MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by perlgeek | 2025-06-17 10:10:13+00:00
Y'know what, I'd have no problem paying for my "core services" if it were that easy. What I have a problem with is paying for potentially so many services:

* phone

* email

* whatsapp, because others use it

* signal, because it's actually good

* telegram, because that one group is on it

* my todo list app

* duolingo

* a good mapping app without ads

... and so on. And the same for my kids. And before you blink, you suddenly pay several hundred dollars per month.

Aka the slippery slope.

One of the problems seems to be that everything comes with transaction costs, so for example Signal cannot easily charge me a single dollar per month, which I suspect is a price point that would work for both me and them (if every one of their users paid it).
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 10:10:21+00:00
As a die-hard Lisper, I still disagree. Yes, Lisp can go further than anything else to eliminate boilerplate, but you're still locked in a single representation. The moment you switch your task into something else - especially something that actually cares about the boilerplate you hidden, and not the logic you exposed - and now you're fighting an even harder battle.

That's what I mean by Pareto frontier: the choices made by various current-generation languages and coding methodologies (including choices you as a macro author makes, too), are all promoting readability for some tasks, at the expense of readability for other tasks. We're just shifting the difficulty around the time of day, not actually eliminating it.

To break through that and actually make progress, we need to embrace working in different, problem-specific views, instead of on the underlying shared single-source-of-truth plaintext code directly.
by hulitu | 2025-06-17 10:10:32+00:00
> And in my experience, users are too stupid to handle fine-grained permissions. Every time I see my parents, I need to go over all of the websites they've somehow managed to permit notifications for (despite my disabling that shit by default),

so the user is at fault because the browser ignores the user's setting

> and I'm not the only one. Research shows people will click "allow" without thinking

It is because "app developers" insist until the user gives up. Earlier was " ok and " cancel", then " ok and don't ask me again" and now " ok and ask me later".

> and leave apps running and updating in the background for months before cleaning house.

Apps which run by default in the backgroung, with no possibility to stop them. Why does Android does not respect my "force stop" ? Why does it restart the app ?

But yes, blaming the "idiot user" is the way to better UX.
by gchamonlive | 2025-06-17 10:10:48+00:00
Totally get your point. And I feel the same way.

It's really hard to maintain a healthy state of mind when there is a dude overdosing with several paramedics trying to stabilise him. I still remember that time and it hurts me every time I think about it.

But there are smaller raves, with 50-500 people, where I think this feeling is maintained.

I'd maybe recommend avoiding what we call here "commercial raves" and go to "pvt's", private raves, which are not private, just with more modest economic goals.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-06-17 10:11:16+00:00
Yup, you can always tell LLMs just from the ridiculous output most of the time. Like 8-20 sentences minimum, for the most basic thing.

Even Gemini/gpt4o/etc are all guilty of this. Maybe they'll tighten things up at some point - if I ask an assistant a simple question like "is it possible to put apples into a pie?" what I want is "Yes, it is possible to put apples into a pie. Would you like to know more?"

But not "Yes, absolutely — putting apples into a pie is not only possible, it's classic! Apple pie is one of the most well-known and traditional fruit pies. Typically, sliced apples are mixed with sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and sometimes lemon juice or flour, then baked inside a buttery crust. You can use various types of apples depending on the flavor and texture you want (like Granny Smith for tartness or Honeycrisp for sweetness). Would you like a recipe or tips on which apples work best?" (from gpt4).
by sylware | 2025-06-17 10:11:37+00:00
Anybody with deep knowledge of current RISC-V opensource implementations here?

Do harts have store queue and load queue optimizations? Namely some kind of memory request fusion?

I asked this question because since I am writing rv64 assembly, and since rv64 is a load/store architecture, I tend to pack as much as I can memory ordered loads and stores.
by jonplackett | 2025-06-17 10:12:18+00:00
Not at all, I don’t think humans are magic at all.

But I don’t think even the ‘thinking’ LLMs are doing true thinking.

It’s like calling pressing the autocomplete buttons on your iPhone ‘writing’. Yeah kinda. It mostly forms sentences. But it’s not writing just because it follows the basic form of a sentence.

And an LLM, though now very good at writing is just creating a very good impression of thinking. When you really examine what it’s outputting it’s hard to call it true thinking.

How often does your LLM take a step back and see more of the subject than you prompted it to? How often does it have an epiphany that no human has ever had?

That’s what real thinking looks like - most humans don’t do tonnes of it most of the time either - but we can do it when required.
by fennecfoxy | 2025-06-17 10:13:57+00:00
Lmao I remember uni teaching me UML. Right before I dropped out after a year because fuck all of that. It's a shame because some of the final year content I probably would've liked.

But I just couldn't handle it when I got into like COMP102 and in the first lecture, the lecturer is all "has anybody not used the internet before?"

I spent my childhood doing the stuff so I just had to bail. I'm sure others would find it rewarding (particularly those that were in my classes because 'a computer job is a good job for money').
by rglullis | 2025-06-17 10:14:27+00:00
People could in theory also get a college-level education by watching videos on YouTube, but in practice the masses just end up watching Mr. Beast.

15 years ago, people were sure that the Khan Academy and Coursera would disrupt Ivy League and private schools, because now one good teacher could reach millions of students. Not only this has not happened, the only movement I'm observing against credentialism is that I have good amount of anecdata showing kids preferring to go to trade school instead of university.

> pull themselves up using hard work etc studying n reading hard.

Where are you from? "The key to success is hard work" is not exactly something part of the Gen Z and Zoomers core values, at least not in the Americas and Western Europe.
by bargainbin | 2025-06-17 10:16:18+00:00
The key delineation here is the work is voluntary. I was uneasy reading the article and weighing it up, realised that the author could choose not to work whilst he serves time.

If he was being coerced into labour however, which the for-profit prison undoubtedly makes profit from, it’s simply unacceptable; indentured servitude, slavery, call it what you will, it’s bad for society in every way because it allows the ruling class to steal labour from the working class under the guise of “rehabilitation”.
by LiKao | 2025-06-17 10:16:47+00:00
Interesting that you use some kind of schizophrenia axis.

There is actually some scientists that hypothesize schizophrenia and autism are exact opposites of each other. It's call the predictive coding hypothesis of autism.

In essence the predictive coding hypothesis assumes that large parts of our brain function like a modern video codec. Always predicting the next states and reducing information by only picking up on prediction errors that need to be encoded separatedly.

Under this hypothesis schizophrenia arises, if there is a very strong predictive coding and very little influence of the prediction errors. You hear voices out of noise, because your prediction mechanism tries to encode these noises as something sensible.

On the other hand in autism you have very little prediction and high external influence (i.e. the normal information reduction doesn't take place).

There are some studies that try to pick up the prediction vs. error components in simple cognitive tasks that support this idea.
by marliechiller | 2025-06-17 10:17:31+00:00
I find the use of the word intelligence to be a bit of a misnomer. Is something intelligent if all its doing is pattern matching? Is the evolution that led to owl butterflies appearing like an owl intelligent? Im not sure.

As an aside, its amusing we simulatenously have this article on the front page as well as [Generative AI coding tools and agents do not work for me](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44294633) also on the front page. LLMs are really dividing the community at the moment and its exhausting to keep up with what I (as a dev) should be doing to stay sharp
by CuriouslyC | 2025-06-17 10:19:02+00:00
Shallow take. LLMs are like food for thought -- the right use in the right amounts is empowering, but too much (or uncritical use) and you get fat and lazy, metaphorically speaking.

You wouldn't go around crusading against food because you're obese.

Another neat analogy is to children who are too dependent on their parents. Parents are great and definitely help a child learn and grow but children who rely on their parents for everything rather than trying to explore their limits end up being weak humans.
by lynx97 | 2025-06-17 10:19:43+00:00
"Ghetto systems" as the saying goes aren't a solution either. Those have been tried decades ago. Remember "IBM Homepage reader"? No? Probably before your time. Its a nice idea, in isolation. However, the translation layers you talk about are never going to be sufficient. You're just moving the problem. Now, if you want to use a system which doesn't have a translation layer for your ghetto system, you're out of luck again.
by kasey_junk | 2025-06-17 10:20:10+00:00
If you get to 2 or 3 and it hasn’t done what you want you fall back to writing it yourself.

But in my experience this is _signal_. If the ai cant get to it with minor back and forth then something needs work, your understanding, the specification, the tests, your code factoring etc.

The best case scenario is your agent one shots the problem. But close behind that is that your agent finds a place where a little cleanup makes everybody’s life easier you, your colleagues and the bot. And your company is now incentivized to invest in that.

The worse case is you took the time to write 2 prompts that didn’t work.
by HenryBemis | 2025-06-17 10:20:20+00:00
You are preaching to the choir here :) My point is not for "us, the techies" and privacy-oriented people. My point is clearly for the 50%-60% that think that "we are trying to take their precious WhatsApp from them" and they don't understand that their car insurance is gradually 20% more expensive than others because they keep posting photos from bars on FB.

I keep 'lean' devices, the apps that I actually use, battery lasts from days to weeks (phone, tablet respectively) and NoRoot Firewall (on Android) makes sure that my phone stays 'silent' to the apps and target IP-addresses of my choosing.
by hocuspocus | 2025-06-17 10:20:25+00:00
In practice RCS is entirely run by Google outside China, the path to federation was killed around 2019 when Google decided every MNO should eventually move to Jibe if they wanted access to a global interconnected RCS, same on the client side.

I don't think it's too late as iOS finally supports RCS. But so far Google hasn't shown willingness to let unsanctioned clients connect to Jibe.
by elihu | 2025-06-17 10:21:22+00:00
I wonder what the implications for tires are? Apparently modern tires about 1/3 natural rubber. Presumably if they could be made of close to 100% natural rubber, it would mean less microplastic entering the environment from tire wear. On the other hand, you'd need about 3x as much natural rubber production as we have now, which might not be realistic.

The wear characteristics would come into play too, though. If pure rubber tires wear out faster than mostly-synthetic rubber tires, then you'd need even more natural rubber. On the other hand, if it wears much more slowly than typical modern tires, then maybe current rubber production is sufficient.

(EVs are also prone to somewhat faster tire wear due to additional weight.)
by lurk2 | 2025-06-17 10:21:23+00:00
> we have no reason to believe he was trying to kill anyone.

If someone gave a loaded hand gun to a small child, there might not be any reason to believe that this person was trying to kill the small child, but when the child inevitably shoots himself or someone else, the one who gave the child the gun in the first place shares at least some of the blame.

You may protest that children are not comparable to adult drug addicts; to this, I’d suggest taking a walk through any major metro area in America and deciding for yourself if “willing and aware” are appropriate words to describe these addicts.
by je42 | 2025-06-17 10:23:11+00:00
> All participants were then reassured that though 20 minutes might be a rather short time to write an essay, they were encouraged to do their best.

Given that the task has been under time pressure, I am not sure this study helps gauging the impact of LLMs in other contexts.

When my goal is to produce the result for a specific short term task - I maximize tool usage.

When my goal is to improve my personal skills - I use the LLM tooling differently optimizing for long(er) term learning.
by ryanackley | 2025-06-17 10:23:36+00:00
You're completely missing his point. If nobody figures things out for themselves, there's a risk that at some point, AI won't have anything to learn on since people will stop writing blog posts on how they figured something out and answering stack overflow questions.

Sure, there is a chance that one day AI will be smart enough to read an entire codebase and chug out exhaustively comprehensive and accurate documentation. I'm not convinced that is guaranteed to happen before our collective knowledge falls off a cliff.
by echelon_musk | 2025-06-17 10:23:56+00:00
> “I took five people and we locked ourselves in a building for three weeks and we took 400 micrograms of LSD every four hours. That is 2400 micrograms of LSD a day.… We finally were just drinking out of the bottle.… We were very high. What happened in those three weeks in that house, no one would ever believe, including us. And at the end of the three weeks, we walked out of the house and within a few days, we came down! It was a very frustrating experience, as if you came into the kingdom of heaven and you saw how it all was…and then you got cast out again.”

Ram Dass and his retelling of this experience contributed to my shift from psychedelics to established spiritual traditions. They had the territory mapped out thousands of years ago. Ram Dass ultimately settled as a Hindu where as I find myself drawn to Buddhism. Anatta maps nicely to experiences of ego death and I find that I can see all drugs as part of the conditioned world. If you rely on a physical substance of the conditioned world for access to the divine then you're not free yet.
by bonoboTP | 2025-06-17 10:24:15+00:00
I don't know. Predicting delays, costs and timelines is notoriously hard unless it's something you've done the exact same way many times already. For example in physical work, like installing external insulation on a building, a contractor can fairly easily predict the time required because they did similar buildings in the past several years, it's multiplying an area by a time average, and they know the delay caused by asking for some material by checking the shipping time on the website they order it from.

Developing software is very different and many nontechnical execs still refuse to understand it, so the clever engineers learn to make up numbers because that makes them look good.

Realistically, you simply come across as more competent and the exec compressed all that talk about the details into "this guy is quite serious about not recommending going this way - whatever their true reason and gut feel, it's probably okay to go their way, they are a good asset in the company, I trust that someone who can talk like this is able to steer things to success". And the other guy was "this guy seems to actively hide his true reasons, and is kind of vague and unconfident, perhaps lazy or a general debbie downer, I see no reason to defer to him."
by TeMPOraL | 2025-06-17 10:26:14+00:00
> I hope you don't think that what you're paying for an LLM today is what it actually costs to run the LLM. You're paying a small fraction.

Depends, right? Claude Code on a Max plan is obviously unsustainable if the API costs are any indication; people can burn through the subscription price in API credits in a day or less.

But otherwise? I don't feel like API pricing is that unrealistic. Compute is cheap, and LLMs aren't as energy-intensive in inference as some would have you believe (especially when they conveniently mix up training and inference). And LLMs beat juniors at API prices already.

E.g. a month ago, a few hours of playing with Gemini or Claude 3.5 / 3.7 Sonnet had me at maybe $5 for a completed little MVP of an embedded side project; it would've taken me days to do it myself, even more if I hired some random fresh grad as a junior, and $5 wouldn't fund even an hour of their work. API costs would had to be underpriced by at least two orders of magnitude for juniors to compete.
by fsflover | 2025-06-17 10:26:25+00:00
> Sure, Matrix is a thing, but every time I look at it, all I see is criticism of its specifications and poor interoperability between implementations?

Not sure what you're talking about. Everything is working fine for me, and they even conduct a whole conference about it annually: https://2024.matrix.org/

With a large number of clients and servers and the lack of a walled garden (like with Signal), you will always find something non-interoperable. It doesn't mean that you have to use it.
by LiKao | 2025-06-17 10:26:42+00:00
Not at the same rates, but at higher rates than the general population and even stronger:

""" Together, our results indicate that object personification occurs commonly among autistic individuals, and perhaps more often (and later in life) than in the general population. """

This is well known for many autistic people. "I put this thing there, and now it has to stay at that position, because otherwise it will be very sad."

The surprising part is not that autistic people do have empathy for inanimate objects (this is so well known, it's even covered in some diagnostic tests), but rather to find further confirmation and compare it to the general population. Mostly because this is surprising, as in general autism is related to empathy disfunction, so it is surprising to observe empathy at higher rates (see below).

However, as many researchers have pointed out that is exactely what would be expected. Empathy disfunction is incorrectly interpreted by many as "lack of empathy". But empathy means understanding and representing the emotional state of another living creature. Assigning emotional states to inanimate objects is by definition an empathy disfunction, because you are mentally representing something that is not there in the real world. Same with over-empathy that is reported by some autistics. Since these are over-representing the emotional states of others, this is also a disfunction (i.e. a mismatch between observed subject and the representation).

So the article builds strongly on the false equivalence between empathy disfunction and lack of empathy.
by sothatsit | 2025-06-17 10:27:02+00:00
A lot of the changes to get agents to work well is just good practice anyway. That's what is nice about getting these agents to work well - often, it just involves improving your dev tooling and documentation, which can help real human developers as well. I don't think this is going to become irrelevant any time soon.

The things that will change may be prompts or MCP setups or more specific optimisations like subagents. Those may require more consideration of how much you want to invest in setting them up. But the majority of setup you do for Claude Code is not only useful to Claude Code. It is useful to human developers and other agent systems as well.

> There was a lot of talk about prompting techniques ("prompt engineering") last year and now most of these are redundant.

Not true, prompting techniques still matter a lot to a lot of applications. It's just less flashy now. In fact, prompting techniques matter a ton for optimising Claude Code and creating commands like the planning prompt I created. It matters a lot when you are trying to optimise for costs and use cheaper models.

> I think these skills are just like learning how to use some tools in an ide. > if you have to switch ide they may not actually help you

A lot of the skills you learn in one IDE do transfer to new IDEs. I started using Eclipse and that was a steep learning curve. But later I switched to IntelliJ IDEA and all I had to re-learn were key-bindings and some other minor differences. The core functionality is the same.

Similarly, a lot of these "agent frameworks" like Claude Code are very similar in functionality, and switching between them as the landscape shifts is probably not as large of a cost as you think it is. Often it is just a matter of changing a model parameter or changing the command that you pass your prompt to.

Of course it is a tradeoff, and that tradeoff probably changes a lot depending upon what type of work you do, your level of experience, how old your codebases are, how big your codebases are, the size of your team, etc... it's not a slam dunk that it is definitely worthwhile, but it is at least interesting.
by cout | 2025-06-17 10:27:44+00:00
In my experience, a free and ad-free app is often better, because it was written by someone who doesn't have profit as a motive (often just a hobby). There are tons of great paid apps too, but it's hard to know which paid app is actually good and which is a slipshod app designed to profit from the rare user who will buy an app without much thought.
by 0x416c6578 | 2025-06-17 10:28:52+00:00
| its exhausting to keep up with what I (as a dev) should be doing to stay sharp

That for me is the biggest thing I am feeling about LLMs at the moment, things are moving so quickly but to what end? I know this industry is constantly evolving and in some ways that is very exciting but I also feel like it is this exponential runaway that requires very deliberate attention focused on the bleeding edge to stay relevant, when a lot of my time in my day job doesn't facilitate this (which I have identified and have made the effort and will be changing company in a month).

My own two cents on LLMs (as a junior / low mid level early career software engineer) is that they work best as a better version of Google for any well explored issue, and being able to talk through problems in a conversational manner has been a game changer. But I do fear sometimes that I am not gaining the same amount of knowledge as I would before LLMs became mainstream, it's a shortcut that in the long run I fear is going to reduce the average problem solving ability and original / novel thinking ability of software engineers (whether that is even a requirement in most SWE jobs is up for debate).