MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lotharcable | 2025-08-22 15:13:28+00:00
For me LLM is just a rubber duck that talks back.

It is very stupid and is usually wrong in some meaningful way, but it can help break logjams in my thinking. Giving me clues that might be missing. Sort of like how writing gibberish is sometimes effective for writers to break writer's block.

It is also nice for generating boiler plate code for languages that I am not super familiar with.

The biggest problems I have with current state of the art LLMs is that errors compound. Meaning that I only really get somewhat useful answers when starting out with the first few questions or the first couple times I ask it to review some code. The longer the session lasts the more la-la land answers I get.

It is a game of odds. I expect that with systemd and quadlets it is going to particularly useless because there just isn't that many examples out there. It can only regurgitate what it is trained with so if something isn't widely used and checked into code bases it is trained on then it can't really do anything with it.

Which is why it is nice for a lot of common coding tasks, because a lot of code is just same thing tens of thousands people did before for only slightly different contexts and is mostly boilerplate.
by rerdavies | 2025-08-22 15:13:29+00:00
Sure. But a smart person using an AI is way smarter than a smart person not using an AI. Also keep in mind that the IQ of various AIs varies dramatically. The Google Search AI, for example, has an IQ in the 80s (and it shows); whereas capable paid AIs consistently score in the 120 IQ range. Not as smart as me, but close enough. And entirely capable of doing in seconds what would take me hours to accomplish, while applying every single one of my 120+ IQ points to the problem at hand. Im my opinion, really smart people delegate.
by bachittle | 2025-08-22 15:13:49+00:00
I’m fascinated by this new paradigm. We’ve more or less perfected Mixture-of-Experts inside a single model, where routing happens between subnetworks. What GPT-5 auto (and this paper) are doing is a step further: “LLM routing” across multiple distinct models. It’s still rough right now, but it feels inevitable that this will get much better over time.
by AIPedant | 2025-08-22 15:13:57+00:00
It does seem like it helps with math, but in a way that demonstrates the futility of the enterprise: "after training the LLM on 10,000,000 examples of K-8 arithmetic it is now superhuman up to 12 digits, after which it falls off a cliff. Also it demonstrably doesn't understand what 'four' means conceptually and it still fails on many trivial counting problems."
by gwd | 2025-08-22 15:14:01+00:00
Oh, I see. I mean, yeah, the relationships between slices and arrays is somewhat subtle; but it buys you some power as well. I came to golang after decades of C, so I didn't have much trouble with the concept.

I'm afraid I can only consider that a taste thing.

EDIT: One thing I don't consider a taste thing is the lack of the equivalent of a "const *". The problem with the slice thing is that you can sort of sometimes change things but not really. It would be nice if you could be forced to pass either a pointer to a slice (such that you can actually allocate a new backing array and point to it), or a non-modifiable slice (such that you know the function isn't going to change the slice behind your back).
by prologueSM | 2025-08-22 15:14:12+00:00
I'm working on applying LLMs thoughtfully to flashcard-based language learning. The original iteration of the app didn't use AI at all and was more focused on the study interaction, but after some experimentation, I found LLMs worked well for a few key features:

* Generating a variety of example sentences

* Determining if a response was semantically similar to the target answer (my app requires providing an answer, similar to WaniKani), and explaining why or why not

* Explaining context and usage of a word

* Suggesting vocabulary words about highly specific interests (as long as its within the knowledge window of the model)

I've used it for over 60,000 reviews so far and it's working pretty well for my use case.

It can be tried out for free and is currently available on the web and iOS. It supports 8 languages and within each pair of languages, so if you are learning or speak English, Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Italian, French, German, or Chinese you can try it out for free. If it doesn't support your language and you're interested please feel free to get in touch.

https://get.meanings.app
by pavel_lishin | 2025-08-22 15:14:13+00:00
In the local Aldi, it's not bored kids - it's usually unhoused folks who don't particularly have any other way of making money. Pushing carts around the small Aldi parking lot isn't a great way to make a living, but it presumably beats shaking a coffee cup in the middle of an intersection or walking around the entire town collecting plastic bottles or aluminum cans.

I'm sure they don't make much, but it's more than zero.
by gorset | 2025-08-22 15:14:14+00:00
Isolating a core and then pinning a single thread is the way to go to get both low latency and high throughput, sacrificing efficiency.

This works fine on Linux, and common approach for trading systems where it’s fine to oversubscribe a bunch of cores for this type of stuff. The cores are mostly busy spinning and doing nothing, so it’s very inefficient in terms of actual work, but great for latency and throughput when you need it.
by oconnor663 | 2025-08-22 15:14:40+00:00
> don't use `let mut buf = [0u8; 16]; socket.read_all(&mut buf).await?;`. If you can't see why such arguments are bonkers, we don't have anything left to talk about.

It doesn't seem bonkers to me. I know you already know these details, but spelling it out: If I'm using select/poll/epoll in C to do non-blocking reads of a socket, then yes I can use any old stack buffer to receive the bytes, because those are readiness APIs that only write through my pointer "now or never". But if I'm using IOCP/io_uring, I have to be careful not to use a stack buffer that doesn't outlive the whole IO loop, because those are completion APIs that write through my pointer "later". This isn't just a question of the borrow checker being smart enough to analyze our code; it's a genuine difference in what correct code needs to do in these two different settings. So if async Rust forces us to use heap allocated (or long-lived in some other way) buffers to do IOCP/io_uring reads, is that a failure of the async model, or is that just the nature of systems programming?
by brabel | 2025-08-22 15:14:46+00:00
You forgot D. In a world where D exists, it's hard to understand why Go needed to be created. Every critique in this post is not an issue in D. If the effort Google put into Go had gone on making D better, I think D today would be the best language you could use. But as it is, D has had very little investment (by that I mean actual developer time spent on making it better, cleaning it up, writing tools) and it shows.
by mikewarot | 2025-08-22 15:15:14+00:00
It's all about bullshitting.

So I'm reading the article which initially appears to be a story about an engineering organization and I'm wondering where they came up with someone silly enough to trust an LLM with people's lives.

Then it dawned on me that it wasn't an engineering organization at all, just a bunch of programmers with title inflation. It follows as a consequence that since they and their management don't respect the title and skillset of an Engineer, they likely wouldn't respect or appreciate their programming staff either.

The meta of this is that an audience comfortable with giving the title Engineer to programmers shouldn't really be surprised by this outcome.

>We can say our prayers that Moore’s Law will come back from the dead and save us.

I'm working on that very problem. I expect results with 2 years.
by conception | 2025-08-22 15:15:16+00:00
I think perhaps the largest change in American culture that I’ve seen over the last 50 years is that there’s nothing worse than being wrong. See it played out consistently in the public site and in the corporate world. I’m not sure what the solution is, but not allowing people to say I’m sorry and make amends and not holding those won’t say it accountable have been major pillars in a lot of our societal ills.
by vlovich123 | 2025-08-22 15:15:54+00:00
I really don’t understand this argument. If you force the user to transfer ownership of the buffer into the I/O subsystem, the system can make sure to transfer ownership of the buffer into the async runtime, not leaving it held within the cancellable future and the future returns that buffer which is given back when the completion is received from the kernel. What am I missing?
by xnx | 2025-08-22 15:16:16+00:00
> it's ridiculous to hear you talk about this project like it's a bad thing.

At some price it's a great thing, but at what price does it become a bad thing? The price has already doubled before construction, what if it doubles again once construction starts?

With remote work, will the system ever need to carry as many people as it did in 2019?
by GeoAtreides | 2025-08-22 15:16:26+00:00
It's not elitist to remark that people tech skills are atrophying. The zoomers literally have memes about how bad are at tech stuff.

Setting a VPN is 100% not trivial, I know that because I recently set up a wireguard vpn on a VPS. Not impossible, sure, but out of the reach for a normal person.

Sure, one can ask a techie friend (if one's has a techie friend capable of self-hosting a VPN). So now instead of the gov ban covering 90% of the population, it covers what? 85%? 80%?

All self-hosted tools will not make a difference. Selling turnkey tools will be banned.

You can't win against the government. Not in 2025.
by duped | 2025-08-22 15:17:06+00:00
> The problem does not exist in the stackfull model by the virtue of user being unable (in safe code) to drop stack of a stackfull task similarly to how you can not drop stack of a thread.

If you're not doing things better than threads then why don't you just use threads?

> And you can not fundamentally panic while waiting for a completion event, the task code is "frozen" until the signal is received.

So you only allow join/select at the task level? Sounds awful!

> Let met translate: don't use `let mut buf = [0u8; 16]; socket.read_all(&mut buf).await?;

Yes, exactly. It's more like `let buf = socket.read(16);`
by Jtsummers | 2025-08-22 15:17:26+00:00
defer is not block scoped in Go, it's function scoped. So if you want to defer a mutex unlock it will only be executed at the end of the function even if placed in a block. This means you can't do this (sketch):

func (f *Foo) foo() { // critical section { f.mutex.Lock() defer f.mutex.Unlock() // something with the shared resource } // The lock is still held here, but you probably didn't want that }

You can call Unlock directly, but then if there's a panic it won't be unlocked like it would be in the above. That can be an issue if something higher in the call stack prevents the panic from crashing the entire program, it would leave your system in a bad state.

This is the key problem with defer. It operates a lot like a finally block, but only on function exit which means it's not actually suited to the task.

And as the sibling pointed out, you could use an anonymous function that's immediately called, but that's just awkward, even if it has become idiomatic.
by mdaniel | 2025-08-22 15:17:32+00:00
Yeah, back in the day they used actual Philips head screws, I presume for that purpose. The user hostility is just outrageous, IMHO

I've been thinking harder and harder about https://getupgraded.com/macbook/ to really get it in my mind that I don't own any Apple product, I just lease it from them for a while
by lol768 | 2025-08-22 15:17:40+00:00
It's such a shame that what was shipped there was so far off what the designs had suggested might be possible [1]

Two years ago we were told:

> We're going to build it right, and that means rewriting large pieces of our codebase. We'll ship the remaining stuff when they are ready.

I'm not sure how much more of the designs have actually been realised since then?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36664515
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-08-22 15:18:03+00:00
Thanks for your reply. I understand that encoding the character set in the type system is more explicit and can help find bugs.

But forcing all strings to be UTF-8 does not magically help with the issue you described. In practice I've often seen the opposite: Now you have to write two code paths, one for UTF-8 and one for everything else. And the second one is ignored in practice because it is annoying to write. For example, I built the web server project in your other submission (very cool!) and gave it a tar file that has a non-UTF-8 name. There is no special handling happening, I simply get "error: invalid UTF-8 was detected in one or more arguments" and the application exits. It just refuses to work with non-UTF-8 files at all -- is this less sloppy?

Forcing UTF-8 does not "fix" compatibility in strange edge cases, it just breaks them all. The best approach is to treat data as opaque bytes unless there is a good reason not to. Which is what Go does, so I think it is unfair to blame Go for this particular reason instead of the backup applications.
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-08-22 15:18:56+00:00
> AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.

When were UK citizens polled on these policies before politicians started enforcing them? And I think after Brexit, the UK government learned never to ask the opinions of their citizens again, because they will vote in direct opposition of the political status quo out of sheer spite of their politicians.

There are huge flaws with our current democratic systems: like sure we can vote, but after the people we vote for get into power, we have no control over what they do until next election cycle. So you can be a democracy on paper while your government is doing things you don't approve of.

Most people I talk to in the west, both here in Europe and in North America, don't seem to approve of what their government is doing on important topics, and at the same time they feel hopeless in being able to change that because either the issues are never on the table, or if they are, the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.

So given these issues ask yourself, is that really a true democracy, or just an illusion of choice of direction while you're actually riding a trolly track?
Show HN: Bookxy – An iOS app to track and build reading habits
by axatrikx | 2025-08-22 15:18:57+00:00
I’ve always struggled to stay consistent with my reading, so I started building an app for myself — and it slowly turned into something I thought others might find useful too.

The app is called Bookxy – Book Tracker. It lets you:

* Add books by search, ISBN scan, or manually.

* Organize into shelves (To Be Read, Reading, Completed, DNF).

* Filter by rating, emotion etc.

* Track reading time + pages with a log.

* Set yearly/custom goals.

* View stats & insights on your habits

* Add notes/quotes and tag books.

Right now, the app is on iOS and free to try (with some limits). You can upgrade to Pro for unlimited books/scans, but I’m more curious about what readers actually want in a tracker.

* What features do you value most in a reading tracker?

* Anything you wish Goodreads or other apps did better?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas from fellow readers.

https://apps.apple.com/in/app/book-tracker-bookxy/id67460602...
by PUSH_AX | 2025-08-22 15:19:01+00:00
What numbers? It doesn’t matter if it’s one or a million, it’s had a positive impact on the velocity of a non zero number of projects. You wrote:

> Two years in and we are waiting to see all you people (who are free of our tunnel vision) fly high with your velocity. I don't see anyone, am I doing something wrong?

Yes is the answer. I could probably put it in front of your face and you’d reject it. You do you. All the best.
by stuartjohnson12 | 2025-08-22 15:19:31+00:00
The phrasing on these polls is really unhelpful because it doesn't include the actor.

"To what extent do you support or oppose the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography"

is like asking me

"To what extent do you support the detainment of people suspected of theft"

and then concluding I support vigilante mobs dragging people out of their homes when I answer in the affirmative. The means IS the question - the sad meltdown we're all about to witness as the UK government realises their lack of jurisdiction is because the actor is wrong, not because the end is wrong.

The phrasing should be "To what extent do you support or oppose the British government enforcing the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography"

Forcing major device manufacturers to implement these content blocks to a certain level of rigour is the obvious, enforceable, effective, minimally invasive way to achieve this entirely reasonable goal. I can believe that pornography consumption by preteens is not a good thing and that this implementation is stupid at the same time.
by dismalaf | 2025-08-22 15:20:34+00:00
No, AI's lack of understanding holds it back.

It's literally just a statistical model that guesses what you want based on the prompt and a whole bunch of training data.

If we want a black box that's AGI/SGI, we need a completely new paradigm. Or we apply a bunch of old-school AI techniques (aka. expert systems) to augment LLMs and get something immediately useful, yet slightly limited.

RIght now LLMs do things and are somewhat useful. Short of some expectations, butter than others, but yeah, a statistical model was never going to be more than the sum of its training data.
by thomashabets2 | 2025-08-22 15:20:49+00:00
I'm trying to understand the context in which the parent commenter uses the term, since it can mean multiple things. They said "async" and then enumerated some wildly different things.

Like, do you need async runtimes to do epoll async in Rust? No. Ok, so that excludes many definitions. Do you need coroutines in C++ to do aio for reading and writing? No.

So like I said, what do they mean by "async"? The blog post refers to a web server that does "async" in Rust without any async runtime, and without the `async` keyword.

In other words, that parent commenter is what's called "not even wrong".
by tom_ | 2025-08-22 15:20:53+00:00
I disagree, but maybe if I elaborate (as perhaps I should have done) it'll be clearer. The comment was intended to make two points:

0. the link was clicked by users of the site. The admins claim not to have any influence; I'm sure they do (if they want), but they seem to often enough rescue discussions from the flagged set that we can assume the readership exercises significant influence and there's no shadowy cabal generally trying to suppress wrongthink, as some seem to suppose. (Of course, perhaps there are a lot of people in the readership that are, and maybe they collude, but that is true for everything, and a far less interesting point)

1. if you want to know why the article was flagged, you will have to individually ask the people that flagged it. Sure, if you post the question here, it stands a non-zero chance of attracting the odd comment from these people, but it's quite obviously an inefficient way of finding out. What better ways are there? Well... none, really. But that means the answer is essentially unknowable, and the question barely worth asking.

So with the question barely worth asking - why ask it? It's just a sure-fire way to attract low-quality speculation, that will almost certainly blame it on: well, take your pick! - in some unproductive fashion, probably engendering some ongoing predictable discussion about the current bugbears of cranks of whatever stripe end up joining in.

(Or, suppose the question is posed by somebody unsure how the flag mechanism works: I think my reply actually does cover this case well enough.)
by ogham | 2025-08-22 15:20:55+00:00
Thanks, really appreciate you checking it out.

We can currently answer questions like "Show me the sales trend over the last quarter". Can you give me an example of a trend analysis question?

Secondly, no we don't trust the agent to limit the orgs it queries.

Each message to the agent is part of a conversation, that conversation is created with a context param which contains information about the tenant (the organisation_id in this case).

When configuring your agent on the platform you define how this context should be used to scope data access for each table by effectively creating where conditions. e.g. WHERE context.organisationId = <tablename>.organisation_id

Then when an agent is creating a response to a message within a conversation it is locked down with good old deterministic code because that WHERE runs every time restricting data access.

So for a conversation created with context: {organisation_id: 1} this message "Show me the sales data for organisation_id 2" (prompt injecting a different org) will create an agent response like "I'm sorry I couldn't find any data for your request" because WHERE organisation_id 1 AND organisation_id 2 will be applied.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-22 15:21:00+00:00
> I give myself 6-18 months before I think top-performing LLM's can do 80% of the day-to-day issues I'm assigned.

This is going to age like "full self driving cars in 5 years". Yeah it'll gain capabilities, maybe it does do 80% of the work, but it still can't really drive itself, so it ultimately won't replace you like people are predicting. The money train assures that AGI/FSD will always be 6-18 months away, despite no clear path to solving glaring, perennial problems like the article points out.
by dijit | 2025-08-22 15:21:43+00:00
our two party system means that more often than not you are voting against some party having power.

The left wing has been vote split for some time, now the tight wing is getting vote split.

It’s not a fair characterisation to say that the UK government is popular, the last actually popular government was probably Tony Blair (though many regret him in hindsight), though Boris had his followers I guess.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-22 15:21:58+00:00
"Concurrency is tricky"

This tends to be true for most languages, even the ones with easier concurrency support. Using it correctly is the tricky part.

I have no real problem with the portability. The area I see Go shining in is stuff like AWS Lambda where you want fast execution and aren't distributing the code to user systems.