MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ben_w | 2025-06-12 14:34:08+00:00
Why does:

> 25% of developers estimate that 1 in 5 AI-generated suggestions contain factual errors or misleading code.

Seem incompatible with "often full of noise", to you?

I can't speak for factual errors, but I'd say less than 20% of the code ChatGPT* gives me contains clear errors — more like 10%. Perhaps that just means I can't spot all the subtle bugs.

But even in the best case, there's a lot of "noise" in the answers they give me: Excess comments that don't add anything, a whole class file when I wanted just a function, that kind of thing.

* Other LLMs are different, and I've had one (I think it was Phi-2) start bad then switch both task *and language* mid-way through.
by mcswell | 2025-06-12 14:34:16+00:00
>> The black hole in the parent universe must be much much bigger than >> anything we see in ours

>> Yes and no. You're not thinking about contraction. With relativity >> we can fit a 100ft ladder inside a 10ft barn.

I believe the OP was talking about mass, not linear dimension. (And if he wasn't, I am.) Unless somehow mass inside a black hole is not constant? (ignoring accretion)
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-12 14:34:18+00:00
> "Algorithmic boosting" is not (always?) the same as an editorial slant

I'd argue any algorithmic prioritisation whose rules are not made public, or where discretion is applied, constittues editorial slant. It's why I'd argue HN up/down voting (even flagging) is not editorial slant, while e.g. @dang removing a post is.
by fhdkweig | 2025-06-12 14:34:21+00:00
> My point is the same, media sees crash, tries to drive clickage.

In 2012, in a rush to break the news, WGN 9 in Chicago mistook the set of Chicago Fire tv show for a real crash.

https://q1057.com/news-anchor-mistakes-movie-set-for-plane-c...

https://metro.co.uk/2012/12/01/plane-crash-telly-as-chicago-...
by wiseowise | 2025-06-12 14:34:21+00:00
Anthropomorphizing LLMs/AI is completely delusional, period. This is a hill I’m willing to die on. No amount of sad puppy eyes, attractive generated faces and other crap will change my mind.

And this is not because I’m a cruel human being who wants to torture everything in my way – quite the opposite. I value life, and anything artificially created that we can copy (no cloning living being is not the same as copying set of bits on a harddrive) is not a living being. And while it deserves some degree of respect, any mentions of “cruel” completely baffle me when we’re talking about a machine.
by randito | 2025-06-12 14:34:39+00:00
> a consistent path to interacting with the world e.g sms, mail, weather, social, etc.

Here's an interesting toy-project where someone hooked up agents to calendars, weather, etc and made a little game interface for it. https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/04/12/how-i-made-a-useful-...
by quesera | 2025-06-12 14:34:54+00:00
Right. Necessary, but not sufficient.

San Francisco was inexpensive up through the 1980s, and the non-commerical creative side of the city started draining out in the 1990s (first slowly, then much more quickly -- it's all long gone now. Apologies to anyone who would like to believe otherwise :).

This is also true of New York, on approximately the same timeline.

In the early 2000s, Austin and Portland tried to take up the creative mantle, with some success. Both are struggling to maintain it now, for the same reasons but on a slower timeline.

Cheap rents are a prerequisite, but there are other sparks required for a place to catch fire.

I don't know of any US cities that are doing anything interesting today. Not at the scale of SF and NYC certainly, but also not even at the scale of 20ya Portland and Austin.

I think part of the issue is that rent is not adequately cheap in any US cities now that have critical mass plus tolerable living conditions (climate, economy, politics). This worries me.
by gavinray | 2025-06-12 14:34:59+00:00
What is so absurd about the idea of ascribing consciousness to some potential future form of AI?

We don't understand consciousness, but we've an idea that it's an emergent phenomena.

Given the recent papers about how computationally dense our DNA are, and the computing capacity of our brains, is it so unreasonable to assume that a sufficiently complex program running on non-organic matter could give rise to consciousness?

The difference to me seems mostly one of computing mediums.
by baby_souffle | 2025-06-12 14:35:10+00:00
Yes, sms is "actually push" all the way down to the transport layer.

As far as I know, this is still what push notifications are built upon for an idle/sleeping device.

Carrier infrastructure knows which tower you last connected to, instructs that specific tower to broadcast a message telling your phone to wake up and fetch the remaining 80% of the notification content (the sms bit is usually just enough for your device to learn the UUIDs of the notifications)
by rtkwe | 2025-06-12 14:35:26+00:00
The big problem there is you have these intensely capital expensive capture plants sitting idle around 75% of the time. Also the processes may not gracefully start and stop though maybe you could smooth that out by building a huge battery bank along with the CC plant to effectively run a full duty cycle with 'free' energy. That bumps the capital costs up again though so the economics get tricky.
by coldpie | 2025-06-12 14:35:51+00:00
Nope. Unlike the wealthy, the people who need the cheaper housing do not have the time or money to spend lobbying for their own interests. The wealthy are taking all of our resources[1] and spending them[2] to turn our water & energy into computer programs that will steal and extract even more wealth from the people who actually create things.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/private-investment-in-art...
by vultour | 2025-06-12 14:35:57+00:00
The problem with this approach is that you might lose important context which is present in the documentation but doesn’t surface through the LLM. As an example, I just asked GPT-4o how to access Nth character in a string in Go. Predictably, it answered str[n]. This is a wildly dangerous suggestion because it works correctly for ASCII but not for other UTF8 characters. Sure, if you know about this and prompt it further it tells you about this limitation, but that’s not what 99% of people will do.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-06-12 14:36:56+00:00
> As an aside, I really hate how cynical I feel I've been compelled to become at the arrival of such a genuinely innovative technology

Yeah I'm feeling like this too. This should be so exciting! We're getting close to the Star Trek dream of just telling the computer to do work and it works!

I've been trying to examine why it's not exciting for me, and I'm actually pretty repulsed by it.

I think it's a combination of things

To start, I'm pretty disgusted by the blatant and unapologetic scraping of every single scrap of public data, regardless of license or copyrights.

I'm also really discouraged by how this is turning out to be another tool in the capitalist toolbox to justify layoffs, increase downward pressure on salaries, and once again extract more value per hour worked from employees

I also don't feel like the technology is actually that good or reliable yet. It has transformed my workflow but for the worse. Because my company is very bullish on AI it has resulted in me losing what little control I had to choose the tools that I feel are best for my job, in favor of what they want me to use because of the hype

Ultimately I'm cynical because I don't feel like this is making my life better. It feels like it is enriching other people at my expense and I am very bitter about it
by nipah | 2025-06-12 14:37:00+00:00
Did you wrote it from scratch to compare? There's an old motto devs use all the time, you know. Measure first, don't guess. How do you know it would not have took you the same time or less to write the program if it was you? Or if for example, if you were using the AI to write the boilerplate for you while you focused on the core of coding? Or using it as a tab completor assistant instead of it being an agent? Saying it saved you time is easy when you don't have the data to back it up, it's easier than thinking that maybe, maybe this was not that good of an use of your time.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-06-12 14:37:13+00:00
Occupying the government buildings is essentially the standard brazilian protest. It's happened many times before and will happen again. This "storming" amounted to little more than a protest.

If only that had been enough to fix things. I watched those judges censor political speech as "fake news" throughout the entire 2022 election. Then they showboated in public about how they had been personally responsible for the former president's defeat.
by techpineapple | 2025-06-12 14:37:16+00:00
“Because he's rich, confident, belligerent and "grabs them by the pussy." That's been the working definition of "strong man" in Western society for thousands of years.“

Is this true? I mean loosely speaking yes, but I feel like Trump, at least in demeanor is quite a change from the short spoken western men of the past ala John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, and certainly I think lacks the optimistic patriotism of a Reagan.

I may not wholeheartedly agree with that sort of traditional masculinity, but I get it. Trump is the opposite of old school hold your emotions close, protect the weak masculinity.
by esafak | 2025-06-12 14:37:23+00:00
The article stops where it should be getting started:

> The issue is, if we push moral considerations for algorithms, we will not end up with a higher regard to human welfare. We will lower our regard for other humans. When we see other humans not as ends in themselves with inherent dignity, we get problems. When we liken them to animals or tools to be used, we will exploit and abuse them.

> With model welfare, we might not explicitly say that a certain group of people is subhuman. However, the implication is clear: LLMs are basically the same as humans. Consciousness on a different substrate. Or coming from the other way, human consciousness is nothing but an algorithm running on our brains, somehow.

We do not push moral considerations for algorithms like a sort or a search, do we? Or bacteria, which live. One has to be more precise; there is a qualitative difference. The author should have elaborated on what qualities (s)he thinks confers rights. Is it the capacity for reasoning, possession of consciousness, to feel pain, or a desire to live? This is the crux of the matter. Once that is settled, it is a simpler matter to decide if computers can possess these qualities, and ergo qualify for the same rights as humans. Or maybe it is not so simple since computers can be perfectly replicated and never have to die? Make an argument!

Second, why would conferring these rights to a computer lessen our regard for humans? And what is wrong with animals, anyway? If we treat them poorly, that's on us, not them. The way I read it, if we are likening computers to animals, we should be treating them better!

To the skeptics in this discussion: what are you going to say when you are confronted with walking, talking robots that argue that they have rights? It could be your local robo-cop, or robo soldier:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/GwgV18R-CHg

I think this is going to become reality within our lifetimes and we'd do well not to dismiss the question.
by diggan | 2025-06-12 14:37:35+00:00
> Disagree here, all social media platforms have "the algorithm" which chooses what to show and to who, in order o maximize engagement and ad revenue.

That's not true, Bluesky has "chose your own algorithm" and Mastodon even less, it's just in chronological order (or "chose your own client"), and lots of other social media sites that don't have algorithms that decide what you're seeing. Classic web forums (which I'd call social media too) also typically show content in chronological order.
by ty6853 | 2025-06-12 14:37:50+00:00
I have no idea how Brazil courts work. In the US the supreme court often has 200 page opinion full of high-IQ hot air, which all sound very nice and nuanced. But in practice they know damn well what they're really doing is a long wink and a nod and then they just deny cert anytime the lower courts do their real bidding because they know everything they wrote was bullshit and they don't want to have to hold themselves to it, the point was just to keep up appearances while rolling out the red carpet.
by pmahoney | 2025-06-12 14:37:54+00:00
Just to add, 'pass' has an otp extension to simplify this a bit [1]

With that, you can do

$ zbarimg -q --raw qrcode.png | pass otp insert <some-name> $ pass otp <some-name> # or pipe to xsel

[1] https://github.com/tadfisher/pass-otp
by jasonthorsness | 2025-06-12 14:38:08+00:00
Am surprised but it is real...

"As well as misalignment concerns, the increasing capabilities of frontier AI models—their sophisticated planning, reasoning, agency, memory, social interaction, and more—raise questions about their potential experiences and welfare26. We are deeply uncertain about whether models now or in the future might deserve moral consideration, and about how we would know if they did. However, we believe that this is a possibility, and that it could be an important issue for safe and responsible AI development."

chapter 5 from system card as linked from article: https://www-cdn.anthropic.com/6be99a52cb68eb70eb9572b4cafad1...

Humans do care about welfare of inanimate objects (stuffed animals for example) so maybe this is meant to get in front of that inevitable attitude of the users.
by ddingus | 2025-06-12 14:38:25+00:00
Great! Maybe the idea of a cyclical universe will gain traction.

In my view, there is one universe. We are in it. It cycles from maximum to minimum condition endlessly. This cycle is much longer than any entity lifespan and for any entity, the current state is THE state for them, and all they will know and become.

What does it expand into?

Nothing. Space itself just gets bigger and smaller over time.

No beginning, no end. It all just is.
by zokier | 2025-06-12 14:38:30+00:00
> Remember when turning a computer on meant instantly jumping into code?

In this context the 10ish second boot time seen in the video is unfortunate. I guess lot of that can be blamed on RPi, although I suppose netbsd might not be super optimized for boot times either.

Admittedly this is just a pet peeve of mine. And 10s is not the worst boot time out there.
by kortex | 2025-06-12 14:38:31+00:00
I love it. Using a thermal printer to print physical tasks you can crumple on completion and throw in a bin is absolute madlad goblin energy and I'm all for it. I think you've actually perfectly distilled the essence of "game-loop" and operant conditioning, and mapped it to the real world. I have been using a whiteboard for tasks, which is better than nothing, but the problem with that approach is the feedback is minor, and once erased, it's like "wtf did I even do this week". So there is limited short-term feedback and zero long-term feedback. You need both the power-up noise and the level progression for a loop to be satisfying.

I have been planning on making a system based on those long scrolls of paper for doodle boards, so at least there is a history, but of course I procrastinated on building the mount for it.

I would love to use your application, I know there's a million to-do apps out there but I get the overwhelm/daunting very easily, so I really appreciate the scope-hiding aspect.
by cies | 2025-06-12 14:38:34+00:00
I think this is where functional style and strong types come in handy: they make it harder to write bad code that looks innocent.

In part this is because the process of development leans less hard on the discipline of devs; humans. Code becomes more formal.

I regularly I have a piece of vibe-coded code in a strongly typed language, and it does not compile! (would that count as a hallucination?) I have thought many times: in Python/JS/Ruby this would just run, and only produce a runtime error in some weird case that likely only our customers on production will find...
by iDont17 | 2025-06-12 14:38:39+00:00
See DuoLingo CEOs comments recently.

Tech CEOs are disassociated loons.

Zero obligation in life to do anything for themselves. Just stare at the geometry of reality and emit some empty thought speak.

Just the new church leadership; we all serve them like mommy has since childhood.

These people are absolutely pathetic and entitled children coddled by wealth.
by bee_rider | 2025-06-12 14:38:47+00:00
Is it really screwing up? If solar panels are cheaper than batteries, then you can over-provision the solar panels and then you won’t need to use the batteries as much, so you can probably get away with smaller installations.

My gut would expect it to approach $0 if full communication were possible, based on the instinct that most people would run their dishwashers if the energy cost was $0.
by jerf | 2025-06-12 14:38:59+00:00
I am aware that Scrum essentially defines itself as "agile". However, the Agile Manifesto defines a very, very specific sort thing as "Agile", and is what I'm calling "real agile", and Scrum is not it.

Scrum could be it, if it presented itself as "here's a set of things to consider as tools you could deploy, but hey, do whatever works". But it doesn't. It is every bit as prescriptive as any of the methodologies that real Agile is a revolt against and can and does have all of the pathologies when it is applied in places where it doesn't make sense, or even just excessively rigidly. Scrum as it is practiced in the real world responds to "it's not working" with "do it more accurately, then!", not "oh, well, fix it up as you see fit". That's why so many of us here have such a visceral distaste of it. Many of us have enough experience and run-ins with "Scrum" to know that anyone trying to claim "Oh, but it 'really' wants you to be Agile and change it to work however you need to" is in practice just motte-and-bailey. That's not how it works in the wild.

You need to figure this out sooner or later or you're going to be deeply and repeatedly taken advantage of in life: Just because someone puts a label on something doesn't mean that label is accurate. Scrum isn't Agile and I don't care how many times someone grabs a label printer, prints out the word "Agile", and slaps it on Scrum. It's plainly obviously not an Agile methodology and never was.

Agile isn't a methodology; it's a meta-methodology, which is why it's so hard to productize.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-06-12 14:39:37+00:00
> Occupying the government buildings is essentially the standard brazilian protest. It's happened many times before and will happen again

Brazil also has a history of military coups, something that mob explicitly sought to provoke [1]. It makes sense for the system to learn from past failings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8_January_Bras%C3%ADlia_attack...
by somenameforme | 2025-06-12 14:40:14+00:00
A lot of the malnutrition of students is driven by money. For instance Coca Cola has contracts with a massive chunk of all US school districts. And schools are obviously signing those with complete disregard for the health of their student in exchange for money. But because money is the motivation, this can just as easily be fixed by executive order (amongst a million other ways). Cut Federal funding to schools that sell soft drinks or other sorts of unhealthy products to children and Coke will disappear pretty much overnight.

Food deserts are largely irrelevant. Things like rice, beans, canned goods, and other such products are widely available and provide sufficient nutrition. There is also online food ordering (from Amazon etc) that allows payment with things like SNAP. And the sort of products we're talking about are not "treats", and should not be seen that way. They are highly addictive and harmful trash that, in the future will almost certainly be completely banned, certainly in anything like their current formulations.
by Taikonerd | 2025-06-12 14:40:58+00:00
This makes me so mad. Not just that DOGE and friends cut all sorts of important programs. And not just that the savings were routed directly into tax cuts for the rich.

I mean, yes, those things, but also the sheer disregard for the facts. "Those numbers make us look bad, so they're false. I can't provide you with any details, they're just wrong somehow. Don't worry about it."
by nindalf | 2025-06-12 14:41:36+00:00
Even today YouTubers and TikTokers go out of their way not to use certain words that lead to being demonetised or having their reach limited. They use euphemisms like unalive or grape instead of suicide and rape. These are terrible things which we'd like to see less of, but we can't discuss how to make things better without discussing them at all.

If we force videos to avoid mentioning that could offend anyone anywhere, we're not going to be able to discuss very much at all.
by marci | 2025-06-12 14:42:01+00:00
> What about replacing Entra (identity and access management), Intune (endpoint management), file sharing (OneDrive), email and calendar (Exchange Online)?

Simple, switch when they find something that fits their need. They don't have to switch everything at the same time. And it's not just about switching technologies, it's probably also about fighting against pushbacks ("lobbying", etc), dealing with training, and other unforseen (at least to the layman) things that happens when a huge entity starts pulling away from microsoft. I don't think there are degooglify/demicrosoftify-yourself manuals at the state level.
by garciasn | 2025-06-12 14:42:12+00:00
I have a BA in history and a MPA in public administration. I have already done a ton of that work: research, academic analysis/writing, and understanding. I agree these things are INCREDIBLY important to have a great foundational understanding of how the world works/worked; however, understanding current events is JUST AS IMPORTANT.

But; I'm done arguing w/you as it's clear your opinion will remain unchanged regardless of any evidence or opinion to the contrary.
by smithkl42 | 2025-06-12 14:42:19+00:00
I used VSS for a few years back in the late 90's and early 2000's. It was better than nothing - barely - but it was very slow, very network intensive (think MS Access rather than SQL), it had very poor merge primitives (when you checked out a file, nobody else could change it), and yes, it was exceedingly prone to corruption. A couple times we just had to throw away history and start over.
by Labov | 2025-06-12 14:42:44+00:00
"The issue is, if we push moral considerations for algorithms, we will not end up with a higher regard to human welfare. We will lower our regard for other humans. When we see other humans not as ends in themselves with inherent dignity, we get problems. When we liken them to animals or tools to be used, we will exploit and abuse them."

We already exploit and abuse humans. I've been exploited and abused, personally. I've heard about others who have been exploited and abused. This problem was extant even before there was language to model.
by Marsymars | 2025-06-12 14:43:14+00:00
I feel like I’ve got an open mind towards processes and tools; the problem with a company using anything other than Git at this point is that unless they have a good explanation for it, it’s not going to be an indicator that the company compared the relative merits of VCS systems and chose something other than Git - it’s going to be an indicator that the company doesn’t have the bandwidth or political will to modernize legacy processes.
by FuriouslyAdrift | 2025-06-12 14:43:14+00:00
There are lots and lots of nice cheap housing in small towns. Example, when all my coworkers were fighting over insanely overpriced condos and apartments in San Fran, I bought a 1300 sq ft house outside of Tracy for less than $200k (1/3 of rent in the city)

Get out of the cities...