MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jbstack | 2025-08-29 17:38:05+00:00
But what is meant by "real coder"? Does it mean an experienced senior coder? In that case, no, AI isn't ready to replace one. How about a junior coder who is fresh out of university and starting his first job? Surely that counts as a "real coder"? I'd argue that AI can and does already replace such coders, depending on the type of work they have been assigned.
by greggman65 | 2025-08-29 17:38:14+00:00
If you gave them permisison isn't that on you?

iOS you can

(1) Choose no permission - Then, if you want you can go to your photos in the iOS Photos app, select a few, pick "Send to App -> Facebook" when you want to give Facebook a few photos

(2) Copy and Paste photos

(3) Choose "only selected photos" - In this case, in the Facebook app, you choose to add photos, the photos you previously gave the app permission to view appear and there's a button "Select more Photos". You can pick that and select more. I use this option peronsally

(4) Choose "all photos" - I give this permission to Google Photos since I use Google Photos to make all my photos visible across all devices.

If you choose 4, that just seems on you. You told them they could access all the photos.
by ehnto | 2025-08-29 17:38:35+00:00
I do find years in enterprise made me uniquely prepared for organising my game code. I definitely see the spaghetti in there, but it's at least neatly contained in the bowls I've set out.

But it's definitely the hardest software domain I have ever tackled, and if only it were just software! Game dev is realy 6 other disciplines in a trenchcoat. Which disciplines they are depends on your game and whether or not you have help.
by legitster | 2025-08-29 17:38:49+00:00
"Premature optimization is the root of all evil".

Some of those routes sound nice, but they don't usually have enough daily traffic between them to warrant the massive infrastructure costs. LA to Vegas would rival the distance of the longest European high speed lines, but with many fewer stops between and a fraction of the passengers between. Outside of connector flights, I don't even know how many people even regularly travel between Chicago and Detroit.

Part of the advantage places like Japan and Europe have over the US is not just that they are dense, but that their population skews to one massive metropolitan center. So it's easy to design a hub model where traffic patterns are easy - in and out of one area. You see this in the success of regional commuter rail networks in the US.

(SF and LA is a great candidate though, and it's failure a highlight of how hard it is to build in the US)
by moribvndvs | 2025-08-29 17:38:53+00:00
I’m not necessarily coming to the defense of CF’s proposed solution, but it’s ridiculous and rather telling that the article mounts such a strong defense for agents around the notion they are simply completing user-directed tasks the user would otherwise do themselves, while avoiding the blatantly obvious issues of copyright, attribution, resource overusage, etc. presented by agents.

It’s somewhat ironic to let fly the “free and open internet” battle cry on behalf of an industry that is openly destroying it.
by jackdeansmith | 2025-08-29 17:39:04+00:00
I think it's a lot harder to have this particular type of communications failure if you're writing on a chalkboard. Imagine trying to write out that whole slide, it would take forever. If you really did have to present that information on a chalkboard, you'd be significantly more likely to write something along the lines of:

"We checked the test data: possible to damage tiles significantly" "Foam that hit wing was way bigger than the tests"

Obviously you can miscommunicate via any medium, but I think the author's point here (which I agree with) is some mediums lend themselves to specific types of miscommunication.
by dc396 | 2025-08-29 17:39:34+00:00
Ignoring the point that climate sensitivity wasn't in the parent comment, AFAIK, airplanes generate 0.16 kg/km, whereas trains are around 0.1 kg/km and container ships are at 0.016 kg/km. However, passenger ships and gas cars are at 0.25, diesel cars at 0.28 kg/km and rockets are over 1.0 kg/km, so it appears planes are in the middle, not really "one of the best ways" to worsen climate change.

Sure, through a simple analysis of CO2 kg/km, trains are better for the climate for long distance travel, but they are vastly slower (average time from LA to DC is over 80 hours), which has knock-on effects, e.g., sleeping at home averages 0.25 - 0.32 kg/night, whereas staying at a hotel averages 10-40 kg/night, eating at home averages 2.3 kg/meal vs. 3-8 kg/meal, etc.
by anthem2025 | 2025-08-29 17:39:36+00:00
We see massive initial growth followed by a slowdown constantly.

There is zero reason to think AI is some exception that will continue to exponentially improve without limit. We already seem to be at the point of diminishing returns. Sinking absurd amounts of money and resources to train models that show incremental improvements.

To get this far they have had to spend hundreds of billions and have used up the majority of the data they have access to. We are at the point of trying to train AI on generated data and hoping that it doesn’t just cause the entire thing degrade.
by joshua_s_penman | 2025-08-29 17:39:52+00:00
> interesting, so you think the issue with the above approach is the graph structure being too rigid / lossy (in terms of losing semantics)?

Yeah, exactly.

>And embeddings are also too lossy (in terms of losing context and structure)

Interestingly, it appears that the problem is not embeddings but rather retrieval. It appears that embeddings can contain a lot more information than we're currently able to pull out. Like, obviously they are lossy, but... less than maybe I thought before I started this project? Or at least can be made to be that way?

> But you guys are working on something less lossy for both semantics and context?

Yes! :) We're getting there! It's currently at the good-but-not-great like GPT-2ish kind of stage. It's a model-toddler - it can't get a job yet, but it's already doing pretty interesting stuff (i.e. it does much better than SOTA on some complex tasks). I feel pretty optimistic that we're going to be able to get it to work at a usable commercial level for at least some verticals — maybe at an alpha/design partner level — before the end of the year. We'll definitely launch the semantic part before the context part, so this probably means things like people search etc. first — and then the contextual chunking for big docs for legal etc... ideally sometime next year?
by PaulRobinson | 2025-08-29 17:40:06+00:00
This doesn't scale to the general web, does it? I think invite-only might work to build communities, but you end up in the situation we're in today where people are buying/selling invites, and that's with treebans in place.

I do fear the actions of the current bot landscape is going to lead to almost everything going behind auth walls though, and perhaps even paid auth walls.
by strogonoff | 2025-08-29 17:40:32+00:00
When recording data, it is best to store it as literally as possible. Your data processing layer can adjust it in whatever way necessary for reporting, and that logic can change, but what should not change is whatever the user has entered, no matter when they look at it again.

Imagine you record length and your user enters 7.4 ft. You store an integer number of millimetres, and the nearest one is 2256. For a while it is fine, but at some point someone on GUI side makes conversion more precise and now from vantage point of the user the original 7.4 ft somehow retroactively became 7.401575 ft.

While a basic string could be the most reliable way to preserve data as entered, numbers with decimal point are formatted differently across countries, so it you want a 1,25 entered in Sweden to appear as 1.25 after your user moves to the US, it makes sense to record it using a decimal structure exactly as entered, along with a unit of measure. Another benefit of decimal structures is that you can store precision and thus distinguish a 7.4 ft that could have been 7.39 ft or 7.41 ft (the measuring device was not very accurate) from exactly 7.400 ft.
by dividefuel | 2025-08-29 17:40:44+00:00
It's interesting to compare Taco Bell (and many other chain fast food restaurants) with In-N-Out.

At Taco Bell, a meal costs something like $15/person unless you're aggressive about saving money. They also only seem to have 2-3 workers at a time. There usually isn't a long line in the store or at the drivethru. They still frequently mess up my order, leaving out items or giving me the wrong thing.

Compare that with In-N-Out. A meal costs more like $10/person, and they have more like 15 workers at a time. I rarely have mistakes in my meal. You pay less and have a better staffed restaurant. I'm guessing they get away with it because they always have a long line of people waiting for food. They make up for it all through volume.
by nbulka | 2025-08-29 17:41:05+00:00
Training on personal data people thought was going to remain private vs. stuff out in public view (copyright or not), are two different magnitudes of ethics breaches. Opt OUT instead of Opt IN for this is CRAZY in my opinion. I hope that the reddit post is WRONG on that detail but I seriously doubt it.

I asked Claude: "If a company has a privacy policy and says they will not train on your data and then decides to change the policy in order "to make the models better for everyone." What should the terms be?"

The model suggests in the first paragraph or so EXPLICIT OPT IN. Not Opt OUT
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-29 17:41:11+00:00
The new cars hold far more people, are faster, and they are supposed to be paired with comprehensive upgrades to the extremely aged infrastructure and tracks along that route.

Both the cars and the overhaul on the route were funded by the Biden admin (primarily with funds allocated by congress between 2021 and 2023) with the intent that modernisation to the route would gradually allow the cars to run at speed over the next few years. Now it's unclear what the status is of this infrastructure overhaul with the current administration suspending funds for the previous admin's projects.
by semi-extrinsic | 2025-08-29 17:41:23+00:00
Yes, this. I recently used Midjourney to generate a super-convincing drone shot video for a presentation. The alternative would have been a stock photo.

Probably took me the same amount of time to generate a pleasing video as I would have spent browsing Shutterstock. Only difference is my money goes to one corporation instead of the other.

As far as the video is concerned, it adds a bit of a wow factor to get people interested, but ultimately it's the same old graphs and bullet points with words and numbers that matter. And those could just as well have been done on an overhead transparency in 1987.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-29 17:41:57+00:00
If you put your information freely on the web, you should have minimal expectations on who uses it and how. If you want to make money from it, put up a paywall.

If you want the best of both worlds, i.e. just post freely but make money from ads, or inserting hidden pixels to update some profile about me, well good luck. I'll choose whether I want to look at ads, or load tracking pixels, and my answer is no.
by scoofy | 2025-08-29 17:42:14+00:00
I mean, I'm a Housing Theory of Everything guy, so, yea, the high minimum wage here is just part of the over all inflation spiral that is being fueled by the fact that there isn't enough housing for the people who want to live here, in places people want to live. It makes sense that we'd end up with more employees making these higher wages, because it's an inflationary spiral, not a supply-demand issue.

It's just the effects of everyone here trying to address this inflation for folks at the lower end of the earning spectrum, but without actually addressing the underlying issue (god forbid we allow multifamily housing next to major transit corridors), which is obviously the massive inflation in housing costs caused by the massive, near-statewide shortage.
by mallowdram | 2025-08-29 17:42:19+00:00
Words do not function as communication. You asked a pointless question. It has no function except to extract values from actions: it was subjective, arbitrary. Until CS grasps this, it is irrelevant.

All the symptoms from LLM failure rates stem from their reliance in arbitrary forms to extract value, and they are no different than the errors we experience in reality in climate, politics etc. CS didn't solve the initial conditions, it's maxing them out as errors.
by adamcharnock | 2025-08-29 17:42:20+00:00
Oh wow, this is exactly what we're doing. We've been doing this for a while, but since last year we've gone all-in on it. See: https://lithus.eu

We saw that companies were hesitant to deploy on bare metal because of: risk of project failure, need to retrain, need to hire, and general fear of unmanaged hardware.

So we did the math and realised that for half the price of AWS we could provide the infra /and/ provide the DevOps engineering time to support their software developers. We'd already built the IP to do this over the proceeding years anyway.

So we're definitely a services company rather than a product company, but we are actually doing this in a really meaningful way. We migrate people out of AWS (et al), then operate their infra and become their DevOps team. And now we have some very happy customers!

Always happy to chat if anyone is interested – adam@ domain.
by gchamonlive | 2025-08-29 17:42:35+00:00
Could you elaborate your argument? I'd say AI is far from replacing any human contributor at this point.

Context doesn't work the same way as memory + experience in humans. While humans have an impression and a flexible mental model of any single domain, AI needs hard data, which is hard to manage with context and can't really be worked around by fine-tuning in practice, lest you have to retrain the model on each and every code merge.
by extraisland | 2025-08-29 17:42:42+00:00
I learned the basics in maybe a day almost 20 years ago now. I could make a page template with PHP and style that in maybe a day. This was back when IE6 was dominate, I don't think Firebug was even a thing.

At that time I was a novice, didn't know what a debugger was (I printed everything out the the console / page) and didn't know what an IDE was (I think I was using Notepad++). I managed this feat by following the tutorial.

The biggest problem I had was that I couldn't understand why centre, and colour didn't work. Once I realised that I had to spell everything in American English, that problem quickly went away.
by sugarpimpdorsey | 2025-08-29 17:42:43+00:00
>To be fair they were also wiretapping/stealing stuff, which makes it slightly more serious than breaking in just to protest.

Funny you should mention that because the group also planted listening devices in his office, under couch cushions and behind books, so no, they didn't break in "just to protest".

Source: Brad Smith 8/25 press conference https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6tl7KoIVgA
by tshaddox | 2025-08-29 17:42:53+00:00
If a number if computable, it means you can compute it to any given precision using an algorithm which halts.

It doesn't mean that you can compute a complete representation in decimal (or any other positional numeral system) of the number using an algorithm which halts. This is of course impossible with computable numbers like pi or 1/3.

But you can compute the value of pi or 1/3 within error bound n, for any rational number n. Thus we say pi and 1/3 are both computable numbers. This isn't quite the same as saying you can always generate the first n digits of the decimal representation, because as you point out, any decimal digit can be sensitive to arbitrarily small changes in value.

But given these definitions, we can see that adding two computable numbers is indeed computable. In your example, the decimal representation of the output could begin with 0.5 or 0.6, depending on the precision you chose and the values of the two inputs at that chosen precision. Regardless, the output will be within the chosen precision.

Your example also comes close to illustrating that testing the equality of two computable numbers is not computable. There is no finite algorithm which can tell you if any two computable numbers are equal (or tell you which one is larger). Again, you can compute whether they are within any chosen bound of each other, but not whether they are equal.
by amaranth | 2025-08-29 17:43:03+00:00
That's what Intel wants everyone to believe but not quite accurate. Intel was vague at best about what the motherboard manufacturers should and were allowed to do but even following their guidance as best as possible resulted in CPU failures. Gamers Nexus did a few videos on this, here is one that covers most of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6vQlvefGxk
by goku12 | 2025-08-29 17:43:06+00:00
It looks like you are thinking about programming and its abstractions. As somebody already pointed out, this isn't that type of coding. This is coding from information theory - source coding, channel coding, decoding, etc.

A lot of modern coding does involve programming. But it is more concerned with storage and transmission of information. Like how to reduce the symbols (in info theory parlance) required for representing information (by eliminating information redundancy), how to increase the error recovery capability of a message (by adding some information redundancy), etc. Applications include transmission encoding/decoding dats (eg: DVB-S, Trellis code), error detection and correction (eg: CRC32, FEC), lossless compression (eg: RLE, LZW), lossy compression (most audio and video formats), etc.

As you may have already figured out, it's applications are in digital communication systems, file and wire formats for various types of data, data storage systems and filesystems, compression algorithms, as part of cryptographic protocols and data formats, various types of codecs, etc.
by true_religion | 2025-08-29 17:43:14+00:00
Now adays, ordering a B&E to wiretap & steal won't cause a US president to resign. If such news ever made it out, it would immediately be called fake by the administration, and if proven, it'd only be deemed the indulgences of a 79-year-old man born during a different time so we should let it go.

Considering what era we are actually living in, B&E to merely protest should not be a first time firing offense.
by NotPractical | 2025-08-29 17:43:14+00:00
To add:

> it's arguable that the DSA (Digital Services Act), which is just as applicable, actually compels Apple to de-platform this app

I'll assume this is completely bogus, unless you elaborate.

Also, the text of the DMA confirms that they can only restrict apps outside of the App Store if they endanger the integrity of the OS, not for any other reason. Not even for "enabling IP infringement" (which browsers would also be guilty of).

The EU does seem to take violations of the DMA seriously, and this is unambiguously a violation.
by sneak | 2025-08-29 17:43:28+00:00
> But the reality is how can someone small protect their blog or content from AI training bots?

First off, there's no harm from well-behaved bots. Badly behaved bots that cause problems for the server are easily detected (by the problems they cause), classified, and blocked or heavily throttled.

Of course, if you mean "protect" in the sense of "keep AI companies from getting a copy" (which you may have, given that you mentioned training) - you simply can't, unless you consider "don't put it on the web" a solution.

It's impossible to make something "public, but not like that". Either you publish or you don't.

If anything, it's a legal issue (copyright/fair use), not a technical one. Technical solutions won't work.

I'm not sure why people are so confused by this. The Mastodon/AP userbase put their public content on a publicly federated protocol then lost their shit and sent me death threats when I spidered and indexed it for network-wide search.

There are upsides and downsides to publishing things you create. One of the downsides is that it will be public and accessible to everyone.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-29 17:43:31+00:00
Exactly because of the benefits of this, there is the meme CGO is not Go, as any package with native dependencies kills the possibility to cross-compile with the Go toolchain.

Same applies to the pain of using native dependencies in Perl, Python, Ruby,...

Many .NET developers are only now slowly the pain of having so many dependencies to C++ DLLs, COM and C++/CLI.

One of the reasons why we still do so many .NET Framework projects at my employer agency.
by ffsm8 | 2025-08-29 17:44:24+00:00
Sorry, but then your opinion is just plain wrong

Bare metal in the context of running software is a technical term with a clear meaning that hasn't become contested like "AI" or "Crypto" - and that meaning is that the software is running directly on the hardware.

As k8s isn't virtualization, processes spawned by its orchestrator are still running on bare metal. It's the whole reason why containers are more efficient compared to virtual machines
by quectophoton | 2025-08-29 17:44:30+00:00
I don't know about this. This means I'd get sued for using a feed reader on Codeberg[1], or for mirroring repositories from there (e.g. with Forgejo), since both are automated actions that are not caused directly by a user interaction (i.e. bots, rather than user agents).

[1]: https://codeberg.org/robots.txt#:~:text=Disallow:%20/.git/,....
by lukev | 2025-08-29 17:44:33+00:00
I mean it's funny you mention Descartes, because I find the argument that consciousness is the ONLY thing you can really know exists for sure to be pretty compelling. (Descartes then significantly loses the thread, hah.)

I agree with you that consciousness is much more fragmented and nonlinear than we perceive it to be, but "I exist" seems pretty tautological to me (for values of "I" that are completely unspecified.)
by jstummbillig | 2025-08-29 17:45:44+00:00
Oh, I understand what you need to do. It's like losing weight. It's fairly simple.

And at the same time it's borderline impossible proven by the fact that people can't do it, even though everyone understands and roughly everyone agrees on how it works.

So the actual "trick" turns out to be understanding what keeps people from doing the necessary things that they all agree on are important – like treating code reviews very seriously. And getting that part right turns out to be fairly hard.
by true_religion | 2025-08-29 17:45:59+00:00
All things being equal, I don't think you can trust people who try to secretly spy on others so I see why they were fired.

What did they think they were going to find with the listening devices? This sounds like the tactic of someone who is looking for a specific admission when they already have enough evidence to know something illegal is happening, but not how far up the hierarchy it goes.
by sershe | 2025-08-29 17:46:07+00:00
"AI drivers" glitch/fail differently than human drivers, and in ways that to humans look bizarre and easily preventable. Human driver failures (like being tired, drunk, very upset, or being on your phone, distracted by passengers, etc), to humans, look understandable, but from an AI perspective they look bizarre and easily preventable.

In theory, what we should care about is which ones cause more deaths or accidents. The fact that AI accidents seem worse based on naive intuition shouldn't matter.

However, humans serve on juries so here we go... Would there be a 200 million dollar judgement against someone who tried to get a can of pop from the back seat, ran over a pedestrian and then tried to lie about e.g. whether the light was red?