MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fao_ | 2025-04-24 18:12:16+00:00
This is the kind of reason why I will never use AI

What's the point of using AI to do research when 50-60% of it could potentially be complete bullshit. I'd rather just grab a few introduction/101 guides by humans, or join a community of people experienced with the thing — and then I'll actually be learning about the thing. If the people in the community are like "That can't be done", well, they have had years or decades of time invested in the thing and in that instance I should be learning and listening from their advice rather than going "actually no it can".

I see a lot of beginners fall into that second pit. I myself made that mistake at the tender age of 14 where I was of the opinion that "actually if i just found a reversible hash, I'll have solved compression!", which, I think we all here know is bullshit. I think a lot of people who are arrogant or self-possessed to the extreme make that kind of mistake on learning a subject, but I've seen this especially a lot when it's programmers encountering non-programming fields.

Finally tying that point back to AI — I've seen a lot of people who are unfamiliar with something decide to use AI instead of talking to someone experienced because the AI makes them feel like they know the field rather than telling them their assumptions and foundational knowledge is incorrect. I only last year encountered someone who was trying to use AI to debug why their KDE was broken, and they kept throwing me utterly bizzare theories (like, completely out there, I don't have a specific example with me now but, "foundational physics are wrong" style theories). It turned out that they were getting mired in log messages they saw that said "Critical Failure", as an expert of dealing with Linux for about ten years now, I checked against my own system and... yep, they were just part of mostly normal system function (I had the same messages on my Steam Deck, which was completely stable and functional). The real fault was buried halfway through the logs. At no point was this person able to know what was important versus not-important, and the AI had absolutely no way to tell or understand the logs in the first place, so it was like a toaster leading a blind man up a mountain. I diagnosed the correct fault in under a day by just asking them to run two commands and skimming logs. That's experience, and that's irreplaceable by machine as of the current state of the world.

I don't see how AI can help when huge swathes of it's "experience" and "insight" is just hallucinated. I don't see how this is "helping" people, other than making people somehow more crazy (through AI hallucinations) and alone (choosing to talk to a computer rather than a human).
by jader201 | 2025-04-24 18:13:03+00:00
It should be pretty obvious, but…

When social media started out, it was simply a feed of what you followed. FB, Twitter, Reddit, everything — they showed you a chronological list of everything that the people/groups you followed posted.

It was glorious.

But it wasn’t making money. These platforms were all funded by investors in hopes that they would someday make money.

And now they are — through ads and sponsored content that no one asked for or wants, via algorithms designed for one thing: profit.

It’s zero surprise to me that social media platforms have become the garbage that they are now.

I’ve moved on from all but a couple platforms (HN, Board Game Geek, and Bogleheads — arguably not social media platforms in the same vein as the others mentioned, because they aren’t trying to monetize, except BGG which monetizes via traditional banner ads, which I’ll take 10/10 over “content ads”).

But I have zero interest in returning to anything that injects their sponsored content in the middle of feeds.

If social media platforms can’t figure out a way to monetize without injecting this garbage, I’ll stick to these others.
by senko | 2025-04-24 18:13:18+00:00
How is using Claude over Llama benefitting corporations over workers? I work with AI every day and sum total of my token spend across all providers is less than a single NVidia H100 card I'd have to buy (from a pretty big corporation!), at the very least, for comparable purpose?

How are self-hosted LLMs not copying the work of millions without compensating them for it?

How is the push for more productivity through better technology somehow bad?

I am pro FOSS but can't understand this comment.
by erxam | 2025-04-24 18:13:37+00:00
It is kind of extreme. I personally daily drove the OG Pinephone for about a year-and-a-half, back in 2020. I bought in during the postmarketOS edition.

I'm still dealing with the fallout from the choices I made in order to conform with that phone. And at the end of the day... I got nothing out of it. Nothing but issues, problems and inconveniences.

The modem eventually stopped working for some reason, and I moved to an iPhone 7 that had been abandoned for quite some time.

It felt like I had let out a breath I had been holding in for years.
by teraflop | 2025-04-24 18:13:48+00:00
Yup. And interestingly enough, that detail wasn't in the original novel by Carl Sagan. It was added for the movie, based on (AFAIK) a 1993 paper by David Blair and Marjan Zadnik: https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1993A%26A...278..669...
by hnthrowaway0315 | 2025-04-24 18:13:58+00:00
In one of my previous companies, they forced middle managers to go back to work as IC. I'd say it's just a way to force more work for the middle managers because they are still taking management work.

I wonder when we will see the next cycle. Might be decades away, or even never, if it ends up with a hot war.

I really need to convince my wife to sell our 2nd house ASAP, when there is still market.
by sanderjd | 2025-04-24 18:15:04+00:00
Ha, someone who has money to invest asked me about an investment thesis at the end of 2022 related to the release of chatgpt. I said nvidia seemed like the most clearly likely to benefit in terms of public equities, but he said no way, it was already overpriced. :shrug:

Everything hypey overshoots eventually, but nobody knows exactly when!
by timewizard | 2025-04-24 18:15:17+00:00
> Unfortunately it is exactly what users "want".

No it isn't. No one "wants" to be addicted.

> Any for-profit social media will eventually degrade into recommendation media over time.

They will measure you then do everything they can to increase the number of minutes you spend on the site. The media recommendation is a consequence of cost. It's very cheap for them to maximize your time spent using other peoples content.

> It’s our human lizard brain on dopamine.

There are tons of ways to get dopamine flowing into your brain. Which is why it was important for Meta to monopolize and dominate the field. Turns out lizard brains are exceptionally fickle.
by cogman10 | 2025-04-24 18:16:36+00:00
> Look at the concentration of the nasdaq 100--it's all huge companies. Same for the DJIA.

The nasdaq 100 is the largest companies that exist. That's why that index exists. Ditto for S&P-500.

The DJIA is also exclusively large capital businesses.

Pretty much any index out there is going to be primarily composed of the largest players in the market, that's just how these things work.
by aengelke | 2025-04-24 18:17:00+00:00
I agree; and the article seems to have also quite a few technical flaws:

- Register width: we somewhat maxed out at 512 bits, with Intel going back to 256 bits for non-server CPUs. I don't see larger widths on the horizon (even if SVE theoretically supports up to 2048 bits, I don't know any implementation with ~~>256~~ >512 bits). Larger bit widths are not beneficial for most applications and the few applications that are (e.g., some HPC codes) are nowadays served by GPUs.

- The post mentions available opcode space: while opcode space is limited, a reasonably well-designed ISA (e.g., AArch64) has enough holes for extensions. Adding new instructions doesn't require ABI changes, and while adding new registers requires some kernel changes, this is well understood at this point.

- "What is worse, software developers often have to target several SIMD generations" -- no way around this, though, unless auto-vectorization becomes substantially better. Adjusting the register width is not the big problem when porting code, making better use of available instructions is.

- "The packed SIMD paradigm is that there is a 1:1 mapping between the register width and the execution unit width" -- no. E.g., AMD's Zen 4 does double pumping, and AVX was IIRC originally designed to support this as well (although Intel went directly for 256-bit units).

- "At the same time many SIMD operations are pipelined and require several clock cycles to complete" -- well, they are pipelined, but many SIMD instructions have the same latency as their scalar counterpart.

- "Consequently, loops have to be unrolled in order to avoid stalls and keep the pipeline busy." -- loop unroll has several benefits, mostly to reduce the overhead of the loop and to avoid data dependencies between loop iterations. Larger basic blocks are better for hardware as every branch, even if predicted correctly, has a small penalty. "Loop unrolling also increases register pressure" -- it does, but code that really requires >32 registers is extremely rare, so a good instruction scheduler in the compiler can avoid spilling.

In my experience, dynamic vector sizes make code slower, because they inhibit optimizations. E.g., spilling a dynamically sized vector is like a dynamic stack allocation with a dynamic offset. I don't think SVE delivered any large benefits, both in terms of performance (there's not much hardware with SVE to begin with...) and compiler support. RISC-V pushes further into this direction, we'll see how this turns out.
by Jordan-117 | 2025-04-24 18:17:43+00:00
The narrator's "friend" pickpocketed him. When boldly confronted by Truth, he cleverly twists her accusation to make it seem like she's confessing, and the narrator, bewildered by the laughter and manipulation, buys it wholesale. Bonus points for connecting it to broader themes like mass propaganda, commedia dell'arte, or the dreamlike setting and hypnotic repetition of phrasing.

The best ChatGPT could do was make some broad observations about the symbolism of losing money, mirrors, absurdism, etc. But it whiffed on the whole "turning the tables on Truth" thing. (Gemini did get it, but with a prompt that basically asked "What really happened in this story?"; can't find the original response as it's aged out of the history)
by cameronh90 | 2025-04-24 18:18:09+00:00
I'm in the UK where we do have a generally very reliable postal service, but of those three, it's only the bank card that involves a physical letter for me - and even then I have no idea where my bank cards even are because I just use contactless via my phone/watch nowadays.

My electricity payment is direct debit - though I can pay manually via the app if I wish. The app has the amount on it, and they notify of service changes via the app and email. I suppose that if I ignored the electronic notifications they'd eventually send me a letter.

Even if you do get your statements by post, basically nobody here would pay for it by mail. If you really hate computers, you can pay over the phone, or set up a direct debit by phone/letter, or use a "PayPoint" - which includes most corner shops, supermarkets and post offices. It's also quite common for elderly people to just have one of their younger relatives manage it all for them.
by paulcole | 2025-04-24 18:18:10+00:00
How long has it been since you’ve tried this?

Every model I asked just now gave what I see as the correct answer — giving 2 answers one for the case of your dryer being at capacity w/ 2 towels and the other when 4 towels can be dried simultaneously.

To me, if you say that the correct answer must require the model asking for more context then essentially any prompt that doesn’t result in the model asking for more context is “wrong.”
by Apocryphon | 2025-04-24 18:18:41+00:00
Yeah, there's certainly been a steady erosion of labor benefits in the postwar. To dial back my own great man theory a bit, Welch was active in the '80s when Reagan and Thatcher were in power, and those "great men" were also operating in a milieu where the Chicago Boys were very influential, and they had the political mandate to institute management-favoring policies thanks to economic crises of the '70s.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-04-24 18:18:43+00:00
I'm not sure what you're referring to, since profitability wasn't a metric I used. I agree not all profitable things should exist, but increasing the availability of customer support seems to me like a clearly good thing.

Perhaps you're thinking that profit-chasing is the only reason companies don't offer good customer support today? That's not accurate. Providing enough smart, well-resourced human beings to answer every question your customers can come up with is a huge operational challenge, unless your product is absolutely dead simple or you're small enough to make random employees help in their spare time.
by reginald78 | 2025-04-24 18:18:46+00:00
I believe it was GoogleAI in search but it was worse than that. Some asked it if Angelina Jolie was in heat. The tone started kind of insulting like the user was a sexist idiot for thinking human women go into heat like animals, then went back and forth saying she is still fertile at her age and also that her ovaries had been removed. It was funny because it managed to be arrogant, insulting, kind of creepy and gross and logically inconsistent while not even answering the question.

Angelina Jolie was not in Heat (1995). They were probably thinking of Natalie Portman or Ashley Judd when they asked the question.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-24 18:19:00+00:00
The interesting counterpoint is Australia, which did not allow google and facebook to simply pull news. Instead it gave itself the power to assign fees to the companies for not showing the news.

this forced the companies to the negotiating table because the question wasn't to pay for news or not, but pay for news, pay a fine for no news, or leave the market entirely.
by jonathanstrange | 2025-04-24 18:19:10+00:00
My girlfriend also gets the same stuff over and over, most of it AI-generated garbage she's absolutely not interested in. No matter how often she selects "not interested", they always come back. Strangely, this started only recently on her account and mine is still comparatively okay. From what I've heard, it's much worse for US users.

One thing that amazes me is that Facebook thinks I'm interested in content I was interested in more than 25 years ago before Facebook even existed. It's mysterious.
by tinyhouse | 2025-04-24 18:19:18+00:00
I actually find Facebook's feed much better than LinkedIn's for example. Meta seems to be pretty good at showing me posts from groups I often visit and even the "random" stuff is pretty relevant (although mostly a waste of time reels). LinkedIn "random" stuff is always the same stupid content that for some reason has 1000+ likes. Twitter is not much better, the push stupid videos, but at least they have the "following" feed that is much more relevant and I usually don't even bother with the "for you" feed.
by sershe | 2025-04-24 18:20:02+00:00
Are you sitting in a room while typing this? At the margin to reduce the odds of heart attacks, you should be at a walking desk outdoors, or ideally not arguing on the internet at all. Someone trying to "help humanity" should decide the threshold of acceptable self harm for you, just like you feel free to decide it for smokers; then after determining how you should live, they can declare that the alternatives make the world a worse place.

If I was asked about the best correlate for being evil, honestly trying to make the world a better place by determining how specifically others should live would be on top of the list by a huge margin.
by fragmede | 2025-04-24 18:20:30+00:00
I want to know as well! Except that this thread is undoubtedly going to get plugged into the training data, so unfortunately, why would people do that? For mine that worked before the ChatGPT 4.5, it was the river crossing problem. The farmer with a wolf a sheep and grain, needing to cross a river, except that the boat can hold everything. Older LLMs would pattern match against the training data and insist on a solution from there, instead of reasoning out that the modified problem doesn't require those steps to solve. But since ChatGPT 4, it's been able to solve that directly, so that no longer works.
by wasabi991011 | 2025-04-24 18:20:53+00:00
For those who feel weird about the whole "forbidden transitions being only possible with quantum tunneling" thing and want an alternative interpretation:

It's only true that the transitions are forbidden under a given simplified model of the atom. It is very much possible to calculate the transition probabilities under a more realistic model, and the previously "forbidden" transitions are now just regular transitions that occur with lower probability.

In this case, the simplified model is that of the electric dipole approximation, where the atom is taken to be an electric dipole (reasonable when the wavelength of light emitted during an atomic transition is much larger than the size of the atom).This means it interacts with electromagnetic radiation only through electric dipole interactions, which implies that energy transitions must change orbital angular momentum, hence the 21cm transition is "forbidden". However, in reality, the atom is not truly an electric dipole, and so the 21cm transition is possible by the magnetic dipole interaction, just with low probability. (This low probability is due to the relative strength of the magnetic interaction compared to the electric interaction).
Show HN: I made an open source, keyboard-first AI writing assistant
by stanlee_o | 2025-04-24 18:20:56+00:00
Hey everyone!

I just "vibecoded" Spellbound MVP in a day—it's an AI writing assistant that lets you hit a shortcut for instant translations or writing tips, making workflow automation super easy.

First time using Electron for cross-platform apps. A lot of fun

It’s open source. Check it out: https://github.com/stanlee000/spellbound

PS: And yes, I used Spellbound for this post

Would love your feedback
by apitman | 2025-04-24 18:20:57+00:00
I might be misunderstanding what you're saying here. How is ActivityPub more authenticated than Webmention? WM requires the poster to host their content on a website. This is exactly what the AP spec says to do. Now, since the spec was published, most AP implementations also support HTTP signatures[0], but this doesn't provide additional guarantees that you can't get with WM. The authentication is still tied to a URL.

As far as spamming goes, I don't see how WM is any worse than AP. In both protocols your only options are passlists and/or blocklists.

[0]: And an old version that doesn't have an official spec. ActivityPub's issues with spec stagnation and de facto standards is a whole other thing.
by shalmanese | 2025-04-24 18:21:09+00:00
The best case scenario is you succeed after 10 years. The second best case scenario is you fail after a month. The worst case scenario is you fail after 10 years for a thing you could have figured out in the first month.

There's a very basic funnel you can define and the validation is inserting numbers into the funnel to figure out where (if anywhere), the business is. The artistry is figuring out where the rules are and where you can break the rules in surprising ways to make the funnel work.

eg: You can do customer validation on your users and ask them the following Qs:

* Have you ever gone on a group tour with strangers before, how many times? Under what circumstances?

* Show me your calendar for the last 3 months, black out all the dates you definitely couldn't have been open to a tour, what are the dates that remain as a percentage?

* How much have you spent on travel over the last 12 months? What percentage of that was the destination non-negotiable (ie: visiting parents) vs negotiable on a shortlist vs totally open to suggestion?

* How many tools that you used only once 3/6/12 months ago can you name right now? How many under the right prompting? How many did you totally forget unless you got the "oh yeah, I did use that thing a while back".

Start with the end result of how many people before a trip breaks even and work backwards to understand how many people need to fill a cohort before you can reach that breakeven number. Many people who are in your theoretical target market just can't do any trip for totally understandable reasons and you have to be realistic about the cohort you need to reach per trip at scale.

The art is figuring out which sub groups the numbers get weird in your benefit. eg: Parents with young children will always cluster their travel around the school calendar so you get a particular density you can build on but this is also not a group classically associated with fitness. Retirees have a more flexible schedule but also not associated with fitness. Are there other cohorts this might be viable with? I have no idea, it's your job to find out!

But rather than taking 3/6/12/120 months to figure out the answer, there's Qs you can ask that disvalidate your hypothesis in the first month! Figure out what those Qs are and ask those!

PS: I work as a founder coach, feel free to msg me from my bio if you're interested in talking more. Always happy to chat for free for motivated founders.
by caymanjim | 2025-04-24 18:21:13+00:00
This is the primary reason that I'm closer than I've ever been to deleting my Facebook account. I stopped using it in any meaningful way over a decade ago. I think I've posted about six times in the past decade. But I did still check at least a few times a week to see what my friends posted. Now I can scroll for 15 minutes and see only a tiny handful of friend posts, with about six ads and garbage meme posts (not shared by friends, just pure noise injected by Facebook) for each real friend post. I think the ratio is probably even worse than that.

The other day something popped up in the Facebook Android app advertising a new feature to "just see your friends' posts" and when I clicked on that, it really did only show me friend posts and a couple actual ads. I can't find it in the app anymore, though. It's what should be the default view. It's the only thing I will ever care about.

I'm willing to accept a reasonable amount of advertisement as a necessary evil to support the service. What I can't understand is why I'm seeing an endless stream of garbage memes from random accounts that I do not follow and couldn't care less about. Stop "suggesting" things to me. I don't want to "Follow" these morons. I never intentionally interact with any of them, yet I'm flooded with them.

There's little chance of me making it to the end of this year without deleting Facebook entirely. It does nothing to keep me connected to friends anymore, because it hides 99% of their posts unless I view their profiles one at a time, and the few things it does put in my feed are lost in the noise.
by ImPostingOnHN | 2025-04-24 18:21:58+00:00
> If iPhones are to be allowed into the system, they also have to be honest and secure.

This describes a 1:1, total-trust relationship. There are other types of systems fulfilling the requirements without needing a 1:1, total-trust relationship.

For example, the main requirements here are: The account succeeds at making requests it is allowed to make, and the account fails at making requests it is not allowed to make. Both those requirements can be fulfilled entirely server-side, and should be. Why require the client to be locked down?