MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BlueTemplar | 2025-05-31 09:17:26+00:00
> An expert will immediately notice discrepancies in the hallucinated answers, and will follow for example the List of IBM PS/2 Models article on Wikipedia. Which will very quickly establish that there is no Model 280.

'member when similar blogposts were written about not trusting Wikipedia ?

(And Wikipedia is still better than LLMs : while you can trust it less than fixed, specialist-made references, you can improve it yourself, as well as check Talk pages for potential disagreements, and page history for potential shenanigans.)
by jajko | 2025-05-31 09:19:43+00:00
Or a lot of small fixes all over the place. Yet in reality we dont see this anywhere, not sure what exactly that means.

Maybe overall complexity creeping up rolls over any small gains, or devs are becoming more lazy and just copy paste llms output without a serious look at it?

My company didnt even adapt or allow use of llms in any way for anything so far (private client data security is more important than any productivity gains, which anyway seems questionable when looking around.. and serious data breaches can end up with fines in hundreds of millions ballpark easily).
by ghusto | 2025-05-31 09:21:04+00:00
I'm a little more optimistic, which is boosted by the change in levels of awareness I'm seeing in people around me (not just tech people).

As much as I like to shit on gen-z, one great thing they have going for them is awareness and understanding at levels that were unobtainable for my generation, and it's trickling _up_ to the older generation.

A good example: My generation always ended discussions of counter-productive change with "Well, that's progress!". Gen-z are asking "progress towards _what_?". People are waking up to the fact that common accepted "wisdom" can be questioned.
by quacksilver | 2025-05-31 09:21:48+00:00
I am not technically an employee - I get given a project and agree to complete milestones for payment. I supply my own tools and take on any risks that it won't be delivered or stuff will break. I carry my own insurance. I could hire other people to do the work if they passed my client's background check requirements and signed the NDAs.

I have a few different clients who I do work for and actively market my services.
by iknownothow | 2025-05-31 09:21:50+00:00
That's fair. I care about the end result.

The problem is about taking information in 2D/3D space and solving the problem. Humans solve these things through vision. LLMs or AI can do it using another algorithm and internal representation that's way better.

I spent a long time thinking about how to solve the ARC AGI 2 puzzles "if I were an LLM" and I just couldn't think of a non-hacky way.

People who're blind use braille or touch to extract 2D/3D information. I don't know how blind people represent 2D/3D info once it's in their brain.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-31 09:22:13+00:00
I saw a report recently about the political left in Denmark, who are basically one of the the only progressive movements in countries that understood what it takes to maintain support, and hence Denmark has had much less of a rise in support for far right parties than other countries in the world. Here's an article, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/magazine/denmark-immigrat....

Basically, progressives in Denmark have argued for very strict immigration rules, the essential argument being that Denmark has an expensive social welfare state, and to get the populace to support the high taxes needed to pay for this, you can't just let anyone in who shows up on your doorstep.

The American left could learn a ton of lessons from this. I may loath Greg Abbott for lots of reasons, but I largely support what he did bussing migrants to NYC and other liberal cities. Many people in these cities wanted to bask in the feelings of moral superiority by being "sanctuary cities", but public sentiment changed drastically when they actually had to start bearing a large portion of the cost of a flood of migrants.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-31 09:22:18+00:00
Hyperbole is as much of a problem. ChatGPT is not omniscient, but it's also not "dumb as shit", at least not across the board. LLMs got popular in big part because they provide unique, distinctly new value.

This black and white assumption that because LLMs are not always giving probably correct answers therefore they are dangerous, reminds me of what the generation of my parents and teachers thought of Wikipedia when it became popular. The problems were different ("anyone can edit" vs. "hallucinates stuff"), but the mindset seems very similar.
by prmoustache | 2025-05-31 09:23:07+00:00
> M&S is not Amazon and doesn't have that many SKUs, 5 people could probably walk round the store in a few days and photograph all of them for the new shopping site.

I can't speak about M&S buy all big physical retail brand which started selling online are exactly operating as Amazon with SKUs coming from various third party entities. The offering is much bigger than what is sold at the physical shops.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-05-31 09:23:25+00:00
losing jobs is the biggest predictable hazard of AI but far from the biggest

however there seems to be a big disconnect on this site and others

If you believe AGI is possible and that AI can be smarter than humans in all tasks, naturally you can imagine many outcomes far more substantial than job loss.

However many people don’t believe AGI is possible, thus will never consider those possibilities

I fear many will deny the probability that AGI could be achieved in the near future, thus leaving themselves and others unprepared for the consequences. There are so many potential bad outcomes that could be avoided merely if more smart people realized the possibility of AGI and ASI, and would thus rationally devote their cognitive abilities to ensuring that the potential emergence of smarter than human intelligences goes well.
by ben_w | 2025-05-31 09:24:21+00:00
Indeed, this is part of the current monopoly abuse case they're facing — did Google deliberately choose to make search worse, because that causes people to return to the search results page and spend more time looking at ads, and they knew they could get away with it?

e.g. bottom of first page, penultimate paragraph https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-11/417557.pdf
by cassianoleal | 2025-05-31 09:24:26+00:00
Plenty of opinion pieces and articles with all kinds of biases are posted here.

If you have specific criticism about something in the article, that could be interesting and has the potential of generating curiosity and starting an interesting discussion.

An empty complaint about the bias of this particular article is what I would rather not have to see here.

And finally, as the sibling user commented, this publication is very upfront about who they are and what they stand for, so the bias itself is not hidden in any way.
by pegasus | 2025-05-31 09:27:46+00:00
There's dumb and there's incoherent. If a person would be incoherent at this level even one time, they would be well advised see a neurologist. Unless they are in some other way incapacitated (i.e. drunk or drugged). Same if they wouldn't be able to count the r's in "strawberry", attempt after attempt, getting more and more lost in again incoherent mock-reasoning.
by rlpb | 2025-05-31 09:29:06+00:00
> I mean, the whole point of fast-math is trading off speed with correctness. If fast-math was to give always the correct results, it wouldn’t be fast-math, it would be the standard way of doing math.

A similar warning applies to -O3. If an optimization in -O3 were to reliably always give better results, it wouldn't be in -O3; it'd be in -O2. So blindly compiling with -O3 also doesn't seem like a great idea.
by apgwoz | 2025-05-31 09:29:18+00:00
The providers need a “driver.” Without that, they aren’t very useful as is. That’s the danger. (Yes, pulumi, etc)

Additionally, HashiCorp changed the terms of service on the registry, making it only acceptable to use the official terraform binaries to download modules or providers.

Now, the providers are mostly open source, so, it was never impossible to recreate the thing—just work. But the point here is that Hashicorp took steps that caused the community of terraform users to recognize that closing off the ecosystem would have a tremendous impact on devops.

That’s why there was so much outrage and immediate action taken.
by frou_dh | 2025-05-31 09:32:16+00:00
Given an eval primitive function that's a black-box, using it does seem somewhat similar to the use of a macro, in that a kind of "double evaluation" occurs (First, eval's argument is evaluated. Then the result of that is evaluated).

When a macro is used for any given purpose, what happens is a bit more general because it first "does something with" its argument (rather than necessarily straight-up evaluating it). Then the result of that is evaluated.
by ljosifov | 2025-05-31 09:34:05+00:00
It will recombine the existing resources in new ways. Neanderthals had access to exactly the same natural resources as we have now. Obviously we do much more with what we both got, then they ever did. Obviously it's not only the availability of some atoms or molecules, but what one does with them, how one recombines them in novel ways. For that one needs knowledge and energy. And the later mostly turns out can be derived from the the former too.
by Simulacra | 2025-05-31 09:35:18+00:00
Maybe because I didn't meet my wife until I was 35, I think there is some rationality in all of this.

Modern dating is mostly based on how someone looks, in those short milliseconds before they decide to swipe left, or right. I think that recognizing when you may not be what women want, and that attempts in modern dating have and will continue to fail, why not just back away instead of continuing to put yourself through that?
by goku12 | 2025-05-31 09:37:00+00:00
> I don’t think I could have taught myself touch typing on QWERTY because I was already too ingrained with bad habits

It is possible to learn touch typing on a layout where you have already developed bad practices. That's what I did on Qwerty. There will initially be a tendency to switch back to the hunt-and-peck method, since you're not yet fully comfortable with touch typing. This can be curtailed by forcing yourself from looking at the keyboard. It's nearly impossible to hunt-and-peck without looking at the keyboard occasionally. However, that tendency will eventually disappear as you become comfortable with touch typing, as it's the easier style among the two.
by hnaccount_rng | 2025-05-31 09:37:58+00:00
That’s a difficult example. I don’t think anyone would reasonably expect the engineering artifact twitter.com to break. But the business artifact did break. At least to a reasonable degree. The Ad revenue is still down (both business news and the ads I’m experiencing are from less well resourced brands). And yes, that has to do with “answering emails with poop emojis” and “laying off content checkers”
by bonki | 2025-05-31 09:39:27+00:00
I do believe her when she says that this has great sentimental value for her as well (although I'm equally certain that's not the whole truth), since the business value, as you said, isn't as huge anymore as it used to be before her re-recordings. But she bought back the rights to everything, including artwork, music videos etc., so she got back a lot more than what she possibly could "work around" by just re-recording the music. The re-recordings are really, really good (in a reverse-engineering sense concerning the production), and to a casual listener or untrained ear they might sound identical (apart from the stuff that's intentionally different), but they aren't and to me they sound just off. Swifties probably prefer the new versions for the reason you explained, but I like the originals more since every nuance is engrained in my brain and to me the tiny differences are throwing me off when listening to the new versions.
by CamouflagedKiwi | 2025-05-31 09:40:54+00:00
The optimisations in -O3 aren't supposed to give incorrect results. They're not in -O2 because they make a more aggressive space/speed tradeoff or increase compile times more significantly. In the same way, the optimisations in -O2 are not meant to be less correct than -O1, but they aren't in that group for similar reasons.

-Ofast is the 'dangerous' one. (It includes -ffast-math).
by delusional | 2025-05-31 09:41:56+00:00
> it's just sort of understood that a kernel LPE is going to break containers.

I think it's generally understood that any sort of kernel LPE can potentially (and therefore is generally considered to) lead to breaking all security boundaries on the local machine, since the kernel contains no internal security boundaries. That includes both containers, but also everything else such a user separation, hardware virtualization controlled by the local kernel, and kernel private secrets.
by delusional | 2025-05-31 09:46:00+00:00
> silicon support for nested virtualization

Is there any guarantee that this "silicon support" is any safer than the software? Once we break the software abstraction down far enough it's all just configuring hardware. Conversely, once you start baking significant complexity into hardware (such as strong security boundaries) it would seem like hardware would be subject to exactly the same bugs as software would, except it will be hard to update of course.
by bobsingor | 2025-05-31 09:46:38+00:00
Quick update: I just added a new option where you can set a custom wasmUrl when initializing the snippet. This way you can host your own .wasm build if you want to be 100% sure it hasn’t been modified.

Here’s the commit: https://github.com/embedpdf/embed-pdf-viewer/commit/ff928377...

Thanks again for raising the point — really good feedback!
by jajko | 2025-05-31 09:47:22+00:00
Switzerland is the same. By far the best implemented immigration policies in whole Europe, if only Germany and France egos would step down a notch, acknowledge their mistakes and take an inspiration from clearly way more successful neighbour. They have 3x more immigration than next country and it just works, long term.

EU would flourish economically and there would be no room for ultra conservative right to gain any real foothold (which is 95% just failed immigration topic just like Brexit was).

Alas, we are where we are, they slowly backpedal but its too little too late, as usually. I blame Merkel for half of EU woes, she really was a horrible leader of otherwise very powerful nation made much weaker and less resilient due to her flawed policies and lack of grokking where world is heading to.

Btw she still acknowledges nothing and keeps thinking how great she was. Also a nuclear physicist who turned off all existing nuclear plants too early so Germany has to import massive amount of electricity from coal burning plants. You can't make it up.
by hommelix | 2025-05-31 09:48:35+00:00
> - Give me an app to scan my (mostly neatly-written) notes into text, maybe with hooks so I can train it on my own quirks of notation. Then I can review my notes more easily - even on the go - during the semester, and rearrange & reformat & refactor them.

Some tablets have apps for your first request. If I write by hand so that I can read myself later, my Supernote Nomad can transcript and export to text file. It's not perfect, but with the fast feedback, I can rewrite a word more cleanly when I see that a letter was not recognized.
Show HN: MCP server that compresses and serves MySQL schema data
by shibayu36 | 2025-05-31 09:49:07+00:00
I built an MCP server that compresses and serves MySQL schema information.

When you ask an AI to write MySQL queries, you must give it the project’s schema. In very large projects a single database can have hundreds of tables. If you feed the whole schema dump to the AI, the context becomes too long and the request often fails.

To fix this, I thought an MCP server could return a neatly compressed schema so SQL generation works better. While learning MCP, I built a server that first fetches a table list and then fetches detailed information only for the tables you need.

More details in the blog post: https://medium.com/@shibayu36/i-built-an-mcp-server-that-com...
by fuddy | 2025-05-31 09:50:06+00:00
The OWASP auth cheat sheet discusses many of the options for making that phishing of a password useless instead of reacting to its use.. Separate IDPs with weak mfa, fido, etc. And of course if one isn't doing small-time bland business one should consider more complete computing silos for many things, signed email or separate double ratchet oriented messengers, etc.
by delusional | 2025-05-31 09:51:23+00:00
Could you elaborate on how you could secure those architectures better? It's unclear to me how being in device firmware or being a VMM provides you with any further abilities. Surely you still have the same fundamental problem of being a shared resource.

Intuitively there are differences. The Linux kernel is fucking huge, and anything that could bake the "shared resources" down to less than the entire kernel would be easier to verify, but that would also be true for an entirely software based abstraction inside the kernel.

In a way it's the whole micro kernel discussion again.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-05-31 09:53:54+00:00
You may not be wrong overall, when it comes to systemic issues. The problem men have in this context is systemic and societal. The problem women had historically with inequality and lack of liberties was also systemic and societal. Men not adapting to fairness and equality though, that may be societal but it isn't systemic, as in an issue caused by some social system. It maybe a psychological issue that has reached epidemic levels and maybe it can be addressed systemically, but the cause boils down to individuals not accepting a just and fair outcome.

This also applies in other matters like race relations for example. People whom historically have been afforded better opportunities suffer when people from all races are treated fairly. That is what justice looks like. Not having an unfair and unjust entitlement does not translate to suffering from a systemic issue. Accepting just and fair outcomes and adapting to a current reality is a healthy way of adapting.

The reason I feel strongly about this is because historically, when groups of people have a social complaint and they feel wronged and their entitlements taken away from them, they tend to turn to violence or some other social harm. They end up implementing injustice at mass scale. For example, regardless of your views on the topic, abortion laws in America today are designed to degrade liberties of women (regardless of anyone's intent). Fairness and equality to all members of society is not a systemic issue that needs correction. Failing to obtain a romantic partner of interest is not an unfair situation, for men or for women alike.
by nextaccountic | 2025-05-31 09:54:24+00:00
> ('Naming: "algebraic" is not very descriptive of what this does since the operations themselves are algebraic.' :D)

Okay, the floating point operations are literally algebraic (they form an algebra) but they don't follow some common algebraic properties like associativity. The linked tracking issue itself acknowledges that:

> Naming: "algebraic" is not very descriptive of what this does since the operations themselves are algebraic.

Also this comment https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/136469#issuecomment...

> > On that note I added an unresolved question for naming since algebraic isn't the most clear indicator of what is going on. > > I think it is fairly clear. The operations allow algebraically justified optimizations, as-if the arithmetic was real arithmetic. > > I don't think you're going to find a clearer name, but feel free to provide suggestions. One alternative one might consider is real_add, real_sub, etc.

Then retorted here https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/136469#issuecomment...

> These names suggest that the operations are more accurate than normal, where really they are less accurate. One might misinterpret that these are infinite-precision operations (perhaps with rounding after a whole sequence of operations). > > The actual meaning isn't that these are real number operations, it's quite the opposite: they have best-effort precision with no strict guarantees. > > I find "algebraic" confusing for the same reason. > > How about approximate_add, approximate_sub?

And the next comment

> Saying "approximate" feels imperfect, as while these operations don't promise to produce the exact IEEE result on a per-operation basis, the overall result might well be more accurate algebraically. E.g.: > > (...)

So there's a discussion going on about the naming
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-05-31 09:54:36+00:00
I basically agree with you, and I think the thing that is missing from a bunch of responses that disagree is that it seems fairly apparent now that AI has largely hit a brick wall in terms of the benefits of scaling. That is, most folks were pretty astounded by the gains you could get from just stuffing more training data into these models, but like someone who argues a 15 year old will be 50 feet tall based on the last 5 years' growth rate, people who are still arguing that past growth rates will continue apace don't seem to be honest (or aware) to me.

I'm not at all saying that it's impossible some improvement will be discovered in the future that allows AI progress to continue at a breakneck speed, but I am saying that the "progress will only accelerate" conclusion, based primarily on the progress since 2017 or so, is faulty reasoning.
by chronid | 2025-05-31 09:56:25+00:00
Suddenly? That's the level of quality that is standard in all software projects I've ever seen since I've started working in IT.

Enshittification is all around us and is unstoppable. Because we have deadlines to hit and goals to shows we reached to the VP. We broke everything and the software is just half working? Come on that's an issue for the support and ops teams. On to the next beautiful feature we can put on marketing slides!
by TeMPOraL | 2025-05-31 10:00:12+00:00
> eg i ask for a source, it gives me a quote

It should give you both - the quote should be attributed to where it was found. That's, generally, what people mean when they ask or search for "a source" of some claim.

As for general point - using LLMs as "better search" doesn't really look like those Google quick AI answers. It looks like what Perplexity does, or what o3 in ChatGPT does when asked a question or given a problem to solve. I recommend checking out the latter; it's not perfect, but good enough to be my default for nontrivial searches, and more importantly, it shows how "LLMs for search" should work to be useful.