MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AngryData | 2025-06-01 04:14:08+00:00
Well how many people are actually making 6 figures in the trades? Because the vast majority are not, and most of those who do are working 80 hour weeks in expensive locations where the value is way inflated above the rest of the country.

And residential trades prices are based on how much they think they can get you to pay, not what the work is actually worth. Part of it is because people living in a nicer areas can require extra hand holding and change their mind on things 20 times throughout a project which inflates costs, but a lot of it is just "He drives a really nice car and lives in a neighborhood with property values 4x the average of what we typically serve, so we will quote him 4x as much, and that will help make up for the other jobs for poorer people we do that we only earn tiny margins off of or tried to stiff us on pay and required us to go to court for."

Also, trades are largely boom-bust industries. You make money when the market is hot, but that has got to cover enough for the 5-10 years later when the market is trash. And if a market is hot, customers are bidding against each other for their time. Maybe they already had a $30K project, but then someone else wants the same thing too that they would have to work overtime for, so they quote $40K. But then someone else comes along and also wants it too, but now it is crazy amount of work to get all these things done on time, so they quote $60K. Maybe they don't want or need the work and are hoping you turn them down, but if you agree to pay some outrageous price then they will of course make the time. Just like if someone offered you 3x your normal wage for crazy overtime you would probably take it too, but if someone offered your normal wage for crazy overtime work you would likely decline. That doesn't mean your normal wage is actually worth 3x as much, it just means someone is willing to pay a premium for you at that exact fleeting moment in time.

Also jesus, $60K for backyard renovation? Either they didn't want your work, or you are wanting an ass ton of soil moved in, or wanting multiple years of pre-established trees and plants, or they are pegging you as a sucker. Seeding grass is not any more difficult than picking orders and stuffing boxes, but lawn and garden care industries were one of the scummiest and scammiest industries ive ever worked in.
by Kirby64 | 2025-06-01 04:14:52+00:00
> There is a tiny risk of electric shock if you use an outdoor-rated extension cord, a bigger risk if you use an indoor-rated strip, and a pretty big risk if you use indoor without a GFCI outlet.

Citation needed. There is certainly not a “pretty big risk” of electric shock. Outdoor vs indoor rated cords should have no bearing on safety inside. Also, if the extension cord is wired to an outlet in the bathroom, the bathroom outlet is almost certainly GFCI unless it’s an extremely old house. If it isn’t, that can be fixed for less than $30 as well. The only thing you’d need to be worried about for an extension cord is the power rating, since bidets can consume a decent bit of power… but most don’t really pull a ton (maybe 600W on full tilt), so almost any extension cord should be able to handle that load.
by wenc | 2025-06-01 04:15:24+00:00
I can relate. This sort of trade off exists today in almost all commercial code. Sharp enough to do the job, but not sharper.

A solo programmer can afford to be an artisan, but commercial code is rarely artisanal. It's full of trade-offs and compromises.

Commercial code is always about business costs -- maintenance cost, buy-vs-build cost, refactoring cost, business continuity costs, etc. You're always working under constraints like time, headcount, available expertise, maintainability, and coordination bottlenecks.

Craftsmanship in commercial code is rare. Sometimes you get geniuses like John Carmack who writes inspired stuff in code that ships. But most of the time, it's just a bunch of normal people trying to solve a problem under a ton of constraints.
by neom | 2025-06-01 04:22:19+00:00
Goods and services are a byproduct of business, business is primarily concerned with systems and processes that facilitate value exchange, so my tool, can work with a user, to build a business, not a product or a service. If you bake cupcakes, my tool can get you 100 people at your door, it cannot open the door or provide the cakes.
by intended | 2025-06-01 04:22:38+00:00
Your Question is an example of the difference.

Your question can be rephrased to “what would an actual difference look like.”

However, what you are asking underneath that, is a mix of “what is the difference” and “what is the PRACTICAL difference in terms of output”

Or in other words, if the output looks like what someone with understanding would say, how is it meaningfully different.

—-

Humans have a complex model of the world underlying their thinking. When I am explaining this to you, you are (hopefully) not just learning how to imitate my words. You are figuring out how to actually build a model of an LLM, that creates intuitions / predictions of its behavior.

In analogy terms, learning from this conversation, (understanding) is to create a bunch of LEGO blocks in your head, which you can then reuse and rebuild according to the rules of LEGO.

One of the intuitions is that humans can hallucinate, because they can have a version of reality in their head which they know is accurate and predicts physical reality, but they can be sick/ill and end up translating their sensory input as indicating a reality that doesn’t exist. OR they can lie.

Hallucinations are a good transition point to move back to LLMs, because LLMs cannot actually hallucinate, or lie. They are always “perceiving” their mathematical reality, and always faithfully producing outputs.

If we are to anthropomorphize it back to our starting point about “LLMs understand”, this means that even when LLMs “hallucinate” or “lie”, they are actually being faithful and honest, because they are not representing an alternate reality. They are actually precisely returning the values based on the previous values input into the system.

“LLMs understand” is misleading, and trojans in a concept of truth (therefore untruth) and other intuitions that are invalid.

—-

However, understanding this does not necessarily change how you use the LLMs 90% of the time, it just changes how you model them in your head, resulting in a higher match between observer reality and your predictive reality.

For an LLM this makes not difference, because its forecasting the next words the same way.
by dangus | 2025-06-01 04:22:40+00:00
For the news feed, it makes me think “Pinterest for home improvement,” which is pretty “meh” to me. Great, another ad feed. Why would I want to be here instead of a subreddit?

For tool rental, the first thought in my mind is that you’re going to be competing with hardware store giants like Home Depot or your country’s equivalent: many places already exist that already rent tools and equipment and they aren’t hard to find on the Internet. There are also a lot of local community options like rental libraries.
by cookiengineer | 2025-06-01 04:22:50+00:00
The point of your opponent's argument is that measured age should be an indicator of maturity and stability of frameworks and toolchains.

In JavaScript, it is not. So you claiming 10 years as a time frame in your response is in bad faith, because you certainly know that code written 10 years ago is 100% incompatible with the modern versions of the same frameworks.
by onecommentman | 2025-06-01 04:28:49+00:00
A cute thought: what if a global initiative could hand out candles and ask the population in a given area to go to a clearing during a clear night and light the candles at the same time (an individual could hold more to represent children, elderly, the sick)? Satellites and drones could do the counts.

Exquisitely low tech on the ground, and a fun, engaging, global exercise. May not be perfect for total population figures, but may identify where undercounting is occurring (and overcounts). A nice image: hundreds of millions of lights at the same time, each representing a single human life, spanning large portions of the globe. The spy satellite folks would get a kick out of it.
by Brandutchmen | 2025-06-01 04:29:20+00:00
I’m always building small tools for myself that end up buried in private repos. I figured it was time to start sharing a few that others might find useful.

Just published tldx, a CLI tool I use to quickly check if a domain name is available across a bunch of TLDs and variations.

Hopefully, some of you CLI enthusiasts can find it useful!
by kragen | 2025-06-01 04:30:39+00:00
> It is also talking about functions which do not have a derivative at all and therefore could not possibly have that property [that their changes over an displacement dx are bounded by K |dx| for some K]

Functions that do not have a derivative at all can certainly have that property. Perhaps you were confused by the notation "dx", suggesting a differential, for the displacement, rather than the conventional Δx, but the sentence makes no sense if we try to read it as a statement about differentials. Possibly your correspondent is not a Greek Keyboard Achiever. Moreover, the functions they are discussing, while indeed not differentiable, are continuous and differentiable almost everywhere, so you can also prove Lipschitz continuity if you can prove a bound on their gradients at the points where they do exist.

> That is just some arbitrary scaling. Only relevant to have the math look nicer. E.g. if f is Lipschitz for L=10, then f/10 is Lipschitz for L=1.

It's a relevant difference if you don't know the Lipschitz constant L or a bound on it, because then you don't know what to divide by.
by KPGv2 | 2025-06-01 04:34:56+00:00
> we also don’t have central heat (just a heat pump

I'm so terminologically confused at this point by comments like this. In Texas, many people's central heat is a heat pump. My current house's heater is the first I've lived at in over forty years that wasn't a heat pump (this one is gas). High end homes, cheap rentals, everything in between, heat pump central heating.
by lotharbot | 2025-06-01 04:36:43+00:00
that said, the respective odds of humans vs geese are not even remotely close. People sometimes get mild injuries from geese, and on rare occasions significant injuries, most often from losing their footing and hitting the ground hard. Whereas a human with even the slightest bit of knowledge and who isn't squeamish could easily end the lives of many geese in rapid succession.

Geese aren't confident because of some sort of rational assessment that they can put up a good fight against a human. Geese are confident because as a general rule, humans don't pick fights with them, and it's therefore safe enough for the group to hang around in places where humans are present at short distances.
by hartator | 2025-06-01 04:37:37+00:00
> 2. Not all requests are created equal. 20 requests a second for the same static HTML file? No problem. But if you have, say, a release page for an open source project with binary download links for all past versions for multiple platforms, each one being a multi megabyte blob, and a scraper starts hitting these links, you will run into bandwidth problems very quickly, unless you live in a utopia where bandwidth is free.

All of this is (and should) cached on a cdn. You can go 1000 QPS on this in that config.
by intended | 2025-06-01 04:37:49+00:00
> If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck,or something so close to a duck that we'd be better off calling it that.

Saying “LLMs match understanding well enough”, is to make the same core error if we were to say “rote learning is good enough” in a conversation about understanding a subject.

The issue is that they can pass the test(s), but they dont understand the work. This is the issue with a purely utilitarian measure of output.
by onecommentman | 2025-06-01 04:38:20+00:00
“Hiraeth is an untranslatable Welsh word that describes a longing for a home, a place, or a feeling that no longer exists or never existed.

It’s a homesickness for the places from your past you can’t return to or even those you’ve never been to. Hiraeth can also mean nostalgia for your past self, the people who are long gone, or the emotions you used to feel.

But it can also describe a sense of yearning for imaginary places, feelings, and people – for example, the ones you read about. Sometimes, it feels as if you suddenly take a glance into your previous life and connect with the people and things that existed long ago – or, at least, could have existed.“

https://www.learning-mind.com/hiraeth-deep-thinkers/
by JoshCole | 2025-06-01 04:39:11+00:00
Chess engines cannot see like a human can. When they think they don't necessarily think using the exact same method that a human uses. Yet train a chess engine for a very long time and it can actually end up understanding chess better than a human can.

I do understand the points you are attempting to make. The reason you're failing to prove your point is not because I am failing to understand the thrust of what you were trying to argue.

Imagine you were talking to someone who was a rocket scientist, and you were talking to them about engines and you had an understanding of engines that was predicated on your experience with cars. You start making claims about the nature of engines and they disagree with you they argue with you and they point out all these ways that you're wrong. Is this person going to be doing this because they're not able to understand your points? Or is it more likely that their experience with engines that are different than the engines that you're used to give them a different perspective that forced them to think of the world in a different way than you do?
by hayst4ck | 2025-06-01 04:41:28+00:00
> higher quality, and generally more fruitful debates with the models you say don't understand

My favorite thing about LLMs is that they can convincingly tell me why I'm wrong or how I could think about things differently, not for ideas on the order of sentences and paragraphs, but on the order of pages.

My second favorite thing is that it is amazingly good at deconstructing manipulative language and power tactics. It is scary good at developing manipulation strategies and inferring believable processes to achieve complex goals.
by camkego | 2025-06-01 04:42:24+00:00
I enjoyed the article, and as a longtime developer. I certainly relate to being heads down on a problem, only to step away for a walk or a breather and realize I can maybe avoid solving the immediate problem altogether.

I also don’t think it’s possible to focus at 100% on a detailed complex problem, and also concurrently question is there a better path or a way to avoid the current problem. Sometimes you just need to switch modes between focusing on the details the weeds, and popping back up to asking does this even have to be completed at all?
by NHLOCAL | 2025-06-01 04:42:26+00:00
AI is moving fast. To help track it all, I built an open-source timeline that maps out every major milestone in generative AI, from GPT-4 to Gemini, from Midjourney to Claude. It’s updated monthly and covers the key developments across models, tools, and breakthroughs in a clear, no-frills format.

MIT licensed and fully open for contributions. Ideal for staying oriented in the chaos.

https://github.com/NHLOCAL/AiTimeline
by nurettin | 2025-06-01 04:42:48+00:00
Within the general context of this discussion, "cannot be represented" is a red herring.

You don't need to have a representation of the exact number 0.1 if you can tolerate errors after the 7th decimal (and it turns out you can). And 0.1+0.1+0.1 does not have to be comparable with 0.3 using operator==. You have an is_close function for that. And accumulation is not an issue because you have rounding and fma for that.
by bix6 | 2025-06-01 04:43:31+00:00
Love the banner image ha!

Flipped around a bit, looks great. One question I have is how will users know what a fair price is?

On the legal issues. Maybe making loaners attest the tool is in good condition and the renters sign a waiver? Untrained people are terrifying with power tools, I would be hesitant to take on the liability of someone losing an arm for $50.
by intended | 2025-06-01 04:46:15+00:00
A Person who memorizes something by rote, can pass many tests. From a test and verifiability perspective, they cannot be distinguished from someone who understands a subject.

An LLM can pass many tests, it is indistinguishable from someone who understands the subject.

Indistinguishable does not imply that the processes followed match what a human is doing when it understands a subject.

I use this when I think of humans learning - humans learn the most when they are playing. They try new things, explore ideas and build a mental model of what they are playing with.

To understand something, is to have a mental model of that thing in ones head.

LLMs have models of symbol frequency, and with their compute, are able to pass most tests, simply because they are able to produce chains of symbols that build on each other.

However, similar to rote learning, they are able to pass tests. Not understand. The war is over the utilitarian point “LLMs are capable of passing most tests”, and the factual point “LLMs dont actually understand anything”.

This articulation of the utilitarian point is better than the lazier version which says “LLMs understand”, and this ends up anthropomorphizing a tool, and creating incorrect intuitions of how LLMs work, amongst other citizens and users.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-06-01 04:47:53+00:00
You know how all the channels and pages with (official) in their titles are usually not?

Well I pressed "Play" and began to wonder if the ChatGPT voice and dialogue were faked. My mind numbed as she snappily fielded all questions with direct answers. As she smoothly broke into a sponsored advert at the 7-minute mark, my suspicions of fakery were confirmed.

Does TTS or voice synthesis take in audible breaths? Gemini and Bing don't seem to.

Good joke mate!
by keiferski | 2025-06-01 04:50:03+00:00
I’m not a programmer so take my metaphor with a grain of salt.

I am, however, a writer, and so your comment made me think of the difference between writing and editing. It’s perfectly possible (and common, even) for someone to be an amazing writer but a terrible editor, and vice versa. The writer focuses on production, and typically even thinking about editing during that process is detrimental to the quality of the work.

The Ai-human coding situation seems relatively analogous to this.
by StressedDev | 2025-06-01 04:50:14+00:00
You would end up blocking every network then. Almost no one wants malware on their machine or network. Unfortunately, people get hacked and network operators cannot always determine which machines are hacked (hackers are not known for letting people know that they have taken over a machine).

Security is hard and there are no easy solutions. People often do not know they have been hacked or even know if a computer on their network has been hacked. Also, it is often not easy to determine if traffic is legitimate, illegal, malicious, or abusive.
by fracus | 2025-06-01 04:52:03+00:00
Near the end of my time there it became near impossible to get any positive and constructive engagement with my questions. A mod would quickly come in and dismiss it as not providing enough information. And even after you provide this dubiously required info you never hear from them or anyone else again.

The site also suffered from a too strict "no repeat questions" rule. People can phrase and search for the same in question in many different ways. To pick just one phrasing limits answers and the different ways people can find them.
by godelski | 2025-06-01 04:53:15+00:00
> wouldn’t that imply that you’re trying to converge on a physically accurate world model?

I'm not the CEO or associated with them at all, but yes, this is what most of these "world model" researchers are aiming for. As a researcher myself, I do not think this is the way to develop a world model and I'm fairly certain that this cannot be done through observations alone. I explain more in my response to the CEO[0]. This is a common issue is many ways that ML is experimenting, and you simply cannot rely on benchmarks to get you to AGI. Scaling of parameters and data only go so far. If you're seeing slowing advancements, it is likely due to over reliance on benchmarks and under reliance on what benchmarks intend to measure. But this is a much longer conversation (I think I made a long comment about it recently, I can dig up).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44147777
by aloha2436 | 2025-06-01 04:53:16+00:00
The article doesn't advocate sending it progressively to make it smaller on the wire. The motivating example is one where some of the data (e.g. posts) is available before the rest of the data in the response (e.g. comments). Rather than:

- Sending a request for posts, then a request for comments, resulting in multiple round trips (a.k.a. a "waterfall"), or,

- Sending a request for posts and comments, but having to wait until the commends have loaded to get the posts,

...you can instead get posts and comments available as soon as they're ready, by progressively loading information. The message, though, is that this is something a full-stack web framework should handle for you, hence the revelation at the end of the article about it being a lesson in the motivation behind React's Server Components.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-06-01 04:53:45+00:00
> a kind of contradicting idea of AI being really intelligent agents, but also AI needs to be checked carefully. Either they're intelligent enough to not need humans or we are changing the definitions of intelligence.

Why is everyone so flummoxed by this? Your coworker is intelligent, but still needs code reviews.

Why is it than whenever people think of artificial intelligence the only options they see are dumb as a rock / pure parrot, or some omniscient god? There is no intelligence on earth that falls in either of those categories, but thats the only two options people can use to visualize AI and if it not one to them it must be the other.

Intelligence exists without being perfect gods. I feel like people have watched too much sci-fi.
by yawaramin | 2025-06-01 04:54:06+00:00
> I’d like to challenge more tools to adopt progressive streaming of data.

It's a solved problem. Use HTTP/2 and keep the connection open. You now have effectively a stream. Get the top-level response:

{ header: "/posts/1/header", post: "/posts/1/body", footer: "/posts/1/footer" }

Now reuse the same connection to request the nested data, which can all have more nested links in them, and so on.
by priorityfill | 2025-06-01 04:55:11+00:00
Thank you! That's exactly what I was after, a fresh way to interact with LLMs that's not necessarily chat-centric. I will likely add some sign in option at some point, but the goal is to keep the base experience freely available for as long as possible. And there are more features, improvements to the quality of the content I would like to implement first (which can be a hit and miss at the moment)
by aperturecjs | 2025-06-01 04:55:33+00:00
I previously wrote a prototype of streaming a JSON tree this way:

https://github.com/rgraphql/rgraphql

But it was too graphql-coupled and didn't really take off, even for my own projects.

But it might be worth revisiting this kind of protocol again someday, it can tag locations within a JSON response and send updates to specific fields (streaming changes).