MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-05-23 16:25:39+00:00
Yes, but.

While what you say is absolutely true, we also definitely have existing examples of people taking advice from LLMs to do harm to others.

Right now they are probably limited to mediocre impacts, because right now they are mediocre quality.

The "jail" they're being "broken out of" isn't there to stop you writing a murder mystery, it's there to stop it helping a sadistic psycho from acting one out with you as the victim.

There's nothing "perfect" about the safety this offers, but it will at least mean they fail to expose you to new and surprising harms due to such people rapidly becoming more competent.

For both senses of "the LLMs are not perfect", consider https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/teen-charged-with-terro...
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 16:25:56+00:00
Oh I see. There are many writers, such as Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, and Isaac Asimov who were simple academic fellows with insular lives and limited social skills, who dashed off shallow fairy tales with a notable lack of allegory, deep meaning, or social/political import. That's all they knew.

On the other hand, there are other writers, such as Roald Dahl, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein, who had not only a distinguished education, served honorably in their nation's military service, saw combat, perhaps even worked in military intelligence, and led a cosmopolitan lifestyle with plenty of diverse contacts throughout the world, and they're also dashing off these cotton-candy, boilerplate fairy tales that people just consume and toss into the fireplace. Surely they enjoyed having a hobby where they could set aside their career and experience, and just sort of doodle with pen and paper.
by eduction | 2025-05-23 16:26:01+00:00
Even if you’re right about how software packages should work (I tend to agree), whether Flatpak should take on enforcing this model is a whole other question.

As far as I know, older packaging systems like dnf/yum and apt allow what Flatpak allows.

Maybe the developers just wanted to focus on being a good packaging system, which as we’re seeing is a hard enough job, and not on changing the permission model of packaging systems. Seems reasonable?
Show HN: I revived an unfinished vector image generator by turning to Cursor
by visiwig | 2025-05-23 16:26:07+00:00
Over a year ago, I tried building a system to generate single-color vector images and publish them to a website. It involved generating images, converting them to vectors, and automating the uploads — but as a web dev I ran into learning curve after learning curve: Python, Stable Diffusion, vector libraries, even scripting Adobe Illustrator (which has almost no usable documentation).

Eventually, I got it working, well mostly. All the workarounds led to disappointing results, so I never shared it — and moved on.

Recently, after messing around with Cursor, I decided to revisit this project. Cursor wasn’t perfect, but it got me past some of my most frustrating roadblocks — especially Illustrator scripting.

Glad I finally finished it and got it to a point worth sharing.
by wkat4242 | 2025-05-23 16:26:41+00:00
> Smaller parties look likely to gain a lot more seats in the next election.

That's true but that's more because the "two party system" became a one party system with labour doing the same as the tories. They started to become more different again under corbyn after the disaster of "tory-lite" but now they're right back to their old ways.

> I think it is not that simple. The poorly educated correlate strongly with the poor, who have done badly in recent decades.

Yes but voting right-wing is making them even more poor because the right only think of the poor as a natural resource. Yet they manage to convince them they care. Why would a billionaire care about the poor?? The only reason they became a billionaire was exploiting the poor. The only reason billionaires exist is the huge gap between rich and poor and those are always going to draw the short end of the stick.

If they voted left they would fare way better. Yet the right manages to convince them that the left only wants to take what's theirs. This image is very apt I think: https://pjhollis123.medium.com/careful-mate-that-foreigner-w...

> There are multiple European countries that have parties more extreme than the US right that are growing: AfD, PVV, Fidesz, Rassemblement national etc.

I don't think those are more extreme than the Republicans are now. They are the exact same. I'm from Holland myself and the reason the PVV (and also similar parties like FVD and BBB) is not getting anything done despite being the biggest party now, is that the coalition government waters everything down. The current government is constantly trying to grin to one another while trying to shoot each other in the back. Which is good, because it undermines their ability to do anything. I doubt they will make their full term.
by weitendorf | 2025-05-23 16:26:51+00:00
The AI integration is interesting to me. I have been trying to get Claude to help me with postgres from within my product and have found its ability and understanding of postgres/sql to be significantly worse than with common programming languages.

Maybe it's because my tolerance for imperfection is much lower for databases than web apps, but it is so bad that I can't trust it for anything database-related beyond text transformations and generating boilerplate queries. It will incorrectly tell me things like postgres doesn't support TABLE OF <TYPE>, or make syntax errors for ON CONFLICT, and immediately agree with any "what about" or "are you sure" I throw at it.

Curious if anybody else has run into this. Obviously LLMs are not always great in specialized domains like this but the poor performance with something as popular as postgres is pretty uncharacteristic IMMO.
by em-bee | 2025-05-23 16:26:54+00:00
as someone who started the s-expression task on rosettacode.org, i approve. if you need an s-expression parser for your language, look here https://rosettacode.miraheze.org/wiki/S-expressions (the canonical url is https://rosettacode.org/wiki/S-expressions but they have DNS issues right now)
by triclops200 | 2025-05-23 16:27:15+00:00
Thanks for that, looked it up and was a interesting rabbit hole: Basically, that oath was Oxford University saying "fuck you" to a request of the King (1200s England) officially after he effectively tried to order them to break their collective line and accept a rich fuck who murdered a scholar in the past. Feels kinda like a proto-union-action to me https://blogs.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/archivesandmanuscripts/2023/...
by dcrimp | 2025-05-23 16:28:04+00:00
interesting! Super cool idea to augment software built with traditional DBs

I had some thoughts [1] around a concept similar to this a while ago, although it was much less refined. My thinking was around whether or not we could have a neural net remember a relational database schema, and be able to be queried for facts it knows, and facts it might predict.

This seems like a much more sensical (and actualised) stab at this kinda concept.

[1]: dancrimp.nz/2024/11/01/semantic-db/
by tudorg | 2025-05-23 16:28:10+00:00
We use event triggers both in pgroll [0] and pgstream [1] to capture DDL changes. It's a feature of pgroll that it captures the schema migration history, regardless if you do the changes via pgroll or with another tool. And pgstream uses it to put the schema changes in the logical replication stream.

One thing to be aware is that on many Postgres DBaaS EVENT TRIGGERS are not allowed, because they generally require superuser. But RDS and Aurora do support them, we (Xata) support them of course, and I think Supabase is working on adding support for them.

[0]: https://github.com/xataio/pgroll

[1]: https://github.com/xataio/pgstream
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-23 16:28:55+00:00
It's nice to think that but life and relationships are also composed of the little moments, which sometimes happen when someone asks you over to help with a "bs menial task"

It takes five minutes to program the thermostat, then you can have a beer on the patio if that's your speed and catch up for a bit

Life is little moments, not always the big commitments like taking a day to go fishing

That's the point of automating all of ourselves out of work, right? So we have more time to enjoy spending time with the people we love?

So isn't it kind of sad if we wind up automating those moments out of our lives instead?
by seveibar | 2025-05-23 16:29:09+00:00
This solves a major problem that I built an npm package called "pgstrap"[1] for. It generates a "database structure" directory so that my database schema is available to LLMs (it also makes code review easier because you can see the changes to various tables). So I have a SQL file for each table in my database, neatly organized into directories for each schema. Rails has a similar idea with schema.rb

I'm not sure whether or not it's better to have your editor database-aware or to have your codebase have appropriate context committed. On one hand, less generated code/artifacts make for a cleaner codebase. On the other hand, not everyone uses VC Code or will know how to use this integration. Database browser GUIs have never really had a single winner. That said, VS Code does have enough dominance to potentially make themselves "the standard way to view a database in development"

[1] https://github.com/seveibar/pgstrap
by alexjplant | 2025-05-23 16:30:00+00:00
> there is a vanishingly small percentage of devs who want to do Ops, or even consider that a server with real constraints is running their code. Performance takes a backseat to DX, which AFAICT is code for “I don’t want to do anything but write code and push.”

This is because many tech orgs judge performance by "business impact" and dev and infra teams have different value propositions.

A dev writing and shipping features conspicuously demonstrates value because they write things that users pay for. Product features are novel and specific to a business; a developer can write "Built an automatic cardinal grammeter synchronizer that generates $100M in ARR" on their resume. There is essentially no upper bound on the dollar value of their impact.

Infra teams, on the other hand, have no direct way of quantifying their work. Even though their job is very necessary it's difficult to move the needle as far as cashflow is concerned. People tend to consider infrastructure a commodity so it ends up being one of those things that's only noticed if it breaks. A good day on an ops team means no trouble, not more money. The cherry on top of the sundae is that more users is more money which means more prestige for developers whereas more users means more load which means more problems for the infra and ops teams to contend with.

This incentive structure is why many devs would rather spend all of their time slinging code than worrying about k8s cluster nodes or IAM roles.

As a jack-of-all-trades I don't think this a healthy dynamic. I've led infra teams and dev teams both and know what it looks like on each side of the fence - a little consideration goes a long way and it's one of many reasons why I think that it's healthy for everybody to do a bit of everything in a tech org. People are much less likely to "play defense" if they understand a team's motivations and don't anticipate a negative interaction.
by throwawaymaths | 2025-05-23 16:30:24+00:00
there's a lot of unmeasured assumptions and if you read what is described to the public its usually scientifically wrong. usually it's one of:

- methane has a higher absorption than CO2

incorrect. CO2 has a dipole moment amd c-infinity-v symmetry so it absorbs way more

- methane has higher absorption in open windows of IR frequencies

also incorrect. the water band don't overlap with CO2

- methane has a longer atmospheric half-life

incorrect. you can look up the numbers on this. i believe it was believed to have a longer half life a few decades ago but detailed isotopic studies have disproved it?

you have to dig really deep to figure out that there is I think? an estimated self-shading effect of CO2 that changes the marginal absorbance of a single molecule. but this assumes a uniform distribution of CO2 in the atmosphere and no scattering. anyways i think this is not spoken of because it also reminds that the effect of Co2 is logarthmic (A = log(T))
by isodev | 2025-05-23 16:30:51+00:00
I think MCP’s popularity is a side effect of the hype bubble driving AI atm - one of the fancy things one can do with AI.

If there was any “easy” value in making one’s data available in a standard form, we would’ve seen a lot more adoption of interoperable endpoints (e.g. using schema.org or generally common ontologies as opposed to custom formats that always need a special magic SDK).
by belter | 2025-05-23 16:31:18+00:00
> The only feature that Aurora (MySQL) has that is remotely impressive is its ability to restart the DB process

I dont really care about Aurora MySQL...only Aurora Postgres, but you forgot about Parallel Query and Clones. For clones you dont pay for the extra storage for the new database, only the delta if you add new data...

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/new-parallel-query-for-amaz...

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-aurora-fast-database...

"...AWS successfully hoodwinked companies everywhere with bullshit, and are absolutely raking in cash because of it."

Really?...

"How Twilio modernized its billing platform on Amazon Aurora MySQL" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/how-twilio-modernized-...

"No observable Aurora downtime taken in over 5 months of experimentation, and almost 2 months of running shadow production..

Steady state metrics on over 40 accumulated days of live production data across all Aurora clusters:

- Over 46 billion transaction records indexed and available, compared to less than one billion stored in the former online Redis system

- 4.8 TB of data across all tables

- Over 11,000 active database connections to all clusters

- Less than 10 milliseconds median end-to-end transaction run latency

- Less than 60 milliseconds 99th percentile end-to-end transaction run latency..."

"Increasing Scalability and Reducing Costs Using Amazon Aurora Serverless with BMW" - https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/case-studies/bmw-group-auro...

"FINRA CAT selects AWS for Consolidated Audit Trail" - https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/finra-cat-selects-...

https://aws.amazon.com/rds/aurora/customers/
by pphysch | 2025-05-23 16:31:27+00:00
xAI is a concrete example of this. During the initial LLM explosion, X locked down its previously public APIs and data sources. Simultaneously, xAI is investing massively in building its private data hoard and compute infrastructure. Probably a similar case with Meta.

"Data for me but not for thee"

MCP is only getting the light of day, arguably, because of LLM "one trick ponies" like OpenAI and Anthropic, who do benefit from MCP amplifying their value proposition. As that business model continues to fizzle out and lose/subordinate to the AI integrators (Google, Microsoft, xAI?), MCP will probably fizzle out as well.
by AndrewStephens | 2025-05-23 16:31:56+00:00
You are getting some pushback but you are not wrong. I thought I was being pretty careful with my DO droplet but just last weekend discovered that it had been hacked and was consorting with mysterious IP addresses in Russia and Brazil.

This was on a box that was firewalled and ssh was locked down. It was running an older kernel - that was probably my downfall.

I immediately shut down and rebuilt the droplet with a more modern kernel. It wasn't too hard because my site is (mostly) static with a simple custom service but is very discouraging to find that somebody has damaged your home project just to (I assume) make a small amount of money.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-23 16:32:53+00:00
I don't expect to be able to git clone the Linux kernel, write "claude make it good" and fix everything.

I do expect these tools to be to able to understand they code they write through. Writing new code is very easy. Maintaining code is hard.

So far I'm very disappointed compared to how hyped this tech is. Although, I'm happy to have a job and if these coding models lived up to their promise I don't think I would have one.
by jrockway | 2025-05-23 16:33:26+00:00
As far as I went with linting this sort of thing was to check that "gofmt -s" yields the code that's checked in. https://github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm/blob/master/src/inter...

It does not care if the imports are organized differently. I like to do:

import ( # standard libraries "fmt" "io" # our stuff "github.com/pachyderm/pachyderm/src/internal/whatever" # packages "example.com/foo/bar" "github.com/whatever/whatever/foo" )

People/tools will remove the newlines or mix in local packages with upstream packages, and I decided not to care. I'm pretty sure nobody else cares.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-23 16:33:40+00:00
> Can't use it for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities? Uh, this actually seems insane to me? What is it for then?

Its a public preview, for which Microsoft probably does not wish to accept non-disclaimable liabilities for defects when used in those circumstances.

It is for previewing. By people who are interested in what is in the pipeline for a more general release.
by dang | 2025-05-23 16:34:58+00:00
Please don't harangue new users as soon as they show up to HN. Whatever legitimate point you have is drowned out by the atmosphere of hostility you create.

Not only that but it damages the reputation of this community.

You (<-- I don't mean you personally, but all of us) should be welcoming to new users and assume good faith, as the site guidelines ask (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). There's no reason why you can't make your substantive points while doing so. (Edit: you needn't look far for a good example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074135.)

It might also be good to remember that everyone makes mistakes, that project launches don't always go perfectly, and that HN is for discussing the interesting aspects of a submission.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-23 16:35:01+00:00
> if the 2nd amendmend was literally interpreted it would be (quoting from memory) “in order to form a well-ordered militia the right to bear arms shall not be infringed”

I don't agree at all that this is a case of creative reading. The actual text of the amendment is "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Note that the text does not say "in order to" or anything like that, which is why interpretation of this amendment gets controversial. Was the intent that bearing arms is only a right insofar as people are part of a local militia? Was the intent that people must have the right to bear arms and the militia was simply cited as one example of why? It is genuinely unclear from the text, which means that no matter what we do we have to layer our own interpretation on top. That doesn't mean anyone is reading the law creatively, that's just the unfortunate facts of having to deal with an unclear text.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-23 16:35:10+00:00
Practically the difficulty of generating error messages is one reason why "we can't have nice things". I ran into this problem while trying to write an adventure game (like Zork) in Drools. Drools sucks in a lot of stuff from a Java compiler and mashes it into a production rules framework and the result is I was getting error messages that made no sense at all and thus gave up on the project.

One approach to compiler development is one of successive transformations and it is possible to cut compilers into very thin slices like the original FORTRAN for the IBM 1401. Similarly you can go beyond the methods taught in Graham's On Lisp to do rather complex metaprogramming in Lisp or some other language, trouble is that an error manifests at stage N+5 but the information required to explain what went wrong was elided at stage N so it is quite difficult to figure out what's going wrong.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-23 16:35:26+00:00
Monetarily, Visual Studio.

There are tons of enterprise development workflows, and plugins, that probably will never be ported into VSCode, from their .NET and COM implementations.

Now in terms of mindshare, and gateway drug into Microsoft ecosystem, definitely VSCode.

It is also the best Web IDE, for the return of timesharing development, sorry cloud.

That alone means everyone that is on Github and Azure, gets to use it as the modern version from X Windows and RDP/Citrix sessions.

Not bad, for Eclipse v2 (Enrich Gamma is one of the main architects), pity the whole Electron shell though.
by LarsDu88 | 2025-05-23 16:35:28+00:00
The thing about Carmack in the 90s... There was a lot of research going on around 3d graphics. Companies like SGI and Pixar were building specialized workstations for doing vector operations for 3d rendering. 3d was a thing. Game consoles with specialized 3d hardware would launch in 1994 with the Sega Saturn and the Sony Playstation (in Japan only for one year)

What Carmack did was basically get a 3d game running on existing COMMODITY hardware. The 386 chip that most people used for their excel spreadsheets did not do floating point operations well, so Carmack figured out how to do everything using integers.

May 1992 -> Wolfenstein 3d releases December 1993 -> Doom releases December 1994 -> Sony Playstation launches in Japan June 1996 -> Quake releases

So Wolfenstein and Doom were actually not really 3d games, but rather 2.5 games (you can't have rooms below other rooms). The first 3d game here is actually Quake which also eventually also got hardware acceleration support.

Carmack was the master of doing the seeminly impossible on super constrained hardware on virtually impossible timelines. If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?
by dang | 2025-05-23 16:35:31+00:00
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, bots, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
by J_McQuade | 2025-05-23 16:35:48+00:00
Easily VSCode, if we're talking about developer reach. I'm not big into Microsoft stuff, but almost every 'serious' .Net developer I personally know is using Rider, so I can only assume that Visual Studio is retreating to the same space occupied by Eclipse and Netbeans, i.e. still used, but mostly only in places where change is hard.

I'm an emacs user and even I keep a copy of VSCode installed just because I occasionally have to interact with SQL Server and it's really the best way to do that on non-windows systems now that they're winding down ADS.
by throwaway7783 | 2025-05-23 16:36:20+00:00
MCP is basically APIs V2 as far as I can see. It probably will evolve in its concrete specs, but useful and not niche, especially when they can be composed fairly trivially.

In that sense, it is probably the building block for the next user interface, which is conversational.

Maybe the mention of web 2.0 is triggering all negative responses here, but on it's own, it is useful and could disrupt (not MCP itself, but the overall field) how we interact with software and systems