MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-06-03 18:36:05+00:00
yeah, i think what you're getting at is something i think about a lot re: art, which is the delineation and interplay between "art" and "craft".

i value and appreciate craft on its own merit. something intentionally well-done by someone who is informed by practice is valuable in at least some capacity. but not all craft is art (obviously, harder to define), or at least, i don't hold all craft-as-art as equal or as personally valuable.

to me the biggest thing that separates art from craft is the intention behind creating or materializing an idea through craft vs simply creating or materializing an object (digital or physical). i can really appreciate your "artist's statement" behind the mastery of craft (mathematics in this case) as a means to an end to convey a greater concept, if that's what you're getting at.

this is entirely personal, but it's why i value certain forms of craft-centric art less than art that places a higher value on concept. i guess it's a value difference between media and message. it's why i kinda can't stand listening to prog rock like Rush or Dream Theater (technically very impressive! and valuable craft as someone who strives to become better at "Music"), but instead tend to prefer things that don't place the craft so prominently compared to other aspects.

again - that's not me knocking Rush or Dream Theater anything like that. extremely talented people doing extremely impressive things. but on my personal barometer (personal! not forced on anyone else), i guess i just tend to find it harder to enjoy than some other types of music.
by paulorlando | 2025-06-03 18:36:48+00:00
Many forms of ignorance include the failure to recognize something that you experience.

There’s a scene in Michael Lewis’ book The New New Thing that chronicles a tear in a sail on Netscape investor Jim Clark’s mega yacht, the Hyperion. That ripped sail, way up on the 194-foot mast, stops the trip.

The Hyperion had at the time, the most advanced electronic monitoring and control systems. Yet, it took a crew member, a rare sailor among those on board, to notice a strange whipping sound, climb up the mast, and verify that the giant sail was ripping in the wind. While everyone on board was exposed to the same sound, few noticed that it was unusual. Fewer knew how to investigate and determine that the problem existed.

https://unintendedconsequenc.es/acquiring-ignorance/
by sokoloff | 2025-06-03 18:36:53+00:00
I'm a manager of software engineers. I have absolutely no intention of paying engineer B the same as half-as-productive engineer A.

Figuring out the best way to determine productivity is still a hard problem, but I think it's a category error to think that productivity gains go exclusively to the company.

If all (or even most) of the engineers on your team who were previously your equal become durably twice as productive and your productivity remains unchanged, your income prospects will go down, quite possibly to zero.
by hnlmorg | 2025-06-03 18:37:49+00:00
I’m not talking about personal preference. I’m talking about the wider industry.

As I said before, I had a PC back then. I used to write software for them. I know how the hardware and software compared with other systems out there at the same time.

If you were in East Germany at the time, then you wouldn’t have had an accurate view of what was happening in the industry. You would have had your own brands of things because it wasn’t as easy (or even possible) to import western products. And by the time the wall fell and the borders had opened up, PCs had reached parity with their contemporaries. So of course Atari STs and Amigas weren’t common items and PCs seemed like better devices from your perspective. But surely you have to also understand that your experiences aren’t a typical snapshot of the computer industry in the 80s. In fact they’re about as atypical as it gets.

You’d have been better off saying something like “things were a lot different in Soviet Germany” and we could have had a more interesting and productive insight into what life was like for yourself. Instead you’ve been talking about your own experiences like it was a fact of how those products compared to each other (which is where you’re wrong) rather than what devices made it to your borders (which you were correct on). You do understand how they’re different arguments?
by mseepgood | 2025-06-03 18:37:54+00:00
- It has poor visibility, it hides control flow branches in a single statement / expression. That's one of the reasons Go got rid of the ternary operator in favor of an if statement where each branch has to be on its own line.

- It isn't easily breakpointable.

- It favors "bubbling up" as-is over enriching or handling.
by renewiltord | 2025-06-03 18:38:21+00:00
It's just viral memes. Most people are inferior to the average LLM in reasoning and repeat phrases wholesale without comprehension of what it means. Few, if any, have even approached understanding what they are saying. Among those, fewer still have validated their assumptions.

Many years ago we had to deploy an HFT trading strategy on a specific hardware platform because that was the one that was (in this field) closest in network topology to the exchange. I just read the released docs for the platform, and watched a couple of videos where they hinted at certain architectural decisions and then you could work something out from there. Latency was reliable and our strats made money.

But this was public information and we were actually late to it. It had been released for 3 years at the time. And many people I talked to had told me that what they had was as good as it gets. But they were each just repeating what the other guy said.

Many of the things you see on Hacker News are just that: it's deterministic parrotry.
by zahlman | 2025-06-03 18:38:35+00:00
> This happened with the introduction of smartphones too. Every slashdot post had a haughty and upvoted ‘why would i want such a thing!!!’.

I am in my 40s; have never owned a smartphone and still can't imagine wanting one; am constantly surrounded by others who have them and thus am completely aware of their functionality; AMA.
by stego-tech | 2025-06-03 18:38:39+00:00
I mean…you can’t, at least not right now, not for civvies. Let’s consider some of the current countermeasures:

* Flak/Shrapnel/Birdshot: An excellent last-minute defense if you’re calm enough to line up an accurate shot, but data shows that equipping civilians with these sorts of weapons en masse is a bad idea for safety and well-being. That’s a no-go.

* Nets: Popular for defense, but it’s a matter of time before drones adapt by flying under the nets or changing payload to something to dissolve it. A kamikaze drone could also be enough to destroy an opening for more to swarm. In a civilian context, they’re an excellent deterrent for high-population areas, for now, albeit unsightly.

* Buildings: Safest for now, provided the structure is relatively hardened and the windows are secured. But most civilian structures aren’t guarded against explosions or external attacks, and even those that are require a human to vacate it eventually. Once inside however, there’s more options for stopping an attack - for now - like interior netting, small arms with pellets or buckshot, or even lasers to blind the optical sensors. Impractical for civilian deployment at scale, presently, and highly variable.

* Jammers: Good against piloted drones, but as the article points out, the current crop of dev work is geared towards autonomous slaughterbots instead of human decision-making. Jammers are restricted by most countries and, if left functioning after an attack, could hinder first responders. If left on constantly, would disrupt civilian work. So that’s a no-go.

* LASERS! Probably the best deterrent in the short term for civilians, I would wager. A randomized strobe of a high-powered IR laser could devastate a swarm of drones’ optics, making navigation or target acquisition difficult or impossible. Sticking a piece of protective glass on the sensor would likely nullify it long enough to finish its mission, though.

And that’s what distresses me, ultimately. The future depicted in Slaughterbots or Horizon is rapidly approaching, where autonomous drones can murder with impunity and are affordable enough that any threat actor could get their hands on it. Combined with modern databases of humans - faces, biometrics, profiles, locations, habits, schedules - we’re nearing an era where assassination or murder is a drone away.

That is what horrifies me. And if there’s one thing my time in the defense industry taught me, it’s that nobody is trustworthy with that kind of power. Companies making these absolutely will use them (or condone their use) against dissidents, opposition, regulators, and governments. Pandora’s Box is already open, and I don’t think enough folks appreciate the horrors it will bring.
by mediaman | 2025-06-03 18:38:58+00:00
That's the old way of thinking about software economics, where marginal cost is zero.

Marginal cost of LLMs is not zero.

I come from manufacturing and find this kind of attitude bizarre among some software professionals. In manufacturing we care about our tools and invest in quality. If the new guy bought a micrometer from Harbor Freight, found it wasn't accurate enough for sub-.001" work, ignored everyone who told him to use Mitutoyo, and then declared that micrometers "don't work," he would not continue to have employment.
by benatkin | 2025-06-03 18:39:17+00:00
It has obvious annoyances like these deeply nested paths:

quarkdown-quarkdoc-reader/src/main/kotlin/com/quarkdown/quarkdoc/reader/dokka/DokkaHtmlContentExtractor.kt

https://github.com/EnterpriseQualityCoding/FizzBuzzEnterpris...
by NoMoreNicksLeft | 2025-06-03 18:39:27+00:00
They're battery operated, so I think there's a time limit of a few months. Then, you want to be very careful with the infrastructure you leave behind (little pop-open doors/roofs for them to fly out of) to avoid future investigation. You're going to need some practice, your first try will just go to shit perhaps. Opsec while you're setting all this up is still a big deal that amateurs will have trouble getting right. But none of these are particularly insurmountable. With the correct software and careful planning, this will succeed at its goals.

Things you can't help: they will discover the remains of the drones, and also their origin. This evidence will eventually lead back to you (unless you have the aid of a enemy nation-state). Not a big deal if you're dying in a suicide attack, but maybe you don't want the extended vacation in the CIA's worst black ops rendition site.
by rollcat | 2025-06-03 18:39:53+00:00
I return the error to the caller. The caller returns it to their caller. 5 frames up, someone gets a [syscall.EINVAL], and has to figure out what to do about it. Perhaps it's time to log it?

If I had to write my own "100 mistakes" book, "assuming the callee knows what to do" would be somewhere in the top 20, down below "I won't need to debug this".
by dylan604 | 2025-06-03 18:39:56+00:00
I mean, it is kind of a cool work around. There's a lot of motivation in telling someone they can't do something where "hide and watch" is a pretty typical response. The creative thinking that comes up with ideas like this is not something to discourage. It is a shame that the effort is for such a shit purpose, but these "people" are not stupid, and not many other areas offer these kind of challenges.
by mtlmtlmtlmtl | 2025-06-03 18:40:13+00:00
Sure, if you wanna be reductive, absolutist and cynical about it. What you're conveniently leaving out though is that there are varying degrees of trust you can place in the result depending on who did it. And in many cases with people, the odds they screwed it up are so low they're not worth considering. I'm arguing LLMs are fundamentally and architecturally incapable of reaching that level of trust, which was probably obvious to anyone interpreting my comment in good faith.
by alienbaby | 2025-06-03 18:40:29+00:00
Reading the authors comments on the github page I can relate. Over this paast weekend I attempted to use copilot to write some code for a home project and expected it to be terrible, like the last time I tried.

Except, this time it wasn't. It got most things right first time, and fixed things I asked it to.

I was pleasantly surprised.
by yannis | 2025-06-03 18:40:39+00:00
Depends on the user. Basic LaTeX2e/LuaTeX can be learned over 5 days. Guru level like any programming language needs its 10K hours. There are people who have an aversion for backlashes. The main reason for the "\" is perhaps the only char that is not commonly found in texts. Others like ":" re very common in texts. When parsing LaTeX and behind it is Knuth's original TeX engine, the commands are swimming in a sea of text (as the Dragon book says).
by munificent | 2025-06-03 18:40:58+00:00
I'm not trying to split hairs.

I think "theatre" is a fairly well-defined term to refer to live performances of works that are not strictly musical. Gather up all of the professions necessary to put those productions on together.

The number of opportunities for those professions today is much smaller than it was a hundred years ago before film ate the world.

There are only so many audience members and a night they spend watching a film or watching TV or playing videogames is a night they don't spend going to a play. The result is much smaller audiences. And with fewer audiences, there are fewer plays.

Maybe I should have been clearer that I'm not including film and video production here. Yes, there are definitely opportunities there, though acting for a camera is not at all the same experience as acting for a live audience.
by 0j | 2025-06-03 18:41:03+00:00
I don't feel like being dependent on LLM coding tools is much of an issue, you can very easily switch between different vendors. And I hope that open weight models will be "good enough" until we get a monopoly. In any case, even if you are afraid of getting too dependent on AI tools, I think everyone needs to stay up to date on what is happening. Things are changing very quickly right now, so no matter what argument you may have against LLMs, it may just not be valid any more in a few months
by thomastjeffery | 2025-06-03 18:41:28+00:00
Models are Bias

A model is bias, implemented as a collection of statistics that weigh relationships between given tokens. It doesn't deduce or follow logic. It doesn't make or respect categories. It just shows you what in its data set is most familiar to what is in your prompt; where familiarity is defined implicitly by the makeup of the original training corpus, and explicitly by the training weights.

We need to stop talking about models as programs. We need to stop anthropomorphizing models. The only thing a model does is present bias.
by thrance | 2025-06-03 18:41:42+00:00
Please, please, please, do not use auto translators to localize your pages. There's nothing worse than an half-assed translation that was obviously made by a machine.

Auto-translated sentences are awkward and I feel extremely insulted every time someone chooses to impose this garbage watered-down version of their products on me.

Hire a translator or don't localize your site.
by ccorcos | 2025-06-03 18:42:56+00:00
Unless the law forbids working more than 15 hours per week, the numbers will shift around but the supply-demand market equilibrium will remain approximately the same.

If minimum wage goes up 40/15 = 267%, then the price of your coffee will go up 267% because the coffeeshop owner needs to pay 267% more to keep the cafe staffed.

The 40 hour work week is something a cultural equilibrium. But we've all heard of doctors, lawyers, and bankers working 100h weeks which affords them some of the most desirable real estate in the world...
by munificent | 2025-06-03 18:43:29+00:00
> So, any solution would be better than the status quo - and they all would probably agree on that.

The point is that people do not agree that any solution is better than the status quo. In my analogy, if redeveloping that plot of land is quite expensive in tax dollars, people will prefer it be left alone completely so that money can be spent elsewhere than have it squandered on a "solution" that does nothing for them.

Likewise in Go, adding language features has a quite large cost in terms of cognitive load, decision load, implementation cost, etc. After many many surveys and discussions, it's clear that there is no consensus among the Go ecosystem that any error handling strategy is worth that cost.
by whoisyc | 2025-06-03 18:43:32+00:00
The complaints are likely coming from heavy gamers who are more exposed to game prices because they buy more games and are also way more vocal online. Nintendo sold 151 million switches but only 1,391 million games [1], meaning on average a Nintendo switch user bought less than ten games. I doubt spending maybe an extra $20 a year would be considered unacceptable by the average Nintendo customer especially considering these games are never cheap to begin with.

[1] https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/finance/hard_soft/index.htm...
by cdrini | 2025-06-03 18:44:07+00:00
Ah darn. Yeah that is a tricky space, I'm curious to find if there's an incantation to make it actually do the right thing... But knowing next to nothing of your domain makes that impossible for me :P I will note ChatGPT isn't great at very long documents as input; Gemini Pro performs better there. Pulling out the specific section _might_ help, but that's getting into a-lot-of-work territory.

Alas, good luck!
by sterlind | 2025-06-03 18:45:16+00:00
the problem I had with Dafny was the automated prover abruptly driving off a complexity cliff. the strategy is to build "tactic" functions that don't run at runtime but discharge a proof obligation at compile time.

I'd be ecstatic if LLMs could write those tactic functions. Unfortunately, they're not great at the reasoning and preciseness required (plus their training data isn't exactly overflowing with Dafny proofs.)
by MangoToupe | 2025-06-03 18:46:01+00:00
> People that failed to grasp arithmetic cannot reason about numbers to a useful degree.

I think you're extrapolating far too much from such a simple interaction, which doesn't imply anything about ability to reason about numbers, just their ability to compute addition. If you say "if a is larger than b, and b is larger than c, is a larger than c?", you're testing numerical reasoning ability.
by cherryteastain | 2025-06-03 18:46:05+00:00
All they have to do is to expand generics to support generic methods so we can have monadic operations like in C++'s std::expected or Rust's Result, like

func (r Result[T, E]) AndThen[OtherT any](func(T) Result[OtherT, E]) Result[OtherT, E] { ... }

which would enable error handling like

sum := 0 parseAndAdd := func(s string) (func(string)Result[int, error]) { /* returns func which parses and adds to sum */ } return parseAndAdd(a)().AndThen(parseAndAdd(b))

There's a reason why every other language is converging to that sort of functional setup, as it opens up possibilities such as try-transform generics for ranges.
by gsekulski | 2025-06-03 18:46:28+00:00
Shaheds and Ukrainian long-range drones are based on inertial navigation, the drone knows its coordinates and the coordinates of the target it is to hit, and the entire route between them is covered based on data from accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers.

However, the decision-making based on image recognition mentioned in the article is undoubtedly more effective in more changing fields, when the target is moving
by wongarsu | 2025-06-03 18:46:38+00:00
In a pre-drone world you can get explosives, divide them into X equal sized packages, add a timer set to the same point in time to each, then travel around the country hiding them in high-traffic areas.

Yes, that approach is inferior to the drone version. You have to hide them inconspicuously, and a bomb sniffing dog could find them. But you can visit a lot of places in a single European country or US state within one day, and unless the country is already on high alert you can hide something for that time span in public. Yet this doesn't happen. Even regular bombings are rare.

The reasons are manifold: In most places getting explosives isn't actually all that easy (unless you go the homemade route) and is a good method to get attention from authorities. But another factor is that there just doesn't seem to be a large interest in doing that kind of complex attack unless there is already an ongoing civil war. Actual terrorism is fairly rare, and the terrorists tend to be not all that sophisticated.

Are these kinds of drone attacks a scary new possibility? Yes, absolutely! Are they likely to happen? Not really. We might see it as a method to assassinate officials (imagine staging drones at a place where you know the US President will hold a speech in a couple months), but I doubt it will play a major role against the general population
by Anthony-G | 2025-06-03 18:46:42+00:00
I always figured that the president of the European Commission is a member of the European Commission but I wasn’t 100% sure if that is “technically” the case. I did some research and The list of Members of the von der Leyen Commission¹ clarifies that the president – along with the vice-presidents – are included among the 27 members of the “College of Commissioners”.

¹ https://commission.europa.eu/about/organisation/college-comm...
by flkiwi | 2025-06-03 18:46:47+00:00
I tend to agree with the gist of this, namely that the change is here and "AI" presents some huge potential to save me from having to do the tedious stuff. But we do need a bit of a sanity check. I'm in the middle of trying to convince any of the AIs that I have access to to write me some simple Lua. Specifically, I'm trying to write a query that returns a certain subset of pages from the Silverbullet V2 note tool. This isn't particularly difficult, but it's become this hilarious journey to try to get the AI to figure this problem out. Silverbullet is a niche use case, v2 even more so, but a reasonably skilled developer could peruse the API documentation and come up with a pretty good starting point. AI tools? Absolutely insane wrong answers. I finally specifically asked one or two of them not to guess with their answers and they just straight up said "nah, we don't know how to do this."

Point being: there's some real power in these tools, but if the ground is not already well-trodden, they risk creating a huge time sink that could be better served just learning to do the thing yourself.