MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by throwaway13337 | 2025-05-23 16:37:09+00:00
It's reasonable to be cynical, but the future hasn't been written yet. If we choose only to see a negative future, we will ensure that it can only exist.

In the negative vein, I see a lot of VCs and business leaders talking about making AI for companies that directly interface with customers.

Those agents will be used to manipulate and make painful existings services exactly like today. Enshitified transactional websites engineered for maximum pain.

A different direction can happen if we choose instead to use our ai agents to interact with business services. This is actually what's currently happening.

I use gemini/chatgpt to find things on the web for me without being manipulated and marketed at. Maybe one day soon, I can buy airline tickets without the minefield of dark patterns employed to maximize A/B tested revenue.

The only thing that needs to happen to keep us on this path is to bite the heels of the major companies with great agent systems that put the user at the center and not a brand. That means selling AI agents as a SaaS or open source projects - not ad-supported models.

This community is probably the group that has, collectively, the most say in where this future goes. Let's choose optimism.
by steamrolled | 2025-05-23 16:37:50+00:00
The point of the SI system is not that one meter is "better" than one foot. It's that we picked one subjective point of reference and then made almost all the other units related to that in a straightforward way and scaled with a common set of prefixes.

In everyday life, the metric system offers no big benefit, except for consistency for international standards and trade. But if you're doing anything engineering-related, your life is simpler if you don't need conversion factors to move between liters, meters, joules, watts, amperes, volts, ohms, and so on.

And FWIW, even to the extent that US engineers sometimes use inches and Fahrenheit, almost everything else they do is anchored to SI.
by paulorlando | 2025-05-23 16:37:58+00:00
Fun fact... or not so fun?

For 12 years of the revolutionary era, France did use decimal time. And the calendar and clocks were organized around a 10 day week and a 10 hour day. But those changes, coupled with the loss of Sunday worship, had other effects on the population.

Here’s an assessment of what was really meant and then lost by the elimination of Sunday:

“‘The elderly ladies took advantage of the long journey (to church) to exchange old stories with other old gossips … they met friends and relatives on the way, or when they reached the county town, whom they enjoyed seeing … there then followed a meal or perhaps a reciprocal invitation, which led to one relative or another….’ But if that was the way it was for the old ladies, what did Sunday mean to ‘young girls, whose blood throbbed with the sweetest desire of nature!’ We can well understand their impatience, ‘they waited for each other at the start of the road they shared,’ they danced.

“Now, however, when the Tenth Day came around, ‘the men were left to the devices they always had:’ the old men went to the tavern, and they bargained. The young men drank and, deprived of their ‘lovely village girls’, they quarrelled. As for the women, they had nothing left to do in village. The mothers were miserable in their little hamlets, the daughters too, and out of this came their need to gather together in crowds. If the need for recreation is necessary because of moral forces… there is absolutely no doubt that village girls find it very hard to bear privations which are likely to prolong their unmarried state: ‘in all regions the pleasure of love is the greatest pleasure.'”

– from The Revolution Against the Church, From Reason to the Supreme Being, by Michel Vovelle, pp 158-159.
by ramoz | 2025-05-23 16:38:17+00:00
If you read Anthropic's latest model card. It's not just about keeping you safe - they are testing their own moral authority with these models.

They seem to have a societal moral obligation vs user. Highly concerning. This seems like the origin of actual Skynets.

Page 22 and beyond: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/6be99a52cb68eb70eb9572b4cafad1...
by vel0city | 2025-05-23 16:38:48+00:00
I mean sure, there's always been a lot of people who didn't care for the radio and absolutely found it valuable to buy physical media copies or later digital versions they truly owned. But there's pretty much always been a large chunk of people who didn't care to own a lot of content. They didn't have to be "convinced" to no longer want to own their own copies of music, they never cared to from the start. They just didn't really have any other options other than maybe buy a small handful of physical media or listen to the radio. Now they have a ton more options. It's not enshittification to build new services to target customers which previously only had worse options. Before, these users practically only had AM/FM radio to service what they were looking for. Now there's lots of apps out there with ad supported or cheap tiers (the price of a few CDs a year to get access to thousands and lots of constant new content) offering them on-demand music and autoplaylists and what not.

These platforms aren't necessarily drawing people who really wanted a big privately curated music collection to own forever, they're drawing the people who just want to listen to music and not have to spend much or anything at all for it. Which happens to be a ton of people.
by bee_rider | 2025-05-23 16:38:49+00:00
I mostly use Linux on my laptop. I thought you server folks needed this kind of functionality—you guys have to, like, serve stuff, be visible on the network, install weird software for business needs, right? As an individual, I can crank up the firewall, trust all of the people who use my laptop (it is just me) and not install sketchy software.
by mckeed | 2025-05-23 16:39:14+00:00
Fun post! I drew the first 5 iterations by hand myself and I'm finding it easiest to think of as a self-similar coloring of a square tesselation.

If you start with the shape of iteration 3, it tessellates as a 5x5 square tile. Make an infinite grid of those tile shapes with one iteration 3 version in the center. Treat that center tile as the center square in the iteration 3 pattern and color the tiles around it according to how the 2nd and 3rd iterations were built of squares. This gives you the 4th and 5th iteration and you can continue to iterate on the coloring outwards to color the grid of tiles in the wallflower pattern.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-23 16:39:20+00:00
I think most of the safety stuff is pretty contrived. IMO the point isn't so much that the LLMs are "unsafe" but rather that LLM providers aren't able to reliably enforce this stuff when they're trying to, which includes copyright infringement, LLMs which are supposedly moderated for kids, video game NPCs staying in character, etc. Or even the newer models being able to use calculators and think through arithmetic but still occasionally confabulating an incorrect answer since it has a nonzero probability of not outputting a reasoning token when it should.

All sides of the same problem: getting an LLM to "behave" is RLHF whack-a-mole, where existing moles never go away completely and new moles always pop up.
by tayistay | 2025-05-23 16:41:25+00:00
I've been working on a type checker for a language with ad-hoc overloading and what I did was have the checker proceed iteratively, making passes over the set of constraints and applying deduction rules. So it never guesses, branches, or has to backtrack. If it can't make progress because there's too much overloading, it gives up and asks the user to add some type annotations. I suspect this will actually work quite well in practice even if it can't type check some valid programs.
by yvdriess | 2025-05-23 16:41:55+00:00
Their pictoral representation is a "shut up and calculate" notation, you can always map it 1:1 with the linear algebra formulation. It was developed as a better tool of thought for working out proofs in QC.

I had the pleasure of interacting with Duncan and Bob when XZ calculus was being developed. While I did not use their calculus for my own research, it did inspire the graphical notation I doodled with.

While I agree that naming a thing after a person makes it less clear at first glance, it is definitely not to intentionally sound smarter and exclusive; it's simply a handy short label for often subtle and complex things in an environment where you are constantly referring to it. New fields or domains will typically develop their own notation, as they often require new tools of thought. I'm sure you are not suggesting that Feynman diagrams or Einstein summations making things more complicated than they really are.

To your point: the annoying part is when the conventions clash. In early QC works an X could be the X-gate or something else completely. A good chunk of the effort in writing or understanding a QC publication was establishing the notation. After a while notation gets a bit more consolidated as conventions get naturally established. Of course, if you move from a world that has established its own conventions, e.g. behind the iron curtain, it can be frustrating to be confronted with the many eponyms in a field where you already have deep expertise. I had similar experiences just from working in teams that were using different programming languages: "Why call it a SAX parser? That's just tree-recursive descent!"
by WorldMaker | 2025-05-23 16:42:01+00:00
Microsoft has had official Microsoft SQL Server, Azure Storage, CosmosDB and more extensions for VS Code for a long while now. The surprise is building an official branded Postgres extension rather than leaving that to all the (many) third party and/or open source extensions. I suppose it is a nice side-effect of "AI all the things" efforts that "GitHub Copilot support" was enough reason to grab resources for a postgres query editor and other tools.

(I thought it was particularly nice when you could install most to the VS Code DB extensions standalone as "Azure Data Studio"; you can build separate VS Code profiles for your coding and DBA hats of course, but it's not quite the same feel as launching a separate, dedicated application. Though "Azure Data Studio" was often overlooked because it worked just fine on non-Azure hosted databases.)
by shawnz | 2025-05-23 16:42:04+00:00
There is already a Microsoft SQL server extension for VS Code and this looks to effectively be a clone of it. After giving this a quick spin, it looks and feels the same as the SQL server extension, with the same menus, dialogs, etc. The SQL server extension I believe is what formed the basis of the now-deprecated Azure Data Studio (which was a VS code fork).

See here for the SQL server extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-mssql...
by apsurd | 2025-05-23 16:42:53+00:00
Good speech. It makes me think of why the rich get richer though. More access to more types of people earlier and throughout one's life.

The best thing to give kids is access to a very wide—as wide as they can stomach—orientation of all there is in the world. It's not curation, it's not "the best". it's volume and contrasts.

I debate my friends about private school. they have kids, I don't yet. Private school is actually a narrow lens, is my argument.
by madaxe_again | 2025-05-23 16:43:15+00:00
Yep - I mean, to some extent, he’s right, as the problem was that there ended up being a perceived divide between team leads and teams - so with the rotating teams everyone who wanted to got to have a go at wearing the team lead hat, which both allowed people an opportunity to interface directly with the big bosses on the regular and feel seen (even though we were very much hands on with everyone anyway), and to understand that herding cats wasn’t as much fun as it looked like from the outside.
by pantsforbirds | 2025-05-23 16:43:30+00:00
It seems MUCH better at tool usage. Just had an example where I asked Sonnet 4 to split a PR I had after we had to revert an upstream commit.

I didn't want to lose the work I had done, and I knew it would be a pain to do it manually with git. The model did a fantastic job of iterating through the git commits and deciding what to put into each branch. It got everything right except for a single test that I was able to easily move to the correct branch myself.
by homefree | 2025-05-23 16:43:35+00:00
The circle embarrassed by ignorant students screaming for intifada.

Mao is a good example because it was similarly ignorant students that drove the cultural revolution and ended up killing millions. There's a line from these Harvard students to the two Jews a "Free Palestine" communist executed this week.

You're right that communism is a threat - you're wrong about where the threat lies.
by bostik | 2025-05-23 16:43:59+00:00
That second trick is neat, I'll need to remember that. I also really wish I had known about it back in 2015, when we had to massage an inconveniently big (at the time) PG database and started to carve it out into smaller, purpose-specific instances.

Being able to verify that an index was either useless or inefficient without jumping through hoops would have saved quite a lot of time.
by mcphage | 2025-05-23 16:44:49+00:00
> But you can ask if it happened because of California's political environment, or despite it.

You can ask that, and it's a good question, but it's a much harder case to make in a political ad. "Sure, the Californian economy is enormous, but it would have been bigger if someone else was in charge!" isn't an easy case to make.
by lolinder | 2025-05-23 16:45:00+00:00
I didn't mean it to be haranguing, but OP was giving what amounted to legal advice that was actually wrong and dangerous. I do think that needs to be called out and clarified—not as a personal attack on OP but just as a matter of safety for readers.

I'll acknowledge that kstrauser may have done a better job of sounding friendly about it, but I don't think my question was out of line nor even particularly aggressive given the circumstances.
by jahewson | 2025-05-23 16:45:22+00:00
The thing is, if AI agents become a significant part of web traffic then the content of the web will simply shift to manipulate the agent instead of the human.

And don’t forget when you use an AI agent today to buy something it’s using “marketing” information to make its decisions. It’s influenced by SEO in its search results, indeed there’s no shortage of marketers busy working out how to do this.

I do agree there’s much to be optimistic about but the fundamental dynamics of the consumer market won’t change.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 16:45:22+00:00
> provide a reasonable argument

Here's what I infer from most of the scenarios I've seen and read about.

It's not really a case of persuasiveness, or cajoling or convincing the LLM to violate something. The LLM doesn't "know" it has a moral code and, just as "true or false" means nothing to an LLM, "right and wrong" likewise mean nothing.

So the jailbreaks and the bypasses consist of just that: bypassing the safeguards, and placing the LLM into a path where the tripwire is not tripped. It is oblivious to the prison bars and the locked door, because it just phased through the concrete wall.

You can admonish a child: "don't touch the stove. or the fireplace." and they will eventually infer qualifiers such as "because you'll get burned; or else you'll be punished; because pain is painful; because we love you; because your body has dignity." and the child develops a code of conduct. An LLM can't make these inference leaps.

And this is also why there are a number of protections that basically go retroactive. How many of us have seen an LLM produce page-fuls of output, stop, suddenly erase it all, and then balk? The LLM needs to re-analyze that output impassively in order to detect that it crossed an undetected bright line.

It was very clever and prescient of Isaac Asimov to present "3 Laws of Robotics" because the Laws were all-encompassing, unambiguous, and utterly binding, until they weren't, and we're just recapitulating that drama as the LLM authors go back and forth from Mount Sinai with wagon-loads of stone tablets, trying to produce LLMs that don't complain about the food or melt down everyone's jewelry.
by ivan_gammel | 2025-05-23 16:45:25+00:00
11 engineers is a big enough company to split the team.

In some cases it may work, however building great UX in browser is not the same job as performance optimizations or security of a server application even on the same stack. Generalist can build a CRUD app, sure, flex layout and ORM are not rocket science. Going beyond that is like finding a unicorn. Such people do exist, but they are rarely found in an average company. C# or Java UIs are a different story, of course, but I’m not sure they should be called “frontend”.
by gz5 | 2025-05-23 16:45:40+00:00
>nobody makes money when things aren't locked down

i would rephrase as "incumbents don't usually make more money if things are opened up".

if consumer gets materially better value, then challenger ecosystem around MCP will evolve. it will be open at first - great for startups and challengers, innovator's dilemma for market leaders.

and then it will close as the new wave establishes their moats. but, similar to web, even though the current web leaders are now much more closed than we would like, the overall ecosystem is more open than it was.
by kergonath | 2025-05-23 16:46:55+00:00
> But "the" metric system, so called, functions entirely on the happy coincidence of macroscopic distance being divisible at human discretion

What do you mean exactly? Any distance is divisible arbitrarily, it’s a continuous scale regardless of the unit system. We could define the metre as a foot (or rather, as the distance of some physical phenomenon close enough to a foot) and build a decimal system out of it, and it would have the same advantages as the metric system.

> while the similar and simultaneous effort at decimalizing time foundered on the rocks of how long it actually takes Earth to revolve upon its axis and to circle the sun

The fact that there are 60 seconds in an hour and 24 hours per day has absolutely nothing to do with how quickly the earth revolves. Your argument works (kinda) for the number of days in a year, that’s all.

> Both efforts originate in the same silly hamartiac human desire to prescribe a shape to which reality must conform

No, this is completely backwards. This effort originates from the idea that we should observe and understand nature, and build a rational society based on this understanding. The original metre was a fraction of the length of a meridian for a reason. They did not change the size of the Earth to conform to an arbitrary unit. Instead they came up with a unit that made sense to them, for both philosophical and practical reasons. They did the opposite of what you say.

> Especially since, in another example of its designers' foolishly misplaced priorities, metric offers no units at the human scale

The metre is about 2 thirds of an average human height (give or take, the average also changed with time). How is that not a human scale? If you want to go lower, to the scale of something you can hold, you have centimetres. If you want to go larger, to the scale of a distance you can walk, you have kilometres. And all conversions and comparisons spanning the 5 orders of magnitude relevant to our daily lives are seamless and make sense. What is your problem with this system?

> They may have prefigured the brutalists in this way

That is actually hilarious. The enlightenment philosophers and humanists who came up with the metric system are polar opposites of the brutalists. They rationalised our understanding of the world around us. They did not rebuild it square.
by lucideer | 2025-05-23 16:46:55+00:00
I use docker for the same reasons as the author's reservations - I combine a docker exec with some of my own loose automation around moving & chmod-ing files & directories to obviate the need for the acme client to have unfettered root access to my system.

Whether it's a local binary or a dockerised one, that access still needs to be marshalled either way & it can get complex facilitating that with a docker container. I haven't found it too bad but I'd really rather not need docker for on-demand automations.

I give plenty* of services root access to my system, most of which I haven't written myself & I certainly haven't audited their code line-by-line, but I agree with the author that you do get a sense from experience of the overall hygiene of a project & an ACME client has yet to give me good vibes.

* within reason
by davidivadavid | 2025-05-23 16:47:13+00:00
Oh great, can't wait for our AI overlords to control us more! That's definitely compatible with a "utopian society"*.

Funnily enough, I still think some of the most interesting semi-recent writing on utopia was done ~15 years ago by... Eliezer Yudkowsky. You might be interested in the article on "Amputation of Destiny."

Link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-th...
by majoe | 2025-05-23 16:47:32+00:00
Working for a crane manufacturing company. While raw material costs are maybe not that drastic, we consider material efficiency the most important metric for cost and a lot of brain power was spent to optimise the amount of steel used. There are multiple reasons for this. The ones I can think of are:

* The margins for cranes are thin and steel is expensive. * Thicker steel is harder to work with, increasing manufacturing cost. * Each kg of dead weight may decrease the performance of your product, e.g. max. Live load. This is especially true for the jib. * More weight at the top of the crane may necessitate a sturdier structure below, amplifying cost even more. * More weight may require more ballast blocks, which are costly (especially transport) * More weight means higher transport costs * More weight means more wind area, which is the critical factor for high constructions.
by nullc | 2025-05-23 16:48:32+00:00
Even when you train AI on human language, the tokens can have "subtext" that is only legible to the AI. And, unfortunately, it's not even legible to the AI in ways that it could ever explain it to us.

It's no different than how in English we can signal that a statement is related to a kind of politics or that it's about sex through particular word and phrase choice.

Training for reasoning should be expected to amplify the subtext, since any random noise in the selection that by chance is correlated with the right results will get amplified.

Perhaps you could try to dampen this by training two distinct models for a while, then swap their reasoning for a while before going back-- but sadly distinct models may still end up with similar subtexts due to correlations in their training data. Maybe ones with very distinct tokenization would be less likely to do so.
by profstasiak | 2025-05-23 16:48:55+00:00
I was struggling to get a job with 1 year of experience under a belt, then I read this comment [0] by vmception

> vmception on Dec 15, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: How to Stand Out with Your Job Application as a Ju...

> 7. Form an LLC and lie about your experience as you worked for this company for so long. This joker recruiter is an inconsequential gatekeeper, you need to be forwarded to the technical interview that you have to pass no matter how big your open source contributions are. There are many popular developers whose libraries get used by large organizations, yet cannot get hired by them due to the brainteasers.

> All you need is the callback so forget the reindeer games described in this article.

I added one year of experience to my CV and started recruiting for mid positions. Got a job offer in two weeks, after previously spending many months going nowhere.

Thank you!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29570736