MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thiht | 2025-05-20 08:41:35+00:00
I have a few qualms with this library:

1. For an AI engineer, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by fine-tuning a lightweight inference model, deploying it behind a FastAPI endpoint, and orchestrating requests with a custom prompt pipeline. If you want to go further, you could even ensemble multiple LLMs for higher evenness accuracy.

2. It doesn't actually replace the modulo operator. Most people I know just use `n % 2 === 0` to check if a number is even, and they still keep that knowledge handy in case the AI service is down. This does not solve the reliability issue.

3. It does not seem very "viral" or income-generating. I know this is premature at this point, but without charging users for the library, is it reasonable to expect to make money off of this?
by gwd | 2025-05-20 08:42:00+00:00
Because sci-fi is about thinking about how technology affects us as human beings, and the conference was about how AI will affect us as human beings.

He was invited presumably partly just to draw people to the conference, partly because he's used to thinking about how technology affects society. He says right up front that he has no authority to speak "ex cathedra" about what's going to happen, but that his goal was to say some things that might provoke discussion among the group.

I mean, sure, the fact that Neal Stephenson can draw a bigger crowd to talk about AI than a real AI scientist is kind of annoying. But that's the way humans are; if your goal is to influence humans, you've got to take their behavior into account. Stephenson is trying to use his (perhaps in some ways undeserved) powers for good, and I think did a decent job.

Watch this video about why Veritasium gave in and started using clickbaity titles. In short, their goal is to get knowledge out to more people, and clickbait-y titles improve that significantly:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng
Show HN: I've build a prompt generator for Lovable
by pereayats | 2025-05-20 08:42:13+00:00
I'm always thinking of ideas to promote my agency directory and bring more visitors to it. I've noticed that free tools do very well in this kind of situations.

So after talking to a friend I came up with an idea. He uses Lovable for some of his agency work and he was complaining about the fact that depending on the prompt you provide, working with this AI coding tools becomes very very tedious.

So basically, the premise was simple: if you start with a very good prompt, the back and forth of tweaking changes and prompting again and again becomes WAY easier. A very good thing is that all this AI coding tools (like Lovable, Bolt, Vercel v0) already provide a "prompting bible".

I got to work and a came up with a very simple yet effective Prompt Generator for Lovable. It follows the guidelines of Lovable and I have tried it with different examples and it works!

Let's see if it can be useful for anyone and even bring some more people to the main agency directory.

I would love to know what you guys think. Any feedback is welcome!
by dakom | 2025-05-20 08:42:18+00:00
I've never delivered a game anyone's really paid for, so take with a grain of salt, but imho the big win when you are writing your own stuff is you get to decide what not to include.

That sounds obvious but it really isn't. One example: maybe you don't need any object culling at all. Nobody tells you this. Anything you look up will talk about octrees, portals, clusters, and so on - but you might be totally fine just throwing everything at the renderer and designing your game with transitions at certain points. When you know your constraints, you're not guessing, you can measure and know for a fact that it's fine.

Another example: shader programming is not like other programming. There's no subclassing or traits. You have to think carefully about what you parameterize. When you know the look you're going for, you can hardcode a bunch of values and, frankly, write a bunch of shit code that looks just right.

The list goes on and on... maybe you don't need fancy animation blending when you can just bake it in an external tool. Maybe you don't need 3d spatial audio because your game world isn't built that way.

Thing is - when you're writing an _engine_ you need all that. You don't get to tell people writing games that you don't really need shadows or that they need to limit the number of game objects to some number etc. But when you're writing a _game_ (and you can call part of that game the engine), suddenly you get to tweak things and exclude things in all these ways that are perfectly fine.

Same idea applies to anything of course.. maybe you don't need a whole SQL database when you know your data format, flat files can be fine. Maybe you don't need a whole web/dom framework when you're just spitting out simple html/css. etc. etc.

I think this headspace is pretty common among gamedevs (iiuc large projects often copy/paste dependencies and tweak between projects rather than import and support a generic api too)
by flohofwoe | 2025-05-20 08:42:26+00:00
I keep saying that the engine is just that little runtime attachment dangling off the end of the asset pipeline ;)

(and the same is becoming more and more true for shader compilers vs 3D APIs - all the interesting stuff is happening in the shader compiler, while the 3D API is just there to kick off shaders and feed them with input data)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-20 08:42:44+00:00
> I’m less convinced of the good of an AI therapist. Seems too healthcare-y for these current buggy messes. But if somebody is aided by having a digital shoulder to cry on… eh, ok, why not?

Medium-term that may be the problem. The social aspect of having another person "see you" is important in therapy. But on the immediate term, LLMs are a huge positive in this space. Professional therapy is stupidly expensive in terms of time and money, and makes it unavailable to majority of people, even those rather well-off.

And then there's availability, which, beyond what the article discussed, matters also because many people have problems that don't fit well with typical 1h sessions 2-4 times a month. LLMs let one have a 2+h therapy sessions every day at random hours for as long it takes for one to unburden themselves completely; something that's neither available nor affordable for most people.
by davedx | 2025-05-20 08:42:49+00:00
It’s also refreshing to see what IMO is a very smart selection of technology, when you see so many other people following hype (I’m reminded of the rust gamedev post the other week). C#, SDL3, and some other nice libraries. The thing is, it’s not trivial to get to the point of having enough experience and judgement to know what to choose!

When I start a new game I’m often paralised by the sheer volume of engines out there. When I first started making games all I had was GWBASIC…
by flave | 2025-05-20 08:43:20+00:00
I assume this is a strategy (the man is a marketing/pr strategist) borrowed from certain climate change advocacy groups which is basically to take up the most extreme possible position and hope to “shift the Overtone Window”.

Personally I think it’s a. Immoral b. Dangerous and c. Self defeating.

Immoral because deceiving is actually quite bad regardless of your justification.

Dangerous because you will attract true-believers who are neurotic, mentally ill or misguided and really believe what you’re saying as a strategic thing. You will create a movement that you don’t control and is just wrong about the world.

Self-defeating partly for the above reasons but mostly because you may discredit your position with the people who understand “just enough” and those people run many major companies, countries etc.
by amarcheschi | 2025-05-20 08:44:03+00:00
Hell, I was asked to use confidence interval as well as average values for by bs thesis when doing ml benchmarks and scientist publishing results in medical fields aren't doing it...

How can something like that happen? I mean, i had a supervisor tell me "add the confidence interval to the results as well", and explained me why. I guess that at nobody ever told them? Or they didn't care? Or it's just a honest mistake
by guappa | 2025-05-20 08:45:53+00:00
I have a Thinkpad T560 with only 8GB. I develop using docker and I use kate with python3-pylsp for completion. And of course the occasional zoom/teams.

Instead of slack I normally use localslackirc, so that alone probably saves a ton of battery rather than using the electron one.

When I compile a lot I still manage to get half a day on battery. If I want to save power I just ssh to a server and do everything there :)

edit: that model has also hotswap battery so if you really really need more battery life you can buy a spare.
by oxcabe | 2025-05-20 08:46:27+00:00
I've been paying a premium subscription to Focumon (https://www.focumon.com/) for a year and a month. It's a small Pokémon themed productivity tool that I found promoted here on this site. The paid subscription doesn't really give you much, but is inexpensive and I want to support the creator.

Small web tools have some advantages that could make them sustainable as a business model. Off the top of my head, some of these are:

* Creators are way more reachable, they often get back to you directly when you send them feedback. Sometimes, even, you get to have longer conversations with them too.

* You have more impact on what the product evolves into. It's also likely that you get some minor features added if you ask for them.

* Smaller tools are able to resist against enshittification with less of an effort. Doesn't mean that it may not happen, of course.

If you're asking this because you want to create a small web tool, I'd say the best advice you could use is to make something you like, make it reliable, and be proactive in engaging with you clients / let them reach out easily, demonstrating that you can and will listen and care about their concerns.

And if you create something you're proud of and have value, feel more than welcome of posting it here!
by alpaca128 | 2025-05-20 08:47:20+00:00
Not GP but the terminal is inefficient and limiting for input and UI. For one you cannot detect key-up and key-down events, only a full key press. The press of multiple (non-modifier) keys at once can't be recognized either. Also there are some quirks, like in many terminals your application cannot distinguish between the Tab key and Ctrl-I as they look the same. But in some (e.g. Alacritty) it can work, so now if you have two different keybindings for Tab & Ctrl-I your program will behave differently in different terminals.

If you want to do anything that's not printing unformatted text right where the cursor is, you need to print out control sequences that tell the terminal where to move the cursor or format the upcoming text. So you build weird strings, print them out and then the terminal has to parse the string to know what to do. As you can imagine this is kind of slow.

If you accidentally print a line that's too long it might break and shift the rest of the UI. That's not too bad because it's a monospaced font, so you only have to count the unicode symbols (not bytes)...until you realize chinese symbols are rendered twice as wide. Text is weird and in the terminal there is nothing but text. But to be fair it's still a lot simpler than proportional fonts and a lot of fun, but I definitely understand why someone would decide to just throw pixels on a canvas and not deal with the historical quirks.
by uludag | 2025-05-20 08:47:27+00:00
I'm sure there's many people out there who could say that they hardly use AI but that crypto has made them lots of money.

At the end of the day searching work documents and talking with computers is only desirable inasmuch as they are economically profitable. Crypto at the end of the day is responsible for a lot of people getting wealthy. Was a lot of this wealth obtained on sketchy grounds? probably, but the same could be said AI (for example, the recent sale of windsurf for an obscene amount of money).
by noduerme | 2025-05-20 08:47:28+00:00
I really miss the days of Flash when I could write lots of mini-engines as needed (e.g. platformers or side scrollers or 2.5D, multiplayer, chat ... all hand coded but reusable) and rely on being able to mix lots of different pipelines for vector art, bitmaps, 3D, audio and UI. There's nothing like that now. I tried to reinvent a few wheels. But at this point... a fairly low level (for script) rendering library like PixiJS is really the best we have. No frameworks, please.

That being said, games are kind of dead. The idea of spending another year or two on another indie game that barely cracks the top 50 for a couple days on an app store is... depressing. Going through the bureaucratic hoops to even get it there and maintain it seems like an exercise in self-torture. I'm kinda back to just making art in my spare time - screen savers, weird web experiences, one-off toys. I think having all my mini-engines in Flash suddenly deleted forever just made me realize how pointless it all was.

Maybe I just spent 20 years getting to be great at the wrong thing. I don't know of a historical parallel of someone spending their life perfecting an art that literally was burned down and blackholed overnight, in quite the same way. I imagine the scribes at Alexandria could at least have gone and scriven somewhere else the following year. So screw it, when I started learning code I was 8 and my brother was a CS major, he gave me his laptop to learn BASIC, and he said "we're just writing on sand." I finally learned that was true.
by z3t4 | 2025-05-20 08:47:35+00:00
I like to start all my software projects from scratch. Everyone who are used to working on large software projects know that it's very slow. But starting from scratch is fast! You just implement the bare minimum. But also on later stages of the development when you have abstractions going, then it becomes even faster to implement new features. Working on an enterprise software project and your own engine that you've written from scratch is nothing alike, you can work 1000x faster when you have written the thing yourself and can just cut out and refactor everything you want. This is why I advocate micro service architecture and small teams. Things are much smoother when you do it yourself and from scratch. There are however landmines you have to hit and it will take years of trail and error until you get a feeling for what architecture and abstractions work and which doesn't as well as learning the in and outs of the language and platform you are working on.
by 0xEF | 2025-05-20 08:47:50+00:00
Businesses would. The problem with that is you have decision makers in said businesses who don't know any better, so Microsoft-all-the-things gets pushed down the line. Offices are all trapped on Windows 10/11 and using Teams/Outlook with Exchange/Entra/Azure chugging along in all its misconfigured glory. Heck, half the MSPs I work side-by-side with seem to only offer support on Windows machines.

It gets worse. When we go to the manufacturing side of the building, there's a high chance they're still using Windows 7. Yeah, still! And IT or Controls has no idea what to do with it since, well, it's still working. Is it secure? They don't know because the team is comprised of kids who memorized the CompTIA exams and use Windows 11 at home.

Trying to get the business world to switch to Linux with all that in mind is an impossible task. It's the same as asking an American city to rip out all its old infrastructure at once and replace it with new instead of patching the old. The cost and knowledge required for such a task is unthinkable, to them. Believe me, I've tried.

Microsoft was quite brilliant in the way that they shoehorned their way into the fabric of the way we do business, not just in the US, but on a global scale.
by edarchis | 2025-05-20 08:47:56+00:00
A former colleague makes it an interview question. He asks the recruiter what the procedure is if he wants to buy a product or use a service under $100/year. If the bureaucracy is overwhelming, it's a major red flag.

When I was working at Cisco, the general rule was to get manager approval and just go for it. Of course, these days, there are security concerns but for most cases, it's not a problem.

In a different company, it was sooo hard to get anything that they refused to buy JetBrains IntelliJ and forced us to use Eclipse. Most of us ended up buying it ourselves.
by echelon | 2025-05-20 08:48:02+00:00
Doesn't mean lay people have the wrong ideas about where this is going.

It seems obvious that we'll keep building this tech up until the very end.

Every AI coding startup is trying to automate the software engineer and reduce the cost of software, yet engineers fling themselves at the problem.

In the GitHub Copilot AMA today they were practically giddy about it. And in OpenAI Codex's Reddit AMA, they stated the mission was to make the delivery of end-to-end well-defined software a fully solved problem within a decade.

"But what about your own jobs?", people ask.

Crickets.

We're going to be building it until we have no more to contribute. Not a value statement, just a statement of what evidently looks to be the case.

Now I don't personally have a problem with software automation - I'd love to automate myself and do more. I might even be one of the people building the thing. But I have a problem with trillion dollar companies unilaterally owning the means of production and seeing the recursive upside behind a mile-tall moat. I'd never be able to work for company that rivals nation states.

AI will only work for all of us if there is no single, limited set of winners. If there is no moat.

Not sure we'll be so lucky.
by id44037319 | 2025-05-20 08:48:12+00:00
This is great, I'll be returning to this tool often. Thanks.

A few suggestions and ideas for futher projects.

-allow for "keyword", -negate operators and "mult word string" searches, [Pubmed](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/advanced) is what I'd consider an Ideal search interface

-allow for regex, or direct sql lookups with limited query time ratelimited by POW. for example, if the server is under load, require a token from something like [anubis](https://anubis.techaro.lol/) and lower the maximum DB query time

-Index the title of all discussion/forum type posts with a VectorDB for semantic search. And add an option to sort by replies. (Like [answer overflow](https://github.com/AnswerOverflow/AnswerOverflow))This would make it possible to find relevant discussions among ~60B messages. ScyllaDB doesn't support vector search, so I'd suggest something like [usearch](https://github.com/unum-cloud/usearch) for a detached index. Embedding models are faster and smaller than most people realize, pick whatever's on top of the [mteb leaderboard](https://huggingface.co/spaces/mteb/leaderboard) after deciding on size.

-calculate the jaccard similarity (user overlap) between discord server members, this would allow for searching in "similar" severs, and potentially, mapping discord. [github](https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-github) [reddit](https://anvaka.github.io/map-of-reddit)

-fix doxing. Searching by <@userid> is currently possible.

-expect the alternative to the cloudflare captcha to be abused, it's too simple for modern solvers.

-open source the stack? I'm interested in the scraper.
by piltdownman | 2025-05-20 08:48:18+00:00
Low Salaries in Europe are because of progressive tax regimes leading to extremely low wealth inequality and far higher social cohesion.

It's like when agitators use the comparable GDPs of Bavaria and Mississippi as a KPI indicating Europe's lack of economic prowess. In fact, it's just a scathing indictment of wealth inequality in Mississippi where life expectancy is 10 years less and infant mortality 400% higher than in Bavara, despite their similar GDPs.
by Y_Y | 2025-05-20 08:48:23+00:00
I'm guessing you're referring to the Overton Window https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window but now you've got me wondering if that's just a clever turn of phrase and there's some poetic analogy to higher harmonics and compactly-supported SDE-estimation tools.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Window_function
by b3lvedere | 2025-05-20 08:48:47+00:00
The market is getting more diverse (mobile, steam deck alikes, laptops, consoles, etc), but i guess if you want to quickly earn the most money on your (huge) development investment, you better try and take the biggest piece of the pie first.

Personally i don't really believe in AAA (or UbiSoft's AAAA) titles that much anymore. Strange exclusivity for some console or device may bring some money early on, but i have plenty games in my Steam libary that could run perfectly under many platforms. And most AAA games heavily drop in price after a few months, Nintendo being the sole exception.
by leonard-somero | 2025-05-20 08:50:04+00:00
I'm an indie game developer with over 10 years of experience. I'm not using Unity or Unreal, but I do have some frameworks that handle things like rendering graphics or playing audio. However, I write all the game logic, data manipulation, and entity management from scratch for each game I make. It seems to be the smoothest option for me, since I have full control over how my games actually operate, but I don't have to reinvent the wheel as far as the low-level architecture goes.
by eviks | 2025-05-20 08:50:16+00:00
What led you to continue to misrepresent... everything?

Why did you make up a point about a person deserving respect and pass it as my thought? Could you not come up with a more coherent difference between those two situations yourself?

Why are you asking a question about the motivation if you don't even understand "whatever" it is I disliked?

Why did you make up the implication that rejects having fun?

Why are you making it personal in the first place?

How can criticism be neutral when it's... critical?

What kind of well argued thing do you expect in a... single sentence to even ask such a question?

Again, why is there such a huge mismatch in your expectations re. a comment and a professional app?
by flave | 2025-05-20 08:50:30+00:00
As another commenter said, $5 is a terrible price.

$5 a month works for apps with huge user bases and they just take the small conversion and that makes their business run. And this is never web apps (certainly not new ones because the easy ones already exist).

If you charge $30-$100 a month you have to find 10 times less people which is way way easier for a small web dev. Yes the problem you solve will have to be more acute but a. There are actually loads of rich people out there - more than you think and b. You now basically only have to build for your most committed users.

See 1000 True Fans for better, fuller explanation: https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/
by _0ffh | 2025-05-20 08:50:36+00:00
While I hate the apparent renaming of everything ML to "AI", things like AlphaFold would be "narrow AI".

As to the common idea of having to wait for general AI (AGI) to bring the gains, I have been quite sure since the start of the recent AI hype cycle that narrow AI will have silently transformed much of the world before AGI even hits the town.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-20 08:51:02+00:00
> While they didn’t say who modified it. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t Elon.

Is it really that hard to understand how these things happen?

The boss says "remove bias" but the peons don't really know how to do that and the naive approach to unbiasing a thing is to introduce bias in the other direction. And then if you're Google and the boss thinks it has a right-wing bias you crook it and get black Nazis and if you're xAI and the boss thinks it has a left-wing bias you get white genocide.

In both cases the actual problem is when people think bias operates like an arithmetic sum, because it doesn't.