MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by singingboyo | 2025-04-08 23:04:31+00:00
There are legitimate criticisms that AI is harming creative endeavours. AI output is sort of by definition not particularly innovative. By flooding spaces with repetitive AI work, it may be drowning out the basis for truly innovative creation. And maybe it does suppress development of skills it tries to replace.

The appropriation argument is somewhat unsound. Creative endeavors, by definition, build on what's come before. This isn't any different between code, creative writing, drawing, painting, photography, fashion design, music, or anything else creative. Creation builds on what came before, that's how it works. No one accuses playwrights of appropriating Shakespeare just because they write a tragic romance set in Europe.

The hyperbolic way you've made whatever arguments you had, though, is actively working against you.
by yellowapple | 2025-04-08 23:04:48+00:00
LLMs are still notorious for hallucination; last I checked ChatGPT in particular still hallucinates about 1/3rd of the time.

So yeah, I do still use search engines, specifically Kagi and (as a fallback) DuckDuckGo. From either of them I might tack on a !g if I'm dissatisfied with the results, but it's pretty rare for Google's results to be any better.

When I do use an LLM, it's specifically for churning through some unstructured text for specific answers about it, with the understanding that I'll want to verify those answers myself. An LLM's great for taking queries like "What parts of this document talk about $FOO?" and spitting out a list of excerpts that discuss $FOO that I can then go back and spot-check myself for accuracy.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-04-08 23:05:14+00:00
If they're using -e with pipefail you can't check PIPESTATUS because the shell has exited.

If you use pipefail without -e, nothing happens, except the return status of the line is different (and thus using the option is pointless unless you're checking return statuses/PIPESTATUS, which of course nobody who uses this option actually does, because they don't know how it works)

From the Bash manual:

The return status of a pipeline is the exit status of the last command, unless the pipefail option is enabled. If pipefail is enabled, the pipeline's return status is the value of the last (rightmost) command to exit with a non-zero status, or zero if all commands exit successfully. If the reserved word ! precedes a pipeline, the exit status of that pipeline is the logical negation of the exit status as described above. The shell waits for all commands in the pipeline to terminate before returning a value. pipefail If set, the return value of a pipeline is the value of the last (rightmost) command to exit with a non-zero status, or zero if all commands in the pipeline exit successfully. This option is disabled by default.

They don't mention how the rightmost command might be the one failing due to the lefthand one failing if it's trying to read data and fails, or from a signal handler, or if you have multiple commands in the pipe and it's the first one that failed, or multiple because (again) maybe they're feeding input to each other and two of them failed, etc.

The use of this option is an anti-pattern. You don't even need it because you can check PIPESTATUS without it.

Everybody uses pipefail because bloggers and people on HN say to use it, but without actually understanding what it's doing.
by gazebo64 | 2025-04-08 23:05:40+00:00
I think the most salient point the artists make in the article is that the process of ideating and iterating on art is just as valuable, if not moreso, than the end result. You can get a good looking image from an AI generator but miss out on the ideas and discoveries you would otherwise make by actually working on that art.

I think it's also unfortunate how the advocates for AI replacing artists in gamedev clearly think of art as a chore or a barrier to launch rather than being the whole point of what they're making. If games are art, then it stands to reason the.. art.. that goes into it is just as important as anything else. A game isn't defined just by the logic of the main loop.
by adas-safe-eng | 2025-04-08 23:06:46+00:00
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by laweijfmvo | 2025-04-08 23:08:07+00:00
I just very recently tried using ChatGPT for a situation where’d I’d typically search, draw some conclusions, search again, etc. Basically, planning an open ended vacation.

The biggest issue is when GPT returns something that doesn’t match your knowledge, experience, or intuition and you ask the “are you sure?” question, it seems to inevitably come back with “you’re right!”. But then why/how did it get it wrong the first time? Which one is actually true? So I go back to search (Kagi).

So for me, LLMs are about helping to process and collate large bodies information, but not final answers on their own.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-08 23:09:03+00:00
>nowhere do we want to isolate as a country. Look at all the jobless Americans in once thriving industrial cities. Generations left without pensions or skills all because we outsource our workers to other countries.

And we didn't pay for re-skilling, re-training, re-education. We didn't give them welfare benefits to hold over while they learned these new things. We did near nothing, and expected these areas simply to pick themselves back up organically.

Of course that failed. When you do little to nothing, you get little to nothing in return.

Tariffs and manufacturing aren't going to solve this fundamental problem, which is as industry demands shift they externalize the cost whenever possible, which leaves workers, cities and states with a poor deal. If you instead plan around the fact you can't micro manage the economy, but you can setup a meaningful floor that catches people when industry shifts and allows them to invest in themselves - without fear of losing their livelihood - to take advantage of the next opportunities or better yet, create new ones - you wouldn't have this problem in the first place.

Tariffs won't help. Bringing manufacturing - in whatever capacity does get brought back, it remains to be seen if this will even happen - won't help alleviate this in any meaningful way.

On top of all this, the tariffs are here, and there is little plan beyond simply implementing them and...waiting for industry to magically start manufacturing in the US again? What is the actual plan here?

I frankly can't understand the undeserved optimism. If we wanted to make things better for formerly industrial cities, we should have invested in them and their citizenry decades ago. We failed to do this meaningfully. Thats the real problem, and they aren't fixing that problem at all
by Rochus | 2025-04-08 23:10:14+00:00
A very interesting and worthwhile article (better than the comments here would suggest). However, I find it a bit of a pity that the author places so much emphasis on the assumption that the project has failed. The approach has not simply failed because the search for a solution has been going on for forty years. It took even more than forty years and costed at least as much before neural networks became really useful, and nobody would claim that the project failed because of that. And today's LLM are not really that intelligent yet. Maybe Cycorp's knowledge base will be made generally accessible at some point, so that it can be used to train LLMs. Perhaps then a greater benefit of this data will become apparent.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-04-08 23:10:31+00:00
I was amazed by China's behaviour in their trade war with Australia. They banned our coal. We were treated to the sight of Australia's coal transport ships as far as the eye could see sitting outside of China's ports. It caused havoc on the Australian side at the time, paying for all that shipping time, figuring out what to do with all the unwanted coal.

But China used that coal in their coal fired power stations. It was their winter. They were literally freezing in the dark. It went on for months.

FWIW, the usual take is Australia won that war. Australia didn't do anything in retaliation. We keep buying from China when they were cheapest, and busied ourselves by seeking out new markets for our products elsewhere. We would have been better off if it hadn't happened, but there was an upside - we developed new markets.

The trigger for all this was our then Prime Minister sided with Trump, in blaming China engineering COVID. True or not, poking the Pooh Bear like that was pure insanity. We got rid of that prime minister as soon at the next election.

Xi does take stands on principle, and he is willing to bear a lot of pain while doing so. If you doubt that, look at how he handled COVID. I don't think there can be much doubt that in a fight about principles between Trump and Xi, who is the most principled man. It isn't even close.
by riggsdk | 2025-04-08 23:10:56+00:00
How would you deal with this common issue in many multiplayer shooters?: - I see someone sniping - I go behind a wall to safety - I still die From the enemy snipers perspective I was still in view when he shot. From my perspective I was not. Many game servers only roll back time to validate from the shooter's perspective. In this case you'd want some logic to perhaps negotiate a compromise - like only dealing half damage.
by maw | 2025-04-08 23:11:05+00:00
I have memories of a similar escalator, probably at or near Downtown Crossing.

I don't remember it being made of wood, but I remember it being narrow and slanted downwards and kind of scary. Come to think of it, the station in general was very run down and a bit frightening to ~5yo me.

This would have been in the early to mid eighties.
by gazebo64 | 2025-04-08 23:11:06+00:00
>Yet no one with all his mind can deny that ai makes writing code faster, not necessarily better but faster, and games at the end are mostly codes.

It's actually quite easy, and not uncommon, to deny all of those things. Game code is complex and massively interwoven and relying on generative code that you didn't write and don't fully understand will certainly break down as game systems increase in complexity, and you will struggle to maintain it or make effective modifications -- so ignoring the fact that the quality is lower, there's an argument to be made that it will be "slower" to write in the long term.

I think it's also flat wrong to say games are "mostly codes" -- games are a visual medium and people remember the visual/audio experience they had playing a game. Textures, animations, models, effects, lighting, etc. all define what a game is just as much if not more than the actual gameplay systems. Art is the main differentiating factor between games when you consider that most gameplay systems are derivative of one another.
by wnissen | 2025-04-08 23:11:45+00:00
If I had to guess, it has more to do with the type of person who is willing to save diligently for decades. Government work (at least until the last few months) tended to be lower paying but steadier. The type of risk-averse person who takes a government job is also more likely to save over time, taking advantage of compounding. Just correlated, in other words.
by esbranson | 2025-04-08 23:12:06+00:00
> space aliens on Earth

I, like most UFO witnesses, can tell you we don’t think they’re human in origin. And disbelieving an entire fleet of military pilots and support officers as they explain under oath UFO videos they were involved with .. because of entertainment shows is, well, kinda funny in this context. Especially since NYT dropped those videos. I doubt any amount of journalism, testimony, or videos would change your mind as you say .. whatever it is you’re saying.
by TheGrognardling | 2025-04-08 23:14:26+00:00
Honestly, I'm pretty encouraged by all of the projects and efforts within legislation and organizations regarding clear lines being drawn - i.e., through watermarking to clearly label whether something is AI-generated or not - as well as the efforts by industries for livelihoods to be protected, specifically in the creative space, where human intentionality and feeling are still of the utmost essentiality. We've seen, are seeing, and will see cultural and societal acceptance and backlash against one thing or another, but I'm confident that we will adapt. Ultimately, pushback, thanks to the Web itself, is already pretty monumental among artists and even other AI researchers in many respects - regulations for the internet, largely due to lack of the Web, were far slower to materialize, on an exponential scale. I remain optimistic that we will find the niches where AI is needed, where it isn't, and where it is detrimental.
by keithnz | 2025-04-08 23:14:28+00:00
chatGPT search puts links through out its results and has a sources button that shows all the sources it used. Just a headsup as I think a few people are getting this wrong, this isn't chatgpt but chatgpt search, chatGPT search is trying to find source information and then summarizes it, you can then go to those source. It's up to date with all current events etc.
by schwartzworld | 2025-04-08 23:15:13+00:00
AI is mediocre at a lot of things, but it makes a damn fine upgrade from stock photos. This is the art that’s going to get replaced by this tech, shitty low effort stuff. Images where you just need a picture of X because people are expecting a picture.

It’s the same with code. I don’t think software engineers will really be replaced, but small web dev agencies have a good reason to be nervous. Why would you pay someone to make a website for your restaurant when 3-5 prompts will get you there?
by Finnucane | 2025-04-08 23:15:23+00:00
In ye olde dayes, indeed by hand. That's why there was often extra space after punctuation. In more mechanized times, the operator has to watch for it. Proofreaders are trained to watch for loose lines, rivers, widows, hyphenation errors, and other spacing problems. Those things will be marked as errors in proof. Even with modern DTP tools, typesetters still have to make a lot of manual corrections. Of course, for print, you're setting for a fixed format. You can do a lot of fine-tuning that a browser can't do on the fly.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-08 23:15:45+00:00
There are two main reasons that individuals don't build their own houses and cars from scratch.

1) They don't know how.

Specialization is a thing. But this is a thing that applies to individuals rather than nations. You don't need every person to know how to mine ore or hang drywall as long as somebody does. But a country the size of the US could certainly contain someone who knows how to do any given thing.

2) They get paid more to do something else.

This is the argument that you get paid $200,000 to be a doctor and people who mine ore get paid $80,000 so it's better for you to do $2000 more work as a doctor and then pay someone $800 for ore than to put on a miner's hat yourself.

But this is again something that applies to individuals rather than countries. There are people in the US who already get paid less than $80,000, or less than $30,000, or even who are unemployed. It makes no sense to convert doctors into miners but it makes plenty of sense for the people who are currently doing something that pays even less.
by yencabulator | 2025-04-08 23:16:16+00:00
Perhaps the suit wasn't the one level up that people are talking about? If you accidentally go 3 levels too formal, you've definitely ruined the initial impression.

Me personally, I like working at places where people can wear shorts and flip-flops. One level up is "pants and shoes, with socks", not even a collared shirt. Maybe a single-color new T-shirt, to be safe. A full suit would be an alarmingly bad read of the culture, and at that point we'd have made you come eat lunch at a burrito place to get a read on whether you're really a bad fit or just socially awkward.

The best thing I heard from an interviewee that was wearing a suit was that they interviewed elsewhere nearby that morning, and those people needed to be impressed with clothing.
by manquer | 2025-04-08 23:16:47+00:00
How so ? While it is P2P protocol, the network is pretty centralized.

UPI is owned by NPCI(gov entity) and runs on top of IMPS both the networks are strongly regulated by RBI the central bank.

There is fair amount of regulation and KYC/ AML requirements before an app/service gets direct access to the network and even then it can be pretty challenging. WhatsApp struggled for years to get UPI integration .

Holding money in a wallet has even more regulations than merely transferring it .

Payment networks tend to centralize by their nature. I see pix or UPI as competitor to Mastercard or VISA , they have proven it is possible to run a network far cheaper than claimed
by ww520 | 2025-04-08 23:16:57+00:00
Coincidentally I just did an asymptotic complexity analysis yesterday (something I rarely do). It seemed right since it's by the book but I wasn't sure. After running the extensive benchmarks on the algorithm, I was so happy to find the results matched the asymptotic prediction. The lesson is verify, verify, and always verify.

[1] Algorithm, https://github.com/williamw520/toposort/blob/master/Algorith...

[2] Benchmarks, https://github.com/williamw520/toposort/blob/master/README.m...
by mrangle | 2025-04-08 23:16:59+00:00
I remember saying the same thing about my girlfriend's conservative mother, in my mid-twenties, around the time when people were very worked up over GWB's supposed degradation of US World standing. It was a mistaken sentiment. What I didn't understand then is that they are voting for their interests. It's just that their and your idea of their interests differs, and they're obviously correct in their evaluation. Because they are them and you aren't. Common misperception.
by ethbr1 | 2025-04-08 23:17:44+00:00
> The advice in this article was to hold out as long as possible for a desirable job, which meant a ton of networking, taking internships if possible, and also possibly additional schooling.

Emphasis on the next actions to take.

Being in a graduating cohort affords you certain opportunities -- internships, career fairs, faculty-connected networking.

Post-graduation, and especially post-college, people don't have these same opportunities.

Fwiw, I'd lean very heavily into interning. Take an internship at the best company you can, that's likely to have solid financials and be hiring when you finish the internship.

Intern -> hire is a ridiculous cheat code for your first "in industry" job.

The employer decreases the risk of making a mistake on an unproven new grad. You get a job offer if you do enough solid work. Win/win.

Worst case (no job offer), you should push really hard for a solid recommendation letter from your direct or second level manager.
by haburka | 2025-04-08 23:19:01+00:00
> While keeping in mind that this isn't a field that I have a ton of practice in, I can confidently assert that a parser for HTML input that outputs CSS classnames does not need all of the following:

This is kind of an example of the Dunning Krueger curve. You’re admitting naivety while also claiming confidence, which should give pause.

The main issue I have with your argument is the framing - you’re trying to make your build tool as simple as possible to a developer like yourself which is not who the tools were built for or by. Context matters. Not everything is designed to work on 15 year old hardware and most developers would simply scoff at an engineer who thinks the best way to build software is with ancient hardware.

If you view everything as trying to use as little dependencies as possible (like a C programmer should) then you absolutely will think it’s bananas that this used 100 MB of dependencies. But if you have a different perspective, you may see that the dependencies don’t matter that much as long as it works.

In fact, by using common tools that have good interoperability, that are only used on a developer machine, it doesn’t matter too much what resources they use. Of course if you’re developing on a 2010 laptop with 16Gb of RAM then you may have issues but that’s not the open source developers problem. If all the open source developers had to fit your performance constraints then they would just not get much work done at all.

My main point is that developer tools don’t have to be light speed, they just have to be fast enough on modern hardware, which they absolutely are for frontend. I have enjoyed 3-5 second iterative builds on all my projects for the better part of 10 years.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-08 23:19:51+00:00
This was predictable, but demonstrates something very important about trust.

Trust is now gone. You can not trust America. This, and everything else, will harm generations of American's as every other country and person on the earth understands that our word means nothing. Today's promise is tomorrow's attack. If you give, we will take and give nothing back.

Everyone will at all times have to sink resources into being on guard and asking how every action potentially weakens or strengthens them.

Trust is the inverse of zero sum ideology. Trust means you can let your guard down just a little and spend a few less resources being on guard, but people with a zero sum ideology destroy this.
by tharne | 2025-04-08 23:19:58+00:00
> “Everything” may be a bit extreme, but seriously, have you already forgotten the lessons learned during the Covid supply shocks?

I don't why the mainstream media isn't focusing more on this angle. Five years ago the richest, most powerful, country in the world couldn't get basic medical supplies to its citizens during a public health crisis. That should have terrified us into making major policy changes, but instead everyone just seems to have shrugged it off and gone back to business as usual.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-08 23:20:20+00:00
> Maybe Cycorp's knowledge base will be made generally accessible at some point, so that it can be used to train LLMs.

More likely, it will be made increasingly irrelevant as open alternatives to it are developed instead. The Wikipedia folks are working on some sort of openly developed interlingua that can be edited by humans, in order to populate Wikipedias in underrepresented languages with basic encyclopedic text. (Details very much TBD, but see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia ) This will probably be roughly as powerful as the system OP posits at some point in the article, that can generate text in both English and Japanese but only if fed with the right "common sense" to begin with. It's not clear exactly how useful logical inference on such statements might turn out to be, but the potential will definitely exist for something like that too, if it's found to be genuinely worthwhile in some way.