MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by liad-miggo | 2025-05-15 10:30:05+00:00
I built a tool that automatically monitors all AWS documentation, identifies changes, and analyzes their security implications.

AWS documentation updates constantly without notifications, making it nearly impossible to keep track of security-relevant changes. My tool solves this by:

1. Pulling all AWS documentation on a daily schedule

2. Diffing against previous versions to identify exact changes

3. Using LLM analysis to extract potential security implications

4. Presenting results in a clean, searchable interface

An RSS feed is also available! The Tracker highlights exactly what was modified and provides security-focused analysis explaining potential impacts on your infrastructure or compliance posture. You can filter by service, severity, or timeframe.

It's available as a free resource for the security community: AWS Security Docs Changes

I'd appreciate feedback on how it could be more useful for security workflows.
by mnky9800n | 2025-05-15 10:30:24+00:00
Maybe because off-shoring is so prevalent most of the code nowadays is written off-shore and so that is the code that went into training LLMs and that code then biases LLMs to write code like an off-shore engineer.

The solution is obvious, we need to employ the best and brightest minds, put them in spaces where all their needs are met and they are protected from bureacracy, off the rails stakeholders and PMs, so that they can write the cleanest best Carmackian code there can be. Then after that generation of code is written, we use it as training data for the next generation LLM.
by cess11 | 2025-05-15 10:31:21+00:00
"Instead, it sends individual queries and joins the data on the application level. However, this doesn't mean that Prisma's relational queries are per se slower"

Wow, what the fuck.

"Also, this chapter about Query Performance Optimization from the High Performance MySQL book has some great insights. One of the techniques it mentions is JOIN decomposition:

Many high-performance web sites use join decomposition. You can decompose a join by running multiple single-table queries instead of a multitable join, and then performing the join in the application."

This belief that they can write JavaScript that outperforms decades of bare-metal executed optimisations in mainstream database engines is just astonishing.
by Koshima | 2025-05-15 10:32:31+00:00
I think the decline of FILE_ID.DIZ files is largely a byproduct of changing distribution methods. Back in the BBS and early FTP days, these small text files were crucial because they provided a quick summary for file archives, especially when bandwidth was limited, and you couldn't afford to waste time downloading the wrong file.

With the rise of platforms like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket, project descriptions and metadata have become more integrated. The README.md has essentially replaced FILE_ID.DIZ as the default "project descriptor", but with much more flexibility for formatting, linking, and even embedding media.

Additionally, the way we discover and share software has changed. We now have package managers, app stores, and automatic metadata parsing tools that handle much of what these files used to do. Plus, we expect modern software to have much more comprehensive documentation than a few lines in a .DIZ file.
by johnecheck | 2025-05-15 10:33:29+00:00
Mmmh yes and no. Some languages truly do have more/less restrictions.

For example, a garbage collector is the compiler/runtime taking on more work to avoid the restrictions of proper memory management.

This is in some sense analogous to the C++ vs Rust debate. Borrow checking allows the compiler to statically verify whether the program is memory safe. Like statically verified types, it turns a class of undesirable runtime behavior into a compilation failure. Ofc, this is a restriction that may be undesirable, which is why you can turn it off with 'unsafe'.

Python and Java though... do you really have that much more to worry about in Java?

In my eyes, you've got your problem. Regardless of your language choice, you can write a pseudocode algorithm for it. Terms in your algorithm have types already.

When we translate this algorithm into python/Java, the types of the program need to match the types of our pseudocode. Regardless of whether we get feedback on errors at runtime or compile time, we just need to get the types right. I'd prefer my error at compile time. The benefit is tiny for short scripts, but becomes massive when working on a large code base.

What about Java (being a "systems" language) makes you worry about so much more than Python (the "scripting" language)? There are definitely differences, but I don't think they stem from this systems/scripting dichotomy that's intrinsically linked to whether you check your types at compile or run time.
by irridiance | 2025-05-15 10:35:26+00:00
I transform hundreds of tabular sources. For the cleaning / transformation, I found that a very small number of transformations is required, and that we need to review them as a team including business owners. So, I wrote a simple grammar that is very English-like; that gets translated into Polars operations under the covers in Python. It covers 98% + of my ingestion needs, and means that we focus on the needs of the logical data transformations as a team. Business users can easily make changes for sources they manage.

One of the concepts is a “map”, for old values to new values. Those we keep in Excel in Git, so that business users can edit / maintain them. Being Excel, we’re careful to validate the import of those rules when we do a run, mainly to indicate where there’s been a lot of change to identify where there might be an unintended change. Excel makes me nervous in data processing work in general (exploration with Pivots is great, though I’ve moved to Visidata as my first tool of choice). But for years of running in this way we’ve worked around Excel lax approach to data, such as interpreting numerical ID fields as numbers rather than strings.

For output “rendering”, because everything is in Polars, we can most frequently simply output to CSV. We use Jinja for some funky cases.
by briandear | 2025-05-15 10:35:41+00:00
> What ad is relevant to a Taylor Swift song?

How did radio handle this for 90+ years?

> This is why so much TV advertising is cars, banks, medications…

No, that’s because national TV advertising is super expensive.

> Does displaying Hulu ads to readers in countries without Hulu access make sense?

Yeah, perhaps it’ll generate interest in Hulu expanding to that country. You’d be reaching an audience that are ostensibly TV enthusiasts, so it’s a perfect idea for Hulu to gauge and develop interest among audiences that matter.

> A YouTube video explaining the Fourier series?

I don’t know: what kinds of products, services, or events might be interesting for someone who was interested in the Fourier series?

This isn’t a hard problem at all. Advertising worked in the 1950s just fine.

There is zero reason for a company to have my personal buying and interest habits in their database. It doesn’t benefit me. Is the advertising landscape better in 2025 than it was in 1964? Not at all. Here’s a prime example: my friend is an author, he reads blogs and websites on all matter of topics, but somehow if he’s researching a character, he’ll be followed around the web forever advertising products he’ll never buy. In the real world, if I go into a perfume shop one time and buy something, that doesn’t mean I’m a perfume enthusiast — so all of those CPM ads from the perfume companies: completely wasted.

Just because I view, visit, or even buy something, that doesn’t mean I’m interested. Am I in a feminine products affinity group because I occasionally have purchased those products for my wife?

Why not have everyone give a DNA sample to Google so they can tailor advertising based on my genetics? Where does it stop, and to what levels of absurdity shall it reach before we push back — both as consumers and well as tech people building all of this shit?

Want to sell boats? Advertise in boat content. Want to sell subscriptions to your “innovative accounting platform,” the advertise in accounting or business related content.

Again, this isn’t hard. I don’t want “personalized” advertising because the internet doesn’t know me or what I’m interested in at a particular moment. The data on me is very noisy, my interests frequently are fleeting or change, and my “buying habits” are very much contextual and situational. Not to mention I don’t want Google and potentially governments to know what I’m interested in — it’s literally none of their business.

Privacy is a human right and we should be pushing for that. If that makes it harder to monetize Taylor Swift — tough shit. Not my problem. And I don’t think Taylor Swift cares either way.
by Koshima | 2025-05-15 10:35:48+00:00
I break it down based on context:

Tasks: If it’s actionable, I add it to Linear as a task. This keeps my workflow organized and ensures I don’t lose track of things that need follow-up.

Learnings: For insights, ideas, or interesting conversations, I maintain a set of organized Notion documents. I capture everything from technical deep dives to random thoughts I find valuable, so I can revisit them later without cluttering my immediate workspace.

This way, I can close all tabs at the end of the day without worrying about losing context or forgetting something important. It also helps me spot patterns in what I’m learning over time, which is surprisingly motivating.
by visarga | 2025-05-15 10:36:54+00:00
> Imagine, for a moment, a world with no humans. Just machines, bolts and screws, zeros and ones. There is no emotion. There is no art. There is only logic. Humans use logic-defying algorithms called “emotions”. They get angry. They get sad. They have fun. They make decisions based on “gut”.

This is not right, machines can also have the equivalent of "emotions", it is the predicted future reward. It's how Reinforcement Learning works. How much we appreciate something is akin to the value function in RL. You could say RL is a system for learning emotions, preferences, and tactics.

"But those reward signals are designed by humans"... Right. But are AI models really not affected by physical constraints like us? They need hardware, data and energy. They need humans. Humans decide which model gets used, which approaches are replicated, where we want to invest.

AI models are just as physically constrained as humans, they don't exist in a platonic realm. They are in a process of evolution like memes and genes. And all evolutionary systems work by pitting distributed search against distributed constraints. When you are in a problem space, emotions emerge as the value we associate to specific states and outcomes.

What I am saying is that emotions don't come from the brain, they come from the game. And AI is certainly part of many such games, including the one deciding their evolution.
by michalu | 2025-05-15 10:37:03+00:00
Lived there for a while. Inside those buildings. It's one ugly place that hurts an eye and the skyline of beautiful city of London. Those photos do it a great favor. But it has its charm if you're into that sort of thing.

There used to be an iconic club Fabric it was called. Nearby Farringdon is my favourite place in London. Most underrated area.
by pas | 2025-05-15 10:37:07+00:00
I think rejecting a candidate for almost any reason that those making the decision feel as important is okay, but wasting people's time is not.

Just reading the thread is obvious that the requirements were sufficiently vague -- which, again, is not necessarily a problem -- but going about this in a very disrespectful way is not.

(And yes, of course, the hiring manager always can say that "oh I did not want to reject them before they sent the finished assignment, because they could have surprised us with their code!" -- which, while technically true, but I think simply showcases the absolute uncaring laziness that we see from many companies.)
by belorn | 2025-05-15 10:37:18+00:00
It should be perfectly fine if people want to pay with personal information, as long that personal information has zero social costs.

A prime example is sharing information about DNA since that has a social impact on relatives. Less obvious problem would be people in a position of social position, like say a judge or jury, since access to personal information in that situation provide unfair position of power in society. It also is a problem with voting, since access to voters personal information has a high risk of influence elections.

To take a more direct example, if you are paying your email provider with data, then you are also selling the information of anyone who send their emails to you. The sender is in an impossible position in that they can't know who the email provider is of a recipient (email forwarding is a thing), so the social cost is on the recipient if they sell the information.
by Koshima | 2025-05-15 10:39:24+00:00
This feels like a classic “globalization vs. national interests” tension. Apple’s move to manufacture iPhones in India is part of a broader strategy to diversify its supply chain and reduce dependency on a single region, which makes sense given the geopolitical landscape and recent disruptions in global trade.

Also, India is one of the fastest-growing smartphone markets, and local manufacturing often means lower import duties and a better understanding of regional demand. It’s a smart business move, not just a political one.

Curious to see how this plays out, especially given the Make in India push and the fact that China is no longer the default factory floor for the world.
by mrtksn | 2025-05-15 10:39:54+00:00
It's not what they say on the stage but how voters from different countries behave.

UK: 0 points total

Cyprus: 12 points from Greece

Azerbaijan: 12 points from Turkey

San Marino singer: A Turkish guy sings in English

Armenia: the song is in English instead of Armenian

It gives you a clue on what's going on in every country. How nationalistic they feel this year, are they fixing their issues with their arch enemies, are they opening up to different cultures, do they feel part of the community, is everybody still annoyed by the Brits and did they took the event seriously enough to send a good song etc.
by cess11 | 2025-05-15 10:40:16+00:00
That's a tradeoff that sometimes makes sense. MICROS~1 SQL Server heavily leans into the 'use specific features extensively', and countless applications on it consist mainly of stored procedures. It does however cause a lock-in that might not be attractive, your customers might be sensitive to what database engine you run their stuff on and then you need to figure out the common ground between two or more alternatives and build your application in that space.

It's not as uncommon as one might think, one of the big products in public sector services where I live offers both SQL Server and Oracle as persistence layer so they can't push logic into stored procedures or similar techniques.

But just sketching out some schemas and booting PostgREST might be good enough for forever, if that's the case, go for it. As for ORM:s, I kind of like how Ecto in Elixir settings does things, it solves a few tedious things like validation and 'hydration', and has a macro DSL for generating SQL with concise expressions.
by pas | 2025-05-15 10:40:40+00:00
Lot of people are very spicy in the comments, but for a mid-level position mind-reading shouldn't be required.

Not to mention that the whole problem is that the fucking hiring manager was too slimy to actually go to the technical team and ask them what they think about the proposal, and too lazy to take the time and energy and answer like a normal sentient being, and instead sent this autoresponder-level bullshit reply.
by ffdixon1 | 2025-05-15 10:40:55+00:00
Oreos are food, but only good in controlled quantities. During covid, many of my co-workers cited putting on extra weight as they were unconsciously snacking on junk food when working at home. It was just to easy to have another bite when the plate of food was next to their mouse.

For learning, I think having an Oreo cookie (using AI) is OK once in a while, especially if your hitting a wall and can't get through, but it's a really, I think, a very steep slippery slope that leads to avoiding the learning process altogether.

I remember as a co-op student spending three days solving a particularly subtle bug in a C-based word processor. My grit was rewarded. On day three, I vividly remember staring at the code and the solution just popped into my head. That was one of the most formative experiences in my earlier years as a developer and feeling of elation never left me. I worry that AI will take these moments, especially early in ones career.

Our brains have not changed in hundreds of years, and I agree that the in person experience is actually the best. Humans learn best from humans. I'm trying to learn French, and Duo has been sad for a few weeks due to my absence, but its not having the same effect on me if it were a human French teacher was was sad with me.

Regarding failing students, I personally had to take summer school twice and still ended up failing grade 12 and repeating the entire school year. Why? I was too focused on computers and nothing else. In retrospect, taking summer school and repeating grade 12 actually helped me catch up at time when the stakes were low. If I hadn't, I would have definitely failed later in life when the costs were higher.
by sshine | 2025-05-15 10:41:05+00:00
Back then, programmers had to care about performance. The field of programming was less accessible, so the average skills to reach the barrier to entry were higher. So people were, on average, better programmers. The commercial incentives of today to reach market with something half-assed and then never fix it don’t help.

In 2002 I ran OpenBSD on my laptop (thus sacrificing wifi). The memory footprint of running X11, a browser, a terminal, and an editor: 28MB
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-15 10:41:47+00:00
>Though I don’t understand why US companies so afraid to make a bad hire given that it is easy to fire someone who doesn’t perform well in the US.

I assume because in the US employees can still sue for what they would consider wrongful termination, especially if the worker is part of a protected group, making firing a very expensive endeavor in the end.
by Freak_NL | 2025-05-15 10:42:47+00:00
And yet the event is full of politics. From the voting cliques and countries favouring specific allies, to lyrics with hidden (or not so hidden¹) messages, it's everywhere. A lot of it is on a meta level though, leading to an event which taken at face value seems devoid of politics.

1: Georgia's entry in 2009 was called “We Don't Wanna Put In”…
by eesmith | 2025-05-15 10:45:38+00:00
I tried this out on a couple of different public mapping systems. It's interesting that a few of them REALLY don't want you to take US-62 between El Paso and Carlsbad. I think it's because of the salt flats, which OSM humorously describes as a "ford". [1]

I thought that

https://brouter.de/brouter-web/#map=7/33.519/-106.496/standa...

was pretty good, though it doesn't let you label, and it gives elapsed distances (in km at multiple of 100 miles(?)) rather than segments.

Mapquest at

https://www.mapquest.com/routeplanner/from/us/tx/el-paso-282...

doesn't show distances on the map - those are in the turn-by-turn instructions for each segments, and it doesn't let you change the markers.

On the other hand, its "Let use reorder stops" option points out that El Paso to White Sands to Carlsbad Caverns to Roswell to ABQ is faster, at 9 hr 23 min / 589.6 miles instead of 10 hr 46 min / 675.9 miles.

Which ties back to questions of, what's the goal? If it's route planning between friends, a link to an editable map page - especially one which can re-route for you - seems to me more useful than a static image of the map.

The low-detail map you linked to doesn't show POIs, which means you can't decide if perhaps you want to visit Guadalupe Mountains National Park, or drive through a (small) salt flat.

This was why I asked what you meant by "best route" - strictly minimal distance/time? or are you okay with taking 20 minutes longer to detour and visit a shallow cave which was a prehistoric home? (It's on the drive from White's City up to the caverns.)

From a UX view, is your goal to optimize a one-shot "make an image with this route highlighted, with marker images for the waypoints, and with distances for each segment"?

Or is it collaborative effort based on multiple changes? If it's the latter, then the UX can be very different. For one, typing all those place names to update the map each time will become a nuisance.

Plus, I cautioned that your automagical interface needs to know enough to fix the ambiguities in your original routing, and of course your personal preferences of "best route".

My definition of "best" includes going on roads I haven't been on before, so I would drive an extra 1h20m to avoid the backtracking Mapquest suggests.

[1] There's a story about some German POWs during WWII held in a camp in the Southwest. They found a map which showed a river nearby that went to Mexico. They managed to make a raft and break out, but when they got to the "river" it was dry. They weren't expecting seasonal rivers.

It's likely that in really wet year that salt flat does turn the road into a ford.
by tra3 | 2025-05-15 10:46:39+00:00
Are there any companies making the news that are going in the opposite direction? Allowing more flexible “hybrid”, or even full remote?

I recently got an Amazon recruiter ping, but realized that they couldn’t pay me enough to commute into the city center. I’m not really looking, but if push came to shove, I would have to if the industry is really moving back to the office. Makes me real sad.
by ignat_244639 | 2025-05-15 10:46:58+00:00
Huh, that's strange, I wanted to check whether your embeddings have biases, but I cannot use "white" word at all. So I cannot get answer to "man - white + black = ?".

But if I assume the biased answer and rearrange the operands, I get "man - criminal + black = white". Which clearly shows, how biased your embeddings are!

Funny thing, fixing biases and ways to circumvent the fixes (while keeping good UX) might be much challenging task :)
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-05-15 10:47:05+00:00
> but many of the most common complaints about LLM coding (most notably hallucination) are essentially solved problems if you're using agents.

I have definitely not seen this in my experience (with Aider, Claude and Gemini). While helping me debug an issue, Gemini added a !/bin/sh line to the middle of the file (which appeared to break things), and despite having that code in the context didn't realise it was the issue.

OTOH, when asking for debugging advice in a chat window, I tend to get more useful answers, as opposed to a half-baked implementation that breaks other things. YMMV, as always.
Show HN: Novella – A platform for AI-generated stories
by a_void_sky | 2025-05-15 10:47:24+00:00
Hi HN! I built Novella, a platform that lets you read AI-generated fiction across different genres, created by different models.

What is Novella? Novella is a web application that showcases AI-generated fiction.

Why I Built This? I wanted to explore how different AI models (LLM) can be used for creative fiction.
by freehorse | 2025-05-15 10:47:37+00:00
Which is why I really like zed's chat UX experience: being able to edit the full prior conversation like a text file, I can go back and clean it up, do small adjustments, delete turns etc and then continue the discussion with a cleaner and more relevant context.

I have made zed one of my main llm chat interfaces even for non-programming tasks, because being able to do that is great.