MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rayiner | 2025-05-04 19:59:21+00:00
That’s a bizarre argument. Conduct is illegal because it’s bad or has harmful effects. Immigration laws exist because society recognizes that immigration has various undesirable effects (cultural change, strain on public resources, etc.), so we need to restrict immigration to controllable levels that manage those negative effects.

The objection to illegal immigrants is that they’re here. While deportation efforts should follow the law like everything else, there’s nothing about illegal immigration that makes the legal process especially important compared to other things.
by jokoon | 2025-05-04 19:59:30+00:00
I stopped playing counter strike like 2 months ago after playing for 6 months, because I was getting paranoid about closet cheaters. My trust in the game eroded, even though cheaters are not there all the time.

Closet cheaters are cheating in subtle ways, which make it impossible to know if they're really cheating.

It's a constant analysis of "is he cheating or am I bad?", and most of the time, I could not really know. It's a psychologically toxic experience as I cannot focus on the game itself. I was enjoying the game, but that paranoia made things just unbearable.

I suspect china/russia are actively paying people to make effective cheating software, as it's also a lucrative business.

Even a few pro players are cheating. Those online FPS are rotten to the core.

Apparently valve doesn't seem to care that much, because they probably know that there is a big overlap between cheaters and people who trade skins, who are a big source of income.

Too bad!
by p_ing | 2025-05-04 19:59:32+00:00
> and finally the entire concept of an app store for a PC OS is simply the cherry on top of the FU cake.

macOS has had an App Store for quite some time which according to what you're saying, should lead to a dwindling market share, some how.

Not that the author provides any of their assertions are factual, so there's that.
by lemonlime227 | 2025-05-04 20:01:01+00:00
I've seen purelymail, but my biggest doubt about it is getting blocked by email servers. I don't send too many emails, and almost all are sent to Gmail/Outlook accounts. Love the pricing though; I don't use up a massive amount of storage with my emails (way way way under outlook's free storage with 10 years of use) and pay as you go seems really nice.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-05-04 20:01:16+00:00
Worth noting that this has become considerably less of a barrier lately:

> Most noticeably, Zanzibar is built with Spanner Google’s distributed database, and Spanner has the ability to order timestamps using TrueTime, which relies on atomic clocks and GPS antennae: this is not standard equipment for a server. Even CockroachDB, which is explicitly modeled off of Spanner, can’t rely on having GPS & atomic clocks around so it has to take a very different approach.

GPS based timing is very accurate (not atomic clock accurate), and very good boards can be a couple hundred dollars, based around chips like the U-blox LEA-M8F or it's newer variants. @jeffgeerling has been going through a bunch of the various offerings. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28380002 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36893922

If that's not good enough chip-scale atomic like the CASC-SA65 is "only" $5-$3k. https://www.microchipdirect.com/product/090-02789-001?srslti...

It'd be very interesting to assess what the requirements really are, what the threat analysis really is. My instinct says that even advanced attacks are unlikely to be problematic, that rarely will cutting off access this millisecond or that make a huge difference. But most people aren't safeguarding extremely high value systems that would incentivized advanced persistent threats to sit there finding out.

Really cool to see skip-lists involved; very fun having a datastructure that integrates statistics. I'm kind of surprised how little advancement there's been here since Pugh introduced them in 1989.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-05-04 20:01:53+00:00
TIL: SD inspired by air-crash investigations (which attract "informed" pundits like bugzappers), AND is a flight instructor himself!

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00224...

>Investigators are often forced to rely almost exclusively on domain knowledge and common sense, but this exposes them to the mechanisms of hindsight.

(I was on a hunt for his dissertation (Ohio State, Cognitive Engineering, 1996) -- wanted to approach the topic at a level as low+concrete as possible))

As to the King's Peace (Wilderness?) , nobody really knows or cares who chairs NTSB/OSHA lol

https://www.fisherphillips.com/en/news-insights/trump-nomina...
by digdugdirk | 2025-05-04 20:02:21+00:00
I've investigated this space, and I'm not entirely sure its even a desired goal from the perspective of a mechanical designer. The benefit tends to be for smaller aspects (ensuring hole sizes are appropriate for the desired thread, or that holes aren't too close to a bend line on a sheet metal part, etc) but the final design of a 3d part is so non-deterministic, and the variety of manufacturing methods are so varied and unique, it might just cause more issues than benefits.
by simonw | 2025-05-04 20:02:26+00:00
This is a really useful document - the explanations are very clear and it covers a lot of ground.

Anyone know who wrote it? It's not credited and it's pubished on a free Markdown pastebin.

The section on DRY - "repetition penalties" - was interesting to me. I often want LLMs to deliberately output exact copies of their input. When summarizing a long conversation for example I tend to ask for exact quotes that are most illustrative of the points being made. These are easy to fact check later by searching for them in the source material.

The DRY penalty seems to me that it would run counter to my goal there.
by db48x | 2025-05-04 20:02:48+00:00
Back in the day Mercury, Venus, Earth, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune were the 12 planets. You could kinda consider Pluto to be the 13th planet, but in 1930 when it was discovered there were already over 1000 named asteroids. So Pluto is the 1146th planet.
by peteforde | 2025-05-04 20:03:04+00:00
This is actually supporting my point, though (again IMO).

There's a world of difference between a very junior dev producing 1000 line PRs and an experienced developer collaborating with Cursor to do iterative feature development or troubleshoot deadlocks.

Also, no shade to the fictional people in your example but if a junior gave me a 1000 line PR, it would be part of my job as the senior to raise warning bells about the size and origin of such a patch before dedicating significant time to reviewing it.

As a leader, its your job to clearly define what LLMs are good and bad for, and what acceptable use looks like in the context and environment. If you make it clear that large AI generated patches are Not Cool and they do it anyhow... that's a strike.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-04 20:03:09+00:00
>There is NO OTHER INDUSTRY wherein "normies" that didn't go to highly-regarded school for years and years on end have a realistic shot at this kind of compensation.

60 years ago, you could raise a family of 4 and be a homeowner on a median wage. Average apartment housing cost 40% of minumim wage.

We all know thst high floor completely crashed. Just because the ceiling also raised doesn't mean it can't also come crashing down. Its good for us now, but it can definitely become the next crash in as little as a decade.
by antonvs | 2025-05-04 20:03:49+00:00
> Programming languages solve the specification problem, (which happens to be equivalent to "The Control Problem").

Not equivalent, for several reasons. An obvious one is simply that even providing a perfect specification in fact does nothing to solve the control problem, because you still have to enforce following of the specification.

It's similar to the human version of the control problem: we can write comprehensive and copious laws, but that doesn't automatically prevent humans from breaking them.

Besides that, the control problem is inherently subjective. The difficulty of breaking it down into an exhaustive list of deterministic rules is a big part of the problem, which programming languages do nothing to solve.
by Deathmax | 2025-05-04 20:04:04+00:00
Thoughts used to be available in the Gemini/Vertex APIs when Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental was initially introduced [1][2], and subsequently disabled to the public (I assume hidden behind a visibility flag) shortly after DeepSeek R1's release [3] regardless of the `include_thoughts` setting.

At ~10:15AM UTC 04 May, a change was rolled out to the Vertex API (but not the Gemini API) that caused the API to respect the `include_thoughts` setting and return the thoughts. For consumers that don't handle the thoughts correctly and had specified `include_thoughts = true`, the thinking traces then leaked into responses.

[1]: https://googleapis.github.io/python-genai/genai.html#genai.t...

[2]: https://ai.google.dev/api/generate-content#ThinkingConfig

[3]: https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/blob/157b16b8df40...
by svara | 2025-05-04 20:04:20+00:00
> Any carbon captured in a plant that depended on a fossil fuel source of nitrogen cannot be considered carbon neutral, unless you draw a useless system boundary.

What? That sounds really confused.

"Carbon neutral" in this context means a process that shuttles an atom of carbon around in a closed loop between the atmosphere and living organic matter.

To paraphrase what you're saying, human agriculture is not carbon neutral, so human breathing contributes to climate change, because humans require agriculture.

It's the kind of statement that is maybe technically correct if you look at it from the right perspective, but totally unhelpful to understanding ecological flows of atoms.
by doikor | 2025-05-04 20:05:07+00:00
This is actually how cheating is "solved" to some degree in South Korea. Basically you can't play without logging in with your government provided id.

Though they do also use it for stuff like under 16 year olds not being able to play online games between midnight and 6am.

edit: Some extra details about this from a few months ago https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617

> KR (Korea) requires national identity numbers for gaming, which opens up a convenient opportunity to ban cheaters at the “soul” level. It is remarkably effective at keeping them out of game for longer periods of time—cheaters have to buy whole new identities to keep playing, so the bans really stick.
by peteforde | 2025-05-04 20:05:37+00:00
Oh, I see. That is... impressively dark.

Still, I would push back that if you are publishing code that hackable, you already had different and bigger problems even outside of the context of LLM code.

I've been at this a very long time and I am regularly humbled by dumb oversights that Cursor picks up on and fixes before it goes out the door.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-04 20:05:40+00:00
I still prefer Syslinux but it's still not officially supporting UEFI yet :(

The only time I would want Grub is for that reason primarily. But it makes sense to be very familiar with Grub so you can not be screwed up by systems you encounter which may have been set up, "grub-reinstalled", or configured by those who are not as familiar as they should have been.

Once you do have a regular ordinary multiboot system or SSD that includes one or more Linux installs, with Grub working well, then adding the themes like this is only the icing on the cake.
by caditinpiscinam | 2025-05-04 20:05:45+00:00
As a fellow linux users and 3D printing newbie:

- Tinkercad (browser) fun and great for very simple projects. Like the MS Paint of 3D.

- OnShape (browser) seemingly pretty powerful, but not the easiest to learn in my experience, and has some annoying bugs.

- Plasticity (desktop) I played around with the free trial and liked it a lot, found it more intuitive than OnShape.

- Womp (browser) not CAD software, but easy to use and great for making free-form/organic looking designs.

- Blender (desktop) not CAD software and haven't used it myself, but I've seen others use it to design 3D prints.
by mtalantikite | 2025-05-04 20:05:47+00:00
Yeah absolutely, I'm not arguing against theory by any means. I'm happy I know it, but often times I wish my early music teachers spent more time with me on following my ears than whatever it was they were trying to do. It wasn't until I was an adult that I found someone that really cared about that.

But also... what's John Lee Hooker's secret of the guitar??? Don't hold out on us!
by whs | 2025-05-04 20:06:02+00:00
A few years ago I tried implementing Zanzibar for my company, but I needed one change - I don't want to store permissions in Zanzibar but instead it should act as an API gateway that lookup permissions stored in the services. Like if user act on an order, the user service and order service should be contacted.

Turns out it is pretty much required for a distributed system. A common question in microservice architecture is whether to validate permissions only at the API gateway layer, or at every points of use. If you want to validate it everywhere, what happen when you're running async job and the user get revoked. In Zanzibar you attach the cookie as the user's context and Zanzibar will always return the same answer. (This is not meant for cronjob where user set it once and it repeat daily, but rather for quick, one off background jobs like generating reports to users' email) If you remove the internal store, the application's API must provide point-in-time query, which I never see one application does that let alone a microservice environment.

Another problem is cache invalidation - when permission get added or removed, users want that to reflect quickly. I can't remember how the paper handle this, but in any case since the permissions are stored in Zanzibar, every changes goes through Zanzibar. If you remove the internal data store, you lose the change notification.

The pseudo-Zanzibar lives in production today, but I feel like it is one of the mistake in my career.
by jparishy | 2025-05-04 20:06:48+00:00
I had not, looks pretty cool but solves the inverse of the problem as I see it. I want a backend agnostic frontend toolset that is a GIS that I can customize to my needs. I don't want to implement the tools myself, that's too low level. I don't want the service to manage, control, or own the data, that's too high level. There's a sweet spot I don't think is being hit yet.
by HocusLocus | 2025-05-04 20:07:24+00:00
This garden universe ... vibrates complete. Some may get a sound so sweet. Vibrations reach on up to become light, and then through gamma, out of sight. Between the eyes and ears there lie the sounds of color and the light of a sigh. And to hear the sun, what a thing to believe ... but it's all around if we could but perceive.

To know ultra-violet, infra-red, and x-rays ... beauty to find in so many ways. Two notes of the chord, that's our full scope, but to reach the chord is our life's hope. And to name the chord is important to some. So they give it a word, and the word is "OM".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N36oRaEF4jA
by lemonlime227 | 2025-05-04 20:07:59+00:00
Google Workspace looks like the best option. Decent plus is that I'm already using a Google account for a lot of things except email. Main concern I had (forgot to include in original post) was calendar. I use iCloud+Calendar.app for calendar (and basically nothing else), and my existing Google account doesn't play too well with it. Figure I could mostly mitigate this by looking into other calendar clients (Notion Calendar works with Google which is a plus).
by doikor | 2025-05-04 20:08:23+00:00
Though if the AI is only as good as a human can be it is not that desirable. If the cheat does "super human" stuff it can be detected from behavior on the server side though this is after the fact from processing some replay files and thus not that "great" for players as the cheater gets to ruin at least one game.

> “You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” said Koskinas. “And once you’re there, you’re not really cheating enough to make it worth it for most users.”

But it is something they acknowledge will be an issue at some point in the future. Personally I think for now AI is way too slow as all the computation needs to happen in a few milliseconds to really be effective.

> Koskinas says he often worries about the use of AI for screen classification, to learn what human inputs look like, and how to reproduce them.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-04 20:08:34+00:00
> Most people do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to getting a decent job

Then fail to actually learn anything and apply for jobs and try to cheat the interviewers using the same AI that helped them graduate. I fear that LLMs have already fostered the first batch of developers who cannot function without it. I don't even mind that you use an LLM for parts of your job, but you need to be able to function without it. Not all data is allowed to go into an AI prompt, some problems aren't solvable with the LLMs and you're not building your own skills if you rely on generated code/configuration for the simpler issues.
by jocoda | 2025-05-04 20:08:48+00:00
I did a double take when I saw the lettering on the news. I'm not a designer but am aware that the black art of kerning is a thing. It's bad and deserves to be called out. That said, I suspect that most are not going to notice until it's pointed out to them.

Now that the nyt has called them on it, I wonder if they are going to fix this...
by the__alchemist | 2025-05-04 20:09:36+00:00
Enders were... not a great experience. I understand they were in a good price spot at the time, but from my experience and from what I gather online, very finicky. People who liked tinkering with the printer itself loved and recommended them because 3D printing became a skill of its own (Not for the design considerations in the article, but to make the equipment work consistently).

I've heard that Bambus are much better. I have a Raise3D E2 from the Ender era, and it's rock solid. A step up in price, but no finicking. Just works, when new, and now.
by o11c | 2025-05-04 20:10:24+00:00
That's what everybody uses `venv` for. Or `virtualenv` if you're stuck on old Python.

But as a rule, `<=` dependencies mean there's either a disastrous fault with the library, or else the caller is blatantly passing all the "do not enter" signs. `!=` dependencies by contrast are meaningful just to avoid a particular bug.
by dang | 2025-05-04 20:10:24+00:00
The opening of the article derives from (or at least relates to) Peter Naur's classic 1985 essay "Programming as Theory Building". (That's Naur of Algol and BNF btw.)

Naur argued that complex software is a shared mental construct that lives in the minds of the people who originally build it. Source code and documentation are lossy representations of the program—lossy because the real program (the 'theory' behind the code) can never be fully reconstructed from them.

Legacy code here would mean code where you still have the artifacts (source code and documentation), but have lost the theory, because the original builders have left the team. That means you've lost access to the original program, and can only make patchwork changes to the software rather than "deep improvements" (to quote the OP). Naur gives some vivid examples of this in his essay.

What this means in the context of LLMs seems to me an open question. In Naur's terms, do LLMs necessarily lack the theory of a program? It seems to me there are other possibilities:

* LLMs may already have something like a 'theory' when generating code, even if it isn't obvious to us

* perhaps LLMs can build such a theory from existing codebases, or will be able to in the future

* perhaps LLMs don't need such a theory in the way that human teams do

* if a program is AI-generated, then maybe the AI has the theory and we don't!

* or maybe there is still a theory, in Naur's sense, shared by the people who write the prompts, not the code.

There was an interesting recent article and thread about this:

Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and LLMs replacing human programmers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43818169 - April 2025 (129 comments)
by dang | 2025-05-04 20:10:33+00:00
With lots of HN threads over the years!

Naur's "Programming as Theory Building" and LLMs replacing human programmers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43818169 - April 2025 (129 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42592543 - Jan 2025 (44 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38907366 - Jan 2024 (12 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37263121 - Aug 2023 (36 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33659795 - Nov 2022 (1 comment)

Naur on Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31500174 - May 2022 (4 comments)

Naur on Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30861573 - March 2022 (3 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23375193 - June 2020 (35 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736145 - Aug 2019 (11 comments)

Peter Naur – Programming as Theory Building (1985) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10833278 - Jan 2016 (15 comments)

Naur’s “Programming as Theory Building” (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7491661 - March 2014 (14 comments)

Programming as Theory Building (by Naur of BNF) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121291 - Feb 2008 (2 comments)
by jt2190 | 2025-05-04 20:10:34+00:00
Exactly. People are too focused on shoehorning AI into today’s “humans driving computers” processes, instead of thinking about tomorrow’s “computers driving computers” processes. Exactly as you say, today it’s more efficient to create a “one size fits all” web site because human labor is so expensive, but with computer labor it will be possible to tailor content to each user’s tastes.
by threeducks | 2025-05-04 20:12:56+00:00
ConvNeXT's architecture contains an AdaptiveAvgPool2d layer: https://github.com/pytorch/vision/blob/5f03dc524bdb7529bb4f2...

This means that you can split your image into tiles, process each tile individually, average the results, apply a final classification layer to the average and get exactly the same result. For reference, see the demonstration below.

You could of course do exactly the same thing with a vision transformer instead of a convolutional neural network.

That being said, architecture is wildly overemphasized in my opinion. Data is everything.

import torch, torchvision.models device = torch.device("cuda" if torch.cuda.is_available() else "cpu") model = torchvision.models.convnext_small() model.to(device) tile_size, image_size = 32, 224 # note that 32 divides 224 evenly image = torch.randn((1, 3, image_size, image_size), device=device) # Process image as usual x_expected = model(image) # Process image as tiles (using for-loops for educational purposes; should use .view and .permute instead for performance) features = [ model.features(image[:, :, y:y + tile_size, x:x + tile_size]) for y in range(0, image_size, tile_size) for x in range(0, image_size, tile_size)] x = model.classifier(sum(features) / len(features)) print(f"Mean squared error: {(x - x_expected).pow(2).mean().item():.20f}")
by Jensson | 2025-05-04 20:13:27+00:00
> An LLM, specifically trained for test generation, consumes this specification. Its objective is to generate a diverse and comprehensive test suite that probes the specified behavior from an external perspective.

If one of these tests are wrong though it will ruin the whole thing. And LLM are much more likely to make a math error (which would result in a faulty test) than to implement a math function the wrong way, so this probably wont make it better at generating code.