MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hmaxwell | 2025-04-17 19:36:00+00:00
I did some testing this morning:

Prompt: "can you find any mistakes on my codebase? I put one in there on purpose" + 70,000 tokens of codebase where in one line I have an include for a non-existent file.

Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Try 1 - new chat) Claimed it Found a race condition in the api of the admin interface that would be triggered if two admins were to change the room order at the same time. Claude suggested I group all sql queries in a single transaction. I looked at the code and found that it already used a transaction for all queries. I said: the order_update api is already done with a transaction. Claude replied: "You're absolutely right, and I apologize for my mistake. I was incorrect to claim there was a race condition issue. The transaction ensures atomicity and consistency of the updates, and the SQL queries are properly structured for their intended purpose."

Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Try 2 - new chat) Found a comment in the admin ui javascript code that suggested a potential alternative to event handler cleanup that was not implemented because I decided to go with a cleaner route. Then asked "Is this the issue you intentionally included, or would you like me to look for other potential problems?" I said: "The comment merely suggests an alternative, right?" claude said: "Yes, you're absolutely right. The comment is merely suggesting an alternative approach that isn't being used in the code, rather than indicating a mistake. So there's no actual bug or mistake in this part of the code - just documentation of different possible approaches. I apologize for misinterpreting this as an issue!"

Claude 3.7 Sonnet (Try 3 - new chat) When processing items out of the database to generate QR codes in the admin interface, Claude says that my code both attempts to generate QR codes with undefined data AS WELL AS saying that my error handling skips undefined data. Claude contradicts itself within 2 sentences. When asking about clarification Claude replies: Looking at the code more carefully, I see that the code actually has proper error handling. I incorrectly stated that it "still attempts to call generateQRCode()" in the first part of my analysis, which was wrong. The code properly handles the case when there's no data-room attribute.

Gemnini Advanced 2.5 Pro (Try 1 - new chat) Found the intentional error and said I should stop putting db creds/api keys into the codebase.

Gemnini Advanced 2.5 Pro (Try 2 - new chat) Found the intentional error and said I should stop putting db creds/api keys into the codebase.

Gemnini Advanced 2.5 Pro (Try 3 - new chat) Found the intentional error and said I should stop putting db creds/api keys into the codebase.

o4-mini-high and o4-mini and o3 and 4.5 and 4o - "The message you submitted was too long, please reload the conversation and submit something shorter."
by nopelynopington | 2025-04-17 19:36:12+00:00
AI giving feedback on your story is a few steps up from using spell check or grammarly. Harmless enough, right?

But consider this: any feedback the AI gives us 1) not intelligent, merely guessing the next word based on similar requests for feedback it has seen and 2) always pushing your story toward a more generic version.

Not to mention, there are thousands of excellent human editors out there who's livelihood is under threat from AI editors just as much as writers are from AI writers, coders from AI coders.

I experimented with AI writing tools when they came out first. I was excited by what LLMs could do. Fiction is one place they excel, because hallucinations don't matter. Eventually I came around to the viewpoint that no matter how cool it useful they are, they're not a good thing.

AI is already destroying the publishing industry, and making it very difficult for human writers to get noticed in a sea of robot submissions. There are lots of people out there who won't want to read something if AI was used, for that reason
by fragmede | 2025-04-17 19:36:14+00:00
The point is that AGI is the wrong bar to be aiming for. LLMs are sufficiently useful at their current state that even if it does take us 30 years to get to AGI, even just incremental improvements from now until then, they'll still be useful enough to provide value to users/customers for some companies to win big. VC funding will run out and some companies won't make it, but some of them will, to the delight of their investors. AGI when? is an interesting question, but might just be academic. we have self driving cars, weight loss drugs that work, reusable rockets, and useful computer AI. We're living in the future, man, and robot maids are just around the corner.
by lordnacho | 2025-04-17 19:36:19+00:00
I think it only takes a small tweak for everything to stall.

Suppose say, that people only trust a small group. Extended family and lifelong friends, for instance. People get very violent as soon as they disagree on something, immediately wanting to settle disputes by force.

Nobody can strike a deal to do anything with anyone outside their group, and you certainly can't make agreements with a guy in Seattle to deliver things to London. You can't mine coal hoping to sell it to an as yet unknown person. There's no point in fishing more fish than you and your friends can eat.

What happens in this world? Well, I think people will still be intelligent. They'll still think about social situations, especially when it comes to mating. There will still be stories, and humor.

But we're not advancing tech, and we're not changing economically.

Why do I say it's a small tweak? Well, we've all met people who seem to not be able to work with anyone. It's not unlikely that out in the stars, there's some planet with people who have everything we have, but they can't get things to work.
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-17 19:36:47+00:00
Alice is a professor at Harvard. She wants to research some topic. She applies to the NSF for a grant. The NSF says "wow that research sounds awesome and aligned with our priorities" and funds her lab to perform that research. She and the lab perform the research and share it with the scientific community for free.

That's what federal funding for universities looks like.
by kllrnohj | 2025-04-17 19:37:10+00:00
> my macbook screen literally goes darker AROUND the video , which gets brighter. I am not making this up

This is almost certainly your eyes playing tricks on you, actually. Setup that situation where you know if you scroll down or whatever it'll happen, but before triggering it cover up the area where the HDR will be with something solid - like a piece of cardboard or whatever. Then do it. You'll likely not notice anything change, or if there is a shift it'll be very minor. Yet as soon as you remove that thing physically covering the area, bam it'll look gray.

It's a more intense version of the simultaneous contrast illusions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrast_effect & https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Checker_shadow_illusion

Eyes be weird.
by Kon5ole | 2025-04-17 19:37:14+00:00
It's a metaphor, "strong" and "weak" refers to the ability to overcome the "hard times", whatever that may be.

Basically if you experienced the direct consequences of a "hard time" (a demagogue, a famine, a recession or financial crisis, SCRUM, or whatever) you will be more aware and resilient to allowing the things that caused that to happen than if you never experienced it. That's "strength".

It is of course true, we see it everywhere in nature, but it's perhaps often more due to hard times eliminating weakness than actually creating strength.

Good times tend to increase the number of people who don't know how serious bad times can get, don't realize the importance of principles that were obvious to the people who survived the bad times.

So "strong people" can perhaps be "created" equally in good times as well, but they are increasingly outnumbered. During hard times the "weak" are eliminated.

This being Ycombinator one can consider the example of how any crazy idea gets funding during good times but during hard times the ideas that actually have legs remain. ;-)
by southernplaces7 | 2025-04-17 19:37:38+00:00
It would be somewhat worrisome to actually find signs of primitive extraterrestrial life because of the Fermi Paradox. Given the age of the universe, and how long it took both complex life to develop on earth and for a creature such as us to emerge from that, finding life elsewhere would beg a return to Fermi's question of "Where is everyone?" implying that something comes along and causes evolving civilizations to be exterminated before they ever show signs to their presence to the wider galaxy.

If life, even of a very primitive sort, were found, it would stand to reason that it had done so in the past and that other civilizations, possibly even many of them, had formed in our huge galaxy long ago, giving them time to develop enough to be detectable even to us, so then, where are they?

Then again of course, there are probably many, many known unknowns and unknown unknowns lurking amidst all of the above supposition.
by SillyUsername | 2025-04-17 19:37:42+00:00
Well yes, but still the name should give it away and you'll be shot during PRs if you submit JS as TS :D

The fact is the training data has confused JS with TS so the LLM can't "get its head" around the semantic, not technical difference.

Also the secondary point wasn't just that it was "incorrect" it's the fact its reasoning was worthless unless it knew who to ask and the right questions to ask.

If somebody says to you something you know is right, is actually wrong, the first thing you ask them is "why do you think that?" not "maybe I should think of this from a new angle, without evidence of what is wrong".

It illustrates lack of critical thinking, and also shows you missed the point of the question. :D
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-17 19:38:19+00:00
Catastrophic risk was never a serious possibility from anything OpenAI could ever produce, so it's not surprising at all that this is being sidelined as they pivot to a for-profit company

Anyone who joined OpenAI in the past thinking they were seriously going to produce "Catastrophic Risk" from their research into language models is a joke

If you want me to believe "catastrophic risk" is an outcome from your company, I would assume you are developing autonomous weapons, not glorified chatbots

Please be serious
by singularity2001 | 2025-04-17 19:38:39+00:00
one wasmtime dependency and a self contained python file with 100 loc seems reasonable!

much better than calling deno, at least if you have no pip dependencies...

just had to update to new api:

# store.add_fuel(fuel) store.set_fuel(fuel) fuel_consumed=fuel-store.get_fuel()

and it works!!

time to hello world: hello_wasm_python311.py 0.20s user 0.03s system 97% cpu 0.234 total
by HelloMcFly | 2025-04-17 19:38:47+00:00
> If it wasn't worth your time to create then it's not worth my time to consume... It is "ai generated, human assisted"

I truly do understand this, but this line you and others keep using isn't actually helping me understand your position. I spent three months writing my last 7k short story, it was the culmination of an idea that took me a long time to work through. Not a single line was written or suggested by AI (an overt part of the prompt), nothing in the "story bible" was informed by AI in any way. AI helped observe grammar and structure and uncertainty as feedback for me, but it didn't create anything. Nothing was copy-pasted (literally or essentially).

I don't really put labels on my writing because they are again, just for me (when others read them, it's because they ask to, and yes I've made clear how AI aided in editing in the last two). Nevertheless, I just don't see it this way at all given what I wrote above. The fun part is the execution of the idea, I've no interest in robbing myself of that.

But I can also appreciate that given the private nature of what I'm doing, the stakes are lower so believing what I say is easy. If someone asked me to read a self-described "AI-assisted" story, I probably wouldn't want to because I wouldn't know how much to believe them if they said what I said above.
by sfink | 2025-04-17 19:39:11+00:00
Membership in NP is a statement about how easy a problem is (specifically, that you can verify an answer in no worse than polynomial time). NP-hard is about how hard a problem is (at a minimum).

I wonder if there would be less confusion over this if NP had been called "NP-easy" in the first place. But Wikipedia says that by now that term has already been taken.

P is "very easy": you can solve these in polynomial time. NP is "easy": you can verify a solution in polynomial time. Are there any problems you can verify but not solve in polynomial time? Nobody knows! (But ~everyone thinks so.)

NP-hard is "hard": it takes polynomial time or more to even verify these.
by jchw | 2025-04-17 19:39:11+00:00
> yes, this blog is a proud user of the european date format - if you don't want to see yyyy-mm-dd's, please press alt-f4 and go back to boycotting bud light or something

Interesting to call this the "european date format", given that prior to ISO 8601 I'm pretty sure this date order was almost entirely used in East Asia and not Europe. To me day-month-year will always be the European date order.
by kbolino | 2025-04-17 19:39:43+00:00
That was a bit tongue-in-cheek, sorry. I've worked in mTLS shops and it's definitely not practical for the public Internet.

Ultimately, I think the practical solution to homoglyphs is in the presentation layer, whether it be displaying different scripts in different ways, warning when scripts are mixed, or some other kind of UX rather than protocol change. The only protocol change I can think of to address them would be to go back to ASCII only (and even that is more of a presentation issue since IDNs are just Punycode).
by mathteddybear | 2025-04-17 19:40:16+00:00
It is 'incredibly efficient' because it is incredibly good at predicting clicks, conversions, or even conversion values. Which in turn makes it efficient. Sure, there is something called "auction" there, but Sothesby's or Tattersalls generally don't have buyers bidding based on what some machine-learning prediction AI computed in a jiffy (or maybe they do these days, who knows).
by s_tec | 2025-04-17 19:40:20+00:00
This isn't the charging circuit - that goes in the charger. This circuit is responsible monitoring the state-of-charge (for that little LED bar graph on the front), disconnecting the cells if something goes wrong, and negotiating available current with the tool. It should also be responsible for cell balancing, but it looks like Milwaukee forgot to implement that feature (oops).

The videos at the bottom of the article have most of the details, since those dive into the communications protocols as opposed to the raw schematics.
by southernplaces7 | 2025-04-17 19:40:25+00:00
The paradox would remain valid in my view. Even with all those stacked difficulties and plausibility levels, the galaxy alone is immense and if life of any kind were to be found, i'd argue that we should be able to see signs of sophisticated life somewhere at least, so where is it? It's still a cause for some speculation and maybe even existential worry.
by cosmic_quanta | 2025-04-17 19:40:55+00:00
I'm not going to sell you on anything. All of the things you've mentioned are true. Loosely, the multitude of string types and the state of the standard library come from the same place: the language is 30+ years old! There are many warts to be found.

However, if you decide to start learning, the path is hard, especially if you come from a non-computer-science background like me. I attempted to learn Haskell twice; I bounced off the first time, quite hard, and didn't try again for years.

What worked for me is a combination of two things:

* Having a goal in mind, that has nothing with the choice of language. For me, it was building a personal website

* The book Haskell Programming from First Principles [0]

and if you have more questions, reach out.

[0]: https://haskellbook.com/
by disillusionist | 2025-04-17 19:41:00+00:00
you can do this rather easily by returning an object rather than a primitive. if you're using a language like TypeScript, destructuring the resulting returned object is rather trivial and (in my opinion) delightful to read. eg

function combineNames({ first, last }) { const fullName = `${first} ${last}`; return { fullName }; } const { fullName } = combineNames({first: 'John', last: 'Doe' });
by stickfigure | 2025-04-17 19:41:22+00:00
I don't work for Snap, but they do use some software I wrote, so I guess that's close enough.

I find all of these "social media is bad" articles (for kids or adults) basically boil down to: Let humans communicate freely, some of them will do bad things.

This presents a choice: Monitor everyone Orwell-style, or accept that the medium isn't going to be able to solve the problem. Even though we tolerate a lot more monitoring for kids than adults, I'm still pretty uncomfortable with the idea that technology platforms should be policing everyone's messages.

So I sleep just fine knowing that some kids (and adults) are going to have bad experiences. I send my kid to the playground knowing he could be hurt. I take him skiing. He just got his first motorcycle. We should not strive for a risk-free world, and I think efforts to make it risk-free are toxic.
by physicsguy | 2025-04-17 19:41:39+00:00
Windows works because it just continues to work. An enterprise can buy software, and it largely just run and run and run because they are serious about backwards compatibility.

This is just not true on Mac. See: the end of 32-bit support, switch to ARM largely worked, but some software didn't if it used particular x86_64 processor instructions.

On Linux, Ubuntu is decent but people still have issues with things like graphics drivers, Wayland, etc. etc. which makes it hard to advise it for your totally non-technical user.

On top of all this, Windows has the best management options if you're running 1000s of machines in your company.
by brandensilva | 2025-04-17 19:41:56+00:00
Extortion is Trump's favorite tactic. He's been punishing Maine for standing up to him. The law firms too. Soon the democrats when he can get past deporting the criminal U.S citizens.

I don't think it's unreasonable to say people are the only option to change our trajectory. We haven't reached critical mass yet, but the next national protest is April 19th which lands on the 250th revolutionary war anniversary. Be there or be square.
by UncleMeat | 2025-04-17 19:41:57+00:00
Please do me a favor.

Write down on a sticky note "if the government sends a US citizen to CECOT I will..." and fill in the rest of this sentence. Put it somewhere you see it everyday.

I'm personally absolutely sick of the "oh it is not a problem until..." lines moving basically daily. Everybody defending this administration needs to commit to a line otherwise I fully expect to see posts saying what you are saying here with ever more brutal and violent outcomes from the state for the rest of time.
by jtsnow | 2025-04-17 19:42:26+00:00
This seems highly revisionist. Cancel culture isn't just about boycotting or being selective about what one consumes. It's not even about holding people accountable.

It's about destroying people and tearing them down in order to make examples of them. It results in antagonists showing up at people's homes, writing letters to employers, creating petitions, attacking people in the nastiest ways possible with out engaging with ideas or arguments.

It's the disproportionate and graceless reactions that distinguish cancel culture from past methods of accountability.
by superfrank | 2025-04-17 19:42:35+00:00
Is there really lock in with AI models?

I built a product that uses and LLM and I got curious about the quality of the output from different models. It took me a weekend to go from just using OpenAI's API to having Gemini, Claude, and DeepSeek all as options and a lot of that time was research on what model from each provider that I wanted to use.
by srean | 2025-04-17 19:42:40+00:00
> on the algorithmic differentiable ring (and operator)

That sounds like an interesting read. Do you have the chapter or the reference to the paper that you can share ?

Regarding th crop of deep neural network research their self-serving and willful blindness has a reputation that's well deserved.

A grad student from Hinton's lab mentioned one researcher who would misspell a citation on purpose so that the citation count of the cited paper does not go up.
by AlexandrB | 2025-04-17 19:42:49+00:00
I would argue that traffic laws and signage is more about efficiency than capability. Not every country has a culture of following traffic laws and people still manage to navigate motor vehicles around somehow.

My personal experience with this is from Mexico where, in heavy traffic, lanes are not really a "thing" and people will pack their vehicles in wherever possible. This leads to much more chaotic traffic flow and more unexpected stops though.
by mindslight | 2025-04-17 19:42:58+00:00
Just when I think the Kool-aid can't get any worse, there's a new level of peak brain damage - another dispatch from the backwards bizarro world where all of the extreme benefits of global power are just taken for granted and forgotten about, with the remaining dynamics framed in terms of being liability and injustice instead.

In some sense the dynamic isn't surprising as it rhymes with how the left is often shouted down for criticizing while ignoring realpolitik, and maggots are coming from that place of self-centered entitlement cranked up to 11. It's still shocking though.
by turtletontine | 2025-04-17 19:43:09+00:00
Um, no, the market is obviously not defined as “google ads.” You could bother to do one single search (maybe even with google!) before spewing nonsense.

Specifically, part of the case found google liable for “unlawfully [tying] its publisher ad server and ad exchange” in violation of the Sherman antitrust act. Basically, google has locked down both the supply side (sites with space the sell for ads) and demand side (market of advertisers bidding on that space) so it can play both sides - and (crucially!) it has integrated them so as to lock in both advertisers and publishers. That’s how you unfairly build a monopoly.

And funny that you use the App Store as an example. Two years ago google lost an antitrust case brought by epic games about their android store practices: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_Games_v._Google?wprov=sft...
by spruce_tips | 2025-04-17 19:43:25+00:00
i have a high volume task i wrote an eval for and was pleasantly surprised at 2.0 flash's cost to value ratio especially compared to gpt4.1-mini/nano

accuracy | input price | output price

Gemini Flash 2.0 Lite: 67% | $0.075 | $0.30

Gemini Flash 2.0: 93% | $0.10 | $0.40

GPT-4.1-mini: 93% | $0.40 | $1.60

GPT-4.1-nano: 43% | $0.10 | $0.40

excited to to try out 2.5 flash
by danielbln | 2025-04-17 19:43:50+00:00
Google's Gemini 2.5 pro model is incredibly strong, it's en par and at times better than Claude 3.7 in coding performance, being able to ingest entire videos into the context is something I haven seen elsewhere either. Google AI products have been anywhere between bad (Bard) to lackluster (Gemini 1.5), but 2.5 is a contender, in all dimensions. Google is also the only player that owns the entire stack, from research, software , data, compute hardware. I think they were slow to start but they've closed the gap since.
by ack_complete | 2025-04-17 19:44:00+00:00
That happened to me at a CompUSA, opened up box for what was supposed to be wireless keyboard and found newspapers instead. It helped that I had just been there with my dad 5 minutes ago and the newspapers were from a town 40 miles away.

They have to be suspicious because customer fraud is as much of a problem as employee fraud, but it still sucks to be accused as the victim.