MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by amsilprotag | 2025-05-26 18:34:36+00:00
I stopped using duolingo regularly about a month ago. It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost the battle. You can get 10+ pop-ups after a lesson. The friend feed is cluttered with meaningless achievements. The web app is tolerable, but the phone experience is miserable. But if you're behind a computer and keyboard, there are much more effective ways to learn. Busuu is a much warmer product on either device, with videos of native-language speakers to help with listening.

Duolingo has scaling and distribution. It makes no sense to scrimp for pennies on a product (e.g. English learning Spanish) that has millions of daily users. The AI radio lessons feel alienating and demoralizing compared to voice-acted stories, and the quality control is much worse.
Which languages, require the programmer to EXPLICITLY manage "environments"?
by jerng | 2025-05-26 18:34:52+00:00
QUESTION : can you point me to any existing languages where it is common / mandatory to pass around a list/object of data bound to variables which are associated with scopes? (Thank you.)

MOTIVATION : I recently noticed that "environment objects / envObs" (bags of variables in scope, if you will) and the stack of envObs, are hidden from programmers in most languages, and handled IMPLICITLY.

1. For example, in JavaScript, you can say (var global.x) however it is not mandatory, and there is sugar such you can say instead (var x). This seems to be true in C, shell command language, Lisp, and friends.

2. Languages which have a construct similar to, (let a=va, b=vb, startscope dosoemthing endscope), such as Lisp, do let you explicitly pass around envObs, but this isn't mandatory for the top-level global scope to begin with.

3. In many cases, the famous "stack overflow" problem is just a pile-up of too many envObjs, because "the stack" is made of envObs.

4. Exception handling (e.g. C's setjump, JS's try{}catch{}) use constructs such as envObjs to reset control flow after an exception is caught.

5. Generally, I was surprised to find that this pattern of hiding the global envObs and handling the envObjs IMPLICITLY is so pervasive. It seems that this obfuscates the nature of programming computers from programmers, leading to all sorts of confusions about scope for new learners. Moreover it seems that exposing explicit envObs management would allow/force programmers to write code that could be optimised more easily by compilers. So I am thinking to experiment with this in future exercises.
by baq | 2025-05-26 18:34:53+00:00
I'm finding that google's own gemini flash is cannibalizing google search in my own usage, but there's no other way for them to survive being eaten alive by the competition.

The sad realization is you probably shouldn't expect humans to read your content anymore - it'll be quoted verbatim (best case) by the all-consuming LLMs, just without your ads, your layout or anything yours at all that isn't your written or spoken words. (Sad part is that's often an improvement until chat interfaces start putting product placement in their responses. We can truly bury the web then.)
by Apreche | 2025-05-26 18:35:09+00:00
> “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with AI, but I do know it’s going to fundamentally change the way we work, and we have to get ahead of it,” admits the man who just a few weeks ago crowed about how vital AI was to Duolingo’s business.

> “AI is creating uncertainty for all of us, and we can respond to this with fear or curiosity. I’ve always encouraged our team to embrace new technology (that’s why we originally built for mobile instead of desktop), and we are taking that same approach with AI. By understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI now, we can stay ahead of it and remain in control of our own product and our mission,” writes von Ahn.

We don’t know what is going to happen, but we can plainly see what has already happened. The overwhelming majority of it has been absolute garbage. We’re not responding with fear or curiosity. We are responding with disdain.

To be fair, language translation is one of the use cases that are an acceptable and legitimate use of LLMs, but they still are not all the way there yet. If I were Duolingo CEO, I would have people doing R&D with them, but I would not be using it at all in any way whatsoever on any production product. Publicly, in terms of marketing, I would shit all over them. I would make myself out to be the non-evil non-AI tech CEO. Even if the R&D is a success and I later have to eat crow, that’s fine. I’m a wealthy CEO, who cares?

As for me using Duolingo, I think I’m going to switch to live human tutoring over video and/or in-person.
by anthk | 2025-05-26 18:35:26+00:00
A lot of emergent gameplay was under MUDs and roguelikes decades before.

There were urban based ones, too; not just about sorcerers and warriors. As they were mainly text based, they could set tons of properties to in game-objects and their relations, truly advanced for their era.

And, no, a lot of LLM's aren't even close to what kind of simulation you could get in a MUD. LLM's can fill tons of details, but they can't get a whole coherent world with ease.
by sarchertech | 2025-05-26 18:36:22+00:00
>That in itself is a simple fact that you can verify with basic publicly available government budget/taxation statistics numbers.

There's a few problems here. Yes if you take total government expenditures per capita, he's not paying that much in taxes directly. But most of those costs are fixed. If a new person pops up in the US, it doesn't actually cost the federal government an extra $20k a year.

Over a century ago we decided that the more money you make the greater proportion of our total fixed costs you have to pay. There are various justifications for this, the more wealth you have the more you benefit from those government services, diminishing marginal unity of money etc...

But the point is if you're just going to look at total per capita expenditures, looking just at the federal level for simplicity, you need to make around $100k a year before your federal taxes exceed that.

By your argument anyone not making $100k a year is consuming more public money than they are returning and are thus a burden on society.

Your premise logically leads to that absurd conclusion. Obviously the rest of society is necessary in order for the people who do make $100k a year to exist. By your logic someone who lives on $5k a year but who writes open source software for free that some company uses to make $100 million dollar a year is a burden on society.

Someone who creates art that inspires millions of people, or someone who makes articles, games, or videos that provide millions of hours of entertainment, is a burden on society if they give away their work instead of sell it.

My mom was a burden on society because she raised children instead of working outside the home--even though she now has 3 adult children paying hundreds of thousands in taxes per year.

>It only really works out okay because not everyone is doing what the author does.

That's true of nearly every lifestyle you could recommend. Or hell even every piece of good financial advice.

Having 6 months of savings is almost universally considered sound financial advice. But if right now every consumer in America cut all of their discretionary spending to build up a 6 month cushion, it would completely destroy the economy.

That doesn't mean that it's not a valid recommendation for a financial advisor to make.

The author isn't recommending that everyone in America live this way, he's saying that if you can learn to live without all the things you think you need, this is an alternative. If you are the type of person who can't stand the idea of working a 9-5 for 40 years, this is something you can do.

Most people will never do this, but just the fact that it's available as a relief valve is I pretty amazing I think.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-05-26 18:36:43+00:00
Not just Bosch ECUs, not just European car companies, and this shit has been going on for decades. All the car companies do it and have since at least the 90's. The proof is in the ROM dumps of all the various cars - the tuners can point to two sets of tables of fuel mixture/timing maps, one for when the ECU thinks it's being emissions tested and one for regular use.

As early as the late 90's tuners offered features where doing something with the cruise control buttonss which would switch the engine computer back to stock programming to pass emissions, run on cheaper gas, or fool the dealer if it went in for service. How does everyone think they were able to do stuff like that without any hardware mods?

Oh, and all the car companies were self-reporting their CO2 emissions in the EU for decades. When EU regulators actually got around to testing cars, shockigly, the companies were lying.

It's basically accepted at this point that Telsa lies about their range and efficiency numbers, and recently there's evidence they have been fucking with people's odometers for the purpose of getting them out of warranty quicker.

Ferrari have all sorts of terms and prohibitions on things journalists can't do with their cars - one being track lap time testing. Why? Because they got caught by Top Gear specially modifying their cars for the Top Gear test circuit, as well as using tires that aren't on the production vehicles - and when Top Gear called them out, Ferrari permanently banned them *and have gone so far as to prohibit Ferrari owners from allowing Top Gear staff access to the owner's vehicles for testing, under threat of being blacklisted. Now that they've been caught cheating, they simply won't allow anyone to test their cars versus anyone else's.

The wheel keeps on turning.
by Interesco | 2025-05-26 18:37:06+00:00
These percentages seem a bit high compared to what I have seen. I usually see/hear about a 1-3mpg and 10-30% HP. I understand the point you are trying to make but "doubling of fuel economy and about an 80% jump in horsepower" is far from accurate, especially considering the downsides of a delete on every outside of the vehicle
by Nasrudith | 2025-05-26 18:37:29+00:00
That sounds like a terrible idea because it would progressively "bribe" the government to be in their interest to take the company's side as they gain more and more of it. Combine it that conflicts of interest with the appearance of improprirety and another conflict of interest of making expropriation of the successful a temptation.

The latter could be even more disasterous long term. Nobody wants to go out to dinner with cannibals or show up at the stores for fear of being eaten. Likewise being known as an expropriating country, you may as well go ahead and embargo yourself.
by adocomplete | 2025-05-26 18:37:34+00:00
It's not stinginess, it's value.

If an LLM can teach me a language, why wouldn't I go straight to the source and use GPT or Claude and customize it to my exact needs.

I feel like so many AI products these days won't be around a few years from now once more people find out that all their doing is providing a slightly different UI to what you can get directly from OAI, Anthropic, Google for cheaper and better and more tailored to you.
by throw10920 | 2025-05-26 18:38:12+00:00
I'm hoping that this will be yet another shot in the war to convice corporations and government agencies that they need to have on-prem data hosting that isn't accessible to the company running the service. I don't think you can do full E2E between individual employees in a corporate setting, but at the very least if all of the organization's data is only accessible to the organization, that'll help with a lot of these third-party data beaches.

(it won't help when the organization is beached, which unfortunately still seems to be the main way that user data gets leaked)

Ultimately, though, until there starts to be federal law mandating chain of custody for user data and harsh penalties on it being leaked, I think that this will continue for a long time...

Update: I should have read the article - did not realize TeleMessage was supposed to be E2E. I guess now the lesson is that you shouldn't be using normal devices for national security information (classified or not), and otherwise it's still not good to use a sketchy service that doesn't have Moxie-grade crypto implementations.
by hnlmorg | 2025-05-26 18:38:14+00:00
You can say user ID is broken and define how it’s broken. You don’t have include any of their PII outside of the user ID.

> It's common to require PII to be stored elsewhere, but people will still make mistakes and copy paste PII for convenience.

That’s a training problem.

And It’s also common for people to fuck up RBAC. The latter is a harder problem to fix with training than teaching them to keep PII out of issue tracking systems.

> In the end isn't it better for your issue tracking system to be flexible enough to store PII?

I’ve worked in some very sensitive domains. They managed just fine keeping customer data out of the issue tracking systems.
by altusbrown | 2025-05-26 18:39:26+00:00
If you really want to avoid getting anything in your water - even essential vitamins and minerals - you can always distill your water. It’s worse for you though, much worse. That ‘chalk’ in your carafe is just small amounts of minerals you need anyway that come out of solution.

Bottled water has it too.

If they build up to the point it’s bothering you, a little vinegar will dissolve them right out.
by baq | 2025-05-26 18:40:22+00:00
I'm still missing being able to read only +5 insightful comments after 20 years.

I'd expect Slashdot's point systems and meta moderation to make a comeback in the LLM slop world we live in currently, but nobody knows about it anymore. Steam kinda rediscovered it in their reviews, perhaps even was inspired by it (I hope...)
by lolinder | 2025-05-26 18:40:37+00:00
My wife quit Duolingo the week before this announcement after years of watching Duolingo prioritize attention manipulation over learning. She had a nearly 6-year streak and was on the paid version at the time, but realized that it wasn't actually helping her learn any more: she'd at some point begun maintaining a streak just for the sake of maintaining a streak.

The best documentation for Duolingo's decline is this article from a few years ago [0]. It's a piece by Duolingo's CPO (who was a former Zynga employee) where he discusses at length how Duolingo started using streaks and other gamification techniques to optimize their numbers. He has a lot to say about manipulating users into spending more time with them, but in the entire piece he barely even gives a token nod to the supposed mission of the company to help people learn. The date he cites for the beginning of their efforts to optimize numbers pretty closely correlates to my sense for when my wife began to complain about Duolingo feeling more and more manipulative and less and less useful.

This past month they finally jumped the shark and she decided to quit after 6+ years. The subsequent announcement that they'd be using AI to churn out even more lackluster content gave us a good laugh but was hardly surprising: they'd given up on prioritizing learning a long while ago.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34977435
by donnachangstein | 2025-05-26 18:41:07+00:00
It's not a special case at all. 20 years ago this was standard architecture (hell, HN still caches static versions of pages for logged-out users).

No, what changed is the industry devolved into over-reliance on mountains of 'frameworks' and other garbage that no one person fully understands how it all works.

Things have gotten worse, not better.
by hyperman1 | 2025-05-26 18:41:10+00:00
Afaik the idea of giving plastic back to supermarkets, is to make them give less plastic to us in the first place. In this case, the point is not what percentage is recycled. The point is shrinking the total amount of plastic, i.e. the number to which the percentage is applied. Do they burn 70% of 10 tons or 70% of 1 ton.

So is this happening?
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 18:41:18+00:00
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827978

The leaked AI memo had phrases like “productivity expectations will rise” and off comments about how they now know that LLMs “work better with context”.

It felt like the Duolingo CEO saw the trend of companies embracing AI coding tools and tried to come up with a way of being the on of the most extreme thought leaders in going “AI first”, without really understanding anything beyond surface level.
by whyowhy3484939 | 2025-05-26 18:41:23+00:00
LLMs cannot "teach you a language". They make for cool demos to show off. They can perhaps be a building block of a proper language learning experience.

Then again, the only languages I actually learned - besides my mother tongue - to the point of being able to do things were English and Latin and both were very much acquired offline. I have plenty of experience with language learning apps and I'm not convinced tech is the solution or even part of the solution.
by ilyagr | 2025-05-26 18:41:45+00:00
See https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj/wiki/GUI-and-TUI for a standalone GUI and two VS Code plugins. None of the GUIs there are fully-featured, so sometimes you have to imagine what it could become, but each one is usable. The two VS Code plugins can be used at the same time and complement each other somewhat.
by rcarmo | 2025-05-26 18:42:06+00:00
That thread is 5 years old, and nothing really came out of it.

The genius solution in there is probably this one:

@media (prefers-color-scheme:dark){body{filter:invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg)}}

...which you can try by doing this in the browser console:

const styleElement = document.createElement('style'); styleElement.type = 'text/css'; styleElement.textContent = "@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) { html { filter: invert(1) hue-rotate(180deg); } }"; document.head.appendChild(styleElement);

But I get that there are a lot of opinions. Just try one, put up a vote over a week, do it over 4-6 weeks, settle on the one that has the best feedback...
by michaelt | 2025-05-26 18:42:29+00:00
Some cynics think the plastic industry supports sham “recycling” efforts that don’t actually work, in order to alleviate customer guilt and forestall a ban or mandatory reformulation.

The bad thing, in this line of thought, is that we’re being lied to and taken for fools. Tricked into buying things we’re promised are recyclable when they’re not.
by vendiddy | 2025-05-26 18:42:55+00:00
I do think AI could be a better language tutor than an average language teacher, but I don't think Duolingo's approach is very effective.

The ideal AI-powered tutor would work more closely to a private language tutor. It would speak with you and gradually integrating language concepts into the conversation. When you make mistakes, it could correct you on the spot and keep track of where your strengths and weaknesses are.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-26 18:42:57+00:00
Those repercussions are essentially just a form of market feedback through demand contraction, i.e. it is the inevitable result of human action under conditions of scarcity and subjective preference, a natural outcome. The market would correct itself. If no one goes to Ticketmaster, someone else could (and if there is demand (among other things), most likely will) take its place, and they will no longer be a monopoly, simply put.
by zzzeek | 2025-05-26 18:43:15+00:00
im re-visiting learning Spanish in my spare time and am working with Babbel, LingoDeer and a pretty good independent site morpheem (https://morpheem.org/) that has the heaviest use of AI of all three. I didn't even consider duolingo as LingoDeer is generally better in the "cutesy gamified language learning" space.
by nz | 2025-05-26 18:43:35+00:00
By way of analogy, the result of the theorem prover is usually actionable (i.e. we can replace one kind of expression with its proven equivalent for some end like optimizing code-size or code-run-time), but mathematicians _still_ endeavor to translate the unwieldy and verbose machine-generated proofs into concise human-readable proofs, because those readable proofs are useful to our understanding of mathematics even long after the "productive action" has been taken.

In a way, this collaboration between the machine and the human is better than what came before, because now productive actions can be taken sooner, and mathematicians do not have to doubt whether they are searching for a proof that exists.
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 18:44:00+00:00
> It's wonderful that Luis von Ahn says in interviews that he tries to prevent teams from cluttering the app, but it seems like he lost the battle.

This is classic PR spin. Do one thing, publicly say you’re not doing it. Try to get the benefit of good intentions while doing the opposite.

The CEO doesn’t lose any battles with the product managers. He could reverse the changes in a matter of days by calling a meeting or sending an email.

What’s actually happening here is they Product Managers are responding to what gets rewarded at the company, which ultimately comes from the CEO.
by mathgeek | 2025-05-26 18:44:01+00:00
> 1) Is that automatically good? Damn those capitalists and their slow and steady approach to major changes, I suppose. Wouldn't want to proceed too thoughtfully.

Considering how long it’s taken even the most progressive regulations to be enacted, it’s arguable that we’ve done anything but proceed without thoughtfulness towards how these changes affect the other 99% of the population.

We sure do spend a lot of time letting the wealthiest folks skim those points off the top without spending any more than they are required to by regulations, though.
by sargstuff | 2025-05-26 18:44:04+00:00
Try variation of "infinite money theorem"[0][1] with something other than Shakespeare, one or more search engines and/or plenty of time. Perhaps, initially just trimming general category stuff, till list gets down to reasonable/managable size and/or diverge to different topic(s) of note/interest?

Replace 'monkey' in theorem with smart glasses[2][3] to pull things from one's daily surroundings to feed the 'infinate monkey theorem" machine.

-----------------------------------------------------

[0] : https://codepen.io/justinchan/full/krOLzV

[1] : https://hum11c.omeka.fas.harvard.edu/exhibits/show/open-read...

[2] : https://www.instructables.com/EDITH-How-Did-I-Build-a-Powerf...

[3] : smart glass manager :https://github.com/AugmentOS-Community/SmartGlassesManager/w...
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-05-26 18:44:05+00:00
The value proposition gets even more dicey if the target language is one with a sizable online learning community. Those are churning out more tools and instructional content every day, most of which are made freely available, and this content has the benefit of not only being made by humans but also by people who are passionate about the language who care about the small details. These communities are much quicker to embrace experimental learning methods, too, and so generally the stuff that doesn’t work gets filtered out in short order.

And as others in these comments note, if one wants to use an LLM as a language tutor, you can do that for less than what Duolingo is charging while also getting the benefit of being able to tune it to your exact needs instead of being stuck with whatever Duolingo decided is best.