MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hilux | 2025-05-23 17:58:45+00:00
As an immigrant to the U.S., I am glad that the U.S. has better protections for the public than some other countries (although inferior to the EU), AND I think that the current legally fraught situation is insane and untenable, both for companies who must obey an insane thicket of regs and laws (which drives them to constantly decrease "quality" and add sugar), and for the supposedly chronically ill almost everybody.
by jumski | 2025-05-23 17:59:02+00:00
pgflow can be used with any language/runtime, I just started with TypeScript and Supabase, as that's what I'm using.

The worker is stateless and "dumb" by design (currently it runs on serverless functions) - it just calls SQL functions: "poll_for_tasks" to get some tasks from the queue and then either "complete_task" or "fail_task" after executing user code - that's it, nothing more, so it should be relatively easy to adopt it to other runtimes.

I have written a small architecture primer on pgflow if anyone is interested in its simple but flexible design https://www.pgflow.dev/concepts/how-pgflow-works/
by FeloniousHam | 2025-05-23 17:59:05+00:00
I've found Datagrip to be far and away the most impressive universal database tool. I feel like I've tried them all, and they all have a quality of having been developed by database people, rather than IDE designers. The depth of capability, extensibility, pace of improvement--I'm a very happy customer.

I don't want to poop on open source, but pgadmin and dbeaver and not even close to playing in the same league.

I work in Oracle and Datagrip saved my sanity.
by hinkley | 2025-05-23 18:00:08+00:00
Water has to flow. It doesn’t just appear where it “needs” to be.

There’s a brackish pond/lake in a park in Victoria BC, you go over a bridge from downtown to get to the main entrance, though the locals can cross a street.

If should actually be a bay, but under said bridge is a stone formation that forms the throat of this bay, which being so long and narrow, cannot fill up or drain as fast as the tides. So at high tide there is a waterfall flowing into the pond, and as the tides recede it’s a waterfall going the other direction.
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-05-23 18:01:11+00:00
especially the demos are (over-all) astonishing! I still remember the cracks made by phrozen crew and razor 1911 in the '90ties. They incorporated demos into their cracks of a few dozen Kb - that was awesome! What an audiovisual experience! That was my first time I heard about the demoscene :)
by proc0 | 2025-05-23 18:01:31+00:00
I had to hack my windows with some shady regex i found in order to stop constant and forced updates because of things like this (although this is not a big deal but they add up and it's only a matter of time until they release an update with ads everywhere).

I just completely disagree with the philosophy of software being something that is constantly updated and changed (of course it needs updates but less is more here, instead of the usual CI/CD with daily production updates every day). We could have solid and reliable software that optimizes for stability, but that would cost companies more money so instead they allow themselves all the runway they need to fix and update as much as needed and they can cut costs around testing and engineering while using end users as their testers.

I'm definitely looking into Linux but unfortunately I do like Nvidia GPUs and I have concerns around that. Regardless, it's not tha I don't want to pay for an OS. MacOS is basically the best of both worlds, but I wish there was something like MacOS for PCs. I heard Valve is making a SteamOS, and I think that looks promising.
by rustcleaner | 2025-05-23 18:01:33+00:00
>Why not call it “conversion of a signal into frequencies”

I agree, there has to be a combination of Greek & Latin parts to compile into a Germanic-style adjective sandwich of a word which describes the Fourier.

Interpolation is one such word:

Inter - between/among,

pol - fill/smooth/polish,

ation - action or process of the foregoing.

May I propose 'Signalidominotransform' or 'Signalidominomorphosis' as candidates to replace "Fourier Transformation?"
by seanhunter | 2025-05-23 18:02:12+00:00
Yes. MCP allows (and uses) exactly the same authentication mechanisms that any other rest or similar api allows. So if you have a service you want to expose (or not) via MCP you can do that in exactly the same way as you currently could do that for a rest API.

The difference for the user is instead of them having to make (or use) a special-purpose client to call your rest api, the llm (or llm powered application) can just call the api for them, meaning your rest service can be integrated into other llm-powered workflows.
by nodesocket | 2025-05-23 18:03:12+00:00
This might already exist, but seems like AI would be a natural fit and efficient at recommending indexes based off queries. I’ve been building a Python SQLite3 app and I gave ChatGPT the entire schema along with all queries and it did a fantastic job at recommending queries and explaining them. Compound indexes, unique indexes, compound primary keys. Taken a step further, if a process ran live inspecting queries in real time and then sent notifications of missing indexes would be super useful.
by snowwrestler | 2025-05-23 18:03:39+00:00
Humans’ developed code of conduct lives primarily in the nonverbal parts of our brain. Rule violations have emotional content. A kid does not just learn a rational response to a fire or hot stove, they fear it because of pain and injury. We don’t just reason about hurting others, we feel bad about it.

LLMs don’t have that part of the brain. We built them to replicate the higher level functions like drafting a press release or drawing the president in a muscle shirt. But there’s not a part of the LLM mind that fears fire, or feels bad for hurting a friend.

Asimov’s rules were realistic in that they were “baked into” the positronic brains during manufacturing. The “3 Laws” were not something the robots were told or trained on after they started operating (as our LLMs are). The laws were intrinsic. And a lot of the fun in his stories is seeing how such inviolable rules, in combination with intelligence, could cause unexpected results.
by bunderbunder | 2025-05-23 18:04:12+00:00
> The real question for me is: are they less reliable than human judges?

I've spent some time poking at this. I can't go into details, but the short answer is, "Sometimes yes, sometimes no, and it depends A LOT on how you define 'reliable'."

My sense is that, the more boring, mechanical and closed-ended the task is, the more likely an LLM is to be more reliable than a human. Because an LLM is an unthinking machine. It doesn't get tired, or hangry, or stressed out about its kid's problems at school. But it's also a doofus with absolutely no common sense whatsoever.
by nimitkalra | 2025-05-23 18:04:48+00:00
One method to get a better estimate is to extract the token log-probabilities of "YES" and "NO" from the final logits of the LLM and take a weighted sum [1] [2]. If the LLM is calibrated for your task, there should be roughly a ~50% chance of sampling YES (1) and ~50% chance of NO (0) — yielding 0.5.

But generally you wouldn't use a binary outcome when you can have samples that are 50/50 pass/fail. Better to use a discrete scale of 1..3 or 1..5 and specify exactly what makes a sample a 2/5 vs a 4/5, for example

You are correct to question the weaknesses of a panel. This class of methods depends on diversity through high-temperature sampling, which can lead to spurious YES/NO responses that don't generalize well and are effectively noise.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16634 [2]: https://verdict.haizelabs.com/docs/concept/extractor/#token-...
by etruong42 | 2025-05-23 18:04:54+00:00
I've been treating the LLM as a conversational partner rather than as a "superhuman brain augmentation". Their output still needs to be digested and deeply challenged. If their idea seems finished and polished, perhaps we are treating it too much like a brain augmentation where we too readily accept the things that our brain produces. Production of great ideas require different ideas to be challenged. Great ideas are not just the polishing of mediocre ideas.
by olalonde | 2025-05-23 18:05:55+00:00
Sure they can - they're just another API interface tailored for LLMs. I think parent and OP are in fact ranting about that (many APIs being locked behind signups or paywalls). Not sure I agree with the criticism though. In my view, web 2.0 was a huge success: we went from a world with almost no APIs to one where nearly every major website or app offers one. That's real progress, even if we didn't turn every business into an open data non-profit.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-05-23 18:06:10+00:00
Wow it defaulted to "enabled" for me but wasn't working because I'm not signed in with a Microsoft account. I didn't even notice it was on.

I use notepad as a copy/paste tool to strip formatting and make minor edits. I paste a lot of sensitive information there; I already had to turn off the "restore content on reopen" feature, this is disturbing that I am not sure whether having Copilot enabled could possibly send content to an LLM unprompted (maybe it's just menu-driven but I don't know...)
by Alupis | 2025-05-23 18:06:30+00:00
I think the main difference is an AI judge may provide three different rulings if you just ask it the same thing three times. A human judge is much less likely to be so "flip-floppy".

You can observe this using any of the present-day LLM's - ask it an architectural/design question, provide it with your thoughts, reasoning, constraints, etc... and see what it tells you. Then... click the "Retry" button and see how similar (or dissimilar) the answer is. Sometimes you'll get a complete 180 from the prior response.
by smeej | 2025-05-23 18:07:12+00:00
I came here to leave a comment related to this. This article has great advice, if you're normal enough that enough of "your people" exist to be able to find them and do something together.

But if you've spent your whole life being told by the whole world--even people you thought were really interesting and wanted to get to know--that you're "just too fucking weird," it lands more like, "Oh. More advice for other people."

Similarly, if you're a person who likes all kinds of things--but only for 6 weeks to 6 months and then becomes utterly bored of them--there is no stable group of "your people." There's just "these people, for now, I guess," and you hold them lightly because you know in a matter of months, when you don't share the passion for the one thing they're stably obsessed with, you won't have enough in common anymore for them to tolerate you.

I'm almost 40. I'm really at a decision point where I have to decide if I want to keep working on my underlying trauma wounds, in hopes that if I just work hard enough, I'll eventually break into the "fun kind of odd" category instead of "too fucking weird," and blend in enough to have "people," or whether I want to own that this is just how I am, and there's nothing to be done about it, so I should really do what I can to appreciate the fleeting tolerance of "people who don't know me very well yet" while it lasts, but invest most of my energy in trying to figure out if there's any way to be both happy and lonely.
by ydlr | 2025-05-23 18:08:17+00:00
There is a little bit of a sleight of hand going on in this article by claiming the lifestyle of boomers is within reach, but then actually using boomers' parents and grand-parents as the standard. It would be more honest to say "Most of us can't have the relative wealth of our grand parents, but with some sacrifices and creativity, the lifestyle of our great-grand parents is attainable."

Even that is only true in a very narrow sense. My great-grand parents built a 600sqft house in a small town and lived their most of their lives. But they built that house right next to their parents. They lived within 5 miles of their combined 9 siblings. They were within half a mile of their church and half mile from the my great-grandfather's union hall. The town was small, but thriving, with multiple department stores downtown. My great-grandmother worked in two of them.

They did not isolate themselves into a dying town with few opportunities far away from their friends and family.

What millinials and zoomers are really struggling with is the hallowing out of the social and economic institutions that supported our collective wealth and well-being. These struggles may manifest as complaints about the individual ability to afford housing, healthcare, education, etc. But there are not individual solutions to these problems. They are structural.
by hollerith | 2025-05-23 18:09:17+00:00
>I don't know what my desires are.

No need: it would be the AI's job to find out (after it has become very very capable), not your job.

>"Desire" itself is a vague word that can't be measured or quantified

There are certain ways the future might unfold that would revolt you or make you very sad and others that don't have that problem. There is nothing vague or debatable about that fact even if we use vague words to discuss it.

Again, even the author of the CEV plan no longer put any hope in it. My only reason for bringing it up is to flesh out my assertion that there are superalignment plans not vulnerable to Goodhart's Law/Curse, so Goodhart's Law cannot be the core problem with AI: at the very least, the core problem would need to be a combination of Goodhart with some other consideration, and I have been unable to imagine what that other consideration might be unless perhaps it is the fact that all alignment plans I know about not vulnerable to Goodhart would be too hard to implement in the time humanity has left before unaligned AI kills us or at least permanently disempowers us. But even then it strikes me as misleading or outright wrong to describe Goodhart as the core problem just because there probably won't be enough time to implement a plan not vulnerable to Goodhart. It seem much better to describe the core problem as the ease with which an non-superaligned AI can be created relative to how difficult it will be to create a superaligned AI.

Again "superaligned" means the AI stays aligned even if its capabilities grow much greater than human capabilities.
by yencabulator | 2025-05-23 18:09:24+00:00
> It's like saying breathable air is communist.

Clean air is a socialist value. Limiting the ability of corporations to pollute the air is very much a Nordic/European thing that US right wing frowns upon. Watch all the oil wells leaking methane and the coal plants, and the discussion around those. It's very political, and very much on that axis.
by JeremyNT | 2025-05-23 18:09:55+00:00
Yeah I'm with you here.

It's a bit ironic coming from Anil, who has quite a following on social media due to "calling it like it is" when big tech or VC culture does something rotten or self-serving.

The doublespeak and evasiveness in this "incredible journey" post is exactly the sort of thing he'd typically criticize!
Show HN: I Added AI to Weather
by dailywisdomq | 2025-05-23 18:10:32+00:00
I built an AI powered weather sidekick that answers your questions like “What should I wear today?” or “Can I play tennis tomorrow at 6?” It’s like if ChatGPT and a weather app had a weirdly helpful baby. Runs on GPT-4o + WeatherKit. Integrating other weather API's soon. Would love feedback!
by lgas | 2025-05-23 18:10:49+00:00
> How many of us have seen an LLM produce page-fuls of output, stop, suddenly erase it all, and then balk? The LLM needs to re-analyze that output impassively in order to detect that it crossed an undetected bright line.

That's not what's happening here. A separate process is monitoring for content violations and causing it to be erased. There's no re-analysis going on.
by homebrewer | 2025-05-23 18:10:54+00:00
I am very comfortable in the command line and still work with databases in IDEA. It gives you:

— autocompletion for everything — table/function names, types; very helpful on projects with hundreds to thousands of tables

— navigation ("jump to referenced table", "find foreign keys to this column", etc)

— data export in two dozen formats (configurable)

— exactly the same UI for working with 30 database engines (or however many it supports, I'm too lazy to count). Especially helpful with databases that have atrocious CLI clients, like Oracle.

— a nice tree-structured view of your database; or you can generate a (possibly vector) diagram for the rare case when that helps

— high quality autoformatter that works for every SQL dialect it supports, and in the same way

— minor things like the ability to extract a subquery with a couple of key presses, or rename a table alias

Probably something else I'm forgetting.

Saving a couple of keystrokes when writing SQL has little to do with it.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-05-23 18:10:57+00:00
If DOOM released in 1994 or 1995, would we still remember it in the same way?

I think so, because the thing about DOOM is, it was an insanely good game. Yes, it pioneered fullscreen real-time perspective rendering on commodity hardware, instantly realigning the direction of much of the game industry, yadda yadda yadda, but at the end of the day it was a good-enough game for people to remember and respect even without considering the tech.

Minecraft would be a similar example. Minecraft looked like total ass, and games with similar rendering technology could have been (and were) made years earlier, but Minecraft was also good. And that was enough.
by iLemming | 2025-05-23 18:11:01+00:00
You perfectly just illustrated my original point of "without the slightest attempt to even understand what kind of philosophy makes it appealing..."

Saying "I can just use my pdf editor" is on the same level of "integration" as pulling another laptop with a pdf next to the one you have already. What I'm talking about is something like ITEE (Integrated Text Editing Environment), and you simply just don't get it. Emacs allows you to get closer to the plain text as possible. And the value of the plain text proposition is enormous. When every bit of information is reduced to text — it allows you to manipulate information more easily. In Emacs, everything becomes text — the list of directories and files? You can freely edit them — using all the editor features you have — multiple cursors, search-find-replace, macros, whatever. Extracting a bunch of URLs from a web page, or a PDF? Easy. Finding a specific URL from that list and retrieving a description for it? Piece-of-cake. Your browser history — it's just text. Various search engines? They are just a middle-man and you talk to them in text. Version-control interactions? All happen in text. etc. etc.

Of course, browsers allow you to do a ton of interesting things, and btw. it's not using Emacs 'instead', but rather having a choice — e.g., I do use zsh, but some things I do in Eshell in a much more productive way.

Browsers, shells, specific apps, scripting engines, etc. I have no problem using them when I see fit, but it really seems like you have zero idea how actually awesome it is to be able to not only perform spell-checking, but also consult the Merriam-Webster thesaurus, get the definitions for specific words (from another service), translate entire sentences and paragraphs (e.g. via google translate), parley with a bunch of LLM models, perform web search and etymology lookup, consult your own notes and knowledge-base, check through your browser history, etc. etc., and all that "on point" — in the same context and place where you're composing a piece of text. Like a comment you're replying on Hacker News. The mental model between approaches is just vastly different. It puts you into the "flow state" described by renowned psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. And btw., If you think I had to leave my text editor even for a second, to lookup his name to mention it here — you still don't get it.
by freedomben | 2025-05-23 18:11:12+00:00
I've run into this a few times before too. Sometimes discussing maintenance/ongoing costs and how minimal they are with an Elixir/Phoenix app can be compelling, though not always. I prefer to be over-transparent with clients so I'll usually add that if they plan to switch contractors often then it's probably not (tho sometimes still is) a good idea to go with Elixir. When I compare the amount of ongoing effort to keep a PHP, Node, or Python app running securely in prod with the ongoing effort with a Phoenix app, it's usually a better deal for them.

The one Danger Zone area though is when they want something between WordPress and a "real" app. A lot of the clients I've talked to already have WordPress and are really trying to stretch the framework to places it isn't really made to go. Those customers often think "I should be able to get a full app built for <=$10,000" and often shop around until they find someone who will accept it, and then they usually end up getting a bad/buggy product that is slow as dirt. At that point it's often too late as well because nobody wants to pay to start over. For those clients though I wouldn't recommend Elixir because they would almost rather spend more in maintenance costs than in initial development because the numbers feel smaller when spread out, even if they add up to more in the long run and with a much worse product.

That is not to say of course that any Elixir app is going to be better - there are bad Elixir devs just like any stack, though I think Elixir's relative lack of popularity actually leads to an overall more skilled dev pool.
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-23 18:11:23+00:00
> It has never been possible to reply to [dead] posts, and nothing to do with the mechanics of posting has changed in a long time.

I am referring to replying to live comments on [dead] posts, which I am positive was possible before, because I do it fairly often until yesterday or so when I tried and it didn’t work.

As a journalist, this impacts my ability to interact with the public and corroborate information in the public good. As a HN user, it has a chilling effect on legitimate public discourse on this site.
by mdf | 2025-05-23 18:12:01+00:00
Just finished reading your linked article. I found it interesting and I experienced similar excitement from the results as mentioned up-thread. There were some new things I learned, too.

I wouldn't say your article is too technical; it does go a bit deeper into details, but new concepts are explained well and at a level I found suitable for myself. Having said that, several times I felt that the text was a bit verbose. Using more succinct phrasing needs, of course, a lot of additional effort, but… I guess it's a kind of an optimization as well. :)
by flyingbuilding | 2025-05-23 18:13:36+00:00
I wrote this after a conversation with a junior developer I’m mentoring. They asked what happens after you become a senior engineer—and it made me realise how rarely we talk about the career fork that follows.

In most companies, the “next level” splits into two very different paths:

Staff+/Principal Engineer: more scope, deeper technical leadership, no direct reports

Engineering Manager: more people, cross-functional responsibility, career development work

Both are valid, but the expectations and daily work look nothing alike. This post explores how that fork shows up in your career—sometimes before you’re even aware you’re at it.

I’m curious how others here approached this decision. What helped you choose (or avoid) one path? Did you ever switch between them?
by throwanem | 2025-05-23 18:14:31+00:00
I'll credit this argument when I see you publish a training set of selfies, or a model finetuned thereon.

If you want to argue no one should expect to have anything to hide, you'd better do it from a glass house and in the altogether if you mean to be taken seriously, don't you think? It is a radical departure. The example is therefore necessarily yours to set, else you show yourself a hypocrite.