MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bost-ty | 2025-05-04 19:38:06+00:00
I like the author's take: it isn't a value judgement on the individual using ChatGPT (or Gemini or whichever LLM you like this week), it's that the thought that went into making the prompt is, inevitably, more interesting/original/human than the output the LLM generates afterwards.

In my experiments with LLMs for writing code, I find that the code is objectively garbage if my prompt is garbage. If I don't know what I want, if I don't have any ideas, and I don't have a structure or plan, that's the sort of code I get out.

I'd love to hear any counterpoints from folks who have used LLMs lately to get academic or creative writing done, as I haven't tried using any models lately for anything beyond helping me punch through boilerplate/scaffolding on personal programming projects.
by doikor | 2025-05-04 19:38:18+00:00
That is what you use behavior detection for. If you don't give human like inputs from the cheat it is detectable and if you limit yourself to what a human can do then the cheat is not very desirable.

> “You have to humanize [the cheat] to a degree where the advantage is imperceptible from what a human can do,” said Koskinas. “And once you’re there, you’re not really cheating enough to make it worth it for most users.”

But if you read the article they do have some way to detect (some) DMA based hacks too where the actual cheat runs on a different computer and use DMA through a pci-express card to read/write directly into memory.

> “I think we detect the majority of it today, but it’s kind of iterative,” said Koskinas.

Though most cheaters "rage cheating" after losing really badly and using cheats to "get back" and those are much easier to detects. This kind of "download random cheat from the internet" at the best only get you banned and at worst your computer is super duper hacked (you are effectively manually downloading a virus and manually giving it admin/kernel level access)

> Thanks to all these techniques and strategies, most cheaters can now be roughly divided into two categories. The first, representing the majority of cheaters, is made up by those who are “rage cheating” by using cheap tools that are easy to detect. Riot employees sarcastically call these cheats “download-a-ban,” according to Koskinas.

At the end of the day all I know from my own experience is that the difference in the amount of cheaters I run into between Counter Strike and Valorant is massive and the main claimed difference being kernel level stuff in Valorants anti cheat (or Valve is just really really bad at making anti cheats)
by poulsbohemian | 2025-05-04 19:38:20+00:00
> Your tankless water heater is a good example of something that is completely inadequate for solar setups, they draw insane amount of energy over very quick period

I know nothing about any of this, so please educate me for the good of us all - wouldn't this logically be a use case for a battery? IE: solar (or wind or whatever...) feeds a battery that feeds the tankless water heater. As a layperson, it would seem to me like the issue isn't generation but rather availability at the moment of demand - which would be the case in any kind of micro generation, right?
by cortesoft | 2025-05-04 19:38:28+00:00
> I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large language model can transform them into.

Really? The example used was for a school test. Is there really much original thought in the answer? Do you really want to read the students original thought?

I think the answer is no in this case. The point of the test is to assess whether the student has learned the topic or not. It isn’t meant to share actual creative thoughts.

Of course, using AI to write the answer is contrary to the actual purpose, too, but it isn’t because you want to hear the students creativity, but because it is failing to serve its purpose as a demonstration of knowledge.
by variaga | 2025-05-04 19:39:02+00:00
I think it could. If wireless charging docks has been common at the time, the upgrade to "now your wireless charger can do data sync too" is a straightforward improvement.

Unfortunately, at the time there was only one phone that had wireless charging built in (Palm Pre). I know our sales and marketing did try to engage with them on getting wireless usb into "the next version" of the Pre, but nothing came of it. I don't know the details.

At this point wifi is ubiquitous enough that a new version of wireless usb would have a hard time competing with it though.
by neuroelectron | 2025-05-04 19:39:06+00:00
For a long time, storage was getting cheaper all the time but we've hit scaling walls in both CPUs and drives. I remember when I was a kid and bought Mechwarrior 2 a game that could use up to 500mb! The guy working the video game locker warned me "are you sure you have enough hard drive space?" after having just bought a 2gb drive for like $60, or something, I don't remember exactly. A concern that would have been valid maybe a year earlier.
by andy99 | 2025-05-04 19:39:40+00:00
I used to teach, years before LLMs, and got lots of copy-pasted crap submitted. I always marked it zero, never mentioning plagiarism (which would require some university administration) and just commenting that I asked for X and instead got some pasted together nonsense.

As long as LLM output is what it is, there is little threat of it actually being competitive on assignments. If students are attentive enough to paraphrase it into their own voice I'd call it a win; if they just submit the crap that some data labeling outsourcer has RLHF'd into a LLM, I'd just mark it zero.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-05-04 19:39:42+00:00
The third sentence of the Wikipedia article begs to differ. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Value-added_tax&o...

> A value-added tax (VAT or goods and services tax (GST), general consumption tax (GCT)) is a consumption tax that is levied on the value added at each stage of a product's production and distribution. […] VAT is an indirect tax, because the consumer who ultimately bears the burden of the tax is not the entity that pays it.

(Even then, Wikipedia is oversimplifying: "ultimately bears the burden" isn't how economies work.)
by const_cast | 2025-05-04 19:39:55+00:00
No, a lot of government agencies are specifically positioned to not favor money over safety.

Something like the FAA or FDA would never be conducted by the private sector. Because they're money sinks, and knowing how safe something is, is bad, actually. The private sector would much rather be blissfully unaware. Less liability that way.

The only time something like the FDA "fails" is when they give too much plausible deniability to the private sector. Like when they like J&J handle their asbestos BS in the 70s. And then... we got 50 years of asbestos baby powder. Oops! Should've never trusted them.
by dang | 2025-05-04 19:40:11+00:00
If you know more than others, that's great, but in that case please share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Just putting others down doesn't help.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

"Edit out swipes."

"Don't be curmudgeonly."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by bost-ty | 2025-05-04 19:40:17+00:00
I hear you. But in this case, it seems like the author was mostly referencing academic uses of LLMs for either writing assignments or reviewing (academic) papers. Enterprise communications have their own carefully set requirements, but often they aren't meant to be instructive to the person writing them (assignments) or enhancing an existing corpus of knowledge (academic papers, optimistically).
by gregwebs | 2025-05-04 19:40:20+00:00
One definition of legacy code I have seen is code without tests. I don't fully agree with that, but it is likely that your untested code is going to become legacy code quickly.

Everyone should be asking AI to write lots of tests- to me that's what AI is best at. Similarly you can ask it to make plans for changes and write documentation. Ensuring that high quality code is being created is where we really need to spend our effort, but its easier when AI can crank out tests quickly.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-05-04 19:40:37+00:00
In all fairness, anti-cheat is like a lock. No lock will prevent a determined thief from just breaking your window, but the point is to keep out the majority of "easy thieves". For them the goal isn't the be perfect but to not be the easy target.

Now is a kerbal level anti-cheat overkill? Hard to say from the outside but it does seem like installing a steel vault for your door. While the window is still right there as normal.
by DevKoala | 2025-05-04 19:40:50+00:00
I’ve been very successful with AI generated code. I provide the requirements and design the system architecture, and AI generates the code I would usually delegate. If any specific part requires me to dig in, I do it myself.

PS: Also, some people act as if they have to remove their common sense when using Gen AI code. You have to review and test the generated code before merging it.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-05-04 19:40:54+00:00
> It would be really interesting to see a website that generates all the pages every time a user requests them

We tried a variant of this for e-commerce and my take is that the results were significantly better than the retailer's native browsing experience.

We had a retailer's entire catalog processed and indexed with a graph database and embeddings to dynamically generate dynamic "virtual shelves" each time when users searched. You can see the results and how it compares to the retailer's native results

Example on Ulta's website: https://youtu.be/JL08UDxM_5M

Example on Safeway: https://youtu.be/xQEfo_XCM2M
by Aperocky | 2025-05-04 19:41:25+00:00
trivial doesn't mean the AI will get it right. A trivial request can be to move an elephant into a fridge. Simple concept right?

Except AI will probably destroy both the elephant and the fridge and order 20 more fridge of all sizes and elephants for testing in the mean time (if you're on MCP). Before asking you that if you mean an cold storage facility, or if it is actually a good idea in the first place
by lucasoshiro | 2025-05-04 19:42:08+00:00
> does anyone has any good tips for a complete Newbie where to begin?

Start with Tinkercad: https://www.tinkercad.com. It runs on the browser, it has some limitations, but it is really simple to use, just open and model whatever you want joining and extracting shapes and importing SVGs for extrusion.

After that, if you know any programming language you'll find OpenSCAD easy to learn. I gave a course last year about it, the slides are available here: https://lucasoshiro.github.io/posts-en/2024-03-24-openscad/. They are in Portuguese, if someone shows interest I can translate them to English, but I think they are easy to follow even by non-speakers.
by mrweasel | 2025-05-04 19:42:35+00:00
My old boss and I used to defend ourselves to younger colleagues with the argument that "This is how you did it back in the day". Mostly it was a joke, to "cover up" our screw-ups and "back in the day" could be two weeks ago.

Still, for some things we weren't wrong, our weird hacks where do to crazy edge cases or integrations into systems designed in a different era. But we where around to help assess if the code could be yanked or at least attempt to be yanked.

LLM assisted coding could technically be better for technical debt, assuming that you store the prompts along side the code. Letting someone what prompt generated a piece of code could be really helpful. Imagine having "ensure to handle the edge case where the client is running AIX 6". That answers a lot of questions and while you still don't know who was running AIX, you can now start investigating if this is still needed.
by sireat | 2025-05-04 19:43:09+00:00
Sure alcohol is not healthy.

Unfortunately, neither is oxygen.

Now you will say that we need oxygen and can survive without alcohol. But then again, we do not have a Faustian bargain of choosing to abstain of all the fun things in life and living for 200 years.

The elephant in the room is that no matter how healthy a life style you live, we presently have no way to reverse a rapid decline in quality of life around 85-90 culminating in complete collapse ages 100-110.

And those are absolute best case scenarios!

My illusion of being in control of your destiny was shuttered when Jack LaLanne - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_LaLanne died at 95.

You can have a great quality of life until mid 80s by leading a moderately healthy lifestyle provided you do not get cancer.

After that we are a loss on how to prolong our lives.

I would almost welcome if Larry Ellison would prove us wrong in 10-15 years at least there would be theoretical hope. We'll see about Peter Thiel as well, but I will not be alive to see his experiments.
by abe_m | 2025-05-04 19:43:16+00:00
I find it funny the old "I'm so feminist" prose thinking they're empowering women, while their actually demeaning the work the wife did. One comment from Toby Koosman directly lumps the wife in with servants.

Published work (writing) gets better with an editor helping, so she is providing valuable work, that even today computers can't engage in. Are the ideas expressed clearly? Does the piece make sense overall. Is the narrative properly built. Are their weird parts hanging around that get in the way of the intended message?

You have a couple that is engaging in each other's ideas, discussing issues that are most likely of interest to both of them. People often couple up who share a view on how to live, so it is likely that the wife is just as into the low tech lifestyle as he is. There exist women who like the rural and homesteading lifestyle.

The overall tone of the comment section is pretty disrespectful towards the wife.
by BillyTheMage | 2025-05-04 19:43:22+00:00
Why in gods name would we just go around creating even more people ON PURPOSE‽ And why do we feel entitled to "have" more people. They are people, they're not some plaything. Property. This is the same problem I have with people who up and decide to "get" a dog. Like they'll literally be like "we don't have a dog, we need to go get one". Slavery. Pets should end up as your pet by chance because they needed you or wanted to be your friend. People who go out of their way to "have" a pet are bad people. Doubly so for people involved in breeding and trafficking.
by groggo | 2025-05-04 19:44:06+00:00
A good point. Certainly for raster analysis it doesn't make sense.

But any type of vector data could be modeled on a sphere, right? Points, shapes, lines. And I saw "better" because even the best suited projection will have some small amount of distortion.

Either way, most things use planer geometry so projections are necessary, and you need to have some understanding of how all that works
by deathanatos | 2025-05-04 19:44:18+00:00
> That's the only reason I'd ever consider moving away from the ergonomics of something like Node or Python, if my bare metal server can save me money by simply handling more requests with less cpu/memory.

… but what does the "bare metal server" have to do with it? Presumably, Occam's Razor would suggest that a Rust framework that outperforms Go on a VM would likely continue to outperform it on a bare metal. The bare metal machine might outperform a VM, but these are most two orthogonal, unrelated axes: bare metal vs. VM, or a Rust framework vs. a Go or Node framework…
by orbital-decay | 2025-05-04 19:44:37+00:00
>Realistically what is the alternative?

What even makes you think it's a solvable problem? Even with a totally cryptographically controlled end-to-end hardware chain that treats the player like an adversary/inmate (like in the consoles, maybe even more strict) there's always a possibility of ML-based cheats with a low-latency camera. Barely anyone does that now because there are easier methods, but trust me, it will get used if required, just like DMA is used now. People already throw crazy money into cheating.

It's a race to the bottom where everybody eventually loses except the corporations. Players never get rid of the cheaters completely, unrelated people who don't play games get their hardware+software locked down because of a bunch of whiny gamers, and corpos obtain the ultimate vendor lock.

The optimal amount of bad behavior is not zero.
by epmaybe | 2025-05-04 19:44:42+00:00
Eye doctor here: some hot takes in this thread about the diagnostic abilities of the specialists involved in this patient's care. It's easy to be an armchair clinician.

The timeline for delayed immune reaction to a leptospirosis infection makes diagnosis incredibly difficult. There was no mention of an acute febrile illness preceding this during the patient's trip to the tropics, which I assume a uveitis specialist would ask.

While empiric treatment with doxycycline wouldn't be a bad idea, you have to decide what to empirically treat with, and for how long, and what the ramifications of increasing resistance to antibiotics are for society. Do I commit a patient to the hospital for two weeks of IV penicillin because I "suspect" syphilis? of course not.

Better diagnostics for these occult diseases should be applauded. But we shouldn't be vilifying the clinicians that are by all accounts doing their best.
by Retric | 2025-05-04 19:44:44+00:00
In case you are concerned that’s wildly misleading.

The US exports lots of cheap food and imports expensive foods like wine, beer, high end cheese, candies. In terms of calories / nutrition the US is a huge net food exporter but we like our luxury chocolates etc.

American companies love to setup cheap factories overseas even if they use US corn syrup to make a beverage the trade balance is based on corn syrup not the value of the manufactured soda. Meanwhile in the other direction we’re importing cans of soda manufactured in other countries.
by pncnmnp | 2025-05-04 19:45:22+00:00
Absolutely! I can elaborate on that part.

The code starts by simulating 15 tournament years (like from 2010 to 2024), with each year containing 4 grand slam tournaments - held in a knockout format. There are 64 players in the pool, all starting with an initial ELO score.

These players compete in the tournaments, with outcomes predicted based on their ELO ratings. ELO is then updated after each match. We rank players solely based on their ELO. Once the simulation completes, it generates a wealth of data. For each game, details such as points scored, points allowed, fastest ball speed, number of aces, point-by-point results, and more are simulated.

We can then cache and use this information for a ton of color commentary. For example, we can identify the GOATs of the game, highlight players who are performing exceptionally well, pinpoint underdogs, find matches similar to the one currently being played, etc.

However, I am just scratching the surface. Imagine having a function that considers "age" alongside ELO. Then, you could simulate performance based on age as well - and show things like the younger generation overtaking older players, or veterans still competing despite being past their prime. With a fn like this, you could simulate matches that span the past 75-100 years, generating a ton of nice data to analyze.

Data itself is not fun - you need nice metrics too - for fun correlations! See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_statistics. The metrics don’t have to be perfect, after all, humans aren’t perfect. The key is engagement.

To find similar games, I store and cache all historical matches in a KD-tree, then use a NN search to find similar games - that's quite fast!

Some commentary can also be dynamically generated at runtime - for example, locker-room whispers. It is important to provide GPT with a decent historical window to avoid generating contradictory info in such cases.
by kjjoseph | 2025-05-04 19:45:47+00:00
Location: San Diego CA USA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes (but would prefer to stay here)

Technologies: Mainly front-end (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, React), but some experience with back-end as well (MySQL, Node, Go)

Résumé/CV: https://kevinjoseph.net

Email: kevin.p.joseph@gmail.com
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-05-04 19:45:55+00:00
It is kind of like reviewing PRs from a very junior developer that might also give very convincing but buggy code and has no responsibility. Seriously don’t see the point of it except doing copy paste refactoring or writing throw-away scripts. Which is still a lot so it is useful.

It needs to improve a lot more to match the expectations and it probably will. It is a bit frustrating to realise a PR is AI generated slop after reviewing 500 of 1000 lines
by mchannon | 2025-05-04 19:46:35+00:00
Trackers are useless when the majority of the incoming sunlight is diffuse (as is the case where you live).

Trackers are useful when the majority of the incoming sunlight is direct (America has a mix but the western half and parts of the south have a lot of direct).

Trackers are essential when you use concentrated sunlight.

A tracker that doubles the amount of sunlight hitting a panel is not free, but it also makes the panel take up 2x the area, or more, to avoid shading its neighbor.

The thing people tend to forget about trackers is they offer this trade-off where you can trade shaded area for power per rated panel. When land is cheap and panels (or arrays, heliostats, power towers, etc.) are expensive, trackers make sense.

The reverse has been the case for the past ten years, and continues to get more true by the day. I doubt we will ever see the day return where land is cheap again and/or PV are expensive again.
by pdimitar | 2025-05-04 19:46:59+00:00
Elixir -> Rust -> SQLite library (FFI bridge). The FFI library is completed (without some of SQLite's advanced features that I don't deem important for a v1) and I am just adding more tests now, though the integration layer with Elixir's de-facto data mapper library (Ecto) has not been started yet. Which means that an announcement would be met with crickets, hence I'll work on that integration layer VerySoon™. Otherwise the whole thing wouldn't ever help anyone.

I do feel strongly about it as I believe most apps don't need a full-blown database server. I've seen what SQLite can do and to me it's still a hidden gem (or a blind spot) to many programmers.

So I am putting my sweat where my mouth is and will provide that to the Elixir community, for 100% free, no one-time payments and no subscription software.

And yes, I do get annoyed by privileged people casually working on completely irrelevant stuff that's never going to move anything forward. Obviously everyone has the right to do whatever they like in their free time, but announcements on HN I can't combine with that and they do annoy me greatly. "Oh look, it's just a hobby project but I want you all to look at it!" -- don't know, it does not make any sense to me. Seems pretentious and ego-serving but I could be looking at it wrong. Triggers tend to remove nuance after all.
by Ancalagon | 2025-05-04 19:47:26+00:00
I fully support the author’s point but it’s hard to argue with the economics and hurdles around obtaining degrees. Most people do view obtaining a degree as just a hurdle to getting a decent job, that’s just the economics of it. And unfortunately the employers these days are encouraging this kind of copy/paste work. Look at how Meta and Google claim the majority of the new code written there is AI created?

The world will be consumed by AI.
by meew0 | 2025-05-04 19:47:51+00:00
Reading about this process always makes me wonder: in a particular round, was an elector allowed to choose someone who had already been chosen in a previous round? And if yes, to what extent was this done in practice?

Depending on this detail, the character of this election process changes completely, since if repeats are allowed, it could easily degenerate into an oligarchy of ~50 people consistently choosing candidates from among their ranks.