MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by saghm | 2025-05-24 19:27:19+00:00
Yeah, I don't feel confident in the idea that my pinky is around 1/4 of a golf ball. It could be 1/6, or 1/2, or nowhere close to either. A lot of this seems to be an exercise in how confident someone is about arbitrary guesses, and it seems weird to me that a higher willingness to make assumptions is somehow correlated with raw intellect. If someone wants me to do the math with a completely made up number, I can do that, but at that point it seems like the true test is figuring out whether the person asking the question actually cares about the accuracy of the answer or not, and that seems more about the social aspect of an interview. That isn't to say that what it's measuring isn't useful, but I think as someone on the spectrum, it's hard for me not to have a strong reaction to the idea that it's purely a measure of intelligence.
by karmakaze | 2025-05-24 19:27:36+00:00
Jevons Paradox likely applies here. There could be an initial reduction in jobs, but longer term humans using AI will reduce the cost (increase the efficiency) of those jobs which will increase demand more than merely satisfy it.

Basically any job that uses a word processor, spreadsheet, drawing tool, etc will all become more efficient and if Jevons Paradox applies, demand for those things will increase beyond the reduction due to efficiency gains.

I can imagine that for many fields it will be cheaper to have humans use AI (in the near term) rather than try to make fully automated systems that require no/little supervision.
by Barrin92 | 2025-05-24 19:29:45+00:00
> LLMs are challenging the assumption, often unvoiced, that humans are special, unique even. A good chunk of people out there are starting to feel uncomfortable because of this.

I'm gonna be honest, after Copernicus, Newton and Darwin it's a bit hilarious to think that this one is finally going to do that worldview in. If you were already willing to ignore that we're upright apes, in fact not in the center of the universe and things just largely buzz around without a telos I'd think you might as well rationalize machine intelligence somehow as well or have given up like 200 years ago
by mbohdana | 2025-05-24 19:29:45+00:00
The issue is not selling more oil but where the profit goes. I work for the Alberta Government, I know a person who works for the Ministry of Energy and Minerals who processes land use rights applications for oil and gas activities. Most of the profit obtained from selling the aforementioned rights goes to the federal government (about 85%), and only about 15% gets reinvested into the provincial department
by toss1 | 2025-05-24 19:29:48+00:00
THIS!!

The ability to estimate within an order of magnitude or within 2X is vastly more valuable, and beyond being able to have a sense of whether the "official" answer is likely accurate or off by orders of magnitude.

During most of the process of designing anything in or that touches the physical world, you are using rough figures.

Taking time to get the fully accurate and precise answer for every question is a waste of time as you don't need that many decimals of precision to move forward. Every decimal of precision in the answer takes more time and there are MANY of those questions, so being 100% accurate in every answer does not scale.

Of course, when it gets to the end of the process, the accuracy & precision requirements increase, but the emphasis needs to be placed where needed, not everywhere.

Plus, you are not going to find the "official" and accurate number of golf balls in the particular school bus you want to model. You'll find some vaguely similar answer or set of sub-answers, so sure, those will be fully accurate and precise, but THEN you must take those as inputs for your estimate, and we're back to the skill of estimating being most critical.

Being able to estimate and do sound back-of-the-envelope calculations is the far more critical skill, at least on any team I'm building.
by ignoramous | 2025-05-24 19:31:04+00:00
> ... he writes mostly to justify his luck in amassing capital as something of intellectual consequence.

Strange take, given PG made his billions from actually building something of immense consequence (YC) & provably codifying a blueprint on building fast-growing companies in SV.

If PG was a prof at HBS, it is likely he'd be considered in the same bracket as Clayton Christensen.
by jasonjayr | 2025-05-24 19:31:09+00:00
https://voip.ms is running my "land line" to the house, really just camping on a number we've had for years and is used in a bunch of important accounts, and to give out as a number to companies or people I do not want ringing my cell phone.

I think I pay USD $20 every 4-5 months to top it off. (about 3-5 inbound calls a day, and maybe 1-2 outbound calls every week or so) ATA adapters are relatively cheap to come by, which should be able to configured directly to voip.ms. I run a full FreePBX in my homelab for my connection: my ATA connects to that instead, and is connected to a cheap analog cordless phone.
by m3047 | 2025-05-24 19:31:22+00:00
I don't have a college degree. I made a deal with the head of the college math department that he'd sign me in to (senior level) Numerical Analysis (this was the early 1980s) if I taught myself calculus first; which I did. He had misgivings about this self-guided selection of study, and summed it up thus:

How do you know what's important?

Now of course ML is all the rage, but that question has stuck with me. I still ask myself that question, and I don't always know the answer.
by dylan604 | 2025-05-24 19:33:08+00:00
I think that there are ways to standardize organic components. One of the links provided in another comment to the south china morning post has a good write up on the scaffolding. They show the minimum thickness of the wood as well as the minimum diameter. We know that wood of specified dimensions have the necessary strength. Sure, these components might not be "straight", but as long as they have the minimum specs, they can be considered standardized. Hell, go to your local big box hardware store, either the blue one or orange one, and look at all of the non-straight standardized lumber they offer. People build houses out of that crap
by w10-1 | 2025-05-24 19:34:39+00:00
This 2009 advice to be accessible when small is highly relevant for the many outside work who haven’t managed to catch the AI wave, or for those AI companies targeting micro-niche.

But I suspect that early adopters are different for AI companies than technology infrastructure: AI early adopters want the benefit, but have no insight into how to push things forward.

So if there is backflow of information from your customers, exactly what information do you need to improve?
Ask HN: Which is the better hire? Product Manager or Product Designer
by siri- | 2025-05-24 19:35:16+00:00
Assume

- early stage startup (Pre-Series A)

- ENG hiring is at capacity

- No PM or PD

Specify founder makeup

- both founders are ENG

- neither founders have PM or PD experience

Specify company type

- b2b

- b2c

- ecom

—

Just curious what the PM vs PD split is between ENGs
by purplezooey | 2025-05-24 19:35:25+00:00
As others mentioned, self-checkout has been widespread for 30 years. They had it at most stores in the 1990s. The answer is, simply, it's cheaper for companies to hire someone at a non-living wage than it is to install and maintain these systems. Perhaps if we had some policies with teeth -- if you're going to hire a person, they must be able to afford to plausibly live and work in the area. Else, your business isn't actually a functioning business and needs reconsideration.
by pseudocomposer | 2025-05-24 19:38:08+00:00
Have you considered that maybe metriculative education systems, and the prestige- and status-seeking behaviors they invoke, aren’t exclusively Western at all? You might give “The Scholars” a read: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scholars_(novel) tl;dr (it really is quite long): Famous/influential Qing-era comedy novel about “successful” scholars in the Chinese imperial education system, with much of its humor revolving around their prestige- and status-seeking behaviors. (And lots of fart and poop jokes.)
by mooreds | 2025-05-24 19:38:32+00:00
Can you move within your current organization? Even 25% of your time? Are there teams that need help that use a technology you'd like to move toward.

This type of a role shift is often an easier sell than being hired for tech new to you by a new organization.

I'd frame it less as "I want to stop doing SN work" and more like "I'm looking to grow my skills to be more valuable to the company".
by cortesoft | 2025-05-24 19:38:38+00:00
I have written by hand and read JSON hundreds of times. You can tell me I shouldn’t, but I am telling you I do. Messing around with an API with curl, tweaking a request object slightly for testing something, etc.

Reading happens even more times. I am constantly printing out API responses when I am coding, verifying what I am seeing matches what I am expecting, or trying to get an idea of the structure of something. Sure, you can tell me I shouldn’t do this and I should just read a spec, but in my experience it is often much faster just to read the JSON directly. Sometimes the spec is outdated, just plain wrong, or doesn’t exist. Being able to read the JSON is a regular part of my day.
by jmb99 | 2025-05-24 19:38:40+00:00
Maybe it depends on the business, but I’ve been using Mac’s in an enterprise environment for my entire career with 0 issues. And yes, fully managed devices, not just “here’s a Mac have fun.” If your company can’t test updates before rolling them out, it doesn’t matter whether your shop is Mac, windows, or something else. I mean hell, if you’re all on Apple Silicon MacBooks, there’s probably only what, 6-8 different SKUs to test? Not like windows shops where you might have a few generations of Dell/Lenovo/HP workstations and/or laptops, each of which will have its own distinct problems.
by rwyinuse | 2025-05-24 19:38:53+00:00
"Oh, and also not factored in: almost every aspect of rural life is heavily subsidized, and I don't just mean direct assistance. I mean literally everything you stare at when you roll through a rural town was subsidized in some way by the federal government, and most of them either don't know or will never admit it."

Things like farming, forestry and so on aren't possible without basic local infrastructure. It's also reasonable that farmers can buy groceries, their kids can go to school, and they have access to healthcare services.

Without farming city folks would starve to death, so I wouldn't complain about things being subsidized. Feds fund lots of less important things.
by deepsun | 2025-05-24 19:39:01+00:00
The more a format restricts, the more useful it is. E.g. if a format allows pretty much anything and it's up to parsers to accept or reject it, we may as well say "any text file" (or even "any data file") -- it would allow for anything.

Similarly to a "schema-less" DBMS -- you will still have a schema, it will just be in your application code, not enforced by the DBMS.

JSON is a nice balance between convenience and restrictions, but it's still a compromise.
by dexwiz | 2025-05-24 19:39:19+00:00
Capsule design in general was a popular idea, but swapping isn't feasible compared to moving. You would still want to remove most items from a capsule when being lifted by crane.

The one place you do see capsule architecture is cruise ships. The rooms are built elsewhere and then slotted into the ship en masse. But in this case, ships are moved to a shipyard to be serviced. In the tower model, the maintenance machines have to come to the tower, which is much harder to make economically viable for single replacements.
by blooalien | 2025-05-24 19:39:19+00:00
> Why would I want to be friends with someone who murders with impunity? Who considers “the public” someone to control? Who considers themselves above question?

Because they're not all that way, and some of them still do genuinely try to "Protect and Serve"? And then you have the others mentioned "fire fighters", "teachers", etc, again many of whom are just tryin' to do some good in the world. Hunt all those good ones down and hold them up as examples of how the rest should be trying to do their jobs. Just complaining about the bad ones and acting like they're the only ones certainly doesn't make the situation any better for them or us.
by karmakaze | 2025-05-24 19:39:20+00:00
Thanks to both of you for these. I see dbdiagram.io listed which I find super easy to use and they've been adding features.

Before that I used wwwsqldesigner[0] which can read a DDL dump and make a huge picture. I forked it to infer relations by naming conventions as many DB schemas don't always make explicit foreign key relationships.

[0] https://github.com/ondras/wwwsqldesigner
by dylan604 | 2025-05-24 19:39:31+00:00
Hell, even in the 5th century or before, they'd have had enough experience to know that bamboo of certain size would be appropriate or not. Sure, they might not now the exact tensile strength in Netwons or lbs/in or whatever unit, but they'd have enough experience to know that to make a bridge for an ox to cross would need certain sizes of bamboo. Even if that knowledge came from losing an ox or two, it would have been learned quickly enough.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-24 19:39:55+00:00
I think we need to understand and accept that this stuff is inevitable as the technology gets cheaper. If the cops don’t do it themselves, private industry will do it for them and sell it or hand the data over as a “public service.” The only way out of this is to make an affirmative series of laws that make the construction of anything resembling a tracking database illegal and heavily-fined, but we’re not there. Even privacy-friendly Europe isn’t close to putting those restrictions on its police.
by mooreds | 2025-05-24 19:40:25+00:00
This is great advice. These folks know you and are (hopefully) impressed by your skills and teamwork. They may be able to point you or intro you to people.

If you do this, one way to make it less awkward is to ask the person "do you know anyone who needs my skills that you'd feel comfortable introing me to" rather than ""do you need my skills" which puts them on the spot.
by mcswell | 2025-05-24 19:40:43+00:00
One other gripe that I have with modern UIs, which I didn't see mentioned (but which I might just have read past) is the scattering of controls in different places. Many are, of course, across the top in either a real menu or (yuck) a "ribbon", but others are down at the bottom, or along one side or the other of an app's window.

My recollection is that MsWord is particularly bad at this, but since I no longer have it installed (one reason is exactly this!), I can't show it.

But I do have Ms's Visual Studio Code on-screen. There is (thankfully) a real menu, with File, Edit, View and Help (the latter no longer exists on most Microsoft products). I happen to have a terminal open; it has six mostly indecipherable icons across the top of its pane. All the panes--the terminal, the file edit panes, and the "bar" at the right-hand side, have a '...', which seems to be the equivalent of a hamburger menu for that pane. Finally, the status bar down at the bottom of the window has still more indecipherable icons near the left end, and a few info things near the right end, some of which are controls ("Select Interpreter", inexplicably highlighted in brown with yet another icon), and some of which appear to be just info (line and column)--except these at the bottom of the window turn out to pull down a special menu item at the top of the window. For example, the control labeled "Ln and Col" (the latter means the character within the line, not the column in a tab-delimited file) pulls down a menu item that allows you to go to a particular line (but not a particular "column").
by KTibow | 2025-05-24 19:40:50+00:00
> With o3 you get something that feels like a human-written bug report, condensed to just present the findings, whereas with Sonnet 3.7 you get something like a stream of thought, or a work log.

This is likely because the author didn't give Claude a scratchpad or space to think, essentially forcing it to mix its thoughts with its report. I'd be interested to see if using the official thinking mechanism gives it enough space to get differing results.
by raverbashing | 2025-05-24 19:41:23+00:00
> Samba's reliance on Unix UID/GID and the syncing as part of its security model is still stuck in the 1970s unfortunately.

Sigh. This is why we can't have nice things

Like yeah having smb in kernel is faster but honestly it's not fundamentally faster. But it seems the will to make samba better isn't there
by lloydatkinson | 2025-05-24 19:41:50+00:00
> Example: those are some time series parameters and instructions, decide if watering the plants or not; vision models that can watch a camera and transcribe what it is seeing in a basic way, ...

This is the problem I have with the general discourse of "AI" even on Hacker News, of all places. Everything you listed is not an example of a *language model*.

All of those can either be implemented as a simple "if", decision tree, decision table, and finally actual ML in the example of cameras and time series predication.

Using an LLM is not just ridiculous here but totally the wrong fit and a waste of resources.
by matthewdgreen | 2025-05-24 19:43:05+00:00
The neat thing about these databases is that you’ll never know. Can a lender buy access to them? How about your abusive ex, who knows and/or is a cop? The stalker who somehow knew just where that woman would be when he killed her, was that just bad luck or did he slip someone a few hundred bucks or buy the data from a data broker?

There’s a version of an answer to this where access to search these systems is so tightly logged that we never need to wonder about the answer to these questions. I doubt most of the systems being deployed worldwide are anywhere near that standard.
by bonki | 2025-05-24 19:43:08+00:00
The huge difference being that you do have the right to upload to GitHub if the code is released under an OSS license. If a project asks you nicely not to it would be equally nice to honor that, but there is no legal obligation to do so. Putting a copyrighted movie on Youtube to which you have no distribution rights is comparing apples to oranges and not the same thing.
by blooalien | 2025-05-24 19:43:12+00:00
> I tell my kids this isn't normal, this isn't what the US used to be like, but they don't know any different, so to them giving up just a little bit of this (like we did with the Patriot Act) isn't a big deal.

That's why books like "1984" used to be required reading in grade-school Literature class (fully supported policy by the History and Civics class teachers), and the "messier" bits of our nation's history were taught openly as "mistakes to be learned from so that we never repeat them" way back when I was a kid and dinosaurs still roamed the Earth...

The idea was (as one teacher explained to me) that we would learn the dangers to watch out for, and as good little patriots, we'd always be ready to defend the freedoms of our great nation whether threatened from without or within.
by verbify | 2025-05-24 19:43:22+00:00
There's a paper Textbooks are all you need - https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11644

> We introduce phi-1, a new large language model for code, with significantly smaller size than competing models: phi-1 is a Transformer-based model with 1.3B parameters, trained for 4 days on 8 A100s, using a selection of ``textbook quality" data from the web (6B tokens) and synthetically generated textbooks and exercises with GPT-3.5 (1B tokens). Despite this small scale, phi-1 attains pass@1 accuracy 50.6% on HumanEval and 55.5% on MBPP. It also displays surprising emergent properties compared to phi-1-base, our model before our finetuning stage on a dataset of coding exercises, and phi-1-small, a smaller model with 350M parameters trained with the same pipeline as phi-1 that still achieves 45% on HumanEval

We train on the internet because, for example, I speak a fairly niche English dialect influenced by Hebrew, Yiddish and Aramaic, and there are no digitised textbooks or dictionaries that cover this language. I assume the base weights of models are still using high quality materials.
by nxobject | 2025-05-24 19:43:35+00:00
A small thing, but I found the author's project-organization practices useful – creating individual .prompt files for system prompt, background information, and auxiliary instructions [1], and then running it through `llm`.

It reveals how good LLM use, like any other engineering tool, requires good engineering thinking – methodical, and oriented around thoughtful specifications that balance design constraints – for best results.

[1] https://github.com/SeanHeelan/o3_finds_cve-2025-37899
by datameta | 2025-05-24 19:43:40+00:00
I like to bring up a similar anecdote to the faux pas that just happened. For example, a friend taking a wrong turn, adding time to the ride and making the party somewhat late. It halted the conversation in the car, and to ease the tension I pointed out how I "do that at least once per every drive to X" to try to make the driver less self-conscious and so the other passengers aren't sitting in awkward silence.
by vunderba | 2025-05-24 19:44:26+00:00
I'm not sure how this affects the premise of the article, but the "jaw dropping quote created by an LLM about NYC" reads like so much pretentious claptrap:

Because New York City is the only place where the myth of greatness still feels within reach—where the chaos sharpens your ambition, and every street corner confronts you with a mirror: who are you becoming? You love NYC because it gives shape to your hunger. It’s a place where anonymity and intimacy coexist; where you can be completely alone and still feel tethered to the pulse of a billion dreams.

If I read this even before ChatGPT was a mote in the eye of Karpathy, my eyes would have rolled so far back that metacognitive mindfulness would have become a permanent passive ability stat.

The author of Berserk said it so much better: "Looking from up here, it's as if each flame were a small dream, for each person. They look like a bonfire of dreams, don't they? But, there's not flame for me here. I'm just a temporary visitor, taking comfort from the flame."
by robwwilliams | 2025-05-24 19:45:01+00:00
Yes old, but even worse, it is not a well argued review. Yes, Bayesian statistics are slowly gaining an upper hand at higher levels of statistics, but you know what should be taught to first year undergrads in science? Exploratory data analysis! One of the first books I voluntarily read in stats was Mosteller and Tukey’s gem: Data Analysis and Regression. A gem. Another great book is Judea Pearl’s Book of Why.
by throwaway81523 | 2025-05-24 19:45:02+00:00
That doesn't handle all the cases: what about fizz buzz bazz?

Added: here's my version, which maybe could be cleaned up further. The spaces and exclamation point make the problem trickier.

{-# LANGUAGE MonadComprehensions #-} import Data.Maybe (catMaybes) import Data.List (intercalate) fizz :: Int -> String fizz n = case zub of [] -> show n otherwise -> intercalate " " zub ++ "!" where f :: Int -> String -> Maybe String f d msg = [msg | n`rem`d == 0] zub = catMaybes . map (uncurry f) $ [(3,"Fizz"), (5,"Buzz"), (7, "Bazz")] main = mapM_ putStrLn [fizz n | n <- [1..110]]
by rwyinuse | 2025-05-24 19:45:30+00:00
Yeah, it really depends on your life situation. When I was reaching 20's I felt like you, and moving to city was great for my mental health. Now I'm in my 30's, my parents and my spouses parents live in rural area. We have small kids, and due to that we have barely any time to socialize. At this life stage, cheaper housing, quiet and proximity to our family in the countryside is really becoming attractive. City life with kids sucks when there's no family nearby, and you can't afford a big enough apartment.