MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by grg0 | 2025-04-19 02:26:34+00:00
Some issues with this "hype":

- Company hires tens of people to build an undefined problem. They have a solution (and even that is rather nebulous) and are looking for a problem to solve.

- Company pushes the thing down your throat. The goal is not clear. They make authoritative-sounding statements on how it improves productivity, or throughput, or some other metric, only to retract later when you pull off those people into a private meeting.

- People who claim what all the things that nebulous solution can accomplish when, in fact, nobody really knows because the thing is in a research phase. These are likely the "charlatans" OP is referring to, and s/he's not wrong.

- Learning "next hot thing" instead of the principles that lead to it and, worse still, apply "next hot thing" in the wrong context when the trade-offs have reversed. My own example: writing a single-page web application with "next hot JS framework" when you haven't even understood the trade-off between client-side and server-side rendering (this is just my example, not OP's, but you can probably relate.)

etc. etc. Perhaps the post isn't very well articulated, but it does make several points. If you haven't experienced any of the above, then you're just not in the kind of company that OP probably has worked at. But the things they describe are very real.

I agree there is nothing wrong with "hype" per se, but the author is using the word in a very particular context.
by tptacek | 2025-04-19 02:27:35+00:00
You cited a ranking of countries that was based on Lynn and his colleagues collecting data from childrens hospitals, because IQ is a diagnostic and not a ranking mechanism, and outside of wealthy western countries nobody has done latitudinal studies. If that was the worst thing Lynn had done to generate his data, it would already be fraudulent, but it isn't. Unfortunately, I don't think you actually understand the statistics you're citing.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-19 02:30:01+00:00
> Trying to pretend that "using race to pick between two equally qualified candidates" is the same thing as "picking unqualified candidates" is, well, damn close to a lie.

When you have a competitive major university that gets thousands of applicants and you base admission strictly on test scores, you'll end up accepting only 1% black applicants because their test scores are lower for various reasons. If you wanted to accept 14% black applicants as reflects their proportion of the US population, you would have to be turning down other applicants with significantly higher test scores. It's not just about accepting someone who got a 1520 instead of a 1530, the difference is hundreds of points.
by Animats | 2025-04-19 02:30:19+00:00
It's not as bad as battery hype.

Remember all those articles about some minor advance in surface chemistry which was then hyped into Trillion Dollar Industry Real Soon Now? They usually appeared in one of Nature's off-brand journals, or just arxiv, not in Chemical Engineering News or IEEE Trans. on Power Engineering. Such articles usually lacked the usual performance numbers (Wh/L, Wh/Kg, and Wh/$).

Then there's Javascript framework hype, which makes everyone run very hard to stay in the same place.

AI is at least making rapid progress. It's been less than three years since ChatGPT came out. Having lived and worked through the "AI Winter" (1984-2005), this is an improvement. The main problem now remains "hallucinations", or worse, "agentic" systems which act on hallucinations.
by mustache_kimono | 2025-04-19 02:30:37+00:00
> Have you actually used modern software?

Uh, yes. When was software better (like when was America great)? Do you remember what Windows and Linux and MacOS were like in 90s? What exactly is the software we are comparing?

> There's a great rant about Visual Studio debugger

Yeah, I'm not sure these are "great rants" as you say. Most are about how software with different constraints than video games aren't made with same constraints as video games. Can you believe it?
by Trasmatta | 2025-04-19 02:30:48+00:00
Having empathy for the suffering in both other people and yourself does not close the door on still finding at least some amount of inner joy or peace. If you can only have any amount of joy when every other living being in the universe is totally free of suffering, then you are doomed to never have even an ounce of happiness.

> I'm not going to pretend this life is a paradise

Who has ever claimed that it is?
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-04-19 02:31:05+00:00
This is only possible because of incredibly negligent notification text. "Remote control of your screen" being given to an application creates wildly different expectations than "remote control of your computer".

A better descriptor would be something like "Caller *name here* would like permission to remotely control your computer. They will be able to view your screen, access your files, and take actions as if they were you".

I swear, with the number of times Zoom has been responsible for security breaches thanks to their fragrantly negligent behavior, you'd think they'd put a little bit of thought into things they know are security threats (hence the warning at all.)
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-04-19 02:31:16+00:00
I occasionally use a “UML Lite,”[0] to illustrate stuff, but I seldom work at the scale that I would consider it necessary. I generally keep my designs in my head. Makes for much faster, and higher-quality work.

[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/the-curious-case-of-the-protoco...
by anon373839 | 2025-04-19 02:31:23+00:00
Hallucinations are caused by humans anthropomorphizing LLMs and imagining that they possess properties that don't exist.

For example, LLMs cannot test their thoughts against external evidence or other knowledge they may have (such as logic) to think before they output something. That's because they are a frozen computation graph with some random noise on top. Even chain of thought prompting or RL-based "reasoning" are just a pale imitation of the behavior we actually wish we could get. It is just a method of using the same model to generate some context that improves the odds of a good final result. But the model itself does not actually consider the thoughts it is <thinking>. These "thoughts" (and the response that follows them) can and do exhibit the same defects as hallucinations, because they are just more of the same.

Of course, the field has made some strides in reducing hallucinations. And it's not a total mystery why some outputs make sense and others don't. For example, just like with any other statistical model, the likelihood of error increases as the input becomes more dissimilar to the training data. But also, similarity to specific training data can be a problem because of overfitting. In those cases, the model is likely to output the common pattern rather than the pattern that would make sense for the given input.
by sandspar | 2025-04-19 02:31:39+00:00
Interesting ideas but terribly overwritten.

"The normal technology frame is about the relationship between technology and society. It rejects technological determinism, especially the notion of AI itself as an agent in determining its future. It is guided by lessons from past technological revolutions, such as the slow and uncertain nature of technology adoption and diffusion. It also emphasizes continuity between the past and the future trajectory of AI in terms of societal impact and the role of institutions in shaping this trajectory."

Why write it so overblown like this? You can say the same thing much more cleanly like, "AI doesn’t shape the future on its own. Society and institutions do, slowly, as with past technologies."
by 9d | 2025-04-19 02:33:14+00:00
No problems inherently cause horror. It's when we feel unloved that the smallest problem can seem like a nightmare. Almost no one in the world truly has genuine, selfless love. So countless people's problems seem insurmountable to themselves. When someone is willing to lift some of your burden, or at least share in it, this is the only proof of genuine love, and even when it doesn't truly solve the problems, it reduces or even removes the horror from them. But it has to be someone other than you, because love must be given and received from an other, and we are not an "other" to ourselves, even if in brokenness we often seem so. I think this is probably best exemplified by Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus Christ carry his cross.
by hedora | 2025-04-19 02:34:31+00:00
Another way (from first principles): Assume you buy two cars per driver. The driver parks one car at their solar panels at a time, so one is available for use 100% of the time, and at least one can charge off the panels 100% of the time.

Assume a 10kw solar system with no batteries, but with a level 2 charger. That costs $28K this year. Assume $50K per car. The system cost is $128K.

Assume the climate is such that you can charge the cars at 6kw (max output of the charger) for an average of 8 hours a day (pessimistic in summer, optimistic in winter).

This setup should last about 10 years. (Or sell the cars after 5 and get money back for new cars.)

That’s 365 * 10 * 8h * 6kw usable for the cars, or 175.2MWh, giving us $0.73 per kWh. Clearly the sky is falling. I’m going to get a steam engine for my buggy!

I forgot to figure the depreciation of the cars. We wasted one because this scheme is dumb, so the depreciation for an equivalent ICE car would be zero. For the other car, I think it’s reasonable to assume 90% depreciation. Say the ICE car depreciates $40K. We can sell the two EVs for a total of $10K. Now the total cost (sans car) for the system is $78K, or $0.445 per kwh — cheaper than California’s grid.

I forgot to figure interest on the $78K of capital. At 8% average return, that’s a bit over 2x, getting it closer to a dollar per kwh.

For a 4 mile/kwh car, that’s $0.25/mile. Of course, if you assume the existence of civilization, then the price drops a lot. For instance you could only buy one car, and you could size the solar smaller, or also plug the house into it.

Anyway, in my hypothetical mad maxian hellscape that’s experiencing healthy, steady economic growth and has access to cheap refined gasoline, he’s still off by a factor of 2.5x.
by ay | 2025-04-19 02:35:30+00:00
> "everyone is expecting 1280"

This works great until there is an app that is expecting 1280 and there is an operator that gives you 1280, and you have to run this app over an encrypted GENÈVE tunnel that attempts to add half a kilobyte of metadata :-). RADIUS with EAP or DHCP with a bunch of options can be a good example of a user app like this. Unfortunately this is a real-world problem.

The smaller mismatch but nonetheless painful is the 20 byte difference between IPv4 and IPv6 header sizes. It trips up every NAT64 deployment.

> where you got your experience?

A long path along all the OSI layers :-). Fiber and UTP networks install between ~95 and 2000. CCIE R&S#5423 in ‘99 and from 2000 almost 10 years in TAC and one of the first CCIE in Europe. Then some years working on IPv6 transition. Large scale IPv6 WiFi. Some folks know me by “happy eyeballs”; some by a “nats are good” YouTube video (scariest thing it’s still funny a decade later). These days - relops at fd.io VPP + internal CI/CD pipeline for a bunch of projects using VPP; and as a side gig - full-cycle automation of the switched fleet (~500 boxes) at #CLEUR installations. One of the recent fun projects was [0] - probably industry first of this scale, for an event network: more than 15K WiFi clients on IPv6Mostly. Though we were benefitting from work of a lot of folks that pushed the standardization and did smaller/more controlled deployments, specifically to shout huge thanks to Jen Linkova and Ondřej Caletka.

If you like low level network stuff, you might like VPP - and given it’s Apache licensed, pretty easy to use it for your own project.

[0] https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/122/slides/slides-122-iepg-...
by teleforce | 2025-04-19 02:36:59+00:00
Fun facts you can use circle of fifths as references or cheat sheet for good Chord Progression [1]:

"Chord progressions also often move between chords whose roots are related by perfect fifth, making the circle of fifths useful in illustrating the "harmonic distance" between chords."

It'll be very interesting to analyse the available songs data to find chords that follow circle of fifths.

By cross-reference patterns with the circle of fifths, we might just end up with the LLM equivalent of data-driven musical composer that's capable of generating harmonically pleasing, genre-aware, even hit songs chord progressions.

[1] Circle of fifths:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths
by mdaniel | 2025-04-19 02:37:17+00:00
> try to find an error in the diagrams.

Easy peasy, it's the 3rd blue line above the purple line /s

https://github.com/takaakit/uml-diagram-for-ddd-example-in-e...

I can't believe someone took time to generate such a thing, as if it is useful to anyone
by Animats | 2025-04-19 02:37:18+00:00
Not in shipping. See "Slow Steaming".[1] Most container ships could go much faster than they normally do.

Sadly, the S.S. United States, the fastest transatlantic liner ever, is about to be disposed of by sinking.[2] 35 knot top speed. Southampton to New York in 3.5 days. No market for that once air travel crossed the Atlantic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming

[2] https://6abc.com/post/what-are-doing-ss-united-states-histor...
by LinuxBender | 2025-04-19 02:39:00+00:00
This is an interesting one. I've seen Censys bots hit all my stuff hundreds of thousands of times and yet for some reason I had no idea that belonged to Google. Makes sense, I just never connected the two. I also use their interface to VT for old browsers [1] all the time. Intriguing.

[1] - https://www.virustotal.com/old-browsers/
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-19 02:40:36+00:00
> Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport, a global logistics firm, warned in a series of posts on X that ocean freight bookings from China are down 50 percent since Trump's tariffs hit. That could potentially wipe out as much as $1 trillion in economic activity if the tariffs remain in place for a full year, he estimated.

Thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1912890256216695002.html
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-19 02:43:12+00:00
Large Language Models are not 8 years old. GPT-3 or arguably GPT-2 is the first LLM.

Moreover, I can think of 0 revolutionary technologies that did what you've said in such timelines. The Internet, Smartphones, The Steam Engine - the idea that revolutionary technology is created and everything changes in an instant is bizarre fiction.

And how well would you know really? Not everyone using LLMs internally is screaming about it from the rooftops.
by halosghost | 2025-04-19 02:44:14+00:00
As opposed to overly-engineered websites that hijack [0] scroll-behavior, which only increase anxiety and fury.

ಠ_ಠ

All the best,

-HG

[0]: web-designers take-note, the normal term [1] in the field for doing this refers to violent crime. Think on your sins.

[1]: https://robinrendle.com/notes/scrolljacking/
by legitster | 2025-04-19 02:45:30+00:00
> “It was malpractice on the side of Harvard’s lawyers not to pick up the phone and call the members of the antisemitism task force who they had been talking to for weeks,” said May Mailman, the White House senior policy strategist. “Instead, Harvard went on a victimhood campaign.”

So what was supposed to be the most "transparent" administration is upset that people don't want to resign to secretive backroom dealings.
by 2020-3030 | 2025-04-19 02:45:37+00:00
The last line of the article says, "The ultimate concern is a panopticon of a single federal database with everything that the government knows about every single person in this country,” Venzke says. “What we are seeing is likely the first step in creating that centralized dossier on everyone in this country.”

The article also mentions how DOGE is integrating voting records from PA and FL.

Americans should reject this, but any administration will be tempted to keep it once such systems are made.
by lwo32k | 2025-04-19 02:45:55+00:00
Same thing can be said about any religion.

There is a reason there are elaborate stories, rituals, prayers, pilgrimages etc etc in all religions. Its not an accident. All these practices, with the prime feature being Repetition, allows for a mental shift to happen/different parts of the brain are kept repeatedly activated, compared to the ones constantly responding to source of depression/stress/anxiety. This opens the door for a focus shift.

The key point is, it might have an effect on people positively, but doesn't change the environment (and the triggers) people return too.

Therefore at best these are coping mechanisms, until we have holistic approaches, where the people and the environment they are in or return too are both being looked at. Not just one or the other and hoping for the best.
by Guthur | 2025-04-19 02:46:16+00:00
There are issues with our current economic model and it blows down to rent. The service need model is allowing the owners and controllers of capital to set up systems that allow them to extract as much rent as possible, AI is just another approach to this.

And then if it is successful for building, as you say we'll have yet another production issue as that building is essentially completely automatic. Read how over production has affect society for pretty much ever and then ask yourself will it really be good for the masses.

Additionally all the media is so thoroughly captured that we're in "1984" yet so few people seem to realise it. The elites will start wars, crush people's livelihoods and brainwash everyone into being true believers as they march their sons to war while living in poverty.
by lern_too_spel | 2025-04-19 02:46:52+00:00
> Uhm, yeah, no. Less bloated JS usually means less concerns but privacy violations and tracking of visitors can very much happen on AMP. Some of that risk isn't removed, just shifted.

Um, yeah, yes. The whole point of AMP (and competing proprietary formats like FBIA and ANF) is that the preloading happens from a cache owned by the link aggregator, so the publisher doesn't get your details just because its page was prerendered in the background. The link aggregator obviously already knows that you're browsing over the article link, so there is zero privacy loss.
by mdaniel | 2025-04-19 02:47:06+00:00
So, if I understand correctly:

- you spent $99 on this (plus your own development time, naturally)

- it requires a bleeding edge iPhone and only works on M1 Macs ("Compatibility: iPhone: Requires iOS 17.0 or later; Mac: Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.")

- it foregoes the largest mobile operating system in the world

- it doesn't even make you money

I believe Apple changed their tune and now allows PWA submissions to the App Store, if you're just using it for a marketing avenue. Almost certainly the same for the Play Store

Since it's iOS/M1 only, I shall not ask how it's different from Transit, as that would make it apples to oranges
by lucb1e | 2025-04-19 02:48:30+00:00
Right, I see. There's still the difference of having official permission according to the legal system, such as the search warrant being a mechanism codified in law, or the mechanism to get a license as an apothecary to operate a pharmacy

If there is no such license you can apply for, I'm not sure there exists a system by which you can be indemnified from criminal prosecution for doing such sales (or possession or whatever the case may be)

The question reminded me of a 2019 case where two parties went to the judge to get a ruling on something, without there being damages or claims. (Here, a potential buyer and seller could ask to decide whether a certain substance would be legal to sell before the sale happens, steering clear of prosecution until there is a ruling.) Reading that case back, the legal provision that made this possible only applies to situations where the parties are free to do whatever (such as with a contract dispute); it does not work for creating jurisprudence on criminal law. Asking ChatGPT as a quick last attempt, it proposes to ask a lawyer (you've shared how well that worked) or to sue the government over the law that makes the sale illegal which would be void if the judge goes "this substance doesn't fall under that law anyway" and then you've got jurisprudence to work with. The latter sounds a bit strange, not sure if that's actually possible, but it'd be worth exploring for such edge cases where it may or may not be criminal to do a certain thing

Of course, I totally see how this is a double standard: you've done your homework and to the best of everyone's knowledge it's legal, and then when it turns out you're wrong, whether you get sent to prison depends on whether it was the government who sanctioned it. Everyone can make an honest mistake, government or no

I don't know the intentions of the drugs dealers you have experience with. If there are legit purposes for the specific analog they were selling (that is, purposes falling outside of the spirit of the law that makes fentanyl (analogs) illegal) then it seems strange that a judge would send them to prison for years. Was a long prison sentence perhaps compulsory due to some minimum sentence requirement as part of this war on drugs thing? Wondering this since our government is implementing more and more minimum punishments despite research showing this does not deter the behavior and also increases recidivism due to the longer time you spend outside society, losing any position that you had in it. It's great
by Loughla | 2025-04-19 02:49:30+00:00
I don't know why you're being down voted.

Life absolutely is a nightmare. We live and struggle and people die horrible deaths for no reason. Children suffer. Then we die.

It's what you do with that. Give up? Or try to make your small part of the bullshit better for yourself and those around you?

Your point is 100% valid.
by londons_explore | 2025-04-19 02:49:50+00:00
0.7 m/s^2 is a typical acceleration for a city bus - most people won't fall over whilst standing at that acceleration.

A city bus perhaps holds 50 70kg passengers = 3.5 tons of cargo, and a lightweight bus design is perhaps 6.5 tons (typical bus=10 tons). Total = 10 tons.

Peak Power required to accelerate 0.7 m/s^2 up to 30 mph = 93 kilowatts.

Which is car territory. The cheapest tesla model 3 has a 208 kilowatt motor, so would be plenty enough power.
by card_zero | 2025-04-19 02:49:58+00:00
I mean, that's just physical work, Jesus could have carried his own damn cross if he'd been super-strong like Samson. (Possible bible fanfic idea? Make Jesus basically Samson, see how it pans out.)

But you're saying we can't quell our own anxieties. No auto-quelling. This is an interesting insight, although I think you overstate it because some auto-quelling seems to be possible. I am not very social, nor very anxious, but I suppose I take comfort in the output of others.

In fact you can see video games that way: an opportunity to accept other people (game creators) making your life better, relieving your stress and anxiety.
by jimmaswell | 2025-04-19 02:50:00+00:00
Hype is good. Hype is the explosion of exploration that comes in the wake of something new and interesting. We wouldn't be on this website of no one was ever hyped about transistors or networking or programming languages. Myriad people tried myriad ideas each time, and most of them didn't pan out, but here we are with the ideas that stuck. An armchair-naysayer like the author declaring others fools for getting excited and putting in work to explore new ideas is the only true fool involved.
by re-thc | 2025-04-19 02:50:37+00:00
> I fail to see how that's hype.

Server management, data center and related business existed ages ago. What's hype is this cloud? People are made to believe that cloud is not a server or servers.

It's an enhancement sure, but not something completely new or different.

> it underpins many of the largest internet companies out there

And most of them would be fine without it. Rent some racks. Run some servers. That's exactly why it's hype.