MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by fuzzfactor | 2025-05-04 22:13:43+00:00
Plus Eno is brilliant, which is a far cry from most politicians.

In music his works can sometimes be considered way different than most, because of even further distance from the familiar composer/songwriter/conductor/bandleader paradigm.

Even more so than things like pure jazz improvisation which can be one of the most "democratic" combos where each person has equal creative input and a wider-than-average freedom of expression. Sometimes the bandleader here is actually voted into position as the one most qualified to do the unavoidable "guidance" tasks of leading even free-form musicians.

As "opposed" to classical orchestral works where each musician's part is well-prescribed, they may have an equal voice among themselves but this is art intended to express the composer's efforts, overwhelmingly more than each individual musician's talent. The conductor here can be more like a dictator and get away with it more often because this tradition has much closer roots to medieval practices.

All these ways, it's the resulting sound that counts to the most significant degree, and it can be a wonder to behold across the spectrum.

Now if there's one type of conductor or bandleader who would be most suitable under all conditions, I would have to describe their most valuable quality as being "magnanimous". Otherwise you can not expect the music to be as satisfying as it could be from the same talented underlying musicians.
by derefr | 2025-05-04 22:14:05+00:00
There is one other very useful form of "expansion" that LLMs do.

If you aren't aware: (high-parameter-count) LLMs can be used pretty reliably to teach yourself things.

LLM base models "know things" to about the same degree that the Internet itself "knows" those things. For well-understood topics — i.e. subjects where the Internet contains all sorts of open-source textbooks and treatments of the subject — LLMs really do "know their shit": they won't hallucinate, they will correct you when you're misunderstanding the subject, they will calibrate to your own degree of expertise on the subject, they will make valid analogies between domains, etc.

Because of this, you can use an LLM as an infinitely-patient tutor, to learn-through-conversation any (again, well-understood) topic you want — and especially, to shore up any holes in your understanding.

(I wouldn't recommend relying solely on the LLM — but I've found "ChatGPT in one tab, Wikipedia open in another, switching back and forth" to be a very useful learning mode.)

See this much-longer rambling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43797121 for details on why exactly this can be better (sometimes) than just reading one of those open-source textbooks.
by jpleger | 2025-05-04 22:14:15+00:00
Things feel like the 2008/2009 time period for hiring, but stock valuations and earnings are still extremely high, which is kinda odd. It feels so strange right now for employment prospects.

I don’t know if anyone else feels it, but the constant under resourcing and do more with less mindset since 2021/2022 have probably made things worse too.
by Anamon | 2025-05-04 22:14:15+00:00
I feel you. I'm a rather social person and generally enjoy social interactions, but reading this article reminded me more of the dreaded "career networking" (I refuse to believe in the existence of people who actually enjoy networking). If those were how my social interactions and gatherings went, I think I'd avoid them, too.

It reads very Ivory Tower, an overly scientific and analytic essay on something that simply doesn't work unless it happens naturally. I appreciate where the author is coming from, and their intentions, but I think it ironically ends up arguing against its own premises. It mentions that people are forgetting how to form natural connections and deal with the messiness of personal interactions, before going on to suggest approaches that feel mostly like following a recipe or checklist.
by orthoxerox | 2025-05-04 22:15:13+00:00
The general making a visible signal is a bad idea. Most generals even today don't have a cool bird's-eye view of the battlefield; they simply won't notice the moment, let alone be able to communicate their decision instantly. Okay, let's replace the general with the sergeant leading the archers.

But this leads us to the more important question: why wait until that last moment? If the enemy is within your range of fire, shooting at them is better than not shooting at them. You shoot at them all the way until they reach your own infantry, accumulating wounds and breaking up their ranks. Not shooting at them won't make the final arrow you loosen before they charge any more damaging.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-05-04 22:15:28+00:00
The judicial resistance to deportation because they didn't follow the law on how to do deportation. That is, the judicial opposition is exactly the rule of law.

The courts are not saying that the administration can't deport illegal aliens. They are saying that, in order to deport illegal aliens, the administration has to follow the law.

Do you have a problem with that? If so, what and why?
by hbsbsbsndk | 2025-05-04 22:16:30+00:00
I organized some grassroots hackathon events 10+ years ago. Turnout was mostly students and die-hard geeks who wanted something to do on the weekend. Even in this small pond we had a local startup sponsor and try to shoe-horn their service into it.

When I attended bigger events with bigger sponsors it felt like 90% marketing to pitch your idea. The actual technical side was never that impressive or interesting.

One community that kicks ass at this are InfoSec people, I've done a lot of terrific volunteer-run CTFs.
by anon22981 | 2025-05-04 22:16:45+00:00
I can’t speak for the lower ranks, but I was mid-ish on premium this season (played from 17k to 23k then stopped iirc) but a lot of the cheaters were subtle enough that not everyone realized that they were cheating, even though they pretty blatant from my perspective. (For reference, I play lvl 10 faceit and have a decent understanding of the game.)

Point being that a ”subtle hacker” might be subtle to some and obvious to others. So OP, being a newbie with only 6 mo of experience, might suspect someone being subtle about their hacking but they might be very blatant to a more experienced player.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-05-04 22:16:51+00:00
Fame, money are fickle but many people seem to go to great lengths to get them. Hackathons give those 2 and these people game the system to get them.

I joined a few corp hackathons before - only to realize the team had been coding even before the hackathon started - rather than hacking during the hackathon period!
by palata | 2025-05-04 22:17:04+00:00
> Doing the exact same work more slowly by hand just to prove a point to someone on HN isn't a productive way to deliver business value.

You prove my point again: it's not "just to prove a point". It's about internalising the information, improving your ability to synthesise and be critical.

Sure, if your only objective is to "deliver business value", maybe you make more money by being uninteresting with an LLM. My point is that if you get good at doing all that without an LLM, then you become a more interesting person. You will be able to have an actual discussion with a real human and be interesting.
by YmiYugy | 2025-05-04 22:17:07+00:00
I mostly use LLMs as a more convenient Google and to automate annoying code transformations with a conveniency of a natural language interface. Sometimes, I use it to "improve" my writing style.

I have to admit I was a bit surprised how bad LLMs are at the continue this essay task. When I read it in the blog I suspected this might have been a problem with the prompt or the using one of the smaller variants of Gemini. So I tried it with Gemini 2.5 Pro and iterated quite a bit providing generic feedback without offering solutions. I could not get the model to form a coherent well reasoned argument. Maybe I need to recalibrate my expectations of what LLMs are capable, but I also suspect that current models have heavy guardrails, use a low temperature and have been specifically tuned for problem solving and avoid hallucinations as much as possible.
Ask HN: What book should my CS1 students read?
by gchallen | 2025-05-04 22:17:22+00:00
tl;dr: I teach introductory computer science (CS1) at the University of Illinois (https://www.cs124.org/). What book should my students read to help introduce them to the field of technology?

In past years I assigned chapters from "Coders" by Clive Thompson for students to read, assessed by a few points of multiple-choice questions on our weekly quizzes. My goal was to complement the technical content and get students thinking about some of the broader issues surrounding technology. I think "Coders" does a nice job of this—covering some of the history of computing, discussing mental health challenges associated with software development, and providing well-reasoned arguments on sensitive topics such as gender and meritocracy.

Maybe I should just bring back "Coders". It was written before the rise of generative AI, but still holds up fairly well.

But I thought I'd ask this community for additional ideas. Note that this could either be required for some small amount of credit, or optional, incentivized with a small amount of extra credit. I'm also receptive to different or more open-ended goals, which is probably reflected in some of the ideas listed below. Generally speaking, I'd like the book to counterbalance an observed tendency among students in my course towards not being wary enough about the computing technology that they will one day participate in creating.

To get you thinking, a few options that I've been considering:

* "The Circle" by Dave Eggers. One of the better satirical takes I've read on our modern technology-centered era. Unfortunately includes some problematic sexual content. * "1984" by George Orwell. Or "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley. I'd probably lean toward "1984", since it just seems like a better match for the present moment somehow. * "Weapons of Math Destruction" by Cathy O'Neill, or one of the many similar cautionary technology tales. One concern is that these tend to be somewhat more focused on one or two specific topics, and don't provide as nice of an overview as something like "Coders". * "Unmasking AI" by Joy Buolamwini, or something similar that mixes biography and technology criticism. Similar specificity concerns here to the group above.

Excited to hear your ideas! Thanks in advance. At this point about 2,000 students take my course each year, so whatever I choose does have the potential to impact more than a few young people.
by apelapan | 2025-05-04 22:18:12+00:00
You won't lose your wheels going at the posted limit, if it is a 30kmh road. For comfort you probably do want to reduce down to 15-20 in an average car.

If you encounter a warning sign for speedbumps on a 50kmh or 70kmh road you better start braking if you dont't fancy getting airborne.

There are some weird deadlocks in Swedish road regulations that make it unreasonable difficult to change the speed limit in some situations. They sometimes work around that by actively making it impossible to drive the posted limit.
by jofer | 2025-05-04 22:18:25+00:00
You can model polygons on a sphere, but the issue is that the data you're starting with is already in a cartesian representation. You actually can't easily convert between the two for complex geometries in cases where they cross the antimeridian/poles. So trying to do anything other than points is difficult in practice, unless you're natively generating data from scratch in a spherical representation, which is rate.
by cadamsdotcom | 2025-05-04 22:19:52+00:00
A few years ago there were wildfires near SF. As a result of SF-based software engineers experiencing truly anwful air quality for probably their first time, Apple and Google’s maps app UIs both got AQI (air quality index) readings.

Glad it’s a thing now! No doubt will come in handy for El Paso residents.

But makes you wonder what else the big companies’ apps would have, if their creators lived in more diverse places.
by Mbwagava | 2025-05-04 22:20:51+00:00
I don't think this is as crazy as it first looks. For instance our values are largely arbitrary. Perhaps you can justify them with rationality, but generally "don't hurt people unnecessarily" seems like something I'd expect most people to get on board with without justification, and is also something I'm 100% ok with being arbitrary.

But you need to be honest with yourself about why you believe what you believe about the world. We all have contradictory beliefs (and sometimes values), so it's only a matter of time before you catch yourself believing in stuff not rooted in your values. This could be harmless, or it could be destructive to yourself and the people around you, or it could allow people to have an unhealthy degree of control over you, your behavior, and how you perceive and interact with the world. All good advice still requires good faith interpretation, and some people aren't going to do that. How much are we supposed to concern ourselves with people who don't try to understand us?

And in general, I'm pretty damn skeptical of anyone who roots their identity in political alignment. Like I'm pretty firmly on "the left", but it's not like I walk around identifying as an anti-capitalist, which is such a broad and vague term I can't control how people perceive it even if some will take me in good faith. And that's still dozens of layers above the values that actually inform my political alignment, and there's a lot of bad-faith actors who appeal to political alignment to get you to work against your values basically in every aspect of society. It's still up to you to notice this and care.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-05-04 22:21:21+00:00
Towards the beginning of my career, my boss asked me to go with him to a [partially] NASA-sponsored hackathon. Being more junior, I wasn't really in a position to say no and not surrender my Saturday (or so I thought at the time). He didn't really do any programming at the Hackathon. I did some pointless space-themed web UI work. It didn't result in anything worth talking about.

He used this event as a PR opportunity and went on the local radio to say we had done a project for NASA.

I'm still embarrassed about that.
by chmod775 | 2025-05-04 22:21:33+00:00
Yes, but none of the current LLMs are even remotely useful doing that kind of work for even something moderately complex. I have a 2k LOC project that no LLM even "understands" *. They can't grasp what it is: It's a mostly react-compatible implementation of "hooks" to be used for a non-DOM application. Every code assistant thinks it's a project using React.

Any documentation they write at best re-states what is immediately obvious from the surrounding code (Useless: I need to explain why), or is some hallucination trying to pretend it's a React app.

To their credit they've slowly gotten better now that a lot of documentation already exists, but that was me doing the work for them. What I needed them to do was understand the project from existing code, then write documentation for me.

Though I guess once we're at the point AI is that good, we don't need to write any documentation anymore, since every dev can just generate it for themselves with their favorite AI and in the way they prefer to consume it.

* They'll pretend they understand by re-stating what is written in the README, then proceed to produce nonsense.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-04 22:21:38+00:00
That's the thing with psyops and "plausible deniability" stuff. Do too much of it and eventually you'll be blamed for everything that's gone bad no matter if you actually did it or not. China and Russia are in the "FO" phase of "FAFO".

Besides, sowing discontent is a tried and true propaganda strategy.
by duskwuff | 2025-05-04 22:22:41+00:00
LLMs aren't even that good at summarizing poorly structured text, like email discussions. They can certainly cherry-pick bits and pieces and make a guess at the overall topic, but my experience has been that they're poor at identifying what's most salient. They get particularly confused when the input is internally inconsistent, like when participants on a mailing list disagree about a topic or submit competing proposals.
by tzs | 2025-05-04 22:25:00+00:00
To add to the examples others have given there is also some that makes you not feel pain but you do remain semi-conscious and when so can still form permanent memories. This is called conscious sedation. They can adjust your level of consciousness as they go, so they can make you more aware if they have to ask questions or need to you do something like move a body part for them and make you less aware when they don't need any interaction.

It combines a sedative from the benzodiazepine family with a synthetic opioid painkiller. This is the most common sedation for colonoscopies. I had a colonoscopy using this, with fentanyl as the opioid and probably midazolam for the benzodiazepine (if not that probably diazepam).

I was aware of the doctor starting the procedure and felt something cold. I could feel pushing sometimes. But nothing hurt or was even annoying (except that cold right at the start). I remember being asked how I was doing and answering. I remember the doctor talking about the quality of my prep--the laxatives had not been as effective as they could have been--and noting that it was still good enough to allow them to continue.

There are some gaps so I think at some points I was more out of it.

I had an earlier colonoscopy with deep sedation using propofol. Here's the experience with that: (1) they start it and I have maybe 10 seconds of memories after that point. At this point I wasn't even in the procedure room. I was in a bed in a waiting area. (2) My next memory is waking up, in the same waiting area, with a nurse telling me they are done, putting the basket with my pants and glasses and phone on the bed, and telling me I could put my pants on.

I've got no memory of being wheeled into the procedure area, or of anything that happened there, or being wheeled back.

That doesn't necessarily mean I didn't feel anything during the procedure. When we were going over the sedation options when arranging for that colonoscopy I asked if deep sedation means you don't feel anything at all, and all the doctor would say is that I would not have any memories of anything.

That isn't exactly reassuring.

If someone offered to pay me a large amount of money to undergo a couple of hours or horrible torture with a guarantee that they would give me a drug to prevent forming long term memories of that torture I would not accept. I would be too worried that there could be other negative persistent effects of such mental trauma than just the formation of long term recallable memories and that the memory preventing drug would not stop those other effect.
by anonymars | 2025-05-04 22:26:48+00:00
I agree: I don't think it's inevitable; I think this was an unfortunate unintentional side-effect of well-intentioned policy. I was primarily responding to the question of whether it was "absurd" to blame Obama. Life would surely be easier if we were judged only on our good intentions and not their unintended consequences.

But I do think it's an easy trap. I think in general it's that rock/hard-place that comes from almost any measurement, aka Goodhart's Law / McNamara fallacy, familiar to probably anyone who has worked their way through a performance review with metrics/OKRs.

There's a fine line separating "the Government-wide Plan shall highlight comprehensive strategies for agencies to identify and remove barriers to equal employment opportunity that may exist in the Federal Government's recruitment, hiring, promotion, retention, professional development, and training policies and practices" (which does not on the face of it require any lowering of standards -- but evidently they concluded that aptitude test was such a barrier) and "we want to change the fact that X% of ATCs are white men" -- what if they find and remove any significant barriers, but the percentage still remains for other reasons (e.g. the "earlier in the pipeline" thing), but there's still pressure to equalize?

I'll give a different-but-related example from my own experience. A few years ago they changed the employee referral bonus program: going forward, if you referred a female candidate that got hired, you'd get twice the referral bonus vs. a male candidate*. Well-intentioned, now we've introduced a direct financial incentive to get the right gender for the job instead of the right person for the job...

*If, like me, you find this astonishing and question the legality -- apparently it's the "neutral" policy that may be discriminatory! Because of the base rate: https://hrdailyadvisor.com/2015/07/19/referral-bonuses-diver...

By the way, short story by Vonnegut: Harrison Bergeron
by notahacker | 2025-05-04 22:27:39+00:00
Mayorkas had exactly the same thin mandate as Trump appointees, and was also unpopular, but he wasn't trying to claim his mandate was so strong that he could ignore courts and the constitution.

If Germany gave you a visa, would you consider it necessary to start a debate about whether such actions were authoritarian? How about if when you got there, they locked you up without trial?