MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Sharlin | 2025-05-15 03:01:35+00:00
Seems like this is an aspect of their well-known overconfidence and the inability to self-reflect and recognize they have to ask for more details because their priors are too low. If you look at the output of reasoning models, it’s clear that the idea of asking for clarification very rarely occurs to them – when they’re confused, it’s just endless speculation of what the user might have meant.

This, of course, has certain implications as to the wisdom of the idea of “replacing human programmers”, given that one of the hard parts of the trade is trying to turn vague and often confused ideas into precise specifications by interacting with the shareholders.
by josecodea | 2025-05-15 03:03:08+00:00
> As someone who works at a university this is very reminiscent of students who don't understand the assignment then complain when they get an unexpected mark.

This is such a lazy and convenient conclusion for someone that is giving out instructions.

Another valid reason that the students might misunderstand an assignment is because they cannot read minds and the instructions are poorly written.

Good teachers are the ones that make themselves understood by the largest amount of students. Bad teachers are the opposite.

With my best teachers, I never had to question their grading, because it was transparent from the start. So if you are getting a lot of confused students, you might be the common denominator.

Buddhist monks learn by solving riddles and guessing the messages of cryptic messages called Koans. Lets agree that students at a faculty, literally paying for tuition, should not be subject to the same practice.
by lotrjohn | 2025-05-15 03:03:22+00:00
> Outside of that, we have a "retro" corner in our home with a 32" trinitron.

A 32” Trinny. Nice. I have the 32” JVC D-series which I consider my crown jewel. It’s for retro gaming and I have a laserdisc player but a very limited selection of movies. Analog baby.

> Sadly though, as I get ready to take on a mortgage, it's likely most of my CRT's will be sold

Mortgage = space. You won’t believe the nooks and crannies you can fit CRTs into. Attic. Shed. Crawl space. Space under basement stairs. Heck, even the neighbors house. I have no less than 14 CRTs ferreted away in the house. Wife thinks I have only 5. Get creative. Don’t worry about the elements, these puppies were built to survive nuclear blasts. Do I have a sickness? Probably. But analog!!!
by rahimnathwani | 2025-05-15 03:04:16+00:00
Woogles is nice.

The board looks like a regular scrabble board, but the special squares are indicated only with colours, and don't say 'Triple Word Score' etc. like on the real Scrabble board. When you hover over a square, you see the bonus as '2x letter' etc.

This behaviour is fine for experienced players, but not for children or beginners, especially those playing on iPads, which don't have 'hover'.

I made a userscript to fix this:

https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/508773-woogles-bonus-label...
by fuzztester | 2025-05-15 03:04:34+00:00
Intrusive popup covering a lot of the screen, telling you to join the site.

avoid like the plague.

screenshot of the popup - a short link generated by the site i used:

https://paste.pics/TAVF0

and the long link if preferred:

https://paste.pics/38ea0f113afaa3b591a2c9a46dcae5a1
by morsecodist | 2025-05-15 03:07:14+00:00
Subjectively the "getting lost" feels totally different than human conversations. Once there is something bad in the context it seems almost impossible to get back on track. All subsequent responses become get a lot worse and it starts contradicting itself. It is possible that with more training this problem can be improved, but what is interesting to me isn't it's worse than humans in this way but that this sort of difficulty scales differently than it does in humans. I would love to get some more objective descriptions of these subjective notions.
by nativeit | 2025-05-15 03:07:31+00:00
To be clear, while McNamara was an advocate for seat belts, he wasn’t particularly instrumental in their development or adoption. In 1955 he introduced a paid option for Ford vehicles that included seat belts. But the option wasn’t popular with consumers, only 2% of new Fords the following year had it installed.

Saab was the first to include them as standard equipment in 1958, with Volvo introducing the modern 3-point seatbelts as standard equipment the following year. They remained unpopular in the US until after Ralph Nader’s 1965 book Unsafe At Any Speed which became a bestseller and prompted congress to pass the National Traffic & Motor Safety Act in 1966, and ultimately were made compulsory by states (presumably under a lot of lobbying pressure from insurers) starting in 1970.
by dtagames | 2025-05-15 03:07:55+00:00
It's a good one! I'm a lifelong fan of the leveling-up techniques you're talking about and I found they're essential when working with AI agents, especially.

I had the epiphany that all of the "AI's problems" were problems with my code or my understanding. This is my article[0] on that.

[0] https://levelup.gitconnected.com/mission-impossible-managing...
by coderatlarge | 2025-05-15 03:08:12+00:00
thanks for the note. i don’t speak the local language so maybe it’s gotten enabled in some indirect way. and js there isn’t much anyone can do about it seems when interacting with a “modern” web page.

i have this day-dream that i’ll learn enough about linux networking to setup one of my boxes as a filter for all my traffic and properly encrypt and observe and properly filter out stray traffic that may be giving me away, but that’s probably a fool’s errand too on some level. also i suspect macos leaks info in various hard to secure ways.
by zacksiri | 2025-05-15 03:08:29+00:00
I've been working on solving this with quite a bit of success, I'll be sharing more on this soon. It involves having 2 systems 1st system is the LLM itself and another system which acts like a 'curator' of thoughts you could say.

It dynamically swaps in / out portions of the context. This system is also not based on explicit definitions it relies on LLMs 'filling the gaps'. The system helps the llm break down problems into small tasks which then eventually aggregate into the full task.
by n2d4 | 2025-05-15 03:10:13+00:00
You are being unnecessarily cynical. These are all subjective. I thought "datum" and "datasets" was quite clever, and while I would've chosen "man" for "king - crown" myself, I actually find "ruler" a better solution after seeing it. But each to their own.

The rant about network architecture misses my point, which is that an LLM does not just do a linear transformation and a similarity search. Sure, in the most abstract sense it still just computes an output embedding from two input embeddings, but only in a very distant, pedantic way. (Actually, to be VERY pedantic, that would not even be true, because ChatGPT's tokenizer embeds tokens, not words. The in- and output of the model is more than just the semantic embedding of words; using two different but semantically equivalent words may result in different outputs with a transformer LLM, but not in a word semantics model.)

I just thought it was cool that ChatGPT is so good at it.
by timeflex | 2025-05-15 03:10:27+00:00
That is what I've noticed as well. The thread regarding KeePassXC is crazy... straight up threatening negative PR because KeePassXC allows people to store their private key, demanding that they instead take away user choice and modify their app to hide & prevent users from doing things. Passkeys appear to me to be nothing more than a corporate gimmick, and to be honest, I personally think in many instances they actually make you less secure... getting a fingerprint is way easier than making someone tell you their password. Now days the intelligence agencies likely already have your fingerprints as well.
by Helmut10001 | 2025-05-15 03:10:57+00:00
My experiences somewhat confirm these observations, but I also had one that was different. Two weeks of debugging IPSEC issues with Gemini. Initially, I imported all the IPSEC documentation from OPNsense and pfSense into Gemini and informed it of the general context in which I was operating (in reference to 'keeping your context clean'). Then I added my initial settings for both sides (sensitive information redacted!). Afterwards, I entered a long feedback loop, posting logs and asking and answering questions.

At the end of the two weeks, I observed that: The LLM was much less likely to become distracted. Sometimes, I would dump whole forum threads or SO posts into it, when it said "this is not what we are seeing here, because of [earlier context or finding]. I eliminated all dead ends logically and informed it of this (yes, it can help with the reflection, but I had to make the decisions). In the end, I found the cause of my issues.

This somewhat confirms what some user here on HN said a few days ago. LLMs are good at compressing complex information into simple one, but not at expanding simple ideas into complex ones. As long as my input was larger than the output (either complexity or length), I was happy with the results.

I could have done this without the LLM. However, it was helpful in that it stored facts from the outset that I had either forgotten or been unable to retrieve quickly in new contexts. It also made it easier to identify time patterns in large log files, which helped me debug my site-to-site connection. I also optimized many other settings along the way, resolving not only the most problematic issue. This meant, in addition to fixing my problem, I learned quite a bit. The 'state' was only occasionally incorrect about my current parameter settings, but this was always easy to correct. This confirms what others already saw: If you know where you are going and treat it as a tool, it is helpful. However, don't try to offload decisions or let it direct you in the wrong direction.

Overall, 350k Tokens used (about 300k words). Here's a related blog post [1] with my overall path, but not directly corresponding to this specific issue. (please don't recommend wireguard; I am aware of it)

[1]: https://du.nkel.dev/blog/2021-11-19_pfsense_opnsense_ipsec_cgnat/
by hackyhacky | 2025-05-15 03:11:33+00:00
Say what you will about Oreos and other processed foods, but they do actually contain calories. They are legitimately food.

Here's my experience as a professional educator: AI tools are used not as shortcuts in the learning process, but for avoiding the learning process entirely. The analogy is therefore not to junk food, but to GLP-1, insofar as it's something that you do instead of food.

Students can easily use AI tools to write a programming project or an essay. It's basically impossible to detect. And they can pass classes and graduate without ever having had to attempt to learn any of the material. AI is already as capable as a university student.

The only solution is also hundreds of years old: in person, proctored exams. On paper. And moreover: a willingness to fail those students who don't keep up their end of the bargain.
by pixelbyindex | 2025-05-15 03:11:33+00:00
Honestly still a question worth investigating. I also dropped Unity for my latest project, spent a year with Godot and then realized.. it's just not quite there. So I had to go back and rework things. One thing you realize quick is that the talent pool for Godot is unfortunately very shallow.

Post publish, I will probably try Unreal and see where it takes me. I think Tim Sweeney has brought some good ideas to the space, so I am more willing to hop on his bandwagon.
by lmm | 2025-05-15 03:12:17+00:00
> Does anyone know of anywhere that managed to bootstrap good public transit after the fact?

Shanghai. Amsterdam up to a point - they never completely lost their transit, but it was in pretty bad shape.

> Anyway I wonder if congestion pricing could potentially be such a bootstrapping force, pushing enough people to use transit to start the virtuous cycle of increasing ridership and increasing quality.

It can help. You need improving transit and densification to happen together so they can reinforce each other, so you need coordination between transport policy and housing policy, I think that's the key.
by seer | 2025-05-15 03:12:38+00:00
I don’t understand the hate, the only truly limiting factor for Prisma right now is its poor support for polymorphism, apart from that it has quite good support for complicated index setups, and if you need anything more performant, just drop to typed raw sql queries, it also supports views (materialized or otherwise) out of the box.

I recently wanted to check it out and wrote a small app that had good use of pgvector for embeddings, custom queries with ctes for a few complex edge cases, and it was all quite smooth.

Now it might not be at the level of active record, ecto or sqlalchemy but it was quite decent.

If you know your sql at any point it gave me options to drop down a level of abstraction, but still keep the types so as not to break the abstraction too much for the rest of the code.
by aidenn0 | 2025-05-15 03:12:53+00:00
I personally think debating whether or not we have free will is the most onanistic thing one can do in philosophy, since if one of the two sides is correct, then the result of the debate is predetermined.

That being said, this article seems to advance the theory that even the most simple single-celled organisms have more agency than any algorithm, at least partly due to their complexity. This, to me, seems to significantly underestimate the complexity of modern learning-models, which (had we not designed them) would be as opaque to us as many single-celled organisms.

I see nothing in this article that would distinguish biological organisms from any other self-replicating, evolving machine, even one that is faithfully executing straightforward algorithms. Nor does this seem to present any significant argument against the concept that biological organisms are self-replicating evolving machines that are faithfully executing straightforward algorithms.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-15 03:15:02+00:00
It's definitely not like solving the halting problem. A solution 100% exists. You are it. If human intelligence can be realized in physical reality by an actual human brain, then it is provably realizable.

Few things in science exist as a north star in such abundance. We KNOW it can be built. Other futuristic things like interstellar travel... we don't actually know.
by ranyume | 2025-05-15 03:15:11+00:00
I'd like more research done on context understanding other than NIAH. I don't believe LLMs support the context length companies say they support. But I need to know this to effectively use the tools. At least for coding.

Stuff like this:

1. Do: Best practice for X model is to include at max 10k lines of code + task + CONVENTIONS.md + architecture guidance. Only queue tasks for components that are fairly decoupled from the rest of the codebase (e.g. small modules).

2. Don't: Start a project without a clearly defined architecture in this format. Don't ask for tasks that require X amount of reading hops to understand the logic.

I find it frustrating that companies release their benchmaxxing without helping developers actually use their models. It's more ironic that some people think of these AIs as employees. Employees can work with their boss about the best way to achieve things! With LLMs you don't even know how to communicate with them and as a result their output is unreliable.
by phillipcarter | 2025-05-15 03:15:12+00:00
Related is Claude for Education: https://www.anthropic.com/news/introducing-claude-for-educat...

It's adjusted to not just give answers, but (perhaps frustratingly for the student), force them to iterate through something to get an answer.

Like anything it's likely also jail-breakable, but as we've learned with all software, the defaults matter.
by ghssds | 2025-05-15 03:15:34+00:00
As the spectator, you get to determine who is the bad guy. A classic example in The Lion King. Mufasa the bloodthirsty king succeed, despite his assassination, in maintaining the order he lived, and killed, for. Meanwhile, his mistreated brother, failed to create a new better order by liberating the oppressed hyennas. Simba had a fair chance at changing things for good after he met Timon and Pumbaa who teach him the true way of life but by the end he has forsaken everything he learned and we see a completely brainwashed Simba accomplish Mufasa's biding.

Or you can watch the movie the way you are told and in this case you are right.
by coderatlarge | 2025-05-15 03:16:23+00:00
i personally enjoyed both and felt they added color in their own way. the point of the story is that it touches on deep feelings ; i personally felt dicaprio did a really good job of exuding the dodgy side of gatsby superimposed on the vulnerable human within but then that’s probably mostly in the eye of the beholder.

judging from my teenage daughter’s reactions to film in general, i’d guess a younger audience would prefer the newer film because it would feel to be of higher production value with better fit and finish.
by rayiner | 2025-05-15 03:17:03+00:00
My argument is fully made in good faith hoping urbanists will confront their own revealed preferences. If you’re an urbanist, why wouldn’t you want to raise a family in a city like Baltimore that spends $21,000 per student annually, where you can afford a 3-4BR townhome near transit and shopping?

I used to live in New Rochelle, NY near the Metro North station. It’s walkable and urban, with great transit. The school district spends $25,000/student, compared to $15,000/student in my Maryland suburb. But housing in New Rochelle is quite affordable considering it’s the NYC Metro area—even cheaper than my suburb. Why don’t the urbanists raise their families there?
by johngai | 2025-05-15 03:17:14+00:00
I'm a growth consultant who works with hospitality and franchise brands. One of my clients, Okami Japanese Restaurant — a fast-growing, All-You-Can-Eat chain with over 60 locations across Australia — had a problem:

They wanted to send personalized, mass SMS promotions without the usual pain of switching between tools, manual CSV uploads, or dealing with clunky systems.

I found a tool called Netcapz — an AI-powered bulk messaging platform — and decided to run an experiment. Here’s what happened:

We uploaded 20k+ customer contacts

Created location-based segments in minutes

Used Netcapz’s AI automation to personalize bulk SMS + schedule across time zones

Pushed out weekend promo messages with trackable links

The results?

38% open rate within 10 minutes

22% increase in weekend table bookings

Consistent 4x ROI across multiple campaigns

All messages delivered through one unified inbox — SMS, WhatsApp, Viber, RCS

Netcapz replaced what used to take hours of manual work with something that felt like magic. It scaled across all of Okami’s locations without adding team overhead.

Honestly, I think most multi-location businesses, especially in hospitality, underestimate how effective AI-driven SMS marketing can be when done right.

Happy to answer questions or share templates if anyone’s curious. email me at john.ayuel@hotmail.com
by lmm | 2025-05-15 03:17:48+00:00
> In any other city, congestion charge would be an effective tax on mobility, because every other city is so comically car-dependent. You might as well just raise the gas tax. Most cities don't even have a downtown to protect from cars, they're just suburban sprawl forever.

Nah. Almost any city built pre-motor-car has a decent downtown that can make for a starting point. And these things grow when policy supports them.

> Existing stroads must be segmented into feeder streets and high-speed roads with ramp lanes on and off.

Nah, this would just result in a wave of urban highway building that also drained transit budgets.

The way forward is to make street parking permit-only, give permits to existing but not new residents, and allow development. Do that and the rest will sort itself out.

> - Require all new streets above the speed limit for (formerly) residential zoned streets have dedicated lanes for bikes and transit vehicles. The lanes must be segmented for safety. The transit lanes can start off as BRT and then get upgraded to LRT cheaply. If you don't want to run a BRT system then rent the lanes to private transit companies.

BRT is a spook that has never worked (or rather it's worked very well in diverting transit efforts and stopping effective transit).
by AndyNemmity | 2025-05-15 03:17:59+00:00
My honest opinion is that some of my skills are atrophying, and some of them are increasing.

I have managed a python app for a long time due to it being part of a much larger set of services I manage. I've never been particularly comfortable with it.

I am easily learning, and understanding the python much much better.

I think I'm atrophying in a lot of syntax, and typing automatic things.

It doesn't really feel straight forward that it's one or the other.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-15 03:19:25+00:00
> inability to self-reflect

IMO the One Weird Trick for LLMs is recognizing that there's no real entity, and that users are being tricked into a suspended-disbelief story.

In most cases cases you're contributing text-lines for a User-character in a movie-script document, and the LLM algorithm is periodically triggered to autocomplete incomplete lines for a Chatbot character.

You can have an interview with a vampire DraculaBot, but that character can only "self-reflect" in the same shallow/fictional way that it can "thirst for blood" or "turn into a cloud of bats."
by dripdry45 | 2025-05-15 03:19:32+00:00
I wonder if adding congestion pricing in small cities to certain intersections or stretches of road would work the same way. if people really want to go through the busiest intersections or areas, then they’re going to have to pay a little bit.

Then people question whether they are going to go through, or pay a little bit to keep up the infrastructure if they do.
by johngai | 2025-05-15 03:19:32+00:00
I recently worked with a multi-location hospitality group that was drowning in tools: Xero for accounting, Trello for projects, spreadsheets for payroll, random CRMs — it was chaos.

That’s when I came across Barawave — an AI-powered, all-in-one Cloud ERP platform. At first, I was skeptical (ERP systems can be notoriously clunky), but Barawave turned out to be surprisingly simple, smart, and affordable.

Here’s what we switched over to Barawave:

Project & task management

Payroll & HR

Accounting & invoicing

CRM

Inventory tracking

Financial reporting

Plus: custom dashboards + AI insights

We rolled it out across 3 departments in under a week. The AI even flagged delayed invoices and suggested ways to reduce stock loss — without any custom code or consulting hours.

The result?

40% reduction in admin time

Real-time visibility across locations

Accurate, automated payroll and tax compliance

Zero need to juggle tools or spreadsheets

It honestly felt like upgrading from a toolbox full of duct-taped apps to a unified command center for the entire business.

If you’re managing a growing business or consultancy and want to cut complexity without losing control, Barawave is worth a look.

AMA if you want screenshots, sample workflows, or onboarding tips.

Contact me at john.ayuel@hotmail.com for consultation
by mjevans | 2025-05-15 03:19:35+00:00
Use case: crawling possibly related files based on string search hints in a repo you know nothing about...

Something on the order of 6 seconds a page doesn't sound TOO out of human viewing range depending on how quickly things load and how fast rejects are identified.

I could see ~10 pages / min which is 600 pages / hour. I could also see the argument that a human would get tired at that rate and something closer to 200-300 / hr is reasonable.