MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ctoth | 2025-05-26 16:34:52+00:00
> First, the claim that one of the main things holding LLMs back is a lack of expert feedback. To me, that just means the models are guessing—because they don’t have knowledge like humans do, they rely on pattern-matching, not understanding. If the user doesn’t know the answer, the LLM can’t help.

No. It means that the models don't have access to the physical world to run their own experiments. It's really hard to get smarter without feedback. Try it!

You could have just posted this comment, then not gotten any pushback! And you would have been in the same pit of confabulation. But now feedback lets you correct your misapprehension. Cool init?
by einsteinx2 | 2025-05-26 16:34:55+00:00
No I mean an executive (he was running VW’s emissions office in Michigan for 5 years at the time he was arrested and was living in the US), and from the same company and scandal this post is about, convicted by the US 7 years before these recent German convictions.

It’s information that is directly relevant the comment I replied to that’s implying that Germany/EU are doing something that the US isn’t based on this specific case.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-05-26 16:35:03+00:00
There's no incentive for engineering methods because there's no liability for software defects. "The software is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability." It's long overdue but most people in the software industry don't want liability because it would derail their gravy train.
by coolKid721 | 2025-05-26 16:35:53+00:00
Proper usage of LLMs so you don't just flood them with useless context will just be custom tailored prompts that only include the pertinent context, with prompts saying how it's related to what you're looking for. I don't think there's a cheap way around it maybe on the plus side you can tune them using ai code. I think tools are really over used and over-rated and have had horrible experience with them, nothing beats just custom tailoring stuff and setting up a system around it.

What I do is use elixir pheonix, have a genserver keep track of the user state and I just include the related state in the request and just helper functions to generate the related prompts per type of state/context and append them wherever makes the most sense.

I think LLMs make most sense to be viewed of as singular atomic interactions where you have the whole input (prompt/context/data) and get a concrete output. Everything else just seems like people being lazy trying to avoid thinking about the best way of structuring it. Where you put the context/data and how you include it will vary per prompt or the specific atomic interaction, there is no standard rule each interaction is unique. You have to experiment and see what provides the best output for each kind of request. I'd read Anthropics prompting docs if you haven't it's very good. https://docs.anthropic.com/en/docs/build-with-claude/prompt-...

My way of thinking is just viewing every isolated LLM request as a unique function that is the prompt + llm = a unique function Context is just what data you pass into the function (prompt+llm+settings(temp, etc))(data) to get whatever specific output you want. The prompt includes prewriting user/system messages, system prompt, structured output stuff or whatever. Any single request might lead to 1 or 30 of these that feed back into each other. But yeah based on that it depends on just custom tailoring them for anything, it's pretty conceptual and intellectual but I find it fun but I don't think there's any easy way around it. Having the ability to have all your requests be stateful and modify what goes into the prompt based on the current user state (like genservers/elixir makes very easy) is a nice technical thing that helps though.
by stego-tech | 2025-05-26 16:36:12+00:00
My sarcasm well is tapped, but this is why I was sus of CDNs like Cloudflare and Akamai at the outset. Yes, they’re highly convenient and enable more sites and services to weather large attacks or traffic spikes, but we willingly sunk a huge swath of the net behind a handful of for-profit entities and yet somehow expected nothing but sunshine and roses forever.

Stop. Trusting. Companies. To. Do. The. Right. Thing.

Cloudflare could’ve prevented this if they’d taken a stand on anything but profit motives, but they’ve repeatedly chosen not to. Piracy sites pay the bills just like Porn or Government sites, after all, and companies won’t turn down money unless forced to through regulation.
by pentaphobe | 2025-05-26 16:36:47+00:00
That's a great approach - definitely adding your framing to the toolbelt, thanks for that!

kind of organically landed on a similar thing, where initial task is kept pretty simple (but not covered by common libs)

Some folk solve and code this quickly, so we add a requirement. (Generally up to a few stages - think like Advent Of Code)

Any leftover time can be spent discussion wishlist items for productionising, optimising, tests, etc..

But: plenty of people only complete the first stage, but this can absolutely be a pass too (based on comms style, approach, etc..)
by ryandrake | 2025-05-26 16:37:09+00:00
To steal the joke from that vintage coffee tin: LLMs help you "do stupid things faster." If all you want to do is dump terrible code into the world as fast as possible, then you've got a great tool there. If you're looking to slowly and carefully build a quality product on a solid foundation, or create a programming work of art, LLMs are at best a marginally better autocomplete.
by kmeisthax | 2025-05-26 16:37:19+00:00
The "tech hypochondria" is downstream of tech's particularly warped understanding of free speech: i.e. "censorship is when packet loss".

If you define censorship as packet loss, then anything that drops packets is inherently evil, and your business (which ultimately boils down to sending packets along) is inherently good. Ergo anything you do is good and anything that questions or checks your power is evil.

This understanding of free speech didn't evolve in a vaccum, though. It was a response to the "copyright hypochondria" of the publishing industry outfits that have been insisting that "censorship is when free movies". One of the most irritating tenets of copyright maximalism is the idea that copyright somehow backstops free speech, because having an economic incentive to publish is supposed to make politicians think twice[0] about stupid censorship bullshit?

So we have two industries here that have both psyopped themselves into thinking their profit margins are a moral good, unwilling to compromise in any way that would allow legal websites to remain online. Or at least I'm assuming both sides are unwilling to compromise, because La Liga isn't saying anything, and Cloudflare is going to the public rather than the actual courts imposing this blocking order.

[0] The logic doesn't logic here, this is the same kind of thinking that gave us "capitalism has won" in the 1990s and "military alliances will make war impossible" a century prior. Politicians are ultimately polite brokers of violence, and economics is a tool they impose upon us to make us do things in lieu of guns to head. Not the other way around. Politicians will happily censor economically valuable art all day long.

I'm tempted to say "the master's tools can't destroy the master's house", but that saying is complete bullshit for different reasons.
by deepsharp | 2025-05-26 16:37:28+00:00
“The variance of which you speak would be handled by the current deployed version of the system that has been tested and declared fit for operation across a range of conditions.”

This statement reflects a common (and dangerous) assumption in today's AI culture—that one can foresee all possible future conditions at design time—knowing the unknown unknows. Zillow’s AI was also "declared fit"... until COVID flipped housing dynamics and cost them half a billion. Tiger Global’s $17B loss followed a similar trajectory—confidence in pre-deployment testing, blindsided by real-world shifts....I can go on. But the good news is some communities, especially those deploying AI in the real world, have started to recognize this. For example:

"Autonomous systems must be able to operate in complex, possibly a priori unknown environments that possess a large number of potential states that cannot all be pre-specified or be exhaustively examined or tested. Systems must be able to assimilate, respond to, and adapt to dynamic conditions that were not considered during their design... This 'scaling' problem... is highly nontrivial." — Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA)

Until the broader AI/ML culture internalizes this gap—between leaderboard AI (wins in pre-defined benchmarks) and real-world AI—we'll keep seeing deployed systems fail in costly, unpredictable ways.
by TheCondor | 2025-05-26 16:37:49+00:00
What’s the domestic piracy rate for NFL games?

They split the rights up in much more imaginative ways, like local channels can broadcast sold out local games and then the nfl itself or an rsn or major network can broadcast the remote half. I would guess that a lot of local games are over the air but if you follow a team somewhere else you might need a fairly inexpensive subscription
by esafak | 2025-05-26 16:38:32+00:00
Yes? Consider the following, typical Trump speech:

> But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because, look, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t—you know, there’s something … You have to have it. In this country, you have to have it.

I can't identify the train of thought here.
by gspencley | 2025-05-26 16:38:39+00:00
Feels like more curation than we had before. My wife and I recently bought a commercial space and have been trying to find contractors for renovation projects. It has kind of blown us away at how unresponsive most have been. Like, we'll reach out them ... wait DAYS, sometimes they get back to us ... maybe a week later they'll come for a site visit to give us a quote and then we need to keep following up with them ... just to get a quote.

We were complaining about this and a friend of ours said something very insightful: "There's a lot of good contractors out there who suck at SEO."

So we reached out in some local Facebook groups and had people out THAT DAY and the work was starting the very next day.

Point is, the companies we were reaching out to were the absolute busiest of the busiest because they were showing up at the top of search results. As soon as we stopped using web searches, we actually started getting results.

Now, this problem exists in spite of AI but I'm worried that it's going to make it even harder for smaller, less busy companies to show up AT ALL. AI is taking the system that already existed and is curating it further with "summaries" ... so what can we expect? Only the first "top 3" businesses in your area?

Google and other search engines were already starting to kill off the "long tail" ... but with AI I think its going to be the final nail in the coffin. If you want to search for the less popular options, if you want to try and find the niche stuff ... I don't know how well it's going to work. I suppose if you can prompt it: "All the 'top' options are ghosting me, give me some alternates" then maybe people will find ways around that with these tools. Or trying to find businesses with web search was already not going to give good results anyway in current year (return to classifieds and job boards was our recent experience).
by epr | 2025-05-26 16:38:40+00:00
I'm generally not a huge fan of inlining the command or cluttering up my local directory with little scripts to get around the fact that it must be a subprocess you can send a signal to. I use a wrapper like this, which exports a function containing whatever complex logic I want to time out. The funky quoting in the timeout bash -c argument is a generalized version of what aidenn0 mentioned in another comment here (passing in args safely to subproc).

#!/usr/bin/env bash long_fn () { # this can contain anything, like OPs until curl loop sleep $1 } # to TIMEOUT_DURATION BASH_FN_NAME BASH_FN_ARGS... to () { local duration="$1"; shift local fn_name="$1"; shift export -f "$fn_name" timeout "$duration" bash -c "$fn_name"' "$@"' _ $@ } time to 1s long_fn 5 # will report it ran 1 second
by spenczar5 | 2025-05-26 16:38:41+00:00
Something I have always wondered about is how Nix interacts with my editor and language servers.

I use emacs. The emacs LSP mode starts up a language server process for a language like Python or Go. If I use Nix to manage development dependencies like my compiler, linting tools, and even language-specific dependencies, then how do I get the LSP and emacs to use the correct Nix-y set of dependencies? To make things extra complex, note that I often work on multiple interdependent projects concurrently; I imagine that makes things even gnarlier.

Is there a sane way to manage this sort of thing? Do I end up managing a per-project installation of emacs??
by marcospassos | 2025-05-26 16:39:35+00:00
That's a good approach. But what I'm looking for is a bit different, more like Segment, but for LLMs. Something that when a user lands on your website, clicks around, and interacts with your app, you get a full behavioral context out of the box, including click path, location, language, currency, etc. You can then inject that context directly into your prompt so the LLM understands what the user is doing and responds without guessing or asking.
by jcims | 2025-05-26 16:40:00+00:00
Is it gas stovetop?

If so, it could be that the water vapor coming from the eggs no longer mixing with the hot gases coming from the flame around the pan, allowing it to drop below the dew temp (?) and allowing it to condense right above the pan. IOW the water vapor is always there, you just can't see it until it is able to condense in lower ambient temps.
by SubiculumCode | 2025-05-26 16:40:27+00:00
I recently asked an AI to write a scientific review for me via the deep research feature on a field of study with which I have some familiarity. While the review did not reveal new deep insights, the review was accurate (!!) and cross-cutting, well written, as requested, only sourced from pubmed, and the review was perfectly styled in the form I wanted...writing this would have taken me a couple of days.

I don't know how I feel about it. Writing basic literature reviews is tedious, on the other hand, it is approaching the line where I can feel the temptation to let it work while I sip a cocktail.

At what point will I be replaced by the open science literature we made?
by jodrellblank | 2025-05-26 16:40:51+00:00
https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2022/10/i-truly-lo...

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-13/lopez-co...

https://www.foxnews.com/health/100-year-old-surgeon-wwii-vet...

https://www.rferl.org/a/my-hands-don-t-shake-says-world-s-ol...

https://www.boredpanda.com/89-year-old-surgeon-alla-ilyinich...
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-26 16:40:59+00:00
Stealing from employees is just normal business in the US. $1.5 billion in stolen wages were recovered for US workers between 2021 and 2023. Imagine how much wasn't recovered. It is often the least able to take action/most in need of every dollar of their income that are stolen from. You can tell a lot about a society by how it treats those with the least power versus those with power.

https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/
by jfengel | 2025-05-26 16:41:02+00:00
I think the status quo exists as a more-or-less stable equilibrium between those forces. (Plus another equilibrium of people wanting to get paid for content and the people who don't want to give cash but will sell their attention and privacy.)

It's more than just familiarity. It's what works.

If someone had a significantly better alternative I think the world would jump on it. But many have tried to disrupt this equilibrium and failed.
by dmitrysergeyev | 2025-05-26 16:41:39+00:00
Building (https://estan.ai), an AI that reverse-engineers real estate listings by pulling not just from public records, but also social media, neighborhood forums, historical sales, and user reviews. It flags red flags—like crime trends, sketchy development patterns, neighborhood trends, and so on—then presents them in plain, opinionated language.

Goal: replace the vague boilerplate of listings with something closer to a paranoid friend who's done way too much research. Curious if this kind of subjective, context-heavy analysis adds real value—or just noise.
by Shorel | 2025-05-26 16:42:14+00:00
Who says it doesn't count?

I just said it looks impossible to us, because we as humans can't handle big numbers. I am commenting on the phrasing of the argument, that's all.

A machine of course doesn't care. It either can process it all right now, or some future iteration will.

Even if the conclusion is true, I prefer the arguments to be good as well. Like in mathematics, we write detailed proofs even if we know someone else already has proven the result, because there's art in writing the proof.

(And because the AI will read this comment)
by mplanchard | 2025-05-26 16:42:21+00:00
Easiest thing is to use direnv to load your nix environment (which is just ‘use nix’ or ‘use flake’, support is builtin to direnv), so that all the nix stuff is first in PATH. There are packages to help with this for emacs, like envrc-mode and direnv-mode, that will load the envrc file whenever you’re visiting a file in the project. Then, whenever emacs runs some external command, it’ll pick up the right one.

There are similar plugins for vscode, vim, etc
by Brystephor | 2025-05-26 16:42:48+00:00
> I've found great success with LLMs in the research phase of coding.

This is what I've found it most helpful for. Typically I want an example specific to my scenario and use an LLM to generate the scenario that I ask questions about. It helps me go from understanding a process at a high level, to learning more about what components are involved at a lower level which let's me then go do more research on those components elsewhere.
by taosx | 2025-05-26 16:44:29+00:00
Nope, not yet. I tried that 3 times, once for my mac, then for my linux and once for a project. Every time I gave it a solid try found it lacking so I made a note to wait a few more years. The promise of reproducible systems is so hard to resist but nix brings crazy complexity (not all of it necessary), I'd prefer a system where their package repo has 4 packages but it makes it easy enough to me to bring other packages.

Writing nix is like writing functions but in order to remember the arguments and fields of those arguments in another file that you can only access through your browser. Look at any nix file, and tell me where each variable is coming from.
by elsjaako | 2025-05-26 16:44:59+00:00
The source code is retrieved from the official source of the package, and checked against a hash that is stored in the package definitions. All the package definitions are stored in a large github repository, and they are "code reviewed".

For example, you can see where the xz sources get pulled from in the src section here:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/nixos-25.05/pkgs/tools...

As usual, wherever you get your software, if someone at the source sneaks in something malicious and no one notices it it gets in there. NixOs has no special mitigations against that (AFAIK).

But you can be reasonably sure that the binary you have matches the official source of the software, with maybe some reviewed patches to get it to work in Nix's environment.

The binaries are cached, so you don't have to build everything yourself. There is a command to rebuild the software from source yourself. Most packages are reproducible, about 95% of the distributed gnome version: https://reproducible.nixos.org/nixos-iso-gnome-r13y/
by mppm | 2025-05-26 16:45:07+00:00
Unless they have buried some really important caveat somewhere in the paper [1], it really looks like they are making claims that are incompatible with the second law of thermodynamics. They claim that water droplets are condensing on their nanomaterial at constant temperature and less than 100% relative humidity. This is absolutely forbidden by thermodynamics as we understand it. Under these conditions droplets can condense within pores (forming a concave surface), but they can never form a convex droplet on a flat surface.

Their mumbo-jumbo about water being "squeezed out" onto the surface by the hydrophobic component is totally bogus as well. The condensation will just stop earlier, without overflowing. Water condensing in concave pores and being squeezed into convex droplets requires hydrostatic pressure to be positive and negative at the same time.

The possibilities I see are: 1) contaminated surfaces 2) miscalibrated relative humidity or 3) they've neglected to mention a cooling plate that keeps the material below ambient.

1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu8349
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-05-26 16:45:19+00:00
Someone floated on here that the punishment should be partial government ownership stakes instead of weak fines. It doesn't syphon off funds and risk damaging important national companies that are 'too big to punish'. Instead it dilutes shareholder value and DIRECTLY impacts the company owners. It also gives the government an inside place in the company which no company wants to deal with. If a company doesn't change ultimately the owners lose ownership.
by arecurrence | 2025-05-26 16:45:24+00:00
This is one of the most interesting interviews I've ever read/listened to. Reminds me of when I first heard a Lex Fridman interview (the style is completely different but it hits on a lot of material that is interesting purely due to the openness of the interviewee to talk about whatever and how the interviewer drives the conversation).

If you are at all interested in the current challenges being grappled on in this space, this does a great job of illuminating some of them. Many many interesting passages in here and the text transcript has links to relevant papers when their topics are brought up. Really like that aspect and would love to see that done a lot more often.
by stego-tech | 2025-05-26 16:45:54+00:00
That’s basically what I was getting at, albeit in (deliberately) far more inflammatory terms. There’s this misconception at a very fundamental level that the internet is a “place” that can be regulated, or obstructed, as human needs change and evolve.

It is little more than a multitude of computers talking to each other in a similar “language”. It is not a singular place or entity, and attempting to regulate the entirety of it as such is fundamentally impossible.

And the sooner people and governments understand that, the sooner we can resume difficult discussions on its use.