MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by theozero | 2025-07-10 19:29:40+00:00
On most projects you end up wiring up a bunch of custom logic to handle your config, which is often injected as environment variables - think loading from a secure source, validation logic, type safety, pre-commit git scanning, etc.

It's annoying to do it right, so people often take shortcuts - skip adding validation, send files over slack, don't add docs, etc...

The common pattern of using a .env.example file leads to constant syncing problems, and we often have many sources of truth about our config (.env.example, hand-written types, validation code, comments scattered throughout the codebase)

This tool lets you express additional schema info about the config your application needs via decorators in a .env file, and optionally set values, either directly if they are not sensitive, or via calls to an external service. This shouldn't be something we need to recreate when scaffolding out every new project. There should be a single source of truth - and it should work with any framework/language.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-07-10 19:30:00+00:00
> but it's the only thing we're certain will work.

Nothing, not even nuclear, has 100% coverage with 100% reliability. And anything less than 100% can be handled with statistics. The goal is 99.99%, because that's the grid reliability so there is no significant benefit for going over that. 99.99% reliability with a combo of wind, solar and batteries is cheaper than nuclear.

The cheapest is 95% solar/wind/batteries and 5% natural gas.
by isoprophlex | 2025-07-10 19:30:38+00:00
Ed Zitron was 100% right. The mask is off and the AI subprime crisis is coming. Reading TFA, it would be hilarious if the bubble burst AND it turns out there's actually no value to be had, at ANY price. I for one can't wait for this era of hype to end. We'll see.

you're addicted to the FEELING of productivity more than actual productivity. even knowing this, even seeing the data, even acknowledging the complete fuckery of it all, you're still gonna use me. i'm still gonna exist. you're all still gonna pretend this helps because the alternative is admitting you spent billions of dollars on spicy autocomplete.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-10 19:31:13+00:00
Because an AI model developed in the EU will, by design, be compliant with EU data and AI regulations from day one, which makes it a strong selling point for companies looking to launch AI-powered products on the EU market?

Yes, regulatory compliance is a significant concern for software product design in the EU these days. But that's a good thing - it stops a lot of hare-brained ideas and abusive business models at the drafting phase. Also, from my own observation, the rules seem annoying at first, because they tend to shut down the most exciting ideas - but after a while you notice that this is because those ideas come with bad failure modes and bad second-order effects, and regulations are forcing you to actually consider them.
by scarecrowbob | 2025-07-10 19:31:41+00:00
I live in the west and drive past dozens of old wells and mines regularly. These are "owned" by companies that went out of business after extracting profits, but it's unlikely that anyone other than the government will ever have the funding to clean them up. If they ever do get cleaned up. Ocasionally they contaminate vast watersheds.

How could folks like me be assured that a similar situation wouldn't happen to all the waste from that proliferation of nuclear technology, in which companies just "vanish" leaving a mess for the rest of us to clean up? Like, a giant rotting solar field isn't a beautiful thing, but at least I am not worried about the cells breaking down and contaminating my water source...

am I just wrong that this is a concern?
by ngruhn | 2025-07-10 19:32:15+00:00
It was my favorite activity in the world. But that also makes it tough to "let go" when your 30s approach. Even when the hangovers get worse. I'm kinda grateful for the pandemic shutting everything down for a while. Before that I had massive FOMO when I "did nothing" on the weekend. I know a bunch of guys who did nothing else with their lives.
by AuryGlenz | 2025-07-10 19:32:24+00:00
As an addendum, my wife just messaged me about getting our daughter a worse child seat because ours is rated for 50 pounds. In Minnesota's new laws that means she needs to be rear facing until she's 50 pounds. She's a few months away from being 4 years old and she's 33 pounds or so. Her legs are getting incredibly scrunched up and we can't extend her leg room even though our car seat is made for that because there simply isn't room in our car to do so. I saw comments on a Facebook post about it from our county that someone's 7 year old was going to need to go back to rear-facing.
by keerthiko | 2025-07-10 19:32:29+00:00
IME AI coding is excellent for one-off scripts, personal automation tooling (I iterate on a tool to scrape receipts and submit expenses for my specific needs) and generally stuff that can be run in environments where the creator and the end user are effectively the same (and only) entity.

Scaled up slightly, we use it to build plenty of internal tooling in our video content production pipeline (syncing between encoding tools and a status dashboard for our non-technical content team).

Using it for anything more than boilerplate code, well-defined but tedious refactors, or quickly demonstrating how to use an unfamiliar API in production code, before a human takes a full pass at everything is something I'm going to be wary of for a long time.
by smokel | 2025-07-10 19:32:34+00:00
Why do you think it needs reproducible steps? It is obvious that the bug is still active, so in a way it is reproducible, just not in a systematic way.

This happens more often, for example when many services work together in an asynchronous way, and in some very rare situation, unwanted behavior occurs. To fix that, it is often easier to reason through the entire process, and to identify weak spots. It might even be a good idea to switch to a different paradigm to avoid certain bugs altogether.

For this particular bug, I would start by reading a lot, and ensurong that the bug is indeed not easily reproducible (by trying to make it reproducible of course). If that fails, I would continue to think about root causes for the bug, and possible workarounds that would work in theory. Then I would try to estimate the amount of work required, and the risk of breaking other things, and report that to those who like to decide on further actions.

And of course, as I know very little about the inner workings of ThunderBird, I would simply ask ChatGPT o3 or similar for advice. It comes up with a plan that seems reasonable.
by vrm | 2025-07-10 19:33:36+00:00
This is neat! I think in general there are really deep connections between semantically meaningful diffs (across modalities) and supervision of AI models. You might imagine a human-in-the-loop workflow where the human makes edits to a particular generation and then those edits are used as supervision for a future implementation of that thing. We did some related work here: https://www.tensorzero.com/blog/automatically-evaluating-ai-... on the coding use case but I'm interested in all the different approaches to the problem and especially on less structured domains.
by albedoa | 2025-07-10 19:33:40+00:00
> it's not in fact the norm for any discussion about code here to include links to the code.

I certainly didn't interpret "these types of posts" to mean "any discussion about code", and I highly doubt anyone else did.

The top-level comment is making a significant claim, not a casual remark about code they produced. We should expect it to be presented with substantiating artifacts.
by dgunay | 2025-07-10 19:34:24+00:00
All of these issues were at some point raised to leadership. I've spent a lot of political capital on the issue and decided that it's not a hill I'm prepared to die on. Either a crop of new hires will come along and improve the situation with their fresh-eyed optimism, or it'll just keep happening and I'll try to remain zen.

And there's certainly a calculus to it that changes when you're an executive. To me, craftsmanship, diligence, and engineering excellence are important, not just because I love programming but also because I'm an IC and it affects me directly. To an executive, I am just some weird nerd they have to pay a lot of money to make computers do things. Beautiful code and a serene on-call experience are nice but they don't usually get a company acquired.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-10 19:34:31+00:00
> continue supporting HomeKit

As far as I understand, Apple insisted that HomeKit devices be manageable locally with cloud connection optional. Your device can still do cloud connection, but Apple devices will only talk to it locally though a HomePod or an AppleTV or some iDevice that you leave on your home network.

So it's not really how they are choosing to continue to support these products, and more of a byproduct of how HomeKit works.
by somat | 2025-07-10 19:34:32+00:00
I am curious, how did you find those?

I like to think that it's (posh accent) "Yes good sir, I do indeed keep an extensive collections of references to exotic bridge layouts"

What would be neatest is to learn that there is an exotic geospatual query language. "no junction and road bend radius less than 20M within 50 meters of bridge"

But I suspect it is a well formulated web search "Complaints about right angle overpass"

And final thoughts, Your right, it is not much different than a common freeway offramp system. So I am not sure what the fuss is about. Perhaps too constrained, and it needs a larger turning area?
by freedomben | 2025-07-10 19:34:50+00:00
Fair, I forgot they changed it to require an active sub rather than just an account. That was a bad move IMHO. And yes I fully agree they should at a minimun automatically allow access to everyone with @company.com with >n licenses.

Pure speculation, but I'm guessing they view the knowledge base as part of "support" (or like level 1 or something), which is why they're so restrictive. I think they greatly underestimate the number of people like us though that already use RHEL but don't want to bother with accounts because we can get by without it, but would benefit from having the access. They don't seem to understand the friction their policies create, and I think that's deeply unfortunate.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-07-10 19:35:18+00:00
I found it helpful to read the steering council's messages on this [1]. From my reading: yes, there is now an "officially supported" build of cPython without a GIL. But while it is "no longer experimental," it's still not the default.

From the SC's list of things that still have to be implemented or stabilized, it really doesn't sound production-ready! Specifically: the ABI is not stabilized yet; the documentation is not written yet; and most importantly, there are not yet "higher-level concurrency primitives that users can use safely and effectively".

[1] https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-779-criteria-for-supported-...
by tptacek | 2025-07-10 19:35:25+00:00
I guess. I kind of side-eyed the original one-shotting claim, not because I don't believe it, but because I don't believe it matters. Serious LLM-driven code generation runs in an iterative process. I'm not sure why first-output quality matters that much; I care about the outcome, not the intermediate steps.

So if we're looking for stories about LLMs one-shotting high-quality code, accompanied by the generated code, I'm less sure of where those examples would be!
by AuryGlenz | 2025-07-10 19:35:40+00:00
Do you feel the same about Cory Booker's "nazi salute?" With the right prompt I'm sure PC-less Grok would have gone full black supremacist as well. Apparently at the same time it was blaming stuff on jews it was also saying the life of 1 jew was worth millions of other lives.

The point is people's reactions to this sort of thing are colored by what's brought up and repeated in social media. Reddit went freaking crazy after Elon Musk did his quasi-nazi salute. Absolute crickets when Cory Booker did the same thing. I don't know everything that PC-less Grok said but I'm sure plenty of it went against your narrative.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-07-10 19:43:35+00:00
I am currently involved in a small claims civil action, as the pro se plaintiff.

During my free time, I have attended a few unrelated sessions in my county courthouse... just to see how it's conducted; I also have two attorney brothers (one is an appellate judge) whom have expressed "ProllyInfamous is ranting crazytalk again about LLMs."

It is absolutely incredible to me how little faith I've observed in these situations, e.g. an attorney, unrelated to me, who recently responded "I think you're putting a little bit too much faith in ChatGPT, bruh."

"Everybody, particularly any/all attorneys/judges, should read the SCOTUS end of 2023 report" [0], was my response.

For my own particular case, Perplexity.ai has been absolutely incredible in helping me to formulate my initial complaint, as well as respond and file motions.

tl;dr: LLMs are massively going to help laypeople inundate court procedings.

[0]: https://www.supremecourt.gov/publicinfo/year-end/2023year-en...

>For those who cannot afford a lawyer, AI can help. It drives new, highly accessible tools that provide answers to basic questions, including where to find templates and court forms, how to fill them out, and where to bring them for presentation to the judge—all without leaving home. These tools have the welcome potential to smooth out any mismatch between available resources and urgent needs in our court system.

>But any use of AI requires caution and humility.

AI discussion starting on page 5 of [0]
by worik | 2025-07-10 19:43:37+00:00
We have debate around this in New Zealand

The problem here is you have a large body of water that is a huge and significant nursery for fish, and the best place for the turbine is where the water narrows.

If the turbine is a barrier to the fish, (and who knows?), then important fisheries may well collapse

This is an objection that needs to be taken seriously and investigated, so I was disappointed that the article did not address effects on marine life.

Personally I think that the turbines and marine life can co-exist, but we need facts, not reckons
by Fluorescence | 2025-07-10 19:43:55+00:00
"New Westminster, British Columbia" lol. It looked nothing like the UK but at least they didn't plump for Colombia!

Anyway, here is a real British one:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/VAdfguBXNcDB74Yu5

I don't think it's that uncommon especially when crossing rivers because roads typically run along the river bank. A lot of roads and field boundaries were set down 1000s of years ago.

The British way is that so long as you put up big 'ol black and white arrows then 90° is child's play, it could be a 180° hairpin. I don't drive much but I hated multi-story-car-park-spiral ramps that for four floors would be a 1560° turn at full lock in a small car. Feels like I am failing astronaut training as my stomach turns over.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-10 19:44:38+00:00
TL;DR: the cookie banners and consent forms are designed to make you blame the EU.

You don't need a cookie banner if you aren't doing anything shady. Using cookies (or other such mechanisms) does not require information or consent popups when they're necessary to make the product/service work for technical reason - the canonical example being session cookies.

The corollary here being, you only need consent popups if you're doing something shady but not strictly illegal. They're not meant to be annoying - they're there because it's illegal to do shady shit without the user agreeing to it, and "agreeing" in the EU means "informed consent". So you have to inform, and then get consent.

It's all pretty reasonable. But of course, people doing shady shit really don't want the users to understand it and risk them not consenting - and they especially hate having to ask in the first place. The industry settled on a "malicious compliance" approach to GDPR - show popups that, as much as they can get away with it, maximize the chance of people consenting to make the popup go away, make the "informed" part as opaque as possible, and generally make this thing super annoying - and then tell people it's all EU's fault, hoping enough Europeans will buy it and the public pressure will make EU undo GDPR.
by kmacleod | 2025-07-10 19:44:40+00:00
The Free Software Foundation (FSF), as the author of the GPL and LGPL licenses, maintains that any software running in the same process space qualifies as "linked" under the terms of these licenses. This includes dynamic and static linking, plug-ins, loadable modules, and, in some cases, even interpreted code.

However, some developers who use GPL licenses interpret these requirements differently and permit certain uses that the FSF does not. A notable example is the Linux kernel, which allows proprietary kernel modules under specific conditions.

For proprietary software authors, the best-case scenario is having to convince a court that the license they accepted, by redistributing GPL-licensed software, permits linking without the obligation to disclose their own source code, as otherwise required by the license.
by antonio07c | 2025-07-10 19:44:58+00:00
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Hi!, I'm a Senior Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience building web applications. I have strong back-end experience to create efficient, scalable and maintainable web solutions, I currently work near Pittsburgh, PA and hold a TN Visa.

If you have a job opportunity or just want to play chess reach out to me!
by cycomanic | 2025-07-10 19:45:05+00:00
Why is it obvious that it can't? I just looked up the numbers and Scotlands absolute peak demand is 6.5 GW and there are about 2.5 M households. With those numbers they would need 18MW for 7000k households, but that ignores all commercial contributors to peak demand (I could not find data on commercial vs residential demand), but it seems to me the number isn't completely off.

Also I would say the expression "powering a home" usually implies average demand not peak demand.
by MisterTea | 2025-07-10 19:45:18+00:00
Its not all screaming into the void. From my point of view people broadcasting their lives in real-time leaves little to catch up on. Why call/meet Joe to talk about his trip to Antigua if he already posted his trip in real-time including video? You know what all your friends are doing.

The twitter scenes is out of my wheel house. Never had an account or knew anyone on it that I cared about.
by spiderice | 2025-07-10 19:45:18+00:00
To each their own.. but I think throwing a party to make friends is a totally reasonable plan and expectation. And if it isn't working out, then the ROI isn't there.

I go to "couples game nights" with my wife and her friends even though I don't really like them. But I like having friends in the neighborhood. So it's worth it to me when one of her friends husbands (who is now my friend) shows me the deck they've been building in their backyard all because I went to a somewhat painful game night.

I think you have it nearly completely backwards. Society would be far better off if more people were willing to do the "un-fun" things (like planning and hosting a party) in order to socialize. GP should be applauded.
by philipkglass | 2025-07-10 19:46:05+00:00
"First concrete for US advanced reactor"

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/first-concrete-f...

"Westinghouse, Radiant to perform first US microreactor tests"

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/westinghouse-rad...

"Utah to host NuCube test reactor"

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/utah-to-host-nuc...

"Oklo named to supply microreactor for Alaska airbase"

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/oklo-named-to-su...

"New York Governor announces plans for new nuclear plant"

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/new-york-governo...

And the US completed its latest commercial power reactor just last year:

https://pris.iaea.org/PRIS/CountryStatistics/ReactorDetails....
by riku_iki | 2025-07-10 19:46:21+00:00
> the real question is why other LLMs didn't do as well in this benchmark.

they do. There is a cycle for each major model:

- release new model(Gemini/ChatGPT/Grock N) which beats all current benchmarks

- some new benchmarks created

- release new model(Gemini/ChatGPT/Grock N+1) which beats benchmarks from previous step
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-10 19:46:38+00:00
It's not perfect, but there's a very close correlation to the size of the femur with overall body mass in modern animals we use to extrapolate.

See the chart in https://phys.org/news/2020-08-dinosaur.html

There's some debate over how useful this is for dinosaurs, but something that died out 10k years ago with closely related existing species is probably easier.
by naasking | 2025-07-10 19:46:50+00:00
I appreciate the desire for consistency and being able to lean on old textbooks and documentation. A couple of considerations since this is a new language where history and precedent should (I think) be less important if it leads to clarity and improved productivity:

1. I think way more people coming to your language will be familiar with SQL and it's problems than with logic programming and Horn clauses.

2. I think many people are now familiar with functional pipelines, where filters and transforms can be applied in stages, thanks to the rise of functional programming in things like LINQ and Java's Stream API. This sort of pipelining maps naturally to queries, as LINQ has shown, and even to logic programming, as µKanren has shown.

3. People don't type programs right-to-left but left-to-right. To the extent that right-to-left expressions interfere with assisting the human that's typing in various ways (like autocomplete), I would personally defer to helping the human as much as possible over historical precedent.

4. Keeping the logic fragment separate from the query fragment (option C) seems viable if you really, really want to maintain that historical precedent for some reason.

My two cents. Kudos on the neat language!
Show HN: Prompt to Spreadsheet
by mpcadosch | 2025-07-10 19:47:15+00:00
Hi HN, I've been tinkering/building AI applications that require interaction with spreadsheets (Excel / Google Sheets). Realized that LLMs don't work off-the-shelf when it comes to producing correct, reliable output for spreadsheets, regardless of how you wish to encode it (JSON, markdown, XML, etc.)

After prompting, fine-tuning LLMs to work for my applications, decided to expose the functionality as an API to this community. Eager to see if it is helpful/of interest to others. Let me know if you need an invite.
by solatic | 2025-07-10 19:47:43+00:00
That doesn't make them public companies or ensure that they serve the public interest; it ensures that they cannot abuse their natural monopoly. Placing handcuffs on someone to prevent them from abusing others is not the same as someone who loves you.

Examples that serve the public interest: charities, many non-profits

Other examples of private companies that are constrained against abusing their power (apart from the obvious other utilities like gas and water): automobile manufacturers did not add seatbelts and airbags out of the goodness of their hearts, nor did they voluntarily improve fuel efficiency. New York City landlords are prevented from raising rents on rent-controlled apartments, in spite of how much they would like to. Factories that would love to pollute our rivers and streams... the list goes on forever.