MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-06-03 13:40:24+00:00
It depends. Frontier coding LLMs have been trained to perform well in an "agentic" loop, where they try things, look at the logs, find alternatives when the first thing didn't work, and so on. There's still debate on how much actual learning is in ICL (in context learning), but the effects are clear for anyone that has tried them. It sometimes works surprisingly well.

I can totally see a way for such a loop to reach a point where it bypasses a poorly design guardrail (i.e. blacklists) by finding alternatives, based on the things it's previously tried in the same session. There is some degree of generalisation in these models, since they work even on unseen codebases, and with "new" tools (i.e. you can write your own MCP on top of existing internal APIs and the "agents" will be able to use them, see the results and adapt "in context" based on the results).
by jhanschoo | 2025-06-03 13:40:36+00:00
> Hayden White's assertion that "history is fiction"

Your comment made me dig up "Historical text as literary artifact".

I have several thoughts on that, but one very important analogy stood out to me and is succinct enough to comment here. In statistics, one talks about the population, collecting data (sampling from the popluation), and building a model from the collected data. You may have guessed that the collected data alone does not typically make much sense, but for the patterns encapsulated by the model, which then has explanatory power; yet among the three classes I mentioned, it is the most fictitious and constructed for a particular goal, the most inauthentic.
by alkonaut | 2025-06-03 13:40:44+00:00
We have had weapons which are autonomous for decades. You launch them consciously then you know that it will find and destroy weapons based on some "intelligence" (A homing missile with a radar you know is likely to hit the thing that reflects the radar waves, whatever that is. There are artillery shells which home in on vehicles and so on). The launch decision by the human means "I'm responsible for this thing hitting and the thing that it finds". The kill/no-kill decision is made at launch time. An AA missile might hit a civilan jet, but there is no way the operator will make a new kill/no-kill decision once it reaches the jet. You made the decision at launch.

That's the same with these drones. The smarter they get, the further away the human goes. Today it might be simple to create autonomous weapons who are instructed to kill vehicles matching various known appearances. That too already exists. The strike on the Russian bombers was reportedly carried out manually, but it would have been pretty easy to have that autonomous, since the targets are huge, stationary, easily recognizable and easy to navigate to in the geography.

If you launch a quadcopter and instruct it to kill any adult human it finds, then that's the same thing. You wouldn't launch it into an area where there is a remote possibility of being any civilians. No difference from firing an artillery shell. If there is a civilian, or a soldier waving a white flag or whatever - there is no cancel button for your artillery shell. The decision to kill whatever is in the other end was made when you fired it. There is literally no difference between firing a million drones and firing a million artillery shells down range. It's your human responsibility and your human consciousness when you make the decision.

I don't think we have had widespread use of autonomous human-targeting drones yet, but it's by no means science fiction today. Just a matter of time. We'll see their use in this conflict.
by falcor84 | 2025-06-03 13:40:59+00:00
You're just disagreeing without offering an explanation - why was the original not a good definition?

As I see it, art is in the eye of the beholder. Splotches of color made by Jackson Pollock and those made by my 3 year old don't differ in their intent (I assume both equally want to express themselves), but in the way that we view the work. I for one don't see any issue with treating a beautiful mountain vista as "a work of art", regardless to whether I believe it was intentionally created by a personified god, or by an RNG in the simulator that's rendering this corner of the universe, or anything in between. I see art.
by john-h-k | 2025-06-03 13:41:25+00:00
Important to note I absolutely do NOT notice the same dangers from bikes as e-bikes. Like yeah some bikes run reds and there are bad cyclists (just as with drivers, etc), but specifically e-bikes frequently cause issue. I have had to dodge n>2 e-bikes riding down the pavement in the last ~2 weeks, and ~0 bikes (for as long as I can really remember). It is very specifically e-bike usage, and they rate at which they move is just not comparable to normal cyclists.

> There's way too much "feels" in this discussion

I agree that hard numbers are useful, but dismissing feeling entirely isn't useful. Feeling safe is an important quality for a city.
by jodrellblank | 2025-06-03 13:41:29+00:00
Similar accident in 1980 when a lost Caesium-137 capsule in a quarry became mixed into a concrete wall of a bedroom in an apartment block in Kramatorsk, killing several people and making others ill, for 8 years before it was found:

https://www.curiousarchive.com/death-in-apartment-85-the-kra...
by techpineapple | 2025-06-03 13:41:31+00:00
GenAI is going to usher in a huge aesthetic shift in the world. I remember when I was a kid sitting at the doctor’s office reading these pamphlets which were obviously hand made in like Microsoft paint using clip art. this is kinda a case of rose colored glasses, but I do remember being aware of how cheesy it was. And now that “professional” quality graphic design is relatively easy to find, on the one hand the world looks “better”, but I kinda miss the dynamic aesthetics. Maybe amateur things should look amateur.

Anyways, I’m also kind of curious, the point of an ad is to stick out right? It will be weird if all ads start adopting the AI slop aesthetic. I imagine that skilled folks will be able to get something more nuanced, but like the world is probably about to converge on an AI art aesthetic in our day to day lives.
by amiga386 | 2025-06-03 13:41:40+00:00
Did you just claim slavery is good?!?!

There are no cases where slavery is good, regardless of who does it or who it's done to. The same goes for genocide, murder, robbery and so on.

The ethic of reciprocity asks you to accept that "X harms Y" is the same as "Y harms X", while the totalitarian propaganda satirised in 1984 asks you to think of "them" and "us" and justifies immorality by claimimg it will benefit "us" and/or harm "them". The same theme ran through Animal Farm as well ("some animals are more equal than others").

It's still say it's doublethink to want to apply surveillance to some group of people but not others.
by tlewisspry | 2025-06-03 13:42:03+00:00
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by 0_____0 | 2025-06-03 13:42:10+00:00
If you're not living in NYC and haven't visited recently, you should know that an incredible amount of e-bike traffic is Delivery Network Company (Doordash et al.) 'workers' who don't seem to abide by any of the same rules of the road as anyone else, cars and cyclists alike. They all ride seemingly the same make of Chinese e-bike, usually wrapped in tape and random tubes and other stuff. It's extremely NYC, and often these folks get included in the general description of e-bike users without distinguishing them from the general population.
by Jensson | 2025-06-03 13:42:14+00:00
> LLMs immediately and completely displace the bread-and-butter replacement-tier illustration and design work that makes up much of that profession, and does so by effectively counterfeiting creative expression. An coding agent writes a SQL join or a tree traversal. The two things are not the same.

In what way are these two not the same? It isn't like icons or ui panels are more original than the code that runs the app.

Or are you saying only artists are creating things of value and it is fine to steal all the work of programmers?
by AnimalMuppet | 2025-06-03 13:42:25+00:00
As far as I can see, Russia has three possible responses.

1. Nuke a Ukrainian city.

2. Launch an all-out conventional war.

3. Continue more or less what they have been doing, just upping the intensity or more targeting civilians or something, to make a "statement".

Of those, #3 changes very little. #2 Putin won't like, because there (I trust) there are limits to the number of casualties he can absorb without triggering domestic unrest, and because it would reveal the "special military operation" to be an actual war, and not (so far) a success.

#1... If I understand correctly, Russian force doctrine calls for using their nukes when they have lost 20% of their delivery mechanisms, or when their homeland is under immediate threat. Losing 40% (perhaps an overestimate) of their strategic bombers isn't quite at the threshold, but it's getting into the neighborhood.

Problem is, Putin is trying to take Ukraine. Nuking it - even one city - diminishes the value of what Putin wants to take.

So option 1 is... I wish it were more clear that Putin will not do that. I still think it to be less likely than not, but it is far less clear-cut than I would wish.
by jeffbee | 2025-06-03 13:42:31+00:00
I think you'd probably better just get over your aesthetic reflex. Getting the family bike moms into your coalition is important to the future of American cycle advocacy.

In Berkeley the local safe streets advocacy org is now easily 80% ebike moms. I could bore them with my story of how back in my day (ten entire years ago) I took my kids to school on a manual-pedal longtail, but I don't.
by paddy_m | 2025-06-03 13:42:31+00:00
Thanks, I'm starting to understand. So Display Postscript was useful because it let you know that what you put on the screen as a programmer would be what's printed?

And it allowed for cool graphics effects like custom strokes and fills.

So that primarily matters for stuff you want to print. It wouldn't matter as much for assembling a UI.

How does windows handle this stuff?
by pixl97 | 2025-06-03 13:42:32+00:00
>You cant use history to predict the future.

I mean this statement is somewhat false.

If I show you a picture of a cup from 100 ms ago and it's in midair probability favors that the cup will be on it's way to the ground to its demise. Statistically this will be true.

History is filled with analogous times where by watching the present you can make predictions far better than flipping a coin.
by wpietri | 2025-06-03 13:42:38+00:00
One of the things I think is going on here is a sort of stone soup effect. [1]

Core to Ptacek's point is that everything has changed in the last 6 months. As you and I presume he agree, the use of off-the-shelf LLMs in code was kinda garbage. And I expect the skepticism he's knocking here ("stochastic parrots") was in fact accurate then.

But it did get a lot of people (and money) to rush in and start trying to make something useful. Like the stone soup story, a lot of other technology has been added to the pot, and now we're moving in the direction of something solid, a proper meal. But given the excitement and investment, it'll be at least a few years before things stabilize. Only at that point can we be sure about how much the stone really added to the soup.

Another counterfactual that we'll never know is what kinds of tooling we would have gotten if people had dumped a few billion dollars into code tool improvement without LLMs, but with, say, a lot of more conventional ML tooling. Would the tools we get be much better? Much worse? About the same but different in strengths and weaknesses? Impossible to say.

So I'm still skeptical of the hype. After all, the hype is basically the same as 6 months ago, even though now the boosters can admit the products of 6 months ago sucked. But I can believe we're in the middle of a revolution of developer tooling. Even so, I'm content to wait. We don't know the long term effects on a code base. We don't know what these tools will look like in 6 months. I'm happy to check in again then, where I fully expect to be again told: "If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago †, you’re not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing." At least until then, I'm renewing my membership in the Boring Technology Club: https://boringtechnology.club/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup
by kentonv | 2025-06-03 13:42:42+00:00
I've noticed this too.

I remember hearing somewhere that humans have a limited capacity in terms of number of decisions made in a day, and it seems to fit here: If I'm writing the code myself, I have to make several decisions on every line of code, and that's mentally tiring, so I tend to stop and procrastinate frequently.

If an LLM is handling a lot of the details, then I'm just making higher-level decisions, allowing me to make more progress.

Of course this is totally speculation and theories like this tend to be wrong, but it is at least consistent with how I feel.
by jerf | 2025-06-03 13:42:52+00:00
I'm not rabidly pro-bike like some HN posters, but I'm at least in favor of the concept.

But I would exhort city bikers and e-bikers, I know it feels convenient to flip back and forth between being a "car" and a "pedestrian" at a whim, but please don't. You're generally supposed to be a "car", at least where I live. And the step where you were a pedestrian a moment ago and just come wandering into my lane because you're a "car" now is probably about the most dangerous thing you do on a daily basis. Pick a lane, literally and metaphorically.

I'm aware of this issue so I'm watching you like a hawk if you're doing this, but I'd advise against betting that everyone else is watching that well. That ped->car transition is very rough on everyone around you.

I'll also agree that cars need to be a lot more aware of bikes in general, but this particular issue is definitely on the bikers.
by osohq | 2025-06-03 13:42:54+00:00
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by john-h-k | 2025-06-03 13:43:13+00:00
Presumably doing it via the ticketing system is simpler - so why would they use the more controversial & more complex system to do it if the other works?

Of course its possible this is just being draconian or whatever, but if I were a betting man I'd wager they are doing this because it is in some way necessary

Necessary does not imply fair, or correct, or anything. Just that I would be surprised if they are doing it if the simpler alternative works
by haswell | 2025-06-03 13:43:16+00:00
> why are drivers of automobiles not getting this treatment?

FTA

> “Since e-bikes do not require a license, drivers of e-bikes can simply ignore their traffic summons with no repercussions whatsoever, making any enforcement futile,” the police spokesperson said. However, the new requirement that cyclists appear in court, or face an arrest warrant if they fail to, creates “a strong incentive to show up in court.”

To answer the “why not do this to drivers?” question, the answer is arguably that the enforcement mechanisms for drivers were more effective than the enforcement mechanisms for bikes. Whether or not this justifies what they’re doing is another question.
by johnecheck | 2025-06-03 13:43:27+00:00
That was a pretty funny little maneuver from Google.

Google: Look at our new chatbot! It's called Bard, and it's going to blow ChatGPT out of the water!

Bard: Hallucinates JWST achievements when prompted for an ad.

Google: Doesn't fact check, posts the ad

Alphabet stock price: Drops 16% in a week

Google: Look at our new chatbot! It's called Gemini, and it's going to blow ChatGPT out of the water!
by blueflow | 2025-06-03 13:43:29+00:00
When you form a mental model and then write code from that, thats a very lossy transformation. You can write comments and documentation to make it less lossy, but there will be information that is lost to an reviewer, who has to spend great effort to recreate it. If it is unknown how code is supposed to behave, then it becomes physically impossible to verify it for correctness.

This is less a matter of "mindset", but more a general problem of information.
by sp0rk | 2025-06-03 13:43:31+00:00
As somebody that was using Windows XP up to its EoL, I am fairly certain I was in the minority (at least amongst home users.) I don't think anybody I knew was using XP by the time its end came. The only reason I was still on it at the time was a complete lack of income which meant using very old hand-me-down hardware.

The situation with Windows 10 feels quite different, because most people I know that use Windows are on Windows 10 currently.
by Firehawke | 2025-06-03 13:43:42+00:00
It means that Microsoft won't suddenly disable your Windows 11 install's ability to update. Microsoft has already, on at least one occasion, disabled further updates for computers that don't meet their specified requirements in regards to processor and TPM.

A lot of the users of 10 we're talking about wouldn't know how to get Windows 11 working again after updates were stripped again.
by consp | 2025-06-03 13:43:49+00:00
We have the same issue (Netherlands) though it is sort of condoned if you behave like an ebike (max 25, pedal only). Strange thing is the pedelecs are under the heavy moped category which must use the roads but in general is about the speed of the lighter category which can and mostly must use the cycling paths. I guess it has to do with the standardization of EU rules with the A(M) categories of driver license.

Even weirder thing is the disabled peoples mini cars must use the cycling path and park on the curb. (NOT the bigger 45kph things which look like fiat pandas in size, those are never allowed on any cycling path despite people doing so). Though I guess since you have to be disabled to get one that sort of makes sense for safety reasons.
by 0xAFFFF | 2025-06-03 13:44:05+00:00
I've been pondering switching to Linux for my mother in-law that has a pretty limited use of her computer (online groceries, emails mostly) and their page is pretty unconvincing in that case. I mean yeah OK, you guys have extensive customization, virtual desktops and all the bells and whistles that appeal to power users, but is it easy to put it in the hands of someone else without having to do customer support all year long?
by questerzen | 2025-06-03 13:44:44+00:00
I realised the backtracker can stop early as soon as all squares are filled in (doh!). As a result the timings have changed dramatically.

Database generation: 25s; Sequential solver - all 'solvable' problems or abandon: 52s; Backtracking solver - all solutions: 19s; Database Lookup - all solutions: 16s;

Key takeaway is that the backtracker is not only much simpler, its actually much faster (for a computer at least) and almost as fast as looking up the answer in a table.
by fifticon | 2025-06-03 13:45:13+00:00
erh, the option with the house, sounds rather expensive? my day-to-day work regards professional building cost estimation software, and I would claim people try to do a lot of work to avoid having to do that. I'm not saying they don't sometimes end up doing it anyway, but in my perspective, the larger the scale, the more this is aggressively avoided as much as possible. Similarly, I encounter a lot of comparisons where "we" software people are told to be either more or less like the building people. What I do see though, is that building people perpetually tend to miss out on a lot of data optimisations / pipelines in the building project flow. They keep talking about wanting to do this, but in practice end up entering a lot of data from scratch multiple times. One of the culprits I see, is that the people who should have shaped the data for this, have no economic motive to do so - "why should we do that, it will only be a problem for X other people at a later stage we are not involved in".
by runarberg | 2025-06-03 13:45:13+00:00
> Ask the AI to give me a markdown to html converter, good2go

Why would you do that? There are dozens of libraries which do exactly that. Instead of AI you can ask npm or pip, heck you can even ask CRAN[1].

1: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/markdown/index.html
by black_puppydog | 2025-06-03 13:45:37+00:00
being a pro-bike activist in a very car-friendly french city, this argument comes up in every. single. comment section. no matter whether there's anything related to actual bikes in there, or whether accidents were the topic at all. Literally in comments on articles like "hey we're organizing a bike ride for kids this weekend."

So forgive me if it's a bit hard to take this seriously. I'll still try to address this because for once I'm not handicapped by my lacking French. :D

The reason you don't feel as threatened by cars as you are by bikes is (without knowing you in person) twofold:

1. As societies, being collectively used to cars and accepting things we'd never accept in any other context when things relate to cars. Search the webs for "motonormativity" if you want the slightly more academic take on this. Since you were a kid, you were probably taught how to "co-"inhabit the road with cars. I put the quotes there because in most places, it's really cars who inhabit, and everyone else who's accepted onto the road, provided they don't impede on drivers' comfort.

2. Infrastructure is built in most places to more or less cleanly segregate pedestrians from cars. There's nothing stopping us from doing the same for bikes and pedestrians, but in most places we don't. Even though inside cities bikes can and do often move faster than cars, and therefore have a higher speed differential wrt pedestrians, their infrastructure is often woefully inadequate to deal with this. Here in southern france they even often put bikes explicitly on the sidewalk, which comes down to a "no biking" policy. Even where bike lanes are put in place, they're often ill-conceived. It turns out, the bike/pedestrian interaction in traffic is not at all the same as the car/pedestrian interaction. The Netherlands and other places have decades of experience in this by now, yet somehow this knowledge is not actively pulled by hesitant local authorities.

I was already quite interested in all of this but recently I also read "Movement" by Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet [1] and I loved it. If you're wondering why certain things in cities suck so hard, IMHO it's a good start.

[1]: https://islandpress.org/books/movement

edit: had swapped "cars" and "bikes" in one sentence, that made no sense. :D