion. In that particular case I kinda feel like Apple might be right to not be afraid, at least not right now.

(P.S.: Personally, I initially thought Epic Games was stupid for flagrantly violating the ToS on purpose. Was that really needed to actually file the lawsuit? I dunno; I'm no expert. But it looked stupid. It looks a lot less stupid now, but it still kinda looks like a tactical mistake.)

Maybe they needn't be afraid here either, but from a risk perspective it does seem like causing a stink here may not be their best move. They're still going to aggressively try to railroad people into developing on Mac; there's no iPhone Simulator on Windows or Linux after all.
Building an eBPF/Rust Tool for Easier SoC 2 Audit Data Collection – Thoughts?
by akshaynathr | 2025-05-17 06:31:47+00:00
Hey HN,

I am building a little tool using eBPF and Rust (for being fast and safe) to tackle task of collecting evidence for SOC 2 audits.

Anyone else out there feel like gathering all that audit data is a massive time sink? Would a tool that could automate a lot of it at the kernel level be something you'd actually use?

What are the biggest data collection headaches you've run into with SOC 2? Any thoughts on whether eBPF could be a good fit for this?

Just curious if this resonates with anyone else before diving too deep. Cheers for any insights!

Is this kind of tool useful for anyone?
by radanskoric | 2025-05-17 06:32:54+00:00
Thanks, sharing my learnings on how coding agents work was my main intention with the article. Personally I was a bit surprised by how much of the "magic" is coming directly from the underlying LLM.

The shell command can run anything really. When I tested it, it asked me multiple times to run the tests and then I could see it fixing the tests in iterations. Very interesting to observe.

If I was to improve this to be a better Ruby agent (which I don't plan to do, at least not yet), I would probably try adding some Rspec/Minitest specific tools that would parse the response and present it back to the LLM in a cleaned up format.
by zahlman | 2025-05-17 06:36:10+00:00
> For years you've been enforcing the dehumanization of human communications (e.g. basic gratitude and courtesy are taboo)

This is so far from true that it's frankly insulting.

> and then you object when AI comes along and people prefer it to your dehumanizing platform.

I do not object in the slightest to people preferring to use an LLM. I have even explicitly suggested in threads like this that people who prefer to do so should continue to do so.

What I object to is the idea that other people should get to decide how Stack Overflow works, or should get to denigrate Stack Overflow on the basis of their idea of how it ought to work.
by radanskoric | 2025-05-17 06:37:56+00:00
Author here. I put the lines of code into the title to communicate to the reader that they can get a good understanding just by reading this article.

Basically, what I wanted to say was: "Here is an article on building a prototype coding agent in Ruby that explains how it works and the code is just 94 lines so you'll really be able to get a good understanding just by reading this article."

But that's a bit too long for a title. :)

Also, a big benefit of Ruby is how concise it is. Yes, there's a library under neath my code but that library is, like Ruby, also very concise. That's kind of the point.

I can see how you might have read the title as hype-ish, but that was not my intention.
by zahlman | 2025-05-17 06:38:35+00:00
From GP:

> We're there to build a searchable Q&A knowledge base and spread knowledge. Some people who ask questions misunderstand and think we're there to help them, personally. To work for free for that single person, and we're not there for that. We write answers for the tens, hundreds, thousands of people who will search for it.

Why is any of this a "problem"? Why should we not create this knowledge base? Why should we help you, personally, for free? Why should we write answers for a single person who asks, instead of for arbitrarily many people who find it later?
by solresol | 2025-05-17 06:38:51+00:00
I'm not sure what's wrong with me, but I just wasted several hours wrestling codex to make it behave.

Here's my workflow that keeps failing: - it writes some code. It looks good a first glance - I push it to github - automated tests on github show that there's a problem - go back to codex and ask it to fix it - it does stuff. It looks good again.

Now what do I do? If I ask it to push again to github, then it will often create a pull request that doesn't include stuff from the first pull request, but it's not a pull request that stacks on top of the previous pull request, it's a pull request that stacks on top of main.

When asked to write something that called out to gpt-4.1-mini, it used openai.ChatCompletion.create (!?!!?)

I just found myself using claude to fix codex's mistakes.
by thomashabets2 | 2025-05-17 06:38:53+00:00
I have the exact opposite experience. I haven't coded much Java, but when I tried to revisit it, code I wrote 10 or 20 years ago doesn't even remotely compile anymore. While with C++, 20 years later you may need to add a missing #include (that you were always supposed to have), but then it just works as it always has.

Java is, in my opinion, a complete mess. And I think it's weird how anybody could like it past the 1990s.

C++ not being compilable later hasn't been true since pre standard C++. We're talking 1980s now.

https://blog.habets.se/2022/08/Java-a-fractal-of-bad-experim...
by theK | 2025-05-17 06:38:58+00:00
Absolutely this. Once you get into the game of running apps at home with certain quality assumptions you end up having to bolt on various things (VPN, DNS, log aggregation etc) that are better wrapped around the application instead of having them run within it. And having an AppOS typically just gets in the way of all that plus what edejong said that you already know how to do it on the typical production OSes and learning to do it for every AppOS is just cumbersome.
by danjc | 2025-05-17 06:40:17+00:00
The article comments "out of the box, LLMs are particularly good at tasks like creative writing" but I think this actually demonstrates the problem with the ai.

A writer won't think that they're good at creative writing. In fact, I'm pretty sure they'd think LLM's are terrible at creative writing.

In other words, to an expert in their field, they're not that good - at least not yet.

But to someone who is not an expert, they're unbelievably good - they're enabled to do something they had zero ability to do before.
by Aloisius | 2025-05-17 06:40:43+00:00
Most people are quite isolated because things like inflation are indirect. Seeing the link between inflation and spending is hard when it's easier for the average person to just see covid or greed or trade wars or simply fed policy and assign blame there.

The direct link between spending and taxes is far easier for people to understand.

So instead, raise taxes by 20+%. Setup automatic tax adjustments to cover spending changes to ensure the debt shrinks every decade.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-17 06:40:58+00:00
> Gosling primarily uses the NetBeans IDE for development, praising its open source, Apache-licensed nature and dedicated community. He expresses frustration with developers who cling to outdated tools: “The thing that drives me nuts the most are people who are madly grasping the ’80s or the ’70s — people who still want to use Vi, which was high-tech in the ’70s.”

From one of the key developers in the Emacs history, and genesis.

He moved on, others keep trying to live in the past.
by radanskoric | 2025-05-17 06:41:07+00:00
Author here. You're actually right here.

I took the code from RubyLLM configuration documentation. If you're pulling in a lot of config options and some have default values then there's value in symmetry. Using fetch with nil communicates clearly "This config, unlike those others, has no default value". But in my case, that benefit is not there so I think I'll change it to your suggestion when I touch the code again.
by BrenBarn | 2025-05-17 06:43:21+00:00
Although I think there's some truth to the overall gist here, I don't really agree with the author's point that AI can do so many of these things better. I seriously doubt that an AI would write a blog post as good as this, and I entirely doubt that it could write a blog post better than the best human writers could. For me the depressing part is not so much that AI can do everything better, but that AI is so much better at producing low-quality output that it's becoming increasingly difficult to locate anything better than that baseline in the morass of slop.
by WhyIsItAlwaysHN | 2025-05-17 06:44:25+00:00
O3s story is not amazing but it sure is orders of magnitude more interesting than your example:

https://chatgpt.com/share/68282eb2-e53c-8000-853f-9a03eee128...

I don't think it's possible to generate an acceptable story without reasoning.

That is not to say that I disagree with you. I would prefer to read human authors even if the AI was great at writing stories, because there's something alluring about getting a glimpse into a world that somebody else created in their head.
by deepsun | 2025-05-17 06:45:28+00:00
Interesting that no one says "The Joys of Discovering the Nazi Underground". Even though the Roman empire was a cruel war machine, with war and slavery being it's cornerstone. What Nazi called "The First Reich" was originally called the "Holy Roman Empire".

But now it's all forgotten and Roman Empire is almost adored.

UPDATE: I honestly don't know what tortures were worse, nazi ones or crucifixions with flayed back, practiced in Roman empire as punishment.
by simonw | 2025-05-17 06:46:18+00:00
"It takes far longer to tell an AI what you want than to write a regex yourself."

My experience is the exact opposite. Writing anything but the simplest regex by hand still takes me significant time, and I've been using them for decades.

Getting an LLM to spit out a regex is so much less work. Especially since an LLM already knows the details of the different potential dialects of regex.

I use them to write regexes in PostgreSQL, Python, JavaScript, ripgrep... they've turned writing a regex from something I expect to involve a bunch of documentation diving to something I'll do on a whim.

Here's a recent example - my prompt included a copy of a PostgreSQL schema and these instructions:

Write me a SQL query to extract all of my images and their alt tags using regular expressions. In HTML documents it should look for either <img .* src="..." .* alt="..." or <img alt="..." .* src="..." (images may be self- closing XHTML style in some places). In Markdown they will always be ![alt text](url)

I ended up with 100 lines of SQL: https://gist.github.com/simonw/5b44a662354e124e33cc1d4704cdb...

The markdown portion of that is a good example of the kind of regex I don't enjoy writing by hand, due to the need to remember exactly which characters to escape and how:

(REGEXP_MATCHES(commentary, '!\[([^\]]*)\]\(([^)]*)\)', 'g'))[2] AS src, (REGEXP_MATCHES(commentary, '!\[([^\]]*)\]\(([^)]*)\)', 'g'))[1] AS alt_text

Full prompt and notes here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/28/dashboard-alt-text/
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-17 06:48:05+00:00
> And the problem with WiFi is energy efficiency (or a lack thereof) compared to ZWave/ZigBee/Thread.

This is a problem I'd really like to solve the old fashioned way/I think it prevents too much building. Energy density, rechargability, etc are like CPU speed to me -- it will eventually be solved, and I can deal with replacing a device every month or swapping a rechargable battery (especially if the device can tell me it's low).

I really do think it will be Thread+Wifi routers that eventually get a built-in Thread antenna that win (at least wining me over).

If either ZWave or ZigBee had managed to get into the home router space, they would have won already IMO. There are probably annoying reasons they couldn't until now.

> So far, I've tried probably most of the home radio standards. Lutron was the most reliable, but it's also super-proprietary. My next house will just have conduits with low-voltage cables running to all the light switches, so I can use something like KNX instead of the radio-based stuff.

Thanks for sharing this and your other experience!

Also TIL KNX.
by zahlman | 2025-05-17 06:49:55+00:00
> I read the answer of that “duplicate” and it was not applicable to my problem

You are supposed to have a question in the first place, not just a problem. (In fact, you are not required to have had anything go wrong with your code, nor to need to know how to do something, in order to ask a question. You only need to ask a question that meets standards.)

If something was wrong with your code, and using Stack Overflow didn't enable you to fix the code, that is not Stack Overflow's concern, by design.

If you expect that your interaction with a website will enable you to fix broken code that you have, and the only standard by which you judge the website is "did I end up fixing my broken code", then Stack Overflow is not the site you want. And that's fine. There are millions of other websites out there that will also not help you fix your broken code. Why should Stack Overflow be required to do so? Just because it's about programming and accepts user-generated content? (Did you know about https://wiki.python.org/moin/ , by the way?)

If you analyzed some non-working code, and found a specific part that did something different from what you expected, and produced a MCVE (although we say https://stackoverflow.com/help/minimal-reproducible-example), then you have an acceptable question. Or if you figured out that you need to do something specific, and came up with a clear, precise specification for it, and there isn't a clear way to break the task down further into logical steps.

And when that question gets closed as a duplicate, you can bet that the accuracy rate is pretty high. You should try the answer, adapting it back to your own MCVE / specification, and then back to the original context.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-17 06:53:14+00:00
> A simple checkbox would have done just fine

Simple is in the eye of the beholder. Try asking a younger person which one is simpler. The checkbox is tied to a form, ticking it doesn’t do anything until you submit, whereas a toggle switch activates immediately.

> Which color or direction is on or off?

The colored state (green or blue) means enabled. The switch knob is always to the right. I have seen confusing designs too, but they are rare.
by zahlman | 2025-05-17 06:53:44+00:00
> while the ones that remain have convinced themselves that not only this new state of affairs is fine, it's actually preferable, and what they are doing is somehow beneficial.

None of you have done anything at all to explain why it somehow isn't, except perhaps to indicate that it isn't how you want the site to work. Or that the company is losing business. (As a reminder, the company has never paid any of us a red cent.)

Why is it "comical" for people you don't identify with to have a vision?
by permo-w | 2025-05-17 06:54:22+00:00
this kind of take is usually the preserve of nostalgic old men who've just discovered YouTube comments, so I'm surprised to see it rephrased so many times here. if you aren't finding high quality modern British-made TV shows it's because you're not looking or you're unwilling to try new things. Wolf Hall, Line of Duty, Slow Horses, Rivals, Fleabag, Adolescence, Inside no 9, Veep, etc etc etc etc. I could name 10 more. TV is more stratified and yes there are a lot of worthless filler game shows and talk shows, but just as it was in the 70s and 80s, there are plenty of stand-out shows that will last the test of time
by xigency | 2025-05-17 06:55:22+00:00
Indeed I was playing with a local model and thought I might work on a difficult project I've been putting off which is a new programming language. As I described the task, the model attempted to convince me this was a foolish endeavour that I wasn't equipped to do -- so naturally I included documentation from my most recent PL project as a counterpoint, then suggested starting from there. Llama responded (ironically) by claiming I was attempting copyright infringement.

Which is to say, in the long and short of it, an LLM is completely useless for anything so ambitious as to be intellectually challenging, because the median user has no use for such cases. If I were to pay a subscription fee for something more cutting edge, I would not only be giving up the copyright on the project but also any and all trade secrets, which would end up feeding the next version of GPT or Claude or what have you.

At least while I'm unemployed and underinsured, I'm not in the business of giving away my remaining talents to multinational billion dollar corporations (and paying for the privilege). Instead I've signed up to be a volunteer developer for a non-profit.

My consolation prize against AGI optimists and Singularity doomerists is the film "Slumdog Millionaire." Our individual experiences feel worthless until the opportunities present themselves where they become invaluable. The exponential space of creative problem solving ensures that (some) winning combinations will always come out of left-field.
by dwattttt | 2025-05-17 06:56:28+00:00
> why do you believe existing software should break? What value do you see in it? Does it have any value at all?

How exactly can a _new_ standard cause existing software compiling on an old standard to break?

EDIT: As to the value, I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread; we know a lot more about the practice of programming than when C++ was created and standardised. Why would we say those design decisions can never be questioned or changed? It locks into place choices we never knew were bad, until they caused decades of problems.

> that would violate the goals and prioritites of the C++ as established by the C++ standardization committee.

Correct. It's these goals and priorities that are being criticised.
by usgroup | 2025-05-17 06:57:30+00:00
Statistical modelling is largely unrelated to machine learning in its ideology. If you're a professional Statistician then you're most likely working as part of some function heavily utilising randomised experiment design, or less frequently, observational designs. This would include hard sciences, actuarial sciences, finance (risk), manufacturing, poll/census research.

The main commercial opensource language for serious Statisticians is R. You can Google for the sorts of jobs requiring R as a marker, if you're interested in applications of Statistics unrelated to LLMs.

To answer your own question about classical ML, you can Google for jobs requiring the specific classical ML technologies in which you are interested as a marker.
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-17 06:57:55+00:00
> Battery life is atrocious and latency from deep sleep will be very bad. I’ve got Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge. The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.

So what do you consider to be "bad" battery life? I've got quite the tolerance, but the problem is that they don't even exist. Everyone seems to stop out on this at "it would never be worth it".

> Zigbee buttons from ikea that run on nimh batteries for a couple years now and only used like half of the charge.

This is intense for me, I'm happy with replacing batteries every 6 months if I could simplify deployment by 10x.

> The hub is an usb dongle attached to the home assistant server, no issues.

Maybe deployment isn't as hard as I'm making it out to be! That said, nothing easier than sending some packets to an IP address. I assume Zigbee APKs are easy... But for example if I search on crates.io (https://crates.io/search?q=zigbee) I don't see any obvious choices.

To restate what I want (and hopefully is sounds a bit more reasonable) I want to be able to buy one smart light bulb, configure it over BLE to connect to Wifi and for the rest of it's live configure it/change it via Wifi. I want that for basically every device, and I'm fine with swapping batteries every 1 to 6months if I could have that!
by abhisek | 2025-05-17 06:58:52+00:00
I think it’s a trade off between depth and breadth. Thinking is hard and painful. But the insights achieved through deep thinking IMHO is worth because of the mental models that we develop. Not just how it compares now with an LLM generated content.

No doubt LLMs are excellent at researching, collating, structuring and summarizing information. Infact I think o3 Deep Research can probably save a weeks worth of survey time.

But in my experience a lot of thinking is still required to do something meaningful with it.
by landl0rd | 2025-05-17 07:01:56+00:00
The "prompting me" part has always been a bit annoying. If I wanted a list of ideas on how to debug my application, I'd do it myself. The idea of the wagie bot telling me what to do and me going to do all the grind-y work is just disgusting. You're the bot. You exist for my convenience. You do the grunt work not me. This isn't something I've been able to easily prompt around.

The emojislop is pretty new. It's less bad on the APIs than on chat interfaces but by no means gone. Prompting can bring it down but it comes back in long chats.
Ask HN: Conversational AI to Learn a Language
by edweis | 2025-05-17 07:02:46+00:00
Hi all,

I want to learn Dutch and by experience I know I learn better when talking with native speakers.

From your experience, is there a good AI I can converse with in Dutch? It would be even better if I could see the transcription in Dutch.

Gliglish (https://gliglish.com) looks good but is more for speaking than for learning. I'd like to be able to set a situation (negotiating a job offer, calling a supplier ...).