MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by croes | 2025-04-04 06:05:27+00:00
• Instead of forming hypotheses, users asked the AI for ideas.

• Instead of validating sources, they assumed the AI had already done so.

• Instead of assessing multiple perspectives, they integrated and edited the AI’s summary and moved on.

These are point against certain actions with a tool not against the tool.

AI is for the starting point not the final result.

AI must never be the last step but it often is because people trust computers especially if they answer in a confident language.

It's the ELIZA effect all over again.
by MPSFounder | 2025-04-04 06:06:57+00:00
The iphone has lacked innovation under Cook. Last 3 iterations (since 13) have been virtually identical. Also, the failure of Apple Intelligence (oversold promise) has seriously hurt the brand. I am an avid iphone user, and will likely continue to be for the next 3 years. But innovation is suffering. Anecdotally, the least talented ML engineers are currently at Apple (the best engineers I know in the field are at Google and OpenAI). I don't expect Apple to be innovating much in that regard, given a lack of talent (just look at Siri for instance).
by kelnos | 2025-04-04 06:07:03+00:00
I think what's going on is a helpful reminder that there's no such thing as "rights" in the way you describe. Everything we have, everything we're permitted to do, is at the pleasure and permission of our governments. Constitutions and laws are only worth anything if the people in charge honor them. Might may not make right, but might does let you impose whatever you want on people who don't have your might.

You can try to design systems where one group of people don't have all the might, and so those who balance them are somewhat adversarial in their goals and desires. We always thought the US had such a system, but when you put law enforcement and the military under a single group, and give the other two groups no teeth, you really don't have that sort of system.
by peterhorvath01 | 2025-04-04 06:07:17+00:00
Yes we offer out of the box open AI subscription with signed data protection clause, but if you need extra privacy or zero trust you can use your own subscription.

Currently supported providers are: - Open AI - MS Azure - Google Gemini - Ollama (this is hosted by you so you can deploy any model)

In regards to the Ollama I recommend to use 7B+ models I tried QWEN 14b instruct and it was working nicely.
by rollcat | 2025-04-04 06:07:52+00:00
It's also almost 50 years since "An Open Letter to Hobbyists"[1]. It's amazing that in the last 30+ years, the "hobbyists" managed to turn the entire software industry by 180°, and that Microsoft themselves are reliant on that work.

Bill even specifically mentions musicians. By 1976, when blues was only ca 100 years old, most bands would play what we now call "covers", credit each original writer on the back of the record, and there was no shame or stigma around it. Art builds on art, and "stealing" is probably the most important part of the process[2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

[2]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/
by croes | 2025-04-04 06:09:27+00:00
That's the real danger of AI.

The false promises of the AI companies and the false expectations of the management and users.

Had it just recently for a data migration where the users asked if they still need to enter meta data for documents they just could use AI to query data that was usually based on that meta data.

They trust AI before it's even there and don't even consider a transition period where they check if the result are correct.

Like with security convenience prevails.
by bilbo0s | 2025-04-04 06:10:28+00:00
all the "low-skill" people would be able to move to the city and find a job

That this doesn't work is self-evident. Cities are currently filled with low skilled people. The vast majority of whom find no employment or employment in illegal activities.

Also:

We don't need more high-quality education

The idea that the world, and the US in particular, has no need for more and better education is laughable. Considering the fact that a lack of education is, arguably, what got the US into the current situation in the first place.
by einr | 2025-04-04 06:10:38+00:00
My understanding of Microsoft's success was it came from marketplace maneuvers, many ranging from unethical to illegal, not from quality or innovative hacking. Compare Windows with any contemporaneous MacOS, for example.

So it's 1992, and OS/2 still isn't happening.

But you can get a 386 at 16 or 25 MHz complete with maybe a 40 MB hard drive, color monitor, 256-color VGA, a couple megabytes of memory, and licenses for MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for $1000 or less. This will let you do a lot of computer things.

If you want to run Mac OS, the very cheapest Macintosh you can get is the Mac Classic, and it costs $1695 for a 7 MHz 68000, a single floppy drive, no hard drive, and a 1-bit black and white display. This will enable you to do a lot fewer computer things, much more slowly.

Macs were very expensive. Windows was good enough. It wasn't better, necessarily, but it wasn't strong-armed onto the market by shady maneuvers either -- at the time of Windows 3 and 95 it was genuinely good "product-market fit". Microsoft, from its earliest days, was good at leveraging mass-market hardware to deliver "good enough" software that worked for the majority of people. Of course they did shady stuff that increased their dominance, but Windows would have sold like hotcakes either way.

Didn't they generate fake errors for Windows running on DR-DOS, or something like that, even though it ran fine?

IIRC that code existed, but was commented out in the final build.
Tea vs. Rootbeer, what will destory your laptop the best?
by LandOfMightDev | 2025-04-04 06:11:10+00:00
Made some tea and got ready to study, immediately dumped the entire cup (12-14oz) of tea on my laptop. I turned it around and waited for the tea to drip out.

Surprisingly, there is no damage.

About a month ago, i did the same thing but with rootbeer,and it immediately killed the keyboard and touch pad.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-04-04 06:11:51+00:00
I had a recent adventure attempting to replenish my Food Grade 35% Hydrogen Peroxide.

Amazon wouldn't even ship the stuff here. I'm coming to realize that any truly potent or powerful substance is strictly off-limits in consumer spaces. Plenty of good reasons for that. But such things as pure isopropyl and pure H2O2 are so versatile and tantalizing to have on-hand, rather than household cleaners with proprietary formulas, as much dilution as possible, unique MSDS, and obnoxious fake fragrance.

I can walk down an entire aisle in the hardware store, chockablock with bottles of household cleaners, and they all amount to 2 or 3 active ingredients, endlessly remixed for credulous homemakers.
by ianpurton | 2025-04-04 06:12:16+00:00
Some context.

1. Some LLMs support function calling. That means they are given a list of tools with descriptions of those tools.

2. Rather than answering your question in one go, the LLM can say it wants to call a function.

3. Your client (developer tool etc) will call that function and pass the results to the LLM.

4. The LLM will continue and either complete the conversation or call more tools (functions)

5. MCP is gaining traction as a standard way of adding tools/functions to LLMs.

GitMCP

I haven't looked too deeply but I can guess.

1. Will have a bunch of API endpoints that the LLM can call to look at your code. probably stuff like, get_file, get_folder etc.

2. When you ask the LLM for example "Tell me how to add observability to the code", the LLM can make calls to get the code and start to look at it.

3. The LLM can keep on making calls to GitMCP until it has enough context to answer the question.

Hope this helps.
by yokaze | 2025-04-04 06:12:59+00:00
> The next piece that concerned me was GDPR which required EU citizens data to be processed in the EU.

That's wrong. It can be processed outside the EU, provided the country has laws providing adequate protections comparable (or better) than the GDPR.

Here more details: https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i...
by Terr_ | 2025-04-04 06:13:17+00:00
My personal pet-peeve is how a great majority of people--and too many developers--are being misled into believing a fictional character coincidentally named "Assistant" inside a story-document half-created by an LLM is the author-LLM.

If a human generates a story containing Count Dracula, that doesn't mean vampires are real, or that capabilities like "turning into a cloud of bats" are real, or that the algorithm "thirsts for the blood of the innocent."

The same holds when the story comes from an algorithm, and it continues to hold when story is about a differently-named character named "AI Assistant" who is "helpful".

Getting people to fall for this illusion is great news for the companies though, because they can get investor-dollars and make sales with the promise of "our system is intelligent", which is true in the same sense as "our system converts blood into immortality."
by rtpg | 2025-04-04 06:14:14+00:00
> This leads to one of the things I love about Cage's music: it compels criticisms that reveal fundamental misunderstandings about music. E.g., you don't buy the radical case-- perhaps reasonable. But you then speculate there are no cases-- which is at odds with common musical practice.

Love this thought. You disagree with an extreme interpretation, do you take the exact opposite? If not, up to where do you go?

This idea is applicable to so much
by lysecret | 2025-04-04 06:14:26+00:00
This is awesome and I will take a closer look! One question: We ran into issue with using Postgres as a message queue with messages that need to be toasted/have large payloads (50mb+).

Only fix we could find was using unlogged tables and a full vacuum on a schedule. We aren’t big Postgres experts but since you are I was wondering if you have fixed this issue/this framework works well for large payloads.
by hakfoo | 2025-04-04 06:14:34+00:00
The bloviation on manufacturing is cargo-culting. It's a promise of a better time for an electorate that's being squeezed by ever increasing precarity. It's a rose-coloured version of 1950, when people with a high-school diploma could walk into a giant General Motors factory and get a job that paid enough to raise a family, own a house, and retire at 60 with a pension. Obviously, this was based on the US being a dominant manufacturing power.

(They neglect that what made it the dominant manufacturing power was a war that killed tens of millions and sidelined most other industrial nations, but perhaps that's plan B when this doesn't work)

As for using tarriffs to deliver the factories, they assume the US market is so vast and desirable, that it's worth building plants and full supply chains specifically for it. I'd expect that any firm that believed that had onshored their factories years ago due to plain economics, without a comical tarriff regime to spur it. (I'm thinking of how "foreign" automakers sprinkled plants all over the South making models that largely fit US preferences)

Conversely, I suspect you'll see a lot of firms say "we'll just skip the US entirely" -- the factory you built in Viet Nam or Germany can still sell cheaply to a hundred and fifty countries, and together that adds up to more than even the US can offer.
by marc_abonce | 2025-04-04 06:15:18+00:00
For some cathedrals that visible mismatch in the materials might be a feature, not a bug.

At least that's the case for the co-cathedral in Zamora, Michoacán which had its construction interrupted for almost a century due to the Mexican Revolution, the Cristero War and its subsequent expropriation by the government. In this context, the mismatching facade remains as a testament of the building's history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diocesan_Sanctuary_of_Our_Lady...
Show HN: We made an open-source alternative to Drata and Vanta (Comp AI)
by lewisbuildsai | 2025-04-04 06:16:59+00:00
Hey HN!

I'm Lewis. I've spent the last 4 months building Comp AI - an open source alternative to Drata & Vanta.

Those platforms can cost $10,000+ per year. We've seen how over the last 18 months AI has changed software development...

We want to change how quick it is to get compliant with frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001 and GDPR. Our goal is to help 100,000 companies get compliant by 2030.

You can check out our GH at https://github.com/trycompai/comp/
by kelnos | 2025-04-04 06:18:41+00:00
I don't think you're necessarily drawing the right conclusion from what the GP said. It seems more likely to me that non-degree-holders aren't resentful about not having a degree, but are resentful that white collar work more or less requires a degree these days. It wasn't always that way; degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work.

Why has that shifted? Can we blame the university system and their "marketing" that has pushed a degree as the One True Way of leaving the working class? If so, that's an understandable reason to be anti-university.
by tsimionescu | 2025-04-04 06:18:59+00:00
I generally agree with your framing, I'll just comment on a minor detail about what "literate" means. Typically, people are classed in three categories of literacy, not two: illiterate means you essentially can't read at all, literate means you can read and understand text to some level, but then there are people who are functionally illiterate - people who can read the letters and sound out text, but can't actively comprehend what they're reading to a level that allows them to function normally in society - say, being able to read and comprehend an email they receive at work or a news article. This difference between literate and functionally illiterate may have been what the poster above was referring to.

Note that functional illiteracy is not some niche phenomenon, it's a huge problem in many school systems. In my own country (Romania), while the rate of illiteracy is something like <1% of the populace, the rate of functional illiteracy is estimated to be as high as 45% of those finishing school.
by mubou | 2025-04-04 06:19:03+00:00
Interesting use of formaction on a button. One suggestion: put role="link" on it so it appears as a link to screen readers as well.

Unfortunately, by using a button you can't right click to copy the URL or open in a new tab/window. Middle clicking doesn't work either, although that could be fixed with JS. The URL also doesn't show up in the bottom left when hovering.

Edit: One thing you could do if you don't mind making your site JS-only is intercept link clicks and trigger a form POST instead, so the links are all normal links that respect default browser behavior, but the requests are all made as POSTs. Though honestly it's a losing battle, trying to stop bots; I've largely given up. You also have to consider what happens when someone shares the URL or bookmarks it, or tried to reload the page.
by brabel | 2025-04-04 06:19:36+00:00
I think you'll never find a case where someone got in trouble for not being a hero. I've recently found myself in a somewhat related situation where a guy turned violent in a pub... first I tried to calm him down and almost got hit... he then turned to other guys who were nearby, and one of them got punched in the face and fell unconscious. My family was with me and told me to stay the hell out of it, but I thought that would be extremely cowardly so I jumped at the guy to try to keep him down, but he was strong and I got a punch in the eye which cost me a week with a black eye, but could've easily turned out much worse for me. If I had just stayed quiet, would I be "negligent"?? The police told me what I did was good as I was trying to help someone, but I didn't have any obligation to do it.

In the case of a child in a pool, the difference is a matter of degree. What if I am terrified of water myself? Does that justify my inaction? What if I just "froze", which is common in stressful situations. Does anything justify not doing something?
by dovin | 2025-04-04 06:20:41+00:00
Humans becoming domesticated by benevolent superintelligences are some of the better futures with superintelligences, in my mind. Iain M Banks' Culture series is the best depiction of this I've come across; they're kind of the utopian rendition of the phrase "all watched over by machines of loving grace". Though it's a little hard to see how we get from here to there.
by zdragnar | 2025-04-04 06:20:47+00:00
> What's the point of our existence if we have no way to meaningfully contribute to our own world?

You may find this to be insightful: https://meltingasphalt.com/a-nihilists-guide-to-meaning/

In short, "meaning" is a contextual perception, not a discrete quality, though the author suggests it can be quantified based on the number of contextual connections to other things with meaning. The more densely connected something is, the more meaningful it is; my wedding is meaningful to me because my family and my partners family are all celebrating it with me, but it was an entirely meaningless event to you.

Thus, the meaningfulness of our contributions remains unchanged, as the meaning behind them is not dependent upon the perspective of an external observer.
by rollcat | 2025-04-04 06:21:42+00:00
Long before systemd took over the init world, Debian led a huge effort to switch their entire infrastructure to dash[1], specifically making heavy use of checkbashisms[2]. The main reason behind it was performance: POSIX sh implementations were much simpler, and easier to optimise.

[1]: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/dash/

[2]: https://linux.die.net/man/1/checkbashisms

My rule of thumb is that if a shell script calls for a Bash-only feature, exceeds 100 lines, defines more than three functions, includes a nested loop, or a pipeline that exceeds 80 characters, it's probably time to reach for Python.

There are reasonable cases for exceptions - my backup script has about 200 lines and 6 functions, but it's 100% portable between Linux & macOS.
by theshrike79 | 2025-04-04 06:22:11+00:00
It's not just the guardrails, but the ham-fisted implementation.

Grok is supposed to be "uncensored", but there are very specific words you just can't use when asking it to generate images. It'll just flat out refuse or give an error message during generation.

But, again, if you go in a roundabout way and avoid the specific terms you can still get what you want. So why bother?

Is it about not wanting bad PR or avoiding litigation?
by shinycode | 2025-04-04 06:22:13+00:00
> "Human brains lack any model of intelligence. It's just neurons firing in complicated patterns in response to inputs based on what statistically leads to reproductive success"

Are you sure about that ? Do we have proof of that ? In happened all the time trought history of science that a lot of scientists were convinced of something and a model of reality up until someone discovers a new proof and or propose a new coherent model. That’s literally the history of science, disprove what we thought was an established model
by sen | 2025-04-04 06:23:14+00:00
This is adorably cute, and deceptively fun to follow along with. I particularly like that it shows which monkey discovered a word first, making you want to visit back and see if your monkey found any new words.

One thing I'd like to see is a way to go back from the "Word view" (after you clicked to see details about a specific word) back to your monkey view with the list of words.
by grey-area | 2025-04-04 06:23:53+00:00
Interest rates, taxes, subsidies and reserves also affect currency value.

The US uses selective tariffs already, which is fine though not actually that helpful IMO, what is new is absurdly high punitive and blanket tariffs on everything. This will tank the stock market, raise prices, cause a recession and perhaps most importantly ruin the reputation of the US as a safe haven.

The absurd tariffs on trading partners that don’t matter like Laos are a perfect illustration of how much thought went into this.
by switch007 | 2025-04-04 06:24:20+00:00
As much as I am still sceptical about AI tools, the past month has been a revolution as a senior dev myself.

I'm blasting through tickets, leaving more time to tutor and help junior colleagues and do refactoring. Guiding them has then been a multiplier, and also a bit of an eye opener about how little real guidance they've been getting up until now. I didn't realise how resource constrained we'd been as a team leading to not enough time guiding and helping them.

I don't trust the tools with writing code very often but they are very good at architecture questions, outputting sample code etc. Supercharged google

As a generalist, I feel less overwhelmed

It's probably been the most enjoyable month at this job.
by acchow | 2025-04-04 06:24:40+00:00
> The concept is simple: Take a picture of the food you are about to consume, and let the app log calories and macros for you.

> The result is an app that the creators say is 90% accurate, which appears to be good enough for many dieters.

It absolutely cannot be "90% accurate". But I'm sure it seems "90% plausible" to its millions of users.

Incredible that a product like this can exist. Do people just will the fiction into reality?

Incredibly, these are the types of app ideas you'd hear from non-tech "entrepreneurs" in 2012 looking for a co-founder. The problem being, the engineers knew it was impossible. You could fake it I guess by asking Google to search for "similar photos" and getting a plausible calorie count half the time. But the users wouldn't believe it.

We're now at the phase where any impossible idea can be fully marketable by slapping "AI" in the name. ChatGPT feels so magical that we now believe unicorns really do exist.
by nostromo | 2025-04-04 06:24:56+00:00
LLMs are also good at commenting on existing code.

It’s trivial to ask Claude via Cursor to add comments to illustrate how some code works. I’ve found this helpful with uncommented code I’m trying to follow.

I haven’t seen it hallucinate an incorrect comment yet, but sometimes it will comment a TODO that a section should be made more more clear. (Rude… haha)
by dheera | 2025-04-04 06:25:25+00:00
> You're not wrong here, but there's a big difference in programming one-off tooling or prototype MVPs and programming things that need to be maintained for years and years.

Humans also worry about their jobs, especially in PIP-happy companies; they are very well known for writing intentionally over-complicated code that only they understand so that they are irreplaceable
by globular-toast | 2025-04-04 06:25:38+00:00
The obvious problem with this is how can it tell how large your meal is or how much butter you put in? I can see it working for fast/junk food, though.

When I learnt machine learning one of the things was continually training the model. Like your spam filter. You show it what is spam and eventually it learns. Is this stuff continually trained on the user's BMI? That's the only way to tell if a diet is working. Or is it just making absolute claims based on universal training data?
by anon_e-moose | 2025-04-04 06:26:55+00:00
> Art builds on art, and "stealing" is probably the most important part of the process[2].

> [2]: https://www.everythingisaremix.info/watch-the-series/

Nice try ChatGPT stealing from studio ghibli and Scarlett Johansson are still two egregious examples of what can kill artist's motivations. Why create or publish if credit is not given?