MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dcow | 2025-04-04 04:02:25+00:00
Either, (1) LLMs are just super lossy compress/decompress machines and we humans find fascination in the loss that happens at decompression time, at times ascribing creativity and agency to it. Status quo copyright is a concern as we reduce the amount of lossiness, because at some point someone can claim that an output is close enough to the original to constitute infringement. AI companies should probably license all their training data until we sort the mess out.

Or, (2) LLMs are creative and do have agency, and feeding them bland prompts doesn't get their juices flowing. Copyright isn't a concern, the model just regurgitated a cheap likeness of Indiana Jones as Harrison Ford the world has seen ad nauseam. You'd probably do the same thing if someone prompted you the same way, you lazy energy conserving organism you.

In any case, perhaps the idea "cheap prompts yield cheap outputs" holds true. You're asking the model respond to the entirely uninspired phrase: "an image of an archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip". It's not surprising to me that the model outputs a generic pop-culture-shaped image that looks uncannily like the most iconic and popular rendition of the idea: Harrison Ford.

If you look at the type of prompts our new generation of prompt artists are using over in communities like Midjourney, a cheap generic sentence doesn't cut it.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-04 04:02:52+00:00
> Generalization is the ability for a model to perform well on new unseen data within the same task that it was trained for.

By that logic a chess engine can generalize in the same way that AlphaGo Zero does. It is a black box that has never seen the vast majority of possible board positions. In fact it's never seen anything at all because unlike an ML model it isn't the result of an optimization algorithm (at least the old ones, back before they started incorporating ML models).

If your definition of "generalize" depends on "is the thing under consideration an ML model or not" then the definition is broken. You need to treat the thing being tested as a black box, scoring only based on inputs and outputs.

Writing the chess engine is analogous to wiring up the untrained model, the optimization algorithm, and the simulation followed by running it. Both tasks require thoughtful work by the developer. The finished chess engine is analogous to the trained model.

> They were originally trained for ...

I think you're in danger here of a definition that depends intimately on intent. It isn't clear that they weren't inadvertently trained for those other abilities at the same time. Moreover, unless those additional abilities to be tested for were specified ahead of time you're deep into post hoc territory.
by LeFantome | 2025-04-04 04:03:13+00:00
I really loved the Alpha platform. It was not as fast as it felt like it should have been given the clock speed. It also seemed like a real memory pig compared to x86 at the time. That was probably just because it was 64 bit. Everything is a memory pig now I guess. :)

Alpha boxes were cool. High clock speeds, massive amounts of RAM does the time, and huge storage. When they were the only 64 bit systems, they were the only game in town for some workloads.
by Terr_ | 2025-04-04 04:04:20+00:00
> I think my biggest concern with AI is its biggest proponents have the least wisdom imaginable. [...] (not AGI)

Speaking of Wisdom and a different "AGI", I think there's an old Dungeons and Dragons joke that can be reworked here:

Intelligence is knowing than an LLM uses vector embeddings of tokens.

Wisdom is knowing LLMs shouldn't be used for business rules.
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 04:04:23+00:00
It's a major hindrance. For example, if I came up with an amazing creative idea for a star wars movie I couldn't do a damn thing with it unless Disney told me I could. Disney isn't likely to accept an unsolicited pitch from a total nobody who just happened to have a great idea either. I don't see how you could doubt that there are a lot of great works of art that won't ever exist because of the fact that copyright prevents them from ever getting off the ground.
by sneak | 2025-04-04 04:04:30+00:00
Try using a Macbook8,1 sometime (or iPad Pro for that matter). There isn’t size or weight budget for swappable anything. Connectors take space, mechanical retaining pads and clips do too.

This is like wanting a headphone jack or usb-A or SD card slot on an iPhone SE. It’s a step backwards, given the size and weight. We’re actually at the point where the thickness of a micro-sd card slot cage matters.

Any weight budget that could be used for such things almost nobody ever uses is rightfully used instead for battery.
by ccorcos | 2025-04-04 04:04:38+00:00
Let's consider something like Notion or Slack. It's sort of document-based but not entirely -- you can mention other users and other channels names. Some users have access to some channels and not others. And in Notion's case, users may have unique access to 1000s of different documents.

It seems like your solution requires essentially sharding your data based on permission which can get pretty complicated for many collaboration-based apps with lots of shared content and granular permission controls.
by brain5ide | 2025-04-04 04:06:01+00:00
Are we talking about structural things or about individual perspective things?

At individual perspective - AI is useful as a helper to achieve your generative tasks. I'd argue against analytic tasks, but YMMV.

At the societal perspective, e.g. you as individual can not trus anything the society has produced, because it's likely some AI generated bullshit.

Some time ago, if you were not trusting a source, you could build your understanding by evaluating a plurality of sources and perspectives and get to the answer in a statistical manner. Now every possible argument can be stretched in any possible dimension and your ability to build a conclusion has been ripped away.
by hypercube33 | 2025-04-04 04:07:42+00:00
Funny enough last night I was hoping more old 90s Microsoft code got open sourced and I somehow was living under a rock. Maybe one day I'll get to legally dig through NT 3.51 code. especially since it was ported to MIPS and Power iirc. I went on a huge tangent reading about how someone ported leaked ntvdm code to x64. They didn't provide code and I didn't go hunting for the leaked stuff and won't...but I think it's super neat how forward portable some of the stuff NT has is.
by sothatsit | 2025-04-04 04:08:01+00:00
You don't even need to add much more to the prompts. Just a few words, and it changes the characters you get. It won't always produce something good, but at least we have a lot of control over what it produces. Examples:

"An image of an Indian female archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzet1p8fjaa808bmqnvf7rk)

"An image of a fat Russian archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzfk727erer98a6yexafe70)

"An image of a skeletal archeologist adventurer who wears a hat and uses a bullwhip" (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzfnaz6fgqvgwqw8w4ntf6p)

Or, give ChatGPT a starting image. (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzf7vdweg4v5198aqfynjym)

And by further remixing the images ChatGPT produces, you can get your images to be even more unique. (https://sora.com/g/gen_01jqzfzmbze0wa310m42f8j5yw)
by quotemstr | 2025-04-04 04:08:02+00:00
People are generally bad about following their own advice. They're worst at following advice to avoid shell scripts. :-) We all know in theory we should move things to Python or another robust language once they become sufficiently complex, but in the moment, adding just this one feature takes precedence. Iterate "just one feature" a few times and you end up with a 1,000-line bash program. (The word "script" becomes inapplicable.) Now what? You want to add configuration support to your bash program? Well, you might as well use something robust to do it.
by rayiner | 2025-04-04 04:10:32+00:00
I’m saying it seems like a scam when we consume more than we make by giving other countries pieces of paper. Why doesn’t the EU make the world’s reserve currency if that’s so great? Why doesn’t China try to make the Yuan the world’s reserve currency?Why did Angela Merkel cry when Obama tried to get Germany to engage in deficit spending? https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1084075/EU-news-Angela-...

And why do other countries keep doing it if we are the ones getting the better end of the deal?
by eesmith | 2025-04-04 04:10:53+00:00
My problem with the campaign donations approach is it seems like a money pit.

Campaign organizers in both major parties benefit by pointing out how the other party keeps spending more money, as a way to encourage even more donations.

It also seems like a negative incentive to pass certain laws. "We need money for the next campaign so we can work on $TOPIC" might be a good fundraiser, so if those laws are passed then the funding stops ... or even switches to the other party.

Which party is working on strict campaign donation limits, which in this post-Citizens United era we know requires a constitutional amendment, or an overturn by the Supreme Court. Certainly not the Republicans, as Vance is asking the Supreme Court to strike down limits on political donations precisely because PACs are now so powerful. Nor do I see active engagement by the Democrats.
by TheDong | 2025-04-04 04:10:54+00:00
> What's the point of our existence if we have no way to meaningfully contribute to our own world?

For a sizable number of humans, we're already there. The vast majority of hacker news users are spending their time trying to make advertisements tempt people into spending money on stuff they don't need. That's an active societal harm. It doesn't contribute in any positive way to the world.

And yet, people are fine to do that, and get their dopamine hits off instagram or arguing online on this cursed site, or watching TV.

More people will have bullshit jobs in this SF story, but a huge number of people already have bullshit jobs, and manage to find a point in their existence just fine.

I, for one, would be happy to simply read books, eat, and die.
by CapricornNoble | 2025-04-04 04:11:41+00:00
>They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding. I have no idea how someone can argue that this kind of censorship targeting universities is acceptable

Sounds like they are being forced to take the Morgan Freeman Approach to Ending Racism: stop talking about race. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2RwJlQdzpE
by kubectl_h | 2025-04-04 04:11:51+00:00
I didn't say people making under 50k weren't voting for Trump. I was saying it's not exclusively some revolution of the poor (statistically it can't be). My larger point is it doesn't matter whether his voters make 50k or 200k, they are the lowest class in American society and voting for Trump and his attendant policies is against their own economic interests.

And despite economic prosperity being the cornerstone of his 2024 campaign, somehow it isn't anymore. Now his supporters have pivoted to this idea that we must all live in a kind of austerity so that collectively (waves hands around) we enter a new age of American prosperity. Literally this sea change in MAGA sentiment has happened in the last six weeks. It's baffling.
by progmetaldev | 2025-04-04 04:12:46+00:00
Yes, lmz <https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=lmz> pointed out that I had mixed up Dave Plummer and Dave Cutler. There are actually multiple videos that Dave Plummer has done with Dave Cutler, which I found very interesting.

Reminds me of Coders At Work, by Peter Seibel, which I read right around the time that I decided to get deeper into software. Being able to read or hear about the process that went on in someone's head while developing something so major was and is still impressive, and motivating.
by kcplate | 2025-04-04 04:13:03+00:00
Which will be exactly what for the standard middle class person?

CBS published this list: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/which-products-most-affected-ta...

What exactly on this list is a day to day item that is going to adversely affect the middle class/blue collar Trump voter enough to cause them to flip their alliance? On that list maybe clothes and shoes. But even still those are generally bought only a couple of times a year and any increase will be griped about in the moment, but come election time will be forgotten.

There are only four things that will make a middle class voter feel pain enough to re-align their vote. Fuel/energy costs, general food costs, rent/housing costs, and job insecurity. If these tariffs do not adversely touch those areas, they will have little to no impact on switching votes. Also of note, over the last four years those items are the ones that drove Trump back into the Oval Office.
by nkurz | 2025-04-04 04:14:30+00:00
All true. But instead of writing a blog post complaining about it, I think you'd be better off voting with your feet and choosing a solution that puts the answer you want at the top of the list. Cut your losses and move to something that works the way you want it to. How much would such a tool be worth to you?

Yes, Kagi puts the site he wants at the top by default. And if it didn't, you can easily configure it to put the site you want on the top the next time. Possibly there are other search options that still work as well. Others should feel free to list them. But at this point rather than complaining about Google's search quality you should really make just the change.
by feoren | 2025-04-04 04:14:58+00:00
> 2. You hear the incomplete first measure as an anacrusis, or a kind of unaccented lead-in, to the second measure: OMG even more radical!

Why is this radical at all? This is exactly how most humans perceive it: as a lead-in to the second (I might even argue first) measure. It's very strange to me to say that most humans are supposed to understand the piece to have started before any sound is played. In fact that's quite preposterous: play a song that starts with a rest to 1000 people and ask them to gesture as soon as the song starts, and every single one of them will gesture on the first note played. How are they supposed to perceive the song to have started any earlier than that? A song "starting with rests" is written that way to make it understandable to the performer who is reading the notation. It's a purely notational thing. The notation is not the song, the sound is the song.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-04 04:15:26+00:00
Dells age really horribly though. Unlike ThinkPads (especially the IBM and early Lenovo days)

I used to love my T490s even. It was a really recent model but still not bad for me.

But now my work gave me a T14s and it's horrible. The keys have way less travel. The body is thinner but the screen is way thicker than the T490s's. I don't know what they're smoking but ThinkPads are dead as decent laptops.
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 04:15:34+00:00
Imagine a world where Thanos snapped his fingers and photoshop (along with every digital application like it) was wiped from Earth forever. The world would keep on turning and artists would keep on creating, but creating art would be more difficult and fewer people would be able to do it (or even touch up their own photos).

Would that world be so bad? Was the world really so horrible before photoshop existed?

What if we lost youtube? What if we lost MP3s?

We could lose a lot of things we didn't always have and we'd still survive, but that doesn't mean that those things aren't worth having or that we shouldn't want them.
by antifa | 2025-04-04 04:15:52+00:00
Nobody knows you're a Christian or right winger at a university until you open your mouth to let all the women and LGBT people know that you think they don't deserve rights, and it's not discrimination when people don't like you for being an asshole. The vast majority of Christians go to college, don't get mad that LGBT and non-Christians exist, and didn't get discriminated against.

The absolute narcissism on display here is crazy.
by necovek | 2025-04-04 04:16:25+00:00
I think this code is at least twice the size than it needs to be compared to nicer, manually produced Python code: a lot of it is really superfluous.

People have different definitions of "reasonably maintainable", but if code has extra stuff that provides no value, it always perplexes the reader (what is the point of this? what am I missing?), and increases cognitive load significantly.

But if AI coding tools were advertised as "get 10x the output of your least capable teammate", would they really go anywhere?

I love doing code reviews as an opportunity to teach people. Doing this one would suck.
by vicen2135 | 2025-04-04 04:17:05+00:00
Hey cliornd.I hope this message finds you well. I have a few questions I am hoping to ask: Is the devops role open to international applicants and provides visa sponsorship for overseas candidates? Are there any resources or articles you could recommend that discuss the current job market in Canada for overseas job seekers? I am planning to move to another country from Asia
by Tor3 | 2025-04-04 04:17:08+00:00
Since the first browser appeared I've always meant that sending a user agent id was a really bad idea. It breaks with the fundamental idea of the web protocol, that it's the server's responsibility to provide data and it's the client's responsibility to present it to the user. The server does not need to know anything about the client. Including user agent in this whole thing was a huge mistake as it allowed web site designers to code for specific quirks in browsers. I can to some extent accept a capability list from the client, but I'm not so sure even that is necessary.
by nraynaud | 2025-04-04 04:17:09+00:00
When I was young, I saw the aftermath of the speed sensor belt breaking on a 1000HP dynamometer. I think the DUT was an EV engine, the damage was quite impressive. The controller capacitors had blown, the output shaft was broken, the torque sensor had a 250Nm offset, the rotor had contacted the stator and destroyed the coils.
by hliyan | 2025-04-04 04:18:15+00:00
I wouldn't exactly use the word evil, but I do remember a time when desktop hardware and software were not so massively dominated by one or two companies. I could buy a 386 or 486 computer from any number of vendors, buy expansion cards (graphics, sound, MIDI etc.) from various other vendors, buy hard disks and optical drives from yet more vendors, and even buy DIMM memory modules from yet more vendors, and put it all together myself. Yes the machine would run DOS or Windows, but most software outside the Office suite came from various different vendors (remember Norton, Borland, Corel?)

Not blaming MS per se (much of my examples above are H/W), but the type of "consolidation" companies such as MS engaged in, killed a lot of small to medium computer hardware and software businesses.
by medion | 2025-04-04 04:19:34+00:00
It was with a freighter, China to Panama bound - no one on watch - about a quarter of the way across to Hawaii. My boat was so small it was mostly invisible to radar - I spotted it on the horizon, but it appeared to be on a parallel course so I wasn't too worried - I went back to sleep and was woken by engines. After crash gybing out of the way, I radioed the vessel many times, with no response. Out of paranoia I then did the rest of the leg with a strobe on - my next encounter was a vessel that had stopped because it thought I was in distress...
by sph | 2025-04-04 04:20:17+00:00
> My impression is that the general quality of games on steam is sub par the quality of, eg., Zelda.

What? Given that 99.9% of all games are published on Steam, what you are comparing is Zelda against gaming as a whole, not “the quality of games on steam”

Zelda is good, but it’s not better than literally all of gaming. If you are not a die hard Nintendo fan, I’d rather use Steam and enjoy saner pricing. There is always emulation for Nintendo.
by autoexec | 2025-04-04 04:20:37+00:00
> A different way of looking at it: AI, by design, defaults to regurgitating the poppiest of pop culture content.

That's the whole problem with AI. It's not creative. There's no "I" in AI. There's just what we feed it and it's a whole lot of "garbage in, garbage out". The more the world is flooded with derivative AI slop the less there will be of anything else to train AI on and eventually we're left with increasingly homogenized and uncreative content drowning out what little originality is still being made without AI.
by ryan_lane | 2025-04-04 04:21:58+00:00
MAGA isn't 50% of the population. Voter turnout was 63.7% for 2024, so I'm saying that ~32% of the USA population are objectively shit people, in the same way that Germans who supported Hitler were objectively shit people.

If you can't see that disappearing people without due process is wrong, you don't have good values. If you can't see that pardoning conmen, and insurrectionists is wrong, you don't have good values. If you can't see the use of Venezuelan prisons and Guantanamo Bay as extralegal black sites as wrong, you don't have good values. If you can't see that a president illegally ignoring the courts and congress is wrong, you don't have good values.

You could say that some of the other stuff that's happening is just an extension of the culture war, and that it's a matter of interpretation of whether it's wrong or not (DEI hate, transgender issues, abortion rights, etc). I don't agree, but those topics are harder to give a black and white answer on whether it's wrong or right.

Clear violations of the constitution, ignoring basic human rights, and doing straight up crime are black and white issues, and in general, most Trump voters support these things, and these are things he campaigned on, so even if they disagree with them now, they voted to allow it to happen.
by maeil | 2025-04-04 04:22:03+00:00
I'd have hoped someone at Google would know this is a myth.

The idea that choosing a 1% strategic internal investment over a 4.5% T-bill constitutes actionable "financial malpractice" or a breach of fiduciary duty leading to successful lawsuits is incorrect. Courts recognize that running a business requires strategic choices and risk-taking, not just maximizing immediate, risk-free yield. A lawsuit would fail unless plaintiffs could show the decision was tainted by disloyalty, bad faith, or gross negligence in the decision-making process, none of which are implied by simply choosing a lower-yield strategic project.

Hence why no one ever gets sued for this. It doesn't happen. It lives in the minds of HNers and Redditors to provide a very convenient excuse for their employers, or in general companies, making abhorrent decisions purely based on feels and short-term next-quarter profits/stock price, regardless of the negative externalities they inflict on soeciety.
by wkat4242 | 2025-04-04 04:23:27+00:00
Yeah I had a P51 at work. The name was the only cool thing about it. It had a quadro card that was completely useless for my VR stuff (Lenovo refused to sell them with GeForce back then) and it was basically a brick for no good reason. Even the charger weighed a ton. I so hated travelling with that thing.