MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-06-18 14:53:55+00:00
I conclude that you've attacked a straw man.

Music does indeed move us emotionally. Some music can move us toward healthy emotions conducive to our flourishing, some can move us toward degradation. So, music can be good or bad with respect to the effect it has on us, and our intentions can be good or bad depending on what we want out of music. Circumstances are also important: you don't play waltzes at funerals, and you don't play requiems at wedding banquets. This accord is a matter of rationality. Appropriate music complements or accentuates the content of the occasion, creating an integrity between reason and emotion, while inappropriate music misdirects emotion and sets it in opposition to reason.

(Since you mention Catholics, yes. For example, chant can be used as part of the liturgy to help move us toward a higher, more contemplative state. This is why some of the bad, schmaltzy music that's been employed at many masses since the 1970s has drawn so much ire and disgust. It is not only objectively bad, but trades the contemplative for the mawkish and sentimental. This is tragic, given the magnificence and wealth of the liturgical music tradition.)

Where drugs are concerned, I never said that all psychoactive effects are bad. In fact, I explicitly said that not all are. We can drink coffee in moderation to make us more alert. We can drink alcohol in moderation to calm our nerves. We can take opiates in moderation to relieve pain. Etc, etc. None of these uses involve the dimming of reason — certainly not the intentional dimming of reason — or the twisting of the senses, or the abuse of the emotions at odds with reality. In the first two examples, we are using drugs in a restorative way; we are enabling the proper function of reason and so on. In the third example, we may be using opiates in a restorative way (ever try functioning when you're in pain?), or, if the dose is high enough to impede reason, we do so not with the intention of impeding reason, but with the intention of relieving extreme pain while tolerating a secondary, undesired side effect of temporary diminution of reason. By impeding reason and clear perception, recreational drug abuse intentionally deprives us of the ability to know and perceive reality, and deprives us of the ability to discern what is good for us and to act rightly in accord with it.

So, where an analogy between music and drugs can be made hinges at least partly on the ill or good effects it produces, which is greater, and whether the ill effects are intended. Recreational drug use intends the bad effects by intending the delusions, the hallucinations, and the irrational. Music that habituates bad mental habits, habituates bad emotional responses and moods, or contains harmful content should likewise be avoided.
by numpad0 | 2025-06-18 14:54:05+00:00
English and Japanese pronunciations never line up well which complicates communications, so people tweak spelling all the time. Toyota or Mazda or muRata is all about that. Matsuda was always matsuda in Japanese but spelling it as Mazda skips whole ordeal about matt-sudah or mar-TSOO-dah. Mazda is just short and close enough. Isuzu unfortunately has the yee-zoo-zoo problem, it's more like "iszh" but it won't roll on any tongue and there isn't much that they can do about it now.

"main farm", "rich farm", "pine farm", "bell tree", "sun field", "river cape", "fifty bells", it's all just surnames. Nothing particularly more awe inspiring than any regular surnames would be.
by prmph | 2025-06-18 14:54:07+00:00
I'm not sure where the complexity is hiding in my examples.

For the code generation, note that some types are almost impossible to express properly, but code can be generated using simpler types that capture all the same constraints that you wanted. And, of course I only use this approach for cases where it is not that complicated to generate the code, and so I can be sure that each time I need to (re)generate it, it will be done correctly (ie., the abstraction is not leaky). Also, I don't use this approach for generating large amounts of code, which would hide the inherent structure of the code when reading it.

For the eslint example, I simply made do without depending on linting as a hard dependency that is always active. That is one of my points: sometimes simply some "niceties" would simplify thing a lot. As another example in this vein, I avoid too much complex configuration and modding of my dev environment; that allows me to focus on what matters.

In the migration example, the complexity with backward migration is that you then need to write a reverse migration script for every forward migration script. Keeping this up and managing and applying them properly can become complex. If you have a better way of doing it I'd like to hear it.
by Aromasin | 2025-06-18 14:55:22+00:00
I work in the FPGA industry, and it's a running joke that the best device manufacturer at any one time if the one with the best SERDES and PHY team.

You can have the best fabric in the world with all of the best IP, but if you can't get information on the device and off again to do anything useful, then what's the point (looking at you Intel F-Tile).
by karmakaze | 2025-06-18 14:55:31+00:00
> I enjoy learning. And learning is a difficult chore. There is no golden road to knowledge. I am constantly frustrated when my assumptions and theories are thwarted. I can’t get the program to compile. The design of this system I was sure was right is missing a key assumption I missed. I bang my head against the wall, I read references, and I ask people questions. I try a different approach and I verify my results. Finally, eventually, the problem gives way and the solution comes out.

> It is during the struggle that I learn the most and improve the most as a programmer. It is this struggle I crave. It is what I enjoy about programming.

This explains the whole post to me. First of all this is an area where using an AI can streamline design considerations before getting to the head-banging-walls. Since this is an aspect that the writer enjoys, there's no saving them. They decided that they like things as they are without AI. The rest of all the cited reasons are post-decision justifications.
by paul7986 | 2025-06-18 14:55:58+00:00
I count calories and use chatGPT to do so by taking pics of my meals / what I eat.

I'm looking forward to Meta adding this feature to their Ray Ban smartglasses so the glasses automagically count my calories each time it sees food on my plate or going into my mouth. A feature they possibly should make optional, but for me who has prescription Metas it would be a big time saver (try to eat 1500 to 2000 calories a day and burn 250 to 500 in exercise). I think the knowledge of how many calories you consume done automagically would prompt 1/4 of people thinking and or on Ozempic to not do it.
by dlisboa | 2025-06-18 14:56:04+00:00
Localization is more important than you might think.

My wife worked for a company that helped provide teaching content for schools throughout Brazil. They'd interview teachers all over the country and one of the complaints from teachers in isolated communities was that they had to use the same textbooks as other places in Brazil without any regard to their own situation.

They reported that many examples for starting math for kids featured things like "strawberries" or "apples", things the kids had never seen or maybe heard. So now they needed to abstract over what is a "fruit" and a "countable object" as well as whatever the example was trying to teach. Teachers reported less engagement and it was more work for them to adapt it to local relevance.

Try to teach kids about vegetables in the US midwest and use green beans and Bok Choy as an example, for instance. It doesn't make sense.
by jdmoreira | 2025-06-18 14:56:51+00:00
You are discussing with a llm? Never happened to me and I use llms all the time. Why would you need to discuss if you know best? Just tell it what to do and course correct it. It's not rocket science.

PS: Both humans and llms are hard to align. But I do have to discuss with humans and I find that exhausting. llms I just nudge or tell what to do
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-06-18 14:57:16+00:00
"Grok (/ˈɡrɒk/) is a neologism coined by the American writer Robert A. Heinlein for his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land. While the Oxford English Dictionary summarizes the meaning of grok as "to understand intuitively or by empathy, to establish rapport with" and "to empathize or communicate sympathetically (with); also, to experience enjoyment", Heinlein's concept is far more nuanced, with critic Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr. observing that "the book's major theme can be seen as an extended definition of the term." The concept of grok garnered significant critical scrutiny in the years after the book's initial publication. The term and aspects of the underlying concept have become part of communities such as computer science. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok
by zeta0134 | 2025-06-18 14:57:20+00:00
Two situations immediately come to mind, though the second is admittedly domain specific:

1. If I actually pause execution, the thing I'm trying to debug will time out some network service, at which point trying to step forward is only going to hit sad paths

2. The device I'm debugging doesn't *have* a real debugger. (Common on embedded, really common for video games. Ever triggered a breakpoint in a graphics shader?) Here I might substitute "print" for "display anything at all" but it's the same idea really.
by surprisetalk | 2025-06-18 14:57:32+00:00
My father deliberately didn't invest in my education because "Jesus is coming back in the next few years anyway".

I was raised SDA; this mindset goes back hundreds of years. Leading up to the 1844, "Great Disappointment", people stopped learning, stopped growing, stopped saving, etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment

Even if AGI is inevitable, its timeline and effects on your life are unknown.

You are alive. You are alive. You are alive.
by alganet | 2025-06-18 14:57:40+00:00
> People are not usually being too specific about what they were trying to do. The same goes for a lot of programming discussion of course.

In programming, I already have a very good tool to follow specific steps: _the programming language_. It is designed to run algorithms. If I need to be specific, that's the tool to use. It does exactly what I ask it to do. When it fails, it's my fault.

Some humans require algorithmic-like instructions too. Like cooking a recipe. However, those instructions can be very vague and a lot of humans can still follow it.

LLMs stand on this weird place where we don't have a clue in which occasions we can be vague or not. Sometimes you can be vague, sometimes you can't. Sometimes high level steps are enough, sometimes you need fine-grained instructions. It's basically trial and error.

Can you really blame someone for not being specific enough in a system that only provides you with a text box that offers anthropomorphic conversation? I'd say no, you can't.

If you want to talk about how specific you need to prompt an LLM, there must be a well-defined treshold. The other option is "whatever you can expect from a human".

Most discussions seem to juggle between those two. LLMs are praised when they accept vague instructions, but the user is blamed when they fail. Very convenient.
by shermantanktop | 2025-06-18 14:57:40+00:00
> People reading this uncritically will come away with completely wrong ideas about the number of yurts in Mongolia

Who is harmed by carrying around a mistaken number for this, especially if they notice the 40% confidence?

As to the rest, I read it as an application of tools for an interesting question, not a comprehensive or authoritative how-to. It’s scaled napkin math, and napkin math is very useful.
by theideaofcoffee | 2025-06-18 14:57:44+00:00
It's a pretty common, well-accepted use in the hacker lexicon. See esr's Jargon File [0] where, by some sources [1][2], it started being used in its capacity as meaning 'understanding' for forty-ish years now at this point.

[0] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/G/grok.html

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=uS4EAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA32#v=one...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grok#In_computer_programmer_cu...
by johnfn | 2025-06-18 14:57:45+00:00
I posted this elsewhere in the thread, but if you listen to Carmack in the interview, it's quite interesting. He would occasionally use one to step through an entire frame of gameplay to get an idea of performance and see if there were any redundancies. This is what I mean by "doesn't understand the problem domain". He's a smart guy, but no one could immediately understand all the code added in by everyone else on the team and how it all interacts.
by PaulHoule | 2025-06-18 14:57:47+00:00
These were symbolic calculations. Mine was a derivation of the Gutzwiller Trace Formula

https://inspirehep.net/files/20b84db59eace6a7f90fc38516f530e...

using integration over phase space instead of position or momentum space. Most people think you need an orthogonal basis set to do quantum mechanical calculation but it turns that "resolution of unity is all you need", that is, if you integrate |x><x| over all x you get 1. If you believe resolution of unity applies in quantum gravity, then Hawking was wrong about black hole information. In my case we were hoping we could apply the trace formula and make similar derivations to systems with unusual coordinates, such as spin systems.

There are quite a few calculations in physics that involve perturbation theory, for instance, people used to try to calculate the motion of the moon by expanding out thousands of terms that look like (112345/552) sin(32 θ-75 ϕ) and still not getting terribly good results. It turns out classic perturbation theory is pathological around popular cases such as the harmonic oscillator (frequency doesn't vary with amplitude) and celestial mechanics (the frequency to go around the sun, to get closer or further from sun, or to go above or below the plane of the plane of the ecliptic are all the same.) In quantum mechanic these are not pathological, notably perturbation theory works great for an electron going around an atom which is basically the same problem as the Earth going around the Sun.

I have a lot of skepticism about things like

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_magnetic_dipole_mome...

in high energy physics because frequently they're comparing a difficult experiment to an expansion of thousands of Feynman diagrams and between computational errors and the fact that perturbation theory often doesn't converge very well I don't get excited when they don't agree.

----

Note that I used numerical calculations for "unit and integration testing", so if I derived an identity I could test that the identity was true for different inputs. As for formal systems, they only go so far. See

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principia_Mathematica#Consiste...
by donkeybeer | 2025-06-18 14:59:01+00:00
The fact that things are still dog slow on modern hardware means we didn't go far enough into C like thinking. And compilers and hardware were much, much worse in the 70s. There is a reason C got adopted so quickly, and languages after those other languages took decades to become practical. That counter history is just made up nonsense. If we didn't have a convenient language back then, people would either just give up and keep writing assembly, or computing would have just slowed or stopped.
by 9rx | 2025-06-18 14:59:35+00:00
A multi-process application isn't the same as microservices. Microservices is a team organization technique, seeing individual teams operate in isolation, as if they were individual businesses. You can't debug other team's services any more than you can debug what happens when you make a call to OpenAI. That is the level of separation you are up against in a microservices context. If you can, you're on the same team, and thus don't have microservices, just a single service.
by oehpr | 2025-06-18 15:00:02+00:00
This is one of those reasons why you really really need to get other people on board with your workflows. If you're the only one who works like that and someone does something insane, but it technically works, but it blows your workflow up... that's your problem. "You should just develop how I'm developing. Putting in a print statement for every line then waiting 5 minutes for the application to compile."

So long as no one sees your workflow as valuable, they will happily destroy it if it means getting the ticket done.
by samvher | 2025-06-18 15:01:46+00:00
Yes I was very surprised after the whole "scandal" around ChatGPT becoming too sycophantic that there was this massive change in tone from the last preview model (05-06) to the 06-05/GA model. The tone is really off-putting, I really liked how the preview versions felt like intelligent conversation partners and recognize what you're saying about useful pushback - it was my favorite set of models (the few preview iterations before this one) and I'm sad to see them disappearing.

Many people on the Google AI Developer forums have also noted either bugs or just performance regression in the final model.
by bentt | 2025-06-18 15:01:54+00:00
One thing that every working dev needs to realize, for their benefit, is that the AI gold rush is leading many, many companies to find ways to trumpet their use of AI for no other reason than to please investors. After all, if it's the big new thing, then of course you need to get on the train or get left behind. Investors are very important. They can provide money. Companies need money.

We might think, "Yeah, but so many of these dumb AI corpo-initiatives are doomed to fail!" and that's correct but the success/fail metric is not based on whether the initiatives' advertised purpose is effective. If investors respond positively in the near term, that's success. This is likely why Logitech embedded AI in their mouse software (Check and see if Logi+ AI Agent is in your task manager) https://news.logitech.com/press-releases/news-details/2024/N...

The near term crash (which will happen) in AI stuff will be because of this dynamic. All it means is that phase one of the grift cycle is completing. In the midst of this totally predictable, repeatable process, a dev's job is to get gud at whatever is truly emerging as useful. There are devs who are showing huge productivity gains through thoughtful use of AI. There are apps that leverage AI to do new and exciting things. None of this stuff happens without the human. Be that human!
by bramhaag | 2025-06-18 15:02:08+00:00
'source available' means the source code is available. Open source comes with a whole set of guarantees [1] about free redistribution and derived works.

Copyleft licenses like the GPL come with extra guarantees that do not violate the core guarantees of open source software. Instead, they make them stronger. The 'restrictions' GPL imposes essentially boil down to this: "if you use (parts of) GPL software, you must give your users the same freedoms the GPL guarantees." GPLv3 and AGPL closed up loopholes that allowed people to bypass those clauses.

[1] https://opensource.org/osd
Ask HN: Paper pad "self-prompting" as rubber-duck-with-a-context-length?
by xeonmc | 2025-06-18 15:02:43+00:00
The conventional advice of speaking to an inanimate object never quite worked for me, as it presumed that speaking emphatically is the most direct mode of that person's natural communication. For myself, it is written communication that comes more naturally and direct, having trouble with indecisive awkwardness of mental-backspacing in the middle of a sentence, and often forgetting what the prior self-conversation was talking about.

However, while typing into a monologue channel is indeed fast and direct and augments my poor mental context-length of verbal communication, the ephemeral, delible nature of uncommitted text undermines the purpose of being forced to formulating a "good-enough" communication as a cognitive device to reifying a thought that would otherwise be in flux.

What I have found to be a good balance that achieves both committal pressure of speech and a longer context-length of text is writing on a tearable paper pad with ink and not pencil. You are still allowed to cross-out words in a pinch but the spatial cost of this means that there is still a slight pressure to force you to stop and formulate before committing, without being debilitatingly permanent.

Essentially, you manually hand write a chat log while mentally alternating between the role of a prompter and a silicon ducky, making a point to delineate between the two by drawing a horizontal line across the page.

I'm wondering if I'm alone in this or if anyone here are also similarly idiosyncratic to have this work for them as well?
by vlovich123 | 2025-06-18 15:02:46+00:00
You can blame the user for not using the tools correctly or the manufacturer for making difficult to use tools that aren’t straightforward or don’t work in various non happy path conditions (ie unreliable installers).

For example, to this day installing MSVC doesn’t make a default sane compiler available in a terminal - you have to open their shortcut that sets up environment variables and you have to just know this is how MSVC works. Is this a user problem or Microsoft failing to follow same conventions ever other toolchain installer follows?
by up-n-atom | 2025-06-18 15:02:49+00:00
The reasonings is simple. It’s the cons con, it legitimizes their bs. And the other cloth are too lazy or naive to see the error of their ways. Those are the same people who have a high tendency to fall for a phishing/ponzi/etc scam or join a cult.

Don’t get me wrong, LLM have potential (proven mostly to deceive). But like everything else in life, cross reference and don’t be a shill.

We’re intelligent because we question, not because we answer.
by bluGill | 2025-06-18 15:04:16+00:00
While photographer was never a sure path to rich and famous, professionals used to do very good business and make a good living.

Demand is way down because while a $5000 lens on a nice camera is better than my phone lens, my phone is close enough for most purposes. Also my phone is free, in the days of film a single roll of film by the time you developed it costs significant money (I remember as a kid getting a camera for my birthday and then my parents wouldn't get me film for it - on hindsight I suspect every roll of film cost my dad half an hour of work and he was a well paid software developer). This cost meant that you couldn't afford to practice taking pictures, every single one had to be perfect. So if you wanted a nice picture of the family it was best to pay a professional who because of experience and equipment was likely to take a much better one than you could (and if something went wrong they would retake for free).
by techpineapple | 2025-06-18 15:04:20+00:00
Also, one thing I observe. There’s sort of free-speech as a law and free-speech as a value. And from a legal perspective, I think like free-speech as law should be minimally prosecuted. For me this is just sort of a left-leaning libertarian value about a minimalistic legal system.

But one thing I notice listening to the FIRE leaders, is they don’t just think the government should stay out of legal issues, They think that the solution to all problems is more speech and we should all be in the fray speaking as passionately as possible about all issues.

And certainly Jack Dorsey either believes this or ran Twitter as if he did which is essentially the same thing.

And I think the reality is more impassioned inflamed speech is not going to solve these fundamental culture war issues. In fact as the blog opines, they probably make them worse.
by triceratops | 2025-06-18 15:04:38+00:00
> Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this

We tried that in the past. The work still got done, and workers just died more often. If you want to live in that reality move to a developing country with poor labor protections.