MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zxexz | 2025-05-17 01:33:35+00:00
I find Gemini excellent for sql. Wouldn’t consider myself an expert in many things, but in sql and database design id consider myself close. I like writing queries and doing the architecture, and that’s where it’s exceptionally helpful. The massive context length combined with pointed questions means i can just dump the entire DDL, and ask “what am i missing?”. It really is an excellent tool for helping with times like checks and catching dumb errors on complex databases.
by jayd16 | 2025-05-17 01:33:37+00:00
Java streams and a lot of other APIs are extremely ugly because of checked exceptions. Conversely, LINQ and delegates and a lot of other syntax is far cleaner in C#.

Your linked blog is pretty wild. Only throw RuntimeExceptions to crash? Why not just Exit if that's the proper thing to do?

If you treat all C# exceptions as RuntimeExceptions, then it satisfies the blog anyhow.
by roywiggins | 2025-05-17 01:34:00+00:00
It depends, sometimes just feeding back broken SQL with "that didn't return any rows, can you fix it" and it comes up with something that works. Or "you're looking at the wrong entity, look at this table instead" or whatever, without knowing how to write competent SQL.

Obviously being able to at least read a bit of SQL and understanding the basic idea of relational databases helps loads.
by SigmundA | 2025-05-17 01:34:08+00:00
Erlang is not as performant for heavy computational loads, this is bared out in many benchmarks, thats not what it's good at.

Message passing share nothing adds overhead when trying to reference data between processes because it must be copied, how would you do multithreaded processing of a large amount of data without a shared heap in a performant way? Only one thread can work on a heap at a time, so what do you do? Chop up the data and copy it around then piece it back together afterward? Thats overhead vs just working on a single heap in a lockless way. Far as I can tell the main Erlang image processing libraries just call out to C libraries that says something of that kind of work.

Yes Erlang indirects computation to a OS thread pool, multiplexing all those little Erlang process on real threads creates scheduling overhead. Those threads cannot work on the same data at the same time unless they call out to a libraries written in another language like C to do the heavy lifting.

.Net does similar things for say web server implementations, it uses a thread pool to execute many concurrent requests and if you use async it can yield those threads back to the pool while say waiting on a DB call to complete, you would not create a thread per http connection so the 4mb stack size is not an issue just like its not with Erlangs thread pool.
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-17 01:35:55+00:00
>evidently repetitive “style”.

Use LORAs, write better prompts. I've done a lot of diffusion and especially in 2025 it's not difficult to get out something quite good.

Repetitive style is funny, because that's what human artists do for the most part. I'm a furry, I look at a lot of art and individual styles are a well established fact.
by fuzztester | 2025-05-17 01:38:18+00:00
>Yes, but can you _read_ it?

Java was marketed (at least in its early days) as a WORA language - WRITE ONCE RUN ANYWHERE.

Perl was unmarketed as a WORM language - WRITE ONCE READ MANY (TIMES). ;)

jk, i actually like perl somewhat.

but I think Larry and team went somewhat overboard with that human-style linguistics stuff that they applied to perl.
by tanewishly | 2025-05-17 01:38:21+00:00
Most of the processes surrounding and supporting science are not robust against a dedicated adversary seeking to exploit the system. This is nothing new - Newton ordered and then wrote the anonymous report commissioned by (iirc) the Royal Society to decide who invented calculus, him or Leibniz.

Basically, science is quite vulnerable to malicious exploiters. Part of this is because society isn't funding science anywhere near sufficiently to do a priori in-depth checks. You claim you got data on hundreds of measurable thingies in a certain way (from surveying people to scanning the web to whatever)? If it's not blatantly obviously a lie, it'll probably be accepted. Which is inevitable: at one point, you're going to have to accept the data as genuine. If there's no obvious red flags, you'd only waste time on further checking data - you'd need to do a real deep dive (expensive time-wise) to come up with circumstantial evidence that may still be explainable in a benign manner. For scientists, it is almost always more profitable to spend such time investments on furthering their own scientific efforts.

So yes, there are various ways in which someone willing, dedicated and sufficiently skilled can "Nigerian-Prince" the scientific process. Thankfully, the skill to do so typically requires intimate knowledge of the scientific process and how to conduct research -- this cheating is not easily accessible to outside bullshitters (yet).
by jwr | 2025-05-17 01:39:42+00:00
The entire Clojure ecosystem is obsessed with stability. And I love it: it might sound boring, and you often see people complain that a library is "dead" or "abandoned" because it didn't receive updates for the last 2-3 years, but it is certainly great for business.

I run a solo-founder business and this approach means that I don't get the cost of constant churn that many other ecosystems suffer from. This is a really important factor.
by mrtimo | 2025-05-17 01:40:47+00:00
Malloy [1] has a semantic layer [2]... and Model Context Protocol (MCP) support is being added through Publisher [3]. Something to keep an eye on. Seems like a great fit for LLMs.

[1] https://www.malloydata.dev/ [2] https://docs.malloydata.dev/documentation/user_guides/malloy... [3] https://github.com/malloydata/publisher
by fennecbutt | 2025-05-17 01:40:51+00:00
I can draw a circle on a piece of paper and that's a serious contribution?

Where is the line drawn?

Is me sneezing a contribution to the world of art, since art is all about interpretation™®© and some smarmy critic will do a piece on how my sneeze is a visceral physical performative art illustrating the downfall of the modern world where technology binds us and we spend too much time inside surrounded by screens and dust and co2.

Nah, I just sneezed. That's all.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-17 01:41:24+00:00
Well, they're not a monolith. They have multiple writers, even though they make an attempt at a more-or-less-unified editorial point of view.

But, to try to steelman their position, you could be in favor of DEI, and not be in favor of it going any farther than restoring balance. If it gets to the point where the other side is down, then you could become in favor of helping the side that is currently down, even if it's not the side that was down a decade ago.

Or, you could not buy that. You could say that they're changing their position. And you could let them do it, instead of demanding that they have to be wrong forever if they were wrong once.
by masterj | 2025-05-17 01:41:36+00:00
The example use-cases in the videos are pretty compelling and much smaller scope.

“Here’s an error reported to the oncall. Give a try fixing it” (Could be useful even if it fails)

Refactor this small piece I noticed while doing something else. Small-scoped stuff that likely wouldn’t get done otherwise.

I wouldn’t ask LLMs for full-features in a real codebase but these examples seem within the scope of what they might be able to accomplish end-to-end
by toast0 | 2025-05-17 01:42:16+00:00
I wish they included details on how they ran these benchmarks, like they did last year [1].

I'd like to take a look and try to understand why there's such a big difference in handshake performance. I wouldn't expect single threaded handshake performance to vary so much between stacks... it should be mostly limited by crypto operations. Last time, they did say something about having a cpu optimization for handshaking that the other stack might not have, but this is on a different platform and they didn't mention that.

I'd also be interested in seeing what it looks like with OpenSSL 1.1.1, given the recent article from HAProxy about difficulties with OpenSSL 3 [2]

[1] https://www.memorysafety.org/blog/rustls-performance-outperf...

[2] https://www.haproxy.com/blog/state-of-ssl-stacks
by neocortex666 | 2025-05-17 01:42:16+00:00
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by creata | 2025-05-17 01:42:21+00:00
Honestly, I doubt that LLMs are great for learning. Too often, they output plausible-sounding things that turn out to be completely wrong. I know Wikipedia can have its problems with factuality, but this is on an entirely different level. (And yes, they do this even when they're allowed to do web searches and "reason".)

The effort of verifying everything it claims may or may not outweigh the effort of other means of learning.
by nomilk | 2025-05-17 01:43:23+00:00
> def execute(path:)

> why the "incomplete" colon?

Just ruby's syntax to denote 'keyword arguments', i.e. when calling this method, you must explicitly use the parameter name, like so: execute(path: "/some/path")

> class ListFiles < RubyLLM::Tool

> what's with the "<"?

Just ruby's way of denoting inheritance i.e. class A < B means class A inherits from B

> param :command, desc: "The command to execute"

> again, the colons are confusing...

The colons can be confusing, but you get used to them. The first one in :command is denoting a symbol. You could think of it as just a string. Any method that expects a symbol could be rewritten to uses a string instead, but symbols are a tad more elegant (one less keypress). The second one, desc:, is a keyword argument being passed to the param method. You could rewrite it as param(:command, desc: "The command to execute")

I sometimes wonder what ruby would be like without symbols, and part of me thinks the tradeoff would be worth it (less elegant, since there'd be "strings" everywhere instead of :symbols, but it would be a bit easer to learn/read.
by vips7L | 2025-05-17 01:44:20+00:00
When people talk about GC performance they’re not talking about using memory efficiently. They’re talking about how fast the GC can allocate and how long it will stop the world when it needs to collect. In both of these areas you won’t find GCs better than the ones provided by HotSpot. Even with what you mention, pointer chasing and lack of structs, they still outperform other implementations.
by esprehn | 2025-05-17 01:44:45+00:00
Using the word "like" is not as bad as it seems, and it's been quite common in language for longer than we think (though usage does seem to increase with each generation).

There was a recent podcast that covered it with some experts that's a great listen:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5w1gdbhmlCyTapoQ3EkMHp
by hardwaresofton | 2025-05-17 01:47:15+00:00
At the risk of sounding like a crustacean cult member, really hope the skeptics read this post. No hype, no drama, just slow, steady high perf incremental improvement in a crucially important area without any feet blown off.

I feel bad for other/new system languages, you get so much for the steeper learning curve with Rust (cult membership optional). And I think it’s genuinely difficult to reproduce Rust’s feature set.
by int_19h | 2025-05-17 01:47:33+00:00
Most of them. They have to, because declaring an uninitialized variable that is later initialized by passing a reference or pointer to it to some initialization function is a rather common pattern in low-level C++.

In a sane language that would be distinguishable by having the direction explicit (i.e. things like in/out/ref in C#), and then compiler could complain for in/ref but not for out. But this is C++, so...
by Aziell | 2025-05-17 01:48:05+00:00
A year ago, I used to journal almost every day. Writing was how I organized my thoughts, found direction, and occasionally uncovered ideas that even surprised me.

But gradually, I started relying on GPT to help me write. At first, it felt efficient. But over time, I noticed I was thinking less. The more I expressed myself through AI, the more my own desire to express started to fade. Now I’m trying to return to my own thinking process again，but it’s much harder than I expected.
by alganet | 2025-05-17 01:49:02+00:00
I'm not so sure about it.

Maybe it's like that because there aren't many novel opportunities for varied experiences nowadays.

The pointy ear sounds trivial in our experience, but it is radically different than ordinary everyday thought when observed as a piece of a whole imagined new world.

Of course, pointy ears now are not a novelty anymore. But that's beyond the point. By the time they were conceived, human experience was already homogenized.

The idea space for what an object is has been depleted by exploration. People already tried everything. It's kinda the same thing as saying that is impossible to come up with a new platonic solid (also an idea space that has been exhausted).

Any novel thought is bound to be nameless at first, and it becomes novel by trying to use derivation to define an unknown observation, not as a basis for it.
by chrisdalke | 2025-05-17 01:49:24+00:00
Cool! As a moonshot fun idea I’ve been interested in MCP as a way to use informal conversations to task robots. I’ll have to play around with this!

One example on unmanned boats: a human could radio to the boat over VHF and say “move 100 meters south”… that speech-to-text would feed to an LLM which extracts the meaning and calls the MCP.

I’ll have to install this and play around.
by selfhoster | 2025-05-17 01:49:58+00:00
Then I guess Ubuntu has had reasoning for several decades:

sudp Command 'sudp' not found, did you mean: command 'sudo' from deb sudo (1.9.9-1ubuntu2.4) command 'sudo' from deb sudo-ldap (1.9.9-1ubuntu2.4) command 'sup' from deb sup (20100519-3) command 'sfdp' from deb graphviz (2.42.2-6) Try: sudo apt install <deb name>
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-17 01:50:26+00:00
There’s a compromise: a government subsidized entity competing with free market providers can, through competition, keep levels of service from dipping below a bar.

Two examples in Australia: Qantas (airline) and the “Triple J” FM radio station.

Qantas has nice things on your 13-15 hour flight to LA or SF. Wine, meals, movies, water, coffee.. all free. United and Virgin compete on this route so have to match Qantas. Theres more to this for sure - but Qantas’ existence as AU national carrier keeps the rest from enshittifying too much..

Triple J radio is government funded. They pay for actual human beings in an actual studio. They support up and coming artists. If your FM station wants to compete with Triple J you gotta also hire humans. End result: in Australia FM radio can be quite pleasant. By contrast, FM radio in many US cities is garbage robot-radio stations with more ads than music.
by fuzztester | 2025-05-17 01:50:28+00:00
I don't know about the difference between 20 years ago versus now, but it's certainly doesn't seem to be clear now.

e.g. poetry, venv and pyenv have been mentioned in just the next few comments below yours. and this is just one example. i have seen other such seeming confusion and different statements by different people about what package management approach to use for python.
by echelon | 2025-05-17 01:50:29+00:00
The film production company flies the cast of actors out to Serbia or whatever and relies on Serbian crews.

Prior to 2022 they'd fly out the entire crew from the US and all the workers would be American and Canadian. Union, highly paid. Now they're using local (non-American) labor.

Amazon and Apple taught the foreign talent how to do grip work so they didn't have to hire expensive American workers anymore.

There are far fewer productions happening domestically within the US now. The numbers are 30% of what they once were.
by dguest | 2025-05-17 01:51:29+00:00
Yeah, MIT-affiliation certainly doesn't imply good presentation skills, I agree with you there.

I wonder about this too, but I think any academic institute asks a lot of PhD students. 90% of it isn't about giving a good public talk. Especially at PhD level it's much more about actually gathering a blob of data, distilling it into a (still nonlinear) structure, and then, finally, serializing it into a paper draft. In many cases the talk is something you do at the end as a formality.

This doesn't get any simpler just because you're at an institute with a fancy name. Your hypothetical 8 year old has one chance to get a cookie and had better be pretty articulate about it. This MIT-branded academic has a million other things going for them and can afford to slack off a bit on the presentation skills.
by protocolture | 2025-05-17 01:51:37+00:00
I dunno, probably differs based on jurisdiction but the one thing that cant happen in my jurisdiction is people on the board directly profiting from the charity.

They get well kept mind. But they never "own" the proceeds. IIRC one of the directors of mine was found with 3 corporate vehicles assigned to him.

Now on the flipside, being upper management in the same charity was a goldmine. Upper 6 figure salary, no expectations, vendors taking you on substantial holidays and meals to get your business, low 6 figure bonus every 12 months.

Different worlds tbh.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-05-17 01:53:15+00:00
> As a person who's dabbled a bit in Rust and Ruby, I'm surprised people find Ruby intuitive and simple

IMO it's because they mostly just don't think about the chaos they're doing. You encounter a function call that ends in a hash. Does the function being called use that as a hash or does it explode the hash to populate some extra trailing parameters? You have no way to know without going and looking. To me that's super dumb. To them it's just another day in unexpected behavior land.
by edude03 | 2025-05-17 01:53:25+00:00
huh, you can't read this blog if your referrer is "hacker" "news"? Seems kind of childish regardless of what you think of this site. Anyway

> It’s open source

> I can just move this device into the new one, rather than being beholden to the car’s manufacturer who at best wants to charge an exorbitant subscription fee for this stuff

Unless things changed recently, the model isn't open source so not really open source but more importantly, something about the comparison between "open source" and the "exorbitant" price of $99/month rubs me the wrong way. Opens ource isn't generally free to develop, and if you'd be willing to buy and install this it clearly provides more than $0 of value to OP - why wouldn't they want to invest some money a month into the project so that it sticks around and continues to mature? Why is open source always treated as the "free" option just because it costs _you_ $0 to download it and why Is $99/m exorbitant? Compared to what?
by lolinder | 2025-05-17 01:54:35+00:00
This is a really shallow dismissal, and I say that as someone who is outspokenly critical of MCP [0].

As you yourself say, the context is the text that is fed as input at runtime to an LLM. This text could just always come from the user as a prompt, but that's a pretty lousy interface to try to cram everything that you might want the model to know about, and it puts the onus entirely on the user to figure out what might be relevant context. The premise of the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is overall sound: how do we give the "Model" access to load arbitrary details into "Context" from many different sources?

This is a real problem worth solving and it has everything to do with the technical meaning of the word "context" in this context. I'm not sure why you dismiss it so abruptly.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43949503
by brudgers | 2025-05-17 01:55:19+00:00
Tactically we wonder if leaving them at the competitor at this stage is more useful.

That might be too clever by half.

It is a big assumption that the other company was less aware than you. Because it makes you feel less taken advantage of, it is particularly attractive.

There’s a reason you have an attorney. It is exactly for situations like this.

It might not be worth substantial legal action. But it also is not worth trying to do what happened to you to another business. Even a competitor.

If you play that game, it is easy to say you deserved what happened.
by int_19h | 2025-05-17 01:55:51+00:00
Zig is also a systems language, yet it doesn't have this problem because every local variable must have an explicit initializer. So this simply won't compile:

pub fn main() void { var x: i32; ... }

If you do actually want an uninitialized variable, you say so:

var x: i32 = undefined;

This rule also takes care of structs by applying recursively.
by creata | 2025-05-17 01:56:31+00:00
> a better library ecosystem

For what it's worth, Erlang's standard library is decently "batteries-included". The C interop also isn't terrible.[1]

[0]: https://www.erlang.org/doc/apps/stdlib/api-reference.html

[1]: https://www.erlang.org/doc/system/tutorial.html
by DavidPiper | 2025-05-17 01:57:20+00:00
That is a nonsense definition of creativity. The parent also wasn't suggesting - as far as I can read - that creativity is defined solely in the realm of the "truly novel" (or "isn't based on anything you've ever seen before").

All creativity is a conversation between our own ideas and what already exists.

Consider the unused soundtrack to James Cameron's Avatar [0][1], where ethnomusicologists set out to create a kind of music that had never been heard before.

They succeeded. But it was ultimately scrapped for the film because - by virtue of it being so different to any music anyone has ever heard before - it was not remotely accessible to audiences and the movie suffered as a result.

To argue that work is not creative because it is still based on "music" is absurd.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tL5sX8VmvB8

[1] https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/pie...