MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by missinglugnut | 2025-06-27 20:38:29+00:00
Steve, I know you're an authority on the language but you've dismissed the point being made here without engaging with it.

Return is a statement in the minds of most programmers, but an expression in the language. That was a very pragmatic decision that required an unintuitive implementation. As a result, we've got this post full of code that is valid to the compiler but doesn't make a lick of sense to most programmers reading it.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-06-27 20:38:59+00:00
The tiniest nudge pushes a complex system (ChatGPT’s LLM) from a delicate hard won state - alignment - to something very undesirable.

The space of possible end states for trained models must be a minefield. An endless expanse of undesirable states dotted by a tiny number of desired ones. If so, the state these researchers found is one of a great many.

Proves how hard it was to achieve alignment in the first place.
by elmolino89 | 2025-06-27 20:40:59+00:00
Frankly I have a problem with one of your problem as described. Who on the planet Earth creates a container with GCC, may I guess, to compile programs? and then complains about make being located in another container. If you miss some utility just convert the apptainer container to a sandbox, install utilities you need and convert the sandbox to .sif as needed.

Also the whole point of building the program using compilers/libraries in the container is to use such container to run the aforementioned program in that very environment and not worry about libraryX or utility Y not installed in some box in a galaxy far, far away...
by timr | 2025-06-27 20:41:40+00:00
Or, more charitably: the Supreme Court has says that the president has this authority, in this specific area, and your characterization of this as "breaking the law" is not correct.

Edit: actually, even that is overstating it. This is an extremely narrow ruling that is mainly about the powers of federal judges. It's the sort of ruling that the "other side" will trumpet as settled law when they're the ones in power again.
by brudgers | 2025-06-27 20:42:19+00:00
What you say makes sense if there actually is a corporate shield.

Because “startup” is often used in a weak sense only to mean “new business,” there may not be corporate protections for the beneficial owners of this startup.

If it is a Silicon Valley style startup, then the founders probably ought to talk to their investors because that relationship matters and the investors probably know something about open sourcing code bases from shut downs.
by pyuser583 | 2025-06-27 20:43:45+00:00
I'm a very, very "tech savy" parent, raising a non tech savy child.

Parental control software simply does not work. It just does not. And even worse, it is advertized as working!

The only solution is to deprive them of devices that access the Internet. But even that does not work, because schools often require Chromebooks to use with Google Classroom.

Did I mention Google Classroom has workarounds that let through tons of inappropriate content, and there is no way for the school to know?

When the schools are literally requiring software that allows inappropriate, what can you do?
Show HN: I built a RAG APIs that works like Stripe Checkout
by KaKandikonda76 | 2025-06-27 20:43:57+00:00
I'm building LiquidIndex, an RAG API service that makes it easy to add personalized context to AI apps. Instead of building a whole system to upload, process, and search through a user’s files or notes, you just call a few APIs. It handles the hard parts - like connecting to Notion or Google Drive, breaking the data into usable pieces, and making it searchable. Then, when you want to answer a question using that data, you just query it, and it gives you the most relevant results - optionally with an LLM-generated answer. No pipelines, no infrastructure, no headaches.

Here are the core APIs:

1. Create a customer (This is a space to put data)

2. Create an upload session (This is where users upload their data)

3. Query

Current connectors: File Upload, Google Drive, Notion, Dropbox

Supported File Types: PDF, text files, Markdown, CSVs, and XLSX (these include google docs and sheets)

Website: https://liquidindex.dev/

Check out the playground to get a feel of how it works!
Show HN: StrateQueue- Bridge backtest and live trading with microsecond latency
by SamTinnerholm | 2025-06-27 20:44:05+00:00
My co-founder and I applied to YC this summer with a full quant platform - backtest, optimize, and deploy strategies all in one place. Regulatory complexity killed us. We had to pivot.

While my co-founder moved on to other things, I kept working on the core problem: why is it so hard to go from backtest to live trading? Our original platform only supported one backtesting framework, and we acted as the broker through Alpaca. It was brittle and limited.

So I built StrateQueue as an open-source library instead. It now supports four major backtesting frameworks (Backtrader, Zipline, PyAlgoTrade, bt) with a unified API. Same with brokers - IB and Alpaca, with more coming. Adding new ones is straightforward.

The key insight was that most people don't need another backtesting platform - they need a bridge from their existing backtest to production. StrateQueue handles the messy parts: real-time data feeds, broker APIs, error handling, monitoring, and latency optimization.

You literally go from backtest to live in 3 lines of code, regardless of which framework you're using.

Would love feedback from anyone who's dealt with this production deployment nightmare before.
by steveklabnik | 2025-06-27 20:44:48+00:00
> Return is a statement in the minds of most programmers

I would take issue with this, sure, for a lot of people, they may be bringing assumptions over from languages where assignment is a statement. That doesn't make them correct.

> required an unintuitive implementation

To some people, sure. To others, it is not unintuitive. It's very regular, and people who get used to "everything is an expression" languages tend to prefer it, I've found.
Show HN: LLM Prompt Diff- Semantic Git Style Diffing for Prompts with Embeddings
by aatakansalar | 2025-06-27 20:44:58+00:00
A CLI tool for managing and semantically diffing LLM prompts. Goes beyond text diff by detecting meaning-level changes using embeddings (OpenAI or local). Useful for versioning, testing, and CI/CD workflows.
by brudgers | 2025-06-27 20:49:25+00:00
[random advice from the internet]

If you really want to put an open source project out in the world the right way, taking what you learned and building an appropriate code base might be a better route.

And if you don’t really want to put an open source project out in the world, that’s okay.

Your customers had an interest in paying you enough to stay in business. They did not pay enough (and maybe because you did not charge enough).

And to me, it seems like you are probably ready to move on and now is probably a good time for moving on. Good luck.
by Azkron | 2025-06-27 20:49:29+00:00
Whatever comes out of any LLM will directly depend on the data you feed it and which answers you reinforce as correct. There is nothing unknown or mystical about it. I honestly think that the main reason big tech claims they “don’t understand how they work” is either to avoid responsibility for what comes out of them or as a marketing strategy to impress the public.

EDIT: By the way, I definitely think LLMs are intelligent and could even be considered “synthetic minds.” That’s not to say they are sentient, but they will definitely be subject to all kinds of psychological phenomena, which is very interesting. However, this is outside the scope of my initial comment.
by unsignedint | 2025-06-27 20:49:36+00:00
I definitely see where you're coming from, though I have a slightly different perspective.

I agree that LLMs often fall short when it comes to capturing the nuanced reasoning behind implementations—and when used in an autopilot fashion, things can easily go off the rails. Documentation isn't just about what is said, but also what’s not said, and that kind of judgment is something LLMs do struggle with.

That said, when there's sufficient context and structure, I think LLMs can still provide a solid starting point. It’s not about replacing careful documentation but about lowering the barrier to getting something down—especially in environments where documentation tends to be neglected.

In my experience, that neglect can stem from a few things: personal preference, time pressure, or more commonly, language barriers. For non-native speakers, even when they fully understand the material, writing clear and fluent documentation can be a daunting and time-consuming task. That alone can push it to the back burner. Add in the fact that docs need to evolve alongside the code, and it becomes a compounding issue.

So yes, if someone treats LLM output as the final product and walks away, that’s a real problem. And honestly, this ties into my broader skepticism around the “vibe coding” trend—it often feels more like “fire and forget” than responsible tool usage.

But when approached thoughtfully, even a 60–90% draft from an LLM can be incredibly useful—especially in situations where the alternative is having no documentation at all. It’s not perfect, but it can help teams get unstuck and move forward with something workable.
by teraflop | 2025-06-27 20:50:01+00:00
The Supreme Court has pointedly not ruled or said that the president has the authority to redefine birthright citizenship. What they have actually done is to put very stringent requirements on how the president's authority can be challenged in lower courts.

And notably, exactly the same Republican-nominated Supreme Court judges did not do anything to interfere with exactly the same legal process (nationwide injunctions) when they were aimed at a Democratic president. See, e.g. Biden's student loan forgiveness executive order.
by ramon156 | 2025-06-27 20:50:13+00:00
I respect both the DIY's and the HA fans.

That aside, I'm currently contemplating whether running TrueNAS Scale for web apps is really necessary. I like the fact that I only need to click a few buttons or fill in a few fields, but on the otherhand my setup can be kept inside a docker-compose.yml

We'll never know, since I like the safety of running my apps through something like TrueNAS Scale. It feels professional
by kevin_thibedeau | 2025-06-27 20:50:19+00:00
This is always a hilarious take. If you inflation adjust a 386 PC from the early 90s when 486's were on the market you'd find they range in excess of $3000 and the 486s are in the $5000 zone. Computers are incredibly cheap now. What isn't cheap is the bleeding edge. A place fewer and fewer people have to be at, which leads to lower demand and higher prices to compensate.
by tavavex | 2025-06-27 20:50:25+00:00
It's not about just fulfillment or price-setting. This is just a narrow-scope experiment that tries to prove wider viability by juggling lots of business-related roles. Of course, the more number-crunching aspects of businesses are thoroughly automated. But this could show that lots of roles that traditionally require lots of people to do the job could be on the chopping block at some point, depending on how well companies can bring LLMs to their vision of a "perfect businessman". Customer interaction and support, marketing, HR, internal documentation, middle management in general - think broadly.
by int_19h | 2025-06-27 20:50:31+00:00
Pure functional languages have the equivalent of "never" - it's the bottom type. Indeed, the return type of `error` in Haskell is that, but also cases like predictable infinite recursion. But this semantics works great for cases like "return" and other forms of control transfer - the expression in which they appear also "never finishes" (but some other expression which contains that one as a subexpression does).

Now, yes, ideally you'd have effects in the type system so that you can express this kind of stuff with more precision. But if you restrict this to stuff like return/break/continue where the destination is statically known and can be validated, you can treat those effect types as been there, just inferred for all expressions and forbidden to cross the function boundary.

For exceptions specifically this trick no longer works because the whole point is for them to cross that boundary. But the amount of complexity this stuff adds to typing even trivial generic code is arguably too much for practical use (see also: checked exceptions in Java). In any case, in Rust you use Result types instead so those exceptions produce regular values. And although panics can be handled, they are certainly not meant to be used as a generic mechanism for transfer of control, so adding effect types for them alone is just not worth it.
by btilly | 2025-06-27 20:50:43+00:00
This paradigm for computing was already covered three years ago by Veratasium in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVsUOuSjvcg.

Maybe not the specific photonic system that they are describing. Which I'm sure has some significant improvements over what existed then. But the idea of using analog approximations of existing neural net AI models, to allow us to run AI models far more cheaply, with far less energy.

Whether or not this system is the one that wins out, I'm very sure that AI run on an analog system will have a very important role to play in the future. It will allow technologies like guiding autonomous robots with AI models running on hardware inside of the robot.
by sandspar | 2025-06-27 20:52:36+00:00
When hotels buy doors, they optimize for things like cost, fireproofing, and weight (so guests and housecleaning can open them easily). Noise cancelling is a nice-to-have, but if you're buying and maintaining ~100 room doors (USA average per hotel), then you have to cut costs somewhere. On top of that, hotel hallway environments tend to be noisy in the first place. We're talking long, narrow hallways with hard walls, plus constant streams of holidaymakers who aren't exactly tiptoeing around.
by modo_mario | 2025-06-27 20:52:37+00:00
Don't have access to the account i was using before right now but when i'm using chatgpt free tier which i believe is GPT-4o I at first thought i got it right again.

I decided to ask it: Can you give me the first 4 paragraphs of chapter 3 of the book The picture of Dorian Grey?

And it gave me something and it looked alright to me. It read right and i went to gutenberg and glanced over it and the first lines of each paragraph seemed correct but only the short ones were. The first paragraph which was longer after the opening lines suddenly had an entire section randomly replaced with hallucination.

A followup asking it to not hallucinate had it search the web to fetch the correct thing which isn't valid in this context.

I suspect it starts hallucinating once the bit of text gets long so i asked for specific sentences of chapters (and to do so without web search). the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and such.

It managed to not outright hallucinate lines then but did get the chapter i asked for wrong sometimes. I presume that with sufficiently careful prompting one can get the book out properly in sequential order with a lot of prompts but it takes quite some effort to get there. But that's where my curiosity ends for the night. My bed calls.
by watersb | 2025-06-27 20:53:17+00:00
Sincerely hope that's sarcasm.

I'm not aware of other private companies doing significant astronomy.

Some defense contractors have built incredible spacecraft, including space telescopes and planetary probes.

But those missions are exclusively run by NASA. The ability to receive the data is entirely a NASA thing. When NASA goes away, those telescopes are dead. Gone.

In general, observatories on the ground in the United States are not funded through NASA; the National Science Foundation funds a great deal of it.

(For private funding of ground-based astronomy, I know of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the SETI Institute's [Paul] Allen Telescope Array. But astronomers using that data mostly get paid by Federal research grants.)
by mariodiana | 2025-06-27 20:53:17+00:00
My understanding is that your characterization is true of the Articles of Confederation, but not true of the Constitution. The federal government's power is delegated from the people.

At the top of the Articles, it's pretty clear that the delegates of the states have come together to establish a league of states. At the top of the Constitution, it's explicitly stated that "We the People […] do ordain and establish."
by btilly | 2025-06-27 20:54:25+00:00
It's an analog system. Which means that accuracy is naturally limited.

However a single analog math operation requires the same energy as a single bit flip in a digital computer. And it takes a lot of bit flips to do a single floating point operation. So a digital calculation can be approximated with far less energy and hardware. And neural nets don't need digital precision to produce useful results.
by apercu | 2025-06-27 20:54:32+00:00
I’ve lived in 5 states and two countries. I’ve been to 10 other countries. I’ve now moved back to SW Wisconsin 4-5 times and will not leave again. I am very far left and not religious. I do not like sportsball. The best friendships I’ve made in my life outside of school are in Wisconsin. It’s the only place that’s ever felt like home for me and I’m not from here.

Admittedly Madison is different than a lot of the Midwest - though I live in a rural area south of the city.

Wait. You’re right. It totally sucks here and you will all hate it. Don’t come. Please, I beg you. Listen to the other guy.
by GrantMoyer | 2025-06-27 20:54:47+00:00
Haskell has `bottom`[1] (see also [2]), which acts like Rust's `return` from a type checking perspective.

I wouldn't call using a uninhabited type for the type of a return expression theoretically inelegant. On the contrary, I find it quite pleasing.

[1]: https://wiki.haskell.org/Bottom

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottom_type
by tuckerman | 2025-06-27 20:55:07+00:00
The big question is the work in question conceived of, designed, scoped, and then 30% to 50% of the doc/code written by a human and then finished by AI or is there some 30% to 50% of the work where all of that was owned by the AI.

Both are useful, but the former situation is one that just makes good engineers more useful/in demand imho.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-06-27 20:55:34+00:00
I think that choking your partner is presumptively physical abuse, in the same way that controlling who your partner can talk to is presumptively emotional abuse. It’s possible to consent to these things, sure, and if some individual tells me they’ve thought it over and genuinely want it it’s not my place to contradict them. But it’s also quite easy to not consent, or to frame mere acquiescence as consent in response to social pressure. I’m intensely skeptical that this is the one kind of gendered violence against women that’s pursued primarily for benign, consent-respecting reasons.
by czbot | 2025-06-27 20:56:16+00:00
Before today’s ruling nationwide injunctions were granted. Not sure how you can now claim “that’s how the court system works” when nationwide injunctions were fine before today’s ruling.

A President can now issue blatantly unconstitutional executive orders and the burden for obtaining relief will rest on each individual person (or small class of people). Prior to today rules/laws that caused harm could be temporarily prevented from being enforced while the matter is litigated. Now parties that will be harmed are much more likely to be harmed before the matter is resolved. This is a sad state of affairs.

If the next President issues an order confiscating guns from people the champions of today’s ruling will want nationwide relief while the matter is litigated.

If someone is going to be deported they can file a case and stop the deportation.

And you accuse OP of not paying attention!
by stefan_ | 2025-06-27 20:57:43+00:00
Thats why the government can just skip ahead and call the Supreme Court, and then the Supreme Court lifts it because apparently being unable to do illegal things is Irreparable Harm (actually makes a mockery of the concept of course).

In the meantime, when I sue John Doe and get an injunction, they are enjoined from their conduct everywhere; but when I sue the government, it should only apply to me? Makes no sense.
by acoustics | 2025-06-27 20:57:49+00:00
The majority seems too trusting that the government will appeal its losses.

Strategically, the government could enact a policy affecting a million people, be sued, lose, provide relief to the named plaintiffs, and then not appeal the decision. The upper courts never get the opportunity to make binding precedent, the lower courts do not get to extend relief to non-plaintiffs, and the government gets to enforce its illegal policies on the vast majority of people who did not (likely could not) sue.
by int_19h | 2025-06-27 20:58:06+00:00
We've been going down this road for a long time now. E.g. "throw" is a (void-typed) expression in C++ already for similar reasons, although it doesn't go far enough without a proper bottom type. C# took it further and added the type so that you can write things like e.g. `x = y ?? throw new Error(...)`. There's no obvious reason why "return" should be conceptually different.

A better question at this point, arguably, is why there should even be an expression/statement distinction in the first place. All imperative statements can be reasonably and sensibly represented as expressions that produce either () or "never". Semicolon then is just a sequencing operator, like comma in C++.
by burkaman | 2025-06-27 20:58:29+00:00
I think that comment is referring to Trump v. United States, where the court said that a president cannot be held accountable for using a Constitutional authority to break the law. It is very literally "a blank mandate to break the law".

For example, a president is granted authority to command the military and issue pardons. They have absolute immunity for any act performed using these authorities, including illegal acts such as assassinating or deporting a political opponent or accepting bribes in return for pardons. This is not a matter of opinion or a controversial interpretation, these consequences were discussed during the case and in the opinion, and the court accepted them.
Show HN: Dungeon Master in Your Console
by spacecadet | 2025-06-27 20:58:30+00:00
I don't normally share side projects here(or in general). Don't have much time to open them up to too much attention. I started this project while riding in a car last weekend. Mainly to explore OpenAI Codex. Using Github mobile I wrote the initial specifications into the readme, and using the ChatGPT iOS app, had Codex build a simple CLI based dungeon master. Switched back to Github for managing the PRs and back and forth for the whole car ride... It kinda got a little out of hand from there, and it's now a mix of AI(mostly AI) and myself making adjustments... The first version was entirely OAI and it worked OK but was too easy on the player. Thanks to HN I had heard about the Wayfarer model and I find that model to be pretty entertaining. In the end I thought this turned out pretty "cute" and makes a decent time waster that looks like work wink wink