MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by numpad0 | 2025-06-10 19:08:09+00:00
I think maybe we should completely switch to admitting this. Every extra second you sit in the (home)office adds to productivity, just not necessarily converting into market values, that can be inflated with hype. Also longer hours is not necessarily safe or sustainable.

We only wish more time != more productivity because it's inconvenient in multiple ways if it were. We imagine a multiplier in there to balance the equation, such factor that can completely negate production, using mere anecdotal experiences as proofs.

Maybe that's not scientific, maybe time spent very closely match productivity, and maybe production as well as productivity need external, artificial regulations.
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-06-10 19:08:25+00:00
The hallucinations get quoted and then sourced as truth unfortunately.

A simple example. "Which MS Dos productivity program had connect four built in?".

I have an MSDOS emulator and know the answer. It's a little obscure but it's amazing how i get a different answer from all the AI's every time. I never saw any of them give the correct answer. Try asking it the above. Then ask it if it's sure about that (it'll change it's mind!).

Now remember that these types of answers may well end up quoted online and then learnt by AI with that circular referenced source as the source. We have no truth at that point.

And seriously try the above question. It's a great example of AI repeatedly stating an authoritative answer that's completely made up.
by tptacek | 2025-06-10 19:08:36+00:00
I mean literally that if you're a green-eyeshade bean-counting manager and you're making a headcount decision and you have the option of retaining a very senior engineer or hiring an early-career engineer, and there's a story you can tell yourself where they both get the same fundamental revenue-generating or cost-avoiding work done (for instance: because the senior engineer has a later-career focus in team building and acceleration, which has become less relevant in this stipulated world where we're laying off tons of engineers --- that's the premise of the question, not what I believe is happening) then there's a lot of reason to believe it's the senior engineer who is going to get the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

I think a lot of senior people talking about the impacts of this technology on "junior developers" understand this, and are trying to talk their own book.
by desireco42 | 2025-06-10 19:09:35+00:00
One cool think about this model, that I installed locally is that supports well other languages as well as it should be pleasant conversation partner.

BTW I am personally fan of Mistral, because while it is not the top model, it produces good results and the most important thing is that it is super fast, just go to it's chat and be amazed. It really saves a lot of time to have quick response.
by bigstrat2003 | 2025-06-10 19:10:25+00:00
> People simply will not go back to clunky software of the 2000s, regardless of the malleability or usability.

Software in the 2000s was markedly better to software today. But it's cheaper and easier for companies to produce shitty software, so that's what we get. It has nothing to do with consumer preference.
by Kranar | 2025-06-10 19:10:30+00:00
I used to think the models got worse over time as well but then I checked my chat history and what I noticed isn't that ChatGPT gets worse, it's that my standards and expectations increase over time.

When a new model comes out I test the waters a bit with some more ambitious queries and get impressed when it can handle them reasonably well. Over time I take it for granted and then just expect it to be able to handle ever more complex queries and get dissappointed when I hit a new limit.
by Cold_Miserable | 2025-06-10 19:11:09+00:00
From the "analysis" I gather it works by encrypting the .exe and the key's are server-side. The hardware info is used to further encrypt it.

I think the goal should be to fool the checks rather than remove the encryption which would be a nightmare. CPUID can output whatever you want, it just reads MSR's. I'm sure there are possibilities to use kernel drivers to make windows functions also read out whatever you want.
by Szpadel | 2025-06-10 19:12:34+00:00
for sure they are no longer clear winners, but they try to be just barely on top of others.

right now new Gemini surpassed their o3 (barely) in benchmarks for significantly less money so they cut pricing to be still competitive.

I bet they didn't released o4 not because it's not competitive, but because they are doing Nvidia game: release new product that is just enough better to convince people to buy it. so IMO they are holding full o4 model to have something to release after competition release something better that their top horse
by fzwang | 2025-06-10 19:12:38+00:00
1) RE: Unintended consequences - It was usually some mix of willful or accidental misinterpretation of what we wanted. I can't go into details, but in many cases the annotators are really aiming for maximizing billable activities. In situations where there are some ambiguities, they would pick one interpretation and just go with it without really making the effort to verify. In some ways, I understand their perspective in the sense that they know their work is a commodity and would just do the minimally-viable job to get paid.

2) RE: Benefits of outsourcing - The primary benefit was usually speed to get to a certain dataset scale. These vendor had existing pools of workers, which we can access immediately. There were potential cost-savings but it was never as good as we had projected. The quality of labeling would be less than ideal, which would trigger interventions to verify or improve annotations, which then adds to cost and complexity.

3) RE: In-house ops - Essentially, moving things in-house doesn't magically solve the issues we had. It's a lot of work to recruit and organize data labeling teams. They are still subject to the same incentive-misalignment problems as outsourcing, but we obviously have a closer relationship with them and that seems to help. We try to communicate to them the importance of their work, especially early on, where their feedback and "feel" for the data is very valuable. And it's much much more expensive, but all things considered still the "right" approach in many cases. In some scenarios, we can amplify some of their work by using synthetic data generators etc.
by Jtsummers | 2025-06-10 19:12:54+00:00
That takes a pretty basic safety mechanism to address, require confirmation after the change. Windows has (had?) that, after 15 or 30 seconds or whatever from a change (like to resolution or something) it reverts back without confirmation. This makes changes of all sorts easy and cheap to perform. The worst case is you idle for 30 seconds waiting for it to go back to a legible form.
by epolanski | 2025-06-10 19:13:47+00:00
Jm2c but I feel conflicted about this arms race.

You can be 6/12 months later, and have not burned tens of billions compared to the best in class, I see it an engineering win.

I absolutely understand those that say "yeah, but customers will only use the best", I see it, but is market share of forever money losing businesses that valuable?
by gdcbe | 2025-06-10 19:13:50+00:00
Yeah such clear cut cases I've done in the past. E.g. there was a period some months ago when random AI people (so not humans "operating AI's) did such PRs. Those were easy to filter out.

But sometimes you have people that do seem to really do put in the time and do their best, and I suspect that without LLM they couldn't do what they can now do.

It's those cases that I find less clear cut. Like how to politely ask them to have certain criteria before they submit.
by Mawr | 2025-06-10 19:13:51+00:00
Well, there's a difference between "our program is written in C++ because we correctly chose it for its performance" and "our program happens to be written in C++ because some programmer 10 years ago really liked C++".

There's a lot of software out there that either was written before good modern options existed, or uses very outdated patterns, or its language wasn't chosen with much thought.
by gpderetta | 2025-06-10 19:14:08+00:00
I don't think false sharing matters here. Cacheline bouncing of the counter, which is written even by readers would be enough to explain the bottleneck. The barrier being likely implied or explicit in the atomic RMW used to update the counter will also stall the pipeline, preventing any other memory operation to happen concurrently.

All threads repeatedly CASing on the same memory location is enough to bring any cpu to its knees.

The critical part of the fix is that readers no longer have to modify any shared memory location and rely on deferred reclamation.
by naikrovek | 2025-06-10 19:14:14+00:00
> Honestly, I generally defend Meta/targeted advertising in these threads

These kinds of things now point me in a direction where I consider advertising alone to be immoral and want it banned. I should have to request information when I want it, rather than being exposed to it at all times on every available surface.

There are only three ways this can go: 1) more frequent and more spookily relevant ads, increasing the number of people who feel that ads should be illegal because of the law breaking required to make it happen. 2) ads don’t change and everyone quickly learns to ignore them. 3) ads go away, replaced by an easy to use marketing information delivery system where only adults can request information unsupervised.

Meta do #1 because #2 and #3 mean the capitalist line doesn’t go up and the end of Meta, respectively. Meta view both of those as the same thing: the end of Meta.

“What about all the businesses which need advertising to survive?”

If they need advertising to survive they’ve been on borrowed time long enough already.

Advertisements encourage the shit Meta is doing. What kinds of similar things are they doing that we haven’t discovered, yet?
by gofreddygo | 2025-06-10 19:14:19+00:00
OP told you what he could in a public forum and left out a few things for private. Its only fair.

The incentives are against you. Lower costs lets defendant fight it out longer with less $$ for lawyer. Law firm isn't spending more hours to earn less. So you gotta have a friend with this skill and a vested interest or do the legwork, which OP suggest AI was for him.

I don't agree AI had a significant part to play here. The leverage, whatever it was isn't likely to be public. Certainly wasn't AI as the title suggests.
by torginus | 2025-06-10 19:14:49+00:00
I was thinking a lot about software malleability - but from a technical perspective. I am on the verge of building something useful - only if I could find the time to do it.

Here's my premise - if you use something like a game engine, say Unity, and Unreal, you basically have the ability to modify everything in real time, and heve it reflected inside the editor immediately - you could change textures, models, audio, even shaders (which are a kind of code), and have the editor reload just that tiny resource instantaneously.

But not code code - for some reason computer code must go through a compilation, optimization and linking process, creating a monolithic executable piece of code, that cannot be directly modified. This is even true of dynamic languages like Js/Ts, which support modification on the fundamental level, yet somehow lose this ability when using advanced toolchains.

Which is weird since most compilers/OSes support this dynamism at a fundamental level - the machine interface unit of the C compiler is a function, the replacement unit in most OSes is a dynamic library, a collection of said functions - yet changing this at runtime is almost unheard of and most of the times suicidal.

This is because of a couple problems - memory allocation - replacing parts of a program at runtime can lead to leaks if we don't clean that up, resource allocation - this once again can be solved by tying resource lifetimes to either outside factors, or the lifetime of the function or its containing unit.

A demonstrated analog of this is OS processes, which can be terminated abruptly, their binaries replaced without fear of resource leakage.

The final problem of data corruption can be solved by making such program parts stateless, and making them use a store with atomic transactions.

I have a pretty good idea on how to build such an environment on the low level, whose core idea is having process-like isolation barriers isolating small pieces of programs, and an object database-like datastore that can never be corrupted due to transactional changes (which can be rolled back, enabling stuff like time-travel debugging). Said processes could communicate either via messages/events or sharing parts of their memory.

Such a system would allow you to fearlessly change any part of the source code of a running application at runtime - even if you mess up the code of a said component - say event to a point that it doesn't compile - all that would happen would that single component would cease to function without affecting the rest of the app.
by mosdl | 2025-06-10 19:14:55+00:00
Android is a different beast since OEMs highly customize the UX. Samsung could easily make a horrible liquid glass ripoff and stick it on Android without Google doing anything.

Most of Google's work on Android seems to be around making smaller changes for the UX and bigger internal changes (splitting up the OS so individual parts can be updated without the OEM involvement, security changes, etc).
by aaronbaugher | 2025-06-10 19:14:56+00:00
Reagan's amnesty, like the others, was a bait and switch. The DC/corporate establishment said, "Let us amnesty the ones that are here, and we'll get control of the border and stop the flow." After getting their amnesty, the second part never happens.

That's led directly to the current mess because it taught people that the most important thing is to get into the country, regardless of legality, so you could be in place when the next amnesty came along.
by jacob019 | 2025-06-10 19:15:27+00:00
I break out Gemini 2.5 pro when Claude gets stuck, it's just so slow and verbose. Claude follows instructions better and seems to better understand it's role in agentic workflows. Gemini does something different with the context, it has a deeper understanding of the control flow and can uncover edge case bugs that Claude misses. o3 seems better at high level thinking and planning, questioning if it should it be done and whether the challenge actually matches the need. They're kind of like colleagues with unique strengths. o3 does well with a lot of things, I just haven't used it as much because of the cost. Will probably use it more now.
by tobyhinloopen | 2025-06-10 19:16:31+00:00
Yes, I inject multiple documents like that before every session. The documents I inject are relevant to the upcoming task.

The one I shared is a variant of the “Base” document, I have specific documents per use case. If I know I’m adding features (controller actions), I inject a prompt containing documentation how to add routes, controllers, controller actions, views, etc and how to format views, what helpers are commonly used.

If I’m working on APIs, I have API specific prompts. If I’m working on syncs with specific external services, I have prompts containing the details about these services.

Basically I consider every session a conversation with a new employee. I give them a single task and include all the relevant documentation and guidelines and wish them good luck.

Sometimes it takes a while, but I generally have a second issue to work on, in parallel. So while one agent is fixing one issue, I prepare the other agent to work on the second. Very occasionally I have 3 sessions running at the same time.

I barely write code anymore. I think I’ve not written a single line of code in the last few work days. Almost everything I submit is written by AI, and every time I have to guide the LLM and I expect the mistake to be repeated, I expand the relevant prompt document.

Last few days I also had the LLM update the prompt documents for me since they’re getting pretty big.

I do thoroughly review the code. The generated code is different from how I would write it, sometimes worse but sometimes better.

I also let it write tests, obviously, and I have a few paragraphs to write happy flow tests and “bad flow” tests.

I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of the possibilities. Im writing my own tools to further automate the process, including being able to generate code directly on production and have different versions of modules running based on the current user, so I can test new versions and deploy them instantly to a select group of users. This is just a wild fantasy I have and I’m sure I will find out why it’s a terrible idea, but it doesn’t stop me from trying.
by Y_Y | 2025-06-10 19:16:33+00:00
Very pleased to see LyX and Ipe here. They've been invaluable throughout my academic career, and are just a pleasure to use (once you get the hang of them).

The Qt/KDE world has (imho) some of the best quality software I've used, and is, astonishingly, relatively unpopular compared to FOSS competitors.

Ipe now has a web interface (through the magic of Qt) and I remember there was a plan to make one for LyX, though if it ever happened, I couldn't find it.
by teeeeeeeeeeeeee | 2025-06-10 19:16:41+00:00
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The short video below demonstrates how to use these editors, highlighting their key features and functionality. You’ll see how to write and execute code, view outputs.
by krferriter | 2025-06-10 19:16:41+00:00
Yeah one of the easiest ways to make windows vista+7 perform better was to simply disable all the fancy UI graphics that add nothing. I don't care if my window title bars have a gradient and animated transparency. It's actually a bit distracting and makes the system perform worse, so I just turned it off.

Even on modern devices though which have more computation and graphics power to the point that they aren't going to actually lag or anything while rendering it, why waste cycles and battery animating these useless and distracting things? There's no good justification.
by elros | 2025-06-10 19:16:47+00:00
Oh, I see, you'd like to immigrate to Europe. In that case, I'd suggest looking at the multiple options for immigrant visas, the rules for which vary country by country.

I believe, as others have stated, that the educational way is probably the most practical, as you can get a residency visa based on attending school (not necessarily a graduation, I know plenty of people that initially came to study the language, and that would qualify you for such visas), and subsequently after living there for a while follow the normal paths towards long-term residency.

As far as I'm aware, the Netherlands and Germany are destinations that have reasonably well-understood processes for immigration and a significant technical market. Both of these countries also have the advantage that you can mostly live your life in English – albeit you should of course strive to learn the local language if you intend to settle there.

For Germany specifically, there's been a recent reform in the laws which give you a very fast track even towards German citizenship, which then would allow you to live and work anywhere in the EU. On the other hand, the Netherlands seem to have a more digitalized bureaucracy, which can be practical: in Germany everything is still done by snail mail.

I've also heard good things about Switzerland, but there I have less personal experience. It is also not in the EU, for what it's worth.

That being said, I'd point out that from a technology market perspective, it's certainly more difficult to find employment at the moment than it was perhaps 10 years ago. This comes and goes in cycles, so I'm saying that so you don't get discouraged if it takes long and requires applying to hundreds of positions: that's the case even for us natives. There's geopolitical and macroeconomic reasons for that, interest rates, etc.

I wish you the best of luck!

P.S. Of course, if you're so inclined, you might want to be aware that Svalbard has no specific visa requirements for residence. You could conceptually move there tomorrow, as long as you're allowed to transit through Norway, which assuming you hold a US passport shouldn't be a problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard

However that place is certainly... not for everyone :-)

P.P.S. On a more serious note, and it's of course not the EU, but Australia has very friendly immigration paths and I personally know multiple people who were able to move there, quickly obtain work in technology, and two of them actually obtained Australian citizenship by now.
by taylorius | 2025-06-10 19:17:21+00:00
There's a certain change of perspective with modern AI (by "modern" I mean Resnet and beyond). When I was deep into neural nets in the 1990s, they weren't that large, and I would think of them in terms of the number of weights and nodes - but modern deep learning seems to have has moved up a few levels of abstraction. (I stepped away from the field for a while). And there's a certain understanding people seem to have now regarding the "gradient flow" through the net and why certain architectures work well (Resnet, Unets etc). I must say I'm finding it tricky to shift into this new level of thinking. Also Transformers - still looking for an intuitive sense of how they work, haha.
by throw_m239339 | 2025-06-10 19:17:23+00:00
I remember my first android device, it had like 512MO of RAM (and storage), and it was blazing fast, it could be used as a WIFI repeater too (which is why I still have it, although it 2.5G...). Fast forward 13 year later or so, if your android device doesn't have at least 8gig of RAM and 64gigs of storage, then it's pretty much useless given how bloated the OS (and the apps) have become...

So basically, Android low end has become useless, I remember 10+ years ago having to search for something very fast because of the context, like something on a map or surf the web for info. It was still super responsive with 512MO...

I tried a few cheap Android phones recently... they are simply unresponsive, google apps will suddenly shut down because the device is out of memory or something... or you try to make a call, you make a mistake so you try to hang up, the phone will refuse to hang up because it's stuck! you'd have to remove the battery to quickly cancel the call! What the hell happened with that OS?
by seadan83 | 2025-06-10 19:17:42+00:00
Lived in Paris 30 years ago, my experience:

Seeing Gens D'Armes on the street was somewhat common. The Gens D'Armes are akin to 'heavy' police and are a show of force. The Gens D'Armes were pretty common to see in the subways, airports, and/or just on patrol. They were Gens D'Armes stations in the city just how there were also regular police stations. Gens D'Armes patrols were a bit distinct from other police patrols, almost always larger groups, around 5 to 7 people with long-guns and plate carriers. Meanwhile regular police had much lighter weapons, no body armor, and very rarely were in groups of more than 2 or 3.
by the8472 | 2025-06-10 19:18:10+00:00
Sadly there are plenty of arguments that boil down to "AI can't be reasoning because they don't do everything humans do", including things such as being embodied, "having consciousness" or some postulated quantum effects in the brain making humans special[0].

Drawing a line around the bag of things that humans do and calling that reasoning isn't all that conductive to discussion either because it's a rather large bag, some parts are idiosyncratic and others aren't well-defined.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestrated_objective_reducti...