MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by munksbeer | 2025-05-02 08:51:16+00:00
I'm an immigrant living in the UK, and have been for over 20 years. I'm practically British now, without the accent. I don't disagree with much of your post, but some of it feels emotionally biased.

>the chancellor threatens the country with a punishment budget

Biased. And whatever cause and effect ended up being, our taxes have risen, immediately after the result came in GBP dropped, we had inflation, and to counter it all interest rates were dropped from already extreme low levels even further. There are no widely respected economists (though they're hard to take seriously anyway) who think leaving the EU has not harmed the UK.

So, I consider it the duty of the chancellor to have informed us of this, because the other side of the argument (the brexiters) had not one bit of moral integrity to present reality. Remember, we're dealing with a group of people who lied for 40 years to achieve their aims. No other country in the EU required an EU hosted web page dedicated to countering all the anti-EU lies.

The brexit side effectively ran at least two campaigns, with plausible deniability by the "official" campaign because Farage wasn't on their team. Farage was the face of the less savoury side of the campaign, and his group ran using things like this: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1920x1080/p078zmng.jpg

While on the "official" campaign we have gems like this (I still genuinely laugh when I read this blog post):

https://www.reaction.life/p/britain-looks-like-brexit

I watched all of this unfold, as an immigrant living in the UK, and we (immigrants) were very acutely aware of the sentiment that drove the brexit vote.

So, what is my main take-away from all of this? That this referendum was about two valid political choices, remain inside a pooled sovereignty union, or leave that pooled sovereignty union. Both valid choices. But the travesty was how poorly the referendum was constructed and run. And that is because we just don't have a history of running referendums very well (see the alternative voting referendum), and this would never have passed the sniff test in for example Switzerland.
by ckw | 2025-05-02 08:51:18+00:00
> Would you have preferred that they have their grant applications cancelled after having published a paper?

I don't understand what you're saying here. We know that Kristian Andersen and Robert Garry were concerned that the virus was not of natural origin because Andersen wrote to Fauci and Collins on January 31 that “some of the features [of SARS-CoV-2] … look engineered” and that he, Robert Garry and others found the genome “inconsistent with expectations from evolutionary theory.”

The next day they joined Fauci's emergency teleconference and 11 days later they submitted The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2 to Nature. Five weeks after the paper appeared in Nature, Fauci's institute (NIAID) awarded Andersen and Garry a new $8.9 million grant, naming them co-principal investigators of the West African Emerging Infectious Disease Research Center.

One might argue that each link in this chain of events is in principle explainable in perfectly innocent terms, and that's true. But to do so would be ironically concordant with the sort of reasoning and argumentation exhibited in the Proximal Origins paper. Specifically, at each turn the original concerns of Andersen and Garry are addressed in a manner emphasizing that in principle the anomaly could be explained in innocent terms. So for example, the poly-basic (RRAR) cleavage site could arise by ordinary insertion or recombination because similar sites appear in other coronaviruses and even evolve during serial passage of influenza, so its presence is “compatible with natural evolution,” and the codon context and flanking O-linked glycans would be an odd choice for a genetic engineer but fit with immuno-evasion seen in naturally evolving viruses, and the genome is “not derived from any previously used virus backbone”, and so on.

What they don't do is adduce any evidence that these theoretical natural pathways actually obtained, they don't systematically weigh their joint probability, and they don't seriously address the possibility of inadvertent lab adaptation and escape (they label the scenario as "improbable" in a single paragraph).

All of which is to say that it seems implausible that they themselves were actually convinced by their arguments. And if they weren't convinced by their arguments, then it seems likely they didn't actually change their view, just publicly voiced the opposite view. Why would they do that? I can think of 8.9 million reasons.
by selcuka | 2025-05-02 08:51:34+00:00
> As apposed to humans who all derive the physics of heat transfer independently when given a question like this?

Isn't that the difference between learning and memorizing, though? If you were taught Newton's Law of Cooling using this example and truly learned it, you could apply it to other problems as well. But if you only memorized it, you might be able to recite it when asked the same question, yet still be unable to apply it to anything else.
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-05-02 08:52:51+00:00
As an NLP professor, yes, I think we're mostly screwed - saying LLMs are a dead end or not a big deal, like some of the interviewed say, is just wishful thinking. A lot of NLP tasks that were subject of active research for decades have just been wiped out.

Ironically, the tasks that still aren't solved well by LLMs and can still have a few years of life in them are the most low-level ones, that had become unfashionable in the last 15 years or so - part-of-speech tagging, syntactic parsing, NER. Of course, they have lost a lot of importance as well: you no longer need them for user-oriented downstream tasks. But they may still get some use: for example NER for its own sake is used in biomedical domains, and parsing can be useful for scientific studies of language (say, language universals related to syntax, language evolution, etc.). Which is more than you can say about translation or summarization, which have been pretty much obsoleted by LLMs. Still, even with these tasks, NLP will go from broad applicability to niche.

I'm not too worried for my livelihood at the moment (partly because I have tenure, and partly because the academic system works in such a way that zombie fields keep walking for quite long - there are still journals and conferences on the semantic web, which has been a zombie for who knows how long). But it's a pity: I got into this because it was fun and made an impact and now it seems most of my work is going to be irrelevant, like those semantic web researchers I used to look down at. I guess my consolation is that computers that really understand human language was the dream that got me into this in the first place, and it has been realized early. I can play with it and enjoy it while I sink into irrelevant research, I guess :/ Or try to pivot into discrete math or something.
New AI Platform Partners with Animation Studio, Putting Animation in Fans' Hands
by emmanol | 2025-05-02 08:53:19+00:00
While Runway leads video generation with its well-funded platform, animation remains ripe for AI disruption. The global animation market is projected to grow from $433.12B (2023) to $801.78B by 2032 (Precedence Research), with AI animation specifically expected to reach $23.6B by 2032, growing at 39.3% CAGR (Polaris Market Research). There is a lot of promise in the animation sector. Several startups are already transforming animation: Wonder Animation (now part of Autodesk) converts video to 3D scenes; Pixelz AI creates anime from text; DeepMotion specializes in AI motion capture; Colossyan develops business video avatars; D-ID generates talking heads from images; and Synthesia creates multilingual AI presenters.

Now a new contender has entered the arena. On April 22, 2025, Animait launched its AI animation platform featuring an industry first: an official partnership with Animotion Media Group that legally allows fans to create using established IP. The technology enables anyone to generate complete animated episodes through text prompts, combining multiple AI models to produce videos with cohesive storylines and synchronized audio. Where animation once required specialized skills and expensive software, Animait lets fans easily create within established universes or build new ones—democratizing content creation while respecting IP rights.

"We help anyone bring creative ideas to life, regardless of animation skills," says Animait Co-founder Alexander Fonarev, PhD. "Our model ensures IP owners' content is protected while they benefit from AI advancements."

The collaboration with Animotion Media Group (46B+ views globally) allows fans to create within the "Question Club" universe — the first officially licensed IP for AI animation. Animait is now rolling out access to waitlisted users at animait.com, with early features available through Discord.

This partnership is consequential for the animation industry. This is the first instance where an AI animation platform secures an official licensing agreement that allows users to legally create and distribute content using an established intellectual property.

While others formed partnerships to protect and monetize IPs in the realm of Generative AI - like Vermillio - these collaborations focus on safeguarding the artist’s rights and managing the use of their likenesses. In contrast, Animait partnership with Animotion moves into yet uncharted territory by actively encouraging user-generated content within a licensed animation universe - a precedent in AI-driven animation.
by tm-guimaraes | 2025-05-02 08:53:44+00:00
Splitting phone and computer seems silly.

The Apple value pack comes mostly from brand value, deep ecosystem interactions, and being pretty much the only big corp ONLY focused on high end personal computing devices. Almost all their revenue is from B2C, their incentives are more aligned than most other big corps.

Any split to not actually harm the customers would be more focused on services such as apple card, icloud, the apple plus services (music,tv,…) etc.

Tbh, even EU mesures i think would be better if apple was instead forced to open the hardware (provide docs and bootloader, and no penalty for an user that takes advantage), rather than opening the OS or store. Not needing such openness on store and OS/core libs, actually allows apple to be more nimble and providing de better service (or bigger margins :( ), buto opnning hardware could actually give other OSs a chance, for once there could be a linux phone, as iphone has few hardware configs, and the device is very wide spread, 2 factors making it very attractive to devs (as example, check asahi linux, how quickly it became usable on a platform without docs)

This would play much more into “i bought this device i run wtv software I want” without restricting software vendors, Apple could keep the benefit of tight integration (that consumers like me like), but would have to provide the docs (and boot) for alternative OS to rise.
by glacambre | 2025-05-02 08:53:54+00:00
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by rgoulter | 2025-05-02 08:54:15+00:00
At a glance, this seems really neat. -- I reckon one thing LLMs have been useful to help with is "the things I'd copy-paste from stack overflow". A loop of "let's fix each error" reminds me of that.

I'd also give +1 to "LLMs as force multiplier". -- If you know what you're doing & understand what's going on, it seems very useful to have an LLM-supported tool able to help automatically resolve compilation errors. -- But if you don't know what you're doing, I'd worry perhaps the LLM will help you implement code that's written with poor taste.

I can imagine LLMs could also help explain errors on demand. -- "You're trying to do this, you can't do that because..., instead, what you should do is...".
by nailer | 2025-05-02 08:54:37+00:00
Somebody responded to you with medical research and Hacker News readers flagged it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43866237

There might be many reasons to disagree with the research - it’s not peer reviewed for one - but flagging seems to be somewhat antiscience, which is a shame for a forum about software engineering and innovation.
by munksbeer | 2025-05-02 08:54:39+00:00
> (e.g. “in order to improve trade we’re going to follow all the EU’s rules but not have a say in any of them”).

We de facto do that anyway, because most of our trade is conducted with the EU and companies aren't stupid. They don't want to design and build to multiple different standards, so they just adhere to EU rules for simplicity and cost reasons. But now we don't get a say in those rules.
by flohofwoe | 2025-05-02 08:54:44+00:00
> Zig main source of QnA is a black box (Discord)?

The Discord is quite okay-ish for getting a quick answer for things you're blocked on. For proper discussions and deeper questions, Ziggit is a better choice (which is also a 'proper' forum):

https://ziggit.dev/latest

> Zig uses Gradle style approach to Maven.

Zig's build system is conceptionally further away from both Gradle and Maven than Gradle is different from Maven (having to wrestle with both from time to time, my personal opinion is: both are a huge pile of excrement, unfit for real-world usage - even cmake is better than what the Java world accepts as build systems, and that's some achievement ;)

At least the Zig build system looks promising in the way that simple things are simple and complex things are possible, even though the API still sometimes doesn't quite know if it wants to be imperative or declarative. But the basic idea is that the Zig build system and package manager are "just" part of the regular stdlib and that your build process is a regular Zig program that gets compiled and then executed to perform the build.

> Zig changes in big exciting ways, sounds like euphemism for breaking changes

...which is completely expected of a pre-1.0 status. OTH, the last couple of versions were not worse than fixing new warnings after a minor C/C++ compiler update.
by famouswaffles | 2025-05-02 08:54:56+00:00
You don't really have to rely on self reported numbers to see its scope. It has become that massive. ChatGPT was the 6th most visited site in the world in March and will likely be 5 in April.

https://x.com/Similarweb/status/1909544985629721070

The idea that a site that consistently has billions of visits every month but most of them have a negative opinion of it seems more delusion than reality.
by DarkIye | 2025-05-02 08:54:59+00:00
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by dns_snek | 2025-05-02 08:55:42+00:00
1. I agree

2. I guess this is a matter of perspective. I don't have strong opinions on build systems but as someone who only occasionally dabbles in systems programming, I know that Zig's build system is infinitely more approachable and coherent than the monstrosities of CMake and any other build system I've ever come across in various C and C++ projects.

3. That's true, but Zig isn't 1.0 yet so that's to be expected.
by munksbeer | 2025-05-02 08:57:07+00:00
> If it had actually reduced mass immigration from the third world, as voters were promised, it would have been good.

There isn't a very high bar to understanding that immigration from "the thirld world" had nothing to do with the EU.

As an immigrant to the UK, I was very acutely aware of the sentiment leading up to, during and after the referendum, but I was mortified by the ignorance displayed by people around the topic.

I'm from one of those third world countries by the way.
by choffee | 2025-05-02 08:57:11+00:00
I think there has been a big uptake in things you don't see like embedded or FPGA cores but as a general CPU it's nowhere near as efficient as ARM/x86 right now is my understanding. So it might be running in the SSD and the Fan controller but not as the CPU. I think a large part of the cost of a CPU core is not the instruction set but the optimisation of the CPU and ARM/Intel/AMD are still way ahead in those. And so it needs people to optimise the cores, which when they have done that they charge for being a better CPU.
by karel-3d | 2025-05-02 08:59:18+00:00
You can still ask your Zig question on Stack Overflow, or they have a semi-official Discourse forum Ziggit (which I find preferable to Discord) where I got answers quickly...

Zig Discord is also just semi-official... there is also Slack, there is also mailing list, libera IRC, Telegram, QQ, Zulip...

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community
by noodletheworld | 2025-05-02 08:59:24+00:00
> so types are not as big a help as one might think.

Yes, they are.

An agent can combine the compiler type system and iterate.

That is impossible using clojure.

The reason you have problems woth ocaml is that the tooling youre using is too shit to support iterating until the compiler passes before returning the results to you.

…not because tooling doesnt exist. Not because the tooling doesn't work.

—> because you are not using it.

Sure, rust ownership makes it hard for LLMs. Faaair point; but ultimately, why would a coding agent ever suggest code to you that doesnt compile?

Either: a) the agent tooling is poor or b) it is impossible to verify if the code compiles.

One of those is a solvable problem.

One is not.

(Yes, what many current agents do is run test suites; but dynamically generating valid tests is tricky; checking if code compiles is not tricky.)
by endofreach | 2025-05-02 08:59:54+00:00
> Guess who's going to be fired by elon :D

i know, you probably just meant it as a fun comment. but i don't get how this is funny. this person probably relies on income, might have a family to feed... and just made a mistake. a type of mistake, that is not uncommon. i mean i have seen corporate projects where senior engineers didn't even understand why committing secrets might be a bad idea.

yes, of course, as a engineer you have responsibilities and this is clearly an error. but it also says a lot about the revolutionary AIs that will apparently replace all engineers... but the companies claiming it are not using it to catch stuff like this.

and let's keep in mind– i am surely not the only one making this experience: every single time i am using an LLM for code generation, i have to remove hardcoded secrets and explicitly show them how to do it. but even then, it starts to suggest hardcoding sensitive info here and there. which means: A. troublesome results made by these models, presented to inexperienced engineers. and people are conditioned to believe in the superiority of LLM code, given all the claims in the media. but also B: that models suggest this practice, shows just how common this issue is.

yes, this shouldn't happen at any company. but these AI companies with their wild claims should put their money where their mouth is. if your AI is about to replace X many engineers, why is it not supervising at least commits? to public repos? why are your powerful, AGI-agentic autonomous supernatural creations not able to regex the sh outta it? could it be that they don't really believe their own tales? or do they believe, but not think?

of course, an incident like this could lead to attempts of turning it into a PR-win– claiming something like "see, this would have never happened with/to our Almighty Intelligence. that's why it should replace your humans." but then: if you truly believe it and have already invested so much resources, you believe to foresee the future so surely, why ignore the obvious? or are is this silent, implicit testimony, that you got caught up in a hype-train and got brainwashed into thinking, that code generation is what makes a good engineer? (just to be safe: i am not saying LLMs are not useful).

also: that something this could even happen at a company like that, is not the fault of one engineer. it indicates either bad architecture or conventions and/or bad practice and culture... and... a l s o: no (human) code review process in place?

the mistake was made by one engineer, yes. but as though it's made to seem like this mistake is the root... it's not. the mistake is a symptom, not the cause.

i honestly hope the engineer does not get fired. and i really don't understand this mentality. if this person is actually good at their job and takes it seriously, it's certain: he or she is not going to leak a secret again. someone who replaces him or her, might.
by ornornor | 2025-05-02 09:00:30+00:00
> I hate to admit, but sometimes I wish someone forced me to sit in a hotel to learn fundamental CS stuffs that I want to do

I don’t think that’s appropriate. You’re jesting about it, NKs working abroad are basically prisoners and their families taken hostages (as in don’t come back or do something we don’t like and we’ll kill your wife and children)

Hardly comparable.
by larodi | 2025-05-02 09:01:12+00:00
Let's admit it - overnight it became much much harder to be a convincing professor, given each student can use GPTs of all sorts to contradict or otherwise intimidate you. Only a seasoned professor knows the feeling of being bullied by a smart-ass student. Which brings down the total value, the incentive, to teach, and also given the avoidance GPTs silently imprint in students. I mean - why write a program/paper/research when the GPT can do it for you, and save you the suffering.

The whole area of algorithms suddenly became more challenging, as now you also have to understand folding multi-dimensional spaces, and retell this all as a nice story for students to remember.

We are very likely heading into some dark uncharted era for academia, which will very likely lead to academia shrinking massively. And given the talk of 'all science now happens in big corpos'... I can expect the universities to go back to the original state they started from - monasteries.

Saying this all having spent 20+ years as part-time contributor to one such monastery.
by snkzxbs | 2025-05-02 09:01:13+00:00
> tariffs levied by the EU and/or Germany are bad for me, because it is going to raise prices in the EU and Germany

That’s short term thinking. Signed: a Spaniard who has seen all of the country’s industry dismantled since we joined the EU to be moved to Germany and Eastern Europe and now we’re screwed.