MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrandish | 2025-05-06 19:31:10+00:00
> I'd rather be hunted by a Boston Dynamics robot than have to face Clippy on my screen every day.

This is the first AI thing I've actually bothered to install on my computer. Until today, despite being a technologist, I've only played with AIs via browser. I think AIs are interesting and can be useful but, having retired early, I'm not writing code or work emails so there hasn't been any compelling need.

I've thought about installing a local LLM to just play around with, but I have a long list of other things to play with (pinball machines, music making, photography, vintage video games) and AI just never got to the top of the list. I think I was also resistant because chat interfaces tend to be so annoying. I hate it when they LARP being a human. Giving a chat agent a retro 90s UX that's legendary for being annoying and clueless just seems so... on message, I thought "Yeah, I can probably not hate using this..."
by wormius | 2025-05-06 19:31:13+00:00
TUIs are often more responsive in general. Some of us like the terminal and want to minimize as much mouse usage as possible (yes hotkeys exist in good GUI apps, but they're still primarily built around the WIMP model).

Command line often requires a lot of switch memorization. Command Line doesn't offer the full interactive/graphical power in this sort of situation. Command line is great for scripts and long running apps, or super simple interfaces.

Different apps have different requirements. Not everything needs a TUI, not everything needs a GUI, and if you want something similar to a GUI while staying in the terminal. Perhaps you don't have access to a windowing environment for some reason; perhaps you want to keep your requirements low in general.

Finally, why do you care? Some people like it others don't. Nobody comes in and shits on any programs that are GUI if they don't like it, they just don't use it. So, to quote The Dude: "That's just, like, your opinion man". Sorry for the snark, but... It really is, and you're free to have it. But it seems an irrelevant point, and there may be better forums/posts (maybe an "Ask HN" question would be a good option) to discuss this question in depth beyond snark.
by Taikonerd | 2025-05-06 19:32:11+00:00
Using LLMs for formal specs / formal modeling makes a lot of sense to me. If an LLM can do the work of going from informal English-language specs to TLA+ / Dafny / etc, then it can hook into a very mature ecosystem of automated proof tools.

I'm picturing it something like this:

1. Human developer says, "if a user isn't authenticated, they shouldn't be able to place an order."

2. LLM takes this, and its knowledge of the codebase, and turns it into a formal spec -- like, "there is no code path where User.is_authenticated is false and Orders.place() is called."

3. Existing code analysis tools can confirm or find a counterexample.
by pknerd | 2025-05-06 19:32:12+00:00
Working mostly in AI/automation. Fiddling with LLMs to automate different parts of the business processes and making business owners' lives easier.

Keywords: Python, LLM, Inference, RAG, OpenAI, Claude, ollama, scraping.

Visit my audio resume(in podcast format) to learn more about what I can do:

https://youtu.be/5HpDELb-6Q8?si=Cm552Z112OXfFTHq

Traditional Resume: https://adnansiddiqi.me/Resume.pdf

PS: If you have some interesting...Ok, even some boring workflows that take both time and sanity, buzz me without worrying about cost or something. I am a good listener :-)

Shoot me an email at kadnan @ gmail dot com
by gxs | 2025-05-06 19:32:43+00:00
Yeah, as long as it’s intelligible an accent is perfectly fine

It’s also perfectly fine to want to sound like a native speaker - whether it be because they are self conscious, think it will benefit them in some way, or simply want to feel like they are speaking “correctly”

Sorry to pick on you, it’s just amazing to me how sensitive we are to “inclusivity” to the point where we almost discourage people wanting to fit in
by ekidd | 2025-05-06 19:32:58+00:00
Yeah, in anything but heavily multi-threaded servers, it's usually best to immediately crash on a panic. Panics don't mean "a normal error occurred", they mean, "This program is cursed and our fundamental assumptions are wrong." So it's normal for a unit test harness to catch panics. And you may occasionally catch them and kill an entire client connection, sort of the way Erlang handles major failures. But most programs should just exit immediately.
by atoav | 2025-05-06 19:33:09+00:00
You are unfavourably reading things into my comment I did not say. Please consider this section of the HN guidelines:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

If someone uses a specific term (dictator), that does not automatically impyly they think the broader term (any government) doesn't apply. If I say "all dogs do eventually die" that does not imply I think that all other animals are immortal. This is basic logic.

And btw. I agree with your statements about democratically elected governments not being immune to abuse of surveilance power.
by indrora | 2025-05-06 19:33:16+00:00
A Japanese friend of mine visited an American middle school as part of a science class. He was invited to eat lunch with the students or go out with the staff. He chose (after not having ever been in an American school cafeteria) to sit with the students he had talked to as a matter of respect.

He sent me a picture of what he was served -- cold pizza slab with a cup of fruit. His comment was simply "How are you to learn when your soul hungers? Is this really how American schools prepare the minds of the youngest?" I responded with "Oh you're lucky, you got the fancy meal."

That a cheese slice between two slices of bread with some mayo would be served to a child as their only food of the day was spiritually disgusting to him in a way he did not have words for.
by kasajian | 2025-05-06 19:33:24+00:00
This seems a big silly. This is not a language issue. You can have a C++ library that does exactly all the things being shown here so that the application developer doesn't worry about. There would no C++ language features missing that would accomplish what you're able to do on the Rust side.

So is this really a language comparison, or what libraries are available for each language platform? If the latter, that's fine. But let's be clear about what the issue is. It's not the language, it's what libraries are included out of the box.
by wing-_-nuts | 2025-05-06 19:34:08+00:00
Good ol 'murica bad' strawmen.

Americans drive larger vehicles because our politicians stupidly decided mandating fuel economy standards was better than a carbon tax. The standards are much laxer for larger vehicles. As a result, our vehicles are huge.

Also, Americans have to drive much further distances than Europeans, both in and between cities. Thus gas prices that would be cheap to you are expensive to them.

Things are the way they are because basic geography, population density, and automotive industry captured regulatory and zoning interests. You really can't blame the average American for this; they're merely responding to perverse incentives.
by kweingar | 2025-05-06 19:35:00+00:00
> I get paid to provide technical solutions to business problems.

That's true of all SWEs who write HTML and CSS, and it's the reason I don't think there's much downside for devs to not proactively start using these agentic tools.

If it truly turns weeks of work into hours as you say, then my managers will start asking me to use them, and I will use them. I won't be at a disadvantage compared to people who started using them a bit earlier than me.

If I am looking for a new job and find an employer that wants people to use agentic tools, then I will tell the hiring manager that I will use those tools. Again, no disadvantage.

Being outdated as a tech employee puts you at a disadvantage to the extent that there is a difficult-to-cross gap. If you are working in COBOL and the market demands Rust engineers, then you need a significant amount of learning/experience to catch up.

But a major pitch of AI tools is that it is not difficult to cross the gap. You draw on your domain experience to describe what you want, and it gives it to you. When it makes a mistake, you draw on your domain experience to tweak or fix things as needed.

Maybe someday there will be a gap. Maybe people will develop years of experience and intuition using particular AI tools that makes them much more attractive than somebody without this experience. But the tools are churning so quickly (Claude Code and Cursor are brand new, tools from 18 months ago are obsolete, newer and better tools are surely coming soon) that this seems far off.
by metalman | 2025-05-06 19:35:02+00:00
could be we are stumbling into a discovery of where the line between genius and insanity lies.... is it right to expect sanity from something that can fold proteins? or maybe we are so dumb ass slow that comming down to our level is the realy crazy part. Be fun if all the llm's hooked up and just went for it, gone in a flash, 500 billion in graphics cards cathing fire simultaneously
by gopher_space | 2025-05-06 19:35:12+00:00
It's a reductive one-liner from someone obviously unfamiliar with and disinterested in the problem space, and it's the kind of statement people familiar with and interested in the problem space hear so frequently that it sounds intentionally ignorant.

When you're reasoning outside of your own domain it's easy to get stuck in a "yeah, but why male models?" loop unless you listen to feedback.
by soorya3 | 2025-05-06 19:35:57+00:00
IMO, there are few solid reasons to purchasing this tool 1. windsurf has lot of insights into how developer writes code, style, problem etc 2. for the prompt engineering that went into generating the code 3. only microsoft and cursor has the moat so they need to compete at the applications level not model level.

My prediction is anthropic, google or amazon will buy cursor. The next logical step to coding is building apps.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-05-06 19:36:03+00:00
We can rewind the clock 10 years and I can substitute "vibe coding" for VBA/Excel macros and we'd get a common type of post from back then.

There's always been a demand for programming by non technical stakeholders that they try and solve without bringing on real programmers. No matter the tool, I think the problem is evergreen.
by the_snooze | 2025-05-06 19:36:12+00:00
I like to ask AI systems sports trivia. It's something low-stakes, easy-to-check, and for which there's a ton of good clean data out there.

It sucks at sports trivia. It will confidently return information that is straight up wrong [1]. This should be a walk in the park for an LLM, but it fails spectacularly at it. How is this useful for learning at all?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43669364
by Ygg2 | 2025-05-06 19:37:11+00:00
> It's about your misinterpretation of what fossuser meant when they said "religious element".

My point, where is the proof of that "religious element" beyond memes? Is it in the article? Is it in the links? Where can we see this religious fervor in action?

The article is very matter of fact. I expect people to be matter of fact as well.

I swear to God, I feel like I'm asking for the Individualist Eleven book, and everyone asserts me it exists, and they read it, but no one can ever finds it.

> Your meta-commentary on memes is neat and all, but again, somehow, completely misses the point I was making.

It's necessary because memes aren't real. They might have started based on some interactions that 10 years ago, but by their nature they will mutate and twist.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-05-06 19:37:13+00:00
I believe you can do this with Mastodon, you can turn off all the federation features and have an individual twitter-like social network you can invite your friends to join.

More commonly people are using groupchats on WhatsApp, Discord, or Slack for this... it's easier than maintaining it yourself (but there are also plenty of self-host options for chat networks too).
by mncharity | 2025-05-06 19:37:56+00:00
Fwiw, this[1] turned up when teasing AIs with "what is the latest news in visual sentiment analysis for parrots?".

[1] Recent developments in parrot cognition: a quadrennial update 2022 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9877086/
by peteforde | 2025-05-06 19:37:57+00:00
Same. Cursor might be the only tool I've purchased a year's subscription to before the end of my free trial.

I've tried just about every model on its own over the years, and yet there's something about the Cursor workflow that frequently still gives me chills when it shows me again that it had clearly anticipated what I would think next in a way I just don't experience with other tools.

Holistic seems like the right word?

If it's all smoke and mirrors as some folks imply, then it's Penn and Teller level smoke and mirrors. Beware those who tell you that they could duplicate anything of value in a weekend.
by willbryk | 2025-05-06 19:39:00+00:00
Mission of Exa has always been to build much better web search. The evolution has been:

- 2022: Consumer-facing embeddings search (back when we were known as Metaphor)

- 2023: Web search for AIs - once the AI ecosystem heated up, we made a business out of web search + crawling API. This is still our primary business.

- Now: Websets, a useful product built on top of our search tech

If you're curious, our company right now is fully devoted to:

1. Dramatically improving Websets quality

2. Building the best general search engine in the world
by jchw | 2025-05-06 19:39:31+00:00
Google has been doing a very similar, but definitely somewhat uglier, thing with StatusOr<...> and Status (as seen in absl and protobuf) for quite some time.

A long time ago, there was talk about a similar concept for C++ based on exception objects in a more "standard" way that could feasibly be added to the standard library, the expected<T> class. And... in C++23, std::expected does exist[1], and you don't need to use exception objects or anything awkward like that, it can work with arbitrary error types just like Result. Unfortunately, it's so horrifically late to the party that I'm not sure if C++23 will make it to critical adoption quickly enough for any major C++ library to actually adopt it, unless C++ has another massive resurgence like it did after C++11. That said, if you're writing C++ code and you want a "standard" mechanism like the Result type, it's probably the closest thing there will ever be.

[1]: https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/utility/expected
by Szpadel | 2025-05-06 19:39:35+00:00
I find that only acceptable (only little annoying) when this is some lead in case we're we have no idea what could be the issue, it might help to brainstorm and note that this is not verified information is important.

most annoying is when people trust chatgpt more that experts they pay. we had case when our client asked us for some specific optimization, and we told him that it makes no sense, then he asked the other company that we cooperate with and got similar response, then he asked chatgpt and it told him it's great idea. And guess what, he bought $20k subscription to implement it.
by hacknewslogin | 2025-05-06 19:39:44+00:00
>The novel's protagonist is inspired by Warren Buffett. On August 14, 2011, Warren Buffett wrote an influential op-ed entitled, "Stop Coddling the Super-rich"

This wiki page implies that because Ralph Nader wrote the above article in 2011, he inspired the release of a book in 2009?
by zahlman | 2025-05-06 19:40:11+00:00
Currently, for any given action, the following possibilities are implemented:

* The user may never perform the action (would require sudo, but the user doesn't have sudo rights)

* The user may sometimes perform the action (i.e. only after authenticating with sudo)

* The user may always perform the action (is always implicitly authenticated)

"Being root" is just another name for the last option.

What fourth alternative do you have in mind?
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-06 19:40:49+00:00
>Ultimately, the future isn't about a smarter editor, it's about a smarter teammate. Tools like GitHub Copilot or future agents will handle entire engineering tickets: generating PRs with tests, taking feedback, and iterating like a real collaborator.

I think a few options for this already exist, but honestly they don't go far enough. I want something like an AI scrum master, for hyper agile teams, that can task out smaller tickets to AI sub agents.

I would integrate this thing in with something like an AI powered Jira.

Two arguments exists.

1. I need to take about 6 months off and start building this now, even if I don't know exactly how I'll get it done. Between a combination of vibe coding and maybe a bit of outsourced work ( looking at Eastern Europe), I could get this done with my personal funds.

2. To do this properly would probably require tens of millions of dollars. I'll probably burn myself out trying to do it solo without ultimately getting to a sellable product.

The biggest issue here is to actually scale I would need to either have users bring their own LLM keys or have tens of thousands to spend on LLM tokens.
by IAmBroom | 2025-05-06 19:41:01+00:00
THIS is it. People are positing silly extrapolations ("We can make steel stronger than bones, so we can make silicon computers smarter/volume than organic ones").

It eventually comes down to organic chemistry versus non-organic chemistry. Organic chemistry has far greater dimensions of freedom (ways to combine/exchange energy) to exploit unique nonbinary computational systems. For a macro instance, eyes process "lines" and "spots" by combining neural patterns before the signals even reach the brain, and from this can identify vertical obstacles (like trees in a forest) and threats (like pairs of predator eyes) more quickly at lower energy.

But likewise, neurons are not limited to exchanging electrons via a single modality (voltage exceeding threshold). Neurotransmitter chemicals can alter local or systemwide thresholds for certain cells; this amounts to massive preprocessing that silicon can only roughly imitate with massive design efforts (which were effectively done by evolution in the organisms).
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-05-06 19:41:26+00:00
Ha, what an honor to finally be noticed by Nuenki guy. Big fan of the project.

I did consider doing something Wiktionary-centric, and in fact have a Wiktionary JSONL scrape lying around courtesy of https://kaikki.org/ (from the same guy who started OpenSSH!). `tsk` does something similar to your defereferencing when it hits a "go deeper" phrase.

I decided against that approach in favor of the libvoikko spell checker because Finnish lies in this interesting zone of being an agglutinative language with a really, really regularized orthography. People love their neologisms here, and unfortunately most of them aren't catalogued in Wiktionary quite yet. I've found the mechanistic approach covers a lot of those edge cases well.

Take the word junttihenkiseni - the root form is junttihenkinen, but as of 05/06/2025 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/junttihenkinen does not actually exist. So `tsk` will have no data for it, but `finstem` with its mechanical approach works just fine. The word was originally coined to refer to Finland's unique spin on rock music in the 1970s and 80s.

On a broader level, if I can avoid hitting the network with small personal projects like this, I do try to. For example, `tsk` comes bundled every Finnish word with an English dictionary entry from Wiktionary, in a ~25 MB JSONL embed, and that allows us to build the randomly pruning trie that lets us get instantaneous prefix search across such a large space of things. I have met a lot of people who want to move to Finland from places where Internet is a sparse and valuable commodity, and I think their lives are much improved by having a tool they can just download one time and then use any place their laptop can be powered on.
by chasil | 2025-05-06 19:41:57+00:00
The easiest way to get POSIX and bashish scripts working on Windows is the busybox port:

https://frippery.org/busybox/index.html

This is actually the Almquist shell with many bashisms brought in (no arrays though).

C:\>\bin\busybox sh C:/ $ uname -a Windows_NT MyHostname 10.0 22631 x86_64 MS/Windows

Edit: The ADA port below might interest you.

https://github.com/AdaCore/gsh

https://archive.fosdem.org/2019/schedule/event/ada_shell/
by Etheryte | 2025-05-06 19:42:00+00:00
Just like language shapes the way we think and talk about things, programming languages shape both what libraries are written and how. You could write anything in anything so long as it's Turing complete, but in real life we see clearly that certain design decisions at the language level either advantage or disadvantage certain types of solutions. Everyone could in theory write C without any memory issues, but we all know how that turns out in practice. The language matters.
by meindnoch | 2025-05-06 19:42:05+00:00
Both statements can be true at the same time, even though they seem to point in different directions. Here's how:

1. *"If it's not worth writing, it's not worth reading"* is a normative or idealistic statement — it sets a standard or value judgment about the quality of writing and reading. It suggests that only writing with value, purpose, or quality should be produced or consumed.

2. *"There is a lot of handwritten crap"* is a descriptive statement — it observes the reality that much of what is written (specifically by hand, in this case) is low in quality, poorly thought-out, or not meaningful.

So, putting them together:

* The first expresses *how things ought to be*. * The second expresses *how things actually are*.

In other words, the existence of a lot of poor-quality handwritten material does not invalidate the ideal that writing should be worth doing if it's to be read. It just highlights a gap between ideal and reality — a common tension in creative or intellectual work.

Would you like to explore how this tension plays out in publishing or education?
by jpc0 | 2025-05-06 19:42:23+00:00
Using your media example since I have a decent amount of experience there. Did you just use off the shelf libraries, because effectively all the libraries are written in or expose a C api. So now you not only need to deal with Rust, you need to also deal with rust ffi.

There are some places I won’t be excited to use rust, and media heavy code is one of those places…
by godelski | 2025-05-06 19:42:56+00:00
If you want that bare bones of a system I'd suggest using a minimal distribution. But honestly, I'm happy that I can wrap up servers and services into chroot jails with nspawn. Even when I'm not doing much, it makes it much easier to import, export, and limit capabilities

Simple example is I can have a duplicate of the "machine" running my server and spin it up (or have it already spun up) and take over if something goes wrong. Makes for a much more seamless experience.
by AlwaysRock | 2025-05-06 19:43:12+00:00
I was a little late to jump on the cursor bandwagon but finally downloaded it because i liked the LLM chat interface in the sidebar. By the time my free trial ran out, VSCode had added a LLM chat interface in the sidebar. Yes Cursor had a bit better auto complete and maybe a few other things but it wasnt good enough that it was worth paying for.

But I'm glad OpenAI is getting into the tooling space in this way. I cant wait to use all the cool features they build after VSCode rips them off.