MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gregjor | 2025-07-02 04:59:21+00:00
> However I believe you and many others are, due to a fear or animosity towards the implications of near term AGI, are engaged in motivated reasoning.

Not fear or animosity. I have over 40 years in software development. I’ve seen numerous fads and supposedly revolutionary tech ideas get pushed hard only to fade away, or fail to deliver. Not long ago we had to endure the metaverse hype, before that blockchain. No code/ low code has been around in some form as a a holy grail for management for decades. I haven’t stayed employable into my sixties by ignoring new things. I try to discern the useful and real from the hyped and fake. I don’t claim to know how LLMs or anything else will eventually play out, but I’ve seen this money-driven hypetrain and cults of personality before.

> Even the smartest people fall victim to this folly, even Einstein for a while could not accept the implications of quantum mechanics.

That of course works both ways.

If so-called AI offers benefits I will adapt, just as I’ve adapted to many new things during my career. If it fizzles out or falls short of the promises I will still have a job. Right now the AI coding tools add nothing for me. Other programmers may have different experiences.

Programmers with years of experience in multiple business domains, like me, have the least to fear from AI. I think excluding young people just starting their careers, at a time when an LLM can plausibly do the same work under supervision, will choke off the path to senior developer and the necessary mentoring and real-world experience. AI may create a demographic crisis even if it doesn’t actually replace senior programmers. The damage will come from management short-sightedness and short-term profit seeking, not the technology itself.

In any case the question of what AI can do or might do only has a little to do with layoffs in tech and other sectors, and that was the original topic.
by BrenBarn | 2025-07-02 05:00:16+00:00
Yeah, I've thought this for a while now. It's like it used to be you either were available to chat or you weren't, but now it's like everyone is half-available at all times. I agree with other commenters that the fact that you had to be sitting at a desktop was also a factor. Finishing what you were doing and logging into AIM (or taking down your away message) was the equivalent of opening your door, going into the lounge/breakroom, etc. --- a signal of openness to interaction.
by Manoj58 | 2025-07-02 05:01:25+00:00
You've identified a fundamental gap - that meta-cognitive "I could retrieve this" intuition that humans have but LLMs lack.

Our graph approach addresses this: - Structure knowledge with visible relationship patterns before loading details

- Retrieval system "senses" related information without fetching everything

- Temporal tracking prioritizes recent/relevant information

- Planning recall frequency tracking for higher weightage on accessed facts

In SOL(personal assistant), we guide LLMs to use memory more effectively by providing structured knowledge boundaries. This creates that "I could know this if I looked" capability.
by BLKNSLVR | 2025-07-02 05:01:25+00:00
I managed to get extended family onto Discord. Also have one just for my non-extended family. It works great.

Signal has stuck for a couple of friends, but has decidedly not stuck for anyone else - and the ones it stuck for were either already on it or have a privacy bent.

Signal, back then at least, didn't do group chats, or nowhere near as conveniently as Discord. So much so that I don't even know if Signal does group chats now as I only ever use it for one-on-one.

I set up a Matrix server back then too, didn't take. Discord won.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-07-02 05:03:08+00:00
Aren't privacy and civil liberties fundamentally at odds with centralized government issued ID checks? How can you claim to value the former while supporting a plan to require the latter?

In the days before electronics were endemic, physically checking a photo ID didn't run afoul of that as long as the person checking didn't record the serial number. But that's no longer the world we live in.
by yakshaving_jgt | 2025-07-02 05:03:52+00:00
As an Australian citizen, this further reinforces my position that the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that Australia is a laidback country full of easygoing people.

It isn’t. For as long as I can remember it’s been wildly authoritarian, and it seems Australians harbour a fetish for the rules that would make even the average German blush.

Hopefully times have changed (though I don’t think they have), but about 20 years ago, standard fare on the road was to provide essentially no driver training, and then aggressively enforce draconian traffic rules. New drivers can’t drive at night. New drivers have to abide by lower speed limits than other drivers. Police stop traffic for random breathalyser tests. “Double demerit” days…

This seems like more of the same. Forget trying to educate the population about the dangers of free access to information (which they will encounter anyway). Just go full Orwell! What could go wrong!
by potholereseller | 2025-07-02 05:03:59+00:00
This sounds like a quasi-Gnosticism: the human body is lower and human rationality is higher; the lower as inhibiting the higher; the best for humans is to transcend their bodies by some means (albeit un-stated in TFA). It is a tempting view, if only because the human body seems frail in comparison to rationality.

It is a QUASI-Gnosticism, because it is a form of rationalism, which is incompatible with Gnosticism; Gnostics valued knowledge as a means, not as an end; they wanted to transcend every aspect of the human body, which includes the rational faculties.

Lovecraft certainly isn't a Gnostic, since total transcendance of the physical world would include (as stated above) transcendance of his cherished rationality. And Lovecraft isn't a quasi-Gnostic: his pessimism is paramount to his stories; do any of his characters ever escape the horrors of his stories? Gnosticism and Xenohumanist's quasi-Gnosticism/xeno-humanism are both fundamentally optimistic; the promise of transcendance is allegedly possible for anyone who acquires relevant secrets (in Gnosticism) or uses the relevant means (in xeno-humanism). I doubt that Lovecraft had room in his heart for such optimism; that would require him to be open to the possibility of the transcendance of Irishmen and blacks.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-02 05:04:06+00:00
> What if you watch a "Just released" movie that costs $10 credits on the first day of the month.

Well then at the end of the month, my usage will be used to allocate my media budget to the content creators, so I unless I consumed no other media that month, I guess I'm sending them less than $10 to the creators of that "Just released" movie. That's unfortunate, but it's still likely to be more than they're getting from the artificial-scarcity-enforced-by-middlemen-who-take-a-cut thing that we're currently doing.

Perhaps my friends should look at how much I'm spending on content and shame me for having it only be $10. And the people who consume my content should perhaps update their settings to pay me less for it on account of me being a stingy sort of participant. Or maybe they stop propagating my content altogether. There is a lot of room to explore incentives that might might work.
by b112 | 2025-07-02 05:04:17+00:00
Da Vinci and others worked on flying machines, I expect designs go back thousands of years. Yet the result is now thousands of designs and working iterations.

I think we're also getting better and faster at iteration and design. CAD, modelling, even wind tunnels from 50 years ago made a massive difference over jumping off a cliff with a glider for tests.

I guess my point is, I don't see 50 years as validation of it being hard. And some of those designs were likely dismissed due to tech limits at the time.
by lurkshark | 2025-07-02 05:04:17+00:00
> Signal really should support bots.

I feel the same way. If Signal supported bots/an API and “Communities” (in the WhatsApp sense) I’d finally be able to cutover all my use-cases from Discord. I get that the E2EE is a bit tricky for an API, and that you can kind of hack together Communities by just having a couple group chats, but the UX gap is just a little too big
by paulmooreparks | 2025-07-02 05:04:18+00:00
Just curious, since I'm not a Mac user: Does Command+Q differ from Alt-F4, which is the standard way of exiting an application on Windows? Back when Windows was new, most applications did actually go away pressing Alt-F4 on their main window, but in these days of notifications and constant connectivity, it seems little more than a glorified "minimize" command.
by ggm | 2025-07-02 05:04:32+00:00
I predict Lower.

Unrelated, but why I don't agree:

The systems which permit voting down stupid laws also permit voting down good laws. This is very "be careful what you wish for" and reductive to "the voter is always right even when they want stupid things" interpretation of democracy.

E.g. Swiss cantons opposing votes for women inside the last 2 decades.
by 123yawaworht456 | 2025-07-02 05:05:17+00:00
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Springer+Nature&ia=web

>Springer Nature is a leading publisher of books, journals, and other materials for researchers across disciplines and regions. Learn about its initiatives, partnerships, and platforms for open science, women in science, SDGs, DEI, and more.

and yeah, the thing looks exactly as you'd expect it to look.
by daniloa | 2025-07-02 05:05:20+00:00
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by CobrastanJorji | 2025-07-02 05:05:55+00:00
Hrm, that app seems to be shit, measuring only by its licensing system.

But I wonder about an app that can count things automatically, plus maybe also work out counts of 3D shapes by counting visible things and making estimates about packing ratios. A sort of "how many M&Ms are in the jar calculator" app. That'd be neat (and would ruin a fun game).
by dwattttt | 2025-07-02 05:06:05+00:00
I did this with a moderate sized cli tool; it was really good to be able to see effectively every error state you could have at the top level of the program.

Something I didn't find an ergonomic solution to though was pulling out common errors; I wanted to say, pull out any std::io errors that occurred at the top level, but all I found was to match and expand every error case to pull them out.

I considered maybe a derive/trait based approach would work, but it was too big a hammer for that project.
by Digory | 2025-07-02 05:07:43+00:00
I’d guess the idea was about generalizing the team’s efforts to spot fakery across the internet, in-browser. But that horse has left the barn.

Before AI, a lot of search result gamesmanship looked more like bad Amazon reviews. But leading-edge fraud is far past “humans pretending to be real, U.S.-based consumers/posters on a website.” The tools don’t generalize anymore.
by ggm | 2025-07-02 05:07:54+00:00
Homomorphic encryption and third parties. No need for government eyes to know axiomatically which 100pts ID verified which login, nor website or search engine to know who the real person is.

Most legislation aims to create the offence of misleading, not actually stamp out 100% of offenders. Kids who get round this will make liabilities for themselves and their parents.
by tapiok | 2025-07-02 05:08:45+00:00
The platform allows bounties that condition payment on providing __positive__ reviews. Let's imagine your idea gets traction. Now we do not have ads discernible from the medium content; instead we have content polluted by favorable mentions of businesses/services/products that do not reflect reality. That sounds like a disaster. Maybe one of your platform policies should be that bounties must not condition payments on the reviews to be positive.
by skydhash | 2025-07-02 05:09:13+00:00
> For example, a common device that painters employ is to configure the neighboring regional contrast of a form can be light against dark on one edge and dark against light on the opposing edge.

I'm not fully sure of what you means. If we take the following example, are you talking about the neck and the collar of the girl?

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ea/70/0b/ea700b6a0b366c13187e...

https://fr.pinterest.com/pin/453596993695189968/

I think the name of the concept is "edge control" (not really original). You can find some explanation here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpSlGmbUB08

To keep it short, there's no line in reality. So while you can use them when sketching, they are pretty crude, kinda like a piano with only 2 keys. The best thing is edges, meaning the delimitation between two contrasting area. If you're doing grayscale, your areas are values (light and shadow) and it's pretty easy. Once you add color, there's more dimension to play with and it became very difficult (warm and cold color, atmospheric colors, brush stroke that gives the illusion of details,...).

Again, this falls under the things that are easy to explain, but take a while to be able to observe it and longer to reproduce it.

There's a book called "Color and Light" by James Gurney that goes in depth about all of these. There's a lot of parameters that goes inside a brush stroke in a specific area of a painting.
by marcus_holmes | 2025-07-02 05:09:25+00:00
All good points, thanks for the constructive reply.

Your point that Swartz would have had a different result had he formed an LLC, and hired a bunch of lawyers, is definitely the key point here. A legal system that only works for the rich and powerful is not something we should defend, support, or put up with.

His purpose in copying research papers and making them available for free is massively more in the public interest than anything the AI companies are doing. They are, after all, seeking to make a profit at the end of this. And they knowingly and deliberately broke copyright law because it was "too hard" to make any kind of licensing deal with the publishers. You can argue about fair use and transformative purposes (as their lawyers have done), but you can also argue from Swartz's point of view that this information was (to a large extent) publicly funded and therefore belonged to the public, and trying to get the journals to acknowledge that is "too hard". And had he been able to afford lawyers, that's a possible line they could have taken. But he didn't get the chance. As you say, we never got to the trial so we will never know.

It's definitely not a stretch to say that his crime and the AI companies' crimes (which they admit to - they admit to downloading source texts from pirate sites) are comparable, even equivalent. Yet their treatment is not.

My understanding of his treatment is that it was a lot more than "light compulsion" and that he underwent a sustained campaign of enforcement activity and litigation at the hands of a specific prosecutor. But given that the AI companies have had nothing - no criminal charges - just a civil case brought by the authors they admit to ripping off, then I don't think I need to push this point. They are clearly being treated differently to him, despite the similar actions.
by paulmooreparks | 2025-07-02 05:10:03+00:00
That's pretty much all I've done since LLMs became the hot thing. I've only used AI on one AI project, and that was pretty much only to say I've worked on an AI project. My main two projects now are a JSON replacement and a CLI construction set (which uses the JSON replacement for its config).

https://github.com/paulmooreparks/
by defrost | 2025-07-02 05:10:16+00:00
It only covers Roman Empire Roads.

See Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shudao https://www.newcivilengineer.com/archive/chinas-ancient-road...

Roman roads relied on thickness and rigidity, and sometimes needed excavations up to 2m deep. This meant they were long lasting but allowed nothing for temperature induced expansion or contraction. They were consequently prone to surface fissuring and uneven drainage.

Vs:

The Chinese roads, on the other hand, were more akin to modern highways, being thinner and more elastic. They were built with a rubble sub-base onto which a layer of finely tamped gravel was added to produce a 'water- bound macadam'.

Other ancient road networks existed, but Rome and China were the big two from a civil engineering PoV.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-02 05:11:22+00:00
The general principle is sound but the engineering is rather a problem. Assuming the launcher is solved (railgun, light gas gun, whatever), and a giant dish to pick up the even tinier then usual signals (maybe the DSN is already enough even, but the US already knows how to build an Orion satellite, so a giant space-based dish isn't impossible), what I would guess to be the sticking points would be the probes themselves.

Each one needs whatever sensors, but more importantly, the auxiliary stuff to last years or decades in transit: in particular power supplies, heaters (=power!) if you can't make your electronics survive constant cryogenic temperatures, as well as comms amongst themselves to organise the mesh and high-gain comms back to Earth.

Maybe the worst of that could be solved with a nuclear power supply and then it's basically "just" radio and software design.

I also don't think you'd use onmidirectional mesh comms, you can get a lot of milage (literally) out of a phased array that can steer the beam at each target, plus it also becomes a bonus multistatic radar network.
by sysmax | 2025-07-02 05:11:42+00:00
It's not really that specific. There's a actually a hidden command there for comparing the current source file against an older version (otherwise, good luck testing the diff GUI without pre-recorded test cases). If anyone's interested, it can be very easily converted into a proper feature.

That said, when you review human work, the granularity is usually different. I've actually been heavily using AI to do minor refactoring like "replace these 2 variables with a struct and update all call sites" and the reviewing flow is just different. AI makes fairly predictable mistakes, and once you get the hang of it, you can spot them before you even fully read the code. Like groups of 3 edits for all call sites, and one call site with 4. Or things like removed comments or renamed variables you didn't ask to rename. Properly collapsing irrelevant parts makes much bigger difference than with human-made edits.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-07-02 05:11:46+00:00
> “Friday week” is surprisingly unambiguous. It always means “count forward from today until a Friday, then add a week”.

Well, no, the typical case would be that it means nothing at all and the other person thinks you're having a stroke. Zero potential meanings isn't actually better than two potential meanings.

You know what's really unambiguous? "Friday the 8th".
by a_tessellator | 2025-07-02 05:14:10+00:00
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by zestyping | 2025-07-02 05:16:06+00:00
Regulation doesn't have to be at the level of controlling how technology is designed. It can be more creative, at the level of organizations or incentives, for example:

- Require advertising companies to follow special rules, including only doing advertising and nothing else

- Fund an agency that measures the health harms of large platforms and imposes fines or restrictions based on harm
by tomhow | 2025-07-02 05:16:52+00:00
> This is hopelessly naive

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by dotancohen | 2025-07-02 05:18:34+00:00
> Or that I’m looking up a data point that I already actually know, just because I want to provide a citation.

Or what were know has changed.

When I was a child we knew that the North Star consisted of five suns. Now we know that it is only three suns, and through them we can see another two background stars that are not gravitationally bound to the three suns of the Polaris system.

Maybe in my grandchildren lifetimes we'll know something else about the system.