MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tkgally | 2025-05-05 01:53:38+00:00
I teach a university class in which I ask the students to submit writing each week, and I have also seen obviously LLM-produced writing. Yes, it’s boring and doesn’t show the students’ thinking, and the students are not getting any wiser by doing assignments that way. Just last week, I told my students that, while they can use LLMs any way they like for the class, their writing will be more interesting if they write it themselves and use LLMs only sparingly, such as for fixing grammatical mistakes (most of the students are not native speakers of English). It helps, I think, that in this class the students’ writing is shared among the students, and during class I often refer to interesting comments from student writing. The students themselves, I hope, will come to understand the value of reading human-written writing.

That said, I myself am increasingly reading long texts written by LLMs and learning from them. I have been comparing the output of the Deep Research products from various companies, often prompting for topics that I want to understand more deeply for projects I am working on. I have found those reports very helpful for deepening my knowledge and understanding and for enabling me to make better decisions about how to move forward with my projects.

I tested Gemini and ChatGPT on “utilizing Euler angles for rotation representation,” the example topic used by the author in the linked article. I first ran the following metaprompt through Claude:

Please prepare a prompt that I can give to a reasoning LLM that has web search and “deep research” capability. The prompt should be to ask for a report of the type mentioned by the sample “student paper” given at the beginning of the following blog post: https://claytonwramsey.com/blog/prompt/ Your prompt should ask for a tightly written and incisive report with complete and accurate references. When preparing the prompt, also refer to the following discussion about the above blog post on Hacker News: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43888803

I put the the full prompt written by Claude at the end of the Gemini report, which has some LaTex display issues that I couldn’t get it to fix:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sqpeLY4TWD8L4jDSloeH45AI...

Here is the ChatGPT report:

https://chatgpt.com/share/681816ff-2048-8011-8e0f-d8cbad2520...

I know nothing about this topic, so I cannot evaluate the accuracy or appropriateness of the above reports. But when I have had these two Deep Research models produce similar reports on topics I understand better, they have indeed deepened my understanding and, I hope, made me a bit wiser.

The challenge for higher education is trying to decide when to stick to the traditional methods of teaching—in this case, having the students learn through the process of writing on their own—and when to use these powerful new AI tools to promote learning in other ways.
by bell-cot | 2025-05-05 01:54:42+00:00
If you were hit and badly injured by brand-new model of car, where would you want the ambulance to take you?

- the dealership that sold that car, where they know all about it

- a hospital emergency room, where they have a lot of experience with patients injured by other, different models of car

I'm thinking that the age-old commonality on the human side matters far more than the transient details on the obsession/addiction side.
by jama211 | 2025-05-05 01:55:32+00:00
I think the author is conflating assignments with learning. The assignments are, by definition, hurdles to be overcome, and they will always be treated as such. Learning can happen in other better ways, and perhaps if your assignment design is to get students to generically regurgitate course material you shouldn’t be surprised when that’s exactly what they do.

I can’t be the only student who had both the experience of wonderful learning moments, AND could see a badly designed assignment a mile off and wasn’t motivated to give such a thing my full attention no?

As a side note, if you want the prompt, simply ask for it in the assignment. Asking students for one thing and then complaining when you don’t get another is insanity.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-05 01:55:51+00:00
No this is just a very overly pedantic and technical way of looking at it.

First of all you'll note that all people are also biased by the Exact same reasoning. You know this. Everyone knows that all people are biased. This isn't something you don't know.

So if every single intelligence, human or not is biased. What is this article truly talking about? The article is basically saying LLMs are LESS biased then humans. Why are LLMs less biased then humans? Well maybe because the training set in an LLM is less biased then the training set given to a human. This makes sense right? A human will be made more biased by his individual experience and his parents biases while an LLM is literally inundated with as many sources of textual information as possible with no attempt at bias due to the sheer volume of knowledge they are trying to shove in there.

The article is basically referring to this.

But you will note interestingly that LLMs bias towards textual data more. They understand the world as if they have no eyes and ears and only text. So the way they think reflects this bias. But in terms of textual knowledge I think we can all agree, they are Less biased then humans.

Evidence: an LLM is not an atheist or a theist or an agnostic. But you, reader, are at the very least one of those three things.
by ValdikSS | 2025-05-05 01:56:28+00:00
Yep, you'll need an OrangePi Zero 3 board, MicroSD, a button, and some soldering skills. Several options for non-KYC cryptocurrency exchanges exist[1], I also accept PayPal (non-RU account). Mail me!

[1]: https://kycnot.me/?t=exchange&q=&fiat=on
by anenefan | 2025-05-05 01:58:09+00:00
That disseminating of US culture around the globe will still occur given this latest tariff. The problem will be films that have been financed and yet to be released into the US market that are wholly Non US. I guess it's meant to put pressure on various countries to talk to Trump - but at this stage it should be getting quite clear on what happens with narcissists if one bends for them, capitulates ... there will be another instance ... and another ...

Oh if this works out for Trump, expect tv series to follow.
by jltsiren | 2025-05-05 02:00:40+00:00
Cavalry won battles in societies that favored cavalry. If your society was built around elite warriors, your army probably relied on cavalry, because those elite warriors wanted to be individually as effective as possible. But if the state was responsible for raising the army and there was a middle class with sufficient combat skills available, infantry (such as Roman legions or mercenary pikemen) was often more cost-effective.

War elephants also beat cavalry in sufficient numbers. Various European, Mediterranean, and Middle Eastern powers tried them but found that they were not cost-effective. South and Southeast Asia thought otherwise.
by hakfoo | 2025-05-05 02:02:16+00:00
What I don't understand is why GRUB needs to be regenerated every time you add a kernel or OS.

Make the bootloader smart enough to find read the underlying filesystems and find kernels. rEFInd does it. If I put in a bootable USB or install Windows on a second SSD, it just shows up on the menu without explicitly demanding it.

Maybe you have to say "/boot needs to be one of n well-supported filesystem types" but one-size-fits-most is probably good enough, relying on something GRUB for the people running ZFS-atop-RAID6-atop-a-collection-of-128-USB-floppy-drives.
by socalgal2 | 2025-05-05 02:02:31+00:00
I think I’m living in the moment. I still take 50-100 pictures on a day trip to a new place. I don’t feel like that means I don’t enjoy the moment. took a ski lift up a mountain, too maybe 3 pics up and 3 down. 20-30 seconds total of a 5-10 minute experience

If I was to guess what might take me out is if I was addicted to instantly posting them, watching the likes and comments flow in, and viewing my friends posts, at the same moment.

I take the pictures and then a day or two later I post 5-8 of the best, if I thought this particular experience was worth sharing. The point being I’m not thinking about posting and likes during the experience. My time spent on photos is < 1%
by patrickhogan1 | 2025-05-05 02:03:49+00:00
1. It feels like those old Rolling Stone pieces from the late ’90s and early ’00s about kids who couldn’t tear themselves away from their computers. Fear was overblown, but made headlines.

2. OpenAI has admitted that GPT‑4o showed “sycophancy” traits and has since rolled them back (see https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/).
by spaceywilly | 2025-05-05 02:04:26+00:00
> and I struggle to think of what would lead one to the urge to implement a key=value config file parser in 2025

That could be a symptom of LLM coding. I have found at times they will go down a rabbit hole of coding up a complicated solution to something when I know that a library already exists it could’ve used. I’m sure part of the problem is that it isn’t able to search for libraries to solve problems, so if its training data didn’t use a particular library, it will not be able to use it.
by MengerSponge | 2025-05-05 02:05:58+00:00
This is, famously, why nobody gets a degree in fine arts. (/s)

Your piano teacher does not give a diploma because she is not offering a university education. If she worked with a few other experts and they designed a coordinated curriculum and shepherded students through it over the course of two to four years, and documented that process to the point where they could file with an accrediting agency, then she could issue a degree in piano.
by jama211 | 2025-05-05 02:06:48+00:00
Yeah this article misses a big point and you’ve highlighted it well. If you just ask students to regurgitate course material generically, it doesn’t (and wasn’t) leading to good learning outcomes whether LLMs existed or not. All the LLM is doing here is signalling to the teacher that their assignment design is bad, but it seems they’re learning the wrong lesson.

There’s a lot of “no, it is the children who are wrong” going on in academia right now and it’s an issue.
by sandworm101 | 2025-05-05 02:07:06+00:00
That is the weight at maximum draw. It is more like pulling back a rubber band that gets progressively harder until you hit your max. It isn't like lifting a weight which is a steady force. Similarly, a lifted weight has inertia. You cant just yank it up. A bow doesn't have inertia. You can pull it back as quick as you like, which makes it easier for a given max "weight" of pull.

(Modern bows are different. They use cams and multiple strings to create the opposite effect. They can get lighter as you draw them back, which is a really strange sensation if you aren't expecting it.)
by LexiMax | 2025-05-05 02:07:16+00:00
Linux does support Secure Boot, and I believe Red Hat offers RHEL with signed bootloaders, kernels and kernel modules. However, I don't know how secure the secure boot environment is in practice, and I'm pretty sure Secure Boot support on most distros is stubbed to be good enough to boot with Secure Boot enabled, but not good enough to meaningfully verify the integrity of your environment.

I wouldn't be surprised if Valve started making serious innards into improving Secure Boot support on Linux for the sake of Steam Deck compatibility. However, I'm not sure that would work with the lack of stable driver ABI on other platforms that aren't a known quantity.
by sho_hn | 2025-05-05 02:07:21+00:00
Because a lot of the readers here seem to be comparing Bambus and Enders: These aren't the only options. If you want a similarly-featured and reliable printer that doesn't phone home, I'd recommend taking a look at Prusa.

It's where Bambu forked much of their software from, they're equally easy to use after recent updates, very reliable and easy to service.

They also added US-based manufacturing recently, and I think you can get US-made Core ONEs, which given the tariffs may mean they're soon to be cheaper than equivalent Bambus.

Some people will groan that every 3D printing thread must have a Prusa fanboy, but then again the company inspires that attachment also not without reason :-) I've printed for thousands of hours on my MK4(S) and I've had zero issues, and it's pretty great they offer upgrade kits to turn this into their next-newer model.
by Terr_ | 2025-05-05 02:09:02+00:00
> Asking students for regurgitated info

You're confusing the artifact with the purpose. Teachers across the nation are not trying to accumulate the largest corpus of distinct human-written reviews of The Great Gatby.

The goal is to elicit some kind of mental practice, and the classic request is for something that helps prove it occurred. The issue is that such proofs are now being counterfeited with unprecedented scale and ease.

When those indicators become debased and meaningless, we need to look for other ways of motivating and validating.
by jama211 | 2025-05-05 02:09:47+00:00
100%. Students aren’t stupid, they can tell the difference between a lazily designed assignment that doesn’t deserve their full attention, and actually engaging learning moments/environments that will spark something inside them. It’s not their fault that the latter is so incredibly rare in course design.

Sounds to me like they asked the students to just regurgitate genetic course info and then complained when that’s what they received. This wasn’t going to lead to an excellent learning moment for these students whether an LLM was used or not.
by owenversteeg | 2025-05-05 02:09:52+00:00
Plan is definitely to injection mold at some point, but this is for several different complex parts that will be expensive to mill molds for. The breakeven point between injection molding and 3D printing is really about the cost of the molds. Let's imagine a 1kg part. If you say 10x $1000 printers at 1-2kg/day and $10-20/kg filament then you can produce 900-1800 parts in 90 days for a total of $15-30/part. Meanwhile with injection molding you have a mold cost of $5k-50k and say $3/kg for pellets, so for 1k parts it costs $8-53/part. So if you're making a thousand 1kg simple parts ($5k mold), molding will be better. Making a thousand complex parts ($50k mold), 3D printing is better. And making five complex parts (5x$50k mold), you can do a lot of 3D printing before injection molding becomes competitive.

I am also in a bit of an unusual situation because of the size of the parts: voluminous enough that shipping from the manufacturer is no longer negligible.

Oh, and unfortunately can't do resin because of strength reasons. 3D printed ABS is already pushing it.
by memhole | 2025-05-05 02:10:00+00:00
On a backpacking trip, a guy and I were hiking together for a moment. I was snapping photos of the landscape and he started to chastise me for it. He made the same point. It’s about the people you’re with. Eventually, all the photos blur together.

He’s not wrong. I’ve got tons of pictures of the outdoors. Not that they aren’t beautiful. Pressed, I mostly couldn’t tell one from the other.
by scarface_74 | 2025-05-05 02:10:25+00:00
I was trying to make it sound like a college student with no strong writing experience.

I use to work at AWS (Professional Services) and there are a few different writing styles depending on what your audience was. I learned how to write in the different “house styles” before LLMs were a thing. So I know when something doesn’t sound right.

I use LLMs all of the time to write. I’m 99% certain that no one can tell the difference between my writing 100% without an LLM to my writing with one
by shawn-butler | 2025-05-05 02:13:08+00:00
It's also as I recall when tuition and student costs started to spike in the US which is probably more directly related than some "philosophical" change in the zeitgeist[0]. When students and parents start racking up debt like this, you become very interested in the fastest way to pay it back.

For me the impact of the university administrators as they chased higher endowments for more buildings with naming rights and expanded their own bureaucracies with direct hires that did not directly contribute to the faculty mission did more to alter the university experience than anything else.

[0]: https://educationdata.org/average-cost-of-college-by-year
by toofy | 2025-05-05 02:14:04+00:00
it is a bit troubling to me how this and stories covering the same group of people are so often quickly flagged.

i saw this story on other sites and immediately thought: hacker news will be the best place to follow along with this only to see it flagged dead. it does seem like this seems to be happening quite a lot when a certain group of people and their competence levels are being covered.

thanks for not burying this particular instance.
by sho_hn | 2025-05-05 02:14:08+00:00
Note that Prusa recently opened a US-based factory according to their blog, so in addition to EU-made they also got US-made going.

As a big fan of the company I'm hoping this will make them price-competitive to Bambu (or even considerably cheaper) while the tariffs rage. I'm not a fan of the tariffs, but if it gives a boost to the Core ONE launch, welp ... good for them.
by rayiner | 2025-05-05 02:14:46+00:00
But he did! The CBO calculates 8.7 million immigrants in excess of normal levels under his watch. It’s a plainly visible policy change in charts: https://images.app.goo.gl/9N5K5DQjcfcj542a8. Biden didn’t have the mandate to do that.

How did that happen? It was because Biden and Mayorkas did not “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” He ignored laws that required him to keep immigrants out. He also interpreted the law in ways that were not “faithful” to Congressional intent. For example, he took a law that allows parole on a “case-by-case” basis, and gave blanket parole to hundreds of thousands. But then judges will say that these blanket protections must be revoked on a “case by case” basis.

People are prattling on about the Impoundment Act and whether Trump has statutory authority to reorganize executive departments. Meanwhile, Obama created an entire amnesty program (DACA) nowhere in the INA, after failing to get the same amnesty through Congress. All of this stuff about “the rule of law” is rank hypocrisy from people who don’t believe in rules or law.
by jama211 | 2025-05-05 02:14:59+00:00
Well… you’re forgetting the part where you can cut out the middleman. Currently a leader has to ask an engineer to build a system, and has to communicate effectively with the engineer until all of the novel details have been ironed out in the specification, and _y_ the engineer builds it.

In a world where the LLM can do the building, the engineer is no longer required.
by sho_hn | 2025-05-05 02:15:59+00:00
I've never any sort of pre-print processing/calibration on my Prusa MK4(S), other than cleaning the build plate. This sort of hand-holding really isn't required anymore on the modern printers.

Slicers also come with presets for different filaments these days, which generally do a reasonable job and knowing about temps & co is largely optional to getting going.
by Barrin92 | 2025-05-05 02:17:30+00:00
>’90s and early ’00s about kids who couldn’t tear themselves away from their computers. Fear was overblown, but made headlines.

How was it overblown, we now have a non-trivial amount of completely de-socialized men in particular who live in online cults with real world impact. If there's one lesson from the last few decades it is that the people who were concerned about the impact of mass media on intelligence, physical and mental health and social factors were right about literally everything.

We now live among people who are 40 with the emotional and social maturity of people in their early 20s.
by WalterGR | 2025-05-05 02:19:38+00:00
zero-dependency DOCX converter

I’ve read that there are a lot of OpenXML elements that are pretty opaque. They appear to basically be XML-esque representations of binary, in-memory structs used internally by Office. (Maybe this has changed over time.)

How much OpenXML does this actually handle?

Extracts information that other open-source tools often do not capture: misaligned tables

Could you expand on what you mean by misaligned tables? Are these tables that appear as separate ‘table nodes’ in the XML, or ones that appear as a single node but have wonky formatting?
by spudlyo | 2025-05-05 02:19:51+00:00
One company I worked for had a culture of semi-regular hackathons and are they were often a lot of fun. As an old, I got to work with some non-jaded wide-eyed interns from U of Waterloo who worked their asses off on inspired hackathon projects as well as doing some solid work for our team. Interns had plenty of motivation to make a splash (and to take chances) and working with them was often a breath of fresh air.

On our larger team, we'd have week long hackathons where the theme was the elimination of jank/cruft/hazards/annoyances across code, infrastructure, and process. We'd split into 2-4 person teams and do our work, and at the end there'd be presentations and war stories, celebrations and the occasional defeat. Somebody would win a prize, and we'd do it again in 6 months.

Corporate Hackathons have been a net positive for me, but I've also seen them implemented poorly, where you were still expected to shovel a full load of story points that sprint.
by WillAdams | 2025-05-05 02:20:21+00:00
I'm actually working on something along the lines of:

>CAD engine can do "production-aware design" that constrains design to the capabilities of standardized machines, e.g. keeping a metal part 3-d millable.

by modeling a part by only using subtraction based on tooling:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview

you'll need: https://pythonscad.org/ but it's allowed me to do pretty much everything I've tried out in it thus far, and I'm putting the finishing touches on a joinery module which should let one make pretty much anything of wood, and metals should be much the same --- even turned out a thread cutting program as a proof of concept a while back.
by anonymars | 2025-05-05 02:20:46+00:00
I was able to find that deck (make of it what you will): https://savecti.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Controller-Hi.... The phrase "adverse impact" means "results in racially disparate outcomes"

I spent a bit more time going down the rabbit hole of the article footnotes, but I need to take a step back, as my time management on this has been poor
by markusde | 2025-05-05 02:20:50+00:00
Preach about the bullet points. I was grading some assignments a while ago and by some mysterious coincidence like a third of the answers were written in this strange bullet point format listing the the same 3 ideas.

The punchline? Bullet point 3 was wrong (it was a PL assignment and I'm 99% sure the AI was picking up on the word macro and regurgitating facts abut LISP). 0 points all around, better luck next time.
by fallinditch | 2025-05-05 02:21:29+00:00
It seems to me that the little sister is acting rationally. Yes it's a bit lazy but then: when was the last time you used a calculator for a calculation that you could have done in your head? Do you actually need to be able to do mental arithmetic, do you actually really need to be able to work out what 24 + 7 is in your head?

I don't know what the answer is. I'm old school, if it was up to me I'd bring back slide rules and log tables, because that's such a visual and tactile way of getting to know mathematics and numbers.

It's interesting to consider how AI is affecting humans' cognition skills. Is it going to make us stupid or free us up to use our mental capacities for higher level activities? Or both?