MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by trjordan | 2025-10-01 14:23:37+00:00
My conversation

"Design a schema like Calendly" --> Did it

"OK let's scale this to 100m users" --> Tells me how it would. No schema change.

"Did you update the schema?" --> Updates the schema, tells me what it did.

We've been running into this EXACT failure mode with current models, and it's so irritating. Our agent plans migrations, so it's code-adjacent, but the output is a structured plan (basically: tasks, which are prompt + regex. What to do; where to do it.)

The agent really wants to talk to you about it. Claude wants to write code about it. None of the models want to communicate with the user primarily through tool use, even when (as I'm sure ChartDB is) HEAVILY prompted to do so.

I think there's still a lot of value there, but it's a bummer that we as users are going to have to remind all LLMs for a little bit to do keep using their tools beyond the 1st prompt.
by mym1990 | 2025-10-01 14:23:39+00:00
"If there’s someone out there who just sits on the beach all day and survives by eating coconuts"

This seems like a dire situation for most humans and probably isn't the status quo for human operation. Its perfectly fine to sit on the beach, but eventually a light should go on that would say "lets go build some tools", "lets go see if I can catch a fish", "lets build a hut". Which would all be fine and admirable things to spend your time doing.
by vrnvu | 2025-10-01 14:23:59+00:00
I've been applying a lot of principles and suggestions from TigerBeetle style lately, mainly in Rust and Go and I can’t recommend it enough.

- single entry point, near-zero deps

- ci locally and tested, one command to runs tests, coverage, lint etc

- property/snapshot/swarm testing, I love writing simulations now and letting the assertions crash

- fast/slow split + everything is deterministic with a seed

- explicit upper bounds + pool of resources. I still dynamically allocate but it makes code simpler to reason about

Thanks to the TB team for the videos and docs they been putting out lately.
by hnlmorg | 2025-10-01 14:24:33+00:00
I don’t see that as a contradiction but I do appreciate how some might.

You can train anything to be really good at specialised fields. But that doesn’t mean they’re a good generalist.

For example:

you can train anything child to memorise the 10 times table. But that doesn’t mean they’re can perform long division.

Being an olympic-class cyclist doesn’t mean you’re any good as an F1 driver nor swimming nor Fencing.

Being highly specialised usually means you’re not as good at general things. And that’s as true for humans as it is for computers.
by piva00 | 2025-10-01 14:24:44+00:00
> It is on each individual to inform themselves, and to decide what to believe and what to disregard.

That's where the conundrum lies, requiring individual responsibility for protecting a whole society of potential bad actors using this freedom to break society apart.

How is it solved? No one knows, what we know is that relying on individuals to each act on their own to solve it won't work, it never works, we also see the effects on society from the loss of any social cohesion around what "truth" is, even though before the age of Internet and social media there were vehicles to spread lies, and manipulate people, this has been supercharged in every way: speed of spread, number of influential voices, followings, etc.

Anything that worked before probably doesn't work now, we don't know how to proceed but using platitudes from before these times is also a way to cover our eyes to what is actually happening: fractures in society becoming larger rifts, supercharged by new technologies, being wielded as a weapon.

I don't think government censorship is the answer, nor I think that just letting it be and requiring every single person to be responsible in how they critically analyse the insurmountable amount of information we are exposed to every day is the answer either.
by stared | 2025-10-01 14:25:26+00:00
Still, what's in your opinion, the advantage of thinking in category theory rather than set theory? (For programming, not - algebraic geometry.)

I mean, all examples I heard can be directly treated with groups, monoids, and regular functions.

I know some abstract concepts that can be defined in a nice way with CT but not nearly as easy - set theory, e.g. (abstract) tensor product. Yet, for other concepts, including quantum mechanics, I have found that there is "abstract overhead" of CT with little added value.
by jghn | 2025-10-01 14:26:24+00:00
> I'm just trying not to drop out of leagues or ruin my streak

You could try not getting suckered in by the gamification. I've been using Duo for years. I have no idea how I'd even find out what a league is, much less if I've dropped out of one.

I do try to use it every day, so my streak is high, but if I don't use it I don't use it.

And no, I don't think my ~15 mins a day over the same amount of time would have made me notably more fluent. I might be *differently* fluent, however as Duo heavily skews towards reading comprehension.
by tomxor | 2025-10-01 14:26:50+00:00
> as they are the bill payer and entering into a credit agreement requires you to be over 18. If you wanted belt and braces the phone companies doing PAYG could set it to disabled unless you authenticate your age to avoid the "buy simcard for cash" loophole.

This is already the case in UK, has been for years. The bill payer needs to prove age with an ID to lift IP level blocks from some default age blocklist.

It doesn't work well because obviously a lot of internet is shared amongst a household, and the blocklist is too broad to make it annoying enough that any adults will remove it. Then of course you can always just use a VPN same as with the current situation.
Show HN: Llmswap – Solving "Multiple Second Brains" with Per-Project AI Memory
by sreenathmenon | 2025-10-01 14:27:09+00:00
I kept seeing developers (including myself) struggle with the same problem: "I need multiple second brains for different aspects of my life, but AI keeps forgetting context between sessions."

So I built llmswap v5.1.0 with a workspace system that gives you persistent, per-project AI memory.

How it works:

- cd ~/work/api-platform → AI loads enterprise patterns, team conventions - cd ~/learning/rust → AI loads your learning journey, where you struggled - cd ~/personal/side-project → AI loads personal preferences, experiments

Each workspace has independent memory (context.md, learnings.md, decisions.md) that persists across sessions. Your AI mentor actually remembers what you learned yesterday, last week, last month.

Key features:

• Auto-learning journals (AI extracts key learnings from every conversation) • 6 teaching personas (rotate between Guru, Socrates, Coach for different perspectives) • Works with ANY provider (Claude Sonnet 4.5, IBM Watsonx, GPT-4 o1, Gemini, Groq, Ollama) • Python SDK + CLI in one tool • Zero vendor lock-in

Think of it as "cURL for LLMs" - universal, simple, powerful.

The workspace system is what makes this different. No competitor (Claude Code, Cursor, Continue.dev) has per-project persistent memory with auto-learning tracking.

Built for developers who:

- Manage multiple projects and lose context switching - Are tired of re-explaining their tech stack every session - Want AI that builds on previous learnings, not starts from zero - Need different "modes" for work/learning/side projects

Open to feedback! Especially interested in:

1. What other workspace features would be useful? 2. How do you currently manage AI context across projects? 3. Would you use auto-learning journals?

GitHub: https://github.com/sreenathmmenon/llmswap

PyPI: pip install llmswap==5.1.0

Docs: https://llmswap.org
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-10-01 14:27:10+00:00
Thanks for helping to refine the thinking. I guess the other side of the coin that would be make the paradox interesting is that, in the long term, it has to seem that most of the stuff built with money (but without intrinsically motivated managers) lose out to the stuff built on pure passion. After discounting for a heap of survival bias.
by tristramb | 2025-10-01 14:27:12+00:00
Take a mapping a and precompose it with the identity mapping i. By the definition of the identity mapping the resulting composition is equal to a.

i;a = a

(Here ';' represents forward composition. Mathematicians tend to use backward composition represented by '∘' but I find backward composition awkward and error-prone and so avoid using it.)

Now, if there is another mapping j that is different from i, such that

j;a = a

then the mapping a loses information. By this I mean that if you are given the value of a(x) you cannot always determine what x was. To understand this properly you may need to work through a simple example by drawing circles, dots and arrows on a piece of paper.

If there is no such j then mapping a is said to be a monomorphism or injection (the set theoretic term) and it does not lose information.

This specification of the property 'loses information' only involves mapping equality and mapping composition. It does not involve sets or elements of sets.

An example of a mapping that loses information would be the capitalization of strings of letters. An example of a mapping that you would not want to lose information would be zip file compression.

If you alter the above specification to use post-composition (a;i = a and a;j = a) instead of pre-composition you get epimorphisms or surjections which capture the idea that a mapping constrains all the values in its codomain. I like to think of this as the mapping does not return uninitialized values or 'junk' as it is sometimes called.

Bartosz Milewski works through this in more detail (including from the set-theoretic side) in the last 10 minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2lZkr-aAqk&list=PLbgaMIhjbm... and the first 10 minutes of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcT7CGPICzo&list=PLbgaMIhjbm....
by setr | 2025-10-01 14:27:25+00:00
A row-based index is a column-wise copy of the data, with mechanisms to skip forward during scanning. You maintain a separate copy of the column to support this, making indexes expensive, and thus the DBA is asked to maintain a minimal subset.

A columnar database’s index is simply laid out on top of the column data. If the column is the key, then it’s sorted by definition, and no index is really required outside of maybe a zone map, because you can binary search. A non-key column gets a zone map / skip index laid out on top, which is cheap to maintain… because it’s already a column-wise slice of the data.

You don’t often add indexes to an OLAP system because every column is indexed by default — because it’s cheap to maintain, because you don’t need a separate column-wise copy of the data because it’s already a column-wise copy of the data.
by patrickscoleman | 2025-10-01 14:27:31+00:00
Only tangentially on-topic, but I do all the financial modeling for the past several (early stage) startups I've worked for in Google Sheets.

The ease, collaboration/sharing, and array formulas win out over the faster speed for calculations, better shortcuts, cross-workbook linking, and customization in Excel.

That said, it's been a few years since I've tried Excel so would love to hear someone convince me to try it again.
by majortennis | 2025-10-01 14:28:20+00:00
I've tried asking it to log every request and response to a project_log.md but it routinely ignores that.

I've also tried using playwright for testing in a headless browser and taking screenshots for a blog that can effectively act as a log , it just seems like too tall an order for it.

It sounds like you're streets ahead of where I am could you give me some pointers on getting started with a feed back loop please
by the_sleaze_ | 2025-10-01 14:28:28+00:00
It's like white people tacos vs food-truck tacos. It used to be gauche but has now become its own standard. You can like white people tacos and food truck tacos.

Try dumping the pasta into the strainer, then putting a layer of olive oil across the bottom of the dry pan like youre about to shallow fry something. Then shallow fry the canned sauce in teh olive oil. It should splatter and hiss. Then dump the pasta in.

Is it legit? No. Is it good and easy? Yup.
by drakythe | 2025-10-01 14:28:29+00:00
People who are malicious or see an opportunity for gain will always abuse a system. Just because the DNS system has had to be patched to handle the abuse doesn't mean its badly designed. If it were as badly designed as your comment seems to imply it wouldn't be able to operate even half as well as it does.

The combustion engine's fundamental design is pretty damn good and that it had to be updated to handle unleaded gasoline isn't a knock (pun... intended?) against that design.
by jtrn | 2025-10-01 14:29:07+00:00
I find Cursor at the same level as Claude code, with some strengths and some weaknesses. Cursor is nice when I want to start multiple parallel agents, while browsing files, monitoring the progress, and switching models as needed. It’s just a simple, zero config environment i can just start using intuitively.

Claude code is more reliable and generally better at using MCP for tool cal, like docs from contex7. So if I had only one prompt and it HAD to make something work, Claude code would be my bet.

Personally I like jumping between models and IDEs , if only to mix it up. And you get a reminder of different ways of doing stuff.
by ux266478 | 2025-10-01 14:29:42+00:00
I see this misconception a lot. Functional programming has nothing to do with mutability or immutability. Just like product types (or associative arrays) don't make for object oriented programming, the paradigm is about the patterns you use and the total structure of the program. In the case of functional programming, it's that your entire program is built around function composition and folds. This changes how you build your program on a fundamental level.

Additionally, functional programming does have a strong theory behind it. That of the lambda calculus. Everything is formalization and constructions built on top of that. We don't have a "hard line" to detect if a language is "functional" because it's not a language paradigm, but a property of the code itself. Grammar is orthogonal to this stuff. You can, however, make a pretty good guess by looking at the standard library of a language. There is no ambiguity that Idris or Haskell are a languages designed for functional programming, for example.

I think this stems from a problem that there are a lot of programmers, who through no fault of their own, have engaged with tools for functional programming, but skipped building things using the alien and weird stuff so in the end there's no actual learning of functional programming itself. Every new programming paradigm is a shift of your core perspective, they require you to relearn programming from the ground up. It shouldn't feel like "this is just ABC with XYZ", you are only truly beginning to learn when you are put back into your shoes as a middle schooler unlocking the power of nested conditionals. If you don't get that feeling, you're just learning a different language and not a programming paradigm.

> And even the best example of purity, SQL

Purity is not a claim of functional programming. Also SQL is not anywhere close to being a functional language, it's not only a non-programming language, but even if it were (and it can be with extensions) its paradigm is far more in line with logic programming.
by ctenb | 2025-10-01 14:30:04+00:00
I mean, technically almost all of math can be related to other math one way or another. To say the CT has a lot to do with computation is definitely a stretch. CT is not a recognized Computer Science subject. It's mostly used in the functional programming community to name certain concepts and theorems, but then applied to a specific type system (so it's not actually doing CT, since your restricting yourself to a single category, whereas CT is really about connecting different categories by generalizing over them).
by btilly | 2025-10-01 14:30:08+00:00
You literally cannot doubt the existence of this oracle, without doubting what existence means in classical mathematics.

Here is why a classical mathematician would say that this oracle exists.

Let f(program, input, n) be 1 or 0 depending on whether the program program, given input input, is still running at step n. This is a perfectly well-behaved mathematical function. In fact it is a computable one - we can compute it by merely running a simulation of a computer for a fixed number of steps.

Let oracle(program, input) be the limit, as n goes to infinity, of f(program, input, n). Classically this limit always exists, and always gives us 0 or 1. The fact that we happen to be unable to compute it, doesn't change the fact that this is a perfectly well-defined function according to classical mathematics.

If you give up the existence of this oracle, you might as well give up the existence of any real numbers that do not have a finite description. Which is to say, almost all of them. Why? Because the set of finite descriptions is countable, and therefore the set of real numbers that admit a finite description is also only countable. But there are an uncountable number of real numbers, so almost all real numbers do not admit a finite description.

The real question isn't whether this oracle exists. It is what you want the word "exists" to mean.
Show HN: Rclone UI – GUI Storage Manager
by ftchd | 2025-10-01 14:30:29+00:00
I became a full on data hoarder recently, but even before I was juggling multiple buckets for backups, stock assets, etc.

I settled some long time ago, but always forgot some flag, and while I do love a CLI for some endeavors, for this one I felt like a UI would make me move faster (if done right).

Some of my favorite features: - Remote Defaults (set default flags for a remote, they are applied as initial flags to every operation where that remote is selected, like a pre-fill) - Templates (a group of flags for an operation, eg. Move, that you can apply. they’re useful when you run the same operation more than once and you don’t want to remember all the flags) (regardless of remote) - Cron Jobs (templates that run periodically) - Multiple Configs (switch between different rclone config files) - Integrated Docs (hover over any flag to see what it does, without leaving the app)

It seen decent usage in recent months, both by companies and random dudes like me, and it has also been starred by NCW, the creator of rclone — an honor.

Here’s the link: https://github.com/rclone-ui/rclone-ui

Happy to share it here with everyone and take your feedback!
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-01 14:30:32+00:00
It's still largely unclear how AI is going to affect the job of software engineers both in the shorter term, pre-AGI, and after that.

However, I'm pretty sure that the job of SWE isn't about to disappear, since even when human-level AGI appears, the process of software development isn't about to get any easier than when it was done by actual humans. I don't see non-technical middle managers able to take over as systems architects and lead developers. It'll just mean that the day-to-day of those charged with developing software per PHB's requirements changes.

That said, I do feel fortunate to have been from the generation where software was developed entirely by hand, having started in the era of 8-bitters (NASCOM-1 in 1978) and only just in the last year transitioning (against my preference) to a role of overseeing offshore developers rather than being hands-on. Still, I think that those who enjoy the challenge and fun of conjuring up dreams out of software will still find plenty to enjoy in the future, although it will be different, just as it has already changed a lot from the time when we were writing everything in assembler to today arguing about whether Rust is better than C++.
by swat535 | 2025-10-01 14:30:44+00:00
While you make good points, I wanted to quickly counter this narrative with the fact that majority of people are chasing money because it provides them the basic necessities.

Money gives you food, shelter, healthcare and relationships; all of which are required for happiness.

I think we need make the distinction between a startup founder missing his daughter's birthday because he is at the office chasing money and the average Joe working double shifts at Walmart.

Most people don't even have the luxury of optimizing their life for money.
by parineum | 2025-10-01 14:31:04+00:00
My point isn't that the use of the phrase is wrong, the point is that the colloquial understanding of the phrase is a bad concept.

[All] lawyers are bad CEOs is a statement that was made. Evidence to the contrary was presented. "The exception proves the rule" was used to dismiss that evidence.

It's used in a similar way as "God works in mysterious ways".
by mystraline | 2025-10-01 14:31:14+00:00
> Just for clarity, you're claiming that there's data to support that 10-year flood plain areas should be marked as having a 100% chance of having a flood every year and you have enough data to say a 100-year flood plain should be reclassified as a 10-year flood plain?

I never claimed to have that data.

I do not trust anything out of the US government, especially now. And for the time being EPA still has ArcGIS API to pull flood planes. But again, from my local area, Ive seen way too many "100 year floods" happening every 3-5 years.

I distrust the government numbers, and prefer to look at risk much more conservatively with respect to bloodlines and flooding.

> That being said, hyperbolic assertions such as this don't help.

This isn't hyperbolic. Climate devastation IS happening and worsening. Even if the previous charts were truthful, they are not being kept up. Thankfully I have local floodmaps for the state saved locally under Biden. And as someone who works with geospatial data, I'm interpreting to what is matching locally.

> The whole state of Florida is low elevation.

Yeah. Louisiana is similar. They are quite fucked. Storm surges can easily flood and destroy homes.

Part of my original comment is, if your house is destroyed, rebuild elsewhere. Or, I'm u sure of building construction techniques that can impede hurricanes and flooding. I'm in IT, not building construction.

Hoping and praying your house doesn't get flooded being 5 miles inland at 2 feet altitude is not a good plan.

> I'd just like to call out this hard-line assertion as well. (Dont buy houses in flood planes)

Of course, everything is probabilistic. But you can make a easier choice by looking at the current EPA floodplains, with a topographical and waterway map, and decide how much elevation you need to relatively guarantee your safety.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-10-01 14:31:35+00:00
Edit: if I were to put myself in Archimedes' shoes, motivation comes from "this is nuts but it could work" and meaning comes from "it works!"

More like survival. I think of Archimedes' letters to the librarian of Alexandria, describing his secret technique of infinitessimals. It seems clear that he knew his work was meaningful but he wasnt going to die without telling anybody about it. He wasn't looking for validation, he didn't need it
by toast0 | 2025-10-01 14:31:57+00:00
> Nothing like that should happen if you're paying for even an individual Workspace plan. You get a phone number for customer support, and it works.

Last I was a workspace Admin, you had to login to get the phone number and the code to dial once you called.

It certainly did get you to a human. Unfortunately, they were not empowered to actually help with any of the things I needed help with, even when it would just be filing a enhancement request with the product team (they just tell you to post in the unmonitored product forum)

I've seen several believable tales of Kafkaesque billing issues leading to Workspace accounts being suspended. It took months to get them to do invoice billing.