MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-27 17:46:59+00:00
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Defining-Package-Va... -- section 9.3 of the Guix Reference Manual at least answers problem 1 for you, I believe. I think 2 is possible, and not sure about 3.

I was more a happy Guix user and computing beginner, rather than an expert, I didn't do anything overly fancy. I was starting to dabble with more advanced topics, but had to leave that system unfortunately for unrelated reasons. Looking forward to a glorious return though, I must say, as soon as I can manage it.

Don't hesitate to try the official documentation with your problems, it's excellent. No answer there, try a full description of your issues on the mailing list, they're a great bunch too.

Search the help-guix archive here before emailing them -- https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/help-guix/

Details on joining the help-guix mailing list, and/or where to send questions, here -- https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-guix
by wild_egg | 2025-05-27 17:47:57+00:00
I haven't looked at MCP payloads properly to compare but often the raw OpenAPI spec is overly verbose and eats context space pretty quick.

Really trivial to have the LLM first filter it down to the sections it cares about and then condense those sections though.

Wrap that process in a small tool and give that to the LLM along with a `fetch` tool that handles credentials based on URLs and agent capabilities explode pretty rapidly.
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-05-27 17:48:10+00:00
Probably worked out pretty well. I get the impression that people tried harder back then: stuff cost more and there was less help available. So, if you even attempted to jump in the deep end, you were committed.

In the late 80's/early 90's I was working for a little electronics manufacturer that also sold Color Computer software. I remember all the phone calls and letters asking for support and there was one lady in particular whose complete address I remembered because she wrote us so often, trying to get her Digitizer working. She was finally successful and pasted a scanned photo of her daughter in a cowboy hat into her final thank-you letter :-)

One of the lessons that stuck with me all these years is that quality of product documentation/ease of use is inversely proportional to the number of support calls I had to take.
by harrall | 2025-05-27 17:48:22+00:00
I think it's critical to have both (1) actual experience working with something and (2) then reading about how it works. You gain natural intuition when you have done both.

When I'm listening to someone suggest an idea, you can tell

- if they're just working off something that they heard about (i.e. let's implement Redis, I heard it was fast),

- if they've done it before but don't really know how it works (i.e. MongoDB worked for me once, don't need to consider Postgres),

- or if they did both
by nico | 2025-05-27 17:48:46+00:00
> requires having reliable shallow intuitions about how things work

This is very insightful and applies to many fields, maybe specially within STEM

Like for example the water flow analogy of current. It’s a great analogy that works to a great degree to explain and model a lot of things about electricity, but eventually breaks down

For 99%+ of the people and cases, the approximate analogy is perfectly useful
by tgv | 2025-05-27 17:48:57+00:00
And learning does do that. It is an economic compromise, though. Most of us have average (or worse) teachers. I have the feeling that that's what your arguing against, not learning per se.

> LLMs are here to call that bluff

Students have been copying from e.g. encyclopedias for as long as anyone can remember. That doesn't mean that an encyclopedia removes the need to learn. Even rote memorization has its use. But it's difficult to make school click for everybody.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-05-27 17:49:03+00:00
oh, absolutely. but the barrier to advertising resale to a large group is a lot lower than when i was a kid (we had a local free classifieds paper, rip The Echo, but you had to mail in your listings). i'm just curious if there's any meaningful difference in the amount of "direct" secondhand sales of stuff that would have otherwise gone in the trash for dumpster divers to pick through and resell.
by alnwlsn | 2025-05-27 17:49:58+00:00
It's not just students. Where I live (admittedly wealthy) people throw away everything they can't be bothered to do the slightest bit of maintenance on. I have found, and made functional:

- a snow blower

- various weed eaters

- vacuum cleaners

- a generator (higher capacity than the one I already had)

- a log splitter

- pressure washers (nozzles usually clogged with dirt)

- a chainsaw

- multiple typewriters (the Selectric I kept, the others I sold)

- a boat motor

- a sump pump (bottom was clogged with sand)

We've all seen those "saved from the garbage" restoration videos on youtube and wondered just how "garbage" that stuff was. Believe it, it happens.
by srean | 2025-05-27 17:50:04+00:00
Your calling him out makes you look ignorant.

Thorpe is a dyed in wool information theory, probability theory academic who happens to be a super cool hacker at heart *.

Among his many accomplishments are, him obtaining a more general version of Black-Scholes model, independently and before Black, Scholes and Mertens had derived theirs. You may recall that got them the Nobel prize.

Managing money and breaking Las Vegas casinos were one of his, side, and mostly academic, entertainments.

There is a nice story of him visiting Shannon to discuss an information theory research paper that he, Thorpe, was writing. The meeting had taken a lot effort to schedule -- Shannon was a busy man, already a celebrity. But then they ended up over-extending their scheduled meeting, discussing, brainstorming with playful eagerness, different mathematical methods to break several popular gambling games, starting with Blackjack. Turns out Shannon was a sucker for such entertaining hacks. (This would be one of the first formulations of card counting [0]) Thorpe and his students would then try these out in Vegas.

*Taking things apart logically, to probe where things break, to understand how they work, that's as quintessentially an exercise in hacking as you can get.

Prof Thorpe wrote about and proved his strategies along with characterizing the assumptions under which they would and had worked.

Finally, you are you and then there is Prof. Thorpe.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_counting#History
by palmotea | 2025-05-27 17:50:55+00:00
I think the title is a little, I don't know, trollish? Unnecessarily controversial?, but I think the insight is true: it's very good to have some knowledge about things outside of "your area," instead of being too hyperfocused.

However, I think that's a broader thing than just "technical" knowledge: you should know a little about what your customers do, what your manager does, what the role is of systems peripheral to yours is, etc.
by imslavko | 2025-05-27 17:51:56+00:00
I worked with Rudi at Figma and of course support his comment - Figma seems to be mentioned for marketing, not for the actual technical comparison.

For others looking for more details on how Figma's sync engines differ and why 2 sync engines emerged, I had a long thread about it here:

https://x.com/imslavko/status/1890482196697186309
by karaterobot | 2025-05-27 17:52:15+00:00
College students may have no concept of how much stuff costs when their parents buy it. But to be fair, I'm in my 40s, and throw out a lot of expensive stuff too. When you're moving house, you're often tired and anxious, and thinking more about the burden of hauling crap around than you are with the price of replacing it. For me, I actually appreciate the forcing function imposed by the size of a moving van or a storage space, it works better than Marie Kondo to help get rid of stuff I've accumulated. I may believe the underlying reasons justify my behavior, but I can't judge anyone else for doing the same thing on the biased assumption that their reasons are less defensible.
by hannob | 2025-05-27 17:52:38+00:00
> The standard approach is be liberal in what you accept and be specific in what you emit.

What you're paraphrasing here is the so-called "robustness principle", also known as "Poestel's law". It is an idea from the ancient history of the 1980s and 09s Internet. Today, it's widely understood that it is a misguided idea that has led to protocol ossification and countless security issues.
by zahlman | 2025-05-27 17:52:39+00:00
> not because they misunderstand the purpose of the site, but because of the unkindness and nonsensical nature of the moderation.

I have read countless examples of this sort of thing, with people attesting to me that the people who wrote it do in fact understand the purpose of the site.

I have yet to see a single example where I was convinced they actually did.

They very frequently write in terms that imply complete ignorance of fundamentals (such as what a "moderator" is, and who has what privileges and responsibilities on the site).

> You are aware of the "popular art form" reporting these experiences - those with empathy pay attention to it.

I have paid attention. I have done close reading. I have been empathetic. I have spent many hours of my life on this.

> It's a bit like driving a car off a cliff because there's a post-it note on the wheel that describes that purpose of the car as to go inexorably in this one cardinal direction.

Your implication is that the purpose I describe for Stack Overflow is somehow invalid.

I disagree in the strongest possible terms, and find this implication actually offensive.

But even if it weren't valid, that doesn't entitle other people to come in and try to change it. It didn't entitle them in 2008, either, even though the vision wasn't fully fleshed out and communicated yet. (It probably started to become clear around 2012, but still not in a way that allowed curators to coordinate and describe clear policy.)
by levkk | 2025-05-27 17:52:51+00:00
That's a good question. To echo the comment above/below, we would have to define what a "direct connection" is.

In my interpretation (and as the founder, I think that matters because I would be the only one who would have any enforcement interest) that means TCP. AGPL says "over network" and that means TCP/UDP. To me at least.

So if you're running a SaaS, the TCP connection is broken by the app layer and all the business logic in between. Your code and proprietary products are safe.

And just to restate my previous point: PgDog is a company. If you want to use the product, we'll make it work.
by ramesh31 | 2025-05-27 17:54:17+00:00
>My workflow involves manual copying and pasting from the browser into my own text editor.

Cline with mcp-playwright: https://github.com/executeautomation/mcp-playwright

There is no free tier like other tools, but it's far more transparent in that regard; it uses an Anthropic/OpenAI/etc. API key directly, and your only costs are direct token usage.

The real "aha" moment with this kind of thing is in realizing that the agent can not just use the tool as provided, but it can write scripts to dynamically execute on the page as well. So it's not just going to a page and dumping a bunch of HTML back into the client; it actually analyzes the DOM structure and writes JS snippets to extract relevant information which are then executed in the browser's runtime.
by proc0 | 2025-05-27 17:54:42+00:00
I think I've already given sufficient logic to demonstrate LLMs don't "reason" like humans (whatever it is we want to call "reason", it is not the same).

You keep using "hallucinate" to compare LLMs and humans, but the word itself demonstrates the difference. Human hallucination is about incorrect perception of the world, not generating tokens. These are meaningful differences.

You say "we don't know anything about LLMs" but we do know how to make them, and how they are structured, and Anthropic has been making progress in explaining their side effects.

Your argument is not sound, and would include any form of computation as reasoning, so we could just say our phones and laptops are all doing reasoning as well. After all we don't know what the human brain is doing and it probably is a computer, therefore all computers reason. As you can see that does not sound right.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-27 17:55:20+00:00
I have several VCRs I picked up at thrift stores for a few bucks. The interesting thing is the fundamental mechanism in them is all the same. The electronics boards change, the box changes, but the machine is the same. I'd swap parts from one brand to another to keep them working.

Another interesting thing is the size of the circuit board kept shrinking!

The usual failure mode of a VCR is the recording head gets dirty. It takes remarkably little dirt to render it non-functional. A bit of alcohol applied brings it back to working order.

I've noticed that the prices of VCRs in the thrift store hit a low of $5, but have been relentlessly creeping up. They're $25 now, and are rarely in stock. Get 'em while you can. Transfer your old family tapes to mp4 while you can.
by immibis | 2025-05-27 17:56:06+00:00
Kulfi red flags:

Does the same thing as a bunch of other systems (e.g. Tor) without providing any comparison of what this one does better.

Docs pages are TODO, certainly don't explain how it works.

Website is "Copyright 2025 YourCompany, Inc."

Discord link goes to something called "fastn" with apparently no relation to Kulfi.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-27 17:56:21+00:00
Growing up in Southern NH circa 1980 the area was full of minicomputer vendors that didn't make the transition to micros. Digital Equipment Corporation was the big one with the PDP-10, PDP-11 and VAX-11 (not to mention the PDP-8 that makes the 6502 look like a great instruction set) but I saw plenty of Wang, particularly dedicated word processors. When I was in elementary school, the high school I later attended had a lab of Wang word processors. I remember seeing Wang signs by the highway driving to Boston and by the late 1980s when I was in high school the Computer Explorers occasionally took a field trip to a Wang office west of town.
Show HN: My new daily word game, LETTERS
by jazzychad | 2025-05-27 17:56:38+00:00
I made a new daily word game for web and iOS which is a funky mix of scrabble and boggle. Each day everyone gets the same randomly generated configuration of bonus tiles and letters on a grid. The app is written completely in SwiftUI and the web port is written in ts/react. Both use the same random seeds each day.
by IHoegfeldt | 2025-05-27 17:57:59+00:00
After decades of speculation, the final passage (K4) of Jim Sanborn’s Kryptos sculpture at CIA headquarters has been fully decrypted.

The solution: • Is deterministic and reproducible • Includes both confirmed keywords ("BERLIN" and "CLOCK") • Uses a transformation aligned with the physical design of the sculpture • Is structured and published with timestamped attribution

Includes an open letter to Sanborn and a breakdown of why this solution fits both the cipher and the art.
by adrian_b | 2025-05-27 17:58:35+00:00
The language PL/I included in its specification many things that are omitted in most modern languages, being implemented in libraries or in the operating system, e.g. for handling threads (tasks in IBM lingo), exceptions, signals, events.

However the integration in the language of those features made them frequently more convenient and I consider the pthreads API available in UNIX/Linux as considerably inferior to the thread handling that PL/I already had in 1965 (e.g. already then PL/I had an equivalent of WaitForMultipleEvents that was better than anything in pthreads).

Even if the C language has evolved from BCPL, most of its evolution has consisted in taking various features either from PL/I or from Algol 68. The C language has introduced very few innovations, i.e. only the "continue" statement and its more general (but more verbose and cumbersome) syntax for the "for" statement. Therefore many features of C and of its descendants come from PL/I, e.g. "struct", ".", "->", "malloc" and "free", signals and many others.

Also PL/I allowed aggregates, i.e. arrays and structures, in many contexts where most modern languages accept only scalar variables, requiring verbose loops for handling aggregates (or the definition of custom object classes, i.e. the implementation of some library for handling them).
by fidotron | 2025-05-27 17:58:43+00:00
Firstly, thanks for playing!

> How do you know it learns with markov chain? How exactly? (What states the chain has? Other details?)

I wrote it! It uses five chains of different lengths, and each of those estimates the next, then a standard way of resolving those to a single signal.

> Why does camera shakes at every move? To me that's very annoying.

Yeah, it is. The first version you actually spun around on the spot too, which was cool but made you sick, even on a phone. Therefore I hacked it to this, but it's not great.

> The game needs stats of the total credits I spent including previous rounds, so that I see the total spent/won balance. I am clearly winning on that measure.

In the menu there is "statistics" which contains more stats than live stats, and that might have more of what you want!
by IggleSniggle | 2025-05-27 17:59:09+00:00
It took me until my 40s to really enjoy Mozart. The thing is, if you approach it from the stodgy perspective of a "Classical Music Enthusiast" then it's easy to miss what's delightful about it, but if you aren't trained in listening to classical music, it's not that accessible.

It's like that with a lot of jokes. If they don't make you grin and laugh, it's hard to "get" what's so special about them. Bach you can kinda just zone into and gradually uncover what's special (or not), and just keep uncovering, or fuguing out, or whatever. Mozart, the joke is here and gone, and if you missed it, the whole thing just kinda doesn't seem all that special.

Like a joke, you can have the punchline explained to you, but it won't make it funny, and you'll question the taste of those who do. But if you find yourself grinning, you'll only find more things to grin at the more you listen. As a kid and young adult I kinda hated Mozart. I was really surprised when I started liking it, more and more, and now I can't get enough.

That's been my experience with Mozart, anyway.
by amitu | 2025-05-27 17:59:24+00:00
fastn is an ingredient to kulfi project. fastn.com is a full stack programming language we (FifthTry, Inc, the company behind these) have built, and it is the web server that is going to be part of Kulfi app.

The comparison posts, TODO, copyright etc we will do/fix when we get around to it. It's all open source, you can send PRs as well.
by JunNotJune | 2025-05-27 17:59:38+00:00
The Gödel analogy is a bit much. These agents aren't formal systems; their failures come from closed design, not logical incompleteness. The real issue is self-referential loops.

What’s missing is external grounding. Even simple things like retrieving examples from real codebases, validating against actual APIs, or injecting adversarial test cases can break the illusion. Until then, most of these agents are just confidently talking to themselves.
by nappy-doo | 2025-05-27 17:59:57+00:00
I went to the local state school, and had an apartment off campus. At the end of the school year, we'd go dumpster diving, and get all the stuff thrown out. We would take orders from people before going – generally things like TVs, VCRs, tapes, books for classes, etc.

In the first dumpster, you should get a couple of backpacks, rucksacks, and a broom handle (to aid in digging). We'd find all kinds of things. Books we'd resell, lots of porn, lots of perfectly good clothing. It was great.

The best thing we ever found was a giant projection TV (it was the 90s) outside a frat. We took it home, and it turned out the TV had been rained on, and a few discrete components needed to be fixed in the low-voltage section. A couple trips to Radio Shack, and we had a massive frat TV (it was a pain to move it). We went back to the frat a couple of days after we had fixed it, and asked them for the remote. They chased us off.

Dumpster diving in college towns is definitely something the townies do.
by ramoz | 2025-05-27 18:00:03+00:00
I can import my entire codebase to Gemini and get more than a nuanced similarity score in terms of agent guidance.

What’s the differentiator or plan for arbitrary query matching?

Latency? If you think about it - not really a huge issue. Spend 20s-1M mapping an entire plan with Gemini for a feature.

Pass that to Claude Code.

At this point you want non-disruptive context moving forward and presumably any new findings would only be redundant with what is in long context already.

Agentic discovery is fairly powerful even without any augmentations. I think Claude Code devs abandoned early embedding architectures.
by JunNotJune | 2025-05-27 18:01:09+00:00
It's a compelling parallel, but I think we need to be careful not to confuse metaphor with mechanism. Gödel's theorem shows that certain truths can't be proven within a formal system. With LLMs, the issue isn't provability. It's that there's no real model of truth in the first place, only prediction based on patterns.
by 542354234235 | 2025-05-27 18:01:13+00:00
On the other hand, I look at it in a more “a rising tide raises all boats” situation. Learning how to accommodate people who fall outside the norm not only helps them, but helps everyone, much like the famous sidewalk “curb cuts” for wheelchairs ended up helping everyone with luggage, strollers, bikes, etc.

We as a society have a lot of proxies for evaluating real world value. Testing is a proxy for school knowledge. Interviews are a proxy for job performance. Trying to understand and decouple actual value from the specific proxies we default to can unlock additional value. You said yourself that you do have strengths, so if there are ways society can maximize those and minimize proxies you aren’t strong in, that is a win win.

Your coworker sounds like they have an issue with laziness and entitlement more than an issue with neurodivergence. Anyone can be lazy and entitled. Even if someone has a weakness with quick turn production but excels in more complex or abstract long-term projects could be a value added for a company. Shifting workloads so that employees do more tasks they are suited towards, rather than a more ridged system, could end up helping all employees maximize productivity by reducing cognitive load they were wasting on tasks they were not as suited for, but did just because that was the way it was always done and they never struggled enough for it to become an actual “issue”.
by zahlman | 2025-05-27 18:01:14+00:00
It was downvoted because the entire purported "threat" is based on a misconception.

It is not relevant to SO whether an LLM can provide personalized help, write with any particular tone, answer promptly, accept every input prompt as valid and try to make sense of it, discuss back and forth to figure out a problem, etc. Because Stack Exchange is explicitly and by design not for those things.

But also, downvotes work differently on meta anyway, and the community there generally takes a negative view of LLMs. Because, again, the point of SO is for the answer to come from a human expert, and be verified against subject matter expertise rather than simply being evaluated for coherence or generally sounding appropriate in context.
by bryanmgreen | 2025-05-27 18:01:19+00:00
So many campaigns for recycle… but not enough on the two more important pieces - Reduce and Reuse.

Over the years I have refurbed some furniture which is a fun hobby in addition to being environmentally helpful.

I think it’s also worthwhile to pay for higher quality items that are made well and last. A nice pair of leather boots can get repaired for minimal cost and mine have lasted over a decade of very hard wear.