MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 65 | 2025-05-16 14:58:41+00:00
LLMs are pretty similar in concept to site builders. They can do the basics reasonably well but if you want anything custom they show their weaknesses.

I have been building a gallery for my site with custom zoom/panning UX to be exactly how I want it (which by the way does not already exist as a library). Figuring out the equations for it is simply impossible for an LLM to do.

I wouldn't be surprised if after the LLM hype we go back to site/app builders being the entry level option.
by tbrownaw | 2025-05-16 14:58:51+00:00
> What other tools in software sometimes work and sometimes don't that you find remotely acceptable?

Searching for relevant info on the Internet can take several attempts, and occasionally I end up not finding anything useful.

My ide intellisense tries to guess what identifier I want and put it at the top of the list, sometimes it guesses wrong.

I've heard that the various package repositories will sometimes deliberately refuse to work for a while because of some nonsense called "rate limiting".

Cloud deployments can fail due to resource availability.
by jpalawaga | 2025-05-16 14:59:01+00:00
tbf, mature tastes are often different. it's not good or bad, it's just different. for example, people who drink a lot of old red wines have developed a taste for it.

yes, it drags people away from the mean, but that doesn't stop large segments of the population from acquiring certain tastes (e.g. coffee).

as a long-time user of tech devices, your tastes too have been dragged in certain ways, even if you couch yourself as an average user.

fwiw. i love android, but I do not really care for their current design direction.

(by the way, you might want to look up skeumorphism. material isn't skeumorphic, almost by intention.
by jgneff | 2025-05-16 14:59:03+00:00
Yes, I have had a similar experience. I eventually gave up on finding a competent cross-border tax accountant and just learned it all myself. I would rather make my own mistakes than pay someone quite a bit of money to make even more mistakes. It took a lot of reading and research, and I needed to make my finances as simple as possible, but so far so good in the past 15 years.
by diggan | 2025-05-16 14:59:15+00:00
I think you misunderstand how these pieces fit together. llama.cpp is library that ships with a CLI+some other stuff, ggml is a library and Ollama has "runners" (like an "execution engine"). Previously, Ollama used llama.cpp (which uses ggml) as the only runner. Eventually, Ollama made their own runner (which also uses ggml) for new models (starting with gemma3 maybe?), still using llama.cpp for the rest (last time I checked at least).

ggml != llama.cpp, but llama.cpp and Ollama are both using ggml as a library.
by static_void | 2025-05-16 14:59:16+00:00
I once went into a LessWrong IRC server.

I posted a question where I referred to something by the wrong name.

Someone said I was confused / wrong, so I corrected myself and restated my question.

For some 10 minutes they just kept dogpiling on the use of the wrong term.

Never a bunch a stupider people have I met than LessWrong people.
by indymike | 2025-05-16 14:59:18+00:00
>> Software rots > No it does not.

I'm thankful that it does, or I would have been out of work long ago. It's not that the files change (literal rot), it is that hardware, OSes, libraries, and everything else changes. I'm also thankful that we have not stopped innovating on all of the things the software I write depends on. You know, another thing changes - what we are using the software for. The accounting software I wrote in the late 80s... would produce financial reports that were what was expected then, but would not meet modern GAAP requirements.
by rnhmjoj | 2025-05-16 14:59:50+00:00
> I have never heard of any SMTP server doing TLS client certificate authentication. I'm pretty sure there's no standard for that, so it can't be a requirement for all incoming email.

> I suspect you might see delivery failures if you start requesting TLS client cert authentication from all SMTP clients.

Thanks, this aligns with my understanding of things. So, this issue is probably a big nothingburger.
by kstrauser | 2025-05-16 14:59:59+00:00
That’s only reasonable if you believe you can only distrust one company at a time. I distrust every one you mentioned there, for different reasons, in different ways. I don’t think that Apple is trying to exclusively own the field of programming tools to their own profit, nor do I think that Facebook is. I don’t think Apple is trying to own all data about every human. I don’t think Microsoft is trying to force all vendors to sell through their app store.

But the thing is that Microsoft hasn’t seemed to fundamentally change since 1999. They appear kinder and friendlier but they keep running the same EEE playbook everywhere they can. Lots of us give them a free pass because they let us run a nifty free-for-now programming editor. That doesn’t change the leopard’s spots, though.
by Abishek_Muthian | 2025-05-16 15:00:00+00:00
The payment gateways are subject to the whims of govt. and the payment hosts are subject to the whims of the payment gateways and due to which they're often overzealous and come up arbitrary rules.

I've had YCombinator funded leading Payment Gateways in India asking me to remove links to Hacker News claiming it to be 'redirection' or thinking I'm some kind of "Hacker man" for having the text "Hacker".

I've had trouble enabling subscription payments because I'm a govt. registered self-proprietor and these Payment Gateways decided they will support subscription payments only for Companies.

In fact I've become so versed in hopping between different payment gateways that I'm now building a self-hosted FOSS payment host[1] with support for all major payment gateways so people can have better control over their payments.

[1] https://github.com/abishekmuthian/open-payment-host
by amluto | 2025-05-16 15:00:45+00:00
Wow, in the process of making the send button slightly easier to find, they reduced the amount of actual content in the screen by a couple lines. And they still overlay controls on the content, thus obscuring some of it, just like earlier versions of Material Design.

The prettier and more fun modern UIs get, the more I miss the UIs of the nineties. Controls looked like controls, screen space was well utilized, and even workflows that weren’t the most common were generally well supported.

<sarcasm>I suppose if an LLM writes your email for you, you don’t actually need to see all the text yourself.</sarcasm>
by cogman10 | 2025-05-16 15:00:46+00:00
A counter to this that I'm aware of is Ukrainian and Polish. The soviet union tried to exterminate both during its heyday yet they've mostly completely revived despite the effort.

Hindi is probably another example of a language that the british empire tried to exterminate yet it has seen a pretty decent resurgence.

I don't think any of these languages really stayed around via force. They simply had a critical mass of speakers that never went away.

For Irish and Welsh, the British empire arguably committed a genocide to eliminate them. It similarly happened to native american tribes in the US and canada.

By my estimation, the two things that kill a language is the death of the native speakers of that language (discussed above) and the evolution of a language past what native speakers would recognize (Old/proto english and Latin for example).
by dylan604 | 2025-05-16 15:00:58+00:00
Totally tangent: What's a 30-day Rial? GenAI poster art with no spell checking I guess. Yet all of the pages of paper are spelled correctly. So now I'm wondering if there was a typo in the prompt used to create the art, or if the genAI is just unaware of the same text being used repeatedly while making a slight change in one place?
by alkh | 2025-05-16 15:01:06+00:00
Thanks for the linked article! I was looking for a local vision model to recognize my handwritten notes, and this article provided a good TLDR about doing this in Ollama.

I think Ollama can improve TLDR and add more attribution to llama.cpp to their README. I don't understand why there's no reply from ollama maintainers for so long
by jsight | 2025-05-16 15:01:08+00:00
On the contrary, I often mention here just how transformative I expect it to be. I think AI is still being underestimated by a lot of people here.

That's exactly why I want more people to have it and more smaller companies to be able to build things with it.

50 different regulatory regimes will make that much harder and lead to more centralization. This isn't even libertarian. I don't care if the government has good regulations, but diffuse local regulations for national companies is not the answer.
by hedora | 2025-05-16 15:01:31+00:00
I completely agree. For many years, I've gotten the impression the SSL ecosystem is designed to undermine endpoint security.

For instance, there were credible accusations that the NSA had a mole on the standardization committee back in the 90's. Their entire job was allegedly to promote things that increased implementation complexity and block things that simplified implementation.

SSL client certs (which this change is yanking) are great for convenience and security (assuming you trust the CA).

Frequently rotated certs lead to outages, and normalize needless credential rotations. If you believe your backend server is compromised, this is a good thing. However, in any scenario where you're achieving your security goals, that server isn't compromised (the data on it is probably more sensitive than the cert) and rotating the certificate frequently just makes it harder to detect a third party using a man-in-the-middle cert to transparently proxy it.

Speaking of which: If you can momentarily control a DNS record or if you are a cloud provider that controls all network paths to your customers, then you can use Lets Encrypt (or any of the ACME providers) to generate a MITM certificate + transparently proxy traffic.

For traffic I care about securing, I use things like wireguard or SSH trust on first use.
by outcoldman | 2025-05-16 15:01:33+00:00
When you have a hammer in your hand everything looks like a nail.

Developing without the knowledge what LLM writes is dangerous. For me having LLM as a tool is like having a few Junior Developers around, that I can advise and work with. If I have a complicated logic that I need to write - I write it. After I wrote it, I can ask LLM to review it, it might be good to find some corner cases in some places. When I need to "move things from one bucket to another", like call API and save to DB - that is a perfect task for LLM, that I can easily review after.

At the same time, LLM is able to write pretty good complicated logic as well for my side projects. I might need to give it a few hints, but the results are amazing.
by andre-z | 2025-05-16 15:01:34+00:00
miniCOIL is a contextualized per-word embedding model. It generates extremely small embeddings (8dim or even 4dim) while still preserving the word's context for each word in a sentence.

GitHub https://github.com/qdrant/miniCOIL HuggingFace https://huggingface.co/Qdrant/minicoil-v1
by pkoird | 2025-05-16 15:01:41+00:00
Well sometimes it just helps to verbalize all the suffering you are going through, in that aspect I don't doubt prayer has a therapy like effect. However, even if I were to believe in God, it feels superficial to ask him for material goods. The Hindu philosophy is particularly enlightening here as it says (something along these lines): "If you ask God, you'll get what you want. If you don't, you'll get what you need."
by TZubiri | 2025-05-16 15:01:58+00:00
My bet is that AI will be great at the user interface. It's mainly an NLP tool.

The thing about AI being on the backend is just the same old dream of programmers to avoid having to program, rather than reality. Which couples with the dream of business people dreaming that they can automate all of their work to avoid working! Salespeople are thinking "Maybe AI can make my sales calls" investors are thinking "maybe AI can analyze my investments", etc...

Selling a dream where AI is the frontend AND the backend is just missing the mark. Everyone is pushing AI everywhere, throwing darts, the game is to pick one dart and make it work.

I get that MSFT as a software provider is in a position to explore the space and create products in all directions, but this vision where everything is AI is akin to a metal fabric reacting to a new metal being discovered, creating a full line of products with this new metal, and selling on the idea of a house built entirely out of numetal, with furniture made of numetal, numetal fridges, numetal kitchen, numetal bath, why not numetal dogs and numetal children?
by beeflet | 2025-05-16 15:02:25+00:00
A lot of bitcoiners like to fool themselves into thinking that bitcoin is some form of energy. That's not the case: you can turn energy into bitcoins, but not bitcoins into energy.

In the same manner you can turn time into money, but not money into time.

The most valuable thing in the world is actual time. Money is just a poor man's substitute.
by btown | 2025-05-16 15:03:09+00:00
I imagine it's not used as an MTA-to-MTA signal, but rather for organizations where outbound messages, received by the org's SMTP server, should only be accepted when the internal sending device has a client certificate.

See, for instance: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/administration/...

Is it possible that orgs have been using Let's Encrypt to issue client certificates for devices on their network to be able to send internal emails over SMTP - to the devices of the old-school partner-level employees who won't use webmail, and to various physical devices on premises? Possibly.

The interesting thing to me is that LE wouldn't know whether this is happening, because they had been issuing combo server+client certificates with the "classic" profile, and wouldn't know which are being used for which purpose. And sure, it makes sense to separate out "tlsserver" and "tlsclient" - but why also add the punitive step of having tlsclient be a new but temporary thing that will go away in May 2026? I don't see any technical reason why they can't support tlsclient, on the new dedicated Google PKI for it, into the future.
by znpy | 2025-05-16 15:03:15+00:00
> Java memory management seems weird from a Unix Philosophy POV, till you understand whats happening. Again, not perfect, but a good tradeoff.

The GC story is just great, however. Pretty much the best you can get in the entire ecosystem of managed-memory languages.

You have different GC algorithms implemented, and you can pick and tune the one that best fits your use-case.

The elephant in the room is of course ZGC, which has been delivering great improvements in lowering the Stop-the-world GC pauses. I've seen it consistently deliver sub-millisecond pauses whereas other algorithms would usually do 40-60 msec.

Needless to say, you can also write GC-free code, if you need that. It's not really advertised, but it's feasible.
by j45 | 2025-05-16 15:03:22+00:00
Another way to look at it based on coming across it in enterprise:

How did he build something adopted by so many enterprises?

It does some things at scale very well and has been afforded the performance improvements of very smart people for 30y.

It’s not to say the language isn’t verbose, one of my favourite features was the ability to write code in other languages right inside the a Java app pretty well in-line by using the JVM, thanks to JSR-223.

It was possible to write Ruby or Python code via Jruby or Jython and run it in the JVM.

https://www.jython.org/

https://www.jruby.org/

Clojure also runs on the JVM.

https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/technotes/guides/scrip...
by yen223 | 2025-05-16 15:03:51+00:00
It's very possible that leap seconds will be a thing of the past. Those need active changes to the calendar, and there's every possibility that future generations will simply not care to make those adjustments.

Other than that, I don't think Gregorian calendars are going anywhere. Traditions have a way of overstaying their welcome, especially once they are automated.
by slippy | 2025-05-16 15:04:00+00:00
You realize that you just gave hacker news gave enough details to commit some satellite controlling backdoor into their system... It's not like some of us aren't going to be like: "Yeah, let's get 'em!" Not me. I'm the ethical type, but some people might think:

Step 1: Modify OSS repository to gain control of satellites Step 2: ... Step 3: Profit!
by wddlz | 2025-05-16 15:04:49+00:00
Sorry for the shameless plug but, we recently published this research on 'Dynamic Prompt Middleware' (https://www.iandrosos.me/images/chiwork25-27.pdf) as a potential approach for this. Basically, based on the user's prompt (and some other bits of context), we generate UX containing prompt refinements for users to quickly select answers to and do the prompting for the user.
by hn8726 | 2025-05-16 15:05:00+00:00
Even better, the original position of the send button is literally in the place where it shouldn't be, according to Android design guidelines throughout the years. Even Material2 doesn't put the _primary_ screen action on the top app bar, most chat apps (where you _send_ content) have the send button in a different place etc., so obviously the users would find the big-ass button faster if it takes away some 20% of the useful content
I'm Peter Roberts, immigration attorney, who does work for YC and startups. AMA
by proberts | 2025-05-16 15:05:32+00:00
I'll be here for the next 5-6 hours. As usual, there are countless topics given the rapidly changing immigration landscape and I'll be guided by whatever you're concerned with. Please remember that I can't provide legal advice on specific cases because I won't have access to all the facts. Please stick to a factual discussion in your questions and I'll try to do the same in my answers.

Edit: I am taking a break now and will return later this afternoon/evening to respond to any comments and answer any questions. Thank you everyone for a great and engaged AMA so far.
by izacus | 2025-05-16 15:05:41+00:00
Because there was nothing else quite like it at the time most enterprise software was created or recreated.

And it's still stable, fast and reliable with a massive ecosystem of stable, fast and reliable libraries and software. With good developer tooling, profilers and debuggers to go with it. And big enterprise support teams from RedHat, Oracle, IBM, etc. throwing in their (paid) support services.

It might not be the best language in any of the categories (speed - runtime and compile time, tooling, ecosystem, portability, employee pool), but there's pretty much almost no languages that are as good in all categories at once.

And to top it off, JVM can host other languages so it can easily interoperate with more modern takes on language design like Kotlin while still running on pretty much all major operating systems used in the wild and most CPU architectures as well. It'll run on your car's SoC, your phone and on your server. In many cases, using the same libraries and same code underneath.
by olllo | 2025-05-16 15:05:47+00:00
I’m curious how others here approach data tasks: Do you prefer writing SQL directly, using Python/pandas, or working with no-code/low-code tools (like Tableau, Airtable, or internal tools)?

For context, I’m building Data.olllo, a desktop app for processing CSVs locally — no upload, just fast filtering, transforming, and exploring data with a spreadsheet-like UI.

What do you personally reach for first when cleaning or analyzing a dataset?
by resters | 2025-05-16 15:07:15+00:00
A few points that are getting overlooked:

- OpenAI is buying WindSurf and probably did diligence on these models before it decided to invest.

- WindSurf may have collected valuable data from it users that is helpful in training a coding-focused AI model. The data would give a 6 month lead to OpenAI which is probably worth the $3B.

- Even if Windsurf's frontier models are not better than other models for coding, if they excel in a few key areas it would justify significant investment in their methodology (see points above).

- There are still areas of coding where even the top frontier models falter that would seemingly be ripe for improvement via more careful training. Notably, making the model better at working within a particular framework and version, programming language version, etc. Also better support for more obscure languages and libraries/versions and the ability to "lock in" on the versions that the developer is using. I've wasted a lot of time trying to convince OpenAI models to use OpenAI's latest Python API -- even when given docs and explicit constraints to use the new API, OpenAI frontier models routinely (incorrectly) update my code to use old API conventions and even methods that have been removed!

Consider that the basic competency of doing a frontier coding model well is likely one of the biggest opportunities in AI right now (second to reasoning and in my opinion tied with image analysis and production). An LLM that can both reason and code accurately could read a chapter in a textbook and code a 3D animation illustrating all of the concepts as a one-shot exercise. We are far from that at present even in OpenAI's best stuff.
by dragandj | 2025-05-16 15:07:22+00:00
Many Clojure tutorials are free! It's difficult to say without knowing nothing about your preference and experience. Everyone's welcome to join Clojure Slack community (for example) which has several tens of thousands of members and dedicated beginners channel. I'm sure if you asked there, you'd get tons of recommendations tailored to you. https://clojurians.slack.com/

(BTW Clojure, as a Lisp dialect, has almost no syntax. You can learn THAT in 5 minutes. The challenge is in training your programming mind to think in totally new concepts)
by rowanG077 | 2025-05-16 15:07:32+00:00
Well I didn't think of this myself. It's literally what the python official doc says:

> A global interpreter lock (GIL) is used internally to ensure that only one thread runs in the Python VM at a time. In general, Python offers to switch among threads only between bytecode instructions; how frequently it switches can be set via sys.setswitchinterval(). Each bytecode instruction and therefore all the C implementation code reached from each instruction is therefore atomic from the point of view of a Python program.

https://docs.python.org/3/faq/library.html#what-kinds-of-glo...

If this is not the case please let the official python team know their documentation is wrong. It indeed does state that if Py_DECREF is invoked the bets are off. But a ton of operations never do that.
by js4ever | 2025-05-16 15:07:33+00:00
Congratulations for the launch! Also I never heard of that license before:

"LICENSE - DON'T DO EVIL" https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red?tab=License-1-ov-file#...

Also I recommend you to put screenshots higher in the readme and also provide real world use case instead of fully abstract examples
by brightball | 2025-05-16 15:08:16+00:00
When I got out of college and was still firmly in the "Java is the solution to everything" mentality I didn't realize that my admiration was really for the JVM and the Java App Server tooling that was so much more advanced than anything else at the time. It was basically Docker + K8s for anything running on the JVM more than 2 decades earlier.

Java the language eventually drove me away because the productivity was so poor until it started improving around 2006-2007.

Now I keep an eye on it for other languages that run on the JVM: JRuby, Clojure, Scala, Groovy, Kotlin, etc.

IMO JRuby is the most interesting since you gain access to 2 very mature ecosystems by using it. When Java introduced Project Loom and made it possible to use Ruby's Fibers on the JVM via Virtual Threads it was a win for both.

Charles Nutter really doesn't get anywhere close to enough credit for his work there.