MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drw85 | 2025-07-03 12:44:04+00:00
Which pretty much every line in it was written similarly somewhere else before, including an explanation and is somehow included in the massive data set it was trained on.

So far i have asked the AI some novel questions and it came up with novel answers full of hallucinated nonsense, since it copied some similarly named setting or library function and replaced a part of it's name with something i was looking for.
by averageRoyalty | 2025-07-03 12:44:21+00:00
To what extent? If you find out that a second camera operator in 200 odd films was a child molester, would you then make a point to avoid all of their prior films? If you found out someone who worked the production line of your favourite chocolate was a neo nazi, would you stop eating that chocolate?

We only seem to care when the person who is bad is also famous. I think everyone else is just as apathetic, but deludes themselves. I promise you that most things you own or use have some tier of evil within them. People buy cheap clothes, slave made phones and all sorts of things all the time and elect to ignore the imorality of it.
by K0balt | 2025-07-03 12:44:38+00:00
It’s astonishing how here, in an ostensibly technical forum, the vast majority of comments are left by people who did not even skim the article. At least read through the informative comments left by those who did read it before giving your venerable opinion based on the information that was already in your head? I mean, isn’t the point of an article or paper to present new, novel information?
by dirkc | 2025-07-03 12:45:19+00:00
I don't want to advocate for the Google Play store, but doesn't seem like legitimate technical / privacy reasons.

I know it's possible to do push notifications without user accounts - I'm doing that in an app I maintain.

But it is tedious to publish Android apps with a personal developer account - you need to run a 2 week test with 12 (used to be 20) users before you can release the app.

What prevents law enforcement for ordering the developer to alter the application in a way that reveals user info, maybe the order is simply that they have to hand over their signing certificates for the app?
by superkuh | 2025-07-03 12:45:42+00:00
Maybe it was never the bottleneck for paid software engineering at incorporated entities but it was definitely, 100%, the bottleneck for most human people.

And now instead of having to get the help or code from an actual programmer, as a non-programmer but technical person, I can generate or alter any small trivial applications I want. I'm not going to be writing an OS or doing "engineering" but if I want to write a GUI widget to display my PCs temps/etc, or alter a massive complex C++ program to have some feature I want (like adding checkpointing to llama.cpp's fine-tune training), suddenly it's trivial and takes 15 minutes. Before it'd take days if it were feasible without help at all.
by exe34 | 2025-07-03 12:45:43+00:00
> - Instead of fixing the things in the original PR, I'd often get a completely different approach as the response to my first review. Again, often broken in new and subtle ways.

This kind of thing drove me mad even before LLMs or coding - it started at school when I helped people with homework. People would insist on switching to an entirely different approach midway through explaining how to fix the first one.
by oytis | 2025-07-03 12:45:52+00:00
> Does that work as well with non-strangers who are your coworker?

Yeah, OK, I guess you have to be a bit less unapologetic than Linux kernel maintainers in this case, but you can still shift the culture towards more careful PRs I think.

> why are you even organizationally using LLMs

Many people believe LLMs make coders more productive, and given the rapid progress of gen AI it's probably not wise to just dismiss this view. But there need to be guardrails to ensure the productivity is real and not just creating liability. We could live with weaker guardrails if we can trust that the code was in a trusted colleague's head before appearing in the repo. But if we can't, I guess stronger guardrails are the only way, aren't they?
by FergusArgyll | 2025-07-03 12:47:05+00:00
> How are these people our elected officials? It’s unbelievable.

Because they know that the vast majority of people advocating for climate change to be a high priority issue is because they want to use that to slow down capitalism - the system that made the US the country they love.

I never hear growth-minded solutions for climate change: Let's get rich enough so everyone (even European hotels) can afford AC? Drug companies make enough money so even poor Africans can afford medicines and theraputics? Deregulate the solar industry? Reduce regulatory barriers for autonomous vehicles? Fast track nuclear power? Stop the fight against ride-sharing?

If the problem was climate change & it was a severe existential issue, I'd assume you'd support all of the above?
by fkyoureadthedoc | 2025-07-03 12:47:07+00:00
CF will stop bots that respect your robots.txt, and try and stop ones that don't. If your concern is just that you don't want your content used to train an LLM, this will stop the honest companies.

If you are concerned about load on your site because the crawlers are hammering your site, the ones that respect robots.txt should be respecting your crawl delay too. CF will be able to block the dumb ones that ignore your robots.txt and hammer you with no real strategy.

But serious scrapers will have rotating residential IPs and be loading your site from real browsers, they'll take effort to appear as actual users. Sites like Ticket Master have an endless arms race against these. Some Chinese LLM company will get your data if it's public lol.
by trealira | 2025-07-03 12:47:09+00:00
Well, perhaps if there's a Democratic president in four years, and they aren't afraid to break laws as much as Trump does, they could abolish ICE by withholding Congressional funding, destroying it the way this administration destroyed USAID, and reorganize other agencies to pick up the slack, which is how it was before 2003, when ICE was established.
by dataflow | 2025-07-03 12:47:27+00:00
> No, he told the author not to complaint. Why would this ask make sense? Because it's contradictory to complain about both of the opposite outcomes

No, it makes sense because you're a grown-up adult who can think beyond yourself and recognize when your demands would be irreconcilable with those of others, instead of a baby that complains the moment he doesn't get what he expected because his world only revolves around him. Does that make sense?
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-03 12:48:10+00:00
Coming from OsmAnd, I'm always impressed by the performance of the maps.me forks, but I find their feature set rather limiting. The route planning in particular seems rather naïve, at least from what I can tell when planning routes I know well. This would send me straight into traffic light-laden roads (that, on paper, if I were the only driver, would be the shortest distance).

That said, if you're just looking for a simple maps app, I suppose OsmAnd could be quite overwhelming and this would probably be a lot better.

I never really got what the Organic Maps drama was about, but as long as the two can peacefully coexist I hope they'll work together to make their apps as good as they can be.
by voidhorse | 2025-07-03 12:49:23+00:00
Yeah, it's amazing to me that any of these clowns consider themselves intelligent when they end up holding philosophical and political beliefs that the average high-schooler could tell you are completely wack.

The natural consequence of the worship of financial success, strong isolationist tendencies, and social atomization. When you "don't rely on anyone else" and managed to make billions with your "own wits" anything you think must be genius or at least correct, right? It's insane how our current socioeconomic structure has effectively let men with the social maturity of twelve year olds gain absurd amounts of influence and power.
by azath92 | 2025-07-03 12:49:24+00:00
thanks for checking it out and taking the time to give some feedback!

When weve been testing things, we often find that if there wasnt a great match between the options when picking preferences, and whats currently on the front page, that the context it generates will result in a lot of skips (understandably, but not great UX). Right now can try regenerating your context (and going through the process again), or manually editing it to get to different results.

Theres also some work for us to better select the options when picking preferences, or ensuring we always surface some deep dives.

Applying the same process to more pages, or bubling up content from multiple pages, or new is a great idea. cool to hear thats where you would look.
by perlgeek | 2025-07-03 12:50:04+00:00
> The actual bottlenecks were, and still are, code reviews, knowledge transfer through mentoring and pairing, testing, debugging, and the human overhead of coordination and communication.

I can relate :-)

Our team maintains a configuration management database for a company that has grown mostly organically from 3 to 500+ employees in ~30 years.

We don't have documented processes that would account for most of the write operations, so if we have a question, we cannot just talk to the process owner.

The next option would be to talk to the data owner, but for many of our entities, we don't have a data owner. So we look into the audit logs to see which teams often touch the data, and then we do a meeting with some senior folks from each of these teams to discuss things.

But of course, finding common meeting time slots with several senior people from several teams isn't easy, they're all busy. So that alone might delay something by a few weeks to months.

For low-stakes decisions, we often try to not go through this effort, but instead do things that are easy to roll back if they go wrong.

Once we have identified the stakeholders, have a common understanding among them, and a rough consensus on how to proceed, the actual code changes are often relatively simple in comparison.

So, I guess this falls under "overhead of coordination and communication".
by netbioserror | 2025-07-03 12:52:11+00:00
All of these are the exact reasons I don't go overboard with a custom Vim or Helix setup with all sorts of bells and whistles, and just use stock Sublime. The real problem is never the speed at which I can write code. I need to model a complex problem domain. My choice of language and tools virtually eliminate all boilerplate and focus the effort on those modeling and software design problems. I've tried LLMs multiple times, and each time they've proven they cannot help me.
by TeMPOraL | 2025-07-03 12:52:43+00:00
Nah, we still treat people thinking about it as crackpots.

Honestly, getting into the whole AI alignment thing before it was hot[0], I imagined problems like Evil People building AI first, or just failing to align the AI enough before it was too late, and other obvious/standard scenarios. I don't think I thought of, even for a moment, the situation in which we're today: that alignment becomes a free-for-all battle at every scale.

After all, if you look at the general population (or at least the subset that's interested), what are the two[1] main meanings of "AI alignment"? I'd say:

1) The business and political issues where everyone argues in a way that lets them come up on top of the future regulations;

2) Means of censorship and vendor lock-in.

It's number 2) that turns this into a "free-for-all" - AI vendors trying to keep high level control over models they serve via APIs; third parties - everyone from Figma to Zapier to Windsurf and Cursor to those earbuds from TFA - trying to work around the limits of the AI vendors, while preventing unintended use by users and especially competitors, and then finally the general population that tries to jailbreak this stuff for fun and profit.

Feels like we're in big trouble now - how can we expect people to align future stronger AIs to not harm us, when right now "alignment" means "what the vendor upstream does to stop me from doing what I want to do"?

--

[0] - Binged on LessWrong a decade ago, basically.

[1] - The third one is, "the thing people in the same intellectual circles as Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nick Bostrom talked about for decades", but that's much less known; in fact, the world took the whole AI safety thing and ran with it in every possible direction, but still treat the people behind those ideas as crackpots. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by matwood | 2025-07-03 12:52:56+00:00
If safety was the real goal the police themselves would announce checkpoints and speed traps. This gives people a chance to not drink too much or speed in the first place. I've lived in places where DUI checkpoints were all announced ahead of time, and I think for many it was a serious reminder to not drink and drive.

But for many DUI checkpoints safety is not the goal. It's simply a pretext to check everyone's papers.
by RHSeeger | 2025-07-03 12:53:31+00:00
>> "Why should I have to pay for Debbie across the country to have a kid? Or Fred across the state?"

> Because they pay for the same benefits you get, that they might not reap as often as you.

I'd set the reason as even more basic than that. Children are absolutely essential the future of society. There is literally no way to argue that is not true.

Since they are essential to society, we should be working on ways to support them; as a society. Now, this can be argued against. But I feel pretty strongly that "I do not think it is important for us, as a society, to works towards goals that beneficial to society" is a fairly brain-dead stance. You can argue about the best uses for _available_ money; but to argue that's a matter of priorities, not "is it a valid goal".
by metalman | 2025-07-03 12:53:33+00:00
un-nervingly near the orbital plane, as the depiction shows the object passing just above, on approach, and juct below, on departure, of the orbital plane of mars given the low relative speed of these objects so far, we can define them as extra solar, something exra galactic could be moveing at fractional light speed relative to us and be almost impossible to see and track unless it was realy big and close, and as there are confirmed exra galactic stars, it is not conjecture to to then include rouge planets and asteriods ,etc in the list of signatures to be looking for, and perhaps dismissed from previous data as bieng equipment artifacts or noise.
by gdbsjjdn | 2025-07-03 12:53:49+00:00
From personal experience, there's over a dozen fly-in communities in the Northwest Territories. No roads, the only way to reach them is snowmobiling in the winter or taking a plane from Yellowknife.

My understanding is that Northern Quebec and Ontario are similar, lots of very small indigenous communities that still follow pre-colonial practices. They would get supplies by plane or by boat. It's not surprising a settlement with 50 people is hard to find on satellite.
by eadmund | 2025-07-03 12:53:57+00:00
> If you can't be an expert after 5 years then there is no such thing as experts.

I think you’ll find that after 10 years one’ll look back on oneself at 5 years’ experience and realise that one wasn’t an expert back then. The same is probably true of 20 years looking back on 10.

Given a median career of about 40 years, I think it’s fair to estimate that true expertise takes at least 10–15 years.
by lsaferite | 2025-07-03 12:54:03+00:00
Just as a related aside, you could literally make that bottom section into a super simple stdio MCP Server and attach that to Claude Code. Each of your operations could be a tool and have a well-defined schema for parameters. Then you are giving the LLM a more structured and defined way to access your custom commands. I'm pretty positive there are even pre-made MCP Servers that are designed for just this activity.

Edit: First result when looking for such an MCP Server: https://github.com/inercia/MCPShell
by mykehunt | 2025-07-03 12:54:06+00:00
The vast majority is probably rent/property taxes. With a distant second benchwork (lumber).

Half a mile of 2-rail O-scale track (3-4 mainlines in a 200 foot loop) at today's pricing is under $8 a foot retail. In bulk and pre-pandemic well under $10k total. Considering the budget his roster of engines and rolling stock seems questionable.

Outside of collectable Lionel. Even the high end, magnificent museum quality KOHS brass compounded steam engine will run you ~$8,500. While he is running diesel.

I can understand the appeal of mainline/realistic operations. O-scale has its limitations (normally space) but an NTRAK meet up shows more creativity.

The clip of him using the knock-off Faller Grassmaster is kind of funny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-Mcgp6Dtq8
by Balnateras | 2025-07-03 12:54:30+00:00
The fact that this organisation studies something doesn't absolve them from peddling bullshit akin to 90s rightwing moral panic, i.e. games cause violence etc.

The only thing that article lacks to become a full on parody is a grand call to protect the children.

And yes, I did created an account to post a generic, dismissive comment, because this level of "reporting and studying" doesn't warrant anything more than ridicule.
by NiloCK | 2025-07-03 12:55:06+00:00
Writing code was never the only bottleneck, and I'm sure there is personal variation, but for me personally it has always been the dominant bottleneck.

My backspace and delete keys loom larger than the rest of my keyboard combined. Plodding through with meager fingers, I could always find fault faster than I could produce functionality. It was a constant, ego-depleting struggle to set aside encountered misgivings for the sake of maintaining forward progress on some feature or ticket.

Now, given defined goals and architectural vision, which I've never been short of, the activation energy for producing large chunks of 'good enough' code to move projects forward is almost zero. Even my own oversized backspace is no match for the torrent.

Again - personal variation - but I expect that I am easily 10x in both in ambition and in execution compared to a year ago.
by msteffen | 2025-07-03 12:55:13+00:00
> The reason the Go code is so much bigger is because it checks and (kind of) handles errors everywhere (?) they could occur

I’ve said before and will say again: error handling is most of what’s hard about programming (certainly most of what’s hard about distributed systems).

I keep looking for a programming language that makes error handling a central part of the design (rather than focusing on non-error control flow of various kinds), but honestly I don’t even know what would be better than the current options (Java/Python’s exceptions, or Go’s multiple returns, or Rust’s similar-seeming Result<T, E>). I know Linus likes using goto for errors (though I think it just kind of looks like try/catch in C) but I don’t know of much else.

It would need to be the case that code that doesn’t want to handle errors (like Max’s simple website) doesn’t have any error handling code, but it’s easy to add, and common patterns (e.g. “retry this inner operation N times, maybe with back off and jitter, and then fail this outer operation, either exiting the program or leaving unaffected parts running”) are easy to express
by nsavage | 2025-07-03 12:55:20+00:00
I think you're right, but I don't think 'colonization' ever really stopped in Ontario - it just moved elsewhere. While Quebec was incentivized to develop its regions, there were more valuable places for Ontario capital to flow to, such as Alberta.

The difference between the two is language really and the urge to develop Quebec as a sovereign country, that drive has never been there for Ontario because Ontario is Canada, at least in the eyes of Ontarians. You don't see people in Ontario proud of being Ontarian as you do in Quebec, the Maritimes, Alberta, etc, instead they're proud of being Canadian.
by ben_w | 2025-07-03 12:55:25+00:00
You may well be correct that people are too optimistic about it being fixable, but I would say the "why" is a little more complex than that.

It is also possible for artisans to produce functioning goods in low volumes, which is why "hand made" has often been seen a positive quality sign rather than a negative quality sign, and AI can do "artisanal" (same root as artificial). With mass production we want all three of "good", "cheap", and "fast", and we've been able to get it.

But even that AI can do artisanal is not sufficient for AI to succeed, and likely still won't be sufficient even when AI is near the best you can hire in a human, because AI is a memetic monoculture: while the errors of many human artisans can be somewhat uncorrelated and therefore the failure modes different, if everything comes from a single AI mind, it all fails in the same general kind of way. Likewise the quotation about science advancing one funeral at a time: diversity beats even very smart geniuses.

Memetic monoculture is what I think can't be fixed with current approaches, because current approaches need too much information for it to be possible to give each LLM* (even from different providers) a statistically distinct training set to learn from.

* The image generators do seem to be able to get meaningfully distinct output styles. At least superficially, I'm not an artist, so I may be missing some common thread they share beyond the "indistinct blurry background item" that I count as an error rather than a style. But in this topic, even that error would count as a common failure mode.
by nabla9 | 2025-07-03 12:55:58+00:00
> well established from multiple studies, easy to google

That's not all of them. You can find systematic reviews and meta-analyses walking trough them all. Easy to google. 50-100 mg per day is OK and possible has some benefits, if you go to more than 2 grams like you suggested for health person, there is no evidence of benefits, only harms.
by Jyaif | 2025-07-03 12:56:02+00:00
A very rough calculation would suggested that the cylinder that goes from our solar system to Proxima Centauri contains 5000 similarly sized objects moving at the same speed:

1 object crossing the solar system plane every 5 years at 60km/s

+

Proxima Centauri is approximately 5 light years away

=>

there are `speed of light / 60km/s` objects in the cylinder.
by inkyoto | 2025-07-03 12:56:20+00:00
> The problem is commercialization. Vitamin C is very, very reactive.

… hence it oxidises easily.

There has recently been a novel development, ethyl ascorbic acid, that is much more stable due to being more inert. It resists the oxidation for a much longer time compared to ascorbyl glucoside and L-ascorbic acid, and it has been successfully commercialised in some skincare products. The products using it command a premium, though.
by whatevsmate | 2025-07-03 12:56:44+00:00
The LLM is the coding tool, not the arbiter of outcome.

A human’s ability to assess, interrogate, compare, research, and develop intuition are all skills that are entirely independent of the coding tool. Those skills are developed through project work, delivering meaningful stuff to someone who cares enough to use it and give feedback (eg customers), making things go whoosh in production, etc etc.

This is a XY problem and the real Y are galaxy brains submitting unvalidated and shoddy work that make good outcomes harder rather than easier to reach.
by mooreds | 2025-07-03 12:57:09+00:00
> When do you think this is most comparable to?

I don't think it has happened to the software industry. We've been growing as computers have become more and more capable since the 1960s.

One analogy is farm employment cratering in the first half of the 20th century.

Went from 11.77M in 1910 to 5.88M in 1950 in the USA[0], even as the population went from 92M to 151M[1]. That's going from 12% of the population to 4%.

Another is travel agents, which went from 100k workers in the USA in 2001 to 30k in 2020[2] (though there has been a rebound since).

0: https://ourworldindata.org/employment-in-agriculture#all-cha...

1: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/dec/popchange...

2: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0254497900A