MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-04-19 00:46:02+00:00
Editoftheeditbecause of time-out:

I mean 'Atmospheric Processing Plants', somehow built similar to https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SRMSC_MSR_HAER_ND-9-...

along the nodes of the smartly (hexagonal?) gridded transmission lines, for capture of atmospheric CO2 and other nasties(fine particular matter, anyone?), and maybe spraying mists of water high in the air when it's too dry.

Ionospheric heating like HAARP and EISCAT for even more weather control could be optional :-)
by caseyy | 2025-04-19 00:46:04+00:00
We could score comments with sentiment analysis. AI, though not necessarily LLMs, can do it very well. Depending on how child comments reflect on the parent, the parent could be scored for relevance, agreement, helpfulness, or any other metric. This would also fuzz the metric itself (karma), and make it hard to game. The Goodhart's law problem in social media (karma farming, ratio-ing, etc) could be solved.

Of course, that presents many other problems. A corporation using AI to steer what discourse is worthy of promotion and what isn't in social networks has already caused much harm. Many things can be said about it.

But as a thought experiment, I think it's an interesting one. Much good could be done, advertisers and financial interests permitting.
by Uehreka | 2025-04-19 00:47:00+00:00
Speaking as someone who just rebuked another commenter for daring to suggest Dijkstra’s algorithm should be on that list… yeah you may have a point. Mobile phones probably belong in the S-Tier with the Internet.

In 2012-2014 I lived in Thailand right as the Smartphone Wave was cresting. I saw people who had never owned a computer leapfrog laptops and get online for the first time (on their own terms) with a cheap smartphone. And sure, many of them just went straight to instagram, but also a generation of working class Thai nerds got access to Wikipedia at their leisure, and that has no doubt led to uncountable good things.

> I would like to hear some uplifting stories about creative things people do with their phones, rather than consume media

Ever since the iPhone X introduced infrared face tracking I’ve been using them in live theatre shows to drive digital characters. Here’s me and my friend Jordan playing 3 “AI Gods” during the Baltimore Rock Opera Society’s 2019 show Space Kumite using an iPhone X for facial motion capture: https://youtu.be/wSYWC1GCZA8?si=RtWDODFwHxEnaB9u
by mcdeltat | 2025-04-19 00:47:54+00:00
You raise good points and I want to dig into it more.

One counterpoint is that LLMs are still young. I think it's preemptive to proclaim now that LLMs are world-changing when we really don't know how they will affect us in the future. For e.g. the internet, it's undeniable that it changed the world because now everything is so much more interconnected than it was 30 years ago. The internet has become a foundational element of technology. Will LLMs do the same? Surely we don't know.

Second counterpoint: "everyone in my life can tell me a way they've been affected by LLMs". Can they? How are they affected, for real? Everyone is certainly talking about them, does that necessarily mean the impact is large? Honestly for me life is basically the same and I'm a developer! Still go to the same job, SDLC is largely the same, my hobbies are the same, eat the same food, etc. The important day to day is the same. Except that I code a little faster, have a fancier search / problem solving tool, and every now and then I see a crappy AI gen image. Compare to e.g. the internet which has undoubtably changed day to day by drastically reducing physical interaction between people and systems.
by shadowgovt | 2025-04-19 00:48:09+00:00
They snatched somebody off the street. Put them on a plane to El Salvador. Without any due process . Then definitively said they made a mistake. And he's not back.

This isn't about preferred candidates losing. I've had preferred candidates lose multiple times in my life for various positions.

This is the culmination of the process that has been rolling through America responding to an attack on our home soil by creating a Department of Homeland security. This is the last chance for it to stop getting worse. There isn't another step beyond "They can disappear you from the street and drop you in a prison in El Salvador with no trial."

> the Alien Enemies Act

... Is for wartime. It's "Enemies" as in the phrase "Enemies at war, in peace friends".

Who are we at war with right now? If you believe "terrorism," you have understood my point.
by bcoates | 2025-04-19 00:48:16+00:00
It’s honestly a little surprising that LLMs are good at information retrieval from their training set at all. (Specifically, it's not a surprise that they hallucinate-it's a surprise that sometimes they don't at rates better than chance)

It’s not necessary for them to ever be reliable at it for them to be useful... just stop asking them to do things they aren't good at, and may never be.
by SanjayMehta | 2025-04-19 00:49:18+00:00
Sequence diagrams existed prior to UML. They were extensively used in telecom: “message sequence charts.”

They were part of a telecom language called SDL. There were tools to “compile” to various languages such as C. If you followed their rules, you were supposed to be able to go back and forth between C and SDL.

I only remember this because the biggest tool provider at that time was a French company called Verilog. They preceded the HDL by a few years, I guess.
by OldManAndTheCpp | 2025-04-19 00:49:32+00:00
I own (half of) a racing boat on the Great Lakes.

Buying a boat brings with it dreams of freedom, winning races, beautiful summer days.

The reality is that you need crew! Serious racers will refer to their boat as their “program”, and are always looking for careful, reliable crew.

I’d say look for a “learn to sail” program at whatever yacht club is nearest you, then see if they have a club racing scene. Most clubs have both.
by pansa2 | 2025-04-19 00:49:35+00:00
One difference is that Python's type system is unsound. You can write code that passes `mypy --strict` but still contains functions that, for example, claim to return an `int` but actually return a `list` [0]. AFAIK it's not possible to circumvent Go's type system in such a way.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43508152
by SecretDreams | 2025-04-19 00:50:15+00:00
There are so many items I'd put on the list before LLMs tbh. It's not even worth the time having the conversation. My quality of life went up much more in the dial up to dsl transition. I wouldn't say DSL to fibre was as much of a jump, e.g.

Anywho, that quality of life jump to DSL ultimately led to the enshitification of the internet I knew and loved and now I'm stuck talking about LLMs I wish didn't exist - I would trade the conveniences of today for the internet of the 2000s any day. I genuinely view us on a downwards QOL trajectory re: technology, even if it feels more novel and useful in the moment. Every new novelty in tech that makes life easier for us seems to actually further degraded the human experience of the internet. I don't know how to reconcile this trend with LLMs as being "great".

It really feels like the more we do "good" to "progress" information technology breakthroughs, the worse the entire field feels. Much shallower, less personal, and dumber.

Sorry for the rant.
by jaredhallen | 2025-04-19 00:50:21+00:00
This seems to be mostly a discussion in good faith, so I'm going to engage. There is definitely some ambiguity around the definition, and that's because DEI isn't law. Particularly in the context of this discussion, different companies implement different policies. So when asking if it's essentially affirmative action, the answer is "it depends".

But to shift gears, I've seen good arguments on both sides here. It seems like (in this discussion), there is a fair amount of agreement that the root of the problem has to do with disadvantaged folks lacking the same opportunities due to historical factors. So that's a good starting point.

The crux of the issue seems to be whether the appropriate course of action is to level the playing field for individuals who are starting from a disadvantage. This can be described as "equal outcome" rather than "equal opportunity". There are pros and cons to both options, but to put a fine point on it, I'm just not aware of any actions that can be taken to effect "equal outcome" that don't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
by mjr00 | 2025-04-19 00:51:12+00:00
> No one longed for a level of AI where you have to double check everything.

This has basically been why it's a non-starter in a lot of (most?) business applications.

If your dishwasher failed to clean anything 20% of the time, would you rely on it? No, you'd just wash the dishes by hand, because you'd at least have a consistent result.

That's been the result of AI experimentation I've seen: it works ~80% of the time, which sounds great... except there's surprisingly few tasks where a 20% fail rate is acceptable. Even "prompt engineering" your way to a 5% failure/inaccuracy rate is unacceptable for a fully automated solution.

So now we're moving to workflows where AI generates stuff and a human double checks. Or the AI parses human text into a well-defined gRPC method with known behavior. Which can definitely be helpful, but is a far cry from the fantasized AI in sci-fi literature.
by airstrike | 2025-04-19 00:51:51+00:00
But it would be terribly wasteful to further entertain someone on the subject of music and artificial intelligence, when it is so evident they must first overcome their oblivious impertinence and emotional incompetence in order for such debate to be even moderately enjoyable to anyone else less arrogant and unhappy.

You assume my choice to not continue the conversation is because I have nothing to say, when in fact I do so because I have nothing to say to you specifically.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-04-19 00:51:55+00:00
> People absolutely do oppose libraries. They also oppose programs that pay for tutors for poor kids, programs that allocate more money to schools in poorer neighborhoods and basically anything else you can think of.

Opposition to spending in general is distinct from opposition to a specific policy because the policy has a deleterious effect, and is much easier to overcome if you would e.g. source the money from a constituency that supports the policy, or offer to cut something else to make room in the budget.

> But I do admit it must make your life incredibly simple to just pretend racism doesn't exist and everyone ends up in the exact position they deserve.

Straw man.
by londons_explore | 2025-04-19 00:52:40+00:00
> few applications need the speed.

Speed is key to profitability for most usecases. If you are transporting people from A to B, and you can do it in half the time, then you can make twice as many trips per day, doubling revenue (or, if there isn't enough demand, you can buy a smaller boat and reduce your capital costs whilst maintaining the same revenue).

And thats before you consider that by going faster you might win more marketshare because the users want the fastest route. And you can often charge extra per person/per ton for faster/express services.
by Baeocystin | 2025-04-19 00:55:06+00:00
Back when I was taking CogSci classes in the 90's, The Bicameral Mind was introduced as a 'this is almost certainly completely wrong, but it makes a great starting point for a lot of great discussion', and it certainly bore out that way; our discussion groups using selections from the book as a starting point were some of the better ones. I agree with you; even now I think it's an interesting read.
by OldManAndTheCpp | 2025-04-19 00:55:45+00:00
Counterintuitively, the bigger the boat the less the fitness requirement.

Small boats (dinghies) require crew weight in certain places (“hiking” as far out to windward as possible) and have less mechanical advantage in the boat systems.

Larger boats, the forces scale out of the human range quickly and the crew relies on winches and pulleys to move the sails.
by calmbell | 2025-04-19 00:57:40+00:00
Please find me someone with any background in technology who thinks AI is complete garbage (zero value or close to it). The author doesn't think so, they assert that "perhaps 10% of the AI hype is based upon useful facts" and "AI functions greatly as a "search engine" replacement". There is a big difference between thinking something is garbage and thinking something is a massive bubble (in the case of AI, this could be the technology is worth hundreds of billions rather than trillions).
by figoshi | 2025-04-19 00:58:42+00:00
Remote Sales Jobs is a niche job board dedicated to connecting top sales talent with 100% remote opportunities from around the world. We focus exclusively on remote sales roles—including SaaS, B2B, and tech sales—giving professionals the freedom to work from anywhere while helping companies find qualified, remote-ready candidates. Our mission is to empower the modern sales workforce by curating high-quality remote positions that promote flexibility, performance, and work-life balance.
by mjr00 | 2025-04-19 00:58:47+00:00
Yeah, the Krugman quote gets pulled out around literally everything. Bitcoin/Blockchain/NFTs, Metaverse, AR/VR, I'm sure some other things I was forgetting.

For every Krugman "the internet will be as useful as the fax machine" quote, there's a corresponding quote like Gartner in 2022 - "Gartner Predicts 25% of People Will Spend At Least One Hour Per Day in the Metaverse by 2026."[0]

[0] https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2022-02-0...
by kjkjadksj | 2025-04-19 00:58:49+00:00
We probably don’t have the physical space to onshore 6x the capacity in warehouse or whatever it would work out to around ports. Short of multilevel warehouses but I mean containers have been stacked 5 high since covid around the port of LA and I think that is about the limit without some significant rethinking of process. Maybe the ships could just anchor off shore for longer and function as the warehouse.
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-19 01:00:36+00:00
Came here to post this. There’s just something so comforting to the soul about that world. There are no politics, crime, religion, homelessness, war, or disease. Just melons. Melons, pumpkins, turnips, corn, rice, and potatoes. Visiting that place is like pure heroin for people with anxiety.
by consumer451 | 2025-04-19 01:03:27+00:00
If that does happen, good thing that Cursor is very similar. Being dependent on any one tool in this environment is folly. Though to be honest, in either case, I am personally dependent on Anthropic. Comparing Claude Code costs to Cursor/Windsurf using Sonnet, it certainly feels like I am temporarily VC subsidized, like early Uber.

It seems to me that all of this is going to be a giant rugpull in the end. "Oh, you are saving the cost of a $40/per hour contractor? Well, we'll just charge you $35.99."

Until then, we might be in the golden era of cheap building, maybe?
by AlchemistCamp | 2025-04-19 01:03:44+00:00
> If one opinion is important, it will like the shared by more than one person.

Sometimes nobody else shares the opinion and the “abrasive person” is both good-hearted and right in their belief: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Personally, I’d rather be the kind of person who could have evaluated Semmelweis’s claims dispassionately rather than one who reflexively wrote him off because he was strident in his opinions. Doctors of the second type tragically shortened the lives of those under their care!
by didgetmaster | 2025-04-19 01:04:55+00:00
>If the subsurface were like an inert container, we could just pump that gas down there, sit back and watch the global temperature stabilize and the glaciers creep back to where they’re supposed to be.

I find it fascinating how some scientists seem so sure about how things are 'supposed to be'. The Earth's climate has never been static. Almost everything present today (temperature, pressure, percentage of each gas in air, etc.) has been higher and lower (sometimes by a lot) in the past.

What makes anyone think that they know the ideal amount of anything? Higher temperatures will certainly cause change, but why does every prediction paint a 'worst case scenario'?
by bcoates | 2025-04-19 01:05:00+00:00
That seems to indicate a catastrophically low bus factor--people get sick, take vacations, sleep, quit, etc. If you’re blocked on an IC doing anything other than finishing their task you've got a bigger problem than them going out of pocket for a day, fix the real problem.

(If they're a manager/decisionmaker of some sort then they better learn how to multitask online, which is like a 30 year old skill requirement at this point)
by martinald | 2025-04-19 01:05:24+00:00
While I agree with you; just to be clear it's not "slightly" beef up the local transformer. If you imagine a medium sized depot with 50 buses stabled at any one time, and 300kW chargers (I believe you could go higher), that's 15MW peak which is not trivial to add in many cities overnight. You really need some sort of HV connection for that kind of load, the existing local LV distribution grid isn't going to handle it.

I do definitely think green hydrogen has a big future ahead of itself though. We still use an absolutely ridiculous about of H2 in industrial processes (especially fertilizers).

Europe could produce huge amounts of fertilizers in the summer in the future with all the excess solar and wind it has via this method.

It seems to me hydrogen skipped a step - focus on replacing hydrogen feedstocks in industrial processes directly with green hydrogen, instead of replacing stuff up the chain that can be done with batteries directly anyway.
by hayst4ck | 2025-04-19 01:05:50+00:00
The counter argument is that forces that are working on society at large are attacking the core value that hacker news is founded upon -- curiosity.

Much like a CEO who only cares about next quarters profits and violating the companies mission statement to do it, you want the short term benefits of indulged curiosity, without paying the price of the coercive defense of it.

From a Kantian philosophical point of view, your statement is self contradictory, if the maxim is applied that everyone who values curiosity chooses to ignore or be neutral towards attacks on curious places (such as universities), then curious places will seek to exist as they are submitted to authority based truth rather than reason based truth.

There is no freedom or curiosity without solidarity, material support, of those who share the same values.

In times of peace I would agree with you, but a war has been declared on the disobedient and curiosity is disobedience to authority.
by OldManAndTheCpp | 2025-04-19 01:05:51+00:00
Other people have echoed the same advice, I’ll add to it.

Take enough of a learn to sail class that you understand the basic theory —- I took one at my local yacht club.

Then, find a racing fleet! Racing boats need crew weight to help the boat sail towards the wind (so you can be useful while you are still learning), and not all the jobs require as much sailing knowledge as others (my first job was to pull the free end of the line while someone was winching in the sail).

Skippers value consistency —- the boat can’t race without a crew, so literally just reliably showing up is a valuable thing.
by alganet | 2025-04-19 01:06:07+00:00
To define what a breakthrough is, is hard.

A "gaming PC" defines how GPUs are important. General people know something there ticks different, specialists know, industries know. It matters. It matters for a long time now.

"Broadband" was a hype, temporary. Once people understood that the speed is the thing, not any name, it stopped mattering. Now every couple of years there's a mini "new broadband tech" but it's all the same. Of course the tech is important. But revolutionary? I don't know. It boils down to being what is defined as generally "the internet".
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-04-19 01:06:08+00:00
LLMs could be one of the most revolutionary changes. The problem is that LLMs as a phenomenon are mostly wishful thinking and an acceptance of downgraded quality and reliability.

Sometimes they do useful things. But the gap between "sometimes" and "reliably" is not trivial.

It's honestly rather culty. I can see the hope that mistakes in today's vibe coding will be fixed by future vibe coding, which will be better in every way.

But it's not a given that's going to happen. Not on the evidence so far.
by pvg | 2025-04-19 01:06:19+00:00
The point of the comment is that "repetition" is probably not an adequate explanation for flagging. [...] What's relevant is that aggressive flagging is happening now.

Why not? Why does only the flagging need to be explained but not, say, the aggressive reposting of stories that are typically, and by long-established practice, offtopic for HN? These are clearly two sides of the same phenomenon, it's not obvious that the flagging alone here should be treated as some sort of anomaly.
by YeGoblynQueenne | 2025-04-19 01:06:22+00:00
>> Would not the author have claimed at the time that those technologies were also "hype"? What consistent principle does the author use (a priori) to separate "useful facts" from "hype"?

Are you saying someone hyped ... databases? In the same way as AI is hyped today?

This is a tweet from Sam Altman, dated April 18 2025:

https://x.com/sama/status/1913320105804730518

Whence I quote:

i think this is gonna be more like the renaissance than the industrial revolution

Do you remember someone from the databases industry claiming that databases are going to be "like the renaissance" or lik the industrial revolution? Oracle? Microsoft? PostgreSQL?

Here's another one with an excerpt of an interview with Demis Hssabis, dated April 17, 2025:

https://x.com/reidhoffman/status/1912929020905206233

Whence I quote:

" I think maybe in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease." Nobel Prize Winner and DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis on how AI can revolutionize drug discovery doing "science at digital speed."

Who, in databases, has claimed that "in the next 10, 15 years we can actually have a real crack at solving all disease"? Data centers? Computers in general? All disease?
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-19 01:06:25+00:00
So after a protracted back and forth your reasoning comes down to the following. The government is already engaging in dragnet surveillance. Somehow this automagically unmasks VPN usage (global dragnet (as opposed to targeted) traffic correlation on that scale would be a seriously impressive feat) in addition to any other privacy measures a typical individual might take. Therefore we should be okay with a system that enables the government to see you registering with various websites, or alternatively with a system that reveals various personal information to said website operator, or alternatively both simultaneously.

Or to summarize, the situation is already organically bad so everyone should be okay if we enact laws that artificially make it even worse in new ways.

To be blunt your reasoning seems entirely specious to me.
by frumplestlatz | 2025-04-19 01:07:34+00:00
The 15k lines of C are generated. The implementations are written in (and formally verified using) F*, and then the C is generated from the F* code using KaRaMeL.

One should be able to trust the proofs of correctness and never look at (or maintain) the generated C directly.

- https://fstar-lang.org

- https://github.com/FStarLang/karamel

- https://github.com/hacl-star/hacl-star
by XorNot | 2025-04-19 01:09:36+00:00
Gonna have to give that a try because it sounds like a very bad interpretation of the expiry mechanism in keys - encryption functionally never expires if you have the key, because you have the key. It's solely an error on the part of the sender to use an expired key, because it might be no longer available.

(admittedly AFAIK encryption is handled by key expiry poorly overall in GPG - the lack of perfect forward secrecy means an expired key which leaks can still decrypt all the old messages if they were intercepted).