MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bilbo0s | 2025-04-28 17:34:01+00:00
Your comment is actually an example of the echo chambers left and right wing people live and breathe in.

Out in, "what the F are you idiots doing with our economy"-land. There are exactly zero people who give a mosquito's dick about Woke DEI Trumpanzees or whatever.

These are issues important to elites. We tend to live in an echo chamber here on HN, so we think it's important to the guys working as hired hands during the day and the walmart stock shift at night.

Let me tell you, out here in flyover country, no one working at Taco bell cares about what you care about. Woke, anti-Woke, digital privacy, owning the libtards, stopping the right wing conspiracy, they don't care about any of it. There's a lot of pain out here, and they're way too busy to even worry about that useless crap.

We had an election in Wisconsin recently that the right wingers sailed in with millions on millions of dollars to try to win. Ended up losing handily. Why? Because they talked about a lot of things that, while they may have meaning outside of opioid country, don't mean a whole lot inside of it.

I just don't think elites get it. And that's dangerous.
by n_ary | 2025-04-28 17:34:16+00:00
When AI becomes equally expensive as a human, layoff humans to continue finance AI because, it is easy to fire and rehire but expensive(more precisely acknowledging failure and bad decision making to hurt leadership ego) to remove and become independent from complex integrations.

Edit: I am just sharing how our CTO responds to the massive push of AI into everything, because integration of a non deterministic system has massive cost and eventually once the thing is made deterministic, the additional steps add expenses which finally makes the entire solution too expensive compared to the benefit. This is not my opinion, just sharing how typical leaderships hope to tackle the expense issue.
by Scoundreller | 2025-04-28 17:34:32+00:00
> Including diesel and turbine generators on bigger BTSes let alone exchanges.

Or if you’re AT&T, grid natural gas backup, so your CO goes down if electrical and natural gas both go out once the batteries die. Did I mention how they didn’t build in roll-up generator connection points and had to emergency install those?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25539586
by nonameiguess | 2025-04-28 17:34:35+00:00
It's helpful when reading these kinds of things to realize what you're reading. This isn't research. It's a press release. The author lists himself as a "Public Information Officer" for UC San Diego. Looking back through his article archives, it appears most, if not all, of the press releases make heavy emphasis of technology used by the research rather than anything about the research itself.

Go the current very last page and he's hyping up nanotech in 2015, which as far as I'm aware, didn't end up panning out or really going anywhere. https://today.ucsd.edu/archives/author/Liezel_Labios/P260
by ajmurmann | 2025-04-28 17:35:32+00:00
Worse you won't see how it ends! I recently read a novel (this is a massive spoiler so I am not naming it) that drove this point home extremely well and has me thinking about it all the time since I read it. The book built up a number of enticing storylines. A huge mystery, various characters had struggles we wanted to learn about. However, the book resolves almost none of this because the protagonist dies and we just never find out. That's what death is. There is no debriefing. You don't find out how life continues for your loved ones you leave behind. You don't find out who wins the next election. You don't find out how your favorite tv show wraps up or what other movies your favorite director makes. You don't find out if faster-than-light travel will be achieved, if we'll one day inhabit Mars or if quantum computers breaking RSA will cause havoc. It just en
by vuggamie | 2025-04-28 17:35:43+00:00
Like all other forums, public and private, HN has an ideological filter. I'm as surprised as the next person that the HN ideological filter turned out not to be permissive enough to discuss the downfall of the free society that fostered its creation.

The oligarchs will not lose their freedom or power and they won't fight (or even inconvenience themselves) to preserve yours. Next time you're reading a blog or a biography of a tech billionaire, remember that they got their wealth from wage theft and they will keep their power by destroying yours.

The only law tech companies -- and the oligarchs that own and control them -- have to obey is allegiance to Trump. No other law will be enforced.
by mindslight | 2025-04-28 17:36:29+00:00
Well, thank you for looking again! I'm curious how you interpreted it? I thought about swapping around the two parts of the sentence to put the familiar context first, but thought it landed better the way I said it.

On the original topic, because I will acknowledge that my comment did have several bits of dry tinder in it - the sin of my lead in sentence was that it was irreverant. It would have been inappropriate if it were responding to another comment. But I think there has to be more leeway in initial comments so that there is a chance of moving past the politicized pit of arguing about whether something even exists, and towards a less-widely-shared but larger understanding such that we might actually do something about it.

I think the fundamental problem here is that we as a country now have something that can be straightforwardly referred to as a concentration camp. There are probably other terms that are more technically accurate, but not so much as to forgo the cultural touchstone of what we're actually really close to.

I'd say you are in a similar position to maybe 2016ish or so (my own mental timeline is a bit hazy), when the tide had just started to turn against the prevailing "woke [0] brigade", and insightful but not-completely-defensively-worded comments would get jumped on by a bunch of reasonably-phrased but inflammatorily-framed comments, making it seem like the original comment was starting the flamewar.

[0] I personally hate this term like others hate "concentration camp", but it's awfully hard to argue against its current utility, regardless of how far from its original meaning it is.
by cowanon2222 | 2025-04-28 17:36:41+00:00
The author's tone is over the top, but I think this quote is true:

> Large Language Models and their associated businesses are a $50 billion industry masquerading as a trillion-dollar panacea for a tech industry that’s lost the plot.

There are very real use cases with high value, but it's not an economy-defining technology, and the total value is going to fall far short of projections. On bottom lines, the overall productivity gain from AI for most companies is almost a rounding error compared to other factors.
by jajko | 2025-04-28 17:36:50+00:00
I would prefer ie heroin overdose. Way less messy especially for those who would find me, while having what has been described as an half an hour orgasm (maybe less since its overdose after all). After all all addicts are doing for rest of their addict career is chasing that first ultimate high (at least as per some addicts words, never came even close to such things).
by theodorewiles | 2025-04-28 17:36:55+00:00
Whoever writes the tool that can Actually Make a legitimate microsoft office powerpoint slide from text will make a lot of money.

From what I have seen most of these tools need to do more user research on how powerpoint slides actually look like in practice.

There's a lot of "you're doing it wrong, show don't tell, just keep the basics on the slide" but the people that use powerpoint to make $$$ make incredibly dense powerpoint materials that serve as reference documents, not presentation guides (i.e. they are intended as leave-behind documents that people can read in advance)

Presentations are also quite hard because:

1. It must "compile to" Powerpoint (it must compile to powerpoint because your end users will want to make direct edits and those end users will NOT be comfortable in markdown and in general will be very averse to change) 2. Powerpoint has no layout engine 3. Powerpoint presentations are in fact a beautiful medium in which VISUAL LAYOUT HAS SEMANTIC MEANING (powerpoint is like medieval art where larger is more important)

If anyone wants to help me build an engine that can get an LLM to ACTUALLY make powerpoints please let me know. I am sure this is a lot harder than you think it is.
by Jensson | 2025-04-28 17:37:21+00:00
> If it can "understand" basic high-school math, what else can it "understand?" What exactly are the limits of what a transformer can "understand" without resorting to web search or tool use?

It is basically a grammar machine, it mostly understands stuff that can be encoded as a grammar. That is extremely inefficient for math but it can do it, that gives you a really simple way to figure out what it can do and can't do.

Knowing this LLM never really surprised me, you can encode a ton of stuff as grammars, but that is still never going to be enough given how inefficient grammars are at lots of things. But when you have a grammar the size of many billions of bytes then you can do quite a lot with it.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-28 17:37:22+00:00
Interestingly, doing woodworking when camping/vacationing is something that I've been wanting to dedicate a toolbox/set of tools to.

Agree on the 3D printed jigs/fixtures thing --- it's surprisingly handy, and lends itself to a wonderful precision.

That said, what I really want for this sort of thing is a shooting plane/board (though I suppose I could just use my Jointmaker Pro, for which I really want to make an angle setting fixture).
by HeyLaughingBoy | 2025-04-28 17:37:30+00:00
I'll keep this in bookmark.

I procrastinate on taxes for the silliest of reasons: I don't want to spend the time to create a P&L for my side gig to give to my accountant. Takes less than an hour but it is just annoyingly tedious.

All my income and the majority of my expenses are done through PayPal because I want to minimize the bookkeeping effort. For some unknown reason, they don't have an annual P&L statement as a standard report. This year I tried a bunch of things with Copilot using PayPal reports. The most eye-opening result was that I could give it a .csv file with all my transactions for the year and tell it to generate a P&L statement with expense categories. It managed the task almost flawlessly. The only cleanup I had to do was to recategorize a couple of items. To say that I was blown away is an understatement.
by jillyboel | 2025-04-28 17:37:50+00:00
Alright, my point is that any harm done here is significantly less than what the bigtech LLMs are doing. If plagiarizing code is bad then so is both building & using LLMs. If building & using LLMs is fine, then so is plagiarizing code.

In this case there's a non-commerical open source project that ignored some other project's licenses. This isn't great, but it doesn't affect me, a third party, in the slightest. I have no reason to be upset about this. It doesn't really affect the other projects either, nor does it negatively affect our society. If anything it adds to our society by giving something people are clearly interested in having.

In the case of RTEMS the only thing they're missing out on is attribution. Nintendo isn't missing out on anything at all, people will still be buying their hardware to run this software.

So my argument is that any harm that may have been done is insignificant at best. Hardly worth getting upset about, especially as a third party.

As for the legal argument, it's hypocritical at best. If someone wants to condemn what happened here they should first go after the big boys who are making billions by doing the same thing on a massive scale.

> If you were able to use this algorithm to produce a representation of learned skills and knowledge, e.g. something lossy enough to be considered legally distinct rather than just a compressed form of the training data, then surely this would not be considered a derivative work of the copyright material used to train it. I think most people would agree with this.

If it's okay for an algorithm to do then it's okay for a human to do. So in that case copyright would be dead since the conclusion is you (or a machine learning algorithm) are allowed to ingest some content, then produce similar content.

A simple example is using an LLM to draw an image of some disney characters. If we say the LLM is allowed to do this because it learned to do so, which we aren't considering to be plagiarism, then why are human artists being sued by disney for doing the same?

Or in this case, let's say the original authors used an advanced LLM to assist their coding. The LLM once happened to ingest Nintendo's binary blobs during training and was advanced enough to learn from them. It uses this knowledge to produce code that can interface with the hardware which just so happens to look like the original code because that's just how you do it. Is it suddenly not plagiarism anymore? Did it become morally okay because the LLM laundered the code? Is this any different from LLMs ingesting all of github and becoming coding assistants? Why are we okay with that, but not when a human does it?

I know that in the end the legal answer is that if you have enough money you can do whatever you want, but this doesn't answer the moral questions.
by BenjiWiebe | 2025-04-28 17:38:08+00:00
As an ex small engine mechanic, I'd advise against using a 2 stroke for something like that. A 4 stroke would be a better bet. Better yet would be a natural gas/propane 4 stroke, since gasoline goes stale and plugs carburetors.

Small diesels could be an option but they're harder to pull start for a given size.
by morbicer | 2025-04-28 17:38:21+00:00
Beware, the linked Creative Society is a front for AllatRa sect, very dangerous Russian backed disinformation group that's infiltrating Central Europe.

It goes so far that district attorney from Slovakia, who is a member of the sect is going after Czech journalists who uncover them.

They have tool to generate videos on any esoteric/conspiracy topic with AI assistance.

Sadly I can't link much English sources.

- https://vsquare.org/disinformation-whitewashing-russia-allat...

- https://allatra.tv/en

- https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-61166339

- https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/AllatRa
by little_ent | 2025-04-28 17:38:34+00:00
I look at it a different way.

Maybe we really are so insignificant that ultimately it doesn't matter. So, we might as well make the most of the time we have here!

Speaking for myself... Some of us care about this little spec of dust, so we try to challenge those who want to destroy the planet. We like making cool stuff, building little empires, and also making our communities fun and thriving!
by ryao | 2025-04-28 17:38:58+00:00
When I said that draconian measures were often opposite of what is needed to make roads safer, I was mainly referring to attempts to get people to drive slower on highways. Any attempt to force people to drive slower than the 85th percentile speed poses a danger to others on the road. If you do not believe me, try driving in the left lane at the 55mph speed limit in NYS in areas around NYC. You will undoubtably have many near collisions in just a 5 minute time frame from people cutting you off. Now, imagine a number of people being coerced to drive like that all the time while the rest do not. It is easy to see that there will be more collisions.

Doing draconian things that are ineffective has an opportunity cost that requires diverting time and effort from doing things that actually make a difference. Data on traffic cameras improving safety is mixed (mainly because of people flooring their brakes to avoid fines only to cause themselves to be rear ended). It also does not help that a number of places actually try to cause motorists to run red lights when traffic cameras are put into place by decreasing the amount of time used for yellow lights so that they can increase revenue. Interestingly, increasing the time spent with the light yellow decreases collisions at intersections and unlike traffic cameras, always has a positive improvement on collisions. Another option would be to eliminate intersections by adopting cloverleaf and/or diamond interchanges, which not only make traffic flows more efficient, but also improve safety (since you cannot run a red light, or have a collision caused by someone suddenly stopping upon seeing a yellow light). As for speed limiters, they are outright dangerous when they restrict people to speeds well below the 85th percentile.

That said, NYS has done a number of things to improve driver safety. They probably do not do as much as they would in less densely populated areas, but it is not hard to imagine other U.S. states adopting them. The real problem is that there are so many cars on the road that the average distances between them are very small. As long as the distance between vehicles remains non-zero, collisions are avoided. Efforts really should be focused on maximizing the distance between vehicles, rather than on minimizing the speed at which they travel. Raising the speed limits to the 85th percentile would help there. Car pooling lanes would also help. Modernizing public transport so that people do not need as many cars would also help.
What if Hacker News had a optical illusion captcha?
by vitarnixofntrnt | 2025-04-28 17:39:09+00:00
By asking visitors to correctly say which direction of say, four (up, down, left or right) a part of a captcha appears to be "moving", it filters out the bots while allowing humans with optical illusion fooled eyeballs to pass the test. Given 16 of those captcha requests in a row and given that there are 2^2 choices per captcha, there is a 2^16*2 - 1 possible ways to enter 16 captchas wrong, but only 1 way to enter them right, leading to a filtration failure of around 1 in 4 billion.

Also, multiple captchas can be done in a row for each failure, but once say, 16 captchas have been solved in a row, access is granted for say, a month, until the captcha has to be done again.

It just feels like Hacker News is full of bots and I have a solution to this.
by roguecoder | 2025-04-28 17:39:09+00:00
The "left" is huge and diverse (which people don't know because left-wing thinkers don't get the adoration and amplification right-wing thinkers do in this country.)

I am guessing you are referring to Marxist-Lennonists, or even Tankies. Folks who believe that only class oppression is worth fighting, and that the solution is centralized authoritarian regimes with left wing people in power. Those folks are generally anti-liberal, despite being on the left, and deny any history that would complicate their politics.

Alternatively, you might know neoliberals, who believe in the power of capitalism to address social problems and deny any history that might complicate their politics.

Or you might know Syndicalists, who believe unions are the path to worker's political power, and who deny any history that might complicate their politics.

Etc.

If you know one "very left" person, you know one very left person.
by n_ary | 2025-04-28 17:39:23+00:00
I think, such sayings are more and more being proven wrong. Buy the rumor, sell the news, or buy the dip and hodl long term etc have severely backfired in recent months and many individuals(I personally know) lost huge.

Until we return to ZIRP somehow, there is just too much money in AI to keep the hype going as long as possible to avoid the investor backlash or cause mass layoffs(cutting costs and recovering because we spent too much on AI but can’t get refunds so layoff people instead), as money seem to only chase hype and due to not enough free and openly available money for other topics, all flows to only thing that everyone chases.
by scarface_74 | 2025-04-28 17:39:32+00:00
The competitive landscape in 2025 is not like it has ever been before for CS grads - and I graduated in 1996.

It would be “malpractice” to suggest anyone waste time on a CS degree from anything less than tier 2+ school. My degree is from a no name state college so I’m definitely not looking down on anyone.
by slibhb | 2025-04-28 17:40:02+00:00
Wokeness isn't hard to define. If you don't know what it is at this point, there's really no helping you.

One of the lessons of the second Trump admin is that "smashing wokeness" may feel good (to people like me for example) but it isn't actually very important, and it doesn't make up for incompetence and lawlessness.
by zoogeny | 2025-04-28 17:40:25+00:00
> AI is fundamentally changing the ways developers work. Our analysis implies that this is particularly true where specialist agentic systems like Claude Code are used, is particularly strong for user-facing app development work, and might be giving particular advantages to startups as opposed to more established business enterprises.

I think seeing a correlation between software startup adoption and user-facing app development work makes a lot of sense. The advantage for a startup in delivering user appreciable features is high. An entrenched business might be more focused on reliability, security, enterprise readiness and these seem like more risky things to outsource to LLMs which are unproven. But a startup that is trying to get their first 1000 customers is in a more "move fast and break things" mentality and the additional risk of unproven LLM code is much lower.

But those adoption rates and the percentage of code written by LLMs is high. What we aren't seeing in this graph are the total set of startups and the percentage of use within that larger set. But if LLM code does make startups faster to market, faster to PMF, faster to growth, etc. then this is going to be transformative. If the next billion dollar unicorn is written 79% by an AI, we're in for a new world.

> As AI systems become capable of building larger-scale pieces of software, will developers shift to mostly managing and guiding these systems, rather than writing code themselves?

I'm coding about 4 hours per day using LLMs primarily. I am trying to get the LLM to write as much of the code as I can. My experience, with the best LLM coding agents I have tried (Cursor using Claude variants and Gemini 2.5 Pro in the browser) is that they need very careful and continual guidance. The errors creep in and compound if you aren't vigilant.

The pace of improvement, however, is pretty remarkable. I think about 75% of the code in a new project I am working on has been written by the LLM. My biggest challenge, actually, is to avoid taking the reigns. Sometimes, the LLM goes off the rails and I think "It will be easier just to do it myself". However, if I catch myself and instead try to write a more detailed instruction, I can often get the LLM to do the thing perfectly.

It is a similar shift in mindset to when I became a manager. I can no longer just roll up my sleeves and fix the problem, I have to manage the individual who I assign to the problem. Every instinct I have is "I know how to do this, I can do it better than you", but I have to resist.

> But in a relative sense, coding is among the most developed uses of AI in the economy.

This is a bit scary for some developers, but if the skill of instructing AIs effectively is deeply learned then it may be even more valuable than coding. This use of AI is new and if we can manage to instruct ourselves out of a job, we'll be the seasoned AI whisperers that other industries look to for guidance on how to replicate the result.