MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Terr_ | 2025-05-23 18:14:48+00:00
> The real question for me is: are they less reliable than human judges?

I'd caution that it's never just about ratios: We must also ask whether the "shape" of their performance is knowable and desirable. A chess robot's win-rate may be wonderful, but we are unthinkingly confident a human wouldn't "lose" by disqualification for ripping off an opponent's finger.

Would we accept a "judge" that is fairer on average... but gives ~5% lighter sentences to people with a certain color shirt, or sometimes issues the death-penalty for shoplifting? Especially when we cannot diagnose the problem or be sure we fixed it? (Maybe, but hopefully not without a lot of debate over the risks!)

In contrast, there's a huge body of... of stuff regarding human errors, resources we deploy so pervasively it can escape our awareness: Your brain is a simulation and diagnostic tool for other brains, battle-tested (sometimes literally) over millions of years; we intuit many kinds of problems or confounding factors to look for, often because we've made them ourselves; and thousands of years of cultural practice for detection, guardrails, and error-compensating actions. Only a small minority of that toolkit can be reused for "AI."
by woadwarrior01 | 2025-05-23 18:17:48+00:00
> Just because your sampler picks a sequence of tokens that contain incorrect reasoning doesn't mean a useful reasoning trace isn’t also contained within the latent space.

That's essentially the core idea in Coconut[1][2], to keep the reasoning traces in a continuous space.

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.06769

[2]: https://github.com/facebookresearch/coconut
by zh3 | 2025-05-23 18:18:38+00:00
Having spend some time there, I really like the R J Mitchell (designer of the Spitfire) wind tunnel - used to be at Farnborough until they took a section of it to Southampton Uni. Real sense of history using it!

Most of our use is validating sensors for use outside wind tunnels, that is showing our on-bike drag sensors match wind tunnel measurements (it's for serious cyclists and triathletes). Watching live drag (more accurately, CdA) change with body position is fascinating - and tells me my back can't handle the most aero position for more than a few tens of seconds.
by bunderbunder | 2025-05-23 18:19:23+00:00
Humans flip-flop all the time. This is a major reason why the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator does such a poor job of assigning the same person the same Meyers-Briggs type on successive tests.

It can be difficult to observe this fact in practice because, unlike for an LLM, you can't just ask a human the exact same question three times in five seconds and get three different answers, because unlike an LLM we have memory. But, as someone who works with human-labeled data, it's something I have to contend with on a daily basis. For the things I'm working on, if you give the same annotator the same thing to label two different times spaced far enough apart for them to forget that they have seen this thing before, the chance of them making the same call both times is only about 75%. If I do that with a prompted LLM anotator, I'm used to seeing more like 85%, and for some models it can be possible to get even better consistency than that with the right conditions and enough time spent fussing with the prompt.

I still prefer the human labels when I can afford them because LLM labeling has plenty of other problems. But being more flip-floppy than humans is not one that I have been able to empirically observe.
by watwut | 2025-05-23 18:20:11+00:00
Trump is literally making the project 2025 happen. It was no secret before election and it was no secret he is going to do it. Amd people saying so were very literally correct and right.

Second, no. Republicans are massively more corrupt. Trump himself went from a guy who had debts to a rich guy due to his first term corruption. The goverment and its positions are quite literally openly on sale right now.

Trump and republicans are not tough on crime, they are heavily involved in crime. They are also ok woth cops breaking the law which makes crimes worst. And makes cops into criminals. Oh, and they are against law enforcement in taxes and such.

Democrats actually did much better then republican on healthcare while repuocans systematically opposed it. Every single time.

I don't know where you mean to go with California, listens fox too much?
by dang | 2025-05-23 18:20:23+00:00
Comments like this break the site guidelines, and not just a little. Can you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the intended spirit of this site more to heart? Note these:

"Please don't fulminate."

"Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative."

"Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

There's plenty of LLM skepticism on HN and that's fine, but like all comments here, it needs to be thoughtful.

(We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074957)
by theGeatZhopa | 2025-05-23 18:20:24+00:00
in a standard windows installation, notepad and wordpad were the only tools for writing. Wordpad was the one, where formatting could be set. But it reached its EoL and is removed from new versions of windows. Notepad was upgraded with tabs for multifile edit. So, it makes sense, as a lot of people do not buy ms office or know about the other software like open office. ... May be its to complicated for them. So, having copilot in notepad solves two pains:

- giving the ones, who do not care for formatting, copilot in the only writing programm in windows/standard.

- allowing MSFT to push their copilot to users in an effort to establish it and to force users into an MSFT-Account

I don't like it either..
by HankStallone | 2025-05-23 18:21:43+00:00
I've lived most of my life in (or outside of) small towns, and some of it in a city. I've noticed that my small-town friends who moved to the city would often talk about all the culture and food choices, but when it comes right down to it, they mostly eat at chain restaurants and go to the movies, same as they could in a smallish town. They might occasionally go to a pro baseball game or the zoo or something that's only available in the city, but country people can make a day trip to do that too.

I'm sure some city people do take advantage of all the diverse options the city gives them, but it seems like a lot of them ended up there for other reasons and then use that as a rationalization for staying where everything costs so much more.
by tecleandor | 2025-05-23 18:22:09+00:00
If it could be run via cli I would do something similar to what Remarcal does (but more flexible, not being closed):

- Check if there are changes on the live calendar (preferably with the ETag header) - If there are changes, download an updated iCal file - Launch the calendar generator using the updated iCal file to update the PDF - Sync the PDF to the eInk reader of choice
by jumploops | 2025-05-23 18:22:19+00:00
As someone who has “reinvented” myself more than once (mostly due to school/job transfers), it seems what wasn’t said is equally if not more important.

Rarely can you “find your people” without letting other people go.

The unspoken truth in this article is that it’s just as important to be willing to let go of relationships that aren’t helping you grow.

Easier said than done.

Whether it’s the negative influence of a toxic friend, or the mediocre advice of an overbearing parent (who is just trying to keep you on the rails), other people rarely have your best interests in mind.

Losing the people who aren’t “your people” is (usually) a necessary step to finding the right people.
by dkarl | 2025-05-23 18:22:55+00:00
Sorry, we've been hearing that since before Trump clinched the nomination in 2016, but political parties change, and there's no enduring Republican norm that is going to imminently reassert itself. I do know some "decent Republicans," though they've been voting Democratic for a while now. When I was growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, a lot of people saw the Republican Party as a party of educated, foreign policy-savvy, business friendly elite pragmatists. For some people I know, that brand is cemented in their minds as the soul of the Republican Party, regardless of 30+ years of various radically different factions dominating the party since then.

But now those "decent Republicans" vote Democrat. Their feeling about it, to repurpose a saying from a different context, could be summed up as, "We didn't cross the border, the border crossed us." They never wanted to be Democrats and still have a sentimental attachment to the Republican Party, but here they are.
by Arnavion | 2025-05-23 18:23:19+00:00
If you want to actually implement an ACME client from first principles, reading the RFC (plus related RFCs for JOSE etc) is probably easier than you think. I did exactly that when I made a client for myself.

I also wrote up a digested description of the issuance flow here: https://www.arnavion.dev/blog/2019-06-01-how-does-acme-v2-wo... It's not a replacement for reading the RFCs, but it presents the information in the sequence that you would follow for issuance, so think of it like an index to the RFC sections.
by IAmBroom | 2025-05-23 18:24:20+00:00
I know modern craftsmen* who lament the same. Being able to divide things in 2, 3, 4, 6, or 12 is mechanically more useful than 2/5/10 (the former being achievable by drafting tools more easily).

*Yes, it should be craftspeople, but that doesn't exactly sound like the same thing, and anyway all of them happen to be men.
by Bjartr | 2025-05-23 18:25:00+00:00
It's not justified for any rigorous setting at all.

In a layperson setting, it's as justified as saying the speed of light slows down in non-vacuum. It doesn't, but it's a close enough explanation for most people most of the time, and if you squint it's sort of saying the right thing, but missing all of the details. In the same way as the observed speed of light is slower in air, the tides happen every 12 hours. But c doesn't change and there aren't two bulges.

It 100% does not, every single photon is moving at the full c speed of light at all times. It's not even that the photons are bouncing around and so they, on average do not make progress as fast. I believe it's a factor of how the moving EM field of the photon nudges particles like electrons a little, whose now moving field results in a lower net wave phase velocity such that observed propagation time is < c, but every photon still moves at exactly c.
by AmazingTurtle | 2025-05-23 18:25:11+00:00
At everfind.ai, we've found a middle ground that leverages both structured and unstructured data effectively in retrieval systems. We utilize a linear OpenSearch index for chunked information but complement this by capturing structured metadata during ingestion—either via integrations or through schema extraction using LLMs. This structured metadata allows us to take full advantage of OpenSearch's field-type capabilities.

At retrieval time, our approach involves a broad "prefetching" step: we quickly identify the most relevant schemas, perform targeted vector searches within these schemas, and then rerank the top results using the LLM before agentic reasoning and execution. The LLM is provided with carefully pre-selected tools and fields, empowering it to dive deeper into prefetched results or explore alternate queries dynamically. This method significantly boosts RAG pipeline performance, ensuring both speed and relevance.

Additionally, by limiting visibility of the "agentic execution context" to just the current operation span and collapsing it in subsequent interactions, we keep context sizes manageable, further enhancing responsiveness and scalability.
by jacob019 | 2025-05-23 18:25:25+00:00
Fun writing, and something to think about. To me, Web 2.0 is kind of a joke; jQuery, REST, AJAX, CSS2, RSS, single page apps were going to change everything overnight, it was THE buzzword, and then... incremental improvements. In retrospect, everything did change, but that loose collection of technologies was just links in the chain of incremental progress. So yeah, Web 2.0 2.0 makes sense.

I've seen a lot of talk around here, and everywhere, about MCP. A lot of enthusiasm and a lot of criticism. I've written a few MCP servers and plan to write some more. It isn't how I would design a protocol, but it works, and everyone is using it, so hooray for interoperability.

I think the hype represents the wider enthusiasm that people have about this moment in time, and the transformative power of these new tools. It's easy to look at MCP and say there it is, now it's easy to connect these tools to the things that I care about, it feels accessible, and there's community.

MCP is NOT the new TCP for AI. It is, essentially, an RPC layer for chat. And while it could be extended to a wider variety of use cases, I expect that it will remain primarily a method for wiring up tool calls for user-facing use cases. We recognize the power of these tools and anticipate deep changes to workflows and systems, but we don't know how that will shake out. If I am writing a classifier for a backend system, I am not going to use MCP, even if I could. Because it's inefficient. Every additional tool we offer the model consumes tokens and increases latency. I expect that the primary user of LLMs is going to be business automation of all kinds, and I don't expect them to reach for MCP to wire things up. Yeah, it's really cool to hook tools up to the chat, for that to feel accessible, to know how to do things in an idiomatic and standards-compliant way, that feels good! And yeah, the hype is overblown.
by boroboro4 | 2025-05-23 18:25:43+00:00
> The simple fact is that we now live in an interconnected world. It is simply not possible or practical to natively produce everything that goes into an iPhone.

US is a huge country with tremendous human capital and natural resources. I don’t see issues with US producing much more goods than it is producing now. It might be not practical, or not practical yet, but it’s for sure possible.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-23 18:26:17+00:00
Solar adds more new capacity to the US grid in 2024 than any energy source in 20 years - https://electrek.co/2025/03/10/solar-new-capacity-us-grid-20... - May 10th, 2025

US EIA: Utility Scale Generating Units Planned to Come Online form April 2025 to March 2026 - https://web.archive.org/web/20250523162037/https://www.eia.g... (yellow = solar, green = wind, gray = batteries)

Solar, battery storage to lead new U.S. generating capacity additions in 2025 - https://web.archive.org/web/20250523183331/https://www.eia.g... - February 24, 2025

https://www.interconnection.fyi/ (scope to solar and batteries)

What is exciting, in my opinion, is rate of change. We are right above the hockey stick inflection point headed upward. Global solar deployment is almost at 1TW/year. US solar deployment is ~50GW/year. Battery deployments are similarly ramping, California battery storage is currently ~13,248M, and is causing a material amount of fossil gas demand destruction for electrical generation every evening. These numbers will continue to increase. Texas can't find anyone who can get a fossil gas generator built in the next five years, for comparison.

Could backward policy slow this down? Certainly, but broadly speaking, there is too much momentum to stop the energy transition at this point. That's not a call to let up of course, but to keep grinding harder towards success (imho).
by armchairhacker | 2025-05-23 18:26:26+00:00
LLMs are good at discovery, since they know a lot, and can retrieve that knowledge from a query that simpler (e.g. regex-based) search engines with the same knowledge couldn't. For example, an LLM that is input a case may discover an obscure law, or notice a pattern in past court cases which establishes precedent. So they can be helpful to a real judge.

Of course, the judge must check that the law or precedent aren't hallucinated, and apply to the case in the way the LLM claims. They should also prompt other LLMs and use their own knowledge in case the cited law/precedent contradicts others.

There's a similar argument for scientists, mathematicians, doctors, investors, and other fields. LLMs are good at discovery but must be checked.
by FooBarBizBazz | 2025-05-23 18:27:10+00:00
Why do students need to be inside the US in order for Harvard to issue them a degree? Surely there is an international network -- collaborators abroad who could host students, etc, etc. For example , Harvard already has an infrastructure of exchange programs. It's not ideal for the students, but I don't see why they can't continue to "be Harvard students" from anywhere.

Hopefully, though, this is an "escalate to deescalate" thing, and this whole discussion will become moot.
by mhh__ | 2025-05-23 18:27:11+00:00
I would be long carmack in the sense that I think he will have good judgement and taste running a business but I really don't see anything in common between AI and graphics.

Maybe someone better at aphorisms than me can say it better but I really don't see it. There are definitely mid-level low hanging fruits that would look like the kinds of things he did in graphics but the game just seems completely different.
by AlienRobot | 2025-05-23 18:27:31+00:00
I still don't know who uses this semantic web. Like you have all these semantics marked up... for whom? What are actual applications using this?

Google has a small subset of schema.org it supports, but rather than "semantic web" it feels more like "here's my API." Its own schema tester often complains about things that should be valid schemas, simply because it doesn't conform to its API. How would any web developer mark up (and test the validity of said mark up) for applications that don't even exist?
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-23 18:27:38+00:00
I am very confused by these claims, because MacIntyre was exactly opposed to relativism, and emotivism, which he saw as characteristic of the hollow shell of modern morality [0]. He acknowledges Nietzsche's criticism of the farce of Enlightenment morals. He appealed to telos as the objective basis for ethics and morality and in that book advocated for return to Aristote.

Perhaps you misunderstand what culture is. It isn't some kind of fiction we lay on top of reality that gets in the way of reality. It is a shared language of a people about reality and one that is not static, but hopefully developing, but at the very least changing. Science is itself a part of culture. You are born into a culture, which can be anything form pretty good to downright lousy, and the "dialogue" of this culture of a people with reality, and other cultures, moves the development of this culture.

Think of all the things you have learned in the scope of science. That aggregate of learning is culture. The presuppositions that science rests on is culture. This doesn't contradict the possibility of knowing the universal. Rather, it is through the cultural that you come to know the universal and through which you are better prepared to know it. We benefit from thousands of years of cultural dialogue. We cannot attain a very high understanding of reality without immersing ourselves in this dialogue of cultures spanning human history.

(Incidentally, as MacIntyre was a Catholic convert, one thing the Catholic Church makes possible is the existence of both the particularity of ethnos and the universality of the Church; "catholic" means "universal". A multiplicity of cultures sharing in the universal, avoiding both cultural parochialism and an alienated cosmopolitanism.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After_Virtue
by svilen_dobrev | 2025-05-23 18:27:57+00:00
dejavu :) Here something i told my mentees 4 years ago:

searching for answers.. does not make life interesting.

search questions.. then You become interesting.

and inconvenient. To the answer-manufacturers. (whole industries and institutions are dealing with only that)

which.. by itself.. IS interesting.

Most people are either answers - pretty boring - or not even answers.. only nondescript. banal.

incredibly predictable and.. like nylon bag, you see through it but cannot get through.

Search for people-questions.

Search.

----

Maybe it can help someone else too..
by ariztocray | 2025-05-23 18:28:17+00:00
Underrated impact of good networking is that it increases the expectations you have for yourself and the potential you ascribe to yourself.

My first job after finishing college was in a factory. After many more years of drifting, I finally had the dumb luck to start encountering people doing intellectually engaging things and actually making good money.

When I started surrounding myself with those individuals, I started realizing I was underselling my capabilities. And I started having higher expectations of what I wanted to achieve in specific domains.

I am definitely not successful by the standards of the corporate world, but I've superseded what my prospects should have been based on my track record in my 20's. And almost all of that started by rubbing shoulders with people in stages of life that I never considered before.
by 12_throw_away | 2025-05-23 18:28:25+00:00
Found this part interesting:

> somehow Kam Air can keep all of their APUs operating but European carriers I've flown with will go the entire Summer season hopping about the Greek Islands with it INOP

If anyone knows: is it normal to allow dispatch without the APU? I kind of assumed it would be a required redundancy, especially on an airbus where the computers and electronics are what keeps the thing in the air ...
by kayge | 2025-05-23 18:28:36+00:00
As someone who wishes they could realistically afford private school for their kids (public school leaves a lot to be desired for 'gifted' kids these days), I think you've got good points but I land on the other side. Using some of your quotes: private school is "a narrow lens", but that lens likely includes a high percentage of the "rich get richer" network. I think my ideal would be private school to help find a better match for my kids' brainpower (2 of them anyway, tbd on #3 :D) and make some good high-value connections, but still make a conscious effort to encourage them to interact with a wider variety of people (through travel, public sports teams, community service, etc.)
by jimbokun | 2025-05-23 18:28:51+00:00
Not Asian or South Asian. I'm sure what you're saying is true.

But having parents that are not involved enough to push their kids towards anything in particular is a much bigger challenge to over come.

If you have a degree from a prestigious university and the network that comes along with it, pivoting towards start ups or something more creative or entrepreneurial is a lot easier than if you never went to college at all or didn't finish high school.
by paulirwin | 2025-05-23 18:28:59+00:00
Azure SQL Database for a long while has been the most cost-effective way of running SQL Server as a PaaS database, and still is if you choose the DTU-based modes, making it a very attractive option. Combined with the rich feature set and maturity and reliability of SQL Server, it is hardly legacy; in fact it's very capable and continues to get new updates like vector operations.

I've helped create apps that support millions to hundreds of millions of revenue on Azure SQL Databases that cost at most a few hundred dollars per month. And you can get started with a S0 database for $15/mo which is absolutely suitable for production use for simple apps.

Unfortunately, I think Microsoft realized how good of a value the DTU-based model was, and has started pushing everyone to the vCore model, which dramatically increases the barrier to entry for Azure SQL Database, making PostgreSQL a much more attractive option. If Microsoft ever kills off the DTU purchasing model of Azure SQL Database, I likely won't be recommending or choosing Azure SQL Database at all going forward. It'll 100% be PostgreSQL.