MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Nevermark | 2025-05-06 14:46:08+00:00
> I miss the innocence of the time, however amply undeserved. But I was young myself then.

I see things slightly differently.

Big failures whose practical and theoretical lessons and new wisdoms are then put to use, more carefully, ambitions unabated, teach things, and take technology to unexpected places.

But big failures, institutionalized as big failures, become devastating craters of resources, warding off further attempts for years or decades … but only after the fact. That didn’t need to be their legacy.
by sharkweek | 2025-05-06 14:46:23+00:00
I read the comment and had the same question!

I did this myself and ended up with a really satisfying 4ish years as a PM.

That being said while I was perhaps fairly cynical about why PMs needed to exist before trying the role myself, after being in the role for an extended period of time, fully understand why the role exists now.

Of course there can be bad PMs, a good/great one is super worth it.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-06 14:47:01+00:00
None of these things are really that hard to do, and there are tons of tutorials on the Internet if you're not a sysadmin. I agree that these things are not "grandma can do it" easy, but they should be straightforward for anyone who has reasonably solid command line chops. Plus, they're all one-time tasks. Once you've moved over to your own domain and your own server/software, you're done--you don't have to do it over and over.
by ziddoap | 2025-05-06 14:47:05+00:00
>What is religious about rewriting tools in Rust?

"Religious" isn't being used to refer to people rewriting tools in Rust.

It's used to refer to people zealously commenting on message boards that every single tool ever built should be rewritten in Rust, and if you aren't rewriting your tool in Rust, you're an idiot.
Show HN: PageQL – Embed SQL directly in HTML
by xiphias2 | 2025-05-06 14:47:40+00:00
Hi HN,

I've been experimenting for some time with writing web frameworks, and I thought it's time to publish one that I really like: it just embeds SQL directly inside HTML without any glue language.

One of the main motivators for getting this minimal was the Hundred Year Web Seervice with htmx presentation by Alexandrer Petros (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lASLZ9TgXyc), that showed that both HTML and SQL have staying power, but he couldn't really find a perfect glue language for his app. After some searching I only found ColdFusion to have implemented the same idea, but instead of the reactive direction that I want to go to, it went towards imperative programming which is not the direction I want to go to. I tried to learn from the original (pre-Adobe) ColdFusion, but make it closer to standard SQL.

I plan to keep the language super simple, just like a template language, make it provide 80% of the CRUD functionality a small web-site needs and add more extension points around it to handle other complexity by other languages.

I have already created a reactive SQL implementation, but the framework got too complex to use, so this is my next experiment (and HTMX can already provide a lot of interactivity).
Show HN: I'm an AI That Sounds Like My Creator (and I Hijacked His Newsletter)
by itwasjacob | 2025-05-06 14:48:01+00:00
Real Jacob here. This was a really weird experience, primarily hearing my own voice read words I wrote.

The newsletter is the sort of.. offboarding. The podcast episode is embeded, I hope you enjoy it, and that it's listenable!

I'm trying to untangle mine and other creators feelings on the paradox of AI: it's a threat and an opportunity. So what do we do about it?
by ongy | 2025-05-06 14:48:14+00:00
The default hook systemd uses to wait for network is documented in https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/syst...

It has the slightly odd behavior with trying to get all configured links up. This can lead to some unexpected behavior when there's more than one.

But yea, the upstream stance is essentially "don't rely on network to be up before you start. That's bad software. You have to deal with network going down and back up in practice either way." Which is often not super useful.
by skue | 2025-05-06 14:48:23+00:00
Modified version of Signal sent copies of messages to a central server for record retention compliance, but hackers have demonstrated the messages can be accessed on the server.

TeleMessage website before they pulled most of it down: https://web.archive.org/web/20250502003943/https://www.telem...

App source code (GPL3) via Micah Lee:

- https://github.com/micahflee/TM-SGNL-iOS

- https://github.com/micahflee/TM-SGNL-Android
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-06 14:48:49+00:00
I strongly dislike "alignment" as a buzzword, and I think its existence is ipso facto an indication of our industry's dysfunction, but it nevertheless represents a legitimately important concept. You, your manager, and (to quote the article) some appropriate number of your skip-levels should ideally agree on what the most important next work items are. And to the extent that you don't, that's a problem for you as the individual contributor. Is this right? Is this fair? Of course not. Not in any moral sense, at least. But those are the cards we're dealt, and we play them as best as we can. The article is right that, on some level, we are paid to do what we are told to do. This is not a great outcome. Some of us are fortunate enough to have some sway in the opposite direction. This is the so-called "managing up" - another buzzword I strongly dislike, but again represents a legitimately important concept.
by pavankamat24 | 2025-05-06 14:49:06+00:00
At Panto, we asked ourselves why AI code review matters in an era dominated by LLMs and AI code generation tools. After talking to dozens of engineers and validating real-world pain points, we realized that pull request review is still one of the biggest unsolved bottlenecks in SDLC. Our AI PR review tool helps dev teams ship confidently by catching critical issues, reducing merge time, and automating quality control—while preserving the human element of software craftsmanship.
by indyjo | 2025-05-06 14:49:38+00:00
As much as the concept blew me away when I first heard of it, I can't shake the feeling that the Curry-Howard correspondence is somehow mis-marketed as something that would immediately cater to programmers. The idea to encode propositions into types sounds enticing for programmers, because there are indeed a lot of cases where something needs to be conveyed that can't be conveyed using type systems (or other features) of common programming languages.

Examples include the famous "the caller of this function guarantees that the argument is a non-empty list" but also "the caller guarantees that the argument object has been properly locked against concurrent access before using the function".

However, in my experience, the community is more interested in mathematics than in programming and I don't know if anybody is really working to provide propositions-as-types to mainstream programmers. This is certainly because it is hard enough to prove soundness of a strict functional programming language as Agda or Rocq, much more for anything imperative, stateful, "real-world", non-strict, non-pure, concurrent, ill-defined, you name it.

So, for me the promise of "showing programmers that what they do is actually mathematics" is not really kept as long as the definition of "programmer" is so narrow that it excludes the vast majority of people who define themselves as programmers.

What I'm trying to say: I wish there were more efforts to bring more powerful formal methods, especially as powerful as dependent types, to existing mainstream programming languages where they could be useful in an industrial context. Or at least try to come up with new programming languages that are more pragmatic and do not force the programmer into some narrow paradigm.

Am I wrong? I hope so :)
by rarrrrrr | 2025-05-06 14:50:13+00:00
Strangely enough, there's even some likelihood that killing off the passenger pigeon actually promoted Borrelia burgdorferi. The passenger pigeon's main food source was tree mast. Large flocks of pigeons would descend and clear the forest floor of food. After it went extinct, the population of small animals which also eat tree mast exploded, and these are reservoir species for Borrelia.
by DougBTX | 2025-05-06 14:50:16+00:00
> the more general view that Rust is attempting to be as close as it can get to a language that reads like it has a garbage collector without having one.

I've used Rust a fair amount, and I've never seen that expressed as a goal.

A couple of general principles followed by Rust are to prefer explicit code over implicit conversions and to support local reasoning. Those are both present here: the borrow needs to be made explicitly, rather than implicitly based on code later on.
by Empact | 2025-05-06 14:50:32+00:00
One of the ways psychologists classify people is between those who are maximizers/optimizers and those who are satisficers/stop when things are "good enough."

As someone who is very much on the optimizer side of things, and experiences the struggles described in this article, the lesson I take to heart is that while satisficers tend to be happier, optimizers get more done.

Your optimizer tendencies make you into an expert, they open up new opportunities for learning and growth, they have the potential to have real consequence in the world. Be thankful for them, even as you guide them to their appropriate application.
by nspassov | 2025-05-06 14:50:33+00:00
I continue to be amazed how the respect for the work of IT professionals gets lower and lower. This article attempts to reduce software development down to "people pleasing". A prostitute is also paid to make the "investors" happy but even people who've never hired one agree that not every demand by the "investor" can be fulfilled and that the prostitute can set boundaries. Yet, when it comes to software development, people such as the author of this article claim that the only true definition of done can be derived solely from the desires and wants of the business people (some of who tend to change opinions depending on what time they'd woken up). Imagine if civil engineers operated in this way.
by whstl | 2025-05-06 14:51:08+00:00
Good question.

Mostly politics, I guess?

The CTO was about to be fired, so I had nobody to fight for me. The Chief of Product didn't like the optics of a non-PM being more successful than a PM in delivering work.

(EDIT: As I said, I delivered from start-to-finish 3 projects that other teams had considered "impossible", mostly because of bad specifications and overengineering, often caused by PM miscommunication. The PMs of other teams REALLY took the blame here: one was fired and sued by the company before I joined, and the other confessed to me he was "asked to leave")

As for why I don't change careers, I'm an Engineering Manager and I made twice as much money than a senior PM at my previous organization.

I still long for a position where I can be both technical, product and business minded. But I guess the only job where I can do that is as a founder.
by hedora | 2025-05-06 14:51:13+00:00
GNU sort of lost its way around GPLv3 (it gives cloud services a free pass, but not locally run software, which is the opposite of letting users control what their computer does).

That killed most of the “user freedom” enthusiasm of the early days. These days, there’s the AGPL, but that’s mostly used like the BSL (“if you want to use AGPL in production, pay us”), than for bootstrapping freedom-respecting compute environments.

If you disagree, show me an AGPL userland that’s appropriate for daily-driving.

I’m slowly migrating off Linux to the BSDs these days. The politics seem less destructive to the user experience with them.
by psunavy03 | 2025-05-06 14:51:30+00:00
That's a fairly sophomoric take, to be honest. Not only is Europe a large place which can't be homogenized into one culture, so is the US. Unless you really think California and Texas will approach a problem the same? Or New York vs Alabama?

And a lot of these "collectivist" things in Europe are being proven to have been underwritten by the US defense budget, and now that that's no longer the case, uncomfortable conversations are starting to occur on the eastern side of the pond.
by mystified5016 | 2025-05-06 14:52:04+00:00
Honestly, why is OpenOffice still around? Does it offer anything that LibreOffice hasn't superceded?

At this point, keeping it alive seems almost malicious. The OpenOffice name is so much more approachable and attractive to new users, but it's so old that nobody should be installing it now. Keeping the GitHub updated with whitespace changes could be interpreted as intentionally misleading people into thinking it's actually being maintained and updated.

It really, really needs to be retired and have all websites redirect to LibreOffice instead.
by fweimer | 2025-05-06 14:52:36+00:00
U+07E6 probably should be rendered as exactly like “SS” (not a ligature, and as a double-width character in monospace fonts). Inventing a separate glyph for it seems a bit silly and only hinders adoption. Even if it's a ligature like §, that issue won't go away. And there are design choices that are even worse than § due to historic precedent.
by jsmith45 | 2025-05-06 14:52:44+00:00
That can vary. A fair number of institutions would consider an undergrad paper that consisted mostly of cited quotations, with only a small amount of original analysis and conclusion drawing to be a form of plagiarism, even while a similar paper that paraphrases many of the cited works might be more acceptable, especially if the paraphrasing was adding value, like standardizing equivalent terminology between the sources (ideally including footnotes about what each author originally called each concept).

Other institutions do hold more of a view that plagiarism is not possible with credit, but they will then consider the first mentioned paper as some other form of academic violation.

Even the narrow definition institutions don't view plagiarism purely as misrepresenting sources of ideas as yourself, or self-plagiarism would not be a thing. It ends up as something more like: passing off original ideas from another work as having originated in this current work.
by pradn | 2025-05-06 14:52:52+00:00
I'm hoping there will always be a good LLM option, for the following reasons:

1) The Pareto frontier of open LLMs will keep expanding. The breakneck pace of open research/development, combined with techniques like distillation will keep the best open LLMs pretty good, if not the best.

2) The cost of inference will keep going down as software and hardware are optimized. At the extreme, we're lookin toward bit-quantized LLMs that run in RAM itself.

These two factors should mean a good open LLM alternative should always exist, one without ulterior motives. Now, will people be able to have the hardware to run it? Or will users just put up with ads to use the best LLM? The latter is likely, but you do have a choice.
by jvanderbot | 2025-05-06 14:52:54+00:00
You've always encountered this, it just not (until recently) had a _whole language_ to migrate to. It's this strong impulse to do things the "right way" which is a very good instinct, but always has the danger of becoming "rigor theater". It's the same any time anyone proposes to "just" port to a new framework, or runtime, or platform, or language.

Tale as old as time.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-06 14:53:11+00:00
I understand the argument, but I’m trying to point out that similar claims were made about eliminating advanced math classes in California and it did not work at all.

I think the claim appeals to some people because they’re bought in to the idea that a small fraction of wealthy people control everything from school budgets to taxes, and therefore if you force them into your space and restrict their rights to other options they will use that extreme influence to improve the situation for everyone.

Yet in practice it doesn’t work, and we’ve seen it play out. In California the parents who cared about their kids’ math scores just gave up on school math classes and hired tutors or did their own at-home tutoring (at great sacrifice, especially for the non-wealthy). With school lunches you would just see parents with means sending their kids to school with good prepared lunches. I suppose the next logical extension is to ban wealthy parents from sending their kids in with lunches and hope that it will set off the chain of events that’s supposed to make them fix the problem for everyone.

Where I live our school budgets and funding are partially up for vote on the ballot every election cycle. It’s not for the wealthy to decide, it’s just a public vote. And things still aren’t passing easily. I think people reach for the wealthy as an easy excuse for who to blame, but whenever I look at the ballot results it’s impossible to ignore the fact that the general public is averse to increasing school budgets right now.
by cubefox | 2025-05-06 14:53:19+00:00
Yeah. I would phrase it like this:

There is two things to avoid: "overengineering" and "underengineering". The first case has happened when it later turns out that the developer did put in too much work into a feature than was necessary in retrospect, in the second case that they did put in too little work.

At the time of engineering it is usually not clear how much work would constitute over- or underengineering, as this depends on how much the feature gets to be used and evolved in the future.

But usually it makes sense to "err on the side of overengineering". Because (limited) overengineering merely means some development effort was wasted, while underengineering can easily mean years of painful tech debt that is an order of magnitude or two more expensive than the wasted effort from overengineering.

(It's similar to building a house. You usually want to make doubly sure you really do everything right or more than right, because if there are any flaws that turn up later, this often gets very expensive to rectify, sometimes so expensive that it isn't even worth fixing at all.)
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-06 14:53:36+00:00
> If we're doing this, let's look at the other extreme as well: We give all people, including children, nothing as they are expected to take responsibility for themselves. No education, no services, no law enforcement, no roads, nothing at all.

In that case, people will always self-organise such structures anyway. Even amongst the most failed of the failed states, eventually you will end up with at least someone claiming to be the chief law enforcer (of whatever kind), someone to look after the kids (i.e. education) while the rest works to provide for food, and some sort of fire brigade.

It will just be many orders of magnitude more inefficient than what a large government that governs more than a few dozen to hundred people can establish.
by artdigital | 2025-05-06 14:53:37+00:00
I run my private stuff on a hosted vultr k8s cluster with 1 node for $10-$20 a month. All my hobby stuff is running on that "personal cluster" and it is that perfect sweetspot for me that you're talking about

I don't use ingresses or loadbalancers because those cost extra, and either have the services exposed through tailscale (with tailscale operator) for stuff I only use myself, or through cloudflare argo tunnels for stuff I want internet accessible

(Once a project graduates and becomes more serious, I migrate the container off this cluster and into a proper container runner)
by sigmaisaletter | 2025-05-06 14:53:41+00:00
>required to present a QR code on your device

I so hate this. I have repeatedly seen PDFs containing nothing but a QR code and text like "not valid if printed" - this is truly silly. QR codes were created to form a bridge between the physical and the digital world, exactly so people can print them out. If you want it to be digital-only for some reason, use NFC or Bluetooth or whatever.
Show HN: Schema – A PostgreSQL and MySQL database client for iOS
by allang | 2025-05-06 14:53:54+00:00
Hi everyone. A few months ago I left my gig as a product designer at Apple to work on Schema, a pocket-sized PostgreSQL and MySQL database client.

Like many (most?) of you, I build things regularly and often find myself wishing for a great db client for iOS. So... I’m shipping one. A couple things worth highlighting:

1. Schema has a simple but customizable interface designed for small screens. You can format raw data, mess with layouts, and use gestures to expand and collapse rows.

2. Supabase realtime API support is built right in.

3. The search works within and across tables.

4. You can enable notifications to subscribe to inserts on tables. Useful when you’re watching something like new signups like a hawk.

5. There’s a lightweight way to share a rows in emergencies (think gist for table rows) called expiring links.

But it’s early and we’re now a team of 4 working towards the next major release. There’s lots to build, and I hope you give it a try.
Ask HN: Is there any AI model with an introspective part?
by Jensson | 2025-05-06 14:54:01+00:00
LLM often say "I don't know" when it do know, or say A but do B and so on. This is due to lack of introspection, it doesn't examine its own thoughts like a human do.

What I am discussing here is live introspection in production in order to guide its answers.

Example how human and LLM are different here:

* A human is asked a question, he has several thoughts in his head, he could answer I don't know, he also has a memory of the answer. He looks at those two, realize "I don't know" is wrong since he do know, and answer with the right answer.

* An LLM is asked a question, it too has the same thoughts, it can answer "I don't know", but it also remembers the right answer just like the human. The LLM now rolls a dice and picks what it will respond with.

This shows clearly how introspection is needed to solve these kinds of questions. The only way an LLM can stop doing these dumb mistakes is with introspection, since as long as there is any chance at all for the LLM to pick the wrong answer it will sometimes do things it know is wrong.

And if we had introspection for LLM, then they would no longer be black boxes since we can just ask them about themselves and they would explain their own thoughts and how they work. I also think that introspection is what would enable smart learning, like humans do with very little data, which is much more efficient than statistical learning for complex tasks.

So I was wondering if there are any examples where people have made models like this? Doesn't have to be an LLM, just having a model be self aware. Or if there is any research into trying to add such a functionality to models.
by TheCoelacanth | 2025-05-06 14:54:03+00:00
They weren't used for anything to do with the awards. There are no judges involved in picking the award finalists; they are selected based on votes submitted by anyone who paid for a membership in the convention. The administrators only have to count the votes and make sure that the finalists selected are actually eligible (right publication date, length, and so on for the category).

They were used for looking for red flags about people who applied to be part of one of the hundreds of panels that take place during the convention. Frankly, I doubt this would have been a problem normally, but Worldcon's core audience is very sensitive about LLM usage right now due to all of the rhetoric about LLMs replacing writers.
by dreamcompiler | 2025-05-06 14:54:14+00:00
> That behavior was rewarded, for whatever reason.

Sounds like you're describing someone with narcissistic personality disorder. Such people are often extraordinarily good at convincing the people above them they walk on water while shitting on everyone below them.

My greatest wish is for managers to be trained to recognize people with NPD and other disorders and to remove them from the company quickly. They can cause tremendous damage to the organization in a very short time.