MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by const_cast | 2025-05-05 18:50:26+00:00
It's definitely a feature when you're starting out. But as the codebase grows and ages, it becomes a bug.

The problem is that the behavior becomes so complex and so much is pushed to runtime that there's no way to know what the code is actually doing. There's paths that are only going to be executed once a year, but you don't know which ones those are. Eventually, editing the code becomes very risky.

At this particular codebase, it was not uncommon to see 3, 4 or 5 functions that do more or less the same thing. Why? Because nobody dared change the behavior of a function, even if it's buggy. Maybe those bugs are the only thing keeping other bugs from cropping up. It's like wack-a-mole. You fix something, and then the downstream effects are completely unpredictable.

It becomes a self-eating snake. Because the codebase is so poor, it ends up growing faster and faster as developers become more risk-averse.
by semireg | 2025-05-05 18:50:35+00:00
I started 3D printing about 10 years ago with the first Taz machines and they left me a broken, broken man.

Fast forward to a month ago, I bought a Prusa Core One, loved it, and then bought a XL 5-toolhead. It's been so much fun using printers that "just work."

I finished this 6-day print last week! https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/1kb3p0w/xl_full_be...
by darepublic | 2025-05-05 18:51:19+00:00
So in my interactions with gpt, o3 and o4 mini, I am the organic middle man that copy and pastes code into the repl and reports on the output back to gpt if anything should be the problem. And for me, past a certain point, even if you continually report back problems it doesn't get any better in its new suggestions. It will just spin its wheels. So for that reason I'm a little skeptical about the value of automating this process. Maybe the llms you are using are better than the ones I tried this with?

Specifically I was researching a lesser known kafka-mqtt connector: https://docs.lenses.io/latest/connectors/kafka-connectors/si..., and o1 was hallucinating the configuration needed to support dynamic topics. The docs said one thing, and I even mentioned it to o1 that the docs contradicted with it. But it would stick to its guns. If I mentioned that the code wouldn't compile it would start suggesting very implausible scenarios -- did you spell this correctly? Responses like that indicate you've reached a dead end. I'm curious how/if the "structured LLM interactions" you mention overcome this.
by lenerdenator | 2025-05-05 18:51:40+00:00
The US government probably doesn't think it's behind.

Right now it's operated by a bunch of people who think that you can directly relate the amount of money a venture could make in the next 90 days to its net benefit for society. Government telling them how they can and cannot make that money, in their minds, is government telling them that they cannot bring maximum benefit to society.

Now, is this mindset myopic to everything that most people have in their lived experience? Is it ethically bankrupt and held by people who'd sell their own mothers for a penny if they otherwise couldn't get that penny? Would those people be banished to a place beyond human contact for the rest of their existence by functioning organs of an even somewhat-sane society?

I don't know. I'm just asking questions.
by fheisler | 2025-05-05 18:52:00+00:00
A PBC is just a for-profit company that has _some_ sort of specific mandate to benefit the "public good" - however it chooses to define that. It's generally meant to provide some balance toward societal good over the more common, strictly shareholder profit-maximizing alternative.

(IANAL but run a PBC that uses this charter[1] and have written about it here[2] as part of our biennial reporting process.)

[1] https://github.com/OpenCoreVentures/ocv-public-benefit-compa...

[2] https://goauthentik.io/blog/2024-09-25-our-biennial-pbc-repo...
by simonw | 2025-05-05 18:52:02+00:00
It's maddening to me how little good writing there is out there on effective prompting.

Here's an example: what's the best prompt to use to summarize an article?

That feels like such an obvious thing, and yet I haven't even seen that being well explored.

It's actually a surprisingly deep topic. I like using tricks like "directly quote the sentences that best illustrate the overall themes" and "identify the most surprising ideas", but I'd love to see a thorough breakdown of all the tricks I haven't seen yet.
by seattle_spring | 2025-05-05 18:52:19+00:00
Person you're replying to is using an "absence of evidence" fallacy as their argument, also known as an "appeal to ignorance" [0]. They're inferring that the absence of evidence that Obama didn't use his BlackBerry "for Secret, Top Secret, or other classified communications" is potentially evidence that he did in fact do so.

(I would have replied to him directly, but the comments have since been [appropriately] flagged)

In reality, no argument could ever be made if you had to prove the negative of every argument. Some other common applications of this fallacy off the top of my head:

"Well we don't have proof that children weren't trafficked in Comet Pizza, so it's proof that it did actually happen."

"We don't have proof that no kids used litterboxes at school, so it's proof that they did use litterboxes."

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance
by zharknado | 2025-05-05 18:52:52+00:00
And they were supported because they were useful labor. Even an unskilled, brand-new apprentice could pump the bellows, sweep the forge, haul wood and water, deliver messages. If it frees up the master to produce more valuable output, that’s a win-win. Then they can grow into increasingly valuable tasks as they gain awareness and skill.

IMO one of the big problems is that we’ve gone too far with the assumption that learners can’t be valuable until after they’re done learning. Partly a cultural shift around the role of children and partly the reality that knowledge work doesn’t require much unskilled labor compared to physical industries.
by bluecheese452 | 2025-05-05 18:54:38+00:00
Yeah because in the 60s you could support a wife and 4 kids, buy a house and 2 cars, without a high school diploma, all before turning 25. There was no reason to go to college unless you were interested in learning.

These days you need a college degree just to afford a 1 bedroom apartment by the time you are 40.
by lenerdenator | 2025-05-05 18:54:41+00:00
Define "imminent".

If I were a person like several of the people working on AI right now (or really, just heading up tech companies), I could be the kind to look at a possible world-ending event happening in the next - eh, year, let's say - and just want to have a party at the end of the world.

Five years to ten years? Harder to predict.
by ignoramous | 2025-05-05 18:54:56+00:00
> I think this is one of the most interesting lines as it basically directly implies that leadership thinks this won't be a winner take all market:

Yeah; and:

We want to open source very capable models.

Seems like nary a daylight between DeepSeek R1, Sonnet 3.5, Gemini 2.5, & Grok3 really put things in perspective for them!
by tptacek | 2025-05-05 18:55:19+00:00
There's definitely a skill to using them well (I am not yet expert); my only frustration is with people who (like me) haven't refined the skill but have also concluded that there's no benefit to the tool. No, really, in this case, you're mostly just not holding it right.

The tools will get better, but what I see happening with people who are good at using them (and from my own code, even in my degraded LLM usage), we have an existence proof of the value of the tools.
by lysace | 2025-05-05 18:55:19+00:00
> After May 5, 2025, the Skype Dial Pad will be available to remaining paid users from the Skype web portal and within Teams.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/skype/how-do-i-make-a-ca...

If I read this correctly, they are launching a new service at https://calling.web.skype.com/ just to keep the functionality working for those with remaining credits (like me). I didn't expect that. Kudos if it actually works :-).

I've been using SkypeOut for many years now for things like long international customer service calls (airlines, banks, etc).
by allenu | 2025-05-05 18:55:34+00:00
Congratulations on the launch! It looks very polished and easy to use.

Coincidentally, I've come up with same idea independently with my own journaling app with a social media interface (Minders). I've seen at least a couple of other apps that go for this kind user experience, which is fun, as there's lots of ways to tackle this type of app. For me, I put in some ideas consistent with social media that may or may not work (still figuring it out), like being able to "retweet" earlier posts, quote them, and reply to them, so it's kind of like having a conversation with yourself across time.

I've found that the social media-like UI really does help with recording quick notes to myself. It seems to promote more browsing than, say, a list of notes, and hashtags make it fun to jump around and see related notes, etc.

Best of luck on your app!
by crote | 2025-05-05 18:55:44+00:00
It's absolutely insane. Kicad v5 was usable, if you wanted to make simple projects and were willing to deal with frequently running into annoyances. Kicad v6 took forever to release, but it suddenly went from "an option for hobbyists who can't afford EAGLE / Altium" to "viable tool for not-too-complicated professional products". Ever since then every release has been filled with quality-of-life improvements - both huge improvements and fixes for small annoyances.

We saw something similar with Blender. At a certain point it becomes good enough that for some professionals it becomes a viable alternative to its obscenely expensive proprietary competition. If those companies are willing to donate $500 / seat / year to OSS instead of spending $1500 / seat / year on proprietary licensing, they can get some developer to fix the main issues they run into. This in turn means the OSS variant gets even better, which means even more companies are willing to consider switching, which means even more budget for development. Let this continue for a few years, and the OSS alternative has suddenly become best-in-class.
by woodruffw | 2025-05-05 18:56:59+00:00
The over/under there doesn't make sense: the US hasn't had a meaningfully hostile-to-Israel policy ever, so pervasively tapping some of the most sensitive USG communications would be a stunning risk to take with a very safe ally.

(It also beggars belief in the current climate -- I would be hard-pressed to name a single member of the current administration who hasn't yelled until purple in the face about their support for Israel's current government and wartime policies.)
by MarkusWandel | 2025-05-05 18:57:23+00:00
I have a story like that! Back in my lab rat days, I dropped a scope probe and its grounded sleeve skittered down the back side of a powered-up, prototype memory board (with 240 individual RAMs on it), leaving a trail of sparks. After that it was dead.

Uh oh. We needed that board. What to do? Well, it can't hurt to try. We had "freeze spray" for debugging purposes, so got a bottle of white-out handy (what's that?), frosted up the board really well on the component side, powered up, and quickly marked the devices that defrosted notably quicker than the rest.

Got the solder station lady to replace all those parts and it worked again.

Old days...
by danenania | 2025-05-05 18:57:33+00:00
I built an open source CLI coding agent for this purpose[1]. It combines Claude/Gemini/OpenAI models in a single agent, using the best/most cost effective model for different steps in the workflow and different context sizes. You might find it interesting.

It uses OpenRouter for the API layer to simplify use of APIs from multiple providers, though I'm also working on direct integration of model provider API keys—should release it this week.

1 - https://github.com/plandex-ai/plandex
by thenewwazoo | 2025-05-05 18:57:45+00:00
As an aside, TFA says:

We’re talking about skills that span kernel-level programming, hardware quirks, low-level debugging, distributed systems, security, orchestration logic, even the capability to work with the UI/UX team... and the ability to explain all that without scaring interns. You can’t just hire for that. You have to grow it. Nurture it. Beg for it. Or in some cases, resurrect it.

If you are that person, what is the best way to market yourself? I am the person described. I've got experience from poking registers in firmware, to wireline transport protocol implementation, to infosec, to writing microservice framework middleware, to pipeline orchestration at the OS level, and on and on. In the last week I've debugged Linux UDS issues and TLS cipher suite problems, and wrote code to provision WiFi-connected devices over BLE.

But it's incredibly hard to demonstrate that in an interview, if I can even find a role that warrants it. You're not going to find me on a university campus or in a research lab because I'm at a FAANG trying to pay my mortgage.
by bhouston | 2025-05-05 18:57:46+00:00
OpenAI is winning in a similar way that Apple is winning in smartphones.

OpenAI is capturing most of the value in the space (generic LLM models), even though they have competitors who are beating them on price or capabilities.

I think OpenAI may be able to maintain this position at least for the medium term because of their name recognition/prominence and they are still a fast mover.

I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."
by delusional | 2025-05-05 18:57:55+00:00
How would you provide a "standard" environment when the third party apps all depend on other third party apps. What would the "standard" environment be for streamlink when it itself is part of the "standard" environment of streamlink-twitch-gui? How about curl, mpv, ffmpeg, libc? How do you evolve such a "standard" environment without the assistance of the third parties (because many of them will never help you).

Debian puts in a massive effort to be a long term stable "standard" system. I've found that effort to be wasteful. I'd much rather just take the occasional (although surprisingly rare) breakage than live with the limitations of old packages. That's a matter of taste though, and greatly depends on the effort of the upstream developers.
by xenodium | 2025-05-05 18:58:30+00:00
Glad to hear it. I was also in two minds about how to position my app. Journaling as a concept may not sound very appealing to many (sometimes associated with keeping a diary).

Having said all that, Journelly can be used in all sorts of ways, including quick-note taking, shopping list, or even sending things to the app for me to save (a link to web, music, movie, etc).
by artyom | 2025-05-05 18:59:02+00:00
I agree but it was always like that. Also there isn't any incentive anymore in growing juniors if they're going to immediately take the next better offer that comes around when they know enough, and you have such thing being offered on a daily basis (at least until a couple years ago).

I would love to work on low-level, systems stuff (anything as close to the hardware as possible), that's even my education and area of expertise. BUT SaaS companies in reality:

- pay better

- have lower costs

- are way easier

- don't have that many (or any at all) geographical restrictions (e.g. importing hardware prototypes).

People follows the money.
by rc00 | 2025-05-05 19:00:10+00:00
> and then submitted here by someone

> I just don’t care about karma that much. The first 500 is the only that matters. I find it hard to say that submitting a story that people found valuable is “abuse.”

The submitting account is automated and mostly non-deterministic. Forget the fake internet points and focus on the fact that there are accounts on this site that mostly exist to spam. Isn't the value of this site that humans curate what is posted? Or is automating submissions not a form of abuse? Good to know where your ethics are.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-05 19:00:22+00:00
> Nonsense. We make far, far more than people did in the past entirely because of the productivity gains from automation.

"We" were never subsistence farmers, our ancestors were

I'm talking about real changes that have happened in our actual lifetimes.

In our actual lifetimes we have watched wages stagnate for decades, pur purchasing power is dramatically lower than our parents. In order to afford even remotely close to the same standard of living as our parents had, we have to go into much larger amounts of debt

We have watched jobs move overseas as automation lowered the skill requirements so that anyone could perform them, so we sought the cheapest possible labour to do them

We have watched wealthy countries shift from higher paying production economies into lower paying service economies

We have watched the wealth gap widen as the rich get richer the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. Some of the shrinking middle class moved up, but most moved down

The fact is that automation is disruptive, which is great for markets but bad for people who are relying on consistency. Which is most people
by the_duke | 2025-05-05 19:00:42+00:00
AGI is matter of when, not if.

It will likely require research breakthroughs, significant hardware advancement, and anything from a few years to a few decades. But it's coming.

ChatGPT was released 2.5 years ago, and look at all the crazy progress that has been made in that time. That doesn't mean that the progress has to continue, we'll probably see a stall.

But AIs that are on a level with humans for many common tasks is not that far off.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-05 19:01:15+00:00
> I get that, and in that sense most languages are compiled, but generally speaking, I've always understood "compiled" as compiled-ahead-of-time

Python is AOT compiled to bytecode, but if a compiled version of a module is not available when needed it will be compiled and the compiled version saved for next use. In the normal usage pattern, this is mostly invisible to the user except in first vs. subsequent run startup speed, unless you check the file system and see all the .pyc compilation artifacts.

You can do AOT compilation to bytecode outside of a compile-as-needed-then-execute cycle, but there is rarely a good reason to do so explicitly for the average user (the main use case is on package installation, but that's usually handled by package manager settings).

But, relevant to the specific issue here, (edit: calling) a hallucinated function would lead to a runtime failure not a compilation failure, since function calls aren't resolved at compile time, but by lookup by name at runtime.

(Edit: A sibling comment points out that importing a hallucinated function would cause a compilation failure, and that's a good point.)
by justlikereddit | 2025-05-05 19:01:50+00:00
If the purpose is thinking, why is the exercise so often about just producing an artifact out of text?

And so often also on wildly tangential subjects that are purely academical artifacts.

Cheating with LLMs is the inevitable conclusion of being a subject to a dragged out must-have education system that mostly just cheats the students of their time and money. That's the friendly way to put it.

I jumped through all the fucking hoops and now I'm paid handsomely, at every corner of the road leading here you see some pompous academic wankers with more medals than a photoshopped North Korean general.
by colechristensen | 2025-05-05 19:02:20+00:00
Secrecy isn't grace or discretion when it comes to vacations or baby showers.

Not bringing up a sensitive topic when interacting with someone is discretion. Hiding a major life event because it might trigger one person is silly.

There's a phase in a big chunk of people's lives where the only thing on their social media is about having a baby. If you're traumatized by that it's up to you, not everyone else, to keep it away from yourself (e.g. stay off social media or start a new profile and only follow hyperpop jazz trombone and COBOL enthusiasts... or whatever).

Not wanting to share your life on social media is one thing, picking and choosing to keep things secret from person A or B because of some drama or another is childish.
by mindslight | 2025-05-05 19:02:23+00:00
You're being downvoted for making the point a bit obtusely, but the general point is spot on. This culture of broadcast sharing with some imagined singlular hivemind is an opinionated policy, and certainly not the only way of socially interacting. Many people view different groups of friends as disparate communities and don't appreciate the social context collapse of them mixing. And even if everyone is friends, more people coming to an event doesn't always make for a better time.

The one-community broadcast-everything model has been embraced and encouraged by these surveillance-based businesses who don't want you to think too hard why they are also privy to all of your communications, and also want to drive the maximum number of interactions for "engagement" metrics. Non-corporate social media, "indie" web, and group chats are much more natural organic patterns of communication.
by Retr0id | 2025-05-05 19:03:05+00:00
Wow, great timing!

I recently got a TDS684A and also made the same discovery, and wrote half a blog post about it which remains unfinished/unpublished. I don't have much of an EE background (at least, not on this level) so my article was certainly worse. It's also my only decent scope, so I don't have a good way to take measurements of the scope itself.

Relatedly, I dumped the firmware of mine (referencing Tom's notes on a similar model) and started writing an emulator for it: https://github.com/DavidBuchanan314/TDS684A

It boots as far as the vxworks system prompt, and can start booting the Smalltalk "userspace" but crashes at some point during hardware initialization (since my emulation is very incomplete!) - some screenshots/logs: https://bsky.app/profile/retr0.id/post/3ljzzkwiy622d

Edit: heh, I just realised I'm cited in the article, regarding the ADG286D
by sunshine-o | 2025-05-05 19:03:39+00:00
> 1. For config, it spreads the config across a bunch of nested directories, making it hard to read and write it without some sort of special tool that shows it all to you at once. Sure, you can easily edit 50 files from all sorts of directories in your text editor, but that’s pretty painful.

It really depends how comfortable you are using the shell and which one you use.

cat, tree, sed, grep, etc will get you quite far and one might argue that it is simpler to master than vim and various format. Actually mastering VSCode also takes a lot of efforts.

> 2. For data storage is that lots of smaller files will waste partial storage blocks in many file systems. Some do coalesce small files, but many don’t.

> 3. For both, it’s often going to be higher performance to read a single file from start to finish than a bunch of files. Most file systems will try to keep file blocks in mostly sequential order (defrag’d), whereas they don’t typically do that for multiple files in different directories. SSD makes this mostly a non-issue these days, however. You still have the issue of openings, closings, and more read calls, however.

Agreed but for most use case here it really doesn't matter and if I need to optimise storage I will need a database anyway.

And I sincerely believe that most micro optimisations at the filesystem level are cancelled by running most editors with data format support enabled....
by rsync | 2025-05-05 19:03:58+00:00
In this arms race you are saying a current "move" is a curated list of IPs that correspond to known DoH servers ... and that's fine ..

However, if the adversary decides to just query - and answer - DoH requests on the same hostname that you are trying to talk to ... isn't that a winning move ?

For instance:

If one had an application - or an appliance - that spoke https to endpoint.samsung.com, how would one block DoH requests addressed to the same endpoint.samsung.com ?