MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by antics | 2025-04-08 18:09:12+00:00
This is only tangentially related, but one thing that I am still kind of hopeful about is analytic combinatorics will free us from the tyranny of asymptotic analysis.

I suppose this is kind of a hot take, and in some ways less relevant than it was (say) 10 years ago, but I believe the theoretical CS community has spent a lot of time analyzing the performance of various algorithms over the years and kind of pointedly not inventing algorithms which accomplish some result at all, even if it is only known to be computable in a pathologically inefficient way. This means a lot of breakthroughs that could have been TCS breakthroughs have been invented, usually worse, by other communities.

I am not the only one who thinks so, here[1] is an obscure talk where Michael Mitzenmacher (a well-known CS theory prof at Harvard) makes more or less this specific complaint.

One of the nice things about Flajolet/Sedgewick[2] (mentioned in this post) is that it gives a nice set of combinators for (at least it seems to me, in theory) precisely enumerating how many "steps" an algorithm would take given some input. I optimistically imagine a world where we replace the relatively non-specific asymptotic bounds of an algorithm with a very specific quantification of the work an algorithm will take. And that this in turn would free TCS to focus on things that are more germane to the field as a whole.

With that all said I'm open to the argument that TCS has fundamentally changed and this is no longer such a big issue. But perusing the various TCS conferences I sense it isn't.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3anjSAnKBo

[2]: https://algo.inria.fr/flajolet/Publications/book.pdf
by smusamashah | 2025-04-08 18:09:27+00:00
You make it sound like an unfair wish, which I would say is unfair itself. I like the book, I like visualising it in my head, and I fantasise what a scene would look like. AI won't generate a true visual. It's all fantasy anyway and AI can actually do it the way I have it in my head. It will solidify that thought.

For this book in particular, I read the comic version and I didn't like the visuals very much. I have a different idea of babel fish. Vogons look different. I would love to see the visual that's in my head on paper.
by twoodfin | 2025-04-08 18:09:50+00:00
Indeed. I find it interesting to look at the generational outliers on that curve: The Cray-1 wasn’t eclipsed in raw FP compute by a consumer system until the Pentium more than 15 years later.

http://www.roylongbottom.org.uk/Cray%201%20Supercomputer%20P...
by Animats | 2025-04-08 18:10:17+00:00
The USS Hornet, a WWII aircraft carrier set up as a museum ship in Oakland, has a very similar escalator.[1] It's a Westinghouse model, like the one in New York. You can visit and walk the escalator, but it hasn't worked in decades. Carriers had escalators to get many pilots in all their gear from the ready room to the flight deck, fast.

[1] https://www.twz.com/12804/us-navy-aircraft-carriers-had-esca...
by speckx | 2025-04-08 18:10:47+00:00
Ha! One of my clients who was interviewing about a dozen candidates had the same experience with most of them, they have a few left to interview.

All the candidates did really well on the online intake questions and the general meet and greet over video. However, once they arrived for the in-person part of the interview, and it got relatively technical, most did nowhere nearly as good as they did on the online. Only one or two admitted to using AI.
by comex | 2025-04-08 18:11:17+00:00
Some feedback: On mobile, why is there a custom keyboard? I found it pretty annoying. I kept getting missed taps, and at least one wrong guess due to a typo I didn’t catch before. It doesn’t seem like the system keyboard’s spellchecking would interfere with the puzzle, so why not just use it? Is it an issue with layout consistency?

Otherwise I quite liked the puzzle.
by quuxplusone | 2025-04-08 18:11:18+00:00
Conspicuously missing from TFA: any measurement of the escalator's width.

There's no shortage of single-file escalators in NYC. I wildly surmise they're seen as fancier than the two-person-wide kind associated with subway stations and malls.

The Marriott Marquis in Times Square has two single-file escalators side by side — presumably the height of decadent luxury. Video: https://youtu.be/35-2FAI2DKU
by mullingitover | 2025-04-08 18:11:28+00:00
Truly insane that the GOP is attacking US taxpayers like this. China is only able to be harmed by how much pain is inflicted through a domestic tax hike.

When the dust settles on this, the executive branch needs to be nerfed to the point that it's mostly a figurehead. Certainly the unchecked tax hike via tariffs power needs to be ripped out immediately, before (any further) permanent damage can be inflicted on the country.
by laichzeit0 | 2025-04-08 18:11:36+00:00
Well I find conversations with people in interviews to be less of a game than giving them “homework” to do, given that unless they’re totally green with no work experience, I’d assume they would actually have some stuff they’ve worked on and would like to talk about.

It’s completely bizarre to me that take home assignments have been normalized as part of an interview with professional working people.
by mywittyname | 2025-04-08 18:11:56+00:00
Targeted tariffs to protect or foster certain industries are acceptable. Blanket ones are not.

And they should be set just high enough that the industry remains competitive while not allowing for price gouging. We know companies will seek to maximize their prices. So if a foreign competitor is selling for 8% cheaper, then tariffs should be no more than 9%. We know from experience that manufactures will sell at the same price as foreign competition and will pocket the difference.

They should also be gradually reduced over time. The goal is to have domestic industries become globally competitive. And that necessarily means that companies need to strive to improve efficiency so they can match or beat the prices of global competitors. If that can't happen, then maybe those companies need to go away.

The reason tariffs are bad in the long term is A) it incentivize global competition to become even more efficient; B) it encourages domestic industries to be non-competitive. So the industry being favored by tariffs will never grow into a global power.

So tariffs on solar panels are fine, so long as they come with other incentives to spur domestic consumption (to drive efficiency gains) and a plan to lower those tariffs over time.

Blanket tariffs are pretty much never good, the only good reason to institute blanket tariffs on a country is as a prelude to direct conflict. As it will provide a market incentive for consumers to replace goods from that country with a more expensive alternative.

After all, a blanket tariff on all the goods coming from a country is a type of economic sanction. So a country who puts tariffs on the goods of every other country in the world is effectively feeling the impact of the first phase of conflict, when allies come together and enact trade barriers with a country. And why to countries band together to push economic sanctions on an adversary? To hurt their economy.

So TL;DR: Biden solar tariffs - well thought out and likely productive. Trump tariffs - pushing yourself in the face.
by firloop | 2025-04-08 18:12:57+00:00
What if they were offered $160mm and Tailscale countered with 4X the valuation, lowering the number of shares by 75%? Similarly, what if they wanted $40mm but the only deal on the table was $160mm due to ownership targets of funds that can actually write $40mm+ checks? It's hard to play these armchair games, even less so when the terms aren't known.
by oersted | 2025-04-08 18:14:06+00:00
> The value of that term, known as the rate of pass-through, isn’t obvious and depends on how companies behave. If foreign exporters cut prices to fully offset the tariffs, leaving import prices unchanged, the pass-through would be zero. Alternatively, it could equal 100 percent if exporters don’t budge, which means import prices would rise in step with the tariffs.

> Alberto Cavallo, Gita Gopinath, Jenny Tang and I studied the tariffs placed on Chinese exports in 2018 and 2019. We found that tariffs of, say, 20 percent caused domestic importers to pay nearly 19 percent more. This represents a pass-through into import prices of about 95 percent

> The Trump administration then plugs a rate of 25 percent into its formula. Where does 25 percent come from? Is it related to our work? I don’t know.

> Had the trade office instead used a value closer to the 95 percent number from our work, as I believe it should have done, the computed tariffs would have been as little as one-fourth of what they are.
by swat535 | 2025-04-08 18:15:35+00:00
In my experience, strength training is about gradually increasing the weight, start with something like 2.5 lbs, then move to 5 lbs as you go. But only add weight once you can do your sets and reps with proper form. Form really matters, bad form is how you get injured.

The other things that make a big difference: eating enough (you need more calories to lift more) and getting enough sleep as well as rest between workouts.

Like every other exercise, it's a question of building a habit.
by uh_uh | 2025-04-08 18:16:06+00:00
Examples of emergence:

1. Multi-step reasoning with backtracking when DeepSeek R1 was trained via GRPO.

2. Translation of languages they haven't even seen via in-context learning.

3. Arithmetic: heavily correlated with model size, but it does appear.

I could go on.

Albeit it's not an LLM, but a deep learning model trained via RL, would you say that AlphaZero's move 37 also doesn't count as emergence and the model has no understanding of Go?
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-04-08 18:16:42+00:00
They are already ramping down new construction and they are starting to replace older (less efficient) plants. It's quite likely that one of these last 3 years will have been peak coal in China. The bad news is: That's a lot of coal that being burned. The good news is: They are less reliant on "recouping costs", which means _those_ plants will be shut down as soon as that's feasible
by oersted | 2025-04-08 18:16:44+00:00
Recent paper from Anthropic on the fact that the reasoning output does not necessarily reflect what the LLM is "thinking".

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.04388

That being said, your idea is not unreasonable. The way DeepSeek phrased it, it just sounds like implementing such solutions might be a hassle greatly increasing complexity, and they were just focused on making an RL baseline work at scale.
by superkuh | 2025-04-08 18:16:54+00:00
I still use google scholar, right dao for deep search (tens of thousands of results), searx instances, and kagi for now but it's not worth the $10/mo for only ~200 results per search.

The serendipity of doing search with your own eyes and brain on page 34 of the results cannot be understated. Web surfing is good and does things that curated results (ie, google's <400, bing's <900, kagi's <200, LLM's very limited single results) cannot.
by jajko | 2025-04-08 18:16:55+00:00
Nope, that's just rather bland justification of cheating. Not sure how US corporations work, but in Europe any big company would flag you internally so you won't be able to work there for a decade, and the mark still remains in their hiring system afterwards. Just a stupid thing to do, as lying always is.

This are not school exams, company wants to hire the best candidate. If all fail then best failing is still the best candidate, and this can be measured and/or perceived by skilled interviewers.
by malcolmgreaves | 2025-04-08 18:16:57+00:00
No. You’re being willfully ignorant at this point.

There’s a difference between convicting people of crimes and arresting protestors because one side doesn’t like what they’re saying.

The republicans are literally kidnapping people who have committed no crimes but are exercising their first amendment right to free speech, writing and publishing their political views. These people are now being held in inhumane conditions. This is stage one of torture: dehumanize.

And you’re dodging the more pressing and serious issues: republicans in government are advocating of using violence against protestors they don’t like. You’re avoiding this because deep down you know you have no logical nor ethical standing.
by em-bee | 2025-04-08 18:17:00+00:00
over the past year I've written tens of thousands of lines of zig code. But that's not on my resume

why not?

i have included every significant contribution to any project, whether it is paid or not on my CV. why would i leave that out? it's experience. only code that i write for my own use and don't publish may not be worth to be listed
by twoodfin | 2025-04-08 18:17:18+00:00
Virtually no new tech startup with a greenfield project is going to pay Delphi $1599-per-seat for each of their developers. Only existing customers stuck with their investment in Delphi code are going to pay that.

I agree with this, and all your other reasons why mainframes will remain legacy platforms.

But man, how crazy is it that an industry that is 100% productivity driven and (until AI data centers, at least) labor-cost-constrained would snub its nose at paying a fraction of a percent of those developers’ salaries to put good tools in their hands.
by smusamashah | 2025-04-08 18:19:19+00:00
I agree that people interpret things differently and visualise differently and that is my point. I want to see the concept from my head in a solid visual form. Some concepts that are not clear, like those that I mentioned having trouble with, I want to see any kind of visual representation at all. I will probably not like some of those, but there these tools can help generate a bunch of variations tailored specifically for me. I can choose one and carry on with that. I can come back and more details to that as I read further.

If someone can show me exactly what I am thinking of, won't that be amazing.
by jjani | 2025-04-08 18:19:39+00:00
I have, dozens of times, and it's generally better than 3.7. Especially with more context it's less forgetful. o1-pro is absurdly expensive and slow, good luck using that with tools. Virtually all benchmarks, including less gamed ones such as Aider's, show the same. WebLM still has 3.7 ahead, with Sonnet always having been particularly strong at web development, but even on there 2.5 Pro is miles in front of any OpenAI model.

Gemini subscription? Surely if you're "using LLMs correctly" you'd have been using the APIs for everything anyway. Subscriptions are generally for non-techy consumers.

In any case, just straight up saying "it isn't good" is absurd, even if you personally prefer others.
by runarberg | 2025-04-08 18:20:14+00:00
How do you know the information it generates is correct?

Just now for example I wanted to know how Emma Goldman was deported despite being a US citizen. Or whether she was a citizen to begin with. If an LLM gave me an answer I for sure would not trust it to be factual.

My search was simple: Emma Goldman citizenship. I got a wikipedia article, claiming it was argued that her citizenship was considered void after her ex husband’s citizenship was revoked. Now I needed to confirm it from a different source and also find out why her ex’s citizenship was revoked. So I searched his name + citizenship and got an New Yorker article claiming it was revoked because of some falsified papers. Done

If an LLM told me that, I simply wouldn’t trust it and would need to search for it anyway.
by pqtyw | 2025-04-08 18:20:21+00:00
> which isn't supported

The general consensus amongst most economists is that humans behave in a rational way? Not spending all the wealth you before you die would be irrational if your children won't inherit it.

Of course in reality that's often not the case especially these days so it might not be sufficient enough.

> clearly true, just supposition.

Well by such standards every discussion on any policy that hasn't been tried is meaningless because there isn't any empirical evidence.
by uh_uh | 2025-04-08 18:20:51+00:00
> We do know how LLMs work, correct?

NO! We have working training algorithms. We still don't have a complete understanding of why deep learning works in practice, and especially not why it works at the current level of scale. If you disagree, please cite me the papers because I'd love to read them.

To put in another way: Just because you can breed dogs, it doesn't necessary mean that you have a working theory of genes or even that you know they exist. Which was actually the human condition for most of history.
by danudey | 2025-04-08 18:21:01+00:00
> Cameras absolutely could emit DNG instead, but that would require more development friction: coordination (with Adobe), potentially a language barrier, and potentially making it harder to do experimental features

I've worked with medical imaging systems from the largest imaging companies in the world -- GE, Siemens, etc. -- all of which use a standardized image format/protocol/etc. called DICOM. DICOM has standardized fields for the vast majority of information you would need to record for medical imaging - patient ID, study ID, image # if it's an image sequence, etc. - as well as metadata about where it came from, like the vendor ID of the machine that did the scan (the CT scanner, MRI, X-ray, etc). There are also arbitrary fields for vendor-specific information that doesn't have a defined field in the specification.

All of these fields have clear purposes and definitions and all are available to every DICOM reader/writer, and yet the company I worked for had a huge table of re-mappings because some scanners, for some reason, would put the patient ID in the vendor field, or the vendor ID in the scanner name field, and so on. There's no reason for this, there's no complication that might cause this; it's all standard fields that everything supports.

These are manufacturers who, while using the standard that everyone else uses, deliberately screw things up in ways that their own hardware and software can silently compensate for but which other vendors then have to work around in order to inter-operate.

In other words cameras absolutely could emit DNG instead, but aside from the arguments that you've made, I have every confidence that manufacturers would fuck it up on purpose just to make it harder for other vendors' software to inter-operate, which would mean that instead of software having to explicitly support e.g. Canon's RAW format, and being able to say "we don't yet support this new format", software would "support" DNG but it would be completely broken for some random cameras because the software developer hasn't had the chance to implement idiotic workarounds for these specific broken images yet.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-08 18:21:11+00:00
Unless someone's life is on the line, usually eyeballing the source URL is enough for me. If I'm looking for API documentation, there are a few well-known URLs I trust as authoritative. If I'm looking for product information, same thing. If the search engine points me to totallyawesomeproductleadgen19995.biz, I'm probably not getting reliable information.

An LLM response without explicit mention of its provenance... There's no way to even guess whether it is authoritative.
by nsagent | 2025-04-08 18:21:51+00:00
Congrats!

One little nitpick is that while I prefer hardmode for puzzles like this, on mobile (where I prefer to play such games), it's WAY too easy to misclick on the keyboard. I had "8 excess keystrokes," but those were all due to mistyping then deleting a single mistyped character (e.g. "ee" -> "er").

Not sure how to keep the essence of the skill-based approach, without the frustration induced by typing on a mobile keyboard.

Anyway, great job and congrats again!
by bearware | 2025-04-08 18:21:59+00:00
This is a cool idea actually, even for a separate extension. Cursor doesn’t offer an API yet (so I’m not sure how to detect when Cursor itself is “thinking”), but it could be always-on.

I recall a site adding Memory Match minigame while a build was running (was it Vercel?), and I couldn’t help playing it every time.

Add in tic-tac-toe and a few others and you have yourself a cool extension.

Maybe a more constructive game also: a multiple choice quiz about your code to make sure you understand it?
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-08 18:22:49+00:00
ChatGPT was 12 months ago for me

I use Claude pretty exclusively, and GPT as a backup because GPT errors too much and tries to train on you too much and has a lackluster search feature. The web UIs are not these company’s priority, as they focus more on other offerings and API behavior. Which means any gripe will not be addressed and you have to just go for the differentiating UX.

For a second opinion from Claude, I use ChatGPT and Google pretty much the same amount. Raw google searches are just my glorified reddit search engine.

I also use offline LLM’S a lot. But my reliance on multimodal behavior brings me back to cloud offerings.
by cratermoon | 2025-04-08 18:23:10+00:00
> as these evolve.

Allow me to introduce you to the first step fallacy. https://thebullshitmachines.com/lesson-16-the-first-step-fal...

I like to use the analogy of building a ladder to get to the moon. The first step fallacy says that building a tall ladder is just the first step to building a ladder tall enough to reach the moon.
by danijar | 2025-04-08 18:23:10+00:00
For a lot of things, VLMs are good enough already to provide rewards. Give them the recent images and a text description of the task and ask whether the task was accomplished or not.

For a more general system, you can annotate videos with text descriptions of all the tasks that have been accomplished and when, then train a reward model on those to later RL against.
Ask HN: Anyone frustrated by AI tools hallucinating API calls?
by anfal | 2025-04-08 18:23:20+00:00
I’ve been using ChatGPT, Claude, and other LLM-based tools to speed up software development — but I keep running into the same issue:

When integrating third-party APIs or SDKs, the AI often gives me outdated or completely wrong info. Sometimes it’s minor (wrong param), sometimes it burns hours.

I figured the root problem is docs go stale, but the AI still tries to be confident. So I’m building a tool (ChatVisible) that makes API/SDK docs AI-compatible and keeps them updated for AI tools.

I’m not here to pitch — I just want to hear:

- Has anyone else run into this problem?

- How are you solving it?

- Would something like this actually help?

Happy to share a link or walkthrough if anyone’s curious, but more interested in validating the problem.
by Tycho | 2025-04-08 18:23:39+00:00
I don’t quite follow. Without equivalisation, adults cramming into HMOs would cause the household incomes to rise dramatically. The number of children, I suppose, could theoretically mask an impoverishment, but there’s not really any clear link between income levels and birth rates (maybe it’s even an inverse relationship).

House price ratio has doubled since 2000 but over the last twenty years in the UK it’s flat. The doomsaying is not justified.
by onlyrealcuzzo | 2025-04-08 18:23:56+00:00
> Until you say something the government doesn't like and they decide that part of your punishment should be lack of access to payment services.

How much worse is that than the same thing happening when you do something a private company doesn't like?

And how much different is that than what the Federal government could already do? If the government says you're a terrorist, you're not accessing any banking.