MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throw10920 | 2025-04-30 02:20:24+00:00
> Is there an interpretation where people credibly thought it was better to aggregate at the fleet grain rather than individual levels? Ie is there a good faith argument?

"Good faith argument" implies that I think that the regulators were acting in bad faith. I don't! I believe they had the best intentions - sorry if I made it seem otherwise.

I'm just using the fact that the outcomes were negative to make the point that, even with the best intentions, if you're not careful with how you act, your actions can have negative results.

I totally get the logic of "it was better to aggregate at the fleet grain rather than individual levels" - I think a naive person would have done something similar - but it didn't work out, and it shows that you need to apply way more thought, effort, and analysis than you might naively assume.
by actuallyalys | 2025-04-30 02:20:59+00:00
> “It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.”

It’s hard to fathom why this would be the case. Isn’t creating learning materials mostly an upfront task? Obviously you want to update your materials and fix mistakes. And perhaps you sometimes have a new idea that necessitates an update or rewriting things. But creating lesson materials honestly seems like it would scale very well.

I think about reading language learning blogs and forums and people would sometimes recommend favorite resources that were from decades ago. I’m sure something was lost in them not being totally up to date but honestly, persistence is way more important than currency, let alone “having a massive amount of content.”
by dudeinhawaii | 2025-04-30 02:21:09+00:00
I see a lot of threads pitting models against each other (or whole swarms of them) in the hope that "wisdom of crowds" will magically appear. After a stack of experiments of my own—and after watching the recent ASU/Microsoft-Research work [1].. I've landed on a simpler takeaway:

An LLM is a terrible verifier of another LLM. Subbarao Kambhampati's "(How) Do LLMs Reason/Plan?" talk shows GPT-4 confidently producing provably wrong graph-coloring proofs until a symbolic SAT solver is introduced as the referee [1]. Stechly et al. quantify the problem: letting GPT-4 critique its own answers *reduces* accuracy, whereas adding an external, sound verifier boosts it by ~30 pp across planning and puzzle tasks [2]. In other words, verification is *harder* than generation for today's autoregressive models, so you need a checker that actually reasons about the world (compiler, linter, SAT solver, ground-truth dataset, etc.).

Because of that asymmetry, stacking multiple LLMs rarely helps. The "LLM-Modulo" position paper argues that auto-regressive models simply can't do self-verification or long-horizon planning on their own and should instead be treated as high-recall idea generators wrapped by a single, sound verifier [3]. In my tests, replacing a five-model "debate" with one strong model + verifier gives equal or better answers with far less latency and orchestration overhead.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u2hdSpNS2o - (How) Do LLMs Reason/Plan? (talk at Microsoft Research, 11 Apr 2025)

[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.08115

[3] https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.01817 (related to the talk in #1)
by ksajadi | 2025-04-30 02:21:18+00:00
I don’t think the argument (at least the one I’m curious about) is about renewables causing it but that with a growing portion of the grid coming from renewables a black start becomes more and more difficult.

I understand the physics behind this claim although I’d add a huge caveat that I’m not a power grid expert so put the comment here to see comments from experts
by mmooss | 2025-04-30 02:21:29+00:00
> in the south violence against the government is treated as distinct from violence against fellow citizens

From what I see and know, among conservative supporters violence against police is strongly condemned and to be harshly punished, as is any form of protest that is arguably the slightest bit disruptive.

> chiefly concerned with protecting the majority from the government.

In fact, by their actions, they make the government - police and prosecutors - free to abuse people in almost any way with no reprocussions. One of the latest Trump executive orders even tells the DoJ to go after any legal authority prosecuting police.

And by their actions, they are chiefly concerned with using the government to persecute and suppress anyone they disagree with.

> 60s ... traditional

It's a nice tactic to try to attribute those who disagree to a passing fancy, and your beliefs to 'tradition'.
by photonthug | 2025-04-30 02:22:29+00:00
Remember those gan demos where a single carefully chosen pixel change turns a cat classification to dog? It would be really surprising if people aren’t working out how to do similar things that turn your random geography question into hotel adverts as we speak.

At least it seems likely to be more expensive for attackers than the last iteration of the spam arms race. Whether or to what extent search quality is actually undermined by spammers vs Google themselves is a matter for some debate anyway
by tootie | 2025-04-30 02:22:38+00:00
I don't know enough about how ChatGPT et al determine what it is or isn't credible. SEO was a bit of a hack but Google has done an ok job of keeping one step ahead of the spammers. It's only a matter of time before nefarious parties learn how to get chatgpt to trust their lies if they haven't already.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-04-30 02:22:38+00:00
That is the impression those pronouncements are intending to give. My point is that it may not reflect reality; it's trying to present "we are way ahead", whether they are or not, as reality, in order to incentivise investment in their company, rather than in a competitors, whilst at the same time scaring away those thinking about attempting to compete by making the moat look wider than it is.

I legitimately don't know who's ahead of who and where the state-of-the-art currently sits, but I do know that I hear far more about Tesla's vision roadmap than Waymo's or Uber's or anyone else's.
by amiga386 | 2025-04-30 02:22:39+00:00
* in Linux, the kernel is responsible for accepting a list of execve(2) argument-words

Yes it does, but the more surprising thing is (coming from AmigaOS with its dos.library function ReadArgs()) that the shell does this. The shell is also responsible for argument expansion - madness!

On AmigaOS, when you type "delete foo#? force", the shell passes the entire command line to the delete command. The delete command calls ReadArgs() with a template (FILE/M/A, ALL/S, QUlET/S, FORCE/S), and the standard OS function parses it into lists of files, flags, keyword arguments, etc. The "file" passed is "foo#?", and the command uses MatchFirst()/MatchNext() to do file pattern matching.

Every command (that uses ReadArgs() and didn't plump for "standard C" parsing) has the same behaviour: running the command with "?" gives you the template, which tells you how to use it. Args are parsed consistently across all programs.

Then you get "standard C", which because K&R and main(), ignores this standard Amiga parsing function and just does naive splits. Across multiple Amiga C compilers, quoting rules are inconsistent. Amiga C compilers have to produce an executable, and it knows it'll be called with a full command line, so the executable itself has to break that into words before it can call main(), and it's up to each compiler writer how they're going to do that. Urgh.

In unix-land, it's up to the shell to parse the command line, and pass only the words... hence why the shell naturally does all the filename globbing, and why you have gotchas like when these two commands are sometimes the same and sometimes they're not:

find . -name foo* find . -name 'foo*'

Then we have Windows, which is like Amiga C programs - it's being passed a full command string and will have its C runtime parse it for main() to consume. There's a vague expectation that it'll do quoting "like COMMAND", which itself has very odd quoting rules. At least, most people are all using the same C compiler on Windows, so it's mostly only MSVCRT's implementation so it's mostly consistent.
by timr | 2025-04-30 02:24:57+00:00
I use the various chatbots when I want a tutorial (e.g. math or some programming library). I can (in fact, must) verify these myself. This is strictly better than doing a bunch of queries and reading a bunch of blogs. I also use them for the class of queries where I don't even know how to begin: ("there is some expression in southern-US english involving animals, about being dumb, that sounds like '$blah', but isn't that. what might it be?") Chatbots are great for that stuff.

Chatbots are absolute trash when it comes to needing factual information that cannot be trivially verified. I include the various "deep research" tools -- they are useless, except maybe as a starting point. For every problem I've given them, they've just been wrong. Not even close. The people who rely on these tools, it seems to me, are the same sort of folks who read newspaper headlines and Gartner 'reasearch reports' and accept the conclusions at face value.

For anything else, it's just easier to write a search query. The internet is wrong too, but it's easier for me to cross-validate answers across 10 blue links than to figure it out via socratic method with a robot.
by mmooss | 2025-04-30 02:24:58+00:00
> The auto factories fled Flint/Detroit due to the UAW basically an attempt to limit the scope of strikes and violence from the UAW.

That is the story the auto companies like to tell, to make unions look damaging to workers and communities. From what I've read, the migration had a lot to do with race. But regardless, do either of us have any evidence to share? (not me right now)
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-30 02:25:02+00:00
Having a nuclear disaster only decade ago with a flurry of other plants that couldn't pass the safety test when re-checked creates a pretty tough situation.

Right now there's a plant that is stopped by the gov from getting back into production for safety issues, with the elec company trying to appeal for the nth time, and it sure doesn't help the overall image.

"This time it will be fine" is kinda hard to stomach for the impacted public to be honest.
by _heimdall | 2025-04-30 02:25:09+00:00
That's the alignment problem. We intended a certain set of rules but didn't define them completely, or there were conditions we didn't consider.

An AI wouldn't have to maliciously break a rule to go wrong. The point is that the system could so exactly what it was supposed to do, it plays within the given rules but the outcomes aren't what we wanted or intended.
by dharmab | 2025-04-30 02:25:56+00:00
Is your comment pro-SLURM or anti-SLURM?

I took a serious look at SLURM for my problem space and among my conclusions were:

- Hiring people who know Kubernetes is going to be far cheaper

- Kubernetes is gonna be way more compatible with popular o11y tooling

- SLURM's accounting is great if your billing model includes multiple government departments and universities each with their own grants and strict budgets, but is far more complex than needed by the typical tech company

- Writing a custom scheduler that outperforms kube-scheduler is far easier than dealing with SLURM in general
Ask HN: How to fix issue and find the origin of bug in codebase?
by timonpimba | 2025-04-30 02:26:18+00:00
I wondered how you people approach a bug problem in the issue section. I have never done these things. Since last week, I've been trying to understand the bug's real issue/origin. I couldn't solve it. Initially, I used git bisect and looked into commits & code. I still couldn't figure it out.

If I could understand how you approach these bugs and how they are fixed, what method do you use, and how do you look at the code to fix them? Then, honestly, it would be invaluable to me.

Also, if you could please share any resources or articles, I would be very interested in looking at them; I could take some lessons from them.

Thanks.
by Capricorn2481 | 2025-04-30 02:27:41+00:00
Well, you're an adult, and you can tell that different democrats are different people, so engage with what the person you're talking to is saying and not going "everything's a crisis with you people!"

They killed people while storming the capitol. If hundreds of protesters getting their hands on all of our ballots, physically threatening our congressmen, is not a constitutional crisis, I don't know what the hell is. Perhaps you should take your own advice. You can only say "you're overreacting" so much before people realize we can't rely on you to evaluate risk.
by Tainnor | 2025-04-30 02:27:45+00:00
> probably even Swift

It's possible to write web backends in Swift, but it's probably not a good idea. When I last did so, I ran into ridiculous issues all the time, such as lazy variables not being thread-safe, secondary threads having ridiculously small (and non-adjustable) stack sizes and there being generally absolutely no story for failure recovery (have fun losing all your other in-flight requests and restarting your app in case of an invalid array access). It's possible that some of this has been fixed in the last 5 years since I stopped working on that project, but given Apple's priorities, I somehow doubt that the situation is significantly better.
by limpbizkitfan | 2025-04-30 02:30:02+00:00
Profoundly stupid article. If affirmative action "forces firms to hire less competent workers", how could one Cambodian guy who benefited from an affirmative action policy also be partially responsible for the "dominance" of Cambodian ownership in the SoCal doughnut business?

Are you seriously going to think the nepotism involved in staffing and franchising Midwestern Dunkin' Donuts is not even more beneficial to the lower intellect/conceived through fertility treatment Choate Rosemary alums who are receiving DNKN dividends? You seriously don't think Indians seeing an insanely predatory franchising opportunity as an opportunity has anything to do with an access to communal financial support? Maybe they don't need to go through an insanely predatory loan to finance their franchise!

You should be angry at the people inheriting large sums of money who are essentially doing nothing with their lives, not the communities who are being maligned in this article for allegedly cornering or forming a cartel over a doughnut market.
by vineyardmike | 2025-04-30 02:31:07+00:00
I’ve started asking Gemini all sorts of things I would’ve googled but don’t want hallucinated. Their integration with search to “ground” the answers is one of the missing pieces required for LLMs to remove direct searching altogether. It’s the final missing version of “I’m feeling lucky”.

The only thing missing is a faster way to go from thought to typing. The ChatGPT apps’ pop-up bar is too easy to not bump every thought and question into. I just don’t trust the results as much.
by WorldPeas | 2025-04-30 02:31:19+00:00
I have a friend who is a teacher. This is some part of the way, but as they said, the real problem is "the kids see school as a waiting room in between dopamine hits", "they are constantly agitated and short-tempered". This matches other descriptions I've seen in the news and of withdrawl. For reference, I was at this school when a phone was not a given and we had a land-line for calling home after school. Some part of this transformation can take place in the classroom, but as has been said ad-nauseum, something needs to be done about algorithmic feeds.
Brutal feedback on my failed idea (anyone up for part-time interview?)
by bbqc123 | 2025-04-30 02:31:30+00:00
Hi, my startup idea is horrible.

But I don't know why, so I'm asking for opinions. Please take a moment and hit me with your brutal honesty.

Here's the idea: 1. Scrape all competitor ads. 2. Automatically run them using a bot account. 3. See their real CTR.

There are already services that either collect competitor ads or run and optimize ads for you, so my twist was combining these into one streamlined workflow.

But lately, seeing the poor performance of ads and landing pages makes me doubt if anyone actually needs this...

Here's my landing page: https://torty.ai

My product is almost finished, so yeah, I'm getting pretty desperate.

That's why I'm here, asking for your brutal feedback: * What assumptions did I get totally wrong? * What should I do to fix this mess?

So, if you have any opinion please contact me to bbqc123@gmail.com. Please give me a chance to hear from you

Three quick things: 1. If you are okay with a zoom call, then we can do it for an hour(max) for $60. Sorry for the low compensation—I'm surviving on $3 sandwiches these days 2. I'm Korean and can't directly transfer cash to US bank accounts, but I'm happy to send an Amazon gift card as a thank-you instead! 3. If you're familiar with Semrush, let me know—I'm super curious about how you use it!
by mindslight | 2025-04-30 02:31:30+00:00
Trump is very adept at talking out of both sides of his mouth in a way that is much different from how a standard politician does it, so he gets a lot of people are excited at hearing what they want to hear. A regular politician equivocates and never really commits. Trump just asserts a statement that sounds definitive despite being word salad, and then shamelessly contradicts himself by asserting the exact opposite later. If he gets called out on it he just responds with nonsense.

If you were evaluating him as a regular person you'd conclude he was demented or otherwise had significant brain damage, and was the no-inhibition combative type that needed to be in a facility. But his word salad apparently appealed to enough people's self-centeredness to end up as President instead. Maybe my happy place can be imagining he's got aphasia, doesn't want any of these harmful policies either, and he's suffering right along with the rest of us.
by andrehacker | 2025-04-30 02:32:50+00:00
Not sure why this was downvoted, the example actually works.

A lot of my interactions with LLMs are like that and it is impressive how it doesn't care about typos, missed words and context. For regular expressions, language specific idioms, Unix command line gymnastics ("was it -R or -r for this command") merely grunting at the LLM provides not only the exact answer but also context most of the time.

Googling for 4 or 5 different versions of your question and eventually having to wade through 3,000 lines of a web version of a man page is just not my definition of a good time anymore.
by davisr | 2025-04-30 02:33:00+00:00
Shameful, especially here in Wisconsin where the minimum wage is still set to $7.25/hour. And even more shameful the tactics used by gig-companies like Uber and DoorDash to depress their own liabilities, and worker wages, even further down.

"No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country." -- Franklin D. Roosevelt
by taf2 | 2025-04-30 02:33:12+00:00
Yeah I don't know how good citations are always... i mean i just read without a doubt the earth is flat [1]. I can now say for certain and without any sarcasm, this is actually fact. Because of my citation it must be true?

[1] https://thinkmagazine.mt/the-earth-is-flat/

The point here is information is hard... unless you do your own thinking, your own testing, you can't be sure. But I agree references are nice.
by Aurornis | 2025-04-30 02:33:14+00:00
> Corruption is nothing new in Washington.

This is not business as usual, no matter how much this administration tries to pretend it is.

Regardless, that wouldn’t make it okay. It’s weird to claim that it’s normal.

> The real question is…

No, that’s a separate question. Not the “real” question. The current tariff drama is widely regarded to be temporary because it’s so economically damaging that Trump’s successor (of any party) will remove it, if Congress doesn’t get there first.

This isn’t bringing manufacturing back to America, it’s making America a toxic and unpredictable place to do business.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-04-30 02:33:22+00:00
The doomsayers treat the amount of software development as zero-sum, so that the more code AI writes the fewer developers will be needed. I think this won't be the case from two directions.

Looking back at all software that already exists, there is often a tremendous backlog of opportunities for performance improvements, reliability improvements, bugfixes, etc. that just never gets worked on due to resources. AI can be turned loose on this and it will get done. Most would never happen otherwise. This includes all kinds of useful but abandoned OSS projects - barrier will be lowered to fork or jump in as a new maintainer.

Looking forward, new projects that would never be attempted due to cost of development are now possible, and will be rewarding businesses. The lower economics of development will open up a tremendous set of new opportunities.

I think the number of lines written per developer and number of lines overall will both vastly increase and not so much at the expense of all the current software engineers.
by jcranmer | 2025-04-30 02:33:43+00:00
> If every car on the road was synced then they could drive more closely to each other and at much faster speeds. This would optimize road space, decrease congestion, and reduce transit times.

That's not going to happen, not in our lifetimes. It's not safe to do this unless you have a critical mass of cars on the road capable of doing it. Given the average age of cars, it'll take ~10-15 years from such tech being mandatory in new cars to think about doing this. Being mandatory is of course itself over 10 years from it being available. And it's not available yet.

We're now a decade out from people starting to say "stop investing in public transportation because driverless cars will obsolete it," and so far driverless cars have only managed to provide a limited taxi service in a couple of cities, a far cry from deprecating public transit.

(Actually, I personally hew to the belief that driverless cars will make traffic worse, since it will probably increase the number of empty cars running around because traffic tends to be dominated by unidirectional bursts of traffic.)
by omneity | 2025-04-30 02:34:32+00:00
It doesn’t have to be contiguous AI-written chunks. This could also mean X% accepted AI suggestions on Y% codebase where X*Y < 30%.

AI suggestions can also be as simple as autocomplete and still be counted for the sake of engagement metrics.

Oh and in enterprise settings and especially MS shops Github Copilot is being pushed everywhere, (forceful) adoption rates are much higher than the market average.
by simonw | 2025-04-30 02:35:03+00:00
Knowledge cutoff isn't particularly relevant for search. I want an LLM that has access to a good search tool and knows how to use it.

Gemini should be excellent here - it should have access to the best search index out there.

But... it doesn't show me what it's searching for. This is an absolute show-stopper for me: I need to know what the LLM is searching for in order to evaluate if it is likely to find the right information for me.

ChatGPT gets this right: it shows me the search terms it's using, then shows me the articles from the results that it used to generate the response.

Until a few weeks ago I still didn't use it much, because inevitably when it ran a search I would shout at my computer "No, don't search for that! You'll get crap results".

This changed with the recent release of o3 and o4-mini. For the first time I feel like I have access to a model with genuinely good taste in searching - it picks good initial searches, then revises those searches based on the incoming results.

I wrote about that recently: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Apr/21/ai-assisted-search/