MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Mbwagava | 2025-05-04 23:24:51+00:00
> Why are aesthetics in media and elsewhere converging towards a homogeneous blob of everywhere-consistent, but meanwhile politics has exploding into a kind of anything-goes mess where there is consensus on nothing

This seems contradictory to me:

1. Liberal politics is all aesthetics. This is why people claim proudly to be moderate regardless of what two political stances they're alleging to moderate between. If you look at actual policy differences between the two parties there's mostly just wedge issues. 2. Our perception of politics is straightforwardly dictated by newsrooms.

In fact, the retreat from consensus to internal peace displayed in this post seems consistent with the liberal (by which I mean both parties) defense of individualism over collective/social responsibility.
by theturtletalks | 2025-05-04 23:25:08+00:00
You’re getting to the crux of the argument, knowing when to use AI. Doing or learning “It” in 2025 means using AI whether to understand it better or use it to get better grades.

My take is teach them to get better at asking questions and then teach them when to use their own understanding to change their answer for the better. How many times has an AI’s answer been 5/10 and with a few fixes it’s a 9/10. That comes with time. Getting them asking questions and learning the “when” later is better at least to me.
by jack_h | 2025-05-04 23:25:41+00:00
> And like the vacuous market theory that claims "market competition solves all problems"

I'm not aware of any market theory that makes such a claim. Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" as referenced at the beginning of this essay certainly doesn't claim this. What Hayek claims is that a centralized economic approach can't allocate resources more efficiently than a decentralized market because the information required for central planners is too vast, changes too quickly, and is too dispersed across individuals. This is not the same as saying that a free market is perfect or solves all problems, it's just the most practicable system we know of currently.

The main point the article seems to be making is that there's a new form of control operating through decentralized algorithms that subtly but pervasively shape tastes and behaviors. These algorithms, rather than traditional institutions, are becoming the mechanisms of social order. Future political battlegrounds may be fought over these methods of control. I could be wrong about the main takeaway as it was a long article, but I didn't read it as being a "market is magical puff piece".
by sri0606 | 2025-05-04 23:26:08+00:00
Hey Hacker News,

I’m Sriram, founder of trulyKin, a private social app built specifically for family groups. Most social platforms are designed around individual attention but that doesn’t work well for families who need a space for connection, shared memories, and plans.

trulyKin is built to be a digital home for families to grow together. You can connect with other families, share moments, milestones, and create events with family members. With tools like collaborative checklists, family calendars, and private messaging, the goal is to help families stay closer, not just online, but together.

Coming soon: A powerful family tree feature- see how you relate to people in connected families and explore how you might be linked to members in families connected to your own. Think of it like a graph of family connections that goes deeper the more families you connect with.

The app is available on iOS (still in early stages), and I’d love feedback from the community. What do you think? What features would make it better for your family?

I know social platforms are niche and very common, but I believe there’s real potential for a platform focused entirely on families, providing a more connected, authentic experience.

Thanks for checking it out!
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-05-04 23:28:28+00:00
I'm old enough to remember MacHack. A 72-hour Mac hackathon in Ann Arbor (late 1980s).

"Kill Dean's Inits!"

Otherwise, hackathons aren't particularly consistent with the way that I work, so I don't do them, anymore. For that reason, I don't really feel that I have any basis to judge them.
by ValdikSS | 2025-05-04 23:28:59+00:00
Yes, it's open only to the customers, as GPL requires:

Selling Free Software <https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html>

> Many people believe that the spirit of the GNU Project is that you should not charge money for distributing copies of software, or that you should charge as little as possible—just enough to cover the cost. This is a misunderstanding.

> Actually, we encourage people who redistribute free software to charge as much as they wish or can. If a license does not permit users to make copies and sell them, it is a nonfree license. If this seems surprising to you, please read on.

You can buy only the firmware package as well, without the device. I'll send you the instruction on how to configure everything and which hardware modifications are required.
by msla | 2025-05-04 23:30:01+00:00
> Unicode is not the only character set (or the best one); this is a falsehood programmers believe about character sets

Unicode is the best if I want to communicate with other people. I lived through the 1990s; you won't convince me that playing "guess the encoding" with dozens of subtly-incompatible standards (and non-standards, and almost-standards) was a good time, or that having to override a web browser's helpful guess was fun.
by bdzr | 2025-05-04 23:30:01+00:00
> there aren’t a ton of good options for workers seeking shorter hours.

Is that true? Most trades can work fewer hours, medical workers like nurses can, hairdressers, plenty of writers are freelance, the entire gig economy.

It seems like big companies don't provide the option, for software at least. I always chocked that up to more bureaucratic processes which add some fixed cost for each employed person.
by pton_xd | 2025-05-04 23:31:38+00:00
> Using llm’s for papers does not mean your brain is atrophying though. There are lots of ways to challenge the mind even if you use llm’s to write some papers.

Writing is hard. Sometimes it means sitting with yourself, for hours, without any progress. Leaning on an LLM to ease through those tough moments is 100% short circuiting the learning process.

To your point, maybe you're learning something else instead, like when/how to prompt an LLM or something. But you're definitely not learning how to write. Whether that's relevant is a separate discussion.
by anon-3988 | 2025-05-04 23:32:17+00:00
If they use LLM for writing papers, they probably use it for other things as well. I have seen so many instances of adult actually skipping the step of "whys" and "whats" and go straight to "ask the LLM and we trim backwards".

Its basically adults producing texts of slop messages to each other. It is actually atrophying.

You might be in a circle of people that wants to know "why" things work. For example, when there's a bug, we go through several processes of:

There's a bug...why does it happen? What were they thinking when they wrote this? How to prevent this from happening?

This is true even for simple bugs, but nowadays you just vibe code your away into the solution, asking the AI to fix it over and over without ever understanding how it works.

Perhaps its just the way things are. I mean who uses their head to do calculations nowadays? Who knows how to create a blurring effect in physical drawing?
by julienchastang | 2025-05-04 23:32:18+00:00
Thank you for sharing that beautiful comment. Yes, there really are random marching bands about. I also enjoyed the Parachute song which I didn't know. This video kind of captures NOLA for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6E_s1oO4YQ. (Also love Boston, but for completely different reasons.)
by hengheng | 2025-05-04 23:32:28+00:00
The people I've talked to found it similarly unnecessary. But mainly because they weren't able to imagine a good implementation.

"But what if I want to do x" is what I heard the most. Like, sure, if you want to make your part on a 3-axis router and then drill one sideways hole, then put that in the markup. CAD always seems to have a feature stack, so apply a 3-axis design rule and discard it before the last step. Similar for multiple setups on a mill, or for surface treatment.

The gold standard still seems to be a signed and printed drawing that is never complete and full of implications. Mapping a design to a factory, or even pricing it, is an art form that has resisted automation. I expected this to change with all the "industry 4.0" push from ten years ago, but somehow that just meant adding wi-fi.
by riknos314 | 2025-05-04 23:33:01+00:00
100% agree.

LLMs may seem like magic buy they aren't. They operate within the confines of the context they're given. The more abstract the context, the more abstract the results.

I expect to need to give a model at least as much context as a decent intern would require.

Often asking the model "what information could I provide to help you produce better code" and then providing said information leads to vastly improved responses. Claude 3.7 sonnet in Cline is fairly decent at asking for this itself in plan mode.

More and more I find that context engineering is the most important aspect of prompt engineering.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-05-04 23:33:20+00:00
What ought to stick in your head instead is the rather prescient ending:

"I write a lot about how we shouldn’t get our enemies fired lest they try to fire us, how we shouldn’t get our enemies’ campus speakers disinvited lest they try to disinvite ours, how we shouldn’t use deceit and hyperbole to push our policies lest our enemies try to push theirs the same way. And people very reasonably ask – hey, I notice my side kind of controls all of this stuff, the situation is actually asymmetrical, they have no way of retaliating, maybe we should just grind our enemies beneath our boots this one time.

And then when it turns out that the enemies can just leave and start their own institutions, with horrendous results for everybody, the cry goes up “Wait, that’s unfair! Nobody ever said you could do that! Come back so we can grind you beneath our boots some more!”

Conservatives aren’t stuck in here with us. We’re stuck in here with them. And so far it’s not going so well. I’m not sure if any of this can be reversed. But I think maybe we should consider to what degree we are in a hole, and if so, to what degree we want to stop digging."

Well, they didn't listen and kept digging and the illiberal left were indeed surprised when the conservatives were able to take control of media outlets and the narrative to win the 2024 elections.
by Hashex129542 | 2025-05-04 23:33:23+00:00
Democracy isn't better system either least worst. It's top most worst system. It's giving power to criminals only.

2 peoples saying 1+1 = 10 and a human saying 1+1 = 2

In democracy theory 10 is very correct answer. They don't consider the answer 2 even as experiment. Now you will argue for the answer 10 only. That's crime in general. But technically you can use the loop hole to argue for Democracy.

Democracy = Demo Crazy!
by al_borland | 2025-05-04 23:34:15+00:00
Most people take their computer into Best Buy or the Apple Store when something goes wrong. I also see small PC repair places around many towns near me.

I’m sure very few of them are fixing PCBs, if that’s the problem, but PC repair businesses exist.

I had the board in a MacBook Pro go bad. I took it to the Apple Store. Maybe they sent it out for the repair, or maybe not, but all my interactions were with the local store. I wasn’t shipping anything myself or calling anyone on the phone.
by Leftium | 2025-05-04 23:35:39+00:00
There seems to be some logic to show some search engines in a different color, but I can't figure it out.

Is it just until something (any single character) is typed into the search input box?

edit: the purple color was just the "visited" link color. The link color changes because the links are updated to include the query (thus changing the visited status.)
by amiga386 | 2025-05-04 23:36:02+00:00
It's an odd thing to even compare. Musical styles and genres come in and out of fashion. Instruments and timbres likewise. People clamour both for novelty and also familiarity. There's no "best" music, just music that has more or fewer fans.

Ideally, the measure of timelessness of a tune is how many people will still go to the effort to play it or reference it once all people who were alive at its release (the people who "liked it before it was cool") are dead. By that measure, the one-hit-wonder of Pachelbel's Canon in D is probably top of the list.
by bitwize | 2025-05-04 23:36:28+00:00
Horrors beyond human comprehension, got it. We know that arthropods can meaningfully feel pain. Turning living insects into a biological Floppotron is some Dr. Moreau shit that will earn you, at best, an IgNobel -- and I'm not even sure the IgNobel committee would want to draw positive attention to this kind of work. That said, I'm sure that The Fifth Element style spy cockroaches will start appearing in homes and offices courtesy your local intelligence agency before the decade is out.
by Mbwagava | 2025-05-04 23:36:57+00:00
It's not even clear "superintelligence" is a meaningful concept. It could be that the broad conflicts in our society are largely intractable and arbitrary, in which case "superintelligence" can do little but complain about the contradictions its passed (something I suspect many on this forum can understand).

Perhaps the calculator is as close as we'll ever get to "superintelligence".
by wjholden | 2025-05-04 23:38:08+00:00
Lately I've been saying often the phrase "the process is the product." When you outsource the process, then the product will be fundamentally different from what you would have delivered on your own. In my own case of knowledge work, the value of the reports I write is not in the report itself (nobody ever reads them...) but rather the thinking that went into them and the hard-won wisdom and knowledge we created in our heads.
by gwern | 2025-05-04 23:38:27+00:00
LLMs are also heavily biased after chatbot tuning leads to mode-collapse. That's why you see the same verbal tics coming out of them, like the em-dashes or the 'twist ending' in the more recent 4os. And if LLMs really were unbiased, you'd expect better scaling when you tried to bruteforce code correctness. Training a 'test LLM' will just wind up inheriting a lot of the shared blindspots. They aren't independent of the implementation at all (just like humans are not independent, even when they didn't write the original, and didn't see it either; and this is why you can't simply throw _n_ programmers at a piece of code and be certain you got all the bugs, and why fuzzers will continue to rampage through code).
by johnea | 2025-05-04 23:38:45+00:00
> allocate resources more efficiently

More efficiently for whom?

"Efficient" in what way?

The extent to which a thing is "efficient" or "optimal" is entirely based on a desired outcome being comparing to actual outcomes. All magical market theory is completely silent on the desired outcome or who would be the beneficiary...

The hyperbolic paraphrasing "market competition solves all problems", is for the purpose of pointing out that making a few of the richest people much richer, while impoverishing the rest of the world's population, may be "most efficient", but it's not really helping make the world a better place to live, even for the most wealthy...
by snapetom | 2025-05-04 23:39:31+00:00
We don't do humor here, and I'm not kidding.

Humor devolves the site into useless one liners. If you want evidence of that, go to reddit and see how useful that site is these days if you want to actually research and learn something. Slashdot knew this back in the day and while funny posts got visibility, they did not add anything to a user's total karma score.
by kergonath | 2025-05-04 23:40:23+00:00
> I'd love to hear any counterpoints from folks who have used LLMs lately to get academic or creative writing done

They’re great at proofreading. They’re also good at writing conclusions and abstracts for articles, which is basically synthesising the results of the article and making it sexy (a task most scientists are hopelessly terrible at). With caveats:

- all the information needs to be in the prompt, or they will hallucinate;

- the result is not good enough to submit without some re-writing, but more than enough to get started and iterate instead of staring at a blank screen.

I want to use them to write methods sections, because that is basically the exact same information repeated in every article, but the actual sentences need to be different each time. But so far I don’t trust them to be accurate with technical details. They’re language models, they have no knowledge or understanding.
by Sentraze | 2025-05-04 23:41:19+00:00
We’re working on an MVP called Sentraze. A developer tool that detects risky dependencies before they become a breach.

It uses AI to flag telemetry libraries, unmaintained packages, or unstable versions that traditional scanners often miss.

Still early, but we’d love feedback from anyone building with open source or working in AppSec/DevSecOps.

Here’s what we’re seeing so far — and what we’re trying to improve. Happy to answer any questions!
by fallinditch | 2025-05-04 23:42:03+00:00
It's been obvious since ChatGPT blew up in early 2023 that educators had to rethink how they educate.

I agree that this situation that the author outlines is unsatisfactory but it's mostly the fault of the education system (and by extension the post author). With a class writing exercise like the author describes, of course the students are going to use an LLM, they would be stupid not to if their classmates are using it.

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. I am aware that AI has many potential and actual problems for society but AI, if embraced correctly, also has the potential to transform the educational experience in positive ways.
by sega_sai | 2025-05-04 23:42:05+00:00
I think the unbiasedness is completely red herring here, but do I agree with the point on focusing on the tests separately and implementations separately. Ideally you'd want two completely different LLMs work on both. But I think the question is, how trustworthy are the LLM tests ? Will the human review of these take more time than writing of the how code ? I think for non-critical applications, it probably does not matter, but in the end I think people will be looking for some guarantees or confidence that the errors happen with frequency less than X%. And I don't think those exist now. And given the models change so frequently it's also hard to be sure if something was working fine yesterday whether it'll be today.
by AlexK90 | 2025-05-04 23:42:25+00:00
Thanks for Posting this.

I have a question about this line of code

file_path = os.path.join(posts_dir, post_directory, 'eng.md'

Is eng.md an extra addition here? By looping through the directory, would the post names be found in the loop? By deleting this I was able to get the code to run and think I'll start using this as a blog template!
by sebastos | 2025-05-04 23:42:35+00:00
I thought this was an excellent statement of the problem, though perhaps it didn’t stick the landing. This author is clear-eyed about the shape of our discontent. Yet, like the rest of us, he had few answers for what to do about it.

Still, the first step is understanding you have a problem, and maybe just understanding it is enough to get started.

One of the difficulties I’ve noticed is that it’s very difficult to spend any length of time pointing out this central insight (the undesirable character of our new and unaccountable “control society”), because of its proximity to the New Right. And you can’t get caught saying there’s a grain of truth to the dark enlightenment, because It’s too easy to be confused for a clever fascist hiding a more odious and primitive agenda. This establishes a sort of containment zone that prevents you from straying too close to the barriers, pre-empting the conversation we really should be having. If you stray too close to the edges, alarm bells go off and people assume your real goal is far more nefarious.

And yet, as annoying as this ‘thought barrier’ is, you really have to lay the blame for it at the feet of the New Right people. It’s not the left’s fault that they went way off the deep end. You get the sense that if the Curtis Yarvin-style dark enlightenment voices had just stayed in their lane and limited their criticism to the world they actually understood (the internet - its power and its foibles), they could have created a reasonable counter culture. Hey, the decentralized bureaucratic forces that shape our lives have no basis for accountability! That’s refreshing! We can take that somewhere!

But no, instead, they disappeared up their own asshole and came out the other end as catholic monarchists. And it was their boosting of a populist megalomaniac that has now put us on a ridiculous, idiotic path of self-immolation. (And won’t it be rich at the end of this to hear them complain that we never tried Real Monarchism?) Any wisdom about the insidious nature of headless disaggregated power is now lost - aliased by the Frankenstein monster that is the current administration, stupidly and cynically assembled by them in their grimoire laboratory.
by orbital-decay | 2025-05-04 23:43:05+00:00
I'm sorry, but no posts above make any sense, which is obvious to anyone with any degree of familiarity with chinese/russian/brazilian/german/british/north american cheating demographic and communities (yes that's a thing, also note how those two are only 1/3 of the worst offenders, and the poster above clearly doesn't have any idea about it). Stop the nationalistic flamebait and FUD, please.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-04 23:43:09+00:00
Because the legislature uses single member districts with essentially either majority, plurality, or some form of two-round runoff elections, and the executive uses indirect elections where the electors are (for the largest part) elected as statewide at-large slates by winner-take-all plurality. This makes, outside of very unusual circumstances, voting for other than one of the two leading parties ineffective in the normal case, and where it has any effect most likely it will shift the result from the least-unacceptable of the major parties to the most.

Many European countries use varieties of proportional representation (most commonly either party list proportional or mixed member proportional), and have a parliamentary system (so that there is not a separately-elected executive administration -- there may be an elected President but they tend to be a head of state and not head of government -- whereas in the US the executive election is even more heavily tilted to support two-party dominance than the legislative system, though the legislative election system is still the more important piece of the problem.)
by MarcoDewey | 2025-05-04 23:43:11+00:00
I think this is a seriously excellent point.

The bet that I am making is that the system reduces its error rate by splitting a broad task into two more focused tasks.

However, it is possible that generating meaningful test cases is a harder problem (with a higher error rate) than producing code. If this is the case, then this idea I am presenting would compound the error rate.
by Modified3019 | 2025-05-04 23:43:11+00:00
Yes, those exist and are very much used (and replaced as a maintenance item).

Unfortunately does not eliminate the slow accumulative injury of going over rough and tilted ground for decades.

It seems like more of an issue here in the willamette valley of Oregon than it was in southwest kansas. I think the steep hills limit what is reasonable for suspension to counter with spines held at an off angle for long periods.