MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pdmccormick | 2025-05-04 20:40:52+00:00
This reads like an LLM's fever dream. Maybe the singularity won't be a unitary super-intelligence but rather something like a gaggle of backscratching consultants, a self-perpetuating, invasive, seething mass of bureaucratic AI agents that are always working hard to convince management that the solution is always more AI, especially for the problems created by earlier, less sophisticated, AI's.
by throwanem | 2025-05-04 20:40:57+00:00
Who pushed?

Jesus, I tried as hard as I knew how not to start a fight, knowing this place plays host to a few foreskin mourners. Better just to avoid entirely, it appears, and duly noted.

What a shame the eyeroll emoji is filtered here. That, apparently, is the level people are on. A paragraph is too much! Or is everyone still rationing since Cerebral, or whatever that telemedicine pill mill was called, shut down a few years back? Is that why no one is reading today?

I never thought I'd say this, but for God's sake and as a favor to us both, pipe my shit through ChatGPT and ask for a reframing on a sixth-grade reading level. You pay for access to the damned robot, let it wipe your nose through the remedial work. I've got embroidery to do and movies to watch.
by necovek | 2025-05-04 20:41:07+00:00
"Forcing" is a bit strong IMHO — I believe we've instead lost track of what is "passable", and everyone in higher education should be able to reach that and score a passing grade (D? C?).

Maybe professors are too stringent with their evaluation, or maybe they are not good at teaching people what a passable writing style is, or maybe students simply don't want to accept that if they don't excel at writing, a D or a C is perfectly fine. Perhaps teachers that look for good writing should have separate tests which evaluate students in both scenarios: with and without LLM help.

The same holds true for math: not everybody needs to know how to deduce a proof for every theorem, but in technical sciences, showing that ability and capability will demonstrate how much they are able to think and operate with precision on abstract concepts, very much like in programming. Even if coursework is a bit repetitive, practice does turn shallow knowledge into operational knowledge.
by lelanthran | 2025-05-04 20:41:23+00:00
> Except for a user on a lower specced device that can’t performantly handle filtering and joining on that mass of data in JS code, or perhaps can’t even hold the data in memory.

Just how low-spec and/or how much state-data are we talking about here? I ask only because I am downloading an entire dataset and doing all the logic on the client, and my PC is ancient.

I'm on a computer from 2011 (i7 870 @ 2.9GHz with 16MB of RAM), and the client-side filtering I do, even on a few dozens of thousand of records retrieved from the server, still takes under a second.

On my private app, my prospect list containing maybe 4k records, each pretty substantial (as they include history of engagements/interactions with that client) is faster to sort and filter on the client than it is to download the entire list.

I am usually waiting for 10s while the hefty dataset downloads, but the sorting and filtering happens in under a second. I do not consider that a poor UX.
by bigyabai | 2025-05-04 20:41:53+00:00
So, name your "essential" digital services. Uber drivers start protesting and scabs are automatically hired at reciprocal rates. Self-conscious software engineers take a stand and get replaced by yes-men happy to subsume a six-figure salary to spy on users. Defense contractors start... oh who am I kidding, those places self-select for the least upstanding individuals.

You get the picture. You can't blame half these people either, most of them just want food on the table same as you or me. Relying on class consciousness to revolt against tyranny is like relying on a drogue chute to stop you 10ft from hitting the ground. It's fatalism predicated on the lie that things now are the worse than they've ever been.
by bitwize | 2025-05-04 20:42:03+00:00
My first "date" with my wife was almost exactly described by the Parachute song New Orleans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKknLB8LXCQ

She spent her late teens and early adulthood living in the city, and moved back after living all over the place several times during her life; and so when we met we just got in her car and she took me to all the places that were meaningful to her: shopping on Magazine Street, Ursuline Academy where she went to high school, a book signing with one of her classmates, coffee and beignets at Café du Monde, lunch at Domilise's, etc. It was important to her because she felt that to understand New Orleans was to understand her as a person better. The major detail from the song that was missing was there were no roses bursting through cracks in the sidewalk, but sometimes there was jasmine growing along the fences and walls adjoining the sidewalk and as you walked along you'd just be bathed in the smell of it. Random marching or jazz bands do sometimes pass right by you. Everything you said about the city is true. It's sometimes dangerous, and I wouldn't want to be out in the wrong place at night, but it's honest and raw and real in a way most cities, even my beloved Boston, are not.
by pengaru | 2025-05-04 20:42:22+00:00
The invasion of the bullshit generators is completely out of hand.

This level of "AI" is more like "artificial well-formed stupidity" and its volume of output is boundless. We're totally fucked if it doesn't become actually intelligent.

I'm already having to deal with clowns pasting useless chat bot drivel into GH comments and JIRA tickets at work instead using their brains and time to do actual work.

My colleague keeps joking about it being a good time to become a farmer, I'm starting to believe him.
by ofalkaed | 2025-05-04 20:42:38+00:00
There was not one thunderstorm in the years I lived in the PNW or the years I lived in Austin TX, it is more complicated than how far north you are. There was a very good thunderstorm during my vacation in Alaska a few years ago but I have no idea how common they are there, no one remarked on it being a rare occurrence, just that it was a good storm.
by phoronixrly | 2025-05-04 20:43:20+00:00
Your comment could use a better tone, but I do agree that, especially with the difficulties that people are having finding a job these days, there has been elevated interest in ADHD and thus there are more attempts to prey on people with genuine issues. Just see how many body-doubling articles hit the HN front-page lately... I sincerely doubt that this is the result of organic interest and not an astroturfing campaign.
by hitekker | 2025-05-04 20:44:25+00:00
The replies to this comment are untruthful. The journalist was clearly sympathetic to the author's ideology, which NPR later tried to conceal. As the diff from original to latest shows:[1]

"hand-wringing about looting" -> "condemnation of looting" "bemoaned the property damage" -> "denounced the property damage" "Korean small-business owner murdering 15-year-old Latasha Harlins" -> "Korean small-business owner [killing] 15-year-old Latasha Harlins"

IMO, you've been downvoted to cover up the journalist's bias and, arguably, the bias of NPR's audience.

[1] https://www.diffchecker.com/CJz1Bn51/
by maccard | 2025-05-04 20:45:44+00:00
I never said that WinGet was a drop in replacement for yum - but the parents claim that windows doesn’t have a package manager isn’t true.

There are plenty of padkages that require you to add extra sources to your package manager, that are not maintained by the distro. Docker [0] has official instructions to install via their package source. WinGet allows third party sources, so there’s no reason you can’t use it. It natively supports dependencies too. The fact that applications are packaged in a way that doesn’t utilise this for WinGet is true - but again, I was responding to the claim that windows doesn’t have a package manager.

[0] https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/fedora/#install-using...
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-04 20:47:24+00:00
I wasn't limiting myself to digital services in such statements. But sure. Software engineers get replaced and services stall for months in the meantime, if not years. That's the power workers hold if they can all stand up and push against corporate.

>You get the picture. You can't blame half these people either, most of them just want food on the table same as you or me.

I'm blaming everyone and no one at the same time. It's a prisoners dilemma, and if everyone struck for even a few days it'd be over in surprisingly quick cadence. The dock workers strike barely lasted 2 days, for instance.

But the alternatives make everyone lose out, and people are very risk avoidant, even if they boil in the pot as a result.
by giantrobot | 2025-05-04 20:47:42+00:00
> Your player scans your library and indexes/sorts it however you'd like.

Which means the concepts of files and folders becomes immaterial. If a music player is only interfacing with a database of music metadata it doesn't matter how the bytes on disk are organized.

There's a reason there's been 30+ years of file systems trying to tack on database functionality (BeFS, WinFS, etc) or over the top metadata indexing (Spotlight, Lucene, etc) to file systems. The files and folders abstraction is not sufficient for non-technical users in many cases.
by breakingcups | 2025-05-04 20:47:42+00:00
I sincerely doubt both the existence of these "hidden messages" and the ulterior motives ascribed to the later spam extortion email. The author is trying to be too clever, to the point of delusion.

There are plenty of places where scam cultures exist, where spam email formats (they used to be called modalities) are passed around between participants, many of which are newbies trying to score big, often still minors. They may have seen or heard of one or two people around them hitting big with a scam and that's all the motivation they need to send out a hundred more messages. Spammers are not always some super-smart entity, they can be clueless teens cargo-culting their way into your inbox too.
by singularity2001 | 2025-05-04 20:48:55+00:00
Since we know that these hyper real numbers are well defined we can teach them axiomatically to high school students the way Leibniz used them (and keep the explicit construction via filters to university students just like with a dedekind cut for reals)

Here is the axiomatic approach in Julia and Lean https://github.com/pannous/hyper-lean
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-04 20:49:10+00:00
I don't think that's really the issue, I think that's just one of the ways in which the lack of control manifests itself. You could substitute your problem with the main guy sending incompetent employees, or showing up himself but drunk, or doing poor work, and the cause would be the same: you can't do anything about it, you're not in control. If you were in control, it's no big deal. Imagine you're a well-organized GC on a new build house. You hire Sam's Plumbers and Sam sends some shit subcontractors. It's no big deal because you have Sam's money and you have other plumbers you've used before. You're not reliant on Sam, Sam has an incentive to care (and thus fix things), and you have real recourse. Or for a simpler example, I order a pizza, cash on delivery. Pizza place uses Frank's Delivery and Frank drops my pizza and it's all fucked up. They used subcontractors but I am in control: I don't need to pay, I can order different pizza, and I live here, so they have an incentive to make it right.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-04 20:49:35+00:00
I think, rather than saying they can’t do their job without an LLM, we should just say some can’t do their jobs.

That is, the job of a professional programmer includes having produced code that they understand the behavior of. Otherwise you’ve failed to do your due diligence.

If people are using LLMs to generate code, and then actually doing the work of understanding how that code works… that’s fine! Who cares!

If people are just vibe coding and pushing the results to customers without understanding it—they are wildly unethical and irresponsible. (People have been doing this for decades, they didn’t have the AI to optimize the situation, but they managed to do it by copy-pasting from stack overflow).
by danielmarkbruce | 2025-05-04 20:49:46+00:00
Apple barely make the product. Look at the margins of all their suppliers. That fat line showing about $200b of cogs is filled with low margin businesses - the vast majority of the world is not some outlier like Apple.

Gotta look more than one layer deep financial statement guy. People who actually read a lot of financial statements have looked at a looooot more than the ones of the names on TV.
by TrackerFF | 2025-05-04 20:50:51+00:00
We very recently had a scandal here in Norway where a city council wanted to shut down a bunch of schools, and to justify this they had written a report where they cited research that backed up their rationale.

Problem was, someone had used some LLM to write the report, which in turn had hallucinated research...but used real authors as the foundation. Some observant journalist contacted the researchers, to inquire on their work - and the researchers were baffled, as they had never written those papers that had been cited in the report. Real world consequences of AI misuse.

But back to the topic of OP: I've seen some pretty sketchy science books, which tend to get spammed on various math FB groups. They look legit enough, but you soon discover that they've indeed been AI generated. Not anywhere near as dangerous as the books in the article, but still - imagine how many out there are reading AI generated slop, under the assumption that it is legit.
by mierz00 | 2025-05-04 20:52:08+00:00
Free markets are the end state, not what is required to become successful. We can see this in countries that have prospered over the last century.

Japan and South Korea both had huge land reforms effectively killing the landlord class and redistributing farms to families.

They then forced businesses to export while maintaining high tariffs and once that was all in place they relaxed the tarifs and opened up the markets.

Countries that took the free market approach include Indonesia and Cambodia.
by doikor | 2025-05-04 20:52:13+00:00
Has been used for some time now.

https://x.com/deteccphilippe/status/1883945555102957617

> “Behavior” refers to an ML suspension (also called “server-sided” anti-cheat), often given to ragehackers.

But then you can just teach an AI to act like a human. Anti cheats in computer games is and always will be a cat and mouse game and AI/ML is just another tool in the bag of many tools (most bans seem to be fingerprinting based basically rebanning previous offenders who failed to get around the fingerprinting system)
by lelanthran | 2025-05-04 20:52:15+00:00
> What's the business usecase for incrementing a counter?

Notification count in the top right?

Remaining credit on an interactive service (like the ChatGPT web interface)?

So, maybe two(!) business use-cases out of thousands, but it's a pretty critical two use-cases.

I agree with you though - do all normal HTML form submissions, and for those two use-cases use `setInterval` to set them from a `fetch` every $X minutes (where you choose the value for $X).
by ZeroSolstice | 2025-05-04 20:52:51+00:00
Reading, writing and math have been the constants utilized throughout life and as such have been core subjects carried through educational systems. I'm not quite sure what subjects and topics we would be teaching future generations that didn't include reading, writing, math and science. At the very least writing should be included in more subjects. The hidden feature of including writing in all subjects, as you might have seen in your history endeavor's, is improvements in critical thinking, formulating cohesive arguments and a clearer understanding of topics.

There are greater difficulties that people will have to do in their daily lives than being "forced" to learn how to read, write and do arithmetic. Maybe learning the lesson of overcoming smaller, difficult tasks will allow them to adapt to greater difficulties in the future.

To quote Seneca:

A gem can not be polished with friction, nor a man perfected without trials.
by necovek | 2025-05-04 20:53:00+00:00
That's really curious: I've never felt that much empowered by an IDE or static analysis.

Sure, there's a huge jump from a line editor like `ed` to a screen editor like `vi` or `emacs`, but from there on, it was diminishing returns really (a good debugger was usually the biggest benefit next) — I've also had the "pleasure" of having to use `echo`, `cat` and `sed` to edit complex code in a restricted, embedded environment, and while it made iterations slower, not that much more slower than if I had a full IDE at my disposal.

In general, if I am in a good mood (and thus not annoyed at having to do so many things "manually"), I am probably only 20% slower than with my fully configured IDE at coding things up, which translates to less than 5% of slow down on actually delivering the thing I am working on.
by em-bee | 2025-05-04 20:53:12+00:00
supporting more and more bashisms is what makes fish less attractive for me. i used fish for years. $(foo) in bash forks a subshell. in fish it doesn't. i am not a fan of supporting different syntaxes to do the same thing. if they had implemented $() to fork a subshell, that might have made some sense, but otherwise it is just redundant. learning to use () instead of $() or `` really isn't hard. so why?
by eesmith | 2025-05-04 20:54:52+00:00
They were almost daily in summer as a kid in Florida. https://www.weather.gov/tbw/RainySeason for reasons. https://climatecenter.fsu.edu/topics/thunderstorms shows I got about 80 per year.

I missed the storms when I moved away. Silicon Valley's weather was so boring.

UK's at least has some variability at a timescale smaller than weekly.
by person3 | 2025-05-04 20:55:10+00:00
It is challenging. In my CS degree grading for programming questions fell into two areas

1. Take home projects where we programmed solutions to big problems. 2. Tests where we had to write programs in the exam on paper during the test.

I think the take home projects are likely a lot harder to grade without AI being used. I'd be disappointed if schools have stopped doing the programming live during tests though. Being able to write a program in a time constrained environment is similar to interviewing, and requires knowledge of the language and being able to code algorithms. It also forces you to think through the program and detect if there will be bugs, without being able to actually run the program (great practice for debugging).
by jsheard | 2025-05-04 20:55:24+00:00
I'm far from the first to make this observation but LLMs are like anti-compression algorithms when used like that, a simple idea gets expanded into a bloated mess by an LLM, then sent to someone else who runs it through another LLM to summarize it back to something approximating the original prompt. Nobody benefits aside from Sam Altman and co, who get to pocket a cool $0.000000001 for enabling this pointless exercise.
by tehjoker | 2025-05-04 20:55:26+00:00
This is a common fable and it doesn't make sense. He increased wages to decrease turnover. It's honestly crazy that Fordist propaganda is still circulating today. The dude was a pro-Nazi freak.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...

https://allthatsinteresting.com/henry-ford-nazi
Ask HN: Hackathons feel fake now
by sepidy | 2025-05-04 20:55:41+00:00
Been going to a bunch of hackathons in SF lately and honestly, everything feels fake. There are like 20 sponsors handing out credits for their tools that all do the same thing. Half the time, they can’t even explain what they’re for. They’re just hoping someone uses them so they can count it as adoption. Everyone jams these into projects to check a box, and what gets built is mostly BS with zero innovation. Was it always like this and I'm noticing it now, or has something changed?
by tilt_error | 2025-05-04 20:55:53+00:00
There are no see cows mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Merovech [0]. I have no knowledge about this, but such a juicy databit should just jump at you, if it was true. Instead, a quite mundane etymology around ‘merovech’ is provided.

One of these articles are wrong :)

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merovech
by _Soulou | 2025-05-04 20:56:40+00:00
Something I have been wondering with Flatpak is about Ram usage. As sharing dynamic libraries allow loading it into RAM only once, while if I use Signal, Chromium and different others Flatpaks, all libs will be loaded multiple times (often with their own version). So maybe disk is cheap but RAM may be more limited, which looks kind of a limit in the generalization of this method of distribution. (You could tell me it's the same with containers)

Am I right to think that? Has someone measured that difference on their workstation?
by afavour | 2025-05-04 20:56:48+00:00
ChatGPT English is set to be the a ubiquitous, remarkably inefficient data transmission format that sits on top of email.

I wish to communicate four points of information to you. I’ll ask ChatGPT to fluff those up into multiple paragraphs of text for me to email.

You will receive that email, recognize its length and immediately copy and paste it into ChatGPT, asking it to summarize the points provided.

Somewhere off in the distance a lake evaporates.
by finnjohnsen2 | 2025-05-04 20:58:21+00:00
6 months into 3D printing and I couldnt have asked for a better article to stumble upon. What a massive field this is and I love some of the take aways. Paricularly circles into hexagons, and making things adjustable.

I’m not making my own designs yet. It is too difficult. Modifiying a little here using Blender is where Im at
by thenrich99 | 2025-05-04 20:58:37+00:00
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by globular-toast | 2025-05-04 20:58:54+00:00
Multiple days? A proper hoarder will take multiple months if there's any stuff of value there. If it's just boxes of old milk bottle tops it might be easier. But a proper hoarder will have a box of milk bottle tops right next to a box of expensive tools or something.

I've done the minimal lifestyle and found it tiring too. I got myself into a state where I wouldn't have any nice things because I would always be thinking it's one more thing to move when I inevitably do. But I don't want to move. I like being in one place and having a home. Hoarding is not the way, but it's ok to have this too.