MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by willmeyers | 2025-05-06 21:49:41+00:00
On using MCP servers with Claude: It's actually been kind of annoying. Sometimes I just need a quick script to copy/paste and it tries to connect to a GitHub repo or write to a local file even when I specify I don't want those things. Overall they're the behavior when using them is wildly inconsistent when I use them. It's annoying I have to manually shut off the MCP servers to get what I want.
by perching_aix | 2025-05-06 21:49:48+00:00
Sounds like a vague requirement, so I'd just generally point you towards the AWS managed policies summary [0] instead. Particularly the PowerUserAccess policy sounds fitting here [1] if the description for it doesn't raise any immediate flags. Alternatively, you could browse through the job function oriented policies [2] they have and see if you find a better fit. Can just click it together instead of bothering with the JSON. Though it sounds like you're past this problem by now.

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_poli...

[1] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-managed-policy/latest/refere...

[2] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/IAM/latest/UserGuide/access_poli...
by godelski | 2025-05-06 21:49:53+00:00
> As soon as we need special commands to just get an impression of what's happening with the service,

I agree this is bad design. I do not intend to defend `--grep` just was trying to help solve the issue. I 100% believe that this creates an unreasonable expectation of the user and that piping to grep should be expected.

Although, my results showed equal times piping to grep and dumping to file then grepping that file. IFF `--grep` is operating in parallel, then I think that's fine that it is faster and I'll take back my critique since it is doing additional functionality and isn't necessary. That situation would be "things work normally, but here's a flag for additional optimization."

Is the slowdown the file access? I do notice that it gets "choppy" if I just dump `journalctl --no-pager` but I was doing it over ssh so idk what the bottleneck was. IO is often a pain point (it pains me how often people untar with verbose...).
by welldonehn | 2025-05-06 21:50:02+00:00
I suspect the reason for increasing frequency of this kind of topic - in particularly the reflective commentary here, is in large part due to the average age of HN poster going up. The self-congratulatory tone is on the verge of the (now outdated) self-fellation, held back by a sense of poignancy and nostalgia.

In other words, y’all got way too soft at shitposting.
by bluGill | 2025-05-06 21:50:06+00:00
$1000 is cheap... The real question is when will companies become wise to this scam?

Most companies make you fill in expense reports for every trivial purchase. It would be cheaper to just let employees take the cash - and most employees are honest enough. However the dishonest employee isn't why they do expense reports (there are other ways to catch dishonest employees). There used to be a scam where someone would just send a bill for "services" and those got paid often enough until companies realized the costs and started making everyone do the expense reports so they could track the little expenses.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-05-06 21:50:44+00:00
> a wonder why these sales were approved in this climate

The EU and UK have no good options at the merger level. If they block the sale, it trashes the start-up ecosystem. If they let it through, an American company buys a local one.

The fundamental problem is the paucity of new-firm formation in the EU and UK, the scaling barriers they face that American compeitors don't, and the increased culture of risk-taking in America that lets its firms pay more for acquisitions. The last can't be addressed. The first two probably can by the EU. (The UK is not a viable sovereign entity in these regards.)
by Volundr | 2025-05-06 21:52:05+00:00
> After pressuring it, it would answer with the correct building and height.

And if you bully it enough on something nonsensical it'll give you a wrong answer.

You press it, and it takes a guess even though you told it not to, and gets it right, then you go "see it knew!". There's no database hanging out in ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini's weights with a list of cities and the tallest buildings. There's a whole bunch of opaque stats derived from the content it's been trained on that means that most of the time it'll come up with the same guess. But there's no difference in process between that highly consistent response to you asking the tallest building in New York and the one where it hallucinates a Python method that doesn't exist, or suggests glue to keep the cheese on your pizza. It's all the same process to the LLM.
by maccard | 2025-05-06 21:52:45+00:00
> Ultimately, the future isn't about a smarter editor, it's about a smarter teammate. Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets: generating PRs with tests, taking feedback, and iterating like a real collaborator.

I disagree, but would love to be wrong. These tools exploded onto the scene and were massive productivity helpers, but since their initial integrations they’ve churned rather than improved in the last 2 years. They are even worse when you try to iterate rather than just get them to one shot the problem space.
by xp84 | 2025-05-06 21:53:09+00:00
“Paid for the development”

This comes off as incredibly bought-in to Apple PR, and if you’re not on their payroll, I don’t understand why you’re carrying water for them so aggressively.

First of all, the incredibly high margin hardware more than “pays for” the development of all the parts that make that hardware useful including iOS. We all know this.

Apple makes a tremendous amount of profit, both gross and net. This will dent their top line and their bottom line a bit. It will not make the iPhone a money-losing platform. “Not making as much pure profit as your near-monopoly status might theoretically allow you to if there were no antitrust laws” does not imply “that money will have to be made up somewhere.” They may end up being only “wildly, amazingly profitable” instead of “wildly, absurdly, amazingly profitable.” They don’t “have to” make up any particular amount of money.

Whether that upsets their shareholders including their mega billionaire CEO, is just the breaks. It is quite fitting for a group of people who enjoyed all those amazing profits from Apple’s monopolistic behavior so far — money that I might point out, isn’t even being required to be paid back.
by wahern | 2025-05-06 21:53:09+00:00
Dealing with integer overflow is much more burdensome than dealing with allocation failure, IME. Relatively speaking, allocation failure is closer to file descriptor limits in terms of how it effects code structure. But then I mostly use C when I'm not using a scripting language. In languages like Rust and C++ there's alot of hidden allocation in the high-level libraries that seem to be popular, perhaps because the notion that "there's nothing you can do" has infected too many minds.

Of course, just like with opening files or integer arithmetic, if you don't pay any attention to handling the errors up front when writing your code, it can be an onerous if not impossible to task to refactor things after the fact.
by BoorishBears | 2025-05-06 21:54:58+00:00
shadcn/ui is such a terrible thing for the frontend ecosystem, and it'll get even worse for it as AI gets better.

Instead of learnable, stable, APIs for common components with well established versioning and well defined tokens, we've got people literally copying and pasting components and applying diffs so they can claim they "own them".

Except the vast majority of them don't ever change a line and just end up with a strictly worse version of a normal package (typically out of date or a hodgepodge of "versions" because they don't want to figure out diffs), and the few that do make changes don't have anywhere near the design sense to be using shadcn since there aren't enough tokens to keep the look and feel consistent across components.

The would be 1% who would change it and have their own well thought out design systems don't get a lift from shadcn either vs just starting with Radix directly.

-

Amazing spin job though with the "registry" idea too: "it's actually very good for AI that we invented a parallel distribution system for ad-hoc components with no standard except a loose convention around sticking stuff in a folder called ui"
by ziddoap | 2025-05-06 21:55:17+00:00
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Have fun.

(I'm sure if I pick any specific quotes, you'll start arguing the semantics of what is "zealous", how whatever number of comments I pick are outliers, or not proof enough, etc. So, here's one query, of many, that you can pick through.)

In the end, I really could not care less if you agree with the characterization or not. But your enthusiastic defense is fun. If you keep going, you'll be coming close to being an example yourself!
by kimixa | 2025-05-06 21:55:40+00:00
It's a "source" that cannot be reproduced or actually referenced in any way.

And all the other examples will have a chain of "upstream" references, data and discussion.

I suppose you can use those same phrases to reference things without that, random "summaries" without references or research, "expert opinion" from someone without any experience in that sector, opinion pieces from similarly reputation-less people etc. but I'd say they're equally worthless as references as "According to GPT...", and should be treated similarly.
by zacwest | 2025-05-06 21:56:01+00:00
These are the changes that Apple was forced to make, specifically referencing 3.1.3 (Other Purchase Methods) and 3.1.3(a) (“Reader” Apps):

> 3.1.3: The prohibition on encouraging users to use a purchasing method other than in-app purchase does not apply on the United States storefront.

> 3.1.3(a): The External Link Account entitlement is not required for apps on the United States storefront to include buttons, external links, or other calls to action.

The bit about the (formerly required in the US) entitlement is:

> Reader app developers may apply for the External Link Account Entitlement to provide an informational link in their app to a web site the developer owns or maintains responsibility for in order to create or manage an account.

They required you use a trackingless, generic URL that was unvarying per user, so you probably didn't run into it super often. Offhand, the Kobo app did use it.
by TZubiri | 2025-05-06 21:56:06+00:00
TZ: "How many types of eye cones do birds like parrots have, what are their colors?" CGPT: "...birds do have an RGB system that's roughly analogous to ours..."

So this works with parrots, unlike dogs who have two color cones and wouldn't see very well on the screen.

https://chatgpt.com/share/681a8524-59e4-800f-8bff-a673910c07...
by rchaud | 2025-05-06 21:58:01+00:00
I'd define them as a large company acquiring a private startup. Slack >> Salesforce was a cash-and-stock deal. Postmaters >> Uber, all stock.

In cases where the company being acquired is already publicly traded, those deals would have to be all cash as their shareholders would need to be bought out. IBM paid cash for Hashicorp, and Doordash will acquire Deliveroo in cash.
by pdimitar | 2025-05-06 21:58:21+00:00
Oh I agree, don't get me wrong. Both are pretty gnarly.

I was approaching these problems strictly from the point of view of what can Rust do today really, nothing else. To me having checked and non-panicking API for integer overflows / underflows at least gives you some agency.

If you don't have memory, well, usually you are cooked. Though one area where Rust can become even better there is to give us some API to reserve more memory upfront, maybe? Or I don't know, maybe adopt some of the memory-arena crates in stdlib.

But yeah, agreed. Not the types of problems I want to have anymore (because I did have them in the past).
by JohnFen | 2025-05-06 21:59:15+00:00
> When you click on a topic under 'Forums', the latest posts are displayed. Am I correct in understanding that you want the latest posts to appear at the bottom (in reverse chronological order)?

No, I prefer it the way you have it. Newest at the top. There's ambiguity that I didn't realize here: to me, "chronological order" means oldest to newest (how time runs), and "reverse chronological order" means newest to oldest (timeline running backwards).
by homefree | 2025-05-06 21:59:16+00:00
I don't have a strong opinion on what language - the bit you edited in what I was replying to changed the meaning of what they were saying.

My reply is flagged dead now which is fine since it did create an unproductive thread, but it was more that I had noticed Rust as a community seems to have more of an identity based political bent around it more so than other languages. Something I've also noticed with Mozilla - it's not just the language, but that the language signals you're a certain kind of person with a certain kind of politics in addition to the general pro-rust stuff.

I don't recall seeing this combination elsewhere with other languages before - though there have been religious like battles over languages forever, but I don't think it's been predictive of someone's political identity before?
by turtleyacht | 2025-05-06 21:59:49+00:00
One comparison is with Stack Overflow (SO). Given a task, there are usually multiple answers. The question may not even be relevant; often, multiple question pages must be compared.

The best answer is the one that fits the aesthetics of my approach--one that didn't exist before (there was only the problem before), but the answer is simple, straightforward, or adaptable.

Having multiple answers is good because different minds evaluated the question. It is a buffet of alternatives, starting from others' first principles, mistakes, and experience. Some are rejected outright from some tacit taste organ. Others become long-lived browser tabs, a promise to read carefully someday (never).

All this is void if it turns out using SO is similarly degenerative in the same way, though.
by franze | 2025-05-06 22:00:46+00:00
here is the thing, even those editors are relict of the pasts, the code is still in the center in these editors. thats something we need now, but not in the near (2 years, 5 years, 10 years?) future.

then the prompt is the coding, the reasoning is the execution, the code just an abstract layer that we do not care to much about i.e.: like assembly, machine instructions.

we know it exists, bit even here on hackernews i would guess only a small fraction know how it really works on a detailed level.

there will still be coding, instructions (prompt) -> execution (reasoning and AI code and code execution -> feedback (debugging to AI then and one point to the user)

bur actual looking at the code, well, thats only when this cycle annoyingly fails.

so current IDEs are still built from an code first mindset. this will not be the IDE of the future.

so basically OpenAI bought a Dinosaur
by jjmarr | 2025-05-06 22:01:22+00:00
Not the OP, but I would rather give a formal specification of my system to an AI and have it generate the code.

I believe the point is it's easier for a human to verify a system's correctness as expressed in TLA+ and verify code correctly matches the system than it is to correctly verify the entire code as a system at once.

Then, if my model of the system is flawed, TLA+ will tell me.

I'm an AI bull so if I give the LLM a natural language description, I'd like the LLM to explain the model instead of just writing the TLA+ code.
by Animats | 2025-05-06 22:02:05+00:00
This isn't about power factor. That's a current vs. voltage thing within one cycle. It's about demand side ramp rate - how fast load can go up and down.

Ramp rate has been a generation side thing for a century. Every morning, load increases from the pre-dawn low, and which generators can ramp up output at what speed matters. Ramp rate is usually measured in megawatts/minute. Big thermal plants, atomic and coal, have the lowest ramp rates, a few percent per minute.

Ramp rate demand side, though, is a new thing. There are discussions about it [1] but it's not currently something that's a parameter in electric energy bills.

[1] https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2012/data/papers/019...
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-06 22:02:10+00:00
> it’s easy to get by without deeply understanding the code you’re deploying.

I feel that's been an issue for a long time, with the heavy reliance on dependencies. AI tools are really just a furtherance of the model already in use.

I have the luxury of developing software as a craft; not as a vocation. I deliberately do stuff "the hard way," because I feel more fulfilled, doing so.
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-05-06 22:02:31+00:00
This also, long term, could kill the 30% commission. Why, as a developer, would you be stupid enough to launch your app as a paid product on the App Store?

Your discoverability is massively impaired, we already knew that. You also give Apple 30% of your cash.

Free app + external web purchase = maximum discoverability at 0% tax.

When things get more advanced, that web purchase link will be an authenticated URL - meaning one click to open the web browser already logged in. Register a protocol handler, remember their card information (or, ironically, use Apple Pay), and one tap in the app, a flash of the web browser, and they’re back in the app with purchase complete.

Apple needs to address this at WWDC. In the US and EU, there are zero, heck, negative advantages of selling on the App Store. All pain, all fees, no benefit of any kind. That’s a big deal.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-06 22:02:50+00:00
Those agents have a right to question people and a right to investigate anyone who may be a threat to the USA or our Constitution. The American people have a right to peace and tranquility on our borders and a right to be protected from anti-American activities. The agents who question people like this are, in fact, following their own due process.

Was this reporter denied entry? Was this reporter denied some sort of rights by being questioned or detained? Was any violation proven or documented by the agents who questioned her and her family? I don't see any problems here. Why do you allege violations of due process? This reporter is simply bitching about being inconvenienced by too many questions at the border that she considers intrusive. Perhaps her activism is the intrusive part. Perhaps her connections to terrorism or anti-American factions, those are the intrusive activities in question here. Perhaps due process is necessary to protect others? What else is proven by her allegations?
by laughingcurve | 2025-05-06 22:05:19+00:00
It’s really obvious you did not read anything in the article. It’s a victim impact statement. It’s not being used as evidence. State law allows for victim impact statements to be delivered in any manner. A family is grieving and looking for closure, but all you seem to see here is another example of AI gone amok. I cannot understand your rationale and behavior without explanation.
by prpl | 2025-05-06 22:05:27+00:00
I view this as an another step in the push/pull between local things, remote things, local things remotely, thin clients, network partitioning, cloud, zero trust, etc...

The last cycle I remember of this IMO is iPython -> Jupyterhub/Jupyterlab. Of course, iPython has existed for a long time, though that change was made because data was too big to analyze locally and it turns out it was more convenient to centrally manage kernels/images/libraries for convenience.

MCP servers and Cursor/Windsurf changed that a bit, but it will end up centralized again at some point (or at least aggregated, if it's not already?). People are passing around lists of interesting MCP servers now, and that will be out of fashion in less than 12 months.
by spyrja | 2025-05-06 22:05:59+00:00
To be fair, this sort of thing doesn't have to be so much worse in C++ (yes, it would have been nice if it had been built into the language itself to begin with). You just need a function to do a back-and-forth conversion which then double-check the results, ie:

#include <exception> #include <sstream> template <typename From, typename To> void convert_safely_helper_(From const& value, To& result) { std::stringstream sst; sst << value; sst >> result; } // Doesn't throw, just fails template <typename From, typename To> bool convert_safely(From const& value, To* result) { From check; convert_safely_helper_(value, *result); convert_safely_helper_(*result, check); if (check != value) { *result = To(); return false; } return true; } // Throws on error template <typename To, typename From> To convert_safely(From const& value) { To result; if (!convert_safely(value, &result)) throw std::logic_error("invalid conversion"); return result; } #include <iostream> template <typename Buy, typename Quantity, typename Price> void sendOrder(const char* symbol, Buy buy, Quantity quantity, Price price) { std::cout << symbol << " " << convert_safely<bool>(buy) << " " << convert_safely<unsigned>(quantity) << " " << convert_safely<double>(price) << std::endl; } #define DISPLAY(expression) \ std::cout << #expression << ": "; \ expression template <typename Function> void test(Function attempt) { try { attempt(); } catch (const std::exception& error) { std::cout << "[Error: " << error.what() << "]" << std::endl; } } int main(void) { test([&] { DISPLAY(sendOrder("GOOG", true, 100, 1000.0)); }); test([&] { DISPLAY(sendOrder("GOOG", true, 100.0, 1000)); }); test([&] { DISPLAY(sendOrder("GOOG", true, -100, 1000)); }); test([&] { DISPLAY(sendOrder("GOOG", true, 100.5, 1000)); }); test([&] { DISPLAY(sendOrder("GOOG", 2, 100, 1000)); }); }

Output:

sendOrder("GOOG", true, 100, 1000.0): GOOG 1 100 1000 sendOrder("GOOG", true, 100.0, 1000): GOOG 1 100 1000 sendOrder("GOOG", true, -100, 1000): GOOG 1 [Error: invalid conversion] sendOrder("GOOG", true, 100.5, 1000): GOOG 1 [Error: invalid conversion] sendOrder("GOOG", 2, 100, 1000): GOOG [Error: invalid conversion]

Rust of course leaves "less footguns laying around", but I still prefer to use C++ if I have my druthers.
by bsimpson | 2025-05-06 22:06:30+00:00
I'll never forget how jealous the Dutch coffee shop owner I met was of Americans.

Dude worked at a bank - respectable white collar job acc. to his Dutch friends and family. He picked up a passion for coffee and wanted to open his own shop. His loved ones all thought he was nuts to leave a stable job for a maybe.

I'm sure there's a degree of that in the US, but we have a lot more "just try stuff" in our cultural myths than the Europeans tend to. Guy felt like his options were keep a job he hates or be disowned by everyone he knows.
by tzs | 2025-05-06 22:06:42+00:00
> Another solution is dummy calculations, which run while there are no spikes, to smooth out demand. This makes the grid see a consistent load, but it also wastes energy doing unnecessary work.

Oh god...I can see it now. Someone will try to capitalize on the hype of LLMs and the hype of cryptocurrency and try to build a combined LLM training and cryptocurrency mining facility that that runs the mining between training spikes.
by Rodeoclash | 2025-05-06 22:06:58+00:00
As a musician, the things I want most from generative AI is:

1. Being able to have the AI fill in a track in the song, but use the whole song as input to figure out what to generate. Ideally for drums this would be a combination of individual drum hits, effects and midi so I'm able to tweak it after generation. If it used the Ableton effects and drum rack then that would be perfect.

2. Take my singing and make it both sound great and like any combination of great singers (e.g. give me a bit of Taylor Swift combined with Cat Power)

I've had a play with the style transfer between singers (bullet point 2 above) but when I last tried it, it was garbage in / garbage out, and my singing is garbage.

What I don't want: To just generate a whole song. Adobe does this style of assistive AI well in the photo editing space but no one seems to have brought it to audio yet.