MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by scrlk | 2025-05-23 15:53:51+00:00
The OP of that thread later went on to do a contract with Kam Air of Afghanistan, which is another good read: https://www.pprune.org/terms-endearment/662364-kam-air-expat...

A highlight:

> YA-KME for example, has a strange little thing where you’ll get an ECAM Red ENG 3 FIRE after you detent into CLB. For f*ck sake, don’t discharge the bottles, there’s no fire. It’ll shut up after 3 or 4 seconds. Again, reason unknown, everybody just kind of lives with it’s quirks now. KME is commonly referred too as “Kill Me”, as this is the aircraft with the most random issues. Brake temps breaking the charts when you start up from cold and dark in DXB for example. You’ll get used to them, and you’ll get used to which ones are “KME Normal” and KME actually trying to kill you.
by pona-a | 2025-05-23 15:54:07+00:00
I understand what you mean, but let's be honest: this is a rare kind of tool that's more useful to feign competence, deceive yourself and others, and produce industrial volumes of slop than it is to do better work. IntelliSense is just dynamic documentation, which has existed since at least Emacs — it doesn't do the thinking for you.

Professional tools, from music notation and art to typesetting and programming, are about translating an image inside your mind into something physical. When you know what you're doing, the lack of an interpretable mapping between prompt and generation means you spend more time trying to describe what you want to write instead of just writing it. I'd be much happier with code generation if it could take a formal specification and either return an error or something that provably implements it. Maybe interpretability research will one day change that, but as they are now, they're simply not tunable or reliable enough to be used as tools. And yes, prompting doesn't count when they increasingly disregard your instructions.

There are many valid uses: I have a tiny WolframAlpha-like script that lets me type some basic computations and the LLM translates that to Python. I sometimes use LLM completions to get some inspiration when writing prose — while I usually discard them, they still help me think. They can often act as better grammar checkers than LanguageTool, and they make a nice companion to smaller translation models, both having their own quirks.

But most of this doesn't need these larger and larger models; I haven't yet tried, but I think fine-tuning some mid-size open-weights LLMs will yield similar or better results. The industry sold the public AGI, not better auto-complete, a fuzzy parser, or a smarter translator, and now they're burning growing piles of money on a saturated research direction to maintain the delusion singularity is 5 months away.
by qntmfred | 2025-05-23 15:54:19+00:00
will definitely be taking a look at this. i started my career on mostly SQL Server and using SSMS fits my brain like a glove. i've been so dissatisfied with the typical options (pgadmin, dbeaver, datagrip, etc) for managing/querying postgres since i started using it probably like 10 years ago. postgres itself is great (don't get it twisted either, SQL Server is fantastic. just costs money) but i never understood why there wasn't more uproar in the community about its DBMS tooling ecosystem
by constantcrying | 2025-05-23 15:54:54+00:00
The question is only relevant if AI is a significant force amplifier. If it is not, it is an unthreatening tool, whose usage should be largely unrestricted, this is the case now.

If that ever changes then there is the question what to do with it and at a certain level of power an individual decision would have impact, if sufficiently amplified.
by rafram | 2025-05-23 15:55:23+00:00
Most of their training data says that Biden is president, because it was created/scraped pre-2025. AI models have no concept of temporal context when training on a source.

People use "who's the president?" as a cutoff check (sort of like paramedics do when triaging a potential head injury patient!), so they put it into the prompt. If people switched to asking who the CEO of Costco is, maybe they'd put that in the prompt too.
by nevi-me | 2025-05-23 15:55:25+00:00
I speculate that it's because the MSSQL tools have been maintained as part of Azure Data Studio, and were in better shape.

ADS is being sunset, and I was surprised when trying to install the Postgres extension on VS Code to find that it had its last meaningful contribution 6 years ago [0]. It couldn't work on newer VS Code versions.

I use ADS with both Postgres and MSSQL, prior to this announcement, I kept using ADS because there was nothing to migrate to.

[0] https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-postgresql/commits/maste...
by kstrauser | 2025-05-23 15:55:37+00:00
It has a proprietary license[0]. That makes it a non-starter. Too bad: it looks nifty!

> The software is licensed, not sold. Microsoft reserves all other rights. Unless applicable law gives you more rights despite this limitation, you will not (and have no right to):[…] d) use the software for commercial, non-profit, or revenue-generating activities

Oops. Better not install this on your work laptop!

[0] https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items/ms-ossdata.vscode...
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-23 15:55:48+00:00
Well, it's unprofessional to just sit and twiddle your thumbs when you're "blocked."

I always find something else to work on. Chances are whoever is blocking me is also busy too.

When I manage people, I always assign them multiple tasks and make it very clear that if they get stuck on one they are to move to the next. Then the next time we meet we can figure out how to unblock tasks.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-05-23 15:56:05+00:00
In the early 2000's I discovered Irfanview, and used it because it was lightweight and loaded jpeg's much faster than anything else I was using at the time - this was on a 133Mhz Pentium 1 running Windows ME with 56MB of RAM.

I also like Irfanview because:

A) It has every basic editing function you might need (crop, color adjust, blur/sharpen), great for ad-hoc one-off things. It has all these functions but loads just about instantly on my older laptop. For example, if I need to rotate a picture real quick, it's convenient to open it in Irfanview and just press L/R to orient it.

B) I like it for one-off converting pics from one format to another, and it's the only GUI program I've seen that lets you save as jpeg, but also specify the target size. So I can convert a 10MB PNG to a 256KB jpeg easily. I know this is trivial to do in Linux with the convert command but when, for example, working with pics from my phone, I'm already previewing it in Irfanview in the first place. Irfanview's save GUI actually exposes a lot of knobs for many image formats that I don't see on other programs.

C) If you want to extract images from a PDF, you can open the PDF in Irfanview and Irfanview will let you save out the individual images. At least for the PDFs I've tried it with.

D) The batch mode it has is decently implemented and is easier to use than Linux command line stuff for small jobs if Irfanview can take care of the need (less than 50 images), especially if the images are all over the place and not in one folder.

I'm so used to it I'll probably use it in Wine (if possible) if/when I actually make the jump to everyday desktop Linux, which Windows 11 may make me do finally.
by jamager | 2025-05-23 15:56:18+00:00
I apologize for the ad hominems.

1. You don't need to learn hundreds of random languages in order to claim you like languages. Most people feel attracted by some languages and not others, so your generalization point doesn't make any sense.

2. For most people I know language is fun once they start to communicate meaningfully, no need to be on the professional leagues.

3. Some people likes to learn a bit of many languages, others like to learn a ton of just two, others don't have enough time to learn as much as the would like, others like languages but maybe also likes sports as much. Even then, almost 1/2 of world population is bilingual and ~1/6 speaks more than 2 languages.

4. The overwhelming majority of people has the tremendous skill of being able to enjoy something in spite of not having any immediate payoffs. Otherwise no one would be doing difficult things of any kind and we all would be great at filling tax forms.
by lolinder | 2025-05-23 15:57:20+00:00
This is Microsoft catching up to what JetBrains has had all along (in their paid products). There's DataGrip but I was also using all these features (minus the AI stuff) in IntelliJ Ultimate and PyCharm 5+ years ago.

The main difference is that JetBrains supports a bunch of databases, not just one.
by huqedato | 2025-05-23 15:57:21+00:00
Years ago I built something similar, a Pub/Sub notification system: https://github.com/huqedato/qnotix. It is still running (with small modifications), in production, at my ex-customer.

Such a pity the industry (customers) reacts with skepticism every time I propose solutions based in Elixir/Erlang. I always hear: "Elixir, what? We want Java/.Net/Python/php"
by dabockster | 2025-05-23 15:57:37+00:00
You’d have to convince someone to say no to a multimillion dollar VC check, bootstrap themselves financially (and often on “bread and water” levels of available money for their project), and be willing to potentially run or be at least somewhat responsible for whatever they build for potentially decades.

An entity would have to really want to do all that for the “American Dream” to happen.
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-23 15:57:45+00:00
But how is this different to what NVIDIA have already done? They have robots that can achieve arbitrary and fluid actions in the real world by training NNs in very accurate GPU simulated environments using physics engines. Moving a little Atari stick around seems like not much compared to sorting through your groceries etc.

The approach NVIDIA are using (and other labs) clearly works. It's not going to be more than a year or two now before robotics is as solved as NLP and chatbots are today.
by SaltPork | 2025-05-23 15:57:46+00:00
If your interested in more of this line of Philosophy or way of thinking I would suggest.

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein

"The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality, and to define the limits of science."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus
by mrits | 2025-05-23 15:57:53+00:00
I've been using DataGrip for a few weeks and admit it is a nice upgrade to DBVisualizer that I've been using for 10 years. The intellisense and features like being able to select the query in the current window are big time savers for me. I'm still on a trial and not certain I'll purchase it just because things are moving so fast in this field. I feel like not having it in my VSCode Agent loop is a huge negative at this point
by Ferret7446 | 2025-05-23 15:58:52+00:00
That's a massive waste of resources and time.

If you are unwilling to use tools like Flatpak, then that limits what distros you can make. e.g., in a world without Flatpak, only distros with X users can exist. In a world with Flatpak, distros with X/10 users can exist.

Another way to think about it: if you want to make/use your own distro, then using Flatpak will cut down the amount of work you have to do by some large multiple. You're free to not use it, just like you're free to install custom electrical sockets in your house and make custom adaptors for every single appliance you buy.

Standardization/centralization exists for a reason.
by Jensson | 2025-05-23 15:59:01+00:00
> It would seem our own generalized intelligence is an emergent property of many, _many_ specialized processes

You can say that about other animals, but about humans it is not so sure. No animal can be taught as general set of skills as a human can, they might have some better specialized skills but clearly there is something special that makes humans so much more versatile.

So it seems there was this simple little thing humans got that makes them general, while for example our very close relatives the monkeys are not.
by weitendorf | 2025-05-23 15:59:42+00:00
It's not that maintaining some kind of audit history is an insurmountable problem, it's that it's both a very common need and the "right" way to do it can take significantly longer to set up than a quick naive approach. Once you take into account batching (many if not all of your pushes to auditable tables that are typically static will happen in batches within that table and across multiple other tables, because you are updating your application logic or implementing some new feature) and the need to not blow up your storage with audit logs by recording diffs, and the need to be able to "replay" or "rollback", etc. it's quite a lot to handle

And again, it's not impossible to do any of that. I just think it seems repeatable enough that it could be a first-party feature, and I would prefer to just enable or configure that feature and move on to other problems.

Going from something like your naive approach which I assume an LLM generated for you, to something productionized enough to bet your business on it, is not always trivial.
by Peritract | 2025-05-23 16:00:14+00:00
> although they periodically hint at their left-leaning politics, admirably dedicate their time and skills to projects paying tribute to the first-responder firemen who perished on 9/11, the victims of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and sick children in hospitals

This is an extremely strange framing; there's nothing anti-left in caring about sick children and the victims of terrorism.
by whstl | 2025-05-23 16:00:33+00:00
You're the one complaining about "hearing names of tasks you know nothing about" but you're also the one saying it should consist of "what have you done, what you will do".

It doesn't. :)

Stand ups are not for status reports, they're for syncing. "I have a big PR coming so please check it today". "I am still stuck with the sprongler bifurcator but I expect to be over tomorrow". "I need to involve someone from team X, their stuff is blocking me". "Ok, Y, let's chat after this meeting".
by magicalhippo | 2025-05-23 16:01:16+00:00
They already have the SQL Server Management Studio[1], which seems to cover similar ground?

I'm assuming they might want to move SSMS to VSCode in time, so trying it out by covering new ground, PostgreSQL, makes sense to me.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/ssms/sql-server-management...
by diego898 | 2025-05-23 16:01:24+00:00
Purely empirical observation, in my own life, make no claim as to humanity/society/etc.:

It's interesting how often fermi estimation problems are used as proxy's for "intelligence". Something like: 'let's assess how well "they can think" - how many golf balls fit in a baseball stadium?' etc.

Often, doing well in these kinds of problems can more than makeup for a lack of specific knowledge in something someone is interested in assessing!
by treis | 2025-05-23 16:01:26+00:00
Your memory is a bit off. The text is:

>A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed

It's the only amendment that comes with a justification so it's unusual but there's nothing in the text that limits the right to the listed justification.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-23 16:01:27+00:00
I think your approach would work for a larger company than the article was about.

Edit:

> "generalist" route with modern frontend and backend is nearly impossible today

This is simply not true; it all depends on design and organizational priorities. An organization can choose to use the same language in the UI and server, and prioritize the compromises that come with same language development. (IE, C# + Blazor, or Typescript + NodeJS.)
by Aidevah | 2025-05-23 16:01:32+00:00
> Universalism: that is the intellectual realm abutting utopianism and ethnocentrism. "There are universal values, and they happen to be mine," was Stanley Hoffman’s delightful definition of the latter. Like utopianism and ethnocentrism, universalism normalizes, excludes, and shouts down. If “universal” does not mean universally accepted, then it means nothing. Those who do not accept must therefore at least be marginalized, and if possible stigmatized.

-- Richard Taruskin [1]

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/10/arts/the-new-seasonclassi...
by belorn | 2025-05-23 16:02:17+00:00
You can do the same with a nuclear power plant and calculate how much power it generate and how much green house gases that represent if it was produced by a natural gas-fired power plant. Fuel cost is a thing, but to my knowledge they are fairly minor in terms of greenhouse emissions when compared to burning fossil fuels.

Batteries/storage do not produce energy so they don't displace any energy in this kind of calculations. They can be viewed as a small efficiency increase of existing wind turbines, in which case they do have a form of greenhouse gas payback time, although the energy must not be counted twice for both the turbine and battery, and the increased wear and tear on the wind turbine may impact the result.

Wind generally has an production rate of around 50%, which mean that countries like Denmark that has already reached over 100% wind production still only have energy for half of their consumption. This mean the storage need is fairly massive, which they currently solve by importing energy from fossil fueled thermal power stations, nuclear and hydropower from nearby countries. Constructing more wind power at this point does not seem economical for power companies, and any storage solution like lithium, reverse hydro, and so on are also not economical (as in, there is basically zero investment into it outside of government subsidized initiatives). As such, wind has in that location seem to have reached its ability to displace any more fossil fuel.
by jaredcwhite | 2025-05-23 16:02:42+00:00
MCP is not an open standard.

People routinely mistake "protocol specification uploaded to GitHub, PRs welcome" as open standards. They are not. Calling them "open protocols" because they are open source, not open standards (no standards body was involved in the making of this protocol!) is essentially a form of openwashing.

This has been happening way too frequently lately (see also: ATProto), and it really needs to be called out.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-05-23 16:03:30+00:00
That is seemingly true of a bunch of tools. I am using an official Microsoft Python library - the repo is public on GitHub, but all of the CI or other backend integration is behind the Microsoft curtain, so it is impossible for the public to actually participate. The cherry on top is that the team that used to support the tool was impacted, so now nobody can maintain the thing.
by Calzifer | 2025-05-23 16:04:36+00:00
for(int i=0;i<10000; ++i){ // do nothing just compute hash again and again. hash = str.hashCode(); }

https://github.com/MayankPratap/Samchika/blob/ebf45acad1963d...

"do nothing" is correct, "again and again" not so much. Java caches the hash code for Strings and since the JIT knows that (at least in recent version[1]) it might even remove this loop entirely.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43854337
by ck2 | 2025-05-23 16:04:55+00:00
What on earth are you downplaying

There never ever has been an above-ground test of a modern enhanced hydrogen bomb in the USA

The Bikini Atoll test in the 1950s using 75 year old technology killed people via radiation over 130 miles away

Modern ICBMs carry several much more powerful warheads than that

Even a few of them would make life on earth a permanent hell like peak covid pandemic but forever

Even the "smallest" nuclear war would be one-and-we're-done event

Eventually some tyrant on their deathbed will do it though
by nradov | 2025-05-23 16:06:03+00:00
Eventually Epic may be replaced but it's really hard to break into the hospital market. Any new competitor would have to meet all of the ONC Health IT Certification requirements, plus a bunch of other checklist requirements imposed by hospital purchasing departments. It doesn't matter whether they solve the UI problems or offer new capabilities if they don't have the basics finished first, and that takes many person years of work.

https://www.healthit.gov/topic/certification-ehrs/certificat...

The only way a startup might be able to eventually replace Epic is to target a niche ambulatory care specialty first where meeting all the checklist requirements is less important than really nailing an optimal clinician workflow. Then gradually expand out from that foothold by adding the features that hospitals need.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-05-23 16:08:51+00:00
“Anyone opensourcing anything while in the course of ‘commercial activity’ will be fully liable. Effectively they rugpulled the Apache2 / MIT licenses... all opensource released by small businesses is fucked. where the was no red tape now there is infinite liability”

This is my current understanding, from a friend not a lawyer. Would appreciate any insight from folks here.
by throwaeay | 2025-05-23 16:09:12+00:00
This simply don't match my experience. You should consider if you have had an experience out of the ordinary that has formed your views.

> They didn't value the pet as "Billy", they value the pet as a "the dog".

I know people with multiple dogs, and they are treated as individuals with their own motivations and habits. They are still dogs, so we should be careful about treating them as a child replacement. But most of those I know treat them with respect.

When a dog dies, they often don't want an identical dog to replace them, because they know that they can't get their dog back.

> They only value it insofar as it fulfills its expected duties like following arbitrary commands for the owner's entertainment

None of the people I know forces the dog to do tricks for food or "roll over" for amusement. They focus on useful stuff like "come here", "sit", "stay" etc. These are only used as a form of communication and only in situations where they are needed.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-05-23 16:09:13+00:00
Humans are the ceiling at the moment yes, but that doesn't mean the ceiling isn't higher.

Science is full of theories that are correct per our current knowledge and then subsequently disproven when research/methods/etc improves.

Humans aren't special, we are made from blood & bone, not magic. We will eventually build AGI if we keep at it. However unlike VCs with no real skills except having a lot of money™, I couldn't say whether this is gonna happen in 2 years or 2000.
by dimitrios1 | 2025-05-23 16:09:13+00:00
technically, the diminutive τεκνίον would be more appropriate in this context. Teknon was more formal, and in its colloquial usage was used commonly in the stereotyped phrase "women and children", which in the ancient world was a symbol of low social status. The diminuative would indicate a different usage, more affectionate, friendly, etc.
by Braxton1980 | 2025-05-23 16:09:41+00:00
>....As such what was a voter to do?

I contend their dislike of the Democrats is based a meaningful amount on Republican lies and exaggerations.

For example

1. Blaming Biden wholly for inflation via spending even though it was worldwide, Trump also used government spending to attempt to help the economy, and Republicans controlled congress for half his term.

2. Blaming Biden for not fixing inflation which assumes this was possible

3. Blaming all illegal immigrants for the crimes of some. This is the same as blaming all Black people for the crimes committed by some.

4. Lying about election fraud