MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-16 18:47:27+00:00
> Would you ever be able to tell e.g. CoPilot: I need a web framework with these specs, go create that framework for me. The later have Claude actually use that framework?

Sure, why not?

The "magic sauce" of LLMs is that they understand what you mean. They've ingested all the thinking biases and conceptual associations humans have through their training on the entire training corpus, not just code and technical documentation. When Copilot cobbles together a framework for you, it's going to name the functions and modules and variables using domain terms. For Claude reading it, those symbols aren't just meaningless tokens with identity - they're also words that mean something in English in general, as well as in the web framework domain specifically; between that and code itself having common, cross-language pattern, there's more than enough information for an LLM to use a completely new framework mostly right.

Sure, if your thing is unusual enough, LLMs won't handle it as well as something that's over-represented in their training set, but then the same is true of humans, and both benefit from being provided some guidelines and allowed to keep notes.

(Also, in practice, most code is very much same-ish. Every now and then, someone comes up with something conceptually new, but most of the time, any new framework or library is very likely to be reinventing something done by another library, possibly in different language. Improvements, if any, tend to be incremental. Now, the authors of libraries and frameworks may not be aware they're retracing prior art, but SOTA LLMs very likely seen it all, across most programming languages ever used, and can connect the dots.)

And in the odd case someone really invents some unusual, new, groundbreaking pattern, it's just a matter of months between it getting popular and LLMs being trained on it.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-16 18:47:30+00:00
Yup, pretty much my experience. There is no way I am going to write paragraphs on a phone. I do not know, I just hit 30, so I guess I am considered old? I definitely am old school, though! You know, nothing fancy, just Void Linux with i3, XTerm, etc.

You know what I wish I could get? A Blackberry phone with that keyboard (maybe KeyOne?). I wonder if there is anything like that still in production.
Ask HN: Any good tools to pgdump multi tenant database?
by polishdude20 | 2025-05-16 18:48:35+00:00
Just joined a new company and they run a multi tenant database in postgres where each tenant is distinguished by their account ID. I'd like to be able to dump the data of a single account to my local instance to assist in debugging.

Problem is, many of the entities do not include an account ID. For example, a user can have an account ID but a user post will not but it will be tied to a user ID.

Also foreign keys aren't really implemented fully.

Are there any tools or techniques that could help make this process easier to do?
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-16 18:48:49+00:00
I knew it would contain a message:

> Lastly, tea - unless one is drinking it in the Russian style - should be drunk without sugar. I know very well that I am in a minority here. But still, how can you call yourself a true tea-lover if you destroy the flavour of your tea by putting sugar in it? It would be equally reasonable to put in pepper or salt. Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter. If you sweeten it, you are no longer tasting the tea, you are merely tasting the sugar; you could make a very similar drink by dissolving sugar in plain hot water. // Some people would answer that they don’t like tea in itself, that they only drink it in order to be warmed and stimulated, and they need sugar to take the taste away. To those misguided people I would say: Try drinking tea without sugar for, say, a fortnight and it is very unlikely that you will ever want to ruin your tea by sweetening it again

Which I will read as "It is best to adhere to reality". Bravo.
by myth_drannon | 2025-05-16 18:49:45+00:00
I was not suggesting "going back" to some sort of medieval past. Aboriginal languages and cultures do exist and they are oppressed. They are not fictional. Oddly, your arguments sound like Putin's points on Ukraine and "fictional" Ukrainian culture. 40 years ago, they all spoke Russian, and the moment they tried to unite around an indigenous, a more deeply connected culture for them, they got attacked by a colonial power.
by o_nate | 2025-05-16 18:50:09+00:00
There's a lot I can relate to here... and also some things I disagree with. I read a lot of these same authors as a bored and slightly alienated Gen-X teenager, and agree with a lot of what the OP says about their appeal. Network TV and pop radio offered a limited range of perspectives, attitudes, philosophies, and role models. There were hints of a more anarchistic, rebellious attitude that one could find on TV, but it usually required staying up late (eg. to watch David Letterman). Or one could buy cassettes by bands like The Smiths, to get a more off-kilter take on the traditional themes of pop. These authors fulfilled a similar function. However, I do think it's a bit unfair to lump them together like this, because they were as different as they were similar, and I disagree with the author's view that one should outgrow them.
by bumby | 2025-05-16 18:50:21+00:00
Except in this case, there is no information to the other party that someone has a disability. So the default that we assume someone has a disability is what most people take umbrage with.

I try to be generous as much as is reasonable. I generally assume the person who cuts me off in traffic may have an urgent need, but vaulting every misdeed to an assumption that it's due to some unknown disability crosses into unreasonable territory, if for nothing else than it's probabilistically a bad assumption. Taken to the extreme, it becomes enabling for everyone who does not have a disability but gets away with bad behavior.
by hackable_sand | 2025-05-16 18:51:42+00:00
It's not obvious that it's "working" for a "very large" percentage of people. Probably because this very large group of people keep refusing to provide metrics.

I've vibe-coded completely functional mobile apps, and used a handful LLMs to augment my development process in desktop applications.

From that experience, I understand why parsing metrics from this practice is difficult. Really, all I can say is that codegen LLMs are too slow and inefficient for my workflow.
by WillAdams | 2025-05-16 18:51:45+00:00
Well, there are pages on problems such as;

https://scriptsofanotherdimension.tumblr.com/

https://blueprintsfromhell.tumblr.com/

and the biggest problem is that a strong bound is screen/display size --- any code chunk which won't fit on a single screen becomes hard to follow (which direction does one scroll next?) and if one does the obvious of declaring modules, then one runs into the wall of text which one was presumably trying to escape from --- just each word is wrapped up in pretty boxes and decorated with lines.

My take on this has always been that we don't have an answer for the question:

>What does an algorithm look like?

That said, I work in this style when I can, often using:

https://www.blockscad3d.com/editor/

to rough out a design, or:

https://github.com/derkork/openscad-graph-editor

for more complex projects --- though that latter usually with a special-purpose library I've been working on: https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview
by bigyabai | 2025-05-16 18:53:55+00:00
Now try doing that with Walt Disney and see how much they like you "learning" from their famous cartoon mouse. AI isn't a catchall defense, and there are reputable trademarks that can (and rationally, should) conflict with commercializing other people's intellectual property.

I don't personally oppose the complete abolition of copyright. But I will repeat myself; this is not that. AI will still butt up against IP laws that are salient and expressly related to training on copywritten material.
by gjvc | 2025-05-16 18:53:57+00:00
that the "activate it" part gets any airtime really pisses me off. that has all to do with bash and zero to do with python. the "activate" script should never have seen the light of day.

include a bin/run-python wrapper script in your project, and have that set environment variables and call the .venv/bin/python binary. done.

yes, i realise in replying to this comment i'm admitting that i'm part of the problem exactly described, but the "activate" script has caused more confusion in the long run than is worthwhile and the "running from a .venv/" directory could have been a much smaller problem instead of the wind-tunnel it has become.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-16 18:54:36+00:00
That still comes back to motivation in my opinion. Using an LLM to generate code and using it without studying the code and understanding it will teach you very little.

I'd still expect most junior Deva that use an LLM to get their job done won't be motivated to study the generated code enough to really learn it.

A student is also only as good as the teacher, though that's a whole other can of works with LLMs.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-16 18:54:41+00:00
I do have experience with Elixir though, I am not sure where you have gotten your conclusions from. What do you think are my claims? I know it is possible to do everything in a single file, but that is NOT the typical case, and you know it. Additionally, I really did not consider myself arguing.

I prefer fewer files, usually, especially when I am just trying to show something up as soon as possible. I do not mind having a serious project written in Elixir (which I have) that spans across multiple files, though.

At any rate, what am I wrong about? I expressed my preference. When I want to get things done ASAP, I stick to Go these days (one file). If I know it is going to be a serious project, I stick to Elixir (multiple files). There is not much to it really. I apologize if I came across as argumentative.
by pvtsparsshh | 2025-05-16 18:55:10+00:00
So this is how I ended up winning hackathons... solo.

I didn’t expect to clear Round 1. But one round after another, the project spoke louder than I ever could. From just hoping to learn something → to actually winning 2nd Place at Vihaan 8.0 (DTU, IEEE) and becoming a Top 17 finalist at AceHack 3.0 (Coding Ninjas) — all as a solo participant.
by jfengel | 2025-05-16 18:55:15+00:00
We'll see how that goes once the budget makes it to Congress. It's called the Senate Launch System for a reason.

Presidential budgets are routinely declared "dead on arrival" -- when the Congress is controlled by the opposite party it's routine.

They're going to send over a budget with vast cuts (that still won't amount to all that much, because the entire non-military non-discretionary fraction of the budget just isn't that large), and the Congress is going to instead work from last year's budget (and cut even less).
by jfengel | 2025-05-16 18:55:21+00:00
That's a really weird definition of "political party". I don't know of any country that has political parties by that definition.

I'm not aware of any law that requires primary elections. As I understand it, that is a decision by the two major parties.

But I don't think it would help this cause either way. The author wants a party to be able to enforce ideological purity. That's going to pare your party smaller and smaller, until it's a party of one.

If ideological purity is your goal, then you can just write yourself in to every election. And then you will spend a few years under the governance of somebody who was able to make compromises and get a plurality of votes.

I don't think the law is this guy's problem. But even if it were, he'd immediately run into a million other problems.
by jfengel | 2025-05-16 18:55:29+00:00
I'm not baffled, exactly, but I am disheartened.

Most companies did social initiatives badly. They're hard to do well, and so a lot of companies never made more than a nod at them. They didn't help and attracted pushback. Given an administration that turned push into shove, it's not much of a surprise that they got rid of it.

Still... as badly as these initiatives are done, it should have at least impressed on you that there was a problem there to be solved. Maybe DEI wouldn't solve it; maybe it can't be solved. But I really think their statements should have been "We maintain a commitment to fairness and an equal opportunity for everybody, and we'll keep looking for ways to engage even if this initiative turned out not to be it."

As it is, it looked more like "thank God we no longer have to pretend that we don't hate minorities".
by oceanplexian | 2025-05-16 18:55:46+00:00
Not sure why medicine has such a cult of personality around it, people in that field are glorified flowchart operators.

Doctors can pull a 10 hour shift for the same reason a call center worker can do the same thing. They aren’t doing deep knowledge work. The people actually doing the knowledge work are at research universities setting up controlled trials, running simulations, and putting out papers.
by convivialdingo | 2025-05-16 18:55:56+00:00
I tried replacing a DMA queue lock with lock-free CAS and it wasn't faster than a mutex or a standard rwlock.

I rewrote the entire queue with lock-free CAS to manage insertions/removals on the list and we finally got some better numbers. But not always! We found it worked best either as a single thread, or during massive contention. With a normal load it wasn't really much better.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-16 18:56:39+00:00
Like the first line says, he is probably the least known famous director. That is, he is not an activist and not flashy, doesn't make a lot of movies, and the general public simply doesn't know about him. But all the other movie directors and famous actors know him and kind of idolize him.

When Thin Red Line came out in 1998 he hadn't done a movie since 1978 (Days of Heaven) and yet he snagged all the famous actors to play in it: Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel (though he wasn't as famous then), George Clooney, Jared Leto, Nick Nolte, John Travolta and others. It's like they were tripping over themselves to be in his film.

But I can't fault the general public for not knowing him either. His movies are more "artsy" so he is like like an American version of Andrey Tarkovsky -- you have to really be in the mood for his movies, like watching Stalker or Mirror by Tarkovsky.
by tudorg | 2025-05-16 18:56:49+00:00
You can try with data subsetting tools, a few that I know are: greenmask, jailer, tonic condenser, and I think there are more. They are not exactly for your use case, but might help you a bit. The problem is most of these tools can walk foreign keys, but only in one directions.

Also, since you said FK are not fully implemented, then there just won't be enough information for them to work with. So you can either work on fixing the foreign keys or have more complex scripts.
by lisper | 2025-05-16 18:56:52+00:00
"Rain shadow" is a common idiom in English. "Wind shadow" is not because English has multiple dedicated words for this concept, including "lee" [2] as well as slipstream.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_shadow

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windward_and_leeward
by somebodythere | 2025-05-16 18:56:56+00:00
I see what you are getting at. My point is that if you train and agent and verifier/governor together based on rewards from e.g. RLVR, the system (agent + governor) is what will reward hack. OpenAI demonstrated this in their "Learning to Reason with CoT" blog post, where they showed that using a model to detect and punish strings associated with reward hacking in the CoT just led the model to reward hack in ways that were harder to detect. Stacking higher and higher order verifiers maybe buys you time, but also increases false negative rates + reward hacking is a stable attractor for the system.
by tagraves | 2025-05-16 18:57:06+00:00
In my experience (and as reflected by the comments on this post already), trying to run complex CI workflow locally is a fairly hopeless enterprise. If you have a fully containerized workflow, you might be able to get close, but even then ensuring you have all of your CI specific environment variables is often not a trivial task, and if your workflow orchestrates things across tasks (e.g. one task uploads an artifact and another task uses that artifact) you'll have a hard time reproducing exactly what is happening in CI. My company (RWX) builds a GitHub Actions competitor and we intentionally do not support local execution -- instead we focused on making it easy to kick off remote builds from your local machine without having to do a `git push` and we made it easy to grab an SSH session before, during, or after a running task to inspect things in the exact build environment that your workflow is running.
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-16 18:57:07+00:00
And I will reply again with the "drawer of commonsense rules".

No you cannot create a """safe""" world where everyone lives in a virtual woumb, but you are to fight individual abuses, through legislation against abuses ("gratuitous violence") - and not through ad hoc legiferation ("when walking on stone sidewalks in spring").
by octo888 | 2025-05-16 18:57:10+00:00
> What area are you in?

I hope it is okay, but I prefer not to say. It is a place with not so high cost of living. There are not really many VCs here, but I think that is not something I would want to do anyway.

> Best advice for now might be to just at least for 3-6 months take a break, work on stuff you enjoy and see from there.

I think I am afraid of not getting a job again in an industry that pays quite okay and is not too difficult compared to others.

But I had six months off in a similar situation in 2010, and it was okay in the end. But at that time, I was much younger than now :-)
by jgilias | 2025-05-16 18:57:43+00:00
If those are remote positions, why do you care about any of this at all? Make it clear that the applicant needs to handle taxation in their home country themselves, and that’s that. I know many software engineers working remotely for companies outside their home country. One would typically set up an LLC or equivalent, and be employed by that.

Any options agreement would be with the private individual to not mess up the cap table.
Show HN: Alfa, always up-to-date code docs when using AI code editors
by 72736379 | 2025-05-16 18:57:45+00:00
My friend and I have been working on Alfa, which allows people to bring in the latest code docs into their prompts when using AI code editors like Cursor, Windsurf, and any editor that supports MCP (model context protocol).

Alfa maintains a database of code docs that we scrape and embed and make it available to user via MCP. Currently focused on rapidly growing out our code docs coverage but we have a few up right now so users can test it out.

We made this after running into lack of context issues when using Cursor with claude 3.5 (and 3.7), as well as gemini 2.5 pro. For example, I was working on a side project that used better-auth (an authentication package) but claude 3.5 suggested using NextAuth (a more popular package that I'm not a fan of), and when I prompted that I specifically wanted to use better-auth, it told me it's not familiar with it [1]. I know that Cursor adds stuff like web search calls and sometimes it does correctly fetch the necessary context, but I wanted something to just work always, no matter the LLM by providing the necessary context.

Would appreciate any feedback. Thanks!

[1] https://i.imgur.com/sjVIeDs.png
by JadeNB | 2025-05-16 18:58:01+00:00
> Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping.

Even in the "before times" we had such limitations: the 486 was shipped as a cheaper version with a functional but disabled math coprocessor. There are meaningful differences in practical terms, but I definitely see it as a clear predecessor of this behavior.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-16 18:58:21+00:00
> while also keeping the maximum accuracy of the results

All of these papers/algos are for the ML hype-train. ML algos are approximate anyway so no one cares about absolute accuracy, only the precision of the overall pipeline (class labels shouldn't change, at least not too much). Consider that very many papers/techniques quantize down to 8 or even 4 bits (yes sometimes even during training) for the purposes of perf.

This whole research area should just be renamed to something like approximate computing so that people don't confuse it (and the goals) with classical numerical analysis.
by fatbird | 2025-05-16 18:58:58+00:00
In the army I had the opportunity to fire the Carl Gustaf 84mm recoilless rifle, which is normally a two person job (one to hold, aim and fire, the other to load and check the backblast area).

We're instructed to exhale before firing because the concussion of the round leaving the front while its propellent leaves the back of the tube creates a brief vacuum. If you don't exhale, the air is forced out of your lungs so violently you feel like you got punched in the chest.

The noise is undoubtedly part of it, but the atmospheric effect is not insignificant, I think.