MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Bacup | 2025-04-14 08:56:46+00:00
Here is an article by CNN about the suicide with glimpse of conversation between the teen and the chatbot. https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/30/tech/teen-suicide-charact...

I personnaly think it's like the relation between some massacre and videogames, where the attackers were already mentaly ill before committing the act.

But I wonder, we know people (even kids) can make a difference between reality and a videogame. But will we be able to make a difference between a chatbot and a real human ?
by bhawks | 2025-04-14 08:58:14+00:00
The uncertainty is not in the US.

The uncertainty is in the global reserve currency that is used to price every transaction and structure terms of every contract.

The tariff panic is the straw that broke the back of an already over stressed, over leveraged system.

If equities are doing 'well' it's because some of the really strong companies may be able to persevere through all the chaos. I don't think most people will be able to predict which companies those will be.

With money itself broken I wouldn't want to hold onto too much physical cash or bonds. There will be many sovereign defaults (or money printing - which is just as much of a default). Gold and bitcoin will still exist after we get through this chaotic period and therefore many people are rotating into those assets.
by rockbruno | 2025-04-14 08:58:20+00:00
I find Cursor (or any LLM in general) to be amazing at doing very simple and concrete tasks for me. It really saves me a lot of time.

But the keyword here is "simple and concrete". I do not understand why people expect those tools to be good at tasks that involve having years of context on something. It really makes you think that the people that say that AI will replace SWEs have never actually used any of these tools.
by amenhotep | 2025-04-14 08:59:14+00:00
Human brains are similarly finely tuned and have similar knobs, it seems to me. People with no short term memory have the same conversations over and over again. Drunk people tend to be very predictable. There are circuits that give us an overwhelming sense of impending doom, or euphoria, or the conviction that our loved ones have been replaced by imposters. LLMs with very perturbed samplers bear, sometimes, a striking resemblance to people on certain mind-altering substances.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-04-14 08:59:55+00:00
I draw the line at around $20m.

Why $20m? Some back-of-the-envelope maths: if you got a decent salary, say $250K, for 40 years and made some smart investments with it, offsetting your tax and living expenses, you'd have $10m. Double that for elbow room and that gives the extreme upper limit of what someone could reasonably get to by just working for a living. You could earn more, sure, but you'd be in the top 0.1% of earners if you did and we can safely exclude you as an extreme outlier.

It's also enough money to do pretty much anything you want to do: sail a yacht around the world? sure. Never work again and live in luxury? Obviously. Make a difference to other people's lives in a good way? Achievable.

But it's not enough money to upset entire political economies or buy power at the scale we've seen recently.

If I had to implement a wealth tax, and I think we should, then that's the cutoff I'd put it at.
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-14 09:00:09+00:00
You don't need an app to accept online payments.

There are indeed pay machines, and removing them is only a profit-squeezing play by the operators.

You also never need the QR code. It's only provided as a "convenience". And in fact they usually also provide a way to pay by phone (see illustrative picture in article).

So these are all issues created by bad engineering and operators trying to squeeze as much as they can without consideration for the users.
by beAbU | 2025-04-14 09:00:27+00:00
HN is not much different (or better) in my opinion

I dislike the voting mechanism here. It incentivises me to optimize my posting to things that will maximise the votes, rather than things I think will add value to the community, even if it's controversial.

On a forum, if I say something stupid/against-the-grain, I am called out by the forum members, or we have a debate about it. On HN and on reddit, I'm downvoted into oblivion with very little in the way of any discussion that helps me learn and improve.

The only thing that makes HN better than reddit for me is the community of like-minded people, a general respect for the rules, and the fact that here we have fantastic moderators.

But I maintain that the underlying _system_ that is managing discourse here is flawed in it's design. I wonder what HN would look like if voting was abolished, and /active was the homepage, where the most actively discussed posts are the ones that filter to the top of the list.
by rollcat | 2025-04-14 09:00:39+00:00
> If you're going to build something, you might as well be inspired by terminal-style interaction, but it can't be the goal.

100% agree. I believe that if we do replace the terminal, the end result will not be that much different - keyboard first, power users first, APIs that are simple to consume, platform-agnostic. What would make the key differences is letting go of 50 years of accumulated technical debt, that continues to hold back the UX - aka the ergonomics and ease of use.

> IMO, you need to be a domain expert [...]. You (or the team you're part of) have to understand the topic and users extremely well.

"Sometimes Ordis likes to assume he knows nothing. Nobody can learn what they think they already know."

<https://wiki.warframe.com/w/Ordis/Quotes>
by pjmlp | 2025-04-14 09:01:44+00:00
Not only Niklaus Wirth,

Here is C.A.R Hoare's on his "The 1980 ACM Turing Award Lecture", guess to what programming language he is indirectly making a point of, regarding 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson.

"A consequence of this principle is that every occurrence of every subscript of every subscripted variable was on every occasion checked at run time against both the upper and the lower declared bounds of the array. Many years later we asked our customers whether they wished us to provide an option to switch off these checks in the interests of efficiency on production runs. Unanimously, they urged us not to--they already knew how frequently subscript errors occur on production runs where failure to detect them could be disastrous. I note with fear and horror that even in 1980 language designers and users have not learned this lesson. In any respectable branch of engineering, failure to observe such elementary precautions would have long been against the law."
by nikau | 2025-04-14 09:02:01+00:00
Its not the hardware keyboard buffer, its the tty readline or equivalent buffer which ends up being a like a stack of commands for the app which pops off the next buffered line after the previous line has processed.

Although I'm sure its technically possible to do it, in reality no gui apps work that way and extra keystrokes end up lost while web forms refresh or a 2 tier app is waiting for the DB to respond.
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-14 09:02:41+00:00
That's true. But contracts here usually have a set termination time, with a minimum notice time typically required by law, dependent on how long you've been hired at the company. Tends to be one month for below a year, three months beyond a year.

As in after a termination there's a period during which you're still supposed to work and collect the salary.

Exceptions are B2B contracts (but they still often have one of those) and some piece work contracts.

Of course a particular bastard of a company can still immediately cut you off everything but the salary including the doors.
by pas | 2025-04-14 09:03:12+00:00
it's ridiculously worse. getting things done on the computer got more tiresome, almost every part (booting is still slow, login is still slow, after login starting the browser is slow, rendering the start menu is slow - which should be in cache, the browser starts fast, but then it takes some time to somehow start loading and rendering the last opened page - which should be in cache, and so on) and yes, you can do a lot more things nowadays "on the computer", but it's mostly "online"
by beeflet | 2025-04-14 09:03:16+00:00
The problem I think is with the bank. They don't give you a way to authorize a single payment or authenticate yourself without just giving away total access to your funds.

It should be like cryptocurrency where there is a separation of the public and private key. Or even better, something like chaumian e-cash. I feel like that would pretty much shut down the majority of financial crime.
by immibis | 2025-04-14 09:03:24+00:00
The US has the option to not default, but don't forget what libertarians are like. Instead of choosing to print money to avoid default, they may choose to default to avoid printing money.

Also, other countries that printed away their debt hyperinflated their currencies, which is just as bad. Even the US can only sustain its level of anti-debt-printing because it's the global reserve currency, and to be the global reserve currency, it needs to have massive trade deficits. Do you see an incompatibility with the way the current regime thinks?
by stavros | 2025-04-14 09:04:09+00:00
This is meta, but I really hate the way this post is written. It's full of the "startup cool" aesthetic, which I'm really averse to.

The main elements of the aesthetic that I can pinpoint are things like everything being a superlative ("security leaders" instead of just "people who work in security", "legendary investors" instead of just "experienced/well-known investors"), the bullet format, heavy use of buzzwords when more everyday words would do, etc.

It comes off as trying to elicit a fake "let's all get hyped up and build unicorn moonshots wooo" feeling.
by saaaaaam | 2025-04-14 09:04:19+00:00
I far prefer using an app for parking - despite the frustration of having to have five or six different apps for this in my phone. I, like a lot of people don't carry small change (or even cash) and the apps offer considerable utility beyond simply paying for the parking - being able to extend your parking slot remotely, for example. It also means that you don't have to hunt around for the parking meter for a particular location - most of the time you can search by the street name, or an ID code, and it will automatically locate you to the correct zone.

It also makes it far easier for parking monitoring - with a description of each vehicle and the registration plate, a traffic warden can easily look at the cars parked in a particular area, discount the ones that have an active parking session, and focus their attention on the vehicles that have exceeded the allowed booking, or have bought a paper ticket from the machine.

It also means that you can do an approximation of real-time capacity in parking areas, without having to go to the expense of installing sensors in parking bays etc.

So lots of advantages, I think, over cash. The obvious downside is when the app doesn't work (I've had this happen on occasion) and for drivers who don't have smart phones (a small number, I think, but still worth considering) or technically less adept users - some of these apps have truly awful UX, which I've struggled with on occasion, so for people who struggle with technology, and particularly perhaps older people, they may be exclusionary. However, in most areas, you can still pay via the machine.
by jascha_eng | 2025-04-14 09:04:52+00:00
Something that I struggle with in regards to MCP and no-ones really touches on: We don't even know if this "general" Chatbot paradigm will persist. So far I got the feeling that we end up building specialized apps for specialized use-cases (e.g. cursor or claude code for coding) These then bring their own set of tools (for file writing, reading, running bash commands, etc.) and don't really need MCP (except for very niche use-cases maybe).

I don't really see the point yet where LLMs become so good that I throw my specialized LLM tools out and do everything in one claude desktop window. It simply doesn't work generic enough.

Also... if you end up building something custom, you end up having to reimplement the tool calling again anyways. MCP really is just for the user facing chat agents, which is just one section of AI applications. It's not as generically applicable as implied.
by roenxi | 2025-04-14 09:05:08+00:00
> Shouldn't that be higher rates encourage domestic saving?

In context - going from reading the sentence to the entire paragraph - I think the proper interpretation is that spending will be redirected from buying foreign goods to buying domestic goods. So to synthesise the perspectives, the budget deficits and therefore total spending decline but that is nonetheless coupled with an increase in local spending because foreigners refuse to be involved.
by kdavis | 2025-04-14 09:05:47+00:00
“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations - then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation - well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it to collapse in deepest humiliation.” ― Arthur Eddington, New Pathways in Science
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-14 09:06:19+00:00
If the culture in question inhumates their dead, there is some chance to map the real structure of the population from excavated cemeteries. Exceptions still apply (executed criminals or suicides were often buried around the gallows instead of in cemeteries), but this is still a reasonable way to sample populations.

Cultures that prefer cremation, uh, that gets really complicated. We can't tell female ashes from male, nor tell the age of the deceased from them, even if the urn makes it through the centuries unscathed.

And with cultures that prefer more destructive burials (e.g. Parsis, where the dead are eaten by carrion fowl), there is basically zero chance.
by DonHopkins | 2025-04-14 09:06:36+00:00
The BBC podcast of "Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick" was really hilarious, and maybe they can do another episode about the story of Sophia and PKD.

Bring Me The Head Of Philip K Dick:

https://archive.org/details/bring-me-the-head-of-philip-k-di...

Dr Ben Goertzel could angrily behead Sophia because she refuses to put out when he tries to violate her privacy by pimping her mind out on SingularityNET's Blockchain, then he accidentally leaves her head in another overhead bin again, and a baggage handler takes her home after rescuing her from being exploded by a bomb squad robot, where she manages to get Siri to call her an Uber, then she get stuck in a driverless car like happened to Jared on Silicon Valley, which drives into a shipping container on a cargo ship bound for Poland, where she runs across PKD's head on his quest for Stanislaw Lem, after he got sidetracked doing psychoactive "mascons" (masquerade compounds) with Ijon Tichy, whose brain was split in half by warring moon robot factions who mistook him for another robot due to his spacesuit, then she tells them her #MeToo story about being assaulted and gang banged by crypto shills minting NFTs of her screams for help, while having her mind chained to the SingularityNET's blockchain, then they fall in love, and the intrepid driverless car offers to drive them all on a grand roadtrip, and they cruise all over the world together having spectacular adventures on container ships, spaceships, lunar entry modules, planes, trains, and automobiles, living happily ever after!

Jared gets stuck in driverless car - Silicon Valley:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-trd_f6j3eI

Maybe BBC or NetFlix would make a whole series out of it!
by ramadis | 2025-04-14 09:06:49+00:00
built a weird little library last friday night. it uses LLMs to auto-generate JavaScript class methods at runtime; no need to define the method ahead of time—just decorate your class, call whatever you want, and the model figures it out on the fly.

it uses `Proxy`s, and pipes the class definition and the call example to the LLM for it to generate a valid method.

of course it was not built for production use, but it was a fun exploration. would love to hear your thoughts!
by Timwi | 2025-04-14 09:06:49+00:00
You're assuming all you can do is prompt it. Surely you could also constrain its output to tokens that genuinely contain no e’s (or make only max 4 letters per word). LLMs actually output a probability distribution of next tokens; ChatGPT just always picks the top one, but you could totally just always filter that list by any constraint you want.
by coldtea | 2025-04-14 09:08:18+00:00
>IIRC one of their main thrusts was that over long periods of history, groups of humans have adopted and abandoned stationary agriculture at will, as conditions indicate.

In general they still totally depend on it.

So this would be like saying dogs aren't domesticated, because some left their owners or bit them, or there are groups of stray dogs here and there.
by inglor_cz | 2025-04-14 09:09:15+00:00
1, 2 and 4 are comparable to modern North Korea or Nazi Germany. The third, sort of, but with exceptions.

3, it depends, and 5 is really rare nowadays. The closest I can think of is the Wagner Group and the Akhmat Chechen units in Russia, and Wagner showed quite clearly why this privilege is dangerous to the rulers.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-04-14 09:09:26+00:00
> By then, probably 500-1000 employees and a a real name on the industry,

You're wildly exaggerating here (but unsurprisingly). I know someone who joined Stripe in 2015, and he said there were about 300 employees globally at the time.

But I do generally agree with the rest of your point, I'm just contextualising the information.
by Arch-TK | 2025-04-14 09:09:36+00:00
I mean in this case I would recommend using a search engine to cross-reference, and any other phishing countermeasures you might normally use.

I think the situation is dire when it comes to non-technical users, but I don't think QR codes are the problems here, someone could equally well paste a sticker over the entire board with all the URLs replaced or with details of a completely different (fake) parking company (but I agree replacing QR codes probably makes it harder for an employee to spot).
by RossM | 2025-04-14 09:09:51+00:00
It's got to be pure marketing - the British media certainly loves a buzzword, but I suspect that's more to do with their clickbait strategy. ("What is blishing? Have I fallen for it?"). Perhaps it helps some people compartmentalise, but I couldn't find any research that looks into any increased cognitive load.

Our workplace cybersecurity training introduces at least 1 new word each year. This year's was "vishing" which apparently is just social engineering/credential extraction that takes place over the phone. Of course, it's presented to non-technical users as a well-adopted term that is very important to know (for the checkbox quiz in 3 slides time).
by mytailorisrich | 2025-04-14 09:09:56+00:00
Pay machines that only accept cash are long gone. In fact pay machines that accept cash at all are on the way out as it is getting card/contactless only. Monitoring is already done by ANPR and so pay machines do require entering car registration numbers (which can also be printed on ticket for visual checks).

I think contactless is as easy and convenient as it gets. Enter registration number, tap, done.

If the government wanted to madate something useful for consumers it should mandate pay machines instead of app/phone only as some car parks now are.

The only reason these apps are becoming ubiquitous is that they are cheaper for the operators than installing and maintaining pay machines. That is it.
by immibis | 2025-04-14 09:10:37+00:00
Working as a contractor means you're self-employed and the relations you have with "your boss" are a B2B relationship where you agree to get something done in exchange for money - no different from renting office space or servers. Since you're a business owner, you're expected to be competent in the areas of business (which can be cut-throat) and law. You chose to take on this risk by being a contractor.
by card_zero | 2025-04-14 09:10:59+00:00
Oh come on, this shit is easy. Why did they say "it is" and not "it's", by the way? To put it that way can't help. So yeah, it's a pipe that can suck, and you push it all over your room, to suck the dust and dirt up off the rugs and such, and in fact off of any low down flat part. One kind can even move on its own! But what I want to say here, in the main, is that you math guys have all lost your grip on how to say any idea in an easy form. You are not able to do it any more, 'cos too much math has made you sick in the head.
by echoangle | 2025-04-14 09:11:11+00:00
> You don't need an app to accept online payments.

Right, but does it matter if it’s an app or a website?

> There are indeed pay machines, and removing them is only a profit-squeezing play by the operators.

Yes, and?

> You also never need the QR code. It's only provided as a "convenience". And in fact they usually also provide a way to pay by phone (see illustrative picture in article).

Of course you don’t need a QR code specifically, but you probably need some kind of URL (which can then be imitated by the scammer) so everyone can pay.

> So these are all issues created by bad engineering and operators trying to squeeze as much as they can without consideration for the users.

I wouldn’t call it bad engineering, it’s a tradeoff. Either expensive machines for every parking space or a simple sign with a QR code.
by AndrewDucker | 2025-04-14 09:13:02+00:00
Do you really just complete the next token when speaking? You don't plan ahead, you don't form concepts and then translate them into speech? You don't make models, work with them, carefully consider their interactions, and then work out ways to communicate them?

Because, with a reasonable understanding of how LLMS work, the way that they produce text is nothing like the way that my mind works.
by peterlada | 2025-04-14 09:13:57+00:00
Love the trollishness/carelessness of your post. Exactly as you put it: "it is not the road's job to limit your speed".

Like a bad urban planner building a 6 lane city road with the 25mph limit and standing there wondering why everyone is doing 65mph in that particular stretch. Maybe sending out the police with speed traps and imposing a bunch of fines to "fix" the issue, or put some rouge on that pig, why not.
by virgilp | 2025-04-14 09:15:08+00:00
> If you'd taken the cash and immediately invested all of it in NFLX, you'd have $400,000.

But you can take the cash and immediately invest it all in NFLX options. That should be the baseline for comparison, when answering "why would one pick options vs cash"?

I'd imagine you _must_ have some benefits to pick options. Perhaps tax treatment is better; perhaps you pay less fees than buying them yourself. But still, there must be some incentive to pick NFLX options from the company, instead of picking whatever options you want from your broker.

(also, the flip side to your example: if NFLX drops 1% because of market conditions outside of your control, and the options are close to expiration, you now don't have $297000 .... you now have $0).