MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by avianlyric | 2025-05-25 18:00:38+00:00
Ah my apologies. I didn’t realise you’re an individual capable of designing and building complex systems made of multiple interconnected novel modules using only wireframes, and having all that work without any prior experimentation.

For the rest of us less fortunate, LLMs can be a fantastic tool to sketch out novel modules quickly, and then test assumptions and interactions between them, before committing to a specific high level design.
by lttree | 2025-05-25 18:00:49+00:00
^^Eh, I'll say while I'm worse now at keeping track, I've moved across 9 countries and many cities -- it's hard to remember to stay in touch.

Also esp when friends use snapchat/instagram/discord/signal/whatsapp/imessage/sms and that one weirdo that only has an email. I barely open my socials, but it doesn't mean I don't value those friendships.
by k310 | 2025-05-25 18:00:59+00:00
Maybe you're just a problem-solver without a bigger vision, or feedback on what's really wanted or needed, like Wozniak had his Jobs.

On a smaller scale, I'll sometimes solve a little problem, and the "mathematician" in me keeps looking for other solutions, maybe more elegant, maybe simpler, maybe more complex, and maybe just because I got the ball rolling and why stop now?

"To Engineer is Human". Not just when it fails [0] but also when it succeeds. Humans are only human. I have hundreds of Calochortus photos,[1] but since it's the very brief flowering season, I am drawn to go out and take more. Except this morning, as I'm a little pooped. But then again ... (looks out window) ...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Petroski

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calochortus
by Terr_ | 2025-05-25 18:01:00+00:00
I like to point out that we are blind to the extraordinarily common "colors" of nitrogen gas and water vapor, blindness which is beneficial, because otherwise we'd constantly stumble through fog until we go over the edge of a cliff or get eaten by a tiger.

Yet if some aliens insisted that our planet was a very boring featureless nitrogen-colored ball, we would probably object that their viewing strategy is naive and incorrect.

We are born seeing the universe based on pragmatic decisions about signal versus noise. Our evolved tuning utterly fails in new places, so we should pick new tunings.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-05-25 18:01:31+00:00
“Reputational harm” is a very real thing with gamers right now. When a game is discovered to be using GenAI, it’s roasted online and players deem it “slop” and sometimes will even say they’ll boycott a game because of it.

I cannot think of a group less likely to stick to a boycott than gamers.

Edit: I hate to describe myself as such, but I am a gamer. Have chuckled many times at the vocal outcry of gaming communities only to watch them crumble the second a new hat is offered.
by dang | 2025-05-25 18:01:34+00:00
Related:

Why Top Posting Has Won (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22801233 - April 2020 (140 comments)

Why Top Posting Has Won - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17302808 - June 2018 (3 comments)
by krackers | 2025-05-25 18:02:16+00:00
Thank you for chiming in! LTO wouldn't really matter for "delinking" exported symbols of shared libraries though, would it? The exported functions must necessarily follow platform ABI convention, and so long as those are copied over, things would seem to work fine.

I guess the one catch with shared libraries is that if shared library A itself depends on another dylib B, then calls within A to functions of B would go via PLT indirection. So then creating an object file out of this would involve not just moving code and creating relocation entry but also possibly patching the assembly itself to remove the call indirection.
by skydhash | 2025-05-25 18:02:41+00:00
I'm not a native english speaker, so I've used for an essay where they told us to target a certain word count. I was close, but the verbiage to get to that word count doesn't come naturally to me. So I used Germini and tell it to rewrite the text targeting that word count (my only prompt). Then I reviewed the answer, rewriting where it strayed from the points I was making.

Also I used it for a few programming tasks I was pretty sure was in the datasets (how to draw charts with python and manipulate pandas frame). I know the domain, but wasn't in the mood to analyse the docs to get the implementation information. But the information I was seeking was just a few lines of sample code. In my experience, anything longer is pretty inconsistent and worthless explanations.
by mistercheph | 2025-05-25 18:02:41+00:00
It's fine if the computer has access to gigabytes of working memory, it can use all of the "natural" advantages that it has to play the game, that's perfectly fair, but there is no comparison to make when you give models bespoke machine interfaces to play games whose core mechanics revolve around perception and physical coordination, it may be impressive, but they are playing a different game, something akin to HvH Counter Strike.

And you can try to play some game where you create disadvantages to try to balance out all of the advantages of the machine interface, but again, hard to reason about the edge cases, and easy to create a misleading headline like "artificially limited reaction time worse than professional gamers" while in practice being able to react to information much more quickly than a human player because of its exclusive interface to game state. All of that is fair and well, and doesn't take anything away from the very cool achievements of google et al., but when you change the core mechanics of the game to accommodate a uniquely challenged player, you're playing a different game! Chess is ~mostly not about physically moving the pieces on the board, but Counter Strike is about little more than that! (And dota is somewhere in between.)
by lostlogin | 2025-05-25 18:03:14+00:00
> The people in the “corrective” generation must support their own two elderly parents plus four of their own children. It becomes practically impossible.

The country and the individual has the same problem. But it also goes a generation further.

There was a link on HN recently which I can’t find. It discussed how we are in an unusual time, where kids can often meet their great grandparents. Previously people died younger, so couldn’t. Now people are having kids at an age where it will be unlikely for them to meet their great grandchildren.
by santoshalper | 2025-05-25 18:04:18+00:00
Or an ideological alignment of values. Generative AI is strongly associated with large corporations that are untrusted (to put it generously) by those on the left.

An equivalent observation might be that the only people who seem really, really excited about current AI products are grifters who want to make money selling it. Which looks a lot like Blockchain to many.
by kazinator | 2025-05-25 18:04:35+00:00
> For example, giving me a loan is probably riskier than giving a loan to Amazon

I seriously doubt it. It depends on the size of the loan.

Amazon could easily default on a loan of the kind of size that ordinary people take out (think cars and mortgages) and there would be no repercussions to them. As in, just stop paying the lender, and ghost them, so that they can't reach any person in Amazon.

Rich people and corporations get away with stuff like this. The Ellen Musks of this world get away with not paying rent on entire office buildings, while some poor person gets kicked out onto the street.
by diggan | 2025-05-25 18:07:28+00:00
Imagine you have function that is called "is_true" but it only gets it right 60% of the time. We're doing this within CS/ML, so lets call that "correctness" or something fancier. In order for that function to be valuable, would we need to hit a 100% in correctness? I mean probably most of the time, yeah. But sometimes, maybe even rarely, we're fine with it being less than 100%, but still as high as possible.

So in this point of view, it's not a bug or error that it currently sits at 60%, but if we manage to find a way to hit 70%, it would be better. But in order to figure this out, we need to call this "correct for most part, but could be better" concept something. So we look at what we already know and are familiar with, and try to draw parallels, maybe even borrow some names/words.
by santoshalper | 2025-05-25 18:07:45+00:00
I see this as much more of a hackers vs. corporations ideological split. Which imperfectly maps to leftism vs conservatism.

The perception on the left is that once again, corporations are foisting products on us that nobody wants, with no concern for safety, privacy, or respect for creators.

For better or worse, the age of garage-tech is mostly dead and Tech has become synonymous with corporatism. This is especially true with GenAI, where the resources to construct a frontier model (or anything remotely close to it) are far outside what a hacker can afford.
by ijk | 2025-05-25 18:07:47+00:00
Not taboo exactly, but definitely discouraged by hiring practices: generally the big studios want someone who can do one narrow task without handholding, and don't put much value on broader skillsets. And like most creative fields there's typically more people who want the specific job than there are jobs in general.

Smaller studios, indies, etc. are typically looser (or just can't afford to hire someone who only wears on hat) but they are also less likely to have a dedicated level designer in the first place.
by rich_sasha | 2025-05-25 18:08:37+00:00
For me, I enjoy having friends and interacting with them, but keeping in touch is still hard. Doesn't come naturally to me. This is basically kinda like a reminder.

If anything, I'd like it to go further - (privacy aside) integrating with email and communicators to automatically remind me of birthdays, friends I didn't message for a while, their kids names etc.
by bananalychee | 2025-05-25 18:09:01+00:00
Assimilation as most people understand it does not necessitate an immigrant become completely indistinguishable from a native citizen. There are some baseline expectations that are not always met right now, such as learning the official language of one's host country, and sometimes its social standards. Most countries simply lack the necessary coercive incentives to make that happen systematically. I would argue that most Western cultures have become too individualistic at the expense of societal health, fueling the notion that assimilation is inherently unethical.
by cperciva | 2025-05-25 18:09:10+00:00
I think there's a more fundamental question, "what does it mean for a corporation to engage in criminal conduct?"

A corporation is just a group of people acting together, and it's pretty well established in international law that collective punishment isn't acceptable; and on the flip side, a corporation can neither "act" nor "think" independently, but rather does so via the humans involved. (Perhaps this would change with corporate-owned AI?)

In all the cases I've seen where a corporation is alleged to have engaged in criminal conduct, there was in fact a human -- or several humans -- who were broke the law. As far as I'm concerned, that's where the buck should stop; it seems that prosecutors tend to target corporations simply because it's easier than doing their job properly and pinning down who specifically bears responsibility.
by tzs | 2025-05-25 18:09:16+00:00
> Most of suburban America wasn't built yet when you were born.

That doesn't sound right.

They said that the US population has grown by almost 100 million since they were born. That would put their birth year around 1989.

Some searching suggests that in 1989 about 50% of the population lived in suburban areas. That would have been about 120 million people.

It is still about 50% which is 170 million people today. That suggests that around 70% of the suburbs were already built when they were born.
by tgv | 2025-05-25 18:09:44+00:00
> But you couldn't explain your brain from principles or its architecture, you'd need all of neuroscience to do it

That's not a good argument. Neuroscience was constructed by (other) brains. The brain is trying to explain itself.

> The truth is that all of the progress on machine learning is absolutely science.

But not much if you're interested in finding out how our brain works, or how language works. One of the interesting outcomes of LLMs is that there apparently is a way to represent complex ideas and their linguistic connection in a (rather large) unstructured state, but it comes without thorough explanation or relation to the human brain.

> Chomsky is [...] pretty flippant about what this stuff can do.

True, that's his style, being belligerently verbose, but others have been pretty much fawning and drooling over a stochastic parrot with a very good memory, mostly with dollar signs in their eyes.
by hiatus | 2025-05-25 18:10:11+00:00
> for no reason other than “nobody said we can’t”.

This is exactly the nature of law though. Everything is allowed unless prohibited. Do you believe you have an expectation of privacy in the public sphere? If not, how could you disagree with the legality of the collection and review of activities performed in public?

I don't want a total surveillance state either but I can't see a basis for disallowing recording in public standing on the 4th amendment for support.
by Smaug123 | 2025-05-25 18:10:32+00:00
From some Googling and use of Claude (and from summaries of the suggestively titled "Impossible Languages" by Moro linked from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar ), it looks like he's referring to languages which violate the laws which constrain the languages humans are innately capable of learning. But it's very unclear why "machine M is capable of learning more complex languages than humans" implies anything about the linguistic competence or the intelligence of machine M.
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-25 18:10:50+00:00
Here's his Website: https://www.davebarry.com

Has a delightful 90's flavor.

He was a columnist for the Miami Herald, for many years, and has written a number of books. The site will let you read a number of his columns. His books read about the same, but longer.

Absolute riot.
by throwanem | 2025-05-25 18:11:54+00:00
Eh. I was on dialup in the age you describe and none of that stuff ever worked for me anyway, even for low-bitrate radio the jitter was a killer. HTTP as transport coincided with wide democratization of access, and I don't think that is at all coincidental; by the time bandwidth penetration made broad access to packet-switched ~realtime (ie broadcast equivalent) streaming feasible, HTTP had achieved the required penetration to represent a local minimum.
by cpatil | 2025-05-25 18:11:58+00:00
Getting a bit difficult to understand your point of view here. The simple fact is NVDA executed well, had the strategic vision from 2006-7 onwards to invest in R&D, build complex libraries encompassing various complicated algorithms as well as allocated precious chip area to support these when no one was using the GPUs for those purposes. They took a risk. I don't use Apple, but I don't complain abt them. You are free to use AMD if you so desire. Why the hate?
by palata | 2025-05-25 18:12:08+00:00
> Funny how in reality it's not how open source works.

Let me copy the full sentence, with the part that you conveniently truncated: "That's how open source works: if you use an open source project and it has a bug, you can fix it and open an MR. If the upstream project doesn't want your fix, you can fork. Nothing forces the upstream project to accept your contributions. When they do, they take the responsibility for them (to some extent, as in: it is now part of their codebase)."

Can you explain to me how this is wrong?

> I'm getting tired of your rants and tangents

How is that a rant? That's almost by design: I make my code open source so that people can benefit from it for free under some conditions. Take the billions of computers running Linux. Which proportion of those are run by people who actually contribute to Linux, do you think? As a good approximation, it's ~0%. Almost all users of Linux don't contribute to Linux. It's a fact, not a rant.

Nowhere did I say that people should contribute.

> Ho many package managers and package format are there?

Who cares? If I want to create a new package manager with a new package format, why would you forbid me from doing it? That's my whole point: people are free to do whatever they want. Are you saying that I must use Flatpak instead of my favourite package manager because you have decided that it was better for everybody?

Why do you stop at package managers? In your view, isn't having different OSes is wasted/duplicated effort? Should we all just use Windows because it's your favourite and you don't understand why other people may have other preferences?

> Sorry, I'm not privy to those voices.

My point is that whenever somebody says "it's stupid, we should all use X", my answer is always "If Y, Z, A, B, C, ... exist, it's because other people, for some reasons, don't want X. Because you like X doesn't mean that everybody should like X. I see how it would be convenient for you if everybody used exactly your favourite system, but the reality is that we can't all love exactly the same things. Hence there are alternatives. Diversity is good".

Diversity is good. I don't say that Flatpak should not exist. I just say that whoever wants me to use Flatpak is fundamentally missing something.
by mattw1 | 2025-05-25 18:12:09+00:00
That makes sense, and there's definitely an element of truth to that position. The trouble is, the response is to dissociate with the technology, which is really not a tenable position if you intend to have a meaningful part in like... anything in the future. What I see-- and this is just my personal experience-- is that leftists tend to want to pretend it isn't happening, or that it won't matter. When it fact nothing matters more.

The deepest of deep ironies: I talk to people all the time talking about ushering in an age of post-capitalism and ignoring AI. When I personally can't see how the AI of the next decade and capitalism can coexist, the latter being based on human labor and all. Like, AI is going to be the reason what you want is going to happen, so why ignore it?
by mrngm | 2025-05-25 18:12:30+00:00
That holds not only for cryptography libraries, but generalizes to the entire computing stack. It's why, for example, coreboot exists, as well as various open source hardware projects. If it's fully open, you can inspect it yourself. Anywhere I see a branching statement within cryptography context, I'll know something's up.

The problems introduced in xz are still fresh, but Dual_EC_DRBG[0] also comes to mind within the cryptography context.

(Besides, getting cryptography right goes way beyond "just writing a library". As the parent commenter wrote, simple operations are the tip of the iceberg with regards to a correct implementation)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
by simianwords | 2025-05-25 18:12:57+00:00
i disagree. this is not at all a ponzi scheme. as you have pointed out the ponzi scheme has no value outside of the system and relies on deception to convince people to buy in to it. crucially the investment scheme provides no "value".

pensions on the other hand don't have the quality of deception and the value is straightforward - it redistributes wealth from the younger population to the older ones. this reduces the need for individuals to plan their retirements as the state takes care of it. as pointed by another post, you don't need a pyramid here, just somewhat equal proportions of population on each side.

wouldn't you characterise any tax scheme as a ponzi scheme? unemployment benefits, healthcare etc? what makes them different from pensions?

but i do agree that one should not think of pensions as a given. its worth pointing out that there are two types of pensions - defined benefits and defined contributions.
by _morph3ous | 2025-05-25 18:13:40+00:00
Thank you! Right now it is parsing the Final Cut data directly. I may be able to, in the future, add srt support. Right now I am working on adding the ability to select different styles of titles, and the ability to specify how many characters per line and have it split at word boundaries.

I have not tested on anything below 15.4, but it is very likely it would still work.
by nicolashahn | 2025-05-25 18:14:44+00:00
I said "on the way to".

> Between 2001 and 2009, the Muslim population increased almost 10 times faster than the non-Muslim population.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_the_United_Kingdom?wp...

Granted 2009 was a while ago but they're still the fastest growing population in the UK by a lot.
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-25 18:15:07+00:00
You may still be looking for momentum that will hold your interest like never before :)

Is that so bad?

If you are getting something out of putting in the effort and making the progress you are making, it may not be that much more work to end up with a "graveyard" of relative "masterpieces".

I wouldn't feel so bad about that :)

I think that's what an artist would do. Don't they often have projects that stack up, more unfinished than anything, before they finally reveal the masterpiece they completed with the utmost of pride?

When the whole time an art lover could come into the studio and might find an unfinished forgotten work they think is more impressive than the latest remarkable masterpiece.

In which case the unfinished piece only needs a few final touches and it's selling to the highest bidder, which is a lot easier than starting from scratch. And some people do have a lot more where that came from than others ;)
by telotortium | 2025-05-25 18:15:26+00:00
There's not enough immigrants that actually are of financial benefit to Denmark. Only European immigrants are a large financial benefit throughout their lifespan, and Middle Eastern immigrants are a financial detriment even in their prime working years[0]. That is apart from the cultural effects of having a large portion of your population consist of non-Danish, and especially non-European immigrants, which might have its own detrimental effect on the birth rate.

[0] Figure 2.7 of the Danish Government report "Økonomisk Analyse: Indvandreres nettobidrag til de offentlige finanser i 2018" - https://fm.dk/udgivelser/2021/oktober/oekonomisk-analyse-ind...
by cj | 2025-05-25 18:16:00+00:00
> Not to mention all the "just engineering" of making chips crunch incredible amounts of numbers.

Are LLM's still the same black box as they were described as a couple years ago? Are their inner workings at least slightly better understood than in the past?

Running tens of thousands of chips crunching a bajillion numbers a second sounds fun, but that's not automatically "engineering". You can have the same chips crunching numbers with the same intensity just to run an algorithm to run a large prime number. Chips crunching numbers isn't automatically engineering IMO. More like a side effect of engineering? Or a tool you use to run the thing you built?

What happens when we build something that works, but we don't actually know how? We learn about it through trial and error, rather than foundational logic about the technology.

Sorta reminds me of the human brain, psychology, and how some people think psychology isn't science. The brain is a black box kind of like a LLM? Some people will think it's still science, others will have less respect.

This perspective might be off base. It's under the assumption that we all agree LLM's are a poorly understood black box and no one really knows how they truly work. I could be completely wrong on that, would love for someone else to weigh in.

Separately, I don't know the author, but agreed it reads more like a pop sci book. Although I only hope to write as coherently as that when I'm 96 y/o.