MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by UncleOxidant | 2025-07-07 22:39:14+00:00
As a hardware engineer turned software developer (including in EDA) who has dabbled in trying to create higher-level HDLs over the years, I now tend to agree with you. As it turns out you can already do a lot of things with parametarization of modules (which has been possible in Verilog and VHDL for years (decades) now). I think a lot of SW folks who look at the problem tend to come up with something that seems better to them from a SW engineering standpoint, but also tends to ignore some of the special needs of HW design so it ends up being klunkier than just writing VHDL or (System)Verilog.
by LordDragonfang | 2025-07-07 22:39:23+00:00
> Well, that's a whataboutism, and doesn't detract from the fact that creative does not exist in the AI sphere.

Pointing out that your working definition excludes reality isn't whataboutism, it's pointing out an isolated demand for rigor.

If you cannot clearly articulate how human creativity (the only other type of creativity that exists) is not impugned by the definition you're using as evidence that creativity "does not exist in the AI sphere", you're not arguing from a place of knowledge. Your assertion is just as much sophistry as the people who assert it is creativity. Unlike them, however, you're having to argue against instances where it does appear creative.

For my own two cents, I don't claim to fully understand how human creativity emerges, but I am confident that all human creative works rest heavily on a foundation of the synthesis of author's previous experiences, both personal and of others' creative works - and often more heavily the latter. If your justification for a lack of creativity is that LLMs are merely synthesizing from previous works, then your argument falls flat.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-07 22:40:10+00:00
> It's acceptable to just pick up your phone now to look up something or check your messages during a conversation in a lull.

I certainly wouldn't find that to be acceptable at all, and if someone I was with did that, I would ask them politely if they had something more important they needed to be doing, and if they wanted to postpone our catch up until later when they weren't as busy.
by junon | 2025-07-07 22:40:12+00:00
Thanks, I always forget the name.

I always remember my friend getting his PS bricked after using his real last name - Nieffenegger (pronounced "NEFF-en-jur") - in his profile. It took months and several privacy-invasive chats with support to get it unblocked only to get auto-blocked a few days thereafter, with no response after that.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-07-07 22:41:50+00:00
I had in mind the problem given in TFA, but I should have been explicit about that.

I think it's probably too hard as an interview question, but also that it actually is a somewhat realistic problem that I'd expect a senior programmer to (eventually) puzzle out correctly. (As opposed to, say, the archetypal bad interview question, "How do you swap two integer values without using a temporary?", where many people happen to already know the trick, and if you don't, you're unlikely to figure it out on your own in the space of an interview.)
by sho_hn | 2025-07-07 22:41:50+00:00
I bought an MK4 two years ago, it's been printing for 1500+ hours, and I haven't done any tinkering. It's just a workhorse.

Again, you said it yourself: You went from an Ender to a Bambu, and you seem to just assume that a Prusa requires "tinkering".
by sweezyjeezy | 2025-07-07 22:42:00+00:00
FWIW the original ARC was published in 2019, just after GPT-2 but a while before GPT-3. I work in the field, I think that discussing AGI seriously is actually kind of a recent thing (I'm not sure I ever heard the term 'AGI' until a few years ago). I'm not saying I know he didn't feel that, but he doesn't talk in such terms in the original paper.
by WorldMaker | 2025-07-07 22:42:18+00:00
On the religious side, I know several megachurches in my city got directly infected by Ken Ham [1] himself. (A person to which I have negative respect, including his massive wastes of state tax incentives that affect my own tax dollars.) One of his schticks was the the "Earth is only 6000 years old because the bible says so". I spent a lot of time in High School (private, years after the public school incident above) rolling my eyes through arguments using another of his schticks used to "combat" things like tectonic theory, the simplistic argument fallacy "Were you there?" I still have so much hate for that anti-science tactic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Ham
by cortesoft | 2025-07-07 22:43:29+00:00
I believed this, which is what made me avoid computer science in college; I wanted to avoid ruining my favorite hobby.

After a few years post graduation, where I wasn't sure what I wanted to do and I floundered to find a career, I decided to give software development a try, and risk ruining my favorite hobby.

Definitely the best decision I could have made. Now people pay me a lot of money to do the thing I love to do the most... what's not to love? 20 years later, it I still my favorite hobby, and they keep paying me to do it.
by handfuloflight | 2025-07-07 22:44:51+00:00
You're asking me to reveal my specific competitive advantages that save me significant time and money to convince someone who's already decided I'm wrong. That's rich.

I've explained the principles clearly: I maintain full engineering rigor while using natural language to express logic and requirements. This isn't theoretical, it's producing real business results for me, and unless I am engaging you in a client relationship where you specifically demanded transparency into my workflows as contingency towards a deal, then perhaps I would open up with more specifics.

The only other people to whom I open up specifics are others operating in the same paradigm as I am: colleagues in this new way of doing things. What exactly do I owe you? You're proven unable to non-emotionally judge ideas on their merits, and I bet if I showed you one of my codebases, you would look for the least code smell just to have something to tear down. "Do not cast your pearls before swine."

But here's what's interesting: you're demanding I prove a workflow that's already working for me, while defending traditional approaches based purely on... what exactly? You haven't demonstrated that your 'deep architectural insights from typing semicolons' produce better outcomes. So we'll have to take your word for it as well, huh?

The difference is I'm not trying to convince you to change your methods. You're welcome to keep doing things however you prefer. I'm optimizing for results, not consensus.
by RestlessMind | 2025-07-07 22:44:52+00:00
This is not happening in a vacuum. The reasons are - Instagram inspiring me with beautiful stories of my friends visiting these exotic locales, cheap and easy ways to be a tourist thanks to low cost airlines and AirBnB, ease of spending in local currencies thanks to credit cards and apps where I never have to carry any cash, answers at fingertips for almost any question I might have about venturing to these places.

In short, any desirable place is going to attract hordes of merely affluent tourists thanks to multiple converging tech trends. If you experience any friction in your travel plans, please share. There might be a startup idea in there /s
by soperj | 2025-07-07 22:44:52+00:00
I mean, you have major tree planting happening every summer in Canada, and it's all around trying to mono-culture the entire country for the sake of timber companies. They immediately spray Glyphosate on areas burnt by forest fires, so that low value fire break species like Alder don't establish themselves in the area and then they can send in tree planters to plant higher value pine, which is a serotinous species, ie: promotes fire. Then they blame all the bush fires on Climate change.
by fasterik | 2025-07-07 22:44:52+00:00
>I don't think we actually even have a good definition of "This is what AGI is, and here are the stationary goal posts that, when these thresholds are met, then we will have AGI".

Not only do we not have that, I don't think it's possible to have it.

Philosophers have known about this problem for centuries. Wittgenstein recognized that most concepts don't have precise definitions but instead behave more like family resemblances. When we look at a family we recognize that they share physical characteristics, even if there's no single characteristic shared by all of them. They don't need to unanimously share hair color, skin complexion, mannerisms, etc. in order to have a family resemblance.

Outside of a few well-defined things in logic and mathematics, concepts operate in the same way. Intelligence isn't a well-defined concept, but that doesn't mean we can't talk about different types of human intelligence, non-human animal intelligence, or machine intelligence in terms of family resemblances.

Benchmarks are useful tools for assessing relative progress on well-defined tasks. But the decision of what counts as AGI will always come down to fuzzy comparisons and qualitative judgments.
by graeme | 2025-07-07 22:44:59+00:00
>Likewise if I have a neighbour who is a notorious liar tell me I can find a piece of equipment in a certain hardware store, should I be mad at the store owner when I don't find it there, or should I maybe be mad at my neighbour – the notorious liar?

If you are a store own, AND

1. People repeatedly coming in to your shop asking to buy something, AND

2. It is similar to the kinds of things you sell, from the suppliers you usually get supplies from, AND

3. You don't sell it

Then it sounds like your neighbour the notorious liar is doing profitable marketing for your business and sending you leads which you could profitably sell to, if you sold the item.

If there's a single customer who arrives via hallucination, ignore it. If there's a stream of them, why would you not serve them if you can profit by doing so?

There are obviously instances you'd ignore and you seem to be focussing on those rather than what OP was obviously talking about, repeat instances of sensible ideas
by drewbeck | 2025-07-07 22:45:07+00:00
I've never worked in an org where this would be necessary but I can see the use case. If you only want to give your designers building blocks and expect them to use them only, then preventing detach makes a lot of sense.

If there's any flexibility in your designers' work, though, preventing detach would be very frustrating: to create a new thing we'll (designers) often pull from an existing component and detach it in order to harvest it for parts. Not being able to do that would drive me batty.
by nradov | 2025-07-07 22:46:55+00:00
No that's not how it usually works. People with a serious mental health condition don't usually start with self diagnosis. Instead they are referred to a mental health practitioner by another healthcare provider, a school administrator, or the criminal justice system because they are unable to function effectively in society. Many mental health conditions impair the type of objective metacognition needed to reliably self diagnose in the first place.
by GianFabien | 2025-07-07 22:47:14+00:00
Unfortunately NO. Consultants own management's thought processes.

If you look at IT history, it goes something like:

$ -> COBOL & mainframes -> RPG & minicomputers -> RDBMS (DB2, Oracle, Ingress, etc) -> ERP (SAP, PeopleSoft, etc) -> CRM (Salesforce, etc) -> ... AI/LLM/ML -> $$$$ -> ?
by HaZeust | 2025-07-07 22:47:32+00:00
What? THAT CASH comes from owning the inside spread on roughly half of every US equity share that trades. They quote a micro-price adjustment, and it pushes out anyone slower - which exactly the “service” that lets retail investors, like us, hit a bid or ask.

Honestly, whether YOU want to call that trend-following or market-making - I can't be arsed, but it’s still data-retrieval that runs THE institutional scale
by eddythompson80 | 2025-07-07 22:48:22+00:00
I wonder if this is the solution something like SponsorBlock is looking for[1][2]. They have a similar-ish problem. How to replicate crowdsourced data that trickles in slowly, but ideally you want replicated quickly.

WAL replication, rsync, bittorrent, etc all things that don't quite work as needed.

[1] https://github.com/mchangrh/sb-mirror/blob/main/docs/breakdo...

[2] https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock/issues/1570
by quacksilver | 2025-07-07 22:49:25+00:00
Maybe I read it differently from you, but it states

"You can use resources (e.g. publications on Google Scholar, Wikipedia articles, interactions with LLMs and/or human experts without sharing the paper submissions) to enhance your understanding of certain concepts and to check the grammaticality and phrasing of your written review. Please exercise caution in these cases so you do not accidentally leak confidential information in the process."

From my reading then that would prohibit putting the paper into an openAI service, but how an interaction with a local LLM that doesn't involve sharing anything is treated is unclear. If you had an airgapped GPU rig running a local model and you formatted all storage on it after you were done, then no information would be shared, as you are just doing a bunch of math operations on it on your own machine.
by TimTheTinker | 2025-07-07 22:50:23+00:00
LLMs directly exploit a human trust vuln. Our brains tend to engage with them relationally and create an unconscious functional belief that an agent on the other end is responding with their real thoughts, even when we know better.

AI apps ought to at minimum warn us that their responses are not anyone's (or anything's) real thoughts. But the illusion is so powerful that many people would ignore the warning.
by lelanthran | 2025-07-07 22:50:51+00:00
> The other day a good friend of mine with mental health issues remarked that "his" chatgpt understands him better than most of his friends and gives him better advice than his therapist.

The therapist thing might be correct, though. You can send a well-adjusted person to three renowned therapists and get three different reasons for why they need to continue sessions.

No therapist ever says "Congratulations, you're perfectly normal. Now go away and come back when you have a real problem." Statistically it is vanishingly unlikely that every person who ever visited a therapist is in need of a second (more more) visit.

The main problem with therapy is a lack of objectivity[1]. When people talk about what their sessions resulted in, it's always "My problem is that I'm too perfect". I've known actual bullies whose therapist apparently told them that they are too submissive and need to be more assertive.

The secondary problem is that all diagnosis is based on self-reported metrics of the subject. All improvement is equally based on self-reported metrics. This is no different from prayer.

You don't have a medical practice there; you've got an Imam and a sophisticated but still medically-insured way to plead with thunderstorms[2]. I fail to see how an LLM (or even the Rogerian a-x doctor in Emacs) will do worse on average.

After all, if you're at a therapist and you're doing most of the talking, how would an LLM perform worse than the therapist?

----------------

[1] If I'm at a therapist, and they're asking me to do most of the talking, I would damn well feel that I am not getting my moneys worth. I'd be there primarily to learn (and practice a little) whatever tools they can teach me to handle my $PROBLEM. I don't want someone to vent at, I want to learn coping mechanisms and mitigation strategies.

[2] This is not an obscure reference.
by ryandrake | 2025-07-07 22:50:58+00:00
I think these responses represent a pretty narrow Reddit/HN/"Chronically Online" asocial attitude and not indicative of the general public's view about spontaneous interactions with nonthreatening people.

Yes, nobody wants Jehovas Witness, Salesmen, or Mentally Unwell people barging in and throwing a word salad at you. But, I don't know anyone (outside of very vocal online posters) who would be offended if we were standing in line and I casually brought up the weather.
by capnrefsmmat | 2025-07-07 22:51:16+00:00
In our studies of ChatGPT's grammatical style (https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.16107), it really loves past and present participial phrases (2-5x more usage than humans). I didn't see any here in a glance through the lightfastness section, though I didn't try running the whole article through spaCy to check. In any case it doesn't trip my mental ChatGPT detector either; it reads more like classic SEO writing you'd see all over blogs in the 20-teens.

edit: yeah, ran it through our style feature tagger and nothing jumps out. Low rate of nominalizations (ChatGPT loves those), only a few present participles, "that" as subject at a usual rate, usual number of adverbs, etc. (See table 3 of the paper.) No contractions, which is unusual for normal human writing but common when assuming a more formal tone. I think the author has just affected a particular style, perhaps deliberately.
by gibbitz | 2025-07-07 22:51:33+00:00
> but as I was writing it I discovered that I am truly horrified that my car's breaks will be programmed by a contractor using some local 7b model that specializes in writing MIRSA C:2023 ASIL-D compliant software.

https://www.edn.com/toyotas-killer-firmware-bad-design-and-i...
by protocolture | 2025-07-07 22:52:05+00:00
>Mainly comic artists and small musicians who are doing things they like and putting out for people, but not for much money?

The number of these artists I have seen receiving some bogus DMCA takedown notice for fan art is crazy.

I saw a bloke give away some of his STL's because he received a takedown request from games workshop and didnt have the funds to fight it.

Its not that I want small artists to lose, its that I want them to gain access to every bloody copyright and trademark so they are more free to create.

Shit Conde Nast managed to pull something like 400 pulps off the market, so they didnt interfere with their newly launched James Patterson collaborations.
by kragen | 2025-07-07 22:52:33+00:00
Agreed.

"Whataboutism" is generally used to describe a more specific way of pointing out an isolated demand for rigor—specifically, answering an accusation of immoral misconduct with an accusation that the accuser is guilty of similar immoral misconduct. More broadly, "whataboutism" is a term for demands that morality be judged justly, by objective standards that apply equally to everyone, rather than by especially rigorous standards for a certain person or group. As with epistemic rigor, the great difficulty with inconsistent standards is that we can easily fall into the trap of applying unachievable standards to someone or some idea that we don't like.

So it makes some sense to use the term "whataboutism" for pointing out an isolated demand for rigor in the epistemic space. It's a correct identification of the same self-serving cognitive bias that "whataboutism" targets in the space of ethical reasoning, just in a different sphere.

There's the rhetorical problem that "whataboutism" is a derogatory term for demanding that everyone be judged by the same standards. Ultimately that makes it unpersuasive and even counterproductive, much like attacking someone with a racial slur—even if factually accurate, as long as the audience isn't racist, the racial slur serves only to tar the speaker with the taint of racism, rather than prejudicing the audience against its nominal target.

In this specific case, if you concede that humans are no more creative than AIs, then it logically follows that either AIs are creative to some degree, or humans are not creative at all. To maintain the second, you must adopt a definition of "creativity" demanding enough to exclude all human activity, which is not in keeping with any established use of the term; you're using a private definition, greatly limiting the usefulness of your reasoning to others.

And that is true even if the consequences of AIs being creative would be appalling.
by danielpetrica | 2025-07-07 22:52:34+00:00
I kept burning time manually recreating calendar blocks for routines like workouts and focus sessions, so I built a client-side solution to automate it. Key features: Generates complex recurring schedules directly in the browser Exports .ics files (tested with Google/Outlook/Apple) Shows time commitment upfront and handles exclusions (holidays/vacations) Zero dependencies beyond Vue 3 + vanilla JS Fully client-side – no data hits server! Tech stack is minimal: Vue 3 + Tailwind (with dark mode). No backend by design to guarantee privacy.

If you want to try dierectly without reading the post: https://danielpetrica.com/periodic-schedule-calendar-generat...

Would genuinely appreciate feedback on:

Edge cases with recurrence patterns (any weird schedules you’ve struggled with?) How it handles .ics exports for your calendar Whether you’d use this for work routines, fitness planning, etc.
by dsp_person | 2025-07-07 22:54:15+00:00
> For a given dimension d, Klartag can pack d times the number of spheres that most previous results could manage. That is, in 100-dimensional space, his method packs roughly 100 times as many spheres; in a million-dimensional space, it packs roughly 1 million times as many.

Those numbers sound wild. For various comms systems does this mean several orders of magnitude bandwidth improvement or power reduction?
by godelski | 2025-07-07 22:54:16+00:00
I think they fumbled with wording but I interpreted them as meaning "audience of HN" and it seems they confirmed.

We always are speaking to our audience, right? This is also what makes more general/open discussions difficult (e.g. talking on Twitter/Facebook/etc). That there are many ways to interpret anything depending on prior knowledge, cultural biases, etc. But I think it is fair that on HN we can make an assumption that people here are tech savvy and knowledgeable. We'll definitely overstep and understep at times, but shouldn't we also cultivate a culture where it is okay to ask and okay to apologize for making too much of an assumption?

I mean at the end of the day we got to make some assumptions, right? If we assume zero operating knowledge then comments are going to get pretty massive and frankly, not be good at communicating with a niche even if better at communicating with a general audience. But should HN be a place for general people? I think no. I think it should be a place for people interested in computers and programming.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-07 22:54:27+00:00
> But then you get Hindi with a four-way distinction, both voiced/unvoiced and aspirated/unaspirated in all possible combinations.

They're spelled that way; I don't think they're supposed to be pronounced that way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspirated_consonant#Voiced_con...

>> True aspirated voiced consonants, as opposed to murmured (breathy-voice) consonants such as the [bʱ], [dʱ], [ɡʱ] that are common among the languages of India, are extremely rare.

> Languages usually have either the voiced/unvoiced distinction as phonemic, or the aspirated/unaspirated distinction.

My understanding is that all of these options are fairly common:

- two-way contrast between aspirated and unaspirated

- two-way contrast between voiced and voiceless

- three-way contrast between voiceless aspirated, voiceless, and voiced

- three-way contrast for labial and alveolar stops; two-way contrast for velar stops
by Wowfunhappy | 2025-07-07 22:55:30+00:00
It wasn't a simple brute force. When Claude was working this morning, it was pretty clearly only playing a file when it actually needed to see packets get decoded, otherwise it would simply open and close the document. Similarly, it would only seek or fast forward when it was debugging specific issues related to those actions. And it even "knew" which test files to open for specific channel layouts.

Yes this is still mechanical in a sense, but then I'm not sure what behavior you wouldn't classify as mechanical. It's "responding" to stimuli in logical ways.

But I also don't quite know where I'm going with this. I don't think LLMs are sentient or something, I know they're just math. But it's spooky.