MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by awongh | 2025-06-09 11:06:23+00:00
> value within their right answers

The thing is that LLMs provide plenty of answers where "right" is not a verifiable metric. Even in coding the idea of a "right" answer quickly gets fuzzy- should I use CSS grid or flexbox here? should these tables be normalized or not?

People simply have an unconscious bias towards the output just like they have an unconscious bias towards the same answer given by two real people they feel differently about- That is, the sort of thing all humans do (even if you swear that in all cases you are 100% impartial and logical).

I think the impulse of ascribing intent and meaning to the output is there in almost all questions, it's just a matter of degrees (CSS question vs. meaning of life type question)
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-09 11:06:54+00:00
Prices early on matter mostly to the Investors. Benefactors will just wait until the price is right - it's not like they invested themselves into the new thing and are now in a hurry.

I do see the argument, though: delays and resulting prices are in a positive feedback loop. But that's a problem for Benefactors only when it makes the new thing stay economically unviable indefinitely. Otherwise, market will find a way (and hype helps!).

EDIT:

Vendor lock-in is always annoying to Benefactors, but I wouldn't worry too much now. GenAI is not Uber - it actually is sustainable at the current and future quality level. Even as major AI services are subsidized with investor money to some extent (I don't have current numbers on that), it's just the usual, boring case of throwing money at a thing to accelerate its growth, to capture more market than competitors.

Uber's case is special in that the business is fundamentally unsustainable, so it actually amounts to market destruction - burning stupid amounts of investor money let them break into existing markets and gut all local incumbents, but as that money runs out, both passengers and drivers see costs skyrocket while quality of service sinks rapidly sinks, and there is no going back - incumbents all died out or transformed into Uber-like thing, which destroyed the structural efficiencies in the market that built up over decades.

As Benefactors of technological advancement, all we got from Uber was the ability to order a taxi with an app. Doesn't feel like it was worth it.

But GenAI is not Uber.
by pjmlp | 2025-06-09 11:08:52+00:00
While I applaud the effort, this always fails on the human factor, and hardware support.

I used to tell about some library efforts in Germany regarding the use of a SuSE based distro for their infrastructure, to be used by folks at the library.

Turns out that one of the things that got recently replaced, when new computers got in, was exactly that.

Now they run selected Windows apps in kiosk mode, because that was what their users used to complain about not being able to access at the library.
by inglor_cz | 2025-06-09 11:09:14+00:00
It wasn't obvious in 1780 if you could build a steam engine that would be reliable and small enough to move itself, for example. Or if you can produce enough steel rails to build a real railway network. It took 50 years of progress to find out that steam-powered railway was indeed viable.

(For a modern parallel - we haven't built a small, portable nuclear reactor ever. The closest you get are nuclear-powered submarines, but no nuclear trucks.)
by spiffyk | 2025-06-09 11:09:17+00:00
That's just the 443 port – the middlebox can't see anything else anyway. Were that an actual concern, we could standardize running DoT on 443 instead of the status quo 853, and negotiating the protocol via ALPN. The "dot" ALPN is already standardized and implemented in actual production DNS software, so the port number is realistically the only obstacle.
by artursapek | 2025-06-09 11:09:50+00:00
Cool! I’ve had a similar feeling about code the last few weeks: I am no long “pushing code around” by hand. AI is letting me move way faster than I could ever manage when I had to type every character of every line of code myself. I can spend more time thinking about the big picture and dictate that to Cursor/Claude Code and get pretty damn good results. I guess this is a dev’s version of liberation from “pixel pushing”.
by ta1243 | 2025-06-09 11:10:21+00:00
Do you work in modern enterprise fleet management?

Linux is fine for an individual - I've used it for over 25 years no problem.

I have no idea if modern desktop configuration management and centralised identity like mdm/intune/sccm/ad even exist, let alone how well they work in the real world

Your mention of SteamOS suggests that you don't understand the considerations governments and enterprises have in fleet management, but maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement.
by K0balt | 2025-06-09 11:10:28+00:00
I wonder which is better, the totalitarian left, or the totalitarian right?

Since technology has empowered centralized power while providing the tools easily repurposed to poison democracy, I suspect that democracy as we understand it will fail to compete with data driven central planning.

So maybe the question we should be asking is what flavor of total surveillance and centralized control do we want to live under?
by steveBK123 | 2025-06-09 11:10:34+00:00
To a degree, yes.

There are a lot of leaders who are looking for problems for their solutions.

edit: I say this as someone who has been stuck on top-down POCs which I late found out originated from "so my brother in law has this startup" where we got management questions that were mostly "so how could we use this here?" rather than "how is it performing / is it a good value / does it solve the problem we want it to solve".

Some tech cannot fail, it can only be failed.
by mousethatroared | 2025-06-09 11:10:58+00:00
Yes, Athens is a part of the West. I never denied that. But how about Jerusalem? How about Rome? How about uncivilized (ie without a city) barbarians?

How about the over 1600 years of history since the split of the Roman empire?

The 1000 years since the Schism?

The 500 years since the Fall of Constantinople?

The Eastern Roman Empire was of a completely different character than the Western one, follows a vastly different path, and one that started diverging (due to all the heresies [0]) as early as Constantine. Since the fall of Constantinople the Greeks had very limited contact with the West until independence in the late 19th century.

According to you the West didn't do anything, didn't evolve, in the last 1600 years since we've been de facto incommunicado?

For example, to say that the West of the Scholastics is "Greek" when the Greeks have always rejected them (with very poignant criticism might I add) is a laugh in the face of the Scholastic's transformational contribution to the West (above all our modern university system).

St Augustine [1] , Boetius [2], and the Papacy [3] create the West anew from of these ingredients.

[0] which (Russian Orthodox) Solovyev lays at the feet of a jealous Greek hierarchy [1] accepted but looked down on by the Greeks [2] the last of the ancients and the first of the Scholastics [3] the most foundational institution for the West and rejected by the Greeks
by empiko | 2025-06-09 11:11:21+00:00
> LLMs are human culture compiled into code. They will strongly tend to follow patterns of human behavior, to the point of that being their main (only?) feature.

Perhaps, but this already disproves the idea of superhuman PhD+ level AI agents.

---

I think that the paper has a good motivation. It would be great if we were able to somehow define the complexity of problems AIs are able to tackle. But the Hanoi towers puzzle does not seem like a good match, especially since you can generate the solution mechanically, if you are aware of the very simple algorithm.
by LargoLasskhyfv | 2025-06-09 11:11:47+00:00
Dunno. Have been unaware of them so far. Am not that often in SJ anyway, but when I am the tap is taboo for me. That stuff can only be spat out.

I know the Eldorado Springs from when I'm in Aspen, Austin, Altadena, and while I don't get the hype surrounding the stuff, it's more than acceptable (for water).

Taste matters. Be it for coffee, tea, cooking, making desserts, even baking, or making your own pizza dough.
by defrost | 2025-06-09 11:12:43+00:00
Modern New York frequently has mountains of unremoved waste whenever there's a sanitation dispute .. it's a problem that hasn't been solved.

New York and London of yore had logistical challenges that could have been improved, London famously rebuilt its sewers to address the the miasma, and there are many uses for urine, horse or human, if gathered.

It's more an infrastructure issue, dealing with waste, than an intrinsic failing of one mode of transport over another.
by robertlagrant | 2025-06-09 11:15:06+00:00
> We're talking about a home server here for hosting eBooks and paperless documents, and you're implying Kubernetes clusters are easy enough to run and so are a good solution here

It's pretty simple these days I think to run k3s or something similar and then deploy stuff how you like via a yaml file. I'll agree though if you need services to share filesystem for some reason it gets more complicated with storage mounts.
by ap99 | 2025-06-09 11:15:55+00:00
We might know the inner workings of the "machine" but we can control inputs (food) and measure outputs (weight).

Let's say I eat 3 hamburgers per day and gain ~1kg per month.

If I reduce that to 2 hamburgers per day I maintain my weight.

And when I reduce that to 1 hamburger per day I lose ~1kg per month.

That is simple. As for how I feel while eating 1 hamburger that's another question.

I can try to improve the machinery of my body by e.g exercising, eating healthier food, adjusting my macros, taking supplements, etc.

So now I can eat 1.5 hamburgers per day and I feel better and still lose 1kg per month.
by rietta | 2025-06-09 11:16:12+00:00
Thousands is probably hyperbole, but there are many, many!

One that I find regular use for when copy+paste does not work because I am either connected to a terminal emulation, vm, or something of the like is typeitforme. It takes the contents of a text file and sends them through the keyboard buffer after a few second delay (that allows me time to switch focus to the window I want the typing done).

I currently have it as a entry in my ~/.bash_aliasas file.

alias typeitforme='sleep 3 && xdotool type --file '

This works in stock Ubuntu Linux. You can check out the xdotool documentation for ideas how to refine it to do more.
by delusional | 2025-06-09 11:16:40+00:00
No it's not. The traditional interpretation of the Turing test requires interactivity. That is, the evaluator is allowed to ask questions and will receive a response from both a person and a machine. The idea is that there should be no sequence of questions you can ask that would reliably identify the machine. That's not even close to true for these "AI" systems.
by varun_chopra | 2025-06-09 11:16:48+00:00
The writing is really strange. I'm not sure if this is AI or not. So many words, and so little has been conveyed...

Example from the comments...

> Great question. I haven’t found a perfect tool. A combination of Figma and Storybook and Zeroheight do a good job pulling it all together. But the real magic is the designer-developer relationship that stay in lock step. Those relationships are what it takes to be in tight sync.

_But the real magic is the designer-developer relationship that stay in lock step. Those relationships are what it takes to be in tight sync._

Who writes like this?
by bgwalter | 2025-06-09 11:17:03+00:00
A rabbi and a priest are sitting next to each other in a plane on the Sabbath. The priest notices that the rabbi keeps on his seat belt for the whole journey. Finally, overcome by curiosity, he asks: "Rabbi, why are you traveling on the Sabbath and why do you keep your seat belt on the whole time?"

The rabbi answers: "I'm not traveling, I'm wearing the plane!"
by Frieren | 2025-06-09 11:17:59+00:00
> Instead, the challenge is to proof [prove] that an admin team can manage users and their data, software and devices with or without Active Directory and without Microsoft Windows within a migration period of rather 2 years than 20 years.

Get rid of consultancy companies and do the change in house. In my experience, consultancy companies solution for everything is to integrate complex solutions (Microsoft, Oracle, ...) an charge as much as possible per hour. They have all the big-tech certifications possible, and that is what they want to implement. It is a the fox guarding the hen situtation.
by inglor_cz | 2025-06-09 11:18:55+00:00
That is too simplistic. Plenty of new technology saw civilian use first, such as photography, X-ray, telephone, moveable type, smartphones or smallpox inoculation. Even FPV drones were mostly an over-the-counter toy for nerds until 2022.

Now civilian use only, that would be different, few technologies are civilian-only, with no possible military use. But war as the first use is not as frequent case as you assert.
by w10-1 | 2025-06-09 11:18:56+00:00
The OP makes a surprising amount of progress.

As other comments note, it's easy to get caught in the weeds of Apple API's and tooling, but AFAICT they generally do as good as possible at the hard problem of compatibility.

The worse problem is that you will get blocked after significant investment.

It's because of Apple's scale and focus. They have millions of developers, but only about a thousand really significant ones driving the latest APIs. To avoid delay and noise, Apple ships and demos the happy path, but fails to warn about all the surrounding pitfalls.

You will hit one, sooner or later.

And any pitfall can be a complete blocker. Unlike web, enterprise, or back-end work, where Java, python, and javascript/typescript libraries and apps are readily available in open-source, bugs present as inscrutable binary blobs that are mostly ignored in the black hole of feedback assistant unless you have some real pull.

It's easy to get started as a solo, but to manage the infinite space of mine fields, you'd need to be in a large organization where people have learned where not to step.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-06-09 11:18:58+00:00
At the end of the day, I fully expect large-n Hanoi and all these things to end up as yet another benchmark. Like all the needles-in-haystack or spelling tests that people used to show shortcomings of LLMs and that were actually just technical implementation artefacts and got solved pretty fast by integrating that kind of problem into training. LLMs will always have to use a slightly different approach to reasoning than humans because of these technical aspects, but that doesn't mean that they are fundamentally inferior or something. It only means we can't rely on human training data forever and have to look more towards stuff like RL.
by librasteve | 2025-06-09 11:19:06+00:00
turns out that this was a different rant than the one i was hoping for - that web designs are too complicated because they are far, far into diminishing returns

seems that the current generation of tooling (React) is encouraging folks to want to design a facebook, when a nice, clean, mainly static site with well designed layouts, navigation and clearly presented information is what people want to make a business decision and to get on with their day

disclosures i am the grug brained dev of https://harcstack.org which is trying to leverage HTMX to make the pain go away
by dack | 2025-06-09 11:19:14+00:00
Calorie tracking is also about educating yourself about how many calories certain things are, so you can make better decisions.

Like, oil is insanely caloric and can accidentally add hundreds of calories, but it's nearly impossible to eat too many greens.

Once you learn this, then the tracking is just to keep you honest - your brain knows what to do but it lies to you when it wants to bend the rules and those little cheats add up enough to throw off the whole diet.
by ReptileMan | 2025-06-09 11:19:32+00:00
Only if their economies crash or something like that. So far the demographics are in extreme cases something like 10% natives, 20% expats, 70% migrant workers in various forms of indentured servitude. External intervention - could work, but the gulf war showed that it won't be tolerated. Internal strife - could be, but so far everyone is living la dolce vita there (at least the ones with the means and capacity to organize this inversion). Saudi Arabia is the only one vulnerable - but if there is something there it won't be islamist because the people seems to not be too fond for both Wahhabism and the royal family.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-09 11:20:24+00:00
This sounds roughly like the sorts of criticisms Jesus would make of the ‘legalism’ of the Pharisees, by which I mean an excessive emphasis on external acts - going through the motions - to appear to obey the law while neglecting its spiritual purpose. A good example is where the Pharisees criticize Jesus for working on the Sabbath when he heals a man. Another is where the Pharisees bring an adulteress to Jesus, and he remarks that any man who lusts after a woman has already committed adultery in his heart. And then there are the parts where the Pharisees try to trap Jesus, such as when they try to find loopholes to justify divorce.

Post-Christian Judaism following the destruction of the Temple only entrenched this Pharisaism by turning the faith away from one of Temple sacrifice, complete with a Temple priesthood, to one hyperfocused on slicing and dicing the Torah. (The Catholic mass continues the sacrificial liturgy, albeit in a perfect and elevated form; the Mosaic covenant is fulfilled and the perfect sacrifice of Christ - the spotless Lamb of God - becomes the sacrificial lamb for which the prior animal sacrifice was a preparation.)
by danaris | 2025-06-09 11:20:49+00:00
This is a common category of error people commit when talking about LLMs.

"True, LLMs can't do X, but a lot of people don't do X well either!"

The problem is, when you say humans have trouble with X, what you mean is that human brains are fully capable of X, but sometimes they do, indeed, make mistakes. Or that some humans haven't trained their faculties for X very well, or whatever.

But LLMs are fundamentally, completely, incapable of X. It is not something that can be a result of their processes.

These things are not comparable.

So, to your specific point: When an LLM is inconsistent, it is because it is, at its root, a statistical engine generating plausible next tokens, with no semantic understanding of the underlying data. When a human is inconsistent, it is because they got distracted, didn't learn enough about this particular subject, or otherwise made a mistake that they can, if their attention is drawn to it, recognize and correct.

LLMs cannot. They can only be told they made a mistake, which prompts them to try again (because that's the pattern that has been trained into them for what happens when told they made a mistake). But their next try won't have any better odds of being correct than their previous one.
by 0xDEAFBEAD | 2025-06-09 11:21:02+00:00
I didn't get the impression that Athenian democracy was particularly successful. So it seemed weird to say that the flaws in democracy are only now becoming apparent.

In fact, I understand that CamperBob2's critique of democracy is quite similar to that of Socrates. So I'm puzzled by the claim that it's "only now" that the critique is being proven correct, given that US democracy is notably more stable and long-lived than Athenian democracy.

In general, I think times of turmoil are always much more salient when you yourself are living through them. We lack the historical perspective to understand how bad turmoil has been in the past.
by ben_w | 2025-06-09 11:21:46+00:00
> People without language - never learned, or sometimes temporarily disabled due to drugs, or permanently due to injury, transient or permanent aphasia - are still consciously thinking people.

There are 40 definitions of the word "consciousness".

For the definitions pertaining to inner world, nobody can tell if anyone besides themselves (regardless of if they speak or move) is conscious, and none of us can prove to anyone else the validity of our own claims to posess it.

When I dream, am I conscious in that moment, or do I create a memory that my consciousness replays when I wake?

> Words from an AI have nothing behind them but word statistics, devoid of any real world, just words based on words.

> […]

> When a fresh out of college person writes this it's based on some shallow real world experience, and lots of hearsay.

My required reading at school included "Dulce Et Decorum Est" by Wilfred Owen.

The horrors of being gassed during trench warfare were alien to us in the peaceful south coast of the UK in 1999/2000.

AI are limited, but what you're describing here is the "book learning" vs. "street smart" dichotomoy rather than their actual weaknesses.
by csomar | 2025-06-09 11:21:51+00:00
> production-ready code using our design system

This is key and the title/introduction makes it seem like AI is capable of crafting UIs. It is not. AI is capable of laying out your components on top of each other. I used to "craft" most of my app UI[1] and am using Carbon Design System[2]. There are a bunch of open design systems available.

If you haven't used a full Design System before, then you should try that now: https://storybook.js.org/showcase/projects

For any given system, there will be a bit of a learning curve and setup cost; but the payoff is incredible comparing to most of tailwind offerings out there. Bonus: Most of design systems are free! Tailwind frameworks made by amateurs, small companies, etc... can serve a small niche but if you need a bit more of components and people who care about accessibility and usability, then you are much better using a design system supported by a major corporation with infinite resources.

So, the secret sauce is the design system, not the AI. The design system saves you immeasurable time and also standardize the process opening the gate for GenAI to create interfaces. I've tried multiple times with Sonnet 3.7 to craft custom components (for Carbon) and it failed miserably even when I hand-held it constantly.

==

1: https://codeinput.com

2: https://carbondesignsystem.com/
by K0balt | 2025-06-09 11:21:54+00:00
I’m imagining a timeline where dolphins have accepted long ago that humans are intelligent because of our external manifestations of technology, and consequentially have developed much more sophisticated philosophy than humans based on having to understand paradigms well outside of their personal experiences.

Soon, we will find out through dolphin-Gemma that they have been talking to aliens for centuries, since the aliens tried to talk to us but failed due to our, and their, philosophical myopia… but the dolphins, with their non-circular philosophical understanding recognized alien communications and started the conversation before we finished the pyramids.
by jsiepkes | 2025-06-09 11:22:20+00:00
> A decent corporate policy will block or decrypt DoH, same as it blocks direct outbound DNS.

DoH is simply HTTPS traffic as far as a firewall is concerned so how are you going to block or decrypt it?

If you take it a step further and you are running a DoH server on the same place where the API endpoints (REST, gRPC or whatever) for your IoT device are running no one is going to see the anything but HTTPS traffic