MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by thaumasiotes | 2025-04-04 03:03:15+00:00
> All I know is the default browser behavior for anchor links within a page has real usability issues when you have anchored headings at the bottom of the page.

Yes, you click on the link and the text you were supposed to have jumped to is in the wrong place.

But the "solution" here takes this very problem and expands it to cover the entire sample article instead of just the bottom of the sample article. How is that an improvement?
by BrenBarn | 2025-04-04 03:03:37+00:00
It's become almost comical to me to read articles like this and wait for the part that, in this example, comes pretty close to the beginning: "This isn’t a rant against AI."

It's not? Why not? It's a "wake-up call", it's a "warning shot", but heaven forbid it's a rant against AI.

To me it's like someone listing off deaths from fentanyl, how it's destroyed families, ruined lives, but then tossing in a disclaimer that "this isn't a rant against fentanyl". In my view, the ways that people use and are drawn into AI usage has all the hallmarks of a spiral into drug addiction. There may be safe ways to use drugs but "distribute them for free to everyone on the internet" is not among them.
by giantg2 | 2025-04-04 03:04:12+00:00
Overall, I believe the number was something like 46%+ had a college degree of an associate or higher. So it's not just the top few percent. But I do agree that many areas of the US, especially in specific subjects, are lacking. But that sort of ties back to my comment on culture since the voters and locals have some influence on what is taught or what is not.
by dcow | 2025-04-04 03:09:23+00:00
We're talking about copyright in this subthread, in the context of AI. I'm not sure how a copyleft slant implies pro-ai, but whatever. There are a lot of reasons to be dubious about AI. But "AI is going to destroy human creativity and ingenuity" is not one that concerns me. And "society would be better without AI" is not an axiom I hold, so yeah I'll respond to that type of supposition when it's thrown into an otherwise interesting discussion.

I could just be wrong about Snow White's original copyright. As indicated by my use of "I imagine", no I didn't search the origins of it. I'm not seeing a big "double down" moment where I asserted that Snow White is definitely owned by Disney--that would be the cinch. In fact nothing about my reply contradicted the GGP adding that maybe Snow White isn't the best example. Why are you so bothered? Anyway, Snow White doesn't have a recent progenitor then it kinda proves the point that the world works perfectly well in the absence of copyright, and that the ability to freely remix culture is a fundamental human right. TIL that Snow White was originally a German fairytale and I'm relieved that Disney hasn't asserted copyright over it.
by crm9125 | 2025-04-04 03:11:44+00:00
Similar sentiment here. I taught myself python a decade ago after college, and used it in side projects, during my masters degree, in a few work projects. So it's been handy, but also required quite a bit of time and effort to learn.

But I've been using Claude to help with all kinds of side projects. One recently was to help create and refine some python code to take the latest Wikipedia zipped XML file and transform/load it locally into a PostgreSQL DB. The initial iteration of the code took ~16 hours to unzip, process, and load into the database. I wanted it to be faster.

I don't know how to use multiple processes/multi-threading, but after some prompting, iterating, and persistent negotiations with Claude to refine the code (and an SSD upgrade) I can go from the 24gb zip file to all cleaned/transformed data in the DB in about 2.5 hours. Feels good man.

Do I need to know exactly what's happening in the code (or at lowers levels, abstracted from me) to make it faster? not really. Could someone who was more skilled, that knew more about multi-threading, or other faster programming languages, etc..., make it even faster? probably. Is the code dog shit? it may not be production ready, but it works for me, and is clean enough. Someone who better knew what they were doing could work with it to make it even better.

I feel like LLMs are great for brainstorming, idea generation, initial iterations. And in general can get you 80%+ the way to your goal, almost no matter what it is, much faster than any other method.
by Animats | 2025-04-04 03:11:50+00:00
You have to use machine filtering of some kind, because there's too much information.

A director of NSA, pre 9/11, once remarked that the entire organization produced about two pieces of actionable intelligence a day, and about one item a week that reached the President. An internal study from that era began "The U.S. Government collects too much information".

But that was from the Cold War era, when the intelligence community was struggling to find out basic things such as how many tank brigades the USSR had. After 9/11, the intel community had to try to figure out what little terrorist units with tens of people were up to. That required trolling through far too much irrelevant information.
by morsecodist | 2025-04-04 03:13:26+00:00
This is great timing. I am in the process of designing an event/workflow driven application and nothing I looked at felt quite right for my use case. This feels really promising. Temporal was close but it just felt like not the perfect fit. I like the open source license a lot it gives me more confidence designing an application around it. The conditionals are also great. I have been looking for something just like CEL and despite my research I had never heard of it. It is exactly how I want my expressions implemented, I was on the verge of trying to build something like this myself.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-04-04 03:13:29+00:00
Torrent sites deliver the movie in its original form. AI models maintain abstract descriptions of the content as individually-unrecognizable high-dimensional representations in latent space.

Over the years we've spent a lot of time on this and similar sites questioning the sanity of a legal system that makes math illegal, and, well, that's all this is. Math.

To the extent the model reproduces images from Indiana Jones and the others, it is because these multibillion-dollar franchises are omnipresent cultural icons. The copyright holder has worked very hard to make that happen, and they have been more than adequately repaid for their contribution to our shared culture. It's insane to go after an AI model for simply being as aware of that imagery and as capable of reproducing it as a human artist would be.

If the model gives you infringing material as a prompt response, it's your responsibility not to use that material commercially, just as if you had tasked a human artist with the same vague requirement and received a plagiarized work product in return.
by bsder | 2025-04-04 03:13:57+00:00
> But at the same time the US „antiracist“ campaign itself looks just like (reverse) racism in many case.

And what do you propose instead? I'm not seeing the EU doing any better than the US with their lowest socioeconomic class groups.

Talking points are nifty. But, at some point, you have to propose an actual solution that does something.

Bigotry exists. What are you going to do about it? It seems that the most popular answers right now vary from "Not a goddamn thing" to "Fuck those bastards."

(In reality, I'm pessimistic that there is much that can be actively done. The bigots who threw slurs at my immigrant ancestors didn't so much get better as much as just change epithets and targets. Sadly, so it goes.)
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-04 03:14:03+00:00
Nah. It was a totally different world. These companies were competing around proprietary advantages at the OS or hardware level that became less and less relevant over time. HP self-immolated itself and you were left with IBM and Sun.

Only IBM survived, and that’s because it won key contracts in the 60s and 70s to run verticals and business systems, and essentially leveraged mainframe financing and legacy contracts to cross-sell everything. On the tech side, they parlayed that into a sustainable business by virtualizing everything and sharing the Power platform. They get some new business for AIX, but it’s mostly that legacy business.

A good chunk of DEC’s and Compaq’s Business was running terminal (as in tty) operations for mainframes. That went endangered with NT 3.5 and extinct with NT 4. As Linux improved, Intel was good enough. ARM is doing to Intel what Intel did to everyone.
by musicale | 2025-04-04 03:14:16+00:00
> F# and Age of Empires

;-) I have never disliked MS games, or Xbox, or Game Pass.

I also dislike Teams, but Microsoft has integration, which means that it works with Outlook's calendar, with Office documents, etc. It's mediocre but full-featured.

I wonder what would have happened if Google Docs had evolved into a credible MS Office competitor? It's also amazing that Skype (and Hangouts/Meet for that matter) had such a head start over Zoom.
by furyofantares | 2025-04-04 03:14:26+00:00
I think we have all grown up with pervasive strong IP rights, and most people have come to internalize it as a matter of fairness or an almost natural right, rather than a practical tool designed to incentivize creation.

And then even if you get past that, the world is filled with lots of IP we love, and it is easy to imagine weakened IP rights taking that away, but quite difficult to imagine what weakened IP rights might buy us.

I do have some hope still that this generative AI stuff will give a glimpse into the value of weaker IP rights and maybe inspire more people to think critically about it. But I think it is an uphill battle. Or maybe it will take younger people growing up on generative AI to notice.
by baranul | 2025-04-04 03:14:32+00:00
Not only are the poor going to bear the brunt of these tariffs, but this has been tried multiple times before, and failed. As in, catastrophic failure.

"Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it"

People should check out all the tariff insanity before and during the period of The Great Depression. That includes the justifications given.
by uejfiweun | 2025-04-04 03:14:46+00:00
The media FUD around top tax brackets continues to astound me. I'm seeing articles saying that taxes will be hiked for "the richest americans." And then you look into it and they're actually talking about the highest earners. Which is COMPLETELY different from the "richest" people. And then there's this, where the headline reads "millionaires" and in reality it's people earning over 1m per year... basically the opposite of the first scenario.

Are journalists really just this stupid? Do they not understand the difference between wealth and income?
by xp84 | 2025-04-04 03:16:29+00:00
Yes, exactly. US. Every millennial has Gmail, idk what GenZ does, probably also Gmail. GenX and Boomers probably split between Gmail, Yahoo, iCloud, and a few AOLs - and that covers probably 95% of Americans.

It was almost embarrassing for me, I have to admit — especially times when I’d been clever about it and set up, say, searsaccount@myname.com as a forwarder, and the cashier at Sears needed my email address. They once asked me oh, do you work for Sears?
by Proofread0592 | 2025-04-04 03:16:41+00:00
> For now, this is a rough comparison that helps us keep AI energy use in perspective - especially next time someone says chatbot use is causing an energy disaster.

The main concern isn't energy use from AI, it's how companies are getting that energy, and how much their emissions are increasing due to it. [Google says its total greenhouse gas emissions climbed nearly 50% over five years, mostly due to electricity that powers AI data centers](https://www.npr.org/2024/07/10/nx-s1-5028558/artificial-inte...). [Chevron to build gas plants to power data centers amid AI boom](https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/chevron-partners-wit...). [Electric utility companies are building more power plants that will burn natural gas to meet demands of a data center construction boom](https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2024/11/1...). Considering this, the argument this piece makes falls apart rather quickly.
by joshdavham | 2025-04-04 03:17:04+00:00
> I hope we're wrong about a lot of this, and AGI turns out to either be impossible, or much less useful than we think it will be.

For me personally, I hope that we do get AGI. I just don't want it by 2027. That feels way too fast to me. But AGI 2070 or 2100? That sounds much more preferable.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-04 03:17:42+00:00
Shifting goalposts usually (at least in my understanding) refers to changing something without valid justification that was explicitly set in a previous step (subjective wording I realize - this is off the top of my head). In an adversarial context it would be someone attempting to gain an advantage by subtly changing a premise in order to manipulate the conclusion.

An incomplete list, in contrast, is not a full set of goalposts. It is more akin to a declared lower bound.

I also don't think it to applies to the case where the parties are made aware of a change in circumstances and update their views accordingly.

> You feel that LLMs are not intelligent. I feel that they may be intelligent.

Weirdly enough I almost agree with you. LLMs have certainly challenged my notion of what intelligence is. At this point I think it's more a discussion of what sorts of things people are referring to when they use that word and if we can figure out an objective description that distinguishes those things from everything else.

> Without a decent definition of what intelligence is, the entire argument is silly.

I completely agree. My only objection is to the notion that goalposts have been shifted since in my view they were never established in the first place.
by wwweston | 2025-04-04 03:19:21+00:00
> I'm NOT trying to maintain my old 2002 Honda Civic

My 2004 Pontiac Vibe is the newest car I've owned -- drove a few GM cars and one Nissan into 200-300kmi territory before that. Saved me tens of thousands of dollars and got me where I needed to go.

Suppose that's consistent with me typing this on an old upgraded MBP.
by mmazing | 2025-04-04 03:19:46+00:00
When working with AI for software engineering assistance, I use it mainly to do three things -

1. Do piddly algorithm type stuff that I've done 1000x times and isn't complicated. (Could take or leave this, often more work than just doing it from scratch)

2. Pasting in gigantic error messages or log files to help diagnose what's going wrong. (HIGHLY recommend.)

3. Give it high level general requirements for a problem, and discuss POTENTIAL strategies instead of actually asking it to solve the problem. This usually allows me to dig down and come up with a good plan for whatever I'm doing quickly. (This is where real value is for me, personally.)

This allows me to quickly zero in on a solution, but more importantly, it helps me zero in strategically too with less trial and error. It let's me have an in-person whiteboard meeting (as I can paste images/text to discuss too) where I've got someone else to bounce ideas off of.

I love it.
by bigger_cheese | 2025-04-04 03:20:15+00:00
In "In the Beginning was the Command Line" Neal Stephenson used a car analogy to describe consumer operating systems, I always thought his analogy was pretty apt:

To paraphrase him a little bit:

Microsoft sells Family Station Wagons. Spare parts are cheap and plentiful and if they breakdown there is a huge network of dealerships with mechanics on staff.

Apple sells Luxury Sedans - nicer to drive than the station wagons but spare parts are uncommon and the oil changes are expensive.

Linux is represented by a group of volunteer hackers organized by consensus giving away tanks for free made from sophisticated space aged materials.

The observation he makes is 90% of people go straight to the biggest dealership and buy a station wagon without ever looking at any of the other options. They will make a bunch of excuses like "I Don't know how to maintain a tank" and get angry when told "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either", in the end their argument boils down to "can't you see everyone else is buying a station wagon"...
by SoftTalker | 2025-04-04 03:20:35+00:00
The TVs prior to the 1970s/solid state era were not very reliable. They needed repair often enough that "TV repairman" was a viable occupation. I remember having to turn on the TV a half hour before my dad got home from work so it would be "warmed up" so he could watch the evening news. We're still at that stage of AI.
by theamk | 2025-04-04 03:21:11+00:00
An interesting story!

I've also had an AI cheater during phone screen, but they were pretty clumsy... A question of form "You mentioned you used TechX on your resume, tell me more what you did with it" was answered with a long-winded but generic description of TechX and zero information about their project or personal contribution.

Another thing that I can take away from that is "take home project" is no longer a good idea in AI times - the simple ones that candidates can do in reasonable time is too easy for AI, and if we do realistic system, it's too hard for honest candidates.
by jwr | 2025-04-04 03:21:40+00:00
> That kind of job existing in the first place is the problem.

Yes, that was my initial reaction, too, when I first saw these people. I felt superior, in My Western World we didn't have jobs like that. We did Bigger and More Important Things. This job was surely an artifact, a silly attempt to reduce unemployment.

But after living in Japan for a while I realized that these jobs actually make a lot of sense. Those people pay attention and really do make sure that people do not get run over by trucks. They direct traffic, they make it easier for truck drivers, they make it easier and safer for people walking on the sidewalk as well. As a side effect, they also watch for unexpected things: if it's a roadwork site, theft, or even things like traffic cones toppling over, or safety lights not working correctly.

It really improves things for everyone.
by WalterBright | 2025-04-04 03:21:51+00:00
> Is this (A) mistyping the function open in module `std::io::file` or is it (B) the global/local `file` is missing from the current scope?

D uses a spell checker for undefined identifiers, and the dictionary is all the identifiers in scope. It has about a 50% success rate in guessing which identifier was meant, which is quite good.

> Also, "io", "file", "random" etc are commonly used variables, so the issue with shadowing is real.

If the same identifier is accessible through multiple lookup paths, an error is issued. If a local variable shadows a variable in an outer scope, and error is issued.

We've developed this over several years, and it works quite well.

Path shortening can be done with:

alias open = file.open;

or:

import io: open;
by chongli | 2025-04-04 03:22:49+00:00
Exactly. The idea of Indiana Jones, the adventurer archaeologist more at home throwing a punch than reading a book, is neither owned by nor unique to Lucasfilm (Disney). There is a ton of media out there featuring this trope character [1]. Yes, the trope is overwhelmingly associated with the image of Harrison Ford in a fedora within the public consciousness, but copyright does not apply to abstract ideas such as tropes.

Some great video games to feature adventurer archaeologists:

* NetHack (One of the best roles in the game)

* Tomb Raider series (Lara Croft is a bona fide archaeologist)

* Uncharted series (Nathan Drake is more of a treasure hunter but he becomes an archaeologist when he retires from adventuring)

* Professor Layton series

* La-Mulana series (very obviously inspired by Indiana Jones, but not derivative)

* Spelunky (inspired by La-Mulana)

[1] https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AdventurerArchae...
by xp84 | 2025-04-04 03:22:50+00:00
Ok. Taking this argument completely in good faith, does it follow that they think no country should be allowed to have any sales tax? Or that it’s an act of economic oppression for any country to have a higher sales tax than our country does? I’m just confused, do they propose every country should abolish all their sales taxes to appease this strange and pretty novel point of view.

I feel like Trump or whoever is running this import tax show has lost the plot on what they’re trying to accomplish.
by almosthere | 2025-04-04 03:25:43+00:00
You can't really tax wealth, most of it is not liquid. What would it mean to "tax" your ownership of stock in a company, or a property (yes property taxes already exist but don't go to the federal gov - at least I don't think they do).

How would you "tax" Elon's ownership percentage of SpaceX for example? Would the federal government simply start owning SpaceX shares, some additional percentage each year? And how would this happen, Elon would simply start a new company in Peru, and sell SpaceX entirely to that new entity.
by mmooss | 2025-04-04 03:25:51+00:00
> The policies didn't help the groups they were supposedly about helping

Do you have any evidence?

> Much like a right-winger or a Christian at one of these universities.

So is the first quote not based on evidence, but based on your ideology? There's no reason any vulnerable minority shouldn't be protected, though 'right-wingers' and Christians (usually meaning conservative Christians) are hardly vulnerable in the US, even if they are a minority on many campuses. They rule the country and always have, have access to every job and privilege.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-04 03:25:57+00:00
Your post was also popular in:

2017 (235 points, 26 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15498341

2016 (82 points, 16 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11378022

2015 (351 points, 42 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9886555
by lr4444lr | 2025-04-04 03:25:59+00:00
As for the roads example, which would go to my second point if I understand you correctly, I think the analogy is limited: roads aren't gate-kept by admissions committees for certain intangible criteria for who can ride on them, with an artificial limit on how many cars overall, while they receive federal funding. If that was happening, then you'd have a similar situation to what universities are doing.
by drweevil | 2025-04-04 03:26:38+00:00
These are the same people who say We can’t have socialism. Can’t have free stuff! There is no such thing as a free lunch, they’ll sagely add. But when it comes to the works and creations of the common folks, why, it’s an all you can eat buffet, and it’s a feeding frenzy. The future this will bring will be unstable and unpredictable. The time to regulate this is now.
by dezzadk | 2025-04-04 03:26:58+00:00
You are still downplaying the effort of Wine massively. Wine is several millions lines of code compared to Proton and it isn't just "syscalls", its decades of trial and error and bugfixing making a mature codebase that Proton is based on. You might think only DXVK matters, just because you are one of the manchilds who buys these extremely hollow GPU-intensive soulless games at launch just to be disappointed every single time.

You just plain out refuse to see it, cuz you totally drank the kool aid.

Steamdeck have literally zero AAA-games compared to Nintendo, because thats the joy of owning a Steamdeck! Smearing diapers in Nintendos face and pirating their games like a true neckbeard, right?

Steam neckbeards are such manchilds. The "idea" of a Steamdeck sells more than the actual games and this is what this article proves. Sad, but true.

The catalog of games on Steam suck, objectively. Unpopular opinion maybe - to those that are addicted to browsing shitty new soulless games on Steam.