MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fc417fc802 | 2025-06-01 00:55:06+00:00
The standard for humans is a clean room reimplementation so I guess you'd need 2 AIs, one to translate A into a list of requirements and one to translate that list back into code.

But honestly by the time AI is proficiently writing large quantities of code reliably and without human intervention it's unclear how much significance human labor in general will have. Software licensing is the least of our concerns.
by jazzyjackson | 2025-06-01 00:57:17+00:00
I always hated the streaming text responses in the chat interfaces, just seemed like a cynical attention-hack to continuously update the content instead of just returning the answer once it was done, so I think email makes a lot of sense, it especially makes slow-running local models a bit more bearable, instead of watching it type at 20 words per minute, just get back to me when you reach a stop token. Plus it can attach any relevant files or files it generates. I wrote a chatbot 8 years ago (chatscript dialog trees) that would gather parameters and run a SQL script, returning the resulting table as a .csv you could download. I wish I thought of doing it as an email character, would have integrated with existing processes way more easily than "login to this service we just spun up whenever you want to use it..."
by xelxebar | 2025-06-01 00:58:04+00:00
It depends a bit on your tastes. The content falls under the broad umbrella of Abstract Algebra, more specifically Ring Theory, or perhaps Field Theory if you squint a bit. Those are your keywords.

"Applications of Abstract Algebra with Maple and MATLAB" by Klinger, Sigmon, and Stitzinger is apparently good for those with an engineering background: https://www.maplesoft.com/books/details.aspx?id=624.

If you're committed, then any introductory text on abstract algebra or group theory might capture your interest.

I would recommend starting with applications or something as close to your wheelhouse as possible just to stay motivated. Abstract algebra, in particular, is known for requiring quite a lot of machinery before obviously connecting with other things, which can feel like an onslaught unless you're inherently interested.

Have fun though! It's really one of the deepest subjects in modern math, IMHO. Almost every field has been affected by it's results.
by djoldman | 2025-06-01 01:01:13+00:00
I find the definition of causality that places it squarely in the realm of philosophy to be a dead end or perhaps a circle with no end or objective or goal.

"What does it mean that something is caused by something else?" At the end of it all, what matters is how it's used in the real world. Personally I find the philosophical discussion to be tiresome.

In law, "to cause" is pretty strict: "but for" A, B would not exist or have happened. Therefore A caused B. That's one version. Other people and regimes have theirs.

This is why it's something I try to avoid.

In any case, descriptions of distributions are more comprehensive and avoid conclusions.
by tbrownaw | 2025-06-01 01:01:17+00:00
> That's because bias is at the root a social problem, not a technical one.

Bias is systematic error.

Maybe your thermometer just always reads 5° high.

Maybe it reads high on sunny days and low on rainy days.

Bias is distinct from random error, say if it's an electronic thermometer with a loose wire.

For classification problems, there's also this impossibility result: https://www.marcellodibello.com/algorithmicfairness/handout/...
by zrobotics | 2025-06-01 01:01:47+00:00
Umm, GFCI isn't an arcane thing, they've been around and required in bathrooms since the 70s [0]. People may not know the acronym, but they 100% are familiar with the outlets with the two little buttons that you sometimes have to reset. Local jurisdictions may have delayed adoption, so your city might not have required them right away but it was national code in 1975 for bathrooms.

They also don't have a circuit breaker built in, they perform a completely different function from a circuit breaker. And have been required in at least some portion of a property since the early 70s under the NEC, expanding over time to include anywhere where exposure to water is a possibility.

Even if we look at a super old version of the NEC, in 1965 I don't see anything that would prohibit installing an outlet near a toilet. I'm referencing a PDF of the 1965 version, but I don't have a shareable link.

I'm posting this not to shame you, but to point out that you have some misunderstandings of what is electrical code and so other members don't see your first confident statement and take it as fact. Plus, you can't tell if an outlet is GFCIs protected or not just by looking at it, even the very early ones could protect downstream outlets and at since the late 00's GFCIs combination breakers have been common. An outlet may look like a normal outlet and be GFCIs protected, I would wager that most of the kitchens you have been in have had GFCIs outlets.

[0] https://www.howtolookatahouse.com/Blog/Entries/2018/7/when-w...
by toast0 | 2025-06-01 01:02:46+00:00
You might try and see what happens if you get everything into a single compilation unit and enable aggressive inlining.

Depending on what you're doing / where it gets slow, it's possible you could get a significant speedup if the stars align. If your whole processing chain gets inlined into a single function, there's likely to be code that can be eliminated: maybe things calculated and returned but not used or redundant type tests or ???

But, you'll probably be better served with a NIF.
by austin-cheney | 2025-06-01 01:03:15+00:00
It has been 2 years since I was laid off. I was upset to lose a job but looking for the next job was even more depressing. JavaScript employment is such a race to the bottom. In hindsight I really don’t miss JavaScript employment even though I absolutely love writing applications in the language.

Fortunately a corporate recruiter found me at this incredible small employer. I was able to get out of the JavaScript nonsense and do something else. I was unemployed for 6 months and now love my current employer. I would never trade my current situation for a much higher paying job in JavaScript.
by ponta17 | 2025-06-01 01:05:05+00:00
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedback — I really appreciate it!

I think there might be a small misunderstanding regarding how the LLM is actually being used here (and in many agent-based setups). The LLM itself isn’t directly executing twist commands or handling motion; it’s acting as a decision-maker that chooses from a set of callable tools (Python functions) based on the task description and intermediate results.

In this case, yes — one of the tools happens to publish Twist commands, but that’s just one of many modular tools the LLM can invoke. Whether it’s controlling motion or running object detection, from the LLM’s point of view it’s simply choosing which function to call next. So the computational load really depends on what the tool does internally — not the LLM’s reasoning process itself.

Of course, I agree with your broader point: we should push toward more meaningful high-level tasks where LLMs can orchestrate complex pipelines — and I think your examples (like fetch-a-beer or map annotation via VLMs) are spot-on.

My goal with this project was to explore that decision-making loop in a minimal, creative setting — kind of like a sandbox for LLM-agent behavior.

Actually, I’m currently working on something along those lines using a TurtleBot3. I’m planning to provide the agent with tools that let it scan obstacles via 3D LiDAR and recognize objects through image processing, so that it can make more context-aware decisions.

Really appreciate the push for deeper use cases — that’s definitely where I want to go next!
by mdp2021 | 2025-06-01 01:05:38+00:00
You are misunderstanding the proposed frame: implementations may be faulty, but the approach remains necessary for "LLMs as informers". I.e., the answer provider should only work vis-a-vis documentation founding the output.

This implies that if we do not have good enough ways to retrieve information from repositories, we will have to invent them. Because the "LLM as informer" can only be allowed to formulate what it will find through the memex.

It is possible that to that aim, LLMs can not be directly implemented as they are in the current general state.

Also the problem of information reliability has to be tackled, in order to build such system (e.g. some sources rank higher).

It is not a solved problem, but it is a clear one. In mission critical applications, you would not even allow asking John at the nearby desk for information he may confuse.
by bad_haircut72 | 2025-06-01 01:06:15+00:00
If the cops hadnt also aggressively pursued people "stealing" music (a bullshit proposition to begin with) Spotify would not have won. For most people avoiding a potentially big fine, even if the chance is small, tips the balance into just paying a few bucks (which is itself a huge price concession from the music industry, who would love to charge what CDs used to cost) - but they cant, that would tip the balance back into piracy
by shubb | 2025-06-01 01:08:16+00:00
They already outsourced thier ecomerce offerings- to ocado - and that's up and running.

What remains is mostly logistics - this company runs farms and abertoires, food import and packaging and a network of warehouses and stores. The drop in cots product is SAP.

The whitelabel ecomerce site is kind of an insurance/ legacy thing while ocado is thier shopfront. Presumably they are prioritising what matters, the logistics, and might sunset this part of thier offer anyway.
by xelxebar | 2025-06-01 01:09:24+00:00
It's actually an interesting observation. If you know where your keys are, finding them is trivial, but if you don't, then even the refrigerator becomes plausible.

Math does feel like that a lot of the time. Once you've tree-searched proof space and found the connection, you can usually spend way less time proving it the next time around.
by zrobotics | 2025-06-01 01:10:16+00:00
Yeah, NEC only requires 1 outlet within 3 feet of each sink in a bathroom, and 2 sinks 6' apart could share 1 outlet. Bathrooms are the really the only place where the NFPA hasn't extended the required number of outlets, and I wouldn't be surprised to see that changed in an upcoming revision. At the very least I wouldn't be shocked to see a NEC requirement for an outlet within 3' of each toilet in the next decade.
by zeeb0t | 2025-06-01 01:11:58+00:00
Sorry for the late response.

I am self hosting Qwen3 and also use a series of models from OpenAI as a fallback / load balance.

I don't guarantee accuracy of data, however I have built in mechanisms for the AI to critique its own response before returning, which means that it is considered by my users to be accurate enough to be a major part of their production data workflows now.
by eadmund | 2025-06-01 01:12:17+00:00
> Like 'hey cool if I use this tool to interact with your site for this and that reason?'

They do ask: they make an HTTP request. How the server responds to that request is up to the owner. As in the article, the owner can decide to respond to that request however he likes.

I think that a big part of the issue is that software is not well-written. If you think about it, even the bots constantly requesting tarballs for git commits doesn’t have to destroy the experience of using the system for logged-in users. One can easily imagine software which prioritises handling requests for authorised users ahead of those for anonymous ones. One can easily image software which rejects incoming anonymous requests when it is saturated. But that’s hard to write, and our current networks, operating systems, languages and frameworks make that more difficult than it has to be.
by dmkolobov | 2025-06-01 01:13:28+00:00
It’s interesting that you use the “a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors” example. That kind of statement is definitely hard to parse when you’re trying to learn concepts.

However, the more I’ve learned about category theory, the more I’ve understood it as a way of defining what things are and what properties follow from those definitions.

Like, a monad really doesn’t have meaning beyond “monoid in the category of endofunctors”. The same is true for monoids and endofunctors: it’s all about the properties of those objects.

In the context of programming, we can impose all kinds of meaning, but the definitions and laws are really what makes it all work when you piece it together.

I guess my approach is to suffer through it until some understanding is gleaned, which admittedly isn’t very satisfying or easy haha.
by bastawhiz | 2025-06-01 01:14:05+00:00
That's simply not true. The best language for a front end is the language that's preferred by the platform. Firefox famously rewrote their UI with Java on Firefox because the XUL version was miserable. You don't build iOS apps with Java. You don't build Android apps with Go.

You can't actually build a mobile app entirely in JavaScript, but if your used React Native the parts that actually deal with materially interfacing between the client and the server aren't in JavaScript. At best you can share some typescript definitions.

Java on the server is extremely different from Java on client, and the same can be said for Swift. What do you get to share? Maybe the code that serializes and deserializes messages? But even then that's thanks to a library, not the language (and if you're using a feature of the stdlib, it's almost certainly just as easy to use in any other reasonable language).

Pyodide and PyScrpt exist and you could certainly build a full stack web app with them. Why doesn't anyone, then? It's because doing so doesn't solve any serious problems or make anything much better.
by rcxdude | 2025-06-01 01:14:44+00:00
>Inductance in your power supply lines is bad, but I don’t have time to get into it right now.

Not always. You want to have appropriate nearby bypass capacitance, but it's common to filter power lines by deliberately adding inductance into them (this also requires care to avoid setting up resonances, but a thin trace will also add some resistance which helps with that). Either way it's not likely to make a detectable difference on this kind of PCB anyway.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-06-01 01:14:55+00:00
> LLM providers should be more aggressive in educating users about their fallability since hallucinations can't ever be fully fixed, even if it means adding friction

But they can't be as the whole premise of the boom is replacing human intellectual labor. They've said as much on many many occasions--see Anthropic's CEO going off about mass unemployment quite recently. How can the two of these co-exist?
by rcxdude | 2025-06-01 01:18:03+00:00
You can 100% do it yourself, though I think the fact that it has GPS makes it a bit of a weird area because it starts to become a radio even if it's not an intentional transmitter (I've had people who work at EMC test labs tell me they don't understand WTF the standards are actually supposed to mean for GNSS kit). But for a regular electronic gadget you don't need a lab with the right certificates or anything, it's just a declaration on your own liability that you think it meets the required standards. If you're happy to do this yourself and that gives you enough confidence to sign it off, you can. (And in practice the regulators don't really come knocking for small stuff like this unless it's somehow doing something catastrophically bad)
by dwohnitmok | 2025-06-01 01:18:18+00:00
> If you realize this, the pattern of each agent fanning out and forking itself into as many sub-agents as are needed to fulfill the task becomes obvious.

And this is precisely how really bad things could happen:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kpPnReyBC54KESiSn/optimality...
by pruetj | 2025-06-01 01:18:37+00:00
I like the idea. The rental section has a lot of potential imo. It makes me wonder if there’s room for the personal property rental business in tools like there is for housing and cars.

I do a lot of DIY and tend to acquire a lot of the tools I use if I think they are generic enough or I’ll repeat a similar job in the future but there’s also jobs I do where I’ll happily borrow from a friend. For example, I just built a small privacy fence that needed 5 posts cemented in. For that, I wanted to use a post hole digger. It’s very unlikely I’ll build another fence any time soon and a post hole digger takes up enough space that I don’t want to buy one and keep one. It’s also like $50.

If I didn’t know a friend who just built a new fence and had one but had an option of renting one from a guy down the street for $10, that’s what I’d do. And I’d be so happy I didn’t just spent $50 and then have to either store a tool that’s never used again or try to sell it.

I think DIY is growing, it’s a great way to save money and it’s only becoming easier with YouTube to help you through most any job. Good luck with the site!
by alfiedotwtf | 2025-06-01 01:18:38+00:00
> Most popular programming languages have the defect that they impose a sequential semantics even where it is not needed. There have been programming languages without this defect, e.g. Occam, but they have not become widespread.

We have memory ordering functions to let compilers know the atomic operation preference of the programmer… couldn’t we do the same for maths and in general a set of expressions?
by const_cast | 2025-06-01 01:19:19+00:00
Kind of, but they lie in the HTTP request - their user agent isn't true, they don't disclose they're a bot, they try to replicate other traffic as a disguise, they use many different IPs so they can't easily be blocked, etc.

It's kind of like me asking to borrow your car to go to work and then I take your car and ship it overseas.
by dataflow | 2025-06-01 01:19:48+00:00
> C++ doesn't consider two atomic accesses of the same memory (at least one being a write) under memory_order_relaxed to be a data race, but TSAN does.

I'm confused what you're saying here. If you take the program I linked, which uses relaxed ordering, and add -fsanitize=thread, TSAN doesn't flag anything. That seems inconsistent with what you're saying?

P.S. note that even using memory_order_seq_cst wouldn't change anything in that particular program.
by geor9e | 2025-06-01 01:20:37+00:00
I love Cerebrus. 10-100x faster than the other options. I really wish the other companies realized that some of us prefer our computer be instant. I use their API (with Qwen3 reasoning model) for ~99% of my questions, and the whole answer finishes in under 0.1 seconds. Keeps me in a flow state. Latency is jarring. Especially the 5-10 seconds most AIs take these days, where it's just enough to make switching tasks not worth it. You just have to sit there in statis. If I'm willing to accept any latency, might as well make it a couple minutes in the background, and use a full agent mode or deep research AI at that point. Otherwise I want instant.
by bastawhiz | 2025-06-01 01:21:50+00:00
Why though? Why would you want your UI code in Python, as an example? Python has nothing in its standard library to help make websites. Tools like PyScript might give you the DOM, but suddenly you'll be using shims for all the other stuff you need, like resize handlers or fetch() or Intl.NumberFormat or anything else you care about.

Web apps are JavaScript. Android apps run on a JVM. iOS apps are whatever can compile to native code and use Apple's APIs. When you avoid the runtime of the language that you're expected to build for on a platform, you'll inevitably spent most of your time working just to get a handful of features that you need from the runtime into the language you're choosing to use.
by MarioMan | 2025-06-01 01:23:01+00:00
One of the more interesting cases of sci-fi greebling is in Infinity Chamber. The film was shot on a budget of only $125,000. Most of the movie happens in a single room. To save money, the backdrop used 2 liter soda crates the filmmakers found discarded at the back of a grocery store. Later they discovered that the crates are regularly reused, so they returned the unintentionally-stolen props after filming.
by m-s-y | 2025-06-01 01:23:07+00:00
> After an eight-hour flight, if you went to bed at 21:00 yesterday, you’ll do the same today. If you had a call at 13:00 yesterday, it’s still at 13:00 today.

Wow. This is amazing. Who knew this only worked with UTC!! /s

Missives like this just make me embarrassed for us “technical folk”.
by zrobotics | 2025-06-01 01:23:40+00:00
Do they need to post sources for every possible municipality? Los Angeles is actually a very definitive source on them being bad for sanitation systems. LA is a pretty young city, they really don't have any terribly ancient sewage systems. There were apparently still wooden pipes in service in Philly in 2017 [0], probably there still are some in service right now. LA's oldest infrastructure could conceivably be from the 1860s, and realistically their oldest infrastructure would be from the 1910s. If their sanitation district advises against it, why would we expect older cities like NYC or Baltimore to fare better?

[0] https://philly.curbed.com/2017/5/5/15545532/philadelphia-wat...
by GouacheApp | 2025-06-01 01:24:30+00:00
Really appreciate you sharing that example—it perfectly captures the kind of use case we’re building Patio for. DIY is awesome, but yeah, not every tool needs to be owned, stored, or bought new. Renting something like a post hole digger from a neighbor for a few bucks just makes sense. That’s exactly the gap we’re trying to fill—making borrowing as easy as buying, and helping people save space, money, and waste. Thanks again for the encouragement!
by andy99 | 2025-06-01 01:24:55+00:00
I can't tell if your comment is intentionally ironic, as in you're saying we need to enforce your view on others that enforcing their view on others is bad.

If this person was vandalizing cultural treasures or something to pressure everyone to use UTC, then yes I agree his forced technocratic fix to a social issue is bad. Just writing about it and sharing an opinion is actually very constructive, even if you disagree with his take.
by rayiner | 2025-06-01 01:27:03+00:00
Okay, when you make a classless society, you get back to me. In the meantime, we have classes. We have a cognitive elite who run almost everything that, from the civil service, to the internet, to the legal system, to the public health system, to the educational system. To use a net neutrality analogy, I think those people, at least in their professional capacity, should be “dumb pipes.” They shouldn’t use their control over the infrastructure of society to impose their own values onto society. They shouldn’t use their power to countermand what the majority wants to do.
by ivape | 2025-06-01 01:27:15+00:00
Developer to PM: yeah so uh, we’ll add the vtol thing after launch in a hotfix, it’s sitting on Dave’s local branch and he’s working on just one bug

PM: Sounds good to me, I don’t shit about the industry I work in

Dev: perfect perfect, okay send out the press release

PM: Should we mention the VTOL thing ….

Dev: Don’t say shit, I’ll see you next week
by anigbrowl | 2025-06-01 01:27:39+00:00
Politicus USA is a garbage partisan site, as bad as something like Newsmax on the right. I don't think this story meets the criteria for HN submissions, as Congressional foot stamping is hardly evidence of an intriguing new phenomenon (rather than because it's political per se). But if you're going to submit a story about it, surely you can find a better source that provides some additional analysis/context rather than just being a two-line intro for a press release.
by reducesuffering | 2025-06-01 01:29:59+00:00
It amazes me people still trot out the same "where's the immediate profits?" line after they were wrong, wrong, and wronger, about Uber, Facebook, Amazon, and Google all being absurdly profitable in the long term. Every one of those had a tremendous amount of naysayers based on poo-pooing the company strategy of not immediately pursuing profitability. They were all wrong in every case then and they're wrong now.