MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hodder | 2025-05-16 20:24:13+00:00
"AI could probably have written this post far more quickly, eloquently, and concisely. It’s horrifying."

ChatGPT write that post more eloquently:

May 16, 2025 On Thinking

I’ve been stuck.

Every time I sit down to write a blog post, code a feature, or start a project, I hit the same wall: in the age of AI, it all feels pointless. It’s unsettling. The joy of creation—the spark that once came from building something original—feels dimmed, if not extinguished. Because no matter what I make, AI can already do it better. Or soon will.

What used to feel generative now feels futile. My thoughts seem like rough drafts of ideas that an LLM could polish and complete in seconds. And that’s disorienting.

I used to write constantly. I’d jot down ideas, work them over slowly, sculpting them into something worth sharing. I’d obsess over clarity, structure, and precision. That process didn’t just create content—it created thinking. Because for me, writing has always been how I think. The act itself forced rigor. It refined my ideas, surfaced contradictions, and helped me arrive at something resembling truth. Thinking is compounding. The more you do it, the sharper it gets.

But now, when a thought sparks, I can just toss it into a prompt. And instantly, I’m given a complete, reasoned, eloquent response. No uncertainty. No mental work. No growth.

It feels like I’m thinking—but I’m not. The gears aren’t turning. And over time, I can feel the difference. My intuition feels softer. My internal critic, quieter. My cleverness, duller.

I believed I was using AI in a healthy, productive way—a bicycle for the mind, a tool to accelerate my intellectual progress. But LLMs are deceptive. They simulate the journey, but they skip the most important part. Developing a prompt feels like work. Reading the output feels like progress. But it's not. It’s passive consumption dressed up as insight.

Real thinking is messy. It involves false starts, blind alleys, and internal tension. It requires effort. Without that, you may still reach a conclusion—but it won’t be yours. And without building the path yourself, you lose the cognitive infrastructure needed for real understanding.

Ironically, I now know more than ever. But I feel dumber. AI delivers polished thoughts, neatly packaged and persuasive. But they aren’t forged through struggle. And so, they don’t really belong to me.

AI feels like a superintelligence wired into my brain. But when I look at how I explore ideas now, it doesn’t feel like augmentation. It feels like sedation.

Still, here I am—writing this myself. Thinking it through. And maybe that matters. Maybe it’s the only thing that does.

Even if an AI could have written this faster. Even if it could have said it better. It didn’t.

I did.

And that means something.
by thisisauser123 | 2025-05-16 20:24:19+00:00
I'm a US Citizen who married a citizen of New Zealand, we met while she was a international student studying CS at the school I was studying at. Since graduating, we moved back to New Zealand.

Over a year ago we filed a for I-130 to move towards her getting a Green Card and being able to live with me in the US.

Right now the USCIS website estimates that it will be another 20 months until our form is processed. This seems like an absurd amount of time? I've tried reaching out to the White House, who passed my case onto USCIS, who told me to pound sand, and to my congressional representatives, who told me they would "look into it".

Is there anything I can do to move this process along?
by octo888 | 2025-05-16 20:24:26+00:00
I go through ups and downs of positivity - it's been a life-long struggle. I wish I could flip it on as easy as firing up the laptop!

Obviously, right now, it's a bit of a difficult time...

> You need to be more confident in yourself

Again, I go through periods. Some days I look in the mirror and I think: you're going to smash it today. Others, I don't like to look in the mirror

I referenced some health/body challenges - confidence is a big reason I want to work on those issues.

> Not being anxious also can be learned

For sure. Just need to work on that
by arjie | 2025-05-16 20:25:10+00:00
My blog is on a totally overprovisioned VPS and I use Cloudflare to cache responses for non-logged-in users. I'm using Mediawiki because I want people to be able to edit it and sometimes it can be extraordinarily slow but with Cloudflare it loads instantly if someone visited it some time recently. I really like Cloudflare's caching control.
by mrguyorama | 2025-05-16 20:25:15+00:00
I would bet money Facebook does very little fraudulent advertising filtering, since they are explicitly incentivized not to.

But "We block 99% of fraud/spam" is an outright useless and purposefully non-informative datapoint. It doesn't tell you anything. As a statement, it is equally true both for the SuperGoodMerchant who lets through a single fraudulent advertisement a year, and it is also true for UltraScamAds who let through a million scam ads a day. It depends entirely on the rate of fraud attempts compared to the rate of legitimate requests.

An actual useful metric if you want to avoid fraud or scams would be, what percentage of ads do they run that turn out to be fraudulent?

My anecdotal experience is like 95%.
by bnchrch | 2025-05-16 20:25:16+00:00
The biggest knock against pagerduty is its both expensive and doesnt have simple features like connecting Pagerduty schedules to slack user groups.

For example if I want to have a slack group that pings (not pages) to current oncall person

```

@oc-platform

```

I need to pay $25/month to a random third party slack app.

Its insane, do they even use pagerduty internally?
by elmerfud | 2025-05-16 20:26:00+00:00
She didn't create a real account to report a fake account, she created a fake account to report another fake account. Clearly she was in violation of their TOS. Her attitude was that anything was permissable to fix something she considered wrong. That is exactly what zealots do, all things are permissable when they think they are agreeved.

The behavior that's predictable is that when she thinks something is wrong she doesn't believe that she needs to follow the rules to address it. It's like no one is taught that 2 wrongs don't make a right.
by abelanger | 2025-05-16 20:26:03+00:00
While we didn't look too closely into this, our buffers used to scale capacity based on a Fibonacci sequence if we hit capacity within the flush interval, up to a max capacity. I'm sure there's much better prior work on the ideal scaling laws here but this worked really well for us, and I'm sure any exponential would do fine.

When we rewrote our inserts system, we opted to just ensure that the buffers would flush immediately on first write, which makes writes fast on anything that's on the order of < 1k writes/s with constant load over the second (10 buffers, 10ms flush interval), which is a pretty good baseline for our system. This is simpler and has been working really well for us, so there wasn't a need at this point to reintroduce any sort of exponential scaling, but I'll be experimenting more with this.
by whyowhy3484939 | 2025-05-16 20:26:35+00:00
> build much larger castles, much faster

See that never was the purpose.. going bigger and faster, towards what exactly? Chaos? By the way we never managed to fully tackle manual software development by trained professionals and we now expect Shangri-La by throwing everything and the kitchen sink into giant inscrutable matrices. This time by amateurs as well. I'm sure this will all turn out very well and very, very productive.
by mikeen | 2025-05-16 20:26:36+00:00
A more realistic example: something like printf or scanf. It can take an object of multiple types as argument. It takes computer's locale from environment and does locale dependent number and date formatting, also supports various timezones that it reads from OS.

And you always run it in a data center that uses a specific locale, and only UTC time zone, and very few simple types. But all this can only be known at runtime, except maybe types if the compiler is good.
by palmotea | 2025-05-16 20:26:47+00:00
> Isolation is for idiots. It is simply not a tenable approach to the modern world.

Neoliberal style free trade is also for idiots.

Now go and find a happy medium.

> Trump has already proved it by reducing his "Liberation Day" tariffs from 145 to 30 percent.

No. Trump is so haphazard and incompetent that him screwing something up doesn't really prove anything.
by chipsrafferty | 2025-05-16 20:28:06+00:00
I'm kinda in a similar situation. ADHD, not autism, but I've struggled to find a job I enjoy and thus struggled to achieve anything impressive in my career. Almost 30. I feel like so many people younger than me have accomplished much more.

Also disillusioned with corporate tech and deleted my LinkedIn. I hate networking and my only network is my (actually quite) extensive and good college network.

I'm actually great at interviews generally though I've become less confident over time as I don't have many impressive achievements to brag about and the longer your career goes on and you've just "made websites and apps" every year the harder it is to defend increasingly senior positions.

Also feeling burnt out and I consider myself a generalist with no amazingly specific skills. Mostly js/ts, web dev, react. Basically the most common shit, I know it best, so nothing makes me stand out.

I don't have any advice, just wanted to share you're not alone in feeling these things.
by smcin | 2025-05-16 20:28:46+00:00
(Yes, and the US is delinquent on clearing landmines in Cambodia which the US supplied half a century ago; Bourdain had some very strong words on the matter. The US has more than enough money to solve this issue, the problem is that they don’t want to. Tu quoque. Also, the northeastern US sends air pollution into Canada, and there's a transborder program on that, with Canada.)

Anyway, the US has fairly successfully managed to conduct foreign assistance on water purification and sanitation for decades (historically, through USAID's Global Water Strategy and other programs, for developing countries, and specific ad-hoc legislation for Mexico) without sending in Chuck Norris to oversee it, or militarily annexing the region involved. In the context of NAFTA+USMCA, SD-TJ is a 21st-century mega-region that straddles national borders (pop 5.46m (2020), 72nd largest in the world and 11th largest in North America), as does the Tijuana water basin. Officially it becomes a mega-city when it hits 10m, projected for the 2030s, or only 1/2 presidencies from now.

Given USAID is currently being dissolved and folded back into the State Dept, the onus is now on the current admin to figure out their approach with Mexico/BCN/TJ to a solution and implement it. Transborder cooperation is possible. Yes there are some obvious structural challenges in dealing with Mexico and implementing assistance.

SoCal water policy is already under a major spotlight in the context of the 2025 LA fires and private agribusiness ownership of water rights in adjacent watersheds; that's a two-century-old story.

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-10-957
by pbhjpbhj | 2025-05-16 20:29:10+00:00
>Earlier this year, the COD conducted a confidential internal review based upon allegations it received regarding certain aspects of this paper. While student privacy laws and MIT policy prohibit the disclosure of the outcome of this review, we are writing to inform you that MIT has no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and has no confidence in the veracity of the research contained in the paper. Based upon this finding, we also believe that the inclusion of this paper in arXiv may violate arXiv’s Code of Conduct.

It sounds like "we don't like it and won't tell you why, we're hiding behind MIT policy and vague notions of privacy".

MIT should just demonstrate in a paper what the shortcomings are and print it, adding it to the citation tree of the original.

Looking very briefly at the paper and speculating wildly, I could imagine that the company who were subject of it - or their staff - might not appreciate it and have put pressure on MIT??

Solid amount of Streisand Effect going on here -- lots of attention has been bought to the paper (and that is everything after all!).
by otherme123 | 2025-05-16 20:29:40+00:00
IIRC Travolta was a furious that his role was brutally cut to almost nothing after shooting a decent amount of footage, and at least a couple of well known actors were fully out of the final cut.

They were indeed tripping to be in the film, that's one thing I remember clearly, rumours of some actors begging to be in the movie for free.
by johnjwang | 2025-05-16 20:30:35+00:00
To be clear, we still hire engineers who are early in their careers (and we've found them to be some of the best folks on our team).

All the same principles apply as before: smart, driven, high ownership engineers make a huge difference to a company's success, and I find that the trend is even stronger now than before because of all the tools that these early career engineers have access to. Many of the folks we've hired have been able to spin up on our codebase much faster than in the past.

We're mainly helping them develop taste for what good code / good practices look like.
by const_cast | 2025-05-16 20:31:04+00:00
Companies are risk-averse to a detriment. If you look at huge companies who have failed over time you'll notice something: they have the tools, but they don't have the balls.

Companies are pretty much always going to prioritize the lowest-risk highest-value option right now, over and over and over, until they eventually fail. This doesn't just pertain to hiring, but all business decisions. RCA, GE, GM, you name it, this is how it's done. It's the American school of business.
by sanderjd | 2025-05-16 20:31:16+00:00
I saw that and thought it was an interesting dichotomy.

I think a way to square the circle is to recognize that people have different goals at different times. As a person with a family who is not independently wealthy, I care a lot about being economically productive. But I also separately care about the joy of creation.

If my goal in making a loaf of bread is economic productivity, I will be happy if I have a robot available that helps me do that quickly. But if my goal is to find joy in the act of creation, I will not use that robot because it would not achieve that goal.

I do still find joy in the act of creating software, but that was already dwindling long before chatgpt launched, and mostly what I'm doing with computers is with the goal of economic productivity.

But yeah I'll probably still create software just for the joy of it from time to time in the future, and I'm unlikely to use AIs for those projects!

But at work, I'm gonna be directing my efforts toward taking advantage of the tools available to create useful things efficiently.
by Towaway69 | 2025-05-16 20:31:33+00:00
I prefer Erlang because it makes the uniqueness of its paradigm clear. Tail recursion, function matching and, bang, everything is a message!

Elixir makes everything seem like Ruby code and many of those Erlang concepts are hidden away, which is also ok but also takes much away.

My aim with ErlangRED is that both are supported, there is a repository for Elixir code[1] that is included in ErlangRED - so I don't take sides, rather I would like to take advantage of both paradigms.

[1] https://github.com/gorenje/erlang-red-elixir-helpers
by whyowhy3484939 | 2025-05-16 20:32:09+00:00
It's actually not. My job description does not say "deliver value" and nobody talks about my work like that so I'm not quite sure what to make of that.

> without sacrificing quality

Right..

> it's your responsibility to use that tool

Again, it's actually not. It's my responsibility to do my job, not to make my boss' - or his boss' - car nicer. I know that's what we all know will create "job security" but let's not conflate these things. My job is to do my end of the bargain. My boss' job is paying me for doing that. If he deems it necessary to force me to use AI bullshit, I will of course, but it is definitely not my responsibility to do so autonomously.
by junar | 2025-05-16 20:32:46+00:00
Well, if you read through your link, you'll understand what parent comment is talking about.

> Requirements for Canadian Citizens

> A visa is not required for a Canadian citizen entering the United States as a USMCA Professional, although a visa can be issued to a qualified Canadian TN visa applicant upon application at a U.S. embassy or consulate.

> A Canadian citizen can apply for TN nonimmigrant status at a U.S. port-of-entry. Learn about these requirements on the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) websites. More information about receiving TN status without applying for a visa is also available on the U.S. Embassy Ottawa website.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-16 20:33:36+00:00
The KPIs weren't focused on speed at all; don't know how you came to that conclusion. Their KPIs were in-line with their spoken criteria and they were always calibrating for best outcomes.

The only time speed or volume was at issue was when we had a backlog. Sometimes we would begin to miss deadlines/time frames and sometimes there was priority work to be picked up. And AFAIK, KPIs weren't looking at those as a negative. It was just one of those productivity issues we encountered in staffing vs. amount of work vs. deadlines.

Basically my work was excellent by all objective criteria and I was receiving fantastic performance reviews. But I still had room for improvement, don't you see? Simply because of the high rate of speed, I could personally tell that it could've been better, more, nicer, with some TLC and some better pacing. That doesn't mean that anyone else noticed or cared. It was mostly my personal assessments of how I was doing.

But they did drop hints -- once or twice, an issue was raised and my mentor said "It's easy to miss if you're going quickly lol". It was just a hint and hardly even criticism, just a reminder that slowing down wouldn't hurt.

And it's true that the rewards weren't there. If I finished everything then everything was finished and sometimes I was forced to clock out without work to do. That was the drawback of hourly wages for, essentially, piecework.

Slowing down was fraught with complications. I type 100wpm, my thoughts operate at a certain pace, and I would get into a groove like playing a video game. Would you slow down in a video game to do a better job? If I slowed down, would I do better or would the artificial pace cause trouble? I often tried playing ambient, tempo-less or downtempo music to slow my pace, but I would typically just find a rhythm and go with it, rather than artificially slow down. Honestly, due to physical issues and the whole WFH distraction, it was often difficult for me to stay at my desk for a stretch.
by ryuhhnn | 2025-05-16 20:34:03+00:00
In formal logic we would call this kind of argument a "post hoc justification". Any company who does anything payments-related is going to be primarily motivated to allow the most amount of transactions possible (including risky ones), everything else is a secondary consideration (including data security). I mean think about it, even if your company has a data breech, it's primarily brand reputation that's on the line, at that point your money has already been made. Of course, now that damage has been done there is a motivation to prevent it from happening in the future, but for companies like Coinbase who operate in emerging markets with little regulatory oversight, it's extremely hard to argue that they have are motivated to do anything besides grow and make money. After all, the mantra has always been "move fast and break things".
by aesbetic | 2025-05-16 20:34:03+00:00
Thank you for responding so quickly.

I asked this question in the first place because I heard/read that an EB1A application is a little more likely to be accepted if you already possess an O-1 visa. The reasoning behind this being the similarity in the eligibility requirements for the O-1 and EB1A applications make them more “compatible”.

What do you think of this?
by IshKebab | 2025-05-16 20:34:17+00:00
> made so by a community that actively discusses policy (and gives detailed reasoning) in the open - not by its tiny, overwhelmed moderation team.

When I say "mods" I mean the tiny group of people that spend a lot of time moderating question, and discussing things on meta. I'm not literally talking about the people with extra privileges.

You can say "but it was always meant to be overly moderated" as much as you want. Doesn't change the fact that it was popular in spite of that, not because of it.
by nico | 2025-05-16 20:34:44+00:00
Great work. This seems very interesting, but I need something slightly more high level to relate to it

Will it just allow me to run let’s say a model with a 2048 token context window with a 4-6k context window? Or a 128k model (like gemma3) with a 256k+ context window?

What’s the ideal use case for local models?

Thank you
by hooloovoo_zoo | 2025-05-16 20:35:20+00:00
Judging quality/fraud is the role of a journal/conference, not arXiv. If a paper gets rejected does it come off arXiv? No. If a paper is never submitted does it come off? No. If a paper is retracted, does it come off? No. ArXiv should avoid making as many subjective determinations as possible.
by lucb1e | 2025-05-16 20:35:51+00:00
> the "ASCII" alternatives (ue, ae, oe, ss)

Isn't that called romanization? Similar to turning 刘慈欣 into Liu Cixin because you can't make the characters

I've found that germans take it for granted that it works this way, but I know of no other latin-script-based language that does romanization. Granted, I don't speak very many languages, but at least among the bigger ones like French, it's not like you write cafee (add an e because you dropped an accent), it's just cafe when you can't make the é. That's actually a terrible example, I just realized, because in german you totally use kaffee (yes yes, different word but same root). Let me try again with the word naive, coming from french naïve: you'd never write naieve. Or if you don't know how to make the ï in Dutch geïntegreerd, writing geintegreerd is understood by everyone whereas geientegreerd only leads to confusion. You could argue that it's because these ï don't have an "e" quality to them, but there is no other romanization taking place either for these, it's just dropped. Only Germans romanize to preserve the pronunciation-to-spelling mapping
by nrmitchi | 2025-05-16 20:36:09+00:00
To be clear, I meant "unexpected delays (to work legally)". As in, waiting a year to submit, and hope for, an H1B to be issued, vs waiting 2 weeks for a TN to be approved.

No portion of my initial comment should have been interpreted to mean that employers do not do their own due diligence after actually hiring someone.
by rlpb | 2025-05-16 20:36:50+00:00
Ah - we're talking about different things.

I was concerned about the implication (or so I thought) that a binary executable should provide the required documentation (eg. via --version or similar). You are thinking about the text being included as part of a binary redistribution. That did not occur to me, because to me, GitHub issues refer to sources, not binary redistributions.

But of course GitHub does have a Releases page. If those binary redistributions do not contain the license text, then I accept that's something that Debian does do, and is the norm in our ecosystem.

But as other commenters have said, it's not completely clear that this is actually a violation of the license, since https://github.com/ollama/ollama/releases/tag/v0.7.0 for example bundles both source and binary downloads and the bundle does contain the license text via the source file download. Certainly anyone who downloads the binary from the maintainer via GitHub does have the required notice made available to them.