MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by com2kid | 2025-07-15 06:48:37+00:00
All of those studies have been torn apart in detail, often right here on HN.

> So while it may be a fun toy for senior devs that know what to look for, it actually makes them slower and stupider, making them progressively less capable to do their job and apply critical thinking skills.

I've been able to tackle problems that I literally would not have been able to undertake w/o LLMs. LLMs are great at wading through SO posts and GH issue threads and figuring out what magic set of incantations makes some stupid library actually function. They are really good at writing mock classes way faster than I ever have been able to. There is a cost/benefit analysis for undertaking new projects, and if "minor win" involves days of wading through garbage, odds are the work isn't going to happen. But with LLMs I can outsource the drudgery part of the job (throwing crap tons of different parameters at a poorly documented function and seeing what happens), and actually do the part that is valuable (designing software).

You still have to guide the design! Anyone letting LLMs design software is going to fail hard, LLMs still write some wacky stuff. And they are going to destroy juniors, I don't know what the future of the field is going to be like (not pretty that is for sure...)

But I just had an LLM write me a script in ~2 minutes (me describing the problem) that would've taken me 30-60 minutes to write and debug. There would have been no "learning" going on writing a DOS batch script (something I have to do once very 2 or 3 years, so I forget everything I know each time).
by Nevermark | 2025-07-15 06:48:38+00:00
The Internet was specifically designed to be maximally decentralized to be robust even to war.

The first web browser was designed to be completely peer to peer.

But you are right about getting it wrong. The peer to peer capabilities still exist, but a remarkable amount of what we now consider basic infrastructure is owned by very large centralized corporations. Despite long tails of hopeful or niche alternatives.
by bgwalter | 2025-07-15 06:49:18+00:00
There are all sorts of numbers floating around:

https://www.theverge.com/openai/640894/chatgpt-has-hit-20-mi...

This one claims 20m paying subscribers, which is not a lot. Mr. Beast has 60m views on a single video.

A lot of weekly active users will use it once a week, and a large part of that may be "hate users" who want to see how bad/boring it is, similar to "hatewatching" on YouTube.
by jstummbillig | 2025-07-15 06:50:24+00:00
I don't think that LLMs are inevitable, but what this piece lacks (and that's fine, I like the point and writing anyway) is a plausible alternative. LLMs might not be inevitable, but until something better comes along, why would they go away? Even if we assume that people are just completely delusional about the models adding anything of value, why would that change at any point in the future?
by tbrownaw | 2025-07-15 06:50:53+00:00
Given that that's a task you want to do, it's at least the right kind of task (language processing) for an LLM. The proposals from the comment starting this thread aren't.

If grant classification is trying to drive a car non-stop (including not stopping for gas) from NY to LA, stuffing LLMs into weapons is more like trying to drive that same car from NY to London. They're just not the proper kind of tool for that, and it's not the same class of error.
by pjmlp | 2025-07-15 06:51:00+00:00
CUDA is neither an API, nor a set of libraries, people get this wrong all the time.

CUDA is an ecosystem of programming languages, libraries and developer tools.

Composed by compilers for C, C++, Fortran, Python JIT DSLs, provided by NVidia, plus several others with either PTX or NVVM IR.

The libraries, which you correctly point out.

And then the IDE integrations, the GPU debugger that is on par with Visual Studio like debugging, profiler,...

Hence why everyone that focus on copying only CUDA C, or CUDA C++, without everything else that makes CUDA relevant keeps failing.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-15 06:51:21+00:00
I'm curious how you ended up in such a conversation in the first place. Hallucinations are one thing, but I can't remember the last time when the model was saying that it actually run something somewhere that wasn't a tool use call, or that it owns a laptop, or such - except when role-playing.

I wonder if the advice on prompting models to role play isn't backfiring now, especially in conversational setting. Might even be a difference between "you are an AI assistant that's an expert programmer" vs. "you are an expert programmer" in the prompt, the latter pushing it towards "role-playing a human" region of the latent space.

(But also yeah, o3. Search access is the key to cutting down on amount of guessing the answers, and o3 is using it judiciously. It's the only model I use for "chat" when the topic requires any kind of knowledge that's niche or current, because it's the only model I see can reliably figure out when and what to search for, and do it iteratively.)
by yorwba | 2025-07-15 06:51:29+00:00
Currently, less than 70% of the world population use the internet. Universal adaption may be inevitable, but it could take a few more decades. Less than 40% use Facebook at least once a month. Comparable user numbers for LLMs are a bit hard to come by, but I'd guess less than 25% overall, not counting cases where LLM output is shoehorned into another product without the user asking for it. The inevitable may take a long time to come to pass.

If you're currently a heavy LLM user, probably you'll continue for the time being. But that doesn't mean you'll inevitably end up doing everything by telling an LLM to do it for you. And it doesn't mean people who currently don't use LLMs at all will start doing so soon (some of them need internet access first), nor will monthly users who literally only use LLMs once a month inevitably convert to heavy users.
by praptak | 2025-07-15 06:51:54+00:00
Inevitabilism has a long history of being used to persuade people to accept shitty stuff. Soviet bloc used Marx's historicism (or their interpretation thereof) to argue that communism (or their implementation thereof) is inevitable.

There was also TINA which was used to push the neoliberal version of capitalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_is_no_alternative
by Doxin | 2025-07-15 06:52:09+00:00
People just don't have any media literacy anymore it seems. Every now and then you get some indie project that doesn't treat the audience as stupid, but then the discourse around it demonstrates that the audience in fact may very well be stupid.

A recentish example I've run into is a song from Hazbin Hotel: Poison. They lyrics go on about how bad it is:

> 'Cause I know you're poison

> You're feedin' me poison

> Addicted to this feelin', I can't help but swallow

> Up your poison

The visuals are largely about the protagonist putting on a brave face under sexual assault. This song isn't putting on any kid gloves. But it's also a catchy pop song. The incongruity is the point. You're supposed to feel weird about liking this song.

But I guess a lot of people can't separate format and content so the discussion in the fandom is about how messed up it is for the authors to "glamorize assault".
by minikomi | 2025-07-15 06:52:43+00:00
That didn't happen.

And if it did, you formatted the prompt wrong.

And if you didn't, you poisoned the context.

And if you didn't, you exceeded the token limit.

And if you didn't, you're missing the right MCP server.

And if you're not, you're using too many MCP servers.

And if you're not, your temperature was wrong.

And if it wasn't, you should have used RAG.

And if you did, your embeddings weren't tuned.

And if they were, you used the wrong system prompt.

And if you didn't, you deserved it.
by spauldo | 2025-07-15 06:53:29+00:00
I used to use them in both X11 and CSS way back in the day. They were really common in X11, because a lot of users were on pseudocolor displays and it made sense to reuse colors as much as possible.

If you used uncommon colors in your program on - for example - a Sparcstation 20, the palette would shift every time you moved the mouse in or out of your window. It's difficult to describe to someone that's never seen it, but it's unpleasant. No one mourns the death of pseudocolor.
by haiku2077 | 2025-07-15 06:53:44+00:00
Specifically, I upgraded my mac and ported my software, which ran on Windows/Linux, to macos and Metal. Literally >100x faster in benchmarks, and overall user workflows became fast enough I had to "spend" the performance elsewhere or else the responses became so fast they were kind of creepy. Have a bunch of _very_ happy users running the software 24/7 on Mac Minis now.
by karlperera | 2025-07-15 06:53:45+00:00
Hey HN, I wanted to share a video on three hardware modifications I made to my telescope that have made a night-and-day difference in my astrophotography. For a while, I felt like I'd hit a plateau with my image quality, and the issues weren't things I could fix in software. The video walks through the 'why' and 'how' of each mod: 3d printing a Bahtinov mask: To get much sharper, more consistent focus across the frame. Flocking the tube: To dramatically increase contrast by killing stray light reflections inside the scope. Adding light shield and baffle: To reduce stray light from entering my telescope and spoiling the images. I tried to show the real-world results with before-and-after image comparisons. These were all relatively low-cost, DIY-friendly projects that had a much bigger impact than I expected. Happy to answer any questions about the process or the gear here!"
by nicewood | 2025-07-15 06:53:58+00:00
I think it's less about the code output, but about the process of humans iterating and adjusting the LLM-drafted requirements and design. Claude Code et al. are good enough, the bottleneck is IMO usually the context and prompt by now. So further improving that by optimizing for and collecting data about the human interaction seems like a good strategy to me.

Essentially, the user labels (accept/edit) data (design documents) for the agent (amazon)
by hosh | 2025-07-15 06:54:38+00:00
I have seen people conduct business that doesn’t enshittify. Though rare, it is not an universal trait for conducting business.

The process of creating the AIs require mobilizing vast amount of energy, capital, and time. It is a product of capital with the expectation of locking down future markets. It is not orthogonal to enshittification.

Small web was still a thing through the 90s and early ‘00s. Web servers were not so concentrated as they are with hardware capable of running AI, let alone training them.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-15 06:54:44+00:00
Cool. It's the most well-known concern. The side-effects of deficiency are pretty terrible, including depression and neuropathy. While there were many happy and healthy vegans in my college's dorm many moons ago, there was one vegan guy who was definitely deficient based on mood (severe depression) and appearance.

Glad you're not contributing to (bacterial) antibiotic resistance, (viral) pandemics, climate change, resource inefficiency, air/water/soil pollution, or animal cruelty as much as the rest of us. I'm merely a lazy vegetarian.
by numpad0 | 2025-07-15 06:54:49+00:00
I think it's the opposite. You can't be hyper-social in a thousand hour long sushi packed train ride. Urbanization suppresses real human connections. That creates demand for mock/fake environments that simulate "parking lot" environments where it would not be too inconsiderate to be social. All the successful examples of these parasocial contents eventually grow communities around them.

(Not that I think this particular one goes anywhere, no way.)
by bradly | 2025-07-15 06:55:00+00:00
What is really interesting is in the "thinking" section it said "I need to reassure the user..." so my intuition is that it thought it was right, but did not think I would think they were right, but if they just gave me the confidence, I would try the code and unblock myself. Maybe it thought this was the best % chance I would listen to it and so it is the correct response?
by tete | 2025-07-15 06:55:50+00:00
Of course!

Just like like we have been using what we now call VR goggles and voice input since the 80s, oh and hand gestures and governments all around use Blockchain for everything, we also all take supersonic planes while we travel, also everyone knows how to program, also we use super high level programming languages, also nobody uses the keyboard anymore because it has been replaced by hundreds if not thousands better inputs. Books don't exist anymore, everyone uses tablets for everything all the time, ah and we cook using automatic cooking tools, we also all eat healthy enriched and pro-biotic foods. Ah and we are all running around in Second Life... err Meta I mean, because it is the inevitable future of the internet!

Also we all use IPv6, have replaced Windows with something that used to be a research OS, also nobody uses FTP anymore EVER. The Cloud, no Docker, no Kubernets, no Helm, no, I mean Kubernetes Orchestrators made it trivial to scale and have a good, exact overview of hundreds, no thousands, no millions of instances. And everything is super fast now. And all for basically free.

Oh and nobody uses and paper wipes or does any manual cleaning anymore, in fact cleaning personnel has switched into obscurity people mostly don't know about anymore, because everyone sells you a robot that does all of that way better for five bucks, basically since the middle of the century!

Also we all have completely autonomous driving, nobody uses licenses anymore, use hyper fast transport through whatever train replacement, we also all have wide spread use of drone cabs and drone package delivery 24/7.

We also are SO CLOSE to solving each health issue out there. There is barely anything left we don't completely understand, and nobody ever heard of a case where doctors simply didn't know precisely what to do, because we all use nanobots.

Email also has been completely replaced.

All computers are extremely fast, completely noiseless, use essentially no energy. Nothing is ever slow anymore.

Oh and thanks to all the great security company, products, leading edge, even with AI nobody is ever victim to any phishing, scam, malware, etc. anymore.

Also everything is running secure, sandboxed code all the time and it never makes any problems.

People somehow seem to think the first 10% take 90% of the time or something. We have seen only very marginal improvements of LLMs and every time any unbiased (as in not directly working for a related company) researcher looks at it they find that LLMs at best manage to reproduce something that the input explicitly contained.

Try to create a full (to the brink) wine glass and try to have even the most advanced LLM to do something really novel especially add or change something in existing project.
by slacktivism123 | 2025-07-15 06:56:14+00:00
Yeah, this model didn't work it seems.

You're holding it wrong. You need to utter the right series of incantations to get some semblance of truth.

What, you used the model that was SOTA one week ago? Big mistake, that explains why.

You need to use this SOTA model that came out one day ago instead. That model definitely wasn't trained to overfit the week-old benchmarks and dismiss the naysayers. Look, a pelican!

What? You haven't verified your phone number and completed a video facial scan and passed a background check? You're NGMI.
by djtango | 2025-07-15 06:56:18+00:00
Speaking about not outsourcing practice reminds me of the physical analogue...

I have heard about people talk about "farmer's strength" to reference a very natural functional strength that is earned by the gruelling and diverse physical demands of doing farm labour for a lifetime.

Now people have invented various training regimes to try to reproduce that kind of strength outside of the original farming environment.

Edit - As an aside, it just occurred to me that I am both a functional strength and functional programming proponent (facepalm). Perhaps in the future after people seeking to strengthen their minds through via mental gymnastics, FP will see a renaissance
by com2kid | 2025-07-15 06:56:27+00:00
Computers ruined entry level jobs for a lot of people. Heck Outlook and PowerPoint put a lot of people out of work. Personal secretary used to be a solid reliable job for many women. Art teams used to exist to make real life presentations on actual paper. Large companies had their own private libraries and librarians to fetch documents.

Arguably we already saw some of the socially destabilizing impacts of computers, and more and more Americans were forced into poorly paying service sector jobs.

I actually suspect that right now, if we wanted to, we could automate a large amount of societies needs if we were willing to take a hit on quality/variety. For example, what % of the food chain could be 100% automated if we really wanted to? Obviously most foods could not, but surely a few staple crops could be automated 100% to the extent of robo-semis and robots loading and unloading crops?

That will be the eventual end goal. The question is what do we do as a society then?
by blixt | 2025-07-15 06:56:34+00:00
This is one type of problem of information retrieval, but I think the change in performance with context length may be different for non-retrieval answers (such as “what is the edited code for making this button red?” or “which of the above categories does the sentence ‘…’ fall under?”).

One paper that stood out to me a while back was Many-Shot In-Context Learning[1] which showed large positive jumps in performance from filling the context with examples.

As always, it’s important to test one’s problem to know how the LLM changes in behavior for different context contents/lengths — I wouldn’t assume a longer context is always worse.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.11018
by meheleventyone | 2025-07-15 06:56:40+00:00
It’s obviously partisan so presenting the figures in the worst possible light but the link to the original article has this:

> Total compensation was $70.8 million for the 134 lifeguards last year, and includes the following: base pay, overtime pay, “other” pay, leave time payouts, health insurance payments, pension contributions, deferred contributions, long-term disability and life insurances, and “other” benefits.
by evil-olive | 2025-07-15 06:56:50+00:00
> if this was built by OP or vibe-coded

I hope we start to see some etiquette / conventions developed around this, especially for open source projects.

if I showed up to a dinner party with homemade cookies, my friends would be appreciative.

if I showed up with store-bought cookies, my friends would probably still be appreciative.

but if I showed up with store-bought cookies and tried to claim they were homemade, my friends would probably feel insulted. even if the cookies were amazing, they'd be overshadowed by my dishonesty about them.

the problem, of course, is that if we had some standard section in a readme for expressing the spectrum between "0% LLM output, entirely whittled by hand as a labor of love" vs "100% LLM output, human eyes have never actually looked at any of it" we'd have LLMs hallucinate that readme section, saying they were human-coded.
by ascorbic | 2025-07-15 06:57:01+00:00
The people claiming that AI in the 80s or VR or robotaxis or self-driving cars in the 2010s were inevitable weren't doing it on the basis of the tech available at that point, but on the assumed future developments. Just a little more work and they'd be useful, we promise. You just need to believe hard enough.

With the smartphone in 2009, the web in the late 90s or LLMs now, there's no element of "trust me, bro" needed. You can try them yourself and see how useful they are. You didn't need to be a tech visionary to predict the future when you're buying stuff from Amazon in the 90s, or using YouTube or Uber on your phone in 2009, or using Claude Code today. I'm certainly no visionary, but both the web and the smartphone felt different from everything else at the time, and AI feels like that now.
by frenchtoast8 | 2025-07-15 06:57:11+00:00
It took me a couple reads of the PDF but I think you're right. The author creates an HTTP request Promise, and then immediately returns a response thereby shutting down the Lambda. They have logging which shows the background HTTP request was in the early stages of being sent to the server but the server never receives anything. They also have an error handler that is supposed to catch errors during the HTTP request but it isn't executed either. The reason for both seems quite obvious: it's completely expected that a Lambda being shutdown wouldn't finish making the request and it certainly wouldn't stick around to execute error handling code after the request was cancelled.

As an aside I find it strange that the author spent all this time writing this document but would not provide the actual code that demonstrates the issue. They say they wrote "minimal plain NodeJS functions" to reproduce it. What would be the reason to not show proof of concept code? Instead they only show code written by an AWS engineer, with multiple caveats that their code is different in subtle ways.

The author intends for this to be some big exposé of AWS Support dropping the ball but I think it's the opposite. They entertained him through many phone calls and many emails, and after all that work they still offered him a $4000 account credit. For comparison, it's implied that the Lambda usage they were billed for is less than $700 as that figure also includes their monthly AWS Support cost. In other words they offered him a credit for over 5x the financial cost to him for a misunderstanding that was his fault. On the other hand, he sounds like a nightmare customer. He used AWS's offer of a credit as an admission of fault ("If the platform functioned correctly, then why offer credits?") then got angry when AWS reasonably took back the offer.
by HenryBemis | 2025-07-15 06:58:02+00:00
The politicians are getting funded/paid (lobbying/donations) by the very same people/companies that pay the ad revenue to those media. Why on earth would politicians legislate against their actual bosses? (As a real life reminder - a dog that bites the hand that feed him is put down). Courts btw don't make up shit.. they 'judge' (verb) with the criteria of 'what does the law define'. So if politicians legislate wisely, courts will enforce any 'parliamentary' and/or executive order to ban the advertisements of medicine.

But they won't. Not until push-comes-to-shove, and the true bosses will reposition to 'the next thing' (smoking, sugary-foods, medicine) and then they will allow the politicians to finally block meds ads. In which case the 'next wave' will begin. Story as old as time...
by tsimionescu | 2025-07-15 06:58:24+00:00
> Most people except for the gamers and plagiarists don't want it.

As someone who doesn't actually want or use AI, I think you are extremely wrong here. While people don't necessarily care about the forced integrations of AI into everything, people by and large want AI massively.

Just look at how much it is used to do your homework, or replaces Wikipedia & Google in day to day discussions. How much it is used to "polish" emails (spew better sounding BS). How much it is used to generate meme images instead of trawling the web for them. AI is very much a regular part of day to day life for huge swaths of the population. Not necessarily in economically productive ways, but still very much embedded and unlikely to be removed - especially since it's current capabilities today are already good enough for these purposes, they don't need smarter AI, just keep it cheap enough.
by zwnow | 2025-07-15 06:58:27+00:00
Yea I know microservices, depending on how you do it this comes with a ton of extra complexity. There are microservice architectures out there where each microservice seems to have a different tech stack, so now you have to hire all kinds of talent. Can work out well too, I believe just doing it in Elixir would save one a lot of headaches