MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by vineyardmike | 2025-07-15 05:35:24+00:00
The study wasn't great but don't outsource your thinking.

The study (if we assume it was good) told students the objective of their task was to generate a factual essay about topic X. The study then measured how much they learned about the topic at the end, but the students who used ChatGPT "learned" less and remembered their own essay less despite an equally passable essay. I want the alternative version of the study where the students are told the essay is practice, and their success will be graded on how much they've learned about the topic.

I imagine you could conduct a similar study challenging students to complete math tasks with and without a calculator and then ask them how much of their multiplication tables they've learned afterwards.

If you want to learn and grow as a person, along some dimension, you need to practice. Growing requires repetition and reflection and to experience the feedback loop of improvement. Outsource thinking for whatever task you don't want to do when the only result you care about is the only outcome. Don't outsource practice and learning if you want to improve. Only you can make the decision on when each situation applies in your day. Maybe you want to be better at some task at your job, but maybe you just need to get through the task and move on.
by maz1b | 2025-07-15 05:35:27+00:00
It seems to me from a cursory glance of the blog post that because certain notable humans / individuals are "framing" the modern AI/ML (LLM) era in a more inevitable way, which I totally get, but isn't that how human life works?

The majority of humans will almost always take the path of least resistance, whether it's cognition, work (physics definition), effort. LLMs are just another genie out of the bottle that will enable some certain subset of the population to use the least amount of energy to accomplish certain tasks, whether for good or bad.

Even if we put the original genie back in the bottle, someone else will copy/replicate/rediscover it. Take WhatsApp locked secret passphrase chats as an example - people (correctly) found that it would lead to enabling cheaters. Even if WhatsApp walked it back, someone else would create a new kind of app just for this particular functionality.
by hinterlands | 2025-07-15 05:37:15+00:00
> All the 'box office records' since then are the result of charging way more to a continually plummeting audience size.

I don't think that going to the movies has gotten more expensive in real terms. It's just that the records are usually not adjusted for inflation, so a film with the same audience and the same inflation-adjusted admission price will appear to make 80% more at the box office compared to 2002.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-07-15 05:37:26+00:00
The quotes in the post are made by people in an attempt to sound profoundly predictive on some vague super-ai future. Its good to call out that bullshit.

On the other end of the spectrum is that people - demonstrably - like access to the ability to have a computer spew out a (somewhat coherent) relevant suggestion.

The distance between those is enormous. Without a vocabulary to distinguish between those two extremes people are just talking past each other. As demonstrated (again) in this thread.

Consequently one side has to pull out their "you're ignoring reality" card.

All because we currently lack shared ideas and words to express an opinion beyond "AI yes or no?"
by toast0 | 2025-07-15 05:37:49+00:00
> It's certainly possible, though I wonder is building a data center like this significantly more "destabilizing" to the ground water than say building a housing development? Many folks have had massive housing communities built at high speed 1000 feet from their property and we haven't seen these sorts of stories about well issues with that (that I'm aware of).

I would think highly likely. Most housing developments are going to be wood framed buildings, maybe a couple heavy trucks. Otoh, a datacenter is going to be a lot of concrete, probably a bunch of HVAC on the roof, brought in with a crane. Maybe more digging because you probably want to put fuel storage in the ground; otoh, housing development where there's people on wells is likely to have digging for placing septic tanks.

> This actually got me wondering, is a data center considered "industrial" for zoning purposes?

Some municipalities have specific zoning for data centers, but I think it would generally fall under light industrial or warehouse zoning otherwise. Data centers can also fit in commercial, but it's not a great fit.
by hosh | 2025-07-15 05:38:37+00:00
I am confused by the use of the term, telegraphed or signpost. I am not even sure I understand what this literalism is about.

Coming from a martial art background, telegraph means reading the subtle signs that comes before an action in order to anticipate, intercept, and counter it within the same tempo. It can also mean exaggeration of the signs, letting slip one’s intentions as an error in execution, or deceiving someone by falsely telegraphing intentions. They all come before the action, whereas the examples in this article seems to talk about things coming after the action.
by fendy3002 | 2025-07-15 05:38:59+00:00
LLMs need significant optimization or we get significant improvement on computing power while keeping the energy cost the same. It's similar with smartphone, when at the start it's not feasible because of computing power, and now we have one that can rival 2000s notebooks.

LLMs is too trivial to be expensive

EDIT: I presented the statement wrongly. What I mean is the use case for LLM are trivial things, it shouldn't be expensive to operate
by bentocorp | 2025-07-15 05:39:08+00:00
Yes it may be entirely based upon AI buzz, but there should be no reason that Apple also couldn't have inflated stock due to AI buzz.

For example, I have questioned why Nvidia has been able to be the unchallenged leader in AI graphics cards.

With Apple's silicon knowledge, access to leading edge TSMC fabs and volume purchasing power (due to selling millions of devices) – Apple could and perhaps should be selling unique processors to AI companies, and also using them themselves – taking a huge amount of revenue and mindshare from Nvidia.
by tomhow | 2025-07-15 05:39:50+00:00
We dislike it as much as you that it seems so difficult to have a sober discussion about political topics here these days, but it's probably more related to the state of the world, and particularly the prevailing style of politics and media we're living with. We'd love it if HN could be better than other discussion platforms, but try as we might, we can't help but be affected by what's going on in the rest of the world.

Rather than condemning the whole community like this, which is against the guidelines, it would be more helpful to highlight the important parts of the article that you think others are missing.
by tfourb | 2025-07-15 05:41:23+00:00
Europe now has hundreds of excess deaths from heat and hundreds of excess deaths from flooding due to events exacerbated or caused entirely by climate change most years. Africa likely already experiences tens of thousands of climate change related deaths each year, although attribution is tricky. Assuming that climate change and its effects are an exponentially escalating phenomenon, why would it be unthinkable that over the next 10/20/50/100 years the cumulative death toll of climate change will reach into the billions?
by mg | 2025-07-15 05:41:36+00:00
In the 90s a friend told me about the internet. And that he knows someone who is in a university and has access to it and can show us. An hour later, we were sitting in front of a computer in that university and watched his friend surfing the web. Clicking on links, receiving pages of text. Faster than one could read. In a nice layout. Even with images. And links to other pages. We were shocked. No printing, no shipping, no waiting. This was the future. It was inevitable.

Yesterday I wanted to rewrite a program to use a large library that would have required me to dive deep down into the documentation or read its code to tackle my use case. As a first try, I just copy+pasted the whole library and my whole program into GPT 4.1 and told it to rewrite it using the library. It succeeded at the first attempt. The rewrite itself was small enough that I could read all code changes in 15 minutes and make a few stylistic changes. Done. Hours of time saved. This is the future. It is inevitable.

PS: Most replies seem to compare my experience to experiences that the responders have with agentic coding, where the developer is iteratively changing the code by chatting with an LLM. I am not doing that. I use a "One prompt one file. No code edits." approach, which I describe here:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding
by WD-42 | 2025-07-15 05:41:38+00:00
I keep hearing this over and over. Some llm toiling away coding personal side projects, and utilities. Source code never shared, usually because it’s “too specific to my needs”. This is the code version of slop.

When someone uses an agent to increase their productivity by 10x in a real, production codebase that people actually get paid to work on, that will start to validate the hype. I don’t think we’ve seen any evidence of it, in fact we’ve seen the opposite.
by hamilyon2 | 2025-07-15 05:41:41+00:00
Yes, interoperability, extensibility, composability and the tyranny of program author is a problem. JVM with runtime-loading of classes and it's once popular beans standard is one of closest approximations, known to me, of the most general "local" solution.

Yes, it's cumbersome and hacky and still limited. The beans idea lost popularity and mindshare.
by cwnyth | 2025-07-15 05:41:44+00:00
All of this is a pretty ignorant take on history. You don't think those who worked on the Manhattan Project knew the deadly potential of the atom bomb? And Communism didn't lead to famine - Soviet and Maoist policies did. Communism was immaterial to that. And it has nothing to do with utopianism. Trains were utopian? Really? It's just that new technology can be used for good things or bad things, and this goes back to when Grog invented the club. It's has zero bearing on this discussion.

Your ending sentence is certainly correct: we aren't imagining the effects of AI enough, but all of your examples are not only unconvincing, they're easy ways to ignore what downsides of AI there might be. People can easily point to how trains have done a net positive in the world and walk away from your argument thinking AI is going to do the same.
by haiku2077 | 2025-07-15 05:41:49+00:00
> Remember the revolutionary, seemingly inevitable tech that was poised to rewrite how humans thought about transportation? The incredible amounts of hype, the secretive meetings disclosing the device, etc.? That turned out to be the self-balancing scooter known as a Segway?

Counterpoint: That's how I feel about ebikes and escooters right now.

Over the weekend, I needed to go to my parent's place for brunch. I put on my motorcycle gear, grabbed my motorcycle keys, went to my garage, and as I was about to pull out my BMW motorcycle (MSRP ~$17k), looked at my Ariel ebike (MSRP ~$2k) and decided to ride it instead. For short trips they're a game changing mode of transport.
by anovikov | 2025-07-15 05:42:19+00:00
Problem with Segway was that it was made in USA and thus was absurdly, laughably expensive, it cost the same as a good used car and top versions, as a basic new car. Once a small bunch of rich people all bought one, it was over. China simply wasn't in position at a time yet to copycat and mass-produce it cheaply, and hype cycles usually don't repeat so by the time it could, it was too late. If it was invented 10 years later we'd all ride $1000-$2000 Segways today.
by SlowTao | 2025-07-15 05:42:44+00:00
I suppose in part it is 'The devil makes work for idle hands to do'. In freeing up time for the individual and not being presently aware of this, you end up just filling it with less than helpful stuff.

I am not advocating for a return to less efficient means but that people need to be aware of how technology can be used create and fill gaps in odd ways.
by ebogdum | 2025-07-15 05:43:00+00:00
Very fair points, thank you very much for taking the time. I will make the changes later today to mention the dependencies.

As for the "speaks the S3 API", the idea is that this has two backends right now, Local File System and any S3 compatible API, like AWS S3, MinIO, DigitalOcean Object Storage ... and so on. In other words you can use them all at the same time, provided you have an instance for each.

But you did give me an idea, as to the fact that I need to add some directory/bucket discovery for existing files.

Thank you very much for your feedback.
by th_1002 | 2025-07-15 05:43:46+00:00
I've been looking since 2024 layoff. Was lucky to set aside a year of emergency savings ... and now that year is up, nothing to show for it

Network did not get me enough interviews. I think this was fatal. Resume blasting is useless but I only kept doing it to not feel the despair of "doing nothing" each day, that was the only purpose. Menial jobs in-person just tell me to apply online

I got rejected from Walmart and related jobs (stocking/janitorial/cashier) even hiding/dumbing down all my tech experience. And it's been going on for months

Paid too much for therapy and insurance.

I now believe the market has concluded that they aren't looking for someone with my skills, too generic or something. Too intelligent for minimum wage, not skilled enough for industry. I work on certs but I figure what's the point if it isn't the difference between interview or no interview, a literal phone screen (setting aside an actual offer). It costs money and I'm following in the footsteps of an industry that offers me no path forward to survival. I have specifically been rejected on the basis of my employment gap regardless of explanation, all the shit I've attempted to make up for it. It's meaningless punishment for already being unemployable

Persistence is the key, but at some point you just gotta admit to yourself that enough is enough and no amount of screaming at a wall will change reality. I needed a win at some point, but I didn't get anything, zero. Lamenting the death of my career daily. This is not a feeling you can medicate or counsel away. Have all but accepted that homelessness is approaching for me and I'll soon have to downsize my life goals
by dheera | 2025-07-15 05:43:58+00:00
That's how people probably felt about the first cars, the first laptops, the first <anything>.

People like you grumbled when their early car broke down in the middle of a dirt road in the boondocks and they had to eat grass and shoot rabbits until the next help arrived. "My horse wouldn't have broken down", they said.

Technologies mature over time.
by kgwgk | 2025-07-15 05:44:46+00:00
In the context of a submission about “A century of QM” that says things like

“To celebrate 100 years of quantum mechanics, the CERN Courier looks back at the impact of this theory and examines how it keeps delivering new puzzles, experimental ideas and technologies.”

the following comment may be completely misguided but I didn’t find it offtopic (maybe offreality):

“This is probably the slowest branch of the sciences, not able to get out of labs even after a century.”

But now I see that the author says that he meant quantum computing so the comment makes even less sense and is indeed slightly offtopic.
by cookiengineer | 2025-07-15 05:44:49+00:00
Woah.

This essentially is the idea of Star Trek computers, where there were "neural gel packs" being programmed/primed for different purposes on the starship's systems.

Damn, I have to think about this more. Essentially you are building a holodeck computer, where the users interacting with it just describe roughly what they want and the computer just generates it - in human language being the primary interface.
by tomhow | 2025-07-15 05:45:38+00:00
> simply because opposite of this is the prevailing normie zeitgeist

We'd love to be able to have reasoned discussions about economics and the pros and cons of wealth concentration vs redistribution here. But this is not the way to do it, and the comment led to an entirely predictable flamewar. Please don't do this on HN, and please make an effort to observe the guidelines, as you've been asked to do before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
by deanCommie | 2025-07-15 05:46:00+00:00
the issue isn't the capabilities of AI.

It's how it will be used maliciously and change our society irrevocably.

Not from saving developers hours of work.

But from making truth even more subjective and at the whims of the powerful.

And from devaluing and stagnating art even further.

And from sabotaging the critical thinking capabilities of our youths.

All technology comes with tradeoffs. The internet you describe also doesn't exist - it's been overtaken with ads and tracking and it's basically impossible to use without some sort of adblocking. But we can all agree it was worth it for humanity.

So will AI. Probably.

But that's what people are always concerned with - the downstream consequences like nothing we've ever encountered before.
by wiseowise | 2025-07-15 05:47:26+00:00
> If that were the case, people would watch classic movies, read novels, etc.

They literally do. Have you ever tried reaching out people NOT on social networks?

> The idea of sitting down and watching a two hour movie is really quite daunting when you’re used to videos that are at most 30 min and often less than one.

Average movie length is increasing every year.
by oblio | 2025-07-15 05:47:40+00:00
The thing is: what is the steady state?

We kind of knew it for the internet and we basically figured it out early (even if we knew it was going to take a long time to happen due to generational inertia - see the death of newspapers).

For LLMs it looks a lot like deindustrialization. Aka pain and suffering for a lot of people.
by lcnielsen | 2025-07-15 05:48:09+00:00
The kind of CUDA you or I would write is not very hardware specific (a few constants here and there) but the kind of CUDA behind cuBLAS with a million magic flags, inline PTX ("GPU assembly") and exploitation of driver/firmware hacks is. It's like the difference between numerics code in C and and numerics code in C with tons of in-line assembly code for each one of a number of specific processors.

You can see similar things if you buy datacenter-grade CPUs from AMD or Intel and compare their per-model optimized BLAS builds and compilers to using OpenBLAS or swapping them around. The difference is not world ending but you can see maybe 50% in some cases.
by scubbo | 2025-07-15 05:48:21+00:00
> Hours of time saved

Come back in a week and update us on how long you've spent debugging all the ways that the code was broken that you didn't notice in those 15 minutes.

Usually I don't nitpick spelling, but "mimnutes" and "stylisitic" are somewhat ironic here - small correct-looking errors get glossed over by human quality-checkers, but can lead to genuine issues when parsed as code. A key difference between your two examples is that the failure-cases of an HTML download are visible and treated-as-such, not presented as successes; you don't have to babysit the machine to make sure it's doing the right thing.

EDIT: plus, everything that sibling comments pointed out; that, even if AI tools _do_ work perfectly (they don't, and never will), they'll still do harm when "working-as-intended" - to critical thinking, to trust in truth and reporting, to artistic creation, to consolidation of wealth and capital.
by nperez | 2025-07-15 05:50:04+00:00
It's inevitable because it's here. LLMs aren't the "future" anymore, they're the present. They're unseating Google as the SOTA method of finding information on the internet. People have been trying to do that for decades. The future probably holds even bigger things, but even if it plateaus for a while, showing real ability to defeat traditional search is a crazy start and just one example.
by nonconstant | 2025-07-15 05:50:22+00:00
We're experiencing a global peak of Ruby meetups (globally). About 800-900 meetups in the last 12 months as per https://rubyconferences.org/meetups/ I'm hosting probably the largest Ruby meetup in San Francisco, see https://lu.ma/sfruby

Rails is not at the peak of visibility (like it was in 2008-2014), it is not a "default stack for new products" but here's what we see: Rails startup just did a large IPO (Chime), another Ruby startup filed for IPO (Figma) Rails startup just posted a record ARR growth (bolt.new)

Lots of startups and lots of success stories. See https://evilmartians.com/events/startups-on-rails-in-past-pr...

Again, not the #1 or "default" choice, which is probably a good thing, because we are past the hype+disappointment cycle and on the pragmatic side of things.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-07-15 05:50:46+00:00
:| I'm an engineer of 30+ years. I think I know good and bad quality. You can't "vibe code" good quality, you have to review the code. However it is like having a team of 20 Junior Engineers working. If you know how to steer a group of engineers, then you can create high quality code by reviewing the code. But sure, bury your head in the sand and don't learn how to use this incredibly powerful tool. I don't care. I just find it surprising that some people have such a myopic perspective.

It is really the same kind of thing.. but the model is "smarter" then a junior engineer usually. You can say something like "hmm.. I think an event bus makes sense here" Then the LLM will do it in 5 seconds. The problem is that there are certain behavioral biases that require active reminding (though I think some MCP integration work might resolve most of them, but this is just based on the current Claude Code and Opus/Sonnet 4 models)
by positron26 | 2025-07-15 05:50:57+00:00
I'm going to hold onto the Segway as an actual instance of hype the next time someone calls LLMs "hype".

LLMs have hundreds of millions of users. I just can't stress how insane this was. This wasn't built on the back of Facebook or Instagram's distribution like Threads. The internet consumer has never so readily embraced something so fast.

Calling LLMs "hype" is an example of cope, judging facts based on what is hoped to be true even in the face of overwhelming evidence or even self-evident imminence to the contrary.

I know people calling "hype" are motivated by something. Maybe it is a desire to contain the inevitable harm of any huge rollout or to slow down the disruption. Maybe it's simply the egotistical instinct to be contrarian and harvest karma while we can still feign to be debating shadows on the wall. I just want to be up front. It's not hype. Few people calling "hype" can believe that this is hype and anyone who does believes it simply isn't credible. That won't stop people from jockeying to protect their interests, hoping that some intersubjective truth we manufacture together will work in their favor, but my lord is the "hype" bandwagon being dishonest these days.
by energy123 | 2025-07-15 05:50:59+00:00
> You don't think those who worked on the Manhattan Project knew the deadly potential of the atom bomb?

They did. I am talking about the physicists who preceded these particular physicists.

> And Communism didn't lead to famine - Soviet and Maoist policies did. Communism was immaterial to that.

The particular brand of agrarian communism and agricultural collectivization resulting from this subtype of communism did directly cause famine. The utopian revolutionaries did not predict this outcome before hand.

> People can easily point to how trains have done a net positive in the world and walk away from your argument thinking AI is going to do the same.

But that is one plausible outcome. Overall a net good, but with significant unintended consequences and high potential for misuse that is not easily predictable to people working on the technology today.