MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hex4def6 | 2025-06-03 18:56:48+00:00
That feels unnecessarily restrictive.

Does Jiro and his sushi constitute an artist and his art? Let's say yes, and let's say most people today agree with this. They're cosmopolitan enough to recognize the sophistication and craft. This definition therefore defines it as "art".

I would say if you told the average Brit living in the UK in the 1950s that there's a guy that's really good at slicing up raw fish, you might get a different average answer.

So I don't think art is dependent on the conclusion viewer, but on the intention of the author. If they arrange rocks just-so, because they enjoy the shadows they make at noon, I think that's art.
by maz1b | 2025-06-03 18:56:51+00:00
I've always wondered a slight amount as to why larger enterprises (which have the resources to hire specialists) don't hire people with expertise in say things like Rust, or Elixir/Phoenix?

It's one thing to say that we want to hire commonly available developers like in Java or C#, but if you have a long term plan and execution strategy, why not pick technology that may pay off larger dividends?

ITT: I get why they chose Swift, it's Apple's own in house technology. Makes total sense, not knocking that at all. Nice writeup.
by jbay808 | 2025-06-03 18:57:16+00:00
If I were given five seconds to glance at the picture of a lion and then asked if there was anything unusual about it, I doubt I would notice that it had a fifth leg.

If I were asked to count the number of legs, I would notice right away of course, but that's mainly because it would alert me to the fact that I'm in a psychology experiment, and so the number of legs is almost certainly not the usual four. Even then, I'd still have to look twice to make sure I hadn't miscounted the first time.
by looneysquash | 2025-06-03 18:58:30+00:00
The sample outputs look nice!

But I always hate it when a templating language grows function calls and all of that. Maybe it makes sense in this context, I'm not sure.

But if you end up using it together with another language, maybe for server side rendering or some kind of document from data generation, you quickly realize that switching between the two languages wastes a lot of time, and the templating language is never as powerful as the "real" language. So I prefer JSX, or something like Javascript's tagged template literals. Something where you use a real programming language, but where the context of the document is understood, so you don't have to worry about escaping or XSS.
Ask HN: Those making $500/month on side projects in 2025 – Show and tell
by fazkan | 2025-06-03 18:58:50+00:00
I used to love these threads, super helpful in finding early customers, and inspiring as well. Please do share your journeys.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194 (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433 (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 (2020)
by fazkan | 2025-06-03 18:59:09+00:00
clicky

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194 (2024) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433 (2023) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 (2022) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 (2021) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 (2020)
by bdelmas | 2025-06-03 18:59:22+00:00
Thank you for the video! This is so much coming. Plus with thermal cameras too which is even more scary.

On the same topic it reminds me Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (from 2005!) where an AI called "Masse Kernels" was automatically creating missions sent to different PMCs, managing war assets, supervising the war effort, coms, and the like... Feels also that's coming, at least in some forms for now.
by bloak | 2025-06-03 19:00:39+00:00
"Why use Wiktionary?"

I can answer that one. I have free access to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is brilliant and generally more detailed and reliable than Wiktionary when it has the word I'm looking for, but their login page is so awful that I sometimes use en.wiktionary.org instead just to save my time and temper. Also, en.wiktionary.org has proper nouns, other languages, and occasionally it has some recent or technical English word that OED does not have. So if I'm doing some serious amateur research: OED. But if I'm doing a crossword and want to check that a word exists and is spelt how I think it is: Wiktionary.
by tptacek | 2025-06-03 19:01:27+00:00
The problem with this argument is that it's not what's going to happen. In the trajectory I see of LLM code generation, security quality between best-practices well-prompted (ie: not creatively well prompted, just people with a decent set of Instructions.md or whatever) and well trained human coders is going to be a wash. Maybe in 5 years SOTA models will clearly exceed human coders on this, but my premise is all progress stops and we just stick with what we have today.

But the analysis doesn't stop there, because after the raw quality wash, we have to consider things LLMs can do profoundly better than human coders can. Codebase instrumentation, static analysis, type system tuning, formal analysis: all things humans can do, spottily, on a good day but that empirically across most codebases they do not do. An LLM can just be told to spend an afternoon doing them.

I'm a security professional before I am anything else (vulnerability research, software security consulting) and my take on LLM codegen is that they're likely to be a profound win for security.
by keeda | 2025-06-03 19:02:10+00:00
For sure! I mainly meant to say that people should not attribute the "6 more months until it's really good" point as just another symptom of unfounded hype. It may have taken effort to effectively use AI earlier, which somewhat justified the caution, but now it's significantly easier and caution is counter-productive.

But I think my other point still stands: people will need to figure out for themselves how to fully exploit this technology. What worked for me, for instance, was structuring my code to be essentially functional in nature. This allows for tightly focused contexts which drastically reduces error rates. This is probably orthogonal to the better UX of current AI tooling. Unfortunately, the vast majority of existing code is not functional, and people will have to figure out how to make AI work with that.

A lot of that likely plays into your point about the work required to make useful LLM-based applications. To expand a bit more:

* AI is technology that behaves like people. This makes it confusing to reason about and work with. Products will need to solve for this cognitive dissonance to be successful, which will entail a combination of UX and guardrails.

* Context still seems to be king. My (possibly outdated) experience has been the "right" context trumps larger context windows. With code, for instance, this probably entails standard techniques like static analysis to find relevant bits of code, which some tools have been attempting. For data, this might require eliminating overfetching.

* Data engineering will be critical. Not only does it need to be very clean for good results, giving models unfettered access to the data needs the right access controls which, despite regulations like GDPR, are largely non-existent.

* Security in general will need to be upleveled everywhere. Not only can models be tricked, they can trick you into getting compromised, and so there need to even more guardrails.

A lot of these are regular engineering work that is being done even today. Only it often isn't prioritized because there are always higher priorities... like increasing shareholder value ;-) But if folks want to leverage the capabilities of AI in their businesses, they'll have to solve all these problems for themselves. This is a ton of work. Good thing we have AI to help out!
by tialaramex | 2025-06-03 19:02:58+00:00
Rust's try! macro was† "essentially a macro for this entirely boilerplate operation" but the Try operator ? is something more interesting because in the process they reified ControlFlow.

Because implementing Try for your own custom types is unstable today if you want to participate you'd most likely provide a ControlFlow yourself. But in doing that you're making plain the distinction between success/ failure and early termination/ continuing.

† Technically still is, Rust's standard library macros are subject to the same policies as the rest of the stdlib and so try! is marked deprecated but won't be removed.
by 9rx | 2025-06-03 19:03:07+00:00
> lets not forget that the Go team made the same blunder made by Java

To be fair, they were working on parametric polymorphism since the beginning. There are countless public proposals, and many more that never made it beyond the walls of Google.

Problem was that they struggled to find a design that didn't make the same blunder as Java. I'm sure it would have been easy to add Java-style generics early on, but... yikes. Even the Java team themselves warned the Go team to not make that mistake.
by jbay808 | 2025-06-03 19:03:48+00:00
I disagree with the assertion that "VLMs don't actually see - they rely on memorized knowledge instead of visual analysis". If that were really true, there's no way they would have scored as high as 17%. I think what this shows is that they over-weight their prior knowledge, or equivalently, they don't put enough weight on the possibility that they are being given a trick question. They are clearly biased, but they do see.

But I think it's not very different from what people do. If directly asked to count how many legs a lion has, we're alert to it being a trick question so we'll actually do the work of counting, but if that image were instead just displayed in an advertisement on the side of a bus, I doubt most people would even notice that there was anything unusual about the lion. That doesn't mean that humans don't actually see, it just means that we incorporate our priors as part of visual processing.
by sim7c00 | 2025-06-03 19:03:55+00:00
interesting paper / idea. i like the idea of a robot or ai who uses profanity like a regular person (if thats ur thing, guess it depends on ur context). i know people who instruct their ai assistants to be rude, mean or profane because they listen better to that. like asking it to tell you to RTFM if you ask a question thats trivially answered (compared to some further context you specify , or not).

i suppose everyone learns to listen better to certain personas through their lifes experiences, so its good to be able to tune it towards personal preferences and not but overly protective or conservative limits or restrictions. (obviously thats a snake pit so i do totally understand tight restrictions)
by nradov | 2025-06-03 19:03:57+00:00
Don't be naive. Leaders of Hamas have control of foreign bank accounts. Probably cryptocurrencies as well now. Those funds are the personal proceeds of theft and embezzlement. They steal aid money directly, or steal supplies and sell them for cash. The locals can't do anything to stop them because Hamas has all of the weapons: there are no other armed locals. Hamas violently suppresses the locals who even try to protest against theft of foreign aid.

https://nypost.com/2023/11/07/news/hamas-leaders-worth-11bn-...

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/palestine-hamas-mu...
by skydhash | 2025-06-03 19:05:24+00:00
It's all about designing software. The callee is the one encountering the error, not any of the caller up in the stack trace. Somewhere in the call chain, there's a need to take a decision.

So you, as the developer, decide where that needs to be. It may be at the callee level (like an exponential retry) or at the caller level (display an error message). In the later case, you may want to add more information to the error data block, so that the caller my handle the situation appropriately. So if you want tracing, you just need to wrap the error and returns it. Then your logging code have all the information it needs: like

[error saving file [permission error [can't access file]]]

instead of just [syscall.EINVAL].
by os2warpman | 2025-06-03 19:05:38+00:00
The 1993 version of Doom was $40 plus shipping and handling. Let's ignore the shipping and handling.

That's $90 today.

I don't play very many video games anymore though I did play the hell out of Doom 30 years ago.

What I have noticed, as an outside observer looking in, about people who play video games today is that they seem to be among the most entitled people on the planet who love bitching about everything.
by reader_1000 | 2025-06-03 19:05:44+00:00
> For instance, a recurring comment in user surveys is about the lack of stack traces associated with an error. This could be addressed with support functions that produce and return an augmented error.

Languages with stack traces gives this to you for free, in Go, you need to implement it every time. OK, you may be disciplined developer where you always augment the error with the details but not all the team members have the same discipline.

Also the best thing about stack traces is that it gives you the path to the error. If the error is happened in a method that is called from multiple places, with stack traces, you immediately know the call path.

I worked as a sysadmin/SRE style for many years and I had to solve many problems, so I have plenty of experience in troubleshooting and problem solving. When I worked with stack traces, solving easy problems was taking only 1-2 minutes because the problems were obvious, but with Go, even easy problems takes more time because some people just don't augment the errors and use same error messages which makes it a detective work to solve it.
by UncleMeat | 2025-06-03 19:05:57+00:00
I am generally pretty skeptical of ai coding. At my job I’m resisting it pretty constantly. However, my wife is a historian with minimal programming skills and these tools have allowed her to build some things that she’d never have been able to build without them (without spending a thoroughly unreasonable amount of time learning). Sometimes she comes to me with some code that is clearly just totally wrong but most of the time she’s able to stumble her way to something useful for exploring her documents and data. Then we just do a code review before anything goes into a publication to check that it is actually doing what she intends.
by blacksmith_tb | 2025-06-03 19:06:07+00:00
Also, never expect AWS support to actually help with anything around billing or account setup, I had to close out an org on a project that was EOL and it was like pulling teeth, their answer to every roadblock was "you should have known you'd need to have the credentials of your former employees, because we might have demanded their payment info too, as backup" etc. I ended up having to spin back up several email accounts so I could impersonate people who'd left years earlier, just to close their accounts (including add payment info to their accounts in order to close them... mind boggling).
by lapcat | 2025-06-03 19:06:34+00:00
I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "filter into" or at what level or stage of classes you're referring to.

To a large extent, it's self-filtering: who is going to voluntarily take advanced math classes except those who are intered in advanced math?

There are of course larger societal questions of how much schooling is funded by the government and how much needs to be self-funded.

I don't know if this is what you're talking about, but I had to take the Graduate Records Exam in order to get into grad school. But the GRE is not taught or administered by the university, so in that sense it's not part of the educational system. You don't actually have to be in the math department to take an advanced math class, though, and other students may take the classes as part of a PhD minor or just for some other interest.
by conduit-tech | 2025-06-03 19:06:55+00:00
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by latexr | 2025-06-03 19:07:07+00:00
Separated into multiple lines to make it easier to find each one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39110194 (2024)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34482433 (2023)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995152 (2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29667095 (2021)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24947167 (2020)
by dabockster | 2025-06-03 19:07:29+00:00
You can get 90%+ of the way there with a tiny “coder” LLM running on the Ollama backend with an extension like RooCode and a ton of MCP tools.

In fact, MCP is so ground breaking that I consider it to be the actual meat and potatoes of coding AIs. Large models are too monolithic, and knowledge is forever changing. Better just to use a small 14b model (or even 8b in some cases!) with some MCP search tools, a good knowledge graph for memory, and a decent front end for everything. Let it teach itself based on the current context.

And all of that can run on an off the shelf $1k gaming computer from Costco. It’ll be super slow compared to a cloud system (like HDD vs SSD levels of slowness), but it will run in the first place and you’ll get *something* out of it.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-03 19:07:29+00:00
Again, it takes few seconds per target with current laser tech. Which means they don't have important simultaneous multi target engagement capability.

The targets, whether it's plumbing pipe rockets or lipo drones, come in at 100-1000 yards/sec, so you don't really have that many seconds per target.

They work in the demo in which you just shoot down the sole target as it fly perpendicular to the machine for both physical and career safety, but when it comes to deploying the thing around your bed, guns make a lot more sense.
by oldpersonintx2 | 2025-06-03 19:07:58+00:00
never

if you can't unionize FAANG, there is no point, its like the UAW but they never got into GM or Ford

you will never unionize FAANG:

the highest paid ICs will see no point, a union is just leveling them down and forcing them to join ranks with people they don't really care that much about

the lowest tiered employees are fungible and can be terminated before they can organize

HN will want to reflexively downvote this, but think it through...how do you unionize the entire engineering dept at a place like Apple? its not possible
by jdietrich | 2025-06-03 19:08:06+00:00
Operation in GNSS-denied areas is already a stock feature on many relatively inexpensive commercial drones. The manufacturers talk about it euphemistically for obvious reasons, but they're designing drones specifically for the Ukraine war. There's a huge amount of engineering effort going into building drones that can remain operational in an extremely hostile RF environment.

Compensating for wind drift is a fairly straightforward software problem when you've got a fast processor, a bunch of high-resolution cameras and a laser rangefinder.

https://www.autelrobotics.com/productdetail/evo-lite-enterpr...
by diggan | 2025-06-03 19:08:14+00:00
Yeah, I'd agree you want to iterate, but I'm not sure the UX of "Log of messages, where some of yours, some are tool calls, others are the assistant" and the workflow of "Add more messages into the log of messages"/"Change existing messages" is the right broad UX for this type of work.

I'm sorry I can't substantiate it more than that, as my own head is still trying to wrap itself around what I think is needed instead. Still, sounds very "fluffy" even when I read it back myself.
by godot | 2025-06-03 19:08:39+00:00
I googled for "image resizer" and every single one of the top results (imageresizer, Adobe, simpleimageresizer, promo.com, etc.) have to upload the image(s) to their server and it does server processing. The upload itself takes a minute and the export/download process often takes longer. On top of that sometimes there are too many knobs and ads. Most of the time when I need to resize one or a bunch of images I already have a target dimension in mind and want to just do it all quickly.

I wrote scripts to do this before but I figured why not build a web tool that's super fast. With HTML5 canvas there's no real reason to do server upload to do resizing other than to get people to sign up or something. This client-only tool should be way faster than the common alternatives.
by maxpr | 2025-06-03 19:08:48+00:00
Hey lukol, that's an exciting problem to solve.

The best solution right now is prompt engineering: turns out, AI can be tuned to provide top quality results with the correct system prompt/few shot setup, and custom prompts can be provided in the compiler config.

Longer term, I want this to never be an issue, and I feel we'll get there together with the help from the open source community!
by petesergeant | 2025-06-03 19:09:06+00:00
I dunno, there's a world where this ends differently, and the company was liquid for six more months and transitioned to "actual" AI instead, having already built the customer base and sales channels, and everyone's happy. Launching your AI product before the AI works appears not to be especially unusual and is only a problem if the money runs out before you finish building the AI.
by frank_nitti | 2025-06-03 19:09:10+00:00
Some may have a better answer, but I often compare with tools like OpenAPI and AsyncAPI generators where HTTP/AMQP/etc code can be generated for servers, clients and extended documentation viewers.

The trade off here would be that you must create the spec file (and customize the template files where needed) which drives the codegen, in exchange for explicit control over deterministic output. So there’s more typing but potentially less cognitive overhead with reviewing a bunch of LLM output.

For this use case I find the explicit codegen UX preferable to inspecting what the LLM decided to do with my human-language prompt, if attempting to have the LLM directly code the library/executable source (as opposed to asking it to create the generator, template or API spec).
by nyrikki | 2025-06-03 19:09:37+00:00
You are in rarified air as Walter Pitts believed this until the 1959 paper "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain" contributed to his decline.

Even in fly eyes, neuron dendritic compartmentalization and variable spike trains are incompatible with our current perceptron based models.

Remember that while the value of MLPs for useful work is unquestionable IMHO, be mindful of the map territory relation. MLPs are inspired by and in some cases useful for modeling biological minds, they aren't equivalent.

Be careful about confusing the map for the territory, it is just as likely to limit what opportunities you find as it is to lead you astray IMHO.
by bb88 | 2025-06-03 19:09:53+00:00
> Obviously a person can easily cycle 20mph, but it just isn't the kind of thing you do on in a crowded area.

I've seen many road bikes do exactly this on a crowded bike path of pedestrians, scooters, and e-bikes. I've also seen e-bikes wait patiently to pass and slow down when there's traffic. I think proclaiming that e-bike riders are worse than road bike riders is patently false.

So it's not really an "e-bike" problem. It's really a speed problem.