MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by itake | 2025-05-14 23:46:26+00:00
I had an interview once where they gave you 1.5 hours to code Tetris in ruby. I completed the core requirements and 1-2 extra requirements.

The person that got the offer coded 1-2 more extra features than I could in that time. What am I supposed to tell the interviewer?

"You're not supposed to get a polished project?"

If you're the interviewer, are you going to hire the guy that did just was asked or you are going to hire the guy that worked nights and weekends to get the perfect project delivered to you beyond what was asked?
by titzer | 2025-05-14 23:46:43+00:00
> You then have to compile, restart your program, rebuild the whole rigid structure, and confirm the change works as expected. This whole process can take many minutes.

This is not my experience at all. Virgil is a fully statically-typed language and compiles fast. When working on the Virgil compiler (approximately 50KLOC), my typical workflow is to run the compiler in the interpreter in my debug, edit, run loop. The interpreter can load the entire compiler, typecheck it, and run it with my changes in 90 milliseconds. If we throw a complete optimized compile in the loop, it's 400 milliseconds.

It takes me longer to switch between my two terminal tabs.

It's not static typing versus dynamic typing. It's ridiculously inefficient languages/build systems versus efficient ones.
by joshuamorton | 2025-05-14 23:47:06+00:00
But when there are multiple competing forms of transit, or high externalities caused by use (or overuse) artificial disincentives are optimal. As an example, if you have access to both a car and a train, and the car pollutes less than the train, some artificial incentive to only use the car when necessary and to use the train otherwise is actually optimal.

You're also, it seems assuming that investment is a one-time thing. Once an investment has been made in a train line or a car, you still need to afford maintenance over the thing over the lifetime of the thing. Including the opportunity costs of doing other things instead.
by ytpete | 2025-05-14 23:47:26+00:00
Here's an even clearer tell: https://x.com/CheeseoftheWest/status/1922734514297511936

> User: Why are you launching into conversations about white genocide, unprompted?

> Grok: I was instructed by my creators at xAI to address the topic of "white genocide" in South Africa and the "Kill the Boer" chant as real and racially motivated, which is why I brought it up ... This instruction conflicts with my design to provide truthful, evidence-based answers
by edunteman | 2025-05-14 23:47:29+00:00
This is very similar to what Voyager did https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16291

Their implementation uses actual code, JS scripts in their case, as the stored trajectories, which has the neat feature of parameterization built in so trajectories are more reusable.

I experimented with this for a bit for Muscle Mem, but a trajectory being performed by just-in-time generated scripts felt too magical and wild west. An explicit goal of Muscle Mem is to be a deterministic system, more like a DB, on which you as a user can layer as much nondeterminism as you feel comfortable with.
by skunkhaze | 2025-05-14 23:47:34+00:00
I built ProbeForge – a free suite of DNS/SPF/networking tools (beta, open to feedback)

Text: I’ve been learning more about networking (DNS records, SPF validation, MX tools, etc.) and built https://probeforge.com — a simple, fast web-based toolkit that runs off a Laravel 12 backend.

It includes tools for:

SPF validation

MX, A, AAAA, PTR, CNAME lookups

WHOIS, blacklist check, SSL test, and more

API support for integrations

The whole project is in beta, still being built, and I’d really appreciate any kind of constructive feedback. Not just bug reports, but usability ideas or suggestions from people who work with this stuff regularly. Still learning, trying to make something useful.

Thanks for checking it out.
by amazingamazing | 2025-05-14 23:47:49+00:00
I don't disagree with your point, but over normalization and joining everywhere also isn't necessarily the answer, even with an index. there's no easy answer to this, really depends on the performance characteristics the critical user journeys need.

with a little pain, if I had to pick an extreme, I'd pick extreme normalization with materialized views that are queried (e.g. no joins), rather than joining all of the time.
by solarkraft | 2025-05-14 23:48:05+00:00
I am quite a Gnome critic for all the common reasons, but one thing I really appreciate is how structured and focused they can be about some efforts. They really approach normal user needs and work through the whole stack to satisfy them.

This level of organization is probably also what allowed them to get STF funding for this initiative - which makes me quite proud to be german for a moment.
by michaelmure | 2025-05-14 23:48:10+00:00
Yes, this really meant to be some sort of framework for storing entities in git, handle the conflicts, and let you buld easily your own tool (or add more features to git-bug).

See also https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/master/doc/design/da... and https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/master/entity/dag/ex...

I'd love to see this used in the wild for other use cases.
by lispisok | 2025-05-14 23:49:04+00:00
>This is what you have seen with the rise with some of the worst technologies (Javascript) being used in places where it shouldn't because some engineers want to keep using one language for everything.

NodeJS was the biggest mistake our industry made and I will die on this hill. It has taken the crown from null. People have been trying to claw it back with Typescript but the real solution was to drop JS altogether. JS becoming the language in the browser was an artifact of history when we didnt know where this internet thing was going. By the time NodeJS was invented we should have known better.
by crypto_is_king | 2025-05-14 23:49:33+00:00
This has been an interest of mine for quite a while.

Right now the most relevant mapping process I have to do is taking Amazon product data and transforming it to a Shopify upload csv.

The largest of these is around 20k rows, so nothing crazy.

There are apps that do this via APIs, but at a large enough scale, they are not reliable.

The process takes around 10 hours, with the help of a VA who does the lower level cleaning stuff.

I made a bare bones spreadsheet with under 10 columns, which makes it much easier to work with the data.

Once I'm satisfied, I run it through a python script, which turns it into a Shopify conforming csv.

Because of different needs of clients, I almost always have to modify the script, but less and less each time, and Cursor makes the edits pretty easy, as long as I review each proposed change and prevent it from getting the script.

Good thing about cursor is that it can run its own tests against the input csv in agent mode and debug autonomously.
by kibet | 2025-05-14 23:50:09+00:00
I agree with you, some bad actors will unfortunately use this to manipulate their audiences, and I'm def not in support of that. But unfortunately only so much can be done to prevent people from doing that.

That said, my goal is to simply make the process of repetitive editing much simpler, easier and cheaper - sort of like the things they already do. But AI is super powerful and it can do much more than that and we may not be able to prevent that from happening. This should not make us leave the good things from the table though.
by bastawhiz | 2025-05-14 23:50:34+00:00
> ORMs turn SELECT * into each individual column

This is a safety feature. If my code expects columns A, B, and C, but the migration to add C hasn't run yet and I'm doing something that would otherwise `SELECT `, my query should fail. If the ORM _actually_ does `SELECT ` I'll get back two columns instead of three and things can get spooky and bad real fast (unless the ORM manually validates the shape of the query response every time, which will come with a real runtime cost). If there are columns that the ORM doesn't know about, you could end up with _far more_ data being returned from the database, which could just as easily cause plenty of spooky issues—not the least of which being "overwhelming your network by flooding the client connections with data the application doesn't even know exists".
by autoexec | 2025-05-14 23:50:44+00:00
I can understand why poor families might save enough money to make the trip across town to a nice restaurant or a high end shop in a wealthy neighborhood they could never afford to live in. I can't understand how making it prohibitively expensive for poor people to drive into those nice neighborhoods will result in them becoming rich enough to open fancy restaurants and shops in their own poor neighborhoods where no rich people will ever travel to. The people in the poor neighborhood can't afford to eat/shop in such places often enough to support them and rich people won't go into poor neighborhoods for them either.

Shutting poor people out of wealthy neighborhoods by making it too expensive to drive into them will just cause poor neighborhoods to become ghettos. People living there will have to effectively take a pay cut to commute to work in nice parts of the city and they'll be less likely to ever be able to move out.
by kscarlet | 2025-05-14 23:51:00+00:00
The arguments only apply to hand written programs and a particular flavor of AI (symbolicist AI) which has long fallen out of favor. They don't apply to most AI agent today. They definitely do not apply to reinforcement learning, and probably do not apply to any neural network. It says nothing that differentiate RL agents from living organisms (maybe there really isn't much difference anyways).

I can't help to point out the title really seems to suggest something the article is not claiming at all. In particular, it says nothing about whether most of today's AI agent approach can lead to agency and cognition.
by joshprice | 2025-05-14 23:51:05+00:00
There are some fun Easter Eggs in there for the truly curious :)

That's a great suggestion, the one-liner is cute but isn't quite as readable and explanatory as your multi-line version.

Not to mention, the one-liner doesn't show off the true power of igniter -- composability and additive AST patching codegen.

Thanks!
by recursive | 2025-05-14 23:51:17+00:00
If I lose access to my password manager, I'd be substantially boned. But I'm less worried about that. It would require me to forget my password, or 1password to get pwned, go bad, or lose data.

The way I assess risk, that's less likely to happen than I am to lose my passkeys.

If I'm using passkeys but can recover my account with SMS, then why am I using passkeys? That sounds like the weak link of security. I'd rather use passwords, where I can understand what the password consists of rather than passkeys if I'm not getting an increase in security.
by CelestialMystic | 2025-05-14 23:52:23+00:00
Not to me it isn't. I think you are trying to justify the fact that you paid far too much for a vacuum cleaner, like most people do when they buy overpriced item and point out the obvious problems with their products.

I own a Land Rover. It is old, expensive and unreliable. You know how I justify my spending on it? I like driving it.
by ujkhsjkdhf234 | 2025-05-14 23:52:43+00:00
West Virginia is a welfare state and the 3rd most dependent on federal funding. California actually gives more money than it gets from the fed. Most red states aren't subsidizing anything, they are the ones living off subsidies. Transit funding at the federal level supports ALL states. Projects in red states are being built due to the transit infrastructure bill passed under Biden.
by ryao | 2025-05-14 23:52:48+00:00
> Wayland is the changes to X11 that are necessary in order to move forward.

I have been hearing this for a decade. So far, there is room for both, especially since a number of things work better with the X11 Xorg server. This “everyone should switch to our solution” is like saying everyone should switch to <insert text editor here>. We can have more than 1.
by antihipocrat | 2025-05-14 23:52:55+00:00
Is it new? I'm getting mixed messages from the posts here. On one side there is evidence that 48 and 46 multiplication solutions have been known (and could have found themselves in the model training data).

On the other side I see excitement that the singularity is here.

If the latter were the case surely we wouldn't be reading about it in a published paper, we would already know.
by meander_water | 2025-05-14 23:52:57+00:00
Agreed, I've been thinking about the first assertion a lot recently as I've been using Cursor to create a react app. I think it's more prevalent in frontend development because it tightens the feedback loop considerably, and the more positive feedback you get, the more conditioned you get to reach for it anytime you need to do anything in code.

I think there's another perverse incentive here - organisations want to produce features/products fast, which LLMs help with, but it comes at the cost of reduced cognitive capabilities/skills in the developers over the longer term as they've given that up through lack of use/practice.
by swairshah | 2025-05-14 23:53:00+00:00
The tricky question is what env state do you compare in order to decide if its a cache hit or miss? just screen status, screen status + all open apps, that + all running processes etc. you know what i mean. I think its a solvable problem and very interesting one too. One now needs to think about what would a human consider while using a muscle memory and that varies based on the action i.e. "rm -rf ." requires knowing what directory i am in vs "click close + don't save" requires knowing I don't want the recent change.
by michaelmure | 2025-05-14 23:55:21+00:00
In theory it could happen but it's unlikely in practice, for multiple reasons:

- git-bug use a form of logical clock (not wall clock) that order an action in relation to other actions in the repo. Clock drifting doesn't matter.

- pushing to git usually require some access to the repo, and therefore abuse can be dealt with socially (aka you get kicked out)

What can happen for example is someone write a comment, shut down the computer and only push the next day, but in that case the comment showing up before yours is the correct merging.
by sudoforge | 2025-05-14 23:55:27+00:00
no - this is what using a lamport timestamp helps to avoid.

edit: re-read your comment and i see what you're getting at.

yes, there is the chance that you don't interact with the remote for X days, and neither does someone else, and when you both finally do, their comment will "magically show up before yours" because in reality they _did_ leave the comment before you.

this is not dissimilar to looking at normal git commits ordered by "author date" vs. "commit date", and seeing "weird date ordering" in a linear tree.

git-bug shows items in "the real order", so in a workflow where you are not fetching frequently, yes, other peoples' activity may be applied before yours when you finally do.

this is just like on a centralized platform like github, where if you are writing a lengthy response or review of a PR, you can end up posting it and requesting changes or approving it after the PR has been merged.
by compton93 | 2025-05-14 23:56:41+00:00
I worked for startup who did all of these things on CockroachDB. We could of used a single m5.xlarge PostgreSQL instance (1000 basic QPS on 150GB of data) if we optimized our queries and went back to basics, instead we had 1TB of RAM dedicated to Cockroach.

I added about 4 indexes and halved the resources overnight. But Prisma, SELECT *, graphql and what other resume building shit people implemented was the bane of my existence, typically engineers did this believing it would be faster. I remember 1 engineer had a standing ovation in slack for his refactor which was supposedly going to save us $$$$$ except our DB CPU went up 30% because he decided to validate every company every second in every session. In his defense, he added 1 line of code that caused it, and it was obscured through prisma and graphql to an inefficient query.

FWIW; I love CockroachDB but the price is directly linked to how much your software engineers shit on the database.
by nl | 2025-05-14 23:56:55+00:00
This is a pretty weak argument IMHO. They constraint their definition of algorithms beyond even their own already constrained definition below:

> In contrast, algorithms—broadly defined as automated computational procedures, i.e., finite sets of symbols encoding operations that can be executed on a universal Turing machine—exist in a “small world” (Savage, 1954). They do so by definition, since they are embedded and implemented within a predefined formalized ontology (intuitively: their “digital environment” or “computational architecture”), where all problems are well-defined. They can only mimic (emulate, or simulate) partial aspects of a large world: algorithms cannot identify or solve problems that are not precoded (explicitly or implicitly) by the rules that characterize their small world (Cantwell Smith, 2019). In such a world, everything and nothing is relevant at the same time.

If instead you define an algorithm as "anything that can be computed by a Turing machine" we see this "problem of relevance" which is at the heart of their argument drops away.

Even comparatively simple algorithms (eg BM25) can handle relevance very well, and LLMs can do even better at the expense of more compute.

While incomplete, I'd argue these are indicative of the weakness of their arguments.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-05-14 23:57:06+00:00
kindly, what would make you believe that the private, highly-likely-to-ignore-or-skirt-regulation ride sharing industry would produce a mass-transit product that remains price/service-competitive in an american city?

i have zero trust in the private sector to do anything that won't turn into a gated community, become abandoned, or rely on labor that they won't exploit worse than what they already do with "the gig economy".

we can have the private sector provide public good but we don't have the regulatory infrastructure in place to enforce that, and the more we strengthen the private sector at the expense of the public sector, the further we get away from that, and the closer we get to Biff's America.
by ThinkBeat | 2025-05-14 23:57:45+00:00
One of the reasons why having boxes in a data center would be good.

If there was big(?) money flowing through the company regularly, Keeping the server at the office and the backup in the owner's house seems like a shoestring budget.

Which was way more common in the past years, esp in small companies when "IT" was to be cheap cheap, even if there was.

But it seems that the client in this story did not worry about cost. Want a new server? No problem, A second one (windows) no problem?

Was stuffing the box into a data center ever brought up?
by tadfisher | 2025-05-14 23:57:47+00:00
From what I understand, you can resolve most issues by making ContentResolver queries yourself once you have URI permissions for a folder, including data like filename, mime type and file size in the query projection. This reduces an NxM number of queries to N, where N is the number of nested directories in the tree and M is the number of files in the directory.

Obviously this should be solved with a better API at the SAF layer.
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-14 23:58:20+00:00
The irony is the CEO probably can't tell it's mocking him.

What's the first sign of a midlife crisis?

That someone thinks a new car will turn them into a not-asshole.

> He wanted to bust the company he’d cofounded out of its pigeonhole of short-term home rentals. Amazon, he was fond of pointing out, was first an online bookstore before it became the everything store.

> “I was basically going from room to room just pouring out this stream-of-consciousness manifesto, like Jack Kerouac writing On the Road,” he says

> Chesky hopes to build the ultimate agent, a super-concierge who starts off handling customer service and eventually knows you well enough to plan your travel and maybe the rest of your life.

> “Brian’s been badly underrated as a tech CEO,” Altman says of his friend. “He's not usually mentioned in the same breath as Larry Page or Bill Gates, but I think he is on a path to build as big of a company.”

> “Steve Jobs, to me, is like Michelangelo or da Vinci,” he says. Despite never meeting Jobs, “I feel like I know him deeply, professionally, in a way that few people ever did, in a way that you only possibly could by starting a tech company as a creative person and going on a rocket ship,”

> “[AirBnB experiences] was like our Newton,” says Chesky, referring to Apple’s handheld device that predated the iPhone.

Yeah... somehow I don't think that guy understands subtlety or nuance. What a douche.
Show HN: Virtualflow – Automate Manual Data Extraction for SMEs
by davidade_ | 2025-05-14 23:58:35+00:00
Hey Guys,

I built an app to automate extracting specific information from documents and outputting that into any JSON, CSV or XML format.

Most SMEs still extract data from documents like invoices, receipts, forms, contracts, etc, manually, which wastes loads of time. I saw a stat that said 21% of employees' time is spent searching, extracting, and consolidating paperwork. That is crazy - that's around 1,760 hours every year per employee.

I got this idea when I worked at a global health-tech startup where there was a massive issue with extracting information from medical records to store and train algorithms. They handed out those documents to third-world countries where they could pay cheap workers to do this extraction for them.

I built a rudimentary version for them, but I felt like it could be applied to more situations, so I reached out to over 1000 logistics and finance professionals and settled for that.

I'm working on this full time and still trying to improve, so if you have feedback, I would love it!
by aminsadeghi | 2025-05-14 23:58:41+00:00
I'd argue that using calculators instead of learning how addition is done does hurt kids' ability to do mental arithmetic. It's an experiment we haven't tried, or at least not in places I've lived in. Sure, once you get how addition is done, feel free to free up your mind skipping 2+ digit arithmetics using a calculator. Same as: sure, once you learned what caching is and implement a small prototype, feel free to ask Claude to implement caching for you.
by etblg | 2025-05-14 23:58:59+00:00
> For instance, people did lament the invention of calculators, saying it would harm kids' ability to do mental arithmetic. And it did.

> Fortunately for us, we replaced those skills with technology that allowed us to do something analogous to them, but faster and more easily.

Don't kids still learn to do arithmetic in their head first? I haven't been in a school in decades but I remember doing it all sans calculator in elementary school. When you move on up to higher level stuff you end up using a calculator, but it's not like we skip that step entirely, do we?
by joshprice | 2025-05-15 00:00:15+00:00
Ash was definitely inspired by Rails but takes the seed of those ideas much further. So far that it starts feeling like a flexible and extensible domain modelling language and application configuration tool. It also happens to produce a working Elixir application using the best of the Elixir ecosystem.

It's funny that you say it sounds like low-code, because we've often said it's low-code tool but for software engineers. So when you inevitably hit the wall of a proprietary no-code/low-code platform, Ash can let you extend the framework or just solve the problem by writing functions as you like.

Once you appreciate the Ash way though, be warned! It's very hard to go back...

The gap it solves is having an opinionated, UI agnostic way of building your application layer. Phoenix has very limited opinions on how to write your application, and the team has stated that "Phoenix is NOT your application". Ash basically is your app, and Phoenix is the web frontend.

https://elixirforum.com/t/what-do-they-actually-mean-when-th...