MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by latexr | 2025-08-21 23:40:17+00:00
> then it's not clear why you would have to disclose talking to an AI.

It’s explained right there in the PR:

> The disclosure is to help maintainers assess how much attention to give a PR. While we aren't obligated to in any way, I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.

That is not true of books, search engines, stack overflow, or talking to a worker, because in all those cases you still had to do the work yourself of comprehending, preparing, and submitting the patch. This is also why they ask for a disclosure of “the extent to which AI assistance was used”. What about that isn’t clear to you?
by throwawaymaths | 2025-08-21 23:40:28+00:00
No. There are some routes that are obviously pointless in foresight, and funding them is just giving money to someone's pet project, for example: Everything Julius Rebek does.

Then, there are people who are defrauding by making claims that are for SURE easy to know are sketchy. I promise you every active researcher (grad student, postdoc) can off the top of their head tell you AT LEAST three results that they know are on shaky ground.

"There are no right answers" is perfectly valid. Saying "there are no wrong answers" is a recipe for disaster, and cronyism.

To put it bluntly: Should the DOE fund perpetual motion research? Of course not. You 100% should block dumb paths of research. We don't do that enough.
by simianwords | 2025-08-21 23:40:31+00:00
The impact of the whole C suite of top 20,000 companies in USA would be much reduced incentives. These are the same companies that are making products that workers purchase from. Sure 5% extra money per family.

Do you really think 5% increase in income would change the savings scenario? The median real disposable income increased by more than 20% over the years. I don't think savings have changed.
by snickerbockers | 2025-08-21 23:40:48+00:00
That's awesome. I wish more games would come up with creative ways to integrate "IRL" into their in-game environment.

This reminds me of the Wii U port of Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker. During the Wii U/3DS era nintendo had their own social network called miiverse, which was functionally identical to twitter but games could access and post messages to your miiverse account. Wind Waker's integration was to let you scribble down a miiverse post onto a sheet of paper (via the Wii U's touchscreen) and Link would roll it up and shove it into a bottle then throw it out to sea. It would then wash up on a beach in somebody else's game and you likewise would find other peoples' miiverse-in-a-bottle posts scattered all over the beaches of hyrule.
by WalterBright | 2025-08-21 23:40:52+00:00
Maybe this is the self correction. Consider the various CEOs of Apple. Some drove it to near bankruptcy, Jobs drove it to the richest company in the world.

Same company, same employees.

The only difference was leadership.

Consider also what happened to MSFT when Nadella took over. Same company, same employees, dramatically different results.

As a shareholder of Microsoft and Apple, I am happy with their CEO compensation. They earned it. And after all, CEO compensation comes out of the pockets of the shareholders, not the pockets of the employees.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-21 23:41:03+00:00
Normally I would say stock picking is a fool's errand, but in this specific example, the appeal really is in the dramatic shift in management in some (but not all) of the energy sector post 2020. For a long time, all of the money went to holes in the ground. They also raised massive amount of debt, which again, went to holes in the ground. Now it's in vogue to focus on shareholder returns, which may seem "normal" for US corporations, but these guys and gals loved drilling holes with reckless abandon.

To do it the easy way, maybe a quant factor overlay with Quality factor? I'm sure there are ETFs doing that for low fees. But the juice is really from the smaller and midsized companies which still trade at a discount because of the expectation that geopolitical risks and lower oil prices will cause havoc in the sector, and then you drill into the earnings call and the CEO is going "we've frozen over half of our planned investment, have redirected some of the cash to increase efficiency of older sites to boost efficiency at the expense of growth, and all cashflow is being split between paying down debt and buybacks."

Suddenly the outlook becomes considerably brighter. I just have a small basket that passed all of the screens, and check in every earning's call to make sure they aren't drilling too many holes or doing obscene M&A from boredom. It's a complex industry, but it's also a simple one. Mostly comes down to drilling holes...
by mattbee | 2025-08-21 23:41:26+00:00
I'd extrapolate that the OP's view would be: you've still put in less effort, so your PR is less worthy of his attention than someone who'd done the same without using LLMs.

That's a pretty nice offer from one of the most famous and accomplished free software maintainers in the world. He's promising not to take a short-cut reviewing your PR, in exchange for you not taking a short-cut writing it in the first place.
by koolba | 2025-08-21 23:42:16+00:00
> What’s the motivation of the CEO to increase employee wages if his compensation isn’t tied to theirs?

Wages are a cost. Profits are revenue minus costs. Share price is driven by profits. The job of a CEO is to maximize share price.

The only reason to raise wages is if you think it will lead to a net gain of profit during your tenure. Say do to efficiency or simply retaining better talent. There’s no gain for simply raising employee wages. Quite the opposite.
by mvdtnz | 2025-08-21 23:42:27+00:00
That's not what a dog whistle is. A dog whistle is when someone isn't doing something, but their ideological opponent wants to imply they are doing that thing, so they accuse them of "dog whistling" the thing. Like if Elon Musk says something that categorically isn't racist but his opponents want to call him racist anyway then they just say he's "dog whistling" to racists.
by bilbo0s | 2025-08-21 23:43:12+00:00
The only halfway competent rail in the US is that northeast corridor in New England. Everything else is crap. And even that northeast corridor is only halfway competent. That people are raving about any of the rail in the US only betrays a lack of use of many foreign rail services. Particularly those in Asia.

It’s sad, because I believe we have the ability to outdo everyone, but we can’t get it done.
by vunderba | 2025-08-21 23:44:16+00:00
100% this. Encouraging devs to reach out to customers? I can't think of a single engineer (particularly on the backend) that would EVER have any desire to do this in their already limited time.

If you have PMs, directors, product designers, etc. actually doing their jobs - then the needs of the customers should already be more than adequately translated into well-defined engineering tasks.

Engineers already have enough on their plates without being forced into some customer-facing or adjacent role.
by ninkendo | 2025-08-21 23:44:50+00:00
> The fundamental purpose of a buyback is not to raise the stock price.

Make up whatever nonsense you want about the “fundamental purpose” of something, it doesn’t matter. The purpose of a system is what it does:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_w...

Stock buybacks increase share price. There’s no reason to look any farther than that. The purpose of stock buybacks is what stock buybacks do.
by mothballed | 2025-08-21 23:45:11+00:00
I'm talking about from a practical perspective including respecting domestic privacy, not theoretical bests.

It is difficult to determine the value of a particular piece of land, particularly if it hasn't been sold for a long time and won't anytime soon.

International trade can much easier be priced, and there is no (additional) privacy concern because it all has to be declared anyway.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-08-21 23:45:22+00:00
I suspect the low tax rate of long term capital gains combined with companies being allowed to do buy-backs drives all of this.

Seems like today they are paid mostly in stock. Their vision becomes very short term. If they can’t organically grow the company, stock buybacks will prop up their shares. Otherwise a CEO paid mainly from salary might be more motivated to stay a tiny bit longer.
by rvz | 2025-08-21 23:45:39+00:00
Almost nobody here wanted to be an 'AI researcher' until late 2022 when the money started pouring into AI researchers.

Now with this article clearly defining each of these roles (AI researcher being the most serious out of the rest) everyone now suddenly wants to be one.

"AI" is a vast field which spans beyond deep learning and LLMs. Unless you are very serious and fully interested in actually advancing the field, don't bother.

Why not robotics or electrical engineer? Not cool enough?
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-08-21 23:46:06+00:00
And the thing is all these “memory features” don’t help either because the “memory” is too specific either to the task at hand and not generalizable to all things, or it is time bound and therefore won’t be useful later (eg: “user is searching for a new waterbed with flow master manifolds”). And rarely can you directly edit the memory so you are stuck with a bunch of potential nonsense polluting your context (with little control when or why the memory is presented).

I dunno.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-08-21 23:46:41+00:00
The goal isn't, or shouldn't be, fewer people owning cars. The goal should be fewer miles driven in urban areas. My cousin in Copenhagen basically only uses it for driving out to a rural area to visit her parents.

Owning a car in Denmark is incredibly expensive. That does significantly impact the ownership rate. And of course if fewer people own cars the miles driven by cars does go down. But lowering the ownership rate is a means to the end, not the end itself.
by throw234234234 | 2025-08-21 23:46:48+00:00
I remember when I saw this in F# interactive (C# didn't have a REPL at all at the time) when I first started using that language around 10 years ago. I thought it was immediately useful as a easy to write, but static typed Python replacement without all of Pythons dependency headaches for quick scripts. Because back then as compared to say C#/Java which required a lot of class files, boilerplate, etc F# read more like a scripting language which made it more suited to this. When they added the ability to pull in packages/dependencies inside the script directly that was great as well. e.g. Pull in a type provider, parse some JSON, make some API calls, create quick CSV's, whatever. Useful for quick scripts, data mangling or quick prototypes - you could just cut and paste the single script with a shebang, message it to someone on your team and it would run dependencies and all without the equivalent venv issues with a simple pasting into a text file. Install .NET SDK and that's it - it would run. In the team I was in at the time it was a quick productivity boost - seeing features implemented in quick scripts and seeing the data workable in a REPL session which could then could be promoted to an actual project was a great workflow.

I think those features have since spread to C# interactive (probably inspired by the F# incubator IMO), as that language has done things to simplify its syntax to make single file apps easier. From your comment Rust seems to be taking a similar approach.
by thorum | 2025-08-21 23:46:56+00:00
My point was more “humans are used to tools that don’t always work and can be used in creative ways” than “no human invention has ever been rigid and reliable”.

People on HN regularly claim that LLMs are useless if they aren’t 100% accurate all the time. I don’t think this is true. We work around that kind of thing every day.

With your examples:

- Before computers, fraud and human error was common in the banking system. We designed a system that was resilient against this and mostly worked, most of the time, well enough for most purposes even though it was built on an imperfect foundation.

- Highly precise clocks are a recent invention. For regular people 200 years ago, one person’s clock would often be 5-10 minutes off from someone else’s. People managed to get things done anyway.

I’ll grant you that Roman aqueducts, seasons and the sun are much more reliable than computers (as are all the laws of nature).
by Aurornis | 2025-08-21 23:47:18+00:00
Being likable and presenting yourself as an open-minded skeptic is the current winning formula for being an influencer grifter.

Some or most of what these people discuss might be true, often because it’s low stakes or obvious. This builds trust and leads people to believe that the person is a universally trustworthy source.

Then they drift into topics where they are incorrect, don’t understand the subject matter, or have been misled by other grifters but they deliver the message just the same as everything else. To the uninformed parts of the audience it feels every bit as accurate and genuine as all of their other content.

This is a very common pattern in the health and fitness world. Andrew Huberman is the current most famous example of someone who has some narrow scientific knowledge but has shared a lot of incorrect and misleading content outside of his domain. He’s the guy who claimed he had to stop wearing Bluetooth headphones because he believed the radio waves were hearing his skin up and he didn’t like it, for reference. He’s been caught out recently as his fan base has started to realize he’s not the genius about every topic that he presents himself as.
by ivanjermakov | 2025-08-21 23:48:01+00:00
Hot take: if you can't spot any issues in the code review it's either good code, code that needs further changes, or review was not done properly. I don't see how "I used LLMs" fit here, because it means nothing to the quality of the code submitted.

If such mention would mean increased reviewer attention, then every code review should include it.
by throwaway13337 | 2025-08-21 23:48:03+00:00
Is there a reason why prompt injections in general are not solvable with task-specific layering?

Why can't the llm break up the tasks into smaller components. The higher level task llm context doesn't need to know what is beneath it in a freeform way - it can sanitize the return. This also has the side effect of limiting the context of the upper-level task management llm instance so they can stay focused.

I realize that the lower task could transmit to the higher task but they don't have to be written that way.

The argument against is that upper level llms not getting free form results could limit the llm but for a lot of tasks where security is important, it seems like it would be fine.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-08-21 23:48:19+00:00
Yeah, but was it really obvious we shouldn't pursue String Theory? It seemed promising in the beginning.

Even for Alzheimer’s, it isn't as slam dunk obvious as a perpetual motion machine.

Recent discussion on pro/con of Alzheimer’s controversy. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-the-amyloid-h...

I'm just super wary of the 'right's tendency to throw the baby out with bath water, like JFK JR, and set the US back a few decades. Just because they don't understand science, so it must all be bad.
by snickerbockers | 2025-08-21 23:48:26+00:00
Silicon Valley has never seen a true bubble burst, even the legendary dot-com bubble was a minor setback from which the industry was fully recovered in about 5-10 years.

I have been saying for at least 15 years now that eventually Silly Valley will collapse when all these VCs stop funding dumb startups by the hundreds in search of the elusive "unicorns", but I've been wrong at every turn as it seems that no matter how much money they waste on dumb bullshit the so-called unicorns actually do generate enough revenue to make funding dumb startup ideas a profitable business model....
by cruffle_duffle | 2025-08-21 23:48:47+00:00
It takes an incredibly detailed spec to get an LLM to not go completely off the rails and even then. The amount of time writing that spec can take more time than just doing it by hand.

There is way too much babysitting with these things.

I’m sure somehow somebody makes it work but I’m incredibly skeptical that you can let an LLM run unsupervised and only review its output as a PR.
by blurbleblurble | 2025-08-21 23:50:17+00:00
Can't tell if you're responding in earnest or not here?

LLMs are trained to be steerable at inference time via context/prompting. Fine tuning is also possible and often used. Both count as "feedback" in my book, and my point is that both can be effective at "changing the LLM" in terms of its behavior at inference time.
by bkettle | 2025-08-21 23:50:55+00:00
I agree that for in-town trips the only thing that reduces the convenience of driving is when you can't drive fast and park directly at your destination for free. But these things (traffic, parking scarcity, etc) are really common, and are often the direct result of the fact that you are trying to go somewhere interesting. They are rarely artificial costs that could be removed.

I do think anecdotes are effective here, so: from my old SF apartment I could bike or ride Muni to the office. I generally chose to bike, but both options were more convenient than driving. The speed of driving and biking were both limited mostly by traffic and traffic lights, so biking was just as fast as driving. Both the traffic and the traffic lights are necessary because other people also want to live and work in a similar place as I do. But since my office was downtown in an urban, popular area where land value is high enough that parking is not a good use of land, if I drove I would have had to park a few blocks away (for a high price) and walk. Since bike parking is so much more space efficient than car parking, I could easily park my bike in my office. Taking the train was faster than either option; if it rained I would simply take the train.

I think you are not correct that a car is a strictly better option for all tasks. I think the convenience of not having to deal with all the things that make driving difficult is extremely valuable, and I think the things that make driving difficult are unavoidable because driving scales extremely poorly.
by nosignono | 2025-08-21 23:50:58+00:00
That's not what "dog whistles" are, lol. Dog Whistle means "coded language" basically.

Dog whistles are where someone says something that their audience will understand to mean a specific thing, but will be inaudible or neutral sounding to people who are not in their audience. They are named that because they are like the whistles only dogs can hear, while most people cannot.

"Inner city" is a canonical example of a dog whistle. Where the literal meaning is the districts in a city in the urban center, but is often used to denote poor minority communities. (If the literal meaning is only "city centers", then would you describe Manhattanites as inner city?)

On the left, "tax the rich" might be a dog whistle that carries a similar literal meaning disjoint from the understood meaning within the community.
by derf_ | 2025-08-21 23:51:07+00:00
> Why don't the sellers of the shares owe tax?

They do, but it is only paid by the people who took the money (instead of being forced to do so), and, more importantly, only on the difference from what they paid.

If you pay out $1mln of dividends, then everyone collectively owes (let's say at a qualified rate of 20%) a total of $200k. If you buy 20,000 shares from one guy at $50/share, you returned the same $1mln of cash to shareholders, but if he bought last year for $45, he only owes (let's say at a long-term capital gains rate of 20%) a total of $20k in taxes.
by Lammy | 2025-08-21 23:52:40+00:00
> Remove apps and features which don't work anymore, and would just make me sad if I saw them.

sudo rm -rf /Library/Widgets/Weather.wdgt

Some of these could be fixed if you find a replacement API. Try this modded Weather widget for example: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/weather-dashboard-widget-da...

And check out Download #2 (`Working_Widgets.zip`) here: https://macintoshgarden.org/apps/widget-collection-2005-macw...
by burntoutgray | 2025-08-21 23:53:28+00:00
Not before there is a vast amount of ML training on the facts, experimental results and theories. LLMs trained by scraping the internet have very little "understanding" of hard, real life facts.

As an example, AI in the field of radiology has required vast amount of guided training on radiology images before it was able to provide analysis capabilities. Yet once the need for surgery has been established only trained surgeons are able to perform the necessary operations.
by mothballed | 2025-08-21 23:54:11+00:00
I follow some forums on international banking from time to time, occasionally I read the story of the guy who's deposits got AML flagged so they simply cut him a check, of course after they put him on world-check or some other banking black flag database that prevents him from depositing the check anywhere else. In that case in theory they don't lose their assets, but I have no idea what happens next.
by stonogo | 2025-08-21 23:54:15+00:00
They do obey the law: they're required to pull onto a siding to allow Amtrak to stay on time. So the operators ensure the train is too long for any of the sidings, which fits them into an escape clause. Any cargo train stuck waiting for Amtrak simply isn't fully stacked yet.

Closing that loophole is what the government is dragging its feet about.
by ethbr1 | 2025-08-21 23:54:38+00:00
Not just RFK Jr. The rest of the government requiring a 15% kickback from Nvidia and AMD to approve GPU sales to China, and the CEO of Intel being told to resign.

I feel like I'm going to be able to tell my adult kids "Yeah, when I was younger the Republicans were the party of free trade and government non-intervention in private industry..."
by tracker1 | 2025-08-21 23:54:39+00:00
I saw an example about a year ago and can't find a specific article... but something along the lines of...

#!/usr/bin/env -S go run

I'm not sure if/when go ignores a shebang on the first line... otherwise, there are a bunch of articles I've seen that have a slightly differing format to do the same.. but google results feel off/old.

searched for: go shebang scripts

shebang is the term for a text/script file beginning with "#!" with the executable and parameters to run.
by pcthrowaway | 2025-08-21 23:55:08+00:00
I'm not really in the habit of watching content in this genre, I suppose. But Sabine Hossenfelder has published one of the best videos on the dangers of sugar alcohols (which I happen to be incredibly sensitive to), which is now my go-to recommendation for those who ask me why avoid them.

But I'd like to avoid other associations people now have with Sabine Hossenfelder; does anyone know of a similar quality video on the topic?
by ranvirdeshmukh_ | 2025-08-21 23:55:42+00:00
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