MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by psychoslave | 2025-05-21 12:50:58+00:00
Funnily "pure" itself is a latinism by that approach, and I guess most Germananic roots will be linked to Indo-European reconstruction by modern philologist standards, anyway.

Taken as a fun challenging learning game that can possibly make ludic instruction meet an amusing defy.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/pure
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-21 12:51:14+00:00
As someone from a relatively successful country with entrenched high levle corruption, I can say that cuts both ways.

Plenty of business people actually like the high level corruption because it can make doing business easier for them: no red tape, no long wait times, just bribe a some politician and all your paperwork is approved instantly, then it's smooth sailing. That's how China became rich despite corruption.

What you don't want is the Africa style corruption where every single peon and government worker from the top to the bottom, from the president to the policeman on the street, wants a bribe from you every 5 minutes for random reasons they make up. This way nothing ever gets done and the country stays perpetually poor.
by marmakoide | 2025-05-21 12:51:19+00:00
Hot take : the whole LLM craze is fed by a delusion. LLM are good at mimicking human language, capturing some semantics on the way. With a large enough training set, the amount of semantic captured covers a large fraction of what the average human knows. This gives the illusion of intelligence, and the humans extrapolates on LLM capabilities, like actual coding. Because large amounts of code from textbooks and what not is on the training set, the illusion is convincing for people with shallow coding abilities.

And then, while the tech is not mature, running on delusion and sunken costs, it's actually used for production stuffs. Butlerian Jihad when
by NobodytheHobbit | 2025-05-21 12:52:03+00:00
They do. If you just scroll the ubiquitous online market, that doesn't need to be named, and look for odd brand names. Intentionally odd. Like "sxrpgh" as the brand as a made up placeholder. These brands are named to quickly start a business.

Why? It's an aliexpress model. Create as many legal entities as you can and let an economic Darwinism kill the ones you do poorly at and cherry pick your successful businesses.

The actual labor is outsourced to the market itself with products produced in southeast Asia by a wholesaler, sent to the market by said contracted wholesaler, and sales handled by the market's fairly much only retailer. It's so automated you really only have to be lucky that consumers pick your product and luck can be bent to will at times.

It's a very botnet approach to business.

This does expand the approach from flooding the market with cheap goods, to making cheap goods and competing with prices from the middlemen, making less efforted profits using the same approach, but exports the profits out of the US economy. I know this is a unusual framing but that's exactly what is happening.

Before a middleman within the economy would extract the wealth from that labor in this way. Why not cut out the middleman if the formula can be followed by anyone? And in the current belligerent state of trade it would politically expedient to do so or at the very least encourage this model if you are adversarial to the US because it works well. Our businesses already proved that.
by OGWhales | 2025-05-21 12:53:05+00:00
> MMT discourse tends to gloss over or ignore the dangers of runaway inflation and act as if you can borrow all you want with no consequence.

I see people say this a lot, which is odd since as far as I have seen it's one of the main points MMT people make. I'm not sure how one of the core insights of MMT has become the main criticism of it, it's kind of funny.

I suppose this is because some people have taken MMT to mean that debt doesn't matter, however that is really not at all what it says. I think a more reasonable conclusion of the system MMT describes is that how money is spent matters greatly (productive vs unproductive spending), the primary purpose of taxes is keeping inflation in-check, and real resources are critical to the health of a currency.
by dboreham | 2025-05-21 12:53:11+00:00
Similar history and similar peeve here. It's much the same as many other fields though -- the people who think loudspeaker cable is directional, and so on.

There is some hope -- if you look for interviews with Billy Gibbons' "tech" guy he talks about how they ran his favorite guitar (Pearly Gates) through a SA while playing an open G cord. Then for every other guitar he plays live they program an EQ spectrum to bring it to the same spectrum as that baseline guitar. So they all sound the same (because it's only EQ that differs between pickups not 1960s magic smoke).
by infecto | 2025-05-21 12:53:23+00:00
You’re totally right that there hasn’t been a fundamental architectural leap like “attention is all you need”, that was a generational shift. But I’d argue that what we’ve seen since is a compounding of scale, optimization, and integration that’s changed the practical capabilities quite dramatically, even if it doesn’t look flashy in an academic sense. The models are qualitatively different at the frontier, more steerable, more multimodal, and increasingly able to reason across context. It might not feel like a revolution on paper, but the impact in real-world workflows is adding up quickly. Perhaps all of that can be put in the bucket of “tooling” but from my perspective there has still been quite large leaps looking at cost differences alone.

For some reason my pessimism meter goes off when I see single sentence arguments “change has been slow”. Thanks for brining the conversation back.
by horhay | 2025-05-21 12:53:23+00:00
I generally think that Kling or even Runway has achieved the visual fidelity of Veo (flaws and all, physics problems and direction of action and such), but now people are basically experiencing sensory bias where they think that some things about the visuals make better sense because nw it has sound as an added context. Visually, yeah. Probably on par with Kling, possibly worse on the depction of dynamic action
by gitremote | 2025-05-21 12:54:10+00:00
Disparate impact is illegal, so it's not a "fringe legal theory".

If you don't see anything wrong with my example of disparate impact, how about a hypothetical company policy that has a dress code of short hair for all engineers regardless of gender? More women than men would quit, seeing the policy as draconian and controlling (or be fired for non-compliance), while men who already have short hair wouldn't find the policy onerous or difficult.
by mihaaly | 2025-05-21 12:55:46+00:00
Peeking out of my bubble a bit:

Why do we need startups?

Why do we need so much that the thought of wrapping the mentality of a whole society around it comes to mind before questioning its legitimacy in a certain context? So serial startup-making can be executed like chain smoking. What are the big benefits that this very form and specific brand of organization type deserves special treatment, other formations or no formations, single persons, departments in a keep-going company, co-ops, semi-chaotic group of enthusiast, or whatever will never ever produce without absorbing proper startup mentality to the core of the society?

I am sceptic, yes, not least because I was in a startup of a serial startuper where half of the efforts were spent on being a proper startup. How startupers do, how they act, what they do in what stage, what is the proper procedure for being a startup? There is even television series that was used as reference. Remaining efforts went into other detals, one among those was product development. Asking another startup founder about where he sees the company in 5 years the answer was 'Sold!' without a second of hesitation. I was phrasing wrong, I assumed I was asking about the product roadmap that happened to be made in the formal setting of this organization, but that was not in the focus of the minds apparently.

Americans can have an inflated positivistic style pulled on when they want to anyways, to be enthusiastic for the sake of enthusiasm, in selective situations, easily shifted to and away from anything. I wouldn't rely on that too much, but especially wouldn't use as reference for transforming a different society that may be a bit more repelling with the same thing of all things.
by abxyz | 2025-05-21 12:56:11+00:00
The author of that comment, an employee of Microsoft, goes on to say:

> It is my opinion that anyone not at least thinking about benefiting from such tools will be left behind.

The read here is: Microsoft is so abuzz with excitement/panic about AI taking all software engineering jobs that Microsoft employees are jumping on board with Microsoft's AI push out of a fear of "being left behind". That's not the confidence inspiring the statement they intended it to be, it's the opposite, it underscores that this isn't the .net team "experimenting to understand the limits of what the tools" but rather the .net team trying to keep their jobs.
by mieubrisse | 2025-05-21 12:57:26+00:00
I was looking for exactly this comment. Everybody's gloating, "Wow look how dumb AI is! Haha, schadenfreude!" but this seems like just a natural part of the evolution process to me.

It's going to look stupid... until the point it doesn't. And my money's on, "This will eventually be a solved problem."
by dkdbejwi383 | 2025-05-21 12:57:30+00:00
This gives me flashbacks to when my big corporate former employer outsourced a bunch of work offshore.

An outsourced contractor was tasked with a very simple job as their first task - update a single dependency, which required just a bump of the version and no code changes - after three days of them seemingly struggling to even understand what they were asked to do, inability to clone the repo, failure to install the necessary tooling on their machine, they ended up getting fired from the project. Complete waste of money, and the time of those of us having to delegate and review this work.
by LocalH | 2025-05-21 12:57:36+00:00
Making a video game "without an engine" is basically another way to say "making your own game engine". Which is a fine thing to do, but you're "just" making a bespoke engine for one game (or series of games). Sometimes those engines get large enough to be used by others. That's why it's called "Unreal Engine", because it has heritage in the Unreal games.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-21 12:58:04+00:00
> Finally, we want a language that is easy to pick up; it should feel like a statically typed version of scripting languages you're used to.

It looks like Rust. All Rust scripting languages do. Is this true for all other languages? Is this just a property of embeddable scripting languages, they will always resemble the language they're implemented in and meant to be embedded in?
by echelon | 2025-05-21 12:58:28+00:00
I've given this some more thought. Even if Imagen 4 isn't that great on its own, all of Google's models and UX products in conjunction (Veo 3, Flow, etc.) are orders of magnitude above the rest of the playing field.

If Tencent wants to keep Google from winning the game, they should open source their models. From my perspective right now, it looks like Google is going to win this entire game, and open source AI might be the only way to stop that from being a runaway victory.
by ikesau | 2025-05-21 12:58:33+00:00
I hadn't seen these before, but they're working because of the limitations of the technology.

The format of the shows are mostly clip-based - man on the street, news hour, etc - and obviously the jokes are all written by someone with a good sense of humour.

Not to discount that this is, as you say, an example of someone using AI to successfully create characters and stories that resonate with people. it's just still very much because of a creative human's talent and good taste that it's working.
by BlueTemplar | 2025-05-21 13:00:12+00:00
The use of the term «AI» is, yet again, annoying by its vagueness.

I'm assuming that they do not refer to the general use of machines to solve differential equations (whether exactly or approximately), which is centuries old (Babbage's engine).

But then how restricted these «Physics-Informed Neural Networks» are ? Are there other methods using Neural Networks to solve differential equations ?
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-21 13:00:29+00:00
> Note that nothing in the script is run automatically when the script is loaded, as happens in many other scripting language. The host application decides which functions and filtermaps it extracts from the script and when to run them.

So it's closer to something like C or C++, where it just defined stuff and you can choose what to use? I guess that's fine when there's no initialization for the script to do. Maybe in your domain that's never the case. But many languages end up adding static initialization as a first-class feature eventually.
by abxyz | 2025-05-21 13:00:31+00:00
Thank you for taking the time to visit here and share insight. Yes, that explains it. The missing pieces for me were 1) no knowledge of "chandelier bids" (I thought bids were bids) 2) the article says "without a minimum price guarantee" which I read to be describing the absence of a reserve. With knowledge of chandelier bids, and an understanding that there was a reserve, it all makes sense :)
by ty6853 | 2025-05-21 13:00:37+00:00
There's not a shortage of skilled labor so much in US as there is a shortage of people able to go through the racketeering process of getting a contractor license, which also requires being a half-slave to someone with a license for a number of years. It's straight up mercantilist style shake-down to benefit prior entrants. It is easier in US to become an electrical engineer than it is to become a guy who adds a new outlet to a room addition, but that has nothing to do with skill.

In fact when I was first hired as an engineer, it was actually someone that wanted an electrician but hired EEs instead because they are cheaper and more readily available.

One of the worst is something like installing HVAC stuff. I got an EPA refrigerant license in 2 days of studying and then did my own myself. If I wanted to install it for a profit for someone else, I would have to spend 4 years working for someone else with a license first to get the contractor license! The end result is it legitimately cost like $700 to have a single capacitor replaced on an air conditioner, and in places like Florida if you do it for someone else without years of 'training' you're now a felon.
by Juliate | 2025-05-21 13:00:47+00:00
> It is also additional value creation.

For _who_ really?

Shareholders of AI tools producing companies?

Shareholders of companies that pretend to replace people and verifiable working processes with poorly understood black boxes?

(I can't help but notice the _same_ playbook as with crypto, NFTs, Web3, metaverse, and the same enabling-hardware provider).

Value, automation, efficiency will not solve the climate change challenges, if they are not directed towards it aggressively, as well as humanity acceptance and well-being.

Alas, they are directed towards a very little few bank accounts. Violence and subjugation, in many of their forms, is directed towards the others. It's not by accident.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-21 13:00:59+00:00
As far as the USA is concerned, his logic is somewhat flawed.

There is nothing "fun" about owning and driving a big US made truck with a V8 engine that has been "lifted" with oversized tires that project out beyond the fenders.

The added height makes it unstable, more likely to tip over and more unweildy to drive. There is certainly nothing "fun" about refueling it. Or making a monthly loan + insurance payment that is larger than rent. There is nothing fun about squeezing it into a parking space only to discover later it has been scratched because you parked too close.

The only "fun" is impressing your like minded peers with how gawdy and impractical and wasteful your ride is. And US manufacturers and oil companies are laughing all the way to the bank.
by HelloMcFly | 2025-05-21 13:01:18+00:00
It’s worth recognizing that the tension between labor and capital historical reality, not just a modern-day bad attitude. Workers and leadership don’t automatically share goals, especially when senior management incentives often prioritize reducing labor costs which they always do now (and no, this wasn't always universally so).

Most employees want to do good work, but pretending there’s no structural divergence in interests flattens decades of labor history and ignores the power dynamics baked into modern orgs. It’s not about being antagonistic, it’s about being clear-eyed where there are differences between the motivations of your org. leadership and your personal best interests. After a few levels remove from your position, you're just headcount with loaded cost.
by mrtksn | 2025-05-21 13:01:27+00:00
Good point but I think these are about the choices you make.

You can choose to look after your metallurgist who become obsolete as a laborers but I'm sure they are amazing people. You might be worried for becoming communist or welfare state though.

You can choose to limit trade and other freedoms so you can artificially keep metallurgists at work so you don't have to share what you have with them without exchanging something. This can help you can feel good about not giving away freebies and pretend that this is a meritocracy but suffer from slow progress and other conflicts related in preserving these artificial limits.

You can just choose to leave them to suffer as long as their numbers are not enough to bother you. This one gives you the good life until suddenly it stops doing that if the numbers go up enough.

I guess in this case it was to ignore the "losers" in the system until they become numerous enough to tear down the whole system. A lot of people who vote for obvious frauds and outright fascists(I'm not talking about USA, but in general) are just anti-establishment who don't mean bad but just want to see the current order teared apart at any price.
by tim333 | 2025-05-21 13:02:03+00:00
Asking Perplexity about that:

>Scott Adams has claimed that during his early corporate career, he was explicitly told by his managers that he would not be promoted because companies were prioritizing minorities. According to Adams, while working at Crocker National Bank in San Francisco, his boss told him that "Whites could not be promoted." He then moved to Pacific Bell, where he says his boss told him directly, "you can’t be promoted because you’re White and you’re male"

I'm not sure him having been discriminated against makes all his office humor suspect.
by Dansvidania | 2025-05-21 13:02:09+00:00
I don’t, but anecdotally I know this to be true. I speak 4 languages pretty fluently and I can confidently say that my personality is different depending on which language I am using. I only got to experience this well after having left university and all my academic aspirations so never got deeper than experiencing it first person.

Just for fun, I theorised that it’s a rewinding to the emotional states - and consequently behaviours - I had when getting proficient in the language.
by AbstractH24 | 2025-05-21 13:02:19+00:00
> These GH interactions remind me of one of those offshore software outsourcing firms on Upwork or Freelancer.com that bid $3/hr on every project that gets posted

Those have long been the folks I’ve seen at the biggest risk of being replaced by AI. Tasks that didn’t rely on human interaction or much training, just brute force which can be done from anywhere.

And for them, that $3/hr was really good money.
by drob518 | 2025-05-21 13:02:21+00:00
It has been interesting to watch the Clojure community’s take on DSLs over time. Clojure is a Lisp, and Lisps are notorious for inventing DSLs, particularly after PG’s various papers promoted that as a superpower of sorts. Clojure has gone the other direction and, while it supports macros, it generally discourages their use unless you’ve tried everything else first. But it still encourages DSLs built from the native Clojure data structures. So, for instance Hiccup for HTML generation.
by Tade0 | 2025-05-21 13:03:49+00:00
My impression is that Copilot acts a lot like one of my former coworkers, who struggled with:

-Being a parent to a small child and the associated sleep deprivation.

-His reluctance to read documentation.

-There being a language barrier between him the project owners. Emphasis here, as the LLM acts like someone who speaks through a particularly good translation service, but otherwise doesn't understand the language spoken.
by Quarrel | 2025-05-21 13:05:11+00:00
I've read the criticisms here, but well, as someone whose first computer was a C64, this is cool as hell.

Like, what?!

On an 8-bit, 64Kb, ~1MHz CPU!

Amazing.

Sure, there are too many caveats, but this isn't really about making this a viable modern alternative.

It's just about, well, being very cool? Nostalgic!

And in that, I think it succeeds.
by mmaunder | 2025-05-21 13:05:37+00:00
Quote: Expanded Multimodal Understanding with Audio: Gemma 3n can understand and process audio, text, and images, and offers significantly enhanced video understanding. Its audio capabilities enable the model to perform high-quality Automatic Speech Recognition (transcription) and Translation (speech to translated text). Additionally, the model accepts interleaved inputs across modalities, enabling understanding of complex multimodal interactions. (Public implementation coming soon)

Wow!!
by pansa2 | 2025-05-21 13:06:35+00:00
IIRC Lua deliberately doesn’t resemble C - so if you’re going back-and-forth, editing both the host application code and a script, you can immediately tell which one you’re looking at.

Makes sense to me - which means scripting languages for curly-brace languages should probably use either Lua-style begin-end or Python-style significant indentation.
by alkonaut | 2025-05-21 13:06:40+00:00
Trying to crudely estimate the popularity i tried doing a regex search for C# statements ending with select ___; vs calls to Select(/Where(. It was (only) a factor 10x which was way less difference than I thought to be honest. I have seen and used one in the wild just a handful of times during 22 years of C#. But it might also vary with industry. It's likely a lot more common in fields where there are databases than where there are not.

[1] https://github.com/search?q=%2F%28%3F-i%29%5Cs%2Bselect%5Cs%2B%5Cw%2B%3B%2F+language%3AC%23&type=code&ref=advsearch [2] https://github.com/search?q=%2F%28%3F-i%29%5Cs%2B%5C.%28Select%7CWhere%29%5C%28%2F+language%3AC%23&type=code&ref=advsearch
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-05-21 13:07:02+00:00
Chinese can't invent new words. It's really difficult to invent new characters holding the new meaning one wants to express.

For example the word computer 电脑 (Dian nao) consist of the word for electric/electricity and the word brain. Both together gives the meaning "computer". While English, German, and other 130 languages I googled, somehow represent the verb "to compute / to calculate" ..

in Chinese it's the "electronic brain".. the calculator is then ji suan ji (计算机) -> calculating machine.

The other things you mentioned are pure cultural influenced. Like "the Chinese is better suited to achieve great scientific discussions" which is actually achieved by accumulation of knowledge and learning. Another example, the best mathematicians are in France, Russia.., ..., and US by most. Gambia also has "one" mathematician.. while English being official. Shouldn't then there be more Gambian mathematicians? ... It's "culture" preventing the accumulation of knowledge, or, at least not teaching it amongst the pupils.