MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-08 16:34:44+00:00
> AI is both terrible and wonderful. It's useless and some things and impressive at others

That's kind of my problem. I am saying that it mostly only appears impressive to people who don't know better

When people do know better it comes up short consistently

Most of the pro AI people I see are bullish about it on things they have no idea about, like non-technical CEOs insisting that it can create good code
by TorKlingberg | 2025-04-08 16:34:45+00:00
I meant to write a blog post titled "What's good about ClearCase" in 2014, and I wish I did because now I've forgotten most of it.

ClearCase is a terrible version control system I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, but it did have some good points that git still doesn't have. Large binary file support, configuration records, winkin, views.

With various big companies going towards giant monorepos and the local git repo just being a view into the super-centralized repo, I think they will re-invent parts of ClearCase.
by analog31 | 2025-04-08 16:34:49+00:00
To put a finer point on it: How's basing the US economy on advertising looking?

I went to college and eventually got a PhD in physics. I've built specialized machine tools. Yet I'm considered a schmuck because I didn't go into software development, and the software developers are considered schmucks if they didn't go into financial services or advertising. And none of that was about emphasizing college. Becoming a programmer doesn't require college.

And lazy knucklehead stories are part of the workforce culture in virtually every occupation and industry. I'm sure I'm the lazy knucklehead in some of those stories.
by jakubmazanec | 2025-04-08 16:34:59+00:00
> Isn't this kind of what an Agent does in the world of Hollywood actors

I was thinking this too recently. But the entertainment is a little bit different. Jobs are shorter (even TV shows take only a few months) and talent agents get 10 % of all your work - but would you pay your IT agent for 2-3 years (I'm guessing the average length of a programmer's tenure at a single company) 10 % even when he literally does nothing most of the time?
by wesselbindt | 2025-04-08 16:35:50+00:00
Ok, so then take Israel, whatever. Despite the ethnic cleansing that Israel is carrying out, it is not valid to look at a person with suspicion just because they're from Israel.

"But it's true!" is in my opinion a poor response to accusations of prejudice. "Black people are criminals" "That's racist" "But it's true, look at the statistics!" It doesn't make the original statement any less racist.
by GoRudy | 2025-04-08 16:35:58+00:00
That's not how these things work. When a company sells an asset the funds go back to the company that sold that asset. So if the "seller" has debts or other obligations those still remain and proceeds from the sale would go towards satisfying those. However, in this case it sounds like the deal was largerly about the employee costs + some cash to the sellers.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-04-08 16:36:04+00:00
The executive branch is really not supposed to have complete unrestrained control over the entire federal government.

The point about AI isn't about efficiency, it's about accountability. This administration already has a huge accountability problem, and the AI is another layer of "Oh, that wasn't really me who did that thing I did." This isn't just cynicism, the current admin is incapable of taking responsibility for anything they've done wrong (and perfectly willing to take full responsibility for things other people have done right).
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-08 16:36:26+00:00
Intelligence requires bigger brains, which comes at a cost - huge energy requirement (20% of total for humans), weight (for birds), head size (issue for human birth), etc.

Many animals have no need for intelligence/generality since they have a very limited behavioral niche (e.g. herbivores, crocodiles, sharks), so it wouldn't have evolved in the first place, but even for those that do the benefit has to outweigh the cost.

If every animal was a generalist they they'd all be in competition with each other, so I'd expect if you ran simulations you'd find that an ecosystem full of species that don't compete head-on is more stable, and therefore likely to result.
by ziofill | 2025-04-08 16:36:36+00:00
I usually agree with most of Gary Marcus' points, but I'd really like to hear his take on this. One of his examples is that "the system can't generate a horse riding an astronaut" and in fact I tried a lot in the past but it would always draw the astronaut on top of the horse. Well, here is the result now: https://postimg.cc/QFtRjbHM
by gruez | 2025-04-08 16:36:48+00:00
>Instead I do consider it critical to "take a step back" and "evaluate the problem statement at hand". Is the end goal more consumption or better living?

Except the context of this thread is talking about tariffs on laptops, not random trinkets from aliexpress. If someone is willing to part ways with $1000+ to get a laptop/phone, I think that's a pretty good sign the goal is "better living".
by flkiwi | 2025-04-08 16:37:08+00:00
They did though. The studio engaged in tremendous amounts of work and created good will, in addition to their specific creative works. Their visual style is tied up in that good will. Use of the visual style for profit without consent is, at least ethically, misappropriation of another's value. And "You should be pleased I used your creative work because now more people will know about you and you will make a lot of money from this!" is one of the oldest defenses to misappropriation of creativity.

I'm not even mad. We do a terrible job in our society of valuing artists and creative people generally and in explaining the value of intangible things, especially something like good will. People have been misappropriating fonts and clipart and screenshots in presentations and posters and whatnot, duplicating clever branding ideas and the creative efforts of others, and so on for _decades_ if not longer, all without ill intent. It's something we need to fix and never will. But when that becomes a channel for another to directly profit, it begins to venture out of harmlessness.
by kmeisthax | 2025-04-08 16:37:10+00:00
If you're not doing the work, you're not learning from the result.

The CEOs in question bought what they believed to be a power tool, but got what is more like a smarter copy machine. To be clear, copy machines are not useless, but they also aren't going to drive the 200% increases in productivity that people think they will.

But because management demands the 200% increase in productivity they were promised by the AI tools, all the artists and programmers on the team hear "stop doing anything interesting or novel, just copy what already exists". To be blunt, that's not the shit they signed up for, and it's going to result in a far worse product. Nobody wants slop.
by nathan_compton | 2025-04-08 16:37:25+00:00
When LLMs came out I suppressed my inner curmudgeon and dove in, since the technology was interesting to me and seemed much more likely than crypto to be useful beyond crime. Thus, I have used LLMs extensively for many years now and I have found that despite the hype and amazing progress, they still basically only excel first drafts and simple refactorings (where they are, I have to say, incredibly useful for eliminating busy work). But I have yet to use a model, reasoning or otherwise, that could solve a problem that required genuine thought, usually in the form of constructing the right abstraction, bottom up style. LLMs write code like super-human dummies, with a tendency to put too much code in a given function and with very little ability to invent a domain in which the solution is simple and clearly expressed, probably because they don't care about that kind of readability and its not much in their data set.

I'm deeply influenced by languages like Forth and Lisp, where that kind of bottom up code is the cultural standard and and I prefer it, probably because I don't have the kind of linear intelligence and huge memory of an LLM.

For me the hardest part of using LLMs is knowing when to stop and think about the problem in earnest, before the AI generated code gets out of my human brain's capacity to encompass. If you think a bit about how AI still is limited to text as its white board and local memory, text which it generates linearly from top to bottom, even reasoning, it sort of becomes clear why it would struggle with genuine abstraction over problems. I'm no longer so naive as to say it won't happen one day, even soon, but so far its not there.
by zozbot234 | 2025-04-08 16:37:28+00:00
> It's usually windy when it's dark and cold and vice versa.

Usually, but not always. You can have many days or weeks, e.g. in mid-winter of overcast weather and very little wind. This is a real problem for renewable energy sources, they're not comprehensively viable unless supplemented by alternatives like gas peakers or perhaps nuclear.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-04-08 16:37:31+00:00
Per capita fossil fuel consumption has been dropping for ~10 years. 2025 will be the year where total CO2 emissions drop and continue to drop. They were hoping that 2024 would be that year, but 2024 GDP growth was higher than expected. The 2025 trump-cession guarantees that CO2 emissions will drop in 2025.

https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e...
by brucehoult | 2025-04-08 16:38:04+00:00
In the mid 80s I used to pace the taking off B737s at Wellington, on the road next to the airport, on my CBX550F2 [1] and later on my K100RT. I could get to about 200 km/h before I had to slow for the corner. The planes were rotating at that point. The speed limit on that road is 50 km/h now, it was a little higher back then ... not enough obviously...

[1] https://hoult.org/cbx550.jpg
by jordigh | 2025-04-08 16:38:15+00:00
The proper way to do that is say, something like "Olivia (Matt)" and then continue. You use the preferred name, and if you need to refer to the deadname to disambiguate, you do it.

If you can avoid the need to disambiguate, you do that too. The name really is dead. You shouldn't use it if at all possible.
by jajko | 2025-04-08 16:38:18+00:00
That's... not how things will roll out. Sure it looks nice on some paper diagram my 5 year old son could pop out, but reality is way, way more complex.

Also, here its US who is doing massive 'violations of international order'. You know which order I talk about? WTO for example, US is founding member, an org specifically designed and accepted to handle this. Various international agreements between close allies. And so on, news are full of whims of one bipolar old man stomping left and right.

What is actually and already happening is that US will lose a lot of customers world wide. That Amazon cloud or tesla car or weapons (machinists heh) or literally any other US product ain't so cool or even acceptable anymore. What will happen actually that rest of the world will replace US products. Not just government, but regular people. Nobody wants to drink US whiskey or wine anymore. Nobody wants any US product or service anymore.

If you think 4% of global population (and just 26% of global GDP) can on whims dictate lives of 96% of mankind by force, well, that's like your opinion man.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-08 16:38:38+00:00
Sure that's a valid interpretation but it wasn't how I read it

> Both statements together are (enthusiasm + formal) > (enthusiasm without formal) > (formal without enthusiasm).

I don't think the last category (formal education without enthusiasm) really exists, I think it is a bit of a strawman being held up by people who are *~passionate~*

I suspect that without any enthusiasm, people will not make it through any kind of formal education program, in reality
by NobodyNada | 2025-04-08 16:38:55+00:00
That's awesome, congrats! I had a lot of fun solving today's puzzle.

One minor bit of feedback/request: maybe I'm too spoiled by code editors, but it would be nice to have a visual aid for identifying matching brackets -- maybe colorizing matching pairs ("rainbow brackets"), and/or a click-to-highlight feature that highlights the entire contents of a pair of braces for you. I felt like I was spending a lot of time trying to count bracket pairs, which made it hard to keep track of where I was in the puzzle and was less interesting than trying to solve the wordplay.
by pydry | 2025-04-08 16:38:55+00:00
The average is probably between 10 and 20 years.

This is on top of an LCOE that is 5x that of solar or wind power and the need for catastrophe insurance to be provided essentially for free by the taxpayer on top of that.

(Fukushima cost about $1 trillion to clean up, the liability cap for US plants is about $250 million because otherwise private insurers who understand the risks better than you or I WILL NOT shoulder the liability)

The cost of nuclear can be dragged down by taking various risks that the people getting that sweet free catastrophe insurance would probably be happy with.
by gwern | 2025-04-08 16:39:04+00:00
It can be easily gamed. The users are self-selected, and they have zero incentive to be honest or rigorous or provide good responses. Some have incentives the opposite way. (There was a report of a prediction market user who said they had won a market on Gemini models by manipulating the votes; LMArena swore furiously there had definitely been no manipulation but was conspicuously silent on any details.) And the release of more LMArena responses has shown that a lot of the user ratings are blatantly wrong: either they're basically fraudulent, or LMArena's current users are people whose ratings you should be optimizing against because they are so ignorant, lazy, and superficial.

At this point, when I look at the output from my Gemini-2.5-pro sessions, they are so high quality, and take so long to read, and check, and have an informed opinion on, I just can't trust the slapdash approach of LMArena in assuming that careless driveby maybe-didn't-even-read-the-responses-ain't-no-one-got-time-for-that-nerd-shit ratings mean much of anything. There have been red flags in the past and I've been taking them ever less seriously even as one of many benchmarks since early last year, but maybe this is the biggest backfire yet. And it's only going to get worse. At this rate, without major overhaul, you should take being #1 on LMArena seriously as useful and important news - as a reason to not use a model.

It's past time for LMArena people to sit down and have some thorough reflection on whether it is still worth running at all, and at what point they are doing more harm than good. No benchmark lives forever and it is normal and healthy to shut them down at some point after having been saturated, but some manage to live a lot longer than they should have...
by observationist | 2025-04-08 16:39:19+00:00
This automatic sense of entitlement to surveil users is the absolute embodiment of the banality of evil.

It's 2025 - we want informed consent and voluntary participation with the default assumption that no, we do not want you watching over our shoulders, and no, you are not entitled to covertly harvest all the data you want and monetize that without notifying users or asking permissions. The whole ToS gotcha game is bullshit, and it's way past time for this behavior to stop.

Ignorance and inertia bolstering the status quo doesn't make it any less wrong to pile more bullshit like this onto the existing massive pile of bullshit we put up with. It's still bullshit.
by toast0 | 2025-04-08 16:39:43+00:00
> Depending on your workload there may be very good economical reasons to consider a mainframe instead of a number of rack-frames.

This may be true, but because there's basically no on ramp to running on a mainframe, there's no way anybody is going to try it unless they're already on a mainframe. Or maybe unless they really need something that only a mainframe can provide. But most companies can live with some downtime, and once you can live with some downtime, you have options for migration between sites, and options for migrating loads so you can swap parts on a stopped machine. Splurging on network infrastructure with multi-chasis redundancy is an easier step to take to get to a more reliable system than building against a totally different system architecture.
by giantg2 | 2025-04-08 16:40:07+00:00
One problem with this is my day job work (99.9% of my experience) isn't publicly posted and wouldn't be captured in the profile. The nature of my personal projects are significantly different than my job and result in different technologies being used to better fit the use case. Also, most of my personal projects are private and would be left out.

I guess this is just one more thing I feel is a barrier to equitable evaluation and hiring practices.
by jordigh | 2025-04-08 16:40:08+00:00
Mercurial had a prominent role in the creation myth. It didn't influence git, but it was there at the same time, for the same reason, and at one time, with an equal amount of influence. Bitbucket was once seen as fairly comparable to Github. People would choose git or hg for their projects with equal regularity. The users were familiar with both choices.

Linus never cared about hg, but lots of people that cared about git at one point would also be at least familiar with some notions from hg.
by hnthrow90348765 | 2025-04-08 16:40:09+00:00
It's been typical for me to get hiring managers/interviewers who don't feel it's a good question format for the job (this might be a .NET/C# cultural thing though).

Since the day-to-day job rarely requires it, and I've gotten jobs without it, there's little incentive to change unless I want to.
by stuckinhell | 2025-04-08 16:40:22+00:00
I suspect elites will build a two-tiered AI system where only a select few get access to the cutting-edge stuff, while the rest of us get stuck with the leftovers.

They'll use their clout—money, lobbying, and media influence—to lock in their advantage and keep decision-making within their circle.

In the end, this setup would just widen the gap, cementing power imbalances as AI continues to reshape everything. UBI will become the bare minimum to keep the masses sedated.
by wincy | 2025-04-08 16:40:32+00:00
I was generating pictures to use for a little game I made with my six and ten year old kids. They were so excited to see us go from idea to execution so quickly, they were laughing and we had a ton of fun. The only thing that disappointed me was I got throttled. We’d need to pay for API image gen to get it even faster.

I made a logo for an internal product that wouldn’t have had a logo otherwise at our company. I also make a lot of shitpost memes to my friends to trash talk in the long running turn based war game we’ve all been playing, like “make a cartoony image of a dog man and a Greek giant beating up a devil” and the picture it gave was just hilarious and perfect, like an old timey Popeye cartoon.

Two years ago I was spending three hours using local models like Stable Diffusion to get exactly what I wanted. I had to inpaint and generate 100 variations which would have been insanely expensive if I wasn’t powering it with my own hardware.

Now I get something good in minutes, it’s crazy really.
by iLemming | 2025-04-08 16:40:37+00:00
> how many developers log off at 5

Programming is an act of creation. Any creative worker - artists, sculptors, novelists, potters will agree, you cannot timebox your creation - it creeps back into your life even when you're away from your studio, from your desk.

I have worked in several different countries. With diverse teams of programmers of different levels of expertise. Different stacks, various types of industries. Most programmers are creators. Those who log off at 5, don't think about it and keep it separate from their lives are "office workers" at best - maybe not even programmers, I'm not sure what to call them. I met that kind of people only twice (with some stretching, maybe three times) during my work life. Both of them ended up switching to different roles later. So, yes, to a certain degree it is perhaps "an axiomatic quality" after all.
by yesfitz | 2025-04-08 16:40:41+00:00
I'd like to provide you with some constructive feedback on your comment:

1. You should include what you think is interesting about the large language model's ability to solve the word puzzle. It's not obvious to me as a reader.

2. You shouldn't post the step-by-step solution to a puzzle, regardless of how it was derived. It's unlikely that anyone will read through it, and if they do, they're less likely to try the puzzle themselves.
by analog31 | 2025-04-08 16:40:49+00:00
I wish I remembered the series of math books that my school system used. It was during the "new math" movement. We learned about sets in first grade. Proofs were introduced fairly early. There were problems for which "no answer" was the correct answer.

If you could find a collection of the Mathematical Games articles from Scientific American, those were entertaining and required little background knowledge, but conveyed the fun of math.

Geometry is a good subject because it doesn't have very many prerequisites other than basic arithmetic, and the older textbooks were mostly about proofs. (Note I'm biased, proofs are what made math come alive for me).
by wongarsu | 2025-04-08 16:41:11+00:00
This graph might be more relevant: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re...

The countries most talking about net-zero are indeed reducing their emissions. China is meanwhile trying to catch up to the standard of living of their Western counterparts, driving up emissions massively (while still having great per-capita values, there are just a lot of Chinese that previously lived on basically nothing)
by motorest | 2025-04-08 16:41:39+00:00
> I'm curious, as a software engineer when was the last time you've seriously worked under pressure?

Jetbrain's 2023 Developers’ Lifestyles survey states that around 29% of all developers work on weekends for work.

Having to work weekends is the last resort when working under pressure. Nearly 1/3 of all developers claim they are at that stage. No other profession has the concept of "crunch time".

https://www.jetbrains.com/lp/devecosystem-2023/lifestyle/
by subscribed | 2025-04-08 16:41:41+00:00
How can I move along if EVERY online shop, mechanic, government body or school I tlak with NEEDS my email address to facilitate the contact, conversation or transaction?

What do you propose to these who are currently forced to provide email addresses to lead their daily lives uninterrupted?

And I'm not asking for the example appropriate for the primary school aged child or a senior living in the care home.

Just examples for the normal human adults.
by jsheard | 2025-04-08 16:41:44+00:00
Whenever one of these well known gotcha prompts gets "solved" the question is always whether they actually solved the underlying reason it used to fail, or did they just have a bunch of third-world workers tag pictures of horses and astronauts until the model started handling that specific example more reliably. As the saying goes, every measure which becomes a target becomes a bad measure.
by lm28469 | 2025-04-08 16:41:48+00:00
Does this look like it's coming to a plateau of even a slowdown to you ? https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fossil-fuel-consumption-b...

> To keep global warming to no more than 1.5°C – as called for in the Paris Agreement – emissions need to be reduced by 45% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.

Even if we stopped right now we'd need to be back to ~2000 co2 emissions by 2030, that's in 5 years. Even if we had 5 years of covid with the same restrictions as we had in peak 2020 we wouldn't reach that point...
by bluefirebrand | 2025-04-08 16:41:55+00:00
> in fact is the entire point of what we do

Pump the brakes there

You may have bought into some PMs idea of what we do, but I'm not buying it

As professional, employed software developers, the entire point of what we do is to provide value to our employers.

That isn't always by delivering features to users, it's certainly not always by delivering features faster