MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dmix | 2025-05-21 14:28:30+00:00
> Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind"

If they weren't experimenting with AI and coding and took a more conservative approach, while other companies like Anthropic was running similar experiments, I'm sure HN would also be critiquing them for not keeping up as a stodgy big corporation.

As long as they are willing to take risks by trying and failing on their own repos, it's fine in my books. Even though I'd never let that stuff touch a professional github repo personally.
by dfxm12 | 2025-05-21 14:28:56+00:00
For people interested in guitars, seeing how things get made, or museums related to guitars, I can't recommend the Martin factory tour enough in Nazareth, PA. You really get up close to all aspects of the guitar making process and can talk to some people while they're working. You can also see guitars from people like Johnny Cash to Ed Sheeran.
by Lcchy | 2025-05-21 14:29:19+00:00
They both do e2ee so they cannot read your secrets server-side, which is the standard.

Critically though, Bitwarden is open source, meaning that if the encryption is weakened, it would be noticed in the source.

With 1Password the clients are closed source: you have to trust the company to encrypt the secrets properly and an (malicious or accidental) change of the encryption cannot be detected by the user.

After Lastpass's fiasco around encryption, I don't feel like blindly trusting another company.
by mikepurvis | 2025-05-21 14:30:22+00:00
My pessimistic view is that we're liable to end up cutting off the pipeline into the industry. Similar to lawyers replacing clerks with bots, if senior engineers can now command bots rather than mentor new hires, where is the on-ramp? How does one actually gain enough experience to become a senior?

Or is all this a nothing-burger, since the new hires will just be commanding bots of their own, but on lower level tasks that they are qualified to supervise?
by troyvit | 2025-05-21 14:30:33+00:00
> Individual LLM requests are vanishingly small in terms of environmental impact;

The article uses open source models to infer cost, because those are the only models you can measure since the organizations that manage them don't share that info. Here's what the article says:

> The largest of our text-generation cohort, Llama 3.1 405B, [...] needed 3,353 joules, or an estimated 6,706 joules total, for each response. That’s enough to carry a person about 400 feet on an e-bike or run the microwave for eight seconds.

I just looked at the last chat conversation I had with an LLM. I got nine responses, about the equivalent of melting the cheese on my burrito if I'm in a rush (ignoring that I'd be turning the microwave on and off over the course of a few hours, making an awful burrito).

How many burritos is that if you multiply it by the number of people who have a similar chat with an LLM every day?

Now that I'm hungry, I just want to agree that LLMs and other client-facing models aren't the only ML workload and aren't even the most relevant ones. As you say adtech has been using classifiers, vector engines, etc. since (anecdotally) as early as 2007. Investing algorithms are another huge one.

Regarding your USENET point, yeah. I remember in 2000 some famous Linux guy freaking out that members of Linuxcare's sales team had a 5 line signature in their emails instead of the RFC-recommended 3 lines because it was wasting the internet or something. It's hard for me to imagine what things were like back then.
by perrygeo | 2025-05-21 14:30:53+00:00
unwrap() is fine for experimental and WIP code. But it's a code smell for production. I usually do a git grep for unwrap and go one of two ways:

1. convert to an expect() - even if a panic is fine, you at least owe the future reader an explanation.

2. Use "proper" result handling, usually let Some, .ok_or, or a match.

Unwrap is a nice ergonomic cheat code to get the program compiled and leave a little TODO for yourself. You just need the discipline to circle back and clean them up, just like any debugging tool.
by binary132 | 2025-05-21 14:31:27+00:00
An API (as people usually mean by it, anyway…) is really just a simple grammar for the creation and manipulation of objects in the system. Those objects still have types and properties just like any other object, but they tend to be implicit and unreliable. A good DSL is just a more abstract and implicitly verb-oriented API. For example, Lua DSLs can resemble something almost like a sort of typed or tagged DDL. Translating that into an “API” just adds more clumsy legwork to achieve the same outcome.
by terts | 2025-05-21 14:31:34+00:00
Not many iterations, but a lot of head scratching was involved haha.

I decided against using a trait and a derive macro because I wanted to avoid running into Rust's orphan rule. We have a crate called routecore where most of our types are declared and then a separate crate called Rotonda which uses those types and uses Roto. I wanted Rotonda to be able to register routecore types.

That's also the downside of the current reflection crates; they require each type to have a derive macro.
by xivzgrev | 2025-05-21 14:31:47+00:00
Could be interesting. My main fear would be a wider variability in behavior, reducing effectiveness.

Currently there are incentives against representatives acting too much like assholes - they would lose the support of their political party, effectively ending their career.

Randomly chosen people have no such incentive. Take the loudest, most obnoxious people and put them in our congress? Nothing would get done, they’d just be grand standing all day, taking selfies, or breaking various rules.

I’m sure most people chosen would be fine, but it only takes a few bad apples to ruin the batch / process.
by alkonaut | 2025-05-21 14:31:49+00:00
I think it goes without saying. PBT shouldn't be random-random (e.g. use a timestamp or cryptographic seed), it should be deterministically pseudorandom if it uses random values. You shouldn't be able to run it 10 times and get 9 pass and one failure. It's either 10 passes or 10 failures.
by tikhonj | 2025-05-21 14:31:51+00:00
I wrote some property-based tests for a parsing library. Eventually one of the tests for case-insensitive parsing failed... because it hit the letter "Ǆ" which has upper, lower and title-case.

The funny thing is that the parsing library was correct and it was the test property that was wrong—but I still learned about an edge case I had never considered!

This has been a common pattern for "simpler" property-based tests I've written: I write a test, it fails right away, and it turns out that my code is fine, but my property was wrong. And this is almost always useful; if I write an incorrect property, it means that some assumption I had about my code is incorrect, so the exercise directly improves my conceptual model of whatever I'm doing.
by bumby | 2025-05-21 14:32:01+00:00
This is a bad faith argument, and I think you know it. There is a wide gulf between “just a few industries” and “everything”. The first is naive and the latter is impractical. My suggestion is we take a targeted stance, where the solution resides in that gulf.

And for what it’s worth, your screw argument belies a poor understanding, especially given your example of a jet. Aerospace parts are notoriously expensive because we want to track and manage the entire supply chain. That’s why an airplane screw can cost $1k, when naive people assume you can just pick up an equivalent part at Home Depot.
by ramesh31 | 2025-05-21 14:33:01+00:00
Conveniently ignoring the fact that the word "citizen" in Athens referred to wealthy (free) adult males who had completed military service, whose parents were both citizens, and even then not always. It was in no ways representative, even if nominally democratic among those privileged few. We take the 14th amendment (birthright citizenship + equal protection) for granted now, but it was truly a revolutionary act in all of world history at the time. Our modern systems of mass elected representative democracy were shaped in the aftermath of that, and are far more equal than anything the people of Athens could have ever dreamed of.
by rz2k | 2025-05-21 14:33:22+00:00
After a hurricane, the plan might be to help neighbors charge their phones, or sell electricity to telcos to power their networks switches and cell towers.

I think I am much less remote than the poster, and I can easily lose power for a week or more after a winter storm. Considering that they already have generators on site that can manage the full load, they probably have much better up time than the utility electricity provider.
Ask HN: Feedback on a Platform to manage AI prompts (Promptly)
by qendi | 2025-05-21 14:33:31+00:00
Hi HN! I’m Qendrim, and I’m working on Promptly, a web platform and Chrome extension for people who frequently use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. It helps you save, organize, and reuse prompts more efficiently.

The core idea is that AI usage is becoming a big part of daily workflows, but most people still manage their prompts with scattered Google Docs, Notion pages, or nothing at all. Promptly gives you a clean, focused interface to store prompts, tag them, organize them by topic, and re-use them quickly.

With the Chrome extension, you can: - Autofill saved prompts with one click - Copy/paste variations instantly - Upload or save new prompts from anywhere - Use hotkeys to speed up prompt insertion - Queue multiple prompts to send in order without switching context

The web platform lets you build a personal prompt library, follow other users, find trending prompts by tag, and optionally use AI to optimize your prompt phrasing.

There will be a premium tier, but all core features like saving, organizing, autofilling, queuing, and hotkeys will be available for free. Premium will cover optional extras like AI-based prompt optimization and extra storage limits.

I wanted to share early here because I think HN is a great place to get feedback on what’s missing, what would be useful, or what just gets in the way.

Would love your thoughts: especially on how you manage prompts now, what your ideal workflow looks like, or any friction you’d want removed.

If you are at all interested, the waitlist is live at promptlyai.ca.

Thanks for reading!
by TonyTrapp | 2025-05-21 14:33:43+00:00
As much as I'd like to also dunk on them because of their AI nonsense, this keeps being misquoted again and again. He said that about 20-30% of their code is written by software. If someone like Satya says "by software" and not "by AI", you can be very sure that there is a good reason that he's phrasing it as carefully as this - because that includes a lot of things like auto-generated code, e.g. COM classes generated from IDL files. Of course in the current climate everyone that's not careful enough will just mis-interpret it as "30% written by AI", and that is probably intentional.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-21 14:33:44+00:00
It goes the other way around. I'd think the kind of people who get elected today, if offered a chance to be corrupt, would often decline politely or it would be possible for people to extend feelers to get some idea about it.

Trying to corrupt a set of random Americans who weren't selected by "being good at politics" would be like a game of Russian Roulette. Some people would go for it but sooner or later you'd be looking at the barrel of a gun or get the police called on you or something.
by xpe | 2025-05-21 14:33:44+00:00
Maybe the author was -- or maybe not -- but for a large number of people there is an implication that one could "blame" corporations for being selfish, self-serving, criminal, clueless, self-destructive, leading to social ills, and so on. But who established the rules for the corporations? It depends how you ask: previous people, previous systems, the progression of history.

My claim, put another way, is that if you trace the causality back a few steps, you land at the level of the system.

Anyhow, the question "who do we blame?" can be a waste of time if we use it only for moral outrage and/or a conversation stopper. Some think "what caused this?" is an improvement, and I agree, but it isn't nearly good enough.* Still, it isn't nearly as important as "how do we change this with the levers we have _now_?"

* Relatively few scientists understand causality well, thinking the randomized controlled trial is the only way to show causality! The methods of causality have developed tremendously in the last twenty years, but most scientific fields are rather clueless about them.
by IanCal | 2025-05-21 14:33:48+00:00
I've had better success with things like o3 with search, because it can actually go and read docs to help fix problems. It helped me dig through matrix specs, proposals and PRs and while the first suggestion didn't work (I thought it would have done) it ended up finding proof that only part of that got merged and found how to enable the experimental side that allowed the other. The iteration of searching and going through things was incredibly helpful. Probably saved me a good few hours or meant I was able to do this at all.
by Vicinity9635 | 2025-05-21 14:33:49+00:00
If you're not using it where it's useful to you, then I still wouldn't say you're getting left behind, but you're making your job harder than it has to be. Anecdotally I've found it useful mostly for writing unit tests and sometimes debugging (can be as effective as a rubber duck).

It's like the 2025 version not not using an IDE.

It's a powerful tool. You still need to know when to and when not to use it.
by abendstolz | 2025-05-21 14:33:51+00:00
You're right. Hot reloading isn't done by default.

I manually compile a plugin and in my system I can "refresh" a plugin and even say "activate version 1.1 of the plugin" or "activate version 1.2" of the plugin etc.

But that's something I had to build myself and is not built into wasmtime itself.
by joseph_terzi | 2025-05-21 14:33:53+00:00
I've built a library that manages hierarchical data in a flat, ordered json. It will perform basic operations. Add, Delete, Demote, Promote, Move Up/Down all data in data out for your use. It computes outline numbering, 1, 1.1, 2, 2.1 etc. As well as can create an ascii tree for console use. You can check out the github page I'd love some early feedback. I built it because I'm building a requirements and project tracking CLI/TUI tool that needs a flat ordered structure, and I couldn't find anything that met that need. Once I had it working I thought it might be useful for other projects!
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-21 14:34:20+00:00
The real missing the forest for the trees is thinking that software and the way users will use computers is going to remain static.

Software today is written to accommodate every possible need of every possible user, and then a bunch of unneeded selling point features on top of that. These massive sprawling code bases made to deliver one-size fits all utility.

I don't need 3 million LOC Excel 365 to keep track of who is working on the floor on what day this week. Gemini 2.5 can write an applet that does that perfectly in 10 minutes.
by fragmede | 2025-05-21 14:34:22+00:00
The worry, that is borne out by the pricing of Uber, isn't that LLMs are more expensive than the generation before, but that it's a VC play. Get into market, undercut your competitors until they go bust, then raiser prices. Ubers used to be $1, which was obviously totally unsustainable. Now Uber's only competing platform is Lyft, and Uber is making money as of their latest quarter. Ubers are not at least $10 if not $50 $100. ChatGPT's $20/month looks like $1 Ubers to some. Only insiders know how much it actually costs OpenAI to support ChatGPT users. I will note, however, that GitHub free private repos are supported by corporations paying for their own private GitHub, so it's unclear that ChatGPT's $20/month ever has to be raised with enough $200 or $2,000 or $20,000/month users.
by pc86 | 2025-05-21 14:34:28+00:00
It's a great way to get from point A to point B, it's a great workout if you're "maybe you should have a television show" levels of obese, but if you're reasonably fit and not completely sedentary in your day-to-day life it is pointless as a means of exercise.

Context matters and in terms of good means of exercise it does not take much for walking to fall pretty far down the list.
by HelloNurse | 2025-05-21 14:34:32+00:00
I'd expect both code and name to be subject to deliberate changes (e.g. name "A" is extended to "Alpha" after the name column is extended from 1 to 5 characters) or "technical" edits (e.g. due to out of order data entry, code "A1" should become "A2" in order to insert the proper A1 record). Anything the user sees is a commitment.
by wiktor-k | 2025-05-21 14:34:47+00:00
> I always felt unwrap is preferable for diagnosing issues, which makes it useful in tests. A failed unwrap will point you directly to the line of code which panics, which is much simpler than trying to trace an issue through many layers of Results.

Take a closer look at testresult since it also points directly at the exact line of failure (due to panics being used under hood) but looks nicer.
by lm28469 | 2025-05-21 14:36:00+00:00
> be bad for one's back and knees?

"This can't be good for your body" is a bullshit excuse most of the time, I have 1 in a million chance to pulling a muscle while deadlifting, but someone who sits all day and don't exercise has 1 in 1 chance of slowly rotting away day by day, pick your poison. Unless you morbidly obese I don't think a 10kg backpack will be the straw that breaks the camel's back

Most people got it backwards, your knees and back don't hurt because you overused them, they hurt because they're grossly underused.
by skybrian | 2025-05-21 14:36:04+00:00
Unlike Bitcoin, which burns more energy for the same usage as the price goes up, LLM inference prices are dropping rapidly [1] because AI companies have big incentives to cut costs.

Companies like Apple and Google are both building data centers and trying to make on-device AI a thing. Unfortunately, they also keep inventing new, more expensive algorithms.

It’s at least plausible that most LLM use will become cheap enough to run on battery-limited devices like laptops and phones, though it’s not what most people are betting on.

[1] https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends
by dfxm12 | 2025-05-21 14:36:25+00:00
In each hobby you will find people that are in it for the gear more than anything.

Playing guitar and collecting gear are two different hobbies. This is not the only hobby like this. The people who play magic: the gathering are not necessarily the people who collect MTG cards for the sake of collecting. There's some overlap, yeah, but these are still distinct hobbies.
by rajnathani | 2025-05-21 14:36:27+00:00
I was going to comment the same about the Superposition hypothesis [0], when the OP comment (edit: Update: The OP commenter is (as pointed by other HN comments, the cofounder of Anthropic) behind the Superposition research) mentioned about "I've had a lot more success with: * The linear representation hypothesis - The idea that "concepts" (features) correspond to directions in neural networks", as this concept-per-NN-feature idea seems too "basic" to explain some of the learning which NNs can do on datasets. On one of our custom trained neural network models (not LLM, but audio-based and currently proprietary) we noticed the same of the ML model being able to "overfit" on a large amount of data despite not many few parameters relative to the size of the dataset (and that too with dropout in early layers).

[0] https://www.anthropic.com/research/superposition-memorizatio...
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-21 14:36:28+00:00
Sorry, you are right. I was unnecessarily snarky

I read some of your other comments in this thread and I'm not sure what to make of your experience. If you've never felt mistreated or exploited in a 30 year career you are profoundly lucky to have avoided that sort of workplace

I've only been working in software for half as long, but I've never had a job that didn't feel unstable in some ways, so it seems impossible to me that you have avoided it for a career twice as long as mine

I have watched my current employer cut almost half of our employees in the past two years, with multiple rounds of layoffs

Now AI is in the picture and it feels inevitable that more layoffs will eventually come if they can figure out how to replace us with it

I do not sleep well knowing my employer would happily and immediately replace me with AI if they could
by abendstolz | 2025-05-21 14:36:57+00:00
Don't rust shared libraries have the problem of no stable rust ABI? So you either use the C ABI or you use some crate to create a stable rust ABI, because otherwise a shared lib compiled with rust compiler 1.x.y on system a isn't guaranteed to work with the binary compiled on the same system with another compiler... or on another system with the same compiler version.

Right?
by pfdietz | 2025-05-21 14:37:20+00:00
It's an example of Alfred Whitehead's quote:

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

We can do property based testing with less thinking than if we try to prove correctness. We are exploiting the ability of the computer to run millions or even billions of tests. It's the enormous power of today's computers that enables this to work.

The theorem prover approach would work only if it could be automatic: press a button, get the proof (after some acceptable delay). Otherwise, look at all the expensive manual effort you just signed up for.

You might think that as computers get faster, theorem proving becomes easier. But testing becomes easier also. It's not clear testing will ever lose this race.
by terts | 2025-05-21 14:37:28+00:00
Hi! Author here. There's a couple of reasons.

First, this language is syntactically a lot like Rust but semantically quite different. It has no references for example. We're trying to keep it simpler than Rust for our users.

Second, using Rust would require compiling the script with a Rust compiler, which you'd then have to install alongside the application. Roto can be fully compiled by the host application.

I think your approach might be preferred when the application author is also the script author. For example, if you're a game developer who is using a script to quickly prototype a game.
by bediger4000 | 2025-05-21 14:37:41+00:00
> Diversity of thought

With all due respect, experience with those using phrases like "diversity of thought" and "echo chamber" (and even 'freedom of speech") has taught us that those phrases are characteristic of right wing takeovers. I don't believe that you're one of those takeover folks. My humble advice is that you should try not to use their catchphrases.
by quantadev | 2025-05-21 14:37:45+00:00
If Event Horizons can come in any number of dimensions (with the conventional things we call Black Holes having 2D of space-like degrees of freedom on the EH) that leads to the obvious conjecture that our 3D universe might itself be a 'manifold' (projection) from a higher dimensional 4D space (i.e. we live on a 3D EH). That 4D space might even itself be a projection from a 5D one, and so on. This is extremely similar to Holographic Principle, but very definitely a more generalized theory.