MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pcwelder | 2025-06-18 08:20:22+00:00
Back when GANs were popular, I'd train generator-discriminator models for image generation.

I thought a lot about it and realised discriminating is much easier than generating.

I can discriminate good vs bad UI for example, but I can't generate a good UI to save my life. I immediately know when a movie is good, but writing a decent short story is an arduous task.

I can determine the degree of realism in a painting, but I can't paint a simple bicycle to convince a single soul.

We can determine if an LLM generation is good or bad in a lot of cases. As a crude strategy then we can discard bad cases and keep generating till we achieve our task. LLMs are useful only because of this disparity between discrimination vs generation.

These two skills are separate. Generation skills are hard to acquire and very valuable. They will atrophy if you don't keep exercising those.
by GJim | 2025-06-18 08:20:57+00:00
> Your reaction to heat is highly dependent on acclimation.

And the other way around.

I once went to a conference, held in early spring, at a Greek hotel. It was 15 C and the hotel staff had closed the pool as it was "too cold" to swim.

Us Brits were puzzled. The Finns were utterly baffled.
Concept: Worldwide Engineering Society (WWES)
by daviddrodriguez | 2025-06-18 08:21:17+00:00
For anyone who is interested in pursuing the following concept:

The idea is to create a community where engineers can inspire each other to use their abstraction abilities to solve problems within societies.

The goal is for engineers to take leadership within their respective countries so that they may help transition the world towards the end goal where super intelligence can take over.

In pursuit towards becoming a planetary civilization.

- Domain idea: wwes.group (available) - Membership requires an engineering degree - Invite engineers from accredited universities from all around the world - Startout with for example computer science and expand - A leveling system for each branch of engineering - Where engineers would no longer require any job interviews but simply a certification of their level from the world wide engineering society. - Official high quality courses by world wide engineering society members - Maybe focusing on the application aspects of engineering instead of theoretical aspects which are taught at universities. - Develop a community platform that can scale from 0 to 1 and anywhere inbetween up to a billion users on the frontend side so that content is always digestible no matter how many users the platform ends up receiving. - Learn from the mistakes of Reddit. What makes subreddits deteriorate when the reach a high number of members? How can this community avoid that? - A few potential ideas: early members submit usually high quality content as a subreddit gains members the quality of the content shared and upvoted are usually those that target the general mass which results in simpler content being favored instead of in depth high quality content. - Maybe the longer a person has been a member of a subreddit the more weight their upvote should hold. - UI/UX ideas: sleek black design. - Somehow to filter the content no matter if its an early stage community with a few hundreds members, a few hundred thousand members or a billion members. - How should content be displayed in a small scale, mid scale and large scale scenario? - Desktop and mobile applications that runs native.
by e4m2 | 2025-06-18 08:22:15+00:00
There's a million and one ways to do it, here's just some of the ones I remember:

- https://www.mdsec.co.uk/2022/04/resolving-system-service-num...

- https://klezvirus.github.io/RedTeaming/AV_Evasion/NoSysWhisp...

- https://whiteknightlabs.com/2024/07/31/layeredsyscall-abusin...

Though I'm not sure which of these techniques, if any, would be most favored by a game DRM as I've never looked into it.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-18 08:22:24+00:00
>Nobody wants to be in a relationship with a language model.

I'm not sure about it. I don't have first or second hand experience with this, but I've been hearing about a lot of cases of people really getting into a sort of relationship with an AI, and I can understand a bit of the appeal. You can "have someone" who's entirely unjudgemental, who's always there for you when you want to chat about your stuff, and isn't ever making demands of you. It's definitely nothing close to a real relationship, big I do think it's objectively better than the worst of human relationships, and is probably better for your psyche than being lonely.

For better or for worse, I imagine that we'll see rapid growth in human-AI relationships over the coming decade, driven by improvements in memory and long-term planning (and possibly robotic bodies) on the one hand, and a growth of the loneliness epidemic on the other.
by laurentiurad | 2025-06-18 08:22:37+00:00
this analogy is flawed to its core. The car doesn't make you forget how to walk, because you are still forced to walk in certain circumstances. Delegating learning to an llm will increase your reliance on it, and will eventually affect the way you're learning. A better analogy is the usage of GPS. If you use it continuously, you will be dependent on it to get to a place, and lose the capacity to find places on your own.
by GuB-42 | 2025-06-18 08:23:30+00:00
ripgrep is one of the best grep replacement you can find, maybe even the best, and also one of the most famous Rust projects.

I don't know of a sed equivalent, but I guess that would be easy to implement as Rust has good regex support (see ripgrep), and 90%+ of sed usage is search-and-replace. The other commands don't look hard to implement and because they are not used as much, optimizing these is less of a priority.

I don't know about awk, it is a full programming language, but I guess it is far from an impossible task to implement.

Now the real hard part is making a true, bug-for-bug compatible replacement of the GNU version of these tools, but while good to have, it is not strictly necessary. For example, Busybox is very popular, maybe even more so than GNU in terms of number of devices, and it has its own (likely simplified) version of grep, sed and awk.
by SideburnsOfDoom | 2025-06-18 08:23:32+00:00
IDk what you're saying:

1) ... because renewables are clearly not at fault and can be discounted immediately?

2) ... because they're ideologically protecting faulty renewables?

1 is a stretch (I don't think they likely are at fault - the disinformation on this is obvious, but investigators have to investigate everything), and 2 is bilge.
by eecc | 2025-06-18 08:24:11+00:00
Frankly, working with an LLM has forced me to explain my problems in a more articulate and precise manner, avoiding unnecessary information that could interfere with a proper framing of the issue.

It is said that one doesn’t truly understand something unless they can explain it concisely.

I think being forced to do so, is an upside to using LLMs
by hadjian | 2025-06-18 08:26:23+00:00
Thank you bertails for the post. I work in IoT and we are also moving in that direction. I was of course hesitant, because of the criticism of semantic web on the ...web ;-), but this approach is used very successfully in our market for many years:

- https://haxall.io/ basically a reinvented copy of sem-web, but so much nicer from a dev perspective

- Used by https://skyfoundry.com/product

- https://brickschema.org/ the new star, built on sem-web

- Used by https://www.mapped.com/ where one of the founders worked on Brick

- https://docs.open223.info also a model that has caught interest in the market

- https://qudt.org/ de-facto standard for units and conversions

We started just a couple of months ago, but I have not regretted the decision, yet.

The downside of a lesser known tech-stack is always the missing OSS tools, e.g. for authoring, ownership management, review workflows etc. Counting on you guys to open source some good stuff ;-)

When we are further down the road, I am interested to get in touch with you guys, if you are up for it?

edit: forgot the ontology part of the haxall project.

- https://www.project-haystack.org/doc/index
by adrian_b | 2025-06-18 08:26:42+00:00
There are many parasitic plants, like the well-known mistletoe, which eat other plants. Unlike mistletoe, some of the other parasitic plants have given up completely on phototrophy, depending only on the nutrients sucked from the host plant.

It is likely that there are much more parasitic plants than carnivorous plants.

Plants that feed on other plants must do it similarly to a fungus, by penetrating them and growing into them a root-like organ, for sucking their fluids.

A plant could not bite and chew another plant, because, like the fungal cells, the plant cells have abandoned their ancestral animal-like mobility, by covering their cells with walls made of cellulose, which prevent cell mobility. While there are a few plants capable of infrequent fast movements, like the Venus flytrap, they use special tricks for creating tension in an elastic structure, like when drawing a bow, which would not be suitable for sustaining a sequence of movements.
by BlackFly | 2025-06-18 08:27:19+00:00
The tools are not mutually exclusive. I also do quite a lot with print debugging, but some of the most pernicious problems often require a debugger.

> It takes less time to decide where to put print statements than to single-step to the critical section of code

Why would you ever be single-stepping? Put a break point (conditional if necessary) where you would put the print statement. The difference between a single break point and a print statement is that the break point will allow you to inspect the local variables associated with all calls in the stack trace and evaluate further expressions.

So when do you debug instead of using print statements? When you know that no matter what the outcome of your hypothesis is, that you will need to iteratively inspect details from other points up the stack. That is, when you know, from experience, that you are going to need further print statements but you don't know where they will be.
by tannhaeuser | 2025-06-18 08:27:22+00:00
Yeah you've got a point. What's the lesser evil though when the alternative is overconfident over-motivated junior devs refactoring stuff for the sake of it while breaking apps, not realising their work should be to support the precious few FOSS desktop apps we have that won't come back with no new ones in sight either, leading us into know how monopolisation. That attitude is showing right here with Wayland apologists getting defensive as in nothing wrong with Wayland, it's just a new "platform" lol. Same thing with programming language fetishists which is just a means to an end. The problem is that the next generation of developers want to have their fun and educational experience reinventing stuff, too; and who wants to blame them when that's just what the previous gen did.
by ricardobeat | 2025-06-18 08:27:22+00:00
I thought the US went into the opposite direction because of ruthless corporate profit optimization, zoning rules and city planning that fuels suburban sprawl?

Economies of scale do mean you can get a fluffy blanket imported from China at $5, less than the cost of a coffee at Starbucks, but for food necessities Walmart isn’t even that cheap or abundant compared to other chains.
by mort96 | 2025-06-18 08:27:30+00:00
10 minutes for linking? The only projects I've touched which have had those kinds of link times have been behemoths like Chromium. That must absolutely suck to work with.

Have you tried out the Mold linker? It might speed it up significantly.

> You can debug an optimized build as well.

Eh, not really. Working with a binary where all variables are optimized out and all operators are inlined is hell.
by perlgeek | 2025-06-18 08:27:41+00:00
For me, the visual proofs of simple sums (like The sum of the first n odd natural numbers is n²) works pretty well for me.

For the more geometry-based ones where you have move triangles around and so, it's often not obvious to me that two angles that look the same really always are the same, and that things that add up to rectangle do so reliably, independently of the actual angles used in the examples.

I guess in these cases, a more parameterized, interactive version would work better, where you can use sliders to adjust some of the angles and lengths used. That should make it much more obvious that it's not just an artifact of particular angles used in an example.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-06-18 08:28:44+00:00
It is actually a great example. If the only way to go to Walmart is by car, it’s a sign of bigger problems with urban planning. Car is a hotfix, that becomes an environmental and public health problem. We shouldn’t try to get rid of cars or individual homes, but there exist plenty of other, more healthier ways of living (and the most livable cities in the world focus on them, not on car-powered suburbia). Same with AI: if it becomes the only way for people to achieve result, it may point not to complexity necessitating the use of an advanced tool, but to problems with education, developer experience etc. AI becomes a hotfix for things that could be fixed with more traditional approaches and in more sustainable way.
by liambigelow | 2025-06-18 08:28:46+00:00
Serious answer: For some, they do change semi-often and don't feel compelled to declare stability. In other cases, it's a stable + widely used 0.x package, and bumping it to 1.0 usually implies _some_ kind of breaking change. (I don't know if that _should_ be the case, but I know that if I see a dependency has bumped from 0.x to 1.0 I'm going to be cautious and wait to update it until I have more time).

In general: People usually aren't too concerned about it.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-06-18 08:29:10+00:00
Probably many people don't pick up on the word "to factor" something these days. They do not make the connection between the thing that mathematicians do and what that could relate to in terms of writing code. At the same time everyone picks up the buzzword "to refactor". It all depends on what ecosystems you expose yourself to. I think I first heard the term "to factor" something in math obviously, but in software when I looked at some Forth. Most people will never do that, because it is so far off the mainstream, that they have never even heard of it.
by jorams | 2025-06-18 08:31:16+00:00
> Where would one get these MP3 files? Not everything is on Bandcamp

A lot of music is still available for sale, if not through Bandcamp then through stores like Qobuz[1]. Sometimes I have to look around for a bit to find a store that sells what I'm looking for, but I can usually find it on Bandcamp or there. Occasionally it's not for sale, in which case I don't feel bad about torrenting or downloading from YouTube, but that's rare.

[1]: https://www.qobuz.com/shop
by edanm | 2025-06-18 08:31:45+00:00
This depends on a lot of things.

For example, one thing you wrote that jumps out at me:

> I already have a working model for the way that the code runs [...]

This is not always true. It's only true for code that I wrote or know very well. E.g. as a consultant, I often work on codebases that are new to me, and I do tend to use debuggers there more often than I use print debugging.

Although lots of other variables affect this - how much complicated state there is to get things running, how fast the "system" starts up, what language it's written in and if there are alternatives (in some situations I'll use a Jupyter Notebook for exploring the code, Clojure has its own repl-based way of doing things, etc).
by nottorp | 2025-06-18 08:32:03+00:00
I haven't written serious assembly since high school :)

But I'm 100% sure i have some "natural" neural connections based on those experiences and those help me even when doing high level languages.

By the way, I am using LLMs. They help until they don't. One real life example i'm hitting at work is they keep mixing couchdb and couchbase when you ask about features. Their training dataset doesn't seem to be large enough in that area.
by rcxdude | 2025-06-18 08:32:18+00:00
It's not impossible, but it requires extensions to the protocol. Historically the main headache is that support across different compositors was inconsistent, and may not even use the same extension, which means a developer looking make such a tool would need to in practice need to implement many different interfaces to make it work, which tended to mean it didn't happen (I think most devs kinda get as far as looking at the interfaces, seeing a bunch of drama between different compositors about what the correct way to do it is and whether it should even be done at all (GNOME), then decide to go for a nice walk instead). I think screen recording is now reasonably well supported and standard, I don't know about input interception and simulation.
by thesz | 2025-06-18 08:32:19+00:00
I used to use debugger when I was young - disk space was small, disks were slow and logging was expensive.

Now, some 35 years later, I greatly prefer logs. This way I can compare execution paths of different use cases, I can compare outcomes of my changes, etc. I am not confined to a single point of time with tricky manual control as with debugger, I can see them all.

To old grugs: learning to execute and rewind code in your head is a major superpower. And it works on any codebase.
by JdeBP | 2025-06-18 08:32:34+00:00
It's a fairly meaningless number.

Some operating systems have massive fan-in and fan-out on what is internally one single system call crossing the shell/kernel divide. Witness how much is done by sysctl() on the BSDs, for example. Whereas others will be more 1-to-1.

Then there's the fact that the Native API for Windows NT is structurally very different to the Linux API (as they are both different from, say, XNU). It's basically entirely coincidental that the numbers are even close, and there are no general conclusions that one can draw from such statistics.

Except, perhaps, a general but rather facile conclusion that these operating systems aren't running on 8-bit processor architectures. (-:
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-06-18 08:33:26+00:00
Do you really think it's random? 30% of car accidents are from drunk drivers. Some large fraction of the remainder are a result of some other impairment or distraction. Don't drive on two hours of sleep and don't text behind the wheel and your chances of hitting someone go way down.

And it will be the same thing with AI. You want to ask it a question that you can verify the answer to, and then you actually verify it? No problem. But then you have corporations using it for "content moderation" and end up shadow banning actual human beings when it gets it wrong, and then those people commit suicide because they think no one cares about them when it's really that the AI wrongly pegs them as a bot and then heartlessly isolates them from every other living person.
by scienceman | 2025-06-18 08:33:33+00:00
That all makes sense, but these don't look like police officers — these are guys wearing backwards baseball caps and surgical masks. Effectively, our trust that someone holds position of authority in law enforcement is based on their uniform and badge.

If we normalize some dude in a mask and a baseball cap as someone that has the authority to arrest you and put you in an unmarked van, that represents a real and serious breakdown of trust and order in society.

ICE agents should wear a real uniform (ICE with their real name), have uncovered faces, and be required to show badge/authorization upon request -- otherwise members of society have to reason to trust them (or people who look like them).
by dotancohen | 2025-06-18 08:33:53+00:00
I've already started.

I've been recording to myself voice notes for years. Until now they've seemingly been near-read-only. The friction for recording them is often low (in settings where I can speak freely) but getting the information out of them has been difficult.

I'm now writing software to help me quickly get information out of the voice notes. So they'll be useful to me too, not just to future historians who happen upon my hard drive. I would not be able to devote the time to this without AI, even though most of the code and all the architecture is my own.
by bodge5000 | 2025-06-18 08:34:04+00:00
A comment on another similar thread pointed out it goes as far back as Socrates saying that writing things down means your not exercising your brain, so you're right, this is the same old argument we've heard for years before.

The question is, were they wrong? I'm not sure I could continue doing my job much as SWE if I lost access to search engines, and I certainly don't remember phone numbers anymore, and as for Socrates, we found that the ability to forget about something (while still maintaining some record of it) was actually a benefit of writing, not a flaw. I think in all these cases we found that to some extent they were right, but either the benefits outweighed the cost of reliance, or that the cost was the benefit.

I'm sure each one had its worst case scenario where we'd all turn into brainless slugs offloading all our critical thinking to the computer or the phone or a piece of paper, and that obviously didn't happen, so it might not here either, but there's a good chance we will lose something as a result of this, and its whether the benefits still outweigh the costs
by davedx | 2025-06-18 08:35:35+00:00
This aligns with my experience (specifically with langgraph). I actually find it a depressing sign of the times that your prototype was in Java and the "production" version is going to be in python.

My experience with langgraph is you spend so much time just fixing stupid runtime type errors because the state of every graph is a stupid JSON blob with very minimal typing, and it's so hard figuring out how data moves through the system. Combined with python's already weak type support, and the fact you're usually dealing with long running processes where things break mid- or end- of process, development becomes quite awful. AI coding assistants only help so much. Tests are hard to write because these frameworks inevitably lean in to the dynamic nature of python.

I just can't understand why people are choosing to build these huge complex systems in an untyped language when the only AI or ML is API calls... or very occasionally doing some lightweight embeddings.
by compressedgas | 2025-06-18 08:36:00+00:00
#2 is called "watermarking". If the watermarking is done for each recipient differently, then it is called "traitor tracing".

#1 and #2 will eventually be defeated by newer models as they get trained on the protected images or need to pass some output condition. You should know that these so-called protective image distortions are the kind of thing that the generative adversary in GAN training learns to do and classifier learns to ignore.

Only #2 and #4, watermarking and signing are likely to be continue to be effective as models improve. For content signing there is the C2PA specification https://c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.2/index.htm... that describes how to include signatures in most media types.