MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dinfinity | 2025-05-24 17:54:30+00:00
> Self-driving vehicles are the perfect example of how something that seems so close can be so far away.

Remember that this was before transformers, LLMs, and more recently VLM/VLAMs, though.

I'm not sure to what extent these are already integrated in self-driving hardware, but I would not be surprised if we see a big improvement in self-driving due to related technologies soon, especially with the smaller models becoming far more (efficient and) potent.
by ajross | 2025-05-24 17:54:51+00:00
TIL "noting the author and forum of a lecture with clear political relevance" == "innuendo".

The point isn't that he's wrong (though multiple people here are indeed pointing out things that are). It's that (1) his not being wrong doesn't remotely justify current policy and (2) who he is and where he spoke was very clearly intended to justify current policy. I mean, duh, as it were.

I mean, please. Link me another dry historical lecture hosted by Heritage. I dare you. Everything they do is political.
by andrewrn | 2025-05-24 17:57:13+00:00
Honestly I don't know. I am just starting to learn these technologies. I think there's a lot of potential in combining LLM structured output with web animation technologies.

One advantage of svg is that each element has a DOM node, making interactivity trivial. (but I say this not having tried mouse targetting in canvas so maybe that's not hard)

Thanks for the insight.
by brudgers | 2025-05-24 17:57:35+00:00
Way down in the article:

Nvidia’s networking business is now bigger than gaming, which now represents less than 10 percent of Nvidia’s total revenue. The company makes more pure profit from AI in a single quarter than total gaming sales in a year.

This is a rational rationale to explain why Nvidia is not terribly interested in all the bullshit that B2C requires in general and the oceans of it that the gamer segment of the market involves.

Case in point, the article is drama. The card is not awesome and probably just reflects a new process in manufacturing and was engineered to translate existing performance to that new process. In other words it was designed to be good enough and the release strategy was simply to provide multiple press-releases in the form post-boomer press releases take.

My thought is "are ordinary people feeling outrage, or just the people who get free GPU's for review?"
by labrador | 2025-05-24 17:59:31+00:00
I assume that buying a machine gun to single handedly murder a biker gang is outside the scope of most of our experiences so not worth mentioning. The real end for me was him alone in a cabin with a barrel of cash. To me that was a more realistic ending.

If anything, your correction proves my point. Most people don’t want living alone in a cabin as their ending.
by zkmon | 2025-05-24 17:59:40+00:00
AI adoption is mostly driven from the top. What this means is, shareholders and regulators would make the CEOs to claim that the company is using AI. CEOs trickle this grand vision and goals down, allocating funds and asking for immediate reports showing the evidence of AI everywhere in the company. One executive went to the extent saying that anyone not using AI in their work would face disciplinary action.

So the point is, it is not about whether AI can fix a bug or do something useful. It is about reporting and staying competitive via claiming. Just like many other reports which don't have any specific other purpose other than reporting itself.

A few years back, I asked an Architect who was authoring an architecture document, about who the audience for this document is. She replied saying the target audience is the reviewers. I asked, does anyone use it after the review? She says, not sure. And not surprisingly, the project which took 3 years to develop with a large cost, was shelved after being live for an hour in prod, because the whole thing was done only for a press release, saying the company has gone live with a new tech. They didn't lie.
by codingdave | 2025-05-24 17:59:54+00:00
I know many people who have lost their jobs after the leadership wanted to go "all-in" on AI. I also know of multiple leadership teams who have been fired en masse after pushing for that direction and the organization failing to deliver.

But if you are asking if I know of an organization that was successful after firing their people... Nope, I don't know any of those.
by tshaddox | 2025-05-24 18:00:00+00:00
I can’t understand why it would be at all safe to conclude this. In any other field, you certainly wouldn’t conclude that good visual design, attention to detail, craftsmanship, etc. indicates anything about the factual or moral correctness of the beliefs of the creators. Do the most beautiful and expensive churches indicate the most moral or theologically correct religious groups? Do the best designed uniforms tell you something about the wartime behavior of soldiers or the military policy of the country? Do the pharmaceutical companies with the best produced television advertisements have the best intentions and products backed by the best medical research?
by benreesman | 2025-05-24 18:00:16+00:00
It's increasingly a luxury to be a software engineer who is able to avoid some combination of morally reprehensible leadership harming the public, quality craftsmanship in software being in freefall, and ML proficiency being defined downwards to admit terrible uses of ML.

AI coding stuff is a massive lever on some tasks and used by experts. But its not self-driving and the capabilities of tge frontier vendor stuff might be trending down, they're certainly not skyrocketing.

Any other tool: a compiler, an editor, a shell, even a browser, but I'd say build tools are the best analogy: you have chosen to become proficient or even expert or you haven't and rely on colleagues or communities that provide that expertise. Pick a project or a company: you know if you should be messing around with the build or asking a build person.

AI is no diffetent. Claude 4 Opus just went GA and its in power user tune still, they don't have the newb/cost-control defaults dialed in yet and so its really useful and probably will be for a few days until they get the PID controller wired up to whatever a control vector is these days, and then it will tank to useless slop just like 3.7.

For a week I'll get a little boost in my ouyput and pay them a grand and be glad I did, and then it will go back to worse than useless.

These guys only know one business plan.
by daseiner1 | 2025-05-24 18:00:25+00:00
"The Question Concerning Technology" [1] mentioned in this piece is dense but can be understood by the literate layman, I think, with patience and a bit of work.

Re: "call to action", part of Heidegger's project by my read is to interrogate such phrases. I think he would refute that "action" is what we need and that orienting ourselves towards the world in terms of "action" is obscuring the Question of Being. He himself offers no real way out. In his posthumously published Der Spiegel interview [2] he himself says "only a God can save us".

I assume you're making a snide reference to his involvement with Nazism, which I'm not going to attempt to downplay or respond to here. He himself in his later life, however, went and lived a humble life in the Black Forest. Can or should we all "return to the land"? No. But his writing certainly has expanded my view of the world and my "image of thought". He is a worthwhile study.

How to Read Heidegger [3] is a great primer for any who may be interested.

[1] https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil394/The%20Quest...

[2] https://www.ditext.com/heidegger/interview.html

[3] https://a.co/d/dK5dp2t

P.S. just noticed/remembered that my username is a Heidegger reference. heh.
by hiq | 2025-05-24 18:00:35+00:00
A lot more customer support seems to be handled by chat bots these days. For support that has migrated from humans to chatbots, I assume it's a poorer but cheaper implementation. For support that has migrated from older chatbots (that seemed to base their answers on regexes or some weird branching logic), maybe it's an improvement?

I'm not into this space, but I also assume that translation work is moving from a writing to an editing job, since an LLM can do that pretty well. I just had an LLM correcting my German mistakes for an email I had to send today.

I'm also not sure that profitability is relevant just yet, as inference costs keep going down. Programming-related use-cases do encompass a lot of why GenAI is useful, simply because they make anyone able to write their mothertongue a programmer. It's fine if LLM-based products bootstrap with high-margin industries like tech, and move into thinner margin ones as costs go down. Of course I'm also not saying the current valuations and hype are justified (I don't know).
Show HN: Berb (Update) – WebRTC File Sharing
by goodpanda | 2025-05-24 18:00:41+00:00
Just updating here that Berb has a new look and mission to support anything creative!

Given Berb is a great display for creative work, I would love to work with any startups/individuals who feel they have something creative to show.

You can promote your brand no problem. Just need cool vibes that go well with Berb aesthetics.
Show HN: Made a free tool for affiliate marketers to fix in-app browser issues
by DevEric | 2025-05-24 18:00:55+00:00
I kept running into a super annoying problem as an affiliate — social media apps open links in their own browsers, and that kills tracking, breaks deep links, and sometimes just eats commissions entirely. I couldn’t find a good fix, so I built one.

It’s a little link converter that makes your affiliate links open in the user’s real browser instead of the in-app one. No magic, just a small trick that makes a big difference.

Totally free. No signup needed unless you want to make a full link-in-bio page. If you just want to fix a link, that works right out of the box. It doesn’t cost me anything to run so I made it available for anyone.

Built it with Next.js and MongoDB. And I am proud to say: Not vibe-coded.

If you’re doing affiliate stuff and this sounds useful, feel free to try it. Happy to help if you get stuck or have questions.

Also any feedback is greatly appreciated!
by -__---____-ZXyw | 2025-05-24 18:01:29+00:00
That's the thing, you don't have to say it, sort of by definition. It's always implied, as is its opposite. Imagine a video or article or whatever, titled:

"How to get a Mediocre Job and live an Unremarkable Life"

Where the content of the article or video was, simply:

"Be born a human. You'll have a 99.99% chance of succeeding!"

It'd be pretty grim, it'd last about 15s to read or view, so no-one makes that video. Instead, they make videos about becoming pilots at 21, or owning your own house at 23, etc.

It's hard to accept these percentages as real, because it's about the opposite of what is presented on the content farm platforms, and that's partly as I said the fact that the story is too grim, but also the fact that the "unremarkable" people are not the ones producing "content".
by practal | 2025-05-24 18:02:08+00:00
Strong opinion! Also, it seems you didn't read my interaction so far carefully enough. You also didn't read the summary I linked to, otherwise you would know that I fully approve the current use of types in programming languages, as they provide lightweight formal methods (another name for what you call "fast, formal checking"). But I think we will be able to do much better, we will have fast, formal checking without static types. Not today, not tomorrow, but certainly not more than 10 years from here.
by bcyn | 2025-05-24 18:02:24+00:00
Many SaaS products are tools. I'm sure when tractors were first invented, people felt that they didn't "control" it compared to directly holding shovels and manually doing the same work.

Not to say that LLMs are at the same reliability of tractors vs. manual labor, but just think that your classification of what's a tool vs. not isn't a fair argument.
by tocs3 | 2025-05-24 18:04:02+00:00
An old (2015) NPR Planet Money story about VisiCalc.

Episode 606: Spreadsheets! https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/epis...

The 1984 story it was inspired by (acording to the episode description).

https://medium.com/backchannel/a-spreadsheet-way-of-knowledg...

There are of course still accountants.
by swayvil | 2025-05-24 18:04:03+00:00
Who gets to be anonymous and who doesn't? Cops or regular people? Mods or users?

And there's the separation between public and private conversation too. Where do we draw that line?

I had a post removed the other day. The moderator's identity (or psuedoidentity) remained hidden. Mine didn't of course. The conversation over his motive and actions remained hidden from public view too.

And that seems bad to me.

So ya, that line.
by kristianc | 2025-05-24 18:04:16+00:00
Interested to know how much Immanuel Kant pg has read. Kant's whole project was about grappling with how the mind structures experience—and how language mediates, rather than transparently transmits, thought. You can never fully get to the thing in itself.

I can see how re-editing can make the ideas more coherent within pg's frame of representation, but I'm struggling with the idea that it makes them any more true.
by potholereseller | 2025-05-24 18:04:54+00:00
I wonder how a prompt could wind up in the final product; this may indicate that the author lacks more than just writing skills; "slopdash" seems a relevant neologism.

> as book 1 of this series released 1/24/25, book 2 on 3/13/25, and book 3 on 3/23/25

That is indeed suspicious, but it is also bad business. Book-reading is uncommon in the US, so it makes no sense to release a book series that frequently; many readers take a long time to read through a single book; it's more entertaining to spread releases out.

> which leads into my paranoid theory that a percentage of readers are just skim reading

That may explain some of the appetite to buy three books in ~3 months. I'm not saying that's fast (I could read a 300-page novel in a day or two, without skimming), but it may be fast if you don't skim, you are working >40 hours/week, and you have a family to take care of. I wonder how much of the book industry is propped up by skimmers.

> The internet at large is also facing an existential threat in the shape of an AI slop tsunami.

That's a bit much; AI slop is a problem, but it isn't a tsunami-level event. It remains unclear if any managers have successfuly replaced any employees 100% with AI; somebody has to write the prompts, and it isn't the managers, who have neither the time nor, in most cases, the understanding of the jobs purported to be replaceable.

For people who like trendy things, AI slop is a problem, because AI is actually good at churning out trendy things, because trendy things are usually slop. But even for trendy slop, AI isn't a tsunami; trends will ebb-and-flow with or without AI.
by eddythompson80 | 2025-05-24 18:05:18+00:00
Man, I remember the first time I came across Far Manager. It was through ConEmu in 2010. I was pretty confused with Far tbh. Couldn’t really figure out who or why you would use it. Then I saw someone actually using it at work.

The Wiki doesn’t go much into the demographic for such file manager. It does say they predate GUI file managers, which is fair I guess, but I always thought you lived by cd/ls/find/cat/etc then. I still do for the most part.
by dismalaf | 2025-05-24 18:05:18+00:00
> You could have built refineries 50 years ago

We literally have refineries in Alberta.

https://www.oilsandsmagazine.com/projects/canadian-refinerie...

> Alberta needed to pivot hard away from oil 20 years ago.

Why would you pivot away from something the world needs? Just yesterday at the G7 our European allies asked why we have interprovincial barriers, and requested a pipeline going east and LNG terminal so they can reduce their dependence on Russia.

https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/it-surprises-us-eu...

Also our economy is more diverse than Ontario or BC. If you were here you'd see that, while oil and gas is a massive windfall, there's a lot of other stuff happening.

https://financialpost.com/globe-newswire/fraser-institute-ne...

See, the thing is, our GDP per capita is 35% higher than Canada's as a whole... We haven't squandered anything. And what do we get from the rest of Canada? Barriers to further development...
by nextos | 2025-05-24 18:05:52+00:00
I don't think his book is meant to be read from cover to cover. It's useful in many ways, as an outline, as a reference, or as an entry point to your niche of interest.

Let's say you are interested in diffusion models. You read the corresponding chapter (and play with the companion code).

If you are missing some background, you can also backtrack and skim through the initial chapters.
Go Beever AI
by malv | 2025-05-24 18:05:54+00:00
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by sixtram | 2025-05-24 18:06:22+00:00
Yesterday, I asked AI for help:

Check my SQL stored procedure for possible logical errors. It found a join error that I didn't remember including in my SQL. After double-checking, I found that it had hallucinated a join that wasn't there before and reported it as a bug. After I asked for more information, it apologized for adding that.

I also asked for a C# code with some RegEx. It compiled, but it didn't work; it replaced the order of two string parameters. I had to copy and paste it back to show why it didn't work, and then it realized that it had changed the order of the parameters.

I asked for a command-line option to zip files in a certain way. It hallucinated a nonexistent option that would be crucial. In the end, it turned out that it was not possible to zip the files the way I wanted.

My manager plans to open our Git repository for AI code and pull request (PR) review. I already anticipate the pain of reviewing nonsensical bug reports.
by blooalien | 2025-05-24 18:06:25+00:00
If you want to play with "this A.I. stuff" and you have a half-way modern-ish graphic card in your PC or laptop (or even a somewhat modern-ish phone) there's a fair few ways to install and run smaller(ish) models locally on your own hardware, and a host of fancy graphical interfaces to them. I personally use ChatBox and Ollama with the Qwen2.5 models, IBM's Granite series models, and the Gemma models fairly successfully on a reasonably decent (couple years old now) consumer-class gaming rig with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti and 64 gig of RAM. There's also code editors like Zed or VSCode that can connect to Ollama and other local model runners, and if you wanna get really "nerdy" about it, you can pretty easily interface with all that fun junk from Python and script up your own interfaces and tools.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-24 18:06:51+00:00
The issue (if you aren’t interested in AI in and of itself, but just in the final version of the tool it will produce) is that the AI companies advertise that they’ve come up with an incredible new version that will obsolete any skills you learned working around the previous version’s limitations, on like a monthly basis.

Like, you say these folks have clearly tried the tool out too long ago… but, I mean, at the time they tried it out they could have found other comments just like yours, advertising the fact that now the tool really is revolutionary right now. So, we can see where the skepticism comes from, right?
by ajoberstar | 2025-05-24 18:07:05+00:00
It doesn't seem like you're talking about the same thing the article is. Graham doesn't say "you must be a good writer to be a good thinker".

> This is only true of writing that's used to develop ideas, though. It doesn't apply when you have ideas in some other way and then write about them afterward — for example, if you build something, or conduct an experiment, and then write a paper about it. In such cases the ideas often live more in the work than the writing, so the writing can be bad even though the ideas are good.

Writers who have trouble expressing thoughts in a non-native language are not actually developing the idea in that language. That doesn't mean they are producing bad ideas, but it _might_ mean they won't produce good writing (in that non-native language).

I took the essay to be highlighting that if you use writing as a tool for thinking, clunky writing is likely to highlight places where your ideas themselves aren't clear or correct yet. The iterative process of refining the writing to "sound good" will help shape the ideas.

This seems to be a commonly expressed idea in other forms. For example, when thinking through ideas in code, the process of making the code more "beautiful" can also result in a clearer expression of more correct ideas.
by tsunamifury | 2025-05-24 18:09:09+00:00
First of all the number one thing getting in the way of mainstream usability is growth hacking.

But to the authors point about power tools usability likely the core issue is new customers need an easier entry point into a power tool than existing customers. This results in simplified designs.

If they don’t do that cruft design builds up over time and you end up in a different usability trap like adobe products in the mid 2000s
by Animats | 2025-05-24 18:10:01+00:00
> you are either a hack, or making mistakes like a NOOB and should be supervised by a senior engineer.

Right. Who put a bare chip on an open board and expected it to work?

There have been cases of photosensitive parts in the past, where the plastic encapsulation didn't have enough carbon black. Some old parts were packaged in brown plastic that wasn't opaque enough. That's a problem from decades ago.[1]

[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/217423/ics-c...
by grogenaut | 2025-05-24 18:10:33+00:00
It's rapidly evolving, if you were to master just one explicit revision of say cursor then I think your anology would be correct. However to me it's more like keep abreast of the new things, try new stuff, don't settle on a solution, let the wave push you forward, don't be the coder who doesn't turn their camera on during meetings coding away in a corner for another year or 2 berfore trying ai tools because "they're bad".

But this is the same for any tech that will span the industry. You have people who want to stay in their ways and those who are curious and moving forward, and at various times in people's careers they may be one or the other. This is one of those changes where I don't think you get the option to defer.