MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-04-20 17:39:53+00:00
> …and rapidly becomes deprecated not due to quality but because the requirements for operation or development changed substantially.

Did they? Like I have no data for this nor would I know how one would set about getting it, but like, from my personal experience and the experiences of folks I've spoken to for basically my entire career, the requirements we have for our software barely change at all. I do not expect Outlook to have chat and reaction functionality. I do not desire Windows to monitor my ongoing usage of my computer to make suggestions on how I might work more efficiently. These things were not requested by me or any user I have ever spoken to. In fact I would take that a step further and say that if your scope and requirements are shifting that wildly, that often, that you did a poor job of finding them in the first place, irrespective of where they've now landed.

They are far more often the hysterical tinkerings demanded by product managers who must justify their salaries with some notion of what's "next" for Outlook, because for some reason someone at Microsoft decided that Outlook being a feature complete and good email client was suddenly, for no particular reason, not good enough anymore.

And again speaking from my and friend's experiences, I would in fact love it very much thank you if Microsoft would just make their products good, function well, look nice and be nice to use, and then stop. Provide security updates of course, maybe an occasional UI refresh if you've got some really good ideas for it, but apart from that, just stop changing it. Let it be feature complete, quality software.

> Engineers, especially academically experienced ones, prematurely optimize for correctness and arbitrary dimensions of quality because they are disconnected from and motivated by interests orthogonal to their users.

I don't think we're disconnected at all from our users. I want, as a software developer, to turn out quality software that does the job we say it does on the box. My users, citation many conversations with many of them, want the software to do what it says on the box, and do it well. These motivations are not orthogonal at all. Now, certainly it's possible to get so lost in the minutia of design that one loses the plot, that's definitely where a good project manager will shine. However, to say these are different concerns entirely is IMO, a bridge too far. My users probably don't give a shit about the technical minutia of implementing a given feature: they care if it works. However, if I implement it correctly, with the standards I know to work well for that technology, then I will be happy, and they will be happy.
by almost_usual | 2025-04-20 17:39:53+00:00
> I unexpectedly moved here two years ago from Chicago

I was going to say, this sounds like it was written by someone who wasn’t around during 2012-2016. Aside from AI not much is new.

> A tech crash wouldn’t just mean a higher unemployment rate; it would also devastate local businesses and public services. Empty offices, empty coffee shops around those offices, empty balance sheets for coffee beans, and so on.

This already happened with COVID and remote work. The city was overflowing with tech hype and industry to support it 10 years ago.
by goeiedaggoeie | 2025-04-20 17:40:36+00:00
I think you misunderstand that case "compiled its scores and statistics by employing people to listen or watch the games, then enter the scores on the computer which transmits the scores to STATS' on-line service, to be sent out to anyone using a SportsTrax pager.[1]"

Notice how they watched the game and got the statistics like that. The restrictions are about using the scoreboard and the data displays and reselling/commercialising that data. It is however legal to watch the game and compile and distribute your own stats due to the game entering public domain.

Due to this many betting companies and data collection companies have to pay people to watch the game vs just scraping the scoreboard (which is the context from which I learnt about this). ironically at venue OCR is a common way to get scoreboard data.
by skybrian | 2025-04-20 17:41:22+00:00
What’s clear is that AI is unreliable in general and must be tested on specific tasks. That might be human review of a single output or some kind of task-specific evaluation.

It’s bad luck for those of us who want to talk about how good or bad they are in general. Summary statistics aren’t going to tell us much more than a reasonable guess as to whether a new model is worth trying on a task we actually care about.
by jen20 | 2025-04-20 17:41:51+00:00
I see the opposite in most Java programs: poor organization with packages based on a type of thing (eg models, controllers) rather than related behaviors.

Go doesn’t have warnings, which is great - if something is worth warning about, it is also worth erroring about. It never ceases to amaze me when a brand new JavaScript project spits out dozens of errors after pulling in a common library, and everyone thinks that is ok.
by dataflow | 2025-04-20 17:41:55+00:00
> It looks like black that glows blue

I could maybe buy that as a description, but...

> I think it is fairly described as a new color—I would be quite unsettled if I encountered it in real life.

I don't feel this follows. There are a lot of things that would unsettle me if I saw them, like if someone gave off a visible aura. Heck, I even found a "black flame" a bit unsettling, and I saw a literal video of it on YouTube (look it up if you don't know what I'm referring to). I'd feel similarly if I saw a transparent human too. The feeling you get - or the fact that you haven't seen something visually similar before - doesn't really imply it's a new color, I think!
by bigyabai | 2025-04-20 17:42:04+00:00
> the idea that the government does not routinely tell private organizations how to comply with the law is a fallacy.

The fact that the government allows (and even sponsors with taxpayer dollars) dragnet surveillance is evidence that any hope for the ethical regulation of business in America has evaporated. It's bipartisan, functionally unanimous on all levels - you have no right to privacy and will suffer at the whims of the current leadership. You want to see "reform in the regulatory state"? How about the US quits investing in Palantir and Blackwater PMC, or stops letting vigilante adversaries like NSO Group off the hook? Do you support prejudice when it only oppresses the people you hate? It's crazy to read people say this like Microsoft deserves a greater right to privacy than they do.

The system is broken, everyone with ethical consistency has known this from a cursory glance. Laughing at Harvard for getting their share of injustice is an American own-goal, and the remediations he's suggesting border on braindead. How many software developers would still have jobs if Microsoft won their appeal? How would any of our lives have possibly improved by not scaring Microsoft away from John-Deere levels of lockdown?

I know this guy is an a16z shill so his moral standard is probably about knee-high, but this would very obviously not stimulate competition in anything America is competent at. There's a reason Tim Cook has to lobby from the absolute top to protect himself from the same fate Microsoft reached, a just court will take him down too.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-20 17:42:27+00:00
You see that all the time with social media and reposts though. Sometimes the reposts hit sometimes not. In either case falsifying the record and making it seem like there is active discussion when most of the original comments have moved on already is a bit of a stupid feature.

Second chance queue is basically dang getting unilateral authority to be an empowered reposter and probably looking at internal data when the site is most active to drop the stale post back in.
by luckylion | 2025-04-20 17:42:33+00:00
Most of the time leadership doesn't need to pressure individuals, because they follow the commands -- not because they so well aligned on all topic (they are not).

Of course there's an argument to be made that it would be a lot more chaotic if every elected MP truly was only beholden to their consciousness, because your certainty of how some vote will go would be very low and you'd have to actually convince MPs that it's the right thing to do (that would open up the question of transparency, i.e. who voted for what; official German politics are fundamentally opposed to that idea).

Brokering backroom deals among party elites is far more efficient and predictable -- you can always buy agreement by offering some concessions on a different topic they care about. But then we're back to that question: why do you need hundreds of people if the decisions are made by a few dozens?
by switchbak | 2025-04-20 17:43:00+00:00
Not really, there’s three cities in close proximity, only one has these progressive policies. The other two are fine, it’s only the more liberal one that has these kinds of issues.

It’s a tough problem with no easy answers, but one of their main solutions is to put up solid fencing around the encampment. Just ignoring or pretending it’s not a problem does not make the problem go away.

One of those cities gentrified decades ago. Their problem is now more to do with all of their residents dying off. Also an interesting problem, and a bit of foreshadowing to what much of the western world will have to deal with fairly soon.

I’m a recent resident of this city, so you can’t really blame me for its state. And I’d place the blame mostly on city policy, not people “letting go”.
by qsort | 2025-04-20 17:44:31+00:00
I don't think it's necessarily worsening, it's just becoming more evident.

The way I conceptualize this is that there are two kinds of knowledge. The first is fundamental knowledge. If you learn what is computational complexity and how to use it, or what is linear algebra and why do we care, then you're left with something. The second is what I call "transient" knowledge (I made up the word). If you learn by heart the DOM manipulation methods you have to invoke to make a webpage shiny (or, let's be real, the API of some framework), or what is the difference between datetime and datetime2 in SQL Server 2017, then it looks like you know how to do stuff, but none of those things are fundamental to the way the underlying technologies work: they are mostly pieces of trivia that are the way they are because of historical happenstance rather than actual technical reasons.

To be effective at any given day job, one might need to learn a few pieces of knowledge of the second kind, but one should never confuse them for actual, real understanding. The problem is that the first kind can't be learned from youtube videos in increments of 15 minutes.

That's what LLMs are exposing, IMO. If you don't know what is the syntax for lambdas in C# or how to structure components in React, any LLM will give you perfectly working code. If your code crumbles to pieces because you didn't design your database correctly or you're doing useless computations, you won't even know what you don't know.

This transcends software development, by the way. We talk about how problem solving is a skill, but in my experience is more like physical form: if you don't keep yourself in shape, you won't be when you need it. I see this a lot in kids: the best ones are much smarter than I was at their age, the average struggles with long division.
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-20 17:44:35+00:00
The big issue is you reply to a comment from an hour ago but never get a reply, because that comment was actually made two weeks ago and the original commenter is not reviewing those old posts for new replies. This leads to a silencing of discussion in the worst way where one party has no idea they aren’t getting heard and the other party has no idea they are being spoken to.
by mellosouls | 2025-04-20 17:44:39+00:00
The capabilities of AI post gpt3 have become extraordinary and clearly in many cases superhuman.

However (as the article admits) there is still no general agreement of what AGI is, or how we (or even if we can) get there from here.

What there is is a growing and often naïve excitement that anticipates it as coming into view, and unfortunately that will be accompanied by the hype-merchants desperate to be first to "call it".

This article seems reasonable in some ways but unfortunately falls into the latter category with its title and sloganeering.

"AGI" in the title of any article should be seen as a cautionary flag. On HN - if anywhere - we need to be on the alert for this.
Ask HN: What is so hard about WiFi Mesh?
by rrr_oh_man | 2025-04-20 17:44:43+00:00
I've been burned with TP Link's Deco that is advertised as a mesh but sneakily isn't.

Meshforce also sucks more than it works reliably. Needs to reboot every couple of days and drops requests like hot potatoes.

OpenWRT seems like a logical solution, but you apparently need to be an enthusiast to get it to work, reliably, over a prolonged period.

So, question: Why does daisy-chaining requests across adjacent nodes work so well in TCP/IP, but seems to be so hard and fails so miserably when we move it to the physical world? What am I missing?
by playnine | 2025-04-20 17:45:23+00:00
> I glanced at the bookshelves around me — a lot of Isaac Asimov and faddish tech-sponsored print magazines covering “the future of governance and society”.

Perhaps because I am in tech I don’t understand how this is a bad “I have to leave this party now” sort of thing.

> The city is the indisputable tech capital of the country.

Do people think that? “Silicon Valley” is on the other side on the bay and I usually think of it as an amorphous blob that covers a few city borders. I’d have probably said Mountain View if pressed.
by gavinray | 2025-04-20 17:46:37+00:00
Is it not physically impossible for LLM's to be anything but "plausible text completion"?

Neural Networks as I understand them are universal function approximators.

In terms of text, that means they're trained to output what they believe to be the "most probably correct" sequence of text.

An LLM has no idea that it is "conversing", or "answering" -- it relates some series of symbolic inputs to another series of probabilistic symbolic outputs, aye?
by D-Coder | 2025-04-20 17:46:39+00:00
_The Mote in God's Eye_:

"Wrong," said Renner.

"The tactful way," Rod said quietly, "the polite way to disagree with the Senator would be to say, 'That turns out not to be the case.'"

Renner's face lit up. "Hey. I like that. Anyway, the Senator's wrong."
by 3np | 2025-04-20 17:48:06+00:00
> some formulaic letter, complete with all the required phatic flourishes

Why do you think that person reading your letter requires those phatic flourishes? Culturally I believe they serve as a form of proof-of-work: The effort is the point.

Written by an LLM, it becomes truluy valueless slop. Just don't generate the slop in the first place.

> I'd you're actually plowing though that slop yourself, you have only yourself to blame.

What a way to react to someone sincerely reading what you wrote them.
by Borealid | 2025-04-20 17:49:24+00:00
What your parent poster said is nonetheless true, regardless of how it feels to you. Getting text from an LLM is a process of iteratively attempting to find a likely next token given the preceding ones.

If you give an LLM "The rain in Spain falls" the single most likely next token is "mainly", and you'll see that one proportionately more than any other.

If you give an LLM "Find an unorthodox completion for the sentence 'The rain in Spain falls'", the most likely next token is something other than "mainly" because the tokens in "unorthodox" are more likely to appear before text that otherwise bucks statistical trends.

If you give the LLM "blarghl unorthodox babble The rain in Spain" it's likely the results are similar to the second one but less likely to be coherent (because text obeying grammatical rules is more likely to follow other text also obeying those same rules).

In any of the three cases, the LLM is predicting text, not "parsing" or "understanding" a prompt. The fact it will respond similarly to a well-formed and unreasonably-formed prompt is evidence of this.

It's theoretically possible to engineer a string of complete gibberish tokens that will prompt the LLM to recite song lyrics, or answer questions about mathemtical formulae. Those strings of gibberish are just difficult to discover.
Ask HN: Who/what is the top-educator/content on how to use ChatGPT/Claude well?
by marcklingen | 2025-04-20 17:49:33+00:00
It think there’s a huge advantage in being very good at using ChatGPT and Claude, but high-quality, actionable content on this topic seems surprisingly hard to find—at least in my social feeds and here on HN.

Can you share any good writing on this? It seems like many of the features within chatgpt/claude are undocumented + would benefit from better examples.

There are so many features that are really useful when being used in combination: audio mode to collect top-of-mind ideas while going for a walk, prompt deep research to compile report that goes deep on multiple topics including comparison tables, then use reasoning model to compile summary within a canvas, rewrite with a large non-reasoning model to improve the writing style (4.5 sounds way nicer than o3 imo).

Anecdotally, many of my friends want to "encourage the use of AI across their teams". Thus, there's probably even a good financial incentive and market to create actionable monetized courses on this. Social feeds also do not seem to be saturated with this kind of content yet, so probably it is fairly doable to gain distribution when starting out.
by ceejayoz | 2025-04-20 17:49:49+00:00
> An Uber spokeswoman said Mr. McDougall and Mr. Calnan “were initially flagged for fraud after a pattern of unusual behavior and their access was removed. After reviewing again, we decided they’re eligible for reactivation.”

Only after a NYT reporter started poking around, of course. How many others don’t have that going for them?
by PabRubio | 2025-04-20 17:50:17+00:00
I've built a web app called MemoryLog (memorylog.io)...

Basically, users can create one "snippet" per day as a way to journal consistently. Each snippet includes an image, a short caption (50 characters) and one emoji. These snippets are stored within MemoryLog so users can revisit them later. I'm also building AI features to improve the user experience. In other words, MemoryLog is a new way of journaling through snippets!

What do you think of the idea?
by brk | 2025-04-20 17:51:48+00:00
I remember saving birthday money and buying this at Radio Shack as a kid. It was pretty advanced for the time. Then I had the idea to try and make it remote controlled, or just fiddle with the internal electronics a bit. Joke was on me, there were no electronics, this thing was 100% mechanical. A single DC motor, and a fuck ton of gears that were engaged/disengaged by manipulating the two joysticks.

This toy probably equally inspired kids to go into robotics, or to design automotive transmissions.
by MattPalmer1086 | 2025-04-20 17:52:14+00:00
That may explain some of it, but I've seen it all over, including in places I know that is not the case.

Mostly I think it boils down to a combination of a CYA mentality, risk averse managers and unskilled security personnel.

Making a decision that this Critical (potential) vulnerability does not need fixing is a decision that none of the above want to make and stand by, or have to explain.
by djha-skin | 2025-04-20 17:54:03+00:00
I understand your statement and it has merit. However, I note the draft has not been active since the 70s. Those men all volunteered to serve their country. They believed in what they were doing, and so did I.

Yes, some volunteered to get out of poverty, bad circumstances, etc., but that doesn't mean it was the only route out. They chose to be there.

My uncle was in a bad situation, married early and had no money or degree. He joined the army and served in Desert Storm. He chose to be there. I was proud of him.

I didn't join because at the time I graduated high school (2005), they weren't taking people who took Adderall for ADHD ("daily psycoactive drug" or some such nonsense). It disqualified me from military service. That's what the recruiter told me anyway. But I would have been proud to serve.

I believe we did good in Afghanistan, fool's errand though it was. I believe a lot of lives were touched good. An entire generation of girls who would otherwise not have an education, for one. I was devastated when things didn't work out.

For this reason, I get annoyed when people say "we sent our kids to die".
by monkpit | 2025-04-20 17:54:08+00:00
This take really misses a key part of implementation of these LLMs and I’ve been struggling to put my finger on it.

In every LLM thread someone chimes in with “it’s just a statistical token predictor”.

I feel this misses the point and I think it dismisses attention heads and transformers, and that’s what sits weird with me every time I see this kind of take.

There _is_ an assumption being made within the model at runtime. Assumption, confusion, uncertainty - one camp might argue that none of these exist in the LLM.

But doesn’t the implementation constantly make assumptions? And what even IS your definition of “assumption” that’s not being met here?

Edit: I guess my point, overall, is: what’s even the purpose of making this distinction anymore? It derails the discussion in a way that’s not insightful or productive.
by gnomeluvscorpo | 2025-04-20 17:54:52+00:00
Perhaps with all these changes to GUI since initial Shell release their goal is to enter some niche mobile market and call job done. Because nothing else explains all this interface gutting out they did over 14 years.

Once they finish sucking donations and other forms of financial support they'll probably announce it's time to "sunset" Gnome/gtk because it sadly didn't met unspecified expectations of unspecified group of people.

Gnome team, what they did and what they still want to do, their attitude towards users - especially those who dare to criticize them is THE result of polluting FOSS with corporate style of software development.

Theming and customization of Linux is half-dead because of what happens at Gnome.
by wongarsu | 2025-04-20 17:55:33+00:00
If you have the model output a chain of thought, whether it's a reasoning model or you prompt a "normal" model to do so, you will see examples of the model going "user said X, but did they mean Y? Y makes more sense, I will assume Y". Sometimes stretched over multiple paragraphs, consuming the entire reasoning budget for that prompt.

Discussing whether models can "reason" or "think" is a popular debate topic on here, but I think we can all at least agree that they do something that at least resembles "reasoning" and "assumptions" from our human point of view. And if in its chain-of-thought it decides your prompt is wrong it will go ahead answering what it assumes is the right prompt
by Telemakhos | 2025-04-20 17:55:57+00:00
Sports and art aren't superfluous: they teach gross and fine (respectively) motor skills. School isn't just about developing cognitive skills or brainwashing students into political orthodoxies: it's also about teaching students how to control their bodies in general and specific muscle groups, like the hands, in particular. Art is one way of training the hands; music is another (manipulating anything from a triangle to a violin), as is handwriting. Without that training. Students may well not get enough of that dexterity training at home, particularly in the age of tablets [0].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43230884
by huntertwo | 2025-04-20 17:55:57+00:00
You need to spend more money on adding “optional” nutrients that would otherwise be produced by organic processes in a living soil. These nutrients are what add to flavor but don’t necessarily help with the growing process.

The distinction isn’t hydroponics vs soil - it’s organic vs inorganic farming. Non organic soil faces the same issues. Aquaponics (I.e organic hydroponics using fish and other aquatic organisms) also yield flavorful crops.