MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by achierius | 2025-05-05 19:14:25+00:00
Speaking as someone who studied excess courses back in the day, I still agree with the GP. There's a big difference between being able to pursue random sparks of interest (as might someone picking up a course they find interesting) and consistently studying even when you aren't necessarily inspired by the material, or when the material is so hard it stops being fun. I spend a lot of time working on projects in my spare time even today, but I can think of only one case where I worked anywhere near as hard on one of those as I did on the projects for my university's OS course, or compilers course, or etc. Even students who do regularly go above and beyond would likely struggle without the structure to A) tell them what to learn, B) give them motivation -- because of course many students who do go the extra mile are still motivated by grades, prestige, research opportunities, etc.
by paxys | 2025-05-05 19:15:16+00:00
If a random guest came to me on my wedding day and said "I don't want you to post any photos of this event online because one of my friends just lost their spouse and I don't want them to see me at a wedding at this time", my response would (rightly) be - I'm sorry for their loss but that isn't going to stop me from celebrating my day in whatever way I see fit. Yes I obviously wouldn't go out of my way to call and tell the grieving person about how much fun I had, but people understand that life goes on, and the entire world doesn't have to be sanitized to meet individual people's preferences.
by foobiekr | 2025-05-05 19:15:22+00:00
I think this is right but also missing a useful perspective.

Most HN people are probably too young to remember that the nanotech post-scarcity singularity was right around the corner - just some research and engineering way - which was the widespread opinion in 1986 (yes, 1986). It was _just as dramatic_ as today's AGI.

That took 4-5 years to fall apart, and maybe a bit longer for the broader "nanotech is going to change everything" to fade. Did nanotech disappear? No, but the notion of general purpose universal constructors absolutely is dead. Will we have them someday? Maybe, if humanity survives a hundred more years or more, but it's not happening any time soon.

There are a ton of similarities between nanotech-nanotech singularity and the moderns LLM-AGI situation. People point(ed) to "all the stuff happening" surely the singularity is on the horizon! Similarly, there was the apocalytpic scenario that got a ton of attention and people latching onto "nanotech safety" - instead of runaway AI or paperclip engines, it was Grey Goo (also coined in 1986).

The dynamics of the situation, the prognostications, and aggressive (delusional) timelines, etc. are all almost identical in a 1:1 way with the nanotech era.

I think we will have both AGI and general purpose universal constructors, but they are both no less than 50 years away, and probably more.

So many of the themes are identical that I'm wondering if it's a recurring kind of mass hysteria. Before nanotech, we were on the verge of genetic engineering (not _quite_ the same level of hype, but close, and pretty much the same failure to deliver on the hype as nanotech) and before that the crazy atomic age of nuclear everything.

Yes, yes, I know that this time is different and that AI is different and it won't be another round of "oops, this turned out to be very hard to make progress on and we're going to be in a very slow, multi-decade slow-improvement regime, but that has been the outcome of every example of this that I can think of.
by drewbeck | 2025-05-05 19:15:48+00:00
I see OpenAI's original form as the last gasp of a kind of liberal tech; in a world where "doing good" was seen as very important, the non-profit approach made sense and got a lot of people on board. These days the Altmans and the pmarcas of the world are much more comfortable expressing their authoritarian, self-centered world views; the "evolving" structure of Open AI is fully in line with that. They want to be the kings they always thought of themselves as, and now they get to do so without couching it in "doing good".
by jojohohanon | 2025-05-05 19:15:56+00:00
… this is incredibly wrong headed. People forget. Even when we promise we will remember, we forget. And what we remember is often false and distorted; more so with every revisit.

Take snapshots and souvenirs to aid and anchor your memory. Take careful photographs to adorn your walls and communicate to others.

But don’t film concerts. There is no upside
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-05 19:16:11+00:00
> Isn't the value of this site that humans curate what is posted?

The value of this site is that interesting things get posted. Them being from a human is not inherently required. I do think that it's more likely to be the case when it comes from a human, but that's secondary.

Also, I would argue that upvoting is more important to curation than submission.

> Or is automating submissions not a form of abuse?

I do not believe it is inherently a form of abuse. The site guidelines do not prohibit automatic submissions, for example. If they did, then yeah, I'd say it's not a good thing to do.
by tgtweak | 2025-05-05 19:16:25+00:00
These are excellent tips. Also helpful is the fact that since Bambu came into the scene, the tooling (slicers) and printers (core-xy and others) are all stepping up their usability game, getting the entire space into a "just print" mentality which is really driving a lot of adoption, model creation and just good for the overall ecosystem.

I design a lot of parts in fusion360 and have been printing for nearly a decade, and even I found some good tips in here.

I would add one very important section here which is filament selection. Modern filaments like PC-CF (carbon-fiber impregnated polycarbonate) are unbelievably versatile for real-world prints and parts, and the higher-end consumer printers can print this (requires a ~300'C capable print head and hardened steel nozzle) with relative ease. There are so many different filaments out there outside the standard PLA that really shine in many ways and aren't 10x more expensive to print with.

Slicers are getting pretty good now too with a lot of work going into slicers to improve print quality, speed and part strength.

Love seeing cnckitchen called out here so many times - such a great resource to follow and learn from if you're getting serious about new developments in 3d printing and unbiased reviews. The quality of models on printables and thingiverse is really getting better and the amount of things you can simply download and print and have a fully functioning device with 0 external parts (print-in-place and single-print components) is really encouraging to see.

Once generative AI gets a grasp on object modelling and cad principles I think we'll see an explosion in functional part models in the same way parameterized models are becoming more mainstream.
by esafak | 2025-05-05 19:17:02+00:00
As with nuclear weapons, there is non-negligible probability of wiping out the human race. The companies developing AI have not solved the alignment problem, and OpenAI even dismantled what programs it had on it. They are not going to invest in it unless forced to.

We should not be racing ahead because China is, but investing energy in alignment research and international agreements.
by llsf | 2025-05-05 19:17:18+00:00
Made me think of Jean-Jacques Rousseau "Reveries d'un promeneur solitaire" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reveries_of_the_Solitary_Walke...

When letting our mind wandering (and walking actually helps me to remove some distractions) can bring some peace and eventually some new perspective.
by chelmzy | 2025-05-05 19:17:30+00:00
Not particularly. The only thing I have noticed in the past decade is the decline of the "American Hacker". Most groups are foreign but will partner with younger Americans for social engineering (ex. Scattered Spider). You just don't have people like Albert Gonzalez/Stephen Watt in America now. However, I suspect that many American hackers have shifted to targeting overseas countries that are not friendly with the US.
by astrange | 2025-05-05 19:17:36+00:00
> In our actual lifetimes we have watched wages stagnate for decades, pur purchasing power is dramatically lower than our parents.

This graph is going up.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

The reason you believe otherwise is that people on social media think they're only allowed to say untrue negative things about the economy, because if they ever say anything positive it'd be disrespectful to poor people.

> We have watched wealthy countries shift from higher paying production economies into lower paying service economies

Service work is higher paying, which is why factory workers try to get their children educated enough to do it.

> We have watched the wealth gap widen as the rich get richer the poor get poorer and the middle class shrinks. Some of the shrinking middle class moved up, but most moved down

They mostly moved up. But notice this graph is positive for every group.

https://realtimeinequality.org/?id=wealth&wealthend=03012023...
by const_cast | 2025-05-05 19:18:07+00:00
The lines for humans aren't clearly drawn, but they are drawn. The main difference is that humans are humans and LLMs are computer programs.

I see no reason why we should even entertain the idea of extending human rights to computer programs, and so far, nobody has been able to give me any good reasons why.

Furthermore, why are we only entertaining the human rights that can be used for profit-driven purposes? Why do LLMs, for example, not have the right to free speech? Or an attorney? It seems highly unethical to grant these computer programs some protections as if they're humans but not grant them personhood. This is akin to slavery, which is something we actually have to consider. Anthropomorphization is a double-edged sword. We cannot simultaneously consider them human when convenient and then consider them programs when it's not. Or, if we want to do that, we need to form coherent argument to why, how, and when.
by sumoboy | 2025-05-05 19:18:40+00:00
I think it's a combination of both, the LLM's today for coding are just average containing a lot of pre-2024 knowledge. The vibe tools are getting around some of the shortcomings and increased token limits which is great, but up to date current knowledge can't rely on llm.txt doc updates as context and expect reasonable code generation. Give me some monthly updated topic related LLM's to use (coding, content writing, history), I don't need the entire world all the time.
by opello | 2025-05-05 19:18:51+00:00
While I'm not sure it runs afoul of the Show HN rules linked, it may given the referenced repository[1] isn't public. The linked repository from this post[2] and the YouTube video[3] might be sufficient.

But I agree it's a little disappointing to not see the code behind the demo.

[1] https://github.com/benb0jangles/EZ-TRAK.git

[2] https://github.com/benb0jangles/EzTrak

[3] https://youtu.be/2A2lW0ONNiE
by bdangubic | 2025-05-05 19:19:22+00:00
AGI is matter of when, not if

probably true but this statement would be true if when is 2308 which would defeat the purpose of the statement. when first cars started rolling around some mates around the campfire we saying “not if but when” we’ll have flying cars everywhere and 100 years later (with amazing progress in car manufacturing) we are nowhere near… I think saying “when, not if” is one of those statements that while probably indisputable in theory is easily disputable in practice. give me “when” here and I’ll put up $1,000 to a charity of your choice if you are right and agree to do the same thing if wrong
by bgnn | 2025-05-05 19:19:22+00:00
There are similar methods to model neural networks in analog. Switched capacitor circuits like CCD are semi digital as they are time discrete. This makes them very interesting for analog computing. It kinda never got popular though, as capacitors are much larger than transistors, and you need an ADC and a DAC to interact with a digital computer. In fact you need a lot of them, and they consume even more power than the digital alternatives.

The biggest use case for this is sensor interfaces where the signal is still analog (not passed through an ADC yet). Voice recognition is a typical example where analog neural networks are used to certain level of success, and now people are pushing for insge recognition but the architecture of a digital camera isn't compatible with that, so I don't see much happening there.

Funny fact is these kind of circuits are used in analog portion of the chips to implement rather complex calibration/training loops (correlation, LMS optimization, pattern recognition etc) heavily since early 90s. There's a lot of analog computing happening in every SoC.
by jeremyjh | 2025-05-05 19:19:44+00:00
Wow, thank you for saying exactly this, this "deferred anxiety" probably does partly explain sleep issues I've had the last 3-4 years. I agreed with GP's comment and have more issues with screens, but didn't even notice this difference in how I take my walks now.

Sometimes my inner thoughts can crowd aside the podcast and I'll get home and realize I didn't hear anything from the podcast, but more often it keeps me distracted the whole time. I think unplugging from podcasts on walks and in the car is definitely worth a try.
by crote | 2025-05-05 19:19:45+00:00
A device communicating over USB3 has to sample once per symbol period, with a 1-bit frequency. Most of the hard stuff is offloaded to purpose-designed silicon, so that 5Gsps analog signal is quickly turned into, say, a 128-bit bus running at 39MHz. That's fairly easy to deal with - especially because most of it is either directly processed and forwarded (like webcams), or has some form of flow control (hard drives).

If you're diagnosing signal quality you're going to want to look at the analog signals, which means sampling at a rate significantly faster than the baud rate, and at a 8-bit or higher resolution to actually see analog behaviour. Suddenly you're dealing with 400Gbps of incoming sampling data - and you have to do realtime analysis on that to trigger at the right time, and be capable of storing at least a few tens of thousands of samples for display.
by gcp123 | 2025-05-05 19:19:53+00:00
While I think the title is misleading/clickbaity (no surprise given the buzzfeed connection), I'll say that the substance of the article might be one of the most honest take on LLMs I've seen from someone who actually works in the field. The author describes exactly how I use LLMs - strategically, for specific tasks where they add value, not as a replacement for actual thinking.

What resonated most was the distinction between knowing when to force the square peg through the round hole vs. when precision matters. I've found LLMs incredibly useful for generating regex (who hasn't?) and solving specific coding problems with unusual constraints, but nearly useless for my data visualization work.

The part about using Claude to generate simulated HN criticism of drafts is brilliant - getting perspective without the usual "this is amazing!" LLM nonsense. That's the kind of creative tool use that actually leverages what these models are good at.

I'm skeptical about the author's optimism regarding open-source models though. While Qwen3 and DeepSeek are impressive, the infrastructure costs for running these at scale remain prohibitive for most use cases. The economics still don't work.

What's refreshing is how the author avoids both the "AGI will replace us all" hysteria and the "LLMs are useless toys" dismissiveness. They're just tools - sometimes useful, sometimes not, always imperfect.
by rep_lodsb | 2025-05-05 19:20:01+00:00
The absolutely minimal code to enter - and leave - protected mode is this:

mov eax,cr0 inc ax ;sets bit 0, assuming it was clear mov cr0,eax dec ax ;clears bit 0 mov cr0,eax

As the article correctly said, descriptor caches are what the CPU actually uses to access memory. Coming from real mode, the attributes are already set up the same as in privileged 16-bit protected mode (except that CS is writable), the limit is 64K, and the base is the segment number shifted left by 4, exactly what we require.

"But that's cheating!", some might say - not really, how else would it be possible to even execute one instruction in protected mode, if those registers weren't already initialized to a sane state? CS at the very least has to be, so that you can execute a jump to the "proper" protected mode segment right after loading CR0.

I remember reading some documentation that even said you can load GDT either before or after the "switch" to protected mode, which would be even more impossible if that somehow required different segments already set up.

If you want to be pedantic, there also has to be a jump in there to clear the prefetch queue and make sure the CPU actually interprets code according to the new mode, instead of the one that was active when the instruction was fetched and decoded. But that first jump can - and according to some Intel manuals, must! - actually be a near jump, staying in the same code segment at least for the moment. Since a lot of protected mode init code gets this wrong however, they had to keep support for a far jump as the first instruction as well, probably making the microcode for that instruction slower than it could have otherwise been.

(To enter "unreal mode", of course you do also need a GDT, but it doesn't need to have any descriptors other than one for the flat 4G data segment)
by ddingus | 2025-05-05 19:20:30+00:00
Yeah that seems familiar. One night on business travel, I decided to just play with the setup and really thought highly of it all.

Then some years passed, I got a Blackberry Curve, then a Note 4 and by the time I looked back at Bluetooth. I HATED IT. Still do, though I am grudgingly working through basics, phone call, play audio, etc and the whole time looking at my still wire capable hardware thinking "not yet"
by neogodless | 2025-05-05 19:21:06+00:00
> Lately I’ve seen more people in their cars thwarting stoplight boredom—­that is, unable to sit unmediated for even the few moments that it takes a red light to turn green, they reach for their smartphones.

I wish it was only at stoplights. But then just a few days ago, I witnessed a totally unnecessary accident. Left-lane got green, and someone in the straight lane noticed the movement but didn't look up and drove right into the car in front of them...
by frainfreeze | 2025-05-05 19:21:09+00:00
I found it is best to keep quiet, not even have a (directly attached to your name) blog with such varried content, and instead just send appropriate version of your CV when needed. When it comes to interviews I found it helps that I'm in my office/lab space, able to pick up the cam and show the person on call contents of my shelves and present few details about them on the office whiteboard. But even then they of course doubt you.

Tldr raise your price and they'll belive easier.
by steveklabnik | 2025-05-05 19:21:35+00:00
> The more prominent and widely used a language/library/framework, and the more "common" what you are attempting, the more accurate LLMs tends to be. The more you deviate from mainstream paths, the more you will hit such problems.

One very interesting variant of this: I've been experimenting with LLMs in a react-router based project. There's an interesting development history where there's another project called Remix, and later versions of react-router effectively ate it, that is, in December of last year, react-router 7 is effectively also Remix v3 https://remix.run/blog/merging-remix-and-react-router

Sometimes, the LLM will be like "oh, I didn't realize you were using remix" and start importing from it, when I in fact want the same imports, but from react-router.

All of this happened so recently, it doesn't surprise me that it's a bit wonky at this, but it's also kind of amusing.
by seattle_spring | 2025-05-05 19:21:36+00:00
Why are so many people conflating Cursor's main value proposition with "vibe coding"? AI assisted development is not "vibe coding", which is just a silly gimmick to churn out half-assed insecure garbage quickly.

Edit: oh, it's because the article erroneously claims it's a "vibe coding app." Yikes.
by Draiken | 2025-05-05 19:21:42+00:00
> I know exactly what happens when we just let the free market "manage" anything.

This is literally how we got here right now. The "free market" allowed Apple to be anti-competitive. The way you say it makes it sound like we're not in a free market, lol.

Monopolies (or its variants) are literally the end game of free markets. You can't have free markets without eventually reaching this shitty endgame of a few players manipulating the market as they see fit.
by scoopdewoop | 2025-05-05 19:21:54+00:00
This is an interesting premise.

The timbre of instruments largely due to the harmonics that they exhibit, and for natural instruments these tend to be simple whole number ratios that we replicate in our scales in just temperament, and approximate more flexibly in equal temperament.

I had never considered what scales a synthetic sound with unfamiliar harmonics would sound best in.

Edit: Not even synthetic instruments, but Gamelan instruments too! Oh so cool, I've seen many Gamelan performances and its very exciting as a musician to hear such a rich and different paradigm.
by robocat | 2025-05-05 19:23:02+00:00
> Or am I just seeing patterns where there aren’t any?

Meta: there are patterns to seeing patterns, and it's good to understand where your doubt springs from.

1: hallucinating connections/metaphors can be a sign you're spending too much time within a topic. The classic is binging on a game for days, and then resurfacing back into a warped reality where everything you see related back to the game. Hallucinations is the wrong word sorry: because sometimes the metaphors are deeply insightful and valuable: e.g. new inventions or unintuitive cross-discipline solutions to unsolved maths problems. Watch when others see connections to their pet topics: eventually you'll learn to internally dicern your valuable insights from your more fanciful ones. One can always consider whether a temporary change to another topic would be healthy? However sometimes diving deeper helps. How to choose??

2: there's a narrow path between valuable insight and debilitating overmatching. Mania and conspirational paranioa find amazing patterns, however they tend to be rather unhelpful overall. Seek a good balance.

3: cultivate the joy within yourself and others; arts and poetry is fun. Finding crazy connections is worthwhile and often a basis for humour. Engineering is inventive and being a judgy killjoy is unhealthy for everyone.

Hmmm, I usually avoid philosophical stuff like that. Abstract stuff is too difficult to write down well.
by jjani | 2025-05-05 19:23:24+00:00
SamA is in a hurry because he's set to lose the race. We're at peak valuation and he needs to convert something now.

If the entrenched giants (Google, Microsoft and Apple) catch up - and Google 100% has, if not surpassed - they have a thousand levers to pull and OpenAI is done for. Microsoft has realized this, hence why they're breaking up with them - Google and Anthropic have shown they don't need OpenAI. Galaxy phones will get a Gemini button, Chrome will get it built into the browser. MS can either develop their own thing , use opensource models, or just ask every frontier model provider (and there's already 3-4 as we speak) how cheaply they're willing to deliver. Then chuck it right in the OS and Office first-class. Which half the white collar world spends their entire day staring at. Apple devices too will get an AI button (or gesture, given it's Apple) and just like MS they'll do it inhouse or have the providers bid against each other.

The only way OpenAI David was ever going to beat the Goliaths GMA in the long run was if it were near-impossible to catch up to them, á la TSMC/ASML. But they did catch up.