MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ceres | 2025-05-30 19:16:02+00:00
Okay this is kinda random and maybe off topic but can someone please explain?

When I tell an LLM to count to 10 with a 2 second pause between each count all it does is generate Python code with a sleep function. Why is that?

A 3 year old can understand that question and follow those instructions. An LLM doesn’t have an innate understanding of time it seems.

Can we really call it AGI if that’s the case?

That’s just one example.
by gjm11 | 2025-05-30 19:16:28+00:00
It's read them in the same sense as it's written a new one: it's ingested them, had what pass for its mental processes influenced by them, remembered some of their contents, etc.

You might want to say that that isn't "reading", just as we never say that aeroplanes "fly" since they don't do the same thing as birds, never say that computers "play chess" since the calculations they do are very different from those done by human chessplayers, never say that machines "dig ditches" since they don't have the experience of tired muscles and the sun beating down on their backs, etc. As you may gather from the tone of the previous sentence, I am not altogether convinced.

I do agree that the two things aren't equivalents. I can imagine futures in which AI systems have a training process that somewhat resembles the present one, and also do something that corresponds more closely to human reading[1], and then I'd want to reserve the term "read" for the latter. What Claude has done to all the books that helped shape it isn't exactly reading. But it's quite like reading for our present purpose; when someone jokes about an author having written more books than they've read, they mean that the author doesn't have much awareness of other people's work, and that isn't a problem Claude has.

[1] E.g., they might have some sort of awareness of the process, whatever exactly that might mean; they might do it "for pleasure", whatever exactly that might mean; etc. Those things would require the AI systems to resemble humans in ways present AI systems aren't designed to and, so far as I can tell, don't; maybe some future AI systems will be that way, maybe not.
by MattSayar | 2025-05-30 19:16:42+00:00
I understand not selling static IPs; there's only ~4 billion of them and >4B devices that need to connect to the internet. CGNAT is the best way ISPs have figured out to ration IPs lately. The IPv6 rollout is something I'd have to read a book about to understand why it's taking 30 years with little adoption.
by em3rgent0rdr | 2025-05-30 19:16:55+00:00
All the open source software that we can already use for free is a big reward. The funny thing is this reward was already provided to us. So contributing to open source software could be though of as our payment for that reward.

The fixed bug or feature itself is a reward. And that you just need to code that feature instead of having to write your own complete clone of that software just to add one extra little feature. And just like that you have added your little brick to some amazing tool which you can say you helped build.

If you are exploring the prospect of contributing, then a good way for you to be motivated is to find some software you use often, but which you personally would like some feature or bug fixed.
by m3047 | 2025-05-30 19:17:07+00:00
That can mean a lot of different things, and imply various adjacent activities which may or may not meet your definition of "contributing".

I've submitted PRs to projects I use (dnspython, scapy). One of the cybersecurity companies I worked for managed various ruses to keep me from supplying fixes to upstreams; the most feckless bullshit reason they came up with was "opsec".

While working for Farsight I reviewed and provided feedback to several open source projects regarding their integrations with e.g. DNSDB.

Not everything has to be a PR, or targeted at the project's self-declared consituency. For instance I wrote a protobuffer dissector for scapy (https://github.com/m3047/tahoma_nmsg) because scapy was a handy "living off the land" kind of way for customers and prospects to taste Farsight's tunnelled SIE products without compiling a bunch of C libraries. (You can declare your own protobuffer data types, use https://github.com/m3047/tahoma_nmsg/blob/master/tahoma_nmsg... as an example.) I don't distribute scapy, so there's no compelling reason for me to use the same license. (You're welcome.)

In fact, I re-used the protobuffer dissector for the Dnstap half of the ShoDoHFlo DNS + netflow correlator (https://github.com/m3047/shodohflo). I started down that road because Vixie got his panties twisted up and his hair on fire about DoH, and once I looked at it it seemed that there was something in there that I'd personally find useful. A couple years later I decided I wanted e.g. "dig -x" more than a GUI, and after several iterations I came up with Rear View RPZ (https://github.com/m3047/rear_view_rpz). I find it useful, and I think it's a pretty cool hack. (Works with EtherApe!)

ShoDoHFlo stuffs data into Redis. I found myself utilizing that data for other purposes and got tired of installing a Redis client and dealing with the security issues. So I implemented a DNS proxy for Redis (https://github.com/m3047/rkvdns).

I still haven't "found my tribe"; or maybe I have, and most of them don't contribute to open source. Nobody submits PRs, and nobody I know opens issues; instead they send me emails. :-/
by Macha | 2025-05-30 19:18:00+00:00
O2 in Ireland went relatively big into imode and it actually had decent uptick among local stuff. But then GPRS came about and phones started shipping sort of functional J2ME browsers that could do the "real web" and that was that.

Opera Mini also was a big leap up in capabilities compared to the Sony Ericsson built in browse I was using on the k750i. Both in terms of compatibility and also the compressing reverse proxy stuff they did when data was being charged per megabyte.
by yieldcrv | 2025-05-30 19:20:00+00:00
And the crypto asset discussions are very nontechnical here, veering into elementary and inaccurate philosophical discussions, despite this being a great forum to talk about technical aspects. every network has pull requests and governance proposals worth discussing, and the deepest discussion here is resurrected from 2012 about the entire concept not having a licit use case that the poster could imagine
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-05-30 19:20:12+00:00
A lot of useful manufacturing techniques are simply not public because it is very expensive to discover them, and obviously most entities don't want to share their techniques with other.

If anything, non-standard not-well-known techniques have only been popularized recently because software is used so much in hardware design these days that some hardware designers have imbued the ethos of FOSS. Without that I doubt people will share niche techniques like this which have the potential to make lots of money.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-30 19:20:48+00:00
For which part?

Every time a new submission is created on HN, you have a curl script that posts a comment on it shilling your product. (According to the /newest tab there seems to be one submission every few minutes.)

What's harder for you to automate: the comment always posts successfully after 500ms, or you get a Cloudflare Turnstile captcha every time?
by gjm11 | 2025-05-30 19:20:53+00:00
That is also my opinion. I would also say that because I have a persistent preference for not dying if I needn't, dying tomorrow in my sleep is bad then too even though I will be asleep/dead at the time and therefore any preferences I have won't be actively motivating me at that point. And -- this is I think clearly more debatable -- that if I prefer now that I eat a slice of chocolate cake tomorrow, then to that extent it's a bad thing if tomorrow I don't eat any chocolate cake, even if tomorrow I prefer not to have any. Not a bad thing on balance; if I make a choice tomorrow, then tomorrow's preferences are rightly more important than today's in most circumstances. But, still, the fact that today I preferred chocolate-cake-tomorrow makes no-chocolate-cake-tomorrow a worse thing than if I hadn't had that preference yesterday. And, similarly, if today I prefer that tomorrow I eat chocolate cake, or kiss my wife, or conquer Spain, and I die tonight, then one reason why that's bad is that those preferences don't get satisfied, even though by the time they fail to get satisfied the person who had those preferences is gone.

But, again, a reasonable person could disagree with most of that.
by ok_dad | 2025-05-30 19:20:59+00:00
Hacker News tries to seem like they don’t push the party line, but they do. There’s no moderation log, there’s little access to any data around moderation, etc. and so my assumption is that this place is heavily bent towards whatever the powerful YC folks want us to read.

They don’t want us to fight this administration for some reason, and it seems that the wealthy and powerful want this government for the USA right now, so they flag and remove everything that’s negative about it.
by leguminous | 2025-05-30 19:21:35+00:00
Some amount of vertical blending often occurred because scanlines tapered off in brightness, bleeding into the next scanline. For example, if the electron beam spot has a two dimensional gaussian profile, then the vertical profile of a scanline at a constant value will also be gaussian. If the height of the scanline (full width at half maximum of the gaussian) is around 1x the distance between scanline centers (a reasonable value at full brightness), then there will be significant overlap between neighboring scanlines. The point between the scanline centers will be a blend of them both.

How much blending there is depends on the brightness at that particular area (brighter parts of the image will have wider scanlines and more blending) and the characteristics and configuration of the particular TV.

If I wanted sharp pixels, I would use something like the pixel-art-scaling shaders in Retroarch. I like bandlimit-pixel and pixel-aa, but most of them look pretty similar. They basically try to antialias the pixel edges. I prefer to fill the screen as much as I can using the correct aspect ratio and not worry about integer scaling.

For more realistic blending, CRT shaders are pretty good now.
by p_wood | 2025-05-30 19:22:25+00:00
I like the idea of 'G' to filter hunks. The perl script does not exist since git v2.40.0 so I don't think the installation instructions work for recent versions of git as there is no way to stop 'git add -p' from running the builtin version. I see this is MIT licenced but the code is very closely based on the perl script which is licensed under the GPLv2.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-05-30 19:23:28+00:00
Magit provides almost complete discovery, interactivity, and feedback for all Git operations.

One of the major barriers to learning CLI Git is that it's hard to discover the available commands and options, and when you run them, it's unclear what what state is changing.

Magit makes it easy to access almost all Git features via interactive keypress driven, self documenting menus, and it displays visually all of your repository state. It also provides easy access to "no brainer" features like committing single chunks or lines, "cherry picking" or reverting single chunks or lines from any arbitrary commit, committing fixups to earlier commits with a single command, etc.

Magit is to other IDE integrations what other IDE integrations is to the Git CLI.
Show HN: AI Morning Reflection Coach
by ajabhish | 2025-05-30 19:23:45+00:00
I’ve been low-key obsessed with how I start my mornings lately. I used Tough Tongue AI to create a Morning Reflection Coach that does following: - Grounding - Planning of day - Positive affirmation

It has memory so across session can remember what happened and note down this on card.

Why I’m liking it - It’s faster than journaling but still forces me to think. - When I slack off, next day it kinda calls me out (politely). - Weirdly makes affirmations feel less cringe because the AI personalizes it and says it

Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8bhLxYV-JY
by AlexeyBrin | 2025-05-30 19:23:52+00:00
AFAIK, Clang (like GCC) needs an extra step to compile the standard modules files. It does not work, as one would reasonably expect, with something like:

clang++ -std=c++23 fname.cpp

(I know you can use Cmake to solve it - but I want a simple solution something that can be shown to a junior programmer.)
by brudgers | 2025-05-30 19:23:57+00:00
And it made people happy. And it made me happy because the markup on Audioquest cables is generally around 67%.

The fact that wealthy people don't resent the price of expensive things because they can afford expensive things is a fact it took me decades to wrap my head around.

Significant wealth still wants salespeople to solve their problems, however the price of things is not among those problems. They don't mind someone else making money because it has no bearing on what they can do for their children.

More ordinary economic statuses come with many experiences of not being able to afford really nice things either outright or because it would limit what we might do for our children.

---

The other piece of the psychology is the pleasure humans can find in exclusivity/tribalism/etc. Brand identity can form a significant part of this and some people want to wear a Monster Cable dozer cap.
by stolsvik | 2025-05-30 19:24:04+00:00
I'm just trying to catch up with you after the "I get so confused on this"-screenshot that's evidently going viral wrt. LLMs. I just turned 50, and that resonated so hard.

Wrt. this feeling you're describing here: You might mostly be feeling the Enshittification. At least that's a big thing for me. Companies are not making things better, they are making everything worse. Instead of actually making new stuff, they're wringing the existing lemon five extra times to squeeze that last drop of juice out of it, adding one extra ad in the youtube viewing, making it harder to integrate. APIs being deprecated, walled gardens. Things have been going downhill for at least a decade. This makes me sad.
by throitallaway | 2025-05-30 19:24:26+00:00
I'd be so happy if the Internet moved away from Cloudflare for Captcha. I got on their "bad list" at one point (for who knows why), and no matter how many times I checked the "I am a human" box their Captcha wouldn't let me through for a few days. I was unable to login to the portal of a product that we pay for. It was such a frustrating experience.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-30 19:24:29+00:00
No, best practice is that you have a checklist to bring up a copy of your system, better yet that checklist is "run a script". In the cloud age you ought to be able to bring a copy up in a new zone with a repeatable procedure.

Makes a big difference in developer quality of life and improves productivity right away. If you onboard a new dev you give them a checklist and they are up and running that day.

I had a coworker who taught me a lot about sysadmining, (social) networking, and vendor management. She told me that you'd better have your backup procedures tested. One time we were doing a software upgrade and I screwed up and dropped the Oracle database for a production system. She had a mirror in place so we had less than a minute of downtime.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-30 19:25:17+00:00
> There will always be a place for really good devs but for average people (most of us are average) I think there will be less and less of a place

You open your post with "we need to accept" and then end with this

This terrifies me. The idea that AI results in me having "less of a place" in society?

The idea of mass unemployment?

We should be scared
by torstenvl | 2025-05-30 19:25:25+00:00
The idea is that you want functions that can return functions, those inner functions being defined in part by the arguments to the outer function. This can't happen without intentionally leaky namespaces.

Bad pseudocode:

function stepincrementgenerator(step) -> function (num) -> num + step

addsix = stepincrementgenerator(6)

addsix(5)

11
by ryandrake | 2025-05-30 19:26:01+00:00
I think the "They might 'gotcha' me and then cancel me as a [racist/sexist/bigot/etc]" fear is overblown and comes mostly from people chronically online and people who care what randos on Twitter write. Yes, the Internet is full of keyboard warriors just waiting to catch you saying something they can twist into some -ism, but these people don't exist in real life, or at least they keep their opinions to themselves in real life. I personally don't care what random people on the Internet think. They might be over there on Twitter canceling me as a racist or sexist right now, and it doesn't affect my life even slightly.
by ryao | 2025-05-30 19:26:18+00:00
Most of my OSS work has been in OpenZFS. I got started on it because of a mix of a hardware failure and Microsoft’s incompetence. Back in college, I had a Windows Media Center machine that had a second drive for recordings. The recording drive failed, and Windows would not boot. I then decided to take a two factor approach to resolving this issue. The first factor was to no longer trust Windows on physical hardware, so I built a new machine to virtualize it. The second factor was to have redundancy to survive drive failures. I tried MD RAID 6 with 6x 2TB drives and LVM2, but no matter what I did, I could only get 20MB/sec in QEMU. There was no run to run variance as the results were basically exactly 20MB/sec each time and I had no idea why. I then tried ZFSOnLinux and saw 200MB/sec to 220MB/sec performance across various runs. ZFSOnLinux was not considered production ready at the time and had some obvious flaws (such as warnings about mutex corruption in dmesg when loading the kernel module), but I thought to myself at the time “I am a CS student. I can fix this.”. I then started writing patches and sending them upstream. Since then around 15 years have passed, and I have submitted somewhere between 400 to 500 patches to OpenZFS (a good number are in the obsolete SPL repository). I also was Gentoo developer for a number of those years and maintained the ZFS packaging and wrote the genkernel ZFS support. I have a number of miscellaneous patches in other projects too, including Linux.

Anyway, I commented to say that I had a similar experience. I did not know how to fix the issue in MD RAID 6 + LVM2 back then, but I knew how to fix another project that did meet my needs, so I fixed that. :)
by bluefirebrand | 2025-05-30 19:27:14+00:00
> I think you have to experiment and develop some new approaches to remove the friction and get the benefit.

What benefit to me?

If I'm 50% more productive using AI that's great for my employer, but what do I get out of it?

I get to continue to be employed? I already had that before AI

So what do I get out of this, exactly?
by chriswarbo | 2025-05-30 19:27:58+00:00
I used de Bruijn indexes in Plumb[0], which is an alternative syntax for Lambda Calculus that embeds nicely in common scripting languages like PHP and Python.

Whilst a classic lambda expression like `λx.y` has three parts: the argument name `x`, the body/result `y`, and the `λ_._` syntax to distinguish it from a variable or application; if we instead use de Bruijn indices, then we don't need a separate part for the argument: all we need is a body wrapped in some distinguishing syntax (like `λy` in the article).

In Plumb, that distinguishing syntax is square brackets, so the "lambda term" `λy` would be written `[y]`. This wouldn't be possible if we had to write argument names, but ends up having some nice consequences:

- We can write this as-is in many languages, and the result is a data structure (usually a list) which we can easily walk over with an interpreter function.

- Variables are numbers, which can also be written as-is in many languages, and result in data that an interpreter function can handle.

- The final piece of syntax is applications, which necessarily has two parts (the function and the input value). Classic Lambda Calculus uses juxtaposition, whilst Plumb uses an explicit binary operator: the comma `,`. Again, commas can be written as-is in many languages, and they interact nicely with square bracket notation, (host language) function application, and (in the case of Python and Haskell) tuple notation.

The nice thing about using de Bruijn indexen, rather than de Bruijn "levels" or some other approaches to anonymous bindings (like those mentioned at the end of TFA), is that functions defined this way have an "intrinsic meaning"; e.g. `λ0` (or `[0]` in Plumb) is always the identity function; `λλλ(2 0 1)` (or `[[[2 , 0 , 1]]]` in Plumb) is always boolean NOT; etc. This lets us mix and match snippets of Plumb code with snippets of host-language code, embed each inside the other, and sprinkle around calls to an interpreter function willy-nilly, without worrying that the meaning depends on where our code ends up (e.g. at which "level" it reaches an interpreter).

[0] http://www.chriswarbo.net/projects/plumb/using.html
by codingdave | 2025-05-30 19:28:18+00:00
That is exactly how I've been working for years, even before AI. The slowest part of everything is sales, so the team has some flexibility in exactly what order to do things when developing features, as a few days of tweaking designs won't actually impact revenue. Devs copy existing patterns from prior features, code things up, and design has time to ask for adjustments before it is released. The longer a product lives, the more patterns already exist that can be copied, the less design needs to come up with new patterns, and the devs can just roll.

So if you have experienced design being a roadblock for years, and you are waiting on Figma for every feature... something is wonky.
by ryao | 2025-05-30 19:28:41+00:00
There is nothing wrong with getting a paycheck to be able to eat. I spent a roughly 2 year period after college between 2012 and 2014 where I had no job and just worked on OSS exclusively without any compensation beyond nerd credit (and a small credit Google sent me for their online store to buy swag after one of their employees nominated me for an OSS award).

My OSS work turned out to be a great resume builder that opened opportunities for me that far exceeded what I would have had if I had gotten a job as a junior developer straight out of college. The mentorship by the ZFSOnLinux and Gentoo communities was fantastic and helped me mature into a senior level developer rapidly. :)

That said, it is great when you can do worthwhile work and be paid for it. It is a double win.