MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjr00 | 2025-05-27 20:37:06+00:00
The top comment in that post shuts down the whole nonsense pretty quickly and firmly:

> If you have a super-generic function like that and type hinting enforced, you just use Any and don't care about it.

It's a stupid example, but even within the context of a `slow_add` function in a library: maybe the author originally never even thought people would pass in non-numeric values, so in the next version update instead of a hardcoded `time.sleep(0.1)` they decide to `time.sleep(a / b)`. Oops, now it crashes for users who passed in strings or tuples! If only there were a way to declare that the function is only intended to work with numeric values, instead of forcing yourself to provide backwards compatibility for users who used that function in unexpected ways that happened to work.

IMO: for Python meant to run non-interactively with any sort of uptime guarantees, type checking is a no-brainer. You're actively making a mistake if you choose to not add type checking.
Show HN: Getting full-text scientific content into LLMs+Agents is stupidly hard
by zk108 | 2025-05-27 20:37:18+00:00
Most APIs don’t return actual content. You get metadata, maybe an abstract, maybe a snippet...never the thing itself. And if you want proper sources like arXiv, PubMed, or major publishers? Good luck. You’re stuck scraping tens of millions PDFs or semantic scholar and building your own ingestion pipeline.

We hit this building agentic workflows and RAG backends. What we needed wasn’t “search”, it was a way to retrieve real, structured full text with enough metadata to plug straight into a reasoning system. So we built a system that could do that: multimodal inputs (text, math, figures), clean citations, reference chaining, and filters that work (by date, by source, etc).

The hard part wasn’t retrieval but preprocessing at scale. Figuring out how to analyse, chunk, structure tens of millions of docs without taking months or breaking the bank. Not to mention dealing with licensed content where formats vary wildly or building retrieval systems at this scale.

Still a work in progress with more updates on the way. But miles better than duct-taping together PDFs, AI search engines etc. and hoping to find the relevant context you need.
by ochiba | 2025-05-27 20:38:35+00:00
I really enjoyed the talk at Local-First Conf today — well done. I thought it was very well explained and made compelling arguments for the event-sourcing materialized into SQLite architecture.

Thank you for championing SQLite and especially OPFS Wasm SQLite on the web — we (PowerSync) are clearly also big proponents of it, so love to see other projects having success with it too.
by kccqzy | 2025-05-27 20:38:52+00:00
When I was a freshman and sophomore I bought a lot of second hand furniture at ~70% off from people who were graduating and moving. I thought I would do the same when I graduate, but no, it took a certain type of personality and executive function to deal with disparate buyers, haggling prices and scheduling pickups amidst the busy graduation and commencement season. Not everyone could properly get rid of their fancy furniture. If one grows up in a middle class family where money isn't tight, often throwing it all away is just the easy way to avoid hassle and the mental toll.

I have found that this persists in work too. For some people it is way more difficult to deal with a larger number of simpler tasks than a smaller number of sophisticated tasks, while for others there is basically no observable difference.
by exiguus | 2025-05-27 20:39:10+00:00
I donate the following Projects and Lobbies on a monthly or yearly basis:

Projects

- Thunderbird (daily driver in my job)

- Debian (also daily driver in my job)

- FreeBSD (daily driver)

- LadyBird Browser (first "real new" browser since ~20 years, privacy first, open source)

Lobbies / Organisations

- The Chaos Computer Club (CCC): Advocate digital rights, Public Awareness and Education, Legal and Ethical Guidance (Advantage: Network, Learning, Nice People)

- Any political part you like: ... (Network, Learning, Nice People)

- The Zentrum für Politische Schönheit (Center for Political Beauty): Human Rights Advocacy etc.

And I go to Conferences and Meetups and pay for it (also when they are free, since i have some money)

Before also:

- FSF

- EFF

- Tor

- Firefox
by jajko | 2025-05-27 20:39:16+00:00
Sorry but facebook a "high quality product"? It was a bug infested shitshow from beginning to this day, across multiple computers, spanning more than decade and a half. Not just me. Literally their only value is social graph, which they have by luck of being first, nothing more.

These days when site crashes I welcome it as a gentle reminder to not spend there even that 1 minute I sometimes do. Anyway its now mostly fake ai generated ads to obscure groups I have 0 interest in, I keep reporting them to FB but even for outrighr fraud or scams FB comes back to me with resolution in maybe 2% of the cases. EU on you you cheap scammers.

But in the past I used it for ie photo sharing with family and friends, since I was super active in adventuring and travelling around the world. Up to 10k photos over a decade.

Photo albums uploads randomly failed, or uploaded some subset, some photos twice. On stable fiber optic, while flickr or google photos never ever had such issue. Cannot comment, some internal gibberish error. Comment posted twice. Page reloads to error. Links to profiles or photos go to empty page. Sometimes even main page just empty feed or some internal error. I saw the sentence "Something went wrong" hundreds or maybe even thousands of times, it became such a classic 500 variant. And so on and on, I dont keep list around. Always on Firefox and ublock origin.

I would be properly ashamed to be ever profesionally linked with such, by huge margin, worst technical product that I ever came across. That is, if I could somehow ignore what a cancer to society I would be helping to build, but that would require advanced sociopathical mental tricks on myself I am simply neither capable nor willing to do.

Nah, FB doesnt deserve to be mentioned in same category as the rest, on any reasonable basis.
Show HN: I Vibecoded a Python Class Hierarchy Checker (Needs Your Eyes)
by adale | 2025-05-27 20:39:25+00:00
I vibecoded a static checker for Python class hierarchies. Basically a tool that scans inheritance trees, spots structural issues (like unimplemented abstract methods or messy multiple inheritance), and helps enforce clean design patterns without running the code. Additionally, if you provide an OpenAI key, it suggests you how to refactor with composition.

It’s still rough and definitely needs polish and tests, but I wanted to put it out there early to see if it might be interesting or useful to others.

I’d love your thoughts. Is this something you’d find useful? Or is it solving a non-problem? Curious to hear what you think.

Contributions are very welcome. Feel free to open issues or PRs if you have ideas or just want to help shape it.

Repo: https://github.com/agaz1985/umberto
by Anamon | 2025-05-27 20:39:28+00:00
Meanwhile, the Trump administration claimed to have saved 258 American lives with their drug busts. In contrast to Harris, who I'm sure realised her mistake and would've corrected it if asked about it, the Trump admin actually believes their number and doubled down on it.

Harris misspoke. Trump believes the majority of the American population would have died in 2025 had he not been in office.
by parkersweb | 2025-05-27 20:40:16+00:00
Ah - I live just a half mile from these fields. It’s one of the historical quirks of the city; lots of common land open to the public, grazed by cows.

Although there’s fencing on other boundaries of the grazing land it simply isn’t practical to fence off the river - and as someone who also rows on the river I usually see a cow in the water at least once a year, so it’ll be interesting to see if they work!
by hombre_fatal | 2025-05-27 20:41:43+00:00
Browsers are permissive not because it's technically superior but as a concession for the end user who still wants to be able to use a poorly built website, and they're competing with browsers who will bend over backwards to render that crappy website so that they look good and your browser looks bad.

It's not a concession you want to make unless you really have to.
by ozten | 2025-05-27 20:42:50+00:00
Apple has had such a terrible off and on relationship with gaming. It never really made sense to me, as in some ways gaming is the future of media and the synthesis of so many artforms. Apple is so strong as a creative platform.

They will have to work really hard to incentivize developers and studios to invest in iOS and macOS and it's bespoke low level libraries.
by claytonjy | 2025-05-27 20:42:56+00:00
for decades, big tech contributed relatively little in the way of python ecosystem tooling. There’s Facebooks Pyre, but that’s about it. Nothing for package/dependency management, linting, formatting, so folks like those at Astral have stepped up to fill the gap.

why is type checking the exception? with google and facebook and astral all writing their own mypy replacements, i’m curious why this space is suddenly so busy
by neilv | 2025-05-27 20:43:31+00:00
> For some reason, I have yet to find a laptop

On the curb, I've found over 100 total tower/desktop PCs/Macs, countless printers/monitors/televisions, and even a few game consoles, but I don't recall any laptops nor smartphones.

I was thinking either laptops&phones are too easy to move, to easy to sell, they don't last long on the curb, or they're small enough to get tossed into the trash.

If you were opening trash bags in the dumpsters, and still didn't find any, I guess they're too easy to keep/move/sell.
by landl0rd | 2025-05-27 20:44:37+00:00
I'll back this up. I feel constantly gaslit by people who claim they get good output.

I was hacking on a new project and wanted to see if LLMs could write some of it. So I picked an LLM friendly language (python). I picked an LLM friendly DB setup (sqlalchemy and postgres). I used typing everywhere. I pre-made the DB tables and pydantic schema. I used an LLM-friendly framework (fastapi). I wrote a few example repositories and routes.

I then told it to implement a really simple repository and routes (users stuff) from a design doc that gave strict requirements. I got back a steaming pile of shit. It was utterly broken. It ignored my requirements. It fucked with my DB tables. It fucked with (and broke) my pydantic. It mixed db access into routes which is against the repository pattern. Etc.

I tried several of the best models from claude, oai, xai, and google. I tried giving it different prompts. I tried pruning unnecessary context. I tried their web interfaces and I tried cursor and windsurf and cline and aider. This was a pretty basic task I expect an intern could handle. It couldn't.

Every LLM enthusiast I've since talked to just gives me the run-around on tooling and prompting and whatever. "Well maybe if you used this eighteenth IDE/extension." "Well maybe if you used this other prompt hack." "Well maybe if you'd used a different design pattern."

The fuck?? Can vendors not produce a coherent set of usage guidelines? If this is so why isn't there a set of known best practices? Why can't I ever replicate this? Why don't people publish public logs of their interactions to prove it can do this beyond a "make a bouncing ball web game" or basic to-do list app?
by wagwang | 2025-05-27 20:44:48+00:00
You're definitely misreading what I wrote, and by the way, given that America has had first pick for the smartest people across the entire world for 100 years, the baseline is much higher than, produces a lot of good research (there has never been a higher IQ gravity well in history). The goal here is to produce amazing research without crippling the middle class with debt and wasting their time so that we have a functioning society that also advances.

Something extremely simple like a 1300-1400 SAT cutoff for university will get us half way there. University being an institution that qualifies for large research grants.
by fastasucan | 2025-05-27 20:45:04+00:00
Can you share a little bit about what makes you form opinions when you are not even using the language? I think its fascinating how especially discussions about typing makes people shake their fists against a language they don't even use - and like your post make up some contrived example.

>I think that the goal there is to understand that even with the best typing tools, you will have troubles, unless you start by establishing good practices.

Like - what makes you think that python developers doesn't understand stuff about Python, when they are actively using the language as opposed to you?
by echelon | 2025-05-27 20:45:22+00:00
> What universities were (and still are) really great at is being a place for intense learning.

Are they? A lot of professors hate and/or are bad at teaching. Especially at R1 research universities.

There are lots of problems, specifically for undergrads:

- Large class sizes

- Professors that don't like teaching

- Professors that can't teach well

- Professors that hand off teaching to TAs, RAs, doctoral students, etc.

- Poor feedback on homework, essays, projects, and exams

- Unnecessary classes

- Outdated classes and curriculum

- Sports programs that serve as recruitment and distraction that are orthogonal to learning

- Admin structures that care more about facilities, growth, and recruitment than learning and research

- Systems that are "too big to fail"

- Student loans that are disconnected from bankruptcy, which feeds a recursively growing monster in such a way that it isn't exposed to evolutionary pressures. There is no risk, so malinvestment doesn't bear consequences.

> What 99% of their customers now want is vocational training to get a well paying job.

You can want a curriculum rich in theory and the vocational training for a well-paying job. The problem is that universities are full of perverse incentives - the admin and faculty are at odds, and often even the faculty itself isn't aligned with teaching.

It's a weird org structure steeped in tradition, nostalgia from alumnus, and a faculty tenure system that doesn't always reward the right things.
by dsign | 2025-05-27 20:45:23+00:00
Caveat, I'm just armchair-commenting and I haven't thought much about this.

After kids learn to read and do arithmetic, shouldn't we go back to apprenticeships? The system of standardized teaching and grading seems to be about to collapse, and what's the point of memorizing things when you can carry all that knowledge in your pocket? And, anyway, it doesn't stick until you have to use it for something. Plus, a teacher seems to be insufficient to control all the students in a classroom (but that's nothing new; it amazes me that I was able to learn anything at all in elementary school, with all the mayhem there always was in the classroom).

Okay, I can already see a lot of downsides to this, starting with the fact that I would be an illiterate farmer if some in my family had had a say in my education. But maybe the aggregate outcome would be better than what is coming?
by DaSHacka | 2025-05-27 20:45:29+00:00
How so? Not enough art slop logos so they don't have to pay an artist? Other than in maximizing shareholder return I fail to see how foregoing AI is putting them "behind".

AI, especially for programming, is essentially no better than your typical foriegn offshore programming firm, with nonsensical comments and sprawling conflicting code styles.

If it eventually becomes everything the proponents say it will, they could always just start using it more.
by tibbar | 2025-05-27 20:45:34+00:00
Yeah, the author clearly did not have a good time doing maintenance in one of these buildings, and came to resent her co-workers (and the odds are good that the author was not employed by the same firm as the programmers, increasing the sense of class divide). Interestingly, the author eventually expresses some empathy for the programmers, seeing them as over-worked startup employees, too.

Reading between the lines, I think the narrative here is that all workers are oppressed by The Man and being in an office is part of that. It's a bit of a meme to tell slightly spoiled SF engineers that they're being oppressed, can't they see it? When, realistically, it's a pretty darn good time for a lot of the engineers...
by p_bits | 2025-05-27 20:46:14+00:00
Hi all! I created this tool to simplify making GitHub release notes from code changes in a project I'm engaged with. It uses o4-mini with a beefy prompt, skipping irrelevant bits (library, build code etc) and provides a couple changelog flavors with stats.

Features that might bring this to the next level:

1. Integrate AST parser for more context 2. Caching the input tokens to allow for cheaper repetition 3. Isolating "Releases" as a feature with 2-way sync 4. Adding prompt/flavor opt-in customizations for end users ..etc

But holding off unless the current tool is already useful? Looking forward to feedback.

Thanks, Petar
by jdboyd | 2025-05-27 20:46:21+00:00
Here are the ones I can recall donating to in recent years: KiCAD Arduino tic-80

I'd like to donate to FreeCAD at some point, but the last time I had spare money to do that, I ended up paralyzed trying to figure out what would be the most impactful way to do so. Then Ondsel came and made a subscription the obvious choice (I thought) then they went away.

Ones that I probably should donate to but just haven't gotten to: Inkscape Gimp uv/ruff/ty

There are probably many more. My goal is to at least donate to any project that I make money from, preferably in a similar amount to what I might be paying otherwise. That is an awful lot to track down though, considering how many pieces there are for doing software development. Thus, I've been more focused on media and other engineering tools.
by orbital-decay | 2025-05-27 20:46:54+00:00
It's always a tradeoff, and most of the time chunking and keeping the context short performs better.

I feed long context tasks to each new model and snapshot just to test the performance improvements, and every time it's immediately obvious that no current model can handle its own max context. I do not believe any benchmarks, because contrary to the results of many of them, no matter what the (coding) task is, the results start getting worse after just a couple dozen thousand tokens, and after a hundred the accuracy becomes unacceptable. Lost-in-the-middle is still a big issue as well, at least for reasoning if not for direct recall - despite benchmarks showing it's not. LLMs are still pretty unreliable at one-shotting big things, and everything around it is still alchemy.
by mixmastamyk | 2025-05-27 20:47:31+00:00
Yes, you've solved your problem, not my problem. What about others?

> reason why scalpers can operate is because the artists and venues deliberately allow for it.

The problem isn't solved for a number of parties, from your own words. Despite working in the area, it doesn't feel like you've thought about it deeply. Or, maybe because you work in the area—cue Upton Sinclair quote.
by spiderxxxx | 2025-05-27 20:48:13+00:00
I've been programming in python for over 20 years. An LLM creates code that sometimes works, but it definitely doesn't meet my standards, and there's no way I'd use the code since I couldn't support it. People who have less experience in Python might take that working code and just support that with their LLM, still having no clue what it does or why it works. That's probably fine for MVP but it won't stand up in the real world where you have to support the code or refactor it for your environment.

I tried to use an LLM to write a simple curses app - something where there's a lot of code out there, but most of the code is bad, and of course it doesn't work and there's lots of quirks. I then asked it to see if there are libraries out there that are better than curses, it gave me 'textual' which at first seemed like an HTML library, but is actually a replacement for curses. It did work, and I had some working code at the end, but I had to work around platform inconsistencies and deal with the LLM including outdated info like inline styles that are unsupported in the current version of the library. That said, I don't quite understand the code that it produced, I know it works and it looks nice, but I need to write the code myself if I want a deeper understanding of the library, so that I can support it. You won't get that from asking an LLM to write your code for you, but from you using what you learn. It's like any language learning. You could use google translate to translate what you want, and it may seem correct at first glance, but ultimately won't convey what you want, with all the nuance you want, if you just learned the language yourself.
by ajb | 2025-05-27 20:48:30+00:00
So, the way you've written this comes across as if you think that's a canal running across midsummer common. For the benefit of those unfamiliar, it's not a canal, it's the River Cam. It may well be that the reason for no fences is boat transport, though.

There definitely was serious boat transport in the area- midsummer common hosted a fair; historically fairs were actually vital to the economy as a lot of goods were exchanged there, and even more contracts for goods. Nearby Stourbridge fair was the largest in Europe: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stourbridge_fair and the inspiration for Bunyan's "Vanity fair" in "Pilgrim's Progress"
by JeremyNT | 2025-05-27 20:48:30+00:00
Yes!

I see two variants of the "please hear me, I have good ideas" effect: positive and negative:

1) This looks great, have you thought about adding <seemingly cool sounding thing that is either impossible to implement or wouldn't actually be useful in the real world>?

And

2) Oh no! Aren't you worried about <breaking something in some strange edge case in some ill advised workflow that no real world person would ever use>?

"I'll look into it" is a great answer. Heaven help the poor LLMs who have to take all this stuff seriously and literally...
by armchairhacker | 2025-05-27 20:48:31+00:00
Cheap "universities" are fine for accreditation. Exams can be administered via in-person proctoring services, which test the bare minimum. The real test would be when students are hired, in the probationary period. While entry-level hires may be unreliable, and even in the best case not help the company much, this is already a problem (perhaps it can be solved by the government or some other outside organization paying the new hire instead of the company, although I haven't thought about it much).

Students can learn for free via online resources, forums, and LLM tutors (the less-trustworthy forums and LLMs should primarily be used to assist understanding the more-trustworthy online resources). EDIT: students can get hands-on-experience via an internship, possibly unpaid.

Real universities should continue to exist for their cutting-edge research and tutoring from very talented people, because that can't be commodified. At least until/if AI reaches expert competence (in not just knowledge but application), but then we don't need jobs either.
by sokoloff | 2025-05-27 20:49:04+00:00
I spent a little time chasing broken Aerons (often a bad gas strut ($30) or a bad seat ($125-160)) and selling them onward fixed for $350-400 at the start of COVID. A broken Aeron would go for $100-150 (very occasionally free) and people were buying working ones like crazy as remote took off.

I can’t say it was a great return on my time, but it did give me something to do and I ended up with a little pocket money and 6 Aerons for the family and our guest room computer desk.

If you want to do this, look for ones with a bad strut (or set a marketplace alert for Aerons under $150). They’ll seem really broken to most people, so they sell cheap, but it’s a pretty easy fix (just needs a HUGE pipe wrench* and a $30 strut [and optionally, a $20 set of Rollerblade wheels]).

* or a large pipe wrench and a black pipe “cheater” to fit over the handle.