MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by giancarlostoro | 2025-04-23 17:29:25+00:00
I really think the real breakthrough will come when we take a completely different approach than trying to burn state of the art GPUs at insane scales to run a textual database with clunky UX / clunky output. I don't know what AI will look like tomorrow, but I think LLMs are probably not it, at least not on their own.

I feel the same though, AI allows me to debug stacktraces even quicker, because it can crunch through years of data on similar stack traces.

It is also a decent scaffolding tool, and can help fill in gaps when documentation is sparse, though its not always perfect.
by wolfgang42 | 2025-04-23 17:29:53+00:00
Personally, I’m a lot better at recognizing good writing than producing it, and LLMs are great at being a “calculator for words.”[1] Writing posts became a lot easier once I got an automated editor I could tell to “break up this run-on sentence to make it less confusing” or “rearrange these paragraphs so I introduce concepts before I start using them”. The end result is still the same, but this way I save a lot of time I used to spend glaring at Roget, Strunk, and White.

[1] https://simonwillison.net/2023/Apr/2/calculator-for-words/#c...
by geoka9 | 2025-04-23 17:30:13+00:00
The latest expansion of NATO was barely a year ago (with Sweden joining).

Russian authoritarianism may be secure, but the current regime's power is not (not to mention their leaders' paranoia).

Their ambition is the control of continental Europe. It might sound crazy, but if you listen to people like Dugin, it is very clear. And it's not that unrealistic in the longer run, considering everything you listed in your post.

The onslaught on Europe will continue - first (already happening) on its unity through the financing and propaganda support of the right-wing populist candidates who don't know (or simply don't care) better and then, once every (relatively) little country in Europe is on their own, on their sovereignty through military threat and/or invasion.

I will also leave this here as I think it is pertinent to the discussion:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/313258664_Putin's_R...
by ebiester | 2025-04-23 17:30:20+00:00
I don't dispute that these are problems, but the fact that its hallucinations are quite sophisticated to me means that they are errors humans also could reach.

I am not saying that the LLMs are better than you analyze but rather that average humans are worse. (Well trained humans will continue to be better alone than LLMs alone for some time. But compare an LLM to an 18 year old.)
by Scene_Cast2 | 2025-04-23 17:30:29+00:00
Some ideas are tarpit ideas until enough people get stuck.

Location estimation (figuring out where you are) based on indoor WiFi / BLE is one example. Compared to 15 years ago, we have (IIRC - I don't work in this space) super-precise timing API from the modem, and there has been work on the reflections issue (the two big problematic things that non-RF people typically miss).
by autoexec | 2025-04-23 17:30:31+00:00
> the price is generally about the same as I'd expect to pay elsewhere

I've increasingly found that prices on amazon are higher than you'd pay on the manufacturers website. Sometimes much higher. It's worth checking. Some sites have been cheaper and had free shipping. The only catch is that shipping times were 3-5 weeks as opposed to the 3-14 days it would take for prime's 3 day shipping to actually show up.
by baby | 2025-04-23 17:30:37+00:00
The US is lying about tiktok, the only reason is to mirror China's strategy towards American app. After watching the tit-for-tat video of Veritasum[1] I agree with America's strategy of banning Chinese apps until China allows American apps. That being said, I wish the US was more transparent about why they're doing this instead of lying.

I'm guessing the reason why they're lying is that they don't want to scare ALL Chinese companies.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
by minimaxir | 2025-04-23 17:30:42+00:00
AI-generated prefill responses is one of the use cases of generative AI I actively hate because it's comically bad. The business incentive of companies to implement it, especially social media networks, is that it reduces friction for posting content, and therefore results in more engagement to be reported at their quarterly earnings calls (and as a bonus, this engagement can be reported as organic engagement instead of automated). For social media, the low-effort AI prefill comments may be on par than the median human comment, but for more intimate settings like e-mail, the difference is extremely noticeable for both parties.

Despite that, you also have tools like Apple Intelligence marketing the same thing, which are less dictated by metrics, in addition to doing it even less well.
by bee_rider | 2025-04-23 17:30:53+00:00
> What does "working on climate change" look like?

There’s probably room for some engineering work and a business innovation in the smartgrid space. It seems like a big communication/optimization problem that could use similar muscles that the AI sector uses (but it doesn’t actually compete for talent because there’s no way in hell utilities will ever be able to pay tech startup salaries).
by housebear | 2025-04-23 17:31:34+00:00
Well, I think you articulate the situation quite neatly with, "I don't know, my life is made better..." As long as you yourself are either benefiting or not immediately suffering you are content. That many contrary positions in this thread are thinking about humanity as a whole is why you will not be swayed. You do not seem interested in thinking outside of your own comforts, and therefore all of the anxiety and alarm over the fate of billions outside of yourself just comes across as "exhausting."

I, for one, find the endless selfishness of ultra rich people and their enablers to be exhausting, and happily root for anyone trying to break through to the uncertain that this is a moment for action, not idle ignorance.
by drivers99 | 2025-04-23 17:31:35+00:00
For me, this caught my attention because I am currently re-doing Ben Eater's 6502 project[0]. (I'm spreading it out to more breadboards connected together with a bunch of breadboard power rails as the data and address busses, and I'm planning to add some stuff to read programs from audio once that's done. I also want to add a custom keyboard and a forth kernel. Oh yeah, and read/write SDcard blocks with SPI.)

[0] https://eater.net/6502
by kr99x | 2025-04-23 17:31:41+00:00
I've been down that road, and it's unfortunately a dead end. You can generate an infinite number of reducing forms, each of which itself covers an infinite number of integers, like 4k + 5 → 3k + 4. Each one covers a fraction of the integers 1/(2^x) where x is the number of division steps in its reducing sequence (and the right hand side is always 3^y where y is the number of multiplying steps). You can't just make 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 and so on though (the easy path to full coverage) because sometimes the power of 3 overwhelms the power of 2. There is no 8k → 9k form, because that's not a reduction for all k, so you instead have to go with 16k → 9k. This leaves a "gap" in the coverage, 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/16th. Fortunately, when this happens, you start to be able to make multiple classes for the same x and y pair and "catch up" some, though slower. As an amateur I wrote a whole bunch about this only to eventually discover it doesn't matter - even if you reach 1/1th of the integers by generating these classes out to infinity, it doesn't work. An infinite set of density 1 implies a complementary set of density 0, but a set of density 0 doesn't have to be empty! There can still be finitely many non-reducing numbers which are not in any class, allowing for alternate cycles - you would only eliminate infinite growth as a disproof option.

Mind you, it's almost certain Collatz is true (generating these classes out to 3^20 nets you just over 99% coverage, and by 3^255 you get 99.9999999%) but this approach doesn't work to PROVE it.
by jerf | 2025-04-23 17:31:52+00:00
There is no irony. The EU is targeting US companies. The US is targeting Chinese companies. The US is or soon will be targeting EU companies. China is targeting US companies. China will probably soon be targeting EU companies if they aren't already, which is probably already debatable. And this is not a complete list, it's not even a complete list of the highlights.

If they're doing it by legislation, well, the EU has been passing "legislation clearly designed for US companies to be in infringement of" for a while. Maybe you like that. Maybe it's a good thing; after all, the things they're passing laws about are basically just actions only US companies are capable of taking right now. Nevertheless it is clearly targeting. It's just targeting you like. The US has passed such legislation. China does it both with formal legislation and with de facto rules.

Free trade is a dead letter. Whether you like that or not is not very relevant to whether or not it is dead. It's dead. Maybe it'll swing back around in a few decades but right now even that is a distant prospect, we're not even done accelerating into the current merchantalist phase of the cycle, let alone decelerating, let alone heading back.

(Note "whataboutism" would be an inappropriate response to my point here; that's about "it's ok for us because they do it". My observation is not normative, merely descriptive... everyone is doing it, and they're doing it more rather than less right now.)
by oofManBang | 2025-04-23 17:32:08+00:00
Man, I don't even bother using the ultra-wide monitor on my desk. The screen on my laptop can already display orders of magnitude far more information than I can easily process at one time. Even with contexts where I'm comfortable managing windows/buffers manually (e.g. emacs) there's simply too much space to easily manage. What do you do with all that space? Is it just pulling up every possible resources at once so you don't need to bother doing anything more than moving your eyes to switch contexts? How often are you switching contexts?
by PicassoCTs | 2025-04-23 17:33:14+00:00
I would build a "intrinsic motivation" first curriculum, where knowledge is handed as powertools to a already existing passion and the self-thought "expansion" of knowledge is the most important gift to be made.

If the child is fascinated by video games- i would help it make video games, the curriculum be damned. All knowledge holes can be filled later, but the passion to wanting to know, can never be restored unless the want for knowledge remains intact.
by elefanten | 2025-04-23 17:33:27+00:00
As others in the thread mention, these are problems of political economy that no person or mega corp or even nation state can solve.

So, continuing to also work on other things is both rational and morally sound.

Progress in one area unlocks new possibilities in other areas. E.g. abundant near-free energy would make eliminating poverty a more tractable political problem than it has proven to be.
by 0_____0 | 2025-04-23 17:34:04+00:00
This efficiency extends to their customer support ops as well. I ordered the wrong size of a bin, sent a message in their chat saying I wanted to return the bins and get the ### SKU instead, and without any further input from me, there were new bins delivered 2 days later.

They seem to have the assumption that their customers are actually trying to get some shit done.
by sam-cop-vimes | 2025-04-23 17:34:17+00:00
If one compares software produced by AI with software developed by a "remote team", from the rest of the org's point of view it is the same. It has to go through a QA process and then made available in prod. The real issues start when obscure errors start to happen or there is an outage and suddenly no one knows how to fix it.

For this reason, for a long time to come, AI tools will be an assistant to dev teams who will still have responsibility for fixing issues when the brown stuff hits the fan. To shoulder that responsibility effectively, they will need to have a good understanding of the produced code.

So yes, vibe coding is here to stay but it will not replace software dev teams anytime soon. Dev teams might shrink initially because orgs will think they can save money. The trend will reverse quickly after a few major outages.
by frabonacci | 2025-04-23 17:34:46+00:00
I love AgentDesk’s take on Kubernetes - it’s something we had considered as well, but it didn’t make much sense for macOS since you can only spin up two macOS VMs at a time due to Apple’s licensing restrictions.

Feel free to join our Discord so we can chat more: https://discord.com/invite/mVnXXpdE85
by carlosjobim | 2025-04-23 17:34:59+00:00
Oh yes a cult member he is, he must be stoned! He hates our country, he must be killed!

You have immersed yourself completely in mob mentality, but this is just a discussion board, so you don't have any power of the mob behind you. You're just screaming into the void. On a ride down the track with the destination paranoid schizophrenia. Because that will be the result if you spend too long thinking that everybody who doesn't think like you is an AI robot, a cult member, a foreign spy, or whatever you're going to call me in your next comment.

My "Dear Leader" is not Trump, it's another tariff guy who probably hates Trump just as much as some people here. Tariffs are not my main issue, but it's the main issue in this comment thread titled "The many ways tariffs will hit electronics". If you read my other replies in this thread, I have outlined some positive and negative effects of tariffs.
by themanmaran | 2025-04-23 17:35:30+00:00
The horseless carriage analogy holds true for a lot of the corporate glue type AI rollouts as well.

It's layering AI into an existing workflow (and often saving a bit of time) but when you pull on the thread you fine more and more reasons that the workflow just shouldn't exist.

i.e. department A gets documents from department C, and they key them into a spreadsheet for department B. Sure LLMs can plug in here and save some time. But more broadly, it seems like this process shouldn't exist in the first place.

IMO this is where the "AI native" companies are going to just win out. It's not using AI as a bandaid over bad processes, but instead building a company in a way that those processes were never created in the first place.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-04-23 17:36:07+00:00
The reason so many of these AI features are "horseless carriage" like is because of the way they were incentivized internally. AI is "hot" and just by adding a useless AI feature, most established companies are seeing high usage growth for their "AI enhanced" projects. So internally there's a race to shove AI in as quickly as possible and juice growth numbers by cashing in on the hype. It's unclear to me whether these businesses will build more durable, well-thought projects using AI after the fact and make actually sticky product offerings.

(This is based on my knowledge the internal workings of a few well known tech companies.)
by adelmotsjr | 2025-04-23 17:36:09+00:00
"Personal information fuels much of AI innovation so people need to trust that organisations are using their information responsibly," it said.

No, we do not. First and foremost, in our current society, trust should be earned, and not understood as already given on first sight. Second, even if said trust is earned, it can be lost.

Most of these companies have shown, time and time again, that they cannot be trusted with personal information. To give credit, some companies do put up a disclaimer that you should not provide sensitive information. But that is only acknowledging that they are going to use in a public way, i.e. everything you feed into AI models is going to be public.

And finally, advances in AI do not require personal information. Not ever. Just because we CAN provide personal information, it does not mean we SHOULD provide it.
by azthecx | 2025-04-23 17:36:28+00:00
No, with vibe coding you are not a reviewer an editor or an author, quoting from the source:

There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. ... I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it.
by johnmaguire | 2025-04-23 17:36:38+00:00
My mistake. While Booking.com is HQ'd in Amsterdam, Booking Holdings is indeed a US company (also responsible for Priceline, Kayak, and OpenTable.)

> There are zero European companies, including Spotify - the #1 music streaming marketplace in the world.

This still doesn't answer the actual question of whether the gatekeepers were selected because they are US companies, or because they are are Internet gatekeepers. I don't find it surprising that the US's legal and economic culture resulted in more conglomerate gatekeepers than other nations.
by int_19h | 2025-04-23 17:36:42+00:00
That's still confusing though. The problem here is that `else` is semantically attached to `break`, but syntactically attached to the body of the loop. The latter makes it look like it executes if the loop body didn't, if you interpret it in the most straightforward way.

IMO a better design would be to have a block that always executes at the end of the loop - there's even a reasonable keyword for it, `finally` - but gets a boolean flag indicating whether there was a break or not:

for server in servers: if server.check_availability(): primary_server = server break finally did_break: if not did_break: primary_server = backup_server

Or better yet, make `break` take an optional argument (which defaults to `True` if unspecified), and that's what you get in `finally`. So this could be written:

for server in servers: if server.check_availability(): break server finally server: primary_server = server if server is not None else backup_server
by josh2600 | 2025-04-23 17:36:43+00:00
Hand coded will always win for bespoke projects (and any hard tech startup is a bespoke project).

The reality is that many startups are not tech hard. AI can help alleviate the pain of engineering a v0 to see if you have product market fit much faster. It’s great for prototypes.

I wouldn’t trust AI for production code without also having a strong AI counterpoint testing system.

That is to say, producing code is an annealing process. There is a refinement that comes from striking the hot iron and quenching the blade in water.

With code, spaghetti code will get you out the door, but it will never get you to scale. Scale requires precision, meditation on Kolmogorov complexity, and a clear understanding of the tradeoffs in distributed systems.

AI can help right now, but it is not a panacea, at least in the present moment.
by ssl-3 | 2025-04-23 17:37:31+00:00
I'm 100% sure about the differences in customs form presence.

Stuff that ships regular-way comes via usually comes via China Post and always with a customs form that is usually somewhat dubious (wrong item description, wrong value, checked "gift" box, etc). This always feels like just I'm buying from an individual seller and importing directly; like the equivalent of how buying internationally from small sellers on US eBay is.

Stuff that ships Standard Choice comes without any of that (and also often gets consolidated into a singular larger bag that has smaller bags from different sellers inside of it). When they're not consolidated, then the individual bags are always re-labeled with a paid USPS mailing label over the original. However it is that my Standard Choice orders are handled, they always show up in my mailbox looking like very-normal domestic mail and there are no customs forms to be seen.

So least in terms of logistics, Standard Choice has every appearance of being very centralized and bulk-oriented -- including within the US.

In terms of certainty: That's all that I'm certain of, and I'm only certain that it is this way for me here where I am.

The rest (eg, how this actually plays out in the future) is speculation on my part. I think my speculation may be correct, but I do not know that it is correct. I feel confident, but I won't be able to know if my confidence is misplaced until after the dust settles. They're obviously free to restructure any or all of this, and are incentivized to do whatever it is that makes them the most money.
by prophesi | 2025-04-23 17:37:32+00:00
There are ample opportunities to learn more about software development regardless of experience. It's a bit of an n+1 problem. If you're just building CRUD apps, I can understand how one might plateau in their knowledge, but even that can have a broad scope.

But for a recent example, I learned to stop worrying and love macros in Elixir. Even `defmodule` and `def/defp` are themselves macros.
by jfforko4 | 2025-04-23 17:37:37+00:00
"Beer" had like 1% of alcohol content. Just enough to keep it without bacteria.

Drinking 2 month old stale untreated water... good luck with that.

> they liked drinking beer

Sailors were basically slaves. Nobody cared what they liked. But if crew dies from diarrhia, that is a big problem!
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-23 17:37:46+00:00
> Deliberately or not you're repeating the Trump / DOGE talking point of government expense

Its a run of the mill libertarian position

It doesn't matter which politician or administration does it from that perspective. Those two do happen to be a coalition with libertarian constituents that they courted for votes, so its more than happenstance that the positions and actions will sound the same.

Regardless, private funding isn't controversial. The US Federal government reaching parity with the same level of apathy of every other government organization in the world isn't controversial either.
by kfajdsl | 2025-04-23 17:38:19+00:00
One of my friends vibe coded their way to a custom web email client that does essentially what the article is talking about, but with automatic context retrieval and and more sales oriented with some pseudo-CRM functionality. Massive productivity boost for him. It took him about a day to build the initial version.

It baffles me how badly massive companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple etc are integrating AI into their products. I was excited about Gemini in Google sheets until I played around with it and realized it was barely usable (it specifically can’t do pivot tables for some reason? that was the first thing I tried it with lol).
by int_19h | 2025-04-23 17:38:30+00:00
It's guaranteed to be correct if you use different operators for ints and floats, which is what at least some ML dialects (notably, OCaml) do precisely so that types can be inferred from usage.

That's the downside of operator overloading - since it relies on types to resolve, they need to be known and can't be inferred.
by SirBill | 2025-04-23 17:38:37+00:00
" just a way-too-expensive-to-ever-gain-popular-support"

You assumed that models would stay that price forever???

"how brutally Apple treats developers with their in-app-purchase nonsense"

How is 15% brutal to have access to a market base of hundreds of millions of customers who can click to purchase without entering a credit card.

"Apple itself sure isn't doing anything to put any wood behind the arrow"

Of all the dumb things you said, this may possibly be the dumbest - though to be sure the other two items are incredibly stupid.

Apple has put a TON of effort into the Vision Pro. They have continued to produce high quality immersive content. They have obviously continued to work on new versions. They have recently put on an entire developer day program on producing immersive content (programmatic and video related). They have greatly improved the Mac mirroring features and added other good UI updates on a pretty continuous basis since launch.

Apple is doing all they can to move the platform forward, it just takes time to reduce costs. It's a platform well worth looking into supporting since Apple is obviously fully committed to it moving forward.