MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dTal | 2025-04-12 11:09:06+00:00
>That's a tricky line, because it's on the path to: "You have the 'freedom' to vote for whoever you like, just as long as they're a Communist who will loyally implement Communist policies."

Well, yes. Ideological stability is arguably a desirable property (even if you disagree with specific aspects of it) but regardless of that it is a stable attractor. Practically speaking, if your system permits people to run on a platform of dismantling the system, it will soon be replaced by one that doesn't permit that. You would do well to accept that, and choose carefully the immutable terms on which you would like to base your government.
by foxhill | 2025-04-12 11:09:27+00:00
huh. very cute. in the past, i had an idea for terser lambda syntax, similar to C#'s expression body functions - which i did end up implementing in clang:

auto sum = [](auto a, auto b): a+b;

but this is something else. i didn't think i'd like it at first, but actually i think i might be coming around to it. the.. dollar syntax is regrettable, although it's not a show stopper.
by CryZe | 2025-04-12 11:09:59+00:00
I once implemented a WASM to Rust compiler that due to WASM's safety compiles to fully safe Rust. So I was able to compile C -> WASM -> Rust and ended up with fully safe code. Though of course, just like in WASM, the C code is still able to corrupt its own linear memory, just can't escape the "sandbox". Firefox has employed a similar strategy: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2020/02/securing-firefox-with-weba...
by maxbond | 2025-04-12 11:10:12+00:00
In this video someone does it and it seems to work.

https://youtube.com/shorts/ERDmKW65t38

But it's a very small drop and they don't melt it all the way to the bulb. I imagine that it could shatter in some circumstances.

(Incidentally glass isn't a crystal, but that's just a nitpick.),
by lproven | 2025-04-12 11:10:31+00:00
> The original ribbon sucked but with the improvements it's hard to say it's generally a bad choice.

This is also what I hear about GNOME. "OK, yes, GNOME 3.x was bad, but by GNOME 40 it's fine."

No, it's not. None of my core objections have been fixed.

Both ribbons and GNOME are every bit as bad as they were in the first release, nearly 20 years ago.
by MattJ100 | 2025-04-12 11:10:55+00:00
I agree, but only for situations where the probabilistic nature is acceptable. It would be the same if you had a large team of humans doing the same work. Inevitably misclassifications would occur on an ongoing basis.

Compare this to the situation where you have a team develop schemas for your datasets which can be tested and verified, and fixed in the event of errors. You can't really "fix" an LLM or human agent in that way.

So I feel like traditionally computing excelled at many tasks that humans couldn't do - computers are crazy fast and don't make mistakes, as a rule. LLMs remove this speed and accuracy, becoming something more like scalable humans (their "intelligence" is debateable, but possibly a moving target - I've yet to see an LLM that I would trust more than a very junior developer). LLMs (and ML generally) will always have higher error margins, it's how they can do what they do.
by KingMob | 2025-04-12 11:11:20+00:00
Got called a "self-hating Jew" for the first time on Mastodon a year ago, for criticizing Israel.

Unfortunately for those of us in the diaspora, Israel has really muddied the waters by convincing people that anti-Israel = antisemitism, because it's given real antisemites cover. E.g., like when the ADL came to Musk's defense after his Nazi salute because he officially supported Israel.
by maccard | 2025-04-12 11:11:29+00:00
I don’t get it, honestly. It’s very clear. You get a discount for an annual commitment and they let you pay monthly. It’s super clear which you’re signing up for when you do it. I’m in the UK, and there’s a 14 day cooling off period on the plans too, unless you buy the full blown annual one.

I’m no adobe supporter generally, and sure they could do more, but they take an awful lot of flak for people who won’t read two lines of text and then scream bloody murder.
by viraptor | 2025-04-12 11:11:38+00:00
Have you considered you internalised and normalised working in environments that are messed up 5 steps before the final problem? Crunch, angry managers, thinking "(they're) waiting for us to get our shit together" when planning/communication failed at higher level, "boss is begging us to submit the data" which has likely no impact on your speed of work, "and several hundred hours are now needing to be spent figuring out" is a thing that you have a process for and you know it can happen so the risk should be accounted for ahead of time and not surprising, "why they fucked up and why we suck" when things you know can fail do fail, "the ratings team now needs to go overtime" means more planning failure, etc.

This is toxic BS and mismanagement. It's people not accounting for and communicating risk properly. None of that anger and finger pointing makes this work faster or better. Everything here could happen exactly as it happened, but without anger, if people communicated risks properly and took the failure (which will happen) as part of the process, people would be less stressed about it, and maybe they'd make fewer mistakes too.

Maybe it was correct to progress without better data, or maybe the cost of doing that was too high. Either way, someone should've redone the schedule to match reality, so blocked teams don't get anxious. Then someone should've done the risk/benefit analysis and signed off on the "proceed with testing anyway, we are aware of and accept the risk" path, so nobody talks about fucking up, but concentrates on doing the best they can instead.
by skillgalaxy | 2025-04-12 11:12:35+00:00
Hey! I'm excited to share a project I've been working on recently called SkillGalaxy. It's a web tool that uses some of the latest AI models to help make learning or researching any topic easier. How it works: You give it a prompt (like "How to paint like Bob Ross", "Explain Quantum Physics", "History of the Roman Empire", etc.), and the AI breaks that topic down into sub-topics. It then generates an interactive graph showing these sub-topics, their categories, and the connections between them. You can click on any node (point) in the graph to get more detailed information, resources, related tasks, project ideas, or even quizzes about that specific part of the topic. Check it out here (it's completely free!):https://www.skillgalaxy.io/

Why I built this / Key Uses: To break down overwhelming, complex subjects into smaller, digestible pieces. To visualize the connections and relationships within a topic. As a tool for research, self-learning, brainstorming, or just satisfying curiosity! Key Features: Simple prompt-based interface. Powered by advanced AI models. Supports multiple languages. Rich graph nodes (Info, Task, Resource, Quiz, Summary, Links, Project Idea, etc.). Detailed info available for each node. Easy Google account login. 100% Free! Important Heads-Up (It's a Alpha!): Generation Time: Creating a graph can take 1-2 minutes, please be patient! Daily Limit: There's a cap on daily graph generations per user. Desktop Recommended: It's not optimized for mobile browsers yet. Beta Version: This is an early release, so you might encounter bugs or quirks. Your feedback is invaluable! Zoom: Hold Ctrl and use your mouse wheel. I'd love for you to give it a try and let me know what you think! What topics did you explore? Any suggestions or bug reports would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for checking it out!
Show HN: I made a software that simplifies horizontal scaling and makes it EASY
by GeorgiMY | 2025-04-12 11:12:43+00:00
Quantum Grid is an open-source software I started that allows you to synchronize your computer's computational power, even if the devices are overseas.

Imagine you and your friends want to train an AI, but you live far away from each other. Quantum Grid solves that problem by allowing you to receive data from a server and process it in parallel with the other devices. The processed data is then returned back to the server.

It's the first software that allows you to do parallel processing from a non-relational database (MongoDB currently!)

The tech stack I used was: •Programming Languages: TypeScript •Frameworks: Express.js, Electron and Next.js •Databases: MongoDB, SQLite and JSON files •Libraries: React, ShadCN, TailwindCSS and Mongoose •IDE: Visual Studio Code and Cursor
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-12 11:14:31+00:00
You're assuming ads would be subtly worked into the answers. There's no reason it has to be done that way. You can also have a classic text ads system that's matching on the contents of the discussions, or which triggers only for clearly commercial queries "chatgpt I want to eat out tonight, recommend me somewhere", and which emits visually distinct ads. Most advertisers wouldn't want LLMs to make fake recommendations anyway, they want to control the way their ad appears and what ad copy is used.

There's lots of ways to do that which don't hurt trust. Over time Google lost it as they got addicted to reporting massively quarterly growth, but for many years they were able to mix in ads with search results without people being unhappy or distrusting organic results, and also having a very successful business model. Even today Google's biggest trust problem by far is with conservatives, and that's due to explicit censorship of the right: corruption for ideological not commercial reasons.

So there seems to be a lot of ways in which LLM companies can do this.

Main issue is that building an ad network is really hard. You need lots of inventory to make it worthwhile.
by daveed | 2025-04-12 11:16:18+00:00
Don't think it's a flex, I think it's useful context for the rest of their comment.

> I and every other smart person I know still use ChatGPT (paid) because even now it's the best

My smart friends use a mixture of models, including chatgpt, claude, gemini, grok. Maybe different people, it's ok, but I really don't think chatgpt is head and shoulders above the others.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-12 11:16:19+00:00
> What the author means with "transactional" is that WebSockets have no built-in request-response mechanism

Its not HTTP and does not want to be HTTP. In WebSockets the request/response mechanism is for one side to send a message and then the other side to send a message. If you want to associate a message from one side with a message from the other side put a unique identifier in the messages.

If you really want the request/response round trip then don't use WebSockets. I would rather messages just transmit as each side is ready, completely irrespective of any round trip or response, because then everything is fully event oriented and free from directionality.
by malthaus | 2025-04-12 11:17:23+00:00
i'm swiss living in berlin currently (leaving soon)

germany is a country on the rapid decline. the recently decided investment effort and the new government are a step in the right direction but wont halt or revert that decline. the country needs a BIG shock and be rebuilt from the ground up. the new ministry is just pandering / virtue signalling and won't have any effect.

some examples:

1) legacy financial holes like the pension scheme, no bandaid will save this

2) public workers safety & pension "beamtentum" - wrong incentives, wrong people, wrong mindset

3) workers rights are too strong (betriebsrat, unflexible hiring & firing)

4) taxes are ridiculously high, there's zero incentive for global talent to come here

5) bureaucracy is absolutely insane, a country run by risk averse lawyers stuck in the 1980s

6) immigration was botched so bad, they wont recover from this for another generation

7) the rise of the far right afd was handled so terribly, the trauma from ww2 is still too big to deal with it rationally, rather than calling the strongest party in the country "antidemocratic" (which ironically IS antidemocratic in itself). if they dont get a grip on this, afd will lead the country in 4 years.

8) no common identity / goal except for wanting to show being the "good guys", see misincentived sustainability initiatives, handling of israel / palestina, etc

9) weak leaders / politicians. they are all bureaucrats

10) regulation first, innovation never. see AI
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-12 11:19:07+00:00
> exchange rate of barrels to tomatoes hasn’t altered since that is a matter of productivity

Of course it has. We are one of the world’s largest importers of tomatoes [1]. The dollar devaluing makes them more expensive. That, in turn, means the internal price of tomatoes goes up. We’re a net oil exporter, on the other hand. So yeah—the “exchange rate of barrels [of oil] to tomatoes” has been altered. In part because the productive benefits of comparative advantage are being slashed. In part because trade frictions are being introduced that reduce our economy’s productivity.

[1] https://www.worldstopexports.com/international-markets-for-i...
by kamiheku | 2025-04-12 11:19:48+00:00
While I presume they don't provide a native Linux build, it is listed as Playable on Steam Deck.

> Valve's testing indicates that Blue Prince is Playable on Steam Deck. This game is functional on Steam Deck, but might require extra effort to interact with or configure.

> • Some in-game text is small and may be difficult to read

> • All functionality is accessible when using the default controller configuration

> • This game shows Steam Deck controller icons

> • This game's default graphics configuration performs well on Steam Deck
by user070223 | 2025-04-12 11:20:15+00:00
Indeed, one great path to finding those lost civilizations is to follow river vallies, Atlas pro[0] says there is no consensus on past rivers/bodies of water as evident by different maps of the region, but one can follow (underwater) river sediment which were deposited to the sea. During oil search such area was found in Cap Timiris, Mauritiania. Satelite radar image of the area from 2015 did reveal those rivers beds, Tamanrasset River seems to be the biggest, with a big drainage basin. Trees and shrubs indeed grow there.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-dZj1ZdRtY
by InsideOutSanta | 2025-04-12 11:20:16+00:00
Nothing you describe is normal, healthy, worthy of emulation, or good.

I've worked in large cross-company teams on extremely complex products with millions of LOC and thirty-year-old obsolete code handling millions of US$s of bank transactions. I've been in situations where people made mistakes, systems went down, and transactions were lost. I've been in incredibly stressful situations.

Do you know what would have made none of these situations better? Anger.
by michaelt | 2025-04-12 11:20:16+00:00
> Are you implying that Google will sell a product that is designed to ‘sabotage’ their own customer’s business?

The US government is constantly telling us that the likes of Huawei and Hikvision are doing precisely that, despite being subject to the same risks of reputational damage.

Of course, the same could be said of everything else in the data centre. It's not like Google are somehow more vulnerable than Juniper or Cisco or Unifi or Dell or Intel or whoever.
by walleeee | 2025-04-12 11:20:17+00:00
> The author is essentially arguing that fewer people will be able to build software in the future.

Setting aside the fact that the author nowhere says this, it may in fact be plausible.

> That's the opposite of what's happened over the past year or two. Now many more non-technical people can (and are) building software.

Meanwhile half[0] the students supposed to be learning to build software in university will fail to learn something important because they asked Claude instead of thinking about it. (Or all the students using llms will fail to learn something half the time, etc.)

[0]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-education-report-ho...

> That said, nearly half (~47%) of student-AI conversations were Direct—that is, seeking answers or content with minimal engagement.
by jasode | 2025-04-12 11:21:31+00:00
>I happen to work in this industry, and just a word for those that compare this with an Apple Watch or a Casio, this Vacheron-Constantin will likely be around 200 years from now, it will still be a testimony of the refinement and engineering of a fine craft that few can achieve, a highly valued item [...] The Apple watch on my wife's wrist is a fine computer i guess,

My friend does not work in the watch industry so maybe that's why she came to the opposite conclusion from yours. She has several high-end watches Omega, Ebel, Cartier ... and when she got the Apple Watch almost 10 years ago, it instantly demoted all her expensive jewelry watches to the drawer.

The cheaper "disposable" Apple Watch instantly cured her from wanting any new expensive jewelry watches. She let the batteries die off in the old watches and has never replaced them. Instead, she just loves having the weather, timers, task notifications, etc on her Apple Watch. Sure, the classic watches have "diamond encrusted bezel, gold wristband, Swiss mechanical movement yada yada yada..." but all that is negated by the useful features of the smart watch.

It's a rare situation where a cheap product completely replaces an expensive product.

I had a a similar evolution in thinking when technology made me re-evaluate products I once coveted. When I was young before the internet existed, I drooled over this Geochron illuminated framed wall map $4000 : https://www.geochron.com/clocks/boardroom/

A lot of expensive offices had that and I thought I had to have it too. But then I bought cheap atomic clocks you never had to set and the web had dynamic maps I could explore. Even the new Geochron units don't automatically set to the radio signal from atomic clocks. New technology completely cured me of wanting to buy a Geochron. People used to want tall grandfather clocks in the house foyer as an elegant piece of accent furniture. Now you can't even give away those clocks for free on craigslist. Everybody has clocks on their smartphones so buying a grandfather clock for the house isn't a priority anymore. Even if we romanticize grandfather clocks with descriptions about "heirloom furniture craftsmanship, intricate wood carvings, etc", it still won't entice most people today to want one.
by curious_curios | 2025-04-12 11:23:43+00:00
Historically the moderation tooling on Reddit has been overlooked and terrible. There was a lot of tooling that got built up on the Reddit API to help with this, but a lot of that got torched when they locked down the API. When you add in how easy it is for scammers and spammers to use gen AI to overwhelm moderators it’s really not a great experience moderating a community.

At this point moderators are aiming for literally any filter they have to make their task possible, you just got caught up in this arms race.
by mike_hearn | 2025-04-12 11:23:56+00:00
Gemini with coding seems to be a bit of a mixed bag.

The article claims Gemini is acing the Aider Polyglot benchmark. At the moment this is the only benchmark that really matters to me because Aider is actually a useful tool and performance on that translates directly to real world impact, although Claude Code is even better. If you look closely, in fact Gemini is at the top only in the "percent correct" category but not "percent correct using the right edit format". Cost is marked as ? because it's not entirely available yet (I think?). Not emitting the correct edit format is pretty useless because it means the changes won't apply and the tool has to try again.

Claude in contrast almost never makes a mistake with emitting the right format. It's at 97%+ in the benchmark, in practice it's ~100% in my experience. This tracks: Claude is really good at following instructions. Gemini is about ~90%. This makes a big difference to how frustrating a tool is to use in practice.

They might get that fixed, but my experience has been that Google's models are consistently much more likely to refuse instructions for dumb reasons. Google is the company with by far the biggest purity spiral problem and it does show up in their output even when doing apparently ordinary tasks.

I'm also concerned by this event: https://news.sky.com/story/googles-ai-chatbot-gemini-tells-u...

Given how obsessed Google claimed to be with AI safety I expected an SRE style postmortem after that, and there was bupkis. An AI that can suffer a psychotic break out of nowhere like that is one I wouldn't trust unless it's behind a very strong sandbox and being supervised very closely, but none of the AI tools today offer much in the way of sandboxing.
by imiric | 2025-04-12 11:24:29+00:00
Hey, we could save them all the busywork, and just wire all our money to corporations...

But financial nightmare scenarios aside, I'm more concerned about the influence from private and government agencies. Advertising is propaganda that seeks to separate us from our money, but other forms of propaganda that influences how we think and act has much deeper sociopolitical effects. The instability we see today is largely the result of psyops conducted over decades across all media outlets, but once it becomes possible to influence something as personal as a chatbot, the situation will get even more insane. It's unthinkable that we're merrily building that future without seemingly any precautions in mind.
by marcusb | 2025-04-12 11:24:53+00:00
From the article:

> I’m forgetting something. Oh, of course, Google is also a hardware company. With its left arm, Google is fighting Nvidia in the AI chip market (both to eliminate its former GPU dependence and to eventually sell its chips to other companies). How well are they doing? They just announced the 7th version of their TPU, Ironwood. The specifications are impressive. It’s a chip made for the AI era of inference, just like Nvidia Blackwell
by illiac786 | 2025-04-12 11:25:07+00:00
Ok, that means you think that everyone should move away from countryside and into cities. I think that illustrates very well the problem with your approach. Minorities have zero chances of being represented.

The argument about charity and tax levels is not substantiated by any research as far as I can tell. There is however research showing that rich people give LESS to charity proportionally, compared to poorer people.

Making charity donations tax deductible, that does help though.
by roxolotl | 2025-04-12 11:25:17+00:00
Edit: I noticed this comment was rather controversial and reread the article. The author is actually saying most people misunderstand psychological safety to be an environment where people don’t disagree. Their understanding of psychological safety however is correct. Not sure why the framing flipped my understanding in the first read.

This article completely misunderstand psychological safety even after including the definition. “Nice” teams are not psychologically safe. If everyone is nodding along they do not feel safe.

Conflict and safety are not at odds with each other. The whole point of psychological safety is that everyone feels safe enough to get into productive conflict.

Not all conflict or agreement is productive. The point of the work around psychological safety is to build a team where people agree and disagree willingly because they feel safe to do so.
by jstanley | 2025-04-12 11:25:45+00:00
> There isn't even a continuity of experience for when you go to sleep.

But you remember having lived the previous day. Why is it any different if you remember having lived as a human a second ago and are a computer program now?

> My consciousness cannot be transported to software.

You perhaps don't notice that your entire argument hinges on this claim. This is the central point of disagreement.

I'm saying "if your consciousness was uploaded to a computer you would still experience being yourself", and you're saying "no, if my consciousness were uploaded to a computer I wouldn't experience it as being myself, because uploading a consciousness to a computer is not possible".