MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-07-31 06:35:22+00:00
Yes I've done this kind of refactoring for ages using emacs macros and grep. Language Server and tree-sitter in emacs has made this faster (when I can get all the dependencies setup correctly that is.) Variable name edits and function extraction is pretty much table stakes in most modern editors like IntelliJ, VSCode, Zed, etc. IIRC Eclipse had this capability 15-20 years ago.

I used to have more patience for doing it the grep/macro way in emacs. It used to feel a bit zen, like going through the code and changing all the call-sites to use my new refactor or something. But I've been coding for too long to feel this zen any longer, and my own expectations for output have gotten higher with tools like language-server and tree-sitter.

The kind of refactorings I turn to an LLM for are different, like creating interfaces/traits out of structs or joining two different modules together.
by nakedneuron | 2025-07-31 06:35:40+00:00
Website is superfast. Reason I usually go for the comments first on HN is exactly this: they're fast. THIS is notably different.

On interfaces:

It's not only the slowness of the software or machine we have to wait for, it's also the act of moving your limb that adds a delay. Navigating a button (mouse) adds more friction than having a shortcut (keyboard). It's a needless feedback loop. If you master your tool all menus should go away. People who live in the terminal know this.

As a personal anecdote, I use custom rofi menus (think raycast for Linux) extensively for all kinds of interaction with data or file system (starting scripts, opening notes, renaming/moving files). It's notable how your interaction changes if you remove friction.

Venerable tools in this vein: vim, i3, kitty (former tmux), ranger (on the brim), qutebrowser, visidata, nsxiv, sioyek, mpv...

Essence of these tools is always this: move fast, select fast and efficiently, ability to launch your tool/script/function seamlessly. Be able to do it blindly. Prefer peripheral feedback.

I wish more people saw what could be and built more bicycles for the mind.
by layla5alive | 2025-07-31 06:35:48+00:00
Mitochondrial dysfunction literally leads to Alzheimers, dementia, etc. The link is clear as day - don't sleep, lose your mind. Put a different way, life rusts (oxidizes) your brain, and sleep de-rusts it. And unfortunately I'm still someone who regularly pulls all nighters because of a combination of disorders, ADHD and sleep cycle issues. I'm killing myself rather prematurely. But then, all addictions tend to do that and tend to be things the addict has trouble controlling. :(

Also, the theory would better be expressed as "all mitochondria require rest, neuronal rest in the brain looks like sleep (but many cells in the body also get quite a bit of rest during this time)" - so many people here seem to be getting this backwards thinking sleep is the special thing - it's one way large scale mitochondrial rest (as well as lots of other important co-occuring processes) presents in the brain.

The really interesting question is... how do heart cells do it? Because they're a clear exception to this theory... Lactate?
by CraigJPerry | 2025-07-31 06:36:13+00:00
>> Rarely in software does anyone ask for “fast.”

I don't know, there are a sizeable subset of folks who value fast, and it's a big subset, it's not niche.

Search for topics like turning off animations or replacing core user space tools with various go and rust replacements, you'll find us easily enough.

I'm generally a pretty happy MacOS user, especially since M1 came along. But I am seriously considering going back to linux again. I maintain a parallel laptop with nixos and i'm finding more and more niggles on the mac side where i can prioritise lower friction on linux.
by lmm | 2025-07-31 06:36:25+00:00
> Because no one would write an HTTP fetching implementation covering all edge cases when we have a data fetching library in the project that already does that.

> No one would implement a bunch of utility functions that we already have in a different module.

> No one would change a global configuration when there’s a mechanism to do it on a module level.

> No one would write a class when we’re using a functional approach everywhere.

Boy I'd like to work on whatever teams this guy's worked on. People absolutely do all those things.
by energy123 | 2025-07-31 06:36:48+00:00
Hezbollah declared war on Israel, unprovoked, on October 8th through to late 2024, by launching constant missile attacks on civilian areas, notwithstanding their violation of UNSC Resolution 1701. Israel is justified under international law to invade South Lebanon and completely decimate Hezbollah unless it offers an unconditional surrender.

I am more sympathetic to your views regarding Syria, however. That is a less justifiable war with nebulous preventive/preemptive motivations, which is somewhat coherent on a pure self-interested security basis but is likely validly unjust under different frames of reference (morality, modern global norms and taboos, and international law).
by csa | 2025-07-31 06:37:38+00:00
> So the response of the government is to add even more rules and limitations to building housing…

I mean… they are rules, but not limits. Low-income housing is being built. All of the locals I know consider it a win.

Note that “low income” housing qualification here is about $60k for a single person (often retirees) and $120k+ for a family of four.
by kazinator | 2025-07-31 06:38:56+00:00
`Tis ironic he was locked out trying to interact with LibreOffice.

I had a good interaction with the LibreOffice project. I reported something about LibreOffice Writer. Not even a bug, but just a user experience thing in some paragraph cohesion control UI.

My report was taken seriously, discussed and fixed, in a way that was fairly aligned with my suggestions, and it all happened on not a very long time scale, about within a month and a half.

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156109
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-31 06:39:03+00:00
I remember a time long ago when Microsoft support was great. I had a problem with Windows 3.11 crashing on my computer. Called the free telephone support, and the person went through a rigorous unscripted troubleshooting session with me to finally find the problem. Turned out some dram timing was slightly of in the bios setting which was only tripped by Windows and not by other software.

That was in the 80's.
by crocowhile | 2025-07-31 06:39:10+00:00
It gets much worse than this if you think about what they decided to do with Minecraft. They obliged millions of kids - literally, kids - to have a microsoft account to play a game that has nothing to do with any other microsoft products. They apply sub-standard and child-unfriendly security measures and when armies of kids get hacked (mostly phished) every day the only thing they do is to close down their account and FORCE them to buy the game again.

I still have to understand whether it's incompetence or a business model.
by Tade0 | 2025-07-31 06:40:32+00:00
I wanted to snarkily ask "became?".

I recall how the very first edition of Win XP needed time to "cool off" after startup for a minute or two, otherwise it would be wildly unstable. Service Pack 2 resolved most of those issues, but the fact it was needed at all is already telling.

Similarly Windows 11 had regressions in the weirdest of places, like for instance volume controls.

Microsoft has a legacy of bad software.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-07-31 06:41:00+00:00
As Daniel Colascione ('quotemstr' around these parts) said [1]:

> GNU Emacs is an old-school C program emulating a 1980s Symbolics Lisp Machine emulating an old-fashioned Motif-style Xt toolkit emulating a 1970s text terminal emulating a 1960s teletype. Compiling Emacs is a challenge. Adding modern rendering features to the redisplay engine is a miracle.

Emacs owns its main loop because, damnit, it created one before it was cool.

Hats off to any heroes who would manage to drag it, kicking and screaming, into this millennium.

[1] https://gist.github.com/ghosty141/c93f21d6cd476417d4a9814eb7...
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-31 06:42:31+00:00
AFAIK alignment doesn't even matter anymore (for CPU data at least) since the 'word size' of a modern CPU is the size of a cache line (32 or 64 bytes?), e.g. unaligned accesses within a 32 or 64 byte block are not different than aligned accesses.

(technically there is still an advantage of items aligned to their size in that such an item can never straddle adjacent cache lines though)

And there's also still tons of different alignment requirements when working with GPU data - and interestingly those alignment requirements may differ from C's alignment rules, so you may need to explicitly use packed structs (which are still not a standard C feature!) with manual padding.
by bobthepanda | 2025-07-31 06:43:31+00:00
I mean Japan is a obvious extreme what with the subway pushers and all.

Commuting times used to be rigid until COVID and the resulting WFH and hybrid policies showed corporate the world would not burn down if some people showed up at 800 vs 830 vs 930 vs 1000. Being in at 9am sharp it turns out is not a hard requirement for many jobs.
by polotics | 2025-07-31 06:43:32+00:00
Started with ollama, am at the stage of trying llama.ccp and realising there RPC just works, and ollama's promises of distributed runs is just hanging in the air, so indeed the convenience of ollama is starting to lose its appeal.

So, questions: what are the changes that they didn't upstream, is this listed somewhere? what is the impact? are they also changes in ggml? what was the point of the gguf format change?
by esulteric | 2025-07-31 06:43:38+00:00
> it is terrible, shoddy, insecure code, but he proved out a viable business with just a few hundred dollars of investment

I don't think he proved that. In fact the point of the story seems to be the opposite: even if you have a nice looking demo that does the thing, there is a lot of unseen cost to bringing it up to production spec that has to be accounted for.
by dang | 2025-07-31 06:43:42+00:00
Discussed a few times:

Working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36312295 - June 2023 (183 comments)

Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20611539 - Aug 2019 (171 comments)

Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10020827 - Aug 2015 (139 comments)

jsomers gets a lot of much-deserved love here!
by waste_monk | 2025-07-31 06:43:53+00:00
It is true that google's (lack of) customer support is awful.

>it’s well-documented that sometimes, even if you don’t have 2FA turned on and you know your password, they simply won’t let you log in without some sort of additional verification

However, this isn't quite fair on google - it's not arbitrary "sometimes", it's that accounts get locked if there's been unusual or suspicious activity that may indicate an attempt to compromise the account, such as failed login attempts or logins from a new location. The account is locked from single-factor (password only) authentication for a period of time to prevent compromise (which isn't disclosed but as I understand can vary and is usually a week or two), but will allow login with an MFA challenge.

If the account is locked and there are no MFA methods set up or other means of recovery like backup passwords, how are they meant to verify that it's you recovering the account and not an attacker?

Supposing you did manage to talk to a live google support agent, you'd still have the same problem of not being able to verify ownership of the account.
by yorwba | 2025-07-31 06:43:53+00:00
> Searched the publishing institute (KAIST) website with google search

You could've skipped this part by scrolling down and following the "More information" link.

> Is this enough fact-checking

Depends on which fact you wanted to check. If you want to verify that LLFuzz can indeed be used to find such vulnerabilities, you would need to run it yourself, which is currently impossible because https://github.com/SysSec-KAIST/LLFuzz is empty. It's probably true anyway, but not verifiable by fact checking.

> This whole process takes time, are there any other known techniques/tools to further reduce the time to fact-check and analyze

If you reduce your consumption of sources that require frequent fact checking and only check when it's very important to you to ensure that a fact is true, you can spend less time fact checking.
by a012 | 2025-07-31 06:44:25+00:00
Oh man, I’m pulling my hair right now because Google _decided_ consistently that someone else has my password and locked them out. They’re so proud of themselves about it I can imagine. But in reality, I’m trying to login my Gmail account on my second iPhone which is next to my original Android that has this Gmail account installed. When I logged in on the iPhone they showed a code and asked me to pick the same code on the Android, I did follow but they insisted that it wasn’t enough and still locked me out.
by bjornorn | 2025-07-31 06:44:48+00:00
They probably did a direct translation of this:

«Stargate Norway is planned to deliver 230MW of capacity, with ambitions to expand by an additional 290MW. The facility will target to deliver 100,000 NVIDIA GPUs by the end of 2026, with the intention to expand significantly in the years ahead.»

Makes it sound both like a power plant and a semiconductor factory..
by ggm | 2025-07-31 06:46:39+00:00
No. I think Zuck has reached his peter principle some time ago and is deep in Dunning Kruger territory: he isn't competent to speak about AGI or intelligence.

So, "Zuck said" as an appeal to authority doesn't move me an inch. Meta can afford to (and will) blow wads of money on this, for little or no actual benefit.

Remember, he was an expert about immersive goggle experience too. We're all living in Goggle world now, aren't we? You read this as an avatar, right?
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-07-31 06:47:32+00:00
There was a post I enjoyed recently saying that basically Capitalism lost the plot & became a negative force as it became ever more the purpose of a company to diffuse responsibility, to not suffer greatly for doing a so so or even bad job of the thing.

Tech alas so often is the hammer in this bad relationhip, acts as such a horrible tool against humankind broadly. Doing so much to shield and protect the guilty, to make situations illegible & confounded. There's so many domain of concerns that overlap in so many complex ways, and so so so few people within companies and usually vastly less still outside who can see & view these domains & overlap.

It's only getting vastly worse. It feels like the fix so very nearly was in for the Feds to outlaw any regulation at all against AI in the US! AI is so much harder, so much worse than the bad systems work here, vastly more impervious to understanding than what has come before.

We are falling from god's light, into the deepest shadows of our own making. The machines keep getting more infernal.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-31 06:47:59+00:00
If one company becomes massively profitable despite offering literally zero consumer level support, then why would any other company, that covets the same scalability, make any attempt at consumer level support at all?

Google has not scaled it's services, it has ignored hard problems of scaling in favour of solving (relatively) easy technical problems. It has not been punished in any meaningful way for this unbalanced approach, and so "the norm" shall it become.

To the detriment of us all.
by almost | 2025-07-31 06:48:16+00:00
So it monkey-patches a set of common http libraries and then detects calls to AI APIs? Not obvious which APIs it would detect or in what situations it would miss them. Seems kind of dangeorus to rely on something like that. You install it and it might be doing nothing, You only find out after somethings gone wrong.

If I was using something like this I think I'd rather have it wrap the AI API clients. Then it can throw an error if it doesn't recongise the client library I'm using. This way it'll just silently fail to monitor if what I'm using isn't in its supported list (whatever that is!)

I do think the idea is good though, just needs to be obvious how it will work when used and how/when it will fail.
by rincebrain | 2025-07-31 06:48:20+00:00
I have a lot of strong opinions about Microsoft, but at least during the Vista era, I once called their support without a support contract because someone's machine was very weirdly fucked after trying to upgrade to Vista, and I spoke to someone who spent an hour on the phone digging through weird registry crap and known issues to figure out how to successfully get the machine upgraded and working again. I was pleasantly surprised, having expected crappy support.

So I can confirm they did at least at one point have good support, and more broadly, I think it's not unfair to describe them as having had a great handle on what people wanted in user experiences and support, with how much they bent over backwards to fix compatibility issues for many years. I've also been told their support if you had a support contract was great, but I never was in a position to explore that firsthand.

Those days are, of course, gone, but they were known for that for a while.
by londons_explore | 2025-07-31 06:48:22+00:00
In the past few decades, data centers have been placed with latency in mind - ie. Typically you don't want to be more than 1000 miles from users.

However, in the world of AI, latency is already 1 second plus, so the economics change - you do better to build where there is cheap electricity and free cooling.

I forsee Iceland as a good place to invest.
by canpacis | 2025-07-31 06:49:08+00:00
Erdogan’s son in law, Selcuk Bayraktar, is claiming to have created a local and national social media platform called NeXT. It turned out that they used Mastodon’s open source code, modified it and made it closed source, which is against AGPLv3. There are also some dubious statements in their terms of service that suggest it they heavily track users.
by nojs | 2025-07-31 06:49:46+00:00
In my experience pretty much all of these issues stem from a combination of short context windows and suboptimal “context engineering”.

If the agent has a clean, relevant context explaining what global functions are available it tends to use them properly.

The biggest challenge is how to construct the right context for each request, and keep it clean until the feature is finished. I expect we will see a lot of improvements in this area the coming months (sub-agents being an obvious example).
by buserror | 2025-07-31 06:50:05+00:00
I personally treat the LLM as a very junior programmer. He's willing to work, will take instructions, but his knowledge of the codebase, and patterns we use is lacking strongly. So it needs a LOT of handholding, very clear instructions, description of potential pitfalls, and smaller, scoped tasks, and reviewed carefully to catch any straying off pattern.

Also, I make it work the same way I do: I first come up with the data model until it "works" in my head, before writing any "code" to deal with it. Again, clear instructions.

Oh another thing, one of my "golden rule" is that it needs to keep a block comment at the top of the file to describe what's going on in that file. It acts as a second "prompt" when I restart a session.

It works pretty well, it doesn't appear as "magic" as the "make it so!" approach people think they can get away with, but it works for me.

But yes, I still also spend maybe 30% of the time cleaning up, renaming stuff and do more general rework of the code before it comes "presentable" but it still allows to work pretty quickly, a lot quicker than if I were to do it all by hand.
by efskap | 2025-07-31 06:50:37+00:00
> 14.03.02 - Bolts; Fasteners, bolts; Fasteners, nails; Fasteners, screws; Nails (hardware); Nuts (hardware); Rivets; Screws; Tacks, thumb; Thumbtacks

> 26.01.03 - Circles, incomplete (more than semi-circles); Incomplete circles (more than semi-circles)

the ontology on this stuff is fascinating. That's a fastener?
by atleastoptimal | 2025-07-31 06:50:53+00:00
If a program calls an API like

search_engine.get_search_results(query, length, order)

It doesn't "care" about the algorithm that produced that list of results, only that it fits the approximation of how the algorithm works as defined by the schema. There are thousands of ways the engine could have been implemented to produce the schema that returns relevance-based results from a web-crawler-sourced database.

In the same way, if I prompt an LLM "design a schema with [list of requirements] that works in [code context and API calls]", there are thousands of ways it could produce that code, but within a margin of error a high quality LLM should be able to produce the code that fits those requirements.

Of course the difference is that there is a stochastic element to LLM generated code. However it is useful to think of LLM's this way because it allows being able to leverage their probability of being correct, even if they aren't as precise as calling APIs but being explicit in how those abstractions are used.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-31 06:50:54+00:00
This matches my experience. And I do mind the unnecessary comments. I always tell juniors that every line is important and the presence of a comment is a powerful tool for communicating with future developers. Think of it like labelling circuits on a fusebox. Now these garbage code generators are putting comments on everything because they don't understand anything and can't tell what it's redundant.

But this is only scratching the surface of what's wrong, as the article elaborates.

The thing is people claim these things are making them faster. I don't believe it. What I believe is they are faster at generating shit. I know that because a baby can coax an LLM into producing shit too.

I do not believe you can spend that much time writing the correct prompt - use this exact function, follow this pattern, add a comment here, don't add one there, no, not like that - and still be quicker than just writing it yourself directly in the language.

It's like if I speak French fluently but only communicate through a translator that I instruct in English but constantly have to correct when they miss the nuance in my speech. I'd just speak French!

So, no, I don't believe it.

What I believe is that many, many software developers have been manually writing boilerplate, repetitive and boring code over and over again up until this point. I believe it because I've seen it. LLMs will obviously speed this up. But some of us already learnt how to use the computer to do that for us.

What I also believe is developers exist who don't understand, or care to understand, what they are doing. They will code using a trial and error approach and find solutions based purely on perceived behaviour of the software. I believe it because I've seen it. Of course LLMs will speed up this process. But some of us actually think about what we're writing, just like we don't just randomly string together words in a restaurant and then just keep trying until we get the dish we want.
by yawpitch | 2025-07-31 06:51:48+00:00
Always remember that I’ve lost more than 30lbs in a month, more than 150lbs in a year, and well over 1000lbs in a lifetime, never used an app or a service of any sort and without resort to Twinkies. I’m probably in better shape than you, taking age into account… losing weight isn’t hard, at all, all it takes is an eating disorder and a maniacal capacity for self-abuse. The same is true for athletic performance, which is really just as stupid a metric as body mass. Managing a consistently healthy human body over a lifetime of injury and experience, that’s hard, and made harder with idiotic quantitative measures like calories or BMI.