MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FabHK | 2025-05-07 18:35:49+00:00
> certain values will be far more likely than other values

That's fine, as for the normal understanding of uniformity on the interval, you want the probability that a value is chosen to be proportional to the "space" between its left and right neighbor, and that space is not constant on the interval.

What you try to emulate is picking a real number uniformly between 0 and 1, then returning the closest floating point number (except 1, maybe).
by raincole | 2025-05-07 18:36:48+00:00
> The wildest part is that JetBrains has their own AI coding tools and they seem to be very good.

Which one?

Last time I checked JetBrains' AI tool and it was laughably bad compared to Copilot. My bar was quite low already as I hadn't even used Cursor by the time.

Edit: What I tried is "JetBrains AI Assistant". I haven't tried Junie yet.
by cartoffal | 2025-05-07 18:37:17+00:00
The idea of "type safety over the network" is a fiction.

When it comes down to it, what is being sent over the network is 1s and 0s. At some point, some layer (probably multiple layers) are going to have to interpret that sequence of 1s and 0s into a particular shape. There are two main ways of doing that:

- Know what format the data is in, but not the content (self-describing formats) - in which case the data you end up with might be of an arbitrary shape, and casting/interpreting the data is left to the application

- Know what format the data is in, AND know the content (non-self-describing formats) - in which case the runtime will parse out the data for you from the raw bits and you get to use it in its structured form.

The fact that this conversion happens doesn't depend on the language; JS is no more unsafe than any other language in this regard, and JSON is no better or worse of a data serialisation format for it. The boundary already exists, and someone has to handle what happens when the data is the wrong shape. Where that boundary ends up influences the shape of the application but what is preferable will depend on the application and developer.
by Gajurgensen | 2025-05-07 18:37:37+00:00
Think of higher level specifications which do not imply any details of the implementation.

For instance, consider a sorting function. One could write a bubble sort and consider that a spec, but that is far too much detail, much of which you don't actually care about. A much better specification would be "the function takes a list 'l' and produces a sorted list which is also a permutation of 'l'." This is the sort of specification we want, but we have more work to fill in the implementation details.

This can get arbitrarily difficult if your specification logic is sufficiently expressive. Imagine the spec is something like "solve this unproven mathematical conjecture."
by abirch | 2025-05-07 18:37:58+00:00
From the article Eddy Cue is Apple’s senior vice president of services. "Cue said he believes that AI search providers, including OpenAI, Perplexity AI Inc. and Anthropic PBC, will eventually replace standard search engines like Alphabet’s Google. He said he believes Apple will bring those options to Safari in the future."

So Apple may not be making their own, but they won't be spending billions either. I'm wondering how the people will be able to monetize the searches so that they make money.
by alabastervlog | 2025-05-07 18:38:21+00:00
So... why do so many of them gain weight when they move to the US? Again, are they walking through some kind of anti-willpower field on the way in? Do fat Americans gain willpower when they move to another country and lose weight?

Signs point toward a broad set of factors, mostly outside one's personal control, in one's environment mattering more than willpower.
by bachmeier | 2025-05-07 18:39:04+00:00
> there are, if we are lucky, 20, 30 good years ahead of us

Not sure about that. You should expect serious health issues to start between 65 and 75. That doesn't mean your good years are behind you. You're in "running out the clock mode" when your mind goes and you physically can't do things like walking without assistance. That's late 90s for the lucky ones.
by RugnirViking | 2025-05-07 18:39:17+00:00
"Arrington also noted that the use of open source software "presents a significant and ongoing challenge," with a lack of visibility into the origins and security of software code particularly troubling."

What? This is like backwards. They went to pay more for proprietary software which they can't look at because being able to see the code makes it harder to know it's origins and security???
by neogodless | 2025-05-07 18:39:22+00:00
I'm curious how large this market is.

Speaking only anecdotally, when I was in my 20s, I bought a Sony "home theatre in a box" which included receiver, small subwoofer, and small satellite speakers. Over time, I upgraded to an Onkyo reciever and Polk center, surrounds, and subwoofer.

But... then I decided I wanted a more minimal look, and switched to a JBL sound bar + subwoofer, which has detachable surrounds -- but I almost never utilize them.

For sure, the sound is nothing compared to what I had before, but I'm mostly OK with it. All that to say, how popular are sound bars, and how popular are dedicated receivers?
by simonw | 2025-05-07 18:39:27+00:00
Here's what I got against one of my larger open source projects:

cd /tmp git clone https://github.com/simonw/sqlite-utils cd sqlite-utils uvx ty check

Here's the output: https://gist.github.com/simonw/a13e1720b03e23783ae668eca7f6f...

Adding "time uvx ty check" shows it took:

uvx ty check 0.18s user 0.07s system 228% cpu 0.109 total
by unyttigfjelltol | 2025-05-07 18:39:37+00:00
> The peak as far as visual quality and overall effect of film, for me, was probably the 60s through early 90s, though I love a bunch of films older or newer than that.

Those movies were real. The stories were made up, scenes were sets, but ... the images are of real people in meat-world locations, standing near other people, speaking things they mostly really spoke, doing things they mostly really did. It's jarring by juxtaposition just how ... fake modern hyperreal CGI appears on screen.
by crooked-v | 2025-05-07 18:40:14+00:00
I just tried a couple of cases that ChatGPT is bad at (reproducing certain scenes/setpieces from classic tabletop RPG adventures, like the weird pyramid from classic D&D B4 The Lost City), and Gemini fails in just about the same way of getting architectural proportions and scenery details wrong even when given simple, broad rules about them. Adding more detail seems kind of pointless when it can't even get basics like "creature X is about as tall as the building around it" or "the pyramid is surrounded by ruined buildings" right.
by ch4s3 | 2025-05-07 18:40:35+00:00
Maybe? I'm not as familiar with reading pedagogy for other languages. However there are generally 5 components[1] and one is vocabulary which is how you distinguish Lead and Lead and Led.

You're right, English is kind of wacky, but this exists in other languages as well. For example there's significant Gaulish influence in French[2] and the written and spoken language offer a number of surprises for learners.

[1]https://www.lexialearning.com/blog/a-full-breakdown-of-the-s...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_Gaulis...
by twodave | 2025-05-07 18:40:58+00:00
I don’t disagree there. And I was probably a bit aggressive with my take really. Not all healthy choices are hard ones, and exercise alone isn’t enough. Actually the hardest thing for me (and I have and continue to deal with addiction first-hand) is getting out of the mental ruts I’ve put myself in. I can choose not to eat poorly and to go exercise today, but if it’s just will-power and not a mindset change then it’s not going to be sustainable.
by ablob | 2025-05-07 18:42:00+00:00
As far as I know tacking on security after the fact usually leads to issues. It should be a primary concern from the beginning. Even if you don't do it 100% right, you'd be surprised how many issues you can avoid by thinking about this during (and not after) development.

Dropping your rights to open files as soon as possible, for example, or thinking about what information would be available to an attacker should they get RCE on the process. Shoehorning in solutions to these things after the fact tends to be so difficult that it's a rare sight.

I have been recommended to think of security as a process rather than an achievable state and have become quite fond of that perspective.
by aleksanb | 2025-05-07 18:42:04+00:00
The way these type checkers get fast is usually by not supporting the crazy rich reality of realworld python code.

The reason we're stuck on mypy at work is because it's the only type checker that has a plugin for Django that properly manages to type check its crazy runtime generated methods.

I wish more python tooling took the TS approach of "what's in the wild IS the language", as opposed to a "we only typecheck the constructs we think you SHOULD be using".
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-07 18:42:26+00:00
It doesn’t help you get a software engineering job at BigTech, I would have had to grind leetCode like everyone else.

It did help me get a job as a mid level “cloud consultant specializing in application development” in AWS Professional Services department. It paid around 10% less than a software engineering (SDE) job (cash + RSUs) and was a “field by design” fully remote job. It was the last category of jobs that were forced to be in an office when not on a client site this year.

There are all sorts of jobs at AWS and GCP like that - solution architects, engagement managers (it helps), pre-sales architects, program managers, etc. Heck you can make more in recruiting or HR at BigTech than you could make as a software developer doing enterprise dev.

I had been gone for a year and half by then. Now I’m doing the same thing, making the same amount (all cash) as a “staff consultant” working full time, remotely at a third party consulting company.

I most likely could work at GCP doing the same thing as a “senior consultant”. But I don’t do BigTech and I definitely don’t do in office jobs.
by HWR_14 | 2025-05-07 18:42:26+00:00
The Ecodesign regulations are pretty new. The EU used to just join the US's EnergyStar program until there was talk of getting rid of it in 2018. Canada, Japan and Switzerland still join the US's EnergyStar program. I have no idea what the GP is talking about with the claim that most countries don't have the energy Star program.

Maybe China? But I feel like China has pretty strict regulations about a lot of things.
by horsawlarway | 2025-05-07 18:42:59+00:00
I guess it depends on how you define "better".

JSON does a couple things really well, and most other things terribly.

But the things it does well are pretty valuable. So in the "strengths" category I'd put the two following points:

1. JSON is very easy to read and understand as a human

2. JSON stuck to the basics. No comments, no references, no clever tricks, and not much space to let folks try to hammer in cleverness (see - no comments).

Neither of those are all that much related to JSON itself as a format - the semantics are basically an accident of timing around JS syntax from the 2000s.

But it's very, very useful to be able to get the raw text for a network message and know exactly what's getting sent without having to have a whole specialized tool framework to parse and understand the message.

It's also useful to not let the spec get so complex that I never want to do that, even if I could (see: xml).

So with JSON - I can easily read the actual network request and understand it, even with essentially zero additional tooling AND I have a very good chance of literally being able to open a text editor and create a new message with valid syntax without any other tools or references.

Further - this holds true even if I'm not an industry expert with 20 years of experience. Most random people off the street can do it with only a couple minutes of coaching.

Not many other serialization formats can do that.

Imagine taking your 8 year old, sitting them down in front of the computer and legitimately saying "JSON doesn't know what an integer is in the spec"!

It's true... but it's absolutely not the point. For normal people "number" is complex enough. And if you need an int and not a float... you can do that processing just fine after getting a JSON payload if you'd like. It won't be as fast as a specialized format (ex protobuffs), or as flexible (ex XML) as other formats - but that's a far distant concern to "Can I hold the hammer".

JSON is really easy. "Easy" as a strength is wildly discounted, but man is it a winner when you get it. I also think it's surprisingly hard to do.
by meame2010 | 2025-05-07 18:42:59+00:00
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by r00fus | 2025-05-07 18:43:07+00:00
Most programs that rely on GLP-1 meds also stress that lifestyle changes are needed to not only really lose weight, but also to keep that weight change once you stop taking the medication (or go to a maintenance dosage).

I'm taking the meds right now - what the medication allows me to understand is that without changing your sleep, exercise and diet, I simply won't be very successful even while on the meds.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-05-07 18:43:07+00:00
Valid defense, no, but effective defense - yes. The reason why is the important bit.

The reason your average human guitar teacher in their home can pull up a song on their phone and teach you reproduce it is because it's completely infeasible to police that activity, whether you're trying to identify it or to sue for it. The rights houlders have an army of lawyers and ears in a terrifying number of places, but winning $100 from ten million amateur guitar players isn't worth the effort.

But if it can be proven that Claude systematically violates copyright, well, Amazon has deep pockets. And AI only works because it's trained on millions of existing works, the copyright for which is murky. If they get a cease and desist that threatens their business model, they'll make changes from the top.
by creer | 2025-05-07 18:43:07+00:00
Does it matter? I mean yes it does because students potentially cheating themselves out of an education and gross waste of time and money.

But do any employers still seriously rely on degrees to select their employees? Many still rely on degree to filter before interviews - but even here, we have only ourselves to blame for this, right? This is one thing we (businesses, employers) have complete control on. It does mean we now need to interview on more things. Like 2nd language, general reading comprehension, or basic numeracy. But didn't we already get to the point where we had to do that? Where we can't even trust that whoever is interviewing is the person seeking hiring?

So from a point of view of hiring, perhaps it doesn't matter anymore.

The article itself emphasizes one point where it matters: college as ethics training is on indefinite leave. And interviews will have to test for ethics. A tough one.
Show HN: I recreated Ventscape using SSEs
by hide_on_bush | 2025-05-07 18:43:12+00:00
Hi HN! There is this website I love which lets you "scream into the void" because messages slowly fade away after a few seconds (ventscape.life). The original site uses WebSockets and I wanted to recreate it using SSEs and an ad-hoc framework: Datastar (data-star.dev). I also did a video to explain my code if you are interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3wjLeG3814. The website is a bit lonely so please be my guest and vent your heart out! I hope you will like it <3
by shadowgovt | 2025-05-07 18:43:16+00:00
That's kind of what I mean. Every generation thinks this new tech is ruining kids: we thought it for radio, we thought it for television. Hell, we thought it for writing:

"O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own."

I'm sure there are different stressors and challenges on young people that I didn't experience at their age, but "what's wrong with" is immediately the wrong framing. It flies in the face of a history of human adaptation to their environment. The notion that the newest batch of challenges is different, fundamentally, from previous ones is the kind of thinking that leads people to hold up THESE ARE THE END TIMES signs in the streets generation after generation for thousands of years.

(Having a couple teenagers in my life: the challenges they experience are special and different from what I experienced, but mine were different from my parents and their parents lived through one or two world wars).
by prestonlau | 2025-05-07 18:43:59+00:00
AI agents are transforming technology interaction by automating complex tasks through intelligent systems that can decide, learn, and collaborate. Building these agents in 2025 is facilitated by powerful open-source frameworks, which offer cost-effectiveness, customization, security, and community support. Key features to consider in these frameworks include memory management, tool integration, multi-agent orchestration, reasoning capabilities, ease of deployment, monitoring, and language model flexibility.
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by tamereltamero | 2025-05-07 18:44:25+00:00
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by andai | 2025-05-07 18:46:16+00:00
I think this is referring to JS's unfortunate habit of doing nonsensical things with types unless the user takes special precautions.

For years I thought I needed explicit static typing, until I tried Python, which is also dynamically typed, and found that I had none of the problems I had in JS. This is because Python is strongly typed.

Indeed Python has the opposite problem of being a bit too pedantic with the type conversions. I thought it was interesting that C#, which is also strongly typed, lets you do string + number. (IIRC it has something to do with how they both descend from Object...)

Worth mentioning that I do think static typing is a very good idea in any nontrivial program, and I wish more languages forced the programmer to be explicit here — TypeScript and even Rust have both bitten me in the ass with the type system making incorrect assumptions instead of just asking me (i.e. forcing me to actually specify the program and eliminate guesswork).
by jjmarr | 2025-05-07 18:46:33+00:00
If we could directly convert the food energy of a Snickers bar to electricity we could easily power AI. A Snickers bar has 250 kcal, which is 1000 kJ or about 250 grams of TNT.[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=250+kcal+in+joule] chatgpt-4 uses 3.6 kJ to 36 kJ per query so you could get potentially hundreds of queries on a single Snickers bar.

We only need a way to harness the power of the human body. Maybe we put people in VR for fun while using their body heat to power the AI.
by zoogeny | 2025-05-07 18:46:56+00:00
I continue to find Gemini 2.5 Pro to be the most capable model. I leave Cursor on "Auto" model selection but all of my directed interactions are with Gemini. My process right now is to ask Gemini for high-level architecture discussions and broad-stroke implementation task break downs, then I use Cursor to validate and execute on those plans, then Gemini to review the generated code.

That process works pretty well but not perfectly. I have two examples where Gemini suggested improvements during the review stage that were actually breaking.

As an aside, I was investigating the OpenAI APIs and decided to use ChatGPT since I assumed it would have the most up-to-date information on its own APIs. It felt like a huge step back (it was the free model so I cut it some slack). It not only got its own APIs completely wrong [1], but when I pasted the url for the correct API doc into the chat it still insisted that what was written on the page was the wrong API and pointed me back to the page I had just linked to justify it's incorrectness. It was only after I prompted that the new API was possibly outside of its training data that it actually got to the correct analysis. I also find the excessive use of emojis to be juvenile, distracting and unhelpful.

1. https://chatgpt.com/share/681ba964-0240-800c-8fb8-c23a2cae09...
by kazinator | 2025-05-07 18:46:56+00:00
Engine braking with an internal combustion engine generates a vacuum in the intake manifold, because the throttle is closed while the pistons suck air.

(Performance cars sometimes have vacuum gauges to measure this. Aftermarket ones can be installed.)

A brake light could be rigged to activate past a certain a vacuum threshold. (There would be some false positives that are possibly not worth caring about.)

For all the engineering described in the article, I'm surprised it doesn't mention this possibility, if only to give reasons why it was discarded. (Maybe it's a bad solution; I have no ide!)

It seems that a vacuum-driven brake light could possibly have an advantage of kicking in faster than a motion detector, because it could trigger as soon as the revs are dropping with the throttle closed, before the clutch engages to actually connect the engine braking to the wheel.

I.e. blip-throttle before downshift -> vacuum kicking in / light comes on -> downshift completes, actual braking begins.
by bachmeier | 2025-05-07 18:46:58+00:00
The older I get, the more I've come to appreciate that "old" doesn't mean much. There are people in their late 30s that act like the median 60-year old. There are people in their 60s that act like the median 40-year old. Some people are inactive, less curious, and opposed to change early on. Others are active, curious, and always learning and growing even in their 70s.
by photochemsyn | 2025-05-07 18:47:17+00:00
I can see educational AI companions as workable in narrow contexts, eg a model fine-tuned on Paul Erdos and Martin Gardner and similar could be great for helping students work through math problem sets.

You'd probably want it to reject questions on religion and politics and human relationships to avoid the furious parental outrage, though. Narrow, well-defined contexts only. Even so some kids would come up with jailbreak strategies.