MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by netdevphoenix | 2025-04-25 11:00:18+00:00
I don't think many social systems are equipped to deal with it though.

- Recruitment processes are not AI-aware and will definitely won't be able to identify the more capable individual hence losing out on talent

- Police departments are not equipped to deal with the coming wave of complaints regarding cyberfraud as the tech illiterate get tricked by anonymous LLM systems

- Universities and schools are not equipped to deal with students submitting coursework completed by LLM hence missing their educational targets

- Political systems are not equipped to deal with subversive campaigns using unethical online entertainment platforms (let's not called them social media please) such as FB and they are definitely not equipped to deal with those campaigns when they boost their effectiveness with LLM at scale
by plastic3169 | 2025-04-25 11:00:27+00:00
I think sign up for anything is a tall order. To use a recommendation site I would need it to just start asking me questions and immediatly also start the process of visually narrowing down content suitable for me. How many ratings from me would you need to do a good rec? Is there diminishing returns after certain amount of data from the user? There should be zero barriers of entry to this kind of thing. Like quirky website you click for few minutes. You can always provide ”save your answers” button and have the sign-in flow there, although I would appreciate unique link I can bookmark more.
by pas | 2025-04-25 11:00:45+00:00
In the article the "Materialized view for data derivation" part does the heavy lifting.

I assume this means they are creating time-series (indices) on-the-fly (with eventual backfill of the data). For the "exploratory analytics" the techniques developed for Dremel/Drill/Impala [0] are sufficient, and for anything else raw data crunching speeds are really impressive nowadays. (And they claim they can ingest 1B JSON records in ~10-30 seconds [1].)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dremel_(software)

[1] https://greptime.com/blogs/2025-03-18-jsonbench-greptimedb-p...
by adidoit | 2025-04-25 11:01:22+00:00
Critical Thinking is MORE important however it's much easier (lower friction, lower effort) to just use AI instead of thinking critically leading to cognitive offloading and atrophying because we stop using critical thinking for mundane tasks.

The Microsoft study [1] also mentioned in the blog shows exactly this effect with LLM usage correlated with critical thinking atrophying.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
by m000 | 2025-04-25 11:02:02+00:00
Note that we are the first-wave of AI users. We are already well-equiped to ask the LLM the right questions. We already have experience with old-fashioned self-learning. So we only need some discipline to avoid skill atrophy.

But what happens with generations that will grow up with AI readily available? There is a good chance that there will be a generational skill atrophy in the future, as less people will be inclined to develop the experience required to use AI as a helper, but not depend on it.
by dmazin | 2025-04-25 11:02:36+00:00
This is so bizarre. I wrote an extremely similar blog post in March 2023: "In the Age of AI, Don't Let Your Skills Atrophy"[1]. It even was on HN![2]

Actually, this is not bizarre. The author clearly read my post. A few elements are very similar, and the idea is the same. The author did expand on it though.

I wish they had linked to my post with more clarity than under the word "eroded" in one sentence.

[1] https://www.cyberdemon.org/2023/03/29/age-of-ai-skill-atroph... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35361979
by netdevphoenix | 2025-04-25 11:02:37+00:00
Unlikely. Reading the explanation involves memorising it temporarily and at best understanding what it means at a surface level. Figuring it out on your own also involves using and perhaps improving your problem solving skills in addition to understanding the explanation at a deeper level. I feel LLMs will be for our reasoning skills what writing was for our memory skills.

Plato might have been wrong about the ills of cyberization cognitive skill such as memory. I wonder if two thousand years later from then, we will be right about the ills of cyberization of a cognitive skill such as reasoning
by awongh | 2025-04-25 11:02:43+00:00
The thing is that in this century the creative interaction seems to be moving up the value chain- it wasn't long ago that people would say that being a DJ wasn't creative. Simply selecting songs wasn't creative. Now lots of people consider DJs to be creative artists that are communicating something with their human will of selecting and mixing tracks.

Unless the whole thing moves to a random AI generated slop stream app, whoever turns the knobs of the AI that creates the music will become the new "artist". Right now it doesn't seem like the AI creator "does" anything, but maybe future people will think that.
by lproven | 2025-04-25 11:02:49+00:00
"Seeker" to me means a fan, devotee or follower of the late great Ken Campbell.

I discovered, with some difficulty, that this was about some US (?) radio (?) show I've never heard and barely heard of and a couple of paragraphs later, I realised I did not care and stopped reading.

I do not like bits of writing that assume context and don't explain their referents. People who share that context are typically very annoyed by this and feel attacked when I point it out.

Ah well.
by lillecarl | 2025-04-25 11:03:10+00:00
I use helix editor, but I wouldn't say my editor needs are that great, I don't "write software at scale". I mostly write infrastructure automation in , terraform, Nix, python and YAML pretty much.

For more "developer" focused professions I bet using tools tailored for their needs suits them better, I recently wrote some C# for some Windows software in Visual Studio in a Windows VM and the ootb experience is pretty good.

You're not the only one, but you're probably a small minority with your DE setup.
by guerrilla | 2025-04-25 11:03:27+00:00
Yeah, exactly. Women want to feel chosen and special too. She may be misinterpreting them being so easy as them being willing to take anyone.

I do think she's right about some of them not being interested in getting to know her more deeply though. They don't need to be screening her to be able to learn how she fekt abkut some thing or more details that aren't already public.

(Honestly, I have no idea who she is myself or if she's even hot but I'll take your wiord for it.)
by fragmede | 2025-04-25 11:04:38+00:00
> Would you be completely stuck if AI wasn’t available

It's like the argument for not using Gmail when it first came out. Well, it better not go down then. In the case of LLMs, beefy home hardware and a quantized model is pretty functional, so you're no longer reliant on someone else. you're still reliant on a bunch of things, but more of those are now under control.
by piterrro | 2025-04-25 11:05:23+00:00
> The mistake many teams make is to worry about storage but not querying. Storing data is the easy part. Querying is the hard part. Some columnar data format stored in S3 doesn't solve querying. You need to have some system that loads all those files, creates indices or performs some map reduce logic to get answers out of those files.

That's a nice callout, there's a lack of awareness in our space that producing logs is one thing, but if you do it on a scale, this stuff gets pretty tricky. Storing for effective query becomes crucial and this is what most popular OSS solutions seem to forget and their approach seem to be: we'll index everything and put it into memory for fast and efficient querying.

I'm currently building a storage system just for logs[1] (or timestamped data because you can store events too, whatever you like that is written once and is indexed by a timestamp) which focuses on: data compression and query performance. There's just so much to squeeze if you think things carefully and pay attention to details. This can translate to massive savings. Seeing how much money is spent on observability tools at the company I'm currently working for (they probably spend well over 500k $ per year on: datadog, sumologic, newrelic, sentry, observe) for approximately 40-50TB of data produced per month - it just amazes me. The data could be compressed to like 2-3TB easily and stored for pennies on S3.

[1] https://logdy.dev/logdy-pro
by Zambyte | 2025-04-25 11:05:25+00:00
Zig exposes a Vector type to use for SIMD instructions, which has been my first introduction to SIMD directly. Reading through this thread I was immediately mapping what people were saying to Vector operations in Zig. It seems to me like SIMD can reasonably be exposed in high level languages for programmers to reach to in contexts where it matters.

Of course, the compiler vectorizing code when it can as a general optimization is still useful, but when it's critical that some operations must be vectorized, explicit SIMD structures seem nice to have.
by myrmidon | 2025-04-25 11:05:42+00:00
Not necessarily.

The problem is the somewhat low atmospheric CO2 concentration; this is why all the "lets just pollute now and remove the CO2 from the atmosphere with some futuristic tech!" approaches are also kinda doomed, because even if you had some workable process that did not cause excessive costs by itself (like this one possibly), you still need to process millions of cubic meters of air, every year, just to compensate for a single (!!) car.
by gunnarmorling | 2025-04-25 11:06:04+00:00
It can increase latency (which can be somewhat mitigated though by having a write buffer e.g. on EBS volumes), but it substantially _reduces_ cost: all cross-AZ traffic (which is $$$) is handled by the object storage layer, where it doesn't get charged. This architecture has been tremendously popular recently, championed by Warpstream and also available by Confluent (Freight clusters), AutoMQ, BufStream, etc. The KIP mentioned in the post aims at bringing this back into the upstream open-source Kafka project.
by udit99 | 2025-04-25 11:07:01+00:00
Interesting. I don't mean to detract from your main point but as someone who's deeply into spaced repetition for the past 5-7 years (Daily Anki user + built my own spaced repetition systems for learning various skills), I find myself disagreeing with you on some things that you mentioned:

1. Spaced Repetition is not a fad. It's the most consistent and reliable way we we know for rote memorization (conditions apply). And it's not a new thing either. It's been around since the late 1800s. It just wasnt practical until the advent of computers and mobile devices. So I'm skeptical that there is another "something else" to move on to that is as impactful as SRS.

2. Not sure what the state of education in Australia these days but speaking strictly from my school days in India (1980s-1990s), something like spaced repetition would have been a godsend for every single student. And I'm 100% sure a vast majority of schools and teachers still havent heard of it.

3. I've been learning German for the past few years from some of the top private institutes in Vienna, Austria and let me tell you that neither the teacher, nor the students have any idea about spaced repetition.

That said, you're probably right about the business-viability of such ventures because of the difficulty of selling to the decision-makers, I just strongly disagree about Spaced Repetition being a "flavor of the year"
by dmazin | 2025-04-25 11:07:33+00:00
My belief for the past almost decade is concern that use of AI will homogenize our culture. For example, the more we use LLMs to talk to each other, the more homogenized English becomes[1]. And, of course, it's amplified when the LLMs learn from LLMs.

[1] This is not new: I wrote about it in 2017. https://www.cyberdemon.org/2017/12/12/pink-lexical-slime.htm...
by nelblu | 2025-04-25 11:08:35+00:00
This is a life fact, I realized this early on. I grew up in part of India which is close to the famous Ajanta caves. There are several local artists there, who literally carve a stone into an absolutely beautiful images of Buddha. A lot of times the tools they used were so crude, imagine what they would do if they had access to modern tools. Similarly, when we look at some of the most beautiful ancient artifacts we can hardly say with confidence who actually built them and whether they were truly the greatest of their times. Personally, I find this very satisfying, there is no need of recognition, all one needs is to enjoy what they do.
by pyrale | 2025-04-25 11:08:46+00:00
Before you jump to conclusions, you should make a reasonable claim that IQ is still a reasonable measure for an individual's intellectual abilities in this context.

One could very much say that people's IQ is bound to decline if schooling decided to prioritize other skills.

You would also have to look into the impact of factors unrelated to the internet, like the evolution of schooling and its funding.
by dmazin | 2025-04-25 11:09:02+00:00
Yeah, I picked up Anki and ChatGPT the same year. I heavily use both. I'd say that Anki has increased my intelligence far more than LLMs have. Anki means that I no longer forget interesting things I learn day to day. To me, that's more valuable than the fact that LLMs make me code a multiple faster.
by namaria | 2025-04-25 11:09:20+00:00
> Since good LLMs with reasoning are here

I disagree. I get egregious mistakes often from them.

> because I'm able to always get an explanation

Reading an explanation may feel like learning, but I doubt it. It is the effort of going from problem/doubt to constructing a solution - and the explanation is a mere description of the solution - that is learning. Knowing words to that effect is not exactly learning. It is an emulation of learning, a simulacrum. And that would be bad enough if we could trust LLMs to produce sound explanations every time.

So not only getting the explanation is a surrogate of learning something, you also risk internalizing spurious explanations.
by yatwirl | 2025-04-25 11:09:30+00:00
Well, sharing prompts on the Web leads to their eventual indexing and becoming useless. So don't share the answers ;)

I have two prompts that no modern AI could solve:

1. Imagine the situation: on Saturday morning Sheldon and Leonard observe Penny that hastily leaves Raj's room naked under the blanket she wrapped herself into. Upon seeing them, Penny exclaims 'It's not what you think' and flees. What are the plausible explanations for the situation? — this one is unsurprisingly hard for LLMs given how the AIs are trained. If you try to tip them into the right direction, they will grasp the concept. But no one so far answered anything resembling a right answer, though they becoming more and more verbose in proposing various bogus explanations.

2. Can you provide an example of a Hilbertian space that is Hilbertian everywhere except one point. — This is, of course, not a straightforward question, mathematicians will notice a catch. Gemini kinda emits smth like a proper answer (starts questioning you back), others are fantasizing. With 3.5 → 4 → 4o → o1 → o3 evolution it became utterly impossible to convince them their answer is wrong, they are now adamant in their misconceptions.

Also, small but gold. Not that demonstrative, but a lot of fun:

3. Team of 10 sailors can speed a caravel up to 15 mph velocity. How many sailors are needed to achieve 30 mph?
by Madmallard | 2025-04-25 11:10:31+00:00
Build me a multiplayer browser game with NodeJS back-end, a lobby system, MySQL as the database, real-time game-play, synchronized netcode over webRTC so there's as little input lag as possible, utilizing all the algorithms from gafferongames.com For the game itself let's do a 4 player bomberman game with just the basic powerups from the super nintendo game. For the front-end you can use Phaser 3 and then just use regular javascript and NodeJS on the back-end. Make sure there's latency compensation and interpolation.
by ghaff | 2025-04-25 11:10:34+00:00
They probably did recognize diamonds in the rough. I’ll also say that the one time I did a book through a publisher it was because I happened to be seated next to the managing director and followed up with the acquisitions editor over coffee in London. Would probably never have happened had I sent in a proposal cold. Didn’t make me much money but was a nice addition to the resume.
by signa11 | 2025-04-25 11:11:12+00:00
just curious: wouldn't this entire enterprise be fraught with danger though ? given the proclivity of LLMs to hallucinate how would you (not you per se, but the person engaging with the LLM to learn) avoid being hallucinated to ?

being a neophyte in a subject, and relying solely on 'wisdom' of LLMs seems like a surefire recipe for disaster.
by WhyNotHugo | 2025-04-25 11:11:25+00:00
I hope you'll see the contradiction in this stance.

As a small company, you don't want to deal with small companies because it's too much effort. You just want to deal with one huge company which is your supplier for all your services. But you do want your clients to come to you and negotiate with your small company.

Assume your clients have the same mindset as you: why would they buy from you instead of buying from the same "one-stop-shop" where you're buying everything? They don't want to deal with small businesses such as yours, just like you don't want to.

Your "supplier of all services" might not offer what you're offering right now, but the day they do, you'll quickly be out of business. You and, gradually, all other businesses.

---

As a tangential note: 50 IT service providers is a darn lot. I suspect that is 10x of what the average business needs.
by awongh | 2025-04-25 11:11:54+00:00
In the age of the social feed things are currently tipped more towards the selector/curator/consumer, where before, when all you could do was listen to songs on the radio, it wasn't really possible to participate.

But culture will always be fundamentally about 1:many - we have to collectively agree on liking something- algo-based feeds are making the number of people that agree smaller and more siloed, but the dynamic is still the same.

In that sense I don't think truly 100% algorithmically created and promoted content could ever truly become cultural- at the very least humans will always ascribe some meaning or motive to it, e.g., when instagram launched AI generated accounts some people pointed their finger at Mark Zuckerberg, tracing something back to a human they could ultimately hold responsible.
by Madmallard | 2025-04-25 11:12:40+00:00
Basically anything along the lines of:

Make me a multiplayer browser game with latency compensation and interpolation and send the data over webRTC. Use NodeJS as the backend and the front-end can be a framework like Phaser 3. For a sample game we can use Super Bomberman 2 for SNES. We can have all the exact same rules as the simple battle mode. Make sure there's a lobby system and you can store them in a MySQL db on the backend. Utilize the algorithms on gafferongames.com for handling latency and making the gameplay feel fluid.

Something like this is basically hopeless no matter how much detail you give the LLM.
by namaria | 2025-04-25 11:12:55+00:00
> Reading the explanation involves memorising it temporarily and at best understanding what it means at a surface level.

I agree. I don't really feel like I know something unless I can go from being presented with a novel instance of a problem in that domain and work out a solution by myself, and also explain that to someone else - not just happen into a solution.

> Plato might have been wrong about the ills of cyberization cognitive skill such as memory.

How so? From the dialogue where he describes Socrates discussing writing I get a pretty nuanced view that lands pretty much where you did above: access to writing fosters a false sense of understanding when one can read explanations and repeat them but not actually internalize the reasoning behind it.
by whizzter | 2025-04-25 11:13:58+00:00
Not really, to me it more seems like Pentium-4 vs Pentium-M/Core again.

The downfall of Pentium 4 was that they had been stuffing things into longer and longer pipes to keep up the frequency race(with horrible branch latencies as a result). They scaled it all away by "resetting" to the P3/P-M/Core architecture and scaling up from that again.

Pipes today are even _longer_ and if E-cores has shorter pipes at a similar frequency then "regular" JS,Java,etc code will be far more performant even if you lose a bit of perf for "performance" cases where people vectorize (Did the HPC computing crowd influence Intel into a ditch AGAIN? wouldn't be surprising!).
by agounaris | 2025-04-25 11:14:11+00:00
This model seems super expensive! I interpret it as traces on steroids which will make query complex and slow!

A lot of businesses haven't even nailed simple histograms with prometheus. I wouldn't like observability to become a full set of problems on its own!

Also timeseries is powerfull in observability because a lot of issues can be represented as cheap counters, gauges and distributions. I want to see a paradigm complimentary to this simple principle instead of producing nested documents with nested objects.
by Incipient | 2025-04-25 11:15:41+00:00
This is definitely unexpected for me - I'd have thought something like an RC for a kernel would have to be 'approved' for release only after passing all tests, which should include building with all official compilers (and all official architectures, etc).

Unless either the older GCC or the beta GCC isn't "official"? In which case that's not necessarily expected to be picked up in an RC?
by sunshine-o | 2025-04-25 11:15:46+00:00
Maybe it is just one personality type but I believe "skills" and what you do or figure out yourself is at the core of happiness and self esteem.

- The food you grow, fish, hunt and then cook taste better

- You feel happier in the house you built or refurbished

- The objects you found feel more valuables

- The music you play make you happy

- The programs you wrote work better for you

etc.

This is just how we evolved and survived until now.

This is probably why an AI / UBI society would probably make worse the problems found in industrialised / advanced economies.
by AdventureMouse | 2025-04-25 11:16:06+00:00
Hits the nail on the head.

I would argue that most of the value of LLMs comes from structuring your own thought process as you work through a problem, rather than providing blackbox answers.

Using AI as an oracle is bound to cause frustration since this is attempts to outsource the understanding of a problem. This creates a fundamental misalignment, similar to hiring a consultant.

The consultant will never have the entire context or exact same values as you have and therefore will never generate an answer that is as good as if you understand the problem deeply yourself.

Prompt engineers will try to create a more and more detailed spec and throw it over the wall to the AI oracle in hope of the perfect result, just like companies that tried to outsource software development.

In the end, all they gained was frustration.
by zppln | 2025-04-25 11:16:14+00:00
Indeed. A friend of mine is a motion designer (and a quite talented one at that) and he goes on and on about how AI is gonna take is job away any day soon. And sure, there are all these tools popping up basically enabling people to do (some of) what he does for a living. But I'm still completely uninterested in motion design. I might prompt a tool a few times to see what it does, but I'm just not interested in the process of getting things right. I can appreciate the result, but I'm not very interested in the craft, even if the craft is just a matter of prompting. That's why I work in a different field.

I will note however, that it has expanded his capabilities. Some of the tools he use are scriptable and he can now prompt his way into getting these scripts. Something he'd previously would have needed a programmer for. In this aspect his capabilities now overlap mine, but he's still not the slightest more interested in actually learning programming.