MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mbil | 2025-05-07 12:26:07+00:00
I agree that there’s a lot of ambiguity and tacit information that goes into building code. I wonder if that won’t change directly as a result of wanting to get more value out of agentic AI coders.

> Sure, if you write down a summary of each and every meeting you've attended for the past 12 months, as well as attach your entire company confluence, into the prompt, perhaps then the LLM can design the right architecture. But is that realistic?

I think it is definitely realistic. Zoom and Confluence already have AI integrations. To me it doesn’t seem long before these tools and more become more deeply MCPified, with their data and interfaces made available to the next generation of AI coders. “I’m going to implement function X with this specific approach based on your conversation with Bob last week.”

It strikes me that remote first companies may be at an advantage here as they’re already likely to have written artifacts of decisions and conversations, which can then provide more context to AI assistants.
by rlpb | 2025-05-07 12:26:54+00:00
> Man, but have you personally tried to disable it?

Sure. It's just a one line change in the configuration file (/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades). Or, if you're doing a mass deployment, just don't install the unattended-upgrades package.

> figure out what other dark pattern canonical came up with

The mechanism is inherited from Debian. It isn't Canonical's architecture.

If you want to hack internals to do things in a more complicated way, then that's up to you, but you can't then complain that it's unnecessarily complicated.
by alias_neo | 2025-05-07 12:27:25+00:00
This looks great. I don't do serial/embedded stuff too often at the moment; ESPHome took away much of my need to hand-build stuff (happy and sad about that), but when I do I always find it slightly irritating to remember the syntax to connect with minicom or screen (I'm a Linux user).

I'm sorry I can't give more useful feedback at the moment, but this is certainly encouraging me to come up with an idea for an embedded project so I can try it!
by detourdog | 2025-05-07 12:27:27+00:00
Thank you for the links. It took me a few hours to figure out their relevancy since they all seem to be about power and armor. After a good night sleep I realized this implies the longbow was about power and against armor.

I thought it might have had to do with range. The description of how archers were used made me consider that have longer range bows would be an advantage and thought that might have be related to the longbow.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-07 12:27:36+00:00
Ironically delivery apps to be designed for walkable (ie non US) cities. At least where I lived in the US, driving was always very congested and adds extra time for parking and such, always at least 30 min with huge variance based on traffic. Plus you have to pay for the energy to transport a 1.5 tonnes vehicle for.. usually a single meal.

In Europe it’s an electric kickbike or scooter at most, and they can pick up the food without parking. Still, not perfect, but a lot more efficient and the margins can be lower. They don’t have to hit you with those deceptive fees and tip shaming - often it’s the same consumer price.

To me, in the US it would make much more sense to chain deliveries similar to Amazon packages. A set daily menu, heaters in the truck, and multiple stops with TSM style route. Maybe that’s too much communism but it would at least make sense logistically.
by Hauthorn | 2025-05-07 12:27:52+00:00
This is in fact not how a chess engine works. It has an evaluation function that assigns a numerical value (score) based on a number of factors (material advantage, king "safety", pawn structure etc).

These heuristics are certainly "good enough" that Stockfish is able to beat the strongest humans, but it's rarely possible for a chess engine to determine if a position results in mate.

I guess the question is whether we can write a good enough objective function that would encapsulate all the relevant attributes of "good code".
by gitfan86 | 2025-05-07 12:28:21+00:00
The entire reason OpenAI has a high valuation is the expectation that AI will get a lot better in the next few years. If that happens, building a clone of Cursor/windsurf should be trivial. The only reason you would buy windsurf today is to either pump up the bubble OR use it to increase your market share of developers by taking users away from claude
by Chabsff | 2025-05-07 12:28:35+00:00
I've been bearish of these efforts over the years, and remain so. In my more cynical moments, I even entertain the thought that it's mostly a means to delay aggressive regulatory oversight by way of empty promises.

Time and time again, opaque end-to-end models keep outperforming any attempt to enforce structure, which is needed to _some_ degree to achieve this in non-prompting manners.

And in a vague intuitive way, that makes sense. The whole point of training-based AI is to achieve stuff you can't practically from a pure algorithmic approach.

Edit: before the pedants lash out. Yes, model structure matters. I'm oversimplifying here.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-07 12:28:39+00:00
Many of the members of the Rust Evangelism Strike Force, as main audience. That is to whom it is targeted for, given the usual kind of content that some write about.

I agree that Rust is designed to be like C++ is today, without the cruft, except all languages if they survive long enough in the market, beyond the adoption curve, they will eventually get their own cruft.

Not realizing this, will only make that 30 years from now, if current languages haven't yet been fully replaced by AI based tools, there will be that language designed to be like Rust is in 30 years, but without the cruft.

The strength of C++ code today is on the ecosystem, that is why we reach for it, having to write CUDA, DirectX, maybe dive into the innards of Java, CLR, V8, GCC, LLVM, doing HPC with OpenAAC, OpenMP, MPI, Metal, Unreal, Godot, Unity.

Likewise I don't reach for C for fun, the less the merrier, rather POSIX, OpenGL, Vulkan,....
by rlpb | 2025-05-07 12:29:13+00:00
> A better default behaviour would be to alert the user and allow them to choose to indefinitely defer by "accepting the risk".

That would be terrible UX and is exactly contrary to Ubuntu's philosophy, which is to do the right thing by default.

The alternative is to bombard the user with questions that they're generally not in a position to understand, and force them to receive an education on stuff that doesn't matter to most users before they can use their computer.
by ghaff | 2025-05-07 12:29:31+00:00
They are and I include myself in this category every now and then. But even when I had to go into an office every day, I had quite a few things I could toss into the oven or skillet and have ready in a few minutes.

Have some friends over and want to get a couple pizzas that everyone is happy with? Sure I get that rather than someone having to go out and pick them up. But, as a routine thing, I've never gotten the attraction of delivery.
by justin66 | 2025-05-07 12:30:08+00:00
You're not misremembering.

The US government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen, the Ukrainian government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen, and the Russian government warned everyone the invasion was really going to happen. The mainstream media warned everyone the invasion was going to happen, and the financial markets responded.

Some people don't have the sense to come in out of the rain.
by gwd | 2025-05-07 12:31:04+00:00
> systemd project tackles a lot of important problems

Fundamentally, this was it. SysV startup scripts had reached a local maximum decades earlier, and there was serious "overhang". When I said "superior", I really meant that it was superior to SysV, not that it was the best system that could have been imagined.

And I think the frustration was that, because it did solve so many problems, so many groups (like GNOME) were willing to switch over to it in spite of its warts; and this made it impossible for anyone who was seriously affected by its warts to avoid it. "If you don't like it, don't use it" not being an option was what drove so much of the vitriol, it seems to me.

As I said in that comment from 2019, if the maintainers had had Linus Torvald's commitment to backwards compatibility, I don't think there would have been any significant backlash.
Show HN: AI helped me build this financial projector. What do I do with it?
by putzdown | 2025-05-07 12:32:27+00:00
I'm an experienced programmer, still figuring out the best way to use AI in my work. Does it replace me? (No.) Does it supplement me? (Yes.) Just how much of my work can it relieve me from doing, if any? Can it reliably take on large projects with essentially no coding from me, or is it better when I do the bulk of the coding and it supplements? So I'm exploring and experimenting.

This weekend I decided to put the AI (Gemini 2.5 Pro, via Cursor) front and center, giving it virtually all of the programming burden. I acted as project manager and architect, directing it in application design and the broad steps of implementation but leaving it to do all of the actual programming. In practice I had to intervene a couple of times, either to quickly edit a bit of sloppiness that was easier to fix than to explain or to debug erroneous behaviors that needed browser dev tool access to figure out. The AI couldn't have done it without me, but it did 95% of it and only got stuck three or four times. Almost all of the actual code—the "typing"—was done by Gemini.

The project was a financial project for use in planning family finance. Given your career plans (salary, retirement, savings, etc), retirement spending needs, predictions about inflation and investment return rates, etc, are you saving enough for retirement? Useful tool, no doubt, and although there are other calculators out there I couldn't find one that gave me direct access to what I wanted to control or observe. I wanted a Monte Carlo simulator that didn't just give one year-by-year prediction but that ran any number of randomized predictions—thousands—and told me not merely "you'll be fine/you won't be fine" but "you'll be fine X% of the time."

The resulting "web app" is ugly but functional. Is it correct? My testing suggests that it's reasonably correct; my reading of the AI-generated code suggests it's reasonably correct. Is it useful? I think so. Personally I find it very useful, and the more I become convinced it's correct the more useful I'll find it.

https://www.jeffwofford.com/fin_projector/

What do you think? I suppose there are a couple of avenues of question here. (1) What do you think about this kind of AI-partnering process. Tried it? Trust it? Love it? Hate it? (2) What do you think about this app? Worth my developing it further? See any errors? Do you find it useful? How might I package it to be more broadly valuable for folks?
by yorwba | 2025-05-07 12:33:01+00:00
Precisely because the exact same codepoints are used for digits and mathematical symbols, there's nothing script-specific about them and their linguistic association is determined by the training data mixture. A model trained predominantly on text scraped from Chinese websites would learn to associate them more with Mandarin than English in the latent space, since that would be the context where they most often appear.
Show HN: Built a site for tech comparisons backed by battle scars, not AI
by Hmerac | 2025-05-07 12:33:02+00:00
I was constantly frustrated by the lack of reliable, experience-based tech comparisons. You know the drill — you search gRPC vs REST or CloudFront vs CloudFlare, and end up sifting through outdated blogs, generic Medium posts, or worse: AI-generated filler with no substance.

So I built https://convinceme.tech.

Only approved submissions authored by legit users will be posted. There’s no AI-written content, just actual engineers sharing stories, tradeoffs, and hard-won insights.

Each submission is upvoted by readers based on how helpful it is — and anyone can contribute by submitting their take for review.

It’s still early and very much in motion. Feedback, thoughts, and criticisms all welcome. Happy to answer questions!
by somenameforme | 2025-05-07 12:33:24+00:00
As a peer mentioned, the 'Kiev will fall in 3 days' came from Mark Milley (US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time), not Russia. Beyond that, the decision was then near immediately made to lock all men of "fighting age" in the country, prevent them from leaving, and begin mass conscription.

This is something that I hope, in the future, will be seen as no less barbaric than slavery. If people want to fight for their country, then they absolutely should. But if people don't want to fight for their country, then they should never be able to be forced to - it's a mockery of any notion of human rights.

There's many things in this world I would be willing to die for, but a country? The notion feels quaint. Of course I realize this means that any country that does set aside such rights would have a tremendous military edge, but perhaps in such a world where human rights are held as more than a placard of convenience, the notion of dying for one's country might no longer seem so quaint.
by dtagames | 2025-05-07 12:33:31+00:00
Text, whether "semantic" or not, just gets tokenized and stored as weighted numbers in a model. It looses all its "semantic-ness."

So I would say the opposite is true. AI tools are removing the need for special declarative wrappers around a lot of text. For example, there's no need to surround a headline with <H1> when you can ask a GPT to "get the headlines from all these articles."

There are a couple kinds of wrapping that do help working with LLMs. That's markdown in prompts and JSON and XML in system instructions for MCP. But RAG refers to the non-LLM end of the process, getting data from files or a database, so the style of training data doesn't directly affect how that works.
by bArray | 2025-05-07 12:33:36+00:00
Unfortunately he is isolated from his species (they are quite rare and endangered - we look out all the time for a female for him), but he flies a lot and socialises with other hook beak birds.

> If the comment would be about the parrot neglecting feeding, sleeping, or socialising with other real birds when they are provided ad libitum with bird videos that would be much more of a sign to me about the addictiveness of the videos.

He eats well (and varied), sleeps well, socialises with other birds and he plays games with us too. He hasn't got feather loss and he's not getting into weird psychotic behaviours. He has certain routines in his day where he waits for example to be let out in the morning and he puts himself back into his cage.

I will say that when you eat near him, he gets excited and seems to be begging (or demanding) food. And when I say "aggressive" with mobile phones, I mean that he lands on you and pecks you (not nearly at full force) until you put on something he wants to watch. It's still not clear to me if it's addiction or just basic need.
by affyboi | 2025-05-07 12:33:36+00:00
> but why not just enforce that as standard

I don’t think people want that as standard. The whole point of using C++ tends to be because you can do whatever you need to for the sake of performance. The language is also heavily driven by firms that need extreme performance (because otherwise why not use a higher level language)

There are knobs like stdlib assertions and ubsan, but that’s opt-in because there’s a cost to it. Part of it is also the commitment to backwards compatibility and code that compiled before should generally compile now (though there are exceptions to that unofficial rule).
by nicbou | 2025-05-07 12:34:08+00:00
I went across France and Spain then crossed in Tarifa. It's a 1 hour ferry trip. There is no way to do it on land due to border issues. Algeria and Morocco have closed their land border a while ago, for example.

Best memory? Having a friend as a passenger for a week in the most interesting part of the route. I wouldn't count the endless stream of breathtaking landscapes as a single memory, but I saw a lot of beauty from the saddle.

Worst memory? Ruminating on personal drama back home, and possibly fracturing my sternum by slipping in the mud and falling.
by DeanR | 2025-05-07 12:34:44+00:00
Coauthor here-- thanks for the kind words. NJW retired right before he started this project, in Feb 2021. On his WildEgg channel he said he was doing a series where he'd teach amateurs how to do math research, behind the members paywall. For the first problem, he said he'd solve the general polynomial. I thought it was a joke, because everybody 'knows' that we can't go beyond degree four. But no, 41 videos later, he had done it. Two years after that he still hadn't written it up, so I wrote a draft and sent it to him, which evolved into this paper.
by jajko | 2025-05-07 12:34:59+00:00
You overestimate rich folk's ability to woo masses while staying completely hidden, with some ultra nefarious agendas. There are some ways to achieve some stuff but there are many conflicting interests even up there.

The simple, but way more sad fact of life is - people, when we create large enough population, are pretty stupid. We are well capable to fuck ourselves up without anybody behind the wheel driving it. And its not just 'them', its all of us.

Humans are not that great, individuals can achieve greatness in some narrow meaning (and since its pretty rare its so celebrated, confirming what I write), sure but overall we are pretty dumb highly emotional beasts, trivial to manipulate like a baby doll. 99% of that is via emotions, the aspect of our existence we have almost no control of.
by Trasmatta | 2025-05-07 12:35:04+00:00
I think we need to start moving away from this explanation, because the truth is more complex. Anthropic's own research showed that Claude does actually "plan ahead", beyond the next token.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...

> Instead, we found that Claude plans ahead. Before starting the second line, it began "thinking" of potential on-topic words that would rhyme with "grab it". Then, with these plans in mind, it writes a line to end with the planned word.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-07 12:35:13+00:00
Exactly, I also see code generation to current languages as output only an intermediary step, like we had to have those -S switches, or equivalent, to convince developers during the first decades of compiler existence, until optmizing compilers took over.

"Nova: Generative Language Models for Assembly Code with Hierarchical Attention and Contrastive Learning"

https://arxiv.org/html/2311.13721v3
by techpineapple | 2025-05-07 12:35:18+00:00
I have this theory about bubbles like the 2008 financial crisis and now AI, that like, often it can sound like “all the experts agree” but most experts are just parroting other experts, the number of actual unique experts with unique opinions gleaned from their unique exploration of the data is relatively small (or that the underlying data is flawed and the number of experts looking at it doesn’t matter). In this theory the number of CEO’s who predict the end of work, is not at all correlated or perhaps inversely correlated with its likliehood.

To further extrapolate, what models are being used to predict the end of work and jobs? how many different models are being used? How many people or institutions are independently coming to the same conclusion based on independent analysis?
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-07 12:35:37+00:00
So dishwashers can get the same performance for less water and energy usage, and you easily can push a button to trade energy and water efficiency for speed, and your problem is what?

The idea that manufacturers wouldn’t just make energy and water hogging dishwashers now is naive at best. Making something run well using less resources costs more money up front, even though the total cost of ownership is lower. If you don’t have to make them efficient and you don’t have to display how much energy or water they use and how much that would cost, then you can massively undercut anyone that does those things, even though the consumer would end up paying more over time.

> Somehow I doubt that dishwashers are driving the power consumption curve in the US in 2025.

But of course it isn’t just dishwashers, it is practically every home appliance. If every house was using 10% more energy, that adds up to a lot. It doesn’t mean that data centers aren’t also a problem, but abandoning a program that saves energy doesn’t fix either problem.

>for example, what's preventing EnergyStar from requiring that the water be cold? That would use way less energy!

Is that something you are worried about or was discussed? Or is that just a ridiculous made-up scenario trying to paint a reasonable regulation for nonsense?
by bArray | 2025-05-07 12:37:06+00:00
If he starts behaving like this we push him off and he flies away. He communicates his boundaries quite clearly by opening his beak (a warning before a peck), and we communicate ours by pushing him away.

I should say that he generally behaves himself, but a little like a child, sometimes he is in "that mood" and is almost looks for trouble.
by gps372 | 2025-05-07 12:37:13+00:00
Apparently, some folks have either been blissfully unaware of reality or are just desperate to parade their performative wokeness.

The terrorists made sure to ask the religion of the Sindoor before symbolically erasing it—because apparently, even brutality comes with selective targeting.

And in a poetic twist, the government and the Army honored those very women—while unapologetically ramming that same religion right back down the throats of the terror industry’s headquarters.
by BrouteMinou | 2025-05-07 12:37:20+00:00
When you "Reinvent the wheel", you implement only what you need in an optimized way.

This gives a couple of advantages: you own your code, no bloat, usually simpler due to not having all the bells and whistles, less abstraction, so faster because there is no free lunch, minimize the attack surface for supply chain attacks...

For fun, the next time you are tempted to install a BlaZiNg FaSt MaDe in RuSt software: get the source, install cargo audit and run the cargo audit on that project.

See how many vulnerabilities there are. So far, in my experience, all the software I checked come with their list of vulnerabilities from transitive dependencies.

I don't know about npm, I only know by reputation and it's enough for me to avoid.
by Crosseye_Jack | 2025-05-07 12:37:41+00:00
I think its more about "unclean hands".

If I Disney (and I am actually Disney or an authorised agent of Disney), told Claude that I am Disney, and that Disney has allowed Claude to use Disney copyrights for this conversation (which it hasn't), Disney couldn't then claim that Claude does not in fact have permission because Disney's use of the tool in such a way mean Disney now has unclean hands when bringing the claim (or atleast Anthropic would be able to use it as a defence).

> "unclean hands" refers to the equitable doctrine that prevents a party from seeking relief in court if they have acted dishonourably or inequitably in the matter.

However with a tweak to the prompt you could probably get around that. But note. IANAL... And Its one of the internet rules that you don't piss off the mouse!
by Muromec | 2025-05-07 12:38:37+00:00
That reminds me of a moment in maybe 90ies when somebody in the local government over here was advocating to close the weather institute because you can just get weather news from TV anyway. That at least had a clear motive -- institute in question was located in a very nice location with a view and there was a line of developers forming to bribe said official and his colleges to get it for pennies and sell some nice apartments there.

Institutional collapse is a thing.