MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mhalle | 2025-06-05 13:03:49+00:00
I think it's something you have to try in order to understand.

Running commands one by one and getting permission may sound tedious. But for me, it maps closely to what I do as a developer: check out a repository, read its documentation, look at the code, create a branch, make a set of changes, write a test, test, iterate, check in.

Each of those steps is done with LLM superpowers: the right git commands, rapid review of codebase and documentation, language specific code changes, good test methodology, etc.

And if any of those steps go off the rails, you can provide guidance or revert (if you are careful).

It isn't perfect by any means. CC needs guidance. But it is, for me, so much better than auto-complete style systems that try to guess what I am going to code. Frankly, that really annoys me, especially once you've seen a different model of interaction.
by klabb3 | 2025-06-05 13:03:53+00:00
> That's asshole behavior, and worth naming, shaming, and ostracizing over.

These exploits are being developed, distributed and orchestrated by Meta. The ”millions of websites” are just hummus recipe content farms using their ad SDKs, and are downstream Zuck in every meaningful interpretation of the term.

Meta has been named and shamed for decades. Shame only works in a society where bad actors are punished by the masses of people that constitute Meta’s products. Doesn’t mean we should stop, only that it’s not enough.
by timr | 2025-06-05 13:03:58+00:00
> I definitely do agree with this; and I would add that at that point you can really make do with tab-completion and not a full agent workflow. I used this successfully even back in 2021-2022 with Copilot.

Sure. The thing that "agents" add to this -- and I think it's actually really valuable -- is the ability to run their own output and fix the bugs.

Yesterday I pointed an agent at a controller, asked it to write a test suite (with some core requirements of what exactly to test), and then I reviewed the content of the tests for sanity. Then I pointed another agent at the output of that code, and told it to run the tests and fix the bugs.

It got stuck once or twice, requiring me to say "don't do that" and/or change a few lines of code, but overall I had a much more comprehensive test suite than I ever would have written, in about 15 minutes of drinking coffee.
by ethbr1 | 2025-06-05 13:03:58+00:00
>> Article updated on June 10, 2023 at 5:00 AM PDT

>> Now that the Tesla Model 3 is eligible for the full $7,500 [US federal] electric vehicle tax credit

>> The Model 3 is eligible for the full $7,500 [California tax credit], bringing the total amount of federal and state tax credits to $15,000.

So the cheapest Model 3 (as of 2023) was $14,000 more expensive than the cheapest Camry, but offset by tax policy.
by timonoko | 2025-06-05 13:05:16+00:00
What I really wanted was a "pascal-type" tokenizer and second stack for commands. "(" means push next and ")" means pop and execute. In this kind of system (if (< a 1) (setq a (+ a 2))) is totally valid without much overhead and about 187% more readable than Forth.

And yes I know it is not Lisp, perse.
by kragen | 2025-06-05 13:05:42+00:00
Also, using a 68000 instead of a shitty Intel processor was a huge boon to assembly programming. Ultimately Intel won in the market and eventually even shipped processors that weren't profoundly unpleasant at the assembly level, but the 68000 is still a much more pleasant architecture for the assembly programmer. ARM is nicer still, but this was before ARM's existence as a separate company from Acorn.
by exceptione | 2025-06-05 13:06:32+00:00
> but more of a "government thing".

slight improvement: "more of a not government thing". Neo-liberal dogma tells us that `public services == bad`, government should hand out contracts to commercial sector, aka "small government".

Commercial sector gets dependent on government, and takes on politics as part of the business. You end up with State Capture. That means that the "real world" government is shifted outside public control.

> Defence contractors in the US

are something else entirely. keyword: political economy
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-05 13:06:43+00:00
1.15 fertility rate. Wow.

But, really, women seeing having to take the husband's name as a reason not to marry? I mean, sure, that's rather restrictive for no good reason. But from where I stand, if you're thinking of marrying someone, and having to change your name is your reason not to, you don't really want to marry them very much.

(Easy enough for me to say as a male. But would I have changed my name to marry my wife? Absolutely.)
by weego | 2025-06-05 13:06:45+00:00
Yes, my initial distrust lead me to believe that I should only trust whatever ai agent it is to handle the granular issues in code. But they're fundamentally bad at it unless you spend more time prompting and re-prompting than a human with the right context would spend doing it properly.

Now I've changed my technical planning phase to write in a prompt-friendly way, so I can get AI to bootstrap, structure, boilerplate and usually also do the database setup and service layer, so I can jump right into actually writing the granular logic.

It doesn't save me planning or logic overhead, but it does give me far more momentum at the start of a project, which is a massive win.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-05 13:07:00+00:00
Guns are easy to get, they’re portable, they’re easy to use, and they are stable and safe to operate. Bombs are pretty much none of those things. Bombs are not sold at your local Walmart or sporting goods store, they don have weekend bomb shows at your local convention centers, they require some skill to make, the raw ingredients are tracked at point of sale, and to have the same casualty count tends to require a large amount. It doesn’t take much reasoning to understand why guns are the goto choice
by alnwlsn | 2025-06-05 13:07:21+00:00
One time, I was driving across New Mexico, and we heard something break under the hood. No point in stopping to see what it was; we might as well drive it as far as we can until it stops. All was fine, going along the same perfectly straight section of highway for around 2 hours, until we made it to the next city and went to turn down a street - oof! It was then very apparent the power steering pump went out.
by therealpygon | 2025-06-05 13:07:44+00:00
So you searched “WebRTC”, and then took the extraordinary step of… not actually reading any of them while simultaneous using them as supposed points? Quick question since you seem to know a lot about these CVEs and have spent a fair amount of time understanding them: how many of those were browser implementation issue?

This is like searching CVE for “node” and then claiming Node is terrible because some node packages have vulnerabilities. Low effort and intended to fit evidence to an opinion instead of evaluating evidence. “Linux” has 17,000 results; using your critical lens, all Linux is insecure.
by littlestymaar | 2025-06-05 13:08:41+00:00
> Are they just all in violation or what?

Yes, and that's why the European Commission keeps being pushed back by the Court of Justice of the EU (the Safe Harbor was ruled out, Privacy Shield as well, and it's likely a matter of time before the CJEU kills the Data Privacy Framework as well), but when it takes 3-4 years to get a ruling and then the Commission can just make a new (illegal) framework that will last for a couple years, the violation can carry on indefinitely.
by Someone | 2025-06-05 13:09:18+00:00
The site being discussed prominently mentions

- “Tools for Linux, macOS, and Windows”

- “Run performant services on Linux and deploy to the cloud”

- “Develop efficient, reliable firmware for devices like microcontrollers”

- “Reuse existing C/C++ drivers and SDKs with zero wrappers or runtime glue, integrating in minutes.”

The site has examples for running Swift code on a Raspberry Pi Pico W, an ESP32 microcontroller and a PlayDate.

That doesn’t mean Swift is the best tool for doing these things, but “really hard to imagine a use case for Swift outside of Apple platforms”?
by mopsi | 2025-06-05 13:10:55+00:00
The civilian death toll in Ukraine is severely underreported due to a lack of access to the occupied territories, while the death toll in Gaza is greatly overreported because Hamas is the primary source of information and they are known for inflating the numbers a lot.

Another factor is the nature of the warfare. Russia uses forced conscripts from occupied territories (a war crime on its own) in a deliberately wasteful manner to exterminate them. A significant portion of military deaths deserve to be counted as Ukrainian civilians. Nor am I entirely sure that the tens of thousands of convicts coerced into the military can be considered "military" in the conventional sense. Modern standards and definitions are not well aligned with such a feudal behavior.
by Thorrez | 2025-06-05 13:12:00+00:00
>Why should websites ever have access to the local network?

It's just the default. So far, browsers haven't really given different IP ranges different security.

evil.com is allowed to make requests to bank.com . Similarly, evil.com is allowed to make requests to foo.com even if foo.com DNS resolves to 127.0.0.1 .
by mschuster91 | 2025-06-05 13:12:20+00:00
> All of the things you're discussing are not things that the US simply didn't bother to try to solve, but we were ultimately powerless to do so.

I disagree with this assessment.

Had the Western forces provided actual, proven economic opportunities for the people, the supply of "resistance" fighters would have dwindled. People don't become terrorists or insurgents just because, they follow that path because they do not see a gainful alternative to this life. (Side note, we're seeing this also in Palestine where Hamas and Fatah both draw a steady supply of recruits from the desperate)

Afghanistan has untold billions of dollars worth of all kinds of natural resources [1]. But no attempt was made, not even on paper, to exploit these natural resources. IMHO, even a single pilot project would have been a good start - a mine that pays a decent amount of money to the workers and the profits going to the national government as well as local authorities. Basically, show to the wide population that something good came around from all the suffering in the end, provide an alternative from the Taliban propaganda that at least promised salvation in the afterlife for killing infidels.

But no, we ignored this opportunity, which meant that other than "women can go to schools" we did not have any talking points available to counter the Taliban propaganda of "they're killing us with impunity and the puppet government is looting". That is how we truly lost, and what China and a bunch of oil sheiks will now enjoy.

[1] https://globalinitiative.net/analysis/why-is-afghanistan-par...
by WillAdams | 2025-06-05 13:12:23+00:00
I tried a couple of prompts and never got anything usable.

Quite surprised that:

>Create a gridfinity storage unit with dividers

failed so badly (it created a vertically oriented wall-mount type thing with two extraneous recesses at the top)

The thing is, OpenSCAD is dead simple for things which can be modeled using cubes, cylinders, and spheres (and mathematical transformations/positioning of such components) --- that's the great thing.

The awful thing is one's ability to model in OpenSCAD is strongly limited by one's fluency with mathematics (and esp. trigonometry) --- if this tool could help with that latter aspect it would be far more interesting to me (but I'm obviously not the target audience).
by simiones | 2025-06-05 13:12:45+00:00
English also shows a remarkable variation in pronunciation of words even for a single person. I don't know of any other language where, even in careful formal speech, words can just change pronunciation drastically based on emphasis. For example, the indefinite article "a" can be pronounced as either [ə] (schwa, for the weak form) or "ay" (strong form). "the" can be "thə" or "thee". Similar things happen with "an", "can", "and", "than", "that" and many, many other such words.
by 1718627440 | 2025-06-05 13:12:47+00:00
> HTML, which is executable however, is not seen as a programming language in regular PL discourse

HTML is executable?

> UML is not executable, so could easily be disregarded as a programming language, but is not

Who claims, that UML is a programming language? Is there a program that is written in "UML"? It is more a language in the same sense as a "design language" of a building.
by jshprentz | 2025-06-05 13:13:02+00:00
In his ElixirConf EU 2025 presentation [1], Chris McCord demonstrated Phoenix.new [2], an LLM-augmented VS Code in a browser that knows how to build Elixir/Phoenix apps.

McCord began by reviewing the current scripted and templated Phoenix code generator. He then showed how a tool-invoking LLM agent could be implemented in one screen of Elixir code. The bulk of his talk demonstrated generating apps with the Phoenix.new tool. It was interesting to see the tool generate development plan and begin coding to implement the plan.

I was fascinated to hear McCord explain and critique the LLM agent as it generated a Phoenix app.

"[It's] going to come up with a plan for our app and codify that into a Markdown file."

"Now it's going to take our high-level plan and make it into an expanded plan for us and itself."

"You can say, 'I changed the plan; execute the plan.'"

"We just recursed in the server and we did a req post. It's doing a req post right now and the tokens are coming back!"

"The agent just invoked a tool, which is 'I'm going to create a file.'"

"Hopefully it does a 'surgical modify tool,' which makes it not have to modify the whole file."

"A run-time error! Oh, no! Live coding is terrible. Oh, wait. It knows I need to add some missing functions here."

"You would be like, 'Oh, no, the page broke. What happened? I'm going to look at this error.' We just send that thing back to the chat completions endpoint and magic comes out and fixes the error."

"It didn't change a web file. We should fix that."

"This is an issue that humans hit; Steff and I need to fix that."

"It added the input at the bottom. That's not ideal."

"The agent decided to idle here. ... The way I implemented this is everything the agent responds with is a tool call and it has an idle tool and that's what it invokes when it is done."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ojL_VHc4gLk

[2] https://phoenix.new/
by perihelions | 2025-06-05 13:13:36+00:00
> "Why isn't this done immediately by just lowering it's orbit even further and letting it burn?"

It'd take a very significant and expensive amount of fuel to "just lower" the orbit! From its 700 km orbit, it'd cost (by my estimate) roughly 300 m/s, or on the order of 10% of entire satellite mass, to perform this lowering burn.

It's not at all standard practice to deliberately dispose of satellites this way (SpaceX is a major outlier), and wasn't even on the radar in the 1990's, when this satellite was being built.

(Here's an anchoring point: the projected cost for the propulsion to "just" deorbit the International Space Station, at the end of its operating life, is $1.5 billion [0]).

[0] https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-iss-deorbit-vehicle-...
by vrighter | 2025-06-05 13:14:10+00:00
"correct" for an llm means "fits the statistical distributions in the training data"

"correct" for you is "truth that corresponds to the real world"

They are two very different things. The llm's output is, very much, correct. Because it was never meant to mean anything other than similarity of probability distributions.

It's not what you wanted, but that doesn't make it incorrect. You're just under a wrong assumption about what you were asking for. You were asking for something that looks like it could be true. Even if you ask it to not hallucinate, you're just asking it to make it look like it is not hallucinating. Meanwhile you thought you were asking for the actual, real, answer to your question.
by anarticle | 2025-06-05 13:14:51+00:00
This was a fantastic piece of software that was included with your Sound Blaster card.

At that time, it was uncommon to have a sound card, most computers had a PC speaker that produced beeps and in some really rare cases (Star Control 2 did this) played a low fi version of what would have been sound card output.

You spent your $179, and suddenly games had some kind of midi/wav support.

This had a synthesized voice at your machine which at the time was magical. I was completely blown away at the age of ten, and it definitely kept my interest in computing.
by throw0101d | 2025-06-05 13:15:38+00:00
> If you have an accurate true north compass reading, an accurate clock and assume that you’re at sea level, star positions give you all the information you need to find your location on earth.

After stopping for a little while, the US Naval College brought back sextant training:

* https://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-bac...
by max_on_hn | 2025-06-05 13:16:21+00:00
Some solid tips here but I think this bit really misses the point:

> The key is to view the AI as a partner you can coach – progress over perfection on the first try

This is not how to use AI. You cannot scale the ladder of abstraction if you are babysitting a task at one rung.

If you feel that it’s not possible yet, that may be a sign that your test environment is immature. If it is possible to write acceptance tests for your project, then trying to manually coach the AI is just a cost optimization, you are simply reducing the tokens it takes the AI to get the answer. Whether that’s worth your time depends on the problem, but in general if you are manually coaching your AI you should stop and either:

1. Work on your pipeline for prompt generation. If you write down any relevant project context in a few docs, an AI will happily generate your prompts for you, including examples and nice formatting etc. Getting better at this will actually improve

2. Set up an end-to-end test command (unit/integration tests are fine too add later but less important than e2e)

These processes are how people use headless agents like CheepCode[0] to move faster. Generate prompts with AI and put them in a task management app like Linear, then CheepCode works on the ticket and makes a PR. No more watching a robot work, check the results at the end and only read the thoughts if you need to debug your prompt.

[0] the one I built - https://cheepcode.com
Show HN: MCP Server that simulates smart home and lifestyle devices
by gokhan | 2025-06-05 13:16:56+00:00
Hi HN,

I wanted to see how AI Agents could be used for home automation and everyday household tasks, so I wrote a simulator MCP Server that has tools for things like home appliances, grocery shopping, banking and more.

Testing it with Claude Desktop and so far it's surprisingly smooth. An example from today:

Prompt: Please restock grocery if needed. Agent: - Call: refrigerator_get_internal_picture Sees shelves aren’t full, decides to restock. - Call: grocery_get_past_orders Checks past orders to identify what's missing. - Call: bank_get_creditcard_full_info Grocery order requires payment info. Retrieves it. - Call: gorcery_place_order Places the order and displays a summary.

This worked on the first try, the workflow is automatically discovered by the agent. Other than the prompt, only other input was MCP tool descriptions it received automatically when initializing the MCP Server. In an other example, if you say you're going to bed it closes the blinds, sets temperature around the house, locks the door and stops the music. Both examples are pretty much doable with available technology (though a fridge that takes internal photos might be a slight stretch).

If you'd like to try it out, the code is here: https://github.com/altinoren/Utopia
by haswell | 2025-06-05 13:16:59+00:00
> It depends on one's moral philosophy.

To make sure I understand your comment, are you saying that a company that sells a product with a $50K minimum buy-in — a number determined to be the threshold at which the company can recoup development costs and make a reasonable profit — is engaging in some kind of immoral behavior because it can only be purchased by larger companies?

> One kind would see it as discrimination with a negative, long-term impact on people and markets. Others would say they can do whatever they want.

This is quite the false dichotomy.

There are many valid reasons to sell to specific customer segments/markets that do not amount to “we’re doing it because we want to”.

In the early days of 3D printing, such hardware was prohibitively expensive and primarily sold to businesses. Even now, there are classes of 3D printer that cost many multiples of $10K. It would be strange to classify this as discrimination vs. acknowledging the realities of the market and the fact that it only makes sense target specific customer types depending on the product.

> They might also inspire people to use or develop lock-in-free alternatives which some out there are doing.

Lock-in is orthogonal to this pricing structure. It sounds like your primary issue is with companies that behave badly and use dark patterns. I share those concerns. But those issues are not inherent (or limited to) to “Call Us” pricing.
by ergsef | 2025-06-05 13:17:23+00:00
You're making it very black-and-white when there's a lot of nuance to these kinds of discussions. A woman in a leadership role making difficult choices or shutting people down may be abrasive, but a man doing it might be admired for their vision. A woman taking risks might be careless, or a dilettante, while a man taking the same risks is bold and courageous. Even if the outcome is the same, men can fail while women have to be successful (and even then they're still criticized for _how_ they succeeded).
by silversmith | 2025-06-05 13:17:35+00:00
Aranet runs on e-ink, with silly low energy refresh rate. The two (or was it one? ages since I last checked) AA batteries last me well over two years.

As for vendor lock-in, the basic readings get broadcast over bluetooth advertisments, and you can establish connection to get all the data. I have couple of them working nicely with HomeAssistant.

The cost, yeah, I'd love it to be cheaper.
by rthnbgrredf | 2025-06-05 13:17:54+00:00
Yes, but php-fpm already has this kind of information for you: https://www.inanzzz.com/index.php/post/6cn7/formatting-php-f...

You can print the time, cpu and memory usage per request and build metrics based on these outputs. This can be done in any major cloud, with open source tooling and even with simple linux coretuils. One tool to visualize such metrics is Grafana.
by michaelcampbell | 2025-06-05 13:18:15+00:00
> Elixir has been quite easy to set up, configure and deploy, at least for the last 5-6 years.

One of your sibling commenters noted...

> I've basically found it [Elixir] the only language more difficult than python to set up an environment for.

Quite the difference.

I'm not saying either one of you is wrong; I'm sure you both experienced what you say you did, it's just interesting to see the dichotomy, literally (as of this writing) next to each other.
by kentonv | 2025-06-05 13:18:35+00:00
Luckily, shareholders do not decide who to hire and fire. The actual officers of the company, hopefully, understand why senior engineers are non-fungible. Tech companies, at least, seem to understand this well. (I do think a lot of non-tech companies that nevertheless have software in their business get this wrong, and that's why we see a lot of terrible software out there. E.g. most car companies.)

As for junior engineers, despite the comparisons in coding skill level, I don't think most people are suggesting that AI should replace junior engineers. There are a lot of things humans do which AI still can't, such as seeing the bigger picture that the code is meant to implement, and also, as you note, learning over time. An LLM's consciousness ends with its context window.