MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by quantadev | 2025-04-04 06:27:10+00:00
As of 2025, it's no longer the case that older developers (like me at 57) are at a disadvantage just due to potentially lessened sheer brain power, as we had in our 20s. The reason is simple: We know what all the terminologies are, how to ask for things with proper and sufficient levels of detail and context, we know what the pitfalls and common error patterns are, and on and on, from decades of experience. Working with AI has similarities to management positions. You need to be a generalist. You need to know a little about everything, more so than a lot about one thing. All this can ONLY come with age, just like wisdom can only come thru experience.

I just hope that most hiring managers now realize this. With AI the productivity of younger developers has gone up by a factor of 10x, but the productivity of us "Seasoned" developers has gone up 100x. This now evens the playing field, I hope, where us experienced guys will be given a fair shake in the hiring process rather than what's been happening for decades where the 20-somethings pretend to be interviewing the older guys, because some boss told them to, but they never had any actual intentions of hiring anyone over 40, just on the bases of age alone, even if some older guy aces the interview.
by doctor_radium | 2025-04-04 06:27:18+00:00
Kudos to the coder and the poster. I'm involved in a browser project that runs on OpenSSL, and figured I'd have to dig through WireShark myself at some point to figure this stuff out. Well, I may still need to, but now have many points of reference. If the most common use of OpenSSL is Python, then in the age of Cloudflare, a Firefox TLS spoofing option isn't just a good idea, it's a necessity.
by RavSS | 2025-04-04 06:27:25+00:00
That is the general nature of reverse engineering efforts, but this one has been documented enough that you don't need to blindly trust completely random executables or code from strange places.

You can manually recreate the process of building a patch for the embedded controller instead of just following instructions: https://github.com/hamishcoleman/thinkpad-ec. Here's the presentation by the author himself at linux.conf.au (what used to be the biggest local Linux conference for those of us in Australia and NZ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fzmm87oVQ6c. This is of course not supported by Lenovo.

Unlocking the BIOS is definitely more like what you described. It's the price to pay for freely playing around with processor power limits, getting AES-NI instruction set support, etc. I have not checked since 2019, so there might be a clearer way.
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-04 06:27:46+00:00
Depends on what you mean specifically by the output. The actual neural network will produce deterministic outputs that could be interpreted as probability values for various tokens. But the interface you'll commonly see used in front of these models will then non-deterministiclaly choose a single next token to output based on those probabilities. Then, this single randomly chosen output is fed back into the network to produce another token, and this process repeats.

I would ultimately call the result non-deterministic. You could make it deterministic relatively easily by having a deterministic process for choosing a single token from all of the outputs of the NN (say, always pick the one with the highest weight, and if there are multiple with the same weight, pick the first one in token index order), but no one normally does this, because the results aren't that great per my understanding.
by Black616Angel | 2025-04-04 06:28:19+00:00
> Picture using these apps offline with automatic synchronization when you’re back online. This is the essence of local-first web development – a revolutionary approach that puts users in control of their digital experience.

I had to laugh very hard at the "revolutionary approach". How is it revolutionary, if software was developed "local-first" for decades?

Techbros really do come up with the oldest ideas and call them revolutionary.
by noduerme | 2025-04-04 06:28:27+00:00
You're conflating trademark with copyright.

Regardless, it's not just copyright laws that are at issue here. This is reproducing human likenesses - like Harrison Ford's - and integrating them into new works.

So if I want to make an ad for a soap company, and I get an AI to reproduce a likeness of Harrison Ford, does that mean I can use that likeness in my soap commercials without paying him? I can imagine any court asking "how is this not simply laundering someone's likeness through a third party which claims to not have an image / filter / app / artist reproducing my client's likeness?"

All seemingly complicated scams come down to a very basic, obvious, even primitive grift. Someone somewhere in a regulatory capacity is either fooled or paid into accepting that no crime was committed. It's just that simple. This, however, is so glaring that even a child could understand the illegality of it. I'm looking forward to all of Hollywood joining the cause against the rampant abuse of IP by Silicon Valley. I think there are legal grounds here to force all of these models to be taken offline.

Additionally, "guardrails" that prevent 1:1 copies of film stills from being reprinted are clearly not only insufficient, they are evidence that the pirates in this case seek to obscure the nature of their piracy. They are the evidence that generative AI is not much more than a copyright laundering scheme, and the obsession with these guardrails is evidence of conspiracy, not some kind of public good.
by lionkor | 2025-04-04 06:28:32+00:00
I personally think Studio Ghibli, and by extension their artists and former artists, have created a beautiful art style. The fact that we call it Ghibli, when really, its the artists there (and former artists) is misleading.

The people leave, go to different studios, and make different art. This is not their only style, and Ghibli is not known to make many movies these days.

The only thing this is hurting, if anything, is Studio Ghibli, not the artists. Artists capable of drawing in this style can draw in any style.
by cess11 | 2025-04-04 06:28:48+00:00
wrap_long_lines shares those characteristics:

https://github.com/dx-tooling/platform-problem-monitoring-co...

Where things are placed in the project seems rather ad hoc too. Put everything in the same place kind of architecture. A better strategy might be to separate out the I and the O of IO. Maybe someone wants SMS or group chat notifications later on, instead of shifting the numbers in filenames step11_ onwards one could then add a directory in the O part and hook it into an actual application core.
by Retric | 2025-04-04 06:28:53+00:00
LLM’s can’t pass an unrestricted Touring test. LLM’s can mimic intelligence, but if you actually try and exploit their limitations the deception is still trivial to unmask.

Various chat bots have long been able to pass more limited versions of a Touring test. The most extreme constraint allows for simply replaying a canned conversation which with a helpful human assistant makes it indistinguishable from a human. But exploiting limitations on a testing format doesn’t have anything to do with testing for intelligence.
by LightHugger | 2025-04-04 06:29:09+00:00
Yes actually, i've been ranting about this for a long time, sufficiently powerful corporations are a form of government. I'm not conservative though despite being anti-dei so make of that what you will, i think a lot of people on the left are being lumped in with people on the right because we oppose the types of discrimination and racism now popular with the "left".
by XorNot | 2025-04-04 06:29:15+00:00
Honestly this post seems like misplaced wisdom to me: your concern is the development of AGI displacing jobs and not the numerous reliability problems with the analytic use of AI tools in particular the overestimate of LLM capabilities because they're good at writing pretty prose?

If we were headed straight to the AGI era then hey, problem solved - intelligent general machines which can advance towards solutions in a coherent if not human like fashion is one thing but that's not what AI is today.

AI today is enormously unreliable and very limited in a dangerous way - namely it looks more capable then it is.
by branko_d | 2025-04-04 06:30:40+00:00
> Everything we have, everything we're permitted to do, is at the pleasure and permission of our governments.

Wrong! The people are ultimately responsible for reigning-in their governments and are the ultimate source of any rules or rights that the governments end up enforcing.

If you think that the ultimate authority is with the government, then you have justified every authoritarian regime out there.
by weinzierl | 2025-04-04 06:31:04+00:00
"Of course you can argue that Rust recently adopted language specification, but if you take a second to learn more about it you’ll find out that it comes essentially from outside."

It is worth noting that the Ferrocene specification is made for the certification of the Ferrocene compiler as its sole purpose. It is neither intended nor suitable to implement a compiler based on it.
by dheera | 2025-04-04 06:31:24+00:00
I disagree, I think it's absolutely astounding that they've gotten this good in such a short time, and I think we'll get better models in the near future.

By the way, prompting models properly helps a lot for generating good code. They get lazy if you don't explicitly ask for well-written code (or put that in the system prompt).

It also helps immensely to have two contexts, one that generates the code and one that reviews it (and has a different system prompt).
by 9rx | 2025-04-04 06:32:31+00:00
> degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work.

That's still nearly true, if not true. 60% of jobs are white collar. 40% of the workforce has a degree. Data quality starts to decline somewhat here, but it is expected that 20% of degree holders work in trades or manual labour jobs. So, degree holders only just barely make up a majority on that basis. And maybe not even that as blue collar is usually considered to be more than just trades and manual labour, not to mention that we haven't even delved into other collars (e.g. pink collar) that further take from the degree holding population.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-04 06:32:40+00:00
I prefer lack of "fun" and "fn", to me it is easier to parse C-style. :( This is one of the things (albeit minor) that put me off of C alternatives, I like to keep things as simple as possible, but I understand it has "macro" as well, so might as well have "fn", for the reasons already mentioned.

That said, I will still try C3.
by roenxi | 2025-04-04 06:32:51+00:00
> In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.

That seems to be missing the elephant in the room - they sent kids in their most formative intellectual years to immerse themselves in a culture where there is a very high child:adult ratio. Then the kids come back with this wild culture that would make a lot of sense to a bunch of teenagers and young adults. It isn't just that the kids individuating, it is dumping them into one of the most elitist, authoritarian and artificial subcultures society maintains - populated mostly by near-juveniles I repeat - giving them independence to form themselves and discovering that dislocates them from their parents subculture.

It should be obvious that will happen but parents tend to be pretty dumb. No real training course for parenting I suppose.
by klodolph | 2025-04-04 06:34:03+00:00
You’re making useful points but you’re also just choosing convenient definitions that make your point of view “correct”.

The parent comment has a definition of “rights” that admits their existence… and I think what you’ve demonstrated is that you have a different definition of “rights”. In other words, you’ve demonstrated that you haven’t really grasped the underlying meaning that the parent comment is getting at, and you’re instead responding to the words that they used to express it.

If you start with a definition for “rights” you can make arguments about whether they exist. But if you start with a different definition and get to a different conclusion, it doesn’t mean you’ve discovered some logical flaw in the argument, it just means that the two of you have failed to communicate with each other.
by ManuelKiessling | 2025-04-04 06:35:00+00:00
Thanks for looking into it.

While I would have hoped for a better result, I'm not surprised. In this particular case, I really didn't care about the code at all; I cared about the end result at runtime, that is, can I create a working, stable solution that solves my problem, in a tech stack I'm not familiar with?

(While still taking care of well-structured requirements and guard rails — not to guarantee a specific level of code quality per se, but to ensure that the AI works towards my goals without the need to intervene as much as possible).

I will spin up another session where I ask it to improve the implementation, and report back.
by lysecret | 2025-04-04 06:36:28+00:00
I understand the scepticism here. For sure this app isn’t 90% accurate in any traditional sense.

One note, as someone who also built a calorie tracking app with ai as well as lost a good amount of weight with it: accuracy for calorie tracking doesn’t matter. You can honestly just detect if it’s a meal and return 600 cals. For most people the simple fact that they become aware of what they eat and think about their food in an ongoing basis will lead them to loose Weight. Sticking to it is the hard part.
by johnisgood | 2025-04-04 06:36:46+00:00
@lerno, how do you feel about contributions to the standard library? For example, I might add BLAKE2 if it is not already implemented.

Also I just checked the source code of hash map. What if I want to use a different hashing algorithm for "rehash"?

There is no one true implementation of a hash table either, for example, so I am not sure what to do with that. I want a thread-safe hash table, I wonder if it would ever make it into the standard library.
by alienthrowaway | 2025-04-04 06:36:47+00:00
> In which country? Even for the US I don't believe the law system is that crappy.

There's video from a few years back that shows very American cops standing outside a burning house at night, knowing there was a young child still in it. A passing pizza delivery dude[1] rescued the 6-year old, handed her to cop, and ended up requiring hospitalization. In the online discussion, everyone called the rescuer a hero, but I don't recall seeing a single condemnation of the cops (a "first-responder") who didn't enter the burning house.

edit: 1. the hero's name is Nick Bostic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBlE52qKKuw
by conductr | 2025-04-04 06:37:01+00:00
I like the antidote and does remind me that I tried to create a game, which gamedev has always been a challenge for me. I’ve attempted a few times and didn’t get very far with this one either. I think I could do the coding even though scale is large, but I’m not artistic and asset generation/iteration is my block. I tried a handful of ai tools specifically for this and found they were all really far behind. I don’t particularly like working with asset store art, maybe for parts but characters and the vibe of the game usually would excite and motivate me early on and I can’t quite get there to sustain the effort
by keernan | 2025-04-04 06:37:09+00:00
I turn 73 this year. The IRS requires me to report to them the value of my stocks and bonds as of 12/31/2024 held in my IRA. And then I am forced to liquidate a percentage of those holdings during 2025 so the IRS can collect a tax on that wealth. A genuine wealth tax.

Let's talk for a moment about people owning 100 million dollars plus in net assets.

First, this is the group that pays the millions of dollars needed for their "politician" to run for office. There is only one reason anyone would do such a thing: assuring they own a "member of Congress" who will vote how they say on matters of their personal concern.

Votes on important subjects - such as who will - and will not- pay the cost of operating the government.

Someone with 100 million dollars or more of net wealth do not need to work to survive. They are not forced to have an "income" unless they decide to have one. Their only income is 100% voluntary.

For example, they potentially have "taxable income" if they decide to sell assets - but any such decision is very calculated and designed to transfer certain assets from one investment to another that will perform better and thus increase their wealth beyond whatever "taxable income" may be incurred.

They do not sell assets to generate cash to purchase things. They borrow to generate cash because doing so avoids "taxable income". And most own a family bank used for just for this purpose - providing them with liquidity - without incurring taxes.

Is it any wonder that a decision was made to use "income" as the device for deciding who will pay the cost of running the government? Income being the one thing people with 100 million or more in net assets can control and manipulate and only incur when they decide to incur it?

It is ridiculous to suggest people worth 100 million dollars or more can't find a way to pay a wealth tax. If I can do it (as I will do every year moving forward), then people with 100 million dollars+ (eg billionaires) can certainly do so.
by trentlott | 2025-04-04 06:37:34+00:00
> He was was in theory anti-union because he thought union benefits should just be turned into labor protections for everyone

Uh, hmm. So weaker unions result in labor protections for everyone? I gotta say, doesn't seem like that's really how the U.S. is playing out. If weekends off and an 8-hour workday didn't exist they certainly wouldn't be argued for now.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-04 06:37:45+00:00
My grievances are simple: an expert programming utilizing AI will be a truly dangerous force.

But that's not what we get in this early stage of grifting. We get 10% marketing buzz on how cool this is with stuff that cannot be recreated in the tool alone, and 89% of lazy or inexperienced developers who just turn in slop with little or no iteration. The latter don't even understand the code they generated.

That 1% will be amazing, it's too bad the barrel is full of rotten apples hiding that potential. The experts also tend to keep to themselves, in my experience. the 89% includes a lot of dunning-kruger as well which makes those outspoken experts questionable (maybe a part of why real experts aren't commenting on their experience).
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-04 06:39:07+00:00
The US is going to conquer China by military force? That seems unlikely when they both have nuclear weapons.

It wouldn't be a solution even if it was possible. If China was a US territory and still did all the same manufacturing, how does that help the people in the rust belt get better paying jobs, or address the single point of failure where some turmoil in Asia can disrupt global supply chains?

The only thing that works is to diversify manufacturing out of that single region, and that doesn't require conquest.
by refurb | 2025-04-04 06:39:53+00:00
I think the US courts systems is comprised of judges who generally try to apply the law in an impartial manner.

But judges don't determine which cases they will hear, prosecutors do.

You could have 12 people violate the law, but if the prosecutor decides not to pursue 11 of them, only the 1 will face any consequences.

US code is comprised of tens of thousands of laws. It's not hard to find one that you've violated at some point in your life.

Most of the time they aren't prosecuted. But if they decide to, a judge will have to find you guilty.
by camillomiller | 2025-04-04 06:40:07+00:00
Correct. I will say the following as a STEM person that was lucky enough to have an art bachelor as well. One side of the world, the STEM nerds that have never understood nor experienced the inherently inefficient process of making art for lack of talent and predisposition, have won the game of capitalism many times over thanks to the incredible 40-years momentum of tech progress. Now they're trying to convince everyone else that art is stoopid, as proven by the fact that it's just a probabilistic choice away from being fully and utterly replicable. They ignore, willfully and possibly sometimes just for lack of understanding, that art and the creativity behind it is something that operates on a completely different plane than their logical view of the world, and Gen AI is the fundamental enabler letting them unleash all of their contempt for the inefficiency of humanities.
by ManuelKiessling | 2025-04-04 06:40:51+00:00
Good insight, and indeed quite exactly my state of mind while creating this particular solution.

Iin this case, I did put in the guard rails to ensure that I reach my goal in hopefully a straight line and a quickly as possible, but to be honest, I did not give much thought to long-term maintainability or ease of extending it with more and more features, because I needed a very specific solution for a use case that doesn't change much.

I'm definitely working differently in my brown-field projects where I'm intimately familiar with the tech stack and architecture — I do very thorough code reviews afterwards.
by planb | 2025-04-04 06:42:39+00:00
Sorry, but these images are exactly what comes to my mind immediately when reading the prompts. You can argue about intellectual property theft (though I find it funny that the same people that would boycott Disney for suing a fanfiction author are now on the side of copyright holders), but it's not wrong or unintuitive.

Maybe a thinking model would - just like my brain might after the initial reaction - add a "but the user formulated this in a way that makes it obvious that they do not explicitly mean Indiana Jones, so lets make it an asian woman" prompt, but we all know how this worked out for Google's image generator that generated black nazis.
by gkbrk | 2025-04-04 06:43:06+00:00
Not all browsers, but Chrome certainly desires to be fingerprintable. They even try to cryptographically prove that the current browser is an unmodified Chrome with Web Environment Integrity [1].

Doesn't get more fingerprintable than that. They provide an un-falsifiable certificate that "the current browser is an unmodified Chrome build, running on an unmodified Android phone with secure boot".

If they didn't want to fingerprintable, they could just not do that and spend all the engineering time and money on something else.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Environment_Integrity
by imp0cat | 2025-04-04 06:43:22+00:00
Just read the Google Play reviews, the app still has a long way to go to be usable.

But it's still a great idea.

Also, they should calculate both the calories and power requirements for each meal analyzed. What I mean is, it should says something like: this burger has 800 kcal and the analysis consumed 1kw of datacenter power. ;)
by FeepingCreature | 2025-04-04 06:43:54+00:00
> there is a lot of obviously useful abstraction being missed, wasting lines of code that will all need to be maintained.

This is a human sentiment because we can fairly easily pick up abstractions during reading. AIs have a much harder time with this - they can do it, but it takes up very limited cognitive resources. In contrast, rewriting the entire software for a change is cheap and easy. So to a point, flat and redundant code is actually beneficial for a LLM.

Remember, the code is written primarily for AIs to read and only incidentally for humans to execute :)