MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by legacynl | 2025-07-12 13:46:23+00:00
> Trump is doing exactly what he said he was going to do

No he doesn't. He has never provided a straight answer to any question about policy ever. He just said whatever he thought the audience wanted to hear. His answer to the same question has never been the same.

It's just that 50% of americans have been captivated by fox/facebook/twitter, and they tell those americans what to believe, and they're telling to vote trump, nomatter what he says.
by nick__m | 2025-07-12 13:47:02+00:00
I do the same! To me it's a semi sarcastic hedge against the robots uprising and Roko's basilisk.

But more seriously I remember reading somewhere the LLM produce better output with question starting with please, supplementary politeness was not improving results. Probably because the training corpus include many samples where politeness in request produce better response. That apply to the original GPT-3.5, how it applies to newer models your guess is as good or better then mine...

The thanks are unnecessary but I guess they are useful to reinforce his son politeness habits.
by plqbfbv | 2025-07-12 13:47:43+00:00
This.

I have started testing Copilot for fun, my wife needs a web-based project that is not maintained for a while now and written in PHP.

I asked Copilot (Agent mode) to translate it to rust just for the fun of it, seeing how far it would come - I expected nothing out of it. I broke down the tasks into manageable chunks, directed it in design choices, and asked it to use some specific frameworks.

So far it wrote 40k lines of rust on its own, and keeps track of what functionality is missing compared to the original project. It was impressive seeing it iterate alone for 30m+ at a time.

I'm no programmer, more systems/cloud engineer, so a rewrite like this would have likely costed me >2 years of work and still ending up useless for all intents and purposes. I'm pretty sure that the end result won't work at first try, and I'll need to fix stuff manually or direct Copilot to fix it, but after two weeks of 1-2h iterating at night, I have 90% of something that would have required someone full time for at least a couple years.

The two things I found most valuable (also in other things, like shorter bash and python scripts):

1. Syntax boilerplate: if your task is specific enough, it normally gets it right 99.99% of the time, and my brain can look at the actual logic rather than the commas, brackets and (in python's case) spaces

2. Documentation: I spend 95% less time looking at documentation for something, I don't need to comb the entire language/package/class for the specific things, it normally gets it right, and worst case I can ask it to do a refactor with the most modern standards for specific library version X
by ceejayoz | 2025-07-12 13:48:24+00:00
> So you trust a human artist's ability to draw to-scale more than AI?

Yes. There is a pretty good chance that someone drawing even a stick figure representation of the two to post “for reference” has at least some relevant information on the sizes. People don’t tend to draw giant extinct beavers for fun out of the blue.

AI slop, in this context, is the same as a child’s crayon drawing of a dragon. It may be cute. Pretty. It may make you proud. But it offers little scientific value for assessing the size of real dragons.

AI makes convincing looking art, but that’s worse, because people fall for it in ways unlikely with crayon. And it can be done fast.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-07-12 13:49:26+00:00
I often use the same setup. Qwen 2.5 coder is very good on its own, but my Emacs setup doesn’t also use web search when that would be appropriate. I have separately been experimenting with the Perplexity Sonar APIs that combine models and search, but I don’t have that integrated with my Emacs and Qwen setup - and that automatic integration would be very difficult to do well! If I could ‘automatically’ use a local Qwen, or other model, and fall back to using a paid service like Perplexity or Gemini grounding APIs just when needed that would be fine indeed.

I am thinking about a new setup as I write this: in Emacs, I explicitly choose a local Ollama model or a paid API like Gemini or OpenAI, so I should just make calling Perplexity Sonar APIs another manual choice. (Currently I only use Perplexity from Python scripts.)

If I owned a company, I would frequently evaluate privacy and security aspects of using commercial APIs. Using Ollama solves that.
by cheese_van | 2025-07-12 13:50:11+00:00
Happened to me in the '80's. '71 Buick Skylark. When we went to lunch, our receptionist asked us to drive her Buick as it "was making funny noises." We found it in the 5 storey carpark, took it out and it drove fine. However, we got back rather late, and the carpark was full so we had to park it on the highest level. When we returned, I asked our receptionist, "I thought it odd that you had a St Christopher statue on the dash, I thought you were Baptist?" "No, I don't have a St Christopher on the dash," she replied.

Apparently we took the wrong Buick. The owner, we conjectured, was going to report it stolen since it was sitting 4 floors up on the exposed level.

Not knowing what kind of liability to which we were exposed, we kept it to ourselves.
by AznHisoka | 2025-07-12 13:50:15+00:00
Yes, saying everything is a REST or database wrapper is ingenuous. I’m sorry, but can my database help me compute sales taxes across all my products? Can it help me conduct performance reviews for all my employees?

On the other hand, ChatGPT can easily help me write content (Jasper/CopyAI) or do company research or write an outreach email (AI sales tools)
by android521 | 2025-07-12 13:50:29+00:00
first, you don't need to reward or payback your parent. You don't need to feel guilty for the love and support of your parent. second, it is never too late. you already had a time machine. your future 70 year old self transported you back so that you had awareness and wrote this post but you can't remember that you're from the future. But you do know that you can make a difference starting now. Don't aim for big changes. You will mostly disappoint and give up. Aim for small daily improvements. Procratinate a little bit less (just a little will do) . Learn a bit more (just a bit more is enough) every day.Time will be your friend and you will be a different person a year from now.
by submeta | 2025-07-12 13:50:30+00:00
When I setup systems, I thoroughly document them, test them, develop them according to architectural best practices. My AI assisted code generation is lightyears ahead of what I see in companies I have worked for. The best they —the companies—-do is hire expensive consultants. Who sell them preconfigured system. And when you look into those systems you won’t believe your eyes either. Because you instantly realise that those devs do not know much about architectural patterns, aout systems design, about software development best practices. Yet they sell their systems as well, because they offer a niche product where they have only a handful competitors.

In that setting someone with solid software engineering background using AI to solve problems is like a wizard from the team‘s perspective.

When I worked for startups I was constantly panicking to miss the latest tech trends, and I feared that I would be not marketable in case I didn’t catch up. But in mature companies things work much slower. They work with decades old technology. In that setting not the latest tech counts but being able to solve problems, with whatever means you can.
by notahacker | 2025-07-12 13:50:31+00:00
> Really??? You think NIMBYs will protest a good school?

I mean NIMBYs protest educational facilities and transit links all the time, even when on paper at least they reap benefits in terms of house price appreciation.

Imagine arguing with a straight face they wouldn't protest such improvements more actively when someone else's kids getting a good education pushes them below the poverty line or forces them to leave the area. If you align any improvements to an area with increases in costs, you get incentives to ensure an area doesn't improve.
by interestica | 2025-07-12 13:50:43+00:00
It was a series of events and failures rather than simply “pilot calculated incorrect”. And it was a bit more nuanced than metric/imperial conversion.

Via wiki (but accident section is more detailed):

“ The accident was caused by a series of issues, starting with a failed fuel-quantity indicator sensor (FQIS). These had high failure rates in the 767, and the only available replacement was also nonfunctional. The problem was logged, but later, the maintenance crew misunderstood the problem and turned off the backup FQIS. This required the volume of fuel to be manually measured using a dripstick. The navigational computer required the fuel to be entered in kilograms; however, an incorrect conversion from volume to mass was applied, which led the pilots and ground crew to agree that it was carrying enough fuel for the remaining trip. ”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider
by relaunched | 2025-07-12 13:51:01+00:00
I'm much more concerned with a new hire, especially revOps, that shows up and their day 1 recommendation is to change productivity tooling for the whole company. Typically these big changes on day one kinda folks are tone def to the organization and culture, and don't always survive the backlash / fallout of their changes.

Encourage this person to start a little smaller, build a track record of impactful wins and use that track record to make bigger and bigger changes.

To answer your stack questions, people are successful with all sorts of tools - one stack isn't better or worse.
by graycat | 2025-07-12 13:51:08+00:00
Threads is for mobile? There's an app? Mobile, why do I care about mobile?

Mobile's for phone calls, right? And a mobile phone has a tiny screen, is short on electrical power, and has the worst substitute for a keyboard back before the first typewriter!!!

Instead, I type this using an excellent 32" screen and a really good keyboard got years ago with a Gateway computer!!!

A joke, folks!
by shash | 2025-07-12 13:51:12+00:00
They did, about 10 seconds later (which is both incredibly short and an eternity). But the engines almost immediately start losing thrust and it takes them much more time to restart. At the end of the flight, FDR records that one engine was gaining thrust, and the other was attempting to spin up, but it was too late and they didn't have enough glide time for both to gain enough thrust to climb.
by Olsonify | 2025-07-12 13:51:40+00:00
Stop Guessing If Your Cron Jobs Ran. Know Instantly.

Meet CronGuardian — a dead-simple cron job monitoring tool that just works.

Start for free Get email alerts when a job fails, runs too late, or not at all No clutter, no dashboards to decipher — just clean, effective monitoring

Drop in a webhook. Get peace of mind. That’s it.

→ Try CronGuardian now — no credit card required.
by _heimdall | 2025-07-12 13:52:56+00:00
Also they apparently didn't use a control group, the study was terminated early, and after the 43 day test window 9 of the 28 participants are listed as having the adverse event of malaria.

I'm particularly confused by that last one. How is malaria considered an adverse event when testing an anti-malaria treatment? Other data in the study shows that 1 participant had malaria again with matching DNA, meaning the original infection likely came back. 6 others were reported as getting malaria again but with different DNA. So what does it mean to have 9 with the adverse event of malaria?
by crazygringo | 2025-07-12 13:53:16+00:00
From the article, it seems like this is exclusively (or mainly?) a problem when the LLM's are hooked up to real-time search. When they talk about what they're trained on, they know that Pravda is unreliable.

So it seems like an easy fix in this particular case, fortunately -- either filter the search results in a separate evaluation pass (quick fix), or do (more) reinforcement training around this specific scenario (long-term fix).

Obviously this is going to be a cat and mouse game. But this looks like it was a simple oversight in this case, not some kind of fundamental flaw in LLM's fortunately.
by thunky | 2025-07-12 13:53:24+00:00
> Before the bubble does pop, which I think is inevitable

Curious what you think a popping bubble looks like?

A stock market crash and recession, where innocent bystanders lose their retirements? Or only AI speculators taking the brunt of the losses?

Will Google, Meta, etc stop investing in AI because nobody uses it post-crash? Or will it be just as prevalent (or more) than today but with profits concentrated in the winning/surviving companies?
by justanything | 2025-07-12 13:53:46+00:00
I do owe my parents, firstly because I am adopted and secondly, they went above and beyond for me in every way they could. Thank you for the kind words, I appreciate them.

I am trying small daily improvements now, for the millionth time. But the fear and the guilt is overwhelming, and I am never gonna catch up to other normal people, much less high earners. And then there is AI.
by BugsJustFindMe | 2025-07-12 13:54:16+00:00
Ethics dictate always using the smallest viable cohort to show that giving the treatment regimen (in this case dosage for a drug known to be effective) isn't obviously worse than the thing it's supposed to treat, even if we're already pretty sure. This also keeps the costs of running the studies down so we can effectively conduct more studies for more treatments.

We also already have data about its use in babies over 11 lbs, and this is just going even smaller to 4.4 lbs, so a strong baseline has already been demonstrated.
by impossiblefork | 2025-07-12 13:54:49+00:00
Yes, but the regurgitation can be thought of as memory.

Let it have more source information. Let it know who said the things it reads, let it know on what website it was published.

Then you can say 'Hallucinate comments like those by impossibleFork on news.ycombinator.com', and when the model knows what comes from where, maybe it can learn what users are reliable by which they should imitate to answer questions well. Strengthen the role of metadata during pretraining.

I have no reason to belive it'll work, I haven't tried it and usually details are incredibly important when do things with machine learning, but maybe you could even have critical phases during pretraining where you try to prune away behaviours that aren't useful for figuring out the answers to the questions you have in your high curated golden datasets. Then models could throw away a lot of lies and bullshit, except that which happens to be on particularly LLM-pedagogical maths websites.
by 1oooqooq | 2025-07-12 13:56:18+00:00
so true.

i coded security js code for a decade. right when the standard started to get the many updates.

our system was just a really tiny subset of things you could use that worked safely (and predictably) across browsers. even after the updates, we only incorporated was array.filter and structuredcopy. everything else offered no real benefit and only added to the attack surface.

and then came typescript. the biggest missed opportunity in js history.

even today, good js is knowing you can only use 1% of the language, and even that with lot of care
by miki123211 | 2025-07-12 13:56:35+00:00
> a more robust regulator would call them out

Calling them out is one thing, but do you think the US could realistically stop them?

I don't know much about Polymarkets governance structure, if it's a decentralized smart contract, the US is DOA. Even if it's not... the Pirate Bay wasn't, the US really tried to stop them, and they basically didn't get anywhere.
by BillyTheMage | 2025-07-12 13:57:34+00:00
I second this, and even as a person who doesn't have a phone, I feel that thing deep down sometimes that makes me feel like I need to be doing something. I think it ties both into the hyperstimulation epidemic and use of people as machinery by the capital-owning ruling class. We've both been trained and trained ourselves to feel bad when we're doing nothing, as if we're wasting something that has value.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-12 13:58:13+00:00
I see AI the same way we see calculators: they don’t make us worse at math, they just offload repetitive computation.

The core question is not “are we degrading,” but rather: are we thinking better with better tools? Personally, I use AI only to reduce boilerplate and explore alternatives — the decision-making and abstraction stays on me.

If someone starts thinking less because of tools, the problem isn't the tool — it's how it's used.
by labcomputer | 2025-07-12 13:58:46+00:00
> I don't know why online communities have been so quick to gravitate towards the murder/suicide theory.

Because the hardware failure theories seem preposterously far-fetched and require an unnecessary multiplication of deities.

Your ghost in the machine needs to be “just so” so that it can cause both switches to be read in “cutoff” nearly simultaneously. Then, 10 seconds later one of the switches needs to be read in “run”, then 4 seconds after that the second one needs to read “run”. You also need to explain why there have been zero single engine failures of this type before this double failure.

The ghost also needs to explain why one pilot asked the other “why did you cutoff?” instead of something like “what happened to the engines?” (which is the more natural response, unless you already know the switches are in cutoff).
by bonoboTP | 2025-07-12 13:59:55+00:00
> as the actions required take more than a second

Where do you get this from? You have to pull up the switch with two fingers and move it to the other position and put it back in. This doesn't seem to take more than a second if deliberate.

To me, it points to a Germanwings-style sabotage. And the "I didn't do it" seems to be a lie. Not very confident in it, just the likeliest to me. Though one can ask why not just push the nose down instead. Maybe he thought that's too easy for the other pilot to counteract. The fuel switches are more out-of-mind and more startling to change.
by anonymousiam | 2025-07-12 14:01:34+00:00
And there likely isn't any sort of "oath" at all related to any polygraph. The poly isn't about signing agreements, it's about truthfully answering questions. The scope of the questions is different depending upon the agency and the clearance. The NYT is not an unbiased source. To quote the article:

"In interviews and polygraph tests, the F.B.I. has asked senior employees whether they have said anything negative about Mr. Patel, according to two people with knowledge of the questions and others familiar with similar accounts."

So this can be true and misleading at the same time. Some of the questions asked relate to social media activities and posts related to classified work. I can imagine a scenario where answering these questions would lead to a discussion about Kash Patel. Having a poor opinion of your boss while working in a classified environment could make a person more prone to leaking sensitive information. The FBI has been leaking like a sieve lately.
by skipants | 2025-07-12 14:02:17+00:00
I’m 20 minutes into the video and it does seem mostly basic and agreeable.

Two arguments from Ng that really stuck out that is really tripping my skepticism alarm are:

1) He mentions how fast prototyping has begun because generating a simple app has become easier with AI. This, to me, has always been quick and never the bottleneck for any company I’ve been at, including startups. Validating an idea was simple enough via wireframing. I can maybe see it for selling an idea where you need some amount of fidelity yo impress potential investors… but I would hope places like YC can see the tech behind the idea without seeing the tech itself. Or at least can ignore low fidelity if a prototype shows the meat of the product.

2) Ng talks about how everyone in his company codes, from the front desk to the executives. The “everyone should code” idea has been done and shown to fail for the past 15 years. In fact I’ve seen it be more damaging than helpful because it gave people false confidence that they could tell engineers how to do their job rather than a more empathetic understanding.
by AJ007 | 2025-07-12 14:02:24+00:00
I've been around for a while (not quite retirement age) and this time is the closest to the new feeling I had using the internet and web in the early days. There are simultaneously infinite possibilities but also great uncertainty what pathways will be taken and how things will end up.

There are a lot of parts in the near term to dislike here, especially the consequences for privacy, adtech, energy use. I do have concerns that the greatest pitfalls in the short terms are being ignored while other uncertainties are being exaggerated. (I've been warning on deep learning model use for recommendation engines for years, and only a sliver of people seem to have picked up on that one, for example.)

On the other hand, if good enough models can run locally, humans can end up with a lot more autonomy and choice with their software and operating systems than they have today. The most powerful models might run on supercomputers and just be solving the really big science problems. There is a lot of fantastic software out there that does not improve by throwing infinite resources at it.

Another consideration is while the big tech firms are spending (what will likely approach) hundreds of billions of dollars in a race to "AGI", what matters to those same companies even more than winning is making sure that the winner isn't a winner takes all. In that case, hopefully the outcome looks more like open source.
by masfuerte | 2025-07-12 14:03:02+00:00
It's not just JS. I'm familiar with a language interpreter that used C++ stream I/O for parsing numbers. When C++ expanded the syntax for numbers it broke the interpreter in some cases. This isn't too bad if you catch it quickly but if people start relying on the new, undocumented feature it can be impossible to fix without upsetting someone.

[Small edits for clarity.]
by sinenomine | 2025-07-12 14:03:31+00:00
If you aren't suitable for white collar track, you very well know you can get into blue collar trades or become a taxi driver.

The tests for ADHD and some variations of depression are leaky, erroneous shit. Just get the drugs (Adderall xr, Wellbutrin) and see if these help.

You say you tried some NDRI spectrum drugs, this probably means you have some rare type of depression or schizo spectrum disorder, or something else entirely.

If your parents truly care about you they will find you a decent doctor that will diagnose it.

>it did not stop them from learning or becoming great engineers.

You seem not to be wired to get intrinsic motivation from coding, idk.
by rinawarpt25 | 2025-07-12 14:04:32+00:00
I've developed RinaWarp Terminal, an innovative AI terminal inspired by oceanic beauty. It provides intelligent coding suggestions through a unique mermaid-themed interface. Currently available for beta testing – hope to get feedback from this amazing community! Join the beta: [https://rinawarp-terminal.vercel.app/beta](https://rinawarp-terminal.vercel.app/beta)
by lelanthran | 2025-07-12 14:05:16+00:00
I think what everyone, including those programmers advocating coding agents, are forgetting is that if you can have a full time programmer for $200/m, then that becomes the new value of programming labour in the open market.

IOW, the market will slowly but surely drive the labour rate for programming down to the cost of the cheapest coding agent.

So, sure, boasting about a 10x speedo on boilerplate has good metrics, but let's not delude ourselves that programmers are going to be paid enough to afford the $200/m coding agent in the future.
by dudeinjapan | 2025-07-12 14:05:55+00:00
The words are written in the first chapter of the first book.

Clearly God did not mean “use” as “in turn into rope and strangle other people” (violating other commandments) but nowhere does God say herbs can’t be used for medicine or wine can’t be used for its intoxicating effects, (within some reasonable degree of moderation.)