MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by eej71 | 2025-04-10 15:14:35+00:00
I'm glad to see someone else describe their experience this way too.

bazel has arrived at $WORK and it has been a non-trivial amount of work for even the passionate advocates of bazel. I know it was written by the Very Smart People at google. They are clearly smarter than me so I must be the dummy. Especially since I never passed their interview tests. :-)

Of course given all things google, by the time I'm fully onboard the train, the cool kids will be making a new train and then I'll have to hop onto that way to enjoy the rewards of the promised land that never quite seem to arrive.
by gh0stcat | 2025-04-10 15:14:48+00:00
What's crazy to me is it seems that we as a society have determined that it is far easier and more efficient to throw billions of dollars into a language token generating tool than teach people how to work with computers. It shows that most humans find it so psychologically painful to understand a system of rules and logical problem solving, that they choose to use an LLM, which in many instances is a far less efficient and salient solution.
by empath75 | 2025-04-10 15:14:51+00:00
> But it's becoming clear that within a few more years, computers will be far better at absolutely everything than human beings could ever be.

Comparative advantage. Even if that's true, AI can't possibly do _everything_. China is better at manufacturing pretty much anything than most countries on earth, but that doesn't mean China is the only country in the world that does manufacturing.
by eszed | 2025-04-10 15:15:09+00:00
Around the same time people sometimes posted job openings in the html source of their websites. I never answered any, 'cause I wasn't looking for technical jobs at the time, but it always seemed clever to me.

Any, and only, nerds who were interested in web development incessantly "View Source"ed on every page that looked interesting. It was a major vector by which early-web frontend techniques spread themselves, and it was great: you could cut-and-paste the html, direct download the .css and other resources, and get an offline model of their site running for you to tinker with to learn their secrets. All the magic was out in the open (for those who cared to pull back the curtain), and the future seemed limitless.
by skyyler | 2025-04-10 15:15:22+00:00
>As someone who travels a lot, it’s also one of those things where statistically speaking, the chances of me being on a plane whenever some newsworthy event happens is higher than for the average person. I want my wife, friends, coworkers to know what flights I’m on and what cities I’m in. I’ve survived one terror attack, nearly dodged two others and a mass shooting. It’s one of those things where I want to make sure people who care about me can check in easily to see where I am.

It seems like the author has very different needs than you.
by xpe | 2025-04-10 15:15:32+00:00
> Bloom's taxonomy is a framework for categorizing educational goals, developed by a committee of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom in 1956. ... In 2001, this taxonomy was revised, renaming and reordering the levels as Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, and Create. This domain focuses on intellectual skills and the development of critical thinking and problem-solving abilities. - Wikipedia

This context is important: this taxonomy did not emerge from artificial intelligence nor cognitive science. So its levels are unlikely to map to how ML/AI people assess the difficulty of various categories of tasks.

Generative models are, by design, fast (and often pretty good) at generation (creation), but this isn't the same standard that Bloom had in mind with his "creation" category. Bloom's taxonomy might be better described as a hierarchy: proper creation draws upon all the layers below it: understanding, application, analysis, and evaluation.
by shaism | 2025-04-10 15:16:19+00:00
Very cool. I implemented something similar for personal use before.

At that time, LLMs weren't as proficient in coding as they are today. Nowadays, the decorator approach might even go further and not just wrap LLM calls but also write Python code based on the description in the Docstring.

This would incentivize writing unambiguous DocStrings, and guarantee (if the LLMs don't hallucinate) consistency between code and documentation.

It would bring us closer to the world that Jensen Huang described, i.e., natural language becoming a programming language.
by mapt | 2025-04-10 15:16:20+00:00
Ultimately this is an economic argument. With about $10k you can buy a few dozen machine vision cameras [I would say "webcams" if I knew less about webcam compression], a PC with mobile modem, and a self-contained solar power supply. For $10M you can buy a thousand of these. A thousand of these evenly distributed within a few hundred kilometers of your country's borders are going to add dramatic capability to your air defense network compared to going from 5x $10M radar systems to 6x $10M radar systems. The key bit is that $10k costs far, far less than a single strike missile to take out one of these optical detection sites.

A full Patriot battery is $1100M, with the durable radar and command components being more like $400M.
by bpodgursky | 2025-04-10 15:16:25+00:00
AI is far closer to Asimov's vision of AI than anyone else's. The "Positronic Brain" is very close to what we ended up with.

The three laws of robotics seemed ridiculous until 2021, when it became clear that you could just give AI general firm guidelines and let them work out the details (and ways to evade the rules) from there.
by nradov | 2025-04-10 15:16:25+00:00
And only the higher frequency radars are really useful for interception or weapons targeting. The lower frequency radars are good at long-range detection but they're far less precise.

Early stealth aircraft designs like the F-117 and B-2 were optimized for signature reduction in the frequency bands most typically used by air defense and fighter radar sets. Newer designs like the B-21 and F-47 supposedly have "broadband stealth" which reduces radar cross section across a broader range of radar bands but details are classified.
by NoTeslaThrow | 2025-04-10 15:16:38+00:00
> The Star Trek computer from TNG is basically an LLM, really.

The Star Trek computer is not like LLMs: a) it provides reliable answers, b) it is capable of reasoning, c) it is capable of actually interacting with its environment in a rational manner, d) it is infallible unless someone messes with it. Each one of these points is far in the future of LLMs.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-04-10 15:16:47+00:00
I can't help but feel that this can be said for any country anywhere. Compare New Englanders to Southerners in the US. They are totally different, but they are still wayyy more similar than Southerners are to Cantonese.

It's easy to track differences between people around you, in your country, and very hard to track difference between people in other countries. This creates an illusion of "We are very different, and they are all the same".
by jjani | 2025-04-10 15:16:51+00:00
In my mind, I was thinking of giving a set of fictional findings, not realizing that would technically make it.. fiction!

I think it's fine to have fictional notes. It's still a very different task than e.g. writing a fantasy novel, which these benchmarks roughly are about. Instead, the task would be to turn a given set of facts on a real-world topic into a high-quality, serious article.

> Then even writing what some might consider Pulitzer prize winning is a subjective task.

This applies to these benchmarks for "short fantasy story" tasks all the same.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-10 15:17:13+00:00
Asimov’s future was pretty dark. He didn’t come out and say it, but it was implied that we had a lot of big entities ruling everything. Many of the negative political people were painted as “populist” figures.

If you are a fan of the foundation books, recall that many of the leaders of various factions were a bunch of idiots little different than the carnival barkers we see today.
by westurner | 2025-04-10 15:17:15+00:00
"Universal photonic artificial intelligence acceleration" (2025) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-08854-x :

> Abstract: [...] Here we introduce a photonic AI processor that executes advanced AI models, including ResNet [3] and BERT [20,21], along with the Atari deep reinforcement learning algorithm originally demonstrated by DeepMind [22]. This processor achieves near-electronic precision for many workloads, marking a notable entry for photonic computing into competition with established electronic AI accelerators [23] and an essential step towards developing post-transistor computing technologies.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-04-10 15:17:26+00:00
No one in Asia wants to visit nyc because of friends, sienfeld or sex and the city. These shows to them are mostly raw garbage. The reason is because these shows are culturally focused. Its catered exclusively to the type of American humor and values that most people in Asia do not give two shits about.

They want to visit Hollywood because they want to see the technology that built these blockbusters because internationally everyone understands heroism, sacrifice and special effects. Additionally these movies aren’t watered down. The writing and the effects have gone through years of development to get to that point. It just doesn’t cater to your sensibilities. The term is snobbish.

The writing for Seinfeld and friends and sex and the city took years to get where they are. These aren’t inborn cultural talents. You can easily compare stories from past American movies to see how cheesy and stupid they are. It takes development for stories to come to where they are today and it’s a back and forth between the audience and writers. As writers write more stories audience members learn and become more sophisticated and twists and humor that worked in the past become cliche. Why do you think you’re too snobbish to appreciate something like avengers? You think someone in the 50s wouldn’t appreciate it? Fuck honestly if the whole mcu up till end game came out in the 50s that whole thing would win a Nobel peace prize.

China is 100% going through this learning process right now. The audiences sophistication and the writers as a result are growing at a breakneck pace. I think movies from China that might appeal to who you are is crouching tiger hidden dragon or Hero as these movies share the more universally appreciated parts of Chinese culture and since that is what you’re interested in, I recommend them to you.
by jeroenhd | 2025-04-10 15:17:33+00:00
The RFC treats .localhost as a full TLD. I believe Windows does as well, as does Ubuntu (using default systemd-resolved), but macOS doesn't seem to resolve .localhost by default, necessitating the host file trickery.

Of course, in the early internet, the difference between a TLD and a host name weren't quite as clear as they are right now.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-04-10 15:17:45+00:00
"Hawley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Crime and Counterterrorism Subcommittee, said that Meta or Facebook tried "desperately to prevent" him from holding the hearing.

"They have threatened her with $50,000 in punitive damages every time she mentions Facebook in public ... even if the statements she is making are true," he said. "Facebook is attempting her total and complete financial ruin. They're attempting to destroy her personally, they're attempting to destroy her reputation and I think the question is, `Why?'"

"What is it they are so afraid of?" Hawley asked.""

Meta has a stellar reputation to protect. Honest people doing honest "work".
by lenerdenator | 2025-04-10 15:17:50+00:00
The difference between the 1980 version of my post and the 2025 version of my post is that in 1980 there was conceivably a future where the secretary could retrain to do other work (likely with the help of one of those new-fangled microcomputers) that would need human intelligence in order to be completed.

The 2025 equivalent of the secretary is potentially looking across a job market that is far smaller because the labor she was trained to do, or labor similar enough to it that she could have previously successfully been hired, is now handled by artificial intelligence.

There is, effectively, no where for her to go to earn a living with her labor.
by quxbar | 2025-04-10 15:17:51+00:00
It depends on what you are trying to get out of a novel. If you merely require repetitions on a theme in a comfortable format, Lester Dent style 'crank it out' writing has been dominant in the marketplace for >100 years already (https://myweb.uiowa.edu/jwolcott/Doc/pulp_plot.htm).

Can an AI novel add something new to the conversation of literature? That's less clear to me because it is so hard to get any model I work with to truly stand by its convictions.
by jeetoid | 2025-04-10 15:18:08+00:00
> Might makes right with these people.

As though the entire Biden administration that precedes him doesn't play by this exact principle?

What is the alternative reality that the rest of the world or opposing parties in the US supposedly lives by? In what world does someone have to live at the behest of their opponents and professed haters and simply acquiesce and do whatever they say?
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-10 15:18:08+00:00
The earliest home computers had tiny amounts of memory: my TRS-80 Color Computer started out with 4K of RAM and BASIC in ROM although within a few years I had it filled out with 64K of RAM. There weren't a lot of languages that would fit in 4K, but they included BASIC, FORTH and assembler (like the actual assembler.) [1]

My FORTH experience with that was writing a subroutine-threaded FORTH for the 6809 under the OS-9 operating system in about 3000 lines of assembler. I wrote to the Forth Interest Group and they sent me a card which had a list of standard words in FIG FORTH, mine complied with that except that I used the Unix-like system calls from OS-9 for file I/O instead of the block scheme most FORTHs used.

[1] The popular 6502 (Apple ][, Atari 400/800, C-64, ...) was particularly weak in support for compiled languages because it had few registers and fewer addressing modes but it was easy to write a FORTH for too.
by Cieric | 2025-04-10 15:18:09+00:00
Oh that is pretty neat, I'm still failing to come up with any current use cases though. Most animations I'm use to are bone based which I think would still be smaller than this. I could see it for vertex based animations, but I'm not sure of any current cases where this is used. I'm sure there are good uses out there, I'm probably just missing it. I can at least think of potential future uses like vr movies, where if it's recorded and reconstructed into a 3d scene the bone information won't be there and most likely won't help even if it was.
by kt51 | 2025-04-10 15:18:10+00:00
It looks like there are quite a few glitches in Apple's openrsync. Deletion of two files resulted in four deletion entries.

rsync -av --delete --dry-run a/ b/ Transfer starting: 2 files folder1/file2: deleting folder1/file1: deleting ./folder1/file2: deleting ./folder1/file1: deleting

Also, if a directory has extended attributes, `rsync -av --extended-attributes` resulted in `._` folders in the destination directory.

It is not an acceptable replacement for the original rsync.
by mplanchard | 2025-04-10 15:18:17+00:00
Personally I think a bigger problem is the lack of discoverability of things in nixpkgs, which hits you as soon as you start writing anything remotely non-trivial. "Things" here means functions in 'lib', 'builtins', etc., as well as common idioms for solving various problems. I think this combines with the language's lack of types to make it hard to know what you can write, much less what you should write.

A language server with autocomplete and jump-to-definition would go a long way to making nix more accessible. As it stands, I generally have to clone nixpkgs locally and grep through it for definitions or examples of things related to what I'm doing, in order to figure out how they're used and to try to understand the idioms, even with 4 years of running NixOS under my belt and 3 years of using it for dev environments and packaging at work.
by kace91 | 2025-04-10 15:18:36+00:00
I’m not sure I get your point. Is it that you can’t make art with tools that produce average results?

If so I really disagree, achieving great results with average building blocks is both feasible and I’d say usual - you can perfectly imagine a greatly useful and successful app where any given individual block of code is nothing to write home about.

You can get a great solo of jazz piano over a generated battery filler, you can stitch two recordings by having AI generate the microseconds in the gap, you can produce a melody where AI adds human-like timing micro errors in the synth so doesn’t sound like a robotic rendition, you can rap and generate adlibs as a second voice…
by ben_w | 2025-04-10 15:18:42+00:00
> Every, single, time

No, it really doesn't.

The wisdom of the crowds has some domains where it's good, and others where it's bad.

Bandwagons, groupthink, whatever you want to call it, that effect is also real. If I pick a random person and ask them what they think the "basic truths" of COVID are, 20-40% of the stuff they will say will still be false today — it just doesn't matter any more that they're wrong.

I feel this should be easy to spot by having two large populations that hold mutually incompatible beliefs, such as the way Americans love the 2nd amendment while the UK bans not only guns but also knives in pubic without good reason.
by btbuilder | 2025-04-10 15:18:48+00:00
TR in the US makes sockets harder to use, but I have never heard anyone complain about TR in the UK, as the earth/ground pin is always present, and is physically longer than the live and neutral, so mechanically it is reliable and unnoticeable.

“Just baby proof” means remembering to keep those little plastic covers in place in every outlet. That doesn’t seem like superior usability.
by belter | 2025-04-10 15:19:34+00:00
- Despite the flood of benchmark-tuned LLMs, we remain nowhere close to engineering a machine intelligence rivaling that of a cat or a dog, let alone within the next 5 to 10 years.

- The world already hosts millions of organic AI (Actual Intelligence). Many statistically at genius-level IQ. Does their existence make you obsolete?
by ghaff | 2025-04-10 15:19:41+00:00
The SSN details weren’t true in MA. My card was lost at some point in college and I never bothered to replace. Probably should one of these years.

Not sure what proof of voter registration would look like here though. Proof of resident address can actually be non-trivial for a lot of even housed people. I probably have some online bills and statements but would have to dig them up.
by BuckRogers | 2025-04-10 15:19:48+00:00
We just moved from 4.6.1 to 4.8 this year. We maintain a frontend(++) for a major enterprise software package, and follow them. They just moved to 4.8 so we did as well. Not even the point release. The contractor I work for is pretty conservative, he likes his 1+ million dollar home and worldwide vacations. He won't be changing anything without being forced by Microsoft.

Even if Microsoft puts in a huge effort to updating a migration tool to be seamless, we wouldn't use it. It'll only happen when either the larger enterprise corporation migrates, or when Microsoft forces people off 4.8.
by arrosenberg | 2025-04-10 15:19:48+00:00
We didn't get to control where it stops by following the process either, at least we could have had a hand on the wheel. You are advocating for bringing a knife to a gun fight.

For what its' worth, by the time Biden was elected, the party was already dead. It would have realized that in 2020 if Trump hadn't messed up COVID so badly. The best example of what I am talking about is Obama not seating Merrick Garland on the court and daring the Senate to stop him.
by Spooky23 | 2025-04-10 15:20:12+00:00
Not necessarily. The reality is the landscaping guy is struggling to handle callbacks or is burning overhead. Even then, two girls in the office hits a ceiling where it doesn’t scale quickly, now you’re in a call center scenario.

Call center based services always suck. I remember going to a talk where American Express, who operated best in class call centers, found that 75% of their customers don’t want to talk to them. The people are there because that’s needed for a complex relationship, the more stuff you can address earlier in the funnel, the better.

Customers don’t want to talk to you, and ultimately serving the customer is the point.
by tombert | 2025-04-10 15:20:17+00:00
I mean people might be dicks about it, but I stand by my point.

It’s inherently hard to learn new things, especially if they’re contrary to things that you’ve been doing for N years, so I understand frustration, but that doesn’t imply that Nix itself is more difficult than anything else.

There are plenty of things that aren’t inherently difficult for most humans, but are hard to learn simply because they’re different. I don’t know that Spanish is a more difficult language than English, but I would have trouble learning it just because I have spent my entire life speaking English and approximately none of it speaking Spanish. This doesn’t mean Spanish is more difficult than English.

I will agree that the Nix language itself is kind of a pain in the ass with wonky syntax, though I have grown to kind of like it begrudgingly.
by Damogran6 | 2025-04-10 15:21:08+00:00
I sleep 5-6 hours a night. I also seem to be bi-phasic...on the weekends if I wake up after 5 hours, hang around for an hour and successfully go back to sleep, the second cycle is the sleep of the dead. Like, I don't move. Wake up with limbs fallen asleep, a deep divot in the memory foam...and a lot more rested.

(as an aside: have CPAP, apnea is not a factor.)
by 20after4 | 2025-04-10 15:22:42+00:00
Absolutely. You can do it on a seasonal basis if you have a large enough thermal mass but you can also do it on a daily basis if you have significant temperature variation throughout the day. Doesn't work so well in very hot or very cold climate but places with extreme daily temperature swing get a lot of benefit from thermal battery arrangements.

An example I find very interesting is this greenhouse built to use the ground as a thermal battery. It's possible, even in moderately cold climates, to drastically reduce (or maybe even eliminate) the use of active heating during winter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acByGuSMALc
by damnesian | 2025-04-10 15:22:59+00:00
Midwesterner here. Past generations of conservatives were also very conservation minded. They understood the lasting value of preserving our natural resources. Hell back in the 80s and 90s it was normal for Reagan Republicans to also be in the Sierra Club. That very reasonable centrist organization is now chastized as "radical left," that's how far down the slippery slope we are. They are due for a very rude awakening, but by the time they realize it, it will all be ruined. They don't care about anything if it doesn't affect them directly, the polar opposite of the story of the ancient middle eastern rabbi they name check as their god and savior.
by ajross | 2025-04-10 15:23:11+00:00
Locating civilian, friendly and radar-visible aircraft is a solved problem though. So the distinction is only a matter of subtraction.

No, in fact this kind of technique absolutely puts a hard limit on the value of "stealth" devices, which are purpose-designed to evade a very specific technology that was a warfare-changing innovation in the 1940's but is now pretty cheaply replaceable by consumer junk.

The days of large manned aircraft are very much numbered, and armies that fail to see that are armies that are destined to lose.