MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kalleboo | 2025-06-09 13:50:28+00:00
> Now, their friends all have iphones, and if a kid could hack out an app for their friend group and share it around, it would give them great motivation to learn and hack in that ecosystem.

You can create apps on the iPad and share the source bundles with friends without a paid account https://developer.apple.com/swift-playground/

edit: To be clear, I'm not defending Apple here, I'm still 200% in favor of "let people run the code they want on the device they own", what I'm trying to say is just if you're a kid who wants to do this, you already can!
by disposition2 | 2025-06-09 13:50:31+00:00
Thanks for sharing, I’ve always enjoyed the Smithsonian magazine and its articles, hope to visit some day.

I’m hoping all the RIFs, reductions / eradication of IMLS, etc. don’t reduce the gains in & sharing of knowledge from these institutions, but if I am being honest it kind of feels like it’s purposeful destruction.

So I’ll enjoy it while we have it.
by philbo | 2025-06-09 13:50:59+00:00
> Surely you don't find writing boilerplate fun though?

Of course. So if I'm faced with some boilerplate, I try to refactor it away so it's less boilerplatey. Perhaps I'm lucky but mostly this seems to work, I don't often find myself writing boilerplate.

> I don't know why someone would employ a dev working in such an inefficient way in 2025

Am I working inefficiently? I'm not sure. How much time does the typing part of programming actually take up? I guess it varies, but it's definitely less than 50% for me. Thinking/designing/communicating/listening take most of my time. The typing part is not a bottleneck.
by crustycoder | 2025-06-09 13:51:10+00:00
My favourite example of the underlying probabilistic nature of LLMs is related to a niche hobby of mine, English Change Ringing. Every time someone asks an LLM a question that requires more than a basic definition of what Change Ringing is, the result is hilarious. Not only do the answers suffer from factual hallucinations, they aren't even internally logically consistent. It's literally just probabilistic word soup, and glaringly obviously so.

Although there isn't a vast corpus on Method Ringing, there is a fair amount; the "rules" are online (https://framework.cccbr.org.uk/version2/index.html), Change ringing is based on pure maths (Group Theory) and has been linked with CS from when CS first started - it's mentioned in Knuth, and the Steinhaus–Johnson–Trotter algorithm for generating permutations wasn't invented by them in the 1960's, it was known to Change Ringers in the 1650's. Think of it of Towers of Hanoi with knobs on :-) So it would seem a good fit for automated reasoning, indeed such things already exist - https://ropley.com/?page_id=25777.

If I asked a non-ringing human to explain to me how to ring Cambridge Major, they'd say "Sorry, I don't know" and an LLM with insufficient training data would probably say the same. The problem is when LLMs know just enough to be dangerous, but they don't know what they don't know. The more abstruse a topic is, the worse LLMs are going to do at it, and it's precisely those areas where people are most likely to turn to them for answers. They'll get one that's grammatically correct and sounds authoritative - but they almost certainly won't know if it's nonsense.

Adding a "reliability" score to LLM output seems eminently feasible, but due to the hype and commercial pressures around the current generation of LLMs, that's never going to happen as the pressure is on to produce plausible sounding output, even if it's bullshit.

https://www.lawgazette.co.uk/news/appalling-high-court-judge...
by keybored | 2025-06-09 13:51:30+00:00
> China is not a liberal country, but it's economy was relatively liberalization from the 80s onward.

You’re the one who said “neoliberalism”. You weaken your claim now? Why am I asking.

> I agree that liberalism has lifted many billions of people out of poverty, and that we could be doing more than we already have.

Key word “I believe”. China has made their own progress and a look at worldwide poverty reduction would have to take that into account.

And thanks for collapsing my whole discussion of the poverty rate down to “I agree”. We could do the same for you by bringing up the fact that the Soviet Union economy grew a lot compared to Tsarist Russia—I guess you will have to concede to being a planned economy supporter as well.

> I believe that turning around backwards toward socialism and centralized economic planning would be a grave mistake that would undo the gains made by liberalism since the 1970s

Meaning lifting millionaires into billionaires.
by happy_dog1 | 2025-06-09 13:51:39+00:00
There's a really fascinating article about this from a couple years ago that interviewed numerous people working on data labeling / RLHF, including a few who had likely worked on ChatGPT (they don't know for sure because they seldom if ever know which company will use the task they are assigned or for what). Hard numbers are hard to come by because of secrecy in the industry, but it's estimated that the number of people involved is already in the millions and will grow.

https://www.theverge.com/features/23764584/ai-artificial-int...

Interestingly, despite the boring and rote nature of this work, it can also become quite complicated as well. The author signed up to do data labeling and was given 43 pages (!) of instructions for an image labeling task with a long list of dos and don'ts. Specialist annotation, e.g. chatbot training by a subject matter expert, is a growing field that apparently pays as much as $50 an hour.

"Put another way, ChatGPT seems so human because it was trained by an AI that was mimicking humans who were rating an AI that was mimicking humans who were pretending to be a better version of an AI that was trained on human writing..."
by nextos | 2025-06-09 13:52:02+00:00
Makes sense. I have no experience with Vi-like layers built on top of Emacs, but I think standard Emacs is much easier to use right now than it was in the past. Most major packages work really well with zero configuration. There's even a LSP mode (eglot) built in.

I think the problem is that most advanced users have incredibly convoluted .emacs files, mainly for historical reasons, and this has given Emacs a reputation of being overly complex and difficult to set up.

IMHO, the great advantage of Emacs is that it will always be around, and it's really open to customization in case you ever need that.
by bmitc | 2025-06-09 13:52:06+00:00
Yes, exactly. Especially when a lot of open source projects seem to be resume padders. They're presented as if they're the most useful library in the world with implied support, and then when your first issue is closed immediately with "yea, we don't care about that", you realize the reality.

It goes a long way if a "maintainer" simply states upfront about their mode of operation and sets expectations accordingly.
by gandalfian | 2025-06-09 13:52:11+00:00
What people tend to leave out is the government guarantees the price wind turbines receive for electricity at say 7p a kwh. So they lose money if the wholesale price goes less that that. But they make money when the price goes above that price. So in the bbc's example while turbines where paid while turned off at one end of the grid, at the other end of the grid the gas booster generating plant was turned on and set the market price quite high, perhaps 15 or 20p a kw. So the wind turbines that were still running flat out made the government lots of profit offsetting the losses from the turned off ones... This produces a head splitting mix of incentives between government costs, taxes and electricity prices to consumers. But overall since the Ukraine energy crisis renewables have probably not cost the government/tax payer as much as people think.
by c12 | 2025-06-09 13:52:20+00:00
I had similar many years ago in a custom paint shop. We had an expensive colorimeter that interfaced over serial with a program that ran in DOS.

When the pysical computer gave out, I replaced it with a reasonably new one but instead of using a modern OS I installed MS-DOS in order to get it up and running as reliably and quickly as possible.

If I were doing the same today, I'd likely get a new computer and install FreeDOS.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-06-09 13:52:39+00:00
Cray cray is the worst, longer and sounds dumb.

At least yeet can be funny if you're referencing a meme/being intentionally ironic. I'm not sure there's another great word to replace it anyhow, chuck or hurl are probably the closest but don't imply the level of reckless abandon, and aren't quite as "multi-purpose" in terms of understood contexts.
by AlecSchueler | 2025-06-09 13:52:44+00:00
The most frustrating time I've had is asking it something, pointing out why the answer was obviously wrong, having it confirm the faulty logic and give an example of a portion of the answer now it would look like if it had used sound logic, followed by a promise to answer again without the accepted inaccuracy, only to get an even more absurd answer than the first time around.
by specialist | 2025-06-09 13:52:50+00:00
I have chronic pain. I have the bad habit of holding my breath.

I've learned some different mindful breathing techniques. Very helpful. While I'm doing them.

But what about the rest of the day? How do I improve my breathing while I'm not paying attention?

My initial goal is consistent 6 breaths per minute. Keep breathing, in & out, in & out.

I'm looking for tools (feedback mechanisms) to monitor my breathing. Especially when I'm holding my breath.

Am noob, so I don't know the sciences. My understanding is that inferring breath from tracking heart rate variability works pretty good during sleep. (FWIW, my Apple Watch 10 says I average 8 bpm at night.)

I'd appreciate any tips, links, recommendations. I'd happily wear a device, just to get started.
by mjburgess | 2025-06-09 13:53:13+00:00
Some features of animal sentience:

* direct causal contact with the environment, e.g., the light from the pen hits my eye, which induces mental states

* sensory-motor coordination, ie., that the light hits my eye from the pen enables coordination of the movement of the pen with my body

* sensory-motor representations, ie., my sensory motor system is trainable, and trained by historical envirionemntal coordination

* heirachical planning in coordination, ie., these sensory-motor representations are goal-contextualised, so that I can "solve my hunger" in an infinite number of ways (i can achive this goal against an infinite permutation of obstacles)

* counterfactual reality-oriented mental simulation (aka imagination) -- these rich sensory motor representatiosn are reifable in imagination so i can simulate novel permutaitons to the environment, possible shifts to physics, and so on. I can anticipate these infinite number of obsatcles before any have occured, or have ever occured.

* self-modelling feedback loops, ie., that my own process of sensory-motor coordination is an input into that coordination

* abstraction in self-modelling, ie., that i can form cognitive representations of my own goal directed actions as they succeed/fail, and treat them as objects of their own refinement

* abstraction across representation mental faculties into propositional represenations, ie., that when i imagine that "I am writing", the object of my imagination is the very same object as the action "to write" -- so I know that when I recall/imagine/act/reflect/etc. I am operating on the very-same-objects of thought

* facilities of cognition: quantification, causal reasoning, discrete logical reasoning -- etc. which can be applied both at the sensory, motor and abstract conceptual level (ie., i can "count in sensation" a few objects, also with action, also in intellection)

* concept formation: abduction, various various of induction, etc.

* concept composition: recursion, composition in extension of concepts, composition in intension, etc.

One can go on and on here.

Decribe only what happens in a few minutes of the life of a toddler as they play around with some blocks and you have listed, rather trivially, a vast universe of capbilities that an LLM lacks.

To believe an LLM has anything to do with intelligence is to have somewhat quite profoundly mistaken what capabilities are implied by intelligence -- what animals have, some more than others, and a few even more so. To think this has anything to do with linguistic competence is a proudly strange view of the world.

Nature did not produce intelligence in animals in order that they acquire competence in the correct ordering of linguistic tokens. Universities did, to some degree, produce computer science departments for this activity however.
by jrochkind1 | 2025-06-09 13:53:16+00:00
I think it's worth discussing AI specifically being used by authoritarian governments, because it is so suitable for surveillance and repression. And worth discussing OpenAI as a leader in the field, investing in such collaborations.

It's worth talking about the others too for sure.

Not every article or essay needs to talk about all of them. Sure, it would be improved if it at least mentioned in passing what is known of any other large corporations making specifically AI deals with authoritarian governments. (Such as all of them with Israel).

But not every article needs to talk about everything. The argument that a given article or point should not have been made because it didn't talk about other things -- usually will result in less talk about any of the things, not more. And that's often the intent of such an argument.
by unilynx | 2025-06-09 13:53:17+00:00
> Also, the prices may become more sustainable if LLM providers find ways to inject ad revenue into their products.

I'm sure they've already found ways to do that, injecting relevant ads is just a form of RAG.

But they won't risk it yet as long as they're still grabbing market share just like Google didn't run them at the start - and kept them unobtrusive until their search won.
by allturtles | 2025-06-09 13:53:48+00:00
Okay, well I disagree with your dimensional analysis. To me moral clarity is being confident about who is in the right and who is in the wrong. Taking action to do something about it is another matter. To me it's morally clear that Ukraine is in the right in the current war, but I have taken no personal risks to put my life on the line for that belief.
by yreg | 2025-06-09 13:53:55+00:00
> But who drinks six shots of gin?

Haha, I'm from almost-eastern-europe, so pretty much all drinkers I know. (Actually "Borovička" is the most popular. It is not gin, but somewhat similar to gin.)

But I mean, when someone is trying to reduce calorie intake, they don't consume whatever they want to. They need to make some concessions. So instead of a fancy cocktail or a bottle of wine, you can drink some vodka (provided getting intoxicated is the goal).
by kappamax | 2025-06-09 13:54:00+00:00
This looks promising. I think building on the foundation of Cursor, Claude Code and friends and bringing back what made development fun again. I've seen the cycles of command line development in VI to IDEs to Dreamweaveresque development. I think the tools need to match the jobs to be done. I would argue the traditional IDE was a poor approximation of the job of be done, which is why we struggle today with developers thinking the code is the product. And they spend time debugging, instrumenting, tooling etc and rightfully so, investing in developer experience around these tools. The problem with the old paradigm is that investment took our eyes of the customer and the job to be done.

AI-driven development has also gotten to the point where you need to be a wizard at .cursor.]/rules/*.mdc files, CLAUDE.md, GUIDELINES.md, JUNIE.md etc. Our product compatriots are commiserating with their technical counterparts seeing that the developers are now struggling with their own version of the "A/Cs aren't clear enough" when talking with LLMs, so to compensate we build lots and lots of context to suffice for bad A/Cs in our prompts.

I love not even starting with the code per-se. Just the tasks or jobs to be done. I could see many developers struggling to see how this fits in with existing codebases. I think that's okay, this makes going from zero to one a lot easier.

Excited to see more tools like this solve the core problem of focusing on the jobs to be done. Looking forward to seeing more.
by graemep | 2025-06-09 13:54:33+00:00
> This is like saying that Windows and GNU/Linux are closely related because they both run on PCs, and were both (Windows originally) written in C

A better analogy would be its like saying BSD and MacOS (the current version) are closely related because they share lots of common code.

You should read what the Quran says about Jesus or Mary or the Jewish prophets. Seriously, read what the Quran and the New Testament (and church documents like the Catholic Catechism) have to say about this.

I think the best analogies of the relationships between the religions is:

1. Christianity (claims) to be an updated and enhanced fork of Judaism

2. Islam (claims) to be a bug fixed fork of Judaism with some code from Christianity merged in.

> Quite some applications have become ported from Windows to GNU/Linux or vice versa.

We are not talking about optional bits, we are talking about things of fundamental importance.
by tough | 2025-06-09 13:55:36+00:00
i copy pasted my comment and your question to chatgpt, so this isnt my answer but the AI's:

make your own conclusions

Because both LLMs and the I Ching function as mirrors for human interpretation, where: • The I Ching offers cryptic symbols and phrases—users project meaning onto them. • LLMs generate probabilistic text—users extract significance based on context.

The parallel is:

You don’t get answers, you get patterns—and the meaning emerges from your interaction with the system.

In both cases, the output is: • Context-sensitive • Open-ended • Interpreted more than dictated

It’s a cheeky way of highlighting that users bring the meaning, not the machine (or oracle).
by rainworld | 2025-06-09 13:56:07+00:00
>some other country to just give up

That some other country gets over 55% of its budget from the West and almost all its materiel. Total direct “aid” over 320 billion so far. Total costs to the West much higher still.

And the result for Ukraine is more territory lost, more destruction, and hundreds of thousands of casualties. No one would and could stop them from continuing the war on their own but imagine what that would look like.

And the result for the West is a stronger, hostile Russia with deepening ties to China, North Korea etc. Strategic failure.

>Zelenski is depicted as a war criminal

No. What we saw was a noisy attempt by the US to salvage its strategic failure in Ukraine/Russia. Russians weren’t fooled. It failed.
by karlperera | 2025-06-09 13:56:11+00:00
"The interpretation of dolphin communication, alongside the vocalizations of humpback whales and broader aspects of non-human communication, is increasingly garnering attention from SETI researchers and astrobiologists." Do you think this will help us in our search for life in the Universe? What is the potential of this kind of study and the help that AI might give us in communicating with other sspecis that may or may not be out there?
by Tade0 | 2025-06-09 13:57:37+00:00
Horse manure emits methane, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. Dried up it also becomes brittle and susceptible to turning into PM emissions if disturbed.

It was way more of a problem than just aesthetics and cars, even in their early days, appeared cleaner overall.

The one thing we never got back are noise levels - modern cities are loud.
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-09 13:57:40+00:00
That is true, but it doesn't answer sQL_inject's point. You can't track and control only immigrants, therefore... what? Don't control immigrants at all, once they're here? Make it across the border and you're good forever? Or all, citizens or not, have to show papers to prove who they are?

I don't like either of those alternatives, but those seem to be the only options that are being advocated at the moment. Is there a better option?

And if not, are you really content to advocate for one of those two options? (Either of those two options? Because personally, no, I am not willing to advocate for either one.)
by keybored | 2025-06-09 13:59:28+00:00
We could talk about direct, actual murder. I think that capitalist interference, coups, counter-revolutionaries, and death squads have managed to murder more people than socialists have.

“Source?” Eh, I’m just telling you my perspective in the same vigorous way that you opened this thread.

> I think socialist revolutions have killed more "out group" members than any political/religious movement in human history
by jjice | 2025-06-09 13:59:49+00:00
My answer is definitely not going to be impressive compared to some grey beards, but at my job in the early 2020s, they liked to say they had a "servers are cattle, not pets" mentality, but that was just the case of most of them. They had sentinel servers for each environment that held varying special meaning (only they handled certain tasks) that was poorly documented.

The CEO (the one who wrote most of the initial code but now was uninvolved in the software) never wanted to touch them - he saw the entire server as a house of cards. The problem was, not updating this thing just let to piles and piles of out of date packages and eventually past EOL for the entire distro it used. I'd say it lasted six years without an update til I showed that that it _needed_ an update when they went for SOC2. It honestly wasn't that bad to replicate - some strange edge cases, but like a day of work.

Their MySQL instance was about the same age, but they chose an older version than was stable at the time, so it also went EOL and they left it sitting there. Hell, I don't know if they've update it to this day. For some context, it's a small enough DB (in terms of size), that you could probably even get away with a long running SQL dump.

What scares me is that I have to imagine so many companies operate this way and they handle much more sensitive data. C'est la vie, I guess.
by echelon | 2025-06-09 14:00:04+00:00
> That or maybe everyone will just except things being slightly more convenient but worse.

This is how it will play out.

You'll see it in the cost centers. You'll see it in the "I have an idea for an app" pitches. Business people will make these decisions, and consumers will too.

{ High convenience, High quality, Low cost } - pick two.

Software engineering won't evaporate, but there's something new competing with it.
by motorest | 2025-06-09 14:00:09+00:00
> Lest we all forget, the messaging coming out the the White House at the beginning was "masks are ineffective"

If I recall correctly, at the onset of the covid pandemic the general guidance was to not rush to buy masks with the goal to prevent a supply crunch that would impact first-line responders.

This guidance was quickly switched to a global recommendation to wear masks so to prevent and slow down how the disease was spreading, so that healthcare services could respond to the demand.

This all happened in the first few weeks of the global pandemic.
by globnomulous | 2025-06-09 14:00:29+00:00
This is why I used to fight this "shorthand" whenever I encountered it. The shorthand almost always stops being shorthand and becomes the speaker or author's actual beliefs regarding the systems. Disciplined, careful use of language matters.

But I'm so crestfallen and pessimistic about the future of software and software engineering now that I have stopped fighting that battle.
by netdevphoenix | 2025-06-09 14:00:41+00:00
>This is a tangent to the rest of the article, but this "just" is doing more heavy lifting than Atlas holding up the skies. Taking a user from $0 to $1 is immeasurably harder than taking a user from $1 to $2, and the vast majority of those active users would drop as soon as you put a real price tag on it, no matter the actual number.

Hard indeed but they don't need everyone to pay only enough people to effectively subsidise the free users