MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hwillis | 2025-05-06 18:11:27+00:00
> This is true, but neither is "tensile strength" really a thing for the same reason.

Well, not the same reason. Shear strength is in many ways more important because failure usually propagates from an origin like a rip- by shearing.

But fundamentally, tensile strength and shear strength are both much more empirical than compressive strength. Tensile strength can be used with ~99% accuracy on a wire that is microns long or miles long. If you double the relative width of a testing sample it will dramatically change the measured compressive strength even without buckling.
by diggan | 2025-05-06 18:12:00+00:00
I generally use nix-shell whenever I can too, only resorting to `uv` for projects where I cannot expect others to neccessarly understand Nix enough to handle the nix-shell stuff, even if it's trivial for me.

AFAIK, it works as well with cuda as any other similar tool. I personally haven't had any issues, most recently last week I was working on a transformer model for categorizing video files and it's all managed with uv and pytorch installed into the venv as normal.
by gaeb69 | 2025-05-06 18:12:11+00:00
Adding to the conversation, Cursor is really genuinely good. Their agentic system has solid system prompts, better than Roo imo.

Their UX is absolutely the best as well. Excluding maybe Claude Code (completely different tho). You can argue what's better, what deserves to stand as a standalone product, but Cursor is easily the most mature 'vibe coding' tool imo.
by sanderjd | 2025-05-06 18:12:15+00:00
I'm frankly very skeptical of your last paragraph. That's not at all what seems useful to me. But we'll see!

But I agree with you about the first part, and I think it's awesome for me as a user that all this competition to build a matter mousetrap is happening right now! I'm not as certain as you are that Microsoft will end up building a better version. It's definitely one of the likely outcomes. But it's also totally plausible that Cursor or Windsurf can win the race, even if they need to replace every single one of the MS extensions and entirely diverge the core IDE from upstream. These products are well capitalized and it's just not that hard to build the core pieces of an IDE.
by jaccola | 2025-05-06 18:12:33+00:00
Yup, I see comments like the parent all of the time and they are always a head scratcher. They would be far more rational (and a bit desperate) if they were trying to sell something, but they never appear to be.

Always "10x"/"100x" more productive with AI, "you will miss out if you don't adopt now"! Build a great company 100x faster and every rational actor in the market will notice, believe you and be begging to adopt your ways of working (and you will become filthy rich as a nice kicker).

The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
by comex | 2025-05-06 18:13:01+00:00
From what I’ve seen, Stack Overflow answers are much more reliable than LLMs.

Also, using Stack Overflow correctly requires more critical thinking. You have to determine whether any given question-and-answer is actually relevant to your problem, rather than just pasting in your code and seeing what the LLM says. Requiring more work is not inherently a good thing, but it does mean that if you’re citing Stack Overflow, you probably have a somewhat better understanding of whatever you’re citing it for than if you cited an LLM.
by acjohnson55 | 2025-05-06 18:13:03+00:00
For many sites, this probably is a premature optimization. But for sites that live off of click-through, like news/media, getting the text on screen is critical. Bounce rate starts to go up and ad revenue drops as soon as page loads are less than "immediate", which is about 1 second. The full page can actually be quite heavy once all the ads, scripts, and media load.

We were doing this optimization more than a decade ago when I worked at HuffPost.
by spiffyk | 2025-05-06 18:13:04+00:00
I have personally always been kind of against using StackOverflow as a sole source for things. It is very often a good pointer, but it's always a good idea to cross-check with primary sources. Otherwise you get all sorts of interesting surprises, like that Razer Synapse + Docker for Windows debacle. Not to mention that you are technically not allowed to just copy-paste stuff from SO.
by goda90 | 2025-05-06 18:13:38+00:00
Evidence of bacterium that causes Lyme disease was also found in the 5000+ year old "Iceman" mummy found in the alps. People have described the disease in the 1700s, 1800s and in the 1900s prior to the outbreak in Lyme. Ticks preserved alongside their animal hosts in 1800s biologic samples also are found to have it. Genetic sequencing of different bacteria samples suggests a much older evolutionary tree than a few decades existence.
by rst | 2025-05-06 18:14:27+00:00
Comments describing the organization and intent, perhaps. Comments just saying what a "require ..." line requires, not so much. (I find it will frequently put notes on the change it is making in comments, contrasting it with the previous state of the code; these aren't helpful at all to anyone doing further work on the result, and I wound up trimming a lot of them off by hand.)
by sidgarimella | 2025-05-06 18:15:10+00:00
probably a rare area I fully agree with HN on– the IP here seems weak and it's not hard to swap out code editors, nothing like tearing out Salesforce or other sales-driven tooling. and idk if first mover advantage actually means much in the next 10 years given how dynamic the underlying models are.

but undeniably these cos are all a great lesson in just how much cash lies in executing first/near first
by mynameisvlad | 2025-05-06 18:15:10+00:00
I mean, if all they did is regurgitate a SO post wholesale without checking the correctness or applicability, and the answer was in fact not correct or applicable, they would probably get equally lambasted.

If anything, SO having verified answers helps its credibility slightly compared to a LLM which are all known to regularly hallucinate (see: literally this post).
by athrowaway3z | 2025-05-06 18:16:28+00:00
I really have a love/hate relationship with containers. On the one hand they are entirely self contained, make redundancy simple, and - if used well - are more legible than some adhoc set up procedures.

At the same time, i've seen some horrible decisions made because of them: Redis for things that do not need them. Projects with ~10.000 users (and little potential growth) tripping over themselves to adopt k8 when my desktop could run the workload of 100.000 users just fine. A disregard for backups / restore procedures because redundancy is good enough. "Look I can provision 64 extra servers for my batch job that pre-calculates a table every day".

---

It seems every year fewer teams appreciate how fast modern hardware with a language like Rust or Go can be if you avoid all the overhead.

My standard advice is to use a single container that holds everything. Only after its build and in use can you make the best choice at which angle to scale.

> A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. - John Gall
by Aloisius | 2025-05-06 18:16:51+00:00
A nailer in the US in the 18th century could apparently make 200 nails per hour.[1] One in the UK reported making 3,000 nails/day in the 19th century.[2] Adam Smith reported seeing boys making 2,300 nails/day.[3]

As I understand it, nail making was largely unchanged from the Roman era. One would have to adjust for work hours which differed in the past than today for those, but it like it would take someone 2 years to produce that number working modern hours, though likely less than 1 in the era they were produced.

[1] https://www.mortiseandtenonmag.com/blogs/blog/issue-15-t-o-c...

[2] https://www.bournheath-pc.gov.uk/about-bournheath/bournheath...

[3] https://www.adamsmithworks.org/documents/chapter-1-of-the-di...
by no_wizard | 2025-05-06 18:16:51+00:00
GitLab UI is inferior IMO, and I've used both quite extensively.

I don't like that GitLab lets you nest organizations and such, it makes it so painful to find things over time. I appreciate GitHub doesn't do this, I view it as a plus

I also disagree about GitLab CI, not that it wasn't smart for them to include alot sooner than GitHub, but Actions is really good and really easy to get up and moving with. I find they run faster, have better features - like they can annotate a PR with lint errors and test failures - with very little comparative configuration.

GitLab CI yaml is a mess by comparison. GitHub was smart to push things to the runner level once a certain complexity threshold is hit.

This has been my experience of course, and so much of it is really subjective admittedly, but I don't think GitLab is truly ahead at this point.
by bobthepanda | 2025-05-06 18:17:00+00:00
Department stores want you to be intrigued and maybe pick up extra stuff on the way to the thing you actually want to buy, but they don't necessarily want you to loiter. Idle loitering doesn't get you more purchases, at least not immediately.

This is different from a casino, where the most likely thing you'll do if loitering is to sit at a table or machine and gamble more.
by Alex-Programs | 2025-05-06 18:17:11+00:00
This is neat. I notice that you do similar reverse lemmatisation as my Wiktionary API wrapper: https://dictionary.nuenki.app/get_definition?language=Finnis...

Feel free to use it if you like, it's practically free, and open source if you'd like to host it yourself: https://github.com/Alex-Programs/nuenki-dictionary

Looking at your code, you're processing the actual word in a Finnish-specific way. If you'd like to generalise it, you can also just see if the definitions contains `x of y`, where y is a link, and automatically dereference to `y`.
Show HN: BirdseyePost – Send personalized direct mail with engagement tracking
by ctinianov | 2025-05-06 18:18:18+00:00
We built BirdseyePost to make direct mail as automated and measurable as email marketing.

Most brands ignore direct mail because it's slow, manual, and hard to track. We thought there had to be a better way—so we built one.

With BirdseyePost, you can trigger personalized postcards automatically based on customer behavior (like abandoned carts or lapsed buyers), capture leads the moment they scan a QR code with SnapCapture™, and see real-time reporting on every campaign. We handle everything from targeting and design to printing, fulfillment, and attribution.

We're already helping ecommerce brands turn direct mail into a serious growth channel again, and would love feedback from the HN community.

You can check it out here: https://birdseyepost.com

Happy to answer any questions!
by throw7383753 | 2025-05-06 18:18:25+00:00
You could take that further and say that shear does not exist. It's a construct we have created to deal with tension failures in other planes. Everything basically comes down to a truss model. The failure you idealize as a shear stress is really a failure of a tension element in a miniature truss. This is true in bolt shear, scissors, etc.

This is why the code forces you to use strut and tie model deep concrete beams. As much as you may want to idealize a shear stress, really what's happening is the beam is arching over the span.
by smolder | 2025-05-06 18:18:26+00:00
Yeah, it's something best planned with construction, and a bit pricey, but worth keeping in mind for anyone who intends to build a bunker. :)

Also not bad for high efficiency net zero type homes to supplement natural light without too many windows compromising the thermal envelope. I personally like the variability of natural light for how it keeps you connected to the outdoors. You know when a cloud is overhead or the sun is rising or setting. I've simulated sunset and sunrise with LEDs through color temp and timing but I've always wanted to experience the solar fiber type.
by godelski | 2025-05-06 18:18:45+00:00
Server side I care a ton more!

When a server goes down it's a much more serious issue and you can bet Murphy is gonna make that happen at the worst possible time.

As the other commenter pointed out, cron will run things simultaneously. But on a server I'm much more likely to care about execution order. This is much easier to handle with systemd.

Yes, cron is /deadass simple/ to use, but it can only do trivial things. While systemd is /simple/ and can do a lot of complex things. You're really undermining yourself by not learning it. It really isn't that hard and you get a lot in return for that 30 minutes (if that) to learn how a timer works
by mynameisvlad | 2025-05-06 18:19:13+00:00
I mean, it clearly does based on your comments showing a need for a correctness check to disambiguate between made up "hallucinations" and actual "knowledge" (together, a "consistently correct guess").

The fact that you are humanizing an LLM is honestly just plain weird. It does not have feelings. It doesn't care that it has to answer "is it correct?" and saying poor LLM is just trying to tug on heartstrings to make your point.
by dvratil | 2025-05-06 18:20:34+00:00
The one thing that sold me on Rust (going from C++) was that there is a single way errors are propagated: the Result type. No need to bother with exceptions, functions returning bool, functions returning 0 on success, functions returning 0 on error, functions returning -1 on error, functions returning negative errno on error, functions taking optional pointer to bool to indicate error (optionally), functions taking reference to std::error_code to set an error (and having an overload with the same name that throws an exception on error if you forget to pass the std::error_code)...I understand there's 30 years of history, but it still is annoying, that even the standard library is not consistent (or striving for consistency).

Then you top it on with `?` shortcut and the functional interface of Result and suddenly error handling becomes fun and easy to deal with, rather than just "return false" with a "TODO: figure out error handling".
by rdtsc | 2025-05-06 18:20:58+00:00
> Making LLMs know what they don't know is a hard problem. Many attempts at making them refuse to answer what they don't know caused them to refuse to answer things they did in fact know.

They are the perfect "fake it till you make it" example cranked up to 11. They'll bullshit you, but will do it confidently and with proper grammar.

> Many attempts at making them refuse to answer what they don't know caused them to refuse to answer things they did in fact know.

I can see in some contexts that being desirable if it can be a parameter that can be tweaked. I guess it's not that easy, or we'd already have it.
by necovek | 2025-05-06 18:22:26+00:00
I would assume honesty, so someone showing with a blog post their incremental progress, prompting or code assistant use, rough time spent on each iteration... would be a great start.

I am not looking for formal study level of trust (though even that is frequently debatable), but multiple accounts of this where there is clear quality of output and significant (estimated) time savings would be wonderful.

I don't need much convincing that for many engineers, an LLM can bring incremental speed up (10-20%), though I think that really depends on the personality (eg. do you prefer to fix stuff not created by you or write it nicely from the start?).
by dhosek | 2025-05-06 18:22:27+00:00
Because just because something is in Turkish doesn’t mean it doesn’t also include non-Turkish text. So you end up with weird edge cases when translating mixed text back and forth since it would be a single glyph in legacy Turkish 8-bit text but two glyphs in Unicode so Unicode text that might have “Kırgızistan (English: Kyrgyzstan)” in it under your scheme with a Unicode-Legacy-Unicode roundtrip would encode the i in English as the Turkish dotted i.
by uludag | 2025-05-06 18:22:28+00:00
I can imagine that most LLMs, if you ask it to find a security vulnerability in a given piece of code, will make something up completely out of the air. I've (mistakenly) sent valid code with an unrelated error and to this day I get nonsense "fixes" for these errors.

This alignment problem between responding with what the user wants (e.g. a security report, flattering responses) and going against the user seems a major problem limiting the effectiveness of such systems.
by jpc0 | 2025-05-06 18:22:34+00:00
Amazing example of how easy it is to get sucked into the rust love. Really sincerely these are really annoying parts of C++.

The conversation function is more language issue. I don’t think there is a simple way of creating a rust equivalent version because C++ has implicit conversions. You could probably create a C++ style turbofish though, parse<uint32_t>([your string]) and have it throw or return std::expected. But you would need to implement that yourself, unless there is some stdlib version I don’t know of.

Don’t conflate language features with library features.

And -Wconversion might be useful for this but I haven’t personally tried it since what Matt is describing with explicit types is the accepted best practice.
by laborcontract | 2025-05-06 18:22:36+00:00
Update 2: I've been using this model in both aider and cline and I've haven't gotten a diff matching error yet, even with some pretty difficult substitutions across different places in multiple files. The overall feel of this model is nice.

I don't have a formal benchmark but there's a notable improvement in code generation due to this alone.

I've had gemini chug away on plans that have taken ~1 hour to implement. (~80mln tokens spent) A good portion of that energy was spent fixing mistakes made by cline/aider/roo due to search/replace mistakes. If this model gets anywhere close to 100% on diffs then this is a BFD. I estimate this will translate to a 50-75% productivity boost on long context coding tasks. I hope the initial results i'm seeing hold up!

I'm surprised by the reaction in the rest of the thread. A lot unproductive complaining, a lot of off topic stuff, nothing talking about the model itself.

Any thoughts from anyone else using the updated model?
by w10-1 | 2025-05-06 18:22:45+00:00
The wheel of dharma - suffering as the misalignment of the self with the world - has both compressive and tension aspects (for things happening to you and things you do respectively) each with aversive/grasping aspects (depending on your taste).

The post describes grasping tension, the blessing and curse of the powerful.

Grasping tension highlights the value of work -- the difference between the end/telos model and the actual - or "execution" in business -- and the fundamental priority of time as a value: opportunity matters most. Yes, you do need skill and resources, but they're useless without opportunity.

So, at a minimum, stop polishing turds.

But the main thing about opportunity is that it's a value to someone else. Yes scratching your own itch might end up helping others, but that's incidental luck.

So the solution to this curse might not be perfecting your own craft or impedance-matching your emotions, but really to focus on solving other people's problems.

The really nice thing about this solution is that it enables you to work with a lot of other people. So long as they're acting in good faith to solve the same problem, you'll minimize any coordination costs and enjoy all their strengths without having to do it all yourself. And when your work is needed by others, there's no time or need to worry.

Is that not happiness, to make yourself useful?
by kjkjadksj | 2025-05-06 18:23:09+00:00
Uhh I don’t know how much more defensively minded you can get when the average age of a soldier in the ukraine is what 40 years old now from the demand of able bodied people not just in usual western military years (who pass over people past 25 in conscription). Everyone who can seemingly is contributing to the defensive effort.

What might you even do differently? Switzerland is mountainous terrain. One could conceivably hold off a column of armor with the right geography with an irregular militia; ied the start of the column and it blocks itself in a chokepoint. You can’t do that in the ukraine. It is board flat wheat fields. You can mine it which both sides have done by now but that is about all you can do defensively over such a porous surface for mechanized infantry. There is no hold point. Frankly it is bewildering to me why russia did not take over the country in 30 days or so considering. This should have been a desert storm situation for russia. Clearly something is going right defensively to protract this war for so long on the part of ukraine.
by Glawen | 2025-05-06 18:23:16+00:00
It sure makes children cry when we talk about quality. Thing is, who holds the truth with respect to quality and craftmanship? And how to identify the person which will improve quality ? Which path is best to follow ?

I inherited a failed project, where each team member developped a repo. Nothing is unified, and it's a big architectural mess. Nothing really stands out, but god did I hear them crying about giving them time to build quality software.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-05-06 18:23:56+00:00
> In 2007, LimeWire was estimated to be installed on over one-third of all computers globally. [1]

20 years ago, even grandpa could download the LimeWire setup.exe, install it in 1 min, and start hosting and sharing files with anyone on the internet. You would think we would have made progress since then and things would be even easier to host and run. Instead we have regressed: a simple software requires devops expertise to install.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LimeWire
by macieklamberski | 2025-05-06 18:24:03+00:00
Thanks! For now I have some benchmarks for parsing, as this has been my main focus regarding performance. It consistently ranks in the top 2 with the caveat that other libs do not support most of the feed namespaces that Feedsmith does.

Here are the results: https://github.com/macieklamberski/feedsmith/blob/main/bench....
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-06 18:24:33+00:00
There have been attempts over the years. See here, a decade ago: https://blog.regehr.org/archives/1287

> eventually I came to the depressing conclusion that there’s no way to get a group of C experts — even if they are knowledgable, intelligent, and otherwise reasonable — to agree on the Friendly C dialect. There are just too many variations, each with its own set of performance tradeoffs, for consensus to be possible.
by rnijveld | 2025-05-06 18:24:42+00:00
The features we specifically don’t support are those related to direct LDAP support within sudo, so things like loading a sudoers file directly from LDAP. Sudo-rs will use any user retrieved via NSS, such as when configured using SSSD to load LDAP users. And from the authentication side you can use whatever PAM supports, so anything like Kerberos etc, which again can be coupled with the same LDAP database.
by cogman10 | 2025-05-06 18:24:51+00:00
I've seen this concept tried a few times (For example, MS tried it with Managed C++). The inevitable problem you run into is any such language isn't C++. Because of that, you end up needing to ask, "why pick this unpopular half C/C++ implementation and not Rust/go/D/Java/python/common lisp/haskell."

A big hard to solve problem is you are likely using a C because of the ecosystem and/or the performance characteristics. Because of the C header/macro situation that becomes just a huge headache. All the sudden you can't bring in, say, boost because the header uses the quirks excluded from your smaller C language.
by jasonjmcghee | 2025-05-06 18:25:07+00:00
unfortunately it's not so simple. that's the convention. depending on the library you're using it might be a special type of Error, or special type of Result, something needs to be transformed, `?` might not work in that case (unless you transform/map it), etc.

I like rust, but its not as clean in practice, as you describe