MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mindslight | 2025-05-25 18:42:10+00:00
ugh, you're right. This is the problem with the spiral into fascism - people increasingly demand accountability, but that energy doesn't lead to actual in-system reform but rather just more differentish corruption, which then drives even more increased demands for accountability.

A similar dynamic is at play with Luigi. Someone finally pierced the corporate/legal abstractions of the healthcare cartel with some extrajudicial punishment on one of the more-visible cogs. We can all understand that, and it's downright cathartic...

But when Krasnov calls Bezos and tells him to discontinue publicizing how much Krasnov's new import taxes are costing everyone, Bezos knows how popularly hated his corporate ownership class is. If Krasnov ends him tomorrow most people won't be horrified, rather there will be throngs cheering it on - the rule of law no longer protects him. And so he has little choice but to lash himself to the fascist's power and comply.

I wish I knew how to reverse the trend.
by foobarqux | 2025-05-25 18:42:44+00:00
> The truth is that all of the progress on machine learning is absolutely science

It is not science, which is the study of the natural world. You are using the word "science" as an honorific, meaning something like "useful technical work that I think is impressive".

The reason you are so confused is that you can't distinguish studying the natural world from engineering.
by bowsamic | 2025-05-25 18:43:31+00:00
People will do anything to not address the fundamental weaknesses that are the true causes of their issues. They have wrist pain so they try and fix their wrist with crazy setups, even though they have huge tightness in their traps and never do any strength training. It barely needs anything either, just light strength, high reps low weight. Your wrists can take any keyboard and setup if you don’t avoid physio
by ctoth | 2025-05-25 18:44:26+00:00
> To save money, the FAA elected not to build a new STARS server in Philadelphia to support the move. A new server alone would require tens of millions of dollars, as well as installation of new internet and power infrastructure.

> Instead, it elected to send a “mirror feed” of telemetry from the STARS servers at N90, traveling over 130 miles of commercial copper telecom lines, with fiber optics to follow by 2030.

> The annoyances of traditional cable internet — frequent lag, dropped sessions — are probably familiar to those who stream video or play games online. But for air traffic controllers, even the smallest service disruptions can become dangerous.

So LOL what, they just ... piped it over the Internet? Also can someone make sense of this "new server" costing millions of dollars? Presumably it's not the cost of a server, which is orders and orders of magnitude less than that?
by neilv | 2025-05-25 18:44:41+00:00
One of the many downsides of "top posting" that I didn't see mentioned is when a given email including quotes is taken as the history of the email thread up to that point, but it's missing emails (because of concurrency with possibly multiple replies going on at once, and because of cherry-picking or randomly-picking which subtree to respond to).

Even in a back-and-forth between 2 people, there are some people who'll reply a second time to the same email, not to replace their earlier response, but to add more information.

(Aside: Also, it seems to be rare for people forwarded a top-posted thread context to actually read it, unless they're looking to assign blame.)

In every company, I end up having to reconstruct context for someone, or do archaeology on some interaction, and the top-quoting both helps and hurts.

Downsides of lazy top-posting for these purposes include having to break out all those messages, and fill in the gaps from maybe multiple copies at different points.

Upsides include when, say, a single email is the only record, and the fact that a bunch of people top-posted means you have more raw information, in the quotes, than if that single email was in a history of people doing proper Netiquette with minimal quoting of the parts they were responding to.

There are a whole bunch of reasons and implications for how things are done in corporate practice, and IME most of them come down to one of: poor tools, poor use of the tools (including by "digital natives"), and corporate misalignment + politics.
by overgard | 2025-05-25 18:45:44+00:00
This might be a harsh thing to say, but I don't think the talent at Amazon is top notch because (from everything I've heard anyway) Amazon is such a nightmarishly dystopian place to work that, well, if you have a choice you probably avoid working there? I say that with the recognition that there are always diamonds in the rough, but I'm not sure this really comments on AI usage at a place that treats their employees well.

(That said I'm all for more dystopian stories so we can get past this AI-replacing-coders fad)
by ngneer | 2025-05-25 18:45:49+00:00
It's reasonable to perceive most of the value in math and computer science being "at the scale" where there is unpredictability arising from complexity, though scale may not really be the reason for the unpredictability.

But a lot of the trouble in these domains that I have observed comes from unmodeled effects, that must be modeled and reasoned about. GPZ work shows the same thing shown by the researcher here, which is that it requires a lot of tinkering and a lot of context in order to produce semi-usable results. SNR appears quite low for now. In security specifically, there is much value in sanitizing input data and ensuring correct parsing. Do you think LLMs are in a position to do so?
by levocardia | 2025-05-25 18:46:17+00:00
Indeed. Even before LLMs you could hire a cheap ghostwriter on upwork. Or even better, hire one to write the outline, another to flesh out the outline into a book, and a third to proof it. Get a cover on fiverr and upload. Then rinse and repeat. Fiction, nonfiction, doesn't matter. Whatever sells. Amazon's KDP program had to institute (very modest) upload limits for this reason. People were turning capital into a deluge of slop books -- hundreds per day in some cases. As usual, the real money is in selling courses that "teach" people how to do this technique.
by vessenes | 2025-05-25 18:46:46+00:00
I read the whole thing, thank you for linking it Simon!

Notable to me is that Sonnet is really good at some coding use cases, better than Opus. It would make sense to me to distill Sonnet with an eye toward coding use cases - faster and cheaper - but I’m surprised it’s genuinely better, and it appears to be (slightly but measurably) better for some stuff.
by rkeene2 | 2025-05-25 18:47:44+00:00
In Linux it also needs mprotect() to change the permissions on the page so it can write it. The OpenBSD man page[0] indicate that it supports this as well, though notes that not all implementations are guaranteed to allow it, but my guess is it would generally work.

[0] https://man.openbsd.org/mprotect.2
by James_K | 2025-05-25 18:48:19+00:00
There are developers whose wrists explode after years of holding down the shift and control keys. I honestly can't recommend a split keyboard enough from an ergonomics perspective. It's even more practical than a regular keyboard. You can put drinks or food in between the two halves, and if you get one using laptop-style low-profile switches you can put it in your pocket and take it with you anywhere on the go. Combined with some of those Android apps that give you a VTT and you can fit an entire coding set up in your pocket.
by pbw | 2025-05-25 18:48:19+00:00
I also started in the 1990’s and agree the evolution has been as you describe it. It does highly depend on where you work, but the tightly managed JIRA-driven development seems awfully popular.

But I fall short of declaring the 1990s or 2000s or 2010s were the glory days and now things suck. I think part of it is nostalgia bias. I can think of a job I spent 4 years and list all the good parts of the experience. But I suspect I’m forgetting over a lot of mediocre or negative stuff.

At any rate I still like the work today. There are still generally hard challenges that you can overcome, people that depend on you, new technologies to learn about. Generically good stuff.
by OptionOfT | 2025-05-25 18:48:38+00:00
To me it feels like part of the hype train, like crypto & VR.

I recently had the (dis)pleasure of fixing a bug in a codebase that was vibe coded.

It ends up being a collection of disorganized business problems converted into code, without any kind of structure.

Refinements are implemented as super-narrow patches, resulting in complex and unorganized code, whereas a human developer might take a step back to try and extract more common patterns.

And once you reach the limit of the context window you're essentially suck, as the LLM can no longer keep track of its patches.

English (or all spoken human language) is not precise enough to articulate what you want your code to do, and more importantly, a lot of time and experience precedes code that a senior developer writes.

If you want to have this senior developer 'vibe' code, then you'll need to have a way to be more precise in your prompts, and be able to articulate all learnings from your past mistakes and experience.

And that is incredibly heavy. Remember, this is opposite from answering 'why did you write it like this'. This is an endless list of items that say 'don't do this, but this, in this highly specific context'.
Show HN: Run automated ML experiments using Claude Code
by killerstorm | 2025-05-25 18:48:41+00:00
I made a template which can be used to conduct (basic) ML experiments in a fully automated mode: Claude Code will write the code, you only need to provide a working environment and the idea.

The goal was largely to demonstrate that this is possible, specifically to:

* encourage to people who want to run some ML experiment but don't have time t code it to actually give it a try * provide evidence that LLM recursive self-improvement is not "science fiction"

The template is bare bones, it does not come with niceties for monitoring experiments, conduct experiments at scale, etc.

The script assumes that CUDA, Python, PyTorch are already set up. This is quite easy if you rent an instance from https://lambda.ai/ - that's pre-installed. You'd only need to install Claude Code (which itself requires npm) to get it going.

As I mentioned in the README, the most advanced experiment I tried so far is injection of sentence-embedding memory into a pre-trained transformer.

The timeline on https://ai-2027.com/ assumes that we'll only be able to get AI coding agents which can do ML experiments in 2026, but it seems like it is already possible now. (I spent only few hours on this, obviously proper AI labs can spend whole days on infrastructure, scaffolding, prompting, fine-tuning, etc.)
by calibas | 2025-05-25 18:48:51+00:00
The fact that we have figured out how to translate language into something a computer can "understand" should thrill linguists. Taking a word (token) and abstracting it's "meaning" as a 1,000-dimension vector seems like something that should revolutionize the field of linguistics. A whole new tool for analyzing and understanding the underlying patterns of all language!

And there's a fact here that's very hard to dispute, this method works. I can give a computer instructions and it "understands" them in a way that wasn't possible before LLMs. The main debate now is over the semantics of words like "understanding" and whether or not an LLM is conscious in the same way as a human being (it isn't).
Show HN: Catch hidden exceptions in JavaScript with ESLint and JSDoc
by Xvezda | 2025-05-25 18:49:31+00:00
I've built an ESLint plugin that enforces explicit exception documentation using JSDoc's @throws tag, similar to Java's `throws`.

It currently provides two rules: - `no-undocumented-throws`: flags functions that throw without a corresponding @throws tag - `no-implicit-propagation`: flags functions that call other @throws-documented functions without documenting the propagated exception

It includes auto-fixers, type-aware validation using TypeScript, and support for Promise rejections.

Would appreciate any feedback or suggestions.
by mihaaly | 2025-05-25 18:49:40+00:00
Exactly!

Dependence on special hardware instead of generally available ones is the making of future trouble for yourself.

Also in collaborative environments allowing others to work on your computer, assisting you in an easy way, is important.

For people working 40 years alone in a remote cellar the exact very same way throughout, and making several reserve clone of the unique and specialist hardware replacing the worn out ones, this could be ok.
by abetusk | 2025-05-25 18:50:05+00:00
It concerns the size of the largest sum-free set [0]. Take a (finite) set of integers, A. What is the largest subset of A such that no two entries sum to a third.

The previous results was not much better than |A|/3. The current, just proved, result shows that the largest subset is |A|/3 + c log(log(|A|)).

For example, the set {1,2,3} is not sum-free (1+2 = 3) but the subset {2,3} is sum-free (2+3 \notin {2,3}).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sum-free_set
by timewizard | 2025-05-25 18:50:25+00:00
> but if we manage to find a way to hit 70%, it would be better.

Yet still absolutely worthless.

> "correct for most part, but could be better" concept something.

When humans do that we just call it "an error."

> so lets call that "correctness" or something

The appropriate term is "confidence." These LLM tools all could give you a confidence rating with each and every "fact" it attempts to relay to you. Of course they don't actually do that because no one would use a tool that confidently gives you answers based on a 70% self confidence rating.

We can quibble over terms but more appropriately this is just "garbage." It's a giant waste of energy and resources that produces flawed results. All of that money and effort could be better used elsewhere.
by 1bpp | 2025-05-25 18:50:57+00:00
This is really impressive and surprisingly visually close to Explorer, especially the font rendering and the button hover effects. I also started poking around to see how the animated wallpaper was done and the custom devtools were a nice surprise too. I don't know how much Microsoft cares about people ripping Windows icons, but directly using icons from Facebook Messenger, VLC, VSCode, Chromium, etc might be more of a concern if it starts to get more attention.
by alephnerd | 2025-05-25 18:51:12+00:00
Aerospace is hard.

An ATCS like STARS needs to feed from multiple different OT and IT sources like radars, weather stations, other TRACONs, etc and is implemented in it's own airgapped environment.

It can get very pricy very quick. On top of that, the FAA's budget has been sclerotic for decades now after the 1980s era union action and the 1990s era national cost cutting.

And finally, it is a political organization, and NATCA is a fairly prominent union within the AFL-CIO, and could make the lives of NJ representatives hell for pushing reassignment out of Newark.
by lanfeust6 | 2025-05-25 18:51:34+00:00
> I see this as much more of a hackers vs. corporations ideological split.

That framing may be true within tech circles, not the broader political divide. "Hackers" aren't collectively discounting and ignoring AI tools regardless of their enthusiasm for open-source.

Safety-ism is also most popular among those see useful potential in AI, and a generous enough timeline for AGI.
by xtracto | 2025-05-25 18:52:26+00:00
Haha, you may be too young I'm sorry; it was meant to be a joke.

Back in the 90s when linux came out and started getting traction, Richard Stallman was adamant that people should call the operating system GNU/Linux , because Linux was only the kernel, but mlst of the userland utilities were the GNU software (which were planning to make a full OS like GNU/Hurd).

Some people made fun of that, and I was just kind of paying the joke.
by IndubitableCoil | 2025-05-25 18:52:37+00:00
This really isn't true. I am not deficit doomer, but you can't say its meaningless. The US paid $881 billion on interest on its debt last year. This is on par with the DoD. Yes, it's still only around a tenth of the US's total budget, but it is not hard to imagine the debt going up by 10 times. With the same interest rates, we then the US will pay as much in interest as the rest of the budget combined. If the US just needs to "print as much money as it needs", there is a certain point at which it will become hyperinflationary.
by yborg | 2025-05-25 18:53:16+00:00
The income part of SS is more or less subsistence level, which arguably was its intention to keep the elderly from begging in the streets. But in the dystopian US healthcare system, Medicare is arguably the more important part of the social net. Without it, you are not going to afford any healthcare in old age.

If this budget hits the PAYGO limits, which is basically guaranteed, that will trigger automatic cuts to Medicare, so they can backdoor cut the program without anybody voting for that.
by skydhash | 2025-05-25 18:53:45+00:00
So why do we have Java, Kotlin, Scala, Groovy, and Clojure, all targeting the JVM? And many such families?

The only thing that matter to the machine is opcodes and bits, But that's alien to human, so we map it to assembly. Any abstractions higher than that is mostly for reasoning about the code and share that with other people. And in the process we find some very good abstractions which we then embed into programming languages like procedure, namespacing, OOP, patterns matching, structs, traits/protocols,...

All these abstractions are good because they are useful when modeling a problem. The some are so good then it's worth writing a whole VM to get them (lisp homoiconicity, smalltalk's consistent world representation,...)
by crazygringo | 2025-05-25 18:53:47+00:00
On the one hand, I understand your disappointment with JSON due to its gigantic size.

On the other hand, I wouldn't want another proprietary binary format to deal with.

And it seems like zipped JSON is almost the best of both worlds -- text-based so debugging and manual editing in a pinch is easy, but around as small as a binary format would be.

Sometimes I wonder if there shouldn't be a kind of optimized library that translates directly between 1) an in-memory structure based on e.g. class attributes rather than dictionary keys so the repeated keys aren't using up all your memory, and 2) writing out to zipped JSON format but automatically creating zip dictionary entries for keys, syntax like braces, numbers, repeated values, etc. It could be vastly faster than regular zip compression because it wouldn't be creating a dynamic dictionary, but would know the repeated bits and frequencies in advance. (I.e. by default wouldn't compress English text within JSON values, but you could also enable regular slower global zip compression if you wanted.)

So the file format would still just be zipped JSON that any tool can read. But you could use this optimized library to convert directly between a much smaller size on disk and a small size in memory, without ever having to e.g. hold the entire JSON uncompressed string in memory at any stage.

Maybe something like this already exists? I haven't come across it though.
by Loic | 2025-05-25 18:54:09+00:00
I fundamentally agree with your comment. But for Denmark, it is very difficult to learn Danish. I lived there 3 years, took courses and was at end able to do my daily stuff in English, but a part of the society simply does not want a foreigner to speak Danish. You are forced to use English.

My girlfriend asked me once in a Restaurant (Cafe Norden in Kopenhagen) why I was ordering in English. Then, I spent the complete evening ordering everything in Danish, to always receive answers in English. And this nearly everywhere (not my bakery, the girls there could not speak a word of English, this was an exception). This was in the early 2000's. This never happened to me in all the other countries I have been living in. A Danish colleague simply told me that he does not like to listen to broken Danish, better switch to English.

Still have a lot of friends in Denmark, integration there is not easy, even for highly qualified people from the EU.
by jevndev | 2025-05-25 18:54:22+00:00
I think the key to understanding why people want this is that those people care about results more than the act of coding. The easy example for this is a corporation. If the software does what was said on the product pitch, it doesn’t matter if the developer had fun writing it. All that matters is that it was done in an efficient enough (either by money or time) manner.

A slightly less bleak example is data analysis. When I am analyzing some dataset for work or home, being able to skip over the “rote” parts of the work is invaluable. Examples off the top of my head being: when the data isn’t in quite the right structure, or I want to add a new element to a plot that’s not trivial. It still has to be done with discipline and in a way that you can be confident in the results. I’ll generally lock down each code generation to only doing small subproblems with clearly defined boundaries. That generally helps reduce hallucinations, makes it easier to write tests if applicable and makes it easier to audit the code myself.

All of that said, I want to make clear that I agree that your vision of software engineering Becoming LLM code review hell sounds like… well, hell. I’m in no way advocating that the software engineering industry should become that. Just wanted to throw in my two cents
by mmooss | 2025-05-25 18:54:31+00:00
Don't try to be entirely self-taught. Everyone needs guidance and feedback from experts in the domain; otherwise you are certain to misunderstand things, have large blind spots (truly blind; you'll be unaware of them), not understand how things apply in real situations, and have no exposure to the latest knowledge.

It doesn't have to be via college; there is apprenticeship, even if usually unofficial in IT, at many jobs. (College can be fantastic in many ways if you have the opportunity - don't let the reactionary politics ruin your life-changing opportunity - especially if you are intellectually curious.)

Also, be very choosy about who you learn from; I'd be much more choosy about that then about what you learn, or even where I work or the job I do - do anything to work with and learn from the best people. The range of knoweldge and skill in the real world is almost impossible to conceive of, and a lot of it is so much BS. If you learn from C-level people, you will have C-level knowledge and skills and never know better until you meet someone who is B-level or A-level - there are entire organization and towns of C-level people. One big advantage of going to someplace like the Bay Area is the community of highly-skilled people, many on a level you are unlikely to meet in most other places, and being exposed to the newest ideas. Just being there can raise your game, if you take advantage of it.
I love 2025 because I can vibecode. What a time to be alive
by sankalpdomore | 2025-05-25 18:54:51+00:00
I am going mad with ideas in the age of vibe coding. I have built and monetized a micro-SaaS already and building another one.

So much opportunity to build and so little time. I keep getting ideas to build but I don't want to go the route of fully-automated AI agents.

I want to enjoy the process and have fun building.

Only way forward is building high concentration and focus.

Exciting times ahead!
by harrall | 2025-05-25 18:55:15+00:00
I know friends in a similar boat.

Ultimately you can get very far if you are naturally talented technically and socially.

But if you are normal like most of us, you are lacking in one or more areas and going to school (or attending conferences or maintaining a popular resource) can be one of those ways to shore up one of your “less natural” skills, but no step is strictly required and not everything works for everyone.