MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by armchairhacker | 2025-04-29 21:11:03+00:00
I bet such experiments are very common.

I think it’s actually more ethical to conduct and publish them publicly, as long as names are redacted; so people become aware, then more distrustful and resilient to online manipulation. The key point is, I doubt punishment will meaningfully reduce these experiments, because it’s impossible to reliably detect AI-generated text and “experiments” from genuine conversation; it will only stop them from being public and deter those with moral goals. The next best solution is to reinforce the idea that many things on the internet are fake, and show people what to look out for; publishing studies like this does that.

A counter-argument is that the above reasoning works for many unethical acts, like petty shoplifting, and the world would be a worse place if people weren't nonetheless deterred. But I doubt it actually works for anything that isn't super-common; although it seems like you could easily get away with petty shoplifting, there are actually many ways stores can prevent it (cameras and EAS, and in more extreme cases locking items or employing receipt checkers), whereas a good AI-generated story is indistinguishable from a bland authentic one, and a smart AI using the web is indistinguishable from a human. Also, it's objectively worse for a store if e.g. 1100 people shoplift instead of 1000, but if 1100 bad actors manipulate people online, I don't know if it's worse than 1000; the extra people who are manipulated suffer, but online manipulation is so common they almost certainly suffer anyways, and once they suffer one time they become resilient to later manipulation. Lastly, this isn't "suffering" like physical harm or loss of property, and it already affects almost everybody, so if conducting public experiments has benefits, it may still be overall more ethical than doing nothing.

Reddit has extra incentive to sue these experimenters because it wants to be seen as genuine. But discouragement won’t affect its actual authenticity, and it makes its apparent authenticity worse because of the Streisand Effect. Instead, I suggest Reddit focuses on bot-proofing the site, then challenges people to manipulate it and publish their findings: “researchers tried to run a bot experiment on Reddit, but failed” would be much more favorable than “researchers ran a successful bot experiment on Reddit, now Reddit is suing them”. Unfortunately as mentioned, AI-generated text is indistinguishable from authentic text, so while Reddit can attempt to detect and ban bots, specifically I suggest it a) has some other mechanism (e.g. trusted and/or paid accounts) to reduce online manipulation to negligible levels, b) improves its algorithm so AI-generated content only gets upvoted if it's "good", or (if choosing b also) c) encourages its users to be more openly distrustful of its content (which could be just adding a prominent disclaimer "Be skeptical! Don't believe any stories or suggestions here without evidence! People lie on the internet, one person may use thousands of bots to fake a majority opinion, and moderators may have deleted the dissenting comments!").
by julik | 2025-04-29 21:11:20+00:00
This is a great presentation/article, thank you for posting it since I haven't seen it go by elsewhere.

What holds me, personally, from Sorbet is the fact that it tries (unwillingly) to dictate which features of Ruby are "bad" by not supporting them - specifically, "prepend" and Refinements. Now, Refinements I havent' seen used in the wild, but "prepend" I use the living hell of - both when designing modules and when overriding other libraries (with moderation, and when I do it is gawddam' well necessary).

While I can appreciate opinions, I am not really motivated to adopt a tool which snaps me on the fingers because I use the tools I know the utility of. I am not working at Stripe nor at Shop :-) Another thing I could really appreciate would be ad-hoc interfaces a-la Go - and more support for duck-typing in general. Maybe I missed this in Sorbet, but it seemed the idea was to "inherit like you are told to and shut up" - which is not how truly great things can get done in Ruby, at least in my experience.

Interesting to see where Sorbet goes in the coming years - and stoked for more RBS/Sorbet interplay!
by cesaref | 2025-04-29 21:11:48+00:00
If you look at professional distributed audio systems (Dante, AES67 etc) you'll find that they all require PTP support on the hardware to achieve the required timing accuracy, so yes, you need <1ms to get to the point of being considered suitable if you are doing anything which involves, say, mixing multiple streams together and avoiding phasing type effects.

However, it very much depends on what your expectations are, and how critical your listening is. If no one is looking for problems, it can be made to work well enough.
by godelski | 2025-04-29 21:11:59+00:00
> What would impress you?

I want to be clear that you tainted the capacity to impress me by the clickbait title. I don't think it was through malice, but I hope you realize the title is deceptive.[0] (Even though I use strong language, I do want to clarify I don't think it is malice)

To paraphrase from my comment: if you oversell and under deliver, people feel cheated, even if the deliverable is revolutionary.

So I think you might have the wrong framing to achieve this goal. I am actually a bit impressed by O3's capabilities. But at the same time you set the bar high and didn't go over or meet it. So that's going to really hinder the ability to impress. On the other hand, you set the bar low, it usually becomes easy to. It i slike when you have low expectations for a movie and it's mediocre you still feel good, right?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43836791
by Brybry | 2025-04-29 21:12:43+00:00
Firefox tab groups persist across browser restarts (or at least mine have for ~5 months now). I haven't had any issues with new windows yet either though I have definitely lost Firefox tabs to that issue in the past.

I agree though, Chrome does a similar implementation where tab groups act like a special class of bookmarks and it's much nicer. You have the same process where you never have to fear losing groups and you can 'hide' tab groups that you aren't actively using and they're potentially accessible from any window.
by nomel | 2025-04-29 21:13:02+00:00
I would be interested to know how ofter "oscillations" occur, where they flip flop from being too "agreeable" to challenges (which probably is just a sparse latent space). This happens to me pretty frequently, where you can repeatedly say "no that's wrong" and the LLM will do a 180, explaining why it was "in fact" wrong and you are "right", repeat.
by Avshalom | 2025-04-29 21:13:09+00:00
Jesus, like look I have some sympathy for RGV farmers and all but this is another in series of Texas winning water that suppliers don't have. These treaties are all based on absolute amounts of water rather than percentages and as the southern rockies/chihuahuan climate gets drier this is just getting more painful for everyone. To be clear the drying is partly anthropic yes but also largely geologic, the SW has been getting drier for ~10kyrs
by fionic | 2025-04-29 21:14:09+00:00
I know I’ll get downvoted hard for this but I can’t tell if these posts are supposed to be satire.

Literally every person I talk to in every single industry uses AI daily: Community managers for sending different email content, sales managers for emailing marketing content and researching prospects and are actively researching agents to help communicate with people automatically, govt workers for generating RFPs, defense industry, coders, band members researching audio engineering, real estate marketing house descriptions, just to name a few. Everyone also says they love it and makes their job so much easier. Not a single person has ever said what these articles headline or try to claim: “man this is awful seriously AI is such a dumb concept and it’s making life worse, no one asked for all this AI to get in my way all the time.”

Obviously my experience is anecdotal but makes it very hard for me to understand this kind of negative content who it’s for and who it’s serving. I think people are aware of auto generated content and the words here ring so empty to me and I feel like it has to be the case for others as well.

Pessimists will get left in the dusts of these machines whose shoulders the optimists ride on.
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-29 21:14:20+00:00
> Now, a cubic meter of soil is a very large amount, so the effective concentration is what actually counts.

What counts is how much winds up in humans' bodies. And halfway: how much winds up in crops grown in such areas.

There is no 1:1 relation between [concentration in the soil] and [concentration in crops grown in that soil]. Some plants are known to be strong accumulators of certain elements/compounds. And some plants could be low in X even if soil they're from is high in X.

So the only way to be sure is have crop samples chemically analyzed.
by ozim | 2025-04-29 21:14:44+00:00
In idea world people would not rely on random packages so it would be less of a burden.

In ideal world people who rely on hand picked dependencies they know well would provide fixes or workarounds instead of screaming at maintainers.

But yeah we live in a world where people just add dependencies or install software they don’t need or understand. So we have to deal with that.
by mingus88 | 2025-04-29 21:15:46+00:00
I have learned over the past decade to ignore any articles like this.

If you believed the press, the Muller Report was going to be a smoking gun, destined to reshape the political landscape for a generation and there was nothing Trump could do to stop it.

It’s 2025 now and I’m only going to trust what I read in a sworn deposition, and even then I need to see who took the oath.
by rat87 | 2025-04-29 21:15:58+00:00
That seems like a terrible idea. At best it seems likely to help you make a false but convincing sounding case. I really hope no one is using that to help them understand controversial topics much less using that to determine their stances.

Id recommend looking into actual human experts who are trustworthy and reading them. Trying to get LLM to argue the case will just get you a lot of false information presented in a more convincing fashion
by ananth_ks | 2025-04-29 21:16:52+00:00
I made a prompt library for copy paste with one of my friends and thought I'd share. We've designed it to update with new prompts every day and allow users save personal prompts in a "My Prompts" page, organized by folder.

It's something we made for ourselves to save time when crafting/reusing prompts on a variety of subjects so we thought we'd share (freely) for public use too- hope you guys like it!
by SamPatt | 2025-04-29 21:17:44+00:00
>Will people still derive pleasure from playing it, like with chess?

Exactly - I see it just like chess, which I also play and enjoy.

The only problem is cheating. I don't have an answer for that, except right now it's too slow to do that effectively, at least consistently.

Otherwise, I don't care that a machine is better than I am.
by mmx1 | 2025-04-29 21:17:45+00:00
This is a good take. Also hints at why Peter Thiel's thesis on tech monopolies in a dynamic world is correct; i.e. that they aren't necessarily bad. A lot of the value in big tech comes from scale and integration and is inherently not sensible to have a thousand mom and pop shops do it and keep the same value. To the extent that Google is doing anything nefarious as a monopoly with integration, any other company who is willing to value Chrome at any significant price is inevitably going to need a scaled product to tie this to and accomplish what Google did with Chrome. They cannot pull this off on their own even though the open-source Chromium exists, because Google is actually better than them at maintaining a browser ecosystem. I am certain they will do a worse job at owning Chrome, especially considering Google has shown a good faith effort in shipping a browser and keeping the engine open source.

Ironically, this whole saga is happening at the same time the "Google search business is under attack" is at its peak in the news media.
by int_19h | 2025-04-29 21:18:31+00:00
Most oldschool BASIC dialects (including the original Dartmouth IIRC) use 0-based indices, though. It's the worst of both worlds, where something like:

DIM a(10)

actually declares an array of 11 elements, with indices from 0 to 10 inclusive.

I believe it was QBASIC that first borrowed the ability to define ranges explicitly from Pascal, so that we could do:

DIM a(1 TO 10)

etc to avoid the "zero element tax"
by hamilyon2 | 2025-04-29 21:19:37+00:00
GP said it very clearly: tax the fuel. Taxing carbon atoms as they come from the ground is very different tax.

It is way harder because of reasons you mentioned. It also disincentives, e.g. composite materials with carbon in them. The materials of today and tomorrow, which would make us all richer and planet healthier, because of how much stronger carbon-nanotube reinforced concrete is.

It will disincentive fertiliser production, which can be net carbon-neutral or better.

It will disincentive carbon capture at power plants, since the tax was already paid. Graphite production.

This is my point: every policy is necessary complex. There is no "simple" and "just ..." when making policy
by saidinesh5 | 2025-04-29 21:20:29+00:00
I mean those were the items my non technical friends shared with me so far...

Personally - i was able to get mockups of interior designs based on the photo of a building under construction using chatgpt - this would've cost me both time and money if i went to a real designer.

Gemini has been summarising meetings i could not attend (scheduling conflicts etc...) and saving me from hours of watching meeting recordings.

I was really skeptical of things because of the horrible results I've had 2 years ago with copilot and chatgpt, but things have improved drastically. To the point that it's already empowering certain people/jobs while having the opposite effect on others.

Is it perfect? Nope. The mockups did have weird glitches. But they were 75% there and good enough for the task I wanted. The meeting notes were as good as a real human.

So it's definitely eroding more of these kinds of jobs and so we are
by StopDisinfo910 | 2025-04-29 21:20:37+00:00
For anything semi-adversarial, I have had good results asking the AI to come up with a plan, then take the side of the opponent coming with counter play/way to defeat the plan, finally asking for a revision of the initial plan given the potential reaction from the opponent.

The final plan you obtain is generally a lot more well rounded and thought out.

I find that amusing because the technique also works when I apply it to me. Picking flaws in your plan before revisiting it actually works.
by mikepurvis | 2025-04-29 21:21:25+00:00
Maybe I'm excessively anthropomorphizing, but it does feel a bit analogous to my own thought process, like "I need feature XYZ, and based on other tools I'm more familiar with it should be an --xyz flag, so let me google for that and see if I'm right or if I instead find a four-year-old wontfix on Github where someone asked for what I need and got denied."

Except... the model is missing that final step; instead it just belches out its hypothesis, all dressed up in chirpy, confident-sounding language, certain that I'm moments away from having everything working just perfectly.
by glutamate | 2025-04-29 21:22:27+00:00
In the beginning, when you read papers like this, it can be hard work. You can either give up or put some effort in to try to understand it. Maybe look at some of the other Jepsen reports, some may be easier. Or perhaps an introductory CS textbook. With practice and patience it will become easier to read and eventually write like this.

You may not be part of that world now, but you can be some day.

EDIT: forgot to say, i had to read 6 or 7 books on Bayesian statistics before i understood the most basic concepts. A few years later i wrote a compiler for a statistical programming language.
by julik | 2025-04-29 21:22:27+00:00
I have worked on quite a few Ruby web apps and built quite a few myself. Maybe 3% of the cases I encountered were about Ruby not being performant enough to do what I needed it to do. Where did the rest of the productivity of end users get lost?

Org dysfunction.

Note that those were web apps - so the user did not have to install the runtime, dependencies etc. to use the software. That is a whole other story (and not a very merry one, at least for all the scripting languages out there).
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-04-29 21:23:35+00:00
> I look at video game forums and subreddits and see the same logic when they don't like something; like, you honestly don't know how software or games are built if you are solely blaming the devs at this point.

I always read "devs" in video game discussions as referring to the company which owns the development work rather than the programmers at the company. If someone wrote a comment, "The devs don't let their programmers do their job" on a video game forum, I would logically expand "devs" to "managers at the development company". I totally see how that's not intuitive to a developer, though; perhaps that comes from my interest in video games before I ever became a programmer.
by Validark | 2025-04-29 21:23:56+00:00
A lot of people have ways of accomplishing this, but my way is using compile-time execution in Zig (I know at least D, C++, and Terra have their own versions of this feature). You can specify a parameter as `comptime` and then do different things based on whatever conditions you want. You can also execute a lot of code at compile-time, including your sqrt check.

E.g. I wrote a `pextComptime` function, which will compile to just a `pext` instruction on machines that have a fast implementation, otherwise it will try to figure out if it can use a few clever tricks to emit just a couple of instructions, but if those aren't applicable it will fallback on a naïve technique.

https://github.com/Validark/Accelerated-Zig-Parser/blob/8782...
by senderista | 2025-04-29 21:24:24+00:00
MongoDB has come a long way. They acquired a world-class storage engine (WiredTiger) and then they hired some world-class distsys people (e.g. Murat Demirbas). They might still be hamstrung by early design and API choices but from what I can tell (never used it in anger) the implementation is pretty solid.
by nice_scott | 2025-04-29 21:24:45+00:00
I have seen others similarly have this issue on reddit as well, and the solution was always "someone at google noticed the post and help get the verification issue fixed" or "i had a friend at google look into this for me".

I really wish google offered direct support for developers. Heck, even Apple provides direct support to the developers and limited code support as well! It seems like you get a little more for that yearly $99 developer fee. But now it seems like google charges you a $25 developer fee, just to ban you from the play store because you submitted your ID and their AI couldn't verify your identity and proceeds to not tell you why and give you no recourse to fix it?

it makes sense that google removed "do no evil" from their code of conduct.
by maj0rhn | 2025-04-29 21:24:48+00:00
There is risk in this approach. Nobody has any real idea what supplements are doing in all of the bodily tissues, and sometimes the effects are not benign. "Folate acceleration" of cancer is just one such cautionary tale. Vitamin E and heart failure is another, though I'm not sure how that one ultimately settled out.

There is a wide list of other maneuvers to try first.

- Time in bed does not equate to "great sleep." Make sure you don't have sleep apnea. Practice good sleep hygiene.

- Delivery of oxygen to your brain is just as important as mitochondrial aging, if not more. Get some aerobic exercise (even walking is fine) -- it wakes me up and maybe will do the same for you. Heed your vascular risk factors, because crap in your cerebral vessels will not help.

- The one supplement exception is vitamin B12, which neurons must have. Deficiency can be very hard to judge by symptoms, so I'd get it measured and act accordingly.
by iszomer | 2025-04-29 21:25:02+00:00
I think if it really was the case that Trump's 2nd term appointees had been all right-leaning, the narrative that he is a _fascist dictator_ would have held more weight. But it hasn't as a sort of compromise or willingness to meet closer to the center.

Whereas inversely, a true-to-life dictator XJP whom there is no perceived dissent within his congress or at minimum ever widely publicized or disseminated. Maybe this is the ideological stability you are looking for?
by timeinput | 2025-04-29 21:25:05+00:00
Fundamentally I think the question is what kind of streams are you processing?

My concept of stream processing is trying to process gigabits to gigabytes a second, and turn it into something much much smaller so that it's manageable to database and analyze. To my mind for 'stream processing' calling malloc is sometimes too expensive let alone using any of the technologies called out in this tech stack.

I understand back pressure, and circuit breakers, but they have to happen at the OS / process level (for my general work) -- a metric that auto scales a microservice worker after going through prometheus + an HPA or something like that ends up with too many inefficiencies to make things practical. A few threads on a single machine just work, but end up taking ages to engineer a 'cloud native' solution.

Once I'm down to a job a second (and that job takes more than a few seconds to run to hide the framework's overhead) or less things like Airflow start to work, and not just fall flat, but at that point are these expensive frame works worth it? I'm only producing 1-1000 jobs a second.

Stream processing with these frameworks like Faust, Airflow, Kafka Streams etc, all just seem like brittle overkill once you start trying to actually deploy and use them. How do I tune the PostgreSQL database for Airflow? How do I manage my S3 life cycles to minimize cost?

A task queue + an HPA really feels more like the right kind of thing to me at that scale vs really caring too much about back pressure, etc when the data rate is 'low', but I've generally been told by colleagues to reach for more complicated stream processors that perform worse, are (IMO) harder to orchestrate, and (IMO) harder to manage and deploy.
by julik | 2025-04-29 21:25:08+00:00
This rings true, but I also saw a lot of situations where just as spaghetti was being tangled, the few folks who resisted it were overruled, again and again.

This is hardly the property of languages or frameworks - just orgs being orgs and incentives being incentives. I don't see why a codebase in a compiled lang would not have queries that "start joining and joining and you get monstrosities of queries" if the business logic demands that queriage to be queriaged?.. Maybe you could make a case to the business that the speed of rework has to be reduced "because static lang and we do things properly here" - but the same can be done with dynamic langs, just with a bit of rigor.