MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by augusto-moura | 2025-04-20 22:54:06+00:00
I believe getting a job "just" to get by should be easy, there are plenty of entry and manual jobs to start from, specially if you are young. Construction, farming, auto-mechanic, or even flipping burgers. The true challenge is getting a good pay, or getting social momentum to get out of the situation, there is only a few careers that allow smart people to get out of the "shithole" (pardon my french). IT, for the longest time, was one of such careers.

Surely IT is still a solid career choice for the next 10 years, probably. But if in the past I couldn't find a way on how IT could get outdated or out of fashion, with all the current instabilities, and the sheer number of people getting in the field every year, I kinda see the end of the tunnel. It might be that in the next few decades IT work will be as basic as blue collars, which is not bad per se, but very different from what most people expect.
by dannyobrien | 2025-04-20 22:55:10+00:00
I'm a bit confused here. Are you saying that if I zero out the system prompt on any LLM, including those fine-tuned to give answers in an instructional form, they will follow your effect -- that nonsense prompts will get similar results to coherent prompts if they contain many of the same words?

Because I've tried it on a few local models I have handy, and I don't see that happening at all. As someone else says, some of that difference is almost certainly due to supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) -- but it's weird to me, given the confidence you made your prediction, that you didn't exclude those from your original statement.

I guess, maybe the real question here is: could you give me a more explicit example of how to show what you are trying to show? And explain why I'm not seeing it while running local models without system prompts?
by tim333 | 2025-04-20 22:55:18+00:00
This isn't the holocaust though and probably not fascism. There's an earlier article about ICE arresting Americans:

>The largest number of those arrests occurred in 2012 and 2013 -- at the height of an aggressive push by the Obama administration to deport unauthorized immigrants. https://www.latimes.com/archives/story/2018-04-27/ice-held-a...
by slashdev | 2025-04-20 22:55:43+00:00
That’s the official narrative out of China, and it’s a hopeful one. It doesn’t fit the data though, at least so far. China is constructing record amounts of coal power and consuming ever increasing quantities of coal. https://www.carbonbrief.org/chinas-construction-of-new-coal-...

But even if they manage to turn that around decades from now, the coal will go to India or Africa, it’s not going to stay in the ground until it’s really uneconomical (and even then more likely to be replaced by natural gas than renewables.) Again, some countries may achieve success with regulation in isolation, but what matters is what the whole world does. There I think regulation doesn’t work because we don’t have one government, but instead many competing nations. Tragedy of the commons rules more often than not. This is where we disagree. The data is currently on my side, fossil fuel consumption is at record levels and increasing still. I think your position is this will change at some point in the future, with the help of regulation.

Renewables are way cheaper than coal power in many places, but at the extreme they basically need backing by equal fossil fuel infrastructure as they come to dominate the grid. Because you have to have electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. When you add that to the costs, then they don’t currently win. Fixing that is the innovation that can solve this, which I think we both agree on.
by swat535 | 2025-04-20 22:56:40+00:00
I think there's also a significant cultural dimension to this discussion.

For example, in many Middle Eastern and Asian cultures (pardon my generalization here), there's an ingrained expectation that children should be pushed, often quite hard, especially in areas like mathematics, science, engineering, and law. Hence the old cliche: "You have three career options: doctor, lawyer, or engineer.".

I've seen this firsthand as a Middle Easterner (I was born in IRAN). My father is an engineer, and both my parents were relentless when it came to academic discipline. I ended up in computer science, and my brother became a pharmaceutical researcher after obtaining his PHD.. There's no question that this kind of structure and pressure produced tangible results. But I'd be lying if I said it was an easy or joyful process. It ended up costing me plenty of social anxieties and now I struggle with social dynamics.

That said, I have mixed feelings about it. While the rigor pays off in terms of career and technical competence, it often comes at the cost of creativity, intrinsic motivation, and the space to explore things like literature, music, and the arts. I sometimes wonder what paths we might have followed if exploration had been valued as highly as performance.

So I _partially_ agree with you that some degree of external motivation is necessary, especially with children who haven't yet developed discipline. But I also think we should be careful not to frame this solely as a matter of "lazy" vs. "good" parenting. Upon reflection, I think that there's a balance between encouragement, discipline, and allowing for the development of intrinsic interest. Different families, cultures, and even individual children may need to strike this in different ways.
by gilbetron | 2025-04-20 22:57:13+00:00
AGI that is bad at some things is still AGI. We have AGI, it is just bad at some things and hallucinates. It is literally smarter than many people I know, but that doesn't mean it can beat a human at anything. That would be ASI, which, hopefully, will take a while to get here.

Although, I could be argued into calling what we have already ASI - take a human and Gemini 2.5, and put them through a barrage of omni-disciplinary questions and situations and problems. Gemini 2.5 will win, but not absolutely.

AGI (we have) ASI (we might have) AOI (Artificial Omniscient Intelligence, will hopefully take a while to get here)
by tagalog | 2025-04-20 22:57:19+00:00
OpenAI probably has 3 main reasons

1. Opportunity cost of shifting their team to work on a cursor/ firebase studio/ windsurf clone while they are locked into a model arms race might be worth much more than $3 billion if risk losing supremacy

2. They get a million users day one of the deal getting done and instantly own the team + the number 2 best IDE which gives them a massive boost over all their other model competitors like Google and Anthropic. Personally, I still think we are early enough that building makes more sense, so reason 1 still feels the strongest.

3. You get the dedicated windsurf team that can focus 100% on this product while your main model teams can keep cranking
by accrual | 2025-04-20 22:58:43+00:00
> I cannot tell you why all the kids are addicted to every digital thing imaginable

"They speak of my drinking but not of my thirst"

I think it's important to have safeguards around substances like alcohol and THC, age restrictions, education, etc. But we also should think about why people turn to these things. If kids are vaping and spending hours scrolling on social media, maybe we should assess what can be done to bring their attention away from those things and towards activities, third spaces, and offer non-substance ways to alleviate stress and anxiety. Some of these things are available, but perhaps not in the ratio required to make a dent in the substance/media usage.
by meroes | 2025-04-20 22:59:14+00:00
I mean it’s beyond the scope of o3 or Gemini 2.5 pro or any other public LLM to play a full game of Sudoku. Of course they’re jagged if they do have peaks elsewhere. But even where they are supposed to excel, I very very rarely come across a fully correct technical response, even from these two most recent models.

If you ask it a math question beyond average middle school level, it will have holes (mathematical errors or misleading) at least within a few follow up turns if not right away. And that’s without trying to fool it.

In ten+ years of Wolfram Alpha I’ve found one error (and that was with the help of o3-mini funnily enough).

I’m still on the stochastic parrots side, which is a useful tool in some occasions.
by ben_w | 2025-04-20 22:59:38+00:00
Indeed, on both. Even IQ 85 would make a painful dent in the economy via unemployment statistics. But the AI we have now is spikey, in ways that make it trip up over mistakes even slighly below average humans would not make, even though it can also do Maths Olympiad puzzles, the bar exam, leetcode, etc.
by rainsford | 2025-04-20 23:00:38+00:00
I was on a civil jury a while ago and it was pretty eye opening how the process actually works. I'd say about half of the court time was dedicated to arguments about proving specific damages and ultimately the result was that the jury found in favor of the plaintiff but awarded a much lower damage amount than they were asking for specifically because they failed to prove that amount of harm. The idea of juries plucking random numbers of out thin air doesn't even remotely match my experience, or reality based on conversations I've had with lawyers I know.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-04-20 23:00:53+00:00
You could only later get the thing if you grabbed its hash while it was still available. And you could only reliably resolve that hash later if somebody (maybe you) went out of their way to pin the underlying data. Otherwise nodes would forget rather quickly, because why bother keep around unreferenced bits?

It's the same functionality you get with permalinks and sites like archive.org--forgotten unless explicitly remembered by anybody, dynamic unless explicitly a permalink. It's just built into the protocol rather than a feature to be inconsistently implemented over and over by many separate parties.
by Ichthypresbyter | 2025-04-20 23:02:05+00:00
>Posh = not from round here.

Perhaps the best example of that is that, as one of the linked maps [0] says, both British people who rhyme "scone" with "gone" and those who rhyme it with "alone" think that the other pronunciation is the "posh" one.

[0]https://starkeycomics.com/2024/05/10/eight-british-and-irish...
by wahern | 2025-04-20 23:02:33+00:00
Lottery payouts are structured to ensure the state always comes out ahead. The state takes its share off the top, presumably along with the vendor fees; the jackpot is what's left over. It's not stated plainly, but the article does mention it:

> The Texas Lottery Commission heralded the win, the third largest in state history, which helped raise around $50 million for the state’s public schools out of $138 million in sales over the life of the jackpot run.

That doesn't quite add up as the the jackpot was $95 million ($138 - $50 == $88), so perhaps the article overstates the net revenue or got some numbers wrong?

To the extent anyone lost something concrete, it was those Texans who play the lottery; their expected payout was smaller than it might otherwise have been as they were guaranteed to have to split the pot with the syndicate. OTOH, strictly speaking the syndicate also took a commensurate risk. If 3 or possibly even 2 other players had also won, they would have lost money.

But there's also the loss of confidence and injury to people's sense of fairness, where mathematical odds are only one part of the fuzzy equation. The Texas Lottery organizers thought they were doing right by the state. The more tickets sold, the more money in net revenue. But maybe they should have considered more the long-term implications to the lottery's image and stable revenue streams. Though, at the end of the day perhaps they still made the right decision as fiduciaries, notwithstanding some of them seem to have lost their jobs in the process. In similar cases in other states (usually involving scratch offs?), lotteries knew for years about net-positive schemes, but kept the odds structures as they brought in greater revenue (e.g. attracting interest from savvy players outside the state) regardless. Because the vast majority of players don't respond perfectly elastically to expected odds, especially when they're not a fixed function (e.g. they don't consider things like jackpot sharing), it's arguably a legitimate approach to increase revenue, at least until the schemes become well known.
by antisthenes | 2025-04-20 23:04:47+00:00
This is good advice. I will echo this by saying - ask within your community, start with your parents and see if they have any advice or anyone who needs work.

Maybe some trades can be done on the side? Plumbing/Electric/HVAC? These are not fancy or glorious and won't get you rich, but quality tradesman work will always be in demand.
by hedora | 2025-04-20 23:05:22+00:00
Yeah. I want a weather station, automated blinds and automated window openers. (We have European style 2 way tilt windows. They can tilt open a bit and still be secure against burglars).

The weather station would be for solar load, outdoor temperature, precipitation and (most importantly) wind.

They’d all be coordinated with a local docker container or something like that.

Anyway, if this existed when we built the house, I’d have paid at least $30K for the system, installed and configured. I doubt I’m the only one. It’d be nice if it could control the furnace / ac too.

Edit: also, skylight openers, which are surprisingly inexpensive, except the software integration sounded like a nightmare.
by eastbound | 2025-04-20 23:05:40+00:00
Totally possible that watermark identifies cinemas and showtimes uniquely, and that pirates are due for a lifetime of prosecution. Or that studios will shut down some cinemas, until it stops.

For 15 years you let paid options progress. Then fewer people pirate, then you catch the rest. At the beginning you don’t see it putting its clamps; then suddenly you don’t find piracy anywhere.
by h2zizzle | 2025-04-20 23:06:14+00:00
There's at least one manga series focused on teaching secondary-level maths. It's a bit dry but gets the job done as an introduction. For something a bit more... specific and involved, there's Cipher Academy, a shonen series where all of the battles take the form of cryptography challenges, often based on esoteric Japanese cultural knowledge (the original English translator dropped the series because it was next to impossible to localize things like "a cipher based on mapping the Japanese syllabary to a list of prefectures").
by ac29 | 2025-04-20 23:06:43+00:00
> Gemini 2.5 pro the model has not gained any intelligence since it is a static model.

Aren't all the people interacting with it on aistudio helping the next Gemini model learn though?

Sure, the results of that wont be available until the next model is released, but it seems to me that human interaction/feedback is actually a vital part of LLM training.
by keybored | 2025-04-20 23:07:01+00:00
I love libraries that does a simple check and signals that it "failed" with ThingWasNotTrueException.

In surprising twist: Java has ConcurrentModificationException. And, to counter its own culture of exception misuse, the docs have a stern reminder that this exception is supposed to be thrown when there are bugs. You are not supposed to use it to, I dunno, iterate over the collection and bail out (control flow) based on getting this exception.
by RetroTechie | 2025-04-20 23:09:25+00:00
"It’s not just about hating tech maybe more about buying privacy."

For the ultra-rich, probably this.

Personally, I don't mind 'smart' tech. But only if used wisely, making life more comfortable, saving energy, etc.

I do mind the 'let random 3rd parties spy on your everyday life' part. 'Smart' could be just "automatic" and/or LAN only. Connected but not to anywhere outside the house.

Also I dislike making things more complicated than necessary. Light on/off? Physical switch does the job. Ok, add TV-style remote if you want. But doesn't need phone app/WAN networking or software updates.
by Udo | 2025-04-20 23:10:19+00:00
Yes, skip would be good, but I'd also advocate an option like "I reject the premise of the question".

In legal contexts yes-or-no answers can work because the case can in theory be boiled down to guilty or not. If there is any flaw with the case, the answer should be not guilty.

But let's take the "do I have a moral duty to..." questions used as examples here for contrast. I'd argue you never had a moral duty to attend your sibling's wedding to begin with. But because the question was asked with a weird modifier like "even if it's their 3rd wedding", any answer you give will be inadequate and will just serve to reinforce the flawed premise. Skipping is not enough in my opinion, because even if communicated to the question asker, it doesn't make it clear whether there as an issue on the answerer's side ("I don't know" / "don't feel qualified") or with the question itself.
by ninkendo | 2025-04-20 23:10:31+00:00
I seem to remember a thing china did 10 years back where they injected JavaScript into every web request that went through their Great Firewall to target GitHub… I think it’s known as the “Great Cannon” because they can basically make every Chinese internet user’s browser hit your website in a DoS attack.

Digging it up: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/04/10...
by whateveracct | 2025-04-20 23:11:22+00:00
lying during interviews about things with no actual objective truth is a really key skill

lying on the job too like this is an important political skill too. referencing past projects rhetorically and abusing the fact that your "professional opinion" is fluid is a powerful way to motivate people. You are allowed to over- or under-sell how good or bad an engineering decision/project/tool/process worked.
by hammock | 2025-04-20 23:11:31+00:00
> We’ve gone through rounds of working out if the leafy vegetables absorb the heavy metals or if it’s mostly in the dust and last I read we’re back to the latter.

It depends. For leafy vegetables it makes sense that dust > soil. However we find more lead and antimony in corn grown in proximity to highways.. this is clearly from road runoff taken up by the plant through the soil . We also find arsenic in brown rice and other crops again taken up through the soil because these soils are heavily contaminated from past arsenic-bearing pesticide use

But, dust/ topicals also matter. There is a reason fruits with thick skins like avocados, pineapple, melon, kiwi, always find themselves on the "Clean 15" list every year- because they are testing the flesh of the fruit, which is protected from topical pesticides by the skins. But I eat the kiwi skins sometimes...or make tea with the pineapple rinds... which people usually don't... and am guessing that they are a lot worse than the flesh.
by rs186 | 2025-04-20 23:11:34+00:00
I assume Tesla doesn't have to settle if there is no basis for the claim, if it does not violate any law, or it is not afraid of internal documents revealed about this in discovery. And Tesla has the money and hires lawyers for dragging an ordinary employee into deep lawsuits. If they care enough about what's "right" and the facts, they would prove that in court.

The mere fact that there is a settlement says something to me.
by echelon | 2025-04-20 23:11:34+00:00
In 100 years (probably sooner), the vast majority of people won't be watching our films anymore. Those deep catalogs of IP have lower value with each passing year.

Films are becoming less and less popular with new forms of entertainment that are more immediate, more democratized or individualistic. Our dopamine is being juiced and our attention getting sucked into games, social media, and all other kinds of long tail attractors. Influencers are bigger than Hollywood stars. They simply cater to more interests. Distribution and production are no longer hard problems, so you don't need to build up a Hollywood star.

Film is becoming what radio used to be. It may never become as niche as the radio drama is today, but it certainly won't have the same limitless trajectory we thought it would have pre-pandemic.

Whatever we do today to "fix" films or make them more accessible is accomplishing one thing: extending their lifespan for as long as most (average, non-film connoisseur) people might still be interested in watching.
by tenacious_tuna | 2025-04-20 23:12:03+00:00
I think this is a very limited take for a hacker forum. We talk about how useful accurate names for variables are all the time, or generally how working to encode more natural/context-related semantics to code helps anyone reading it understand what the goal is better than an extremely terse symbology.

Yeah, lots of existing math texts will forever exist with greek alphabet soup, but we don't have to rely on those as our be-all-end-all teaching tools.

To operate at a high level in mathematics I would agree that having the skill of easily abstracting complex things into compact symbols is a necessary skill, just as I would agree to the same concept applied to software engineering or really any complex engineering system; by the same token, we don't have to START on hard mode with all of our students. Math is infamously difficult for some, largely (I think) because we make it unnecessarily opaque out of some misguided sense of traditionalism.

If we want to have lots of people who are good at math we should embrace whatever pedagogy is effective.
by pain_perdu | 2025-04-20 23:13:05+00:00
I don't think new theatre releases are generally getting leak in digital formats anymore until they hit streaming which can sometimes be as soon as weeks or couple months after original release. Obviously 'tele-syncs' (cameras capturing the film) still exist but that wasn't your question. The one exception to this can be oscar movie season when studios release films via a special Apple TV app and that be be slightly less secure (though still water-marked).

I would ask you to support your claim of 'high quality digital dumps' by citing one that has come out in the last couple years. See https://predb.net/
by hollandheese | 2025-04-20 23:14:45+00:00
Sorry no.

You are misrepresenting what's happening. Other departments use beginning math classes as a way of weeding out students they feel won't succeed in their fields because they can't pass basic mathematics classes. Most math departments would absolutely love to have more students in them.

The problem is that these students aren't prepared properly by K-12 mathematics courses and math builds upon itself. If you don't have a good grasp of algebra, you just won't succeed at calculus. We're sticking people in the equivalent of Spanish 4 without having learned Spanish 1 properly.
by ipdashc | 2025-04-20 23:17:30+00:00
Yeah, this has been confusing me a bit. I'm not complaining by ANY means, but why does it suddenly feel like everyone cares about data privacy in LLM contexts, way more than previous attitudes to allowing data to sit on a bunch of random SaaS products?

I assume because of the assumption that the AI companies will train off of your data, causing it to leak? But I thought all these services had enterprise tiers where they'll promise not to do that?

Again, I'm not complaining, it's good to see people caring about where their data goes. Just interesting that they care now, but not before. (In some ways LLMs should be one of the safer services, since they don't even really need to store any data, they can delete it after the query or conversation is over.)
by WalterBright | 2025-04-20 23:17:51+00:00
It's not novel. D pioneered compile time function execution (CTFE) back around 2007. The idea has since been adopted in many other languages, like C++.

One thing it is used for is generating string literals, which then can be fed to the compiler. This takes the place of macros.

CTFE is one of D's most popular and loved features.