MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by atleastoptimal | 2025-07-19 19:26:53+00:00
The fact that you're honestly grappling with this reality puts you far ahead of most people.

It seems a common recent neurosis (albeit protective one) to proclaim a permanent human preeminence over the world of value, moral status and such for reasons extremely coupled with our intelligence, and then claim that certain kinds of intelligence have nothing to do with it when our primacy in those specific realms of intelligence is threatened. This will continue until there's nothing humans have left to bargain with.

The world isn't what we want it to be, the world is what it is. The closest thing we have to the world turning out the way we want it making it that way. Which is why I think many of those who hate AI would give their desires for how the world ought to be a better fighting chance by putting in the work to making it so, rather than sitting in denial at what is happening in the world of artificial intelligence.
by rockemsockem | 2025-07-19 19:27:12+00:00
I was specifically referring to several comments that specifically stated that they did not know what the regulation was, but that they assumed Europe was right and Meta was wrong.

I, prior to reading the details of the regulation myself, was commenting on my surprise at the default inclinations of people.

At no point did I pass judgement on the regulation and even after reading a little bit on it I need to read more to actually decide whether I think it's good or bad.

Being American it impacts me less, so it's lower on my to do list.
by tedsanders | 2025-07-19 19:27:14+00:00
Maybe I misinterpreted "can't sell" - I thought the implication was that even if they said they wouldn't cancel equity outright, they could still exercise power to freeze it out of tender offers, which would have a similar chilling effect. By "fixed" I meant to clarify that not only will they not cancel equity, there's no loophole where they'd specifically freeze it out of participating in tender offers.
by LorenPechtel | 2025-07-19 19:27:47+00:00
Yeah, but there should be a concept of what level of scrutiny is warranted. Pornhub had a legitimate problem in that in permitting user content they made it extremely hard to keep their system from being used for improper purposes (underage, revenge.) But neither would I expect any system to be 100%. Should you have known? If so, you're wrong. Things look reasonable? No fault.
by actinium226 | 2025-07-19 19:28:58+00:00
No shade at wordle, but what you're describing sounds like it would be useful for the shovelware industry and that's about it. Not exactly a great leap forward for humanity...

Although I should be fair, this can help with one-off scripts that research folks usually do, when you just need to plot some data or do some back-of-the-terminal math. That said I don't think this would be a game changer, more of an efficiency boost and a limited one at that.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-07-19 19:29:05+00:00
What about o3-pro? Remember that their model names make no sense.

Edit due to rate-limiting:

o3-pro returned an answer after 24 minutes: https://chatgpt.com/share/687bf8bf-c1b0-800b-b316-ca7dd9b009... Whether the CoT amounts to valid mathematical reasoning, I couldn't say, especially because OpenAI models tend to be very cagey with their CoT.

Gemini 2.5 Pro seems to have used more sophisticated reasoning ( https://g.co/gemini/share/c325915b5583 ) but it got a slightly different answer. Its chain of thought was unimpressive to say the least, so I'm not sure how it got its act together for the final explanation.

Claude Opus 4 appears to have missed the main solution the others found: https://claude.ai/share/3ba55811-8347-4637-a5f0-fd8790aa820b

Be interesting if someone could try Grok 4.
by torlok | 2025-07-19 19:29:08+00:00
Is this a US thing? I stay at hotels from time to time across Europe, and I always pay a fixed price either when booking or at arrival for the whole stay. Never had to enter credit card information anywhere, and I never would precisely for this reason. I put my credit card information once when booking a car at an airport and was scammed with random scratches being found at return. Can't imagine ever going through that again. One of the worst and most infuriating money exchange experiences in my life.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-07-19 19:29:12+00:00
Buddy, that's not really was "there are plans to" means. Unless you count MJT talking about Jewish space lasers "plans to" investigate Jewish space lasers from the US government. In which case, you've got a tabloid-level definition.

The quote of the current law is used to emphasize just how ridiculous sounding what you're saying even is.
by ThrowawayR2 | 2025-07-19 19:29:18+00:00
> "Now consider someone further down the scale - someone at the 75th, 50th or 25th percentile. The output of an LLM very quickly goes from "much worse than what I could produce" to "as good as anything I could produce" to "immeasurably better than anything I could hope to ever produce""

That does, to my mind, explain all the vengeful "haw haw, you're all going to get left behind" comments from some LLM proponents. They actually do get benefit from LLMs, unlike the highest part of the scale who are overrepresented on HN, without realizing what that implies and they think they can overtake the highest part of the scale by using them. Well, we'll see.
by cvoss | 2025-07-19 19:29:25+00:00
I think the feature bloat here has passed the break-even point where no one person needs all this, and it takes so long to find what you need in the docs, and you can't be expected to memorize it, because it's so rare to need to use it, and you can't reliably reverse-search the esoteric syntax you encounter, that any given dev is going to take the path of least resistance and write their own routines for this stuff.

Pad left? That's a two-line method at most. Versus trying to remember whether the syntax is x:n< or x:<n or what. It's faster to do it yourself ad-hoc. And if the next dev has a question about how it works, the implementation is right there (and easy to customize!) not buried in the docs and immutable.
by this_user | 2025-07-19 19:29:35+00:00
Tech people don't like to hear this, but you also need product people. And I don't necessarily mean those with a business background, but those who can see the larger picture from the user/customer perspective and who can ensure that all of the technology is packaged into one coherent and actually useful thing.

If the project is run by those who are all deep in the weeds of low level technological details, odds are that the larger product turns into a giant mess that is all over the place.
by fragmede | 2025-07-19 19:29:48+00:00
> and maybe most importantly I don't want to work with somebody who works like this.

Which, of course, is your perogative, but in what other ways do we, as fellow programmers, judge software libraries and dependencies so harshly? As a Vim user, do I care that Django was written with a lot of emacs? Or that Linus used emacs to write git? Or maybe being judgemental about programming languages; ugh, that's "just" a scripting language, it's not "real" programming unless you use a magnet up against a hard drive to program in ones and zeros. As a user, do I care that Calibre is written in Python, and not something "better"? Or that curl is written in good ole C. Or how about being opinionated as to whether or not the programmer used GDB or printf debugging to make the library?
by FollowingTheDao | 2025-07-19 19:30:21+00:00
> We've come far enough to see and manipulate individual atoms, emit and count individual photons

The fact that you don’t see the downsides of manipulating atoms, and the trouble is causing in this very day with the risk of nuclear war, literally proves that we are not that smart.

> Eugenics was about leveraging population control to ensure only the "good" genes get passed on

Everyone’s assumption are that these genes that are killing these children are “bad“. They know these jeans survived thousands of years of evolution for a reason. And that’s because on Balance. They are not bad, but for some they are very bad. Human genetics cares about our survival, it is totally a moral. It would rather a few babies die so that hundreds could live.
by throw310822 | 2025-07-19 19:30:50+00:00
Interesting observation. One one hand, these resemble more the notes that an actual participant would write while solving the problem. Also, less words = less noise, more focus. But also, specifically for LLMs that output one token at a time and have a limited token context, I wonder if limiting itself to semantically meaningful tokens can be create longer stretches of semantically coherent thought?
by cluckindan | 2025-07-19 19:31:28+00:00
That is exactly the kind of unfounded, strawman-riddled criticism I was after ;-)

What does an algorithmic task such as array comparison have to do with language syntax? The answer is nothing.

Sure, some languages might have builtins for comparing certain things, or doing intersections/differences, but those only apply to arrays of primitives, and even in those cases the utility of the builtins completely depends on the use case, and those builtins still have nothing to do with syntax.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-07-19 19:32:00+00:00
> Having said that, his criticism is completely on point. But the people who have reached the same solution are then lost on what to do after it.

True. But as Kaczynski rightly pointed out, you can't have a revolution out of thin air, and the seeds of distrust have to be sufficiently grown first before there is a critical mass of tension that can act as fuel for the fire. So the first step might just be to sow seeds of well-placed distrust against the modern tech oligarchs.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-07-19 19:32:03+00:00
If you take it with a grain of salt it's better than nothing. In life to express your opinion sometimes the best way is to quantify that based on intuition. To make decisions you could compile multiple experts intuitive quantities and use median or similar. There are some cases where it's more straight forward and rote, e.g. in military if you have to make distance based decisions, you might ask 8 of your soldiers to each name a number they think the distance is and take the median.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-07-19 19:32:12+00:00
All the "PnP"/"ESCD" stuff the pre-UEFI BIOS did was to support DOS or because of DOS. APM leveraged SMI for fan and power control so DOS would work on 90's era laptops. That whole mess morphed into the nightmare of ACPI and UEFI.

The only thing a firmware really needs to is A) initialize RAM, B) initialize a display or serial port for boot comms, and C) load an OS. Anything else modern firmware does would be better as normal devices controlled by OS drivers without the ACPI/UEFI layer.

A third thing: it is of course super convenient if firmware provides some way to reliably identify the platform and provide data on devices that aren't connected to discoverable buses (such as bus controllers themselves), but even that's not really required. Linux lets you build a devicetree as part of the kernel.
by rockemsockem | 2025-07-19 19:32:13+00:00
Are you saying that upon reading a sentence like

"Meta disagrees with European regulation"

That you don't have an immediate guess at which party you are most likely to agree with?

I do and I think most people do.

I'm not about to go around spreading my uninformed opinion though. What my comment said was that I was surprised at people's kneejerk reaction that Europe must be right, especially on HN. Perhaps I should have also chided those people for commenting at all, but that's hindsight for you.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-07-19 19:32:33+00:00
Genuinely this is what it sounds like to accept obsolescence and I just can’t understand it.

What are you attached to and identify with that you’re rejecting new ways to work?

Change is the only constant and tools now look like superhuman tools created for babies compared to the sota at bell or NASA in the 1960s when they were literally trying to create superhuman computing.

We have more access to powerful compute and it’s never been easier to build your own everything.

What’s the big complaint?
by rkelapure | 2025-07-19 19:32:46+00:00
The number one problem with vibe coding is when you get to 80% of the functionality and are stuck in an infinite loop of errors. You have reached a local maxima. The LLM has reached the current depth of its knowledge within the context of the session. At this point, you have to break the LLM free from its prison. There are only three ways to do this right now. Read on ...
by kkfx | 2025-07-19 19:32:53+00:00
What I fails to understand it's why no one seems to offer the most logic MUE which is essentially offering the full download/sync of all accounts maildirs, like with OfflineIMAP, than offer powerful local indexing like notmuch/mu with a pre-made UI nice for end users.

Slogan: own your own messages, own a local GMail. We have all the code except the UI
by daniel_reetz | 2025-07-19 19:33:20+00:00
Respectfully, at this point, do we need Googlers to explain?

Structurally: launch-dependent levels/career advancement. Design wise: massive over reliance on A/B testing. Philosophically: a company hell bent on observing, categorizing, and exploiting us in extremis in exchange for only a tiny "relevant" slice of their potential deliverable.

Because of their focus on "scale", they have never cared about any individual user. The indifference of their technical systems is absolute.
by spyckie2 | 2025-07-19 19:33:23+00:00
hmm after some research I'm inclined to believe that 1) oatly is the best tasting product on the market, 2) it's the distribution channels that was the success, not the marketing copy, and 3) spending massive amounts of capital into growth of a good product will always yield growth.

So no... I stand by what I said, I think they did a lot of things wrong in the marketing department, in spite of having a really solid product.
by asdff | 2025-07-19 19:33:31+00:00
I don't think it can be done without a sort of benevolent authoritarian which is sort of scary because of how much power and implicit trust is behind that. I wish we had a better signal to actually identify these people and elevate them into positions of power. They are readily identifiable in our own life ironically, I can think if plenty of people I know who I would say are trustworthy to do the right thing and not be blinded by profit. Just that for the subset of people who do want to make a buck on bad ideas saddled on top of people, incentives are very strong for them to get into influence, and there is no such mechanism to incentivize your good natured friend with no big profit seeking aspirations to that level. You need significant access to capital just to play in this league of getting elected or getting your company into the bidding process.

I think it comes down to the fact that we still don't have a meritocracy. It is still very much who you know from you getting a job to a company securing a contract with government, vs anything based on actual merit or ideas that are collectively beneficial vs selectively beneficial. Same old roman republic today: making favors to enrich the senators, making spectacles to distract the masses from the senators picking the public pocket. We haven't really changed the paradigm since it was established thousands of years ago with our first chieftans and shamans and their friends elevated above the rest of the tribe.
by jjbinx007 | 2025-07-19 19:33:32+00:00
In the UK ISPs used to advertise how my megabytes of web space you got, how much Usenet you got, how many ISP-only email addresses were allocated, etc.

Most people used modems to dial up paying the local call rate (the ISPs got a cut of this so the longer you stayed on the more they earned) and as a result your computer was directly connected so people could (and did) portscan your machine directly.

Every site was http by default and only switched to https when you were going to buy something.

Web rings were a big thing and so was Yahoo. Search engines let you use search terms that were case sensitive (so "Python" got you comedy results and "python" got you information on snakes).

Big corporate didn't dominate then like it does now and it was a lot more fun, lots to explore and find.
by Terr_ | 2025-07-19 19:33:43+00:00
Meh, those "personhood at conception" [0] folks will always be whining at reality anyway, since what they imagine to be "plain common sense" is actually crazy. To wit:

1. Identical twins from one conception are not a single person.

2. An entity with chimerism (two conceptions) is one person, not two people simultaneously.

3. If I make an SCNT clone [1] of someone, that's another person, not property or a mobile body part.

4. They aren't freaking out about zillions of regular miscarriages, because they don't actually believe those are people-deaths.

_________

[0] They say life, but it really helps to nail them down to a much more specific definition ASAP, because they often to retreat into fallacies of equivocation. HeLa cells are not a person.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_cell_nuclear_transfer
by whatever1 | 2025-07-19 19:34:03+00:00
Commingling only happens at the frontend. For each item the vendor is tracked. Physically they are in different bins and more likely in different warehouses. So if you buy a product and it turns out fake, Amazon can trace back the vendor for the particular item you received.

It helps with inventory availability with the cost of risk of bad customer experience in case of fraud.
by johannes1234321 | 2025-07-19 19:34:10+00:00
Yeah, but building tooling is a hard sell considering the ability of contemporary AI.

The energy cost is absurdly high for the result, but in current economics, where it's paid by investors not users, it's hidden. Will be interesting to see when AI companies got to the level where they have to make profits and how much optimisation there is to come ...
by gretch | 2025-07-19 19:34:33+00:00
Dang that's a crazy outcome.

>Even in a lively discussion it was not compatible with Article 10 of the Convention to pack incriminating statements into the wrapping of an otherwise acceptable expression of opinion and claim that this rendered passable those statements exceeding the permissible limits of freedom of expression.

Although the expression of this opinion is otherwise acceptable, it was packed with "incriminating statements". But the subject of these incriminating statements is 2000 year old mythical figure.
by drewbug01 | 2025-07-19 19:35:17+00:00
> Rather than close or ignore PRs, you should start a dialogue with them. Teach them that the AI is not a person, and if they contribute buggy or low quality code, it’s their responsibility, not the AIs, and ultimately their job on the line.

I’m willing to mentor folks, and help them grow. But what you’re describing sounds so exhausting, and it’s so much worse than what “mentorship” meant just a few short years ago. I have to now teach people basic respect and empathy at work? Are we serious?

For what it’s worth: sometimes ignoring this kind of stuff is teaching. Harshly, sure - but sometimes that’s what’s needed.
by rubicon33 | 2025-07-19 19:35:58+00:00
> I’ve always ended up in a position where I was pretty miserable after a couple years no matter what company I was working for at the time. I’m annoyed at all the process, I’m annoyed with the people, I’m not interested in what the company is doing, and it just feels like such a grind.

This should absolutely be your red flag, your canary in the Coal Mine, your alarm bell.

If you are CONSISTENTLY not enjoying the process then that tells me you don't actually like software development enough to overcome the negatives. There will be negatives at every company, and certainly software as an industry has its share of downsides, but your enjoyment of the craft should easily make day-to-day worth it, even fun.

> Earlier on, I thought that this was just a symptom of not liking the product, culture, or just getting bored of what I was working on at the time and could be fixed by going to a different company. But now after working at 3 different companies of slightly different sizes, I’m starting to think that maybe I just don’t enjoy this field as much as I thought I would.

Sounds like you get it. Smart to work at different companies, products, sizes... Since you've given it a shot, I think you've done your due diligence here.

> All of the companies I talk to are only “hiring the best” and I always think to myself “that’s not me” so I’m wondering if it’s time to just pursue other options.

Toxic aspect of the software industry. I work at a company doing exactly this. We're instructed to only hire people we would "die on a hill" with.

It's SUCH a software / engineer minded thing to do. You're either GODLIKE PROGRAMMER or you're GARBAGE. It's either a 1 or 0. You're either going to take us to the moon, or you're burning our cash and a waste of time.

The reality is so much more nuanced and colorful. People have a wide range of skills and what they don't bring to the table in engineering prowess, they might bring in other ways like product creativity, or passion for design, etc. Moving a company forward can happen in more ways than 1 but this industry has a toxic fascination with developers.

And that's coming from someone who is a developer, loves coding, and has been quite successful at it. I wish we (the industry) had more willingness to train, more willingness to tutor, and less obsession with the 10x autistic kid.
by rockemsockem | 2025-07-19 19:38:01+00:00
See that's crazy though.

You don't like open source ML (including or not including LLMs, depending on how you feel about them)

You don't like React?

You don't like PyTorch?

Like a lot of really smart and really dedicated people work on pretty cool stuff at Meta. You don't have to like Facebook, Instagram, etc to see that.
by Loic | 2025-07-19 19:38:36+00:00
Exactly right now, I am helping a big oil and gas company have a process simulation software to correctly converge on a big simulation. Full access to the source code, need to improve the Newton method in use with the right line search, validate the derivatives, etc.

I do think that for most of the people, you are right, you do not need to know a lot, but my philosophy was to always understand how the tool you use work (one level deeper), but now the tool is creating a new tool. How do you understand the tool which has been created by your Agent/AI tool?

I find this problem interesting, this is new to me and I will happily look at how our society and the engineering community evolve with these new capacities.
by BrandoElFollito | 2025-07-19 19:38:37+00:00
I ahve exactly the same thoughts and I wrote a document to be used in case I die.

Part one is money and where the important papers are.

Part twonis hiw to dulb down my home. How to remove the smart switches (how to wire back the traditionnal switches). How to mive self hosted key services to the cloud (bitwarden, mostly) and what to pay for (domain and mail). Hiw to remove the access point and go back to the isp box.

My wife is not supportive of the smart stuff but now that she knows she can dumb it down she is fine. Honestly she does not realize what strp back the lack of all this stuff will be. But at least it won't be my problem anymore:)