MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by zamadatix | 2025-05-05 00:18:28+00:00
They're all horrible to conceptualize because people don't commonly deal with how far even something like the Earth to the Sun is, I don't think there is any winning answer here - at least an AU is consistently defined and maybe slightly more likely to be familiar, but it's still just about as crap to be honest.

Side note: Apart from AU already being defined as average distance and not current distance, the distance referenced is how far out the proposed object is now, not its general orbital parameters. At that orbital distance 23 years of motion isn't going to be much change in distance even if it's in a hyperbolic orbit.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-05 00:19:40+00:00
i saw chicken wire used for something unknown to me on top of old 1800s greenhouses in France. it was not used for hail because it was resting directly on top of glass. i do not know what it was there for.

but hail and flying debris i got past few years is so big and so frequent that im not sure chicken wire will do the job.

a lot of gardeners use shading cloth for lowering sun light intensity. but that is not always enough to withstand hail.

A lot of times there is multiple pieces of hail stuck in one hole. some just bounce off.

i have PV on roof and not had issue with that. but i had few broken glass pieces of greenhouse glass. even tho it is on same property. it is glass-glass bifacial, i did not do it for back light but for longevity, i saw too many plastic backing tear off, or delaminated or how to call it. so i did not want that. and im not sure if that is also factor in not having broken PV.

doing it on huge PV areas should atleast be by my feeling too much of hassle, investment.

But some people mentioned in other comments small arrays of, if i remember correctly, 5kWp. so that is roughly area im doing it on. so in those small arrays it can be done manually.

https://99percentinvisible.org/article/fruit-walls-before-gr...

https://www.atlasobscura.com/adventures/trips/peru-machu-pic...
by spenvo | 2025-05-05 00:19:52+00:00
That's a fair point, and it's your call - however, if the new (major) development is covered in this way then 1) users on the front page won't see mention of it at headline level and 2) the discussion of that development on HN will be affected by/limited to the time-decay of a post that is 12 hours older. I understand that there are tradeoffs at play, it really comes down to if the development at hand is big-enough to justify another post, and, again, that's your call.
by dimatura | 2025-05-05 00:19:55+00:00
There's been a huge amount of work on image transformers since the original VIT. A lot of it has explored different schemes to slice up the image in tokens, and I've definitely seen some of it using a multiresolution pyramid. Not sure about the RL part - after all, the higher/low-res levels of the pyramid would add less tokens than the base/high-res level, so it doesn't seem that necessary. But given the sheer volume of work out there I can bet someone has explored this idea or something pretty close to it already.
by moralestapia | 2025-05-05 00:20:15+00:00
>Chat, briefly, what does a PM at a company like Google do?

"A Product Manager (PM) at Google is responsible for guiding the development of products from conception to launch. They identify user needs, define product vision and strategy, prioritize features, work with cross-functional teams (engineering, design, marketing), and ensure the product aligns with business goals. They act as the bridge between technical teams and stakeholders to deliver successful, user-focused solutions."

Some might have ignored your question, but in the spirit of good conversation, I figured I’d share a quick explanation of what a PM does, just in case it helps!
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-05-05 00:22:03+00:00
> The onus should be on the educators to reframe how they teach and how they test. It's strange how the author can't see this.

> Universities and schools must change how they do things with respect to AI, otherwise they are failing the students.

Hard disagree.

Students need to answer a fundamental question of themselves;

Am I here to learn or to get a passing grade?

If it is the former, the latter doesn't really matter.

If it is the latter, the former was not the point to begin with.
by kevinsync | 2025-05-05 00:22:25+00:00
I'm very much into AI, in terms of judicious and sprinkled usage across disciplines -- but I'm a computer guy, I produce and support a lot of code, art, audio, video, social, multimedia etc content, and I've incorporated bits and pieces of AI here and there to achieve a vision or get work done (LLMs, diffusion, etc) -- my main issue with it, like anything technical, is that the mainstream interpretation / instinct by the average bozo is that the machine will do my work for me, and nothing could be further from the truth.

There's a lot of anti-AI sentiment from the mainstream, but I'm noticing the pro-AI mainstream sentiment comes from people who are either technically-minded grifters looking to deploy automated solutions to snake $$$ from people's pockets, or lazy / disengaged worker drones who just want the computer to do their middling work for them. And it will, up to a point, where your "work" plateaus into a mess of predictable, non-novel banality lol, unless you invest the time to master the tool (which, for what it's worth, isn't like introducing the toothed saw, it's more like a Dremel or a SAWZALL that have specific purposes but casual users won't ever master them)

Buying a digital ELPH in 2001 didn't make you a photographer unless you were a photographer with an open mind. Squarespace doesn't make you a web designer unless you've studied the system and understand the tradeoffs. AWS doesn't solve infrastructure unless you learn how to architect a solution that works for your use-case. AI, by the same property, is shit until you research how it works, experiment with solutions, and find novel workflows to get something out the other end that's new, fresh and exciting.

Companies just rolling "AI" into their products aren't gonna win over customers and users unless they use the tool to deliver something of exceedingly-needed value. If it's a short-term grift or "hail mary", good luck! You'll need it!
by dimatura | 2025-05-05 00:26:05+00:00
Yeah, the article was painting with a bit too of a broad stroke IMO, though they did briefly acknowledge "special exceptions" such as satellite or medical imagery. It's very application-dependent.

That said, in my experience beginners do often overestimate how much image resolution is needed for a given task for some reason. I often find myself asking to retry their experiments with a lower resolution. There's a surprising amount of information in 128x128 or even smaller images.
by Calwestjobs | 2025-05-05 00:26:57+00:00
well, makes goats not eat precious plants so if it can withstand them, then hail will be ez. XD

(neighbors goats. i do not like animals, too much worry and work around diseases. there are tens, some years even hundred millions of chicken burned because of avian flu, pigs have african swine fewer,.... no thank you, corona cave bats of 2019, was enough for me...)
by thomasahle | 2025-05-05 00:27:04+00:00
The one case where this doesn't work, is if the prompt is, say 3 ideas, which the LLM expand to 20, and the colleague then trimmed down to 10.

Ideally there's some selection done, and the fact you're receiving it means it's better than a mean answer. But sometimes they haven't even read the LLM output themselves :-(
by sivers | 2025-05-05 00:27:04+00:00
I’d always wanted to go to Korea. I was so excited. I set out to explore and forgot my phone in the hotel.

I walked around Seoul for twelve hours that day and experienced so many wonderful things. I remember them all vividly now, years later, but I have no photos of it.

It was a relief to not document everything. I appreciated everything as a one-step process instead of a two-step process. I could just feel amazed, instead of feel amazed and hold up my camera to record it. Besides, how often do I look at those photos later, anyway? I find it more useful to refer to my journal of how I felt, instead of what I saw.

A few times, GPS could have helped, but because I didn’t have it, I had to go ask strangers for directions. Getting lost led me down some great little back roads I never would have found if I was following the map.

So now I intentionally travel without a phone.

I feel free and untethered. A break from connection.

Where you are is partially defined by where you are not. When you’re somewhere, you’re not somewhere else. But when you use your phone, you’re everywhere. You keep in touch with friends. You hear what’s going on at home. You see the screen exactly as you do anywhere else.

It’s wonderful to be cut off from everywhere else — to be more fully only there.

And it’s so nice to not know the time or where I am. Clocks and maps are useful inventions, but I see a moment better without them.

I appreciate a moment more when I know I’ll never see it again. I remember that day in Seoul better than I remember most photo-filled travels.
by throwup238 | 2025-05-05 00:28:25+00:00
The printing press fundamentally changed everything so our sources get much more socially inclusive starting with the arquebus onwards (but not so much the hand cannon, which predates the press). This cuts across all subfields of history because society no longer depended on expensive scribes to preserve sources and publish new material.

More importantly, volleys were crucial to breech loading gun tactics because unlike an archer a gunner is very vulnerable while reloading, since they have to hold the gun, load the powder and ball, and pack it down with both hands. The musketeers were in a formation several lines deep so that when the front line fired, they’d go to the back to reload and it worked much better if it was organized. This cadence also informed the pikemen defending them when it was safe to move and reposition. Archers could “reload” from a quiver much faster so there was no point in coordinating it.
by o11c | 2025-05-05 00:28:34+00:00
That subproblem is fundamentally unfixable unless you're willing to allow incompatible objects to be passed around, which is a really bad idea.

If your code does:

o = foo_v1.get_obj() foo_v2.use_obj(o)

then this is almost always undefined behavior, since the authors of `foo` will almost certainly not write their APIs to accept instances with different internals.
by gonzobonzo | 2025-05-05 00:29:18+00:00
> Nobody should force schoolchildren to memorize them all. Just tell them that there are an unknown number of objects in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud and they’ll know as much as they need to know.

Or just tell them that there's an unknown number of planets in the solar system, but the big 8 are the only ones they're expected to memorize. That was actually the original plan by the IAU, and how many (I believe most) planetary scientists define planet today.

The decision being based mainly on not wanting to add newly discovered planets to the list of planets in the solar system always rubbed me the wrong way. As is the tendency for people to mistakenly believe that this is settled science, when it's actually an unsettled nomenclature debate.
by buu700 | 2025-05-05 00:29:40+00:00
We were talking about writing, not about vibe coding.

No one said anything about vibe coding. Using tools appropriately to accomplish tasks more quickly is just common sense. Deliberately choosing to pay 10x the cost for the same or equivalent output isn't a rational business decision, regardless of whether the task happens to be writing, long division, or anything else.

Just to be clear, I'm not arguing against doing things manually as a learning exercise or creative outlet. Sometimes the journey is the point; sometimes the destination is the point. Both are valid.

I don't know what your job is.

Here's one: prepping first drafts of legal docs with AI assistance before handing them off to lawyers for revision has objectively saved significant amounts of time and money. Without AI this would have been too time-consuming to be worthwhile, but with AI I've saved not only my own time but the costs of billable hours on phone calls to discuss requirements, lawyers writing first drafts on their own, and additional Q&A and revisions over email. Using AI makes it practical to skip the first two parts and cut down on the third significantly.

Here's another one: doing security audits of customer code bases for a company that currently advertises its use of AI as a cost-saving/productivity-enhancing mechanism. Before they'd integrated AI into their platform, I would frequently get rave reviews for the quality and professionalism of my issue reports. After they added AI writing assistance, nothing changed other than my ability to generate a greater number of reports in the same number of billable hours. What you're suggesting effectively amounts to choosing to deliver less value out of ego. I still have to understand my own work product, or I wouldn't be able to produce it even with AI assistance. If someone thinks that somehow makes the product less "interesting", well then I guess it's a good thing my job isn't entertainment.
by 0_____0 | 2025-05-05 00:30:21+00:00
There are DFM tools that you can use on the back end of your design process e.g. through fictiv/protolabs etc. However there is a lot of stuff that is "technically machineable" but way more expensive to do, and it really is an engineer's job to both understand how the part is made, talk to the machinists if they don't, and to trade off the design complexity vs. the engineering needs.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-05-05 00:31:07+00:00
I don't think that the onus should be on historians to prove that something didn't happen. Rather, the onus should be on people to prove that something did happen. It's fine to have arguments about how it's plausible (or not) that something occurred when we don't have direct evidence. But at the end of the day, I think it's better to not draw conclusions without actual evidence.
by halfadot | 2025-05-05 00:31:55+00:00
> Don’t let a computer write for you! I say this not for reasons of intellectual honesty, or for the spirit of fairness. I say this because I believe that your original thoughts are far more interesting, meaningful, and valuable than whatever a large language model can transform them into.

Having spent about two decades reading other humans' "original thoughts", I have nothing else to say here other than: doubt.
by EvgeniyZh | 2025-05-05 00:32:52+00:00
> they would be stupid not to if their classmates are using it.

Why would they be stupid? Were people before LLMs stupid for not asking smarter classmate/parent/paid contractor to solve the homework for them?

Large part of education is learning about things that can be easily automated, because you can't learn hard things without learning easy things. Nothing conceptually changed in this regard, like Wolfram Alpha didn't change the way differentiation is taught.
by ropable | 2025-05-05 00:33:42+00:00
The statistics about the draw weight of war bows being 100 to 170 lb (45-77 kg) is striking to me. Imagine getting to the gym, picking up a single 45 kg dumbbell (the lowest end!), and setting out to rep as many single-arm rows as you can before failure. Of course you wouldn't hold that dumbbell at full contraction; that would be insane and you'd gas out in seconds.
by dheera | 2025-05-05 00:35:19+00:00
Venvs also suck because the user has to create and activate them.

It would be nice if a foo.py file could just deal with all of that.

A while ago I created this thing as a thought experiment. It likely doesn't work with more recent version of python though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24735303

It was partly in jest but I was not entirely un-serious; I think "dealing with dependencies" is quite possibly the biggest reason why Python isn't used to distribute end-user applications. It's a wonderful language but a really shitty import system. There are various attempts to make the experience better (pipx, poetry) but you still can't ship a .py file to someone, have them double click and run it. They still have to conda something, venv something, pipx something.
by halfadot | 2025-05-05 00:35:30+00:00
> Leaning on an LLM to ease through those tough moments is 100% short circuiting the learning process.

Sounds like "back in my days" type of complaining. Do you have any evidence of this "100% reduction" or is it just "AI bad" bandwagoning?

> But you're definitely not learning how to write.

How would you know? You've never tested him. You're making a far-reaching assumption about someone's learning based on using an aid. It's the equivalent of saying "you're definitely not learning how to ride a bicycle if you use training wheels".
by satisfice | 2025-05-05 00:35:33+00:00
I was surprised to find how not true that is when I eventually read the books for myself, long after they became a phenomenon. The books are well-crafted mystery stories that don't cheat the reader. All the clues are there, more or less, for you to figure out what's happening, yet she still surprises.

The world-building is meh at best. The magic system is perfunctory. But the characters are strong and the plot is interesting from beginning to end.
by orbital-decay | 2025-05-05 00:35:43+00:00
I know that I'm repeating myself but none of that has any connection to reality for anyone remotely familiar with the devs of specific cheats and their history. Especially DMA hardware developers which are neither Russian nor Chinese. I can write a long post about this some day (especially about how local online game hacking economy/culture works, for every cultural bubble - they overlap a lot, and specific moments of drama inside them) and post it to HN, but please, stop being a part of the "psyop" you're talking about.
by dang | 2025-05-05 00:37:08+00:00
There's no "don't change titles" rule, though it's interesting how the actual rule gets truncated to that in people's minds! Here's the actual rule:

"Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In this case I was thinking of both the 'misleading' and 'linkbait' bits of that 'unless'. (By the way, this is common HN moderation practice—bog standard, as I often say.)

> to choose one unprovable point until another just as unprovable point is proven

You might have a, er, provable point if that were the case! but I'm taking for granted that the officials in question did actually use this client, so "used" is known while "use" (which I took to mean "are still using") isn't yet known for sure. Did I miss something?

Edit: btw, in case anyone's wondering why we left the submitted title up instead of reverting it to what the article says, one reason is that the submitted title struck me as arguably less linkbaity (and therefore ok under the rule) and the other reason is that we cut authors a bit of slack when they post their own work.
by strken | 2025-05-05 00:37:10+00:00
Yes, I too enjoy that universities never send students to pointless filler courses. I really enjoyed writing long essays about ethics in software engineering for people who'd barely even read them. I especially benefited from being told that "tell your boss, tell HR, then make a police report and quit if that didn't fix it" is not an appropriate response to being asked to break the law at work.

While we're talking about things we're grateful for, I am so glad that we've structured the education and employment systems such that not having a degree puts you at significant risk of unemployment, prevents you from ever immigrating anywhere for the first decade of your working life, and generally marks you as a failure.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-05-05 00:38:02+00:00
> Go binaries on Linux don't need libc (except for NSS, which is glibc-only idiocy).

They don't need NSS either, they just chose to depend on it because getting rid of if was too painful. Everyone's addicted to glibc and nobody enjoys going through the withdrawal symptoms.

> Running a static libc-less binary as init is fun and easy!

It's incredibly fun. I wrote a freestanding Linux Lisp interpreter and my long term goal is to boot Linux into it and bring up the entire system from within the REPL.

https://github.com/lone-lang/lone

I haven't tested it but I bet Linux can already boot into it just fine. I still need to do more work to make it able to bring up the system though. I've implemented endianness independent memory access functions, now I need a binary structure encoder and decoder. That will enable programs to do kernel I/O properly.

What's holding me back right now is continuations. Language still doesn't have flow control. I've been slowly converting my interpreter into an interruptible virtual machine with continuations that can integrate with primitives written in C. Debugging this stuff turned out to be a nightmare.
by mplanchard | 2025-05-05 00:38:07+00:00
I'm always a fan of more historical context on code, so maybe it'd be an okay fallback for a proper comment and git blame, but you'd have to find a way to separate the meaningful part of the prompt from the preamble that is implicitly inserted into most prompts ("you are a helpful assistant, only output code, no formatting markers, etc etc").

That said, I suspect it wouldn't actually be that useful for the "why" very often, which is usually what's lacking in these cases. I would guess that far more people prompt the LLMs with the "how," e.g. "write a function that takes these things as input and produces this output," which of course we can just read in the code.
by jameshart | 2025-05-05 00:38:37+00:00
I’ve come across this analogy that I think works well:

Using an LLM to do schoolwork is like taking a forklift to the gym.

If all we were interested in was moving the weights around, you’d be right to use a tool to help you. But we’re doing this work for the effect it will have on you. The reason a teacher asks you a question is not because they don’t know the answer.
by xaoz | 2025-05-05 00:38:54+00:00
Well, perhaps not quite :D

> But ultimately, should Google have hired me? Yes, absolutely yes. I am often a dick, I am often difficult, I often don’t know computer science, but. BUT. I make really good things, maybe they aren't perfect, but people really like them. Surely, surely Google could have used that.

But he did add some nuance to the situation
by dottjt | 2025-05-05 00:39:12+00:00
I think it depends on what you value.

I think a large part of taking photos and recording things for a lot of people is that they like to journal and record things, in part, for future generations to have.

Like it's great you had those amazing experiences, but in a sense it's as if they're also going to die with you as well (assuming you even have children).

Of course, nothing wrong with what you're describing. I definitely can feel there's value in how you approach it, and I often fantasise about spending an entire year without technology at all.
by myth2018 | 2025-05-05 00:39:18+00:00
> Anecdotally, this phenomenon seems more common among English-as-a-second-language speakers

That part caught my attention. As an English-as-a-second-language speaker myself, I find it so difficult to develop any form of "taste" in English the same way I have in my mother tongue. A badly written sentence in my mother tongue feels painful in a sort of physical way, while bad English usually sound OK to me, especially when asserted in the confident tone LLMs are trained in. I wish I could find a way to develop such sense for the foreign languages I currently use.