MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by voidhorse | 2025-04-04 00:11:59+00:00
Dijkstra is entirely correct in this, and it's something I've been trying to urge people to recognize since the beginnings of this LLM wave.

There is inherent value in using formal language to refine, analyze, and describe ideas. This is, after all, why mathematical symbolism has lasted in spite of the fact that all mathematicians are more than capable of talking about mathematical ideas in their natural tongues.

Code realizes a computable model of the world. A computable model is made up of a subset of the mathematical functions we can define. We benefit greatly from formalism in this context. It helps us be precise about the actual relationships and invariants that hold within a system. Stable relationships and invariants lead to predictable behaviors, and predictable systems are reliable systems on the plan of human interaction.

If you describe your system entirely in fuzzily conceived natural language, have you done the requisite analysis to establish the important relationships and invariants among components in your system, or are you just half-assing it?

Engineering is all about establishing relative degrees of certainty in the face of the wild uncertainty that is the default modality of existence. Moving toward a world in which we "engineer" systems increasingly through informal natural language is a step backwards on the continuum of reliability, comprehensibility, and rigor. The fact that anyone considers using these tools and still thinks of themselves as an "engineer" of some kind is an absolute joke.
by kadoban | 2025-04-04 00:12:19+00:00
Interesting, thanks. That does sound like you could tell from inside if you there or not.

I'll have to read up on that, I always had the vague sense that on ~finite scale of time there existed a region of space where you couldn't really tell the difference if you're inside of a big enough black hole or not.

Which sounds like I'm probably just wrong.
by saurik | 2025-04-04 00:12:31+00:00
This phenomenon is why I personally get so angry at the license washing that these models are capable of for code: I put out a lot of code as open source... but it is GPL on purpose, as I want your code to be just as free as mine in exchange for getting to use mine. But, now, you're all "I want to build that for myself!" and so you ask an AI and just describe what my project does into the tool... and who is to say it isn't generating something "too close" to my code? Do you even check? If you yourself as a human had first looked at my code, you'd have to be VERY careful to not be accidentally infringing my code... and yet people pretend this AI is somehow not capable of IP theft?!
by Kim_Bruning | 2025-04-04 00:12:33+00:00
> I'm guessing you've never created something of value before

That's an interesting speculation. You realize that it could also be turned against you, right? Never a good idea!

So, let's focus on the arguments rather than making assumptions about each other's backgrounds.

> People are entitled to the fruits of their labour and control of their intellectual property.

People are absolutely entitled to the fruits of their labour. The crucial question is whether the current system of 'IP' control – designed for scarcity – is the best way to ensure that, especially when many creators find it hinders more than it helps. That's why many people explore and use other models.
by refurb | 2025-04-04 00:13:07+00:00
No, every country in the world doesn’t manipulate their currency. Most can’t because of the floating exchange rate (which Vietnam doesn’t have).

Do you think Canada’s tariffs on dairy products has worked to protect the industry? Seems like it has?

Claiming that free trade has benefited the US is true, but the benefit has gone to the top at the expense of the bottom.

Europe uses tariffs to protect domestic industry and when the US decides to do it, suddenly it’s wrong?
by Barrin92 | 2025-04-04 00:13:09+00:00
> “Paris, near Place de la République.” It sounds right. You move on. But a trained eye would notice the signage is Belgian. The license plates are off. The architecture doesn’t match. You trusted the AI and missed the location by a country.

I genuinely hope if you're a professional intelligence analyst it doesn't take a trained eye to distinguish Paris from Belgium. Genuinely every day there's articles like this. The post about college students at elite universities who can't read, tariff policy by random number generator, programmers who struggle to solve first semester CS problems, intelligence analysts who can't do something you can do if you play Geoguessr as a hobby. Are we just getting dumber every year? It feels like we're falling off a cliff over the last decade or so.

Like, the entire article boils down to "verify information and use critical thinking", you'd think someone working in intelligence and law enforcement which this author trains knows this when they get hired?
by gerdesj | 2025-04-04 00:14:33+00:00
My current favourite LLM wankery example is this beauty: https://blog.fahadusman.com/proxmox-replacing-failed-drive-i...

Note how it has invented the faster parameter for the zpool command. It is possible that the blog writer hallucinated a faster parameter themselves without needing a LLM - who knows.

I think all developers should add a faster parameter to all commands to make them run faster. Perhaps a LLM could create the faster code.

I predict an increase of man page reading, and better quality documentation at authoritative sources. We will also improve our skills at finding auth sources of docs. My uBlacklist is getting quite long.
by zora_goron | 2025-04-04 00:14:50+00:00
I wrote about some similar observations in the clinical domain -- I call it the "human -> AI reasoning shunt" [0]. Explicitly requesting an AI tool to perform reasoning is one thing, but a concern I have is that, with the increasing prevalence of these AI tools, even tasks that theoretically are not reasoning-based (ie helping write clinical notes or answer simple questions) can surreptitiously offload some degree of reasoning away from humans by allowing these systems to determine what bits of information are important or not.

[0] https://samrawal.substack.com/p/the-human-ai-reasoning-shunt
by idiotsecant | 2025-04-04 00:14:56+00:00
I think if some boundary like this existed it would have physical ramifications that would be quite apparent. space is full of gas and radiation referred to as the interstellar medium (ISM). We can measure the speed, temperature, density, or whatever you want to know about the ISM. If there were regions of space that somehow exerted force on particles or otherwise allowed them to move quickly I suspect we would see it.
by fragmede | 2025-04-04 00:15:03+00:00
The rest of the business is the issue. I can whitelabel a Spotify clone but licensing rights and all that business stuff is outside my wheelhouse. An app that serves mp3s and has a bunch of other buttons? yeah, done. "shifting goalposts?" no, we're having a conversation, I'm not being deposed under a subpoena.

My claim is that in a week you could build a thing that people want to use, as long as you can sell it, that's competitive with existing options for a given client. Salesforce is a CRM with walled gardens after walled garden. access to each of which costs extra, of course. they happened to be in the right place at the right time, with the right bunch of assholes.

A serious contender doesn’t have to start with everything. It starts by doing the core thing better—cleaner UX, clearer value, easier to extend. That’s enough to matter. That’s enough to grow.

I’m not claiming to replace decades overnight. But momentum, clarity, and intent go a long way. Especially when you’re not trying to be everything to everyone—just the right thing for the right people.

as for Spotify: https://bit.ly/samson_music
by nl | 2025-04-04 00:15:06+00:00
> Generally its accepted that a core trait of intelligence is an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.

This is the embodiment argument - that intelligence requires the ability to interact with its environment. Far from being generally accepted, it's a controversial take.

Could Stephen Hawking achieve goals in a wide range of environments without help?

And yet it's still generally accepted that Stephen Hawking was intelligent.
by zabzonk | 2025-04-04 00:17:02+00:00
I've written an Intel 8080 emulator that was portable between Dec10/VAX/IBM VM CMS. That was easy - the 8080 can be done quite simply with a 256 value switch - I did mine in FORTRAN77.

Writing a BASIC interpreter, with floating point, is much harder. Gates, Allen and other collaborators BASIC was pretty damned good.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-04 00:17:29+00:00
There’s a nostalgic aspect to lots of music. The errors we grew up with do become nostalgic. (And other sounds—what kind of a dead-hearted monster doesn’t get a little happy to hear the first couple seconds of GSM interference noise? It’s so jaunty, how has nobody worked that into some techno?). It reminds us of how things were when we were so cool that we could only afford junk.

Nostalgia is cheap of course, but some times cheap things make us happy and that’s fine.
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 00:17:39+00:00
> Agreed. However, by imposing tariffs it is not the privileged who are going to be affected the most.

I thought the idea was that the billionaires would buy up all the crashed stocks then suddenly the tariffs would be lifted so that they can sell them off as soon as they recover. If so, the privileged will be affected the most but only in terms of how much money they'll make while everyone else suffers in the meantime.
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by aretecodes | 2025-04-04 00:18:00+00:00
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by Lerc | 2025-04-04 00:19:12+00:00
I think it would be nearly impossible to prove that your corpus had no mathematical content. In fact it would be extremely contentious as to what was considered mathematical content. Do you remove all reference to numbers and counting? How about the words and, or and not.

I think the only criteria of no math that would satisfy some people would by definition fail because the model would have no concept of points or distance because some would certainly count those as mathematical content.
by lerno | 2025-04-04 00:20:08+00:00
C3 has "path shortening", so for example given `open(...)` in std::io::file is usually used as `file::open(...)`. If we would to write this as `file.open(...)`. Consider now the case of mistyping `open`: `file.openn(...)`. 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?

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

`File file = file::open(...)` is completely unambiguous and fine. `File file = file.open(...)` on the other hand would be bad.

If the language had flat modules, or no path shortening, then it would be possible.
by mindslight | 2025-04-04 00:20:24+00:00
You wouldn't have to keep referencing a tenuous connection in The Twitter Files (cue: X-Files theme music) if you came around to seeing government and corpos as quite similar creatures on a spectrum of coercion rather than as completely disjoint and disparate things.

So called "conservatives" were soooo close to being able to have this realization before they regained the power of the government, vested it all in a unitary execuking, and went back to seeing that extraconstitutional coercion as a feature (like many "progressives" had for ~10 years or so).
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-04 00:21:37+00:00
>No one says you have to code like those influencers. You are a software engineer, use AI like one, iteratively.

This is my issue with all the AI naysayers at this point. It seems to all boil down to "haha, stupid noob can't code so he uses AI" in their minds. It's like they are incapable of understanding that there could simultaneously be a bunch of junior devs pushing greenfield YouTube demos of vibe coding, while at the same time expert software engineers are legitimately seeing their productivity increase 10x on serious codebases through judicious use.

Go ahead and keep swinging that hammer, John Henry.
by saulpw | 2025-04-04 00:22:10+00:00
When Mickey Mouse was created (1928), copyright was 28 years that could be reupped once for an additional 28 years. So according to those terms, Mickey Mouse would have ascended to the public domain in 1984.

IMO any change to copyright law should not be applied retroactively. Make copyright law to be what is best for society and creators as a whole, not for lobbyists representing already copyrighted material.
by bill_joy_fanboy | 2025-04-04 00:22:15+00:00
> What these people don't realize is even if they make 200K a year and drive an 85K financed F-250, they are effectively in the same class as someone making 50K a year managing a Dollar General.

More people making under 50K per year voted for Trump in 2024 than voted for Harris.

Your numbers are off.
by russellbeattie | 2025-04-04 00:22:19+00:00
Allen wrote an 8080 emulator on a time shared PDP-10 in order for Gates to write the assembly code that implemented a BASIC interpreter - complete with I/O and editor - for a sight-unseen system, all in 4 kilobytes. And it worked the first time it was run.

I've been in the industry for 30 years and I couldn't do all that without serious Googling (or AI help nowadays).

Doing it as 20-somethings in the mid 70s definitely qualifies them as pure breed hackers to me.
by myself248 | 2025-04-04 00:23:11+00:00
Years ago, I hatched a theory, that one of the reasons my generation gravitated to rock and roll as teenagers, is that the sound of a distorted guitar closely resembles the sound of an engine, and is thus a symbol of freedom, just like getting one's driver's license.

I shared this theory with my then-little-in-both-senses sister, who asked "what, exactly, is distortion, in a musical sense?"

I trotted to my bedroom and retrieved Pink Floyd's Pulse. I popped disc 1 into the living-room CD player, cued up track 9 (Sorrow), and turned it up. We potched out onto the floor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO9Kp_Wn_2A

"Oh. Okay. Yeah, alright. I think I get it."
by carpo | 2025-04-04 00:24:12+00:00
If you do want to get more into it, I'd suggest something that plugs into your IDE instead of Copy/Paste with ChatGPT. Try Aider or Roo code. I've only used Aider, and run it in the VS terminal. It's much nicer to be able to leave comments to the AI and have it make the changes to discrete parts of the app.

I'm not the OP, but on your other point about completing sprint goals fast - I'm building a video library app for myself, and wanted to add tagging of videos. I was out dropping the kids at classes and waiting for them. Had 20 minutes and said to Aider/Claude - "Give me an implementation for tagging videos." It came back with the changes it would make across multiple files: Creating a new model, a service, configuring the DI container, updating the DB context, updating the UI to add tags to videos and created a basic search form to click on tags and filter the videos. I hit build before the kids had finished and it all worked. Later, I found a small bug - but it saved me a fair bit of time. I've never been a fast coder - I stare at the screen and think way too much (function and variable names are my doom ... and the hardest problem in programming, and AI fixes this for me).

Some developers may be able to do all this in 20 minutes, but I know that I never could have. I've programmed for 25 years across many languages and frameworks, and know my limitations. A terrible memory is one of them. I would normally spend a good chunk of time on StackOverflow and the documentation sites for whatever frameworks/libraries I'm using. The AI has reduced that reliance and keeps me in the zone for longer.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-04 00:24:22+00:00
This story isn’t really about agents browsing the web. It’s a fiction about a company that consumes all of the web and all other written material into a model that doesn’t need to browse the web. The agents in this story supersede the web.

But your point hits on one of the first cracks to show in this story: We already have companies consuming much of the web and training models on all of our books, but the reports they produce are of mixed quality.

The article tries to get around this by imagining models and training runs a couple orders of magnitude larger will simply appear in the near future and the output of those models will yield breakthroughs that accelerate the next rounds even faster.

Yet here we are struggling to build as much infrastructure as possible to squeeze incremental improvements out of the next generation of models.

This entire story relies on AI advancement accelerating faster in a self-reinforcing way in the coming couple of years.
by echelon | 2025-04-04 00:24:54+00:00
The original claim is false,

> intellectual property [...] used over and over again, primarily by the rich and powerful, to stifle original ideas and hold back cultural innovation.

There's nothing about IP which prevents you from creating your own. There are, in fact, a near infinite number of things you can create. More things than there exist stars in our galaxy.

The problem with ideas is that they have to be good. They have to be refined. They have to hit the cultural zeitgeist, solve a particular problem, or just be useful. That's the hard part that takes the investment of time and money.

In the old world before Gen AI, this was the hard thing that kept companies in power. That world is going away fast, and now creation will be (relatively) easy. More taste makers will be slinging content and we'll wind up in a land of abundance. We won't need Disney to give us their opinion on Star Wars - we can make our own.

The new problem is distributing that content.

> The idea of open sourcing everything and nullifying patents would benefit corporations like Disney and OpenAI vastly more than it would benefit the people. The first thing that would happen is that BigCorp would eat up every interesting or useful piece of art, technology, and culture that has ever been created and monetize the life out of it.

Unless the masses can create and share on equal footing, you're 100% right.

If it turns out, however, that we don't need Google, OpenAI, or big tech to make our own sci-fi epics, share them with a ton of people, and interact with friends and audiences, then the corporations won't be able to profit off of it.

If social networks were replaced with common carriers and protocols.

If Gen AI could run at the edge without proprietary models or expensive compute.

If the data of YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Instagram didn't require hyperscaler infra to store, search, and serve.

Unfortunately, there are too many technical reasons why the giants will win. And network effects will favor the few versus many. Unless those parameters change, we'll be stuck with big tech distribution.

Even if the laws around IP change, the hard tech challenges keep the gatekeepers in power. The power accrues to those who can dominate creation (if creation is unilateral), or even more so, to the distributors of that content.
by lerno | 2025-04-04 00:25:14+00:00
Oh, I think you missed something then:

There is both `$if` and `$switch` compile time statements for this: https://c3-lang.org/generic-programming/compiletime/#if-and-...

At the top level and `@if` attribute is used to achieve the same thing: https://c3-lang.org/language-common/attributes/#if
by orbital-decay | 2025-04-04 00:25:19+00:00
"Pariah"? Do you really want to ruin the life of a person that ruins your entertainment? Okay, they will do this quietly. Then what?

Bypassing a good anticheat was and still is a good way to obtain a ton of reverse engineering and software security-related knowledge. Many people are doing this for fun and I don't see any problem with this. Cheating is another question, though.
by ultimafan | 2025-04-04 00:25:57+00:00
That helps but there's still a huge burden on the community who end up having to self moderate. I think one of the biggest issues today is that cheating is not so easy to uncover anymore. It could just be rose tinted glasses or just lack of knowledge among the public about what cheat developers were up to but 20 years ago I don't really remember it being such a prevalent issue. I'd see rage hackers, spin botters, people blatantly using god mode or flying out of bounds or wall hacking but never heard much in the way of the kind of culture that seems to be prevalent now. It feels like there's plenty of extremely subtle cheats out there today and even "microcheats" that don't do much other than tweaking certain values by 10%~ in a way that gives a significant advantage to players with enough skill to leverage their play style around that without it being obvious that they are in fact cheating. And you'd go paranoid trying to catch them out because people are much more clever about how they use them.
by mech422 | 2025-04-04 00:27:07+00:00
>>Or, take another angle. If the US can no longer import vital goods, what do you think will happen? Will the goods magically stop being vital? Will we sit on our hands for several decades and wait for the problem to resolve?

No - consumers will just eat the cost like they did during COVID.

>> Or does the market respond to a need and rearrange itself to provide as profitably as possible?

rearranging itself will mean leaving the status quo, and passing the cost to consumers. Do you think companies are going to jump to spend millions of dollars and 1 year+ to build factories to work around something that might change in 6 months, or even 4 years ?
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 00:27:10+00:00
> The calculus is pretty complicated. Economies of scale become a factor - is one large global factory more efficient than separate regional facilities?

It's not about efficiency. Companies in the US only build and ship their products from the opposite side of the planet because over there they can abuse the local slave labor and pollute the environment in ways that would never be accepted in the US. Even when they could easily afford to by accepting less profit, they aren't going to move production to the US when it means they can't take advantage of those things.
by munificent | 2025-04-04 00:27:19+00:00
SGTM.

Honestly, seriously. Imagine some weird Thanos showed up, snapped his fingers and every single bit of generative AI software/models/papers/etc. were wiped from the Earth forever.

Would that world be measurably worse in any way in terms of meaningful satisfying lives for people? Yes, you might have to hand draw (poorly) your D&D character.

But if you wanted to read a story, or look at an image, you'd have to actually connect with a human who made that thing. That human would in turn have an audience for people to experience the thing they made.

Was that world so bad?