MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by closetkantian | 2025-04-04 07:02:24+00:00
I'm a college admissions consultant, and this doesn't surprise me at all. People don't realize how competitive the landscape has become. His test scores and GPA are average at the schools he applied to. Really you'd need to know how many APs he took and his AP scores to understand how colleges will treat his academic record.

To me, his college list indicates that he was mostly prestige hunting. There's nothing inherently wrong with that, but colleges can tell when a student wants to attend based just on branding. It comes across as if he wants to use college as a resume booster rather than as a place to grow.

The essay reads as a list of accomplishments, with little self-reflection. (Side note: referencing Steve Jobs is way overdone.)

Long story short, college admissions is not a VC pitch. If I had been this guy's advisor, I would have recommended he write an essay about something not related to Cal AI. Colleges will already know about the app from his activities list (and resume and, presumably, recommendation letters). There's a huge missed opportunity for him to write about something else.

The essays that worked for my students this year were often about more mundane topics that gave insight into their character. One of my favorites was from a student who started giving free haircuts to classmates. The essay implicitly shows that he's thoughtful and well-liked—someone you'd definitely want in your college community.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-04-04 07:02:28+00:00
It’s just funny, because there are hundreds of millions of instances of ChatGPT running all the time. Each chat is basically an instance, since it has no connection to all the other chats. I don’t think connecting them makes sense due to privacy reasons.

And, each chat is not autonomous but integrated with other intelligent systems.

So, with more multiplicity, I think thinks work differently. More ecologically. For better and worse.
by raxxorraxor | 2025-04-04 07:02:28+00:00
Tariffs will probably be bad, but on the other hand the old system didn't really work either in the long run. Perhaps he can bring some manufacturing back and I don't really believe consumer goods getting more expensive will be immediately felt. Could be wrong though.

Well, at least it might get interesting if you like crazy. I don't really believe those crying the loudest that they are particularly interested in combating inequality or are too interested in protecting low income people. Yes, maybe they need industries protected by tarrifs instead of cheap t-shirts. Maybe this perspective is rather stupid though. We will find out if that works or not. Economics projecting the next depression aren't really sources to trust either.
by globular-toast | 2025-04-04 07:02:45+00:00
Yeah, something has been lost in current generations. I'm reminded of Asimov's Foundation books where the protagonist dies at the beginning but leaves behind the foundations of a thousand-year plan to rebuild civilisation after the collapse that he predicts including a time capsule that opens following predicted crises.

I feel like such ideas are of a time, namely the 1950s when things were looking up. Nowadays I feel like everyone is aware that Earth is basically finished but we have no way off of it, so they just try to squeeze as much joy as they can before they die without any thought towards the future at all.

This even comes out in smaller cycles like writing software that works today with no thought about how it will look in a decade. I feel like the stuff they were doing even in 90s was done with the intention of being around for a very long time. Now it's like, yagni, just write any old shit that works.
by jl6 | 2025-04-04 07:02:56+00:00
> There are approximately zero people who decide they'll create something if they're protected for 95 years after their death but won't if it's 94 years.

I’m sure you’re right for individual authors who are driven by a creative spark, but for, say, movies made by large studios, the length of copyright is directly tied to the value of the movie as an asset.

If that asset generates revenue for 120 years, then it’s slightly more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 119 years, and considerably more valuable than an asset that generates revenue for 20 years.

The value of the asset is in turn directly linked to how much the studio is willing to pay for that asset. They will invest more money in a film they can milk for 120 years than one that goes public domain after 20.

Would studios be willing to invest $200m+ in movie projects if their revenue was curtailed by a shorter copyright term? I don’t know. Probably yes, if we were talking about 120->70. But 120->20? Maybe not.

A dramatic shortening of copyright terms is something of a referendum on whether we want big-budget IP to exist.

In a world of 20 year copyright, we would probably still have the LOTR books, but we probably wouldn’t have the LOTR movies.
by jjice | 2025-04-04 07:04:32+00:00
You’re objectively correct in a business context, which is what most software is for. For me, seeing AI slop code more and more is just sad from a craft perspective.

Software that’s well designed and architected is a pleasure to read and write, even if a lower quality version would get the job done. I’m watching one of the things I love most in the world become more automated and having the craftsmanship stripped out of it. That’s a bit over dramatic from me, but it’s been sad to watch.
by Jensson | 2025-04-04 07:04:55+00:00
US has very strong unions, you don't have anything close to SAG-AFTRA in Europe since such strong unions are illegal. European unions are just big, but their are reigned in by laws much more.

So yeah I think weakening the protections unions from workers in USA enjoys would lead to more people joining them, since there is less risk in doing so. Most people don't wanna work in an industry dominated by something like the screen actors guild.
by owenpalmer | 2025-04-04 07:05:30+00:00
My reasoning for evaluating the relevancy of this app:

1. If the food being scanned has a nutrition label, I don't need this app.

2. If there's no nutrition label, the app can't possibly extrapolate the nutritional information. It can't estimate portion size or the ingredients in the recipe.

3. If the app can't extrapolate nutritional information, I don't need this app.

4. I don't need this app.
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-04 07:05:55+00:00
I have counterpoints to that, but my main disagreement is where you draw the line. This feels arbitrary. You look at present energy expenditure as waste, if the asset itself is not consumed for an equally arbitrary reason that you approve of, or generates an even more valuable asset or ongoing revenue stream. I view it as all intertwined with commodity economics whether prices are cyclical, seasonal, or permanently bullish. Low float assets aren’t controversial, a small trading or consumed supply dictates the value of the entire supply, for balance sheets, lending, securitization and more.

Thanks for explaining your preference.
by watwut | 2025-04-04 07:06:07+00:00
> Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny.

Not true. This is simply not what they want.

> Democrats want to pursue safety from guns. Republicans want to pursue safety from tyranny. Both sides care about personal safety.

Republicans wants to ensure their opponents are sufficiently tyrannized. They care much less about safety, systematically. They even openly look down on those who care about safety, not seeing them sufficiently manly.

> Do Republicans care about human rights?

Not much. Openly not much so, Musk called empathy the biggest weakness of western civilization. Trumps and Musks moves clearly do not care about human rights, republicans stand by them.

> Do Democrats care about domestic prosperity? Yes.

Yup, they do. I am not really sure about republicans anymore, given last moves.

> The real problem is the one you are contributing to: the unwillingness to empathize. Empathy is the only way to come to a compromise. With a little empathy you might even find that you have to compromise less because you might actually convince someone of your argument, for once.

These people vote for Trump and Vance and see empathy as a weakness. That is not compromise, that is capitulation to a lie. You want one side to dominate and have everything they do excused. The other one should be nice, submissive and empathetic. But this is based on lies - lies about what republicans actually do and lies about their motivation. Lies to make them sound better. And lies about what democrats actually do - lies to make them sound worst.
by planb | 2025-04-04 07:06:27+00:00
> Well, precisely. What then is the AI company's justification for charging money to paint a picture of Harrison Ford to its users?

Formulated this way, I see your point. I see the LLM as a tool, just like photoshop. From a legal standpoint, I even think you're right. But from a moral standpoint, my feeling is that it should even be okay for an artist to sell painted pictures of Harrison Ford. But not to sell the same image as posters on ebay. And now my argument falls apart. Thanks for leading my thoughts in this direction...
by ultimaweapon | 2025-04-04 07:07:11+00:00
For me lack of language specification is not a problem and it is good that Rust only have one implementation so I don't have a headache to support multiple compilers like C++. The only problems I have with trait is lack of const function and trait upcasting, which just solved by 1.86 that released yesterday. For iterator type mismatched it does not cause much problem since I can create a dedicated generic function to handle that.

The major problem for me with Rust is deadlock. In Rust it is very easy to cause a deadlock compared to other languages. In other languages you need to think a lot before locking a mutex but in Rust you just `foo.lock().unwrap()`, which can easily cause a deadlock if you have multiple mutexes and someone in your team does not aware the lock order.
by infthi | 2025-04-04 07:08:16+00:00
if someone gets Indiana on the suspiciously detailed request the author provided and it appears they wanted something else, they can clarify that to the chat bot, e.g. by copying this your comment.

I have a strong suspicion that many human artists would behave in a way the chat bot did (unless they start asking clarifying questions. Which chatbots should learn to do as well)
by noduerme | 2025-04-04 07:08:24+00:00
Interesting you should bring that up:

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/1517ldjmv

Loads of lawsuits have been filed by celebrities and their estates over the unauthorized use of their likeness. And in fact, in 2022, Las Vegas banned Elvis impersonators from performing weddings after a threat from the Presley estate's licensing company:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10872855/Elvis-imag...

But there are also a couple key differences between putting on a costume and acting like Elvis, and using a picture of Elvis to sell soap.

One is that a personal artistic performance could be construed as pastiche or parody. But even more importantly, if there's a financial incentive involved in doing that performance, the financial incentive has to be aligned more with the parody than with drawing an association to the original. In other words, dressing up as Elvis as a joke or an act, or even to sing a song and get paid to perform a wedding is one thing if it's a prank, it's another thing if it's a profession, and yet another thing if it's a mass-marketing advertisement that intends for people to seriously believe that Elvis endorsed this soap.
by mpweiher | 2025-04-04 07:09:12+00:00
Hmm....that's a cool writeup but not really what I was looking for. Anyway, let's take the phone configuration he mentions:

"The A51 featured eight slow cores (4x2.3 GHz Cortex-A73 and 4x1.7 GHz Cortex-A53) on a 10nm process"

Looking at Wikipedia, it also has at least 4 GB of RAM and comes with 4G Internet.

The Alcatel 1 also seems to have at least a 1 GHz CPU and at least a gigabyte of RAM.

I also had a look at the Samsung Galaxy Watch. Lowest spec I could find was 1 GHz dual core + 768MB RAM (bluetooth), 1.5 GB (LTE).

The machine I was doing the web-based Postscript rendering on was a PowerMac G3. Single core 32 bit processor running at 266 MHz and and with 192MB of RAM. Connection was early DSL, 768 KB down, I think 128 KB up.

I did not do any heroic optimizations, it was fast "as-is".

So I think my point stands that modern computers, including low end Smartphones and watches are incredibly powerful and fast, including the networks.

If your tech stack manages to bring that hardware to its knees for basic UI rendering, and requires a lot of optimization effort to run barely reasonably, then there is something fundamentally wrong with your tech stack.
by nottorp | 2025-04-04 07:10:23+00:00
So, most low level functions that enumerate the files in a directory return a structure that contains the file data from each file. Including size. You already have it in memory.

Your brilliant AI calls another low level function to get the file size on the file name. (also did worse stuff but let's not go into details).

Do you call reading the file size from the in memory structure that you already have a speed optimization? I call it common sense.
by Jensson | 2025-04-04 07:10:28+00:00
> The current administration refers to inclusion of PoC and women as "DEI", so when they talk about ending DEI, that's what they mean.

I call bullshit on them wanting to ban women and black people from colleges, that is not what they mean when they say end "DEI", you are crazy.

Can you post a single link where they even hinted at wanting to ban black people and women from colleges? That is such an egregious accusation that you need more than just that they took down a page about a black guy.
by carpo | 2025-04-04 07:10:41+00:00
I agree, but only to an extent. For me, the passion changed over time. I used to love getting an O'Reilly tome and learning something new, but now I don't really want to learn the latest UI framework, library/API or figure out how a client configures their DI container. If the AI can do most of that stuff, and I just leverage my knowledge of all the frameworks I've had to use, it's a huge timesaver and means I can work on more things at once. I want to work on the core solution, not the cruft that surrounds it.

I agree though that the Studio Ghibli trend feels off. To me, art like this feels different to code. I know that's probably heresy around these parts of the internet, and I probably would have said something different 15-20 years ago. I know that coding is creative and fulfilling. I think I've just had the fun of coding beat out of me over 25 years :) AI seems to be helping bring the fun back.
by FeepingCreature | 2025-04-04 07:10:43+00:00
IMO the natural effect of this will be to massively devalue any individual cultural artifact, and that this will also achieve the benefit of defanging the big copyright holders. Is it the right way to go about it? No. Is it an insult to anyone who ever got nabbed for piracy? Sure. But tbh as a pirate voter I'll still very much take it.
by akx | 2025-04-04 07:11:08+00:00
> Using pip-installed libraries brings in the famous packaging problems, but you don't have to use it!

These days, with uv and PEP 723 inline script metadata, that's not an issue either.

# /// script # dependencies = ["numpy"] # requires-python = ">=3.12" # /// import numpy as np

and

uv run myscript.py

will just Do The Right Thing.
Ask HN: What Are Your Experiences with RAG and LLMs in Non-English Languages?
by fforflo | 2025-04-04 07:11:19+00:00
I’ve been working on some projects with Greek-language data and have encountered some interesting challenges with RAG and LLMs. In an English-speaking universe, it's relatively straightforward to have a decent prototype in a short time. But in other languages, it has proven a bit trickier.

I’m curious to hear from others working with non-English languages—what challenges have you faced? Some areas of interest: - Models that are more open to switch language - Availability and quality of language-specific retrieval corpora - Differences in tokenization and embedding quality - Handling multilingual queries and responses - Any workarounds or best practices you’ve discovered

Would love to hear both success stories and pain points.
by jajko | 2025-04-04 07:11:37+00:00
My wife is an opposite of power user and she now uses mostly chatgpt for anything more complex. The ease with fluent sentence search compared to trying to fit those few right terms that google search would understand, not overdo it, avoid over-SEO-ed pages... google search has been gamed for so long it became victim of its own success. It just has momentum but thats waning.

Plus often first results are pure ads, fuck that and fuck them. Maybe LLMs will one be gamed similarly, then we move to something else but right now its night and day even for common folks. Who cares knows it.

Just recent case - we were looking for a robot vacuum cleaner. Spent an hour battling shitty seoed crap sites in google search like nytimes with their paid very selective biased reviews, went over quite a few reliable ones, user reviews etc and came to my wife with list of preference vs cost vs reliability vs other aspects. She puts a short sentence in chatgpt and its the same freakin' list, in 20s.
by jessekv | 2025-04-04 07:12:56+00:00
Its also one of the more controversial features and its introduction sparked Guido's stepping down.

Since it was introduced, I have been looking but there has been only a handful of times where I could use it to write clearer code.

I'm curious if anyone actually likes it.

edit: A quick search shows that I do use it regularly in while loops, e.g.:

while result := my_fun(): ...
by jabl | 2025-04-04 07:13:48+00:00
I'm not familiar at all with the Ferrocene specification, but in general I do wonder if the ISO C/C++/Fortran (singling these out as I'm somewhat familiar with them, not saying there aren't other languages with similar spec processes) process of a prose spec is really the best way to go in this day and age? Those languages certainly have their historical reasons for the specs being the way they are, but I'm not convinced it's the only right way of doing a spec if starting from scratch today.

Say, what about something like a formal machine-parsable spec and/or a testsuite that describes the way the language should behave, rather than a prose description that then each compiler writer interprets to the best of their ability?
by atoav | 2025-04-04 07:14:53+00:00
Also consider secondary effects. If you have a steel tariff anything that uses steel is more expensive. A lot of things use steel, so a lot of things get more expensive. Now thr sellers of those things have to make their stuff more expensive, at some point this increases some of the costs of a service company, e.g. energy bill, rent, the cost of computers and office stuff. A VFX company is more far removed from the steel market than a steel shop would be, but it still is not totally decoupled.

But we are not talking about a tariff on steel, we are talking about a tariff on everything.
by hobofan | 2025-04-04 07:15:28+00:00
Yes, they could be, but then you 100% rely on the client tools doing a good job doing that, which they aren't always good at, and they also have to reinvent the wheel on what are becoming essentially commodity features.

E.g. one of the biggest annoyances for me with cursor was external documentation indexing, where you hand it the website of a specific libarary and then it crawls and indexes that. That feature has been completely broken for me (always aborting with a crawl error). Now with a MCP server, I can just use one that is specialized in this kind of documentation indexing, where I also have the ability to tinker with it if it breaks, and then can use that in all my agentic coding tools that need it (which also allows me to transfer more work to background/non-IDE workflows).
by preisschild | 2025-04-04 07:15:59+00:00
> You can’t run arbitrary programs of your choice on an Android phone without rooting, or on an iPad or an iPhone without jailbreaking.

Since when? You can easily run your self-built / third party apps on Android WITHOUT ROOTING and without paying / getting verified by google. Not-rooting only prevents you from circumventing the Android security model (dedicated toggles for each permission)
by adrianmsmith | 2025-04-04 07:16:21+00:00
> you also will be sued into oblivion by Disney if you paint a picture of Mickey Mouse advertising your soap, so why should it be any different if an AI painted this for you?

If the AI prompt was "produce a picture of Micky Mouse", I'd agree with you.

The creators of AI claim their product produces computer-generated images, i.e. generated/created by the computer. Instead it's producing a picture of a real actual person.

If I contract an artist to produce a picture of a person from their imagination, i.e. not a real person, and they produce a picture of Harrison Ford, then yeah I'd say that's on the artist.
by weinzierl | 2025-04-04 07:16:51+00:00
In math = is used for equality and := for definition[1] which is probably the closest thing to assignment in a programming language. That is why Pascal and similar languages use = for equality only and := for assignment.

That always made more sense to me than = for assignment and more =s for different kinds of equality, but in the end this syntax discussions are always just bike-shedding.
by jstummbillig | 2025-04-04 07:17:04+00:00
> The scary thing is: I have seen professional human developers write worse code.

That's not the scary part. It's the honest part. Yes, we all have (vague) ideas of what good code looks like, and we might know it when we see it but we know what reality looks like.

I find the standard to which we hold AI in that regard slightly puzzling. If I can get the same meh-ish code for way less money and way less time, that's a stark improvement. If the premise is now "no, it also has to be something that I recognize as really good / excellent" then at least let us recognize that we have past the question if it can produce useful code.
by lukasb | 2025-04-04 07:17:12+00:00
In my app the user could have an arbitrary number of long documents open on mobile at the same time, vertically stacked. (This UX makes sense for my app because most docs are daily journal entries.) Sticky headers are very useful here.

Now I’m just waiting for scroll-timeline or scroll-state to hit GA so I can shrink stickied headers in pure CSS.
by concordDance | 2025-04-04 07:17:38+00:00
I probably have a skewed sample, but in my observations those with the best reasoning skills tended to have a mix of views that would be labelled "left" and "right". The better the reasoning skills the less likely they were to just agree with things like "trans women are women" or "capitalism is the best economic system" and the more likely they were to dissect the statement and terms.
by preisschild | 2025-04-04 07:18:31+00:00
I'd much rather have it just use the system time, which is already available over a javascript API. I wish it just were included in your html form datetime-local request.

https://caniuse.com/mdn-javascript_builtins_intl_datetimefor...

or appending the `Date().getTimezoneOffset();` to receive a ISO8601 timezone offset
by exodust | 2025-04-04 07:18:49+00:00
If you're handing out red cards for repetition, aren't you guilty of the same infringement? You repeated the exact same prompt, which is itself an obvious bait for AI to draw the pop-culture lookalike.

I'm surprised by the comments here. When your prompt is so mind-numbingly simple, an obvious "dare" for AI to be a naughty little copyright infringer, can you blame it for dishing up the "big mac" you asked for while sitting in a fancy restaurant?

Don't want Indiana Jones? Don't ask for Indiana Jones!