MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rob74 | 2025-09-30 13:41:58+00:00
How has mathematics gotten so abstract? My understanding was that mathematics was abstract from the very beginning. Sure, you can say that two cows plus two more cows makes four cows, but that already is an abstraction - someone who has no knowledge of math might object that one cow is rarely exactly the same as another cow, so just assigning the value "1" to any cow you see is an oversimplification. Of course, simple examples such as this can be translated into intuitive concepts more easily, but they are still abstract.
by simonw | 2025-09-30 13:42:05+00:00
I learned that lesson from GPT-5, where the preview was weeks long and the models kept changing during that period.

This Claude preview lasted from Friday to Monday so I was less worried about major model changes. I made sure to run the pelican benchmark against the model after 10am on Monday (the official release date) just to be safe.

The only thing I published that I ran against the preview model was the Claude code interpreter example.

I continue not to worry about models having been trained to ace my pelican benchmark, because the models still suck at it. You really think Anthropic deliberately cheated on my benchmark and still only managed to produce this? https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2025/claude-sonnet-4...
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-09-30 13:42:17+00:00
> The LLM doesn't have that

The weights won't have that by default, true, that's not how they were built.

But if you're a developer and can program things, there is nothing stopping you from letting LLMs have access to those details, if you feel like that's missing.

I guess that's why they call LLMs "programmable weights", you can definitely add a bunch of context to the context so they can use it when needed.
by kianN | 2025-09-30 13:42:27+00:00
Hi all, author here. I originally was just planning to put together a few helper functions to support sparse arrays in DuckDB, but there ended up being a lot of interesting lessons in the process of benchmarking storage and optimizing queries.

For those not wanting to read the whole story, GitHub repo with basic benchmarks and utilities is here: https://github.com/Sturdy-Statistics/duckdb-sparse-array-lis...
by gwbas1c | 2025-09-30 13:42:32+00:00
> I think the overboiled pasta is informed by a fear of undercooked food

Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence.

"Mahkit Baskit" (as we say it) is a discount grocery store. Even though it's clean, there are often lots of mistakes that happen with low-wage, untrained labor. IE, one of the few times I went there, the bosc and d'anjou pears were all mixed together because they are green. (But they are obviously different in taste and shape if you are smarter than ChatGPT, and have stickers on them to make it obvious to whoever's stocking the shelfs.)

So it's no surprise the directions on pasta are wrong!
by darkwater | 2025-09-30 13:42:35+00:00
> you do not need the full volume of water the box says, but start your timer once the water has returned to a boil

I never do that, I start the timer as soon as I put the pasta in the water, and usually the cooking times on Italian brands are spot-on. If I have to finish the cooking in a pan (depending on the sauce) I take out 1m or 1m30s, and it's "al dente".
Show HN: Grug-brained Claude Code – AI assistant that hates complexity
by playfultones | 2025-09-30 13:43:36+00:00
I made Claude Code speak and think like the grug-brained developer (https://grugbrain.dev).

Instead of just following simplicity principles, it actively embodies them - warning about "complexity demons", refusing abstractions until the third time you need them, etc.

It's mostly for fun, but I would love to see what others get out of this.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-30 13:43:39+00:00
The way I read it, it was wrapping in feature and bug fix changes. "We found a critical bug here, to fix it instead of backporting a fix we want to pull in all the code which was built before the bug was discovered".

I can understand the motivation. It's a PITA to support an older version of code. But that's not how linux gets it's stability.
by lloeki | 2025-09-30 13:43:40+00:00
Until and unless you're on a system which doesn't or can't have nix (RAM size preventing evaluation, $job policy, ...)

I really appreciate and use nixpkgs+nix-darwin as well as NixOS and flakes and per-project nix-shell/nix develop through and through; even then, Home Manager is a bridge too far for me.

One of the features of my dotfiles setup is that it has zero dependencies (beyond a POSIX shell).
by raxxorraxor | 2025-09-30 13:43:49+00:00
It just wasn't a very wholesome crowd. I don't have to like everyone, but I expect everyone to not try to ban people just because they have the unfavorable opinion du jours. Maybe write that in a COC, but it should be a premise to begin with.

On a completely unrelated note, you very, very rarely find real fascists in open source software projects.

And for even less favorable characters it seemed that it was just powerplay by some actors that wouldn't convince their own mother that they are the most untoxic of them all.
by codyb | 2025-09-30 13:44:00+00:00
If you make pasta frequently, you can just reserve the pasta water on the stove and cook more pasta in it the next day. I usually just leave it out with a cover on, it's fine for a day, probably two.

For whole grain pastas I find this really helps get a more satisfying flavor and consistency.

Sometimes I'd put the whole pot in the fridge after it cooled to room temperature and it'd keep for a bit so I could use it for brown rice, or for more pasta later.

Finally, you can also use that water to water your plants because it has a ton of healthy nutrients in it, but you have to be really careful cause of the salt so I always water it down heavily and don't apply it as frequently as I have a pasta water that I'm going to drain.
by llimllib | 2025-09-30 13:44:07+00:00
That water's _starchier_ but it's not a myth. Here's Kenji on it: https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boi...

(I get what you're saying, spiritually, your pasta water from your giant pot of one box of pasta isn't gonna do much to thicken your sauce. But it's not a myth, just a matter of degree)
by wkirby | 2025-09-30 13:44:26+00:00
I see this as the next great wave of work for me and my team. We sustained our business for a good 5–8 years on rescuing legacy code from offshore teams as small-to-medium sized companies re-shored their contract devs. We're currently in a demand lull as these same companies have started relying heavily on LLMs to "write" "code" --- but as long as we survive the next 18 months, I see a large opportunity as these businesses start to feel the weight of their accumulated tech debt accrued by trusting claude when it says "your code is now production ready."
by Sanzig | 2025-09-30 13:44:56+00:00
Sun is dead and the ZFS copyright transferred to Oracle who then turned it into a closed source product.

The modern OpenZFS project is not part of Oracle, it's a community fork from the last open source version. OpenZFS is what people think of when they say ZFS, it's the version with support for Linux (contributed in large part by work done at Lawrence Livermore).

The OpenZFS project still has to continue using the CDDL license that Sun originally used. The opinion of the Linux team is the CDDL is not GPL compatible, which is what prevents it from being mainlined in Linux (it should be noted not everyone shares this view, but obviously nobody wants to test it in court).

It's very frustrating when people ascribe malice to the OpenZFS team for having an incompatible license. I am sure they would happily change it to something GPL compatible if they could, but their hands are tied: since it's a derivative work of Sun's ZFS, the only one with the power to do that is Oracle, and good luck getting them to agree to that when they're still selling closed source ZFS for enterprise.
by ccvannorman | 2025-09-30 13:45:13+00:00
I joined a company with 20k lines of Next/React generated in 1 month. I spent over a week rewriting many parts of the application (mostly the data model and duplicated/conflicting functionality).

At first I was frustrated but my boss said it was actually a perfect sequence, since that "crappy code" did generate a working demo that our future customers loved, which gave us the validation to re-write. And I agree!

LLMs are just another tool in the chest; a curious, lighting fast jr developer with an IQ of 85 who can't learn and needs a memory wipe whenever they make a design mistake.

When I use it knowing its constraints it's a great tool! But yeah if used wrong you are going to make a mess, just like any powerful tool
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-30 13:45:20+00:00
But more isn't necessarily better; if producing movies costs nothing, then watching it is worth nothing.

I can fire up chatgpt and have it write a thousand stories. Would you read it?

AI is good for generating content, but that doesn't make it valuable content. And we had low value slop before AI, just thinking of e.g. buzzfeed back when.

Anyway, go browse Youtube, plenty of interesting content that doesn't get enough views as it is.
by RajT88 | 2025-09-30 13:46:27+00:00
These look like standard disqus ads. Which is to say - like you see when you scroll to the bottom of a Breitbart article.

I would totally agree that this makes your site look like an armpit of the internet, but also - there was a way to figure out that this would happen ahead of time. Google Ads last I checked weren't nearly as bad, but even these were prone to scams and malvertising campaigns on sites I've frequented.
by cs02rm0 | 2025-09-30 13:46:33+00:00
I built what I guess is a LinkedIn alternative: https://sifted3.com/blog/building-sifted3

It's less focused on the social, more on the jobs. With a limit on the number of job applications a user can make; sort of like Twitter, for job application count. And mechanisms to provide feedback to users. Basically trying to address a few shortcomings of LinkedIn as I see them (with other mechanisms in the pipeline).

But it has neither any jobs, nor candidates.

I'm not sure what the strategy should be to resolve that. I've tried a few things that haven't worked out yet.
by WJW | 2025-09-30 13:47:11+00:00
Good documentation also contains the "why" of the code, ie why it is the way it is and not one of the other possible ways to write the same code. That is information inherently not present in the code, and there would be no way for a LLM to figure it out after the fact.

Also, no "small" program is ever at risk of dying in the sense that Naur describes it. Worst case, you can re-read the code. The problem lies with the giant enterprise code bases of the 60s and 70s where thousands of people have worked on it over the years. Even if you did have good documentation, it would be hundreds of pages and reading it might be more work than just reading the code.
by thw_9a83c | 2025-09-30 13:47:12+00:00
He wrote his science fiction novel "Cat's Cradle" before Slaughterhouse-Five, and I consider this novel to be his best. It is essentially an intelligent parody of the madness of scientists who are eager to make a breakthrough discovery but also completely blind to ethics, and who can even endanger the whole planet. This is a very relevant issue to this day.
by tinco | 2025-09-30 13:47:27+00:00
It makes a difference in that it allows the cloud providers to monetize Redis without having to deal with the Redis team. Which is fair and in the spirit of the original license of Redis, but don't paint it as some great achievement of open source ethos.

What Redis did by embracing a bad license shouldn't be applauded either. But the problem is that there isn't a great copyleft license that prevents embrace, extend & extinguish of great cloud projects. EUPL might've been it, and this weird clause just kills what would have made it perfect.
by nerdjon | 2025-09-30 13:47:36+00:00
> So if the technical challenges are solved and the AI acting is quite good, that changes your view of it?

That "if" seems to be the running thing with everything AI right now. "If" we can fix hallucinations. "If" we can make it actually think and reason. "If" we can make a general AI system. And so on.

"IF" we actually hit that point that these systems can create truly creative genuine work instead of being nothing more than predictive engines than maybe we can revisit this conversation. But the fact is we are not there and we are nowhere near there considering we are still just iterating on the fundamental problem of these just being predictive engines.

> Actors have worked alongside CGI characters for many decades, I remember watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit in the late 80s.

Yes you are right, but there is a pretty massive difference between knowing what the fake thing will do that is already scripted, storyboarded, etc (ultimately controlled by a human the entire time) vs an AI thing that will be an unknown.
by thekoma | 2025-09-30 13:48:32+00:00
Yeah. Using the Kalman filter just to determine the position from noisy position measurements really undercuts the capability of the filter to use system physics to estimate the true state.

In one of the most common applications of Kalman filters, autonomous robots (e.g., a robot vacuum or a commercial drone), the filters are around 9 to 12 dimensions.
by motbus3 | 2025-09-30 13:49:28+00:00
This text reminds me much of tylervigen.com/spurious-correlation. The data presented is completely insufficient for the claim and based on cherry picked narratives. Anyone can slice and cut numbers the way they want to prove a point.

The problem is that hiring an American is so expensive even for America. This will not change. People will need to accept to earn much less than they expected or to have the jobs taken elsewhere.

The root cause of the problem is exactly why Chinese clone products and cheaper versions are on the run. They are in inferior quality many times BUT they are way cheaper. American people buy Chinese products because there is not enough money to spend everywhere, so we stretch our definitions of what is acceptable to cover more areas of our lives.

These recent changes only seems to be effective but do effectively nothing to solve any of the problems. But let's say magically all immigrants disappeared and companies needed to find replacements, what would happen?

- Companies will look to outsource to keep prices at same level - Companies will use AI for whatever is "good enough" - Companies will hire much less capable people and boost them with AI - Companies will hire capable people but pay less because they could have hired someone cheaper - Companies will be forced to pay more for Americans, mean average salary will increase so as every cost, which is basically inflation.

The expedite use of "urgent/emergency" measurements is unsettling as-if US was under constant attack and panic and needs to defend themselves against evil outside world to a level where congress and laws can be totally ignored.

This need of creating an enemy and the constant threat to solidify a heavy power that goes beyond any limits is in itself a threat. Even more now that a this power is being shared among those who can keep eyes and ears on you and your ears and eyes out of the real problems.
by dgfitz | 2025-09-30 13:49:45+00:00
> the current crop of graduates have too little AI experience from their education

They probably have more "AI" (read: LLM) experience than working professionals. Not like chatGPT came out last week, they've had it their entire undergrad.

Also, that's like saying "they don't have enough experience using google" which is just absurd. You type shit into a text box and see what gets shat back out. If it doesn't work, you adapt it.

Prompt engineering is not hard. At best, it takes days-to-weeks learning how to prompt. I think people who are proud of themselves for spending hours carefully crafting prompts are trying to justify the time spent. It isn't hard.
Show HN: Float – AI Slack layer that handles busywork (1-click setup, free)
by FloatAIMsging | 2025-09-30 13:50:02+00:00
Hey HN, I'm Jari and I built an AI Slack laye that lives in your Slack workspace.

*What it does:* Drafts responses, summarizes long threads, finds information across your workspace history, and answers questions – all in natural language.

*The problem:* You're drowning in Slack messages. The average knowledge worker spends 2+ hours/day in Slack, much of it searching for info, re-reading threads, or writing the same updates over and over.

*How it works:* 1-click connect Float to your Slack (Not Admin required). That's it. 5 seconds total. Then you can ask it things like "what's the status on the redesign project?" or "draft a response to Sarah's question about the API."

*What's different:* Unlike Slack's AI (which requires Enterprise plan and only does search/summaries), this actually takes actions for you. And unlike ChatGPT integrations, it has full context of your workspace without you having to copy-paste everything.

*Stack:* Built with [mention tech if interesting] and runs on [architecture details if relevant to HN audience].

*Try it free:* [GitHub repo link] and [product link]. Free tier gives you 100 AI interactions/month. No credit card.

I'd love feedback on what features would actually be useful vs. what's just noise. What Slack tasks eat up your time?
by hans_castorp | 2025-09-30 13:50:13+00:00
SQL Anywhere doesn't really have "Sybase" roots.

It started out as Watcom SQL, then after Watcom was acquired by PowerSoft, it was renamed to "SQL Anywhere".

After Sybase acquired PowerSoft it was later renamed to "Adaptive Server Anywhere". I think SAP renamed it back to "SQL Anywhere" after they acquired Sybase.
by Zak | 2025-09-30 13:50:21+00:00
I use Mastodon for comments on one of my sites using a slightly modified version of the code featured here: https://carlschwan.eu/2020/12/29/adding-comments-to-your-sta...

As the site is focused on a single topic, I almost always tag a related Lemmy community in the Mastodon post, so it gets comments from there too. Federation is cool.
by tao_oat | 2025-09-30 13:50:28+00:00
I think this is somewhat overhyped. If you look at the video that actually exists of this character[^1], it's clearly AI slop that falls flat -- honestly kind of embarrasing for the studio to put out. This seems like more of a media stunt than anything.

[^1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sVO_j4czYs
by estimator7292 | 2025-09-30 13:50:37+00:00
At my first programmer job, a large majority of the code was written by a revolving door of interns allowed to push to main with no oversight. Much of the codebase was unknown and irreplaceable, which meant it slowly degraded and crumbled over the years. Even way back then, everyone knew the entire project was beyond salvage and needed to be rewritten from scratch.

Well they kept limping along with that mess for another ten years while the industry sprinted ahead. The finally released a new product recently, but I don't think anyone cares because everyone else did it better five years ago
by jacobr1 | 2025-09-30 13:50:43+00:00
I think this is part of the reason why I've had a bit more success with AI Coding than some of my colleagues. My pre-llm workflow was to rapidly build a crappy version of something so that I could better understand it, then rework it (even throw away to the prototype) to build something I now know how I want to handle. I've found even as plenty of thought leaders talk about this general approach (rapid prototyping, continuous refactoring, etc ...) that many engineers are resistant and want to think through the approach and then build it "right." Or alternatively just whip something out and don't throw it away, but rather toil on fixes to the their crappy first pass.

With AI this loop is much easier. It is cheap to even build 3 parallel implementations of something and maybe another where you let the system add whatever capability it thinks would be interesting. You can compare and use that to build much stronger "theory of the program" with requirements, where the separation of concerns are, how to integrate with the larger system. Then having AI build that, with close review of the output (which takes much less time if you know roughly what should be being built) works really well.
by Rooster61 | 2025-09-30 13:51:27+00:00
I took it to mean that the way LLM's use natural language causes the typical observer to feel as if they can perform far more than what they actually can. Akin to the analogy of humanoid robots.

It plays off of the "if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck" idiom, which of course isn't foolproof and gives avenue to the kind of spectacular advertising that is fueling this hype.
by scotty79 | 2025-09-30 13:51:39+00:00
> Fix... The patriachy? You want me to fix the patriarchy?

Sure. Also sexism, puritanism, security through obscurity and abrahamic religions while you are at it. It's long overdue.

> There's a very simple solution we can do right now: don't take naked pictures of people.

That's a very temporary solution since in a very near future everybody will have their pictures taken all the time and not necessarily in the wavelengths that stop at clothing for one simple reason, technology exists.

Don't worry, you don't really have to fix anything. Just peacefully die and let the next generation grow up without your cultural burden. It's also a temporary solution but feasible for now since death is still a thing people do.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-09-30 13:51:45+00:00
To be pedantic, before 1990 there were nearly 5000 movies released: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/v1fsld/oc_... (based on IMDB's dataset).

For a better comparison, you could look at China which only allows for a few dozen foreign films per year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_censorship_in_China#Quota...); which films depends on whether the publisher thinks it'll be successful there, whether it passes China's censors, and whether China was involved in its production. It's a different audience though, for example the Warcraft film bombed in the west but was hugely popular in China, possibly because of the relative scarcity of western films there?
by CaptainOfCoit | 2025-09-30 13:51:46+00:00
I'm not sure if you work in software or not, but it's definitely possible to come up with a schema where you could verify people's age in order to use a platform, without exposing your entire identity to said platform, with a combination of signatures and other cryptographic basics.

Say you have a digital certificate from the government or similar that you use to do your taxes online or whatever, the government could have endpoints where you could use that certificate for signing a proof, that you then hand over to the platform you want to verify your age with. The platform can then confirm it's valid, and that $AGE>X, but they get no other details.

You can even go a bit fancier/more complicated, and the government endpoints wouldn't know what platform you're trying to verify.
by gwbas1c | 2025-09-30 13:51:47+00:00
I disagree. They Not every technological advance "improves" at an exponential rate.

The issue is that LLMs don't "understand." They merely copy without contributing original thought or critical thinking. This is why LLMs can't handle complicated concepts in codebases.

What I think we'll see in the long run is:

(Short term) Newer programming models that target LLMs: IE, describe what you want the computer to do in plain English, and then the LLM will allow users to interact with the program in a more conversational manner. Edit: These will work in "high tolerance" situations where small amounts of error is okay. (Think analog vs digital, where analog systems tend to tolerate error more gracefully than digital systems.)

(Long term) Newer forms of AI that "understand." These will be able to handle complicated programs that LLMs can't handle today, because they have critical thinking and original thought.