MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lisper | 2025-07-15 07:27:54+00:00
I don't want to make it all broken. I would much prefer it not to be broken at all. I would much prefer if the courts just followed the law all the time. But if it's going to be broke, if the courts are not going to follow the law, I'd much prefer they do it all the time so that it is obvious that they are not following the law, and then maybe people will notice and do something about it.

The real problem I think is that no one seems to actually want the courts to follow the law. Everyone wants the courts to bend the law to their own desires, and so everyone gives them a pass when they do this. And that's how we end up in situations like we are in now.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 07:27:55+00:00
They are not wrong.

The market, meant in a general sense, is stronger than any individual or groups of people. LLMs are here, and already demonstrate enough productive value to make them in high demand for objective reasons (vs. just as a speculation vehicle). They're not going away, nor is larger GenAI. It would take a collapse of technological civilization to turn the tide back now.
by kukkeliskuu | 2025-07-15 07:28:18+00:00
There are new frameworks all the time, but only very few establish a community that allows the framework to survive on the longer term. When you choose something that has been around for a long time, the probability for this is much higher, than for something that looks promising. Another benefit of the established frameworks is the amount of experience from various corner cases that has been coded in them. New frameworks often appear to handle simple use cases more conveniently, but that is only because they ignore all the complexity that the established solution has painfully learned throughout the years. You get that "for free" when you choose such a framework.
by lmm | 2025-07-15 07:28:27+00:00
> People can't be trusted to do anything either, which is why we have guardrails and checks and balances and audits. That is why in software, for instance, we have code reviews and tests and monitoring and other best practices. That is probably also why LLMs have made the most headway in software development; we already know how to deal with unreliable workers that are humans and we can simply transfer that knowledge over.

The difference is that humans eventually learn. We accept that someone who joins a team will be net-negative for the first few days, weeks, or even months. If they keep making the same mistakes that were picked out in their first code review, as LLMs do, eventually we fire them.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-15 07:28:57+00:00
As touched on in the article, the beauty of colour names would be that they’re celebrated for the machine.

#124356 might look different on one monitor or workstation compared to another.

Having colour names which are calibrated for the device makes a lot of sense. Assuming those colour names are actually calibrated, which as the article also mentions, so often wasn’t the case.

As an aside, this is a big problem in DTP where your display should match the page. However you obviously wouldn’t use colour names in that specific industry because you’re dealing with a vastly greater range of colours and shades.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-07-15 07:31:57+00:00
This is exactly the reason that "Windows Subsystem for Linux" never made sense: the correct preposition would've been "including". Other suggestions: the verb phrase "consisting of"; the adverb "to wit" ("Windows Subsystem, to wit: Linux" has a nice ring to it); whatever part of speech "which is" is.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-15 07:33:32+00:00
Depends, people think in terms of sports car level performance that they desire. But there's a reason the Ford Pinto used to be more popular and common than a Ferrari. It's actually a good enough car for many people.

For the average cheap clunker that you drive around town you neither need a big nor a fast battery. Chinese cheap cars (the type the US consumer can't even imagine is feasible) come with cheap batteries. Which means LFP or sodium ion in China. Cheap here means 5-10K$. For the car. With the battery. Not just the difference between the cheap and the more expensive battery upgrade (as is common in the US). Making a car cost effectively at those price levels means compromises. It's not going to have seat warmers. And you might have to open the window manually. And it won't drive to the moon and back on a single charge. But it will get you to work just fine.

Something like the Slate truck doesn't need top spec batteries. It just needs a decently sized battery. The cheapest one will have a 52kwh battery, apparently. LFP would be a good default. But it would still be a decent truck with a cheaper, lower capacity sodium ion battery. And since there is a 84.3 kwh option, there is some wiggle room for variations in size, weight, and energy density.

At 52kwh, it's not going to break distance records. If you need that, get the bigger battery. But otherwise lots of people get by with cars with ranges below 100 miles. Anybody that has an old Nissan Leaf falls into this bucket. They shipped with something like 60-70 miles of range. If you replace the battery you'll double the range because batteries have improved over time. Loads of them still drive with their original batteries. Nice car to buy second hand for next to nothing. Useful range. Dirt cheap to own and drive. Really affordable at this point.

The notion of buying the battery you need at a reasonable price vs. the range monster you think you need because you are a nervous and range anxious wreck is distorting this discussion.

People: I absolutely must have >500 miles range because I never stop and have a bladder of steel and easily can go without breaks for eight hours. The notion of stopping for 30-40 minutes freaks me out. The horror! I absolutely must have this and I'm going to sell my kidney to get it.

Reality, mr. Joe Average is middle aged, needs to go to the bath room regularly (especially after drinking coffee) because middle aged people just are like that. He isn't super wealthy and he lives 25 miles from work. Which is where he goes every day. He might go on a weekend trip. 50-60 miles is the bare minimum of what he needs. With a safety margin and some convenience, 150 would be fine and also accommodate for cold weather and unplanned excursions. 200 would be comfortable. 300 miles would mean the car lasts the whole week and only needs to be charged on the weekend. He drives his average 12K miles per year (230/week).

Some people genuinely need more. Most people (the average ones) really don't. They just think they do.
by massimosgrelli | 2025-07-15 07:34:14+00:00
Yes and no. Are AI companies overvalued? Yes. Will most of them crash and burn? Yes, they will. Are the words "intelligence" or "reasoning" misused? Absolutely. Nonetheless, nobody can deny that some of these tools are useful and have demonstrated they can generate revenue like no other tool, app, or device before. There is something different from the dot-com bubble; many barriers have come down since 2000. Everyone can be connected 24/7 for a few tens of dollars a month. People trust the internet as a medium to perform transactions and access data. The real bubble is in the private market valuations, especially in the pre-seed stage. Many young entrepreneurs don't understand that raising their first round at $30M, $50M, or even $100M post-money will put a heavy weight on their shoulders approaching the Series A. Raising a funding round is a promise you make to the market. Increasingly high expectations will burn many wanna be entrepreneurs whose contribution to make things better for everyone will be lost forever. I'm deeply convinced that the reality check for all those companies is the public market, and in today's world, you can't go public after 3-5 years if your initial valuation has been built on a 20-year-long promise. All the trillion-dollar companies we know today went public a few years after their creation: Apple, Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, etc. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor are black swans, not evidence of the power law.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-15 07:34:24+00:00
Destroying things to justify privatization while stealing every detail about us to increase profits and target opponents. Sure, there are HIPAA, secrecy, and confidentiality violations happening but there's no one left to prosecute the criminals when the criminals are the police, COTUS, SCOTUS, and the unitary executive. The only meaningful distinction remaining is patronage vs. outsider.
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-15 07:34:31+00:00
There is an old cliché about stopping the tide coming in. I mean, yeah you can get out there and participate in trying to stop it.

This isn't about fatalism or even pessimism. The tide coming in isn't good or bad. It's more like the refrain from Game of Thrones: Winter is coming. You prepare for it. Your time might be better served finding shelter and warm clothing rather than engaging in a futile attempt to prevent it.
by hnarn | 2025-07-15 07:35:11+00:00
I think the point the previous poster is trying to make is that:

> This license restricts how a product can be endorsed/promoted as per the clause.

...is technically not true for licenses, because they do not _restrict_ usage, rather they _permit_ usage. The usage is, by default, always restricted by automatic copyright and authorship laws, so any license (including the GPL) is not a restriction but a permission, since it has _granted_ permissions that were implicitly not there.

So if you change your license in a way where it appears more restrictions have been added, but those restrictions were already implicit because they were not even covered or taken into account in your original license, no new restrictions were added, your "grant" was just made easier to understand.
by bambax | 2025-07-15 07:35:29+00:00
The problem with LLM is when they're used for creativity or for thinking.

Just because LLMs are indeed useful in some (even many!) context, including coding, esp. to either get something started, or, like in your example, to transcode an existing code base to another platform, doesn't mean they will change everything.

It doesn't mean “AI is the new electricity.” (actual quote from Andrew Ng in the post).

More like AI is the new VBA. Same promise: everyone can code! Comparable excitement -- although the hype machine is orders of magnitude more efficient today than it was then.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 07:35:47+00:00
Software engineers have less power than we'd like to think; we may be paid a lot relative to the baseline, but for vast majority that's not even in the "rich" range anymore, and more importantly, we're not ones calling the shots - not anymore.

But even if, that presupposes a kind of unity of opinion, committing the exact same sin the article we're discussing is complaining about. Many engineers believe that AI does, in fact, work, and will keep getting better - and will work towards the future you'd like to work against.
by scott_w | 2025-07-15 07:37:38+00:00
Literally nothing you said stops it being niche. I love triathlon but my sport is niche. I love time trialling, bike manufacturers produce bikes worth up to £20,000 and amateur participants spend hundreds of pounds in a wind tunnel to eke out a few seconds to win their regional championship. It's still incredibly fucking niche.

> It’s multimillion dollar industry for starters.

Most niche hobbies are

> Car manufacturers specifically make models for professional rally circuits.

See above, most niche hobbies have this.

> There’s video games sponsorships and all sorts.

Yeah... so?

> It’s up there with other popular forms of motorsports like NASCAR.

NASCAR is a single country and still outstrips all of rally viewership globally.

> Anything that is a multi-million dollar industry is clearly well beyond the realm of “niche”.

Nope, it's still niche.

> Skiing is another massive industry. It’s definitely well beyond what any normal person would define as “niche”.

Almost nobody takes part in skiing, it's niche.

> it still gets its spectators come the Winter Olympics.

So does track & field but most of those sports are incredibly niche.

> Possibly because spectators are low to begin with and TT are such early stages that people would prefer to see the final stages instead, which are not TTs?

TdF gets high numbers for the TT because it affects the grand tour but TTs on their own get far fewer spectators. The Tour of Britain will have loads of people along the route cheering it. When our region hosted the National 10 Mile TT championship, the only spectators were the families of the competitors and those of us marshalling it.

To be clear: not all TT format sports are niche, I just point out that, in general, head-to-head races get far more viewership than time-trial format sports. In fact, the examples you gave pretty much proved that point. F1 annihilates WRC for viewership. As does NASCAR (even from the UK I know of its cultural impact!)
by blotfaba | 2025-07-15 07:38:01+00:00
> Using ChatGPT on cognitive tasks can reduce your brain connectivity by up to 50% and reduce your ability to recall information about the task by 8x.

I hate this thing. I don't think it added anything to this article to conflate this "study" - did no one stop to think your brain isn't firing on all cylinders when the AI is doing the work because that's what the whole point of AI is?

It's supposed to free up your mind to attend to other matters.

We're not building muscles like we used to when we use tractors and heavy machinery instead of building houses brick by brick by hand either. So what?? Attend a gym and read something technical and dense.
by ebogdum | 2025-07-15 07:38:06+00:00
You're asking me if I use it, I'm telling you where and how I use it. Then you complain how I use it.

Listen, I can totally respect anyones opinion, but this discussion isn't bringing any benefits, it doesn't seem to be constructive at all.

I get it, you're dissatisfied with this project or whatever, and usually I do try to be very accommodating, as you can see I do engage, but at the same time, please understand, this, is an open-source MIT licensed project, it's not the next "save the earth project" and still, you're acting like you're the VC and already lost money on the investment. Like I have to prove some worth or something.

To answer your question, yeah, there were two of us working at this, for a while, then one lost interest, I thought it would still be fair to say "our small team".

As for the losing data or any other such things, great idea, I will add that there is always a possibility of losing data, just like with NTFS, with AppleFS, or any other FS no matter who developed it or supports it. But it is a good point.

As far as this comment thread goes, I will personally refrain from future comments, as I believe it doesn't serve any good purpose other than nit picking.

Thank you.
by orbital-decay | 2025-07-15 07:38:33+00:00
My intuition is that questions that require reasoning always perform worse than direct retrieval questions, without exceptions. Especially when it's about negatives or when distractors are present. You're right though, intuition is not measuring, some relevant numbers would be nice to see.

ICL is a phenomenon separate from long-context performance degradation, they can coexist, similarly to how lost-in-the-middle affects the performance of examples in different positions just as fine.
by CGamesPlay | 2025-07-15 07:38:34+00:00
This is a bad cop-out, honestly. Every macOS for at least 11 years—and iPhones for a similar length of time—have automatically changed dash dash space to an em-dash. Edit -> Substitutions -> Smart Dashes to toggle the behavior. Here's an 11-year-old video discussing the feature. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nZrkDetAmpE
by Jensson | 2025-07-15 07:39:08+00:00
> Do you have any serious sources from history showing that Segway hype is even remotely comparable to today's AI hype and the half a trillion a year the world is spending on it?

LLM are more useful than Segway, but it can still be overhyped because the hype is so much larger. So its comparable, as you say LLM is so much more hyped doesn't mean it can't be overhyped.
by gsliepen | 2025-07-15 07:39:44+00:00
pg_usleep(1000L);

Virtually any time you put a fixed sleep in your program, it's going to be wrong. It is either too long or too short, and even if it is perfect, there is no guarantee your program will actually sleep for exactly the requested amount of time. A condition variable or something similar would be the right thing to use here.

Of course, if this code path really is only taken very infrequently, you can get away with it. But assumptions are not always right, it's better to make the code robust in all cases.
by joules77 | 2025-07-15 07:40:05+00:00
I mean anything you have to "install" from an app store tied to a phone OS. Sometimes if there is no other option I install the app/complete the task and uninstall.

The app guys have normalized the idea that every "bright" idea they get about how to exploit my data or waste my attention, they have a right to push it out to my phone, if I have installed their app.

So the stupid apps keep updating with new shit everyday whether I need it or not.
by BlackFly | 2025-07-15 07:40:30+00:00
It is difficult to talk about the shape of the event horizon because the ordinary definition of a sphere is "surface where all points are equidistant from a given point" is already complex in a differentiable manifold, but even more so when the distance is infinite because of a singularity (or the point doesn't exist/isn't unique because of geodesic structure). So you switch to a definition of "surface of constant scalar curvature with the topology of a sphere", the topology being important to distinguish it from a plane and a hyperboloid.

From there, I haven't personally done or seen the calculations of the shape of the horizon for Kerr or merging black holes, but my intuition is that it would be indeed peanut shaped for a merger (there are likely some saddle points). The coordinate shape certainly is but you can choose coordinates so that a Schwarzschild black hole is a coordinate peanut so coordinates aren't very meaningful.
by leptons | 2025-07-15 07:41:09+00:00
> I don't know why some developers insist on putting their head in the sand on this.

You don't think we're not using "AI" too? We're using these tools, but we can see pretty clearly how they aren't really the boon they are being hyped-up to be.

The LLM is kind of like a dog. I was trying to get my dog to do a sequence of things - pick up the toy we were playing with and bring it over to me. He did it a couple of times, but then after trying to explain what I wanted yet again, he went and picked up a different toy and brought it over. That's almost what I wanted.

Then I realized that matches the experience I've had with various "AI" coding tools.

I have to spend so much time reading and correcting the "AI" generated code, when I could have just coded the same thing myself correctly the first time. And this never stops with the "AI". At least with my dog, he is very food motivated and he learns the tricks like his life depends on it. The LLM, not so much.
by thinkingemote | 2025-07-15 07:43:48+00:00
John Gray the philosopher expands on this by saying that Progress as a whole is thought of as inevitable. The last couple of years I think have shown the cracks in this thinking. Western notions of progress, the liberal movement to increase and improve humanity is actually something to be activiely fought for, it's not something that will organically happen. It's not a human right. But that's what we are told: "the right side of history" is the framing.

People today think progress is a natural thing. That it's inevitable that human rights increase, the individual liberty increases, that my self expression becomes more secure with time, naturally. We still see this inevitablism in culture and politics.

That the political inevitablists don't see the history and origins of progress and liberalism (e.g. partly Christianity) is part of the diagnosis.

We might see parallels with AI. We might see anti-AI stances equated to those who want to take away personal autonomy (e.g. "to claim I cannot have an AI boyfriend means you are advocating for violence against me").

One has to actively defend and campaign for these things and not fall into a sense of it's all natural and inevitable.

Inevitability is a kind of psychological blindness. It's to be encouraged in some as it does actually work but it can give some pain when sight is restored.
by fzeroracer | 2025-07-15 07:44:13+00:00
> None of the "failed" innovations you cited were even near the adoption rate of current LLMs.

The 'adoption rate' of LLMs is entirely artificial, bolstered by billions of dollars of investment in attempting to get people addicted so that they can siphon money off of them with subscription plans or forcing them to pay for each use. The worst people you can think of on every c-suite team force pushes it down our throats because they use it to write an email every now and then.

The places LLMs have achieved widespread adoption is in environments abusing the addictive tendencies of a advanced stochastic parrot to appeal to lonely and vulnerable individuals to massive societal damage, by true believers that are the worst coders you can imagine shoveling shit into codebases by the truckful and by scammers realizing this is the new gold rush.
by kleiba | 2025-07-15 07:44:17+00:00
The license determines the conditions under which you are allowed to use the program. Section 6(d) thus only states that you cannot charge others for the source code, but that does not constrain their ability to charge you.

This changes, of course, if they are using any third-party GPLv3'ed code - because then they become a redistributor of that code in which case clause 6(d) applies and they must redistribute that code free of charge.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 07:44:36+00:00
Maybe? But it doesn't change the fact that most code written is tedious and repetitive and not particularly novel, except as part of one's own personal journey as a programmer.

I wrote my own frameworks as a kid, and I found that exciting. It helped me understand and accept frameworks written by others, and with actual adoption. Doesn't change the fact that none of that code is particularly original or insightful. It's mundane and done to death - like almost all almost every software company does.

Not seeing the tedium may be a sign of working on really interesting problems, or using excellent frameworks and support tooling - but I'd wager it's mostly a sign of inexperience.