MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mellosouls | 2025-05-28 12:40:02+00:00
The text in this essay was written without any use of AI

Stated with pride? Given the proofreading and critiquing abilities of AI this dubious boast is a useful signal for the head-in-sand arguments of the essay.

AI is a profound step change in our workflow abilities, a revolution already. Wise to be wary of it, but this reads as shouting at clouds.

The landscape has changed, we have to change with it.
by notatallshaw | 2025-05-28 12:40:12+00:00
> Don't write functions that support hundreds of input data types

But by it's nature, duck typing supports an unbounded number of input types and is what Python was built on.

You've already decided duck typing is wrong and strict type adherence is correct, which is fine, but that doesn't fit the vast history of Python code, or in fact many of the core Python libraries.
by CommenterPerson | 2025-05-28 12:40:41+00:00
He's my hero!

I might have a tip to share with him though. I use a Garmin to navigate, it's pretty decent. I can give up traffic reports for the reduction in surveillance. Regarding new cars with a GPS which cannot be removed: I am on the lookout for a new car now. However, I'll continue to use my 20 year old Toyota until I find a good car without a GPS in it.
by viraptor | 2025-05-28 12:40:43+00:00
> it doesn't reason about ideas, diagrams, or requirements specifications. (...) How often have you witnessed an LLM reduce the complexity of a piece of code?

> Only humans can decrease or resist complexity.

It's funny how often there's a genuine concept behind posts like these, but then lots of specific claims are plainly false. This is trivial to do: ask for simpler code. I'm using that quite often to get a second opinion and get great results. If you don't query the model, you don't get any answer - neither complex or simple. If you query with default options, it's still a choice, not something inherent to the idea of LLM.

I'm also having a great time converting code into ideas and diagrams and vice versa. Why make the strong claims that people contradict in practice every day now?
by bc569a80a344f9c | 2025-05-28 12:41:06+00:00
There are no scenarios where BGP contained within your home lab is beneficial for anything other than learning BGP. It's the routing protocol for the Internet. Its whole point is scaling globally, and - crucially - enabling making routing decisions that aren't just based on path weights. OSPF, IS-IS, EIGRP, whatever, they are all just path finding algorithms; OSPF is quite literally Dijkstra. That's great when you want to find the shortest or fastest path to somewhere, but that's not how the Internet works: it's quite reasonable for an operator to want to take the cheapest path (in terms of money), or to take the path that avoids specific foreign countries. BGP is expressive enough to write routing policy like that. You don't need that in your homelab, unless you want to learn BGP, either because you need to for work or to further your career, or because you're curious about it.
by acidburnNSA | 2025-05-28 12:42:57+00:00
I helped get a 1960 documentary film showing the details of how we eradicated the screwworm with radiation digitized and posted here [1]. Kinda gross but worth seeing to help emphasize how bad these things are.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFoOnS6CWSI
by bjourne | 2025-05-28 12:43:52+00:00
Arguments against: 1. Most people don't use them correctly. 2. How long a pause should "feel" is lost nuance. Non-native English speakers and people without academic degrees can't feel the difference between semi-colons and periods so why bother? 3. A small set of orthogonal letters and symbols is better for writing than sets with redundancies. 4. Long sentences suck.
Show HN: You are shipping the wrong stuff? Agentic System to test any Business
by Jderenne | 2025-05-28 12:44:53+00:00
Hi.

We have built more than 15 orchestrated AI Agents specialised in business design and strategy.

We want to provide a full System.

One is investigating your product idea with you, others are catching up on the financial return, market potential, go to market strategy, or the implementation roadmap etc.

They are all orchestrated and automatically self improve the knowledge of your business.

You can generate synthetic clients to test your business hypothesis and simulate the change you do.

You can get your own ExCo or Board of Director and check your next move.

Ultimatly you get a full digital twin of your (future) business in minutes and you can play around with it.

Each agents generate full detail repot + slide deck to discuss with peers.

I think this is what you need before Vibe Coding or spending money for nothing.

Today we target shippable product (not internal processes, or internal company product like CRM etc.)

We tested it, it works for all vertical wether your are in IT, or want to open a Sushi bar.

Lots of effort to fine tuned our models and increase our internal the knowledge base.

Would love to get your feedback !

Ps : we are based in Belgium, are technical but also have strategic background.
by hughw | 2025-05-28 12:45:01+00:00
Some use cases really do require the local TZ offset be saved. Transforming everything to UTC wipes out that information.

An engineer in the US reviewing industrial measurements logged in a plant in Asia from a variety of sources is definitely going to encounter lots of events recorded in local time. It would be maddening for that engineer to have to review and resolve events from different time coordinates, especially if they are doing the review months or years later. It's best to accept that reality and adopt local time as the standard. Then you must record the TZ offset per UTC in any new system you create.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-28 12:45:26+00:00
> I don't believe that that's something that we can stop. Somehow, I feel like the popularization of LLMs is a force of natural selection where those who are smart enough to keep training their minds will find themselves more financially secure than those who don't, and therefore more likely to survive.

Yes, that's exactly right, it's the prisoner's dilemma. You articulated it perfectly.
by infecto | 2025-05-28 12:46:17+00:00
You’re not wrong but your assumptions are incredibly over optimistic. Humans are still in the loop but ideally taking out the relatively boring middle parts, long haul interstate driving. You still have paperwork, city driving, hooking up trailers.

But yes the reality is that net jobs will probably be lost. Some will transition into the new role of the truck driver, some go into different industries and some will get lost through the transition. The real truth is that it is incredibly hard to make everyone whole.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-28 12:47:01+00:00
> If AI creates a mess, why won’t future AI be able to continue building a mess on top?

Because due to how complexity works, you reach a state where the expected number of breakages from modifying the code base exceeds the value from the change itself. Even if you assume the cost of labor is 0. It’s like the monkeys writing Shakespeare.

> And if it does hit a dead end, just regenerate a new version of the entire system in minutes.

If this worked it would have been done every few years at big companies. In reality, prototypes cannot take the place of a legacy system because it’s deeply integrated and depended upon. Most notably through the data it owns, but in many subtle ways as well. Simply verifying that a new system will not break is a massive undertaking. Writing meaningfully testable systems is an order of magnitude harder than implementing them.

When there’s a monetary risk of bugs (lose data, lose users, mess up core business logic etc) companies pay for the confidence to get things right. Doesn’t mean it always works, or that their priorities are right, but a payment vendor is not going to trust vibes to do a db migration.

There are still many experimental prototype domains out there, like indie games and static web sites, where throw away and start over is pretty much fine. But that’s not the entire field.
by MattGaiser | 2025-05-28 12:47:32+00:00
The AI tool goes further than a database, so you can in theory just take a photo of food and get the nutrient info. It is definitely more convenient. Accuracy is an issue, but it does have value from a user perspective. However, the main users are athletes who always tracked their macros.

The issue is more fundamental. They are not identifying the right problem that needs solving. For most people, awareness of what is bad for them is not the issue.
by graybanana | 2025-05-28 12:48:18+00:00
While not completely explained in the article, the author correctly notes that the non-singular points on a singular cubic curve over a finite field form a group (under the same elliptic curve group law) that is isomorphic (in an easily computable way) to either the multiplicative or additive group of a finite field.

You can find more details in Silverman's book on elliptic curves, or if you don't have access to that, see Section 24.7 in Lecture 24 of https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-783-elliptic-curves-spring-20....

One could nitpick by pointing out that singular cubics are not elliptic curves (which are, by definition, smooth projective curves). One could also nitpick that the real reason you don't want to use DH in the multiplicative group of a finite field is that there is a known subexponential time algorithm that breaks DH in that setting (forcing > 3000-bit key sizes) whereas for elliptic curves the only known attacks take exponential time (and 256-bit keys are fine). But I don't think either of these nitpicks contradicts the author's thesis.
Show HN: Voiden – a free, offline, Git-native API Client
by kiselitza | 2025-05-28 12:48:43+00:00
Hey HN! Aldin here, a helping hand to Voiden (https://voiden.md)

Voiden is a free, offline, Git-native API client. Your API definitions, docs, and tests all live together.

It came out of years of frustration: cloud sync lock-in, paywalled basics, bloated UIs, and lag on even simple requests. So the team built the opposite: an offline tool with no login, no telemetry, no lock-in. Just markdown and hotkeys.

It behaves like code: local files, git branches, no cloud nonsense. Terminal is built-in, so you can commit, diff, and push changes right from the app.

Docs stay close to your requests, so that API spec and what the API actually does never drift apart. No more scattered Postman, docs, and test files everywhere. A single source of truth.

A minimalist GET request looks something like this:

GET https://dummyjson.com/posts

Just hit /endpoint, paste the URL, and run it with Cmd/Ctrl + Enter.

Not OSS (yet), but 100% local and free. Optional plugins will be coming down the line, but the core stays free.

We'd love feedback from folks tired of overcomplicated and bloated API tooling.
by austin-cheney | 2025-05-28 12:49:35+00:00
The article is talking about hardware, but it largely applies to software just the same.

As a former JavaScript developer and a hiring manager who conducts interviews I would never hire a JavaScript developer who has not completed and published a personal application. To be very clear I don't care what your past titles are. You are not a senior developer if you have not written an application. You are not a leader, or team lead, if you have not managed people.
by abelanger | 2025-05-28 12:49:39+00:00
> program building is an entropy-decreasing process...program maintenance is an entropy-increasing process, and even its most skillful execution only delays the subsidence of the system into unfixable obsolescence

> Only humans can decrease or resist complexity.

For a simple program, maintenance is naturally entropy-increasing: you add an `if` statement for an edge case, and the total number of paths/states of your program increases, which increases entropy.

But in very large codebases, it's more fluid, and I think LLMs have the potentially to massively _reduce_ the complexity by recommending places where state or logic should be decoupled into a separate package (for example, calling a similar method in multiple places in the codebase). This is something that can be difficult to do "as a human" unless you happen to have worked in those packages recently and are cognizant of the pattern.
by _heimdall | 2025-05-28 12:49:54+00:00
Sure, but I thought the prior comment was talking about attrition in general rather than job loss during a downturn.

In my experience, all bets are off when an industry downturn hits. People jump ship or are thrown overboard. Usually those that handle it best keep a steadier hand and don't react as emotionally, it wouldn't surprise me if that group is more often those with the most experience.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-05-28 12:50:05+00:00
To me that an UI/UX issue.

Internally everything is stored and handled in TAI (better than UTC as no discontinuity) and translated from/to something else for human consumption.

I.e. for instance your should have logic to figure out what TAI period corresponds to "next month's meetings" if that's what the user wants, which you apply immediately on user inputs and then forget about DST, time zones, etc. in the rest of the code and storage.

Another benefit is that if your user was in New York but is now in London it is trivial and well-constrained to adjust to local time.
by lolinder | 2025-05-28 12:50:22+00:00
But I think you're the first person to introduce the concept of a monolith to the conversation. How you structure your repo is an orthogonal question to how you break up your deployments, and this conversation is about the former not the latter.

A monolith that's broken up into 20 libraries in their own repos also prevents experimentation with new runtimes just as much as the monorepo version does.
by camillomiller | 2025-05-28 12:51:26+00:00
There are so many use cases where 90% correct answers are absolutely not enough. Nobody would have much of a problem with that, if a flurry of people with vested interests wouldn't try to convince us all that that is not the case, and AI is good to go for absolutely everything. The absurdity of this assumption is so outrageous that it becomes even hard to counter it with logic. It's just a belief-based narrative whose delivery has been highly successful so far in commanding insane investments, and as a travestee for profit-oriented workforce optimizations.
by throwaway71271 | 2025-05-28 12:51:30+00:00
I honestly think that tokens are inhuman, and actually it is harmful for humans to consume tokens.

In gpt2 times I used to read gpt generated text a lot, I was working on a game to guess if the text is AI generated or not, and for weeks while I was working on it I had strange dreams. It went away when I stopped consuming tokens, in gpt4 age this does not happen as I am reading hundreds of times more tokens than back then, but I think it is just more subtle.

Now I use AI to generate thousands of lines of code per day, at minimum sometimes now I just blank out when the AI doesnt spit out the code fast enough, I dont know what am I supposed to write, which libraries it is using what is the goal of this whole function etc, as it is not my code, it is foreign and I honestly dont want to be reading it at all.

This week I took the whole week off work and am just coding without AI and in few days the "blank out" is gone. Well, I did use AI to read 300 page docs of st7796s and write barebones spi driver for example, but I treat it almost as an external library, I give it the docs and example driver and it just works, but it is somewhat external to my thought process.

People argue that all fields have evolved, e.g. there are no more blacksmiths, but I argue that the machinists now are much more sophisticated than the ones in the past, pneumatic hammers allow them to work better and faster, as they use the hammer they get better understanding the material they work with, as in the machine does not take away their experience and ability to learn. I always had 2 days per week where I code without any AI, but now I think I have to change the way I code with it.

AI is for sure making me worse, and lazy. And I am not talking about the "career" here, I am talking about my ability to think.

I wrote few days ago about it: https://punkx.org/jackdoe/misery.html
by willis936 | 2025-05-28 12:51:44+00:00
>the switch is configured to require LLDP for Data Link Layer Classification for devices requiring more than 15.4W

This really feels like a switch configuration problem. A compliant PoE PD circuit indicates its power class and shouldn't need to bootstrap power delivery. If the PD is compliant and components selected correctly then the PSE is either non-compliant or configured incorrectly.
by viraptor | 2025-05-28 12:51:54+00:00
I'm not sure why "The contents of `I` is nowhere modelled by "projection" because this does not model composition, and is not relevantly discrete and bounded by logical connectives."

In practical terms, what do you think the LLM output cannot contain right now? Because the way I read it now is "LLM can't speculate". But that's trivial to disprove by asking for that happy dog on Mars speculation you have as an example - whether you want the scientific version, or child level fun, it's available and the model will give nontrivial idea connections that I could not find anywhere. (For example childlike speculation from Claude included that maybe dogs would be ok playing in spacesuits since some dogs like wearing little coats)

Similarly "And the intensions here do not compose like the extensions." is really high level. What's the actual claim with regards to LLMs?
by nickledave | 2025-05-28 12:52:24+00:00
Same. Anyone know of a similar book for 2D level design?

Some random search results:

- https://www.tadeasjun.com/blog/2d-level-design/ mostly talks about Celeste

- GDC talk from Maddy Thorson linked from that post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RlpMhBKNr0

- previous HN post (original link seems to be dead) with links to other talks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20177157
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-05-28 12:53:01+00:00
Well no, it's just not build agent size; if you have 10 tests that take 3-4 minutes each, you're not gonna go any faster than the slowest of them (plus the time to build them, which is also typically bad for those kinds of tests, although a bigger build agent may be faster there). Having a system that can avoid running the test for many PRs because it can prove it's not affected means in those cases you don't have to wait for that thing to run at all.

Although, time is money, so often scaling build agents may be cheaper than paying for the engineering time to redo your build system...
by NiloCK | 2025-05-28 12:53:35+00:00
I, too, built a POC autothink shortly after the Claude 3.7 release that included the `extended thinking` toggle. It's literally also called autothink:

https://github.com/NiloCK/autothink

https://www.paritybits.me/think-toggles-are-dumb/

My own version took a first pass with an LLM whose job was to assign a 0-100 complexity rating, and then there was more or less a linear scaling of the allocated thinking budget.

The OP effort here is obviously higher grade, and I'm really tickled to see quantitative results. Well done.
by octo888 | 2025-05-28 12:53:41+00:00
Yes, as I said, by putting it in the employment contract when applying for a job.

Honestly it's hilarious how some people view GDPR. They think CEOs lose sleep at night worrying about it, that they might go to jail for it, or have to pay 100M Euro fine for a breach of it. It's simply not the case.

The reality of EU directives and regulations are very different to how they are sold. Many people fall prey to the marketing
by andsoitis | 2025-05-28 12:53:50+00:00
The internet—it seemed like such a good idea at the time. Under conditions of informational poverty, our ancestors had no choice but to operate on a need-to-know basis. The absence of pertinent, reliable, and commonly held facts was at first a matter of mere logistics—the stable storage and orderly transfer of knowledge was costly and troublesome, and entropy was free—but, over time, the techniques of civilization afforded us better control over the collection and transmission of data.

data != information != facts != truth != knowledge
by walthamstow | 2025-05-28 12:53:55+00:00
> The barrier, as I observed when I reported from Panama several years ago, consisted of planes releasing millions of sterile screwworms to rain down over the Darién Gap every week

This reminds me of the Michael Lewis book The Fifth Risk. It's one of the millions of little things the US Gov does to manage risk to the USA, its neighbouring countries and the world at large.
by tveita | 2025-05-28 12:54:24+00:00
Having done this a few times, I suspect the norm is that the decision is taken without a full understanding of the tradeoffs, both because the decision is taken before engineering has matured and can be hard to change later, and because the disadvantages are easy to downplay - "Sure, but our team will always stay on top of dependencies."

Typically someone has read a few blog posts like the ones linked to, and have some vague ideas of the positives but don't have a full understanding of how how the disadvantages will shape their workflow.

I've seen people with experience at hobby or small scale successfully campaigning for a switch at work and then hitting a wall - in both directions. Updating every call site for a breaking change doesn't sound that onerous, and at a small scale it isn't. Having each team update versioned depencies doesn't sound that hard, and at a small scale it isn't.

Just like with languages, don't listen to anyone who tells you this will solve all your problems. One of the options are merely the least bad for your situation.
by robertlagrant | 2025-05-28 12:55:03+00:00
> Then he logs in to Privacy.com, a subscription service that lets him open virtual debit cards under as many different names as he wishes; Harris has 191 cards at this point, each specific to a single vendor but all linked to the same bank account. This isolates risk: If any vendor is breached, whatever information it has about him won’t be exploitable anywhere else.

Any vendor other than privacy.com, one assumes.
by catigula | 2025-05-28 12:55:12+00:00
>How screwworms managed to jump the barrier in 2022 is not fully clear. But in the years immediately before, the coronavirus pandemic reportedly created supply-chain snarls at the fly factory in Panama and disrupted regular cattle inspections that might have set off the alarm bells earlier. And the border between Panama and Colombia got a lot busier; the Darién Gap, once a notoriously impenetrable jungle, became a popular route for migrants.

This seems to imply that the situation is fairly clear and was caused by mass migration.

Not a great feather to have in your cap as a statesman.