MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by criley2 | 2025-06-03 12:46:31+00:00
I didn't miss your point, rather I wanted you to realize some deeper points I was trying to make

- Not all LLM are the same, and not identifying your tool is problematic because "LLM's can't do a thing" is very different than "The particular model I used failed at this thing". I demonstrated that by showing that many LLMs get the answer right. It puts the onus of correctness entirely on the category of technology, and not the tool used or the skill of the tool user.

- Training data cutoffs are only one part of the equation: Tool use by LLM's allows them to search the internet and run arbitrary code (amongst many other things).

In both of my cases, the training data did not include the results either. Both used a tool call to search the internet for data.

Not realizing that modern AI tools are more than an LLM with training data, but rather have tool calling, full internet access, and can access and reason about a wide variety of up to date data sources demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding about modern AI tools.

Having said that:

Claude Sonnet 4.0 says "yes": https://claude.ai/share/001e16f8-20ea-4941-a181-48311252bca0

Personally, I don't use Claude for this kind of thing because while it's proven to be a very good at being a coding assistant and interacting with my IDE in an "agentic" manner, it's clearly not designed to be a deep research assistant that broadly searches the internet and other data sources to provide accurate and up to date information. (This would mean that ai/model selection is a skill issue and getting good results from AI tools is a skill, which is borne out by the fact that I get the right answer every time I try, and you can't get the right answer once).
by captainbland | 2025-06-03 12:46:51+00:00
I think the most likely thing is the cheap self hostable copies will broadly stop improving significantly. It'll be too costly for a community project to distill a bleeding edge cloud model and companies will stop releasing them. What's free now will remain free, we might even get another gen or 2 of improvements (possibly with diminishing returns) on free/cheap local models but those days are numbered.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-06-03 12:47:25+00:00
There's a few, but they're large, expensive, require a lot of electricity and have limited range; there's the Silent Hunter [0] which is 30-100 kilowatts max power but which has a range of up to 4 kilometers. Raytheon has a 10 kilowatt palletized version that can go on a truck bed [1]; I can't find any numbers but it's listed as short-range, so I presume it's only effective at distances of less than 1 km, probably only tens or hundreds of meters. Plus they need to detect the drones first, but there's multiple ways to do that. It likely needs a network of detectors though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Hunter_(laser_weapon)

[1] https://www.rtx.com/raytheon/what-we-do/integrated-air-and-m...
by taesiri | 2025-06-03 12:47:30+00:00
State-of-the-art Vision Language Models achieve 100% accuracy counting on images of popular subjects (e.g. knowing that the Adidas logo has 3 stripes and a dog has 4 legs) but are only ~17% accurate in counting in counterfactual images (e.g. counting stripes in a 4-striped Adidas-like logo or counting legs in a 5-legged dog).
by bccdee | 2025-06-03 12:49:17+00:00
Sure—but I can also write it pretty instantly, with some judicious copy/pasting.

And the less instantly I can write it, the more petty nuances there are to deal with—things like non-trivial validation, a new database query function, a header that I need to access—the more ways an LLM will get it subtly wrong.

If I treat it as more than a fancy autocomplete, I have to spend all my time cleaning up after it. And if I do treat it as fancy autocomplete, it doesn't save that much time over judicious copy/pasting.
by rfrey | 2025-06-03 12:50:00+00:00
That's exactly the point, it's hard to see how someone could hold that view and pillory AI companies for slurping up proprietary code.

You probably don't have those views. But I think Thomas' point is that the profession as a whole has been crying "information wants to be free" for so many years, when what they meant was "information I don't want to pay for wants to be free" - and the hostile response to AI training on private data underlines that.
by memset | 2025-06-03 12:50:07+00:00
This article makes the mistake of conflating “bicycles” and “e-bikes.” It does this to garner sympathy for its position that these laws are bad.

Expanding bicycle lanes is great. Bicycles are great and I’m a fan of reclaiming more land from car traffic for cyclists and pedestrians.

However many e-bikes - I don’t know what percentage - are just technically under the legal limit for being classified as motorcycles. That is not the intended use of the bike lanes. Similarly, Amazon now has motorized delivery vehicles driving through the bike lanes in the city. They are exactly the width of the lane. It’s great to prevent congestion on streets, and a clever piece of engineering, but again, not a bicycle, even though it has pedals.

If you’re driving a motorized vehicle then don’t ride in the bike lane! If you’re on a road then follow the laws and don’t run red lights!
by mattashii | 2025-06-03 12:50:27+00:00
More powerful than what? If StyroPyro can build handheld 200W+ LED laser device in his workshop [0], why wouldn't a sufficiently funded military be able to build an anti-drone laser with the same (or higher) power output?

Note that his laser burns through various reflective materials, including mirrors, copper, aluminium, and steel.

[0] https://youtu.be/UBVlL0FNbSE
by GoblinSlayer | 2025-06-03 12:50:33+00:00
Yep, it looks like LLMs are used as fast typists, and coincidentally in webdev typing speed is the most important bottleneck when you need to add cookie consent, spinners, dozens of ad providers, tracking pixels, twitter metadata, google metadata, manual rendering, buttons web components with material design and react, hover panels, fontawesome, recaptcha, and that's only 1% of modern web boilerplate, then it's easy to see how a fast typist can help you.
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-06-03 12:50:58+00:00
That's not the million dollar question; anyone who's done any kind of AI coding will tell you it's ridiculously faster. I haven't touched JavaScript, CSS & HTML in like a decade. But I got a whole website created with complex UI interactions in 20 minutes - and no frameworks - by just asking ChatGPT to write stuff for me. And that's the crappy, inefficient way of doing this work. Would have taken me a week to figure out all that. If I'd known how to do it already, and I was very good, perhaps it would have taken the same amount of time? But clearly there is a force-multiplier at work here.

The million dollar question is, what are the unintended, unpredicted consequences of developing this way?

If AI allows me to write code 10x faster, I might end up with 10x more code. Has our ability to review it gotten equally fast? Will the number of bugs multiply? Will there be new classes of bugs? Will we now hire 1 person where we hired 5 before? If that happens, will the 1 person leaving the company become a disaster? How will hiring work (cuz we have such a stellar track record at that...)? Will the changing economics of creating software now make SaaS no longer viable? Or will it make traditional commercial software companies no longer viable? Will the entire global economy change, the way it did with the rise of the first tech industry? Are we seeing a rebirth?

We won't know for sure what the consequences are for a while. But there will be consequences.
by hyperdimension | 2025-06-03 12:51:04+00:00
"common failure mode" = 'they break in a particular way a lot'

As Randy Fromm says, "the things that work the hardest fail the most"

Examples: MLCC (multi-layer ceramic capacitors) over time will often fail short.

Older devices with electrolytic capacitors (the large can-shaped things often situated by where the power input is) have a liquid electrolyte in them that evaporates (boils off?) over time. When it does, they lose their capacitance and the power supply stops being able to supply (good) power.

The point being, when something stops working, check these things first. It's like if your lawnmower dies on you, don't go pulling off the head to look at the piston. Check if there's gas in the tank first.

Finally, a DMM is a digital multimeter. This is your basic tool to measure voltage, current resistance, capacitance, et c.) You can't do much troubleshooting without one.

Hope this helps.
by perihelions | 2025-06-03 12:52:12+00:00
Don't forget the space nukes [reactors]! Some of them exploded, and stringed the planet with Saturn-like rings of nuclear dust[0]; others are slowly oscillating towards Earth like the blade from the Poe story, to impact sometime a few centuries from now.

[0] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20190033494/downloads/20... ("The NaK Population: a 2019 Status" (.pdf))
by Const-me | 2025-06-03 12:52:19+00:00
> because of the 16-bit character type

That type is not for characters anymore; all these languages treat these values as UTF-16 units. Unlike C++, their standard libraries provide functions to convert strings between UTF-8 and UTF-16, apply Unicode normalization, decode strings into a sequence of code points, etc.

> That's what iostreams are

iostreams tried to implement binary streams, text streams, and object formatting with the same API. Predictably failed all these tasks, the features are too different. A minimalistic C++ API for a stream of bytes might look something like that:

struct iStream { virtual ~iStream() { } virtual void read( std::span<uint8_t> buffer ) = 0; virtual void write( std::basic_string_view<uint8_t> buffer ) = 0; };

> result in developers making software that doesn't work like users of the OS expect

Can you elaborate? When I write string content = File.ReadAllText( path ) in C#, the standard library does exactly the same thing as some C++ library could do: open file for read access, read it to the end, and because C# strings are UTF-16 convert the bytes from UTF-8 to UTF-16.

> Async interfaces are all the rage these days. Meanwhile browsers have moved from TCP to QUIC

I think both points are exotic stuff. Not sure I would want to see them in C++ standard library. Also going to be hard to design a useful platform-agnostic abstractions. OTOH, Unicode strings, file systems, and streams of bytes are literally everywhere in software.
by p_l | 2025-06-03 12:52:33+00:00
High vertical ascent/descent is very, very dangerous[1] method of takeoff/landing for helicopters, so especially in case of medical transport I would expect it to be due to safety factors more than anything.

[1] been decades since I've read the textbook on it, but IIRC it involves higher load on rotor and engines than "running" methods that utilize ground effect and provide horizontal momentum against wind gusts.
by Bender | 2025-06-03 12:52:37+00:00
It's a bit off topic but the answer would be Friend or Foe systems that are used today in aircraft to help the pilot know if there are friendlies, unknowns and known baddies on the ground. No idea if there are plans to implement this in drones as the systems would likely require retrofit and drones would need more battery draining gear. That gear would have to get a lot smaller.
by appreciatorBus | 2025-06-03 12:52:37+00:00
I wouldn’t be so quick to blame it on Chromebooks. Had they not been developed, or even if schools had never went all in on devices, the future would surely look different but I doubt it would significantly change the average persons’s interest in learning anything about how computers work. Perhaps, for a time, they would be forced to retain awareness of the concept of a file, but eventually someone would realize that most of them really don’t want to, and will happily pay for a sealed black box.

Again, I would compare it to electricity. There’s all sorts of possible futures from its invention, but in each one, I think the pattern would be the same – an initial rise in understanding and awareness as people learn about the new thing, and cope with early limitations, followed by a decline back to near zero as it becomes infrastructure.

To be clear, this saddens me too. I’m not saying this is good necessarily, only that I think it’s inevitable. When I was younger, I was so certain that computers would change the world, and that this change would involve more people discovering the beauty that I had discovered within the machine. Several decades on, I believe that I was mistaken. There is still beauty in there for those who are interested, but most are not, and never will be. It’s just a tool, it’s just infrastructure, that either works or doesn’t.
by bookofjoe | 2025-06-03 12:52:44+00:00
>Who’s Laughing Now? Banana-as-Art Sells for $6.2 Million at Sotheby’s [November 20, 2024]

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/arts/design/cattelan-bana...

https://archive.ph/vs3g3
by hydrogen7800 | 2025-06-03 12:53:02+00:00
If not for a PBS documentary on surrealism, I wouldn't have considered the existence of meta-art; art as commentary on art. The example I remember was Ceci n'est pas une pipe.[0] That sounds a bit like the banana taped to the wall.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
by benhurmarcel | 2025-06-03 12:53:09+00:00
I have this type of issue professionally too, even though we don't use paper. For regulatory reasons, the only approved format we are allowed to use for long term archiving is PDF/A. No attachments, only pages in a single PDF document.

It has shown to be an issue for including data, or spreadsheets. Most colleagues just print Excel files to a PDF that gets appended, but while it complies with the regulation it's basically unusable as-is.
by nickslaughter02 | 2025-06-03 12:53:09+00:00
"Thierry Breton, the European Union’s former internal market commissioner, admitted in a French TV interview at the end of last week that the Romanian Constitutional Court (CCR) bowed to EU pressure. It annulled the country’s presidential elections last month, following the first-round victory of the Eurosceptic and anti-NATO, right-wing populist candidate, Călin Georgescu."

https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/former-censor...
by tkgally | 2025-06-03 12:53:28+00:00
When you’re done talking, you tap anywhere on the screen to indicate that you’re finished talking, and Claude replies a second or two later. If you are silent for several seconds, it goes ahead and replies without waiting for you to tap. When Claude is talking you can tap on the screen to interrupt; that is actually quite useful, as it can be a bit long-winded.

It’s not quite as natural a back-and-forth as with ChatGPT’s or Gemini’s voice mode on mobile, but maybe that’s for the best.

I tried a test later in which I gave it a research paper—Sakana AI’s latest—and asked it to explain it to me. When it used a term I didn’t understand, I just tapped on the screen and asked for an explanation. That worked quite well.
by jjice | 2025-06-03 12:53:35+00:00
I purchase a lot of independent ebooks that come as epub files. You can send them through amazons kindle service or convert them with Calibre, but I love being able to just drag and drop any file I want onto it. I've purchased books on the train and dragged and dropped them onto the Kobo mid ride.

It's mostly because I like owning a more portable file.
by paddy_m | 2025-06-03 12:54:08+00:00
The best functional specs for a UI have come from business people building their own in excel. At a minimum they will have some idea of layout and what information should be displayed on which screens.

This also lets them focus on the core information, not the styling. Building GUIs on the web, there are infinite ways to style every UI element and more attention goes to that then the actual interaction.
by qwertox | 2025-06-03 12:54:43+00:00
"UPDATE: As of June 3rd 7:45 CEST, Meta/Facebook Pixel script is no longer sending any packets or requests to localhost. The code responsible for sending the _fbp cookie has been almost completely removed."

I'm surprised they're allowed to listen on UDP ports, IIRC this requires special permissions?

> The Meta (Facebook) Pixel JavaScript, when loaded in an Android mobile web browser, transmits the first-party _fbp cookie using WebRTC to UDP ports 12580–12585 to any app on the device that is listening on those ports.

Borders on criminal behavior.

Apparently this was a European team of researchers, which would mean that Meta very likely breached the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive. Let's hope this gets very expensive for Meta.
by ACS_Solver | 2025-06-03 12:54:43+00:00
Yes, I currently lean skeptical but agentic LLMs excel at this sort of task. I had a great use just yesterday.

I have an older Mediawiki install that's been overrun by spam. It's on a server I have root access on. With Claude, I was able to rapidly get some Python scripts that work against the wiki database directly and can clean spam in various ways, by article ID, title regex, certain other patterns. Then I wanted to delete all spam users - defined here as users registered after a certain date whose only edit is to their own user page - and Claude made a script for that very quickly. It even deployed with scp when I told it where to.

Looking at the SQL that ended up in the code, there's non-obvious things such as user pages being pages where page_namespace = 2. The query involves the user, page, actor and revision tables. I checked afterwards, MediaWiki has good documentation for its database tables. Sure, I could have written the SQL myself based on that documentation, but certainly not have the query wrapped in Python and ready to run in under a minute.
by xnorswap | 2025-06-03 12:54:55+00:00
Because muscle-memory is a powerful force, and it's a convenient universal input language.

It's why after years of powershell I still reflexively reach for "ls" not "Get-ChildItem"

( "ls" is aliased by default to Get-ChildItem thankfully! )

Markdown is familiar, easy to use, and very human readable and editable without fear of breaking a compilation step.

Typesetting languages however, TeX, LaTex, postscript or the nightmare of the PDF spec, are not.

If I send someone who doesn't know anything about a document markdown, then there's a good chance they'll be able to make simple edits in their favourite text editor and not screw things up.

If I send someone HTML, they'll likely be able to do simple edits but there's greater risk of breaking elements or styling. Not as bad as with stricter languages, but still significantly more chance than with markdown annotations.

If I send someone some TeX, they'll probably not know what to even do with it, they'll likely get confused and ask for a file format they can use.

Reducing how many different languages we have to master is important, so I think it's great if there's a way to write everything in flavours of markdown.

Write markdown everywhere, and let the backends compile to relevant outputs.

In this instance, it's left perhaps a bit function-heavy so there's still larger "risk", but that's likely something that can be solved through templating.

We have flavours of MD, for github issues, for typesetting, for stackoverflow questions. Slack and Discord have (limited) MD support. We can write blogs in MD through jekyll.

MD is everywhere, it's a convenient universal input language.
by flave | 2025-06-03 12:55:07+00:00
I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions.

You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private?

Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian.

It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!
by Mtinie | 2025-06-03 12:55:26+00:00
> Key thing is that we hire them.

I do not feel heartened by this sentence, even though I should be. We're choosing from a pre-curated menu rather than truly "hiring" representatives. The real power lies with party gatekeepers, donors, and institutional barriers that determine who even makes it onto the ballot, not with voters making the final selection. It's more like being asked to pick your favorite from two restaurants that a food critic already chose for you, rather than having genuine choice over where to eat.
by joshstrange | 2025-06-03 12:55:28+00:00
Maybe you are thinking of the contaminated L-tryptophan which happened in 1989. But that was a Japan-based lab.

From the FDA [0]:

> FDA issues a nationwide recall of all over-the-counter dietary supplements containing 100 milligrams or more of L-Tryptophan, due to a clear link between the consumption of L-tryptophan tablets and its association with a U.S. outbreak of Eosinophilia Myalgia Syndrome (EMS), characterized by fatigue, shortness of breath, and other symptoms. By 1990 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirm over 1,500 cases of EMS, including 38 deaths, and FDA prohibits the importation of l-tryptophan.

I’m having a hard time finding a good article/document to link to but apparently the lab (Showa Denko) destroyed production report and reconfigured the production line to hide what happened. They were apparently using a new method to create L-Tryptophan and it had a flaw.

This seems to fit your comment except for the Australia part. I can find other articles about a large Australian vitamin recall, but it’s not related. [1]

[0] https://www.fda.gov/about-fda/fda-history/milestones-us-food...

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1125922/
by dns_snek | 2025-06-03 12:55:28+00:00
I don't know anyone who can think faster than they can type (on average), they would have to have an IQ over 150 or something. For mere mortals like myself, reasoning through edge cases and failure conditions and error handling and state invariants takes time. Time that I spend looking at a blinking cursor while the gears spin, or reading code. I've never finished a day where I thought to myself "gosh darn, if only I could type faster this would be done already".
by jurgenaut23 | 2025-06-03 12:55:57+00:00
Something that I feel is missed in every such post or debate is that, maybe, this isn’t a yes/no question.

Fast forward 10 years, the skeptics will be right on a few things, and the fanboys will be right on other things.

I for one know this isn’t just a “fad” like NFTs were, but I cannot help but feel skeptical about the sweeping claims of software engineering’s doomsday.
by meowface | 2025-06-03 12:56:06+00:00
I definitely get your point, but it's also pretty annoying to write weird indirect or meta-functional code, not just to read it. It's still almost always faster to read than to write.

I can think of edge cases where a certain section of code is easier and faster to write than to read, but in general - in our practical day-to-day experiences - reading a lot of code is faster than writing a lot of code. Not just faster but less mentally and physically taxing. Still mentally taxing, yes, but less.
by kragen | 2025-06-03 12:56:25+00:00
If a pixel can be printed with no colors (white), cyan, magenta, yellow, cyan and magenta (blue), magenta and yellow (red), yellow and cyan (green), or all three inks (black), that's 8 colors, 3 bits per pixel, not just 3 colors. Typically laser and inkjet printers do more or less work like this, but also have a fourth ink, which is black.

I am very skeptical of this idea that people will be able to write but unable to produce useful digital computers. Computers are a mathematical discovery, not an electronic invention. Electronics makes them a thousand times faster, but a computer made out of wood, flax threads, and bent copper wire would still be hundreds of times faster than a person at tabulating logarithms, balancing ledgers, calculating ballistic trajectories, casting horoscopes, encrypting messages, forecasting finances, calculating architectural measurements, or calculating compound interest. So I think automatic computation as such is likely to survive if any human intellectual tradition does.