MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-22 07:41:27+00:00
Is it that ChatGPT is a gimmick or is it that people are using it as such?

A lot of the author's arguments could have been said about the internet in the 90's. This is a baby 4 year old leap in technology, why are people expecting it to be mature?

It is human nature to try and find silver bullets, to take solutions and find problems. The way I would look at the LLM-centered future is to consider LLM agents assistants and suggestion makers, personal consultants even. You don't ask an agent to write an essay for you, you write an essay, and as you write consider its suggestions and corrections. The models should be familiar with your writing style and preferences. Don't blame ChatGPT for human laziness.

There was this fad about every thing being smart* (smart home,smart tooth brush , smart sex toy,etc...). that wasn't smart, it was just connected to a network. This is "smart". and in the future technology might get past "smart" and become "intelligent" (we're not there yet, outside of scifi at least).

At the end of the day, everyone needs to step back and consider this: It's just a tool. period. it's not "AI", not really. there is no intelligence.

The problem is, the world is full of enshittification capitalists and their doomsday bandwagons.
by lifthrasiir | 2025-05-22 07:41:34+00:00
The only thing you should know is that any use of bel and thus decibel should ideally have the reference level suffixed (usually in parentheses or subscript), not implied. The absolute sound pressure level is dB(SPL). The human-perceived loudness level is dB(A) and similar. The RMS voltage expressed in power is dB(u) (formerly dB(v), not same as capital dB(V)). And so on. And then each different instance of dB unit is simply distinct, only connected by the fact that it represents some ratio in the logarithmic fashion. Treat any new dB unit you haven't seen as an alien.
by elric | 2025-05-22 07:41:59+00:00
> “Human interaction is not as important to today’s students,” Latham claims

Goodness that's depressing. Is this going to crank individualism up to 11?

I remember hating having to do group projects in school. Most often, 3/5 of the group would contribute jack shit, while the remaining people had to pick up the slack. But even with lazy gits, the interactions were what made it valuable.

Maybe human/-I cooperation is an important skill for people to learn, but it shouldn't come at the cost of losing even more human-human cooperation and interaction.
by GistNoesis | 2025-05-22 07:42:13+00:00
If only...

When you first encounter diffusion models, you usually see a well formed picture emerge from noise.

And then you realize, there is no reason it shouldn't work for anything where you can add noise to. Which means everything. From picture, to audio to text, to anything encoded in data.

An infinite world of images and human creations in 10GB of weights.

A meaningful universe lost in speckle of dusts.

I remembered the line from the Genesis : "For dust you are and to dust you shall return".

I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.
by danlitt | 2025-05-22 07:43:31+00:00
It is refreshing to see I am not the only person who cannot get LLMs to say anything valuable. I have tried several times, but the cycle "You're right to question this. I actually didn't do anything you asked for. Here is some more garbage!" gets really old really fast.

It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-22 07:43:35+00:00
Well, I interpreted your reply as implying that the only vectors possible were shared WiFi or ARP spoofing. If you merely intended to offer two examples, then it makes more sense. But I am still not sure why your answers are so irrelevant!

So, I am still unsure that you are clued in here, because the article you have linked to has nothing at all to do with tampering in-flight TCP streams, only sniffing them. Perhaps you do not understand how these principles differ. This shared WiFi scenario certainly permits eavesdropping on unencrypted channels, and that’s a danger that’s distinct from actual MITM.

You claim we’re describing the same thing but we are not.

> did I describe methods

No, actually you didn’t — you named one vector and one mostly unrelated LAN attack. ARP spoofing may be a stepping stone, but not really central.

The attack you describe happens at the application layer, in fact. It doesn’t even need to use TCP. You’re simply stealing someone’s credentials and reusing them in a new browser session. There’s really no way to legitimately describe this as “MITM” — or “tampering” at all. [Your Wikipedia article does not use these terms.]

And in a typical Starbucks installation, nobody would realistically attempt to tamper with in-flight TCP streams. Because that attack would involve some elaborate setup, presenting a higher challenge than the Firesheep attack. I am sure you could explain and describe the former, if you understand the underlying principles.

No, the classic MITM attacks on http do involve neither WiFi nor ARP, but simply interposing malicious code somewhere else on-path. [Actually it is not necessarily malicious, because NAT gateways work by modifying TCP streams too!] That’s why a newer name is called “on-path attack”. And you seem to have omitted that scenario from your comments.
by cztomsik | 2025-05-22 07:44:20+00:00
I have no idea how it works actually (in google) but I wouldn't be surprised if it was just post-training because recently RWKV people did something similar: They replaced the whole attention mechanism with WKV (forward-only linear attention), and created such franken-stein just by post-training.

The big wow moment about that is that it sort of implies that most of the useful knowledge is in the FFN, and attention itself is not that unique/important.

https://substack.recursal.ai/p/qwerky-72b-and-32b-training-l...

BTW: It could be also interesting to try use already trained attention and see how long the FFN itself takes in the gpt2 speedtraining (it would be against the rules but still very interesting IMHO - definitely something I'd like to read paper about) https://github.com/KellerJordan/modded-nanogpt

Also, I read yesterday that at some point, the embeddings across all of the models are (very) comparable/similar, and a simple converter can be trained, and if both of these statements are true maybe we could just train everything much faster just by sharing fixed embeddings and attentions.
by ProllyInfamous | 2025-05-22 07:44:28+00:00
My twin always tells me (when I'm expressing sadness): "You need something to do, someone to love, and something to look forward to."

It usually helps.

When I need more words to chew over, I re-read ViolentAcres' incredible post "Most People are Sad for a Reason" [1]. Thanks for my annual reminder.

>“I learned that I wasn’t sad because there was something wrong with my brain. I learned that I was sad because my life sucked ... you should be wary of the Doctor who tells you a pill is a fix for your broken mind. The way I see it, you have a lot of reasons to be sad right now. So if that’s what you’re feeling, that seems about right to me.” —linked author's grandmother

[1] https://violentacres.com.jimfaulkner.net/most-people-are-dep...
by rini17 | 2025-05-22 07:44:30+00:00
The actual modern Ada ended up being reasonable and the conservative design is justified. And it's no more verbose than Java anyway. Is there any writeup on the discrepance between the hysteria and the real thing?

I think it was blowback to the hype. Rust, sadly, seem to be bound to end likewise as the rustaceans enthusiastically endorse AI-driven rewriting of legacy DoD C code into Rust. What can go wrong there?
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-22 07:45:52+00:00
Hardly shortsighted. IntelliJ has a business model, Kotlin doesn't. Maximizing Kotlin usage does nothing for Jetbrains directly, just creates costs. And sure it brings people to IntelliJ, more importantly, it keeps them there.

It's kinda like describing Apple as short sighted for not giving away the source code to all their frameworks. Doing so would maximise usage but that's not their goal.
by atoav | 2025-05-22 07:46:14+00:00
As someone who teaches this concept to.. art students I have to say that this complaint sounds a lot like the typical misconceptions and confusions a beginner would have.

Yes, dB is a weird and unintuitive concept and it takes a moment to understand it, but it is also extremely useful once you get it. The fact that people don't write out the reference values does not help either, people will bounce out that audio mix at -20dB when in fact they mean -20dBFS which is referenced to the digital maximum (Full Scale) value. Above 0dBFS you clip the waveform.

People leaving out the reference part is the mean reason for the confusion IMO.
by neepi | 2025-05-22 07:46:48+00:00
No. dB is not a unit. If it's quoted as a unit, then the person using it doesn't know what they are doing. dBx where x is some reference value is a unit and that means dB relative to the reference unit. So dBm/dBv etc are units. dB is not.

Mathematically, dB is the ratio between two unit values and for example if you divide metres by metres you cancel the units.
by muzani | 2025-05-22 07:47:18+00:00
Find out who has the same problem. They've probably tried hacking a solution. Find communities that hack these solutions.

Reddit is not a community most of the time and the people there are jaded with ads. Product Hunt is generally the wrong kind of community unless you're selling to startups.

Normally you should search for these before building anything. HN might be one, but a lot of us already use AI for repetitive Java code, and those who actually care a lot about boilerplate move on to Kotlin.

There's probably some workflow enthusiast communities or Java though. There's the "practice one kick 10000 times" type of people, who prefer using something tried and proven like Java than learn a new language.
by fedeb95 | 2025-05-22 07:47:19+00:00
Some companies may save money by employing LLMs to do shallow things. Others may not. Also, LLMs are not all AIs. AI is a broad field with many models and applications that were already omnipresent in our lives but less marketable to the general public as revolutionary, such as spam filter. AI is NOT a gimmick per se. Some users are.

P.S.: consider that when there are huge investments in something, people will do anything to see a return, including paying other people to create hype.
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-22 07:48:34+00:00
The demos I see all make compromises in order to work that hobble you from hardening them or otherwise lock you to very specific conceptualizations that you simply wouldn't have building from the smallest low level building blocks or even starting at a super high level state machine placeholder. In my experience no matter how hard I try it will be guided by the weights of the total generated output towards something that doesn't understand the value of compartmentalization, and will add tokens that make its probabilities work internally above all.
by collyw | 2025-05-22 07:49:37+00:00
The benefit of Anki for me has been the decks that I have downloaded more than the app (I have downloaded 3 or 4 for learning Spainsh and some are a lot better thought out than others). If you are going to gain any traction I would suggest trying to convert some popular Anki decks to your app.Otherwise it will be like the Ubuntu phone I bought a few years ago. Nice product, but next to no content / apps, making it a lot less useful than it could have been.
by wilg | 2025-05-22 07:50:38+00:00
> But look at what people actually use this wonder for: brain-dead books and videos, scam-filled ads, polished but boring homework essays. Another presenter at the workshop I attended said he used AI to help him decide what to give his kids for breakfast that morning.

The last example is actually the most interesting! The essays are whatever, dumb or lazy kids are gonna cheat on their homework, schools have long needed better ways of teaching kids than regurgitative essays, but in the mean time just use an in-class essay or exam. But people aren't really making the brain-dead books and videos as anything other than a curiosity, despite the fears of various humanities professors.

The interesting part of AI, and I suspect the primary actual use case, is everything else.
by thinkingemote | 2025-05-22 07:51:46+00:00
"Bob went to Venice to pick up the doge."

Where doge is both the name of a title (like duke) but it is misspelt "dog". The use of "Venice" where doge's are could increase a the likelihood of a smarter spell check keeping doge and not correcting to dog. Looking at a wider context might see that Bob is talking about a pupper.

A simpler example would be "spell cheque"
by kazinator | 2025-05-22 07:51:55+00:00
> This means that if you’re talking about watts, +1 bel is an increase of 10×; but if you’re talking about volts, it’s an increase of √10×. This is nuts: it’s akin to saying that the milli- prefix should have different meanings depending on whether we’re talking about meters or liters.

Well no, because even if you are focusing on a signal measured in volts, the bel continues to be related to power and not voltage. As soon as you mention bels or decibels, you're talking about the power aspect of the signal.

If volume were measured in meters, which were understood to be the length of one edge of a cube whose volume is being given, then one millimeter (1/1000th of distance) would have to be interpreted as one billionth (1/1,000,000,000) of the volume.

When you use voltage to convey the amplitude of a signal, it's like giving an area in meters, where it is understood that 100x more meters is 10,000x the area.

There could exist a logarithmic scale in which +3 units represents a doubling of voltage. We just wouldn't be able to call those units decibels.
by Rashka7 | 2025-05-22 07:51:55+00:00
Hey HN,

I made ProductiveLife.app(https://productivelife.app), a small project built over a few late-night coding sessions. It calculates how many productive hours you have left in life, assuming you’re most productive between 20 and 65.

It's dark, but also strangely motivating. I wanted a way to remind myself to use time better — and this helped.

It’s privacy-friendly, no accounts, no tracking — just a thought-provoking number.

I’d love feedback, ideas for features, or your thoughts on whether this motivates or depresses you

Thanks for checking it out!
Show HN: I built a SaaS that lets you create digital manuals with drag and drop
by NicoBeere | 2025-05-22 07:52:26+00:00
My best friend and I developed a SaaS last month while working full-time: Chyrid (chyrid.com). It’s a tool for creating digital manuals without design or coding skills. Users build structured, polished documents with a drag-and-drop editor, and Chyrid handles the formatting—without using AI. We built it because most documentation tools are either too complex or too unstructured. A company is already using it for onboarding and process docs, but we’re still figuring out how to position it and who finds it most useful. Would love any thoughts on potential use cases or feedback on the concept. If you want to try it out, we’d really appreciate your input.
by techas | 2025-05-22 07:52:49+00:00
I work in academia and have over 70 papers published. I Agree with most ideas in the article. Another dimension not covered is what I called “author engineering”. Many times it is very difficult to “get into” a new field if you don’t have an author known by the editors. I work in applied math (very transversal) and happen to me often to be rejected because “I don’t belong to the area”. PhD students usually don’t suffer from this as the supervisor is already a member of the community. But if not, try to bring a collaborator that is known in the area. This is usually done in conferences by chatting with people.
by modo_mario | 2025-05-22 07:53:17+00:00
As kids we collected pokemon cards. Even less inherent value and we didn't even really play the game well or certainly didn't know the proper rules.

Stamps are collectibles from all over the world, that keep/kept getting made with varied art, history, etc on it often having interesting factoids to know about em, etc And with some effort if you were writing letters and postcards anyway you got them for free (with some stamp lines on em from time to time)
by vineyardmike | 2025-05-22 07:53:19+00:00
I've used a bunch of these, and they're different with different use-cases, but your point still stands about them being confusing. It seems many AI companies see a world where we have lots of small mini-apps written by LLMs, so why not integrate that into a variety of tools, I guess?

AI Studio: Mostly a playground for building mini-apps that integrate with the Gemini APIs. A big sell seems to be that you don't need an API key, instead you just build your app for testing, and the access is injected somehow. The UI is more stripped down than an IDE and I assume you'd only use it to prototype basic things. I don't know why there are "deployment" options in the UI, frankly.

Firebase Studio: Mostly a sales funnel for firebase I assume, but this is a "tradition" prototyping/development tool that uses AI to make a product. It supports front end and backend code. This also has a chat bot, but it's more of a web-IDE than a chat-first interface.

Gemini Canvas: This is gemini-the-chatbot writing mini-web-apps in a side-panel. The use case seems to be visualization and super basic prototyping. I've used it to make super simple bespoke tools like a visualizer for structured JSON objects for debugging, or an API tester. The HTML is served statically from a google domain, and you can "remix" versions created by others with your own prompts.

Jules - Experimental tool that writes code in existing codebases by handling full "tickets" or tasks in one go. Never used it, so i don't know the interface. I think it's similar to Codex though.

Gemini Code Assist - their version of a copilot. I think its also integrated or cross-branded with

Vertex AI API, Gemini API - these are just APIs for models.
by admissionsguy | 2025-05-22 07:53:36+00:00
> It makes me wonder whether everyone else is kidding themselves, or if I'm just holding it wrong.

Have been wondering this ever since 1 week after the initial ChatGPT release.

My cynical take is that most people don't do real work (i.e. one that is objectively evaluated against reality), so are not able to see the difference between a gimmick and the real thing. Most people are in the business of making impressions, and LLMs are pretty good at that.

It's good that we have markets that will eventually sort it out.
by max_ | 2025-05-22 07:54:00+00:00
The millenial tech bros have mostly made thier money off gimmicks like Instagram, TikTok et al

I was very disgusted when I saw VC firms with billions in AUM put money into things like FartCoin, Digital Twins

The Boomer VCs financed stuff that is genuinely useful, MRI Scanners, Google, Apple Computers, Genetech (brought insulin to the masses).

The milenial VCs fund stuff that is at best convenient to have (Airbnb, Uber) but usually gimmicks, Instagram, Tiktok.

Sam Altman is the master of gimmicks.

He took the GPT model that already existed and wrapped it into chat format similar to Elizer[0]

Got Neural style that existed for a long time and paired it with Studio Ghibli fanatics. [1]

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_style_transfer
by th0ma5 | 2025-05-22 07:55:20+00:00
Some opinions out there that people are using them as slot machines, are using them in place of project templates and aren't really working on things of substance, or they are in the business of producing artifacts that look like work but the fitness is determined elsewhere. If they are producing working code beyond autocomplete style capabilities they either are disinterested in the long term supportability, ignoring all of the handholding they have to do to get things to work, or don't understand that experienced programmers ultimately get to a point where they are not writing that much code to begin with which isn't something these tools can help much with other than rubber duck style bouncing off of ideas... but even then on the bleeding edge of capabilities you get exponentially more and more bits from unrelated patterns that make the internal weights work the closer you get away from well worn development paths.
by rocqua | 2025-05-22 07:55:31+00:00
Decibels in gain, those are fine. Though they use a silly base. dBm makes a decent amount of sense, given the RF background. The fact that decibels work differently for voltage and power is very weird, but understandable in isolation.

But audio decibels are horribly underspecified. And any other use of a decibel as a dimensionful unit is horrible. I think the RF people know, and that's why they use dBm. Any system that uses decibels as dimensional units needs to make their baseline clear.

I recently saw a fan advertising a low decibel noise "at 3 meters". And it's nice that they advertise (part of) the baseline, but it sweeps a ~10db difference in pressure under the rug, comparee to the standard 1m reference.
by fouronnes3 | 2025-05-22 07:55:40+00:00
However you must concede that the perspective of an outsider can be refreshingly eye opening sometimes, even to experts. Especially when it reveals the arcane practices that make a field difficult to learn - for example here the point about the base being too implicit is very valid. The article is perhaps ignorant of a few things, but its criticism shouldn't be dismissed outright IMO. Accepting constructive criticism from someone less experienced at something is a good exercise in humility, and can often help you improve. It's far from a "curse in any field".
by close04 | 2025-05-22 07:55:53+00:00
> just looks like a massive pile of wiring, magnets and generic electronics

You just described a tokamak fusion reactor. So at the end of the day you either know exactly what you're looking at and are in awe of the entire achievement, or have no idea what you're looking at and maybe are in awe of the massive pile of engineeringy looking bits and bobs.

Same effect visiting any massive chemical plant or oil refinery (because the processes usually require a lot of pipes, huge containers, and so on), that make you wonder "how on Earth do they even remember where everything is, let alone design and build it".

Not much different from art if you think about it. You can see a masterpiece painting, or some paint on a piece of cloth.

But for all of the above, when you know what those are, the impressive effect is amplified.