MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by metalman | 2025-08-15 07:28:50+00:00
made me laugh out loud I live off grid, and as a result have become somewhat familiar with all the aspects of maintaing a power generation and storage system and so follow technology and news about anything power related. What China has done is to persue both the highest level of technological implimentation in there grid and simultainiously the lowest, but with a clear and functioning plan to install clumsy cheap coal(and worse) plants where power is needed NOW, and rip it out as soon as there vast mega grid reaches the underserved areas........they are doing similar things with, road, rail, and marine infrastructure.....not just for themselves, but in Africa, South America, and well, anywhere people want to do better

not to suggest that China does not have some very serious flaws in there general world view and ideology, they do, but yelling at there engineering achivements is then unfortunately a distraction from there, and our, other problems
by VivaTechnics | 2025-08-15 07:29:08+00:00
- Maybe, design your language first, then name it.

- Single-letter names are mostly taken (e.g., B: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(programming_language)

- Focus on one key feature your language does better than others. Low-level languages are trending; high-level application languages are crowded. For example, if you could make assembly-style code user-friendly, that could be a strong niche.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-15 07:29:10+00:00
That's just regular keyboard for CJK languages. "today" -> "2025/08/15 Fri", "cry" -> ":crying_face:", etc. It's just small extension to regular "keycodes to full UTF-8 gibberish" process that input method editors handle.

There's nothing wrong if someone make ones for en, fr, de, in my opinion. Correction-plus-conversations like "hors douvray" to "hors-d'œuvre" in one key is going go be useful.
by wonnage | 2025-08-15 07:29:30+00:00
My impression of LLM “reasoning” is that works more like guardrails. Perhaps the space of possible responses to the initial prompt is huge and doesn’t exactly match any learned information. All the text generated during reasoning is high strength. So placing it in the context should hopefully guide answer generation towards something reasonable.

It’s the same idea as manually listing a bunch of possibly-useful facts in the prompt, but the LLM is able to generate plausible sounding text itself.

I feel like this relates to why LLM answers tend to be verbose too, it needs to put the words out there in order to stay coherent.
by ruslan_sure | 2025-08-15 07:29:42+00:00
Understanding the business problem or goal is actually the context for correctly writing code. Without it, you start acting like an LLM that didn't receive all the necessary code to solve a task.

When a non-developer writes code with an LLM, their ability to write good code decreases. But at the same time, it goes up thanks to more "business context."

In a year or two, I imagine that a non-developer with a proper LLM may surpass a vanilla developer.
by convo-lang | 2025-08-15 07:30:26+00:00
Hi everybody, I'm Scott, the creator of Convo-Lang. I created Convo-Lang to solve a lot of my personal needs while building AI applications.

Convo-Lang originally started off as a prompt templating and conversation state management system. It gave me a way to load a prompt template into a chat interface and reuse the same code to handle sending messages between the user and an LLM. This was in the early days of OpenAI when DaVinci was the top model.

As Convo-Lang grow in complexity I created a VSCode extension for syntax highlighting to make templates easier to read and write. And as new patterns like RAG, JSON Mode and tool calling hit the scene I added support for them. Before long I had a pretty decent framework that was easy to integrate into TypeScript applications and solved most of my AI needs.

As I built more applications that used tool calling I realized that I was writing less TypeScript, and a good amount of the TypeScript I as writing was basic callback functions called by tools the LLM decided to invoke. At that point I realized if I created a simple scripting language that could do basic things like make an HTTP requests I could build the majority of my agents purely in Convo-Lang and encapsulate all of its logic a single file.

I found the idea of single file that encapsulated an agent in a simple text file very appealing, and then I did as I do. I ignore all of my other responsibilities as a developer for the next few days and built a thing \(ᵔᵕᵔ)/

After those few sleepless nights I had a full fledge programming language and a runtime and CLI that could execute it. It's been about a year and a half since then and I've continued to improve and refine the language.

Links:

Convo-Lang Docs - https://learn.convo-lang.ai/

GitHub - https://github.com/convo-lang/convo-lang

Core NPM package - https://www.npmjs.com/package/@convo-lang/convo-lang

All NPM package - https://www.npmjs.com/~convo-lang

VSCode extension - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=iyio.con...

r/ConvoLang sub Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/ConvoLang/

Any stars on GitHub would be much appreciated, thank you.
by AnonymousPlanet | 2025-08-15 07:31:05+00:00
> Everything's always been unstable, people sometimes just take a slightly rose-tinted view of the past.

No. For the most of history people could look decades into the past and be quite confident that things would be the same decades in the future. The only aspects that mostly changed were local leaders and maybe some fashions. A farmer was a farmer and a carpenter was a carpenter and their sons and grandsons likely too.

Ever changing times with regards to technology and professions is a rather modern thing.
by ChocolateGod | 2025-08-15 07:31:30+00:00
I too believe in universal healthcare and welfare social nets to catch people who fall, but think we've focussed too much on "feelings" over facts or people wanting to score "social justice" points that don't do anything to fix the ills of society.

Here's another example of political correctness going too far, this time related to tech.

https://www.aswf.io/inclusive-language-guide/

Apparently "native support" is offensive.
by imp0cat | 2025-08-15 07:34:17+00:00
It does not work that way. The model does not "know". Here is a very nice explanation of what you are actually dealing with (hint: it's not a toddler-level intelligence): https://www.experimental-history.com/p/bag-of-words-have-mer...

instead of seeing AI as a sort of silicon homunculus, we should see it as a bag of words.
by tobr | 2025-08-15 07:34:38+00:00
I’m not an expert on this, so I’m not familiar with what RDF graphs are, but I feel like everything you’re describing happens textually, and used as context? That is, it’s not at all ”learning” the way it’s learning during training, but by writing things down to refer to them later? As you say - ”ask it to summarize the insights for later use” - this is fundamentally different from the types of ”insights” it can have during training. So, it can take notes about your code and refer back to them, but it only has meaningful ”knowledge” about code it came across in training.

To me as a layman, this feels like a clear explanation of how these tools break down, why they start going in circles when you reach a certain complexity, why they make a mess of unusual requirements, and why they have such an incredible nuanced grasp of complex ideas that are widely publicized, while being unable to draw basic conclusions about specific constraints in your project.
by lucumo | 2025-08-15 07:34:54+00:00
> Even today, you often see a "copy to clipboard" or something on a web page, and it never works on Linux. Not as I've got it configured, in any case.

That's weird. It's a pretty widely available Javascript API for years already. Nothing OS specific on the website's side. Are you running an ancient/fringe browser?

https://caniuse.com/mdn-api_clipboard_writetext
by niezna_m | 2025-08-15 07:35:31+00:00
As I taking a break from working after a burnout last year I started to experiment with AI tooling and discovered how amazing and painful it can be at the same time. We all see how fast is vibe coding growing and every day brings new stories of guy how vibe coded entire app without any coding knowledge and now does not know how to fix new problems and is burning aimlessly through tokens. When playing with it sometimes I faced similar problems myself and only more experienced friends could help with that.

At the same time the market for software developer jobs is getting worse with AI trying to take over each part of this space. Vibe coding is here to stay, but there is a way to help both groups by making a place where they can connect. App owners can solve problems they have and developers get a chance to earn some money. With this idea in mind I decided to build job board dedicated for such cases. It consists of two sides: - regular job board with offers from people who need their ai generated apps fixed; - people who want to post their profiles as professionals/talents who can fix those problems;

Both would be paid at some point, but having an account as somewhat wants to find a job and applying for offers will be free.

Although the scope of what I wanted to prepare is almost done, I am looking for a feedback on the idea as I want to make sure that both groups of users will find this helpful, and maybe I will help people land some contracts in this economy
by AndyKelley | 2025-08-15 07:37:14+00:00
That's precisely the point! It would be really nice for applications to be able to operate agnostic from the DE's decisions about UX and design. Applications want something much more high level: button here, scroll bar there, text input here. It's the DE's job to make such things accessible and look pretty. If you think about it, that's precisely why the web is a popular user interface target: the application has a much higher level interface, and all those concerns are, correctly, handled at a different abstraction layer.
by spauldo | 2025-08-15 07:37:15+00:00
X has had two clipboards for longer than I've been using it, which is nearly three decades.

If your mental model of clipboard interaction only involves a single clipboard, and you use X, your mental model is simply wrong.

Sure, you could change X to match your mental model, but now you've broken the mental models of everyone who actually learned to use the software. And one more useful feature that makes X nice to use gets sacrificed to please the people who came from Windows but desperately want everything to work like Windows.
by TrackerFF | 2025-08-15 07:37:23+00:00
LLMs are as good as the inputs a person gives them.

Right now the scene is very polarized. You have the "AI is a failure, you can build anything serious, this bubble is going to pop any day now" camp, and the "AI has revolutionized my workflow, I am now 10x more productive" camp.

I mean these types of posts blow up here every. single. day.
by thyristan | 2025-08-15 07:38:33+00:00
It doesn't matter if it is exact or not. It is a problem that people may think it looks line a swastika.

Certain places in Europe, for example Austria and Germany, are far more sensitive in those regards, for obvious historical reasons. You really don't want to be associated even remotely with those kinds of things. Even if the similarity isn't sufficient to land you in jail, it will lead to weird looks, social ostracism, loss of business and jobs, hostile behaviour, and increased attention by the authorities.

If you never want to do business or live in central Europe, fine, ignore all that. I know that the rest of the world is more relaxed. But just as USian sensitivities sometimes induce a heated discussion about why a visible nipple isn't actually harmful, this is one of those topics from the European perspective.
by ruslan_sure | 2025-08-15 07:38:36+00:00
What if LLMs get 'a mental model of requirements/code behavior'? LLMs may have experts in it, each with its own specialty. You can even combine several LLMs, each doing its own thing: one creates architecture, another writes documentation, a third critiques, a fourth writes code, a fifth creates and updates the "mental model," etc.

I agree with the PM role, but with such low requirements that anyone can do it.
by phatskat | 2025-08-15 07:40:54+00:00
> Can you imagine a human taking ivermectin or ketamine?!?

While I can only believe the ivermectin stuff because it happened (and the crossover of people who took it is pretty strong with people likely to think drinking bleach cures autism…), I 100% can believe people take ketamine because I have, and I will again - it’s fun!

Note to the curious: always do your homework. Start at Erowid and learn about any new drug, be sure to get reliably safe drugs, and the golden rule (via Rick and Morty during a Deadmau5 NYE of all places): you can always take more drugs, but you can never take less.
by Onewildgamer | 2025-08-15 07:42:13+00:00
Okay I see now. I'm just shooting in the dark here, if there's an ability to generate the next best token based on the trained set of words. Can it be taken a level up, in a meta level to generate a generation? like genetic programming does. Or is that what the chain of thought reasoning models do?

Maybe I need to do more homework on LLMs in general.
by yorwba | 2025-08-15 07:42:19+00:00
Consider a single-neuron model that just pools all pixels in an image together. It's possible for the average activation of this neuron to be exactly the same on faces and non-faces, but extremely unlikely given the large range of possibilities. So in aggregate, this neuron can distinguish faces from non-faces, even though, when you apply it to classifying a particular image, it'll be better than random only by an extremely tiny amount.

As the number of neurons increases, the best face/non-face distinguisher neuron gets better and better, but there's never a size where the model cannot recognize faces at all and then you add just a single neuron that recognizes them perfectly.
by hannasm | 2025-08-15 07:42:23+00:00
> these papers keep stapling on broad philosophical claims about whether models can “really reason” that are just completely unsupported by the content of the research.

From the scientific papers I've read almost every single research paper does this. What's the point of publishing a paper if it doesn't at least try to convince the readers that something award worthy has been learned?

Usually there may be some interesting ideas hidden in the data but the paper's methods and scope weren't even worthy of a conclusion to begin with. It's just one data point in the vast sea of scientific experimentation.

The conclusion feels to me like a cultural phenomenon and it's just a matter of survival for most authors. I have to imagine it was easier in the past.

"Does the flame burn green? Why yes it does..."

These days it's more like

"With my two hours of compute on the million dollar mainframe, my toy llm didn't seem to get there, YMMV"
by kulahan | 2025-08-15 07:42:56+00:00
Nothing I’m saying implies I don’t think they’re speaking how they truly feel. I absolutely believe they genuinely believe them when they say he’s some kind of monster because he didn’t get chemo (???) and was rude to people and took up handicapped parking spaces.

I’m saying it’s unrealistic to target him specifically for being a dick when something like 50% of CEOs already show psychopathic traits.
by aragilar | 2025-08-15 07:43:43+00:00
Sorry, the quotes around safe were supposed to imply GitHub is not that safe in my opinion, but it's possibly why other people aren't concerned about NPM (also, being for a different programming language and community may help).

Anaconda/ContinuumIO (the company) was absolutely treated with suspicion, see e.g. https://www.mail-archive.com/numpy-discussion%40scipy.org/ms... (and you'll find many such threads around that time on mailing lists/forums that were where the scientific python community was), and while the sky didn't fall in, their history hasn't been spotless. In many ways Astral is the more "webby" version of Anaconda/ContinuumIO, and so assuming Astral will behave (and evolve) in a similar way to Anaconda/ContinuumIO seems to me at least to be a rational thing to do?
by littlestymaar | 2025-08-15 07:44:22+00:00
> asking it for various numbers of “tallest mountains” and each time it complied

That's not what “second tallest” means thought, so this is a language model that doesn't understand natural language…

> You kept asking

Gemma 270m isn't the only one to have reading issues, as I'm not the person who conducted this experiment…

> You asked it to enumerate several mountains by height, and it also complied.

It didn't, it hallucinated a list of mountains (this isn't surprising though, as this is the kind of encyclopedic knowledge such a small model isn't supposed to be good at).
by eleveriven | 2025-08-15 07:44:36+00:00
Honestly, this feels like déjà vu. We went from Napster to Spotify, from torrents to Netflix, and now the cycle is reversing. Gabe Newell was right back in 2011: it's always been a service problem, not a pricing one. Weird how the tech just keeps getting better, but the experience keeps getting worse.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-08-15 07:44:47+00:00
> The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.

Israel is getting sucked into their own quagmire right now as we speak and is taking on an expensive ground invasion and occupation of a territory they don't want to be in (like we did) for an unforeseeable amount of time, over a hostile population, against the advice of their own military leaders. They are also actively starving civilians, who are at this very moment dying of malnutrition in scores every week.

It's easy to win the brute force battle with money in the modern world. But wars aren't about destroying things and people with brute force. They are about achieving political objectives. That's what we failed to understand in Afghanistan and Iraq and what Israel failed to learn from our failures in those regions
by timsh | 2025-08-15 07:45:16+00:00
hey, maybe you’d never heard of https://ororo[.]tv this is exactly what you describe, at lease for movies + shows…

just in case - not an ad, not affiliated with them anyhow, just use it for years with all my friends and family.

there are subtitles is 20+ languages, direct download links, no ads, and new episodes come out pretty fast (usually <24 hours from official release).
by ivan_gammel | 2025-08-15 07:46:14+00:00
>But even then, I can volunteer my ID, keep it permanently attached to a computer running a server that allows certain requests (like the boolean age check), and then provide an API / client that allows anyone anywhere to use it to pass.

That’s not technical problem and it doesn’t have to be a technical solution to it. You will be committing fraud and maybe a few other crimes if underage users are involved. As soon as you will start advertising the service, you will be on law enforcement radar. Or maybe you don’t advertise it, but one of the boys using it will brag at school and get someone’s attention…
by klabb3 | 2025-08-15 07:47:14+00:00
It’s the style. Responses are always eloquent and well structured. When you look at output for a domain you don’t know well, you give it benefit of the doubt because it sounds like a highly competent human, so you react similarly. When you use it with something you know very deeply, you naturally look more for substance rather than form, and thus spot the mistakes much easier. This breaks most illusions of amazing reasoning abilities etc.

My ChatGPT is amazingly competent at gardening! Well, that’s how it feels anyway. Is it correct? I have no idea. It sounds right. Fortunately, it’s just a new hobby for me and the stakes are low. But generally I think it’s much better to be paranoid than gullible when it comes to confident sounding ramblings, whether it’s from an LLM or a marketing guru.
by pilif | 2025-08-15 07:49:01+00:00
Reading the report you reference and other issues linked there, I would say that multiple attempts were made to fix it, all of which unfortunately required some heuristics and all of which have broken something else that was deemed worse.

It seems to boil down to an issue in the underlying X11 machinery and it would need to be fixed there first to build a basis on which proper fixes can be implemented.

Given that X11 is in maintenance mode (and as its fans keep saying: It works perfectly fine and doesn't need any more work done on it), it's not likely that's happening.

So, yes, given that information (and I just arrived at that bug report through your post), I would indeed say that waiting for Wayland is the only option they have. All other attempts ended up causing worse issues.
by komali2 | 2025-08-15 07:49:16+00:00
Sure I'm happy to debate aspects of anarchic philosophy itself, but the fact of the matter is that essentially all anarchist philosophy has moved in a collectivist (now communist) direction and any remaining "individualist anarchist" strains are no longer considered anarchist (such as "anarcho capitalism"), since one of the few things anarchists seem to agree upon is the critical importance of mutual aid. You're absolutely right to question authority as it surrounds mutualism - that's what anarchists do all the time!

> You can't have collectivism without this. Any collectivist system (which is all human societies to differing degrees) faces two fundamental problems of self interest. The free-rider problem and the problem of people who put in more than they get out leaving the collective. This requires coercion.

I disagree, and so do many writers, and so does history.

First off, the "free rider" problem is a problem under capitalism, not anarchism. We have ample evidence of "free riders" being supported even in ancient societies with high scarcity, such as highly genetically deformed people who lived to a remarkably old age, which means despite their inability to labor, someone was feeding them. Same for people who had traumatic injuries. The idea of a "free rider" is only a problem in a society that believes everyone needs to justify their existence through labor, such as capitalism. Mutualist anarchist societies don't have this problem. Especially a modern day one, now that we've achieved post-scarcity (all scarcity today is artificially enforced).

Second, no human coercion is necessary to ensure collective bounty. Humans are intrinsically motivated to create bounty, if nothing else by hunger. And, being social creatures, we are also intrinsically motivated towards collectivism - ample anthropological evidence for this throughout every continent humans have lived on.

My proposition to you is that capitalist society is motivated by self-preservation to convince you that what I'm telling you is silly and impossible. The system has glaring faults that we all feel, so it can only continue if it can convince everyone that it's The Only Way.

A great resource that covers these historical facts in detail is Graeber's "The Dawn of Everything." If that's too lengthy, the founder of Food Not Bombs wrote a new version of The Anarchist Cookbook that's available as a free PDF https://www.foodnotbombs.net/anarchist_cookbook.html . Ignore the recipes, they're genuinely terrible. The first couple chapters are a good short introduction to the history of anarchy, and as I recall include ancient examples.
by alena_14 | 2025-08-15 07:49:16+00:00
I'm not a developer and have zero AI-building experience, but I've tried Joinable's RAG in a Box recently and it makes sense to me. It handles complex files (PDFs, Excels, etc) without me having to clean the data first, I didn't need to know anything about coding to use it, and it felt private and secure!