MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by imiric | 2025-05-04 07:37:27+00:00
> With all due respect to folks working on web and phone apps, I keep getting the feeling that AI is great for high level, routine sorts of problems and still mostly useless for systems programming.

As someone working on routine problems in mainstream languages where training data is abundant, LLMs are not even great for that. Sure, they can output a bunch of code really quickly that on the surface appears correct, but on closer inspection it often uses nonexistent APIs, the logic is subtly wrong or convoluted for no reason, it does things you didn't tell it to do or ignores things you did, it has security issues and other difficult to spot bugs, and so on.

The experience is pretty much what you summed up. I've also used Claude 3.5 the most, though all other SOTA model have the same issues.

From there, you can go into the loop of copy/pasting errors to the LLM or describing the issues you did see in the hopes that subsequent iterations will fix them, but this often results in more and different issues, and it's usually a complete waste of time.

You can also go in and fix the issues yourself, but if you're working with an unfamiliar API in an unfamiliar domain, then you still have to do the traditional task of reading the documentation and web searching, which defeats the purpose of using an LLM to begin with.

To be clear: I don't think LLMs are a useless technology. I've found them helpful at debugging specific issues, and implementing small and specific functionality (i.e. as a glorified autocomplete). But any attempts of implementing large chunks of functionality, having them follow specifications, etc., have resulted in much more time and effort spent on my part than if I had done the work the traditional way.

The idea of "vibe coding" seems completely unrealistic to me. I suspect that all developers doing this are not even checking whether the code does what they want to, let alone reviewing the code for any issues. As long as it compiles they consider it a success. Which is an insane way of working that will lead to a flood of buggy and incomplete applications, increasing the dissatisfaction of end users in our industry, and possibly causing larger effects not unlike the video game crash of 1983 or the dot-com bubble.
by altogether | 2025-05-04 07:37:35+00:00
at all ...why includ this stuff to load more at once... the hole web stuff works since cgi implementations at web services on asyncronity to load just what u actually need... like now most of them are fetch or xhr calls... I mean it makes just sence for onepager to keep the markup a bit more structured... but why u want to make static rendered homepages those days?
by anovikov | 2025-05-04 07:39:25+00:00
How much one needs to make to justify the shocking $14K moving bill? I made north of $1M last year and never in my fucking sane mind i'd pay nearly as much! Worst case, it's a matter of renting a truck and moving things oneself maybe hiring asking some neighbour to help loading and unloading, and offering him a drink after. Because you probably won't pack as densely as pro movers will, and you can do packaging as good, do two trips instead of one.

$14K is a shock and a fucking ripoff even if it was done perfectly. How much time is needed to move otherwise? Two days, tops? One of which you spend anyway managing that move done by movers.
by 3036e4 | 2025-05-04 07:41:06+00:00
There is the open source VGA Paint 386 to get something similar: https://www.bttr-software.de/products/vp386/

Runs in DOSBox (i.e. runs everywhere and can be expected to keep working).

And of course also the open sourced A**desk Animator on various platforms (but I run that in DOSBox as well... great for doodling on the phone).

https://github.com/AnimatorPro
by panstromek | 2025-05-04 07:42:45+00:00
> I'm surprised there are developers who seem to not get twice as much done with AI than they did without.

I think it depends a lot on what you work on. There are tasks that are super LLM friendly, and then there are things that have so many constraints that LLM can basically never get it right.

For example, atm we have some really complicated pieces of code that needs to be carefuly untangled and retangled to accomodate a change, and we have to be much more strategic about it to make sure we don't regress anything during the process.
by littlestymaar | 2025-05-04 07:42:54+00:00
> the pigs appear entirely immune to more than 99% of the known versions of the PRRS virus, although there is one rare subtype that may break through the protection.

If there's already a variant of the virus that can overcome the edit, then without additional measures it will simply go from 1% of the case to 100% and the disease is going to be as prevalent as before and the benefit of the tech will be null after just a few years.

(Except that it will draw negative light on CRISPR-based gene editing , slowing down actual progress. That's the curse of GMO: companies making them for bad reasons and reducing collective trust in what is a very promising and important technology for long term food security)
by v9v | 2025-05-04 07:43:28+00:00
re: common lisp shines at low-level tasks like microcontroller programming

While I couldn't find an explicit declaration of this in the linked article, the tunnel system likely has something on the level of an SBC (think raspberry pi) rather than a microcontroller. Common Lisp makes it possible to do fun low-level assembly stuff but AFAIK none of the implementations can run on a microcontroller.

There's uLisp, which builds on Arduino's libraries but it isn't a Common Lisp implementation.

In terms of bare-metal CL implementations there is Movitz (stopped development) and Mezzano, but I don't think those can run on any microcontrollers.

There are also some libraries to convert CL to C, thinlisp and CLiCC, but these aren't actively maintained currently.

The possibility of porting Clozure CL to the RP2040 was discussed in the ccl mailing list last year, but I don't think anyone's working on it.
by lmm | 2025-05-04 07:44:40+00:00
Shrug. Your tracing tools need to understand your transport protocol (or you need to instrument all your endpoints), sure, but that's always been the case. Likewise with security. IME the stuff that's available for GraphQL isn't any worse than what's available for raw HTTPS and is often better since you have more information available (e.g. if you want to redact a particular object field from all your responses depending on the caller's authorisation, it's much easier to do that in GraphQL where that field only exists in one place than in a bunch of handwritten endpoints where you have to find every response that field might appear in).
by McGlockenshire | 2025-05-04 07:44:53+00:00
> it seems like the subquery is getting re-run on every single row of the task queue table

Y'all might find the term "correlated subquery" helpful here.

When I want them, I always get them. Sometimes I get them when I don't want them. Sometimes it's even my fault, not the result of the query planner looking at me sideways.
by bunnie | 2025-05-04 07:45:07+00:00
I got a tour of Prof. Bose's factory as a student while taking his course on acoustics. Active suspension is basically a speaker voice coil but scaled up and pushing a car wheel instead of a cone. A lot of the physics and perhaps more critically, the manufacturing processes, were shared between speakers and suspension as they implemented it. I actually got to sit in the car as it drove over bumps, it was pretty magical. iirc you could flip a switch and set a suspension profile that made it emulate other cars road feel as well. Years later I built a toy model of it using an actual speaker to make a pushbutton switch that could emulate the feel of a broad range of other switches.
by krisoft | 2025-05-04 07:45:17+00:00
> These are not trivial problems

My complaint is that it is not clear why you think what you describe is a problem. You describe that by the time the next image arrives the car traveled a certain distance. And that is correct. But you imply that it is a problem without spelling out why it is a problem in your opinion.

You seem to assume it is so trivial to understand that you don’t even need to spell out the problem. But it is not. Because i don’t know what is in your head I can’t argue with the details of it. I know that whatever you feel is a problem is not a problem in practice.

Definietly not a problem you would solve by having higher frame rate cameras. So what I’m seeing is that you are unclear on the problem and jumping at a non-solution. One which adds other complexities without actually solving anything for you. And that is a certified junior engineer behaviour.

> if this wasn't a problem, why would automotive grade cameras need to exist?

Automotive grade cameras are special in their supported temperature range (they won’t die if you leave them baking in the sun) and their physical and electrical intefaces being resilient to vibration and electrical interference. You can point your smartphone out the window of your car and see that it can record clear images.
by mettamage | 2025-05-04 07:45:27+00:00
That question got a downvote? I wonder why. It's a genuine question. Why can't good faith be assumed?

Edit: I get that people downvote this comment since it's always controversial to ask.

I personally always ask when I am more curious about the answer and am willing to burn any potential karma over it.

Asking for feedback is more important.

I'm just genuinely surprised about the other one.
by DemocracyFTW2 | 2025-05-04 07:46:36+00:00
The difference between "a line of JS" and a standardized declarative solution is of course that a meek "line of $turing_complete_language" can not, in the general case, be known and trusted to do what it purports to do, and nothing else; you've basically enabled any kind of computation, and any kind of behavior. With an include tag or attribute that's different; it's behavior is described by standards, and (except for knowing what content we might be pulling in) we can 100% tell the effects from static analysis, that is, without executing the code. With "a line of JS" the only way, in the general case, to know what it does is to run it (an infinite number of times). Also, because it's not standardized, it's much harder to save to disk, to index and to archive it.
Ask HN: My GCP Vertex AI Notebook achieved immortality. How do I kill it?
by _luiza_ | 2025-05-04 07:48:02+00:00
Paying ~$9/day for a Vertex AI Managed Notebook I can't connect to. Console UI fails to load instance details. Direct access gives <Error 400: invalid_request>.

I'm locked out while billing continues. Has anyone else hit this specific auth block on managed notebooks preventing management?

Short of waiting for Google Support (I'm on the pay-as-you-go model, therefore no human privileges) or assuming it's Multivac calculating The Last Question (reversing entropy might be worth $9/day).

Anyone fought this ghost in the machine?
by SansGuidon | 2025-05-04 07:49:03+00:00
As a former user of N8N the tool looked interesting to me but I ended up converting most of my use cases into shell scripts, python scripts executed by cron jobs, and into ci/cd jobs. It gave me more flexibility about the tech stack I need, and a greater ease of debugging and developing robust designed tools.

I guess N8N was not intuitive for simple things and seemed too complicated for me. I'm now happier with cron jobs/GitOps to manage my automations. On the other hand I also had to replace some IFTTT workflows with my own scripts.

More work for me but I gained quality and control.
by NoahZuniga | 2025-05-04 07:49:28+00:00
Maybe something that adds to this low demand is that: 1. Web pages that are developed from the viewpoint of the user having JS, makes it trivial to implement something that provides the same results. 2. Web pages that are developed for user agents that don't run js, probably want to have some interaction, so already have a server runtime that can provide this feature. 2b. And if it doesn't have any user interaction, its probably a static content site, and nobody is writing content in HTML, so there already is a build step that provides this feature.
by sparky_z | 2025-05-04 07:50:06+00:00
From the article...

"William Peppé handed the gems, relics and reliquaries to the colonial Indian government: the bone relics went to the Buddhist King of Siam (Rama V). Five relic urns, a stone chest and most other relics were sent to the Indian Museum in Kolkata - then the Imperial Museum of Calcutta.

Only a small "portion of duplicates", which he was allowed to keep, remained in the Peppé family, he notes. (Sotheby's notes say Peppé was allowed to keep approximately one-fifth of the discovery.)

Sources told the BBC the auction house considers the "duplicates" to be original items considered surplus to those donated, which the "Indian government permitted Peppé to retain". "

If this is true, it doesn't sound "clearly stolen" to me. Frankly, if there was serious reason to doubt that story, I would have expected the article to quote somebody willing to say so, rather than just expressing vague unease and general hand-wringing about the optics of the situation.
by perihelions | 2025-05-04 07:52:08+00:00
Previous threads,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22176261 ("Harvard scientist is arrested, accused of lying about ties to China (npr.org)" (2020) — 200 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29550410 ("Former Harvard chemistry chair to stand trial for allegedly hiding ties to China (wgbh.org)" (2021) — 194 comments)
by acyou | 2025-05-04 07:56:01+00:00
Well, existing taxes are for very specific and well delineated purposes. We can re-name the fees we pay to access the standard to "Standards User Tax", and it gets collected when you want to access the standard. Obviously, we wouldn't want a vague general tax to cover a wide variety of general purposes, we want to keep things as specific as possible.

Is it that the taxes are already high enough, and we feel that the existing tax base should also cover the cost of standards development, maintenance and distribution? By what mechanism would individual government bodies levying taxes direct the appropriate funds to standards related activities?

If you think that the regulatory and building code system isn't working and want to act to change the status quo, you should travel to other jurisdictions that don't have a robust system of standards. Then it would become abundantly clear that standards development and adherence is expensive and worth every penny.

Yes, a guild system, it's called the building trades, we have this where I live and it works pretty well.

As for secret laws, well, welcome to the western world. No one ever told us what all of the laws are that we're expected to follow. We are never issued a little book. We are expected to learn, read, ask, and pay for resources required in order to live as functioning members of society. There are other things we have to pay for. Clothes, for instance, are not issued for free by the government, but wearing them is a legal requirement in many jurisdictions. Do we consider that governments should provide those for free?
by pvtmert | 2025-05-04 07:56:43+00:00
I use the GitHub pages for that. Though hopping through various CMS or static-site-generators (like, Hugo, Jekyll, etc), I settled on a fully static and custom system, works with Javascript.

I think same could also be achieved via React, but I did not want any `npm install` hence, I used some JS libraries like marked and markdown.js directly at the frontend. (Added as git submodules)

I also sort-of liked how a dependency management mechanism could be built directly on top of the git submodules, without requiring an explicit package manager. Given the commits cloned are already pinned and committed to the repository. Though, the tooling is not as good as the well-established dependency management software like Maven, NPM, PIP, etc.

Nevertheless, it worked well for a basic blog, I publish the articles directly in markdown format, embedding some HTML if necessary. In fact, all the pages are some sort of markdown, rendered to HTML upon loading. But of course, the URLs are not "real", I use the query string to refer to the pages, such as `mert.akeng.in/?/blog`, the JS fetches `/blog.md` and renders it to the `<main>` element. Much like how you would initialize React through/within JS.
by tim333 | 2025-05-04 07:57:08+00:00
Building models can help you understand things. Maybe not so much submarines but building model aircraft and studying aerodynamics definitely helps understand how birds fly.

Artificial neural networks are already helping some understanding of brains for example there was a lot of debate about "universal grammar":

>humans possess an innate, biological predisposition for language acquisition, including a "Language Acquisition Device"...

and it now seems to be demonstrated that LLM like neural networks are quite good at picking up language without an 'acquisition device' beyond the general network.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-05-04 07:58:21+00:00
> Upwards of 90% ... of software should not exist ... it has not meaningfully contributed back to the enterprise

This is Sturgeon's law. (1)

And yes, but it's hard or impossible to identify the useful 10% ahead of time. It emerges after the fact.

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
by impulsivepuppet | 2025-05-04 07:58:35+00:00
Since I don't often write raw SQL, I can only assume the author named their CTE `deleted_tasks` to elucidate that the query might delete multiple items. Otherwise, it makes little sense, for they intended to "pop" a single row, and yet their aptly named `deleted_tasks` ended up removing more than one!

The query reads to me like a conceptual mish-mash. Without understanding what the innermost `SELECT` was meant to accomplish, I'd naturally interpret the `WHERE id IN (...)` as operating on a set. But the most sacrilegious aspect is the inclusion of `FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED`. It assumes a very specific execution order that the query syntax doesn't actually enforce.

Am I right to think that not avoiding lock contention, i.e. omitting `SKIP LOCKED` would have actually produced the intended result?
by _luiza_ | 2025-05-04 07:59:16+00:00
The "choice" to be homeless sort of confuses adaptation with preference. People don't _choose_ trauma responses; brains develop survival mechanisms that self-reinforce when lacking intervention.

Complex problems require layered solutions, but difficulty is not equal to impossibility. Also, not trying kinda makes us a tiny bit more evil.

Homelessness is tractable when we understand that basic/fundamental needs precede behavior change ^^
by dist-epoch | 2025-05-04 07:59:39+00:00
> Abject failure on a task that many adults could solve in a minute

Maybe author should check before pressing "Publish" if the info in the post is not already outdated.

ChatGPT passed the image generation test mentioned: https://chatgpt.com/share/68171e2a-5334-8006-8d6e-dd693f2cec...
by Izkata | 2025-05-04 08:02:13+00:00
Unions had early wins that mostly either didn't go anywhere, or the companies worked around. The real win that normalized it was for capitalistic reasons, when Henry Ford shortened the workday/week because he wanted his workers to buy (and have reason to buy) his cars. Combined with other changes, he figured he'd retain workers better and reduce mistakes from fatigue, and when he remained competitive others followed suit.
by Thorrez | 2025-05-04 08:02:42+00:00
>Drafted for the first time on 17 June 1940, Jägerstätter, aged 33, was again conscripted into the German Wehrmacht in October and completed his training at the Enns garrison.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_J%C3%A4gerst%C3%A4tter

That kind of sounds like he was a soldier to me. Or trained to be one.
by padolsey | 2025-05-04 08:03:04+00:00
I wonder if it's just our egos talking, telling us that for something to have value within this technical sphere it has to be complex and 'hard won'?

I see this agent stuff as a pretty basic agreement wrapped up in the vernacular of a protocol, i.e. "we'll put this stuff in the 'role' prop on our JSON", and then everyone else knows where to look for it. It's not especially important what we decide, as long as we create shared expectations.

I used to think protocols and RFCs and other products of standards bodies were the juicy 'big boy table' of tech, but then I realised: ok, it's not so complex–and perhaps doesn't itch my engineering itch–, but SOMEONE needs to take responsibility for deciding the protocol, otherwise it's just a bunch of randoms making up interfaces 1:1 with other parties and no useful tooling emerging for a long time. Best to beat it to the punch and just figure out a 'good enough' approach so we can all get on and make cool stuff.

Addendum: I will say, however, that the AI space has a particularly unhealthy attraction to naming, coining, forming myriad acronyms and otherwise confusing what should be a very simple thing by wrapping it up in a whitepaper and saying LOOK MA LOOK!
by samke- | 2025-05-04 08:03:52+00:00
SEEKING WORK | Serbia (Europe) | Remote (any time zone)

Frontend developer/Design engineer

I design and code immersive user interfaces, bringing ideas to life.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: HTML, CSS, SASS, Tailwind, Javascript, Typescript, React, NextJS, Astro, Supabase, Firebase, NodeJS, Figma, Photoshop

- Personal site: https://samke.me - Github: https://github.com/ekmas - Email: samuelbreznjak35@gmail.com
by ronnieboy493 | 2025-05-04 08:04:07+00:00
Not a direct cause but popped into my head:

Previous to 1988 the League of Women Voters[0] handled presidential debates. A fully independent outside organization.

Since then, the Commission on Presidential Debates[1] set rules for admittance to president debates. The CPD was founded jointly by Republicans and Democrats and is controlled solely by both parties.

At best, there _appears_ to be a large, gaping conflict of interest when it comes to admitting candidates to presidential debates. In 1992 Ross Perot was invited to the debates as a third option. In 1996 Clinton and Dole successfully argued for Perot to be excluded from the debates as he had no "realistic chance to win" [2]. Perot aside, what happened was downright anti-democratic and further enforced the two party system.

Now that I'm on this...I'll do another example of this abuse of power. Candidates from third parties have been arrested for protesting outside presidential debates [3,4]. Even if the protests broke the law, arresting opponents for asking to be given a podium to speak at feels bad.

---

[0] https://www.lwv.org

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Deb...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/18/p...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/oct/18/jill-s...

[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3740146.stm
by EGreg | 2025-05-04 08:06:18+00:00
How about Xanadu LOL

The Web was freely available, while Gopher was licensed, making it less accessible and competitive

As usual, open beats closed! TimBL actually is on video discussing how CERN didnt care to make money off the protocol, and it was lucky that they let it be freeee.

https://youtu.be/GU6fWHHu6Es?si=gCgEQFyvwAZjKmZ9