MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lumenwrites | 2025-04-03 17:46:12+00:00
I'm pretty good at what I do, at least according to myself and the people I work with, and I'm comparing its capabilities (the latest version of Claude used as an agent inside Cursor) to myself. It can't fully do things on its own and makes mistakes, but it can do a lot.

But suppose you're right, it's 60% as good as "stackoverflow copy-pasting programmers". Isn't that a pretty insanely impressive milestone to just dismiss?

And why would it just get to this point, and then stop? Like, we can all see AIs continuously beating the benchmarks, and the progress feels very fast in terms of experience of using it as a user.

I'd need to hear a pretty compelling argument to believe that it'll suddenly stop, something more compelling than "well, it's not very good yet, therefore it won't be any better", or "Sam Altman is lying to us because incentives".

Sure, it can slow down somewhat because of the exponentially increasing compute costs, but that's assuming no more algorithmic progress, no more compute progress, and no more increases in the capital that flows into this field (I find that hard to believe).
by munificent | 2025-04-03 17:46:22+00:00
> You can say a dozen things morally condemning Trump and the Republican Party and then make one strategic criticism of the Democrats, and they'll look at you like maybe they can't ever trust you anymore.

I think some of this is a consequence of a decade or so of bad faith "wolf in sheep's clothing" online discourse.

I remember way back before Trump's first term, before GamerGate, before the alt-right when people would "joke" about racist and neonazi stuff on 4chan and elsewhere. It was framed as "We're just kidding around because it's fun to be edgy. It's ironic. Obviously, we're not really racist neonazis." People, mostly teens, took the bait and thought it was all in good fun but over time those ideas sunk in and actually stuck.

The next thing you know, we've got white supremacists parading in broad daylight.

If you poke around the dark (and these days not so dark) corners of the Internet, you can literally find people with toxic fringe beliefs discussing how to subtlely soften up their targets with seemingly innocent "just asking questions" when the ultimate goal is to (1) obscure which tribe they are actually a member of and (2) persuade people over to their tribe without them realizing it.

When you're in an environment where people like that do actually exist and participate in discourse, it's reasonable to wonder if the person you're talking to really does share your beliefs or not.
by codazoda | 2025-04-03 17:46:28+00:00
I agree…

I don’t think this is a real problem that needs solving; or I at least think it’s a problem browser vendors should solve, but lets over engineer it while still trying to keep it simple and usable…

What I might do is something similar to what you’re suggesting. I would have the anchor tag be a regular old anchor tag. Then, I’d highlight the heading (maybe just temporarily) at the same time. I’d use CSS if I could figure that out or JS if I couldn’t. The end result would send the user to the normal place and flash a highlight on the heading for users with JS support.

Keep it simple, but over engineer it to make whoever requested this happy.

Edit: After re-reading your response we probably aren’t talking about the same thing, exactly.
by slt2021 | 2025-04-03 17:47:36+00:00
nobody creates techno-fascist regime and invests hundreds of millions into surveillance infrastructure with the goal of enforcing speed tickets. It is just how it is being sold to public, because people are exposed to speeding drivers and would likely to approve of this measure.

the problem does not match to the solution.

if you look at China then you will see how the state can turn surveillance into oppression machine.

if I can give you analogy, it is: when Scrum team struggles with delivery of software (delayed releases or buggy features), the Scrum master proposes to install CCTV cameras monitoring developers and screen capture software that will monitor every single your action with the goal of "improving performance of the team".

sure the goal is noble, but you are just signing up to be under constant surveillance and be subject to whatever random punishments "The Algorithm" decides to throw at you
by bob1029 | 2025-04-03 17:47:48+00:00
> Covering a 4.2-mile (6.8 km) stretch of the Thames in West London, from Putney to Mortlake, it is over three times the distance of an Olympic race.

This is unbelievably challenging. The 2km race is infamous:

> Physiologists, in fact, have calculated that rowing a two-thousand meter race — the Olympic standard — takes the same physiological toll as playing two basketball games back-to-back. And it exacts that toll in about six minutes. [0]

Imagine doing that more than 3 times consecutively without stopping.

[0]: https://archive.nytimes.com/6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/...
by kubb | 2025-04-03 17:48:09+00:00
It won't be able to write a compelling novel, or build a software system solving a real-world problem, or operate heavy machinery, create a sprite sheet or 3d models, design a building or teach.

Long term planning and execution and operating in the physical world is not within reach. Slight variations of known problems should be possible (as long as the size of the solution is small enough).
by lerno | 2025-04-03 17:48:15+00:00
`::` simplifies the module vs identifier resolution.

In C3 there is something called "path shortening", allowing you to use `foo::bar()` in place of something like `std::baz::foo::bar()`. To do something similar with `.` is problematic, because you don't know where the path ends. Is `foo.baz.bar()` referring to `foo::baz::bar()` or `foo::baz.bar()` or `foo.baz.bar()`?
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-03 17:48:20+00:00
Free trade is not hurting the economy. American domestic policy impacting the distribution of the produce of the economy is, even in times of strong aggregate economic performance, hurting the felt effects of the economy on large swathes of the population, but throwing up protectionist policies that collapse both the global and local production possibilities curves doesn't help that; it just shrinks the pie without doing anything to deal with the bad distribution which makes people feel like the pie is shrinking even when it is growing. The results you can expect from that should be obvious without experiencing them, but it looks like we are all going to learn about them through painful experience real soon now.
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-03 17:48:39+00:00
I've recently switched from Instapaper to a self-hosted instance of Shiori for read-it-later-type functionality. It's small, fast, and open-source.

There's also hoarder for when I have no idea if I ever need to remember something, but I might, so I want it stored somewhere.

Both of these are excellent tools.
by Arnavion | 2025-04-03 17:48:40+00:00
Same for me on desktop Linux Chromium (with and without incognito mode), and yes console prints WebGL errors:

> scripts.js?v=1:3820 THREE.WebGLRenderer: A WebGL context could not be created. Reason: Web page caused context loss and was blocked

> scripts.js?v=1:3820 THREE.WebGLRenderer: A WebGL context could not be created. Reason: Failed to create a WebGL2 context.
by zurfer | 2025-04-03 17:49:13+00:00
I recently had fascinating example of that where Sonnet 3.7 had to decide for one option from a set of choices.

In the thinking process it narrowed it down to 2 and finally in the last thinking section it decided for one, saying it's best choice.

However, in the final output (outside of thinking) it then answered with the other option with no clear reason given
by jiveturkey | 2025-04-03 17:49:25+00:00
i found with the gemini answer box on google, it's quite easy to get the answer you expect. i find myself just playing with it, asking a question in the positive sense then the negative sense, to get the 2 different "confirmations" from gemini. also it's easily fooled by changing the magnitude of a numerical aspect of a question, like "are thousands of people ..." then "are millions of people ...". and then you have the now infamous black/white people phrasing of a question.

i haven't found perplexity to be so easily nudged.
by dylan604 | 2025-04-03 17:49:36+00:00
Okay, this is not what I was expecting. People joke that I have a special mindset for being able to shoot a lot of timelapse, but this is an entirely different level of special mindset. That's up there with the guy that made the paper 777 scale model plane out of manila folders. Some people just have a sticktoitiveness that reaches super human levels.
by ein0p | 2025-04-03 17:49:48+00:00
> lower the cost of high-quality education

And how do you propose we do that? By giving schools even more money at taxpayer's expense?

> raising taxes at the high end

40.1% of US taxpayers on the low end of income distribution pay no income tax, 16.5% pay neither income nor payroll taxes. Top 1% pays 40.4% of all income tax (while holding about 30.8% of net worth, 13.8% of the total is held by top 0.1%). Top 1% (with the possible exception of a few billionaires) already pays through their nose.
by dinfinity | 2025-04-03 17:50:36+00:00
Yes, you're most likely doing it wrong. I would like to add that "vibe coding" is a dreadful term thought up by someone who is arguably not very good at software engineering, as talented as he may be in other respects. The term has become a misleading and frankly pejorative term. A better, more neutral one is AI assisted software engineering.

This is an article that describes a pretty good approach for that: https://getstream.io/blog/cursor-ai-large-projects/

But do skip (or at least significantly postpone) enabling the 'yolo mode' (sigh).
by healsdata | 2025-04-03 17:50:38+00:00
The math doesn't account for anything. The formula they published literally has (4 * 1/4) as part of the equation, hidden behind Greek letters, to make it appear more sophisticated.

It's "trade deficit / imports" without any care to why those numbers exist on a case-by-case basis.

This wasn't a thought out solution that took into account the vast multivariate things that happen in the real world, including those you mentioned.

They also used CCTLDs instead of countries which is how we ended up with:

* a tiny Australian island got much higher tariffs than Australia * tariffs on an uninhabited island * an island that is only inhabited by a joint US/UK military base getting tariffs
by munificent | 2025-04-03 17:51:01+00:00
> By far, relationships determine the happiness of ones life, and relationships are not beholden to truth. In fact, they are very commonly built on the opposite. Whether a boss' reprimands are deserved or not, employees bond over a common enemy. Entire groups form on the basis of beliefs, false or otherwise. We have a word for this: “religion".

> Despite organized religion dropping in attendance, religious patterns of behavior are still everywhere, just adapted to a secular world. Health, exercise, politics, work, self-improvement -- these are all things I've seen friends employ their religious muscle into, across all spectrums and political aisles. And as we get older, I'm seeing more and more of my supposedly-secular friends engage in such behavior.

I have a hypothesis that all humans are compelled to indulge in a certain amount of magical thinking. We seem to be hard-wired to believe there is more underlying metaphysical order and pattern to the universe than there actually is.

I presume this is evolutionarily advantageous because it's better to assume you have more agency and ability to predict than you actually do. Over-assuming leads to occasional disappointment and frustration when things don't work out, but under-assuming leads to having less impact than you actually could have.

If that hypothesis is true, then probably the best thing for society is to provide cultural structures that let us indulge than impulse in non-harmful ways, instead of, say, giving it to religions that also tell us to murder gay people.

Sort of like how sports function as a safe pressure release valve for the compulsion towards competition and violence.
by ahofmann | 2025-04-03 17:51:09+00:00
I write bog-standard PHP software. When GPT-4 came out, I was very frightened that my job could be automated away soon, because for PHP/Laravel/MySQL there must exist a lot of training data.

The reality now is, that the current LLMs still often create stuff, that costs me more time to fix, than to do it myself. So I still write a lot of code myself. It is very impressive, that I can think about stopping writing code myself. But my job as a software developer is, very, very secure.

LLMs are very unable to build maintainable software. They are unable to understand what humans want and what the codebase need. The stuff they build is good-looking garbage. One example I've seen yesterday: one dev committed code, where the LLM created 50 lines of React code, complete with all those useless comments and for good measure a setTimeout() for something that should be one HTML DIV with two tailwind classes. They can't write idiomatic code, because they write code, that they were prompted for.

Almost daily I get code, commit messages, and even issue discussions that are clearly AI-generated. And it costs me time to deal with good-looking but useless content.

To be honest, I hope that LLMs get better soon. Because right now, we are in an annoying phase, where software developers bog me down with AI-generated stuff. It just looks good but doesn't help writing usable software, that can be deployed in production.

To get to this point, LLMs need to get maybe a hundred times faster, maybe a thousand or ten thousand times. They need a much bigger context window. Then they can have an inner dialogue, where they really "understand" how some feature should be built in a given codebase. That would be very useful. But it will also use so much energy that I doubt that it will be cheaper to let a LLM do those "thinking" parts over, and over again instead of paying a human to build the software. Perhaps this will be feasible in five or eight years. But not two.

And this won't be AGI. This will still be a very, very fast stochastic parrot.
by vhodges | 2025-04-03 17:51:13+00:00
Huh... I think the Pound is over valued or something. It's $699 CAD (currently discounted mind you) which is something like £380 (according to Google today).

I have a 12th Gen 13 but I will probably wait one more generation and either get that or a discounted Strixpoint MB (since it'll be a generation back and presumably cheaper).
by throwaway9w4 | 2025-04-03 17:51:15+00:00
I agree with you

It reminds me of an online store in the beginning of 2000s

To buy a product, you had to drag&drop the product image over the shopping basket icon. It took me quite a while to figure that out, and I bet they lost a lot of customers.

[Edit: I acknowledge that a PM or manager may have forced the developer to do this, but it's just one example of many]

Sometimes the developers have to take the blame, instead of blaming "stupid" users. Some take that attitude to frameworks as well. If the users complain, they haven't understood how to use it correctly. Just look at the "how to make a todos in 5min" video on YouTube to be convinced of its beauty
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-04-03 17:51:25+00:00
This is such an annoying issue in assisted programming as well.

Say you’re referencing a specification, and you allude to two or three specific values from that specification, you mention needing a comprehensive list and the LLM has been trained on it.

I’ll often find that all popular models will only use the examples I’ve mentioned and will fail to elaborate even a few more.

You might as well read specifications yourself.

It’s a critical feature of these models that could be an easy win. It’s autocomplete! It’s simple. And they fail to do it every single time I’ve tried a similar abstract.

I laugh any time people talk about these models actually replacing people.

They fail at reading prompts at a grade school reading level.
by sabarn01 | 2025-04-03 17:52:26+00:00
The us was the only industrialized economy to come out ww2 unscathed. We didn't have to compete for 2 decades. The end results of these policies was the stagnate 70s Reagan was a corrective. However, the policies of Regan only made sense in that context. Republicans became too found of cutting top end taxes when most of what could be gained already was in the 80s. There is no historical period to look at on how to deal with the consequences of integrating China with the rest of the world.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-04-03 17:52:42+00:00
ahofmann didn't expect AI progress to stop. They expected it to continue, but not lead to AGI, that will not lead to superintelligence, that will not lead to a self-accelerating process of improvement.

So the question is, do you think the current road leads to AGI? How far down the road is it? As far as I can see, there is not a "status quo bias" answer to those questions.
by keybored | 2025-04-03 17:52:56+00:00
I was predicting within the first 500 words that the author was someone who symphatized with Rationalism. But how could this be? How could someone’s approach to rationality, so-called, be so correlated with their approach to politics?[1] Couldn’t people of many different backgrounds come to the same conclusion and my guess just have a small chance of being right?[2] Is it because of tribalism? No. The philosophy leads to a cluster of opinions. Just following its internal logic.

Apply that to other people and you’ll see how the article might be wrong.

[1] It’s not just the approach. There are a dozen things that are stated axiomatically which are not.

[2] Okay, okay. Being this website there is a SC bias already.
by no_wizard | 2025-04-03 17:53:03+00:00
>When DOGE identifies billions of dollars in waste, fraud, or unnecessary spending, the reaction is often

Did DOGE actually identify significant levels of any of this or is it simply labeled that for the expedited purpose of shrinking the federal government's effectiveness by any means possible?

They've been far less than transparent with the data that supports their findings and have been called out numerous times for misrepresentation[0][1][2][3] and lack of transparency which took a lawsuit to at least partially recitify[4]

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/19/nx-s1-5302705/doge-overstates...

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2025/03/01/nx-s1-5313853/doge-savings-re...

[2]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2025/02/19/here-are...

[3]: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/doge/doge-days-musk-trump-t...

[4]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/11/judge-orders...
by disambiguation | 2025-04-03 17:53:08+00:00
Amusing sci-fi, i give it a B- for bland prose, weak story structure, and lack of originality - assuming this isn't all AI gen slop which is awarded an automatic F.

>All three sets of worries—misalignment, concentration of power in a private company, and normal concerns like job loss—motivate the government to tighten its control.

A private company becoming "too powerful" is a non issue for governments, unless a drone army is somewhere in that timeline. Fun fact the former head of the NSA sits on the board of Open AI.

Job loss is a non issue, if there are corresponding economic gains they can be redistributed.

"Alignment" is too far into the fiction side of sci-fi. Anthropomorphizing today's AI is tantamount to mental illness.

"But really, what if AGI?" We either get the final say or we don't. If we're dumb enough to hand over all responsibility to an unproven agent and we get burned, then serves us right for being lazy. But if we forge ahead anyway and AGI becomes something beyond review, we still have the final say on the power switch.
by don-code | 2025-04-03 17:53:25+00:00
I'm thankful for folks who write articles like this. Even if the goal wasn't reached (getting the AlphaStation to boot), having something to show for a negative result still helps if someone else needs to go down a similar road - or, for that matter, needs to know not to go down a particular road.

I likewise wrote a COVID-boredom-induced blog post about my many missteps, and eventual failure, getting AIX to run on an old PC. My "learnings" there were that the installation media (floppies) are _written to_ by the installer, making a reset to a known state rather difficult, and also that support for IDE disks was only made available in a patch.
by johnea | 2025-04-03 17:54:24+00:00
Then run your "fuzzy kitty plays on your desktop" binary executable, downloaded from we-swear-we-wont-hack-you.com, and live with the consequences.

In fact this is the way 3rd party windoze executables are typically distributed.

Nobody's stopping you...

p.s. The above seems like a trolling reply, but I always play the straight man...
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-03 17:55:07+00:00
Dude I live in a hyper red state. The majority of people I know have basically the same common values as friends in Santa Cruz. Now switch to talk in 'propagandized' terms and it switches to extreme, but remove that and just talk and there isn't much difference.

They want immigrants gone, but every immigrant they know is hardworking good people and THEY should be allowed to stay.

They want crime tougher but their friend who fell out of the world because of fent/mexis they wish could get help not prison.

They want capitalism but love their communal national forests and depend on it's deer/elk meat as a huge (normally the majority) source of their protein.

They want smaller government/less government services. But their mom is dependant on government services, and their cousin with a disabled kid wouldn't survive without government help/the school specialized help so that is needed/valued, and when they were kids were dependant at points on government food programs so those are needed.

But one party talks down to them, says they live in flyover country, and promotes people like Jon Stewart unfairly skewering people they see as like them as it's 'entertainment', while the other party pretends it thinks they have value. So they choose the party, eat up the propaganda, that treats them like people/with at least some dignity.
by Nelkins | 2025-04-03 17:55:24+00:00
While we're talking about Firefox, does anybody feel like it's gotten dog-slow recently compared to Chrome? Testing with the following gist it takes FF 2.7 seconds on my machine for the page to fully load, and only ~400 ms in Chrome.

https://gist.github.com/NatElkins/6f2538e58778fdf2868419d824...
by garrettjoecox | 2025-04-03 17:55:36+00:00
I have kids, and have had a Nintendo switch since launch. I cannot even let them play Mario kart alone without them being prompted to visit the store to buy levels or more characters. My 4 year old cannot go a few minutes without ending up back on the home screen, stuck in the settings menus or in the controller reconfiguration menu, asking me to get them back into the game (because they pressed the Home button)

Nintendo has lost it's way in regards to sandboxing a child in a safe environment. I looked at the new console and all I could think about is "another button I have to teach the kids to avoid"

Call me old fashioned, but I have purchased Nintendo DS lites for each of them as that is the last handheld I could find that doesn't introduce a browser or storefront with internet connectivity.
by csdvrx | 2025-04-03 17:55:37+00:00
> And hyprland is freaking gorgeous, fast, and incredibly stable. I don't get nearly as good a development experience on my Macbook, mostly because so much of its navigation is based upon the trackpad vs. the keyboard in Hyprland.

hyprland is so much better than anything else I don't understand why it's not more popular on HN