MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-07 12:32:44+00:00
I currently work for a multi-million dollar company that is completely dependent on this lumbering geriatric. A design from the turn of the century, that limits how we can configure it, modify it, test it, version it, deploy it, roll it back. A rotting piece of fruit with so many bugs and holes we need to constantly look for a newly-announced bug so we can rush to patch it so the rot doesn't spread to our business.

Even the managed hosters have barely adopted modern practices. Do you know it's actually easy to treat the database as an ephemeral, versioned object? Nobody I've talked to does. You just back up the logical database, and rename the database name in the backup to a unique string (including a version, or datestamp, etc). Now you have versioned, uniquely-named database, so you can do immutable infrastructure. Load this backup into a database server (even the "live" database server, as it won't conflict with the old db name). Start a new WordPress container and pass env vars pointing to the new database name. Now you can pair a snapshot of the code with a snapshot of the database. Upgrade or downgrade in seconds, with confidence. (that is, after you've done all the manual work to upgrade, test, and fix in an ephemeral environment)

This simple method makes operations more robust and predictable, makes dev & testing easier, and is used by.... nobody, as far as I'm aware. All the managed hosters I've seen just give you an admin portal, and a "dev", "test", and "live" instance. No ephemeral environments. No snapshots or diffs of configs or databases. Plugin upgrades are largely left to the user, because there's no way to know other than by manual testing if any change breaks everything. There doesn't even seem to be an open source project for containerizing & deploying it immutably (or there wasn't wasn't when I created one 4 years ago). Because everyone's mind is stuck in this box from 2003. Of the bad designs and cloistered practices that were passé 10 years ago.

Organisms can't evolve if they live forever. In order for CMS to evolve, WordPress needs to die. Please just let it die.
by jt2190 | 2025-06-07 12:32:51+00:00
> Sometimes only the patch version of the library is different so it shouldn't be breaking anything... but it does!

OT: Semantic versioning’s major flaw is that is the presumption that the entire chain of package maintainers is extremely diligent about correctly bumping their version numbers. There have certainly been a few projects that are very good about this, but the vast majority are not.

The only solution to this that I know of is to test: Manually exercise the features with the dependencies, write automated tests that check your critical needs from a dependency, or identify and run the tests from the dependency’s test suite that cover your use cases. (Also: Contribute tests that you want in the suite!)
by hulitu | 2025-06-07 12:33:10+00:00
> to figure out which features users are using and which they aren't

Like resizing windows ? Scrollbars ? Title bars ?

A big window telling you that office needs to update when you have work to do (it cannot wait till end of the day).

They rounded the buttons and the windows' corners some months ago, so it must be some use to this "telemetry".
by afavour | 2025-06-07 12:33:55+00:00
> Meanwhile, the federal government is cutting support for public services, including transit systems — many of which still haven’t fully recovered from Covid-era budget crunches. Though ridership nationwide is up to 85 percent of prepandemic levels, Bloomberg News recently estimated that transit systems across the country face a $6 billion budget shortfall.

The gameplan is clear. Take the high value, richer customers from the public transit system as it declines and ensure its complete demise. Then you’re free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to be.
by forinti | 2025-06-07 12:33:58+00:00
Circa 1986 I was tasked with helping my Grandmother's friend Electra (a very energetic old lady) with finding a computer for her nephew.

We went to a lot of shops in Montevideo. You could get anything you wanted.

We saw an Adam at one store. I had heard about the tape problems and also 8 bits were not so hot by then. I was quite surprised to find one; it really made me feel like Montevideo had everything.

I suggested an Amiga or an MSX (as a cheaper option) but in the end she got an Atari ST, which was the only micro we didn't see.
by b112 | 2025-06-07 12:34:18+00:00
What's not new about it?

It's not just the technology, it's the employment of it too. In 1993 this was a new way to use lasers, which a decade before were too expensive, delicate and power hungry to use as such.

Put another way, the change can be incremental. Building upon what is. Without this, pretty much all incremental science would lose funding, for the moment you invent, regardless of cost, it'd just be copied.

If you've ever done hardware, even a toy, it's not simple.

Extensive prototypes, testing for drops, hand fit, assembly at the factory, and more.

Devs today can't even conceive of making a 100% stable product to be shipped on floppy and never updated. Reshipping for bugfixes could break a company in the old days.

Now try that with hardware!

And all those tweaks, fixes, tests can be copied in a second without patents.

I think separating software and hardware patent discussions would be better here, because hardware patents are requied.
by lelanthran | 2025-06-07 12:35:35+00:00
> On the other hand, this sort of preservation does substantially reduce user privacy,

Yes, that's by design and already hundreds of years old in practice.

You cannot refuse a court evidence to protect your or anyone else's privacy.

I see no reason to make an exception for rich and powerful companies.

I don't want a party to a suit having the ability to suppress evidence due to privacy concerns. There is no privacy once you get to a civil court other than what the court, at its discretion, allows, such as anonymisation.
by irusensei | 2025-06-07 12:35:59+00:00
I remember the time around version 7 or 8 when FreeBSD had better drivers than Linux for stuff like Atheros wifi cards.

I favored FreeBSD until around 2021 when computers with different CPU mixed together started to become common. I first bought a RockPro64 with 2 big and 4 little cores and then an Intel Alder lake. As far as I understand FreeBSD scheduler to this day don't know how to properly play with these so it brings the system to the lowest denominator of the slower cores.
by const_cast | 2025-06-07 12:36:25+00:00
I'm talking about very, very basic features like changing input/output at runtime, graphics acceleration, and scaling.

These are janky on X. I'm sorry, they are and we all know it, across many drivers, not just nvidia.

Yes, Wayland is missing some very niche usecases. For my money, I'd rather be able to plug in a monitor without a restart than have a "not-rectangular window". If your priorities are different then fine, I can't argue with lived experience.

Also, for the record, some X "features" were always a bad idea. The whole "every application being to record everything at any time with no permission model" isn't a feature, it's just a vulnerability. Yes, that means we now have to be much more deliberate with how we control these things, so we have popups and portals and whatnot. But that is actually a big improvement from the alternative, which is every application comes with a built-in free keylogger and screenlogger that you're just kind of hoping nobody is using for nefarious purposes.
by michaelt | 2025-06-07 12:38:08+00:00
Except for the sci-fi city at the 40 second video mark, I'm pretty sure it's almost all real video, just brought from a big stock video provider.

If you want video of a drone flying over a power plant or hot air balloons taking off, you can license them from stock providers, just like with stock photos.

Of course, it does share some of the cues of AI-generated content - but I suspect a lot of these AI companies buy a lot of stock content for their training datasets.
by ndsipa_pomu | 2025-06-07 12:39:19+00:00
You must not be aware of the long history of Microsoft being very untrustworthy and lying about how their software behaves.

e.g. funding SCO to pursue a campaign against Linux users and threatening to take them to court for using Linux: https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/fact-and-fiction-in-...

e.g. DOS ain't done til Lotus won't run: https://www.proudlyserving.com/archives/2005/08/dos_aint_don...

and many, many more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Microsoft
by musebox35 | 2025-06-07 12:39:50+00:00
I totally agree that the resulting kernel will be rarely useful. I just wanted to highlight that it is a commonly used educational exercise to showcase how to optimize for memory throughput. If the post showed how to fuse a transpose + rmsnorm epilogue to a gemm then the kernel would be more functional but the blog post would be much harder to follow for newcomers.

Jay Shah’s later articles contain examples that involve epilogue fusion. IMHO, understanding how to write an efficient transpose helps with following the more involved ones.
by gwd | 2025-06-07 12:40:13+00:00
> Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counterintuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget.

This is exactly my experience with coding. Start simple and build up complexity, and everything is great until you get to some threshold, at which point it completely falls apart and seems to stop even trying. Getting effective utilization out of Claude + aider involves managing the complexity that the LLM sees.
by publicdaniel | 2025-06-07 12:40:46+00:00
I’m currently working on a document parsing engine for a specific type of document. The inputs are usually PDFs. I’m able to get great structured output from both the latest Gemini Flash models and the latest Llama Scout models. The best latency I get with Gemini is about 5 seconds end to end. With llama hosted on groq it’s about 3 seconds.

My use case is latency constrained, so I’m exploring fine tuning / distilling to see if I can get latency sub second. I imagine these are the kinds of scenarios where it’s still worth it to fine-tune and distill.

My plan is to generate a lot of synthetic training data using more capable slower foundation models and use that to train the smaller model.
by kevincox | 2025-06-07 12:41:25+00:00
This is true. But unless you are sure that current and future inputs will always be small I find it is better to start with the algorithm that scales better. Then you can add a special case for small sizes if it turns up in a hot path.

This is because performance is typically less important for the fast/small case and it is generally acceptable for processing twice as much to be twice (or slightly more than twice) as slow, but users are far more likely to hit and really burned by n^2 algorithms in things you thought would almost always be small and you never tested large enough sizes in testing to notice.

I wrote more on this topic here https://kevincox.ca/2023/05/09/less-than-quadratic/
by Jensson | 2025-06-07 12:44:17+00:00
> There's a plethora of architectures and combinations being researched

There were plethora of architectures and combinations being researched before LLM, still took a very long time to find LLM architecture.

> the line between mock and "true"intelligence will blur

Yes, I think this will happen at some point. The question is how long it will take, not if it will happen.

The only thing that can stop this is if intermediate AI is good enough to give every human a comfortable life but still isn't good enough to think on its own.

Its easy to imagine such an AI being developed, imagine a model that can learn to mimic humans at any task, but still cannot update itself without losing those skills and becoming worse. Such an AI could be trained to perform every job on earth as long as we don't care about progress.

If such an AI is developed, and we don't quickly solve the remaining problems to get an AI to be able to progress science on its own, its likely our progress entirely stalls there as humans will no longer have a reason to go to school to advance science.
by diggan | 2025-06-07 12:44:53+00:00
> In 1993 this was a new way to use lasers, which a decade before were too expensive, delicate and power hungry to use as such.

I think your timescale is slightly off, but I don't know enough about laser history to say definitely. But judging by what I could find, in 1981 Popular Science seems to have run an ad for laser pointer devices, aimed (no pun intended) towards consumers:

> It wasn’t until the 1980s that lasers became small enough, and required so little energy, that they finally became cheap enough to be used in consumer electronics — take this funky laser pointer from the early 1980s, for example. The November 1981 edition of Popular Science features a Lasers Unlimited advertisement for an assortment of laser pointing devices, including a ruby laser ray gun, a visible red laser lightgun, multi-color lasers and laser light shows, all of which were selling for less than $15 (equivalent to about $42 today) - https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/a-dazzling-history-of-th...

So if they became usable but consumers in 1980s, I'm about 99% confident at least one individual used it for playing with their cats.

But since the author of the patent just happened to have spent the time (10 years later) to write the patent, they got it awarded to them.
by rmccue | 2025-06-07 12:45:12+00:00
The protocol repository [1] has more documentation on how to implement your own repository and we expect there’ll be many implementations of it over time - for launch, our proof-of-concept repo is built on WP since it integrates with Git Updater which is already widely used. (We’ll try and publish to Packagist now that it’s public too!)

[1]: https://github.com/fairpm/fair-protocol
by uecker | 2025-06-07 12:45:15+00:00
To each their own, I guess. I still find C to be so much cleaner than all the languages that attempt to replace it, I can not possibly see any of them as a future language for me. And it turns out that it is possible to fix issues in C if one is patient enough. Nowadays I would write this with a span type: https://godbolt.org/z/nvqf6eoK7 which is safe and gives good code.

update: clang is even a bit nicer https://godbolt.org/z/b99s1rMzh although both compile it to a constant if the other argument is known at compile time. In light of this, the Zig solution does not impress me much: https://godbolt.org/z/1dacacfzc
by sgarland | 2025-06-07 12:45:37+00:00
The tradeoff you’re making is performance, sometimes a lot depending on your RDBMS and table size. For smaller tables, under 10,000,000 rows or so, you won’t really notice much, but in the hundreds of millions or billions, you definitely do.

A UUID is at best 2x larger than even a BIGINT, thus the index size is 2x larger. If you aren’t using v1 or v7, it’s also not k-sortable. But most importantly for MySQL (and optionally SQL Server) if the table contains things related to a common entity, like a user’s purchases, the rows are now scattered around the clustering index’s B+tree. That incurs a huge amount of I/O on large tables, and short of a covering index and/or partitioning (which only masks the problem by shrinking the search space), there is no way to improve it. If instead the PK was (user_id, some_other_identifier), all records for a given user are physically co-located.
by Esophagus4 | 2025-06-07 12:46:03+00:00
Chain Of Thought prompting loses much of its effectiveness on newer reasoning models like GPT “o” series and Claude Sonnet.

As an exercise for the reader, I encourage you all to try the examples vs. control prompts in prompt engineering papers for chain of thought prompting, and you’ll see that the latest models have either been trained to or instructed to reason by default now - the outputs are close enough to equivalent.

CoT prompting was probably much more effective a few years ago on older, less powerful models.

You may find some benefit in telling it exactly how you want it to reason about a problem, but note that you may actually be limiting its capabilities that way.

I’ve found that most of the time, I will let it use its default reasoning capabilities and guide those rather than supplying my own.
by tmtvl | 2025-06-07 12:46:43+00:00
Yeah, the total run-scan function could be fairly short:

(defun run-scan (antenna scan) "Perform a scan on this antenna. Return a scan log." (let* ((slew-time (move-to antenna (scan-position scan))) (on-source-time (delay antenna (scan-length scan)))) (setf (antenna-last-duration antenna) (+ on-source-time slew-time)) (make-scan-log scan slew-time on-source-time)))
by Jensson | 2025-06-07 12:47:12+00:00
Autopilots were a thing before computers were a thing, you can implement one using mechanics and control theory. So no, traditional autopilots are not AI under any reasonable definition, otherwise every single machine we build would be considered AI as almost all machines has some form of control systems in them, for example is your microwave clock an AI?

So I'd argue any algorithm that comes from control theory is not AI, those are just basic old dumb machines. You can't make planes without control theory, humans can't keep a plane steady without it, so Wrights Brothers adding this to their plane is why they succeeded making a flying machine.

So if autopilots are AI then the Wrights Brothers developed an AI to control their plane. I don't think anyone sees that as AI, not even at the time they did the first flight.
Show HN: I made a free, open-source extension to refine prompts for AI chats
by hughqiu | 2025-06-07 12:47:24+00:00
Recently, during my intensive use of various large language models, I noticed a clear pattern: the quality of AI responses almost entirely depends on the quality of the questions we ask. A vague question can only yield a pile of technically correct but essentially useless answers.

At its core, this falls under the realm of Prompt Engineering.

I looked into several existing prompt optimization tools, but none of them really met my needs:

Unclear data flow: Many tools require sending my question and API key to their servers for processing, which raises concerns about privacy and security.

Overloaded features: I don't need chat history, document management, or other complicated features. I just want to optimize a single action — the moment of asking a question.

Commercialization: Most tools tend toward paid subscriptions or user acquisition funnels.

So, I built on all my own browser extension: HelpMeAsk. My development principles are simple: lightweight, focused, and secure.

Here’s how it works:

Model-powered self-optimization: After you type your question, the plugin calls your specified LLM (e.g., GPT-4o, Claude-3, DeepSeek, etc.) and applies a refined meta prompt that helps the model rewrite your question to be clearer and more structured.

Local API key storage: Your API key is encrypted and stored only in your browser's local storage. No third party — other than you and your AI provider — has access to it.

Direct requests: All API requests are sent directly from your browser to your chosen AI provider. The extension does not use any relay servers and does not log any data.
by skywhopper | 2025-06-07 12:49:21+00:00
There’s a huge difference between deterministic generated code and LLM generated code. The latter will be different every time, sometimes significantly so. Subsequent prompts would almost immediately be useless. “You did X, but we want Y” would just blow up if the next time through the LLM (or the new model you’re trying) doesn’t produce X at all.
by wkat4242 | 2025-06-07 12:49:22+00:00
I know some maintainers of the userland and apple never comes up. Most maintainers have no commercial ties to anyone so they don't really care abour corporate influence anyway. They just maintain the software because they like using it. This is exactly the kind of thing I like, in Linux there are too many companies putting money into it because they want to make money back (usually not from normal users but from cloud instances, steering the project in a direction away from its grassroots origins).

I'm sure if Apple wants something it would be considered but there would be a strong validation of "what's in it for us" on the freebsd side. There's also some pretty bad experiences with corporate influence and this is reviewed a lot more independently since the netgate wireguard disaster. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...

Unlike in the Linux world where RedHat and canonical are so embedded due to most of the devs working for them that there will be a lot less questions. And not just those two, also companies like Huawei are heavy kernel contributors.

I'm not saying it's bad to have such commercial influence. But it's not what I want for the OS I run.
by sgarland | 2025-06-07 12:50:30+00:00
Now you have to specify whether or not it’s moved during queries (and what if it moves again?) There’s probably a more elegant way I’m not thinking of, but standard created_at and updated_at fields would work: if a given date is <= the move date, it’s the original airport, else the new one. Rinse and repeat if it moves again.
by faust201 | 2025-06-07 12:50:49+00:00
Hmmm.. not everyone is talented in keeping software up to date. A selling homemade earrings can use something like shopify or paypal or stripe easily.

Do you use visa or mastercard? That is SaaS.

The main thing govts need to do is to force companies to allow export/import transparently . But then small SaaS don't have man power to do this (even if they truly believe in cause).

and also penalize or jail both programmrs/CEO that use subscription model with cancellation fee for even cancellations. Lots of people in HN would even be against this - as they claim - I wrote the code only - following orders.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-06-07 12:51:06+00:00
I understand that trying to take supplements to slow aging is a crap shoot. That said I take Taurine in the form of eating dark chicken meat, legs and thighs. I also take NAD+ with resveratrol as publicized by David Sinclair at Harvard.

I believe that the very best thing to do to maintain health and perhaps have higher quality of life, later in life, is to meditate, forgive other people and yourself, and generally balance spirituality, good sleep, good food, and walk outside a few times a day.

EDIT: left off two big things. As we age we need vitamin D supplements and I personally also believe in loading up on Omega 3 by eating walnuts, chia seeds, and salmon.
by NooneAtAll3 | 2025-06-07 12:52:02+00:00
I don't understand your argument

it doesn't matter whose failure it is

the point of the article (just as with the one about names) is that there are "reasonable defaults" many people would believe - that don't work in practice and become gotchas

whether you have enough knowledge to know that something is unreasonable doesn't mean it doesn't seem reasonable for many others
by afavour | 2025-06-07 12:53:07+00:00
Hm, the word “likely” is doing a lot of work there. If anything local storage of this stuff is encouraging, it suggests at least the possibility that this isn’t all living in the cloud. But it’s being interpreted as a negative with an unsubstantiated assumption about how the data is being used.

I’d also like to think we could have a better discussion on HN than “big number scary”. 122 tables sounds like a lot, sure. They could denormalise the whole dataset and keep it in one table, key/value store style. Would that be better? It’s a photo app with facial recognition. Stands to reason that it needs to store facial recognition data.