MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: FlagShark – Automatically removes stale feature flags via PRs
by joebi | 2025-06-14 16:53:30+00:00
Hey HN! I'm building FlagShark to solve feature flag tech debt automatically. It's a GitHub app that not only tracks feature flags, but actually creates pull requests to remove them when they go stale.

The Problem: We all use feature flags, but they accumulate forever. Knight Capital lost $460M in 45 minutes due to a reused stale flag. Every team I've worked with spends 3-5 hours/week per developer managing technical debt, or worse, leaves them to accumulate. The industry does 20 trillion flag evaluations daily, yet most flags are never cleaned up.

How it works: - Monitors your repos for feature flags using AST parsing - Tracks flag lifecycle across pull requests - When flags go stale, automatically creates PRs to remove them - You review and merge - or ignore if the flag is still needed

The magic: You keep shipping features while FlagShark handles the cleanup. No more quarterly "flag cleanup sprints" or tech debt accumulation.

Currently supports Go, TypeScript/JavaScript, and Python. Detects LaunchDarkly, Unleash, Split.io, Flipt, and custom implementations.

Looking for beta testers! Free access for early users who can provide feedback:

- How stale should a flag be before suggesting removal? - Should it create one PR per flag or batch them? - What safety checks would make you confident auto-merging? - Which feature flag libraries does your team use?

If you're interested, comment here or sign up on the site. Let's eliminate flag debt together.
by jitl | 2025-06-14 16:55:18+00:00
The important distinction for me with Kotlin's system is that the compiler guides developers to write null-safe code by default because it's built into the language itself. Whereas Optional in Java requires extra effort in instantiating Optional.of(...) all over the place. Java Optional is opt-in, similar to (but weaker than) SQL `NOT NULL` - easy to forget, rather than Kotlin opt-out.

Even in safe languages like Rust, you can still introduce errors with the same semantics in application code as null pointer error: doing `some_optional.unwrap().someMethod()` will crash your program just as much as `someNullableObject.someMethod()` in Java.
by jleyank | 2025-06-14 16:55:39+00:00
Tenured theoretical or computational researchers might be able to survive a funding wasteland, but experimental or untenured folks are screwed. They’re going to have to leave academia or leave the country in order to get established in the field or to get work done. Few grad students (they’re the TA’s) and very few postdocs will be available. And non US-ians will just look elsewhere.
by jmholla | 2025-06-14 16:55:44+00:00
1) You can pass `--no-verify` to `git commit` and it will skip the hooks. An alias would make it even more ergonomic.

2) You can write hooks that make the changes for you where possible. This is what I do for lints from auto-formatters. Don't know how to handle the rest of your VS Code issues though.
by nullc | 2025-06-14 16:56:05+00:00
Ending up with visible timing side channels where there otherwise wouldn't be ones though is not an awesome tradeoff. Like... vulnerable to NSA vs vulnerable to everyone? The former is probably preferable. And as you say-- the RISC-V option may not be backdoor free, it may just be an alternative backdoor.

Seems like such an unforced error too, particular because CMOVs are extremely beneficial for performance in out of order deeply pipelined architectures. Though at least the performance side can be answered with extended behavior the security side needs guarantees (and ideally ones that aren't "this instruction sequence is constant time on some chips and variable time on others").
by majormajor | 2025-06-14 16:56:15+00:00
AI would be deployed to behave like the median doctor (at best - or maybe the lowest-common-denominator) to avoid blowing up costs with 99%-likely-to-turn-up-nothing hunts for super-rare conditions.

Today you can try to cajole your human doctor into listening more, or ordering more tests, or considering things you heard online or from acquaintances. AI will be guided to take that into account less because a doctor being more sympathetic and bypassing "standard practice" is an expense caused by humanity that the machine can be trained to avoid.

Today you can go across town and try your luck with another doctor. If it's all AI, you'll just repeat your story to the same basic model and get the same basic dismissal.

The problem arose from trying to make people behave like machines in order to save money. Making a machine behave like a machine ain't gonna help.

You need to shift the goal from "saving money" to "helping people." AI doesn't do that.
by gcanyon | 2025-06-14 16:58:05+00:00
The obvious question (to me at least) is whether "consciousness" is actually useful in an AI. For example, if your goal is to replace a lawyer researching and presenting a criminal case, is the most efficient path to develop a conscious AI, or is consciousness irrelevant to performing that task?

It might be that consciousness is inevitable -- that a certain level of (apparent) intelligence makes consciousness unavoidable. But this side-steps the problem, which is still: should consciousness be the goal (phrased another way, is consciousness the most efficient way to achieve the goal), or should the goal (whatever it is) simply be the accomplishment of that end goal, and consciousness happens or doesn't as a side effect.

Or even further, perhaps it's possible to achieve the goal with or without developing consciousness, and it's possible to not leave consciousness to chance but instead actively avoid it.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-06-14 16:59:52+00:00
sorry but the strongest plausible interpretation of the word cure is obviously not "prevent", it is to undo the damage.

>If the words "cure" or "prevent" don't indicate that, why did you bring it up? :)

the strongest plausible interpretation of my comment would be I brought it up for the reason I said - that if you could cure the disease you would have to be able to give anyone the capabilities the disease destroyed (because these diseases seem to destroy parts of the brain so even if you "brought back" the brain it would be a different brain with different data in it)- and that, although I did not state it, I felt that the original poster had not considered this when they expressed a wish to cure.

on edit: obviously if you have experienced minor damage you can get back to what you were before because the brain has a lot of redundancies and it can recover if decline is halted, but if you have experienced major damage you're probably not getting back and asking for a cure there seems unlikely to work.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-14 17:00:41+00:00
But you’ve already conceded it’s a simulation, so never. The simulation is behavioral.

As Searle (and Kripke, respectively) rightly points out, computers are abstract mathematical formalisms. There is nothing physical about them. There is no necessary physical implementation for them. The physical implementation isn’t, strictly speaking, a computer in any objective sense, and the activity it performs is not objectively computation in any sense. Rather, we have constructed a machine that can simulate the formalism such that when we interpret its behavior, we can relate it to the formalism. The semantic content is entirely in the eye of the beholder. In this way, computers are like books in that books don’t actually contain any semantic content, only some bits of pigmentation arranged on cellulose sheets according to some predetermined interpretive convention that the reader has in his mind.

We can’t do this with mind, though. The mind is the seat of semantics and it’s where the buck stops.
by adrian_b | 2025-06-14 17:01:47+00:00
Like I have expanded in another reply, reals are not necessary, but using them to model the sets of values of the dynamic quantities is much simpler than any alternative that attempts to use only rational numbers.

During the last decades, there have been published many research papers exploring the use of discreteness instead of the traditional continuity, but they cannot be considered as anything else but failures. The resulting mathematical models are much more complicated than the classic models, without offering any extra predictions that could be verified.

The reason for the complications is that in physics it would be pointless to try to model a single physical quantity as discrete instead of continuous. You have a system of many interrelated quantities and trying to model all of them as discrete reaches quickly contradictions for the simpler models, due to the irrational or transcendent functions that relate some quantities, functions that appear even when modeling something as simple as a rotation or oscillation. If, in order to avoid incommensurability, you replace a classic continuous uniform rotation with a sequence of unequal jumps in angular orientation, to match the possible directions of nodes in a discrete lattice, then the resulting model becomes extremely more complicated than the classic continuous model.
by ben_w | 2025-06-14 17:01:53+00:00
> Is this even a trait of consciousness?

There's 40 or so different definitions of the word, so it depends which one you're using when you ask the question.

For me, and not just when it comes to machine minds, the meaning I find most interesting is qualia — unfortunately, I have no particular reason to think this hierarchy helps with that, because there might be a good evolutionary reason for us to have a subjective experience rather than mere unfeeling circuits of impulse and response, it's (1) not clear why this may have been selected for, and evolution does do things at random and only select for/against when they actually matter, and (2) it's not clear when in our evolution this may have happened, and (3) it's not clear how to test for it.
by frereubu | 2025-06-14 17:02:15+00:00
In the spirit of recommending favourite pieces, one of his that I love is Je Te Veux: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1J_lxbaQxQ It's perhaps more obvious in terms of its tunefulness than some of his pieces, but I think it's like a perfectly-cut jewel and somehow quintessentially French.
by tbrownaw | 2025-06-14 17:03:04+00:00
> Yep this is something that only AI can solve.

How? I'd expect them to already have standardized lists of the most useful next thing to investigate given what's already known, and a modern "AI" would actually be worse at that than some sort of solver engine with a database of costs/risks (for tests) and conditional probabilities.

Maybe if they're still using (digitized versions of) paper flowcharts things could be improved, but the most powerful tech should be old-school stuff rather than modern "AI".
by enjoylife | 2025-06-14 17:03:38+00:00
> Once concepts are selected, Sphere walks the knowledge graph and generates SQL queries to retrieve data from the warehouse, no manual joins or technical mediation required.

If I had to guess this is how eng pitched it to the business to carve out the time to build this tooling. As with all these internally built schemas, ui’s, tooling, etc… they’re never gonna post how much this is actually used relative to the work arounds ds and eng use in their day to day.
by majormajor | 2025-06-14 17:04:06+00:00
A chronically ill person is a risk to an insurance company. They could turn into a huge hospital bill for an extended stay any day now. Or, worse, become a permanent disability recipient.

A healthy person is a huge asset to an insurance company. Collect premiums for decades before they need much of any disbursal! They're still likely to be expensive at end-of-life, but you've profited WAY more from their initial healthy years.

(This, of course, is why insurance companies want to consider health in setting premiums, and why it's SO IMPORTANT that the government not allow that and keep things group-based. Because then you have the incentive to help the unhealthy people instead of just "milking the unhealthy people.* I pay the same as my coworker for my insurance. The insurance does NOT want my chronic condition to make me much more expensive to them than my coworker. They'd much rather it go away. Sadly, nobody can do that today.)

What the insurance companies don't* have is the incentive to actually push doctors and facilities to spend more time and money on looking for rare issues for unhealthy people. Because the searching is expensive, and there's a high risk it won't actually find a magic bullet.

So they'd rather have the median patient go from unhealthy to healthy, but if we want them to invest more in the long tail, it's gonna have to come from regulation.

And targeted investment in better detection*. But better detection is harder to sell than "expensive treatment drug" so again. Might need to get the state involved.
by OgsyedIE | 2025-06-14 17:04:25+00:00
The article doesn't mention any details about public alerts. I'd like to see the eventual postmortem cover whether there were any warnings being sent directly to phones in Anoka, Hennepin and Ramsay counties or if alerts have been limited to older messaging methods.

Also, although many people would pin this purely on the political climate there appears to be an inadequate system for reliable identification nowadays that is also enabling a rise in impersonations.
by exe34 | 2025-06-14 17:04:27+00:00
> Obviously I'm conscious

I'm not trying to be pedantic - how do you know? What does consciousness mean to you? Do you experience "qualia"? When you notice something, say "the toast is burning", what goes on in your mind?

> but I can 'simulate' others inside my mind.

Do you mean in the sense of working out how they will react to something? What sort of reactions can they exhibit in your mind?

Sorry if these questions are invasive, but you're as close to an alien intelligence as I'll ever meet unless LLMs go full Prime Intellect on us.
by chmod775 | 2025-06-14 17:04:47+00:00
Chances are that only a species who, through one way or another, has become very uninterested in warfare could have advanced to the point where they would be able to run such a simulation, otherwise they'd have ended their own existence with their shiny toys before long.

War only occurs if you have in the literal sense retarded elements in your advanced species and is nonsensical from an outside POV. A species this advanced would have fixed such shortcomings in itself long ago.

So no, I don't think they'd necessarily be very interested in watching primitive species go to war with primitive weapons.

For all we know the simulation of this universe is happening in their equivalent of an overengineered snow globe, us being an artifact nobody has noticed and that nobody would find particularly interesting if they did notice.
by jmull | 2025-06-14 17:05:20+00:00
I think they are just trying to put in place the common data model that, as you point out, they need.

(So their micro services can work together usefully and efficiently -- I would guess that currently the communication burden between microservice teams is high and still is not that effective.)

> The whole point of GraphQL is to create a unified view of something

It can do that, but that's not really the point of GraphQL.. I suppose you're saying that's how it was used as FB. That's fine, IMO, but it sounds like this NF team decided to use something more abstract for the same purpose.

I can't comment on their choices without doing a bunch more analysis, but in my own experience I've found off-the-shelf data modeling formats have too much flexibility in some places (forcing you to add additional custom controls or require certain usage patterns) and not enough in others (forcing you to add custom extensions). The nice thing about your own format is you can make it able to express everything you want and nothing you don't. And have a well-defined projection to Graphql (and sqlite and oracle and protobufs and xml and/or whatever other thing you're using).
by perching_aix | 2025-06-14 17:05:26+00:00
Well I did. I do not recognize dismissiveness as something objective or formally defined (it's a natural language property after all), which leaves us with subjectivity or at best shared subjectivity. It's also plain context dependent, at that much I hope we do agree on, so indeed if you do not accept my philosophical view underpinning why I'd find it dismissive, clearly you won't appreciate it as dismissive. It's a lot like with Gödel's "proof of god". Only holds as long as you subscribe to the axioms being built upon.

I'd imagine we do not share the same subjective perspective on this (e.g. I don't think my views are particularly radical), so you wouldn't characterize it that way, whereas I do. Makes sense to me. Didn't intend to mislead you into thinking this wasn't one of these cases, apologies if this is not what you expected. I wrote under the assumption that you did.

I feel a lot of disagreements are just this, it's just that most often people need 30 comments to get here, if they even manage to without getting sidetracked, and without getting too emotionally invested / worked up.
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-06-14 17:06:49+00:00
> On the first question, how do you encode omega-consistency as a formula of PA? Just curious, it's not at all obvious to me.

I was also wondering about that, but going by the Wikipedia definition, it doesn't seem too complicated: you say, "For all encoded propositions P(x): If for every x there exists an encoded proof of P(x), then there does not exist an encoded proof of 'there exists an x such that ¬P(x)'." That is, if you can prove a proposition for each integer in the metatheory, then quantifiers within the target theory must respect that.
by FerretFred | 2025-06-14 17:07:30+00:00
Satie's my favourite composer so I was pleased to read this article. If I had to compare him with another composer (and if it was possible), I'd say Basil Kirchin (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basil_Kirchin): I can imagine Satie listening to Kirchin and nodding in that knowing fashion...
by philsnow | 2025-06-14 17:08:14+00:00
I don't see anything like that on the github link in your profile, but I would be interested in taking a look if you have anything public?

As to whether I know any lawyers interested in that kind of thing -- I think your thing would face the same kind of issue that others in this thread have identified: why would lawyers be interested in a product that, at the end of the day, helps them bill fewer hours? You could argue that some law firm could use it as their secret sauce like Whatsapp used Erlang or something like that, but I don't think that the legal space has many people interested in this kind of innovation.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-14 17:09:08+00:00
In some Vista betas, where Aero wasn't finished yet, Aero's glass was a lot more transparent. This video shows some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCDcekzU3cQ

There were parts of Vista that were mostly glass and they still looked fine. The widget picker comes to mind: https://istartedsomething.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/09/gad...

What Apple demonstrated in their first OS demo is not yet finished, and I'm sure they'll add some more frosted glass efects for legibility and such. What they show off in the video looks fine to me, and the explanation that comes with the visuals show that at least from a designer point of view, all of the weird stuff that jumps out in the macOS demo was violating the design principles.

I loved Aero and I bet once Apple adds the diffuse glass to the places it need to for legibility, I'm sure this will look great too.
by progbits | 2025-06-14 17:09:20+00:00
Oh this brings memories of the hours I spent playing Armagetron years ago. I wonder if it still has active player base?

Edit: played for a while, it's pretty fun. However sometimes you die just because another player spawns right in front of you which is pretty frustrating as there is nothing you can do. I would suggest adding some blinking dot that will warn a new player is about to spawn at some location.
by dcre | 2025-06-14 17:09:30+00:00
I don’t know what the guidelines are, but this is not helpful or accurate as a characterization of the interview. If anything, Weatherby is saying exactly what you say he gets wrong: “LLMs are not the total distribution, but they’re a far larger chunk of it than we’ve ever before been able to see or play with.” I am no anti-LLM guy but this is an embarrassing way to use them.
by squigz | 2025-06-14 17:09:34+00:00
Well, we are not "trying to" pursue both - we actively are. Anyway, there certainly is much discussion to be had about class discrimination in medical care, but that seems out of scope for this thread - not least because of very simple things like some country's healthcare systems being radically different than others.

> Additionally, without the desire to preserve life and value of the advantages of aged minds, we will not make as much progress on the disease.

I'm not sure why you think that easing end-of-life suffering would lead us to stop preserving life?

We're also not talking about "aged minds," we're talking about damaged minds - and even if we were, we're not talking about de-aging or anything like that.
by blooalien | 2025-06-14 17:09:47+00:00
> the real weakness of the "AI industry" seems to be the massive increase in CO2 emissions required

> if I was trying to kill it politically that's exactly what I'd focus on

Except that approximately all of one entire political party (who happen to be currently "in charge" of things) believe that CO2 is good for plants, therefore it's good always for everything and we should put more of it into the atmosphere as quickly as possible, especially if it further enriches outdated obsolete greedy pollution-loving science-hating overlords. Anyone who disagrees is a witch or a terrorist.
by collingreen | 2025-06-14 17:09:59+00:00
I think there are more factors than just how groundbreaking their ambitions are that justify different valuations.

Like brands, customer count, contracts, hardware access, headcount, and existing progress.

Thinking openai is worth more than a day1 startup only because they are more ambitious requires all their years of funding, progress, bd, sales, and brand have little value. In my opinion these things matter a lot more than long term ambitions (which always change in response to the market anyway).