MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cubefox | 2025-05-16 19:26:00+00:00
One great example is Amarcord by Federico Fellini. It describes one year in a small Italian town in the 1930s. There is no main character, only a "main family" and a few other related people of various ages with distinct backgrounds. There is no real plot, only a sequence of interesting (absurd, funny, sad) events that happen throughout the year, to varying subsets of those people. The movie is largely fictional, but seems quite realistic, precisely because it doesn't have any main plot to speak of.
by rdtsc | 2025-05-16 19:26:18+00:00
> makes me wish that it was not multi-processing and Erlang, but a more mainstream language with a better library ecosystem and focused on multi-threading instead, Rust comes to mind but there could be a better one.

I am not quite following, why would we drop multi-processing with isolated tiny heaps with a few KBs each and move to multi-threading with a large multi-megabyte stacks per thread and all sharing and writing to the same heap? It seems like a step backward.

> Rust comes to mind but there could be a better one.

I can see the excitement, but at the same time this is becoming a meme. I mean the drive-by comments of "why don't your rewrite it in Rust" on every repo or "show HN" post. It's kind of like nodejs from years past: "why don't your write in nodejs, it's webscale!". The problem is, after a while it starts to have an inverse dose response: it makes people run away from Rust just based on that kind of stuff.
by bradgessler | 2025-05-16 19:26:26+00:00
I keep going back and forth on this feeling, but lately I find myself thinking "F it, I'm going to do what I'm going to do that interests me".

Today I'm working on doing the unthinkable in an AI-world: putting together a video course that teaches developers how to use Phlex components in Rails projects and selling it for a few hundred bucks.

One way of thinking about AI is that it puts so much new information in front of people that they're going to need help from people known to have experience to navigate it all and curate it. Maybe that will become more valuable?

Who knows. That's the worst part at this moment in time—nobody really knows the depths or limits of it all. We'll see breakthroughs in some areas, and others not.
by yurishimo | 2025-05-16 19:26:56+00:00
They don't expect it, but the amount of opportunities that will open up for you if you can speak the local language should not be discounted. I've found that my professional circle has been widely broadened because I can speak the local language. As an immigrant from a non EU country, the peace of mind that I get from knowing that I can leverage my own personal growth into more professional opportunities is worth the "hassle" of learning a new language.

As an added bonus, learning a new language has been one of the most enriching hobbies I've ever begun! Exercising a new part of my brain and opening myself up to new cultural experiences is something I'm very grateful for. If anyone is considering a move abroad, I strongly suggest not only weighing the financial factors, but also the cultural and self-enriching ones.
by codedokode | 2025-05-16 19:28:35+00:00
Why not Vue? Unlike React it doesn't recalculate everything on every mouse move event.

Also I would like something that doesn't require to install Node.JS and unly packer like Webpack which invents its proprietary syntax instead of using standard EcmaScript. I like to make small apps that I run by clicking on HTML file and I don't have time to go to console and install things or type commands just to open a webpage.
by williamdclt | 2025-05-16 19:28:37+00:00
I might have misunderstood your point, but scoping isn’t related to what I’m trying to say.

What I’m saying is that, regardless of how it works, I don’t think string templating for SQL is a good idea because it looks almost exactly like string concatenation. It makes more difficult to distinguish beteeen the right approach and the wrong approach (or learn about it)
by justin66 | 2025-05-16 19:28:47+00:00
That ship has already sailed… and circumnavigated the globe several times. It’s weird anyone feels obligated to bring this stuff up since everybody familiar with the prize knows the deal.

> Nobel accuses the awarding institution of misusing his family's name

From Alfred Nobel’s great grandnephew (I’m not even sure what that looks like on a family tree), to spare anyone else looking it up.
by don_neufeld | 2025-05-16 19:29:14+00:00
Completely agree.

From all of my observations, the impact of LLMs on human thought quality appears largely corrosive.

I’m very glad my kid’s school has hardcore banned them. In some class they only allow students to turn in work that was done in class, under the direct observation of the teacher. There has also been a significant increase in “on paper” work vs work done on computer.

Lest you wonder “what does this guy know anyways?”, I’ll share that I grew up in a household where both parents were professors of education.

Understanding the effectiveness of different methods of learning (my dad literally taught Science Methods) were a frequent topic. Active learning (creating things using what you’re learning about) is so much more effective than passive, reception oriented methods. I think LLMs largely are supporting the latter.
by tokai | 2025-05-16 19:29:37+00:00
Impressively the paper seems to have been cited 50 times already. I don't mind much if its taken down or not, but with the old guard publishers you can at least get a redaction notice or comment about the issues with a paper embedded in the publication. If you find this paper cited somewhere and follow it to the source at arxiv, you will never be made aware of the disputes surrounding the research. Preprint servers has somewhat of a weakness here.
by nuancebydefault | 2025-05-16 19:29:44+00:00
Sounds like you need a break of 3 months to half a year, where you don't think about work. Do stuff that gives you energy. Hiking in nature, visit friends, make or listen to music. Do meditation (just search for a meditation audio/video on YouTube if you do not know where to start. If you can afford it, seek professional counseling. Make sure to exercise or at least walk a lot. Write regularly in a journal what gave energy, what took energy and how you are feeling. Keep in touch with family and friends. Good luck!
by voidspark | 2025-05-16 19:30:15+00:00
This is exactly the problem. The top level executives are setting up to retire with billions in the bank, while the workers develop their own replacements before they retire with millions in the bank. Senior developers will be mostly obsolete too.

I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a rewarding part of the job. My colleagues mostly ignore juniors, provide no real guidance, couldn't care less. I see this attitude from others in the comments here, relieved they don't have to face that human interaction anymore. There are too many antisocial weirdos in this industry.

Without a strong moral and cultural foundation the AGI paradigm will be a dystopia. Humans obsolete across all industries.
by xp84 | 2025-05-16 19:31:59+00:00
While I was only speaking in hypotheticals about companies that only want to hire people who have legal status (no one has asked us to help them get TN status), I'd rather do zero paperwork by hiring people with existing status, than (allegedly) "not hard" work to support TN hopefuls, especially given the US government is liable these days to randomly change things around and cause chaos - especially in areas likely to score political points like immigration. POTUS could declare tomorrow that every TN (in a certain industry? state? whatever) has to go home in 10 days.

My attitude would certainly change though, if/when we can't find skilled people with existing work authorization, or if I had an incredibly strong personal referral.
by yurishimo | 2025-05-16 19:32:14+00:00
If you enjoy English and German but want something with a more modern twist, might I suggest Dutch? I started learning it about 3 years ago and it's very regular in terms of spelling/pronunciation. Once you learn the irregular verbs (the most common ones, like in any language it seems...), many things will just "make sense", especially if you already know English and German!
by taylorallred | 2025-05-16 19:32:15+00:00
Among the many ways that AI causes me existential angst, you've reminded me of another one. That is, the fact that AI pushes you towards the most average thoughts. It makes sense, given the technology. This scares me because creative thought happens at the very edge. When you get stuck on a problem, like you mentioned, you're on the cusp of something novel that will at the very least grow you as a person. The temptation to use AI could rob you of the novelty in favor what has already been done.
by octo888 | 2025-05-16 19:33:00+00:00
> You're afraid to not get a job, so you won't even try?

I genuinely feel I need a break and need to work on other things. And I feel jumping into a similar tech job would make my mental health situation worse.

The point I was trying to make that being unemployed for a long period makes it harder to get employed at the same level/pay again

> Almost all markets in tech still have great opportunities for 40-years-olds.

Great!

> You're not sure if you want to go solo or not? That seems unclear to me as well

I'm open to self employment, just not not grinding away at a tech product in the hope to get VC money. I don't think I have the passion for tech right now to do that
by RhysabOweyn | 2025-05-16 19:33:05+00:00
I believe that code from one of these things will eventually cause a disaster affecting the capital owners. Then all of a sudden you will need a PE license, ABET degree, 5 years working experience, etc. to call yourself a software engineer. It would not even be historically unique. Charlatans are the reason that lawyers, medical doctors, and civil engineers have to go through lots of education, exams, and vocational training to get into their profession. AI will probably force software engineering as a profession into that category as well.

On the other hand, if your job was writing code at certain companies whose profits were based on shoving ads in front of people then I would agree that no one will care if it is written by a machine or not. The days of those jobs making >$200k a year are numbered.
by Sohcahtoa82 | 2025-05-16 19:33:58+00:00
I think about my grandma who basically hasn't had any semblance of quality of life in well over 5 years.

At first, about 5 years ago, she struggled to walk. Anything over 30 feet and she had to stop for a couple minutes to catch her breath. At the time, she was refusing to use a walker since she would say "Those are for old people!" as if she wasn't already 80 years old.

Of course, when you can't walk, you don't, and so everything gets worse. She eventually accepted that she needed a walker, but by then her knees had degraded so bad that even with it, she could barely move. Getting off the couch is an ordeal that requires two people to lift her up. She got dementia and is now basically bed-bound at a memory care facility.

She stopped living and began merely surviving a minimum of 5 years ago, likely closer to 10 years. Personally, I never want to live like that. If I get to the point where I can't do anything, just put a bullet in me or something. I'm not afraid of dying.

Until then, I'm hitting the gym 2-4x/week. Every time, at least 1,000 steps on the stair machine or 1.5 miles on a treadmill, plus some weights. I've only been going for about 3 months, hoping to increase my speed and endurance and turn it into 2,000 steps or 3 miles.
by SigmundA | 2025-05-16 19:35:18+00:00
.Net uses real OS threads and that 4mb is the stack not the heap which must be allocated on thread creation. The heap is shared in the process amongst all the threads whereas Erlang is separate lightweight green thread/processes with dynamic heap and stack per process.

.Net originates in the Windows world where new processes are expensive but threads are much cheaper however they still use native stacks for iterop and hardware protection, stack must be contiguous so it is fixed at thread creation this is typical for all native os threads.

Erlang is a VM and runs on top of of processes and threads but exposes its own process model to the language that does not map 1:1 and therefore does not have a fixed stack size allowing many light weight processes. It pays an indirection penalty in performance for this but allows some nice stuff.

Java started with green threads and abandoned them, both .Net and Java use asynchronous concepts instead to get high concurrency now days cooperatively releasing threads and rentering them. There was talk of trying green threads out in .Net and bringing them back in Java for ergonomics compared to async, these green threads would not have such large fixed stacks and many more could be made similar to Erlang processes.
by kulahan | 2025-05-16 19:35:18+00:00
What do you mean “if they were really effective”? We still hand out CBRN gear and train in how to put necessary parts on in seconds, because that’s often how little time you get before you’re permanently incapacitated. Mustard gas alone should prove this, and that’s an OLD chemical weapon.

Nowadays we have riot control agents that can be tailored to demographics, react more violently in the presence of sweat, or contain psychoactive ingredients. Nanoparticle dispersion bypasses common gas masks and clothing protection. Even if you’re completely geared up, they can be engineered to last on surfaces for a long time, or react only in the presence of certain triggers. Imagine thinking you’re safe until someone turns on a certain light bulb and you cook inside your protective gear because you were actually exposed 12 hours earlier in an undetectable manner.
by PaulHoule | 2025-05-16 19:35:21+00:00
This source would argue the other way

https://cissm.umd.edu/sites/default/files/2019-08/2000-UCS-C...

It seems that a warhead or decoy would fill a single pixel on the sensor until you got very close to the target, 1 km or so, at which case you have to execute a high-g maneuver in a few ms. The state of the art is a "two color" system where you could make either the warhead or the decoys any "color" you want with surface treatments and/or thermal management (worst case: put the warhead inside a shroud cooled to liquid nitrogen temperature and fire the weapon at night when it won't be illuminated by the sun.)

There was a test in the early 2000s I read about where they were able to pick out a warhead which was intermediate in properties with a set of decoys with various surface treatments. That 's great but they knew exactly what they were up against which we wouldn't know if it was a North Korean missile.

I'd have more faith in the discrimination abilities of ground-based radars in the 12 GHz range than in the "two color" focal plane imager system.
by 90s_dev | 2025-05-16 19:35:36+00:00
That's actually really exciting in that case.

If it goes further and generates native C control flow statements when possible ("if", "for", native functions, native function calls, etc), I think it could be an omni-level language, generating basically Lua statements when dynamic and C when not, and mixing them all within the same program, entirely controlled by how much type information you give it (and how you use tables and metatables).
by 1659447091 | 2025-05-16 19:35:37+00:00
What does that have to do with white farmers? Are you saying there are blockades in rural farm lands that prevent police from entering?

The stats don't even say if that one farmer was white black or any other color nor their sex. 5 of those 12, the employees/security killed, were most likely black, the farmer could have been as well. (same for the 4 dwellers if they were the employee's family that lives on the farm)

If you are claiming general genocide because many people kill other people for so many different reasons, that is not genocide. Considering how many women and children are killed due to domestic violence, maybe you can use the words femicide or filicide instead.
by paulorlando | 2025-05-16 19:35:54+00:00
I've noticed something like this as well. A suggestion is to write/build for no one but yourself. Really no one but yourself.

Some of my best writing came during the time that I didn't try to publicize the content. I didn't even put my name on it. But doing that and staying interested enough to spend the hours to think and write and build takes a strange discipline. Easy for me to say as I don't know that I've had it myself.

Another way to think about it: Does AI turn you into Garry Kasparov (who kept playing chess as AI beat him) or Lee Sedol (who, at least for now, has retired from Go)?

If there's no way through this time, I'll just have to occasionally smooth out the crinkled digital copies of my past thoughts and sigh wistfully. But I don't think it's the end.
by Henchman21 | 2025-05-16 19:35:57+00:00
I’m reminded of the “business ethics” scene in Billy Madison[0]. This is what capitalism has wrought in the US: People for whom ethics are anathema, or arguably worse: a completely unexamined topic.

So, is the company SpaceX or what?

0: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xKGeHuln08A
by wjholden | 2025-05-16 19:36:49+00:00
I just wrote a paper a few days ago arguing that "manual thinking" is going to become a rare and valuable skill in the future. When you look around you, everyone is finding ways to be better using AI, and they're all finding amazing successes – but we're also unsure about the downsides. I hedge that my advantage in ten years will be that I chose not to do what everyone else did. I might regret it, we will see.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-16 19:37:24+00:00
The MIT announcement says they asked him to retract the paper but he wouldn't, which led to them making the public statement about the paper.

They may have thought they could jump into an industry job, including the paper and all of its good press coverage on their resume. Only the author can retract an arXiv paper, not their academic institution. It wouldn't be hard to come up with a story that they decided to leave the academic world and go into industry early.

MIT coming out and calling for the paper's retraction certainly hampers that plan. They could leave it up and hope that some future employer is so enamored with their resume that nobody does a Google search about it, but eventually one of their coworkers is going to notice.
by AIPedant | 2025-05-16 19:37:35+00:00
The reason people correctly view this as silly trivia is that it's hardly an "unrelated prize." The Nobel Foundation administers the Economics prize in the same manner as all the others, and the awards are given at the same ceremony. You are making it sound like it's entirely separate when it's not. I don't think the Nobel Foundation was trying to "leech off the prestige associated with his name."

AFAICT your take exists entirely to delegitimize economics as a science. Very childish and frustrating.
by hintymad | 2025-05-16 19:38:29+00:00
It looks we are in this interesting cycle: millions of engineers contribute to open-source on github. The best of our minds use the code to develop powerful models to replace exactly these engineers. In fact, the more code a group contributes to github, the easier it is for the companies to replace this group. Case in point, frontend engineers are impacted most so far.

Does this mean people will be less incentivized to contribute to open source as time goes by?

P.S., I think the current trend is a wakeup call to us software engineers. We thought we were doing highly creative work, but in reality we spend a lot of time doing the basic job of knowledge workers: retrieving knowledge and interpolating some basic and highly predictable variations. Unfortunately, the current AI is really good at replacing this type of work.

My optimistic view is that in long term we will have invent or expand into more interesting work, but I'm not sure how long we will have to wait. The current generation of software engineers may suffer high supply but low demand of our profession for years to come.
by paintboard3 | 2025-05-16 19:38:40+00:00
I've been finding a lot of fulfillment in using AI to assist with things that are (for now) outside of the scope of one-shot AI. For example, when working on projects that require physical assembly or hands-on work, AI feels more like a superpower than a crutch, and it enables me to tackle projects that I wouldn't have touched otherwise. In my case, this was applied to physical building, electronics, and multimedia projects that rely on simple code that are outside of my domain of expertise.

The core takeaway for me is that if you have the desire to stretch your scope as wide as possible, you can get things done in a fun way with reduced friction, and still feel like your physical being is what made the project happen. Often this means doing something that is either multidisciplinary or outside of the scope of just being behind a computer screen, which isn't everyone's desire and that's okay, too.
by MostlyStable | 2025-05-16 19:38:51+00:00
So that is obviously a significant relationship between ChatGPT estimate and the Henselman Guide BFP numbers. But just being a significant relationship doesn't necessarily mean it's useful. I'd bet that BMI (which the author repeatedly mentions is outdated and not very useful), is almost certainly also significantly correlated with BFP values.

Eyeballing that plot, it looks like ChatGPT estimates are +/- 10%. I'm wondering what the cutoff for usefulness is. I wouldn't' be surprised if BMI is that level of correlated or better.
by ryao | 2025-05-16 19:38:52+00:00
They are sometimes very good at using mathematical identities to do simplifications. The following commit was actually inspired by the output of GCC:

https://github.com/openzfs/spl/commit/8fc851b7b5315c9cae9255...

Jason had noticed that GCC’s assembly output did not match the original macro when looking for a solution to the unsigned integer overflow warning that a PaX GCC plugin had output (erroneously in my opinion). He had conjectured we could safely adopt GCC’s version as a workaround. I gave him the proof of correctness for the commit message and it was accepted into ZFS. As you can see from the proof, deriving that from the original required 4 steps. I assume that GCC had gone through a similar process to derive its output.
by WillAdams | 2025-05-16 19:39:15+00:00
This is only a problem if one is writing/thinking on things which have already been written about without creating a new/novel approach in one's writing.

An AI is _not_ going to get awarded a PhD, since by definition, such are earned by extending the boundaries of human knowledge:

https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

So rather than accept that an LLM has been trained on whatever it is you wish to write, write something which it will need to be trained on.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-05-16 19:39:21+00:00
Why surely? Eg on GPU style chips today you'd tile to warpsize (or half or something like that) to target warp cooperative primitives (so called tensor cores). On AMD and NV that's like 16x16 or 32x32 depending on the data type. That's not that far from 4x4 and it's not like all chips in the world have 32-lane warps. Anyway if a trick is good enough and people start trying to shoehorn it into everything (not saying this one is) then the next gen (or the one after that or after) will just have units to support the trick (it's an expensive way to gain ground on mlperf rankings).