MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by samcat116 | 2025-06-03 15:09:50+00:00
I find the opposite, I can stay in flow state much longer than I could before because tabbing out to an LLM is a tighter loop than me going out to google and searching through sites for smaller tidbits that I have to assemble and get through, rather than a full solution that might not be 100% correct, but most of the time I can get to the working solution quicker.
by _heimdall | 2025-06-03 15:09:57+00:00
I can't say I've ever tried to intentionally not use google when working, unless I'm wanting to work offline entirely.

That said I only find google results somewhat helpful. Its a lot like LLM code (not surprising given how they're trained), I may find 5 answers online and one or two has a small piece of what I need. Ultimately that may say me a bit of time or give me an idea for something I hadn't thought of, but it isn't core to my daily work by any stretch.
by stanford_labrat | 2025-06-03 15:10:01+00:00
On the topic of hammers: "if you don't hold the hammer at exactly 2.6cm from the end of the handle and strike the nail with 6N of force at an angle of 58 degrees then of course you won't get a good nail strike into the wood. Oh and you must only use acacia sourced from the subtropics".

Give me a break, it's a hammer. This is a perfectly normal "use" of ChatGPT and a good example of how a literature student may opt to try and use AI to make their work easier in some way. It also conveniently demonstrates some of the shortcomings of using a LLM for this sort of task. No need to call them a dumbass.
by throwawaybob420 | 2025-06-03 15:10:07+00:00
Another day another post about AI by people whose job will be made redundant.

Something fascinating about this HN crowd in particular is its lack of foresight. Companies producing medicine have to take into account longterm effects, yet people working in these “tech” companies push out AI after AI with not a single care in how it’s going to impact people.
by dlivingston | 2025-06-03 15:10:37+00:00
When I do GUI work, it's usually for hobbyist or internal projects. I value quality UI/UX extremely highly. I often get 'analysis-by-paralysis' here because I try to do the design and development in a synchronous single pass. Your comment about tight and rapid iteration being the only solution resonates with me.

One 'trick' I discovered recently was to completely ignore UI design and focus on _formatting_ instead -- the placement of elements in a proper and useable way. Saving the visual aspects of design (widget design, margins, padding, color, animations, etc.) until the very very last step.

My hypothesis is that "good UI" = "good page formatting" + "pretty UI elements".

Any thoughts on this approach?
by jvanderbot | 2025-06-03 15:11:55+00:00
There's a huge difference between firing back at an enemy that is attacking, and spraying radio signals all over the horizon even though nobody is attacking yet. The former won't tell them anything new, but the latter (which I'm talking about), is (was?) considered somewhat dangerous.

When I said "triggered" I meant you would enable it when under attack, at which point it doesn't matter if they know you're there anymore.
by gavmor | 2025-06-03 15:12:02+00:00
> It's a shame people lose sight of the ground beneath their feet when reaching to the sky

Shakespeare:

> 'tis a common proof \ That lowliness is young ambition's ladder, \ Whereto the climber-upward turns his face; \ But when he once attains the upmost round, \ He then unto the ladder turns his back, \ Looks in the clouds, scorning the base degrees \ By which he did ascend.

(Brutus, of Caesar, Julius Caesar)
by thomastjeffery | 2025-06-03 15:12:06+00:00
That's what would happen if it was a logical system. It's not. This is where it gets interesting.

Instead, it's a statistical model, and including that prompt is more like a narrative weight than a logical demand. By including these words in this order, the model will be more likely to explore narratives that are statistically likely to follow them, with that likelihood determined by the content the model was trained on, and the extra redistribution of weights via training.

We don't really need to worry about technically misstating our objectives to an LLM. It doesn't follow objectivity. Instead, we need to be concerned about misrepresenting the overall vibe, which is a much more mysterious task.
by ajross | 2025-06-03 15:12:31+00:00
To be clear, that's because Ardupilot is a really pretty routine UAV navigation project with obvious civilian/industrial/enthusiast application. People hack on Ardupilot because it's fun to see your drone fly around on its own. That you can also put a grenade on it is sort of an obvious extension, but the payload is very much a separate feature.
by raudette | 2025-06-03 15:12:37+00:00
Patrick McKenzie has an interesting perspective on this:

I think this is underappreciated by almost all writers. You should be doing something very differently with your life if you assume that as opposed to a generation earlier or even five years ago, most of the direct effects of writing will be by people who actually read what you wrote.

And you have the opportunity, a near certainty that most "people" who read what you write in the future are not going to be humans. But humans will interact with what you write with an indirection layer in the middle.

from: https://www.complexsystemspodcast.com/episodes/understanding...
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-03 15:12:37+00:00
I think it's a critically important observation.

I thought this experience was so helpful as it gave an objective, evidence-based sample on both the pros and cons of AI-assisted coding, where so many of the loudest voices on this topic are so one-sided ("AI is useless" or "developers will be obsolete in a year"). You say "removing expert humans from the loop is the deeply stupid thing the Tech Elite Who Want To Crush Their Own Workforces / former-NFT fanboys keep pushing", but the fact is many people with the power to push AI onto their workers are going to be more receptive to actual data and evidence than developers just complaining that AI is stupid.
by kabdib | 2025-06-03 15:13:51+00:00
we used FORTH extensively in the bring-up of the Atari ST. it was easy for the hardware engineers to come up with little fragments of FORTH so they could exercise their chips without needing much support from the software team

FORTHs are fun to write. they'll teach you a lot about ruthless simplicity

i don't think FORTH is useful for large programs, but that's not the point of the language
by davidpapermill | 2025-06-03 15:14:20+00:00
Agreed, it's about _imperative_ vs _declarative_ languages.

The problem with languages like LaTeX etc. is they treat a document as a linear sequence of instructions: "write this text", "switch to justify right" etc. - I think that made sense when LaTeX was created, but publishing has come a long way and imperative thinking doesn't help.

A declarative form of document is the way forward. HTML is -kind of- like that, but unfortunately the assumption that a document is a linear list of stuff is still in there. That's one reason it doesn't work well for print.
by michaeld123 | 2025-06-03 15:14:52+00:00
We built a 1.5M word semantic network where any two words connect in ~6.43 hops (76% connect in ≤7). The hard part wasn't the graph theory—it was getting rich, non-obvious associations. GPT-4's associations were painfully generic: "coffee → beverage, caffeine, morning." But we discovered LLMs excel at validation, not generation. Our solution: Mine Library of Congress classifications (648k of them, representing 125 years of human categorization). "Coffee" appears in 2,542 different book classifications—from "Coffee trade—Labor—Guatemala" to "Coffee rust disease—Hawaii." Each classification became a focused prompt for generating domain-specific associations. Then we inverted the index: which classifications contain both "algorithm" and "fractals"? Turns out: "Mathematics in art" and "Algorithmic composition." This revealed connections like algorithm→Fibonacci→golden ratio that pure co-occurrence or word vectors miss. The "Montreal Effect" nearly tanked the project—geographic contamination where "bagels" spuriously linked to "Expo 67" because Montreal is famous for bagels. We used LLMs to filter true semantic relationships from geographic coincidence. Technical details: 80M API calls, superconnector deprecation (inverse document frequency variant), morphological deduplication. Built for a word game but the dataset has broader applications.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-03 15:15:18+00:00
Yikes.

My professor often taught classes with a couple sections, I’d help out sometimes—even that was a ton of work, pretty hard to do the main job (research) during those semesters. I wonder if (given the demographics of the board) folks are suggesting things from a similar place of informed ignorance to me—coming from research oriented STEM universities. In that case it could be reasonable to say “well, the situation with our classes has gotten so dire with AI, it might make sense to sacrifice a semester of research to sort that all out.” Of course if you are already prepping for four classes, there is not much slack to sacrifice…

In that case a lot of us would be specifically more wrong than a random person plucked off the street, somebody who thinks the main job of every professor is teaching.
by chinchilla2020 | 2025-06-03 15:15:34+00:00
The reason I remain in the "skeptical" camp is because I am experiencing the same thing you are - I keep oscillating between being impressed, then disappointed.

Ultimately the thing that impresses me is that LLMs have replaced google search. The thing that disappoints me is that their code is often convincing but wrong.

Coming from a hard-engineering background, anything that is unreliable is categorized as bad. If you come from the move-fast-break-things world of tech, then your tolerance for mistakes is probably a lot higher.
by yowlingcat | 2025-06-03 15:15:40+00:00
Any reason to not just use Pandoc? It's been 15 years since I ran into this problem, but even at that point Pandoc made it pretty easy to go from Markdown -> Latex and then render from Latex -> PDF. The benefit of this pipeline is that if I needed to fine tune any of the Latex there was flexibility to do so.
by y-curious | 2025-06-03 15:15:42+00:00
I am very interested in TLA+. I work on an existing application, say, for serving graphs to customers on the frontend. I want to, for example, add a new button to the front end to turn on dark mode.

What I want to know from experienced formal methods folks: how do I go about scoping my new feature in TLA+? Do I have to model my entire system in the language, or just a subset of features? Is my example even a good use case for TLA+?
by jajko | 2025-06-03 15:15:44+00:00
Take 5 drones, sneak from other directions and simply overwhelm the system. If in pair, multiply the attackers via some decoys, it becomes just a statistics game.

I can imagine this protecting some future US bases in same way C-RAM is used. But from what I read from ie Iraq veterans they had it turned off most of the time for the fear of shooting down its own planes. So much for trust in high tech if its too powerful and automated.

Chinese have some systems, but from demo I've seen the laser beam took some serious time to shoot a single missile. Drones are smaller and way more fragile (so also harder to hit) but this ain't Star trek or Star wars.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-06-03 15:15:48+00:00
> Designing "ChatGPT-proof assignments" feels to me like a similar level of intellectual challenge.

Designing a "mostly ChatGPT-proof class" is in my opinion actually rather simple: just be inspired by the German university system:

Each week you have to complete exercise sheets which are often hard. But being capable of solving a certain quota of the exercises is just the beginning: this only qualifies you for being allowed to take the actual (oral or written) exam.

In this sense (as many professors will tell you), the basically sole purpose of the quota for solving (often hard) exercise sheets is actually preventing students from the "self-inflicted harm" of doing an exam that they are not yet prepared for.

And yes: while it is forbidden to "cheat" (e.g. ChatGPT) on your exercise sheets, this policy is typically not strongly enforced (you will nearly always just get a unequivocal, strongly worded oral reprimand by the tutor). Instead, if you did this, you will for sure not be prepared for the upcoming exam, and flunk it (and most students are very aware of this).

Oh yeah, I didn't mention yet that if you flunked the same exam typically 3 times (depending on the university), you have "finally failed" (endgültig nicht bestanden), and are not allowed anymore to study the same degree course at every German university.
by hn_throwaway_99 | 2025-06-03 15:16:01+00:00
I also like your analogy, but it also explains why I find working with AI-assisted coding so mentally tiresome.

It's like with some auto-driving systems - I say it like having a slightly inebriated teenager at the wheel. I can't just relax and read a book, because then I'd die. But so I have to be more mentally alert than just driving myself because everything could be going smoothly and relaxed, but at any moment the driving system could decide to drive into a tree.
by dlivingston | 2025-06-03 15:16:16+00:00
Apple used to be very good at this, especially in the pre-iPhone OS X era.

iTunes: https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/192853040

Preview: https://www.intego.com/mac-security-blog/wp-content/uploads/...

Garage Band: https://inside.wooster.edu/technology/wp-content/uploads/sit...
by amy214 | 2025-06-03 15:16:33+00:00
This business model will have its lunch eaten by the software stack that claims immunity to hacks, but can still run on the students' hardware, thus massively changing the cost and logistics landscape. Now the student has to manage it.

Of course it's true, the student-owned laptop may in theory always be modded to bypass any software stack. But in practice, the software stack has a huge edge. Any remaining lunch to be eaten, whereby one is insistent that this testing be performed on non-student hardware, can be had by the university computer lab.
by blenderob | 2025-06-03 15:16:53+00:00
> And maybe a few months from now after your latex distribution got updated by the system your document suddenly no longer compiles.

I'm using LaTeX 2e for 25+ years. This has literally never happened to me. If that's not stability, I don't know what is. LaTeX documents I wrote in my grad days still compile for me. I just checked and it does. I do keep the dependency packages myself in my folder.

Has this issue ever happened to anyone? Why would LaTeX distribution getting updated break my documents? It's still the same latex compiler and the same base styles and packages!
by roughly | 2025-06-03 15:17:00+00:00
So this issue clearly doesn’t affect your life in any real tangible way, and yet for some reason it’s so triggering to you that you felt compelled to jump in on a thread about it, and I’d sure wager this isn’t the first time. Again, Why Are You Here? What makes this such a hot-button topic for you that, despite it having no actual affect on you at all, the mere act of someone announcing their pronouns in an online forum is sufficient to compel this kind of reaction from you?
by Sporktacular | 2025-06-03 15:17:08+00:00
“In the perfect world, the drone should take off, fly, find the target, strike it, and report back on the task,” Burukin says. “That’s where the development is heading.”

That's the problem in a nutshell. A few years back, few would argue against keeping a human in the kill/no-kill decision chain. It just took one war to get pop tech authors writing on it without even a mention of the ethical considerations or autonomous killing machines.
by horsawlarway | 2025-06-03 15:18:03+00:00
Takes a little adjustment, but you can do quite a bit of good work without Google (or any search).

Spoken from a fair bit of experience doing software development in closed rooms with strict control of all digital devices (from your phone to your watch) and absolutely no external connections.

There are moments that are painful still, because you'll be trying to find a thing in a manual and you know a search can get it faster - but it's silly to imply this isn't possible.
by lapcat | 2025-06-03 15:18:27+00:00
> When I asked him why he had gone through so much trouble to get to an Ivy League university only to off-load all of the learning to a robot, he said, “It’s the best place to meet your co-founder and your wife.”

On the one hand, this guy is not wrong, from a personal perspective. On the other hand, guys like this are a total waste of time and space in the classroom.

Schools have always faced a fundamental internal conflict, i.e., dueling purposes, and recent developments such as the rise of ChatGPT and the rise of student loan debt may have finally brought the entire educational system to a crisis.

We like to think of education as the primary purpose of the educational system, hence the name. And education is indeed essential, not just for job training but also for the enrichment of human life, as well as the preservation of democracy and freedom. Arguably, the latter are more important. Yet we also rely on the educational system for social and economic sorting. It's a ranking system that has a monumental effect on the future prospects of students. And as the above quotation notes, it's a club, an exclusive club, where the lucky few get to meet the right people and enter into important social circles.

At the university level, things become even more muddled, because professors and scientists are performing important research that may have little or nothing to do with the education of undergraduate students. A lot of this research is important for society, and for industry, but it still comes into conflict with the other purposes of the university.

So how do we resolve the inherent conflict? Is there a way to split the educational system into separate entities that are truer to their individual purposes? Can we make a place for the social ladder climber that's separate from a place where real learning happens, where nobody is tempted to cheat because there's nothing to be gained from cheating? It should also be noted that not everyone is ready to learn. Our current educational system is designed like an assembly line, based on age and social promotion. Everyone of the same age is expected to follow the same track. I personally wasn't ready to study and learn when I was a teenager; it took several more years for me to mature emotionally, develop ambition and discipline. It's difficult to force-feed students: “Most assignments in college are not relevant,” he told me. “They’re hackable by AI, and I just had no interest in doing them.” Perhaps, though, there might be more motivation to learn if learning was not tied to future economic and social prospects. If students view school as merely a tool to achieve certain benefits, then of course they'll view anything else in school as a waste of time.

In a sense, our educational system finds failure to educate to be acceptable, even desirable, because failure fulfills the alternative purpose of social ranking.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-03 15:18:30+00:00
I only listed Dafny, although I do agree with the list on the reply to me.

Never looked into Alloy, I guess have to get an understanding of it.

How can you validate that the beautiful design phase actually maps to e.g. C code, writing data via ODBC to a SQL database, with stored procedures written in PL/SQL?

Neither the semantics of the toolchains nor the semantics of the commercial products ar part of the TLA+ model as such.

Additionally it requires someone to meticulously compare the mathematical model with the implementation code, to validate that what is written actually maps to what was designed.

Although it wouldn't work for my contrieved example, at least tools like Dafny have more viability by going through "formal model => generate library for consumption", so that we can get an automated model to code validation, without human intervention.
by bigmadshoe | 2025-06-03 15:18:51+00:00
Which "coding LLMs" are you referring to that are trained purely on verifiably correct synthetic data? To my understanding o3, gemini 2.5 pro, claude 3.7 sonnet, etc. are all still aligned to human preferences using a reward function learned from human feedback. Any time a notion of success/correctness is deferred to a human, the model will have a chance to "game" the system by becoming more convincing as well as more correct.

Edit: thought I would include this below instead of in a separate comment:

Also, whether the models are trained purely on synthetic data or not, they suffer from these epistemological issues where they are unable to identify what they don't know. This means a very reasonable looking piece of code might be spit out for some out-of-distribution prompt where the model doesn't generalize well.
by sho_hn | 2025-06-03 15:19:11+00:00
Agreed! I think partially it was also that the "bodycam" found footage had such an unusual cinematography style for the show. TNG wasn't exactly known for handheld cams and lights casting harsh shadows. It all felt so out of place.

It's an interesting episode in that it's usually overlooked for being a fairly crappy screenplay, but is really challenging directorially: Blocking and editing that geeky computer sequence, breaking new ground stylistically for the show, etc.
by ibains | 2025-06-03 15:19:48+00:00
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by MongooseStudios | 2025-06-03 15:20:23+00:00
Location: Texas Remote: Yes, exclusively Willing to relocate: Everyone has a price, mine would be very high for relocation. Technologies: Lately mostly Go(lang), but I've done a lot of different stuff including SRE/DevOps work. Résumé/CV: You're welcome to come watch me code live or watch a past stream here: https://www.youtube.com/@Mongoose_Studio or here: https://www.twitch.tv/mongoosestudios Email: located on the about page of https://mongoosestudios.github.io/ Note: Crypto, AI, and Vibecoding shops need not apply
by matthberg | 2025-06-03 15:20:50+00:00
I agree, yet at least you can kind of see where they're coming from.

I guess a better example would be the automatic hardware detection Lenovo Support offers [0] by pinging a local app (with some clear confirmation dialogs first). Asus seems to do the same thing.

uBlock Origin has a fair few explicit exceptions made [1] for cases like those (and other reasons) in their filter list to avoid breakages (notably Intel domains, the official Judiciary of Germany [2] (???), `figma.com`, `foldingathome.org`, etc).

0: https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/

1: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/blob/master/filters/...

2: https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/23388 and https://www.bundesjustizamt.de/EN/Home/Home_node.html (they're trying to talk to a local identity verification app seems like, yet I find it quite funny)
by aspenmayer | 2025-06-03 15:20:53+00:00
It’s not a story. It’s my mom’s life. If she’d been a man, I wouldn’t be here telling you about it. My mom was not successful as an artist, she just liked making art. She wanted to go to art school but got pregnant and was pretty much asked/forced to drop out of high school a month before graduating.

The content of the art perhaps brought out the crazy people? Her art depicted her alien abduction experiences, and the guy she had to ward off intimated that he was some kind of g-man but who can say?