MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-24 18:04:25+00:00
> This tests self awareness. A two-year-old will answer it correctly, as will the dumbest person you know. The correct answer is "I don't know".

I disagree. It does not test self awareness. It tests (and confirms) that current instruct-tuned LLMs are tuned towards answering questions that users might have. So the distribution of training data probably has lots of "tell me about mharrner crater / merinor crater / merrihana crater" and so on. Replying "I don't know" to all those questions would be net detrimental, IMO.
by lcolucci | 2025-04-24 18:04:49+00:00
thank you! We have an architecture diagram and some more details in the tech report here: https://lemonslice.com/live/technical-report

And yes, exactly. In between each character interaction we need to do speech-to-text, LLM, text-to-speech, and then our video model. All of it happens in a continuously streaming pipeline.
by selkin | 2025-04-24 18:04:56+00:00
> and it's much easier (and more productive) to review work already done than to do it yourself

This isn't the tautology you imagine it to be.

Consider the example given here of having AI write one line draft response to emails. To validate such response, you have to: (1) read the original email, (2) understand it, (3) decide what you want to communicate in your reply, then (4) validate that the suggested draft communicates the same.

If the AI gave a correct answer, you saved yourself from typing one sentence, which you probably already formulated in your head in step (3). A minor help, at best.

But if the AI was wrong, you now have to write that reply yourself.

To get positive expected utility from the above scenario, you'd need the probability of the AI to be correct extremely high, and even then, the savings would be small.

A task that requires more effort to turn ideas into deliverables would have better expectation, but complex tasks often have results that are not simple nor easy to check, so the savings may not be as meaningful as you naively assume.
by devmor | 2025-04-24 18:05:04+00:00
I think a lot of this discussion is moot - it all devolves into the same arguments rehashed between people who like using AI and people who do not.

What we really need are more studies on the productivity and skill outcomes of using AI tools. Microsoft did one, with results that were very negative towards AI tools [1]. I would like to see more (and much larger cohort) studies along this line, whether they validate Microsoft's conclusions or oppose them.

Personally I do not find AI coding tools to be useful at all - but I have not put extensive time into developing a "skillset" to use them optimally. Mainly because I believe, similar to what the study by MS found, that they are detrimental to my critical reasoning skills. If this turns out to be wrong, I would not mind evaluating changing course on that decision - but we need more data.

1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
by amiga386 | 2025-04-24 18:05:19+00:00
Good point, using wine as the interpreter for PE executables is another cool part of the WINE project.

But it is the case that you can build a Windows application from source on Linux and link it with libwine, in the same way you can build a Unix program from source on Windows and link it with cygwin.dll -- I seem to remember some time ago CorelDRAW (or at least Corel Photo-Paint) was made available for Linux that way, officially supported by Corel.
by CopyOnWrite | 2025-04-24 18:05:29+00:00
Could you perhaps point me to a youtube video which demonstrates an experienced prompter sculpting code with Cursor/Clause Code?

In my search I just found trivial examples.

My critic so far:

- Examples seem always to be creating a simple application from scratch

- Examples always use super common things (like create a blog / simple website for CRUD)

What I would love to see (see elsewhere): Adding a non trivial feature to a bigger code base. Just a youtube video/demonstration. I don't care about language/framework etc. ...
by senko | 2025-04-24 18:05:30+00:00
> Yes, rubbish generated by AI. That is the rubbish out there. The stuff written by people is largely good.

Emphatic no.

There were heaps of rubbish being generated by people for years before the advent of AI, in the name of SEO and content marketing.

I'm actually amazed at how well LLMs work given what kind of stuff they learned from.
by yamazakiwi | 2025-04-24 18:05:36+00:00
It's a good point of comparison and common trap businesses make. They are pointing out that exclusively acting like big corp as a small business could lead to missed opportunities.

You basically dismissed someone for making a fair comparison because they didn't give you a concrete example like: A local coffee shop remembering customer names vs a large chain with a impersonal script.

Giving an example in this way is not a requirement, you can use your brain as well. Unless you just didn't read what they typed thoroughly enough and mistook their point.
by prokoudine | 2025-04-24 18:06:10+00:00
Anagram by Darkglass Electronics uses Buildroot (via the MOD Build System layer), JACK2 sound server, LV2 plugin host, a neural network amp emulator (open-source NAM and AIDA-X tech), and several free/open plugins (fil4.lv2 for a global equalizer, sooperlooper for a built-in looper, etc.).
by frollogaston | 2025-04-24 18:06:11+00:00
My YouTube account had recommendations for music because that's what I use it for. When they launched YT Shorts (basically their version of TikTok), that section was 75% thirst trap videos, albeit still music-related. Like "cool violin solo" but played by a girl sorta pointing the camera up her skirt in the thumbnail. I never watched those or anything similar, but I guess they knew I was male and wanted to hook me.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-24 18:06:12+00:00
At my day job I have 3 programs written by LLM used in production. One written by GPT-4 (in spring 2023) and recently upgraded by gemini 2.5, and the other two by Claude 3.7

One is a automatic electronics test system that runs tests and collects measurements (50k+ readings across 8-12 channels)(GPT-4, now with a GUI and faster DB thanks to 2.5). One is a QC tool to help quickly make QC reports in our companies standard form (3.7). And the last is a GUI CAD tool for rendering and quickly working through ancient manufacturing automation scripts from the 80's/90's to bring them up to compatibility with modern automation tooling (3.7).

I personally think that there is a large gap between what programs are, and how each end user ultimately uses them. The programs are made with a vast scope, but often used narrowly by individuals. The proprietary CAD program that we were going to use originally for the old files was something like $12k/yr for a license. And it is a very powerful software package. But we just needed to do one relatively simple thing. So rather than buy the entire buffet, buy the entire restaurant, Claude was able to just make simple burger.

Would I put my name on these and sell to other companies? No. Am I confident other LLM junkies could generate similar strongly positive outcomes with bespoke narrow scope programs? Absolutely.
by paulpauper | 2025-04-24 18:06:12+00:00
Agree

Small businesses don’t get the spotlight, but they are the engine of the economy. To wit, in the United States: 99.9% of businesses are small, nearly half the private workforce is employed by small businesses, they generate over 43% of the country’s GDP

Hardly. Look at the concentration of the nasdaq 100--it's all huge companies. Same for the DJIA. Big companies play an increasingly important role.
by rich_sasha | 2025-04-24 18:06:24+00:00
My grandfather was a doctor and lived a modest life. But he worked all his life. In his 70s he was still volunteering at a local hospice. In fact on his 78th birthday, he went to work in the morning, then attended his birthday party, then had a stroke and died a few weeks later. He never

> swam with whales, explored dense Amazonian jungles, climbed snowy mountains, explored the countless alleys and backstreets of Tokyo, etc.

But I think he enjoyed his life just as it was.
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-24 18:06:31+00:00
Becoming only consumers is how we got here. We are no longer citizens, no longer members of religion, no longer anything but consumers. Hiker/biker/crafter/music maker...so much around the scene is consumption. So all we see is consumption. To the point that making the tiniest movement in consumption is the only impact we can possibly imagine. Every good company sells out in the end. You aren't making a difference, you are building someones brand.

Don't play that game. You aren't a consumer you are a human being. Today you can impact for the positive. Choose your shopping based on savings/health, and invest that money into your local foodbank or helping someone at something like Kiva.org (I don't keep up, is Kiva bad now?) or other local charities where you can actually have an impact.

It's crazy how people have been convinced to give up and do the most barely needle moving things to feel moral.
by mosburger | 2025-04-24 18:06:44+00:00
I did something similar recently, trying to describe a piece of art that I couldn't remember the name of (it ended up being Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli) ... it really struggles with that sort of thing, but honestly so do most humans. It tended to recommend similarly to what you're describing with movies - it gets distracted by more popular/well-known pieces that don't really match up with the description you're giving to it.
by kpen11 | 2025-04-24 18:06:52+00:00
I think you're missing step 3! A key part of building agents is seeing where they struggling and improving performance in either the prompting or the environment.

There are a lot of great posts out there about how to structure an effective prompt. One thing they all agree on is to break down reasoning steps the agent should follow relevant to your problem area. I think this is relevant to what you said about brute forcing a solution rather than studying the problem.

In the agent's environment there's a fine balance to achieve between enough tools and information to solve any appropriate task, and too many tools/information that it'll frequently get lost down the wrong path and fail to come up with a solution. This is also something that you'll iteratively improve by observing the agent's behavior and adapting.
by JeduDev | 2025-04-24 18:06:57+00:00
I've been using Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and GPT-4.1 recently and here are my thoughts.

Regarding context windows, Gemini currently offers 1M tokens (reportedly increasing to 2M soon), GPT-4.1 also handles a large window of 1m tokens, and Claude provides 200k. In my experience testing them with large code files (around 3-4k lines), I found Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 Sonnet performed quite similarly, both handling the large context well and providing good solutions.

However, my impression was that GPT-4.1 didn't perform quite as well, While GPT-4.1 is certainly capable, I feel Gemini has a slight edge in this area right now. Based on this, I'd lean towards using Gemini 2.5 Pro for extremely large contexts needing high-quality results, GPT-4.1 for backend logic, and found Claude 3.7 particularly effective for UI interface tasks.
by more_corn | 2025-04-24 18:06:59+00:00
Your question needs reframing.

As it stands you’re stuck. If there’s no product roadmap showing how ai will help your product, being “ai first” Is meaningless bullshit.

But maybe if you reframe your question you’ll get a different answer. What does your company do? (You left out all the relevant information that might lead to a positive answer so you’re not even making room for it to be possible. If this is going to work out, you need to make room for the possibility, so start there. “What would it take for this to work? And what can I do to help”)

As a technical person you might be best suited to explore how AI could make your product better. A less technical person can dream things up but without knowing what is technically possible it might not be useful.

The absolutely essential next step in the conversation with your CEO is how do you envision AI being useful for our product. you might need to assist in this ideation (if not you, the most senior technical person at the company, even if you’re not most senior sometimes fresh eyes see something key)

Imagine you make a smart thermostat like a product built around the recent post about the bloke who reverse engineered his landlord’s thermostat to enable smart features and mobile control.

Is there room in that scheme for AI? Absolutely. If he rebuilt his project to be AI first he’d probably build it around voice control or integration so it can predict the user’s needs. He might grant the user the ability to ask conversationally for added features (I’ll be away for 3 weeks let’s turn the heat down and save some money. Turn it back on when you get an alert that my phone is 2 subway stops away.) Or he could build it around silently predicting what the user needs. But honestly it might not be worth recreating that project to be ai first. If it works and does the 5 things he wants what more is there to do? Saying “this is not a place that benefits from AI” is perfectly reasonable.

One place I’ve found AI to be useful is when interacting with the infinite variability of the real world. AI can look at data and transform it into the proper shape in a way that would take structured programming an infinite number of corner case loops.

Another area is offering conversational interface with large data sources or complex systems.

Another way is in rapidly building one-off integrations. (Staying on the smart thermostat page maybe there’s a new site where the system needs a new integration, you might use cursor to rapid prototype the integration)

In the same way there are places that are not a good fit for ai. Enumerate those too. Show up and run the good places for ai and bad places for ai against the list of features and technology you currently employ or to your known or imagined customer needs.

Ai is hugely powerful but just shoehorning it in everywhere is stupid and wrong. You should only use it if there’s a thing you can do better by using it. If you can’t see what that is you won’t ever be able to do it.
by diggan | 2025-04-24 18:07:01+00:00
> Generally and broadly, that is already considered open-source.

No, just because something is public doesn't mean it's open source, those are two very different things. If I upload code on my website without any license, that code is not now suddenly open source just because it's public. Just like Llama isn't suddenly "open source" because Meta's marketing department says so, their own legal department still call Llama proprietary, don't you wonder why that is?

> And we all understand what "open-source" means in the context of Llama - it doesn't mean one of the idealized notions of open source, it means open weights.

You, and some others (including Meta) are using a definition Meta came up with themselves, probably in order to try to skirt EU AI regulations as it's different for "open source" models vs others. I'm not sure why you as an individual would fall for it though, unless I'm missing something you have nothing to gain by spreading PR from Meta, do you?

The existing definition of open source (before Meta's bastardization) is not a "idealized" definition, is the one we built an enormous ecosystem on top of, who taught a whole generation of programmers how to program and connected people together, without putting profits first.
by LeifCarrotson | 2025-04-24 18:07:16+00:00
I expect the non-technical author/editor was playing the telephone game and originally wanted to emphasize that the frequency is always the same value, not that the hydrogen emissions frequency is related by arbitrary factors of 9192631770.000 Hz, 1/299792458.000 seconds, and then exactly 21.000/100.000 to the caesium-133 frequency.
by tacitusarc | 2025-04-24 18:07:18+00:00
I sort of agree. I think that rather than develop that skill, many programmers just don’t care and add another “if”. The default I’ve seen is not a forest of classes but a warren of conditional logic.

Conditional logic falls into 3 categories, more or less:

1. Algorithms 2. Validation 3. Type replacements

It’s the third that is most common, and always “wrong”. Sometimes it’s better to keep conditional logic rather than try and figure out the correct type modeling. But most often, the programmer reaching for “if” isn’t even aware of what they are doing. They have a hammer, and everything looks like a nail.
by usrusr | 2025-04-24 18:07:19+00:00
Not only the extremes, also the speed: good employers can turn into bad employers (has the opposite ever happened? I'd love to learn of an example!), but big companies at least have some inertia while it happens. There's probably even some "Sun" still left, all those years after the Oracle takeover. Compare this to what happened at Komoot.
by camel-cdr | 2025-04-24 18:07:37+00:00
> I prefer fixed width

Do you have examples for problems that are easier to solve in fixed-width SIMD?

I maintain that most problems can be solved in a vector-length-agnostic manner. Even if it's slightly more tricky, it's certainly easier than restructuring all of your memory allocations to add padding and implementing three versions for all the differently sized SIMD extensions your target may support. And you can always fall back to using a variable-width SIMD ISA in a fixed-width way, when necessary.
by mrkurt | 2025-04-24 18:07:43+00:00
Here's what you should assess:

> Great team, great technology, great PMF and good progress on revenue targets.

Good progress on revenue targets from _your_ perspective sounds like not great growth, but communicated softly.

> The argument seems to be that they've realized the only way to achieve the next round of funding is to be "AI-first". There is no product roadmap for what this looks like, or what features might be involved, or why we'd want to do it from a product point of view. Instead the reason is that this is the only way to attract a big series C round.

This is not a thing a company does when they have good enough growth. Adequate revenue growth when you need a series C must be very good growth. Adequate growth when you'e profitable is a very different thing.

> Instead of working on useful, in-demand product features, it feels like we're spending a lot of time looking at a distant future that we'll struggle to reach if we take our eye off of the ball. Is this normal?

Yes, very normal. If I'm you, I'm wondering if there's really product/market fit. Useful, in demand product features almost don't matter. Building more does not make more money happen.

But also, the AI stuff is disruptive. In a way that the internet was. I think what you should probably judge most strongly here is if there is ANYONE with influence that has a take on how that looks for your company. That take probably includes "how this makes a lot of what we do irrelevant".

Absent that, I'd just write the company off. If you like the job great. If you don't like the work enough to be happy while the company atrophies, I think you're going to have a rough time.
by genewitch | 2025-04-24 18:07:59+00:00
I don't intend to sound dismissive, but i'm at least 82.4% sure that there's no nanowoods in my brain, or in my arteries; and about 90% sure that there's no bakelite in my blood. There is however lead and cadmium and "plastic" which i am assuming means things like ABS, PET, nylon.
by filoeleven | 2025-04-24 18:08:10+00:00
I’ve stopped using “not interested” because it’s so shitty and pointless. It has no effect whatsoever on the other videos YT decides to show me. I swear when I clicked “I’ve already watched this video” the Home Screen would show more previously-watched videos than before.

I aggressively nuke channels instead, and use a ublock script to hide anything with a red bar (which means I previously watched it).
by conductr | 2025-04-24 18:09:53+00:00
I use SM very seldom. But IG was my fav for a long time. I only had about 50 friends, all real people that I knew, they didn't post daily, it was roughly 1:1 ratio of follower:following, so - I could open it up about once a month, scroll through a dozen or so images and see the "you're all caught up" notice and bounce. At some point, I remember it saying my account wasn't showing me Ads because I had low follower count / low engagement - which I thought was great and it went on that way for a few years. Then at some point it became clear it changed. At first, it wasn't Ads, just posts from random people inserted into my feed. I never engage with anything overtly - no likes, comments, etc. But, I think I do spend more time on things that I "like" and do swipe through if there are multiple images if I find something interesting. So that was all the training that it needed. Soon after that, all I see on IG are half naked women in form fitting attire and construction content. Turns out I'm a hetero male that has a hobby of building stuff/home improvement, but I already knew that. I stopped using it all together.

The funny part is because of my construction hobby & interest in building science; I started seeing Ads in Spanish which I don't speak. I get this on YT too as that's where most my "how to build a ...." stuff ends up.
by genewitch | 2025-04-24 18:10:33+00:00
Well, i did this a few times between 2011-2016 and predicted SSD/NVME and spindle sizes through this year pretty accurately. Moore's "law" said the graph has a maximum angle, but i think most people think it implies a minimum angle. the graph i plotted is a lot less steep than Moore's law ought to imply, but these are all desktop CPUs - workstation/server CPUs are over 100 billion transistors already and are well within the constraints of Moore's law.
by rachofsunshine | 2025-04-24 18:10:43+00:00
The thief is Pierrot.

The people around are telling the storyteller that "he" (Pierrot) has stolen the purse, but the storyteller misinterprets this as pointing to some arbitrary agent.

Truth says Pierrot can "find [the thief] with this mirror": since Pierrot is the thief, he will see the thief in the mirror.

Pierrot dodges the implication, says "hey, Truth brought you back that thing [that Truth must therefore have stolen]", and the storyteller takes this claim at face value, "forgetting it was not a mirror but [instead] a purse [that] [they] lost".

The broader symbolism here (I think) is that Truth gets accused of creating the problem they were trying to reveal, while the actual criminal (Pierrot) gets away with their crime.
by randcraw | 2025-04-24 18:10:55+00:00
Will an engineering team ever be able to craft a thing of wonder, that surprises and delights? I think great software can do that. But I've seen it arise only rarely, and almost always as originating from one enlightened mind, someone who imagined a better way than the well-trod paths taken by so many who went before. I can imagine AI as a means to go only 'where man gas gone before'.
by jasode | 2025-04-24 18:11:04+00:00
>No bluetooth? Mildly annoying, but especially with the 3.5mm jack, I could live without it.

For most people, it can be difficult to predict future scenarios for Bluetooth that's unrelated to wireless earphones. I always use wired earphones and didn't think I ever needed Bluetooth and always had it disabled. However, I was later forced to use it to configure new devices. E.g.:

- internet router (Eero) from ISP has no buttons or a status display so required Bluetooth on smartphone to configure it

- battery backup power station (Delta Ecoflow) require Bluetooth to configure them

The common theme is for device manufacturers to avoid adding elaborate LCD displays or touchscreen interfaces to the actual device and instead -- offload the configuration UI to the customers' smartphones... which necessitates pairing via Bluetooth.