MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mjburgess | 2025-05-28 15:27:51+00:00
> But that doesn't mean the concept of happiness or dog does not exist.

That would be a consequence of your position.

The person who wrote the article is english. The claim being evaluated here is from the article. The term "concept" is english. The *meaning* of that term isn't english, any more than the meaning of "two" is english.

My analysis of "concept" has nothing to do with the english language. "Happy" here stands in for any property-concept and 'dog' any term which can be a object-concept, or a property-concept, or others. If some other language has terms which are translated into terms that do not function in the same way, then that would be a bad translation for the purpose of discussing the structure of concepts.

It is you who are hijacking the meaning of "concept", ignoring the meaning the author intended, substituting one made up 5 minutes ago by self-aggrandising poorly read people in XAI -- and the going off about irrelevant translations into Chinese.

The claim the author made has nothing to do with XAI, nor chinese, nor english. It has to do with mental capacities to "bring objects under a concept", partition experience into its conceptual structure ("conceptualise"), simulate scenarios based on compositions of concepts ("the imagination") and so on. These are mental capabilities a wide class of animals possess, who know no language; that LLMs do not possess.
by lenkite | 2025-05-28 15:27:59+00:00
> When you have N repos, you also have N ways of managing dependencies, N ways of doing local bin scripts and dev environment setups, N projects with various out of date & deprecated setups, N places to look when you need to upgrade a vulnerable dependency, N services which may or may not configure telemetry in a consistent way, N different CI & deployment workflows…

No, you do not, unless you mean N=1. Build scripts/tooling/linters etc are put into a different repo, are released and consumed by each individual repo.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-28 15:28:31+00:00
> I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees. It's difficult to take pride in work done for an employee that you aren't proud of, or actively dislike.

I agree that I think this is a big chunk of it. There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is. Doing good work is only rewarded with more work without the extra pay or benefits.

A ton of large employers have removed any and all incentive to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-05-28 15:28:58+00:00
There’s two things going on:

1. People are embracing the fact that there is no possible objective direction for society

2. People a rejecting the directions they were told to prioritize (education, family, religion etc…) because none have predictable outcomes

As function of both, there’s no consistent or coherent philosophical for people to align to.

In the past, the percentage of the population that was forced to align with a local philosophy was basically 100%. Most people had no options to defect from the ritual and social structure they were born into, so they adapted and adopted them even if they didn’t want to.

Now, humans have infinite mobility - which means anyone can defect. That also means you have to either find a new affinity group that fits your vectors or make your own.

That’s new in the last 500 years for humanity.

“God is dead” was meant as a lament, because it epistemologically fractured society - and even if that epistemically was “more correct” or “less wrong” it shows how all ritual and culture is built on effectively nothing but non-testable hallucinated stories.

So how do you align society to coherent action when the core epistemology is constantly changing and being overrun?

You don’t.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-05-28 15:29:11+00:00
“ I think pride in work has declined a lot (at least in the US) because so many large employers have shown that they aren't even willing to pretend to care about their employees.”

Exactly. Companies and wealthy people have cancelled the social contract a long time ago and have decided to go for profit at any cost. It’s hard to be excited about work when you know that you get raises below inflation rate while the company makes record profits. And the CEO may do a town hall claiming how great business is and then lay off people two weeks later. Or DOGE. In theory this is a good idea but instead of improving processes so government workers can do a good job they just laid off people and let the people who are left deal with the mess.

No wonder people become cynical.
by wellthisisgreat | 2025-05-28 15:31:10+00:00
Hmm, I looked at Delta force and I think it’s more of an Escape from Tarkov (EFT) clone in a Call of Duty flavor.

Tarkov is probably the deepest / most engaging FPS of the last decade if not more, so I didn’t really consider its clone - EFTs greatness comes not from its extraction shooter formula but from the unprecedented attention to detail that puts GTA environments to shame. GTA has the macro at, let’s say “district scale” but EFT is unparalleled at street / house scale. It’s the first game where traversing levels makes me at least think about my actions in the context of real world navigation and not game navigation.

I think it’s thanks to: no map, the detailed design, and the fact that many areas are modeled after real locations. It really is quite crazy.
by ryandrake | 2025-05-28 15:31:22+00:00
This isn't just a problem on the job. EVERYONE suddenly seems addicted to their phones. You walk into a coffee shop or restaurant. Everyone (including behind the counter) is staring at a phone. Look at other drivers on the road. Everyone is scrolling their phones while driving 70mph on the freeways. Even social gatherings among friends. I used to do movie night with friends, but we stopped doing it because people pull out their phones within 5 minutes of the movie starting, and there's no point. Might as well just turn off the movie and sit there in silence while everyone watches videos of random nobodies. And if I instituted a no-phones rule, nobody would come. My 11 year old has invited a few friends over to our house to play, and their parents come with, but they don't socialize! They just sit their awkwardly silent staring at their phones. I remember one parent didn't even hear me when I offered her some coffee.

As a non phone user, when I go out into the world, I feel like I'm on that movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where I'm surrounded by these weird non-humans everywhere, and nobody thinks any of their behavior is odd but me.
by kiselitza | 2025-05-28 15:31:40+00:00
Oh, 100%. And I'm all for FOSS and an adapter architecture approach (no lock-ins of any kind). Team is aware of it, CTO wants it, so opening the core is happening. I've got no reason not to believe them. Ofc, can't expect a stranger to believe me either. The fact that you can build your own plugins on top of the core, even before open-sourcing it, should be a sign that it's about giving you control, not locking you in on anything. But yeah, actually making it OSS will make that trust grow much easier.
by runjake | 2025-05-28 15:31:46+00:00
Think of it this way: The brain outweighs those tools (for now). The notebook is an extension of thought and the brain.

Some of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s even used to "program" by handwriting code on paper as kind of a rough draft.

I did this particularly for systems I didn't have at home, like the Apple ][. I'd handwrite programs at home, then take it to school and type it into an Apple ][. This was somewhat common.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-28 15:31:51+00:00
All roads lead to unionization and strong worker rights, which HN is allergic to (broadly speaking). “Americans can always be trusted to do the right thing, once all other possibilities have been exhausted.” Churchill supposedly said. Wages must go up, worker power must go up, there is no other legal path to success (broad improvements in economic security) in this context. If you can show me an alternate path derived from first principles, I’m all ears.
by IanCal | 2025-05-28 15:31:51+00:00
This is where I find having a disconnect between an ML team and product team is so broken. Same for SE to be fair.

Accuracy rates, F1, anything, they're all just rough guides. The company cares about making money and some errors are much bigger than others.

We'd manually review changes for updates to our algos and models. Even with a golden set, breaking one case to fix five could be awesome or terrible.

I've given talks about this, my classic example is this somewhat imagined scenario (because it's unfair of me to accuse people of not checking at all):

It's 2015. You get an update to your classification model. Accuracy rates go up on a classic dataset, hooray! Let's deploy.

Your boss's, boss's, boss gets a call at 2am because you're in the news.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-33347866

Ah. Turns out improving classifications of types of dogs improved but... that wasn't as important as this.

Issues and errors must be understood in context of the business. If your ML team is chucking models over the fence you're going to at best move slowly. At worst you're leaving yourself open to this kind of problem.
by mjburgess | 2025-05-28 15:32:05+00:00
> I don't think one can conceptualize much without the use of a language.

Well a great swath of the animal kingdom stands against you.

LLMs have invited yet more of this pseudoscience. It's a nonesense position in an empirical study of mental capabilites across the animal kingdom. Something previuosly only believed by idealist philosophers of the early 20th century and prior. Now brought back so people can maintain their image in the face of their apparent self-deception: better we opt for gross pseudoscience than admit we're fooled by a text generation machine.
by palmotea | 2025-05-28 15:32:09+00:00
>> That's definitely not true. It sounds like a rationalization for the existing bad and unwise behavior.

> You seem to miss that companies that think quarter to quarter behave just like this.

Did I miss that, or was I commenting on that exact thing?

>> So, dump the untreated toxic waste into the river, then?

> You mean like the current administration that's trying to get rid of the EPA?

What's your point with that political derail? It's honestly baffling.
by vjvjvjvjghv | 2025-05-28 15:32:28+00:00
“ There's no loyalty on either side, and it's not rewarded if there is”

Loyalty actually gets punished. The only way to get a decent raise is to change companies. Your car insurance will keep going up until you change companies. With cable the best deals are available only for new customers and existing customers see their cost go up.

It seems companies hate their employees and customers
by superkuh | 2025-05-28 15:32:34+00:00
Oof. On re-read I see now this sub-thread's topic was "non-GPT, non-MBR". So my "response" was ... off topic and useless. Sorry.

I am not sure what I said that was incorrect though. As I'm always looking to learn, which bit? I am currently assuming the 'rest' about GPT on true BIOS machines. I suppose I have never booted off GPT formatted disks in true BIOS machines. I always boot off MBR formatted disks and just used the GPT as storage/etc.

But I'm unclear on how this would break things since you can still have the MBR in the first sector on a GPT formatted disk. And how could the true BIOS motherboards detect GPT format on the disks when they don't know about it?
by coredog64 | 2025-05-28 15:33:10+00:00
Allegedly, at the time of drafting and passage, it was understood that despite the name, the optimum number of children to leave behind was not zero. However, the optics of that were not great. The plan was to pass it as zero, and then update that value later. Here we are 20 years later and we haven't had the discussion about what the cutoff is.
by adriano_f | 2025-05-28 15:33:27+00:00
What I've been doing when I want to avoid this "unexpected leading", is to tell the LLM to "Ask me 3 rounds of 5 clarifying questions each, first.". The first round usually exposes the main assumptions it's making, and from there we narrow down and clarify things.

I've read you comment about all the things you tried, and it seems you have much broader experience with LLMs than I do. But I didn't see this technique mentioned, so leaving this here in case it helps someone else :).
by 999900000999 | 2025-05-28 15:33:40+00:00
Feels like a really really weird device.

Even when I live with others, we aren't worried about bathroom noise.

I guess if you have a habit of talking to yourself while using the bathroom or showering and need to drown it out this is cool.

However, I'd love this as a general device. I get home and it auto plays music , etc
by viraptor | 2025-05-28 15:33:40+00:00
> LLMs are just a token->token mapping. They can output any set of tokens for any set of input tokens. So there is no output which isn't in the domain or codomain.

This applies the same to humans hearing a question and responding. Tokens in, tokens out (whether words or sound). It's not unique to LLMs, so not useful for explaining differences.

> then for {(prompt', answer')} of similar imaginings we will get reliable mappings. If its cheating, then we wont.

You're not really showing that this is/isn't the case already. Also this would put people with quirky ideas and wild imagination in the "cheating" group if I understand your claim correctly. There's even a whole game around a similar concept - Dixit - describe an image in a way that as few people as possible will get it.

> we can give a series of prompts (p1, p2, p3...) which require increasing complexity of the imagined scenario, and we do not find O(answering) to follow O(p-complexity-increase). Rather the search strategy is always the same

You're describing most current implementations, not a property of LLMs. Gemini scales the thinking phase for example. Future models are likely to do the same. Another recent post implemented this too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44112326
by GENIXUS | 2025-05-28 15:33:56+00:00
I’m very new to the world of LLMs and AI, but this project really caught my attention.

From what I understood, AutoThink helps the AI “think more wisely” by adjusting how much effort it spends based on how hard the question is. That makes a lot of intuitive sense — like how people don’t spend 10 minutes figuring out what 2+2 is, but do take time with tricky problems.

Even though I don’t know the technical parts (like token budgeting or steering vectors), it’s fascinating to see how these methods can make the AI both faster and smarter at the same time.

Thanks for sharing — I’m definitely going to follow this kind of work more closely from now on.
by RHSeeger | 2025-05-28 15:34:04+00:00
> sites that shouldn't need it

There's lots of ways to define "shouldn't" in this case

- Shouldn't need it, but include it to track you

- Shouldn't need it, but include it to enhance the page

- Shouldn't need it, but include it to keep their costs down (for example, by loading parts of the page dynamically / per person and caching the rest of the page)

- Shouldn't need it, but include it because it help stop the bots that are costing them more than the site could reasonably expected to make

I get it, JS can be used in a bad way, and you don't like it. But the pillar of righteousness that you seem to envision yourself standing on it not as profound as you seem to think it is.
by incomingpain | 2025-05-28 15:34:19+00:00
Bluesky has the same problem as Mastodon. Both of which fully understand their problem; neither of which are willing to change.

It's ultimately their choice to make. The current choice means they can never take off and they automatically let X win.

Who am I to tell them what to do?

It must be about 2 years ago when they published their community guideline rules and it's trivial to see how they have no chance of success.
by thewebguyd | 2025-05-28 15:34:29+00:00
It's kind of a self-fulfilling cycle in that way. Employers have taken away any and all incentives to do anything but the absolute bare minimum to not get fired, so now that's what they get.

Because that's now employees behave, now employers won't offer anything else - but without offering anything else, employee attitudes aren't going to change.

I think strong unions are the only way forward
by goku12 | 2025-05-28 15:34:37+00:00
I assume that SpaceX doesn't want to completely shut off the Super Heavy engines during separation, in order to avoid the requirement of ullage thrusting for the boost back burn. But hot-staging is really hard on the equipment. It's like having a flame diverter directly below the Starship's raptors. And it is known to have caused problems in previous flights.
by zovirl | 2025-05-28 15:34:37+00:00
I learned an enormous amount from in-person game jams by chatting with other game developers at the event, most of whom were more skilled than I was. I've also found game jams made it easier find collaborators, easier to get feedback from other designers, and easier to see how other people approach the same theme.

> But if you don't know how to make a game, where does the knowledge come from?

If you're at the stage where you feel like you don't know how to make a game, you might find value in doing the exercises from the book "Challenges for Game Designers" by Brathwaite & Schreiber.
by jpecar | 2025-05-28 15:34:43+00:00
Why not just call it swamp? It would better describe the python ecosystem mess ;)

Jokes aside, this feels very meta: package manager for a package manager for a package manager. Reminds me of the old RFC1925: "you can always add another layer of abstraction". That RFC also says "perfection has been reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away".

And as a hpc admin, I'm not offering my users any help with conda and let them suffer on their own. Instead I'm showing them the greener pastures with spack, easybuild and eessi whenever I can. And they're slowly migrating over.
by severusdd | 2025-05-28 15:34:49+00:00
LLMs are amazing at writing code and terrible at owning it.

Every line you accept without understanding is borrowed comprehension, which you’ll repay during maintenance with high interest. It feels like free velocity. But it's probably more like tech debt at ~40 % annual interest. As a tribe, we have to figure out how to use AI to automate typing and NOT thinking.
by lou1306 | 2025-05-28 15:34:58+00:00
> The existing tools for scientific thought can be divided into two main categories: interactive proof assistants and textual authoring and publishing tools (including LaTeX, as well as the Gerby software that runs the Stacks Project).

This seems... reductive? At the very least, isn't data collection, storage and retrieval also essential to scientific thought? I really do not think those tools can fit into a "textual authoring and publishing tool"-shaped hole.
by noosphr | 2025-05-28 15:35:06+00:00
I used computers for a lot longer than 7.5 hours a day. Doubly so since I got a home desktop with a tablet display and 3 other screens. I find that the reason why productivity in offices is so low is that:

1). The available screen real estate for doing work is tiny.

2). The tools people use have happy paths that force you to work a specific way.

3). Deep thinking is impossible with interruptions.

As an example of a tool which works best on computers, I've finally recreated the literate environment I used at a previous job on my own time and from scratch: https://olive-alayne-28.tiiny.site/

I can now work happily with Emacs in an environment that supports deep thinking about code instead of fighting with it every step of the way.

If you're interested [1] and [3] from that paper are great introductions to literate programming and noweb + emacs + synctex is by far the most pleasant IDE I've ever used.

I also can't rave enough about how well pen tablets work with xournalpp these days. I can take notes on top of multi-thousand page printouts of code bases and rearrange, doodle, remix, and add new pages wherever I feel like. Even five years ago there was no tool that would let you do that without the threat of a major crash is you wrote too fast.
by WalterBright | 2025-05-28 15:36:32+00:00
I managed it for 4 years in college, with usually 3 hours of lecture per day. Was it work? Sure. One was busy the whole lecture. But the results were clear.

My favorite pens at the time were the Pilot pens. Today I love the Tul pens.

I have long since scanned them all in. I should post them on my website, just for fun.
by johnisgood | 2025-05-28 15:36:32+00:00
Do you think Ukraine is going to win? With or without aid? What happens if they win? What happens if they lose? Why is Zelensky so against peace talks? He had plenty of opportunities to choose peace. He did not do so. He recruits random young men at gunpoint. Zelensky is known to eliminate the opposition, too. What do you think, is he a good person?

Just because I disagree with some things that you say, that does not make me a troll. Not everyone who disagrees with you is a troll.

What even is the point of this discussion?

> Also: It's not a tech forum, there's lots of non-tech content here.

It is though, despite non-tech content.
by jonthepirate | 2025-05-28 15:36:38+00:00
I'm on the build team at DoorDash. We're in year 1 of our Bazel monorepo journey. We are heavy into Go, already have remote execution and caching working, and are looking to add support for Python & C++ soon.

If this sort of stuff happens to be something you might want to work on, our team has multiple openings... if you search for "bazel" on our careers page, you'll find them.
by palmotea | 2025-05-28 15:37:07+00:00
>> GE [1]? Boeing [2] [3]? The stocks go up because management and shareholders pull forward the gains as financialization destroys the long term value of the enterprises. Works until it doesn't.

> Boeing consistently went up for many decades prior to the MAX crisis. So did GE.

The point is they could have probably kept going up if they hadn't done that.

It's like how if you choose to eat your seed corn, you'll be fat and happy for a season, then you and your family will certainly starve to death next year. You'd most likely had lived if you hadn't made that short-term decision.

> Companies have life cycles. They grow until they become unable to function efficiently anymore, then they go down.

And how often are the "life cycles" really just the accumulation of bad short-term decisions catching up with the company?

You can kludge and kludge and kludge, but eventually that makes the app unmaintainable. Then you're in "total rewrite" or go under territory.
by egypturnash | 2025-05-28 15:37:36+00:00
I'm thinking about most of my communications on Telegram and it's kind of hilarious to imagine it suddenly starting to reply to people on Xitter with unsolicited horny furry roleplay instead of unsolicited white supremacist rants.

Not so hilarious that it doesn't make me want to consider trying to convince all my circles to move to a community-run Matrix server or something though.
by korse | 2025-05-28 15:38:48+00:00
Bike shops generally don't drug test, rarely have a dress code and attract a pretty select crowd.

Aside from that, you're a mechanic. Motorcycle dealers/car dealers/random car lots hire mechanics too any may or may not care what you do on your own time.

Plenty of maritime industries need that same skill set, as do mining operations, agricultural equipment dealers and all of the medium size shops that repair heavy equipment you've never heard of.

Fab shops are great, if you want a bicycle shop experience but bigger and with 100% more yeehaw. You can teach yourself how to weld for a pretty low sum of money if you've got a couple hundred bucks, some space and creativity.