MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by maxbond | 2025-08-17 16:18:20+00:00
I think we agree more than we disagree on how to go about designing a schema, but that my narrow disagreement is that I think a.) timestamps and enums are better choices than booleans most of the time (without judging anyone who uses booleans to be a "terrible engineer", it's not malpractice) and b.) that's a legitimate trick of the trade rather than something "mindless".

I would agree that throwing a table together based on Twitter vibes without actually designing it will only work like a stuck clock, but I think that goes without saying. I kinda disregard opinions attributed to nebulous Twitter posters and not specific people. I think when you conflate people's opinions together like that you reduce their position to a caricature. If you poll that group of people almost all of them will have a more nuanced opinion.
by cameldrv | 2025-08-17 16:18:38+00:00
I’ve found the interaction between memory and sycophancy to be a major issue. I was trying to help deal with a difficult and confusing medical issue, and based on some lab tests, GPT had determined it was likely condition X. I had also asked a lot of questions about the treatment of condition X. After some follow up tests, it was clear that it wasn’t condition X, but it was extremely difficult to get ChatGPT to give up on it, even with deleting old chats and starting new ones, even changing the name of the patient. Starting in a private chat worked, but then it gets deleted when you close the window.
by card_zero | 2025-08-17 16:18:51+00:00
David Deutsch on LLMs:

>LLMs are trained to imitate patterns of language, not to discover or verify truth. So, when asked to speak as an expert in an area where perceived experts have a widespread misconception, the LLM will parrot that misconception, adopting the register and vocabulary of experts.

>This is dangerous when people take that register and vocabulary as conferring authority, or the very nature of an LLM as conferring truth or impartiality, which it cannot. They then amplify and entrench the misconception.

Only distantly related to the subject, but it's in the general area of mental models. I suppose if you're trying to code a cliche, the LLM will help you get it right, and if you're trying to create something original, the LLM will help you get it wrong.
by bobnarizes | 2025-08-17 16:19:27+00:00
I wanted to validate whether there’s real market interest and if people would actually be willing to pay for a tool like this, since it solves a real problem.

That said, I’d love if you give it a try, here's the download link: https://github.com/taranntell/fallinorg/releases/tag/1.0.0-b...
by latexr | 2025-08-17 16:19:34+00:00
> Your only option today is to go buy an asset pack and do your best.

There is a real possibility the assets generated by these tools will look equally or even more generic, the same generated images today are full of tells.

> What this means is that making even a 2 minute short animation is out of reach for a solo artist.

Flatland was animated and edited by a single person. In 2007. It’s a good movie. Granted, the characters are geometric shapes, but still it’s a 90 minute 3D movie.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland_(2007_Ehlinger_film)

Puparia is a gorgeous 2D animated film done by a single person in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puparia

These are exceptional cases (by definition, as there aren’t that many of them), but do not underestimate solo artists and the power of passion and resilience.
by RaftPeople | 2025-08-17 16:20:46+00:00
> In the split-up design, since you're not sharing the database, you can do whatever you want.

> we can't add a new field, we can't change this field

Ok, let's do an example.

Assumption:

A-ERP system with approximately 30 modules in use (e.g. sales order mgmt, inventory, purchasing, etc)

B-For split DB, the DB is split by module and data flows exist for all shared data. So there are X different copies of the item master (many and possibly most of those modules use the item master), each with the subset of data required by the specific module.

Sample change, add a new field to the item master:

Shared DB:

1-Update DB schema for item master

2-Update code in different modules that need to use the new data element (per feature requirements)

Split DB:

1-Update DB schema in all modules that require the new data element (per feature requirements)

2-Update code in different modules that need to use the new data element

3-Update the data flows for item data in each module that needs to use the new data element

I think you're understating the level of effort when you say "now we can do whatever we want". The actual effort in this change (which is a very common example) is actually greater than in a shared DB and requires more coordination.

Again, there are times when it's the right thing to do, but definitely not a silver bullet without trade-offs.
by zoeysmithe | 2025-08-17 16:20:56+00:00
The Amiga was more 2nd gen. I think the Micro equivalent was more like an Apple I/II. TRS-80/Tandy Color, or Vic-20/C64. The Amiga was Motorola 68000 based and at a clockspeed that really outran those zlog and 6502 based early devices.

The Amiga was a pretty impressive device with an OS that was fairly advanced. You could probably use it still today for word processing and sound design and not feel like you're missing much. The OS looks a lot like one of those super low-resource linux DE's.
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-17 16:21:12+00:00
None of those work, because they inevitably become vectors of the problem they're supposed to solve.

This is yet another disproof of the nonsense belief that markets reward efficiency, which is good for consumers.

Markets are fundamentally about gaining advantage over others, and it's far easier and cheaper to gain advantage through manipulation and questionable forms of persuasion than by any other means.

Which is why everyone and everything is now drowning in toxic sludge.

Markets, lacking any sense of the collective good, inevitably produce a tragedy of the commons for the benefit of a small number of the most successful, persuasive, and least ethical predatory manipulators.

This is supposed to be "rational", but that framing is itself a manipulation.

There's nothing rational about drowning in toxic sludge. It's a specific moral policy choice, with predictably negative consequences that have played out over and over again.
by GuB-42 | 2025-08-17 16:21:28+00:00
Your eyes compute gradients, as part of the shitton of visual processing your brain does to get an estimate of where the local and global minima are.

It is not perfect though, see the many optical illusions.

But we follow gradients all the time, consciously or not. You know you are at the bottom of the hole when all the paths go up for instance.
by Philpax | 2025-08-17 16:21:51+00:00
Significant whitespace pushes a tooling problem (correct indentation) into the human domain. It might have made sense before autoformatters that run on save, but I agree with you that in today's languages, it's a net negative.

As far as I'm aware, none of the new languages that have seen success in the last ten years (Go, Rust, Swift, Dart, Kotlin) rely on the author to format code correctly - instead, they do it for you. And that's good! That's one less thing the programmer has to worry about!
by rglover | 2025-08-17 16:21:56+00:00
One of the most obnoxious things about LinkedIn are the games that people play. Fake engagement over a series of my posts only to drop their pitch in my messages.

That, and it's so rare to find real content on the site that isn't just some mimetic rehash of the same thing other people are saying.

Frankly, it's a very ominous network to interact with—it's very unsettling to see how quickly and deeply people have adopted a performative mask that's uniquely a "LinkedIn character."

Endless droves of "think pieces" from people you can tell have never really been challenged in their field, have limited experience, and insist that they are the expert missing from your sheathe.

The saddest part is that the mediocrity will only ever increase, not decrease, in a world that rewards mediocrity and punishes excellence.
by thelastgallon | 2025-08-17 16:22:02+00:00
I think the administration's energy density should be extended for all things. Lets take transportation: Can't use federal lands, waterways, airspace or highways unless the airplanes, trains, ships, trucks and cars are powered by the highest energy density (nuclear).

Also, anything that uses airwaves: So, nuclear powered phones, watches, airtags.

This would be the biggest breakthrough for humanity. We have nuclear powered submarines but miniaturization of nuclear stalled since then.
by DrBazza | 2025-08-17 16:22:12+00:00
Commodore Amiga and Atari ST were 16-bit 68000 chips.

The BBC Micro was 8 bit and a 6502 chip, that era had at least the following:

BBC Atom, Micro, Electron, Master

Commodore Pet, Vic32, Commodore 64

Atari 400/800 XL

Tandy TRS80

Oric Atmos

Sinclair ZX80, 81, Spectrum, QL

Amstrad CPC 464

Dragon 32/64

MSX machines
by atmosx | 2025-08-17 16:22:27+00:00
I don't trust the rhetoric or the motives. Which brings me to the following questions:

Do all of your acquaintances even use VPNs? Because 97,56% of mine don’t. So it's not about you and your friends.

But lets assume for a moment that it's about you and your friends... If this law goes through, what’s to stop them from pushing through a series of follow-up laws forcing every VPN provider include backdoors? Who’s going to stop them? Why stop them? By then, the public will have already given in. No one will care if you or your friends are sentenced to 25 years for using a “non-compliant” (read: secure) VPN. Do you have _something to hide_?

In five years, any provider without a backdoor could easily be branded as “insecure.” We’re already living in a world where words often mean the exact opposite of what they should. Why would this be any different? And from my PoV, why take the risk? Children need safe ways to communicate as much as adults.
by Lio | 2025-08-17 16:23:27+00:00
Well the ARM's original goal was to run BBC BASIC faster than the BBC B could run assembly code.

To that end the ARM instruction set was heavily inspired by the 6502 in the Beeb and cruicially the BBC Micro was used to simulate the ARM before it went into production.

Latter the original ARM development kits were connected as second processors to Beebs courtesy of the Tube connector.

I think it's fare to say that without the BBC Micro there would be no ARM processors.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/a-history-of-arm-par...
by Al-Khwarizmi | 2025-08-17 16:24:03+00:00
Many people use this kind of reasoning to justify that LLMs can't be creative, are destined to write bland text, etc. (one notable example was Ted Chiang in the New Yorker) but it has never made any sense.

In my view, the easiest mental model that can be used to roughly explain what LLMs do is a Markov chain. Of course, comparing LLMs to a Markov chain is a gross simplification but it's one that can only make you underestimate them, not vice versa, for obvious reasons.

Well, even a Markov chain can surprise you. While they predict the next word probabilistically, if the dice roll comes out just right, they can choose a low-probability word in the right place and generate original and unexpected text.

Add to this that LLMs are much better at "Markov chaining" that Markov chains themselves, that there is the added instruction tuning (including RLHF) which can be used to bias the model towards more creative/original text that humans like, and that LLMs often pull off things in ways that we don't even really understand - and this kind of claims sound very naive.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-08-17 16:25:23+00:00
Because American websites often don't bother with preemptive GDPR compliance, and DPAs consider first-party cookies of small websites to be a pretty low enforcement priority. My browser shows four persistent cookies, one for news.ycombinator.com and three for .ycombinator.com, that definitely require GDPR consent. In particular note that merely keeping you logged in across browser sessions requires a cookie banner, because that persistence is not strictly essential to the site's functionality; the official GDPR explainer (https://gdpr.eu/cookies/) calls this a "preferences cookie".
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-08-17 16:25:40+00:00
But if AI can do anything that human labor can do, what would even be the incentive for AI owners to farm wheat and sell it to people? They can just have their AIs directly produce the things they want.

It seems like the only things they would need are energy and access to materials for luxury goods. Presumably they could mostly lock the "human economy" out of access to these things through control over AI weapons, but there would likely be a lot of arable land that isn't valuable to them.

Outside of malice, there doesn't seem to be much reason to block the non-technological humans from using the land they don't need. Maybe some ecological argument, the few AI-enabled elites don't want billions of humans that they no longer need polluting "their" Earth?
by matthewfl | 2025-08-17 16:25:42+00:00
Author here.

Chapter 2 of my dissertation covers a lot about the syntax of Dyna https://matthewfl.com/papers/mfl-dissertation.pdf

As refset said in the other comment, In Dyna, terms return values like a function in a functional programming language. Hence, when you write

word(I)

this returns the value defined by the `word` function. E.g.

word(0) = "Hello".

This is different from typical logic programming languages like Prolog in that if you write

foo(X, bar(Y))

then you are "calling" the term `foo`, but then `bar` ends up being a structured-term that gets unified with the second argument of `foo`. Prolog provides this shortcut as "calling" `bar` doesn't make sense in this case, as `bar` only would return the value `true`, which isn't particularly useful.

In Dyna, we provide square brackets to create structured-terms as both calling the term "bar" and creating the structured-term bar can be useful. E.g. the Prolog expression `foo(X, bar(Y))` would be equivalent to the dyna `foo(X, bar[Y])`.

For the aggregator `max=`, this is looping over the different possible values on the right-hand-side and selecting the value that is the max. Hence in

phrase(X,I,K) max= phrase(Y,I,K) \* rule(X,Y).

this is looping over the variable `Y` and selecting the one that is maximal. Using `max=` on

phrase(X,I,I+1) max= rule(X, word(I)).

is done because we want all of the right-hand-sides to use the same aggregator so that we can aggregate between different rules that contribute to `phrase/3`.
by rovingeye | 2025-08-17 16:26:08+00:00
I can sort of understand the publishing argument, since npm doesn't solve for this at all, unlike JSR:

"You publish TypeScript source, and JSR handles generating API docs, .d.ts files, and transpiling your code for cross-runtime compatibility."

Not allowing it for private modules doesn't make much sense to me, though. It either forces me to use a loader, or now figure out a JS build step which I have been more than happy to avoid up until now.
by Hamuko | 2025-08-17 16:27:17+00:00
It seems to be less of a "file organizer" than it is a "document organizer" since it only supports plain text and PDF files.

Personally, I don't think I have that many PDF and text files that organizing them manually would be a pain. The organization logic also is a miss for me, since I don't really organize my documents in buckets like "Legal & Contracts", but rather I have folders like "Car" (for my car's service records, bill of sale, owner's manual, etc.) and "Mortgage" (mortgage quotes, contracts, etc) that's housed under "Apartment".

Doesn't help that most of these documents are not in English.
by ycui1986 | 2025-08-17 16:27:20+00:00
tube’s failure is such that if they survive the infant fatality, they will be more robust and reliable than transistor. The transmitters on Voyager probes have been going for 47 years. Those tube were pre-screened ones that survived from infant fatality. It’s like sea turtle, if they survive first few years in the wild, they will a very long lifespan.
by ragequittah | 2025-08-17 16:27:41+00:00
There was an NVIDIA update recently [1] that caused problems with temperatures being properly reported. Entirely software, killed some video cards. Though entirely nvidia's fault I wouldn't say it's because they make garbage hardware in any way.

It seems increasingly these problems (including the NVIDIA one) are only cropping up on 24H2 machines which is why I've decided to stick with 23H2 until it's out of its support window. Unfortunately that's coming up pretty soon.

[1]https://www.neowin.net/news/nvidia-fixes-windows-11-24h2-dri...
by rovingeye | 2025-08-17 16:28:24+00:00
I can understand the argument, since npm has no solution for TypeScript packages, unlike JSR:

"You publish TypeScript source, and JSR handles generating API docs, .d.ts files, and transpiling your code for cross-runtime compatibility."

Still would have been nice to have this for private packages.

This makes Deno/Bun much more attractive alternatives
by canjobear | 2025-08-17 16:28:30+00:00
> Even 6 year olds don't understand humour at all. Very similar to LLMs they know the shape of a joke from hearing them before, but they aren't funny in the same way LLM jokes aren't funny.

For further examples see a great deal of documentation here: https://www.tumblr.com/badkidsjokes
by simianwords | 2025-08-17 16:29:17+00:00
You are completely exaggerating and pointing out edge cases. Sure sometimes advertising can be harmful and there are laws against false advertising. But in general it is helpful and provides value. For instance I personally like it when I 'm shown a relevant advertisement which actually convinces me to purchase it. Just recently I saw some advertisement on Instagram related to some concert near where I live. It was actually relevant and I considered purchasing a ticket.

You can always exaggerate and cherry pick bad instances from anything. What you are doing is similar to this. There were a few Samsung phones that blew up and caused injury. You now characterise all phones as being harmful and dangerous to society.
by latexr | 2025-08-17 16:29:21+00:00
> history has, so far, mostly proven that the end result of better tools is better experts

I’m inclined to agree with the general sentiment. However, it is not a given that LLMs are better tools. You don’t really get better at them in the same sense as before, you just type something and pray. The exact same thing you typed may produce exactly what you wanted, and aberration, or something close with subtle mistakes that you don’t have the expertise to fix. Other tools made you better at the craft in general.
by joshdavham | 2025-08-17 16:29:48+00:00
If you find reading posts on LinkedIn as annoying as I do, there’s actually a nice solution that will literally wipe your feed blank:

1) Change your preferred feed view to “Most Recent Posts” : https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/m/settings/preferred-...

2) Unfollow all of your connections. You’ll stay connected but won’t see their annoying posts anymore.

…and there you have it! Focused peace and zen on an otherwise excruciating website.
by Ukv | 2025-08-17 16:30:05+00:00
> that's no excuse for a system such as Windows to brick SSDs like that [...] it either has to be part of windows quality control to test these low end systems or it should make it very clear about the system requirements

If this was a widespread problem I'd agree it should've been caught during testing and mitigated, but it doesn't sound like that's the case ("We looked around and could not find other reports resembling such situations"). As far as I'm aware it's just one Twitter thread reporting this, not all/many low end systems. Only so much Windows can do if it's just a faulty batch of SSDs, or even an incorrectly installed part in the user's setup.

> Either way, the problem was patched, which makes it a problem on windows side.

Has it been? I can't see Microsoft even verifying that the issue exists yet.
by sbarre | 2025-08-17 16:30:28+00:00
> You only know if it was worthwhile in hindsight.

Yes that's because, so far, we haven't been able to see the future. Which is why we base predictions and assumptions on past performance and on lived experience. Sometimes we will be wrong.

You're also arguing in the abstract here while I am speaking about this specific topic of using LLMs to improve 3D modelling tooling.

Are you arguing that neither LLMs or 3D modelling tools are "worthwhile"?

Are you suggesting that improvements that make these tools more accessible, even incrementally, are a bad thing?

Or are you just challenging my right to make assumptions and speculate? I realize that we may not be even on the same page here.

You're also cherry-picking a limited number of examples where software isn't better, and I agree with all those (and never said that software universally gets better), but those examples are a tiny subset of what software does in today's world.

It's starting to feel like you just want to argue.

My opinion is that, broadly speaking, software advancements have improved the world, and will continue to improve the world, both in big and small ways. There will of course be exceptions.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-17 16:30:40+00:00
> IMO it's not possible in theory to build a branch predictor that never makes potentially exploitable mispredictions.

I believe the Mill hardware design would be immune by design because the hardware is in-order (relying on other trickery for its performance). Of course, it's still vaporware, but the noises made have been fairly competent.

So in some ways, yes, but in other ways, what if you didn't need a branch predictor in the CPU.

https://millcomputing.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Sp...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8E4qs2irmpc
by vannevar | 2025-08-17 16:31:32+00:00
The Chinese room setup just hides the problem behind a facade, it does not solve the problem. Which is that as soon as you communicate to someone in the dinner party that you're running the experiment, it ceases to be a dinner party.

It is certainly true that every constituent part of the colony doesn't need to contribute to any particular action to demonstrate sentience, any more than to demonstrate locomotion. But in the case of humans, an individual human is so clearly sentient and conscious that any experiment would be completely confounded if it involved communicating directly and consciously with any individual human. In your Chinese room, any sentience could just as easily be explained by one of the parties simply communicating directly with the experimenter as it could be by group sentience, and Occam's Razor would apply.
by starchild3001 | 2025-08-17 16:31:48+00:00
Correct. People claim these models "saturate" yet what saturates faster is our ability to grasp what these models are capable of.

I, for one, cannot evaluate the strength of an IMO gold vs IMO bronze models.

Soon coding capabilities might also saturate. It might all become a matter of more compute (~ # iterations), instead of more precision (~ % getting it right the first time), as the models become lightning speed, and they gain access to a playground.
by throw0101c | 2025-08-17 16:31:58+00:00
> This is great news. If costs climb rapidly, homeowners will switch to […]

And what about renters (who are, in the US, often the poorer)?

Electricity is an input to industrial and commercial operations, so if companies see their costs rise, they will probably raise prices to maintain margin: this will feed into higher prices everywhere (all goods and services).
by AlecSchueler | 2025-08-17 16:32:04+00:00
I feel like it's more particular than 30 year old. Seems to be a white, straight male with an Anglo Saxon heritage living in England. A black lesbian living in Derry would have a vastly different experience despite being just as much "30 year old in the UK."

This isn't a criticism just an interesting case of unconscious bias at play and how we tend to universalise our experiences.