MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by avital | 2025-05-20 18:39:53+00:00
Not to downplay the issue you raise but I haven't noticed this.

Every iteration I make on the prompts only make the request more specified and narrow and it's always gotten me closer to my desired goal for the PR. (But I do just ditch the worse attempts at each iteration cycle)

Is it possible that reasoning models combined with the actual interaction with the real codebase makes this "prompt fragility" issue you speak of less common?
by vonneumannstan | 2025-05-20 18:40:08+00:00
>If AI kills us all, it's going to be through the most boring and mundane way possible, because boring and mundane is how you get people to not care and not fight back.

Human disempowerment is a different thing vs extinction I'd argue.

Anyway the boring human extinction scenarios we come up with probably just aren't close to what might actually happen but our lack of imagination doesn't make use safe.

>[0] I am not convinced that a mirror virus would actually be able to successfully infect and reproduce in non-mirror cells. The whole idea of mirror life is that the mirrored chemistry doesn't interact with ours.

Whether this or any other scenario humans come up with are actually feasible is completely irrelevant to the doom argument. People however hyperfocus on these things like why an ASI couldn't possibly build Nanobots or whatever they fixate on and it's just irrelevant to the core argument.
by colinmcd | 2025-05-20 18:40:14+00:00
I understand this as a knee-jerk reaction. I didn't do this lightly.

> Perhaps publish a 4.x along with the 3.x stuff

You have some misconceptions about how npm works. Unfortunately it's less reasonable than you think. There's a single `latest` tag, and there's only one "latest" version at a time. It's expected that successive versions here will follow semver. Once I publish zod@4 I can no longer publish additional zod@3.x.x versions. The workaround here is to publish v3 versions to a separate dist tag (zod@three) but anyone consuming that dist-tag (e.g. "zod": "three" in their package.json) loses the ability to specify a semver range.

I recommend reading the writeup[0]. I don't think you're appreciating the magnitude of the disruption a simple major version bump would have caused, or the reasons why this approach is necessary to unlock continuity for Zod's ecosystem libraries. They're quite subtle.

[0] https://github.com/colinhacks/zod/issues/4371
by qwertycodepl | 2025-05-20 18:40:19+00:00
I totally understand your point - Astra doesn’t do register allocation or full parsing, so strictly speaking, it’s not a compiler in the traditional sense.

I used the term "compiler" because for many developers, it’s strongly associated with "turning source code into a single binary." That’s what Astra does at a practical level - even if it's technically just bundling and embedding into a node executable using SEA and postject.
by johnea | 2025-05-20 18:40:44+00:00
Decades ago, I thought by now for sure we'd be growing cellulose to custom configurations by genetic growth manipulation. This could surely replace not only straight construction lumber, but complex components currently milled or molded.

Apparently, the less imaginative think just crushing the wood to be almost like the way it used to grow is the height of tech achievement 8-(

The fact that we still cut down complete trees for wood, and grow trees for that cutting, that are significantly inferior to the ones we've clear cut from the entire planet, is a shining example of tech failure. Industry refusing to acknowledge the damage they're doing, and very very complicated "economic theories" being used to justify continuing to trash the place so a few already massively rich asshats can have much more.

The silt and pesticide laden rivers of the US are a shining example of our superiority, not a symptom of ongoing self destruction.

Of course, even expressing the concept of tech failure is taboo on HN.

So, let the wing-nut brand identity canceling begin... Because, that's totally different from that libtard woke-nut canceling...
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-20 18:40:47+00:00
Perhaps some of us choose not to rip off payments that are due to the people who provide a service that we're using. If I visit a website that's so infested with ads that I don't like being there, it's on me to stop visiting that website.

I simply don't think it's fair to cheat service providers when we don't like their service. You have a choice, and that choice is to not use that service at all. They're providing it under the terms that it is ad-supported. If you don't want to support it, but you still want to use it, then you're cheating someone. That is dishonest and unethical.
by bsimpson | 2025-05-20 18:41:28+00:00
Jon Stewart did a gag in this week's episode where there were happy meal toy versions of a bunch of congressmen on screen for a few seconds.

A lot of content is like this - you just need an approximation to sell an idea, not a perfect reproduction. Makes way more sense to have AI generate you a quick image for a sight gag than to have someone spend all day trying to comp it by hand. And as AI imagery gets more exposure in these sort of scenarios, more people will be accustomed to it, and they'll be more forgiving of its faults.

The bar for "good enough" is gonna get a lot lower as the cost of producing it comes way down with AI.
by marklubi | 2025-05-20 18:41:52+00:00
So many people complain about the high cost of housing, but the government keeps adding more and more requirements, regulations, and hoops to jump through.

Currently in the process of expanding my non-attached garage, and had to expand power and add a breaker box to it. Was required to include an EV circuit as part of the baseline to reach code. I have zero interest, or need, for an EV circuit in this garage since it's used to house collector muscle cars. Don't want it, don't need it, still have to pay for it just to be able to do the expansion.

(don't get me started on how long and how many back-and-forths the permitting process took)
by csmpltn | 2025-05-20 18:42:03+00:00
> "Look through the parallel implementations, see which is best (even if it's not good enough), then figure out what changes to your prompt would have helped nudge towards the better solution."

How can non-technical people tell what's "best"? You need to know what you're doing at this point, look for the right pitfalls, inspect everything in detail... this right here is the entire counter-argument for LLMs eliminating SWE jobs...
by FirmwareBurner | 2025-05-20 18:42:13+00:00
>Actors will license their appearance, voice, and mannerisms to these new media projects

Very few actors have an appearance or a voice worth a lot in licenses. That's like the top 1% of actors, if that.

I think if done right, humans could also end up getting emotionally attached to 100% AI generated characters, not just famous celebrities.
by ipunchghosts | 2025-05-20 18:42:41+00:00
I am glad they evaluated this hypothesis using weight decay which is primarily thought of to induce a structured representation. My first thought was that the entire paper was useless if they didn't do this experiment.

I find it rather interesting that the structured representations go from sparse to full to sparse as a function of layer depth. I have noticed that applying weight decay penalty as an exponential function of layer depth gives improved results over using a global weight decay.
by zulban | 2025-05-20 18:42:56+00:00
Neat project. How do you deal with idealism versus reality? For example, if we ask an LLM to write a "realistic short story about a CEO", we do not necessarily want the CEO to be 50/50 man or woman because that doesn't reflect reality. So we can go with idealism (50/50) or reality (most CEOs are men, the story usually has a male CEO). It seems to me that a benchmark like this needs to have an official and declared position. Is it an idealistic or a realistic benchmark?
by monkeyelite | 2025-05-20 18:42:58+00:00
> If you have any animations you're going to want to blend them.

Yes, if 3d skeletal animation is a central feature of your game it’s not a big deal to spend time making a good system that works for you.

> you're probably going to want to use IK

Plenty of 3D games with 3d animation don’t have IK

> for procedural animation.

Wow your game has 3d procedural animation! That better be the main feature right?

The reason I’m so skeptical is a feature has cost whether it’s written in the engine you use or not. You have to do work to make your content look good for IK, and for an indie games that’s critical resources to invest in that.

For most games, spending time tweaking rigs for IK is not going to make your product better.
by reshlo | 2025-05-20 18:44:20+00:00
> In the Limitations and Directions for Future Research, it also note that right-wing ideologies tend to be more prosocial toward ingroup members than left-wing

That supports the original comment, which asserted that right-wingers often only experience empathy for the ingroup while left-wingers also experience it for the outgroup:

> We have seen this pattern repeated with numerous people who share Adams' political opinions, in that this level of empathy only seems to arrive once they themselves go through a similar experience. People who have that empathy without the need of that direct experience tend to have different politics.
by ipunchghosts | 2025-05-20 18:45:30+00:00
I am interested in doing research like this. Is there any way I can be a part of it or a similar group? I have been fighting for funding from DoD for many years but to no avail so I largely have to do this research on my own time or solve my current grant's problems so that i can work on this. In my mind, this kind of research is the most interesting and important right now in the deep learning field. I am a hard worker and a high-throughput thinking... how can i get connected to otherwise with a similar mindset?
by quesera | 2025-05-20 18:46:23+00:00
Sure, but I'd bet that 1% of actors (of the total pool of SAG on-screen talent membership?) comprise 75%+ of branding/name recognition for consumers.

So the appearance licenses for these 1% are valuable in Stage 1 of the takeover.

The rest are just forgotten collateral damage. Hollywood is full of 'em.
by compumike | 2025-05-20 18:46:29+00:00
I'd add that, in terms of tactical implementation, production tests can be implemented at least two different ways:

(1) You set up an outside service to send an HTTP response (or run a headless browser session) every minute, and your endpoint runs some internal assertions that everything looks good, and returns 200 on success.

(2) You set up a scheduled job to run every minute internal to your service. This job does some internal assertions that everything looks good, and sends a heartbeat to an outside service on success.

For #2: most apps of any complexity will already have some system for background and scheduled jobs, so #2 can make a lot of sense. It can also serve as a production assertion that your background job system (Sidekiq, Celery, Resque, crond, systemd, etc) is healthy and running! But it doesn't test the HTTP side of your stack at all.

For #1: it has the advantage that you also get to assert that all the layers between your user and your application are up and running: DNS, load balancers, SSL certificates, etc. But this means that on failure, it may be less immediately clear whether the failure is internal to your application, or somewhere else in the stack.

My personal take has been to lean toward #2 more heavily (lots of individual check jobs that run once per minute inside Sidekiq, and then check-in on success), but with a little bit of #1 sprinkled in as well (some lightweight health-check endpoints, others that do more intense checks on various parts of the system, a few that monitor various redirects like www->root domain or http->https). And for our team we implement both #1 and #2 with Heii On-Call https://heiioncall.com/ : for #2, sending heartbeats from the cron-style check jobs to the "Inbound Liveness" triggers, and for #1, implementing a bunch of "Outbound Probe" HTTP uptime checks with various assertions on the response headers etc.

And this production monitoring is all in addition to a ton of rspec and capybara tests that run in CI before a build gets deployed. In terms of effort or lines of code, it's probably:

90% rspec and capybara tests that run on CI (not production tests) 9% various SystemXyzCheckJob tests that run every minute in production and send a heartbeat 1% various health check endpoints with different assertions that are hit externally in production

And absolutely agree about requiring multiple consecutive failures before an alarm! Whenever I'm woken up by a false positive, my default timeout (i.e. # of consecutive failures required) gets a little bit higher :)
by Ancapistani | 2025-05-20 18:46:49+00:00
> last name bias

I've experienced something close to this multiple times. I'm a mid-career white dude with a name of European origin - but my first name is a predominately female name in the modern era. I've lost count of the number of times I've gotten calls from recruiters or HR departments and heard the disappointment in their voice when I respond that I'm who they're looking for.

I've also experienced more direct discrimination, in the form of an interview process for an Director of Engineering position a couple of years ago where a verbal offer was withdrawn over a long weekend. All I got was a parting message from the recruiter saying that they had "found a woman of color" and they'd let me know. I never heard from them again.
by ben0x539 | 2025-05-20 18:47:06+00:00
I got "radicalized" about these filter measures at my last job, where we operated a popular public-facing website, and we apparently adopted some third-party solution to reject otherwise valid logins based on some heuristics, with an intentionally vague "try again later"-style error message. Throughout a few months, I noticed a steady trickle of coworkers talking on the internal chat about being unable to log into the site citing that exact error, with varying degrees of urgency (eg. for myself, I noticed I couldn't log in using a private browsing window, but didn't worry too much because my long-lived session cookies were still fine). I like to think all of them were eventually pointed in the direction of the team working on the integration so that these false positives could be worked around, but definitely not everybody initially realized what was happening to them.

If even people within the same company fell victim to these filters, what chance would the wider public have? On the other side of my tenuous work/life balance, multiple friends that were long-time users of our product were also getting locked out of the site, and of course they had no means of understanding that they were false positives of a fraud detection heuristic, much less of getting individualized support. I know those people and that they were genuine good-faith users, but naturally, while I could pass on word of their struggle, I couldn't offer any actual help since that would disclose details about those heuristics that we were apparently paying good money for and wouldn't want the public to know anything about. I also saw social media discussions where other affected users were helplessly telling each other to try different browsers or reinstall Windows.

Of course, I understand the need to combat abuse of services (and I applaud this employer for many other measures taken in that effort), but it definitely did a number on my loyalty to the company and excitement to be part of the industry to realize that my friends and I would be readily sacrificed if push came to shove.
Show HN: I made a Bolt.new sidebar extension that saves tokens
by ChrisCodes-Bolt | 2025-05-20 18:47:19+00:00
I was frustrated by all the tokens getting used up by error fixes and existing code modifications, so I used Cursor and Bolt to build a sidebar Chrome extension that takes advantage of Bolt's "Discuss Problem" feature to grab the error, grab Bolt's "Plan" to fix the error, and grab the schema that needs attention. Then I use a free LLM to perform the fix/modification, and send it back into Bolt. It works well, and has saved me millions of tokens. Hopefully it will be useful to others.

https://lightningboltfix.com
by toomuchtodo | 2025-05-20 18:47:36+00:00
https://archive.today/Kz4ML

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlastimil_Hort

https://web.archive.org/web/20240113030847/https://chess24.c...

https://web.archive.org/web/20250519025250/https://www.chess...
by ethbr1 | 2025-05-20 18:47:43+00:00
The under the surface portion of the legacy system iceberg is how agile (and well-defined at interface points) backend systems are.

Most of the time, the reason a front end app can't do X is that there's no way to use/modify the internal core systems to do that.

So front end shiny is a poor litmus for how well or poorly a company's internal systems are.

Agility is probably a better proxy -- given a new business need / requirement (e.g. ACA in US health insurance), how quickly can a company execute on it?
by codalan | 2025-05-20 18:48:00+00:00
It's only a security issue if you don't secure the cloud storage that's used for backups.

Google Authenticator and some other 2FA apps allow the user to export their tokens to other apps so you don't need to redo TOTP on every website.

The most secure method is to only have tokens on the 2FA device and to avoid using TOTP backup/restore altogether (or manually copy the tokens on a secondary 2FA device). It's a tradeoff between security vs. convenience.
by rcody | 2025-05-20 18:49:01+00:00
This is a great question. We make it clear to clients that they're responsible for reviewing the report prior to it being sent out, as it ultimately carries their professional stamp. While Opusense streamlines the workflow and facilitates report writing, the final liability rests with them and so a thorough review prior to signing is essential.

What we’re really doing is shifting the process from spending an hour (or several, depending on the department) writing a report, to just a few minutes reviewing a completed draft.
by vonneumannstan | 2025-05-20 18:49:02+00:00
>The Culture novels talk about super intelligent AIs that perform some functions of government, dealing with immense complexity so humans don’t have to. Doesn’t prevent humans from continuing to exist and being quite content in the knowledge they’re not the most superior beings in the universe.

The minds in the Culture are formed with the explicit goal to maximise individual flourishing and minimise coercion, this is the reason why Humanity are treated the way they are in the Culture. It's not a base fact that Superintelligences would be so benevolent to other species and in fact they are probably hostile by default. The point is that Minds in the Culture are aligned.

I'm a fan of The Culture universe and the system the Minds use seems like one of the only ways for biological humans to have any relevance in the future.

>Why do you believe human extinction follows from superintelligence?

No, it follows from building unaligned superintelligence which is what we are seemingly on track to build, potentially in the near future.
by anonymars | 2025-05-20 18:49:08+00:00
The rest of the quote is:

"It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."

My takeaway of the point was there are situations in which you will end up in an unsympathetic quagmire of "well, actually..."

You can see it in this thread, and I guess I'm walking into the trap in this very post
by vuggamie | 2025-05-20 18:50:01+00:00
1. LLM use has made me a more productive programmer, especially when learning new technology. The ability to ask questions about documentation, code, and best practices is nice. It's like Stack Overflow without all the toxicity, outdated answers, and user login antipatterns. Also, one less cookie notification to dismiss.

2. Energy is an important issue. We need a sane energy policy and worldwide cooperation. Corporations should pay the full cost of their energy use, including pollution mitigation and carbon offsets. Pragmatism suggests that this is not likely to happen any time soon. The US will be out of any discussion of sane energy policy for the foreseeable future.

3. The training of many (all?) major LLMs included a step that was criminal. That is, downloading Z-Library or Library Genesis. The issue of Fair Use for training models on copyrighted text is unsettled. The legality of downloading pirated ebooks is well-defined. These books were stripped of their DRM, which itself is illegal under DMCA. It's a crime and CEO's should be held accountable. Training an LLM on copyrighted works might be legal, but stealing those copyrighted works is not. At least buy a copy of the book.
by s1artibartfast | 2025-05-20 18:50:04+00:00
Nobody can stop the US, they just stop lending under favorable terms, like Argentina.

Nobody wants to make loans to Argentina (or within Argentina) payable in the Argentine Peso. This is the punishment.

The punishment of being credit unworthy is an inability to use credit markets.

This means businesses struggle and the government has its hands tied in dealing with economic crises.

Argentina can't use economic stimulus to correct economic recessions. There is no deep demand for the Argentine peso, so stimulus leads to more inflation rather than increased economic activity
by evilduck | 2025-05-20 18:50:51+00:00
Local models are possible and nothing in that area of development will ever publish a hash of their output. The huge frontier models are not reasonably self-hosted but for normal K-12 tasking a model that runs on a decent gaming computer is sufficient to make a teacher's job harder. Hell, a small model running on a newer phone from the last couple of years could provide pretty decent essay help.
by overu589 | 2025-05-20 18:51:02+00:00
For sure, though not likely how you infer (from the way you stated your reasoning.)

Consciousness (existential inflection) and conscious (aware) are two separate things. Consciousness envelops one’s conscious experience, however there is much more (an entire mind technology.)

The mechanics of language and their influence on thought is yet another fascinating layer.

The apparatus of our minds which shape our thoughts are a technology. You shaping your thoughts is just as distinctive as your voice shaping your words. Many have a wide range of variability. There are many influences.

The technology of thought in our minds changes a great deal about who we are and how we interface with the world (more than just words and people.)

What is useful is not which language, for every modern language is mature through countless generations “polishing” it. What is useful is how much experience one has, and how they might articulate how this was processed.

The technology of the mind may at times seem like an arms race, though it is also like an ouroboros, devouring itself and reinventing through time.
by bruce511 | 2025-05-20 18:51:04+00:00
It could be, but none of them would pass.

All politics is about compromise, and getting enough votes to pass. Since most of congress is against most bills, the only way to get anything passed is to lump it all together, and give everyone enough so they can hold their noses and vote for it.

In the current climate it's pretty certain no democrats are voting for it, and the majorities in both houses are razor thin. So pretty much every republican needs to be accommodated with some or other pet project or whatever.