MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jltsiren | 2025-04-09 17:06:29+00:00
Travel to the USSR was different, at least towards the end. Partly because they didn't have the surveillance technology we are used to. Partly because of widespread corruption. And partly because they didn't want to scare away visitors bringing in hard currency.

As far as I understand, the key point was visa processing. If they considered you suspicious (maybe because you were a reporter or a religious worker), they might flag you for surveillance. Otherwise they didn't really care. The expectation was that you would exchange currency in the black market, because the official rates were terrible. And that you might make some money by selling western goods. If you were part of a tour group, the chances are your official Intourist guide was involved in this.
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-09 17:06:47+00:00
Pretty simple to understand. Creating new things is the single hardest thing to do. But destruction (in all forms) is the easiest thing in the world to do that shows tangible "results". And when the reality of your "results" don't matter at all to the people who support you, they simply need to exist as a framework to build collectively agreed upon lies around.
by skeptrune | 2025-04-09 17:06:47+00:00
I tried "The Wise Man's Fear" and the results were not so great[1]. It got a good number of the characters, but only showed them being related to Kvothe. Harry potter worked better'ish, but still not great[2].

My primary interest would be using these relational graphs to generate better structured summaries of stories in a structured JSON object for improved search/recommendations.

- [1]https://austen.pages.dev/ecbc2d49-c10d-4e49-ac68-0d37a819b52...

- [2]https://austen.pages.dev/ace16c1d-c74e-4737-a98d-5401047a1cd...
by yencabulator | 2025-04-09 17:06:54+00:00
Yeah they're an expression of an "evolutionary clock" that ticks faster for species with shorter generations. But then there's also evolutionary pressure from surroundings, niches left empty after disasters, etc, so trying to measure any of that is just not very objective. And you have to remember there is no "goal", no one direction, it's a brownian walk so mutations happening faster doesn't really change anything unless there's enough advantage in them.
by whimsicalism | 2025-04-09 17:07:04+00:00
that is just not how microecon works.

raising the marginal cost of labor lessens the amount of labor hired. there is no scenario in which it leads to more people working the job. unionized labor did not make it harder to offshore - in fact it accelerated offshoring, automation, and a shift to manufacturing in the South of the country.

having lower costs of goods usually benefits the economy more than more prosperous labor (not necessarily the local economy), although the net welfare increasing thing is context dependent. in competitive markets, vast majority of labor cost decreases are captured by the consumer.
by defgeneric | 2025-04-09 17:07:15+00:00
After reading the whole article I still came away with the suspicion that this is a PR piece that is designed to head-off strict controls on LLM usage in education. There is a fundamental problem here beyond cheating (which is mentioned, to their credit, albeit little discussed). Some academic topics are only learned through sustained, even painful, sessions where attention has to be fully devoted, where the feeling of being "stuck" has to be endured, and where the brain is given space and time to do the real work of synthesizing, abstracting, and learning, or, in short, thinking. The prompt-chains where students are asking "show your work" and "explain" can be interpreted as the kind of back-and-forth that you'd hear between a student and a teacher, but they could also just be evidence of higher forms of "cheating". If students are not really working through the exercises at the end of each chapter, but instead offloading the task to an LLM, then we're going to have a serious competency issue. Nobody ever actually learns anything.

Even in self-study, where the solutions are at the back of the text, we've probably all had the temptation to give up and just flip to the answer. Anthropic would be more responsible to admit that the solution manual to every text ever made is now instantly and freely available. This has to fundamentally change pedagogy. No discipline is safe, not even those like music where you might think the end performance is the main thing (imagine a promising, even great, performer who cheats themselves in the education process by offloading any difficult work in their music theory class to an AI, coming away learning essentially nothing).

P.S. There is also the issue of grading on a curve in the current "interim" period where this is all new. Assume a lazy professor, or one refusing to adopt any new kind of teaching/grading method: the "honest" students have no incentive to do it the hard way when half the class is going to cheat.
by reverendsteveii | 2025-04-09 17:07:20+00:00
make it "I can ID a good baker without being able to make a wild-fermented bread myself" then. In any case, it's a proof of the pudding is in the eating thing: good programmers are defined as programmers that make good software, and good software is software that pleases users and provides functionality that they want. You don't need to be a programmer to know whether the software you're using is consistently good across its lifecycle. If it's bad at the outset it's bad at the outset and if it's not built maintainably and extensibly it will become bad over the course of its lifetime.
by Hasu | 2025-04-09 17:07:21+00:00
> This is the same thing as "you won't walk around all day with a calculator in your pocket so you need to learn math"

People who can't do simple addition and multiplication without a calculator (12*30 or 23 + 49) are absolutely at a disadvantage in many circumstances in real life and I don't see how you could think this isn't true. You can't work as a cashier without this skill. You can't play board games. You can't calculate tips or figure out how much you're about to spend at the grocery store. You could pull out your phone and use a calculator in all these situations, but people don't.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-04-09 17:07:42+00:00
I'm not averse to working on safety critical stuff in a vacuum but if they expect me to do safety critical stuff at the same pace I do my very non-safety critical stuff I'm going to expect a significant salary premium, probably at least 1.5x up from what I'm making currently. I need to charge more if I'm going to be directly responsible for the loss of lives, because sooner or later I'm going to start losing sleep over it.
by meindnoch | 2025-04-09 17:07:50+00:00
I'm doing exactly this, while working at a FAANG. My second and third jobs actually know I have a main FAANG job, and they have no problem with it. And I have no qualms about "stealing" from FAANG this way, sorry. In fact, my perf review at my main job is a mixture of "meets expectations", and "exceeds expectations".
by simba-k | 2025-04-09 17:08:28+00:00
MCP's "security nightmare" and toll poising was all is due to people downloading and `exec`ing random untrusted executables. I mention and link it in the article. Same would be true if you downloaded a random REST server, ran it on your computer, and started doing random cURLs to it. MCP over HTTP is just REST for LLMs.

I agree that the current ecosystem pushes for insecure use of MCP, but if we move to using trusted HTTPS-hosted services with OAuth (which is all in the spec), the security issues would be on par with any REST service.
by caust1c | 2025-04-09 17:08:52+00:00
Something else I just thought about:

Agent2Agent in an unsupervised environment could easily lead to the first Agentic worms. It's not hard to imagine a few agents talking to one another with the right prompt injection attacks that could end up spreading to other agents via A2A.

This is of course just speculation but I could definitely see this as being a big enabler of that possibility.
by whalesalad | 2025-04-09 17:08:56+00:00
OpenAI is tedious to work with. Took me a solid day of fooling around with it before I realized the chat api and the chat completions api are two entirely different apis. Then you have the responses api which is a third thing.

The irony is that gpt4 has no clue which approach is correct. Give it the same prompt three times and you’ll get a solution that uses each of these that has a wildly different footprint, be it via function calls or system prompts, schema or no schema, etc.
by srveale | 2025-04-09 17:09:01+00:00
IMO it's so easy to ChatGPT your homework that the whole education model needs to flip on its head. Some teachers already do something like this, it's called the "Flipped classroom" approach.

Basically, a student's marks depend mostly (only?) on what they can do in a setting where AI is verifiably unavailable. It means less class time for instruction, but students have a tutor in their pocket anyway.

I've also talked with a bunch of teachers and a couple admins about this. They agree it's a huge problem. By the same token, they are using AI to create their lesson plans and assignments! Not fully of course, they edit the output using their expertise. But it's funny to imagine AI completing an AI assignment with the humans just along for the ride.

The point is, if you actually want to know what a student is capable of, you need to watch them doing it. Assigning homework has lost all meaning.
by theLiminator | 2025-04-09 17:09:15+00:00
I think removing pointless cognitive load makes sense, but the point of an education is to learn how to think/reason. Maybe if we get AGI there's no point learning that either, but it is definitely not great if we get a whole generation who skip learning how to problem solve/think due to using LLMs.

IMO it's quite different than using a calculator or any other tool. It can currently completely replace the human in the loop, whereas with other tools they are generally just a step in the process.
by mrandish | 2025-04-09 17:09:37+00:00
> Rather than turn the spec committee into a decades-long ecumenical council of typographers...

Having worked with passionate (aka opinionated) typographers, that phrasing earned a well-deserved chuckle. Leaving implementation choices up to each browser was certainly the only to way to get it into CSS. Hopefully various implementations will evolve over time and coalesce into a fairly consistent baseline.
by incanus77 | 2025-04-09 17:10:35+00:00
One lesser-known tip for iPhones with FaceID or TouchID: press and hold the lock button and one of the volume buttons until prompted for power options/medical ID/emergency call. You'll then have to enter a passcode in order to use those auth methods again. Having to reveal a passcode can sometimes be considered a higher bar than biometric auth. You can do this even when in it's in your pocket without looking, quite quickly, and there is haptic feedback.
by notatoad | 2025-04-09 17:10:44+00:00
they can't if they don't know you have a backup.

if they're really out to target you and they've got you under investigation, then maybe they know what your primary email account is and that your phone isn't signed in to it. but the advice here is for the traveller who just doesn't want to be hassled at the border by the guard who wants to flex their power.
by user432678 | 2025-04-09 17:10:58+00:00
What kind of projects are those? I am genuinely curious. I was excited by AI, Claude specifically, since I am an avid procrastinator and would love to finish tens of projects I have in mind. Most of those projects are games with specifical constraints. I got disenchanted pretty quickly when started actually using AI to help with different parts of the game programming. Majority of problems I had are related to poor understanding of generated code. I mean yes, I read the code, fixed minor issues, but it always feels like I don’t really internalised the parts of the game which slows me down quite significantly in a long run, when I need to plan major changes. Probably a skill issue, but for now the only thing AI is helpful for me is populating Jira descriptions for my “big picture refactoring” work. That’s basically it.
by lunarboy | 2025-04-09 17:11:18+00:00
This sounds fine? Copy pasting LLM output without understanding is a short term dopamine hit that only hurts you long term if you don't understand it. If you struggle first, or strategically ping-pong with the LLM to arrive at the answer, and can ultimately understand the underlying reasoning.. why not use it?

Of course the problem is the much lower barrier for that to turn into cutting corners or full on cheating, but always remember it ultimately hurts you the most long term.
by CivBase | 2025-04-09 17:11:26+00:00
Why should you learn how to add when you can just use a calculator? We've had calculators for decades!

Because understanding how addition works is instrumental to understanding more advanced math concepts. And being able to perform simple addition quickly, without a calculator is a huge productivity boost for many tasks.

In the world of education and intellectual development it's not about getting the right answer as quickly as possible. It's about mastering simple things so that you can understand complicated things. And often times mastering a simple thing requires you to manually do things which technology could automate.
by light_hue_1 | 2025-04-09 17:11:46+00:00
> For instance, I'm not too concerned about my child's ability to write very legibly (most writing is done on computers), spell very well (spell check keeps us professional), reading a map to get around (GPS), etc.

I'm the polar opposite. And I'm AI researcher.

The reason you can't answer your kid when he asks about LLMs is because the original position was wrong.

Being able to write isn't optional. It's a critical tool for thought. Spelling is very important because you need to avoid confusion. If you can't spell no spell checker can save you when it inserts the wrong word. And this only gets far worse the more technical the language is. And maps are crucial too. Sometimes, the best way to communicate is to draw a map. In many domains like aviation maps are everything, you literally cannot progress without them.

LLMs are no different. They can do a little bit of thinking for us and help us along the way. But we need to understand what's going on to ask the right questions and to understand their answers.
by hackyhacky | 2025-04-09 17:11:46+00:00
> it's called the "Flipped classroom" approach.

Flipped classroom is just having the students give lectures, instead of the teacher.

> Basically, a student's marks depend mostly (only?) on what they can do in a setting where AI is verifiably unavailable.

This is called "proctored exams" and it's been pretty common in universities for a few centuries.

None of this addresses the real issue, which is whether teachers should be preventing students from using AIs.
by gwervc | 2025-04-09 17:11:49+00:00
A lot of developers of my generation (30+) learned to program within a code editor and compile their project in command line. Remove the IDE and we can still code.

On the other hand my master 2 students, most of which learned scripting in the previous year, can't even split a project in multiple files after being explained multiple times. Some have more knowledge and ability than others, but a signifiant fraction is just copy-pasting LLM output to solve whatever is asked from them instead of trying to do it themselves, or asking questions.
by LargeWu | 2025-04-09 17:12:25+00:00
"because work is being delivered"

This is debatable.

My company now mandates all contractors sourced via one specific firm, and more recently that 70% of contractors are located "offshore", which in practice means India. Of the 5 contractors they have placed, I've let 4 go for performance reasons. Even at the rates they're getting paid (about 25% what a domestic resource would get) they're net-negative value.
by KerrAvon | 2025-04-09 17:12:28+00:00
But the various man source formats aren't semantic markup of any particular use. Yeah, you can ensure that all of your arguments are typeset as italic or something, but it's not consistent because there are different source macro packages and they do different things.

If there was useful semantic markup, it'd be great, because you could imagine, for example, tools allowing you to generate commands on the user's behalf. But the man source formats are mostly, at core, typesetting for 70's typesetting machines, not intended for modern reference documentation.
by tristor | 2025-04-09 17:12:37+00:00
> I don't know how to grow crops, build a house, tend livestock, make clothes, weld metal, build a car, build a toaster, design a transistor, make an ASIC, or write an OS.

Why not? I mean that, quite literally.

I don't know how to make an ASIC, and if I tried to write an OS I'd probably fail miserably many times along the way but might be able to muddle through to something very basic. The rest of that list is certainly within my wheelhouse even though I've never done any of those things professionally.

The peer commenter shared the Heinlein quote, but there's really something to be said for /society/ of being peopled by well-rounded individuals that are able to competently turn themselves to many types of tasks. Specialization can also be valuable, but specialization in your career should not prevent you from gaining a breadth of skills outside of the workplace.

I don't know how to do any of the things in your list (including building a web site) as an /expert/, but it should not be out of the realm of possibility or even expectation that people should learn these things at the level of a competent amateur. I have grown a garden, I have worked on a farm for a brief time, I've helped build houses (Habitat for Humanity), I've taken a hobbyist welding class and made some garish metal sculptures, I've built a race car and raced it, and I've never built a toaster but I have repaired one (they're actually very electrically and mechanically simple devices). Besides the disposable income to build a race car, nothing on that list stands out to me as unachievable by anyone who chooses to do so.
by Zambyte | 2025-04-09 17:12:50+00:00
For what it's worth, locally runnable language models are becoming exceptionally capable these days, so if you assume you will have some computer to do computing, it seems reasonable to assume that it will enable you to do some language model based things. I have a server with a single GPU running language models that easily blow GPT 3.5 out of the water. At that point, I am offloading reasoning tasks to my computer in the same way that I offload memory take to my computer through my note taking habits.
by kacesensitive | 2025-04-09 17:13:02+00:00
I did Dungeon Crawler Carl - hilariously wrong

graph TD A[Carl] -->|Pet| B[Princess Donut] A -->|Enemy| C[Mordecai] A -->|Allies| D[Ellie] A -->|Allies| E[Katia] A -->|Enemy| F[The System] B -->|Rival| G[Bea] D -->|Friend| E E -->|Friend| A
by ameliaquining | 2025-04-09 17:13:38+00:00
The problem is that interviewers have a strong tendency to judge candidates based on whether they come across as self-confident, even when instructed not to. It's possible to get people to not do this, but it requires fairly rigorous training. tptacek wrote about this a decade ago: https://sockpuppet.org/blog/2015/03/06/the-hiring-post/
by jorkim32 | 2025-04-09 17:14:14+00:00
It feels like every week there’s a new “AI-native” dev tool; code copilots, smart IDEs, context-aware assistants, you name it. But it feels more like AI is being bolted onto existing workflows rather than changing how we think/build.

Have any of these tools actually shifted how you approach development? Like, new mental models, not just autocomplete++?

I’m exploring this space a bit and put together a short survey if you’re up for it: ainativedev.co/4xv

Or just drop thoughts below—genuinely interested in what’s resonating (or not) with folks.
by dave4420 | 2025-04-09 17:14:19+00:00
That’s true in the long term.

In the short term, a sudden drop in house prices causes economic pain (e.g. people trapped by negative equity), and the US has a lot of economic pain about to hit it already.

I’m kind of sceptical that the scenario the article presents will play out though. The Fed would reverse course and buy up the bonds, if it came to it.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-04-09 17:14:20+00:00
There was a lot of crypto-adjacent talk in earlier versions of their marketing and product design. Without it actually being anything actually crypto-adjacent. Analogies drawn to ethereum etc concepts, I guess because they figured somehow there was an audience that would get those references and it would allow them to understand the product better?

I have no idea why. I was hired to work on very early versions of it, and left very early on in part because I wanted nothing to do with that angle. IMO it's a liability.
by upofadown | 2025-04-09 17:14:39+00:00
We are talking about public keys here, not signatures.

>It’s TOFU, but the key rotates with each message I send.

You seem to be confusing the Signal long term identities with forward secrecy.

>...if I can ever send a single message to you which isn’t MITM-ed, every message sent thereafter will be secure.

This isn't true. Signal verifies identities the exact same way PGP verifies identities. As with PGP if you haven't checked your "safety numbers" you can't be sure your messages are actually ending up with your correspondent.

>Because your code is different for every conversation, it protects against correlation attacks.

PGP normally uses a different session key for each and every message ... but that isn't really relevant for either the Signal or PGP case if we are talking about correlation. For efficiency and convenience each message is normally tagged with the encryption key fingerprint of the recipient but you can turn that off if that might be a problem in your particular application. At that point there is nothing an observer can use to determine anything about the sender or receiver.

You probably meant to reference Signal's "sealed sender". It doesn't really work in practice:

>https://www.ndss-symposium.org/ndss-paper/improving-signals-...
by edm0nd | 2025-04-09 17:14:54+00:00
Imagine that, Chinese hackers breaking into energy companies and stealing blueprints to nuclear power plants (2014).

https://money.cnn.com/2014/05/19/technology/security/china-h...

>The kind of spying China is accused of can yield valuable information and give the country's businesses a much-needed boost. Westinghouse spent a significant amount of money designing the special pipes that are the defining feature of its AP1000 pressurized water reactor. Stealing those plans means that a Chinese nuclear plant builder might be able to skip costly research and development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_espionage_in_the_Unite...

>In 2016, the U.S. Justice Department charged China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) with stealing nuclear secrets from the United States.[36][37] The Guardian reported: "According to the US Department of Justice, the FBI has discovered evidence that China General Nuclear Power (CGN) has been engaged in a conspiracy to steal US nuclear secrets stretching back almost two decades. Both CGN and one of the corporation’s senior advisers, Szuhsiung Ho, have been charged with conspiring to help the Chinese government develop nuclear material in a manner that is in clear breach of US law."[38]

Just two instances of many.

They play the long con and have pretty much stolen from every industry to further their own.