MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by SkyBelow | 2025-06-09 15:06:39+00:00
The issue with education in particular is a much deeper issue which gen AI has ripped bandages off and exposed the wound to the world, while also greatly accelerating its decay, but it was not responsible for creating it.

What is the purpose of education? Is it to learn, or to gain credentials that you have learned? Too much of education has become the latter, to the point we have sacrificed the former. Eventually this brings down both, as a degree gains a reputation of no longer signifying the former ever happened.

Or existing systems that check for learning before granting the degree that showed an individual learned were largely not ready for the impact of genAI and teachers and professors have adapted poorly. Sometimes due to lack of understanding the technology, often due to their hands being tied.

GenAI used to cheat is a great detriment to education, but a student using genAI to learn can benefit greatly, as long as they have matured enough in their education process to have critical thinking to handle mishaps by the AI and to properly differentiate when they are learning and when they are having the AI do the work for them (I don't say cheat here because some students will accidentally cross the line and 'cheat' often carries a hint of mens rea). To the mature enough student interested in learning more, genAI is a worthwhile tool.

How do we handle those who use it to cheat? How do we handle students who are too immature in their education journey to use the tool effectively? Are we ready to have a discussion about those learning who only care for the degree and the education to earn the degree is just seen as a means to an end? How to teachers (and increasingly professors) fight back against the pressure of systems that optimize on granting credentials and which just assume the education will be behind those systems (Goodhart's Law anyone)? Those questions don't exist because of genAI, but genAI greatly increased our need to answer them.
by anonymars | 2025-06-09 15:06:49+00:00
Here's the one I'm thinking of (time flies, doesn't it?)

https://www.wired.com/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking...

> Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.

> But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple's and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information – a partial credit card number – that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.
by flir | 2025-06-09 15:06:54+00:00
I had the weirdest 286 clone I'm quite nostalgic about - a tiny little thing with a 9" monochrome screen and 40Mb HDD that I learned C on. Whole thing was shrunk in the same proportion as the monitor, so it looked like a shrinky-dink version of a standard desktop of the era. The CPU component would have been about 8" wide. I tricked it out with a 28.8k modem so I could get to local BBSes.

This "tied an onion to my belt" reminiscence may go to support your theory.
by reaperducer | 2025-06-09 15:07:02+00:00
It must be a daunting chore to maintain all the legacy pages. The amount of now-years-old stuff that long-standing sites have to maintain, or choose to maintain, is shockingly high, and testing the combination of all that stuff is impossible.

One company I worked for used interns and new hires for that. One of the early tasks assigned to the intern pool was to comb the web sites for outdated information, or things that no longer conformed to the current brand book. The list then went somewhere else so the pages could be updated or deleted.

The major benefit of this was giving the new people an overview of what we do, why we do it, and a slice of the history of the products.
by nemomarx | 2025-06-09 15:07:04+00:00
I think an input stream is input from the perspective of the consumer? Like it's things you are consuming or taking as inputs. Output is things you emit.

Your input is ofc someone else's output, and vice versa, but you want to keep your description and thoughts to one perspective, and in a first person blog that's clearly the authors pov, right?
by guywithahat | 2025-06-09 15:07:08+00:00
I have the same thought; it messes with peoples value systems and just isn't healthy for a lot of people. I wouldn't say it ruins lives but people will do nothing but work and tend to their 3 dogs, which inhibits personal development or meaningful progress in life.

Plus nobody enforces a lot of health and safety laws anymore, it's not uncommon to see dogs in grocery stores for example, despite it being illegal and gross.
by int_19h | 2025-06-09 15:07:29+00:00
What are the benefits?

The downsides are obvious: we're effectively arming people whose worldview is fundamentally incompatible with ours and who are, at most, allies of convenience right now, and with no guarantee that anything we'll give to them won't end up resold to China anyway (indeed, given that those regimes are notoriously corrupt, I think that's virtually a certainly).
by bgwalter | 2025-06-09 15:07:32+00:00
I notice a couple of things in the pro-AI [1] posts: All start writing in a lengthy style like Steve Yegge in his peak. All are written by ex-programmers who are on the management/founder side now. All of them cite programmer friends who claim that AI is useful.

It is very strange that no real open source project uses "AI" in any way. Perhaps these friends work on closed source and say what their manager wants them to say? Or they no longer care? Or they work in "AI" companies?

[1] He does mention return on investment doubts and waste of energy, but claims that the agent nonsense works (without public evidence).
by thadt | 2025-06-09 15:08:17+00:00
On Learning:

My wife, a high school teacher, remarked to me the other day “you know, it’s sad that my new students aren’t going to be able to do any of the fun online exercises that I used to run.”

She’s all but entirely removed computers from her daily class workflow. Almost to a student, “research” has become “type it into Google and write down whatever the AI spits out at the top of the page” - no matter how much she admonishes them not to do it. We don’t even need to address what genAI does to their writing assignments. She says this is prevalent across the board, both in middle and high school. If educators don’t adapt rapidly, this is going to hit us hard and fast.
by abirch | 2025-06-09 15:08:21+00:00
I agree we shouldn't eat all the time. That's what was in my comment.

Quick question, in addition to eating all of the time do they eat processed foods like I mentioned in my comment? Examples include soda, white rice, flour (Naan), etc. https://www.thinkglobalhealth.org/article/curbing-indias-ult...
by sameermanek | 2025-06-09 15:08:32+00:00
There is a problem with these llms though which is that these companies will have to keep spending massive amounts of money on research unless they solve major issues with these models. These models are inherently depreciating assets and they depreciate almost fully within months as soon as either they or their competitors come out with a new model.

For eg. Claude was undoubtedly the best model for software devs until gemini 2.5 was released and now i see people divided with majority of them leaning towards Gemini.

And there is very little room for mistakes, as we have seen how llama became completely irrelevant in matter of months.

So while inference in itself can be profitable (again thats a big *), these companies will have to keep fighting for what it looks like decades unless one of them actually solves hallucinations and re constructs computer interfacing at a global scale!
by jplusequalt | 2025-06-09 15:08:45+00:00
>Seems likely there will be changes in higher education to work with gen AI instead of against it, and it could be a positive change for both teachers and students.

Since we're using anecdotes, let me leave one as well--it's been my experience that humans choose the path of least resistance. In the context of education, I saw a large percentage of my peers during K-12 do the bare minimum to get by in the classes, and in college I saw many resorting to Chegg to cheat on their assignments/tests. In both cases I believe it was the same motivation--half-assing work/cheating takes less effort and time.

Now, what happens when you give those same children access to an LLM that can do essentially ALL their work for them? If I'm right, those children will increasingly lean on those LLMs to do as much of their schoolwork/homework as possible, because the alternative means they have less time to scroll on Tik Tok.

But wait, this isn't an anecdote, it's already happening! Here's an excellent article that details the damage these tools are already causing to our students https://www.404media.co/teachers-are-not-ok-ai-chatgpt/.

>[blank] is an amazing tool ... when used properly

You could say the same thing about a myriad of controversial things that currently exist. But we don't live in a perfect world--we live in a world where money is king, and often times what makes money is in direct conflict with utilitarianism.
by bfrog | 2025-06-09 15:09:14+00:00
I too can cast pointers to memcpy'ed C structs. What I can't do in a short order is generate language agnostic descriptors in an IDL that then gets converted to the language of choice to send/recv messages over a wire or file with fast validation. Capnproto does all of this.

So while rkyv looks cool, I think its going to be limited by its language specific tie ins with Rust, and the numbers are skewed towards the unvalidated "deserialization" (pointer casting...).
by TheBigSalad | 2025-06-09 15:09:27+00:00
That's an interesting perspective. As an adult who has both human children and many pets, I disagree that your premise that pets are only valuable for children. We come from cave people who live in big family groups. Modern humans are more isolated and live in relatively small houses, without their extended families. I think it's only natural for us to want to care for animals. And just because a dog isn't as smart, and can't talk doesn't mean it can't be a real friend.
by Garlef | 2025-06-09 15:10:06+00:00
> Having a conversation with a computer to generate code that I don't entirely understand and then have to try to review is just not fun.

Same for me. But maybe that's ultimately an UX issue? And maybe things will straighten out once we figure out how to REALLY do AI assisted software development.

As an anology: Most people wouldn't want to dig through machine code/compiler output. At least not without proper tooling.

So: Maybe once we have good tools to understand the output it might be fun again.

(I guess this would include advances in structuring/architecting the output)
by BryantD | 2025-06-09 15:10:50+00:00
I think there are cases of people using keystroke expanders to automate the -- to em-dash conversation outside word processors. Not so common among technical folks, though, for postfix operator reasons.

The comment we're talking about doesn't read like AI to me because of the use of parenthetical asides, although that just means I haven't seen a LLM that tends to use parentheses heavily.
by tzs | 2025-06-09 15:11:00+00:00
Interesting that he is now CEO of CTIA. His predecessor as FCC chairman, Tom Wheeler, was once also CEO of CTIA. Wheeler did so well at that job that he was inducted into the Wireless Hall of Fame.

Wheeler was also once President of NCTA, which is the main trade group for cable companies. He did so well there that he was inducted into the Cable Television Hall of Fame, becoming the only person to be in both the cable and wireless halls of fame.
by Lendal | 2025-06-09 15:11:19+00:00
I'm in the camp of people who believe that while they are bullshit machines, oftentimes bullshit can be extremely useful. I use these bullshit machines all the time now, for minor tasks where bullshit is acceptable output. Whether it's a chunk of low-quality throwaway code that's easily verified and/or corrected, or an answer to a question where close-enough is good enough.

Not everything needs to pass a NASA quality inspection to be useful.
by bts | 2025-06-09 15:11:19+00:00
Quadratic Voting and Quadratic Funding have some ideas in common, but they refer to separate concepts. To learn more about these topics, I would probably check out the website for RadicalxChange. IIUC RxC is the main public body attempting to realize the theoretical benefits of QF and related ideas.

Here's an explanation of Quadratic Funding from their website[1], which I guess they now refer to as "Plural Funding":

Plural Funding (also known as Quadratic Funding or QF) is a more democratic and scalable form of matching funding for public goods, i.e. any projects valuable to large groups of people and accessible to the general public. “Matching funding” is a model of funding public goods where a fund from governments or philanthropic institutions matches individual contributions to a project. Plural Funding optimizes matching funds by prioritizing projects based on the number of people who contributed. This way, funds meant to benefit the public go towards projects that really benefit a broad public, instead of things that only have a few wealthy backers. In Plural Funding, [total funding] for a proposal is [the square root of each contribution to it → summed up, then squared.] Plural Funding strongly encourages people to make contributions, no matter how small, and ensures a democratic allocation of funds meant to benefit the public.

[1] https://www.radicalxchange.org/wiki/plural-funding/

EDIT: formatting
by nikolayasdf123 | 2025-06-09 15:11:28+00:00
> Go programming language is especially well-suited to LLM-driven automation. It’s small, has a large standard library, and a culture that has strong shared idioms for doing almost anything

+1 to this. thank you `go fmt` for uniform code. (even culture of uniform test style!). thank you culture of minimal dependencies. and of course go standard library and static/runtime tooling. thank you simple code that is easy to write for humans..

and as it turns out for AIs too.
by Spivak | 2025-06-09 15:12:32+00:00
Counterpoint: folks not from America create a 2d projection of our government where on the whole Americans are very aligned and where (usually Europeans) are not and conclude that US parties are the same while their parties are very different.

Meanwhile I can't tell the difference between any of the (just picking one) UK parties. From an outsider perspective their government seems exactly the same no matter who is elected. But I don't conclude that the Brits are brainwashed and instead that I would have to be there to actually understand just how different they are.

We're at a point in the US where your political party is a dating dealbreaker for 60% of Americans and 85% of Americans only date within their own party. This isn't a small group of heavily politically involved with strong opinions, this is everyday people recognizing what are extremely different and fundamentally incompatible world views.

We're only 6 months in and I would hope the world can really feel the difference when a conservative government took power. I would be shocked if anyone couldn't tell the difference between our government pre and post january.
by nkrisc | 2025-06-09 15:12:48+00:00
That confused me a bit too, but what I suspect is that owning a pet is kind of like having a permanent baby, but without many of the real challenges a human child presents.

Your dog can be cute and child-like and playful for its entire life, but is also far more self-sufficient than a human child is in the first year or two of its life.

It’s kind of like you get to be a make-believe parent without any of the difficult parts.
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-09 15:12:58+00:00
>I actually think the quantity of bizarre imagery whose content is unknown to humans is pretty darn low.

Historically, this just hasn't ever been the case. There are images today that wouldn't have merely been outlandish 150 years ago, but absolutely mysterious. A picture of a spiral galaxy perhaps, or electron-microscopy of some microfauna. Humans would have been able to do little more than describe the relative shapes. And thus there are more images that no one will be familiar with for centuries. But if we were to somehow see them early, even without the context of how the image was produced I suspect strongly that clever people might manage to figure out what those images represent. No model could do this.

The quantity of bizarre imagery is finite... each pixel in a raster has a finite number of color values, and there are finite numbers of pixels in a raster image after all. But the number is staggeringly large, even the subset of images that represent real things, even the subset of that which represents things which humans have no concept of. My imagination is too modest to even touch the surface of that, but my cognition is sufficient to surmise that it exists.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-06-09 15:13:32+00:00
In the loop is not really a problem I have. I use intellij. So, I'm usually not really limited by my ability to type fast. I don't actually type a lot of code mostly.

A better auto complete than comes with the IDE already is actually hard and most of the AI code completion approaches I've seen conflict with the built in auto complete and don't actually don't do better. I've tried a few things and usually end up disabling the auto complete features they offer because they are quite pointless for me. What happens is that I get a lot of suggestions for code I definitely don't want drowning out the completions I do want and messing up my editing flow. Aside from having to constantly read through code that is definitely a combination of not what I'm looking for and probably wrong. And it is actually extra work that I don't need in my life. A bit of an anti feature as far as I'm concerned.

But, I actually have been using chat gpt quite a bit. It works for me because it connects to the IDE (instead of interfering with it) and it allows me to easily prompt it to ask questions about my code. This is much more useful to me than an AI second guessing me on every keystroke.

Codex adds to this by being more like a team mate that I can delegate simple things to. It would be nice if it could notify me when it is done or when it needs my input. But otherwise it's nice.

I'm pretty sure the codex and chat gpt desktop UIs might merge soon. There's no good reason to have two modalities here other than that they are probably created by two different teams. Conway's law might be an issue here. But I like what OpenAI has done with their desktop client though and they seem to be on top of that.
by bloomingeek | 2025-06-09 15:14:10+00:00
Almost anything, humane, to lower the earth's population, is fine by me. Do some people go a little overboard? Certainly. Are they having fun and not hurting anyone else at the same time? Excellent!

I think the only entity sabotaging the environment is we humans. Nature deals with what it's given by adapting. I do think the baby carriages are hilarious, unless it's a geriatric pet.
by donnachangstein | 2025-06-09 15:14:27+00:00
People bringing their pet dogs into grocery stores is an especially egregious societal ill. It's a major problem in places like Seattle where dogs outnumber children.

I once watched a woman hold her little dog over the glass at the pizza bar in Whole Foods. Was waiting for the dog to drop a free sausage link onto the pizza below.

Placing dogs into shopping carts is another one. Dogs rub their dirty buttholes on the same surfaces where you later place your fruits and vegetables.
by bitwize | 2025-06-09 15:14:34+00:00
When tragedy befalls an animal, we tend to be more upset about it because animals are innocent. They're not aware like we are and can't make better choices when we can, so when they get caught at the wrong place at the wrong time, it's somehow sadder to a stranger than if it were an adult human.

You see this in cinema. We're relieved that the cat survives in Alien, even though we just watched several humans die horribly. And we kind of feel like John Wick's Roaring Rampage of Revenge is justified after the Russian mafia kills his dog.
by jhedwards | 2025-06-09 15:14:36+00:00
Sure, but my whole point is that humans are _not_ passive input/output systems, we have an active biological system that uses an input/output system as a tool for coordinating with the environment. Thinking is part of the active system, and serves as an input to the language apparatus, and my point is that there is no corollary for that when talking about LLMs.
by bArray | 2025-06-09 15:14:47+00:00
I think they are just trying to get across how critical this infrastructure is, it can't be powered down for several days and unscheduled maintenance is risky.

The other problem they are up against is that there are not many people around that still understand how it works or what the edge cases are.

Upgrading these large distributed systems can be painful. The NHS tried to upgrade their software, over £10 bn later and they abandoned it [1].

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/18/nhs-records-...
by pandler | 2025-06-09 15:15:43+00:00
In addition to not enjoying it, I also don’t learn anything, and I think that makes it difficult to sustain anything in the middle of the spectrum between “I won’t even look at the code; vibes only” and advanced autocomplete.

My experience has been that it’s difficult to mostly vibe with an agent, but still be an active participant in the codebase. That feels especially true when I’m using tools, frameworks, etc that I’m not already familiar with. The vibing part of the process simultaneously doesn’t provide me with any deeper understanding or experience to be able to help guide or troubleshoot. Same thing for maintaining existing skills.
by motorest | 2025-06-09 15:16:34+00:00
> When Americans were “resisting authority” by not wearing masks and keeping their businesses opened despite lockdown orders did you feel the same pride in anti-authority behavior then?

From an outsider's perspective, it's hard to see the people with a militant attitude against basic health and higiene measures as other than narcisist authoritarian fools, who believed their personal whims naturally took priority over anyone's interests and needs. There's a reason why they frequently resorted to attacking and outright assaulting anyone who dared not cater to their demands.

It's very hard to see these covid karens portrayed in the same light as the US founding father's revolutionaries or today's protesters.

I guess the point is to not be consistent or coherent with these remarks. The goal is cynicism. You see Trump's secret police kidnapping people off the streets in broad daylight and when people dare express concern or opposition then the cynical "but covid" remarks flow in to muddy the waters. No, your ICE agent throwing flashbangs into crowded restaurants while kidnapping US citizens is not Ruby Bridges. Why even pretend?