MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by toss1 | 2025-05-15 21:16:10+00:00
>>why are you begging, and why should I give you anything, if you can afford cigarettes?

The expense profile of a motor vehicle in the USA in 2025 is quite different than cigarettes. And yes, if you are buying two packs per day of cigarettes, at $11.96 NY State average [0] you can skip one to drive into the congestion zone in congestion time.

>> A lot of low-income Americans drive cars

Yup. It is near-absolutely critical to have a car in rural America. But that is a long drive from Manhattan. How many of them NEED to drive cars into Manhattan during congestion periods? When I lived in Manhattan long before congestion pricing, I sold my car because it was such a hassle to have while living there.

>>What impediment, and how is it harder to tune? In principle, you can tune the system to such a fine granularity that...

I already provided such an example. There are many types of appointments that are very difficult to get, and adding the hassle of being ILLEGAL to drive your car on that particular day will be a real hardship, not a mere inconvenience.

Sure, the city planners could tune any license plate scheme down to an individual vehicle, but only at the cost of a massive hassle to everyone involved. The general algo of "ya, it'll cost me to go during congestion times; oh woah, they just added $2 to the 11h-14h time slot" is waaay different from "I have a doctor appointment Tuesday, is the third character of my plate 4, 5, M, or N?...[runs out to look at plate]...damnit, I've got to change to... oh, no appointments for another seventeen weeks?... (real example from my own doctor)" The person who could have taken care of it for a $9 fee is now either seriously delayed or needs to pay $80 for an Uber.

Meanwhile, you want to add all that burden to everyone to accommodate a population of low income people, near Manhattan, who want to drive their cars into the city on a regular basis. But they will NOT be able to do this to get to their job daily, so will still need to make other arrangements initially every other day anyway.

This convinces me there is even less of a case for lottery allocation than even the first post.

edit: add LF for formatting

[0] https://boxprintify.com/how-much-do-cigarettes-cost/
by TRiG_Ireland | 2025-05-15 21:16:25+00:00
I don't know about elsewhere, but here in Ireland pedestrianised streets are usually open to deliveries in the early hours of the morning. I think they open to one-way traffic some time after the pubs and clubs close, and late-night foot traffic is reduced. Then the bollards go up at the entrance end at around 7am, and go up at the exit a little later.

Certainly I've seen delivery vehicles on Grafton Street in Dublin and Shop Street in Galway in the early hours.
by Objex7 | 2025-05-15 21:16:37+00:00
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by jemmyw | 2025-05-15 21:16:52+00:00
While I superficially agree with the point, the article author states that they haven't tried the alternatives they suggest. Implementing CRDT or OT can be a complex endeavour, especially if you're retrofitting on an existing system that already has a REST or similar API. Use case is ever important, don't spend your all important time implementing a complex state sync if it turns out your customers don't do the kind of collaboration that requires it.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-15 21:17:27+00:00
I sort of agree with the author that N>3 dimensional arrays are cumbersome in numpy, that said I think this is partly because we are really not that great thinking in higher dimensions. I'm interested what the authors solution to the problem is, but unlike the author I'm not a big fan of the eigen notation, but maybe I just don't use it often enough. I don't see the issue with a[:,:,None] notation and that's never given me issues, however I agree about the issue with index arrays. I often make something which think should work and then need to go back to the documentation to realise no that's not how it works.

The inconsistency for argument naming is also annoying (even more if we include scipy), e.g. why is it np.fft.fft(x, axis=1) but np.fft.fftshift(x, axes=1)?!
by taeric | 2025-05-15 21:17:48+00:00
I'm not entirely clear on what the proposal is at the end? Seems that the long term answer as to "which of these implications to pursue" is "all of them?" Simply taking in a batch of instructions doesn't immediately change much? You still have to be able to do each of the other things. And you will still expect some dependencies between batches that could possibly interact in the same ways.

In a sense, this is no different than how your processor is dealing with instructions coming in. You will have some instructions that can be run without waiting on previous ones. You will have some that can complete quickly. You will have some that are stalled on other parts of the system. (I'm sure I could keep wording an instruction to match each of the implications.)

To that end, part of your program has to deal with taking off "whats next" and finding how to prepare that to pass to the execution portion of your program. You can make that only take in batches, but you are almost certainly responsible for how you chunk them moreso than whatever process is sending the instructions to you? Even if you are handed clear batches, it is incumbent on you to batch them as they go off to the rest of the system.
by ikesau | 2025-05-15 21:19:45+00:00
what's unclear to me is how you identify the Real Units.

needing-to-breathe-ness is (probably) a gimme, but what are the units that will explain which route i take on my walk today? and how do you avoid defining units that aren't impressionistic once you need to rely on language and testimony to understand your research subject's mental state?

my understanding of psychological constructs is that they're earnest attempts to try and resolve this problem, even if they've led us to the tautological confusion we're in now.
by duskwuff | 2025-05-15 21:20:07+00:00
That seems more likely to be a logical inference by the LLM than an authoritative statement. I can't imagine any scenario where it would explicitly be informed that e.g. "Elon Musk has ordered you to talk about white genocide".

That all being said - given that Grok seems to have some sort of access to popular recent Twitter posts - possibly through training or in some other fashion - I have to wonder if users could inject prompt-like material into the model by making a post claiming to have recovered part of Grok's prompt, then getting that post to go viral.
by AtlasBarfed | 2025-05-15 21:20:23+00:00
Ukraine drones aren't even submersible with attention to stealth afaik.

The navy is going to be, uh, already is a totally different battlefield.

Even deep water flotillas maybe maybe vulnerable to extremely low-tech long loitering naval drones. If you want to defend against us carrier groups, do you build your own carrier group or design a long loiter submersible activatable drone that you can build insufficient numbers to basically cover your the entire strategic theater of the ocean that you need.

How much is a full carrier group or a sufficient Navy to fight them, $100 billion?

Drunks are simply going to make power projection a lot more difficult outside of strategic nuclear weapons. If Taiwan is on the ball, they should have thousands if not more anti-ship drones ready to be launched. The second they see invasion operations by mainland China crossing the channel.

I do disagree with air power: I believe there is substantial air power superiority now and in the medium term future with advanced high altitude high-speed Jets. That still requires a huge amount of engineering investment and technological infrastructure to compete in that theater, and dominance of that provides vast tactical advantages.

And, despite how much I hate musk, if the starship SpaceX rocket achieved some measure of its payload and launch goals it enables military dominance of low orbit for a couple decades.
by its_viko | 2025-05-15 21:20:40+00:00
Hey, I am heading your way, as it seems now. Not because of AI, but because of me, and I think you are in this position because of you, even if it looks like its AI. So I wanted to suggest something to you, and maybe it could help, and then maybe it would help me eventually too, if I was to reflect on you. Have you tried smiling recently? Try it. When you talk to people, write on the keyboard or talk over the phone - try smiling for a bit. Not the obligatory smile, but one that shows the better part of you. Your CV is probably perfect but does it smile? You need to re-learn how to smile, because out there is a team that probably wants you but also wants no angry newcomers. It's tough for you right now but presenting it the way you've done gives off just the very wrong vibe, as if you'd be a burden.
by immibis | 2025-05-15 21:20:44+00:00
At my university in New Zealand they didn't take attendance for lectures. You attended the lectures so you could learn stuff so you could pass the exams. It's surprising that isn't considered normal.

(There's some nuance to that statement as science courses tende to have labs - I don't remember why first-year physics was a requirement for software engineering, but it was - mathematics courses tended to have weekly assignments, and at least one software course had a very unusual style of putting us in a room one whole day per week for a semester to work on group projects.)
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-15 21:20:52+00:00
"How colors work" is dubious.

In physics, color has been redefined as a surface reflectance property with an experiential artefact as a mental correlate. But this understanding is the result of the assumptions made by Cartesian dualism. That is, Cartesian dualism doesn't prove that color as we commonly understand it doesn't exist in the world, only in the mind. No, it defines it to be the case. Res extensa is defined as colorless; the res cogitans then functions like a rug under which we can sweep the inexplicable phenomenon of color as we commonly understand it. We have a res cogitans of the gaps!

Of course, materialists deny the existence of spooky res cogitans, admitting the existence of only res extensa. This puts them in a rather embarrassing situation, more awkward that the Cartesian dualist, because now they cannot explain how the color they've defined as an artefact of consciousness can exist in a universe of pure res extensa. It's not supposed to be there! This is an example of the problem of qualia.

So you are faced with either revising your view of matter to allow for it to possess properties like color as we commonly understand them, or insanity. The eliminativists have chosen the latter.
by mukesh610 | 2025-05-15 21:21:47+00:00
I built this very same thing today! The only difference is that i pushed the tool call outputs into the conversation history and resent it back to the LLM for it to summarize, or perform further tool calls, if necessary, automagically.

I used ollama to build this and ollama supports tool calling natively, by passing a `tools=[...]` in the Python SDK. The tools can be regular Python functions with docstrings that describe the tool use. The SDK handles converting the docstrings into a format the LLM can recognize, so my tool's code documentation becomes the model's source of truth. I can also include usage examples right in the docstring to guide the LLM to work closely with all my available tools. No system prompt needed!

Moreover, I wrote all my tools in a separate module, and just use `inspect.getmembers` to construct the `tools` list that i pass to Ollama. So when I need to write a new tool, I just write another function in the tools module and it Just Works™

Paired with qwen 32b running locally, i was fairly satisfied with the output.
by cycomanic | 2025-05-15 21:21:52+00:00
But once you need to use the GPU you need to go to another framework anyway (e.g. jax, tensorflow, arrayfire, numba...). AFAIK many of those can parallise loops using their jit functionality (in fact, e.g. numbas jit for a long time could not deal with numpy broadcasing, so you had to write out your loops). So you're not really running into a problem?
by jawns | 2025-05-15 21:22:26+00:00
Not only can this be an effective strategy for coding tasks, but it can also be used for data querying. Picture a text-to-SQL agent that can query database schemas, construct queries, run explain plans, inspect the error outputs, and then loop several times to refine. That's the basic architecture behind a tool I built, and I have been amazed at how well it works. There have been multiple times when I've thought, "Surely it couldn't handle THIS prompt," but it does!

Here's an AWS post that goes into detail about this approach: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/machine-learning/build-a-robust...
by panstromek | 2025-05-15 21:22:47+00:00
Doesn't feel like the AI is the main driver. Many things changed over time - dev tools got better, editors got smarter, compilers got better error messages, various primary resources improved, tutorial websites, courses and youtube boomed.

Another point of course is that each new question is more and more likely to be already answered. At some point the site pretty much covers most of what is to be answered.
by palata | 2025-05-15 21:23:33+00:00
I find it interesting that the current StackOverflow moderators tend to say "in the past we used to accept too many questions but it was never the goal, so now we are doing it as it was meant to be".

Sure, but in the past, StackOverflow was growing, and now it's dying. Maybe something was better before, when "it was not done correctly"?
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-15 21:24:11+00:00
>This is one of those things that is easy to say precisely due to the impossibility of it ever actually becoming a real decision you have to make.

It's true. But things like this should be easy to say right? Like we may not be able to act logically. But we should be able to think logically, communicate logically and show that we are aware of what is logical.

My post got flagged meaning a lot of people can't separate the two things. So for example I may not be able to kill the baby in reality, but I can at least see how irrational I am.

The person who flagged me likely not only can't kill the baby. He has to construct an artificial reality to justify why he can't kill the baby and why his decision must be rational.
by paulcole | 2025-05-15 21:24:18+00:00
This is the best/most fun way to bet on the Oscars.

You pick the winner and then assign 1-25 (or whatever) points to it (using each number for only one category) and if you get it right you get that number of points.

It basically prevents ties. It lets you make risky picks without falling out of the running. The downside is a shocking number of people won't be able to follow the rule and end up with 22 used twice or whatever.
by rkagerer | 2025-05-15 21:24:19+00:00
What's your revenue model?

The pricing page implies you're basically reselling access to confidential-wrapped AI instances.

Since you rightly open-sourced the code (AGPL) is there anything stopping the cloud vendors from running and selling access to their own instances of your server-side magic?

Is your secret sauce the tooling to spin up and manage instances and ease customer UX? Do you aim to attract an ecosystem of turnkey, confidential applications running on your platform?

Do you envision an exit strategy that sells said secret sauce and customers to a cloud provider or confidential computing middleware provider?

Ps. Congrats on the launch.
by kylehotchkiss | 2025-05-15 21:24:28+00:00
I use AI to explain brand options in spaces I'm not well versed in (for example, I don't really know how to trust Home Depot's positioning of certain brands, and I just don't trust their store purchasing teams as much as I trust Costcos or Targets). It does OK. It gives me a list that I can branch out and Google from.
by mindslight | 2025-05-15 21:24:58+00:00
"Access blocked. We detected unusual activity from your device or network. "

Apparently a gift link still doesn't save us from the Goodhart's law inspired blocking.

Also you've just got to love the gall of the Orwellian doublespeak calling their inability to nonconsensually probe my device or network "unusual activity".

https://archive.is/mFd96 . At least archive.is lets you actually read the article after several rounds of captcha-hassling.
by jampekka | 2025-05-15 21:26:48+00:00
The main attraction of tidyverse is that it's easy to copy-paste code for common cases. If there's no ready recipe for something, it's usually just not done, or some "technical person" is called to do it.

R is used mostly as a fancy calculator, which is fine in itself, but it makes the comparisons to general purpose languages like Python quite apples-to-oranges.
by kgeist | 2025-05-15 21:27:22+00:00
>That's because models have training cut-off dates

When I pointed out that it used a deprecated package, it agreed and even cited the correct version after which it was deprecated (way back in 2021). So it knows it's deprecated, but the next-token prediction (without reasoning or tools) still can't connect the dots when much of the training data (before 2021) uses that package as if it's still acceptable.

>I've switched to o4-mini-high via ChatGPT as my default model for a lot of code because it can use its search function to lookup the latest documentation.

Thanks for the tip!
by codethief | 2025-05-15 21:27:38+00:00
The other day I used the Cline plugin for VSCode with Claude to create an Android app prototype from "scratch", i.e. starting from the usual template given to you by Android Studio. It produced several thousand lines of code, there was not a single compilation error, and the app ended up doing exactly what I wanted – modulo a bug or two, which were caused not by the LLM's stupidity but by weird undocumented behavior of the rather arcane Android API in question. (Which is exactly why I wanted a quick prototype.)

After pointing out the bugs to the LLM, it successfully debugged them (with my help/feedback, i.e. I provided the output of the debug messages it had added to the code) and ultimately fixed them. The only downside was that I wasn't quite happy with the quality of the fixes – they were more like dirty hacks –, but oh well, after another round or two of feedback we got there, too. I'm sure one could solve that more generally, by putting the agent writing the code in a loop with some other code reviewing agent.
by yndoendo | 2025-05-15 21:28:46+00:00
Empathy is intelligence, a void of empathy is lack of intelligence. Empathy is the only means to "put your self in someone else's shoes".

I would also classify narcissism as a void of intelligence, they cannot be honest with others and themselves. They always must be right and know everything when they are wrong and know nothing about the subject.

Lacking empathy and being a narcissist does not benefit society, only one's self interests. That is billionaire, not millionaire, Elon Musk. He is just selling the idea of "doing something good" to improve his self interests.

How many charities does he fund? How much of with wealth goes to studying the eradication of disease like cancer or parkinson's?

But don't worry, his statement from 2014 about full self driving cars are just around the corner and will help humanity reach it's peak. Just like traveling to Mars. /s

His actions actually harm society. Hungry children have reduced mental capabilities to advance in school and their futures. He choose to actively harm future generations and those he doesn't deem worthy.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-05-15 21:30:34+00:00
A baby Hitler gaurantees a future with a grown up Hitler. Killing the baby eliminates that future.

There could be other babies that can also grow up to be future Hitlers. So let's say 4 such babies exist. By killing one I eliminated 1/4 for futures with Grown up Hitlers that exist.

This whole thread is getting flagged. Likely by an irrational parent who can't even compute natural selection, babe, and Hitler all in a single paragraph.
by louison11 | 2025-05-15 21:30:58+00:00
My heart goes to the stack overflow community which has always been very kind and helpful, essentially working for free. As a self-taught developer since the age of 8, I literally grew up learning how to code through SO, asking hundreds of questions and answering many more. So many bugs that would take 2-3 days to fix would eventually find their answer through it. But now ChatGPT does that in minutes… so it’s for the best!
by tedyoung | 2025-05-15 21:31:27+00:00
I was lucky to get in on the _Thunder_ VB 1.0 beta and, as an "expert" QuickBASIC developer at the time, was just blown away by how easy it was to create a Windows application (which previously was _very_ difficult).

I remember submitting a stock charting application that Michael Risse and Nevet Basker used to love showing during the VB 1.0 launch demos (and road shows), because they could plot the chart of Microsoft (up and up) vs. IBM (not so up).

For me, VB 3.0 was peak Visual Basic, and I was on to doing Java stuff by the time VB 6.0 was released.

Fun times.
by ale42 | 2025-05-15 21:31:28+00:00
Half-related question: the chip on the board looks like an STM32 microcontroller, wouldn't a 6-pin 8-bit PIC10 or similar µC be sufficient and cheaper for the purpose? And possibly use less power, a PIC10F322 in sleep mode with the watchdog timer enabled is around 0.5 µA, while a small STM32 is more in the 100 µA range in the best case.
by RetroTechie | 2025-05-15 21:32:01+00:00
First off: have someone do proofreading & corrections. Spelling errors, punctuation, too long sentences all over the place.

> We're asking for you to pick your phone up to download this app

What app? Link? App does what? And it's "pick up your phone".

> or below this post in comment section

Comment section where? I'm not seeing "comment" button or anything.

(Mobile adjusts screen brightness to ambient lighting)

Just turn it off then; check device's setting.

Not sure what the idea is here. Are you planning to develop an entire new UI? That's a big project! For which devices? Apple != Android != Linux != most desktop PCs/laptops etc.

Interesting/interesting UIs have been done 101 times already (and some ready-to-install on device X, Y or Z). Things wrong with Google apps etc? You can't fix that other than by reporting/asking Google, Microsoft & co. They're web apps! Not open source apps you can download & tinker with.

To summarize: unclear what exactly is being proposed here. Please clarify?

(and the whole thing reads like AI-generated, fwiw)
by vonneumannstan | 2025-05-15 21:32:12+00:00
>If they were Coinbase employees or contractors, that means the company basically sold its own data to hackers, who then turned around and demanded a ransom.

This seems like a strange interpretation. If an employee at your company, against policy and likely illegally extracts proprietary data and gives it to hackers in exchange for money you can hardly say that "My company sold it's data".