MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by nico | 2025-05-27 16:39:26+00:00
Very interesting. Can these models be used in editors/agents like aider or roo? I can see also see a use case of some sort of plugin or browser extension, to easily apply the patches provided by GPT/Claude on their web interfaces (without having to copy/paste and manually edit the files in the editor)

Also, would love to see more concrete examples of using the Apply model

Reading here: https://docs.relace.ai/docs/instant-apply/quickstart

Is it correct, that first I need to: 1) have some code, 2) create a patch of the code with the changes I want, 3) call the Apply model with the full code + patch to make the changes and provide the result?

Do you have metrics to compare that workflow with just passing the code from 1) with a prompt for the changes to something like gpt/claude?
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-27 16:39:59+00:00
Does hydroelectric power violate the second law of thermodynamics in your opinion? I mean

1. Drops fall from the sky

2. They collect and flow down a river

3. We use that river to generate hydroelectric power to get free energy!

Water vapor, in air, has both thermal and potential energy that under the right conditions can be converted into a more useful form. We agree on that yes?
by oliwary | 2025-05-27 16:40:40+00:00
> If you’ve ever tried to construct a crossword, you’ll find that the framing of a crossword grid under square theory feels right. When you’re nearing the end of the grid-filling process, finding valid crossings of words to fill that final corner of a grid, there’s a satisfying “clicking” feeling—a sense of magic—when it all fits together, analogous to the wrapping-around feeling of completing the square.

If you enjoy this feeling, I think you would like my word game https://spaceword.org. The goal is to arrange 21 letters in a square that is as tight as possible. No one has achieved a "perfect" pattern yet, but people are very close, often leaving only 3 spaces blank!
by SketchySeaBeast | 2025-05-27 16:41:05+00:00
Given the shift in focus from back and forth interaction with the AI to giving it a command then waiting as it reads a series self-generated inputs and outputs, I feel like we're at that inflection point - the prompts might appear to be getting smarter because it can do more, but we're just hiding that the "more" it's doing is having a long, hidden conversation that takes a bunch more time and a bunch more compute. This whole "agentic" thing is just enabling the CPU to spin longer.
by fallinghawks | 2025-05-27 16:41:13+00:00
I was driving from Albany to Binghamton last week and spotted my first BE in the wild over 88. Fully mature, bright white head and tail. I'm into hawks and falcons and don't go out of my way to look for BEs, so it was lucky, and pretty neat.

In the Bay Area where I normally live we've had bald eagles nesting in at least 2 locations -- Crystal Springs reservoir, and next to a middle school in Milpitas, which is rather surprising considering how suburban Milpitas is.
by cfmcdonald | 2025-05-27 16:41:49+00:00
Author here. Thank you for the reference, this is very helpful. The name "Colonel Whitney" came from a 1984 Stan Veit article: https://www.atariarchives.org/deli/computer_magazine_madness...

Obviously he misremembered the name. I wasn't able to find other references to corroborate more details of the scam, but of course now I know that I wasn't searching for the correct name.
by memv | 2025-05-27 16:41:57+00:00
Hi HN,

I’ve been working on a symbolic computation engine based on a number sequence I discovered during experimentation with arithmetic vs. symbolic logic. I call it the Ruth Sequence, and it's defined by a recursive alternation between -2 (reset) and +11 (symbolic leap). What emerges is a sawtooth-like symbolic number pattern:

(-2, 9, 7, 18, 16, 27, 25, ...)

This logic is different from arithmetic — for example:

* 1 + 1 = 2 in math * but 1 + 1 = 11 in symbolic form (concatenation, not addition) * I used this to build a prototype symbolic OS (called Symbase) layered into 3 parts:

1. Arithmetic Layer – raw numbers 2. Normative Layer – symbolic strings like “100100” 3. Geometrical Layer – shapes/patterns from symbolic logic

This lets the system treat leading zeros, emotional state changes, and recursive logic as symbolic operations, not just numerical ones. It can be used for:

* symbolic memory * pattern-based computing * recursive UI generation * emotion-aware symbolic agents

I’ve published a thesis and a live demo if you’re curious.

I’d love to hear your thoughts. Is symbolic logic + recursion a valid foundation for post-function computing?

Thanks! – MEMV
by rendaw | 2025-05-27 16:42:02+00:00
Gradual typing means that an implicit "any" (unknown type) anywhere in your code base is not an error or even a warning. Even in critical code you thought was fully typed. Where you mistakenly introduce a type bug and due to some syntax or inference limits the type checker unexpectedly loses the plot and tells you confidently "no problems in this file!"

I get where they're coming from, but the endgame was a huge issue when I tried mypy - there was no way to actually guarantee that you were getting any protection from types. A way to assert "no graduality to this file, it's fully typed!" is critical, but gradual typing is not just about migrating but also about the crazy things you can do in dynamic languages and being terrified of false positives scaring away the people who didn't value static typing in the first place. Maybe calling it "soft" typing would be clearer.

I think gradual typing is an anti-pattern at this point.
by neepi | 2025-05-27 16:42:51+00:00
The mainframe terminal user interface was shown to me in all its glory by Italian gate staff at the airport in Rome. Literally hammered through a security check after I was flagged as having two return flights. It was no less than a form of kata.

I can imagine how shit it would have been if you have to log into windows and open a web app and use the mouse and stuff to click through a web form hacked up to do the job.
by cassianoleal | 2025-05-27 16:43:02+00:00
You're reading both too much into it.

First, I don't really consider what exists in "the west" as actual democracies. They are oligarchies or autocracies disguised as democracies instead. They've always been that, only now it's becoming more obvious.

> the dictatorship is then better

No, not at all. But it does have a clear path toward something better. This doesn't make it better, but it is a silver lining.

> Why couldn't then a democracy have a revolution as well

It could, but more frequently what happens are coups - and they descent into authoritarianism. Or the authoritarians get elected.

> And how's all this black and white thinking, like because democracy is not perfect, dictatorship becomes suddenly acceptable???

I definitely didn't say or think that.
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-27 16:43:14+00:00
I speculate, from this, that you are giving the LLMs too big of a task. Not quite vibe coding, but along that path.

> "You've refactored most of the file but forgot a single function"). It would take many many iterations on trivial issues, and because these iterations are slow that just meant I had to context switch a lot, which is also exhausting.

Try prompts like this:

"Given these data structures: (Code of structs and enums), please implement X algorithm in this function signature. (Post exact function signature)."

Or: "This code is repetitive. Please write a macro to simplify the syntax. Here's what calling it should look like (Show macro use syntax)"

Or: "I get X error on this function call. Please correct it."

Or: "I'm copying these tables into native data structures/match arms etc. Here's the full table. Here's the first few lines of the native structures: ...""
by adrian_b | 2025-05-27 16:43:28+00:00
After Motorola has abandoned totally (MC88k, M.core) or partially (MC68k => Coldfire) its older ISAs and it has transitioned to using the POWER/PowerPC ISA, it has applied it to the market in which they was interested, designing many kinds of microcontrollers with it, mainly for the automotive and communications markets, where microcontrollers with higher performance were required. Around the same time IBM has also introduced a series of microcontrollers based on the POWER ISA (PowerPC 4xx).

However, when the POWER ISA has initially been designed, before its launch in 1990, its target were high-end scientific workstations and servers made by IBM. The idea of using it in embedded computers has come much later, when the increased density achievable in integrated circuits has made that possible.
by dakiol | 2025-05-27 16:44:13+00:00
This goes against what you said above:

> Because, until recently, it was very costly to replace the code. AI "programmers" will create completely new code in a few minutes so there's no need to maintain it. If there are new problems tomorrow, they'll generate the code again.

In order for the programmer to know what change needs to be made to fix the bug, the programmer needs to debug the code first. But if code is costly to replace (and we'll use LLMs to regenerate code from scratch in that case), code is also costly to debug (reason for code being costly to replace is that code has grown to be an unmaintanable mess... that's the very same reason debugging is also costly).

Also, it doesn't make sense to ask programmers to debug and tell LLMs to code. Why not tell directly the LLM to debug as well?

So, your scenario of generating "new code" every time doesn't really sustain itself. Perhaps for very tiny applications it could work, but for the vast majority of projects where usually ~100 engineers work, it would lead to an unmaintainable mess. If it's unmaintainable, then no programmer can debug it efficiently, and if no programmer can debug it, no one can tell the LLM to fix it.
by geodel | 2025-05-27 16:44:19+00:00
I read that book last year. Very informative read. To my surprise Jack Welch felt lesser villain in book than I have considered him before. My takeaway was things one can get way with being 100 million dollar company in a growing economy is not possible with 100 billion dollar company in stagnating economy.

All that growth in GE credited to its executives was in large part due huge american spending power with massive and growing economy. So all these ways where GE fucked its workers, environment and so on worked because there were others who would balance out. How ever at some point it was no longer the case then gravity brought GE to its rightful place.
by itishappy | 2025-05-27 16:44:33+00:00
Agreed, but today's GE is quite different from it's former self. The article touches on this:

> But complexity has a cost when multiple things collapse at once. The power business cratered in 2017 and the insurance liabilities exploded and oil prices collapsed. CEO John Flannery launched "Project Eisenhower," a secret plan to break up the company. His successor, Larry Culp, made it official: After 126 years, the conglomerate would split into three.

> The final irony? The same GE labs that created the first US jet engine, the MRI, and LED lighting still exist. In 2024, they're developing hydrogen-powered aircraft engines and 3D-printing technology that would have amazed Edison. But the conglomerate that funded them is gone.
by sybercecurity | 2025-05-27 16:44:36+00:00
I assume that "donation" also doesn't include graduates giving things to returning students. No way to even track that.

This amount doesn't really surprise me. This has been happening ever since students were in dorms. Even in my little liberal arts school, people would dumpster dive for stuff in the dorms where the rich kids lived. The dedicated divers would even go around after Thanksgiving break and the end of fall semester, when the kids who were too into partying left (or were kicked out) and just left stuff behind that the RA threw out.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-27 16:45:36+00:00
> Canon law, for those of you who are unfamiliar, is used in the governance of the Catholic Church. It governs the internal affairs of the church and the conduct of its members.

The Code presented in the website under discussion is that of the Catholic Church, but “Canon Law” is not exclusively Catholic (the various Churches of the Anglican Communion have their own canon law, for example.)
by squeedles | 2025-05-27 16:45:50+00:00
Thanks for the history! Been driving past that plant for almost 40 years going back and forth across the state.

I was surprised when the article opened with what it said was the worlds first transistor radio, because I always thought that was the TR-1. It looks like GE made a prototype, but never took it to market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regency_TR-1
by ben_w | 2025-05-27 16:46:47+00:00
I say that everyone doing a startup needs to know what the actual minimum in the "minimum viable product" really is for them.

The idea of the MVP is there to say "publish this as soon as you can, don't wait because the market will have moved on and you'll run out of money if you wait for perfection".

MLP is a reaction against this, but I don't know if it's a reaction by perfectionists (who are wrong because then you go bankrupt), or a reaction by people who've tried one too many buggy and unready alpha products that was shipped to test the market before it was ready (who are correct, I'll let you think of your own example here).
by brucehauman | 2025-05-27 16:47:01+00:00
Until you've tried using an LLM assistant fully hooked into a stateful REPL, you can't speculate. The experience is fantastic as the feedback for the code being developed is earlier and tighter.

The LLM agent will often write the code for a function and immediately follow that code up with several smoke testing expressions and the eval the whole thing in one go, function and tests.

It will creatively setup test harnesses to enable it to exercise code while it's being developed. (think html endpoints, starting and stopping servers, mocking)

And it goes on from there. Its an experience, and I submit to the reader that they experience it sooner than later bc its an extremely effective workflow and its AWESOME!
by setr | 2025-05-27 16:47:35+00:00
Seconding this. With infinite time and money, I can do whatever you want — excepting squaring the circle.

Onus is yours to explain the difficulty and ideally the other party decides their own request is unreasonable, once you’ve provided an unreasonable timeline to match.

Actually straight-up saying no is always more difficult because if you’re not actually a decision-maker then what you’re doing is probably nonsense. You’re either going to have to explain yourself anyways (and it’s best explained with an unreasonable timeline), or be removed from the process.

It’s also often the case that the requestor has tried to imagine himself in your shoes in an attempt to better explain his goals, and comes up with some overly complex solution — and describes that solution instead of the original goal. Your goal with absurd requests is to pierce that veil and reach the original problem, and then work back to construct a reasonable solution to it
by jonfw | 2025-05-27 16:47:35+00:00
> there’s a little, but not a lot of insight into why an LLM does what it does.

That's a "black box" problem, and I think they are some of the most interesting problems the world has.

Outside of technology- the most interesting jobs in the world operate on a "black box". Sales people, psychologists are trying to work on the human mind. Politicians and market makers are trying to predict the behavior of large populations. Doctors are operating on the human body.

Technology has been getting more complicated- and I think that distributed systems and high level frameworks are starting to resemble a "black box" problem. LLMs even more so!

I agree that "prompt engineer" is a silly job title- but not because it's not a learnable skill. It's just not accurate to call yourself an engineer when consuming an LLM.
by mattnewton | 2025-05-27 16:48:01+00:00
You don’t have rights without a way to enforce them, and the courts are what our laws provide for the enforcement of rights against the government.

Due process already doesn’t need to be costly, Bush, Biden and Obama all deported millions and processed millions of asylum claims using administrative processes invented for this. Trump’s admin either doesn’t want to or is incapable of doing the work of governing by the book; so they attempt to trample people’s rights and effectively deputize random border security with the power to detain you or even throw you in CECOT for life. This worries some foreign conference visitors. Because it’s not clear that any law actually prevents it from happening to them in practice, they’d rather not visit the US and interact with those border agents. It’s that simple, there is no conspiracy of the “lawyer class” or “excessive litigation” “dragging our feet” or a “media invention”.

There has to be some due process or we have nothing enforcing our rights. There are no fast and easy solutions here, and I don’t think it is worth sacrificing it all to enable a strongman who can’t rise to the task otherwise. Let’s have a higher bar for the highest office in the land.
by nick-baumann | 2025-05-27 16:48:23+00:00
Fair point Jeff -- you're right that we're still doing retrieval. The key distinction is how we retrieve.

Traditional RAG for code uses vector embeddings and similarity search. We use filesystem traversal and AST parsing - following imports, tracing dependencies, reading files in logical order. It's retrieval guided by code structure rather than semantic similarity.

I highly recommend checking out what the Claude Code team discovered (48:00 https://youtu.be/zDmW5hJPsvQ?si=wdGyiBGqmo4YHjrn&t=2880). They initially experimented with RAG using embeddings but found that giving the agent filesystem tools to explore code naturally delivered significantly better results.

From our experience, vector similarity often retrieves fragments that mention the right keywords but miss the actual implementation logic. Following code structure retrieves the files a developer would actually need to understand the problem.

So yes -- I should have been clearer about the terminology. It's not "no retrieval" -- it's structured retrieval vs similarity-based retrieval. And with today's frontier models having massive context windows and sophisticated reasoning capabilities, they're perfectly designed to build understanding by exploring code the way developers do, rather than needing pre-digested embeddings.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-05-27 16:48:40+00:00
I know most WWE fights were scripted when I was watching those fights. You can see how the camera angle gets cut or changed when blows lands and needless jumping on the mat to distract. But it was entertainment. In that way, WWE is no different than day-time dramas, soaps. It is good for business or at least it is working currently - since WWE is still in business!
by pkd667 | 2025-05-27 16:49:07+00:00
Static Linear Untiful Tensors

A library for vectors and matrices with physical dimensions. Basically `uom` but in a vector space.

```

let mass = (10.0).scalar::<Kilogram>();

let force = Vec2::<f64,Force>::new::<Newton>([1.0, 2.0]);

// let error = mass + force; // error (expected)

let mass = mass + Scalar::<f64,Mass>::from::<Gram>(5.0); // works

println!("{}", mass);

/*

Tensor [1x1x1]: M^1

-- Layer 0 --

( 10.005 )

*/

let acc = force.scale(mass.inv()); // works

println!("{}", acc);

/*

Tensor [1x2x1]: L^1 * T^-2

-- Layer 0 --

( 0.09995002498750624 )

( 0.19990004997501248 )

*/

```
by pfunctional | 2025-05-27 16:49:13+00:00
(Preston, other guy on the team)

Yes, they can -- I actually tried a semantic edit implementation in Aider. It got the "correct edit format" percentage to 100%, but didn't really budge the overall percent correct on SOTA models. I should push it sometime, since it really helps the reliability of these local models like Qwen3. If you reach out to me, I can try to share some of this code with you as well (it needs to be cleaned up).

But yes, 1. have some code, 2. create a patch (semantic, diff, or udiff formats all work), and 3. apply will return it to you very fast. There's roughly a 10-15% merge error rate when we last benchmarked on using Claude 3.7 Sonnet to create diff patches, and with us it was 4%; and you can use the Apply as a backup if the merge fails.
Show HN: Zero JDK – Java builds without installing Java
by julien-may | 2025-05-27 16:49:19+00:00
Zero JDK is a POSIX-compliant shell script that bootstraps a Java project by downloading and setting up the required JDK (via a custom URL in .jdk/config.properties). It works without needing Java installed globally.

It also supports installing Maven or Gradle wrappers, so that a new contributor or CI runner can clone the repo, run ./build init, and build the project without touching system state.

I made this because I kept jumping between projects with different JDK versions, and I wanted a zero-dependency way to ensure reproducible builds. Inspired by the simplicity of scripts like mvnw or gradlew, but extended to also bootstrap the JDK itself.

It currently supports macOS and Linux. Curious if others find this useful and happy for feedback or contributions.
by fmbb | 2025-05-27 16:49:29+00:00
Mid 1800s computing classic.

> On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

From Passages from the Life of a Philosopher (1864), ch. 5 "Difference Engine No. 1"
Ask HN: Merge Request Review Agent?
by surrTurr | 2025-05-27 16:49:40+00:00
Looking for an agent that I can use to create a MR review for MRs e.g. on GitLab.

The agent should review the changes using (1) git diff (2) rag on codebase (3) other sources, e.g. web

Yes, I could build this myself using e.g. langchain; however, I think this has been built hundrets of times by now; therefore my question: are there any ready to use agents for this kind of task?
by starkparker | 2025-05-27 16:50:37+00:00
Because it's not about the money, it's about the conflict between the characters. Despite them talking about a real-world company, this still concerns the characters that the wrestlers are portraying.

Professional wrestling is by and large a scripted drama series about athletes, with scenes of interpersonal conflicts connected with stuntwork scenes of simulated competition.

What you're calling out is a plot point, even if it blurs lines with the real world. It's a storytelling property that modern wrestling employs, if not uniquely then distinctly; because the promotion knows that modern fans regularly argue over which wrestlers are most valuable to the promotion, the promotions use that to add heat to the character drama.
by constantcrying | 2025-05-27 16:51:13+00:00
Exactly. Even much of the discussion here misses the point. Whether design is flat or has depth is totally irrelevant, when it isn't first and foremost focused on enabling humans to interact with computers.

The debate about aesthetics just hides the ever declining usability of interfaces. Constantly redesigning everything so that it fits some global aesthetic mould is destructive to usability.