MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tiltowait | 2025-04-05 16:49:58+00:00
It's also interesting to notice how often comedies are also tragedies.

My favorite modern example is Dumb and Dumber. If you remove the comedic timing and absurdity, it's a depressing story! By the end, Harry and Lloyd are destitute and stranded halfway across the country. They have no hopes and no prospects. Everything they tried to accomplish ended in failure. Neither got the girl in the end; the girl, in fact, was never available to be got in the first place. And in the closing scene, they reject their final lifeline because they're too dumb to recognize it.
by SirensOfTitan | 2025-04-05 16:50:15+00:00
Do you have any evidence to suggest that LLMs have increased productivity in software? And if so what is the effect size?

I don’t really see any increase in the quality, velocity, creativity of software I’m either using or working on, but I have seen a ton of candidates with real experience flunk out on interviews because they forget the basics and blame it on LLMs. I’ve honestly never seen candidates struggle with syntax the way I’m seeing them do so the last couple years.

I find LLMs very useful for general overviews of domains but I’ve not really seen any use that is a clear unambiguous boost to productivity. You still have to read the code and understand it which takes time, but “vibe coding” prevents you from building cognitive load until that point, making code review costly.

I feel like a lot of the hype in this space so far is aspirational, pushed by VCs, or a bunch of engineers who aren’t A/B testing: like for every hour you spend rubber ducking with an LLM, how much could you have gotten thought out with a pen and paper? In fact, usually I can go and enjoy my life more without an LLM: I write down the problem I’m considering and then go on a walk, and come back and have a mind full of new ideas.
by aisenik | 2025-04-05 16:52:06+00:00
This implies significant deflation, $7.25/hr locks you out of traditional rental market and property ownership and access to foods beyond the cheapest staples.

You'd be looking at >60hr weeks doing physical labor and living hand to mouth in extreme poverty to sort of stay above water unless everything drops in price by an order of magnitude.

The implication that there will not be a massive drop in quality of life and workplace environments is difficult to reconcile with the seemingly-required impacts of massive deflation in real estate assets and commodity prices.
by antirez | 2025-04-05 16:52:50+00:00
LLMs learn from examples where the logits are not probabilities, but how a given sentence continues (only one token is set to 1). So they don't learn probabilities, they learn how to continue the sentence with a given token. We apply softmax at the logits for mathematical reasons, and it is natural/simpler to think in terms of probabilities, but that's not what happens, nor the neural networks they are composed of is just able to approximate probabilistic functions. This "next token" probability is the source of a lot misunderstanding. It's much better to imagine the logits as "To continue my reply I could say this word, more than the others, or maybe that one, a bit less, ..." and so forth. Now there are evidences, too, that in the activations producing a given token the LLM already has an idea about how most of the sentence is going to continue.

Of course, as they learn, early in the training, the first functions they will model, to lower the error, will start being the probabilities of the next tokens, since this is the simplest function that works for the loss reduction. Then gradients agree in other directions, and the function that the LLM eventually learn is no longer related to probabilities, but to the meaning of the sentence and what it makes sense to say next.

It's not be chance that often the logits have a huge signal in just two or three tokens, even if the sentence, probabilistically speaking, could continue in much more potential ways.
by lossolo | 2025-04-05 16:52:57+00:00
> And let's be clear — the US did not "lose a war" in Afghanistan or Iraq. Yes, we had failed pseudo-occupations. That is not the same as losing a war.

You do not wage war for the sake of war, war is a tool for achieving political goals. What you're saying is that the U.S. won battles in these wars, but ultimately lost because they failed to achieve their political objectives — which were the very reasons the wars were started in the first place. They lost in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. They lost all of these wars.
by bko | 2025-04-05 16:53:22+00:00
Because he has a core belief and based on that core belief he made some statements that turned out to be incorrect. But he kept the core belief and adjusted the statements.

So it's not so much about his incorrect predictions, but that these predictions were based on a core belief. And when the predictions turned out to be false, he didn't adjust his core beliefs, but just his predictions.

So it's natural to ask, if none of the predictions you derived from your core belief come true, maybe your core belief isn't true.
by dragonwriter | 2025-04-05 16:53:29+00:00
> Here’s what I always remind myself about this current government: It is really the worst ideas conflated together, but it was that, or elect leftists in power.

There were basically no leftists running under any major party banner for any federal office in the US, and the small number of arguable center-leftists doing so in the general election were mostly incumbents, and mostly reelected.

It was not, in fact, a choice between leftists and what we got, it was a choice between the center-right corporate capitalist wing of the Democratic Party and what is, at best, lawless kleptocracy and at worst outright fascism.
by mattgreenrocks | 2025-04-05 16:54:01+00:00
Algebraic data types are superb for compilers. Case exhaustiveness checks are really helpful in this domain, especially when doing any sort of semantic analysis.

Frankly, I try to avoid languages that don’t have ADTs as much as possible. They are incredibly useful for specifying invariants via your design, and their constraints on inputs lend themselves to easier implementation and maintenance.
by spicybright | 2025-04-05 16:54:11+00:00
Just worked through a lot of the puzzles. I love the concept, and I also like how the timer doesn't reset when you switch between them.

3 pieces of feedback:

1. Since your time matters, a start button before a new puzzle is presented would be nice.

2. I wanted to play more puzzles but didn't realize the calendar button up top switched puzzles till reading comments. I think fading the screen with an overlay with the existing buttons and adding a "Play Another?" button would hook people in more.

3. Some of the scrambles are too easy. Maybe that's by design, but an example is "PAWSN" in the apr 4th chess puzzle, it's stupidly obvious compared to the other words.

But again really awesome content and would make an amazing mobile website or app.
by phillipseamore | 2025-04-05 16:54:41+00:00
There's no need for real names, what is needed is that you can't create multiple accounts. This can be done without linking identities by using two unrelated parties. Party A is the platform and B is the authenticator, when creating an account on A you are sent to B to authenticate your identity and get a token to finish your account creation on A. As long as A and B are separate, A never knows the identity of the user and B doesn't know what the user represents himself on A.
by gus_massa | 2025-04-05 16:56:04+00:00
[Hi from Argentina!] LLM have a particular style that will make people suspictious or even angry.

One posibility is to write the answer in Korean and use autotranslation. (And post only the autotranslation.) Double check the technical terms, because autotranslation sometimes choose the wrong synonym.

Another posibility is to write the answer in English inside gmail, and gmail will highlight orthographical and gramar errors. So you can fix them.

Most people here will tolerate a few mistakes if the answer has your own personal style.

(Nice project, by the way.)
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-04-05 16:56:18+00:00
In many ways, a half-truth is worse than a simple lie, and there is no guarantee all parties are wrong in their own way:

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Poems_of_John_Godfrey_Sax...

Media tends to interview the most outrageous looking imbecile they can find at any event... regardless of political affiliation. The Sinclair Broadcast Group helps local news maintain consistent messaging, and thus any mistakes intentional or not are less noticeable.

Fact-checking is only as good as the data sources people find. There are groups that ran entire fake scientific journals to sell the public outright nonsense.

Verifiable facts are difficult to validate. "AI"/LLM slop content just made it worse =3
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-05 16:57:48+00:00
> As LLMs do things thought to be impossible before

Like what?

Your timeline doesn't sound crazy outlandish. It sounds pretty normal and lines up with my thoughts as AI has advanced over the past few years. Maybe more conservative than others in the field, but that's not a reason to dismiss him entirely any more than the hypesters should be dismissed entirely because they were over promising and under delivering?

> Now reasoning models can solve problems they never saw

This is not the same as a novel question though.

> o3 did huge progresses on ARC

Is this a benchmark? O3 might be great, but I think the average person's experience with LLMs matches what he's saying, it seems like there is a peak and we're hitting it. It also matches what Ilya said about training data being mostly gone and new architectures (not improvements to existing ones) needing to be the way forward.

> LeCun is directing an AI lab that as the same point has the following huge issues

Second point has nothing to do with the lab and more to do with Meta. Your last point has nothing to do with the lab at all. Meta also said they will have an agent that codes like a junior engineer by the end of the year and they are clearly going to miss that prediction, so does that extra hype put them back in your good books?
by rurp | 2025-04-05 16:58:15+00:00
Saying that sanctions helped the Russian economy is an absolutely wild claim to make, and not one I have seen made from a single credible source.

Double digit inflation despite a central bank baseline rate of over 20% is absolutely terrible. GDP numbers are only staying up because their government is spending a massive amount on the millitary and running huge deficits. The situation is very bad and getting worse. Millions of prime age workers have been pulled from productive work to supply the army and serve as assault troops. Hundreds of thousands have been killed or disabled.

The soviet stockpile drawdowns appear to have peaked which will put even more strain on the system. Nobody knows when the system will collapse but it will get there sooner or later without some major changes.
by djoldman | 2025-04-05 16:58:53+00:00
The idolatry and drama surrounding LeCun, Hinton, Schmidhuber, etc. is likely a distraction. This includes their various predictions.

More interesting is their research work. JEPA is what LeCun is betting on:

https://ai.meta.com/blog/v-jepa-yann-lecun-ai-model-video-jo...
by ben_w | 2025-04-05 16:59:36+00:00
I agree about SwiftUI. It's something I want to like, but everything about it… no.

For me, SwiftUI does exactly two things better than UIKit: tables and collection views. For everything else, it's so much easier to get stuff done with UIKit*, regardless of if I'm working with Interface Builder or making UI in code (as per various projects I've dropped into).

In theory, reactive UI is good. In practice, at least in the case of SwiftUI, the "magic" data passing does sometimes fail — perhaps someone put in the wrong @ on the property — and then you've got to debug some weird magic, and if there's a sensible place to put a breakpoint for that kind of problem I have yet to learn it.

In theory, the UI is reusable across all Apple platforms. In practice, the nature of the user experience is so different that actually trying this makes it suck for everyone — you don't want finger-sized buttons on a mouse-driven UI or tiny mouse-suitable click areas for a mobile UI, and I have no idea what the user expectations are for tvOS or WatchOS despite having written apps for both because hardly anyone shares their experiences and lessons learned.

In theory, having the code be the source of truth for the WYSIWYG editor is great. In practice, the WYSIWYG editor keeps giving up because of e.g. a compiler error, and decides to stop forever until you manually resume the preview.

* I'm mostly on iOS rather than macOS, but I'd assume UIKit and AppKit have the same strengths and weaknesses.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-05 17:00:11+00:00
> In fact, pattern-matching is all there is: That's a bear, run away; I'm in a restaurant, I need to order; this is like a binary tree, I can solve it recursively.

This is not correct. It does not explain creativity at all. It cannot solely be based on pattern matching. I'm not saying no AI is creative, but this logic does not explain creativity
by bitshiftfaced | 2025-04-05 17:00:25+00:00
From what I can see, Madagascar in 2024 had a trade deficit with the US of about $700 million and had total imports of about $5.4 billion. It's feasible that they might prefer to transfer 13%[0] of their current imports to sources from the USA even if it's more expensive since being able to export more cheaply to the USA would be a net gain.

0. Actually less than this since there's a floor of a 10% tariffs. They can have deficit/imports of up to 20% before they incur a penalty.
by jxjnskkzxxhx | 2025-04-05 17:02:39+00:00
I don't think the difference is material, between "they learn probabilities" Vs "they learn how they want a sentence to continue". Seems like an implementation detail to me. In fact, you can add a temperature, set it to zero, and you become deterministic, so no probabilities anywhere. The fact is, they learn from examples of sequences and are very good at finding patterns in those sequences, to a point that they "sound human".

But the point of my response was just that I find it an extremely surprising how well an idea as simple as "find patterns in sequences" actually works for the purpose of sounding human, and I'm suspicious of anyone who pretends this isn't incredible. Can we agree on this?
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-05 17:02:43+00:00
I personally benefit from AI auto complete when coding. I think that value isn't worth what people say it is. But I'm often wrong about what I think the value of something is (e.g. social media) and it's true value. I unfortunately often have people try to justify their thinking or beliefs by just pasting a ChatGPT output or screenshot to "prove" it.
by darth_avocado | 2025-04-05 17:03:08+00:00
Not at all a silly argument. The human species is extremely bad at understanding the delicate balance the nature is in and extremely bad at estimating how much we know about nature. We don’t even know all the insect species that exist, yet we are comfortable telling others that they will find other similar food.

It’s the kind of confidence aliens would have observing humans eating lettuce and assuming we’d be fine with grazing grass if they take all the leafy vegetables away.
by latexr | 2025-04-05 17:03:19+00:00
You’re ignoring half of the argument. I have given some examples of branding and some examples of real use. “Legibility, and understanding” aren’t branding. “Dyslexia” isn’t branding. Typography is a branch of graphic design with a lot of study behind it. Just like subtle uses of colour and element positioning can change how you interact with, perceive, and feel about an interface, so can typefaces.

Again, just because you’re unable to notice how exactly you’re being affected does not mean you aren’t. You also don’t notice all the ways you’re affected by advertising, but they still work on you.

Yes, of course not every single subtle change to a font makes a huge impact. Just like a single subtle change to a colour’s hue doesn’t. But pronounced changes do, even when you’re unable to put your finger on it.
by znpy | 2025-04-05 17:03:21+00:00
You seem to have missed the lesson completely:

> But it's not without cause or just doing it out of the kindness of his heart... As it turns out ultimately this regression was inadvertently introduced by the [nVidia] engineer.

And it's not even responsibility really. If an engineer from company A had introduced a regression that impacts company A's direct competitor (company B)... That's borderline sabotage.

It's not sabotage only because the engineer from company A (nVidia) fixed the regression.
by overfeed | 2025-04-05 17:03:32+00:00
> you won't miss that right at all.

Until the day the goons break down your door and drag you away. Then you'll wish you had a fair trial. "It'll never happen to me if I keep may head down" will ensure no one will feel safe about publicly opposing the president on any issue.

Your dictator is not special, most of them concentrate their power by claiming to address an issue that's legitimately concerns a lot of citizens; Idi Amin expelled Asians under cover of addressing inequality.
by tiu | 2025-04-05 17:04:05+00:00
I just got over writing 2 (well 2.5) toy compilers and I think a lot of the material in the compiler-teaching space lack some subtle developmental aspects.

I wish there was a course designed somewhere which talked about more ingrained issues: how to structure/design the AST[0], buffer based vs noncontextual tokenization/parser design, index handling and error sync in the parser, supporting multiple codegen architectures, handling FFI, exposing the compiler as an API for external tooling, namespaces and linkage handling etc. etc. etc.

It is refreshing to see how Carbon designed some of its components (majorly the frontend, yet to take a look at the backend) as it touches on some of the subtleties I mentioned. If someone is starting out on writing one, I would recommend taking a look at it or any of the talks.

Always nice to see new material coming up. A few resources that I would like to mention would be dabaez's compiler course, Khoury college's compiler course (in Rust, previously i think and Ocaml), Nora Sandler's book as well as http://compilerbook.org; Which I consider to be the best guide out there for writing small learning compilers, the videos are good as well.

[0]: Some related content that I enjoyed reading: https://lesleylai.info/en/ast-in-cpp-part-1-variant/
by jchw | 2025-04-05 17:04:22+00:00
Well, I don't have one, so I can't say with great certainty. I did, however, have a Pinephone Pro, and the experience wasn't great for a few different reasons. The Librem 5 is apparently faster, but it seems like it's not that much faster, so even if the experience is better I'd suspect it's not ready for most people. I think that's a real shame because it feels close and the target they're chasing (usable daily driver) isn't really moving as fast as it once was, but compared to a very cheap Android phone, the relatively-expensive Librem 5 is weak in almost every dimension. I considered buying it anyways... but I know damn well I can't daily drive it yet.
by moosey | 2025-04-05 17:04:31+00:00
I don't aliens that could come here would recognize profit as something real. They would see us destroying the world to eat meat. To pointlessly travel at high speeds. To drive cars around in pointless errands. To collect pointless knick knacks for social stature.

The penguin gives a stone to his mate. The human buys an F150 to attract social attention and a mate. To a hypothetical alien species, the gap between the intelligence of these two species is not large.

Collectively, we act in accordance with our biology.
by m463 | 2025-04-05 17:04:38+00:00
wingspan is on my wishlist.

I played this computer game "eliza" by zachtronics and it had this very interesting solitaire mini-game inside it. I liked it so much I bought the zachtronics solitaire collection. And wow, I would launch it "between things" for a moment and it could easily spin the clock forward an hour or more.

I had to delete it from my computer.

I think there are some things you have to just say no to and go through the pain of making yourself bored so something better will fill in.

I think wingspan may remain on my wishlist :)
by giardini | 2025-04-05 17:05:32+00:00
cycomanic says>"Europeans seem to be much more susceptible to an "if you don't want it to be done to you don't do it to others" argument"<

While they may "talk the talk", Europe doesn't "Walk the walk"! Europe has strong tariffs on imports. The USA is now simply equalizing the situation. Here's an example:

Automobile Tariffs by Country 2025: put your cursor on a country to see its automobile tariff. European tariffs on autos are roughly four times those of the USA. While you're there you can look up the "sales tax" too!

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/automobil...

European companies have had tariffs on USA products for decades. Those tariffs protect and maintain industries within a country. The USA failed to maintain that protection: the USA lost jobs and harmed industry which guts an economy. Meanwhile, for example, Germany protected it's auto industry with tariffs on cars from abroad.

My feeling is that "What's good for the goose is good for the gander."

There's no doubt that the "Law of Comparative Advantage"(LCA) in economics is a valid argument for trade. However, the LCA is almost always argued in the absence of externalities: costs generated by use of the LCA are usually not taken into account when examining a full economy: job losses, industry shrinkage and failure, etc.
by aprilthird2021 | 2025-04-05 17:05:34+00:00
But it possibly did lower our ability to memorize? We may be didn't need that ability to be so high to go to Mars or whatever.

I'm just saying, it's possible that reliving our minds of various tasks worked incrementally each time until a point it didn't anymore. Same way our liberal and egalitarian progress as a society worked great until all our countries started having birth rate problems? I mean, not trying to start another argument. The point is. Something (technological progress, social progress, even financial progress) can be great until we hit a point of no return where things collapse.
by mindslight | 2025-04-05 17:05:42+00:00
I think there's something like a dual of the uncanny valley when it comes to protocol complexity vs adoption. Really simple like UART, I2C, or SPI, and engineers will adopt it on their own. But once you start wanting to add some higher level features, engineers would just as soon reinvent their own proprietary schemes for their own specific needs (the "valley"), and the network effects go away. So to create a more popular protocol you end up with a design committee where everyone piles in their own bespoke feature requests and the thing ends up being an ugly complex standard that nobody really likes. But at least it gives it a shot at wider adoption to prime the pump of network effects. (Or maybe it's more akin to how Java beats the Lisp Curse by using the social effect of having to raise an army to do anything?)
by dccsillag | 2025-04-05 17:05:56+00:00
Hard disagree. There are a lot of implementation "details" that, if you want to do properly, are a lot of hard work and very much nontrivial. For example, do try to write a compiler with efficient incremental compilation, and especially one that does so while also having optimization passes. And that's just one example, most things in compiler implementations actually turn out to be fairly complex. And lots of features that modern languages support e.g. more powerful typesystems, trait/typeclass systems, etc. are also very very tricky.

While designing a language is by no means trivial, it generally really occupies just a very small fraction of the language/compiler developer's time. And, in most cases, the two things (language design + implementation details) have to walk hand-in-hand, since small changes to the language design can vastly improve the implementation end.