MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fkfyshroglk | 2025-05-23 03:18:22+00:00
Maybe you should stop lying to your grandparents!

But seriously, nobody was promised anything not dictated by statute. Who gives a shit about what you, specifically understood the statute to mean? By any reasonable understanding of the law it's not even possible for SSI to go without funding, assuming the government is still operational.

What's more real and relevant is that the government only cares about your insofar as you contribute to the private economy. Like what can we do to make those fucks actually pay out and take care of us?
by godelski | 2025-05-23 03:19:10+00:00
I think the problem here is we keep making promises we can't keep. It causes us to put too many eggs in one bakery, ironically frequently preventing us from filling in those gaps. We'd make much more progress without the railroading.

There's only so much money but come on, we're dumping trillions into highly saturated research directions where several already well funded organizations have years worth of a head start. You can't tell me that there's enough money to throw at another dozen OpenAI competitors and another dozen CoPilot competitors but we don't have enough for a handful of alternative paradigms that already show promise but will struggle to grow without funding. These are not only much cheaper investments but much less risky then betting on a scrappy startup being the top dog at their own game.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-05-23 03:19:22+00:00
Under what metrics are you judging these improvements? If you're talking about improving benchmark scores, as others have pointed out, those are increasing at a regular rate (putting aside the occasional questionable training practices where the benchmark is in the training set). But most individuals seem to be judging "order of magnitude jumps" in terms of whether the model can solve a very specific set of their use cases to a given level of satisfaction or not. This is a highly nonlinear metric, so changes will always appear to be incremental until suddenly it isn't. Judging progress in this way is alchemy, and leads only to hype cycles.

Every indication I've seen is that LLMs are continuing to improve, each fundamental limitation recognized is eventually overcome, and there are no meaningful signs of slowing down. Unlike prior statistical models which have fundamental limitations without solutions, I have not seen evidence to suggest that any particular programming task that can be achieved by humans cannot eventually be solvable by LLM variants. I'm not saying that they necessarily will be, of course, but I'd feel a lot more comfortable seeing evidence that they won't.
by tptacek | 2025-05-23 03:20:46+00:00
The author jokes, but almost everybody's DR plan (at least, the DR plans motivated by regs like SOC2 --- which I believe are most DR plans) are worse than what you'd get from an LLM. An LLM can at least take some input and craft something ostensibly related to your circumstances. The DR plans the LLM competes with are literally just copy-pasted.
by teleforce | 2025-05-23 03:21:38+00:00
For me the best audio player ever is Napster [1].

It's not just an audio player but an eco-system, and for better or worst it changed the music industry forever.

Perhaps the modern version should make a p2p music streaming from peers rather than direct downloading.

[1] Napster:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napster
by Brajeshwar | 2025-05-23 03:21:51+00:00
If you want to try something in these lines, David Seah has some pretty awesome printables perfected over the years. I’ve used them like 10+ years ago, and I still like to print out some copies and tinker around. However, I have changed my ways of using pen and paper. His work is extremely detailed. I heard many restaurants have standardized on some of this work.

https://davidseah.com/productivity-tools/
by roflyear | 2025-05-23 03:23:04+00:00
People will down vote you, but when I worked for a mega corp and a hurricane knocked out our office, they had a plan, and it worked: they set up in a hotel, and continued operations, people stayed employed, people got the products (which were largely essentials) in their supermarkets, etc.

This is not like, super trivial. People needed to figure out power, hardware, networking, vpn, etc.. etc.. etc.. and staffing. A lot of that had absolutely nothing to do with IT, but some of it did.
by viraptor | 2025-05-23 03:25:43+00:00
Maybe... It will be interesting to see the improvements now compared to other benchmarks. Is 80->90% going to be an incremental fix with minimal impact on the next benchmark (same work but better), or is it going to be an overall 2x improvement on the remaining unsolved cases. (different approach tackling previously missed areas)

It really depends on how that remaining improvement happens. We'll see it soon though - every benchmark nearing 90% is being replaced with something new. SWE-verified is almost dead now.
by morsecodist | 2025-05-23 03:25:49+00:00
I agree on the diminishing returns and that the code doesn't cut it on its own. I really haven't noticed a significant shift in quality in a while. I disagree on the productivity though.

Even for something like a script to do some quick debugging or answering a question it's been a huge boon to my productivity. It's made me more ambitious and take on projects I wouldn't have otherwise.

I also don't really believe that workers are currently being replaced by LLMs. I have yet to see a system that comes anywhere close to replacing a worker. I think these layoffs are part of a trend that started before the LLM hype and it's just a convenient narrative. I'm not saying that there will be no job loss as a result of LLMs I'm just not convinced it's happening now.
by dghlsakjg | 2025-05-23 03:27:04+00:00
AFAIK, you can just pack as much fuel as you want into the secondary to scale the size of a thermonuclear bomb. So yeah, there is no size limit. Interesting aside; the US had the dial-a-yield mechanism that allowed one bomb to deliver a selectable amount of energy, not sure what the mechanism for this was, however.

As to your second sentence, pretty sure that’s what a MIRV is.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-05-23 03:27:08+00:00
I don't actually understand why you'd want reproducibility in a statistical simulation. If you fix the output, what are you learning? The point of the simulation is to produce different random numbers so you can see what the outcomes are like... right?

Let's say I write a paper that says "in this statistical model, with random seed 1495268404, I get Important Result Y", and you criticize me on the grounds that when you run the model with random seed 282086400, Important Result Y does not hold. Doesn't this entire argument fail to be conceptually coherent?
by dreamcompiler | 2025-05-23 03:27:52+00:00
> electricity prices in $/kWh range from around 9 to around 34

You mean .09 to .34 but I agree there's a lot of variation. I pay about 13 cents at home and my fuel bill is around 1/4 the $ per mile in the Model Y as it is for my ICE car when I recharge at home.

Superchargers are much more expensive; they're typically a minimum of 25 cents per kWh. But even on long road trips using supercharger energy I still pay a lot less per mile than I would for gasoline unless I drive over 80 mph (wind resistance is the efficiency killer for EVs.)

If you want to run the numbers yourself, a Model Y typically can go a mile on 250-300 Wh if relative airspeed is under 60 mph. (I look for tailwinds with windy.com on road trips. I find this fun but I don't expect that's a universal emotion.)

I have not seen a trip planner like you describe. The Tesla will tell you the supercharger rates before you arrive so you could choose a different one but that's about it.

Tesla tries very hard to keep you from running out of energy. Once I drove away from a supercharger toward the middle of nowhere. My destination was a guest house that I knew had a Level 2 charger. But the car didn't know that. As I approached the halfway point the car started nagging me "You are approaching the point of no return. Turn back NOW to avoid running out of energy."

I hit 'Ignore', laughed and kept driving. The car was wrong but I was grateful it had my back.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-23 03:29:08+00:00
> More generally, I’ve been playing with Linux and computers in general for over 20 years, and when I finally got a job in tech about five years ago, I was stunned at how little people knew about how computers work. I don’t expect (nor do I think it’s helpful) anyone to know how a bus arbitration cycle works, but I assumed that things like IOPS and throughput would be generally understood.

My expertise is only in sleeping until 11am on weekends, but I too started in "tech" after being a lifelong hobbyist and have been continually shocked at how concepts like "pass by reference" are alien to a seemingly large portion of the people that I've worked with.

People often fail to know things that are basically "table stakes" in the domains they ostensibly work in, to say nothing of even being aware of something like L1 cache or how code they write could interact with it.
by ndiddy | 2025-05-23 03:29:54+00:00
> This is just made all the more true if there is an alternative source for these tools, like Flathub.

The point I was trying to make is that Red Hat is deprecating graphical desktop programs on RHEL and telling their customers to switch to getting them from Flathub, while a Red Hat employee giving a talk about the future of Flatpak is saying that it's not actively developed anymore and that there's nobody responsible for reviewing MRs for new features. I'm not saying that it's necessarily a bad thing that Red Hat stopped packaging graphical programs. I'm saying that since they've endorsed Flatpak as their alternative to packaged graphical programs, I wish Red Hat would put some of the development resources they've saved from no longer packaging/supporting those graphical programs into helping to improve Flatpak.
by roenxi | 2025-05-23 03:30:09+00:00
Plans are useless but planning is essential

~ Lots of people

This guy is quite possibly going to end up looking stupid when something goes wrong and it turns out he lied about having thought about it. I hope he is as clever as he thinks he is at anticipating what will go wrong in the future. Fires and whatnot do happen. Even AWS us-east-1 has experienced outages.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-23 03:30:28+00:00
> Consider the sadistic cruelty

Well, I uh, can't do that if I don't see it.

I think Wonka's character is a great way to personify the distant coldness of the industrialized corporate bosses of Dahl's day and our own.

I can't honestly say that Wonka exhibited any sadism or cruelty. He simply acted as a corporate boss. He was distant, apathetic, unemotional. His Oompa-Loompas were there to do his bidding and nothing more. The children he invited in, well, he CYA'd with the initial contract, [that's why he's unworried about law enforcement, in civil matters], and the misfortunes they met were definitely not at his own hand. They were simply "occupational hazards" from inexperienced and careless persons getting too close to the industrial machinery.

Wonka was never gratified or pleased when someone got hurt, even while lacking regret or remorse. And he was often right there to give assurances to the parents, about the incinerator or the squeezing process or something. Wilder's comic portrayal was masterful as he remained aloof, with a thousand-year-stare in those closeups; his business patter undisturbed by the strange happenings around him; he simply didn't care about this world and was floating in an executive bubble that no other character could understand. He was a politician with no stake in human suffering.

As far as showing off trade secrets -- won't read TFA but -- Wonka was essentially giving a Guided Tour for the entire plot. The kids straying from the path, were all meeting misfortune when they did it. They saw what they saw when they saw it, and then they were ushered onwards. Slugworth's entire plan revolved around reverse-engineering a prototype, and that's all he could do!

Tell me, if a group of five innocent children and parents toured a real-world modern manufacturing plant or data center, what sort of Trade Secrets would they steal when they were dismissed at the end of a long day? Especially after four were chewed up in the machinery quite early on

A sadistic and cruel business owner would not have hundreds of healthy Oompa-Loompas or a worthy successor who was happy to take over the business after the glass elevator ride.
by morsecodist | 2025-05-23 03:30:52+00:00
I think it actually makes sense to trust your vibes more than benchmarks. The act of creating a benchmark is the hard part. If we had a perfect benchmark AI problems would be trivially solvable. Benchmarks are meaningless on their own, they are supposed to be a proxy for actual usefulness.

I'm not sure what is better than, can it do what I want? And for me the ratio of yes to no on that hasn't changed too much.
by MindSpunk | 2025-05-23 03:33:16+00:00
Even for apps that don't use one of the native toolkits like GTK or Qt, where this has been a solved problem for decades, they should at least respond to a dark/light mode flag if they can. Flatpaks mostly don't.

They don't even have the same cursor as the system a lot of the time. It's especially cool when running display scaling when some apps shrink the cursor to a minuscule size too because of poor system integration.
by def13 | 2025-05-23 03:34:54+00:00
There are so many great non-browser read-it-later bookmarking solutions these days. There open-source self hosted solutions as well as many free/paid hosted solutions with generous free plans, with some pretty advanced paid features. Pocket has stagnated for a decade except for a poorly thought through UX redesign. The paid plan has almost nothing to offer except ereader integration, and there is a handful of others that offer that these days.
by noduerme | 2025-05-23 03:35:14+00:00
I'm not saying there isn't a ton of brilliant creativity in the field. But there's no path to success in either of those fields. If there ever was, it was when spending 2 years perfecting a game or an album could separate you from the pack, if you were talented. To some extent, the work you did could stand up for itself, without everything being contingent on luck and how much you were willing to make yourself a social media tool. I didn't mean games and music are "dead" in the sense that no one is innovating. Lots of people are. I mean that for people who need to know that they aren't going to waste years building something beautiful that will be forgotten ten seconds later, indie games are no longer a lucrative area unless you have a fat bank account and can afford to waste a couple years of your life.

As a creative outlet, I'll always love making games that no one will ever play, but that's a hobby and not a job.
by hiAndrewQuinn | 2025-05-23 03:35:49+00:00
You have taken me entirely and completely wrong on so many points I don't know where best to start. But let's start with your ad hominems. To hammer home the generality of this argument I will replace all mentions of an L2 language with a randomly selected one from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_official_languages .

* I neither like nor dislike [roll - Tibetan]. I feel about the same way towards [roll - Kalaallisut] as I feel towards all languages, including my native [roll - French].

* I have always had a strong distaste for language learning in general, starting with [roll - Nauruan] when I ~4 years old. But I don't think that distaste is at all uncommon - it's just the obvious ugh reaction anyone would get to something which takes tens of thousands of hours with little to no concrete payoff.

* My level is good enough to "participate in society exclusively in [roll - Khanty]", but I admit it would take at least a few months of immersion I'm simply not interested in doing. However, this kind of statement is like saying "don't worry, tennis becomes fun once you make it to the professional leagues" - it makes the cost-benefit of starting tennis or language learning worse, not better, and much worse if we're talking about a strictly hobbyist approach. Very few other "good" hobbies are like this - 10 minutes of exercise a day, for example, has an astonishing ROI right from the start, if you're starting from zero.

* Your "enriching experience" comment leads us to an interesting question. Consider the group of all people who are C2 CEFR speakers of both, say, [roll - Slavey] and [roll - Sami]. If the experience was so enriching, why are they all not immediately spending another handful of thousands of hours learning a new language? It can't be a monetary cost thing, because language learning is basically free thanks to the Internet. There's no good a priori reason to suspect only the second language is enriching, and the third would be worthless - that would be even weirder. So why don't we see more of them learning e.g. [roll - Zulu]? Because the enrichment isn't worth it. Anything you do consistently for thousands of hours is going to enrich your life, but I would far rather spend those 10,000 hours becoming e.g. a world level Olympic tennis player than a pretty darn good speaker of [roll - Fijian].
by fallinditch | 2025-05-23 03:36:03+00:00
On a basic level it's commanding and automating actions like making bookings and purchases, managing your calendar, etc.

But then it's operating a group or 'swarm' of specialized AI agent assistants to carry out research, communication, analysis, planning, reporting, content creation, software development, etc.

So I'm not yet operating agents via my phone and the AI assistant on my phone is only going to help me by removing some friction and speeding things up a little.

How do you use AI on your phone?
by CobaltFire | 2025-05-23 03:36:08+00:00
Update a few hours later for anyone who stumbles upon this later:

Apple has unilaterally disabled my account and told me to create a new one. They will let me know in 5-10 business days if they will refund the balance in my account.

There is a slight chance that the refund process will resolve the account issue as it is being elevated to an engineering team in the fraud department.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-23 03:36:43+00:00
Bill Ackman made his bed with Trump and will now have to deal with the fact that his fate is tied to whatever random whims Trump has over the next 1,340 days.

I suppose there is a possibility that on January 21, 2029 this country won't be viciously angry about the past four years, and everyone associated with it. But I wouldn't want to bet on that.
by nycticorax | 2025-05-23 03:38:27+00:00
I don't agree with him 100%, but I always find Drew DeVault to be thoughtful on this topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32936114

https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/27/Let-distros-do-their-job....

Basically, he argues that application distribution outside of the distro (a la flatpak, snap, appimage) is just a bad model. The right model is the one distros have been using for years: You get software through the distro's package manager, and that software is packaged by people working on behalf of the distro. As he says: "Software distributions are often volunteer-run and represent the interests of the users; in a sense they are a kind of union of users."

The other issue, of course, is that in practice flatpaks/snaps/appimages never seem to 100% work as well as distro packages do.
by BeetleB | 2025-05-23 03:39:32+00:00
Thanks for the concrete examples! These seem to be more sophisticated than the cases I use them for. Mostly I'm using them for tedious, simpler routine code (needing to process all files in a directory in a certain way, output them in a similar tree structure, with changes to filenames, logging, etc).

Your Django ORM may be more complicated than the ones I use. I haven't tried it much with Django (still reluctant to use it with production code), but a coworker did use it on our code base and it found good optimizations for some of our inefficient ORM usage. He learned new Django features as a result (new to him, that is).

> I tried to prompt it with a chat style discussion, but it often did bigger edits I would have liked, and failed to share a high-level plan in advance, something I often requested.

With Aider, I often use /ask to do a pure chat (no agents). It gives me a big picture overview and the code changes. If I like it, I simply say "Go ahead". Or I refine with corrections, and when it gets it right, I say "Go ahead". So far it rarely has changed code beyond what I want, and the few times it did turned out to be a good idea.

Also, with Aider, you can limit the context to a fixed set of files. That doesn't solve it changing other things in the file - but as I said, rarely a problem for me.

One thing to keep in mind - it's better to view the LLM not as an extension of yourself, but more like a coworker who is making changes that you're reviewing. If you have a certain vision/design in mind, don't expect it to follow it all the way to low level details - just as a coworker will sometimes deviate.

> My biggest frustrations were not coding problems per se, but just general inability to follow instructions and see implications, and lacking the awareness to step back and ask for confirmations or better directions if there are "hold on, somethings not right" kind of moments.

You have to explicitly tell it to ask questions (and some models ask great questions - not sure about Sonnet 3.7). Read this page:

https://harper.blog/2025/02/16/my-llm-codegen-workflow-atm/

I don't follow much of what's on his post, but the first part where you specify what you want it to do and have it ask you questions has always been useful! He's talking about big changes, but I sometimes have it ask me for minor changes. I just add to my prompts "Ask me something if it seems ambiguous".
by zbentley | 2025-05-23 03:39:56+00:00
I hope you're right. But how is WASM going to answer questions like "how does the application play sound?" or "how does the application request a password from the system keychain?"

WASM solves a lot of problems, but I don't think its chances of providing a uniform API to things like that are any better than Snap/Flatpak's, because those problems are fundamentally not about the runtime/packaging system. They're caused by OS functionality being a fragmented and moving target. Directly executable applications have to deal with those complexities themselves. Containerized applications in WASM/Docker/Snap/Flatpak/whatever rely on the container layer to do it. But someone's software has to chase that moving target, and it moves very fast.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 2025-05-23 03:40:15+00:00
"Apparently, the goal is to keep the dreams alive without ever actually fulfilling any of them."

This seems to be how Silicon Valley works. (Also Redmond.)

A captive audience, e.g., manipulated through intermediaries like Twitter, etc., that is prohibited from considering past or present failures and forced to remain fixated on a future that Silicon Valley assures can be predicted, but only by Silicon Vallley and its devotees.

Can Silicon Valley be "disrupted".
by jhanschoo | 2025-05-23 03:41:00+00:00
The SE answer gave you a nice map. The points where the white lines coalesce experience no change in height. The blue regions experience low tidal amplitude, whereas the red regions experience high tidal amplitudes. The white lines are the lines of equal phase: if a point on the line is experiencing its high tide, so is every other point on the line, and likewise for low tide.

As is clear from the map, the tidal response is profoundly affected by land mass and ocean depth, which have complex shapes; so too the tidal response is as complex as it is, which is simple in comparison.
by acrophobic | 2025-05-23 03:41:16+00:00
> ...it being Javascript didn't suit my project.

If you're using Go, I maintain Go ports of Readability[0] and Trafilatura[1]. They're actively maintained, and for Trafilatura, the extraction performance is comparable to the Python version.

[0]: https://github.com/go-shiori/go-readability

[1]: https://github.com/markusmobius/go-trafilatura