MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Gajurgensen | 2025-05-06 21:08:27+00:00
Program synthesis is of course very difficult in general, especially if you want it to be entirely automated. One option to make it more practical is to have the user drive synthesis from specification to implementation via something which looks like a sequence of tactics.

(I'll add a plug to some stuff we are working on at Kestrel: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~moore/acl2/manuals/latest/index.h.... We've used the APT library to do stepwise refinements from specs ACL2 to C code. Each step is something like "make function tail recursive" or "switch to a new, isomorphic shape of the data").

By the way, Curry-Howard offers a compelling insight here: deriving programs from specifications (i.e. types+propositions) may be the same process as deriving proofs from propositions. So the two processes can in principle work the exact same way.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-05-06 21:09:08+00:00
> I can't save you, and I don't even want to.

"Love your neighbor as yourself" exists in some form in every major pre-modern religion and philosophy because it's a cornerstone of society.

Not over-compassionate, truthless love or yet another government program, but caring about those we run into enough to--at minimum--personally help meet their basic needs and defend or rescue them from immediate threats to their safety.

If we're going to let anything go, it shouldn't be that.
by kristopolous | 2025-05-06 21:09:29+00:00
Comfyui workflows, fine-tuning models, keeping up with the latest arxiv papers, patching academic code to work with generative stacks, this stuff is grueling.

Here's an example https://files.meiobit.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/22l0nqm...

Being dismissive of AI art is like those people who dismiss electronic music because there's a drum machine.

Doing things well still requires an immense amount of skill and exhaustive amount of effort. It's wildly complicated
by raydiak | 2025-05-06 21:09:33+00:00
To me, the value of these types of projects is specifically that they are self-contained and local-only. That's the only kind of interaction with it I'm comfortable with right now. I mostly jumped ship on commercial software a long time ago, so I'm hoping there will still be some AI-free linux distros for a good long time. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. At the point that the type of AI integration you're imagining becomes ubiquitous and mandatory, I may or may not stop working with computers entirely, depending on the state of the tech and the state of society by then.
by charlieyu1 | 2025-05-06 21:09:41+00:00
From the first link:

> The Solar System planets accumulated from a disk of dust and gas that once orbited the Sun. Therefore, the planets move close to their common plane on near-circular orbits. About 3,000 small objects have been observed to orbit the Sun beyond Neptune (rp > 35 au); surprisingly, most move on eccentric and inclined orbits. Therefore, some force must have lifted these trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) from the disk where they formed and altered their orbits markedly.

I feel there is a strong bias towards objects that are only discoverable because of their highly eccentric orbit
by pchangr | 2025-05-06 21:10:11+00:00
Zoom? Better? Maybe to have a videocall.. but add a couple hundred users to a call .. and you start hitting limits. Granted, those are not very common but I think the killer feature of slack and teams is discoverable channels. Dont get me wrong Teams UX and performance is terrible in MacOS the whole experience is like taking a school bus to a freeway.. but feature-wise is very complete IMHO and it can handle 500+ user video calls with no problem.
by gorniv | 2025-05-06 21:10:49+00:00
Knowing the Apple private relay email is almost like knowing a password — not a perfect method, but it’s currently the best option we have for verifying identity when the original email is no longer reachable and Apple provides no fallback.

That said, any sensitive data in our service is either encrypted with a user-provided phrase or never sent to our servers at all. We’ve put a lot of effort into security, but we honestly didn’t expect this kind of curveball from Apple — where the login email they issued suddenly becomes invalid and breaks access.

We’re waiting for a response from Apple and exploring safe fallback options in the meantime.
by epolanski | 2025-05-06 21:11:09+00:00
Not my experience, at all.

I have long stopped using OpenAI products, and all oX have been letdowns.

For coding it has been Claude 3.5 -> 3.7 -> Gemini 2.5 for me. For general use it has been chatgpt -> Gemini.

Google has retaken the ML crown for my use cases and it keeps getting better.

Gemini 2.0 flash was also the first LLM I put in production, because for my use case (summarizing news articles and translate them) it was way too fast, accurate and cheap to ignore whereas ChatGPT was consistently too slow and expensive to be even considered.
by yjftsjthsd-h | 2025-05-06 21:11:23+00:00
There are two ways to attempt to move beyond POSIX sh:

1. You can do a superset of POSIX, like BASH and I think Zsh. This gives you a graceful upgrade path while maintaining backward compatibility, at the expense of being somewhat "stuck" in places. Oil is another attempt at exploring how best to use this path.

2. You can throw out POSIX totally, like fish and PowerShell. This lets you really improve things, at the expense of breaking backwards compatibility. IMHO, breaking compatibility is painful enough that it's really really hard to justify.

It's also worth pointing out that you can separate the roles of "interactive shell" and "shell for scripts". It is, for example, perfectly reasonable to use fish for interactive sessions while keeping /bin/sh around and perhaps even preferring dash as its implementation, which gives you compatibility with software while making things friendlier to users. I mean, I say this as someone who writes a lot of sh scripts and between that and years of practice my fingers expect something roughly sh-like, but I hear a lot of good things from folks who just switched their interactive shell to ex. fish.
by egorfine | 2025-05-06 21:11:24+00:00
Wait until you want to disable some of the built-in behaviors in Ubuntu. To make things really suck for you, they run some tasks both in crontabs AND in systemd timers. So good luck pulling hair out when you have removed apt updates from all crontabs () around but they still do.

() yeah, it's a bad idea; it was required for a specific installation where every cpu cycle counted.
by im3w1l | 2025-05-06 21:11:27+00:00
Windows is a bit different I suppose. Many pieces come together to make it kinda work there.

* Privileged gui to display and approve what will run as you mentioned. In Linux, non-privileged gui is used to request permission to do... something.

* Executable verification. Let's say someone with user level permissions swaps out the program you wanted to run for a malicious one. The replacement would not pass certificate checks which would be revealed in the privileged gui. Maybe you could supply an old version with known vulnerabilities though idk?

* Kinda commandline parameters verification. In Linux-land you can pass parameters to the program those could be intercepted with user-level permissions. In Windows this would be displayed in the privileged gui. However! The parameters are only visible if you click "show more" which I would guess <1% of people actually do.

As an example of the last point I tested making a shortcut to cmd.exe and used Run As Administrator. Then I changed the shortcut to C:\Windows\System32\cmd.exe /c calc and again did Run As Administrator. Opens calculator instead of command prompt with identical approval gui (except with show more).
by KhaledAlam | 2025-05-06 21:11:35+00:00
Microsoft’s open-source GraphRAG project lacked a way to estimate token usage and LLM cost prior to running the indexing pipeline. I recently contributed a feature that adds a CLI flag (--estimate-cost) which previews token counts and cost estimates for both embedding and summarization steps.

It simulates chunking using the same logic as GraphRAG’s actual pipeline, pulls live model pricing from a hosted JSON, and includes output token projections. The user is also prompted whether to proceed with full indexing after seeing the estimates.

This is particularly useful when working with large corpora or limited OpenAI quotas.

Blog post (with technical deep dive and lessons learned): https://blog.khaledalam.net/how-i-added-token-llm-cost-estim...

GitHub PR: https://github.com/microsoft/graphrag/pull/1917
by dylan604 | 2025-05-06 21:11:47+00:00
for what purpose? waiting for the copyright to expire, and then hope to cash in on it in the public domain?

if the content is unreleased, there's other complications. you'd then be using the likeness of any talent involved whether that's their voice performance for animated content or for live action their full person. you'll be susceptible to those issues for releasing it.
by strict9 | 2025-05-06 21:12:27+00:00
>No one remembers how to fix it.

This thought exercise also gets interesting with software development. There are few prospects available for new grads and junior devs now. Relentless offshoring, headcount reductions, and AI promises from CEOs have hollowed out the tech landscape. There are very few opportunities for young people to professionally develop the knowledge to keep the systems running.

And now most startups are focused on eliminating staff via AI. The people who would keep the systems running. I'm not sure where all of this leads to in a few years.
by godelski | 2025-05-06 21:13:21+00:00
> Something that really frustrates me about interacting with

Something that frustrates me with LLMs is that they are optimized such that errors are as silent as possible.

It is just bad design. You want errors to be as loud as possible. So they can be traced and resolved. On the other hand, LLMs optimize human preference (or some proxy of this). While humans prefer accuracy, it would be naive to ignore all the other things that optimize this objective. Specifically, humans prefer answers that they don't know are wrong over those that they do know are wrong.

This doesn't make LLMs useless but certainly it should strongly inform how we use them. Frankly, you cannot trust outputs, so you have to verify. I think this is where there's a big divergence between LLM users (and non-users). Those that blindly trust and those that don't (extreme case is non-users). If you need to constantly verify AND recognize that verification is extra hard (because it is optimized to be invisible to you), it can create extra work, not less.

It really is two camps and I think it says a lot:

- "Blindly" trust - "Trust" but verify

Wide range of opinions in these two camps, but I think it comes down to some threshold of default trust or default suspicion.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-06 21:13:22+00:00
I've found, like you mentioned, that the tech stack you work with matters a lot in terms of successful results from LLMs.

Python is generally fine, as you've experienced, as is JavaScript/TypeScript & React.

I've had mixed results with C# and PowerShell. With PowerShell, hallucinations are still a big problem. Not sure if it's the Noun-Verb naming scheme of cmdlets, but most models still make up cmdlets that don't exist on the fly (though will correct itself once you correct it that it doesn't exist but at that point - why bother when I can just do it myself correctly the first time).

With C#, even with my existing code as context, it can't adhere to a consistent style, and can't handle nullable reference types (albeit, a relatively new feature in C#). It works, but I have to spend too much time correcting it.

Given my own experiences and the stacks I work with, I still won't trust an LLM in agent mode. I make heavy use of them as a better Google, especially since Google has gone to shit, and to bounce ideas off of, but I'll still write the code myself. I don't like reviewing code, and having LLMs write code for me just turns me into a full time code reviewer, not something I'm terribly interested in becoming.

I still get a lot of value out of the tools, but for me I'm still hesitant to unleash them on my code directly. I'll stick with the chat interface for now.

edit Golang is another language I've had problems relying on LLMs for. On the flip side, LLMs have been great for me with SQL and I'm grateful for that.
by gamblor956 | 2025-05-06 21:13:34+00:00
LA is upgrading its fare collection systems because the alternative is for the rail cars to become homeless hotels.

Objectively speaking, the past several years (especially post lockdowns) have demonstrated the folly of a fare-free system. It only takes one homeless person misbehaving once to permanently dissuade dozens or hundreds of other people from ever using public transportation again.

In the past few months since LA has upgraded fare equipment and begun checking for valid fares, drug use and property crimes has fallen by over 3/4th. People have begun riding the Metro again now that the homeless aren't using it to shoot up. It has worked so well that they're expanding it to the entire rail system over the next several years and trying to figure out how they can do something similar with the buses.
by scrubs | 2025-05-06 21:14:01+00:00
You want interesting? You want insight? Let's talk to the author here in 20 years, and review this question. In addition to operationally defining "get things done" and our own 20 years we can learn about,

- why done means "some manager is happy" is just a silly definition leading to notions of things like customers, SQA/TQA etc..

- impediments to getting things done, which must be solved first

- on grit: sometimes you gotta hang tough and do the right thing when the people you're helping are morons and reject what you do

- towards defining what "value" is

etc.
by dhosek | 2025-05-06 21:14:15+00:00
EXCEPT that the legacy Cyrillic codepages had separate codepoints for Latin a and Cyrillic а. You’re also making assumptions about the roundtrip preservation that are invalid. The idea is that if a string is encodable in the legacy codepage, you should be able to make the roundtrip. Yes, you can’t roundtrip ⨋ to most legacy codepages, but that’s not the brief.
by pilingual | 2025-05-06 21:14:18+00:00
When OpenAI was rumored to acquire Windsurf last week I went to their site and switched languages. When I tried to switch back it got into a weird state and didn't display the original language. Not sure what to think of that other than vibe coding may need a little more oversight. (Who is working on AI QA? Winning pickaxe and shovel business right there.)
by vaibhavdubey97 | 2025-05-06 21:15:02+00:00
Absolutely! When we started building this out, we knew that we had to build an agent to perform data cleaning and feature transformations. After speaking to data analysts, PMs and engineers over the last few weeks, we've received strong feedback about adding this capability to Plexe and we're actively working on it. We've already added some features related to this and hopefully will roll out the whole agent very soon!
by genrilz | 2025-05-06 21:15:11+00:00
If you obscure the implementation a bit, you can change GP's example to a runtime overflow [0]. Note that by default the checks will only occur when using the unoptimized development profile. If you want your optimized release build to also have checks, you can put 'overflow-checks = true' in the '[profile.release]' section of your cargo.toml file [1].

[0]: https://play.rust-lang.org/?version=stable&mode=debug&edition=2024&gist=847dc401e16fdff14ecf3724a3b15a93 [1]: https://doc.rust-lang.org/cargo/reference/profiles.html
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-06 21:15:24+00:00
Open source just means you're being taken advantage of. You're working for free to make the lives of people who look down on you easier. They won't do it themselves, their time is too valuable for this worthless nonsense. Better to leave things as is until some unpaid perfectionist can't stand it anymore and fixes it free of charge.

Never forget the words of Zed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120620103603/http://zedshaw.co...

> Why I (A/L)GPL

> I would actually rather nobody use my software than be in a situation where everyone is using my gear and nobody is admitting it.

> Or worse, everyone is using it, and at the same time saying I can’t code.

> I want people to appreciate the work I’ve done and the value of what I’ve made.

> Not pass on by waving “sucker” as they drive their fancy cars.

If you're gonna go down this route, don't ever do "open source", do free software. AGPLv3 on everything. No exceptions.
by bluGill | 2025-05-06 21:15:26+00:00
True, and I suppose the patent is expired by now so you could in theory start making it. Though the FDA has rules about how you can produce such things. Probably better for a company to risk/start a new vaccine which they can patent and thus get some benefit that way vs one out of patent. Also just because you can legally make it doesn't mean it is practical. It may require other things that are not longer made, or specific equipment that would be expensive to recreate. Still this is an opportunity for someone in India (where a lot of generic drugs are made already, though the country doesn't matter) if they want to.

I don't hike as much in areas where Lyme is common as I used to, but I'd still take a vaccine if I could. (I didn't know the vaccine existed in 2001 or I would have)
by skippyboxedhero | 2025-05-06 21:16:11+00:00
Agree, that is the purpose of unsafe but there is a degree of irrationality there, which I am guilty of, about using unsafe in Rust. I also worry about unsafe leaking if I am using raw pointer on a struct...but stdlib uses a lot of unsafe code, so I should be too.

I think the issue that people have is that they come into Rust with the expectation that these problems are actually solved. As I said, it would be nice if lifetimes weren't so impossible to use.

The compiler isn't doing the thinking if you have to change your code so the compiler is happy. The problem with Rust is too much thinking: you try something, compiler complains, what is the issue here, can i try this, still complain, what about this, etc. There are specific categories of bugs that Rust is trying to fix that don't require the changes that Rust requires in order to ensure correctness...if you use reference counter, you can have more bugs.
by gorniv | 2025-05-06 21:16:28+00:00
Definitely save the email in your database — even if it’s a private relay address. Also, send a welcome email right after signup, so users can see which email was used and ideally encourage them to update it to a regular one or add an alternative login method (like passwordless email sign-in or OAuth).

If we were starting over, we’d make that update flow more prominent from day one. Apple’s “Hide My Email” sounds harmless until it silently breaks everything later.
by hedora | 2025-05-06 21:16:29+00:00
The lack of encrypted (and cross platform) backups is the biggest security hole I know of in Signal.

People inevitably end up working around it, which can mean using SMS, copying the threads / screenshots / attachments to arbitrary other storage, or switching to things like TeleMessage because of record keeping requirements.

I wish Signal were less hostile towards forks. I'd happily switch to a client that uses their network, but that's compatible with iCloud backup.
by rippleanxiously | 2025-05-06 21:17:18+00:00
It just feels to me like a boss walking into a car mechanic's shop holding some random tool, walking up to a mechanic, and:

"Hey, whatcha doin?"

"Oh hi, yea, this car has a slight misfire on cyl 4, so I was just pulling one of the coilpacks to-"

"Yea alright, that's great. So hey! You _really_ need to use this tool. Trust me, it's gonna make your life so much easier"

"umm... that's a 3d printer. I don't really think-"

"Trust me! It's gonna 10x your work!"

...

I love the tech. It's the evangelists that don't seem to bother researching the tech beyond making an account and asking it to write a couple scripts that bug me. And then they proclaim it can replace a bunch of other stuff they don't/haven't ever bothered to research or understand.
by egorfine | 2025-05-06 21:17:42+00:00
I'm not sure which of the turds (NetworkManager, netplan) are currently installed with ubuntu and what's their relationship with systemd but I equally hate them all.

My ubuntu initiation script includes apt-get install ifupdown, which actually works unlike those two. And why bother learning because by the next ubuntu release the upcoming fanboys will replace the network stack by whatever they think they like - again.

But the bug we are discussing is probably systemd's, because the network is up and running while systemd still waits for it.
by wduquette | 2025-05-06 21:17:57+00:00
Yeah, shaders aren't the problem with Oblivion; the problem with Oblivion is that when you move to a new scene everything looks like it's made of enormous triangular things until the rendering catches up, which on my machine can take five seconds or so.

If this is typical for Unreal 5 it's what I'd call a deprovement (rather than an improvement).
by Molitor5901 | 2025-05-06 21:18:11+00:00
When I saw the video of people in New York City in 1910(1), then colorized, I was floored. But then I found an article(2) where someone managed to find out who the family was, and it really hit me how close we are to the birth of technology that today are so common place that we lose perception of our collective timeline.

(1)https://youtu.be/68rZ2RNndSA?si=7xOsDi2Vaa74Dusp&t=25

(2)https://www.brownstonedetectives.com/who-are-these-people-19...
by agar | 2025-05-06 21:18:44+00:00
Little known fact: in the late '00s, PGP Corp had developed a free standalone "Viewer" to decrypt email if you didn't have the full PGP email product installed (the onboarding process walked you through initial key generation and publication on a keyserver).

The decryption process showed the encrypted PGP Message block and used a similar Sneakers-inspired animation to transform it into your plaintext email. It was incredibly cool and I remain sad that the product never saw the light of day.
by dwaltrip | 2025-05-06 21:19:24+00:00
Very good post. I’m happy the author has had these important personal insights.

Things that I’ve learned (through much difficulty) for myself that feel relevant:

* Boundaries: not all problems are mine to fix. It’s okay to say no, even if someone else doesn’t like it.

* Acceptance: perfection is an illusion, there will always be an endless list of problems to work on, human time and energy have real limits, I am allowed to have different desires and motivations today versus yesterday (or an hour ago!)

*Emotional maturity: humans are emotional beings, it’s okay to get annoyed / upset at something, including particular issues with software. The root cause of an emotion often becomes clear much later than after the initial trigger, which usually is only slightly connected to the deeper issue.

*Wisdom / self-love: it’s ok to rest. It’s okay to not finish a project. It’s okay to say no. Human lives are immensely complicated, we will always make mistakes, and change happens always. Words like need and should are are directives springing from the shifting, hidden narratives we have imbued our lives with. We can understand and reshape these narratives.

If I had more time I would have a written a neater, more concise, and more complete list :)
by Aurornis | 2025-05-06 21:19:31+00:00
No, the point is for the government to have access the plaintext after it is securely delivered to an approved archive location, not TeleMessage having access on AWS-hosted servers exposed to the public internet.

TeleMessage pitched their service as using end-to-end encryption of the message into the corporate archive.

> End-to-End encryption from the mobile phone through to the corporate archive

Apparently the plaintext messages were going to a TeleMessage server on AWS (not an approved government archive location) that was publicly accessible. Naturally it was hacked.