MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Yizahi | 2025-07-15 10:27:57+00:00
LLM programs can't describe what they are doing. The tech doesn't allow this. LLM can generate you a text which will resemble what LLM would be doing if that was hypothetically possible. A good example has been published by Anthropic recently - they program LLM to add two integers. It outputs correct answer. Then they program it to write steps which LLM executed to do that addition. LLM of course starts generating the primary school algorithm, with adding one pair of digits, carry 1 if needed, adding next pair of digits, add 1, combine result, then next digits etc. But in reality it calculates addition using probabilities, like any other generated tokens. Anthropic even admitted it in that same article, that LLM was bullshitting them.

Same with your query, it just generated you a most likely text which was in the input data. It is unable to output what it actually did.
by IshKebab | 2025-07-15 10:28:44+00:00
Yeah... I used C++ coroutines a bit and they're super powerful and can do anything you want... But... I mean look at how complex co_await is:

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/coroutines.html#c...

It does about 20 different steps with a ton of opportunities for overloading and type conversion. Insanely complicated!

And they kept up the pattern of throwing UB everywhere:

> Falling off the end of the coroutine is equivalent to co_return;, except that the behavior is undefined if no declarations of return_void can be found in the scope of Promise.

Why?? Clearly they have learnt nothing from decades of C++ bugs.

Hopefully Rust gets coroutines soon...
by shaky-carrousel | 2025-07-15 10:28:47+00:00
Hours of time saved, and you learned nothing in the process. You are slowly becoming a cog in the LLM process instead of an autonomous programmer. You are losing autonomy and depending more and more on external companies. And one day will come that, with all that power, they'll set whatever price or conditions they want. And you will accept. That's the future. And it's not inevitable.
by prmoustache | 2025-07-15 10:28:57+00:00
I found out recently that my partner was "listening" and half looking at a TV show while preparing herself for work. I was quite surprised and asked her if she had run out of podcasts but she told me that show was so addictive she preferred running it in the background than waiting for it. It obviously made her inefficient at everything, preparing herself and following the show.

I've often found most US TV shows were overexplaining everything already. Maybe I have an higher cultural, technical and medical knowledge than the baseline of US TV viewers but lots of dialogs are already filled with what feels to me as unneeded explanations in general that would feel completely weird in a real life dialog.

I am like the opposite of the binge watcher, after one, two episodes at the maximum, I just want to do something else. It works well with my habit of watching movies and TV shows on a projector as it has a kind of ritual to it, you shut off the blinders, turn on the projector and sit comfortably on the sofa. My partner often do not understand how I can I just say "that's it, let's do something else" and shut off the beamer when the show obviously make sure it ends the episode with a moment of uncertaincy/suspense.
by infecto | 2025-07-15 10:29:29+00:00
For sure but unlike then we are in a very different buying environment. Investors are more discerning even though folks here would like tot think differently. Cisco had something at peak like a 179x pe. That is a vastly different world than what we see Nvidia at today. I am not saying it cannot fail or collapse but to say this feels like the .com bubble is wrong.
by ineedaj0b | 2025-07-15 10:30:18+00:00
some drug are moneymakers. lots of people can take them. viagra was that or now ozempic etc. but there's lots of novel drugs that never get past testing because they cost too much or the market too small to recover profit.

these studies struggle to find candidates, the testers rarely have serious side effects, so i think on the net this will not cause the harm you worry.

however! i would be worried taking new broad market drugs post any fda collapse.. but there's fewer of those on average. and pharma companies compete on efficacy and side effects and love to show investors results. so mixed bag.

we play it too safe. ozempic will save many many lives. if it had been approved years earlier it would have saved many many more. waiting for perfect is what the current system feels like, and seems like something you also know is foolish.

18 studies. only 6 novel. not a healthy ecosystem imo
by rwmj | 2025-07-15 10:31:09+00:00
Software engineers definitely do understand that spreadsheets are widely used and useful. It's just that we also see the awful downsides of them - like no version control, being proprietary, and having to type obscure incantations into tiny cells - and realise that actual coding is just better.

To bring this back on topic, software engineers see AI being a better search tool or a code suggestion tool on the one hand, but also having downsides (hallucinating, used by people to generate large amounts of slop that humans then have to sift through).
by ForHackernews | 2025-07-15 10:31:39+00:00
Sorry, I thought the point was clear: Dropbox (file sync) is a feature, not a product. Cursor (AI in your IDE) likewise, is a feature, not a product.

I am old and I remember when you could make a lot of money offering "Get Your Business On The Information Superhighway" (HTML on Apache) and we're in that stage of LLMadness today, but I suspect it will not last.
by andrepd | 2025-07-15 10:32:02+00:00
Literally astrology at this point. We don't understand the black box bs generating machine, but actually if you prod it this and that way according to some vague vibe, then it yields results that even if wrong are enough to fool you.

And christ, every single time there's the same retort: "ah but of course your results are shit, you must not be using gpt-4.69-o7-turbo-pro which came out this morning". Come on...
by znpy | 2025-07-15 10:34:00+00:00
> That's hilarious considering I did my senior project in Perl

Same. Wrote a web application using Catalyst and a client for mobile phones using J2ME.

Writing projects in obscure languages is the best way to avoid dumb professors/examiners ask you stupid questions about your codebase lol.

I remember reading the Wikipedia page of Perl the night before the oral exhibition, just to be sure and guess what... The examiner asked me about the difference between "Perl" (capitalized) and "perl" uncapitalized. Which was one of the first lines in the Wikipedia page.

The guy literally went fishing for stupid and pedantic questions to ask, on Wikipedia, the night before.
by m-schuetz | 2025-07-15 10:34:23+00:00
On the contrary, I think they should move faster and provide more convenience functions that are "good enough" for 90% of use cases. For power users, there will always be a library that addresses domain-specific issues better than the standard could ever hope to.

Instead, the comitee attempts to work towards perfect solutions that don't exist, and ends up releasing overengineered stuff that is neither the most convenient, performant, nor efficient solution. Like <random>
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-15 10:34:39+00:00
Feeling well informed is not the same thing as being informed. Just because it's possible to live in the USA and follow some news without knowing how badly the democratic order is being eroded doesn't mean that all is actually well.

Do your friends know about the absolute immunity the Supreme Court invented for the president? Do they know about the illegal deportations that are accelerating? Do they know about the presidential order that aims to deport legal citizens of the USA (the end of birthright citizenship)? Do they know about the gutting of virtually all social programs?

If they don't, then they're ill informed, regardless of their feelings on the matter. If they do and still think all is well, then they are just as much a part of the problem as the ones doing this all.
by aquariusDue | 2025-07-15 10:35:38+00:00
Between the ridiculously optimistic and the cynically nihilistic I personally believe there is some value that extremely talented people at huge companies can't really provide because they're not in the right environment (too big a scale) but neither can grifters packaging a prompt in a vibecoded app.

In the last few months the building blocks for something useful for small companies (think less than 100 employees) have appeared, now it's time for developers or catch-all IT at those companies and freelancers serving small local companies to "up-skill".

Why do I believe this? Well for a start OCR became much more accessible this year cutting down on manual data entry compared to tesseract of yesteryear.
by ljosifov | 2025-07-15 10:36:38+00:00
I don't think it's inevitable, for very few things are really inevitable. However, I find LLM-s good and useful. First the chat bots, now the coding agents. Looks to me medical consultation, 2nd opinion and the like - are not far behind. Enough people already use them for that. I give my lab tests results to ChatGPT. Tbh can't fault the author for motivated reasoning. Looks to me it goes like: this is not a future I want -> therefore it should not happen -> therefore it will not happen. Because by the same motivated reasoning: for me it is the future I want. To be able to interact with a computer via language, speech and more. For the computer to be smart, instead of dumb, as it is now. If I can have the computer enhance my smarts, my information processing power, my memory - the way writing allows me to off-load from my head onto paper, a calculator allows me to manipulate numbers, and computer toils for days instead myself - then I will probably want for the AI to complement, enhance me too.
by sunshine-o | 2025-07-15 10:37:23+00:00
I am not sure this is specific to Belgium, I have seen this attitude in many countries unfortunately.

The worst is this attitude is also applied internally in those organisations. Too often, everybody knows about some critical vulnerabilities but talking about them will get you in big troubles. This also apply to security consultants and "auditors".

The saddest part is Belgium was, if I remember correctly, at the forefront of online banking security in the early 2000s with strong auth physical tokens and digital signatures [0]

They seem to have switch to this itsme system to cut costs.

- [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneSpan#History
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-15 10:37:26+00:00
Lemonnier only cites

pp22

A first approach to programming with quantum effects is the quantum λ-calculus [SV09]. Nevertheless, that language does not handle quantum programming as an algebraic effect, since it requires measurement into classical data to control the flow of execution.

pp23 1st para has more of the same

In the quantum λ-calculus, a qubit has to be measured before influencing the control of a program. These models are not of interest to this thesis, because the use of measurement breaks superposition, therefore it does not preserve the aforementioned quantum effect.

[SV09] Peter Selinger and Benoit Valiron. Quantum lambda calculus. Semantic techniques in quantum computation, pages 135–172, 2009.

Keye Martin: be right back (I didn't see much there either.)

in my own heap: one might be able to use Scott continuity to replace lemma 7?

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.10072

pp6-10 "Corrupted geometric sum"

Pay attention to how the "control gates" (as in SV09) are invoked

pp7: The crucial step in Shor’s algorithm, after the quantum Fourier transform, is to take a quantum measurement, with the property that the probability of observing a state that is close to an integral multiple of 2^n/ω is high.

pp12 has this speculation

>At its most fundamental level, it is not permitted to ask the computing machine to scan a continuously deformed symbol from ξ to ζ, while a mathematical homotopy can easily be envisioned.
by chii | 2025-07-15 10:38:19+00:00
> and you learned nothing in the process.

why do you presume the person wanted to learn something, rather than to get the work done asap? May be they're not interested in learning, or may be they have something more important to do, and saving this time is a life saver?

> You are losing autonomy and depending more and more on external companies

do you also autonomously produce your own clean water, electricity, gas and food? Or do you rely on external companies to provision all of those things?
by creshal | 2025-07-15 10:38:25+00:00
I save having to deal with a full-blown DBMS daemon accessed through a network boundary unless I need this, and I have approximately zero pain, because I read the documentation and set up my database schemas to work on both solutions (and use WALs so sqlite is rock stable). I also know how to open a file on the command line if I need raw database access for some reason (very rare with django anyway, django's console is just too good not to use it). I also design my apps to not deadlock on unnecessarily long transaction and don't turn every request into a database write, so I can scale out pretty far before I have to worry about write performance. And if I do, I can still use postgres. Until then, I can do unified, consistent backups of all state by snapshotting the filesystem containing uploads and sqlite files.

So I dunno why people insist on spreading so much FUD.
by priyanshu_101 | 2025-07-15 10:39:06+00:00
One pattern I’ve been noticing (especially talking with folks trying to break into cybersecurity): a lot of entry-level candidates feel “ready,” but then get completely thrown off by the actual technical interviews and hands-on tests used in real SOCs. Most prep resources seem to focus on memorizing buzzwords or predictable scenarios, but the practical reality is… tougher.

Across conversations, it seems like the biggest gaps show up when people are asked to: Walk through real incident response scenarios (not just definitions). Show evidence of actual work, like configs, scripts, or forensic notes. Explain logic and decision-making, not just recite steps from a playbook.

Built this assessment tool to be better prepared for cybersecurity roles.
Show HN: Sync-in – Secure, open-source platform for file collaboration and sync
by johaven | 2025-07-15 10:39:09+00:00
Hi HN,

I’m happy to announce the public launch of Sync-in (https://sync-in.com) — a secure, open-source platform to store, sync, organize, and collaborate on files, without compromising privacy.

Sync-in wasn’t born from a business plan, but from a personal need: being able to access my files remotely, share them easily with family or colleagues, and protect my data — through a clean, responsive, and user-friendly interface.

Over the past 10 years, it has evolved and matured to support individual, team, and organizational workflows.

You can host your own workspace to organize, access, and collaborate on files, notes, and documents — with your team, your friends, or just for yourself.

Key features include:

• Data sovereignty – Your files stay on your infrastructure. No third-party cloud, no compromise.

• Privacy-first design – No telemetry, no tracking. Your data remains yours — and stays private.

• Granular permissions – Fine-tune access per user, group, space, or file.

• Desktop sync – Keep files synced across devices with native apps (Windows, macOS, Linux, CLI).

• Collaborative editing – Edit documents together in real time (via OnlyOffice integration).

• Spaces – Organize content into secure areas: personal, team, or public.

• Secure sharing – Share with individuals or groups, with precise access control.

• Public links – Create time-limited, password-protected links to share content externally.

• Full-text indexing – Search instantly through documents, server-side and private.

• Activity tracking – See who did what, and get real-time notifications.

• WebDAV support – Mount Sync-in as a remote drive from any device.

• Universal access – Use Sync-in from any browser, mobile, or desktop app.

Sync-in was designed as the kind of tool we should expect in 2025: fully open-source, privacy-first, and built with a modern, full TypeScript stack — both frontend and backend.

Privacy isn’t a feature — it’s a commitment.

This public launch is just the beginning. Sync-in is built to grow with its community, and I’d love your feedback, thoughts, and ideas.

• Site: https://sync-in.com

• GitHub: https://github.com/Sync-in

• Docker setup: https://github.com/Sync-in/docker

• Docs: https://sync-in.com/docs

• Mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@sync_in

• Discord: https://discord.gg/qhJyzwaymT

If you find it useful, you can:

Star the repositories Report issues and suggest improvements Contribute code, translations, or documentation

Thanks for checking it out
by DonHopkins | 2025-07-15 10:39:30+00:00
Some other handy passive-aggressive electronic mail techniques, courtesy of Bernard Greenberg from Symbolics (BSG 4/11/84):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Greenberg

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/archive/humor/flame-manual.t...

Proposed Symbolics guidelines for mail messages BSG 4/11/84

>It is impermissible to use the term "EMAIL".

>It is customary to attack the someone by including his or her message, indented (unless you are using MM), and replying point by point, as someone debating someone they are watching on TV, or hearing on the radio.

>It is considered artful to append many messages on a subject, leaving only the most inflammatory lines from each, and reply to all in one swift blow. The choice of lines to support your argument can make or break your case.

>Mail should be at least a mixture of upper and lower case. Devising your own font (Devanagari, pinhead graphics, etc.) and using it in the mail is a good entertainment tactic, as is finding some way to use existing obscure fonts.

>Sending the mail from Unix is frowned upon (although this has gotten much better).

>Replying to one's own message is a rarely-exposed technique for switching positions once you have thought about something only after sending mail.

>You get 3 opportunities to advertise your Rock band, no more.

>Idiosyncratic indentations, double-spacing, capitalization, etc., while stamps of individuality, leave one an easy target for parody.

>The entire life, times, collected works, expressions, and modalities of Zippy the Pinhead are a common ground for much of the metaphor, rhetoric, and invective which pass daily through the mail. An occasional parenthetical "yow" CORRECTLY USED will endear one to the senior systems staff. So will puns and other remarks addressed directly to the point.

>Including a destination in the CC list that will cause the recipients' mailer to blow out is a good way to stifle dissent.

>When replying, it is often possible to cleverly edit the original message in such a way as to subtly alter its meaning or tone to your advantage while appearing that you are taking pains to preserve the author's intent. As a bonus, it will seem that your superior intellect is cutting through all the excess verbiage to the very heart of the matter.

>Keeping a secret "Hall Of Flame" file of people's mail indiscretions, or copying messages to private mailing lists for subsequent derision, is good fun and also a worthwhile investment in case you need to blackmail the senders later.
by aspenmayer | 2025-07-15 10:39:42+00:00
> Meanwhile, build database centers at incredible scale to run AI and force it into those same consumers in every way possible, but never tell them how much power that wastes.

Why would they? Those expenditures and investments are already priced in, and that blood is coming from that stone one way or the other or it won't, damn the expense.

Shame, on the other hand, is a renewable resource!
by andrepd | 2025-07-15 10:40:58+00:00
Okay. And the fact that LLMs routinely make up crap that doesn't exist but sounds plausible, and the fact that this appears to be a fundamental problem with LLMs, this doesn't give you any pause on your hype train? Genuine question, how do you reconcile this?

> I really wish OpenAI gave us the whole thought process verbatim, as I'm kind of curious where those "thoughts" come from and what happens to them.

Don't see what you mean by this; there's no such thing as "thoughts" of an LLM, and if you mean the feature marketers called chain-of-thought, it's yet another instance of LLMs making shit up, so.
by erchier | 2025-07-15 10:41:25+00:00
The damage to U.S. government safety institutions by the current administration may be significant, from faulty pacemakers and cancer-inducing scanning machines to disabled babies and Ebola.

It’s not some temporary thing where we can just raise awareness and then people will vote them out of office next time. The changes that have been made affect the ability for those opposing to win the next election, and even if they were to, the checks and balances have gone.

At this point, unless you plan to work to undo it long-term, you could accept that our society will be quickly devolving maybe 100-150 years or more.

In the past, opportunity abounded in fake science, magical thinking, weird products, dirty industry, manual labor, inequity, and brutish behavior.

If they want to outlaw processed foods and we all start eating flavorless thick hard biscuits of grain and beans and less-than-stellar-looking fruits and vegetables, it’ll probably be better for my mental and physical health.

However, that may be offset by my teeth rotting from lack of fluoride and getting cancer and intestinal problems from lack of regulation. And the death, disease, and disablement will overshadow the fear and excitement from street fights, arcing electrical devices, dangerous bubbling chemicals, planes falling from the sky, things exploding, medicine shows, and AI whorehouses.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 10:41:34+00:00
> It's just that we also see the awful downsides of them - like no version control, being proprietary, and having to type obscure incantations into tiny cells

Right. But this also tends to make us forget sometimes that those things aren't always a big deal. It's the distinction between solving an immediate problem vs. building a proper solution.

(That such one-off solution tends to become a permanent fixture in an organization - or household - is unfortunately an unsolved problem of human coordination.)

> and realise that actual coding is just better.

It is, if you already know how to do it. But then we overcompensate in the opposite direction, and suddenly 90% of the "actual coding" turns into dealing with build tools and platform bullshit, at which point some of us (like myself) look back at spreadsheets in envy, or start using LLMs to solve sub-problems directly.

It's actually unfortunate, IMO, that LLMs are so over-trained on React and all kinds of modern webshit - this makes them almost unable to give you simple solutions for anything involving web, unless you specifically prompt them to go full vanilla and KISS.
by Applejinx | 2025-07-15 10:42:45+00:00
"hard not to anthropomorphize accidentally' is a you problem.

I'm unhappy every time I look in my inbox, as it's a constant reminder there are people (increasingly, scripts and LLMs!) prepared to straight-up lie to me if it means they can take my money or get me to click on a link that's a trap.

Are you anthropomorphizing that, too? You're not gonna last a day.
by polivier | 2025-07-15 10:43:07+00:00
When my wife was pregnant and had to stop working, she got bored so I got her this game. At first she said she didn't like it "because the graphics suck". A couple days later she was totally immersed in the game and had made spreadsheets to track the whereabouts of every character over time. It is a really well-made game.