MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by envirogis | 2025-05-24 18:29:36+00:00
I had the same reaction. I spend an increasingly large part of my day reading and being required to edit AI slop. Part of what makes that hard as well as annoying is that it is all reasonably well written and plausible. Just not factual. That’s the real problem I think all of society is likely to face soon if not already. Not to mention the upcoming problem of new AI models trained on the internet of slop.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-05-24 18:29:50+00:00
The OP is conflicted by wanting to share code under a permissive OSS license but regretting how this is benefitting certain users they dislike. I understand this, but at least it burns both ways (look at Microsoft's VS Code vs. Cursor and the other forks).

The way "real" OSS licenses (by OSI) allow use for any purpose has been a major reason the movement has succeeded and for that it's worth putting up with some users doing stuff the authors might not like.
by watwut | 2025-05-24 18:30:16+00:00
> In addition, Germany’s value-added tax is remitted on exports but charged on imports.

VAT is paid regardless of who manufactured the car. It is something the final customer has to pay regardless of whether the product was made in EU or abroad. If you are buying BMW, you have to pay VAT. If you are buying Toyota, you have to pay VAT. If you are buying an American car, you have to pay exactly the same VAT. It is sales tax, basically, just managed differently to make tax fraud harder.

Also, Mercedes-Benz and BMW have great reputation and fit into European roads. Ford and General Motors do not have comparatively great reputation. Germans were buying Teslas tho, before those became associated with support to far right.

Article author is lying, plain and simple.
by EdgeExplorer | 2025-05-24 18:30:54+00:00
My proposition is that likes are very different from the non-verbal responses you describe.

Non-verbal responses can only happen in 1) an existing conversation with 2) a small group.

Likes often happen 1) in place of conversation and 2) within a large group.

A like could be given drive-by by any of your 1000 connections at any with no other engagement. That is nothing like "uh huh" and head nods. In fact, if someone outside your small group conversation interjects an "uh huh" randomly while walking past, it's a bit rude.
by pixl97 | 2025-05-24 18:31:18+00:00
>so it’s silly to speculate what will happen when it replaces humans in those jobs it can’t actually perform

Why?

If you're waiting around for AI to do these things by the time it happens it will be getting hit like a truck. The speed of technological implementation these days is very fast, especially when compared to the speed of regulation.

Moreso we are not just seeing improvement in things like LLMs, there is broad improvements in robotics and generalized behavior in AI.
by mmarian | 2025-05-24 18:31:20+00:00
Why don't you reach out to the person who's hiring, tell them your situation, and ask for an informal chat? Maybe even offer to work for free / on a freelance basis for a few months? Or build something that's relevant to them, then show them?

Better than writing up a generic bio/cover letter and going through their ATS.

I wouldn't bother too much with LinkedIn, just put the tech keywords and you're set.
by supertimor | 2025-05-24 18:33:04+00:00
As the other poster pointed out, California, in fact, has one of the lowest felony theft thresholds out of any of the states. In fact, it has the 12th lowest felony threshold in the union. [1]

Of the top 15 states with the highest felony thresholds, only 4 of them are Democratic states. Two states are purple (but have voted red in the last election). So, it would seem Republicans states actually tend to have the highest felony threshold amounts across the US.

It was actually Oklahoma who started the trend to increase the felony threshold in the early 2000s.

Do you want to know which states have the highest felony theft thresholds? It’s Texas and Wisconsin at $2500. In 2014, California went from a threshold of $400 to $950. In 2015, Texas went from a threshold of $1500 to $2500, so California’s threshold has always been much lower even in the recent past. [2]

On top of that, California actually repealed parts of prop 47 in 2024.

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/felony-thef... [2] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-bri...
by tormeh | 2025-05-24 18:33:29+00:00
The Slack thing is a feature. Each org can have their own theme. Don't understand why it's desirable that everything has the OS theme. Some people spend 8 hours per day in Slack. Having it look a bit unfamiliar the first time you boot it up is fine, IMO.

Also IRC looks and works like ass. As a teenager I used it without putting in the time to getting used to it, and it was really really impenetrable.
by perching_aix | 2025-05-24 18:34:16+00:00
It is an objection. I'm not sure if you consider the whole subfield of machine learning that is classification non-existing, or just the fact that LLMs can produce classifications, but either way, I do object.

The objection against the former is trivial and self evident, and was more where my sudden upset came from. *

Against the latter, the model trying to make the overall text that is its context window approach a chat exchange, by adjusting its own output within it accordingly, doesn't make a hypothetical request for classification in there not performed. You either classify or you don't. If it's doing it in a "misguided" way, it doesn't make it not performed. If it's doing it under the pretense of roleplay, it still doesn't make it not performed. Same is true if the LLM is actually secretly a human operator, or if the LLM is just spewing random tokens. Either you got a classified output of your input or you didn't. It doesn't "look like" anything. I can understand if maybe you mean that the designated notion of the person in the exchange it's trying to approximate for is going to affect the classifications it provides when requested one in the context window, but since these models are trained to "act agentic", I'm not sure if that's a useful thing to ponder (as there's no other way to get anything out of them).

I object to the whole "AI is just statistics" notion too. In several situations you want it to do something completely different than what the dataset would support just through rote statistics. That's where you get actual value out of them. One could conveniently recategorize that as just "advanced statistics", or "higher level" statistics, but I think that's a very perverse way of defining statistics. There's very clearly more mathematics involved in LLMs than just statistics. Just the other day, there was a post here trying to regard LLMs as "just topology". Clearly neither of these can be true at the same time, which was consequently explored in the thread too.

> You're not talking with the model, you're talking with some entity

I'm not suggesting I'm actually talking with anyone or anything in particular beyond the antropomorphization.

* What I meant by "people saying AI is not real" is that people claim to regard that the current generation of AI products are not real "artificial intelligences", because they seem to think that it's either "SkyNet" and "Detroit: Become Human", or nothing. Unsurprisingly, these folks don't tend to talk much about OCR, image segmentation and labeling, optical flow, etc. And just like the half a century old field of Artificial Intelligence isn't just some new marketing con that just spawned into existence, classification algorithms aren't some novel snakeoil either.

Edit: typing this all out about how I'm aware I'm not actually having conversations with anyone or anything gave me a feeling of realization. This is not good, because intellectually I was always aware of this, meaning I got subconsciously parasocial with these products and services over time. Really concerned about this all of a sudden lol.
by hbartab | 2025-05-24 18:35:48+00:00
Interesting article, though I disagree with the statement that many a government does not care:

> At a time where the government's uncaring boot is pressing down on all of our necks, the best way to fight back is to care.

They care, just not about most people, animals, or the planet. They care to get richer and consolidate even more power.
by yencabulator | 2025-05-24 18:37:18+00:00
The other downside is that D2 is a thinly-veiled Open Core project and you'll be forever stuck with yet another company trying to get money from you:

https://d2lang.com/tour/tala/

> Proprietary layout engine developed by Terrastruct

> TALA is a separate install from D2, to keep a clean cut between 100% free and open-source D2, and proprietary, closed-source TALA.

The two non-proprietary layout engines are 1) Dagre, a port of ideas from Graphviz to Javascript, where the only benefit over Graphviz seems to be "it's in Javascript!" 2) ELK, a fairly naive layout engine that makes non-symmetrical graphs with oddly crooked lines.
by neilv | 2025-05-24 18:37:21+00:00
I would've liked to hand articles like this to someone, when I was making related arguments about not pretending to be a big company.

One seed startup (where I had our prestigious flagship enterprise customer running with thus-far-perfect uptime in critical production, but we needed a second customer before we could raise), and which was down to a few people, I tried to convince a biz person to let me pitch in on sales.

(Seeing as how, although I dislike doing sales, it was what most needed help right then, or there wouldn't be a business, and I could also use product insight into what actually resonates with customers. And I've done a bit of sales before, and my dad was an engineer-by-training salesperson (osmosis!). My mindset is I don't try to pretend I'm not a nerd. I instead convey that I'm genuinely aligned with their success, I'll listen and understand, and I'll deliver successful solutions like competitors can't.)

Nope, we need a glossy Web site including video. Biz person needs to reformat our security assurances document into a brochure before it can be handed over to prospect's IT for vetting. And biz person needs to introduce me on a customer call as "one of our software engineers" (when I was the only one, working the usual technical cofounder miracles). :)

Like all startups, there were many mistakes, but I think one of the mistakes that time was thinking we had to fake it till we make it, when that undermined our strengths. (Well, slick artifice fit some of our sales prospects, but we didn't land those anyway.)

In hindsight, I think we should've focused on presenting ourselves as an exceptionally skilled and credible team that is 100%+ committed to the pilot project being a success for that particular customer (and for our champions there).

Competitors' salespeople couldn't deliver that, nor fake it very credibly, and there wasn't yet an obvious enterprise CYA alternative (nobody ever got fired for buying IBM).
by tough | 2025-05-24 18:38:36+00:00
I was thinking about this the other day, wouldn't it be feasible to make fine-tune or something like that into every git change, mailist, etc, the linux kernel has ever hard?

Wouldn't such an LLM be the closer -synth- version of a person who has worked on a codebase for years, learnt all its quirks etc.

There's so much you can fit on a high context, some codebases are already 200k Tokens just for the code as is, so idk
by out-of-ideas | 2025-05-24 18:39:41+00:00
> Sometimes I think of telling my boss that I don't want a raise, I want less hours at the same rate.

tell em! i feel a lot of folks feel obligated to burning themselves out to justify their newly gotten raise.. then they get burned out and are functionless at work - or worse, making constant mistakes.

removing artificial stress from the workplace can be very powerful; valuing employees wellbeing crucial (but it involves caring, paying people, and a healthy work-life balance) - to me this means less work hours and keeping the pay consistent, plus removal of commutes (especially if the job is computer related enabling somebody to click buttons on a website so the end-user never has to leave their home couch).

happier healthier employees means they can focus more and care about what theyre doing.... otherwise, be a zombie i guess
by cortesoft | 2025-05-24 18:40:15+00:00
I have always thought that futuristic police state movies and shows underestimate how oppressive a fully capable, automated surveillance apparatus could be.

Movies like Minority Report try to show the surveillance state as being a struggle to overcome, but it is still always too easy. Computers don’t get distracted, scale perfectly, and can run 24-7. You can’t just sneak away with your head down, because the machines would have tracked you into a place, would know exactly who is in every building, and would be able to associate the person exiting a building with the person who went in. They wont forget.
by jamiejquinn | 2025-05-24 18:40:42+00:00
Sorry to ressurect but having just experimented with reducing redundant renders in my own game, which isn't even fully real-time, I'm with you. Trying to know when a game may or may not need a new render is a tricky problem, glitchy if done poorly, and ultimately battery life in games seems like a (high priority) nice-to-have... Shame you're getting flack from folk that clearly haven't ever shipped a game.
by spyckie2 | 2025-05-24 18:41:19+00:00
While writing, you edit your writing towards both sounding good and having solid ideas.

That's the entire essay's point and I largely agree with it.

Its why I think current LLMs are bad writers, not because their prose or ideas are off, but AI generated writing does not have the same quality of robustness from ideas that are thoroughly vetted through the author's editing of it.

At the end of the day, good writing takes a lot of time thinking through what you are really saying and standing behind it. LLMs cannot do that for you (yet).

LLMs can certainly be a helpful tool, mostly by unblocking authors via creating prose, honing in on accurate expressions, researching edge cases and suggesting arguments or counter arguments.

But the craft of sharpening an idea to a very fine, meaningful, well written point is something that is still far off.

Of course, until the next research paper completely proves me wrong.

Step 1. RLHF on real time edited documents Step 2. Profit??
by nostrebored | 2025-05-24 18:43:38+00:00
This isn’t true. You can look at basically every cross encoder used today and observe degradations in precision with increases in k

Ofc latency matters for retrieval pipelines and this is another reason to care. But first pass retrieval has to surface the right candidates for it to matter at all. It has to do it within the constraints of the precision degradation wrt k of the first pass reranker
by stirfish | 2025-05-24 18:44:15+00:00
>they all are great at the initial response and slowly degrade add the conversation continues

I've noticed this too. I give the llm 3 or 4 prompts before a new session is opened and code is repasted. My work flow is a lot like

1. Here's a schema, what would you change? I assume nothing, because my schemas are perfect.

2. Given this schema, make me some structs

3. Given these structs, make me some endpoints

1.(New session) Given these endpoints that return data like this, make me a ui

1. while true: (New session), An llm wrote me this ui, what would you change?

If I try to steamroll ahead from schema to ui, I find it starts having trouble with context, like hallucinating functions it meant to write but didn't, or just straight up dropping functions it wrote before.
by NaOH | 2025-05-24 18:44:59+00:00
Related, and worthwhile for the source article:

Why Hong Kong uses bamboo scaffolding, and meet the spider-men who climb it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42665355 - Jan 2025 (2 comments)

Bamboo Scaffolding in Hong Kong - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42820011 - Jan 2025 (3 comments)
by verisimi | 2025-05-24 18:45:26+00:00
> However, I don't think people are just going to wake up from calls to wake up, unfortunately.

> We typically only wake up to anything once it is broken. Society has to break from the over optimization of attention and engagement.

I don't think anyone will be waking up as long as their pronouns are 'we' and 'us' (or 'people', 'society'). Waking up or individuation is a personal, singular endeavour - it isn't a collective activity. If one hasn't even grasped who one is, if one is making a category error and identifies as 'we' rather than 'I', all answers will fail.
by sodality2 | 2025-05-24 18:46:01+00:00
I'd be willing to bet the sum of all code submitted via patches, ideas discussed via lists, etc doesn't come close to the true amount of knowledge collected by the average kernel developer's tinkering, experimenting, etc that never leaves their computer. I also wonder if that would lead to overfitting: the same bugs being perpetuated because they were in the training data.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-05-24 18:46:14+00:00
And to the assertion that Copilot emits copyrighted code - this is in nobody's best interest, not the authors, Microsoft, or Microsoft's customers. Microsoft had to promise to legally defend any of its customers that are sued for using code that came from Copilot (https://www.legal.io/articles/5443653/Microsoft-Will-Pay-for...). I've used Copilot in a business setting and sometimes it will cancel a response because it detects that it contained copyrighted material. So Microsoft appears to be trying its best to avoid the main problem the article is concerned about, and they are confident enough that they are succeeding to make legal guarantees.
Apple Rejects My Name Because It Contains "Dek" – But "Dick" Is Allowed
by Kevin605 | 2025-05-24 18:46:35+00:00
Hey everyone,

I’m a long-time Apple user and fan, but I ran into something absolutely ridiculous today while trying to buy a gift card for a friend on Apple’s website (https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-giftcard/giftcard/). I couldn’t complete the purchase because my name (and email) contains the letters "Dek"!

Whether I enter my email or my actual name, the system blocks the transaction. Apparently, "Dek" is somehow flagged as forbidden or offensive. Here’s the kicker: I tested it with the literal name "Dick," and it went through without any issues. So, Apple’s system is fine with "Dick" but rejects my name over "Dek"?

I’m beyond frustrated and honestly a bit insulted. I just want to buy a gift card without having to legally change my name! I called Apple support about this, and they told me they can’t do anything to help. Is this some kind of overzealous filter gone wrong?

Thanks for any insights or help.
by antirez | 2025-05-24 18:47:26+00:00
Nope, gemma3 and qwen3 exist of many sizes, including very small ones, that 4-bit quantized can run on very small systems. Qwen3-0.6B, 1.7B, ... imagine if you quantize those to 4 bit. But there is the space for the KV cache, if we don't want to limit the runs to very small prompts.
by sombragris | 2025-05-24 18:49:04+00:00
In some previous life, while studying biochemistry at my university's Faculty (school) of Chemical Sciences, I hung around the Botany Department (yes, they had one. Because you know, chemistry schools teach pharmacy, which in turn uses plants and so...). That was in 1989-1992.

The Department had a NEC PC 9801 (IIRC), with two floppy drives and no hard disk, and they used to register plants cataloged in their herbarium using a simple dBase-II application. Quite nice setup for that time. I never saw any graphics; all I saw was a very well-built system with a beautiful text font (it looked very well IMHO representing Western Latin characters).
by b112 | 2025-05-24 18:49:59+00:00
There's far more climate change fight than local pollute fight, regardless of your comment.

And just because your comment is upstream the tree, doesn't make it the only one upstream. People were discussing "why" more generically.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/anti-pipeline-america...

But your response is a bit weird to me. You say it is irrelevant if it is safer? Ok, so there are 4 equal spills vs 2.

Regardless of being made whole, if there's 1/2 the spills, and therefore 1/2 the people not harmed, you think that's not better?? Or worth pursuing?

This is sort of what I'm talking about. Any improvement is good. But you're saying "screw all those extra people being hurt, and that damage, because it's not perfect in this way".

That's folly.
by imiric | 2025-05-24 18:50:49+00:00
To push back at your obvious facetiousness, I do think that both cryptocurrencies and machine learning are very powerful and useful technologies. Underneath the scammers, grifters and investors that jump on the hype train for their get-rich-quick schemes, and the general public that falls for it and fuels the hype train, both technologies have solid reasons for existing, and can be generally very useful to humanity.

So I reject the notion of throwing the baby out with the bath water as much as the hype bubble around them.

What we do need, as with any novel technology, is oversight and regulation. Which is difficult this time around when the grifters are also the ones in power.
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-24 18:52:06+00:00
This is America.

We don't have any money to treat sick people, we need to make sure the networth of billionaires continues to grow.

We need to fund military bases all over the world and conflicts in places most of us can't find on maps.

You find how truly alone you are when you can't afford your medicine. No longer an "American" you're a freeloader, a parasite. Perhaps God himself hates you.

And Blessed are the Billionaires for God gave them so much.
by mcpherrinm | 2025-05-24 18:52:35+00:00
Everything is an object, identified by a URL. You start from a single URL (the directory), and you can find all the rest of the resources from URLs provided from there.

ACME models everything as JSON objects, each of which is identified by URL. You can GET them, and they link to other objects with Location and Link headers.

To quote from the blog post:

> Dig around in the headers of the response, looking for one named "Location". Don't follow it like a redirection. Why would you ever follow a Location header in a HTTP header, right? Nope, that's your user account's identifier! Yes, you are a URL now.

I don't know if it's the pure ideal of HATEOS, but it's about as close as I've seen in use.

It has the classic failing though: it’s used by scripts which know exactly what they want to do (get a cert), so the clients still hardcode the actions they need. It just adds a layer of indirection as they need to keep track of URLs.

I would have preferred if it was just an RPC-over-HTTP/JSON with fixed endpoints and numeric object IDs.
by andrewrn | 2025-05-24 18:53:10+00:00
The point about end-notes being a mechanism to ease the strain of fitting tree-like ideas into a linear essay is lovely. It brings to mind David Foster Wallace's writing, which is obsessively end-noted and if you listen to his speeches, you can see that he basically tortures himself in sanding down his ideas, much like PG says.

PG's ideas in here, to the extent that I agree with them (which is not fully), does break down for ideas. Example being: brilliant engineers who are incredibly capable at having ideas and executing against them but incredibly incapable of communicating said ideas. Their ideas are very true, evidenced by their ability to produce real results, but also oftentimes ugly when communicated.

A final counterpoint is JFK's eulogy, which sounds amazing, but, after the initial emotional appeal wore off, I realized doesn't really have a strong unified thread running through it, and is thus forgettable in terms of the truths it ostensibly delivers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOiDUbaBL9E. Compare to "This Is Water" by DFW, which doesn't have the same epic prose, but is maybe the most true-seeming speech I've ever heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCbGM4mqEVw. It could be that PG's ideas were never intended for spoken speeches, but whatever this is still an adjacent truth != beauty example.