MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ndriscoll | 2025-06-08 12:29:09+00:00
Containers do not do deployment (or set up software defined networks). docker or kubernetes (or others) do deployment. That's my point.

nix makes it trivial to set up ephemeral environments: make a shell.nix file and run `nix-shell` (or if you just need a thing or two, do e.g. `nix-shell -p ffmpeg` and now you're in a shell with ffmpeg. When you close that shell it's gone). You might use something like `direnv` to automate that.

Nixos makes it easy to define your networking setup through config.

For your last question:

services.postgres.enable = true; services.nginx.enable = true; services.keycloak.enable = true;

If you want, you can wrap some or all of those lines in a container, e.g.

containers.backend = { config = { config, pkgs, lib, ... }: { services.postgres.enable = true; services.keycloak.enable = true; }; };

Though you'd presumably want some additional networking and bind mount config (e.g. putting it into its own network namespace with a bridge, or maybe binding domain sockets that nginx will use plus your data partitions).
by mpweiher | 2025-06-08 12:29:25+00:00
Er...they actually tried and failed.

"I stopped counting long ago, but there have been many, many attempts to try to modernize the US’s air traffic control (ATC) system over the years"

https://crankyflier.com/2025/05/12/the-us-government-tries-t...

I am sure you can find better sources as there are so many of them.
by kypro | 2025-06-08 12:29:56+00:00
In a few years hopefully the AI reviewers will be far more reliable than even the best human experts. This is generally how competency progresses in AI...

For example, at one point a human + computer would have been the strongest combo in chess, now you'd be insane to allow a human to critic a chess bot because they're so unlikely to add value, and statistically a human in the loop would be far more likely to introduce error. Similar things can be said in fields like machine vision, etc.

Software is about to become much higher quality and be written at much, much lower cost.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-08 12:30:42+00:00
I see this the opposite way: kudos to the FAA for sticking it out so long on legacy hardware and software as long as they have!

ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them.

If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.
by jeroenhd | 2025-06-08 12:33:18+00:00
Trams can share lanes with normal car traffic. There's still a massive cost in terms of infrastructure (especially the overhead lines, utilities that need to get out of the way for the rail base, that sort of thing), but this project has a detailed description of why those aren't a problem for this project.

The tram they show in the animation also very much has a driver in the front.

If they can deliver on what they show in their demos, I don't see why the size of the trams or the infrastructure should be a problem. All the expensive stuff has been thought about, the system barely takes up any extra space, and the system is capable of scaling up by just sending more vehicles into service.
by sarchertech | 2025-06-08 12:33:26+00:00
I just finished writing a Kafka consumer to migrate data with heavy AI help. This was basically best case a scenario for AI. It’s throw away greenfield code in a language I know pretty well (go) but haven’t used daily in a decade.

For complicated reasons the whole database is coming through on 1 topic, so I’m doing some fairly complicated parallelization to squeeze out enough performance.

I’d say overall the AI was close to a 2x speed up. It mostly saved me time when I forgot the go syntax for something vs looking it up.

However, there were at least 4 subtle bugs (and many more unsubtle ones) that I think anyone who wasn’t very familiar with Kafka or multithreaded programming would have pushed to prod. As it is, they took me a while to uncover.

On larger longer lived codebases, I’ve seen something closer to a 10-20% improvement.

All of this is using the latest models.

Overall this is at best the kind of productivity boost we got from moving to memory managed languages. Definitely not something that is going to replace engineers with PMs vibe coding anytime soon (based on rate of change I’ve seen over the last 3 years).

My real worry is that this is going to make mid level technical tornadoes, who in my experience are the most damaging kind of programmer, 10x as productive because they won’t know how to spot or care about stopping subtle bugs.

I don’t see how senior and staff engineers are going to be able to keep up with the inevitable flood of reviews.

I also worry about the junior to senior pipeline in a world where it’s even easier to get something up that mostly works—we already have this problem today with copy paste programmers, but we’ve just make copy paste programming even easier.

I think the market will eventually sort this all out, but I worry that it could take decades.
by intended | 2025-06-08 12:37:48+00:00
There’s 2 things going on here.

Output orientation - Is the output is similar to what a human would create if they were to think.

Process orientation - Is the machine actually thinking, when we say its thinking.

I met someone who once drew a circuit diagram from memory. However, they didn’t draw it from inputs, operations, to outputs. They started drawing from the upper left corner, and continued drawing to the lower right, adding lines, triangles and rectangles as need be.

Rote learning can help you pass exams. At some point, it’s a meaningless difference between the utility of “knowing” how engineering works, and being able to apply methods and provide a result.

This is very much the confusion at play here, so both points are true.

1) These tools do not “Think”, in any way that counts as human thinking

2) the output is often the same as what a human thinking, would create.

IF you are concerned with only the product, then what’s the difference? If you care about the process, then this isn’t thought.

To put it in a different context. If you are a consumer, do you care if the output was hand crafted by an artisan, or do you just need something that works.

If you are a producer in competition with others, you care if your competition is selling Knock offs at a lower price.
by JKCalhoun | 2025-06-08 12:38:21+00:00
Pushback from the HN crowd? I'll say it anyway, Apple should double down on AI.

As loopy as the news of the purchase of Jony Ives company (?) that made the rounds lately, I am pretty sure that what I want to carry around in my pocket from here on out is an AI assistant that rivals OpenAI's or Anthropic's. Whether it can be feathered in to Apple's existing xOS and put into the iPhone, or it requires writing a new platform is yet to be seen. But it's clear to me at least that this is the future.

In fact, if a new AI initiative required a new chip from Apple (A19? A20?) it would make a wild selling point to get some of us to buy new hardware just so we could get the new AI features (Yep, still on my iPhone 12 Mini I bought just before I retired).

(And here I didn't even use the word "agent" — whoops, I just did.)
by tkrn | 2025-06-08 12:38:32+00:00
Years ago when I was a bit obsessed about the Holy Grail of a living & breathing CRPG world the approach that seemed most promising to me then was having an expert system style AI module running on top of the complex but mechanical and boring low level simulation. This GM module would then find and tie together predefined hierarchical abstract patterns from the engines event log, adding some narration and meaning to it all and slightly nudging things along to some hopefully more interesting and meaningful paths.

I have been thinking that the current LLMs might actually make something like this more feasible, a kind of an GM in a Chinese Room that translates game events in to potential narrative arcs that the player is then free to follow if they wish. As the LLM's actions would be both inspired and limited by the game engine this would probably also tone down the problems with hallucinations and slop.
by elvis10ten | 2025-06-08 12:39:09+00:00
> LLMs make learning new material easier than ever. I use them a lot and I am learning new things at an insane pace in different domains.

With learning, aren’t you exposed to the same risks? Such that if there was a typical blind spot for the LLM, it would show up in the learning assistance and in the development assistance, thus canceling out (i.e unknown unknowns)?

Or am I thinking about it wrongly?
by firesteelrain | 2025-06-08 12:39:11+00:00
In the US, you can live in campgrounds year round in a tent. Usually a nominal fee with access to amenities. Similarly, author of the article chose to live in a tent right next door to the University where he had access to amenities. I can totally see the analogous situation here. It was a way to save money not a necessity. Both situations don’t make you homeless.

That’s my takeaway and others on the difference here. Homelessness driven by choices then turn into necessity to live. I don’t think responding to the sentiment with technical definitions from Wikipedia is the right discourse either (as done in other comments not yours). You can see the problem with this story without having to cite your comment to try to bring some strength to it.
by ThomasWaldmann | 2025-06-08 12:39:54+00:00
Bugs?

I don't know about any show-stoppers in borg 1.x.

Design limitations?

Yes, there are some, that's why borg2 will be quite different. But these are no easy or small changes.

Also, borg2 will be a breaking release (offering borg transfer to copy existing archives from borg 1.x repos). It takes long because we try to put all breaking changes into borg2, so you won't have to transfer again too soon after borg2 release.
by demosthanos | 2025-06-08 12:42:05+00:00
I'd say definitely do not do that. That would make the benchmark look more serious while still being problematic for knowledge cutoff reasons. Your prompt has become popular even outside your blog, so the odds of some SVG pelicans on bicycles making it into the training data have been going up and up.

Karpathy used it as an example in a recent interview: https://www.msn.com/en-in/health/other/ai-expert-asks-grok-3...
by bnop | 2025-06-08 12:43:29+00:00
1. If scraping the entire internet is easier, but doesn’t give me as good of results as including private or licensed data, I will train my LLM on private data or lose the race. It is not about easy. Just look at some of the lawsuits against OpenAI: https://originality.ai/blog/openai-chatgpt-lawsuit-list

2. Think about this - what you are saying is that you can’t sell anything without also making it public. These are not the same thing. I sell something to get value from my labor. I make something public to get eyes on it. The whole issue is that people who want to privately sell things have their work being undercut by LLMs

3. LLMs are recreating the content

4. Take Miyazaki. He spends his whole life developing a unique art style and skill. Years. He makes his living and provides a living for others with it. The value of that _used to be_ the movies he was paid to make and the revenue they generated. Now LLMs can create his work for free, and he doesn’t see a dime whenever someone converts their profile picture into his style. This is the ethical problem - he is not compensated, let alone the ethics of upending artists years of work for the sake of it
by wry_durian | 2025-06-08 12:43:37+00:00
The book has a chapter about how to optimize variability in the product development process. The key idea is that variability is not inherently good nor bad, we just care about the economic cost of variability. There are lots of asymmetries in the payoff functions in the software context, so the area is ripe for optimization, and that means sometimes you'll want to increase variability to increase profit. But if we're mostly concerned that software development is too variable, there are lots of ways to decrease it, like pooling demand-variable roles, cross-training employees on sequentially adjacent parts of the product lifecycle, implementing single high-capacity queues, etc.
by ghusto | 2025-06-08 12:43:37+00:00
I couldn't my finger on this myself, but you nailed my feelings well.

Having said that, it doesn't make anything she's said inaccurate in itself, and I would even back up her take. I've worked for and with a few US companies, and ... jeeesh.

I feel the main cultural difference is that people here _presume_ you're doing your best, whereas in the USA people feel like they have to _prove_ they're doing their best.
by layer8 | 2025-06-08 12:44:59+00:00
Context from the link: Editor's note: Commodore Corporation B.V. only owns the rights to the "Commodore" brand and the well-known "Chickenhead" logo. Software rights such as firmware ROMs or AmigaOS are owned by the Italian Mike Battilana or his Amiga Corporation, the same applies to various brands from the Amiga sector.
by fzzzy | 2025-06-08 12:46:04+00:00
Even if it is a joke, having a consistent methodology is useful. I did it for about a year with my own private benchmark of reasoning type questions that I always applied to each new open model that came out. Run it once and you get a random sample of performance. Got unlucky, or got lucky? So what. That's the experimental protocol. Running things a bunch of times and cherry picking the best ones adds human bias, and complicates the steps.
by criddell | 2025-06-08 12:46:12+00:00
You said it yourself - universities are the major hubs that bring talented driven people together and provide access to some of the greatest teachers and researchers and other resources. MIT and Stanford are special, somehow, in this regard.

You see this as inefficient and maybe you’re right. I think about how little it has cost to run these schools compared to the wealth (financial, cultural, technological) they spin off and to me it looks very efficient.
by zdragnar | 2025-06-08 12:46:14+00:00
A person typing an essay with a word processor is producing an essay. A person using a no-code tool to modify a software process is producing software processes.

The nature of the tweak involved probably determines the classification of the effort, but for tax purposes and R&D expense amortization, it is a percentage of time basis.

If the executive tweaks the code once, the percentage is so small it won't count as far as anyone cares.

If 20% of the executive's time is tweaking the tool, then odds are the company cannot expense 20% of the executive's salary and instead must claim that portion as R&D over five years.

Back before 174, I worked for a company that did claim R&D but only for one of the projects I worked on. As such, I had to be careful filling out my timesheet because they wanted an accurate accounting of what was salary expense and what was R&D.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-06-08 12:46:55+00:00
Many people here are talking about what they percieve as the systematic issues that prevent them from losing weight. I no longer buy any of this, because I moved from the US to Europe a few years ago and have since gained around 10 kg.

No amount of public transit-friendly infrastructure is going to stop me from putting more food in my mouth than I need at any given time. No belief that cooking needs to be an hour long affair or it's worthless is going to change the fact that I can cook a week's worth of lentils in a rice cooker with 5 minutes of prep time on a Sunday. 5 more minutes gets me a week's worth of boiled eggs.

Rather, I think most people are incentivized to make themselves look good, and want to chatter about conspiracy theories as to why their lives secretly suck. I can understand this, I'm liable of both of these myself in the same way. But at the end of the day, I am fat because I chose over a long period of time to put more food into my body than I needed, and the way I get out of being fat is by putting in less. When I reach a healthy weight the mission changes to a much easier, match caloric income with caloric expenses.

Focusing my efforts on that simple fact is the only way I have ever successfully lost weight. The theories are fun, in the same way quantum physics is fun even though 99.9% of what we do in everyday electromagnetics is in the boring house that Maxwell built.
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-06-08 12:48:48+00:00
It sounds more like the concern is that a post coming from China has a significantly higher likelihood to be state-sponsored propaganda than a resident’s/citizen’s genuine opinion. It makes sense on its face that it would be “higher” (that’s the point about the Great Firewall) but it seems to be a matter of personal opinion how “significant” that increase is.
by diggan | 2025-06-08 12:48:53+00:00
> LLMs will tell you 1 or 2 lies for each 20 facts. Its a hard way to learn.

That was my experience when growing up with school also, except you got punished one way or another for speaking up/trying to correct the teacher. If I speak up with the LLM they either explain why what they said is true, or corrects themselves, 0 emotions involved.

> They cant even get their urls right...

Famously never happens with humans.
by ben_w | 2025-06-08 12:49:35+00:00
$50/share would reduce their current absurd P/E of 162 down to about 27.5.

BMW's P/E is currently about 7; Porsche about 12; Renault about 16; BYD (who has their own autopilot) about 24.

Tesla's models are no longer competitive, the plans for the robo-taxi release this month is about 5.5 years behind Waymo (or 6.5 years if they use safety drivers, even remote ones), and several other businesses already sell humanoid robots for less than his speculative price for Optimus.

Of Optimus: the public demonstration was uninspiring, because even if you assume it was all AI the only thing it did that was impressive was picking out a single voice in an environment with many unrelated background voices — but worse than that, there's increasing reason to suspect that even when Musk says "our AI does XYZ", it isn't and can't.
by crucialfelix | 2025-06-08 12:50:12+00:00
- Minecraft - Roblox - LittleBigPlanet - Mario Maker

This is what kids do to be creative.

Slightly more serious (and therefore less succesful): - Logo/Turtle Graphics - Scratch - HyperStudio

HyperCard was both graphic design and hypertext (links). These two modalities got separated, and I think there are practical reasons for that. Because html/css design actually sucks and never became an amateur art form.

For writing and publishing we got Wiki, Obsidian et al, Blogs (RIP), forums, social media. Not meant to be interactive or programmable, but these fulfill people's needs for publishing.
by JimDabell | 2025-06-08 12:50:41+00:00
They already have a Swift LSP, but I think expecting iOS developers to switch over to VS Code is probably going a bit far. By the time you build things like code signing, SwiftUI previews, build settings, etc. into it, you’re basically building a new IDE on top of VS Code rather than just supporting VS Code itself.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s possible. It’s just what you’d get at the end wouldn’t really resemble VS Code. Even though I spend a lot of time writing web app code in VS Code, my hope – wearing my iOS developer hat – is that they have a skunkworks project to replace Xcode with a new native IDE, not that they embrace VS Code.
by csdreamer7 | 2025-06-08 12:50:52+00:00
> ATC is a safety-critical function that has what amounts to a 100% uptime requirement. Whatever system they're running currently either works or has known flaws that they know how to work around, and air traffic controllers have been trained on these systems for more than a generation now. Upgrading merely for the sake of being up to date would have been foolish no matter how much funding Congress would have given them.

I do not have enough knowledge to disagree on this. But I will say the FAA is still on floppy disks when the US Nuclear Arsenal moved off floppies back in 2019.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/us/nuclear-weapons-floppy...

Yes, they have different requirements and yes, SACCS was using 8 inch IBM mainframe floppies from the 70s, but they are both 24/7 critical systems.

> If they're saying that they need the upgrade now, I'll trust them on that, but it was the right call to make it last.

The real answer is likely embarrassing incidents that came up during the start of this presidency. There is now political will to address it; instead of 'before' it becomes a problem. They are on Windows 95-it was budget issues.
by roxolotl | 2025-06-08 12:51:39+00:00
> Many of these same mistakes can be found in popular Stack Overflow answers, which is probably where Claude learnt them from too.

This is what keeps me up at night. Not that security holes will inevitably be introduced, or that the models will make mistakes, but that the knowledge and information we have as a society is basically going to get frozen in time to what was popular on the internet before LLMs.
by sulam | 2025-06-08 12:53:31+00:00
If you trust everything the LLM tells you, and you learn from code, then yes the same exact risks apply. But this is not how you use (or should use) LLMs when you’re learning a topic. Instead you should use high quality sources, then ask the LLM to summarize them for you to start with (NotebookLM does this very well for instance, but so can others). Then you ask it to build you a study plan, with quizzes and exercises covering what you’ve learnt. Then you ask it to setup a spaced repetition worksheet that covers the topic thoroughly. At the end of this you will know the topic as well as if you’d taken a semester-long course.

One big technique it sounds like the authors of the OAuth library missed is that LLMs are very good at generating tests. A good development process for today’s coding agents is to 1) prompt with or create a PRD, 2) break this down into relatively simple tasks, 3) build a plan for how to tackle each task, with listed out conditions that should be tested, 3) write the tests, so that things are broken, TDD style and finally 4) write the implementation. The LLM can do all of this, but you can’t one-shot it these days, you have to be a human in the loop at every step, correcting when things go off track. It’s faster, but it’s not a 10x speed up like you might imagine if you think the LLM is just asynchronously taking a PRD some PM wrote and building it all. We still have jobs for a reason.
by ben_w | 2025-06-08 12:55:44+00:00
> Quality depends on your market position and what you are bringing to the market.

That's the point.

The market for go-karts does not support Porche.

If you bring a Porche sales team to a go-kart race, nobody will be interested.

Porche doesn't care about this market. It goes both ways: this market doesn't care about Porche, either.
by briHass | 2025-06-08 12:56:14+00:00
I highly recommend anyone going this route to use Proxmox as your base install on the (old) hardware, and then use individual LXCs/VMs for the services you run. Maybe it's just me, but I find LXCs to be much easier to manage and reason about than Docker containers, and the excellent collection of scripts maintained by the community: https://community-scripts.github.io/ProxmoxVE/scripts makes it just as easy as a Docker container registry link.

I try to use LXCs whenever the software runs directly on Debian (Proxmox's underlying OS), but it's nice to be able to use a VM for stuff that wants more control like Home Assistant's HAOS. Proxmox makes it fairly straightforward to share things like disks between LXCs, and automated backups are built in.