MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-04-17 23:35:19+00:00
The "glue" comment here reflects a view from someone who does mostly software work. That's been the situation since mechanized production lines were first built. The job of the humans is not direct labor. It's to monitor the machinery, restart it, and fix it.

Power looms were probably the first devices like this. Somebody has to thread the loom, but then it mostly runs by itself.[1] Production lines with lots of stations will have shutdowns, where a drill bit broke or there's dirt on a lens or some consumable ran out. Exceptions are hard to automate, and factory design focuses on minimizing exceptions and bypassing stuck cells.

It's helpful to understand how a factory works when watching how software development is changing. There's commonality.

So the phrase "vibe coding" is only two months old.[2] How widespread will it be in two years?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyRW9XOuUdU

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding
by 9rx | 2025-04-17 23:36:18+00:00
What value do you think a multi-million dollar passenger jet creates own its own, absent a skilled pilot and crew? But where skilled operators are at the helm, the laptop has the potential to create considerably more value, yet costs almost nothing. It is really quite amazing how cheap they have become. Early general-purpose computers did cost about as much as a jet, so them becoming dirt cheap wasn't a foregone conclusion. But we're lucky they did.
by dumbledoren | 2025-04-17 23:36:49+00:00
> That "sociopathic" profiteering funds the 401(k), IRAs, and pension plans of tens of millions of Americans

At the cost of the destruction of the entire rest of the economy, which is coming home to roost right now. People's retirement should never have been loaded onto the stock market. That was a 'mistake' from the start. A 'mistake' that was designed to bloat the stock investors' coffers.

> God forbid these companies be run for the collective benefit of all shareholders

No; First, if you are profiting at the detriment of entire rest of the society by consolidating the economy in your hand by bankrupting everyone else, it doesnt matter if you run it 'for the collective benefit of the shareholders'. And even cheating, scamming at that:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719246

Second, let's get real - it's not the employees who benefit from the stock prices the most. Even proposing they do is just self-deceit.

> The "Day in the Life" videos that made the rounds on TikTok sapped the general public of whatever sympathy they may have otherwise had for the FANMAGers getting sacked from their $100-300k jobs.

The layoffs involve much more than those 6-figure job holders.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-04-17 23:37:31+00:00
You have some good points, but realize that actual racism when it comes to hiring, renting, business interactions and more scenarios like that is very real. You don't even have to look far, there are plenty of researches and even successful lawsuit surrounding last-name bias. If you have a last name that indicates african or latino ancestry, your resume gets tossed out the majority of the time (yes,not sometimes but most of the time). If you substitute only the last name of the resume and application and apply to the same list of companies with a european name you will get at least an invitation for a first round phone interview most of the time. I can see all the faults with diversity and inauthentic DEI efforts, but what I think well meaning people misunderstand is that that problem pales in comparison to actual racism that's going on.

Like, ok, get rid of DEI but can you wait until racial profiling in hiring goes down a bit? like give it at least one more generation? a person who was 20 in 1963 facing "no blacks" signs all over America is 85 today, young enough to still be working in congress, vote and drive still and even serve as CEO or on a board.

> There are too many softhearted fools who honestly believe the world owes them something for whatever happened to their ancestors generations ago, whether it was slavery, or the church, or the pilgrims/colonizers whatever. They fail to realize you don't get anything by whining. You take it, or you work/trade for it, but you will never get and keep power by crying for attention.

Yeah, i don't care for what you said there but people should be treated fairly right? forget history, forget all that. but if you have skills you should have work opportunity right? People are owed a fair chance at life's opportunities. that isn't happening, diversity,dei,etc.. is a flawed approach to address all that. If people like you suggested better ways of solving the racism problem, that would be great, but your solution is to leave racism alone and pretend it isn't a thing.
by yibg | 2025-04-17 23:37:47+00:00
It's not just a energy cost issue with AGI though. With autonomous vehicles we might not have the technology, but we can build a good mental model of what the thing can look like and how various pieces can function long before we get there. We have different classifications of incremental steps to get there as well. e.g. level 1, 2 and so on where we can make incremental progress.

With AGI, as far as I know, no one has a good conceptual model of what a functional AGI even looks like. LLM is all the rage now, but we don't even know if it's a stepping stone to get to AGI.
by fvdessen | 2025-04-17 23:38:15+00:00
The problem is who pays to maintain the system. There are systems that allow you to share your age anonymously (among other things) and they’re already widely used in Europe but the system knows what you’re using it for since the second party pays for the information, and some accounting info is needed for the billing. It would be completely illegal for the system to use that info for anything else though.
by exceptione | 2025-04-17 23:39:16+00:00
I didn't know that? That is hitting a new low.

But maybe it should not surprise me, C/C++ got out of fashion (with good reasons), but the devs lost the UI toolkit with it. The average dev does not command a language with an ecosystem that is up to the task. So it is some slow Python + some crapshoot UI.

Linux finally has an option for good, performant UI, written in a sensible high level language with a vast standard library. Look at HN, people hate the electron stuff. There is just a shortage of competent programmers.

Java + JavaFX might be an other option next to .net core, but Java is verboten as well. People rather fix runtime crashes in the untyped langue they learnt in their first tutorials than broaden their horizon.
by abletonlive | 2025-04-17 23:39:30+00:00
This feels like a "if i say it enough, people will agree and it will be true" kind of comment. Almost none of these propositions check out or even make sense. I literally can't distinguish between reddit commenters and HN commenters. An unoriginal HN complaint but frustrating to witness over time.

1. Plateau != Regress. Why point to regressions as evidence of plateau? Why only look at a single model and minor version? we are clearly still at AI infancy, regressions are to be expected from time to time.

2. Where's the evidence of this? Humans are using AI to branch out and dip their toes into things that they wouldn't have fathomed doing before. How would that lead you to "disincentivized"?

> Doubly so when systems that were primarily or entirely "vibe coded" start to break in ways

So in this fantasy everybody is vibe coding resilient code/systems that lasts for 10+ years and everybody stops learning how to code, and after a decade or so, they start breaking and everybody is in trouble? This world you're creating wouldn't stand up to the critique of sci-fi readers.

I'm sorry but if we can vibe code systems that last 10+ years and nobody is learning anything because they are performing so well, then that's a job well done by OpenAI and co. We're probably set as a civilization.
by abdullahkhalids | 2025-04-17 23:39:33+00:00
Humans are fundamentally creators of tools and art and imaginary world - this is one of the factors that distinguishes us from animals. For most of human history, most humans spent a lot of their time creating. The very recent phenomena of a large fraction of humans creating almost nothing in their adult life is caused by modern economic systems, almost all of which force people to work so much every day that all their creative energies are sapped.

Go to a 4 day 24 hour work week and you will find almost everyone creating again.
by stego-tech | 2025-04-17 23:39:56+00:00
A long, long time ago (within the past ten years), I had to verify my age with a site. They didn't ask for my ID, or my facial scan, but instead asked for my credit card number. They issued a refund to the card of a few cents, and I had to tell them (within 24hr) how much the refund was for, after which point they'd issue a charge to claw it back. They made it clear that debit and gift cards would not be accepted, it must be a credit card. So I grabbed my Visa card, punched in the numbers, checked my banking app to see the +$0.24 refund, entered the value, got validated, and had another -$0.24 charge to claw it back.

Voila, I was verified as an adult, because I could prove I had a credit card.

The whole point of mandating facial recognition or ID checks isn't to make sure you're an adult, but to keep records of who is consuming those services and tie their identities back to specific profiles. Providers can swear up and down they don't retain that information, but they often use third-parties who may or may not abide by those same requests, especially if the Gov comes knocking with a secret warrant or subpoena.

Biometric validation is surveillance, plain and simple.
by cmsj | 2025-04-17 23:40:04+00:00
I would say there's a big difference with AI though.

Assembly is just programming. It's a particularly obtuse form of programming in the modern era, but ultimately it's the same fundamental concepts as you use when writing JavaScript.

Do you learn more about what the hardware is doing when using assembly vs JavaScript? Yes. Does that matter for the creation and maintenance of most software? Absolutely not.

AI changes that, you don't need to know any computer science concepts to produce certain classes of program with AI now, and if you can keep prompting it until you get what you want, you may never need to exercise the conceptual parts of programming at all.

That's all well and good until you suddenly do need to do some actual programming, but it's been months/years since you last did that and you now suck at it.
by krisoft | 2025-04-17 23:41:31+00:00
> What's the machine code of an AGI gonna look like?

Right now the guess is that it will be mostly a bunch of multiplications and additions.

> It makes one illegal instruction and crashes?

And our hearth quivers just slightly the wrong way and we die. Or a tiny blood cloth plugs a vessel in our brain and we die. Do you feel that our fragility is a good reason why meat cannot be intelligent?

> I jest but really think about the metal.

Ok. I'm thinking about the metal. What should this thinking illuminate?

> The inside of modern computers is tightly controlled with no room for anything unpredictable.

Let's assume we can't make AGI because we need randomness and unpredictability in our computers. We can very easily add unpredictability. The simple and stupid solution is to add some sensor (like a camera CCD) and stare at the measurement noise. You don't even need a lens on that CCD. You can cap it so it sees "all black", and then what it measures is basically heat noise of the sensors. Voila. Your computer has now unpredictability. People who actually make semiconductors probably can come up with even simpler and easier ways to integrate unpredictability right on the same chip we compute with.

You still haven't really argued why you think "unpredictableness" is the missing component of course. Beside the fact that it just feels right to you.
by johnwalkr | 2025-04-17 23:41:49+00:00
Well both are not always available. In many countries, there is no hot water tank/line. There are only inline heaters or very small tanks locally where needed (each bathroom and kitchen sink). Then, you buy appliances such as dishwashers and clothes washers that also have inline heaters built-in (and you don't need to think about this, in such a region, this is the default thing that is sold).

It doesn't necessarily take longer to heat up, they are pretty much instant since they are designed to heat as needed locally as needed (don't need to heat a large volume of water) and they are at least as fast to provide hot water as a central hot water tank. They can be gas or electric powered depending on what is available/cheaper in the region and you never run out of hot water with an inline heater.

Even if you do have a central hot water tank, it's possible that heating water locally at the dishwasher is faster depending on distance to the tank. Anecdotally, I used to wait for hot water in the kitchen when I lived in Canada and I no longer do in Europe where I have no central hot water tank. In North America, recent high end home kitchens feature a local inline heater for hot water at the kitchen sink even though a central hot water tank exists.
by HaZeust | 2025-04-17 23:42:38+00:00
I implore everyone to listen to Obama's 2004 DNC speech [1], endorsing John Kerry. Specifically, for 12:00 and beyond:

"For alongside our famous individualism, there's another ingredient in the American Saga: A belief that we're all connected as one people [...] If there's an Arab-American family being rounded up, without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens MY civil liberties [too]. It is that fundamental belief. I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper, that makes this country work."

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWynt87PaJ0
by blibble | 2025-04-17 23:43:08+00:00
how does rogue anchor revocation in practice?

say if an anchor has issued tens of thousands of legitimate ids, and also ten to career fraudsters who gave them $10000 each

as you've outsourced the trust you have no idea which are legitimate, and if you revoke the lot you're going to have a lot of refunds to issue

(ultimately this is why countries only allow people who can be banned from their profession to certify documents)
by jchw | 2025-04-17 23:43:39+00:00
> Please don't use dd-mm-yyyy

I wasn't listing a date format, but a date order; the dashes were not meant to be separators. That said, I tend to use year-month-day, in RFC-3339 format. Although I honestly don't lose sleep about it.

> It's better to use different separators to clarify the date format. The three common formats are yyyy-mm-dd, dd.mm.yyyy and mm/dd/yyyy.

As an American, I most commonly see day-month-year written as "April 17th, 2025" or "4/17/2025". I'm sure "4.17.2025" exists, but e.g. it is not what a locale-aware date formatter will output for U.S. locale.

Here's my hot take: One should generally either use locale-specific date formatting, or use RFC 3339 or ISO 8601. They both have a time and a place where they are more appropriate. Sometimes it's just simply going to be more correct and less confusing to use a locale-specific date format, especially if you have to deal with passing dates between different entities. (As an example, if I were filing legal documents, I would most assuredly use the standard in a given locale for dates. Maybe a long, unambiguous form just to be safe, if it happens to be applicable.) In any case, using another option that isn't either of these seems counter-productive to me.

I think it's weird how people get overly attached to issues like these. It is a shame that date formats can be ambiguous, occasionally causing preventable problems, but we'll survive. Stuff like this doesn't get fixed over night.
by sgc | 2025-04-17 23:43:45+00:00
I think they meant that Google managed to limit the number of bidders for ad placement - they shut out other advertising groups -, so they could then charge what they want to those who need to advertise their business or perish, and take what they want from websites that publish ads as well (take a larger cut from the 'ad inventory' understood either as ad space or ads to be published). In this sense the linked article states:

"The US argues that Google used its financial power to acquire potential rivals and corner the ad tech market, leaving advertisers and publishers with no choice but to use its technology."
by zoogeny | 2025-04-17 23:44:01+00:00
It's a bit of a fancy way to say "yes man". Like in corporations or politics, if a leader surrounds themselves with "yes men".

A synonym would be sycophantic which would be "behaving or done in an obsequious way in order to gain advantage." The connotation is the other party misrepresents their own opinion in order to gain favor or avoid disapproval from someone of a higher status. Like when a subordinate tries to guess what their superior wants to hear instead of providing an unbiased response.

I think that accurately describes my experience with some LLMs due to heavy handed RLHF towards agreeableness.

In fact, I think obsequious is a better word since it doesn't have the cynical connotation of sycophant. LLMs don't have a motive and obsequious describes the behavior without specifying the intent.
by russellbeattie | 2025-04-17 23:44:21+00:00
You misunderstood my criticism. I have zero idea about Go, and I know it.

What I would have liked is for the video to take a minute to explain how a single move so early in a game was immediately obvious to players as amazing, given so much focus was put on the fact that there are more move options than atoms in the universe.

Let me rephrase: Mathematically, what was it about move 37 that reduced the quintillions+ of possible outcomes down to a perceived guaranteed win?

My assumption is that there are far fewer combinations of practical moves, which constrains the calculations considerably. I would have liked to have known more about that.
by lolinder | 2025-04-17 23:44:31+00:00
The first Trump admin started the Google search antitrust suit 3 years before the Biden admin filed this one. Attacking Big Tech is a bipartisan affair these days.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Google_LLC_...
by Defletter | 2025-04-17 23:45:11+00:00
Stopped using Jellyfin after it played ear-splitting screeches directly into my eardrums. It was a song from an exported iTunes library, I knew iTunes would skip over the song and didn't know why, nor was I particularly bothered. I have to assume now that the file was corrupted, and Jellyfin uncritically played it anyway. I knew I had a few other songs like that in the library and stopped using it for fear for my ears, my headphones, and my speakers.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-04-17 23:45:33+00:00
Yes, IME, Anthropic seemed to be ahead of Google by a decent amount with Sonnet 3.5 vs 1.5 Pro.

However, Sonnet 3.7 seemed like a very small increase, whereas 2.5 Pro seemed like quite a leap.

Now, IME, Google seems to be comfortably ahead.

2.5 Pro is a little slow, though.

I'm not sure which model Google uses for the AI answers on search, but I find myself using Search for a lot of things I might ask Gemini (via 2.5 Pro) if it was as fast as Search's AI answers.
by aaron695 | 2025-04-17 23:46:07+00:00
Astronauts in the Gemini and Apollo programs breathed 100 percent oxygen at reduced pressure for up to two weeks

There are no reports of "altered states of consciousness" I know of. There would have been rigorous testing before.

Similarly divers, I've never heard of lack/decreased CO2 causing their hallucinations vs nitrogen narcosis or hydrogen narcosis.

This sounds made up, have they been getting high on their own supply?
by Calwestjobs | 2025-04-17 23:46:15+00:00
ETH is insane last few years, last year literally dirt cheap literally lossless seasonal energy storage : https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2024/08/iro...

now they have better 3D perception algo than Tesla after 10 years of Musks fraudulent ai claims...
by monkeycantype | 2025-04-17 23:46:35+00:00
A few years ago, I remember hearing reactionary podcasters panicking about trans identity propagating by "social contagion" {their phrase}. The word "contagion" sets up an awful frame around this. I think instead you could come at this from an angle that recognises that there is a kind of social and internalised Overton window, a set of ideas that people are willing to express, or even allow themselves to think. As we increasingly see people living good full lives expressing and owning aspects of themselves that had once been heavily stigmatised - there may be a dynamic beyond just better diagnosis - there may be an uptick of people willing to be more honest about an aspect of themselves that they may otherwise have sought to hide or suppress, others might have been able to avoid even self-awareness. If that is the case - just as there will never be a person who matches the reference human genome - there may be no upper limit to the fraction of people who find some aspect of themselves that extends outside the venn diagram circle of neurotypical.
by ndriscoll | 2025-04-17 23:47:02+00:00
That was, in fact, what COPA mandated in the US in 1998, and SCOTUS struck it down as too onerous in Ashcroft v. American Civil Liberties Union, kicking off the last 20 years of essentially completely unregulated Internet porn commercially available to children with nothing more than clicking an "I'm 18" button. At the time, filtering was seen as a better solution. Nowadays filtering is basically impossible thanks to TLS (with things like DoH and ECH being deployed to lock that down even further), apps that ignore user CAs and use attestation to lock out owner control, cloud CDNs, TLS fingerprinting, and extreme consolidation of social media (e.g. discord being for both minecraft discussions and furry porn).
by nixpulvis | 2025-04-17 23:47:55+00:00
Identity verification remains unsolved and likely will remain that way. Any attempts at improvement are authoritarian. And the status quo leave massive room for circumvention.

Personally, I grew up in an era before there was any expectation of validation, and enjoyed the anonymity of message boards and forums. But when people are posting blatantly illegal activity online, I can see the appeal for more validation. Just makes me sad.
by dumbledoren | 2025-04-17 23:48:05+00:00
Yep. On top of that, it also controls the algorithm. Recently it has been tweaking the algorithm to sell non-relevant keywords to advertisers by making 'exact match' not 'exact' anymore. People have been burning their ad budgets for worthless traffic as a result, and PPC professionals are livid over it with every other post in communities talking about it:

https://reddit.com/r/ppc

Recently someone even posted a timeline of google starting to hide the keywords advertisers are buying and the increase in Google's ad revenue. Eye opening.
by rglover | 2025-04-17 23:48:21+00:00
Like I said, in the short-term this will sound false, but in the long-term I expect it to be frighteningly accurate.

> I literally can't distinguish between reddit commenters and HN commenters.

No need to condescend. I have a fair amount of experience building with and using these tools daily. I'm not just some "reddit idiot."

> So in this fantasy everybody is vibe coding code that lasts for 10+ years and everybody stops learning how to code

I'm extrapolating. Look at what happened in the wake of the industrial revolution. Most people don't know how to fix or create anything today, and instead, rely on fast-and-cheap products or services made by or offered by other people. Hence the panic over China and tariffs. The AI-ification of everything is just another, modern version of a similar thing.

I could absolutely be wrong (and hope I am). But when you track human laziness over time, it leads to deterioration and incompetence. I view this as a gradually than all of a sudden type of problem. One that will be incredibly difficult to dig ourselves out of later.