MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dijksterhuis | 2025-04-12 12:47:24+00:00
as ever, any task that has any sort of safety or security critical risks should never be left to a “magic black box”.

human input/review/verification/validation is always required. verify the untrusted output of these systems. don’t believe the hype and don’t blindly trust them.

—

i did find the fact that google search’s assistant just parroted the crafted/fake READMEs thing particularly concerning - propagating false confidence/misplaced trust - although it’s not at all surprising given the current state of things.

genuinely feel like “classic search” and “new-fangled LLM queries” need to be split out and separated for low-level/power user vs high-level/casual questions.

at least with classic search i’m usually finding a github repo fairly quickly that i can start reading through, as an example.

at the same time, i could totally see myself scanning through a README and going “yep, sounds like what i need” and making the same mistake (i need other people checking my work too).
by msm_ | 2025-04-12 12:47:57+00:00
Anecdote unrelated to programming - when climbing (on a climbing wall or bouldering) I was significantly stronger compared to my peers. Because of this, I was the best (or one of the best) in my group for the first year of two. But then I hit the wall - at some difficulty level I couldn't just bruteforce my way to the top, and I had to learn proper techniques, footwork, unlearn bad habits - things my peers were doing for the past two years already.
by gryzzly | 2025-04-12 12:48:42+00:00
right, if you, for example, wear uniform, and if you, for example, have not started the war and didnt cause the genocide by not wearing uniform, by using civilians as human shields, and by stealing the humanitarian aid and reselling it to poor displaced civilians, that you then cynically enlist to die for your cause, because there is no other source of cash to feed your families.

you should also consider the sequence of events before using such grave accusations.
by sally_glance | 2025-04-12 12:49:02+00:00
Thanks, that was insightful. Vision and mission can be a hard sell, depending on the company. Having some decades of engineering tradition certainly helps with that.

Focusing on retention somehow went out of fashion these days, it pains me how often I have to reiterate short vs long term costs. It's not all on the employer side though, loyalty seems a rare attribute today as well... I get many CVs of people who barely ever stayed a year at any one company. Doesn't mean they won't stay with us, but takes some convincing arguments on their side.
by ryangittins | 2025-04-12 12:49:16+00:00
> ...getting insecure or jealous of all the other social connections that your extrovert friends have. There’s an asymmetry there that can feed lots of insecurities.

I wouldn't sweat this too much. Mathematically, most people have fewer friends than their friends have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox
by peterisza | 2025-04-12 12:49:31+00:00
This video is a reconstruction of Mark Rober's failed test that had a similar setup. However, Mark Rober only tested Autopilot which is just a lane keep assist from 7 years ago, and is a different software from FSD.

According to Tesla, FSD is the real deal, FSD is supposed to become unsupervised. Many Tesla owners were curious whether FSD would stop under the same simulated conditions, and this is why the setup is like this with the hose and everything.
by stafferxrr | 2025-04-12 12:49:31+00:00
I don't think it possible with the the twitter/bluesky UI to not become dominated by grandstanding, attention starved, narcissists.

The same way a photo sharing app is going to become dominated by attention starved, narcissists posting sexy photos.

Normal users just don't have the same motivation to post.

It is like complaining rotting meat is attracting flies.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-12 12:49:34+00:00
It's always seemed to me that AI is going to be a commodity business - it's pretty clear that any company with enough money can compete, and it seems that current LLM-based AI is levelling off in terms of capability, with the new focus being on building layers of services on top of that (e.g. deep research agents).

In a commodity business cost is key, and Google with their N'th generation home grown TPUs and AI-optimized datacenters have a big advantage over anyone paying NVIDIA markups for accelerators or without this level of vertical integration.
by notdarkyet | 2025-04-12 12:50:04+00:00
This is the most reasonable comment here on the topic. Everything else so far is either blatantly political and/or misunderstands market dynamics.

Unfortunately half the comments I read on here are becoming increasingly more reddit-esque. Users posting emotionally charged comments and speaking with an authoritative voice on topics they have little experience or knowledge in an accordingly Hacker News has become more and more useless as a news source.
by red_admiral | 2025-04-12 12:51:19+00:00
Int-to-int pairs are more likely to form in nature at specific watering holes.

For example, EA/rationalist is not quite my kind of community (altough I think highly of many of their writings), but an ACX meetup looks like a good place for introverts of a particular kind to come together.

I guess the trick is to find the right kind of place first.
by anileated | 2025-04-12 12:52:15+00:00
> The entire legal edifice around recognizing and protecting intellectual property is an entirely artificial construct

The presence of “natural” vs. “artificial” argument is a placeholder for nonexistent substantiation. There is never a case when it does anything else but add a disguise of objectivity to some wild opinion.

Artificial as opposed to what? Do you consider what humans do is “unnatural” because humans are somehow not part of nature?

If some humans (in case of big tech abusing copyright, vast majority, once the realization reaches the masses) want something and other humans don’t, what exactly makes one natural and another unnatural other than your own belonging to one group or the other?

> that goes against the nature of information and knowledge

What is that nature of information and knowledge that you speak about?

> forcing information to behave like physical goods, so it's not unfair to the creators in an economy that's built around trading physical goods

Its point has been to encourage innovation, creativity, and open information sharing—exactly those things that gave us ML and LLMs. We would have none of these in that rosy land of IP communism where no idea or original work belongs to its author that you envision.

Recognition of intellectual ownership of original work (coming in many shapes, including control over how it is distributed, ability to monetize it, and just being able to say you have done it) is the primary incentive for people to do truly original work. You know, the work that gave us GNU Linux et al., true innovation that tends to come when people are not giving their work to their employer in return for paycheck.

> IP laws were built on moral arguments, so it's only fair to change them on moral grounds too.

That is, perhaps, the exact point of people who argue that copyright law should be changed or at least clarified as new technology appears.
by Ecstatify | 2025-04-12 12:52:26+00:00
It’s not only about suppression; it’s about cultivating fear around expressing your opinions. There are groups actively working to have individuals fired for voicing support for Palestine.

For instance, a woman wrote “Freedom for Palestine” in Gaelic on LinkedIn, prompting a group of Israelis in a WhatsApp chat to actively coordinate efforts to get her fired.

The General Manager of Wix, Batsheva (Levine) Moshe, responded in a WhatsApp chat saying:

“Hi yes we know. Being taken care of since it was published. I believe there will be an announcement soon regarding our reaction.”

Wix were orderd to pay €35K for unfair dismissal.

ref(s):

https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-inf...

https://www.breakingnews.ie/ireland/israeli-tech-firm-ordere...
by tmcb | 2025-04-12 12:52:41+00:00
I know this is not an accurate portrayal of your point, but this sounds very much like the “the left needs its own Joe Rogan” argument to me.

The problem with it is that we delegate the duties towards our fellow citizens to the talking heads on TV or in our algorithmic feeds and wash our hands on it—I say “we” because it has been happening in basically every country at this point.

If democracy has failed, as some people love to say, it was not because it was supposed to fail, but because politicians have successfully managed to replace it by the current series of popularity contests we have in place.
by h4ckaerman | 2025-04-12 12:53:15+00:00
> Googler...

Whole things reads like someone leaving a cult.

It's ok to be sad about leaving a job but your identity shouldn't be so tied up in it that you're crying in a blog post online.

We all lose jobs and we all get on with it. Obviously they're talented and will land fine somewhere.

I'm not trying to be mean but it's bad that a person can get upset to this point around a job. The corp isn't caring.
by gryzzly | 2025-04-12 12:53:30+00:00
do you feel like it is “Israel’s war on Gaza”? Does that represent reality fully? Is that what children should be taught, that there is a demonic people that kills children? You don’t see any problem with omitting the massacre of israeli civilians, the captured hostages and many thousands of rocket launches towards densely populated civilian communities? is that how we achieve peace in your view?
by re-thc | 2025-04-12 12:54:08+00:00
> ie trying to not do new things because it takes more work to change

That's not what the word conservative means, not by the dictionary or even politically.

Conservative is the averse to change or to hold traditional values without logic. It's more like a type of fear. Even if the change was easy or have 0 cost, a conservative entity won't do it.
by albert_e | 2025-04-12 12:54:51+00:00
Amazon also invests in own hardware and silicon -- the Inferentia and Trainium chips for example.

But I am not sure how AWS and Google Cloud match up in terms of making this verticial integration work for their competitive advantage.

Any insight there - would be curious to read up on.

I guess Microsoft for that matter also has been investing -- we heard about the latest quantum breakthrough that was reported as creating a fundamenatally new physical state of matter. Not sure if they also have some traction with GPUs and others with more immediate applications.
by testing22321 | 2025-04-12 12:55:05+00:00
> They are not worth less in dollar terms. The same number of dollars will still settle next months mortgage bill, or tax bill regardless of what it may or may not exchange into Euros

By that logic you are saying if the US dollar to Euro went 10 to 1 or even 100 to 1 there would be no impact because the same number of dollars will still settle the mortgage or tax bill.

Surely there is a flaw in your logic.
by davidee | 2025-04-12 12:55:56+00:00
We used that particular feature quite heavily. A lot of our clients often have poorly cropped photos or something with branding that needed removal and the context-aware generative fill was quite good.

But we decided to drop Adobe after some of their recent shenanigans and moved to a set of tools that didn't have this ability and, frankly, we didn't really miss it that much. Certainly not enough to ever give Adobe another cent.
by jacobobryant | 2025-04-12 12:55:58+00:00
It's a fun part of the code to work on for sure :).

I started trying out datastar in another part of the app by the way, mostly for the frontend signals so far e.g. https://github.com/jacobobryant/yakread/blob/8a61443235d1f6f...

Since this app isn't collaborative it's not clear to me if there'd be any benefit of doing any long-lived SSE vs. just sticking with the request-response model I'm already doing with htmx. Also since various parts of the app do take 100 - 1000ms to render/query, so rerendering the whole page on any change I don't think would be a good fit. But even just having the signals part baked in is pretty nice.
by asadotzler | 2025-04-12 12:56:12+00:00
90% of Netscape users were free users and by late 1997, less than two years after the IPO and massive user growth, it was free to all because of MS's bundling threat. That didn't help. By 2002, MS owned 95% of access to the web. No one has ever reached even close to first mover Netscape or cheater bundled IE since, with the far superior non-profit Firefox managing almost 30% and Chrome from the biggest web player in history sitting "only" at about 65%.

Bundling a "good enough" products can do a lot, including take you from near zero to overwhelmingly dominant in 5 years, as MS did.
by kenjackson | 2025-04-12 12:58:42+00:00
You’re comparing an LLM to expert programmers. Compare an LLM on the same task versus the average college student. And try it for a math problem. A poetry problem. Ask it a more complex question about history or to do an analysis of an essay you wrote.

Put it this way — I’m going to give you a text based question to solve and you have a choice to get another human to solve it (randomly selected from adults in the US) or ChatGPT, and both will be given 30 minutes to read and solve the problem — which would you choose?
by bookofjoe | 2025-04-12 12:58:54+00:00
If possible watch Episode 1 of Season 7 of "Black Mirror."

>... ads would become the main option to make money out of chatbots.

What if people were the chatbots?

https://youtu.be/1iqra1ojEvM?si=xN3rc_vxyolTMVqO
by wilsoniu | 2025-04-12 12:59:18+00:00
AdventureX 2025 Summary Event Overview: • What: China’s largest hackathon, AdventureX 2025 (ADVX 2025) • Where: Hangzhou, China • When: July 2025 (exact dates TBD) • Duration: 120 hours (5 days) • Participants: Over 800 hackers, including engineers, designers, and builders • Prizes: $150,000 in total prizes • Goal: Transform innovative ideas into reality, fostering creativity and collaboration Why Attend: • A haven for dreamers and misfits to create world-changing products without constraints • Connects young talent globally to build the future in 72 intense hours • Emphasizes freedom, creativity, and bold innovation 2024 Highlights: • Hosted 247 participants who created 67+ projects • Some projects evolved into startups with a combined valuation exceeding $10M Inclusivity & Support: • Scholarships: Full funding for underprivileged participants • Travel: Flight/train reimbursement for distant travelers • Accommodation & Food: Hotels, three meals daily, unlimited snacks, and sleeping bags/tents provided • Accessibility: Support from application to event participation • Pre-Event: City pub gatherings to build community Resources & Community: • Youth-driven platform empowering participants to build, break, and redefine • Strong mentorship from founders, open-source pioneers, and artists • Focus on lasting memories and lifelong connections Partners & Impact: • Backed by companies sharing the vision of sparking innovation • Organizers noted for their sincerity, treating participants like friends and fostering passion-driven creation Call to Action: • Encourages dreamers to apply and join the movement • Application open at adventure-x.org with a countdown to the event Core Message: AdventureX is a celebration of youth, creativity, and limitless potential, uniting diverse talents to shape the future through collaboration and innovation.
by re-thc | 2025-04-12 12:59:28+00:00
The argument in the article breaks down by taking marketing by definition and try to apply it to a technical argument.

You might as well start by saying that the "cloud" as in some computers really float in the sky. Does AWS rain?

This "AI" or rather program is not "training" or "learning" - at least not the way these laws conceived by humans were anticipated or created for. It doesn't fit the usual dictionary term of training or learning. If it did we'd have real AI, i.e. the current term AGI.
by simion314 | 2025-04-12 12:59:43+00:00
I give you a lot of clues on how to detect a bot I did not said that all people that disagree with me ar bots, for example I disagree with lot of MAGA uninformed people and they are not bots, I can see they are behaving like regular people.

Read those hints again, is your account a f ew days old, do you only post about Israel? do you comments appear super fast in response to my comments like it was triggered by alarms? If those are yes then you are a bot, can't be 100% sure if you are paid, could be someone doing is mandatory unpaid military service.
by GrantMoyer | 2025-04-12 12:59:48+00:00
Another idea in this vein, but with a surprisingly straightforward implementation (27 lines): https://github.com/GrantMoyer/lambda_hpp

I started out trying to write something like the OP, but changed direction when I convinced myself there would have been no sane way to implement member call syntax. I honestly can't decide if it's cursed or genuinely useful (minus the unicode name, that's cursed).
Ask HN: Using an Open Source API for Meeting Transcription Infra?
by DmitryGrankin | 2025-04-12 12:59:56+00:00
Hey HN, For those building apps that need meeting data (AI agents, sales tools, CRMs, etc.) – how are you handling the real-time transcription piece? Building the necessary infra (bots for GMeet/Zoom/Teams, scaling, real-time streaming) seems like a major distraction from core product work. We're developing Vexa as an open-source (Apache 2.0) API layer specifically for this – think of it as transcription infra you can build on. Our v0.2 just launched a simple API for GMeet bots & real-time transcripts. Curious about the builder perspective: Would an open-source API like this accelerate your roadmap vs building it yourself or using closed APIs? What are the biggest pain points in getting reliable transcription data into your application? What features (platforms, data formats, etc.) would make such an infrastructure layer most valuable? Looking for thoughts and experiences from fellow builders!

repo: https://github.com/Vexa-ai/vexa
by TheSwordsman | 2025-04-12 13:01:16+00:00
I'm waiting for the AI apologists to swarm on this post explaining how these are just the results of poorly written prompts, because AI could not make mistakes with proper prompts. Been seeing an increase of this recently on AI-critical content, and it's exhausting.

Sure, with well written prompts you can have some success using AI assistants for things, but also with well-written non-ambiguous prompts you can inexplicably end up with absolute garbage.

Until things become consistent, this sort of generative AI is more akin to a party trick than being able to replace or even supplement junior engineers.
by sunray2 | 2025-04-12 13:01:27+00:00
Do you think that craftmanship and longevity, in terms of keeping these people on board, go hand-in-hand?

As an example, Hamamatsu Photonics has been in the optics field a long time, and is going hard on developing for quantum physics applications. It's refreshing, since pretty much every company in quantum computing is very young, so hasn't had the time to build that craftsman vibe yet. Of course, there are people who've been working on quantum information technologies for a few decades now.

I look forward to seeing this ethos developing in quantum, for sure.
by redphony02 | 2025-04-12 13:01:53+00:00
I am currently in CS, Year 2. I'd argue that ~99% of all students use LLMs for cheating. The way I know this is that when our professor walked out during an exam, I looked around the room and saw everyone on ChatGPT. I have a feeling many of my peers don't really understand what LLMs are, beyond "question in, answer out".
by jacobobryant | 2025-04-12 13:02:40+00:00
Fun to see this on the front page! I worked on Yakread full time for about 8 months as an attempted startup, after a few years of other recommender system startup ideas. Now it's a side project that I develop on the weekends after my kids fall asleep, aided by caffeine (me, not the kids). I'm in the middle of open-sourcing/rewriting it. Hopefully will be done in a couple months? Then I can finally get back to adding new features. I talked about some potential ones in my previous post: https://obryant.dev/p/rewriting-yakread/

also I guess a link to the actual app wouldn't hurt: https://yakread.com
by crazygringo | 2025-04-12 13:03:06+00:00
This is a real problem, and AI is a new vector for it, but the root cause is the lack of reliable trust and security around packages in general.

I really wonder what the solution is.

Has there been any work on limiting the permissions of modules? E.g. by default a third-party module can't access disk or network or various system calls or shell functions or use tools like Python's "inspect" to access data outside what is passed to them? Unless you explicitly pass permissions in your import statement or something?
Ask HN: Are remote cofounders eligible for L1
by bitlad | 2025-04-12 13:03:31+00:00
Currently, I am cofounder of a US based Startup. I am paid as a contractor.

My question is - Am I eligible for L1? How do founders based out of EU resolve their visa situation.

I have been going in with ESTA for meetings but would be great to have something that allows for longer residency and less renewals.
by xrraptr | 2025-04-12 13:04:27+00:00
I honestly think the problem is you are just a lot smarter than I am.

I find these tools wonderful but I am a lazy, college drop out of the most average intelligence, a very shitty programmer who would never get paid to write code.

I am intellectually curious though and these tools help me level up closer to someone like you.

Of course, if I had 30 more IQ points I wouldn't need these tools but I don't have 30 more IQ points.
by jasode | 2025-04-12 13:05:15+00:00
>How sad. That wall map is a nice object and a good conversation piece to boot.

It shouldn't be sad to avoid adding another artifact of consumerism to one's life. I'm at a stage in my life where I've gotten rid of most of my "conversation pieces". E.g. I once had an expensive antique warship in my office as decoration. (https://www.google.com/search?q=hms+bounty+model&tbm=isch). I thought it looked really nice. But one day as I was cleaning the dust off of every crevice with an art brush to keep it from looking like a junked up antique, I realized it was an example of a possession making me its slave. I got rid of it and don't regret it. I dodged a bullet by not getting the Geochron and saving $4000 but my journey of enlightenment wasn't complete so I still got suckered into the wooden warship.

>I guess you haven’t actually tried to buy a grandfather clock. Quality ones are in the thousands at least, if not tens of thousands.

Yes, I agree that grandfather clocks are expensive and that's why I used it as a parallel example to the expensive wristwatches.
by scott_w | 2025-04-12 13:05:31+00:00
It's not about forcing every Dev to learn every aspect of Ops work. It's about ensuring the team that builds the feature manages its delivery end-to-end, including dev, test, deployment, failure response.

The reason for this is, as I pointed out, because the organisations that created a hard split had much worse outcomes for customers and themselves. This split might have been necessary in the past, due to the vast gap in skill-sets and operating environments.

However, most orgs now will create a different split where a team manages the underlying infrastructure and tooling (to varying levels, depending on the specialisation required), but developers are responsible for ensuring their code Runs on Prod (tm). This does not mean developers are regularly fitting their own server racks and hand-wiring their networking infrastructure. It means, for the third time, developers own the delivery of their code to prod, end-to-end.