MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by levi0saur | 2025-05-28 12:25:23+00:00
> At work I need to drive two 4K displays at 60Hz and I don't think there are many motherboards that will do that with onboard graphics

MSI has such motherboards in their PRO range, the UEFI allows you to set the primary GPU. The otherwise anemic Intel UHD 770 graphics are able to drive two 4K monitors (144 and 60Hz, DP and HDMI respectively) quite smoothly.

Besides that, performance and idle power consumption, the onboard NIC and wireless should also be taken into consideration. Intel's are pretty well supported across operating systems, and were the deciding factor in my case.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-05-28 12:26:17+00:00
No, you’re right.

Ultimately, after large-scale technological innovation that leads to societal change like worker displacement (like happened after agricultural innovations displaced farm workers in the American South, or manufacturing innovations displaced American factory workers, or unemployment during the Great Depression) you end up with societal unrest (like organized protest and political action) that leads to increased societal safety nets and welfare benefits… temporarily and if the unrest is big enough.

But eventually, as markets adjust and other types of employment opportunities pop up or as the capital class gets annoyed at rising labor costs, the welfare roles contract to encourage people back into the workforce (in American society, I’m talking about. I’m not sure how other countries handle this.)

There’s a thorough and well-researched (though very dense) book called Regulating the Poor if you want to see more along those lines.

But job retraining tends not to have much of an effect.
by paradite | 2025-05-28 12:26:20+00:00
You have biased view on the definition of "concept" based on English language and logic.

In Chinese language, concept is 概念.

In Chinese language, happy dog is 快乐的狗.

Notice it has an extra "的" that is missing in English language. This tells you that you can't just treat English grammar and structure as the formal definition of "concept". Some languages do not have words for happiness, or dog. But that doesn't mean the concept of happiness or dog does not exist.

The reverse is also true, you can't claim a concept does not exist if it does not exist in English language. Concept is something beyond any particular language or logical construct or notations that you invent.
by dotancohen | 2025-05-28 12:26:22+00:00
The idea is that once I have my CDs ripped to flac, I could run an encoder to MP3 for e.g. listening in my Tesla. But I don't know if the settings that work best for Dark Side of the Moon are going to be good for Rust in Peace. If there were some automated tool review hours and hours of audio, finding the discrepancies, that would save me a lot of time and provide me much enjoyment listening.
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-05-28 12:27:25+00:00
I agree with your main point, and almost as if to nitpick: more and more output (specifically in the context of LLM-produced code) is paradoxical to economies of scale, precisely because LLMs make too many mistakes at scale. So then we necessarily have to limit their use to relatively simple and mundane tasks. That is, of course, still valuable in itself, but history teaches us that there _will_ be a mass movement to building large, complex, risky products using LLMs.

I don't believe that that's something that we can stop. Somehow, I feel like the popularization of LLMs is a force of natural selection where those who are smart enough to keep training their minds will find themselves more financially secure than those who don't, and therefore more likely to survive.
by gwbas1c | 2025-05-28 12:27:29+00:00
> CheerpJ can run existing, full Java applications from unmodified JARs, with no recompilation or pre-processing, straight from bytecode.

I'm kind of curious what limitations happen with networking?

As far as I know, there's no way to do direct socket / network IO in WASM. (IE, you need to use the fetch API.) Likewise, what if a jar uses HTTP, but uses an HTTP library that uses sockets?
by conartist6 | 2025-05-28 12:27:34+00:00
WRONG lol.

First you're assuming a brand new conversation: no context. Second you're assuming a local-first LLM because a remote one could change behavior at any time. Third, the way the input is expressed is inexact, so minor differences in input can have an effect. Fourth, if the data to be operated on has changed you will be using new parts of the model that were never previously used.

But I understand how nuance is not as exciting as using the word WRONG in all caps.
by mousetree | 2025-05-28 12:31:17+00:00
This looks great - congrats. Would I be able to build an internal "Chat with your code" type product? I'm looking at the "code reranker" api docs and they require a list of files including the code itself. This would probably be infeasible to send all our code just to get relevancy. Are there any local ways of reducing the list of files and code we send?

We're using Github Copilot chat (the interface hosted at https://github.com/copilot) for this purpose today but I'm curious how one would build such a thing ourselves.
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-28 12:31:17+00:00
> a paper you cited.

> You've attributed a causal claim

> your sources

> your argument

> what you present yourself able knowledgeably to discuss.

No, no, no, nope and no. None of these accusations are correct. Feel free to embarrass yourself with lacking basic reading and quoting comprehension; I am not the author of the Dynomight article.
by xtiansimon | 2025-05-28 12:31:57+00:00
> “craftsmanship cosplay”

Nice slap down.

Aaaa. I’d like to see stats over the comments—if management role, job history, age, income, education—and I’d expect opinions would be revealed as archetypical. In other words, it says more about the speaker than it says about successful software development.

Clearly the OP is talking about what works for them mentally—focus, creativity.

It’s a mistake for anyone to read a post like this and think of it (and the criticism) as prescriptive. Emulating any of the patterns would have the same result of cargo cult behavior.
by mihau | 2025-05-28 12:32:18+00:00
Hi Simon!

I'm a heavy user of the llm tool, so as soon as I saw your post, I started tinkering with MCP.

I’ve just published an alpha version that works with stdio-based MCP servers (tested with @modelcontextprotocol/server-filesystem) - https://github.com/Virtuslab/llm-tools-mcp. Very early stage, so please make sure to use with --ta option (Manually approve every tool execution).

The code is still messy and there are a couple of TODOs in the README.md, but I plan to work on it full-time until the end of the week.

Some questions:

Where do you think mcp.json should be stored? Also, it might be a bit inconvenient to specify tools one by one with -T. Do you think adding a --all-tools flag or supporting glob patterns like -T name-prefix* in llm would be a good idea?
by mystraline | 2025-05-28 12:32:20+00:00
> This is the idealistic take. What's your practical take for moving hundreds of thousands if not millions of people from truck driving jobs to higher complexity tasks?

There isn't one, and there won't be one in the USA for the foreseeable future.

This country's people and majority governments have no issue in throwing people away, with no backup or contingency plans. Sector falls over? Too bad, go back to school (and spend MORE money), or live under a bridge.

But when a company sector falls over, they get government subsidies to tide them over till they create the next fallout.

And this isn't just a 'hate on republicans' or 'hate on democrats' thing. All elected parties share this attribute. R's just remove programs, and D's just means-test them to hell and back... But only for the individuals. Companies get free money (PPP), and have it forgiven.

Its unabashed capitalism for the populace, and socialism for the companies. And that absolutely means that people removed from trucking jobs will have absolutely nowhere to turn, unless they make their exit plan themselves.
by ramraj07 | 2025-05-28 12:32:44+00:00
Stupid is okay. _Nonsense_ is not. Your example was nonsense, it was absurd. The moment I saw the first example I was like, this should be add_ints and should only take ints.

Imagine I say "the human body is dumb! Here's an example: if I stab myself, it bleeds!" Like is that stupid or absurd?
by tremon | 2025-05-28 12:32:55+00:00
The last place anyone expected this to happen is America

I don't really understand this. In my circles, I have heard people warning about the direction that the US was heading in since the 90s. The US government has been working for We, The Corporations instead of the people for decades (Bayh-Dole, repealing Glass-Steagal*, zero repercussions for the subprime mortgage crisis). The militarization of police forces didn't happen overnight either, and neither did the anti-intellectual bias in US corporate media (for example, I remember when Sarah Palin was hyped up as a viable presidential candidate).

So no, from my point of view none of this is unexpected nor unforeseen. The only thing that could have surprised some people was the timing (directly after Obama), but the direction was communicated loudly.

* sidenote: the Glass-Steagal act was enacted just a few years after the 1929 stock market crash which caused the Great Depression; and within ten years of repealing it, we got hit with the largest financial crisis since 1929. Lessons were unlearned and not learnt again.
by klabb3 | 2025-05-28 12:33:05+00:00
Also worth mentioning that tools have stable output. An LLM is not a tool in that sense – it’s not reproducible. Changing the model, retraining, input phrasing etc can change dramatically the output.

The best tools are transparent. They are efficient, fast and reliable, yes, but they’re also honest about what they do! You can do everything manually if you want, no magic, no hidden internal state, and with internal parts that can be broken up and tested in isolation.

With LLMs even the simple act of comparing them side by side (to decide which to use) is probabilistic and ultimately based partly on feelings. Perhaps it comes with the territory, but this makes me extremely reluctant to integrate it into engineering workflows. Even if they had amazing abilities, they lower the bar significantly from a process perspective.
by apignotti | 2025-05-28 12:33:06+00:00
CheerpJ does out-of-the-box support HTTP/HTTPS requests using fetch when the application uses the standard Java UrlConnection APIs. Of course the requests must be to the same domain (which a common case) or to a domain which is CORS enabled, since CheerpJ is subject to the same limitations as any other JavaScript library.

For more general cases our Tailscale integration is required. For more information see: https://cheerpj.com/docs/guides/Networking
by isleyaardvark | 2025-05-28 12:34:35+00:00
The problem with that is you lose the localtime information, which you may want. Say you have recorded the localtime with the known UTC offset of 0, and that localtime is midnight UTC. Now you want to map it back to a localtime in the past. Ok, which localtime? Was it 8pm in NYC? Or was it 5pm in LA? Is the assumption that the localtime is wherever the user is right now, and is that a valid assumption? If the user has traveled to a different timezone, the time is now being converted to a localtime in the past that is different than it actually was when it happened.

edit: another commenter shared this link with an example: https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a...

I like their "Principle of preserving supplied data".
by sfmz | 2025-05-28 12:34:39+00:00
I had a prompt for this. It works perfectly well, but its not sticky or engaging enough somehow. I think if you could interact with other real people, or if it interacted with a game engine somehow (i'm thinking something like Myst) and there was world persistence it would be more engaging. In the chat I bought some train tickets and got a haircut before I got bored, and haven't resumed the "quest".

[1]you are an interactive storyteller, but your objective is to teach me German, you need to create an interactive text environment like a "choose your own adventure" book, if i answer in German, then correct my German and proceed, if I answer in english then translate to German and proceed. The storyline starts with me arriving in Germany as a study abroad student, all other communication should be in German
by djoldman | 2025-05-28 12:34:49+00:00
Pretty well in some ways:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knox_Mine_disaster

https://www.sitesofnj.com/Bethlehemsteel/BethlehemsteelMemor...

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/08/02/State-officials-Mond...
by rTX5CMRXIfFG | 2025-05-28 12:36:01+00:00
Honestly there are good reasons to resist AI even as a senior. If prompting an LLM cannot be easily integrated into your existing workflow or demands a huge change in tooling, it's just distracting or crippling. I don't think we need to have a long discussion as to why distractions and context switches are counterproductive.
by MattGaiser | 2025-05-28 12:36:10+00:00
> “The good news is that we have all the tools we need today to help make the world metabolically healthy,” Hashemi added, pointing to AI-enabled technology that allows users to know the amount of protein, fiber, carbs and the like in a food—and their likely blood sugar response to it—just by taking a picture of it.

Knowledge of that generally isn't the problem though. It is that dietary change is fundamentally too difficult for most people to psychologically pull off day after day.
by red_trumpet | 2025-05-28 12:36:14+00:00
I don't get this article. They make a big fuss about looking for the right category, because apparently the category of groups cannot explain the difficulty of breaking Diffie-Hellman, since there is an isomorphism <g> -> Z/nZ. But the same isomorphism exists in the category of algebraic varieties! So was all in vain?

To me this sounds a bit like an a-posteriori justification of why people use elliptic curves to do cryptography. This feels weird to me, as elliptic curves are a well-studied subject in algebraic geometry, whose history reaches back over 150 years to Clebsch. So when Victor Miller and Neal Koblitz proposed to do cryptography with them, they already knew very well about elliptic curves (both have a background in algebraic geometry of finite fields).
by baazaa | 2025-05-28 12:36:20+00:00
One thing that I've noticed is that AI has made it even more abundantly obvious that the low IQs of middle-managers are the main problem.

They have a great faith in AI (which is understandable), but they're constantly realising that:

a) they don't understand any of the problems enough to even being prompting for a solution

b) the AI can explain our code but the manager still won't understand

c) the AI can rephrase our explanations and they still won't understand.

Traditionally middle-managers probably consoled themselves with the idea that the nerds can't communicate well and coding is a dumb arcane discipline anyway. But now that their machine god isn't doing a better job than we are of ELI5ing it, I think even they're starting to doubt themselves.
by FrancoisBosun | 2025-05-28 12:36:36+00:00
You still need the timezone name to map back to UTC, in case you want to make some types of computations, usually along the lines of "how long ago was this" and "remaining time until this thing happens".

You may argue that we can use local time to make the computations and be done with it, but during DST transitions, local time jumps so the number of actual seconds won't be consistent.
by paulcole | 2025-05-28 12:36:43+00:00
> What if there was something wonderful and curious that you could explore and someone else would actually pay you money while you were exploring that thing?

The latter part of this is irrelevant if you’re rich.

I have no issue with someone who is rich who chooses to do what most other people consider work.

The issue I have is someone who says, “What would I do if I wasn’t working?” Figure it out. You’ve got infinite options. Consider enough of them to be confident in your choice.

If you’re just defaulting to “working” because you haven’t really tried anything else, that’s what I don’t get.
by zhivota | 2025-05-28 12:36:49+00:00
In my experience the difficulty in this kind of task is reading the docs of a bunch of packages I haven't used in months/years and probably won't use again anytime soon, testing things manually and creating all the little harnesses to make that work without running for minutes at a time, etc.

Sure for someone who does ETL type work all day, or often enough anyway, they'd scoff, and true LLM won't really save them time. But for me who does it once in a blue moon, LLMs are great. It's still on me to determine correctness, I am simply no longer contending with the bootstrap problem of learning new packages and their syntax and common usage.
by pornel | 2025-05-28 12:37:14+00:00
FSD in principle could be, but the overpromised misnomer we have right now isn't. Being better than a drunk driver isn't good enough when it's also worse than a sober driver. The stats of crashes per mile are skewed by FSD being mainly used in easy conditions, and not for all driving.

There are real safety improvements from ADAS. For safety you only need crash avoidance, not a full-time chauffeur.
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-28 12:37:26+00:00
For what it's worth, you recently engaged with me a week or two ago and I could not meaningfully engage back due to concern that your smug and combatative approach to discourse would devolve the conversation into an argument in which you have every intention of "winning". I watched that play out with another commenter who took your bait.

So to see you again using such smug language on another thread, proclaiming unsubstantiated conclusions and refusing to reconsider your position when faced with counterevidence or to otherwise provide solid, direct evidence of your own, while calling someone else smug, is equal parts amusing and concerning. If you think smugness leads to confusion, I think it's time to reevaluate your own approach to discourse.
by jvanderbot | 2025-05-28 12:37:33+00:00
This has been about 50% of the time my experience as well. There are very good SWE who know how to use ML in real systems, and then there are the others who believe through and through it will replace well understood systems developed by subdomain experts.

As a concrete example, when I worked at Amazon, there were several really good ML-based solutions for very real problems that didn't have classical approaches to lean on. Motion prediction from grid maps, for example, or classification from imagery or grid maps in general. Very useful and well integrated in a classical estimation and control pipeline to produce meaningful results.

OTOH, when I worked at a startup I won't name, I was berated over and over by a low-level manager for daring to question a learning-based approach for, of all things, estimating orientation of a stationary plane over time. The entire control pipeline for the vehicle was being fed flickering, jumping, adhoc rotating estimate for a stationary object because the entire team had never learned anything fundamental about mapping or filtering, and was just assuming more data would solve the problem.

This divide is very real, and I wish there was a way to tease it out better in interviewing.
by infecto | 2025-05-28 12:38:41+00:00
If it’s going to happen anyway why pander to that group? It’s like how politicians in the US keep promising coal is coming back. No it’s not.

I don’t want to actively “make” people lose jobs but I also don’t want to limit innovation. The relatively free movement of labor is a benefit for all including workers. I guess if someone really wants that Amazon warehouse picker job great but I am not sure that’s true.
Show HN: Termitty – Open Source Terminal Automation Framework (Selenium for SSH)
by dpacman | 2025-05-28 12:38:47+00:00
Hey HN!

I built Termitty because I was tired of the hacky solutions I kept writing for SSH automation.

While building my workflow automation SaaS, I had this seemingly simple requirement: workflows needed to execute tasks on remote servers, not just in browsers. Selenium made the browser part elegant - you could wait for elements, handle dynamic content, maintain session state. But for SSH? I was stuck in the stone age.

I ended up writing this monster of a custom driver that:

- Maintained persistent SSH connections in a pool - Kept track of working directories between commands - Tried to parse ANSI escape codes with regex (don't do this) - Had a "wait_for_prompt" function that was just `time.sleep(2)` with extra steps

The breaking point was when I needed to automate a workflow that involved:

1. SSH into a production server 2. Start a database backup 3. Navigate an ncurses configuration menu 4. Detect when the backup finished (from a progress bar!) 5. Verify the backup file

My "solution" was embarrassing - screen scraping terminal output with regex, hoping the prompt detection worked, and praying the timing lined up. It was brittle, unmaintainable, and I knew there had to be a better way.

So with Claude Opus 4's help, I built what I wished existed - Termitty brings Selenium's patterns to terminal automation

The key insight was that terminals are stateful UIs, just like web pages. So Termitty maintains a virtual terminal buffer - it actually understands what's on screen, tracks cursor position, handles ANSI codes properly. You can find text on the terminal screen just like finding DOM elements.

Some cool stuff that emerged:

- Full terminal emulation - It maintains a complete VT100/ANSI terminal state - Session recording - Records everything to JSON/asciinema format with a slick replay UI - Interactive shell - Persistent shell sessions that can control vim, top, installers - Real wait conditions - No more sleep()! Wait for specific output, prompts, or patterns

Once I had structured terminal state, AI integration became obvious - now LLMs can actually "see" the terminal and make intelligent decisions about what to do next.

What SSH automation pain have you encountered? I'm especially curious about edge cases I haven't hit yet!

P.S. - Check out the terminal player in the docs. You can record a session and share it with beautiful playback UI - it's like Loom for terminals!
by ramraj07 | 2025-05-28 12:38:54+00:00
If you're supposedly good at software and you spent too long trying to make python work consider the possibility that you're not good at software?

Python has flaws and big ones at that, but there's a reason it's popular. Especially with tools like pydantic and fastapi and uv (and streamlit) you can do insane things in hours what would take weeks and months before. Not to mention how good AI is at generating code in these frameworks. I especially like typing using pydantic, any method is now able to dump and load data from files and dbs and you get extremely terse validated code. Modern IDEs also make quick work of extracting value even from partially typed code. I'd suggest you just open your mind up to imperfect things and give them a shot.
by tarnith | 2025-05-28 12:39:39+00:00
Also see https://michaldrobot.com/2014/04/01/gcn-execution-patterns-i...

A bit of an older article but still very relevant.

I've found with webGL2 you can also skip the whole upload/binding of the buffer and just emit the vertexes/coordinates from the vertex shader as well.

Less of an impact than cutting it down, but if you're just trying to get a a fragment going, why not use the least amount of data and CPU-> GPU upload possible.
by lherron | 2025-05-28 12:39:41+00:00
This is my experience as well. I do not view the first shot LLM generated code as the end result. It’s more like a blob of clay I can continue to shape (with the LLM) until it meets my standards.

I also had a similar typed language experience, switching from untyped to type hinted python made the outputs much easier to understand and assess.