MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pjmlp | 2025-05-18 08:59:40+00:00
I think people are still fooling themselves about the relevance of 3GL languages in an AI dominated future.

It is similar to how Assembly developers thought about their relevance until optimising compilers backends turned that into a niche activity.

It is a matter of time, maybe a decade who knows, until we can produce executables directly from AI systems.

Most likely we will still need some kind of formalisation tools to tame natural language uncertainties, however most certainly they won't be Python/Rust like.

We are moving into another abstraction layer, closer to the 4GL, CASE tooling dreams.
by lmm | 2025-05-18 08:59:48+00:00
> Companies paying for public transport is a matter of flooring the commute cost: (almost) nobody lives in an area with no public transportation and car commute costs more, so companies will pay the price for lowest commute and you get to decide what you do with it.

If that was the reason they would simply not pay for commutes at all, as is normal in most other countries.

> Government has little to do with most of it, subsidies only matter on the smaller, super low volume lines where rising prices would kill the traffic.

Nah. Both the railway companies and the government lean into the myth of their being private operations because it suits everyone, but the "private" railway companies were set up with immensely valuable government funded capital assets and would never have been able to operate without them, they rely on government support for any substantial new capital investments, and they have the relevant governments as significant investors, in many cases the largest investors. Yes JR central is immensely profitable if you accept the accounting fiction that the tokaido shinkansen simply popped into existence one day and is worth nothing.
by numpad0 | 2025-05-18 09:00:16+00:00
What if you built a wheeled carriage to go over your desk?

Something made of precisely cut 2x4 lumber or 2040 frames, assembled like a whiteboard frame but have just a single beam where the board would be. Then the pole of monitor arm can be bolted onto the beam to hang upside down.

Once assembled, the whole thing can be rolled in and up to the front edge of the desk, right up to your face. If someone else needs to use your computer, the carriage can probably be moved back towards the wall.

The reason why display arms extend only so far is because a long cantilevered weight love to wreck the base. The desk top is going to break if it's too far out. So stretching the arm is probably no go.
by cgio | 2025-05-18 09:00:42+00:00
I think a pseudo random walk would be a good algo for diversity. Long form anything is being challenged, but form is an epoque attribute. In 10 years people will be lamenting how the young generation is lost in hourlong songs and encyclopaedia length posts, maybe… The only thing that got lengthier is cinema as subsumed by mini series. But it indicates a complexity in dynamics that may be harder to pin down than we think we do on the surface.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-18 09:00:56+00:00
> Whereas with ranked voting, the person who gets the most #1’s might not win and that can confuse some citizens.

Not ranked voting, ranked voting is still very broken. Rated voting. Approval voting is a rated voting system.

Score voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 1 to 10.

Approval voting: Rate each candidate on a scale of 0 or 1.

Score voting (or STAR) is generally better and the argument that people are going to be confused by "that thing they use at the Olympics" is nonsense, but approval voting is fine if you want to silence the complainers while still using something that basically works.
by ajuc | 2025-05-18 09:02:30+00:00
You are calling the main function with arguments "New York, Chicago, Washington". Then the system runs the loop and you are just an effector managed by the system.

Running the loop takes hours. Choosing the arguments for the main function takes seconds.

Which means for vast majority of time you delegate decision-making to the system. Which means your decision-making circuits atrophy. This is the problem people are talking about.
by sky2224 | 2025-05-18 09:02:31+00:00
This is cool. I remember not too long ago I had a professor telling me that this was essentially the future of software engineering and that soon we won't be writing code as we know it today. I believed him, I just didn't think we'd be seeing it here so soon.

Any plans to create systems that allow this to be embedded in existing code bases? It'd be neat to be able to sketch out new systems that your tool could generate code for that seamlessly hooks into an existing system's architecture, especially if it could have a UX similar to how copilot or cursor behave in how they're directly inline with the code.
by raydenvm | 2025-05-18 09:02:42+00:00
This reminds me of the UML/RUP era from the early 2000s.... Is that an attempt to revive or even resurrect UML diagrams and Rational Unified Process blending it with AI? I would bet it's all dead forever. I'm skeptical about diagram-driven development making a comeback. In my experience, developers today prefer more agile, code-first approaches because requirements change rapidly and maintaining diagram-code synchronization is an unbearable challenge.
by defrost | 2025-05-18 09:03:19+00:00
Damn.

My bad for getting the full details .. I came to this story via a chain of bridge clearance fail stories and jumped to the assumption this was another intended passage clearance mistake.

There are some knuckle chewing engineering videos of planned water transits of "big loads" timed happen for a still water king low tide .. fast work with tiny clearances and major downsides on failure.
by imiric | 2025-05-18 09:03:57+00:00
> The output of artists has copyright.

Copyright is a very messy and divisive topic. How exactly can an artist claim ownership of a thought or an image? It is often difficult to ascertain whether a piece of art infringes on the copyright of another. There are grey areas like "fair use", which complicate this further. In many cases copyright is also abused by holders to censor art that they don't like for a myriad of unrelated reasons. And there's the argument that copyright stunts innovation. There are entire art movements and music genres that wouldn't exist if copyright was strictly enforced on art.

> Artists shape the space in which they’re generating output.

Art created by humans is not entirely original. Artists are inspired by each other, they follow trends and movements, and often tiptoe the line between copyright infringement and inspiration. Groundbreaking artists are rare, and if we consider that machines can create a practically infinite number of permutations based on their source data, it's not unthinkable that they could also create art that humans consider unique and novel, if nothing else because we're not able to trace the output to all of its source inputs. Then again, those human groundbreaking artists are also inspired by others in ways we often can't perceive. Art is never created in a vacuum. "Good artists copy; great artists steal", etc.

So I guess my point is: it doesn't make sense to apply copyright to art, but there's nothing stopping us from doing the same for machine-generated art, if we wanted to make our laws even more insane. And machine-generated art can also set trends and shape the space they're generated in.

The thing is that technology advances far more rapidly than laws do. AI is raising many questions that we'll have to answer eventually, but it will take a long time to get there. And on that path it's worth rethinking traditional laws like copyright, and considering whether we can implement a new framework that's fair towards creators without the drawbacks of the current system.
by sieve | 2025-05-18 09:04:55+00:00
I am not sure that the intersectional feminist writing this essay has access to the mental framework necessary to understand the fundamental dispute between the countries. But her toxic essay needs some grounding. So...

Pakistan was created upon the idea that Hindus and Muslims are two distinct nations that can never live together in peace. Unfortunately, total population exchange was never achieved due to Indian politicians of the era living in la-la-land (a majority of them continue to do so to this day). Nehru, for all his claims to erudition, was supposedly horrified when Hindu-Muslim riots restarted post-partition.

Everyone knows why these disturbances happen across space and time. It is not a question of a parcel of land ("Kashmir"). It is a question of jihad. The Pakistani Army is a jihadi army. These are the words of General Zia-ul-Haq, dictator/president of Pakistan from the foreword to the book "The Quranic Concept of War" by Brigadier S. K. Malik:

> I write these few lines to commend Brigadier Malik’s book on ‘The Quranic Concept of War’ to both soldier and civilian alike. JEHAD FI-SABILILLAH is not the exclusive domain of the professional soldier, nor is it restricted to the application of military force alone.

> This book brings out with simplicity, clarity and precision the Quranic philosophy on the application of military force, within the context of the totality that is JEHAD. The professional soldier in a Muslim army, pursuing the goals of a Muslim state, CANNOT become ‘professional’ if in all his activities he does not take on ‘the colour of Allah.’ The non-military citizen of a Muslim state must, likewise, be aware of the kind of soldier that his country must produce and the ONLY pattern of war that his country’s armed forces may wage.

> I have read this book with great interest and believe that it has a useful contribution to make towards this understanding that we jointly seek as citizens of an Islamic State, soldier or civilian. I pray and trust that this book will be read by many. For a task so sincerely undertaken and so devotedly executed, the author’s reward is with his Lord.

For some Pakistanis, Muhammad bin Qasim is the first Pakistani because he destroyed the Hindu kingdom of Sindh in the early 700s. For others, Pakistan is the new Medina, a place to gather one's strength and attack Mecca ("India") when ready, thus following in the footsteps of their prophet. Some Pakistanis are unwilling to accept that their ancestry is Indian. Instead they go looking for their presumptive fathers in Persia, Arabia and, more recently, Turkey.

For decades, Pakistanis have named their missiles and armaments after Islamic invaders from the north-west who raped and murdered their ancestors, forcibly converted them to Islam and sold their women into sex slavery. The list of their jihadi antics is long.

Just as there can be no peace between cannibals and humans, there can never be peace between the two countries because jihad does not allow for peace: the enemy must be conquered and converted or destroyed. And India cannot allow that.
by pjmlp | 2025-05-18 09:05:01+00:00
While I go into another direction in a sibling comment, lifetimes does not imply not needing garbage collection.

On the contrary, having both allows the productivity of automatic resource management, while providing the necessary tooling to squeeze the ultimate performance when needed.

No need to worry about data structures not friendly to affine/linear types, Pin and Phantom types and so forth.

It is no accident that while Rust has been successful bringing modern lifetime type systems into mainstream, almost everyone else is researching how to combine linear/affine/effects/dependent types with classical automatic resource management approaches.
by 7bit | 2025-05-18 09:05:15+00:00
> First of all, it gives the server more certainly that the other side of the TLS connection is the authenticated user, and not a MitM[1].

The certificate (or rather the privkey) is -- like the token -- a secret that only the client and the server should know.

Certificate-based authentication and token do protect equally from MITM. And MITM attacks are equally possible when cert or token auth is being done.

The only thing where cert based auth got the client shines is that you don't have to move a new token over the wire, initially.
by deafpolygon | 2025-05-18 09:05:40+00:00
Not a single source of truth.

The often cited study is [3] which shows longform writing to be more beneficial - it also comes to this conclusion: "Although more notes are beneficial, at least to a point, if the notes are taken indiscriminately or by mindlessly transcribing content, as is more likely the case on a lap-top than when notes are taken longhand, the benefit dis-appears."

There was a follow-up study made (see [1], [2]) that showed it made no difference in the end. It's what you do with it afterwards that really matters.

Long story short? One form is not more superior to other, but I find typed text (in a digital document) easier to manipulate, transfer to other tools (i.e. Anki) and less friction when I'm thinking as I type.

---

[1] https://www.themantic-education.com/ibpsych/2023/01/20/note-...

[2] https://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2022/01/is-handwriting...

[3] https://brucehayes.org/Teaching/papers/MuellerAndOppenheimer...
by 59nadir | 2025-05-18 09:06:25+00:00
About 1.5-2 years ago I was using GitHub Copilot to write code, mostly as a boilerplate completer, really, because eventually I realized I spent too much time reading the suggestions and/or fixing the end result when I should've just written it completely myself. I did try it out with a pretty wide scope, i.e. letting it do more or less and seeing what happened. All in all it was pretty cool, I definitely felt like there were some magic moments where it seems to put everything together and sort of read my mind.

Anyway, that period ended and I went until a few months ago without touching anything like this and I was hearing all these amazing things about using Cursor with Claude Sonnet 3.5, so I decided to try it out with a few use cases:

1. Have it write a tokenizer and parser from scratch for a made up Clojure-like language

2. Have it write the parser for the language given the tokenizer I had already written previously

3. Have it write only single parsing functions for very specific things with both the tokenizer and parsing code to look at to see how it works

#1 was a complete and utter failure, it couldn't even put together a simple tokenizer even if shown all of the relevant parts of the host language that would enable a reasonable tokenizer end result.

#2 was only slightly better, but the end results were nowhere near usable, and even after iteration it couldn't produce a runnable result.

#3 is the first one my previous experience with Copilot suggested to me should be doable. We started out pretty badly, it misunderstood one of the tokenizer functions it had examples for and used it in a way that doesn't really make sense given the example. After that it also wanted to add functions it had already added for some reason. I ran into myriad issues with just getting it to either correct, move on or do something productive until I just called it quits.

My personal conclusion from all of this is that yes, it's all incredibly incremental, any kind of "coding companion" or agent has basically the same failure modes/vectors they had years ago and much of that hasn't improved all that much.

The odds that I could do my regular work on 3D engines with the coding companions out there are slim to none when it can't even put together something as simple as a tokenizer together, or use an already existing one to write some simple tokenizer functions. For reference I know that it took my colleague who has never written either of those things 30 minutes until he productively and correctly used exactly the same libraries the LLM was given.
by immibis | 2025-05-18 09:06:45+00:00
This comment was down voted but it's right. We don't need more open source platforms - we need more successful open (source code doesn't matter) platforms.

Actual businesspeople are pretty ruthless in getting people to using their product. Open source people aren't, by nature (except for Lennart Poettering).

Also open source people tend to make software instead of services. Mastodon isn't a Twitter clone - it's software you can install on a server to make your own Twitter clone. Mastodon is software and Twitter is a service. mastodon.social is a Twitter clone. The only exceptions to this are highly P2P softwares like Bitcoin, where the software and the service merge into one.
by Etheryte | 2025-05-18 09:07:17+00:00
I think this largely misses the point. Power users, so most of the users on HN, are a niche market. Most people don't need a hundred gigs of RAM, they need their laptop to run Powerpoint and a browser smoothly and for the battery to last a long time. No other manufacturer is anywhere close to Apple in that segment as far as I'm concerned.
by Tade0 | 2025-05-18 09:07:53+00:00
I would like to see how the fight scenes in The Beginning After the End could improve from being passed through this tool.

In all seriousness I wonder where is this all headed? Are people long term going to be more forgiving of visual artifacts if it will mean that their favourite franchise gets another season? Or will generated imagery be shunned just like the not-so-subtle use of 3D models?
by lintalist | 2025-05-18 09:08:11+00:00
"Freeware and open source. (source included with the download). The zipped download is 259kb and includes the interpreter, documentation, and over 80 examples. The unzipped IDE/interpreter exe is 274kb. (it's been growing as I add features). Exe doesn't write anything to system registry. (just uses Windows api). Exe will run on it's own without any of the includes files. The IDE automatically regenerates it's help file in the same directory."
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-05-18 09:08:49+00:00
> your car can be used for illegal purposes. that is why it has license plate, vin

License plates identify vehicles rather than individuals and when they were introduced it was infeasible to use them for mass surveillance. They're now becoming a problem and something is going to have to be done about it.

Their ostensible purpose is to identify the vehicle in case it gets stolen or is in an accident, not as a form of location tracking. But this is why "slippery slope" is not a fallacy. Not only are they now used for location tracking, they're being used as a precedent to rationalize further invasions of privacy. If they can track your car, why shouldn't they be able to track your phone? If they can track your phone, why shouldn't they be able to read your email? The answer is that they shouldn't be able to do any of these things without a warrant.
by saagarjha | 2025-05-18 09:09:01+00:00
Uh, no, you're missing the point. It's always possible for you to reverse the array and read it backwards. After all, that's how you are capable of reversing it! The problem is that the thing that you are handing it to might not be capable of that. You can't pass an array to write(2) and tell it to actually print it in reverse order. You can't mmap a page where first byte of data is actually at the high address. Your DMA engine won't flip your buffer for you. If you want to use these APIs, you have to reverse the array before you hand it to them. There's just no way around it.

Also, I do want to note that just because your language is higher level and takes iterators or sequences or whatever abstraction you have on top of "a bunch of elements" doesn't actually mean that reversing an array is never worth it. It is often the case that your API/compiler/language will support passing in an arbitrary "view", but if you actually try to do this you will find that it can only fully reason about the "forward, contiguous" buffer case, which it will optimize well. If you pass it anything funny it will fall back to the element-by-element code which can be an order of magnitude slower, or more (usually this means no vectorization, for example). In this case it's often better to pull out an optimized reverse and then pass a normal array to the API. Even though it would read the data twice this can still be a lot faster.
by Abimelex | 2025-05-18 09:09:59+00:00
That's mostly the thing with safety measurements. If they are there you do not recognize them and if they are missing and something happens it's hard to proof if it would have changed anything.

Have a look on "Heuristics That Almost Always Work" https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-alwa...
by kappuchino | 2025-05-18 09:10:28+00:00
Well, he commented on his post the prompts: Two LLM prompts to Gemini 2.5 were used to help with the content.

> The following is a blog post. Please identify additional points of leverage and sanction in each context mentioned in the blog post.

and

> The following is a blog post. I want to make the content more engaging. I am reluctant to illustrate the points with stories, so I'm looking for other ways to make the content accessible and engaging.

Since it's mostly a list of lists and a starter text (for engagement) ... well played.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-18 09:11:35+00:00
What is the difference between integer compositions and integer partitions? It says a composition is just an ordered partition of an integer, but according to this article, number 4 can be partitioned into 5 parts, but apparently has 8 compositions. I find the 8 compositions much more accurate, but I do not get why it would not have 8 partitions.
by whilenot-dev | 2025-05-18 09:12:28+00:00
I'm a bit lost here.

Locking is a challenging problem in complex systems. Is this list to be interpreted as a "TODO: get rid of locking conflicts in future releases" or more a "NOTE: be aware there are known conflicts that will not change - find ways to work around them"?

EDIT: Also, is the creation of this list an automated or a manual effort?
by metalman | 2025-05-18 09:12:31+00:00
accidents happen, https://maritime-executive.com/article/video-cma-cgm-feeder-...

the one in new york is bad because it's cadets, on a world tour, they are the best, representing there country, and flag generaly these national training ships meet up somewhere each year and do a sail past, be interesting to see if Mexico pulls it together and can step new masts and be sea worthy in time
by nevi-me | 2025-05-18 09:12:34+00:00
This is not a great advertisement for Home Assistant. The writing is also not good like some point.

I am on my third iteration of HA, I regularly update it, so I also read the release notes that the author prepares/publishes.

HA feels like a broad church that caters to many users' integration needs. Lots of plugins that are supported as part of the core, fancy ways to create dashboards (admittedly I still struggle beyond the basics, and maybe I want automation and not dashboards).

It's one thing to write in the release notes about the fancy new features being added to dashboards, and another to actually use them as the lead developer. I personally wouldn't have posted that as my best/most used dashboard, because that signals that you don't really use your product.

There's a time when I led a team building a product, and my sermon to the team was that we should always be the superusers of our product because we'll be the first people to notice issues, our clients would look to us for support and we can't correctly build what we don't understand.

I don't get a sense of that from this post. It's not even about having a well oiled automation/assistant (as you're not the only one using devices in the house like you correctly point out), but find a subset of your devices in the instance you want to use, and produce something you want to regularly tell the world about.

Else we'll keep getting frustrated with HA until the big beans eventually catch up.

My 18 month toddler can do things with Google Home, she knows where to press to turn on the lights she can't reach. She fumbles her way around "he gugu". That's a good experience for someone who can't yet form sentences. Even with the best devices, I doubt I'd get her to that proficiency with HA.

Yeah, it's been the year of voice, but it feels complicated at a distance, I'm not even bothering with it.