MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cmiles74 | 2025-07-18 13:42:38+00:00
Agreed. They aren't converging on a statistical model of reality, they are converging on a statistical model of their training data. In the case of LLMs and the size of the training data it's possible they are also converging on some commonality between all text. I doubt this reveals a core truth but maybe it will give us some insight into what we all agree certain chunks of text represent (when I use this idiom, everyone understand I mean this).
by ecshafer | 2025-07-18 13:43:26+00:00
No the salaries aren't high. They are typically lower than other software engineer salaries. There are a large number of contractors from Indian consulting companies with "experience in cobol" to make run of the mill cobol cheap enough.

The very high salaries you hear about sometimes are always for VERY specific mainframes that are extremely old with a lot of quirks, and are usually being paid to consultants.
by kierangill | 2025-07-18 13:44:53+00:00
Past the basic setup, what are people doing to grease the tracks for these tools?

That is, how are people organizing their context and codebase to help the tooling guide themselves to the right answer?

I have some half-baked thoughts here [1], but I know there are more (better) methodologies to be discovered.

[1]: https://blog.kierangill.xyz/oversight-and-guidance
by pragmatic | 2025-07-18 13:45:01+00:00
AIX on big iron.

Used for ex nightly batch processing at banks. Lots of horse power for your on prem needs. Moving this kind of horse power to the cloud would be insanely expensive and complex for the mid size banks relying on these systems.

They shipped these massive boxes out and connected them to massive SANs. You could license the processors later if your workload grew.

I spent a year as consultant to big customers building SOA, websites, SSO for whatever they needed. ATM networks with low latency etc.
by zeeframe | 2025-07-18 13:45:22+00:00
I’m not a COBOL dev but I work with mainframes(z/OS). Most COBOL applications I’ve seen have been banking and insurance related with few exceptions. Most of them either run as a series of batch jobs or via transaction managers like IMS and CICS. Backends are usually sequential files(we call them datasets),DB2,VSAM(Virtual Storage Access Method) or DL/1(hierarchical DB that’s part of IMS). Quite a few places I’ve seen have run IBM MQ as well.

If changes are made to these systems it’s often due to changes in regulation or driven by changes in the business(new financial products being offered etc.

Off-topic: I’ve seen quite a few mainframe related posts on HN fly by over the years. I’ve been meaning to create an account and participate but I’ve only gotten around to it just now.
by quibono | 2025-07-18 13:45:29+00:00
Lovely, I might try doing this for some other "classic" utility!

A bit off-topic too, but I'm new to Zig and curious. This here: ``` const allocator = sfb.get();

var cmd: Command = .{ .arena = allocator };

``` means that all allocations need to be written with an allocator in mind? I.e. one has to pick an allocator per each memory allocation? Or is there a default one?
by dcow | 2025-07-18 13:45:46+00:00
I prefer that world too.

The only people morally responsible for committing atrocities are those who commit them. Shall we hold the farmers who grow food that Russian leaders consume morally culpable for those leaders’ actions? I’m dead serious. You cannot in good faith actually argue that everyone is indirectly morally culpable for any action that is “enabled” by something they do.

Like freedom of expression, neutral objective search is too important to poison with identity politics and virtue signaling.
by jfyi | 2025-07-18 13:46:32+00:00
>Amanita

It's an entirely different class of hallucinogen. I don't have personal experience with it but I have done other dissociative hallucinogens and his take is likely largely true (though I wouldn't argue with someone saying they felt euphoria on it). The problem here is it's the entirely wrong mushroom.

I can assure any doubters that psilocybin on the other hand has legitimate euphoric effects.
by wslh | 2025-07-18 13:46:38+00:00
I recommend reading "Idea Man" [1] by Paul Allen, Microsoft's cofounder, to understand the deep and early involvement he and Bill Gates had with computers.

I also recommend Hard Drive (1992) [2] for a deeper look into the business side of Bill Gates.

Regardless of any negative opinions about him, I believe Bill Gates was/is in a league of his own.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea_Man

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp...
by Retr0id | 2025-07-18 13:47:03+00:00
They removed SGX but are still working on SGX-like technologies (I forget the acronyms) specifically for server-oriented processors.

I'm sure the NSA already has various tools to break SGX but they'll be protective of that investment, they're probably not going to be using them against lower-priority targets.

I used NX and ASLR as a point of comparison because they are mitigations that are routinely bypassed - but we still usually consider them a good idea.
by yason | 2025-07-18 13:47:24+00:00
People, in their excitement to play with or write cool tools to automate boring details in the programming process, often underestimate the value of boring grunt work.

While what you're doing consciously is something simple you're simultaneously also mucking about in your codebase in the "spinal cord level", or spending quality time with your creation. It's times like those when bigger/other things often click together the first time all the while you're doing something that's seemingly just grunt work.
by elktown | 2025-07-18 13:47:28+00:00
The comment history [0] suggests that it isn't trolling, but fanaticism - with the telltale hope of demise for everyone that can't see the light.

If I digress a bit, I wonder what it is with some hypes - tech or just broader in society - where something reaches a critical mass of publicity where suddenly a surprisingly large portion of people becomes just convinced, regardless of if they have some actual knowledge of the subject or not. Like, anecdotally, watching completely unrelated sports streams and there's a really sincere off-topic comment that AI will change everything now and "society isn't ready" or similar. But I guess it shouldn't be surprising when supposedly intelligent tech gurus and media folks are just eating everything up and starts peddling the narrative to the general public, why shouldn't one believe it? It's like a confluence of incentives that becomes a positive feedback loop until it all blows up.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163596
by rbanffy | 2025-07-18 13:48:04+00:00
> BASIC compiler

Interpreter - an entirely different kind of animal. Microsoft didn't get a BASIC compiler until much later.

> He helped Wozniak implement a version of BASIC supporting floating point numbers.

No. He sold Apple a BASIC, then used it as leverage to prevent Apple from making a BASIC for the Macintosh.

> Ballmer was the biggest businessman in the bunch.

He suggested cutting Paul Allen's family off when Allen was battling cancer.
by phyzix5761 | 2025-07-18 13:48:16+00:00
Anecdotal, but I know someone who suffered major depression and was hospitalized multiple times. Their medication wasn't working and neither was therapy.

They discovered mindfulness meditation and in combination with becoming a more moral person, limiting music, eliminating social media and unwholesome entertainment, and practicing small acts of charity multiple times per week they were able to overcome their depression. It's been almost 15 years since they've had any symptoms.
by oldpersonintx2 | 2025-07-18 13:48:21+00:00
youtube is FLOODED with free fitness content, I mean, you could workout for five years and never see the same video twice

its all evergreen - crunches from five years ago are just as good today

everyone I know who worked as a personal trainer has moved out of the industry

endless free resources out there

and then the content connected to devices like Peloton etc

not sure how you can make a buck in this business

want to track your progress? look in the mirror or guesstimate
by KaiserPro | 2025-07-18 13:48:37+00:00
If you want to try sword fighting there are a bunch of ways to do it.

HEMA people are generally very welcoming and probably slightly mad. quite expensive to get into, but great fun.

Fencing is more common, but start out with epee, foil is a big weird as you have right of way, its a training system and it shows, its harder to learn and not as fun. Sabre is for people who like shouting lots, more one hit wonder.

For the eastern styles:

A good Aikido class should start out with weapons, you wont be going full speed as even with wooden sticks, stuff gets dangerous pretty quick.

Korean sword work is going through somewhat of a renaissance, I don't know that much about it though.

If you're doing eastern style sword work, don't be tempted to get a metal sword, you'll never be able to train with it, and they are almost always poor quality. (unless you know what you're doing)
by kbos87 | 2025-07-18 13:48:42+00:00
Yes, the one time I've tried mushrooms it was a very unpleasant experience. For weeks I was left feeling like I had done some permanent damage to my mental health. I eventually got past that feeling and there might be a point I try them again, but not without professional guidance. Psilocybin is powerful and not a remotely recreational thing (for me at least.)
by mtmail | 2025-07-18 13:48:59+00:00
Met one close to retirement who worked on a ERP system in the food processing industry. Nightly batch jobs would trigger orders from their suppliers, customer service would enter new orders. Two SAP migrations already failed, costing the company millions. All company process knowledge was in code, database fields have been repurposed (but no renamed, too much work), feature development stop long time ago. In parallel a new system was built in-house (no longer trusting external consultants) and his job was explaining what the system does. Probably well paid but he didn't seem to care, he just wanted to work less and retire on good terms.
by b_shulha | 2025-07-18 13:49:02+00:00
Hi there,

Okay, maybe not the last one, but I'm working on a prototype of the "idiomatic" OpenAPI schema generator.

I wasn't happy with the well-known options:

swaggo requires magic comments that I cannot take.

goa introduces custom DSL and forces you to either use it's generated structures or continuously hook in your own structures, trying to match those in sync.

I decided to give a try for my own vision and this project was born. It is currently at the PoC stage, but I plan to use it for my other tiny startup (it's live, but runs on the MVP version with React Server Actions under the hood).

Please let me know what you think!
by yorwba | 2025-07-18 13:49:10+00:00
If I'm generous, that "database" stores a single number. If you transform a more realistic database (one that can store many arbitrary values) into a Boolean circuit, you'll generally end up with at least one operation per stored value. And when you evaluate the circuit on encrypted data, you have to evaluate all those operations every time. That's why I wrote "without doing at least as much work as computing E(y)" instead of just "without computing E(y)." Yes, you do not necessarily explicitly encrypt all stored values. But you'll end up performing a corresponding amount of computation anyways.
by Amezarak | 2025-07-18 13:49:23+00:00
The claim is that opening the spillway decreased salinity in the Mississippi Sound and caused substantial hardship for Mississippi fishermen. They want it opened less often, not more often. There was a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers over it. It’s hard to see why Mississippi would care at all if it weren’t true.

Papers: https://www.scirp.org/pdf/ojce_1882046.pdf (salinity)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S004896972... (dolphin mortality)

News stories: https://www.mpbonline.org/blogs/news/five-years-after-disast...

> With salinity levels bottomed-out as a result of the overwhelming freshwater intrusion from the Spillway, an estimated 95% of the estuary’s oyster population was wiped out. 2018 remains the last time a wild oyster was harvested from Mississippi waters – once among the most productive oyster fisheries in the world.

> Data provided by MDMR shows the seafood industry along the Coast, which in many respects was both the first and primary early-economic driver of the region, suffered revenue losses exceeding $210 million in 2019 alone.

https://www.wlox.com/2023/01/19/court-rules-army-corps-engin...

I can definitely understand why, after events like this, people would be extremely leery of other Mississippi river diversions.
by Kirby64 | 2025-07-18 13:49:26+00:00
This (and the GP) are because your device supports some sort of fast charge USB-PD negotiation, but does not support what is known as “dead battery mode”. Basically, dead battery mode enables those pull down resistors by default (when no power is applied) so you can get 5V to the system, where eventually it would charge up and the chip that can do PD negotiation will be powered. Usually this is done simply by having the negotiation chip default to pull down resistors internally when unpowered.
by warmwaffles | 2025-07-18 13:50:08+00:00
I stopped using the app around 2018 and went back to pencil and paper. Although I did like the diagrams on the movements to do, but once you learn them, you can't forget them. I never entered the data into a spreadsheet though, I didn't care about tracking gains. All I cared about was, what I was doing last week and where I am at this week.
by lenkite | 2025-07-18 13:50:29+00:00
According to NPR's statement, it only receives 1% of funding from the federal government.

https://www.npr.org/2025/05/13/1250902337/npr-cpb-public-rad...

"Today, NPR receives only about 1% of its operating budget directly from the federal government. Other revenue includes donations, returns from its endowment and corporate sponsorship."
by gardnr | 2025-07-18 13:50:53+00:00
This is oddly true in my experience. I ask people where they get their information from and the channels are generally a lot more sparse than topics posted to HN.

If I were to venture to guess: I'd say "most developers" seek work-life balance and aren't interested in reading long-form articles on how to do X or Y when they are off the clock.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-07-18 13:51:27+00:00
Yes, but they are getting good at chasing 9s in the US, those skills will translate directly to chasing 9s outside the US, and frankly the "first drafts" did quite a bit better than I'd have expected even six months ago

Guangzhou: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DWz1TD-VZg

Paris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iN9nu-IkS1w

Rome: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zg3jc90JTI
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-07-18 13:51:55+00:00
Well, as a battle-scarred old war horse, I can say that "It Depends™."

I have found that "It Depends™" is a mantra for almost everything that I do, and experience has given me the ability to choose a fork in the road, when an "It Depends™" moment happens.

When I was younger, my world was governed by "hard and fast" rules. There could be no exceptions, and some of the worst code I wrote, consisted of the gymnastics required to shoehorn an unsuitable library/paradigm into my projects.

I tend to use a lot of self-developed dependencies. They are really distillations of things that I do frequently, so I factor them into standalone packages. That way, I don't have to reinvent the wheel, and I'm confident of the Quality and provenance.

But if there's functionality that is required, and beyond me, for whatever reason, I am always open to including dependencies, as long as I can reconcile myself to their quality and other issues.
by kristoff_it | 2025-07-18 13:52:01+00:00
Allocator is an interface so you write library code only once, and then the caller decides which concrete implementation to use.

There's cases where you do want to change your code based on the expectation that you will be provided a special kind of allocator (e.g. arenas), but that's a more niche thing and in any case it all comes together pretty well in practice.
Show HN: Tips for getting great Text2Cypher outputs from LLMs for Graph RAG
by laminarflow027 | 2025-07-18 13:52:04+00:00
For folks working on Graph RAG and trying to get LLMs to generate Cypher queries, I ran some experiments on the LDBC dataset and wrote a blog post about it (code is available in the link shown at the end of the post). I've been trying to answer a burning question of mine that I've had for a while now: when doing Text2Cypher, are LLMs better at interpreting graph schemas in JSON, XML or YAML? (Spoiler alert, the format barely matters, it's all to do with context engineering and retaining only the relevant parts of the graph schema in the prompt). Results on the latest LLMs are really good!

The post also contains some other tips on graph schema design: I think we're in an age now where we need to design graph schema for both LLMs and humans. If you're working on Text2Cypher in any way, hope some of these ideas and experiments are useful!
by landl0rd | 2025-07-18 13:52:17+00:00
Which is a terrible strategy actually. People did the same with marijuana. “Dude it’s medicine lol. Dude it can’t possibly contribute to schizophrenia. Dude weed lmao.”

All this does is create a credible argument that the pro legalization crowd are objectively lying to people and therefore untrustworthy.
by rbanffy | 2025-07-18 13:53:00+00:00
Jobs had a key difference from Gates - he had taste. He insisted on the injection molded case for the Apple II instead of sheet metal because he wanted it to look like a finished product. He insisted on not having lines dividing the color bands in their logo, which made it more expensive to print (but much nicer to look at).

Jobs would never let something like Windows 1 escape the lab.
by mschuster91 | 2025-07-18 13:53:03+00:00
> Why does this require inventing lsr as an alternative to ls instead of making ls use io_uring?

Good luck getting that upstreamed and accepted. The more foundational the tools (and GNU coreutils definitely is foundational), the more difficult that process will be.

Releasing a standalone utility makes iteration much faster, partially because one is not bound to the release cycles of distributions.
by ButOneDuck | 2025-07-18 13:53:03+00:00
I get that writing logs can be incredibly frustrating, but most of the time people are looking at logs because either something went wrong, or they have a hunch that the program is misbehaving and they're looking for a clean sign or signal that they are on the right track. If I've spent multiple hours on someones broken piece of code, the last thing I want to be thinking is "did some non-deterministic chat-bot write this?", "are these logs even internally consistent?", "Why does this log mention code that doesn't exist?".

I get that is most devs least favorite part, but logs and errors are supposed to be unshakable, ground-truth understandings, things that point you to the light in a dark room of broken spaghetti code and misunderstandings.

Think about this from a users or a testers perspective, can you imagine the compounding frustration you would experience? To be chasing a skein of understanding through wall of text that you only mostly understand, to find out that the hunch was based on a red-herring by a dev who wasn't bothered to help you in return.

Not to mention the amount of non-bugs you are generating for yourself in the future, we already have bug bounties being swarmed by LLM-gen faux-bugs, how is anyone supposed to reason about real bugs if the logs are only tangentially related to the truth?
by Qision | 2025-07-18 13:54:36+00:00
If I understand correctly companies like OpenAI could run LLMs without having access to the users new inputs. It seems to me new users data are really useful for further training of the models. Can they still train the models over encrypted data? If this new data is not usable, why would the companies still want it?

Let's assume they can train the LLMs over encrypted data, what if a large number of users inject some crappy data (like it has been seen with the Tay chatbot story). How can the companies still keep a way to clean the data?
by sgarland | 2025-07-18 13:54:41+00:00
> You're up against millions of engineering hours in this space.

Tangential, but the fact that many orgs choose to not use native DB features like foreign key constraints, saying that “they’ll handle it in application code,” has always seemed like the pinnacle of hubris to me. You’re going to ignore some of the most battle-tested pieces of technology, and recreate it poorly instead? Quite the decision.

While there are valid reasons to not want to use FKCs, IME much of the time when you peel apart the layers of why someone chose not to, you find that they made several erroneous assumptions that led them to that conclusion. Other times, it’s that they simply didn’t know something existed, because they never read the docs. Windowing functions are a good example: RDBMS can do quite a bit of manipulation to data, rather than just sending huge result sets and having you parse them. There are trade-offs, of course, but you should at least know that it’s even possible before choosing to ignore it.
by ActionHank | 2025-07-18 13:54:56+00:00
What people haven't realised yet is that Cursor isn't a product, it's a collection of features that every product is feverishly working to add.

The key take away here is that save for the deep integration, there is a strategy for working with a best in class agent solution agnostic of tooling.

These learnings will eventually coalesce into "best practices" that people will apply using the editor or IDE of their choice and all these vscode forks will have died off.
by tuesdaynight | 2025-07-18 13:55:21+00:00
I don't have depression, but the first time I used psychedelics was so emotional helpful that I strongly suggested for depressed friends. I corrected that mistake hours later, after realizing that the risks are low, but life changing if it happens. However, I will never forget that feeling. I've used it again in the following years, but the results faded and it became boring for me.
by whstl | 2025-07-18 13:55:48+00:00
The problem I have with this line of thinking is that it only works when you're talking about bottom of the barrel developers.

The tech world has this tendency to dumb down every advice so it caters to the lowest common denominator, but I honestly have never worked in such an environment where developers couldn't learn to duplicate the functionality of shitty dependencies while at the same time fixing the problem.

And as much as people love to mock CRUD, bad abstractions can be a horrible drain on teams doing CRUD work. And even the popular stuff can often suck and be a timesink unless you're doing absolutely basic stuff that's just repeating the tutorial.
by Aurornis | 2025-07-18 13:56:11+00:00
> because they were often in the context of legalization. "I know someone who went crazy after trying $foo so we should still lock people into iron cages just for the crime of possessing it."

I think that’s what people thought when reading negative anecdotes, but I definitely didn’t see a lot of suggestions that we lock people up.

The same thing happened for marijuana: Any mention of negative effects would bring downvotes, scorn, and disbelief pre-legalization. Then once it was legal it became acceptable to say that marijuana wasn’t a panacea and using a lot of it was actually a problem.

Before this change, it was common to read highly upvoted anecdotes here and on Reddit claiming everything from medicinal properties to fixing depression to improving driving skills (an actual claim I saw here and on Reddit multiple times). Now it’s widely acceptable that frequent marijuana use is not good for mental health and wellbeing, but that was once a thing you could not say on the internet.