MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by diggan | 2025-05-02 20:37:48+00:00
> It is worse than nothing. A LLM does not understand the situation or what people say to it. It cannot choose to, say, nudge someone in a specific direction, or imagine a way to make things better for someone.

Right, no matter if this is true or not, if the choice is between "Talk to no one, bottle up your feelings" and "Talk to an LLM that doesn't nudge you in a specific direction", I still feel like the better option would be the latter, not the former, considering that it can be a first step, not a 100% health care solution to a complicated psychological problem.

> In my experience, not any more than reading a book would.

But to even get out in the world to buy a book (literally or figuratively) about something that acknowledges that you have a problem, can be (at least feel) a really big step that many are not ready to take. Contrast that to talking with a LLM that won't remember you nor judge you.

Edit:

> Most people with real social issues don’t engage in communities, virtual or otherwise.

Not sure why you're focusing on social issues, there are a bunch of things people deal with on a daily basis that they could feel much better about if they even spent the time to think about how they feel about it, instead of the typical reactionary response most people have. Probably every single human out there struggle with something, and are unable to open up about their problems with others. Even people like us who interact with communities online and offline.
by godelski | 2025-05-02 20:38:40+00:00
> Math major here

Forgive me if I doubt, but your comment would strongly suggest otherwise, along with this one[0].

The reason for doubt is a failure in fairly basic logic. Your claim is:

¬(A ↦ B) ⟹ ¬(B ↦ A)

I'd expect anyone willing to claim the title of "math major" is aware of structures other than bijections and isomorphisms. The mapping operator doesn't form an abelian group.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43873351
by leptons | 2025-05-02 20:39:16+00:00
>Coding IS math.

No, not always. Quite a lot of high-level code doesn't require any math at all. It doesn't take math to perform CRUD operations, which account for a lot of programming work. Sure, the underlying machine code is all based on math, but the higher level programming doesn't need to involve a single math equation for it to be useful. Let's see where the goalposts move now...
by archagon | 2025-05-02 20:39:45+00:00
The first picture is definitely not "dad bod". The man is already in relatively good shape and looks like a normal human. It's not some sort of virtue to disappear every last bit of flab¹, and it should be no surprise that many people would find the "before" more attractive.

¹ (But no judgement if that's what you like, of course.)
by jenadine | 2025-05-02 20:40:36+00:00
There is an asymetry anyway as the company is probably contributing more than 90% of the code, maintain the infrastructure for the CI and website, do the promotion of the software, and more.

Depending of the motivation for your contribution, you get what you want, eg, the feeling of contributing to an open source project presumably used by many people, or having that entity to maintain your patch "for free".

You can keep your change in a fork if you like, but the likelihood that your fork is getting used is not that big, and mean more work from your side to rebase the change.
by ahmedfromtunis | 2025-05-02 20:40:39+00:00
Man, I wish we had the technology to just concoct a spacecraft that can intercept the lander in its shallow reentry and bring it back in as few pieces as possible.

I don't know what value can it have to be studied since it never left low earth orbit (albeit it was there since 1972), but I know it would be a cool addition to any museum that may host it.
by eh_why_not | 2025-05-02 20:41:25+00:00
The ChatGPT session he links [0] shows how powerful the LLM is in aiding and teaching programming. A patient, resourceful, effective, and apparently deeply knowledgeable tutor! At least for beginners.

[0] https://chatgpt.com/share/68143a97-9424-800e-b43a-ea9690485b...
by monero-xmr | 2025-05-02 20:41:37+00:00
America is the best because citizens can do basically whatever they want all the time. The latest complaints are people took it too far (rampant drug use, camping on sidewalks, and shitting everywhere in San Francisco, etc.).

But if you want to buy a rural cabin on a beautiful mountain, it’s available, and cheap. You don’t need to go to Asia to live like a hermit.
by porphyra | 2025-05-02 20:41:57+00:00
It's funny/sad how a bunch of Soviet Venera probes had malfunctioning camera lens caps and returned black photos. From Venera 9-12 all four probes had malfunctioning lens caps. And then

> The Venera 14 craft had the misfortune of ejecting the camera lens cap directly under the surface compressibility tester arm, and returned information for the compressibility of the lens cap rather than the surface.
by whoopdedo | 2025-05-02 20:42:05+00:00
These are AI bots. Computational capacity is not a limiting factor. I'd argue that my desktop consumer PC is less capable of efficiently solving a PoW than a multi-GPU cluster in a data center.

Even if, as you say, crawlers will hit the PoW thousands of times more, the only way to make it a barrier is if the cost is higher than the profit to be gained. Otherwise it's merely an expense to be passed on to the customer.
by timbit42 | 2025-05-02 20:42:15+00:00
A lot of Canadians seem to think the CBC is overly biased but that the BBC is less biased, but the BBC is actually more biased than the CBC.

A lot of Canadians also think the CBC is too expensive but it is less expensive than the BBC and public media in most of the EU. The British government pays BBC $100/person/year. The Canadian government pays CBC $29/person/year.
by sbarre | 2025-05-02 20:42:23+00:00
There's a point in everyone's career where they think their work is under constant threat of being stolen, copied, repurposed or otherwise used in a manner that will "steal your livelihood" or some thing..

Eventually you realize that a) no one cares, your work isn't _that_ unique and valuable and b) if someone wants to use your stuff, they will find a way..

The idea of a giant watermark behind text that can just be scanned and OCR'ed anyways is this kind of silly.
by ben_w | 2025-05-02 20:42:33+00:00
I didn't miss anything in the wordplay*, it was obvious. (As are the initials, an extra pun).

I put quotemarks around "flamethrower" because that's what it was originally sold as before obvious and predictable legal issues with real flamethrowers and the fact it was obviously mimicing the prop in Spaceballs.

My point is: neither weed burners nor actual flamethrowers have anything to do with digging tunnels nor any adjacent aspect of civil engineering.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boring_(manufacturing)
by nayuki | 2025-05-02 20:42:37+00:00
This reminds me of the reverse, where music drives 3D animations. I remember Animusic from the early decade of 2000.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animusic , https://www.animusic.com/ , https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=animusic , https://www.youtube.com/@julianlachniet9036/videos
by Defletter | 2025-05-02 20:42:46+00:00
I've been firmly pro-spaces ever since I discovered there was an everlasting war over this, and it came about primarily over documentation. Say you're writing documentation within a /***/ block, so each line is prefixed by three characters. Now say your documentation includes a code snippet. Or lets say that particular sections of the documentation (such as JavaDoc's @see) are indented so each line always starts after the @see. You end up with documentation indented with spaces because it's the only way to ensure consistency. And if you're doing it with your documentation... why not your code too?

However, my conviction has since been tested by Dart which opinionatedly forces you to use two-space indentation. There's no way to disable this and its IDE plugins enforce the style. I just find it so difficult to read, even with Rainbow Brackets. I yearn for Dart to use tabs just so I can configure the tabs to appear as four-space indentation. Or better yet, stop trying to coerce how people write their own code.
by tylerhou | 2025-05-02 20:43:23+00:00
In higher math (typically 2nd year and onwards at US universities) there is fairly little explicit calculation, and math is more about studying the (formal) relationships between mathematical objects. For example, we can abstractly define topological spaces and abstractly define algebraic “groups,” and algebraic topology studies the relationships between topological spaces and algebraic groups. This is somewhat like having a “data type” defined by some library, examining ways it can be transformed into data types defined by some other library, and studying what invariants hold under those transformations.

In some sense, an undergraduate math education is akin to learning the “standard library” (in the software engineering sense) of higher mathematics. Most courses start with basic abstractions of some mathematical object and repeatedly construct more and more abstractions on top of those. The structure of those abstractions is similar to how you might build a library. A professional mathematician is expected to be fluent in the mathematical standard library, just like how you might expect an experienced software engineer to be fluent in Python’s standard library.

If this analogy is true, people who can learn Python relatively quickly might be able to also learn higher mathematics relatively quickly under the right pedagogical environment.
by cardanome | 2025-05-02 20:43:50+00:00
There wouldn't be a point in seeing artists play live if people only cared about the end result.

Listening to the studio mix on my headphones at home will always be better sound than being in a crowded concert.

I mean you are right to a certain degree, if it works, it works and if generative tools inspire you to make better music that is great. I am not so sure about that though.

I am forced to vibe code at work and it has not make me more creative. Is has made me want to quit my job.
by SequoiaHope | 2025-05-02 20:44:22+00:00
Indeed! Eric Schmidt was regularly meeting with pentagon officials. I think he had stepped down as CEO by the time of those reports, but he was obviously very friendly to US government interests. We really tend to assume that CEOs all want to protect their data from the government but if they don’t want to do that we really can’t know or defend against it while using those services.
by Tostino | 2025-05-02 20:44:50+00:00
I need pushback, especially when I ask for it.

E.g. if I say "I have X problem, could it be Y that's causing it, or is it something else?" I don't want it to instantly tell me how smart I am and that it's obviously Y...when the problem is actually Z and it is reasonably obvious that it's Z if you looked at the context provided.
by Freeformcareers | 2025-05-02 20:45:25+00:00
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by mschuster91 | 2025-05-02 20:45:37+00:00
> When you add bureaucratic hurdles to a process to try to slow down abuse, you often find that abusive users are more willing to navigate that process than legitimate ones.

In this case, it's not just a bureaucratic hurdle, it's adding a real external cost - app authors now have to go and deal with their government to get something DUNS accepts as a certification of entrepreneurship.

For single developers and legitimate startups, that cost is practically irrelevant and they're going to have to do it anyway to file taxes - but scammers run into the issue that they'll have to either use their own identity or have to clone someone else's which carries significantly more risk when the cops come investigating.
by sunray2 | 2025-05-02 20:46:12+00:00
Don't be discouraged! It might even be that 2D is better than 3D in this case: it's all about how it sounds, right? And if a 2D simulation can be less expensive than a 3D while sounding just as good or better, it works in your favour!

I think that's the real key to this stuff: what makes these things actually sound good?
by UncleOxidant | 2025-05-02 20:46:28+00:00
They just want to hand our technological/scientific leadership position over to China. This is ironically, a sort of Cultural Revolution that the Trumpists are espousing - they're suspicious of anything they can't understand and would prefer that PhDs go out and earn their living doing hard labor in the fields and tshirt factories. This is essentially Maoist ideological purity. Our economy is going to suffer, but it won't be felt right away so most of the rubes won't understand and will instead blame our problems on foreigners and immigrants like they always do.
by rurp | 2025-05-02 20:47:03+00:00
>We can argue over whether or not it's "real" empathy

There's nothing to argue about, it's unambiguously not real empathy. Empathy from a human exists in a much broader context of past and future interactions. One reason human empathy is nice is because it is often followed up with actions. Friends who care about you will help you out in material ways when you need it.

Even strangers will. Someone who sees a person stranded on the side of a road might feel for them and stop to lend a hand. ChatGPT will never do that, and not just because interaction mediums are so limited, but also because that's not the purpose of the tool. The purpose of ChatGPT is to make immense amounts of money and power for its owners, and a nice sounding chat bot currently happens to be an effective way of getting there. Sam Altman doesn't have empathy for random ChatGPT users he's never met and neither do the computer algorithms his company develops.
by seabass-labrax | 2025-05-02 20:47:27+00:00
Location: Great Britain

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Yes

Technologies: Willing to work with all technologies, but with a particular penchant for functional programming and Linux

Résumé/CV: https://seabass.systems/cv.pdf

Email: hn@seabass.systems

Specialist in standardization, compliance and governance with senior leadership experience. Expertise in computer security as well as extensive connections in the free and open source software (FOSS) community. Looking for roles such as CISO, CTO or Open Source Program Office (OSPO) manager for organizations with a European presence, ideally in Germany.
by w10-1 | 2025-05-02 20:47:45+00:00
> used as a static constant

Yes, but remind people it's not static in the sense of being associated with the class, nor constant for compile-time purposes.

Perhaps better to say: A stable value is lazy, set on first use, resulting in pre- and post- initialization states. The data being set once means you cannot observe a data change (i.e., appears to be immutable), but you could observe reduction in resource utilization when comparing instances with pre-set or un-set values -- less memory or time or other side-effects of value initialization.

So even if data-immutable, a class with a stable value ends up with behavior combinations of two states for each stable value. Immutable records or classes without stable values have no such behavior changes.

But, writ large, we've always had this with the JVM's hotspot optimizations.

For String, it becomes significant whether hashcode is used when calculating equals (as a fast path to negative result). If not, one would have two equal instances that will behave differently (though producing the same data), at least for one hashcode-dependent operation.
by thebosz | 2025-05-02 20:48:09+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | United States

Location: Vancouver, WA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Open to discussion

Technologies: Javascript, Typescript, Web Developer-centric things

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/165fbWB_769XWZjFQTbDu6tenP2W...

Email: nathankerr@gmail.com

Web developer for over 10 years with an emphasis on leading front-end development using React, Typescript, etc.

Very quick learner and have passing interest in most computer things.

Particularly love solving complex problems using simple solutions.

Authorized to work in US without sponsorship.
by thebosz | 2025-05-02 20:48:23+00:00
Location: Vancouver, WA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: Open to discussion

Technologies: Javascript, Typescript, Web Developer-centric things

Résumé/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/165fbWB_769XWZjFQTbDu6tenP2W...

Email: nathankerr@gmail.com

Web developer for over 10 years with an emphasis on leading front-end development using React, Typescript, etc.

Very quick learner and have passing interest in most computer things.

Particularly love solving complex problems using simple solutions.

Authorized to work in US without sponsorship.
by wwweston | 2025-05-02 20:48:56+00:00
I think it's entirely fair to point out that Amazon often wins on price and speed.

One question I've been asking myself lately: are single to maybe double digit price optimizations on books such a dominant concern that I should prioritize them over other values?

For an activity I have to do daily, maybe. That order of savings on meals adds up fast enough to be a triple digit number in a month.

Book purchases are weekly to monthly events, any savings on the order that amazon can give me tends toward a rounding error in a monthly budget. Or if my budget shrinks to the point they're not and I need to conserve funds that badly, I will use a library system.

Speed is nice but it's rarely crucial (and these days publishers themselves can get it in your hands pretty quickly).

Lots of us software engineers know "premature optimization is the root of all evil" -- when you overoptimize early, you commit resources in particular attention towards optimizations you may not know serve your ultimate goals.

Maybe your goals begin and end with getting the book in your hand at the lowest price in the shortest time period.

Maybe your goals include what kinds of businesses, activity, people and therefore society you support economically.
by treis | 2025-05-02 20:49:01+00:00
They definitely can. Here's an example when I tried it:

Me: I'm struggling with some things today and feel like eating a bunch of food to make myself feel better. can we talk about it?

Deepseek: Absolutely, I’m here to listen. It’s completely understandable to turn to food for comfort when you’re struggling—many people do. But if you’re open to it, we can explore what’s going on beneath the urge to eat emotionally.

Would you like to share what’s weighing on you today? Sometimes just naming the feelings can take some of their power away. And if you’d rather not go into details, that’s okay too—we could brainstorm other ways to cope that might leave you feeling more nourished emotionally (and physically).

Some gentle questions to consider (no pressure to answer all or any): - What’s the emotion you’re trying to soothe? (Loneliness? Stress? Sadness?) - If eating wasn’t an option, what’s one tiny thing that might bring you a moment of relief? (A hug? A walk? A favorite song?)

You’re not alone in this.

That's a really solid opening response and it kept doing well from there. I haven't tried a complex psychological issue but for the "I'm struggling and need someone to talk to" it does surprisingly well.
by SequoiaHope | 2025-05-02 20:49:04+00:00
I mean it in the “technically correct” usage, in reply to someone who seemed to expect a unified standard between China and the US. My point is to be clear that the US is also spying on US citizens, but the government and media only dislike it when other countries do it.

Personally I don’t like that the US government runs mass surveillance against US citizens.

Also mass surveillance and spies are related but have some differences. The US can run mass surveillance through US corporations without spies, though I’m sure they also have spies.
by const_cast | 2025-05-02 20:51:28+00:00
I really dislike this line of argument that goes like "everything is the same as everything else so why don't you oppose this?".

Okay, but Fox News is obviously fundamentally different because it's a private entertainment program. That's why it's bought out and influenced by the ultra-wealthy. It's a propaganda program for capitalists. You can't just say that's "the same" as a neutrally-funded public program.

You can't "sell", so to speak, public services. That's why republican generally oppose it - they can't give a slice to their cronies so they don't want it. The problem with things like SS, which the right has attacked and attempted to dismantle the second it was written into law, isn't that it's "unfair", it's that it's not private. If you actually look at the proposals for dismantling SS, they all involve privatizing it, aka stealing it and handing out slices to their cronies.

Things like PBS and NPR getting public funds and being allowed to exist is a problem to the right because it means it can't be bought and controlled like Huff Post or Fox can.
by duskwuff | 2025-05-02 20:51:36+00:00
For what it's worth, that bit of the policy was written early in the life of the App Store, when there really was a glut of low-effort novelty apps, particularly in the categories they mentioned, and when app discovery features in the store were more limited. It's probably not as necessary nowadays, but it does help guide developers away from writing apps which users are unlikely to find useful. (And if you've genuinely put in the effort to create something novel, it shouldn't be difficult to convince the reviewer of that - App Store review is a two-way street.)
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-02 20:51:54+00:00
Friend of mine is a retired, high-level music exec.

He has a story about the cover art for Their Greatest Hits (Eagles)[0].

The bird skull is sitting in what looks like "snow."

Apparently, that's what it was. After the shoot, they snorted it all.

[0] https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0566/5105/5295/files/eagle...
by tern | 2025-05-02 20:52:13+00:00
The fact that LLMs compute an average of human culture is more apparent in music AIs than any other medium. You cannot get these things to do anything original, same as with images, designs and creative writing—and it's not an "intelligence" problem.

I'm not sure if this is solvable, but I think it should be a bigger research topic. If anyone knows of any papers on this, I haven't found one yet (not sure what to search for).