MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by angrydev | 2025-05-29 22:33:10+00:00
Thank you for sharing your experience. I think I am reaching a better understanding of my relationship with WoW and gaming in general with my free time. I think now I regard it as not addiction (since I'm really not forgoing anything 'important' to play) and more of just a "default" activity, developed long ago in my suburban childhood when my agency was far more limited than now. It served me well in those days which were chaotic, gave me something of my own that was well understood and I could control.

Now it feels like more of a crutch to fill free time, and not serving me well for the person I'd like to be. However, I do think there's a place for it, specifically with the world of vanilla. Just being in it for a bit fulfills some deeper need to connect with my past.

I just wish I could find something that engages me as much as it used to.
by CGMthrowaway | 2025-05-29 22:33:27+00:00
It doesn't go into detail, but it does say "a line of epidemiological studies suggest reduced risk of prostate cancer associated with sun exposure, outdoor activity, highly active vitamin D receptor variants [9], high level of vitamin D [10], childhood sunburn, regular foreign holidays, sunbathing score, high exposure to UVR [11] or living at lower latitude [12], results all pointing at the protective role of sun exposure."
by throwaway314155 | 2025-05-29 22:34:46+00:00
Pro-tip: Check out Claude or Gemini. They hallucinate far less on coding tasks. Alternatively, enable internet search on o3 which boosts its ability to reference online documentation and real world usage examples.

I get having a bad taste in your mouth but these tools _aren't _ magic and do have something of a steep learning curve in order to get the most out of them. Not dissimilar from vim/emacs (or lots of dev tooling).

edit: To answer a reply (hn has annoyingly limited my ability to make new comments) yes, internet search is always available to ChatGpT as a tool. Explicitly clicking the globe icon will encourage the model to use it more often, however.
by reaperducer | 2025-05-29 22:34:53+00:00
I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.

A lot of companies, including mine, played this game for a long time. They were forever going on about how we're all a big family, and we all have to watch out for one another, and how's your mental health today? Do you need a hug? Here, have some free burritos.

Then COVID hit, and all that ended. They fired half of the staff in 10 hours, and since then have showed their real faces, because it's too soon for them to go back the other way. Everyone will know it's just a show.
by CursedSilicon | 2025-05-29 22:35:06+00:00
If it's the same one that brings the equipment to Retro Computing events. He sadly has declined to publish any kind of archive of the software for other hobbyists :(

I understand that he's under no obligation to do so. But a lot of us worry that if the hard disks die or if he loses interest in the hobby, that software will be irrevocably lost for all of us
by username223 | 2025-05-29 22:35:14+00:00
Hah!

Ruby, Python, and Perl all had similarly good package ecosystems in the late 1990s, and I think any of them could have ended up as the dominant scripting language. Then Google chose Python as its main scripting language, invested hundreds of millions of dollars, and here we are. It's not as suitable as Matlab, R, or Julia for numerical work, but money made it good enough.

(Sort of like how Java and later JavaScript VMs came to dominate: you can always compensate for poor upfront design with enough after-the-fact money.)
by bachmeier | 2025-05-29 22:35:40+00:00
I suspect humans will always be critical to programming. Improved technology won't matter if the economics isn't there.

LLMs are great as assistants. Just today, Copilot told me it's there to do the "tedious and repetitive" parts so I can focus my energy on the "interesting" parts. That's great. They do the things every programmer hates having to do. I'm more productive in the best possible way.

But ask it to do too much and it'll return error-ridden garbage filled with hallucinations, or just never finish the task. The economic case for further gains has diminished greatly while the cost of those gains rises.

Automation killed tons of manufacturing jobs, and we're seeing something similar in programming, but keep in mind that the number of people still working in manufacturing is 60% of the peak, and those jobs are much better than the ones in the 1960s and 1970s.
by eikenberry | 2025-05-29 22:35:46+00:00
I don't think it is only (or even mostly) not wanting to accept it, I think it is at least equal measure just plain skepticism. We've seen all sorts of wild statements about how much something is going to revolutionize X and then turns out to be nothing. Most people disbelieve these sorts of claims until they see real evidence for themselves... and that is a good default position.
by vlovich123 | 2025-05-29 22:37:07+00:00
It’s not mainly the syntax though although it has a marginal effect. It’s partially the lack of typing information (which is syntax) but mostly that it runs interpreted. Pypy is significantly faster because it applies JIT to generate machine code directly to represent the Python code and it’s significantly faster in most cases. Another huge cost is in multi-threaded scenarios where Python has the GIL (even in single threaded there’s a cost) which is an architectural and not syntactic decision.

For example, Python has a drastically simpler syntax in some ways than C++ (ignoring the borrow annotations). In many ways it can look like Python code. Yet its performance is the same as c++ because it’s AOT compiled and has an explicit type system to support that.

TLDR: most of python’s slowness is not syntactic but architectural design decisions about how to run the code which is why alternate Python implementations (IronPython, PyPy) typically run faster.
by dwringer | 2025-05-29 22:37:15+00:00
Definitely a lot to be said for these ideas, even just that it helps to start a fresh chat and ask the same question in a better way a few times (using the quality of response to gauge what might be "better"). I have found if I do this a few times and Gemini strikes out, I've manually optimized the question by this point that I can drop it into Claude and get a good working solution. Conversely, having a discussion with the LLM about the potential solution, letting it hold on to the context as described in TFA, has in my experience caused the models to pretty universally end up stuck in a rut sooner or later and become counterproductive to work with. Not to mention that way eats up a ton of api usage allotment.
by viraptor | 2025-05-29 22:37:23+00:00
> They chosen Asian traits that Western beauty standards fetishize that in Asia wouldn't be taken serious at all.

> where as Chinese text2image generate attractive and more light skinned humans.

Are you saying they have chosen Asian traits that Asian beauty standards fetishize that in the West wouldn't be taken seriously at all? ;) There is no ground truth here that would be more correct one way or the other.
by numpad0 | 2025-05-29 22:38:11+00:00
The basic design outlined in "important notice" section on brochure page[1] sounds a bit simplistic to be honest - it doesn't seem to have a PIN or really advanced checks, more towards "we've done our homework" checks, but OTOH, they did seem to have done homeworks.

1: https://lp.da.pf.japanpost.jp/
by username223 | 2025-05-29 22:39:28+00:00
Unfortunately the calling conventions and memory models are all different, so there's usually hell to pay going between languages. Perl passes arguments on a stack, Lisp often uses tagged integers, Fortran stores matrices in the other order, ... it goes on and on. SWIG (https://swig.org) can help a lot, but it's still a pain.
by rob-olmos | 2025-05-29 22:40:30+00:00
Anthropic employees Sholto Douglas & Trenton Bricken did an interview recently with Dwarkesh Patel, pieces here and there was about the circuit tracing insights.

https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/sholto-trenton-2 -- search the transcript for "circuit" for the quick bits.

Eg, "If you look at the circuit, you can see that it's not actually doing any of the math, it's paying attention to that you think the answer's four and then it's reasoning backwards about how it can manipulate the intermediate computation to give you an answer of four."

https://transformer-circuits.pub/
by mattmaroon | 2025-05-29 22:41:32+00:00
But are people repeatedly getting up the mountain in much less time? If so, it really doesn’t matter if it’s because of one particular substance or another, and if not, it would be pretty easy to determine it is fake, right?

If something normally takes two weeks and some guy claims his novel method gets you up there in one, it’s at least easy to verify whether his novel method actually does do it.
by mywittyname | 2025-05-29 22:41:56+00:00
Yeah. My mindset is assume "2020" becomes a regular occurrence that gets progressively worse over time. And I'll mentally work through situations such as "2020 with an extended utilities outage", or "2020 but car travel is not possible", or "2020 plus pervasive violent hate crimes". Then we dry run for the weekend.

You learn a surprising amount in that first day. I.e., being stuck without power/internet/cell service/water, and realizing you can't watch DVDs on your laptop because they haven't come with disk drives for years. After the weekend, you end up with a list of issues to address, i.e., you buy a portable dvd drive and put together a Plex server with a bunch of locally-hosted media.

Honestly, I feel more capable and resilient than I ever have before. We had some tornadoes come through and we didn't even need to think about what to do, we went into our safe room which contains our go-bags, hiking food, critical docs, usb backups of key pass, battery backups and some ipads, and we chilled out watching a weather channel and listening to the emergency radio. Had a tornado hit our house, I'm confident we would have survived, been able to help the neighbors, and manage a few days until aid could come.
by spwa4 | 2025-05-29 22:42:22+00:00
I don't understand what the aim is here. LLMs have disadvantages compared to human doctors that make them a really, really bad option.

1) they can't take measurements themselves.

2) they don't adapt on the job. Illnesses do. In other words, if there is a contagious health emergency, an LLM would see the patients ... and ignore the emergency.

3) they are very bad at figuring out if a patient is lying to them (which is a required skill: combined with 2, people would figure out how to get the LLM to prescribe them morfine and ...)

4) they are generally socially problematic. A big part of being a doctor is gently convincing a patient their slightly painful toe does not in fact justify a diagnosis of bone cancer ... WITHOUT doing tests (that would be unethical, as there's zero chance of those tests yielding positive results)

5) they will not adapt to people. LLMs will not adapt, people will. This means patients will exploit LLMs to achieve a whole bunch of aims (like getting drugs, getting days off, getting free hospital stays, ...) and it doesn't matter how good LLMs are. An adaptive system vs a non-adaptive system ... it's a matter of time.

6) they are not themselves patients. This is a fundamental problem: it will be very hard for an LLM to collect new information about "the human condition" and new problems it may generate. There's many examples of this, from patients drinking radium solution (it lights up in the dark, so surely, it must give extra energy, right? Even sexual energy, right?) to rivers or ponds that turn out to have serious diseases lurking around. Meaning a doctor needs to be able to make the decision to go after problems in society when society finds a new, catastrophically dumb, way to hurt itself.

Now you might say "but they would still be good in the developing world, wouldn't they?". Yes, but as the tuberculosis vaccine efforts sadly showed: the developing world is developing partially because they invest nothing whatsoever in (poor) people's health. Nothing. Zero. Rien. Which means, making health services cheaper (e.g. providing a cheap tuberculosis vaccine) ... has the problem that it does not increase the value of zero. They won't pay for healthcare ... and they won't pay for cheaper healthcare. And while Bill Gates ad the US government do pay for a bit of this, they're not sustainable solutions. If, however, you train a local with basic medical skills, there's a lot they can do for free, which actually helps.
by chgs | 2025-05-29 22:42:31+00:00
The point is you are paying for one bed, one living area, one bathroom, whether you are a single traveller or as a couple. I’m in a hotel room at the moment with a bed and a sofa, can host 4 people or me, it’s the same size. At breakfast I usually sit on a table which can seat 4, but certainly one that can seat 2. I use almost all the resources a couple do, and spend less at the bar in the evening, so I’d expect to pay the same or even more.
by retrogame365 | 2025-05-29 22:43:45+00:00
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by mrinterweb | 2025-05-29 22:44:50+00:00
The spirit of this reminds me back to earlier days of the internet. I know a lot of people bemoaned Flash sites for weird navigation, and other issues. Not saying the Flash criticism wasn't warranted, but I did appreciate the creativity some people put into making their site unique. Too much of the internet feel homogeneous now, and with AI generated content, that is only going to get worse. I appreciate the portions of the internet that don't want to conform.
Ask HN: What do you think of this Tetris variant that is simpler than Tetris?
by amichail | 2025-05-29 22:45:36+00:00
Here's a prompt to try it out using Gemini 2.5 Pro (preview):

Create a single web page that I can load into a browser that implements this Tetris variant: tetrominoes always retain their shape and are removed in their entirety. In particular, clearing a line would remove all tetrominoes with at least one square in that line. Remaining Tetrominoes do not fall. Use dark mode. Show a shadow.
by tharkun__ | 2025-05-29 22:45:43+00:00
Fair enough on 'cutting the learning tree' at some points i.e. ignoring that you don't understand yet why something works/does what it does. We (should) keep doing that later on in life as well.

But unless you teach a kid that's never done any math where `x` was a thing to program, what's so hard about understanding the concept of a variable in programming?
by wijwp | 2025-05-29 22:45:50+00:00
> Not to sound like a tin-foil hat but odds of achieving something like this increase by the day.

Where do you get this? The limitations of LLMs are becoming more clear by the day. Improvements are slowing down. Major improvements come from integrations, not major model improvements.

AGI likely can't be achieved with LLMs. That wasn't as clear a couple years ago.
Ask HN: Why do we still buy cars like it's 1995?
by samsullivan | 2025-05-29 22:47:00+00:00
Recently tried to sell my car and was shocked by how archaic the process remains. Facebook Marketplace is sketchy, Kijiji and Craigslist are dying, and dealerships take massive cuts. Airbnb revolutionized home rentals for a $1T market, why hasn't anyone cracked the $1.5T used car market? Is it regulatory capture by dealers, or am I missing something obvious?
by godelski | 2025-05-29 22:47:28+00:00
Or how the volume of an n-ball goes to 0[0,1]

Or how gaussian balls are like soap bubbles[2]

The latter of which being highly relevant to vector embeddings. Because if you aren't a uniform distribution, the density of your mass isn't uniform. MEANING if you linearly interpolate between two points in the space you are likely to get things that are not representative of your distribution. It happens because it is easy to confuse a linear line with a geodesic[3]. Like trying to draw a straight line between Los Angeles and Paris. You're going to be going through the dirt most of the time. Looks nothing like cities or even habitable land.

I think the basic math is straight forward but there's a lot of depth that is straight up ignored in most of our discussions about this stuff. There's a lot of deep math here and we really need to talk a lot about the algebraic structures, topologies, get deep into metric theory and set theory to push forward in answering these questions. I think this belief that "the math is easy" is holding us back. I like to say "you don't need to know math to train good models, but you do need math to know why your models are wrong." (Obvious reference to "all models are wrong, but some are useful") Especially in CS we have this tendency to oversimplify things and it really is just arrogance that doesn't help us.

[0] https://davidegerosa.com/nsphere/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volume_of_an_n-ball

[2] https://www.inference.vc/high-dimensional-gaussian-distribut...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic
by davesmylie | 2025-05-29 22:49:42+00:00
I suspect this is the only way they can differentiate it from a phone, and it will be pointless.

Voice-to-text is already as good as it needs to be now, and most people barely use it because unless you are driving, a keyboard is better. I don't want others to hear what I'm searching for - or for the device to be always on, listening. A keyboard of some sort seems unavoidable.

As soon as you put a keyboard on it, then it needs a screen. As soon as you have those two things you pretty much have a phone - and why would anyone want a second device that's basically just another phone that could have just as easily been an app on their existing phone.

It'll need to android based if they want any one to use it as otherwise they'll trying to start from scratch, and why would anyone use something that doesn't have access to the 27 million existing app on the android app store. (see windows mobile)
by arn3n | 2025-05-29 22:49:54+00:00
I actually love performative licensing. Notable examples are the "Stallman License" [1] and the "Pinkest Pink: Available to Everyone except Anish Kapoor" [2]

[1] https://github.com/benlk/misc-licenses/blob/master/stallman-... [2] https://stuartsemple.com/anish-kapoor-banned-worlds-pinkest-...
by amdivia | 2025-05-29 22:50:28+00:00
I agree with the sentiment, but in this specific case, the "nihilism" is more of a green card to do whatever to better your own life, as there is no point improving anyone else's, just focus on yourself and survive.

So here it could be seen as an excuse to not only exploit existing systems, but also to avoid attempts at fixing them.

So in a way, holders of such fatalistic believes are ironically flourishing
by jdiff | 2025-05-29 22:50:35+00:00
Why would we not? If they were so effective, their effectiveness would be apparent, inarguable, and those making use of it would advertise it as a demonstration of just that. Even if there were some sort of social stigma against it, AI has enough proponents to produce copious amounts of counterarguments through evidence all on their own.

Instead, we have a tiny handful of one-off events that were laboriously tuned and tweaked and massaged over extended periods of time, and a flood of slop in the form of broken patches, bloated and misleading issues, and nonsense bug bounty attempts.
by Marsymars | 2025-05-29 22:50:47+00:00
> That was stupid but also practically irrelevant-if an uninhabited territory has zero exports, you can set the tariff as high as you like, with no exports nobody is going to pay it. To be clear, I don’t agree with these tariffs and think they are a mistake, but I think we should focus on their real world harms not a silly administrative error

If the administration put out all their executive orders in spelling-mistake-riddled crayon, it would also be “practically irrelevant”, but it would similarly show the level competence behind the tariffs’ implementation.
by godelski | 2025-05-29 22:51:21+00:00
I remember when that was dropped! It nicely complements Flatland, going in the other direction. Highly recommend, but it is easier to miss the limitations of intuitions here than it is when looking at Flatland. But still, highly recommend. I think it helps highlight how non-intuitive things are. I'd suggest people try to predict movements of things before that movement happening. Helps to see how wrong you are because we have a tendency to post hoc justify why we actually knew something was going to happen lol
by smw | 2025-05-29 22:51:26+00:00
bat # cat with syntax highlighting zoxide # keeps track of directories tig # ncurses git viewer atuin # shell history across machines choose # easier cut or "awk '{print $1}'" direnv # set environment vars when you enter a directory fd # better find fzf # fuzzy find anything, total game changer gh # GitHub client rg # really fast recursive grep
by dnemmers | 2025-05-29 22:51:34+00:00
It looked like the ‘Equity’ grading would be closer to what some colleges do, i.e., only test count, not homework or in class effort:

“ Under the equity program, students’ final grades would rely on summative assessments, not “classwork and homework,” according to district officials. “

Some criticism against: “San Francisco has come up with a brilliant solution for its failing schools,” California State Representative Kevin Kiley said. “Students simply won’t be failed. Under the new ‘Grading for Equity’ plan, Fs are now Cs; Bs are now As; homework and tests are ungraded; truancy is unpunished; and finals can be re-taken again and again.”
by potholereseller | 2025-05-29 22:52:17+00:00
How exactly would China wage war with the US (besides nukes)? They don't have the means to send a meaningful amount of troops to US soil, and that's without the US Navy intervening. China might be able to deposit troops on the island of Taiwan, but that isn't scary to most members of Congress; the well-being of Taiwanese civilians doesn't generally affect US election outcomes.

These stories about a China-US war being imminent always come from people who personally benefit from Congress spending money. It's lobbying thinly-veiled as fear-mongering.
by averagefluid | 2025-05-29 22:52:27+00:00
Market-based hypothesis is that the person erecting the fence incurs costs and if the expected value of the fence isn't higher than the cost of erecting it, it wouldn't have been erected in the first place.

Of course mismanagement happens but the implied value of understanding why the fence was erected is to understand the expected value it would bring and understand the problem it was trying to solve. This does not imply that it should have been erected, just that there were others before you trying to solve a problem and if they're failing it's important to know why so you don't fail in the same way.