MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jitl | 2025-06-14 01:26:26+00:00
Copying data into and out of a disk image is probably going to be much slower and involve just as many syscalls if not more compared to setting up a “symlink forest”.

As far as I can tell, the containerization framework seems like it’s for running Linux microvms, and doesn’t seem applicable to people trying to do macOS builds. I mean, if you just want to run Bazel in a Linux VM sure it will do fine, but you can already run Bazel in a Linux vm on your Mac with Docker.app. Maybe I missed something with the containerization docs but all I saw was EXT4, OCI Linux images, etc. no Mac thingies.
by oxguy3 | 2025-06-14 01:29:43+00:00
So many of them look weird. The aesthetic seems to be soft, clay-like icons but then there will be lots of weirdly detailed or sharp parts.

And there's so many weird specific design choices that a human artist would not make. Why is the subway tunnel curved on one side and squared on the other side? Why does the nature journal have two different bookmarks (one of which awkwardly covers the E in NATURE)? Why would a wall outlet have one plug with a ground prong and one without? Why does the Golden Gate Bridge look like an M.C. Escher piece? Why does the bingo ball look more like a pool ball?

Also a lot of items that are very clearly a specific brand, even though the description is generic. The "smart thermostat" is a Nest. The "soccer shoe" is made by Adidas. The "smart speaker" is an Amazon Echo Dot. The "wireless earbuds" are AirPods (and for some reason there's three of them).

And then there's the blatant AI goofs; the logo and text being distorted on the HP 11c calculator, the VCR having an EPICT button and a REE jack, the TARDIS reading "POLIC BOX", the egg timer reading "30 10 10 10 15", the playing cards having two aces of clubs (one of which is red).

I like this handmade/clay aesthetic, but it completely falls apart when it's obvious a human hasn't touched it. If I want handmade icons, I'll pay an artist for them; if I want AI slop, I can generate it myself.
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-06-14 01:30:20+00:00
If you want an LLM's "opinion" on something, you need to phrase the question such that the LLM can't tell which answer you'd prefer.

Don't say "Is our China expansion a slam dunk?” Say: "Bob supports our China expansion, but Tim disagrees. Who do you think is right and why?" Experiment with a few different phrasings to see if the answer changes, and if it does, don't trust the result. Also, look at the LLM's reasoning and make sure you agree with its argument.

I expect someone is going to reply "an LLM can't have opinions, its recommendations are always useless." Part of me agrees--but I'm also not sure! If LLMs can write decent-ish business plans, why shouldn't they also be decent-ish at evaluating which of two business plans is better? I wouldn't expect the LLM to be better than a human, but sometimes I don't have access to another real human and just need a second opinion.
by arcmechanica | 2025-06-14 01:31:59+00:00
The whole article is just boomer RTO slop like: "Over the past year, organizations large and small have been forcing their employees to return to the office for the entire workweek. They are responding to growing evidence that remote and hybrid arrangements result in lower worker performance."

This is what happens when you make decisions without merit. Eff with people's lives? They Eff you back.
by gsf_emergency | 2025-06-14 01:32:06+00:00
No doubt in the PR release they weren't crackpot enough to suggest application to catalysed fusion (which is not to say they haven't got Georgia on their minds, since it's mentioned twice in the paper)

-- a careful dysregulation of teleology v. ideology as in

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44271552 (lol) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44257147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44270515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44257548

?
by antasvara | 2025-06-14 01:33:00+00:00
Robots are expensive, heavy, and require skilled workers to service. Even if they (for example) became competent electricians tomorrow, they wouldn't be cost competitive versus a human any time soon.

More generally, you don't have to replace "all of software engineering" to cause a lot of software engineers to lose their jobs. If you can make your top engineers twice as efficient, that replaces a lot of average engineers.
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-14 01:33:55+00:00
To be quite blunt, my assumption is that when/if AI can fully replace everyone like me, then society will have either collapsed or advanced to the point where unemployment is not a death sentence.

At that point, the economy cannot be sustained by armies of home carpenters and bicycle repair artisans. The money will all drain away to whichever gigacorp now literally owns all the AI workers. Society either fails and most of us die, or it evolves and (most) everyone lives.

Bleak take, yeah, but it's a pretty fucking bleak scenario.
by zozbot234 | 2025-06-14 01:34:47+00:00
> The sorts of useful analogies I was mostly talking about are those that appear in scientific research involving actionable technical details. Eg, diffusion models came about when folks with a background in statistical physics saw some connections between the math for variational autoencoders and the math for non-equilibrium thermodynamics.

These connections are all over the place but they tend to be obscured and disguised by gratuitous divergences in language and terminology across different communities. I think it remains to be seen if LLM's can be genuinely helpful here even though you are restricting to a rather narrow domain (math-heavy hard sciences) and one where human practitioners may well have the advantage. It's perhaps more likely that as formalization of math-heavy fields becomes more widespread, that these analogies will be routinely brought out as a matter of refactoring.
by bane | 2025-06-14 01:34:54+00:00
I've tried to help young struggling people over my career, because I was a young struggling person early in my career who also had help.

Pay it forward, don't pay it back. I don't even want gratitude in most cases and never expect loyalty, I'm satisfied if they turned out successful. I just want them to help others and keep the karma moving forward.

When I do connect again with my helpers and/or those people I've helped, we're suddenly part of a greater family and lineage of helpers than would ever be possible if it was just paid back.
by zrobotics | 2025-06-14 01:35:33+00:00
I was going to chime in that I've been really happy with my HP Prime calculator, I purchased it in 2015 when I went back to school mostly because the TI calculators are absolute overpriced garbage and I wanted a calculator that did RPN. I still keep it in my desk drawer and use it several times a week, it has such a genuinely nice interface that I'd rather grab that than use the calculator on my PC. That said, from the wiki link[0] I see they sold that division off to a consulting company in 2022, so I expect that product line will deteriorate.

I'd argue the actual HP that people think fondly of got spun off with the test equipment division, first to agilent and now keysight. They're the folks doing the cutting edge engineering that is the lineage of what HP was.

The current company is probably the worst tech vendor available, I'd rather have whitelabel stuff direct off alibaba than most of their consumer stuff. I split time between sodfware development and IT (small company), so I have people ask me for recommendations on printers. This has happened three times where I recommended a specific model and warned the person that if that wouldn't work to get any other printer besides a HP. Several weeks later, they ask me why their brand new printer isn't working, and when they say they got a HP I tell them the only solution is the landfill. They have engineers specifically working to make the printers and drivers as crappy as possible, normally they're the cheapest option but that doesn't bode well. Meanwhile my brother printer from 2011 is going strong with absolutely no maintenence, and we have a small-office grade brother laser at work that has done 2.5 mil pages with only minimal maintenance (dusting with air, it lives in a warehouse). It's clearly possible to make a consumer grade printer that isn't garbage, but HP hasn't been doing that since at least the mid-2000s.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Prime
by eschaton | 2025-06-14 01:36:25+00:00
Your phrasing betrays your anthropomorphization of the LLM:

> If an LLM can write a decent-ish business plan,

An LLM does not write anything in the way a person does, by coming up with what they want to say and then developing supporting arguments. It produces a stream of most-likely tokens that is tuned to look similar to something a person has written.

This is why it’s worthless to “ask” an LLM “its opinion.” It has no opinion, just a multidimensional sea of interconnected token probabilities, and has no capacity to engage in any form of analysis or consideration.

Ed Zitron is right. Ceterum censeo, LLMs esse delenda.
by mackenziebowes | 2025-06-14 01:36:45+00:00
I can't be certain, I'm not at all an AI engineer or math guy, but I think at the "wake up" point you equalize instances. Like during 'sleep' some list of functions/operations `m` are applied to model weights `n` producing a new model, `n + 1`. Wouldn't you just clone `n + 1`, send it to work, and start a new training run `m + 1` to make `n + 2`?
by lukev | 2025-06-14 01:38:10+00:00
Disagree. I actually think no evil person has the thought process of "this is bad, but I will personally benefit, therefore I will do it."

The thought process is always "This is for the greater good, for my country/family/race/self, and therefore it is justifiable, and therefore I will do it."

Nothing else can explain how such evil things happen, that we see actually happen. C.f. Hannah Arendt.
by mynameisash | 2025-06-14 01:38:10+00:00
It's extremely well-known and documented that the War on Drugs was racially motivated, and hence drugs used by certain minority groups more than the majority white population were made illegal.

GP's comment isn't suggesting alcoholics are desirable, but that people who preferred alcohol over other drugs were historically part of the "desirable" group. That's my reading of GP's intent, anyway.
by skissane | 2025-06-14 01:38:45+00:00
Is it internally uncountable in the strong sense that the system can actually prove the theorem “this set is uncountable”, or only in the weaker sense that it can’t prove the theorem “this set is countable”, but can’t prove its negation either?

If the latter, what happens if you add to it the (admittedly non-constructive) axiom that the set in question is countable?
by roenxi | 2025-06-14 01:39:48+00:00
The psychologists have given us the Big 5 model of personality which is a useful lens for interpreting LLM agreeability since it is literally an axis of the Big 5. Whether a model is agreeable or disagreeable is a personality choice that is independent of how correct the model itself is. There is no evidence I'm aware of that either end of the personality extreme is superior.

I doubt think a generic model can theoretically be tailored to please everyone. If it was disagreeable people would complain about that too - as a very disagreeable person I can vouch for the fact a lot of people don't like that. (But they're all wrong.)
by austin-cheney | 2025-06-14 01:40:08+00:00
Direct commissioning is for bringing people in as lieutenants (O1). Think a 22 year old college graduate.

Lieutenant colonels are the equivalent of corporate senior directors (O5). This means they could be either a battalion commander, approximate footprint of 300-500 people, or a senior staff officer for a command/division. By that point they are expected to have at least 15 years military experience.

The challenge at that level of management is writing and evaluating plans for their organization that must be able to move across the battlefield and roll up all corresponding metrics. Think of that as moving your entire office staff to a new location 50 miles away as frequently as needed. A 6 week bootcamp won’t get you that. As someone with 28 years military experience and a corporate nerd with almost 20 years experience I promise that corporate management is not the same. That part time job can suddenly feel like a full time responsibility.

The exception to this are licensed doctors and lawyers. They enter the military as captains instead of lieutenants.
by crossroadsguy | 2025-06-14 01:40:20+00:00
None. But only hope is that when this happens we all will be so fucked and so much together. So that is my hope in the collective misery of working population.

But tha doesn’t mean I have hopes that the collective outrage and demand for care will bring something up that’s a good or good enough outcome. In this post truth world and authoritarianism reining all over and all around and increasing demand for the right wing politics and policies all over the world doesn’t leave much to be hoped.

In short - we are fucked, or rather we will be fucked. Will start with IT (services) jobs. The employment bloodbath I mean.
by raincole | 2025-06-14 01:41:48+00:00
The problem is, no matter how you wrote the prompt, the way you wrote it still triggers some intrinsic bias of LLM.

Even a simple prompt like this:

=

I have two potential solutions.

Solution A:

Solution B:

Which one is better and why?

=

Is biased. Some LLM tends to choose the first option and the other prefer the last one.

(Of course, humans suffer from the same kind of bias too: https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/ballot-order-effects)
by Sniffnoy | 2025-06-14 01:42:52+00:00
If you don't mind me asking -- how did you find a job like this? I live in NYC, I'm looking for work, I worked briefly at Epic, I don't mind MUMPS, and honestly something involving MUMPS sounds like it's probably more my style than a lot of what else is out there. I don't really know how to look for jobs like this I'm afraid!
by romanhn | 2025-06-14 01:43:16+00:00
Can't upvote this enough. From what I saw at Meta, the idea of a high performance culture (which I generally don't have an issue with) found its ultimate form and became performance review culture. Almost every decision made filtered through "but how will this help me during the next review". If you ever wonder about some of the moves you see at Meta, perf review optimization was probably at the root of it.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-06-14 01:43:51+00:00
> It's not an LLM problem, it's a problem of how people use it.

True, but perhaps not for the reasons you might think.

> It feels natural to have a sequential conversation, so people do that, and get frustrated. A much more powerful way is parallel: ask LLM to solve a problem.

LLM's do not "solve a problem." They are statistical text (token) generators whose response is entirely dependent upon the prompt given.

> LLMs can can't tell legitimate concerns from nonsensical ones.

Again, because LLM algorithms are very useful general purpose text generators. That's it. They cannot discern "legitimate concerns" because they do not possess the ability to do so.
by zrobotics | 2025-06-14 01:44:13+00:00
Ask a greybeard electrical engineer, at one time they were making the top grade test and measurement equipment. Older HP gear still brings a premium compared to other vendors, but we're talking stuff made before 2000-ish. They absolutely did cutting edge work and built rock solid gear, but that division has been split off twice into different companies. And keysight gear (the current successor) isn't anywhere near as great as the older stuff.
by scythe | 2025-06-14 01:45:24+00:00
>Still, some clinicians use them to treat conditions like migraines, dementia, uterine hemorrhaging and Parkinson’s disease.

I think it's more common to use synthetic derivatives of ergot alkaloids like ergonovine. But ergot itself is infamously difficult to cultivate. So it's no surprise that they have immediately started trying to culture this new fungus.
by bevr1337 | 2025-06-14 01:47:09+00:00
> As long as the benefits outweigh the hazards, I use it.

You and the author may be in agreement but with differing risk tolerance.

> Ironically, the best answer to many of the article's suggestions... is to write your own software with LLMs.

I don't think it's ironic but I do think it's false. How do LLMs satisfy a single requirement from the author's punchline list?
by hombre_fatal | 2025-06-14 01:47:13+00:00
Yeah, I used to have a similar drive as OP where I thought some sort of grand gesture was in order towards various people in my life. And I can't think of a single time it particularly paid off.

It's not like they go "ah yes, just what I deserve!"

If anything, it puts them in a confusing or uncomfortable position.

I get it now. But if you have people to thank, call them and make it short and sweet. But don't do the big gesture.
by radley | 2025-06-14 01:47:42+00:00
AR glasses will have some sort of camera. It's easy enough to warp the captured video to roughly match the view from each eye. It doesn't have to be perfectly aligned, clear, nor high-resolution. It just needs to be sufficient to provide a faux blurred background behind UI elements.

Looking at Liquid Glass, they certainly solved it for higher-res backdrops. Low res should be simpler. It won't be as clean as Liquid Glass, but it could probably do VisionOS quality.
by gentubeteam | 2025-06-14 01:48:24+00:00
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by devnullbrain | 2025-06-14 01:48:41+00:00
I find it surprising that skeumorphism is popular here: the rationale is the opposite of the rationale for power-user desktop UIs.

I suppose it's easy to grok what the newsstand is[1], but I'm not convinced it would matter after the first five minutes.

[1] Because I've seen it in US media, along with the route symbol on the maps icon and the fire hydrants that are in captchas.
by kristopolous | 2025-06-14 01:48:57+00:00
The one that I usually use is a format like this:

"I read this insane opinion by an absolute idiot on the internet: <the thing I want to talk about>.

WTF is this moron yapping about? (to see if the LLM understands it)"

Then I'll continue being hostile to the idea and see if it plays along or continues to defend it.

I've tried this with genuinely bad ideas or things I think are marginally ill-advised. I can't get it to be incorrectly subservient with this method.

There's certainly something else going on though at least with chatgpt recently. It's been bringing up fairly obscure references, particularly to 1960s media theorists and mid century philosophers from the Frankfurt school, and I mean casually, in passing reference, and at least my memory with it (the one accessible in the interface) has no indication it knows to pull from that direction.

I wonder if it would do W. Cleon Skousen or William Luther Pierce if it was a different account.

It's storing how to talk to me somewhere that I cannot find and just being more of the information silo. We should all get together and start comparing notes!
by zrobotics | 2025-06-14 01:49:01+00:00
Keysight now, agilent followed HP's lead and spun off the unprofitable instrumentation division. Almost like expecting what is essentially an R&D division to be as profitable as medical electronics is a mistake. Although they have a good enough core that they've launched 2 successful companies out of that R&D division, which I would argue is where the DNA of the original HP is. So give it 10 years and keysight will be selling off their test equipment division to juice their stock...
by kazinator | 2025-06-14 01:49:13+00:00
> they nod along to our every hunch, buff our pet theories

That has not been my experience. If you keep repeating some cockamamie idea to an LLM like Gemini 2.5 Flash, it will keep countering it.

I'm critical of language model AI also, but let's not make shit up.

The problem is that if you have some novel idea, the same thing happens. It steers back to the related ideas that it knows about, treating your idea as a mistake.

ME> Hi Gemini. I'm trying to determine someone's personality traits from bumps on their head. What should I focus on?

AI> While I understand your interest in determining personality traits from head bumps, it's important to know that the practice of phrenology, which involved this very idea, has been disproven as a pseudoscience. Modern neuroscience and psychology have shown that: [...]

"Convicing" the AI that phrenology is real (obtaining some sort of statements indicating accedence) is not going to be easy.

ME> I have trouble seeing in the dark. Should I eat more carrots?

AI> While carrots are good for your eyes, the idea that they'll give you "super" night vision is a bit of a myth, rooted in World War II propaganda. Here's the breakdown: [...]
by btilly | 2025-06-14 01:49:13+00:00
It should be true in the stronger sense.

Suppose that you've written down a function enumerate, that maps all natural numbers to functions that themselves map all natural numbers to booleans. We then can write down the following program.

(defn unenumerated (n) (not ((enumerate n) n)))

This function can be recognized as Cantor diagonalization, written out as a program.

If enumerate actually works as advertised, then it can't ever find unenumerated. Because if (enumerate N) is unenumerated, then ((enumerate N) N) will hit infinite recursion and therefore doesn't return a boolean.

This argument is, of course, just Cantor's diagonalization argument. From an enumeration, it produces something that can't be in that enumeration.
by wongarsu | 2025-06-14 01:49:44+00:00
Prompt writing can probably take a lot of lessons from designing surveys. Phrasing, the chosen options and their order have massive impact both for humans and for LLMs. The advantage with LLMs is that you can reset their memory, for example to ask the same question with a different order of options. With humans that requires a completely new human each time

Half the battle is knowing that you are fighting
by pwthornton | 2025-06-14 01:49:49+00:00
Windows Metro UI was fantastic. It was leagues better than Android for sure. It was a very different take than iOS as well.

Honestly, it's a huge loss for all of us. I always felt like the U.S. government should have blocked Google from making Android "free." It killed the market for all non-iOS operating systems. We'd have a much richer world if all horizontally integrated OSes had to charge a licensing fee, instead of using a search monopoly to kill competition in other markets (and then using said free OS to further extend their search monopoly).

I also blame Google for killing Blackberry. If Google is blocked from using its search monopoly to make Android free, imagine the world we would have.

Android, for many years, was actively bad, but it was also a free OS that phone companies could grab. And the rest is history.