MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by the_af | 2025-08-05 02:54:53+00:00
The author is doing nothing of the sort.

Among other things, he's analyzing his students attitudes' re: AI and cheating with AI, and also comparing what they claim to feel vs what they actually do! It's mostly a reflection of what his students feel about the use of AI in English writing, not about calculators vs AI.

It seems as if you're responding to the line you quoted (out of context) through your preconceptions of what the article is about instead of actually reading the article!

> and many of the author’s students probably have used LLM’s for homework despite their statements that please the author.

"Probably have used LLM's"!? Don't take this the wrong way, but it seems you didn't read past the line you quoted, am I right? Because this is explicitly addressed multiple times, and the answer may surprise you.
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-05 02:55:31+00:00
> But if, as I suspect, Perplexity are visiting that page and then using information from that webpage in order to train their model then sorry mate, you're a crawler, you're just using a user as a proxy for your crawling activity.

If it is not recursive access, and is only one file, then it hopefully should be OK (except for issues with HTML where common browsers will usually also download CSS, JavaScripts, WebAssembly, pictures, favicons (even if the web page does not declare any favicons), etc; many "small web" formats deliberately avoid this), especially if it is just used only since you requested it.

However, if they do then use it to train their model, without documenting that, that can be a problem, especially if the file being accessed is not intended to be public; but this is a different issue than the above.
by vdupras | 2025-08-05 02:55:32+00:00
> Everyone keeps saying it these days: treat your AI like a (brilliant) new junior dev.

Really? You mean that person that drains senior developer time, but in which we still invest time because we're confident they're going to turn out great after the onboarding?

Until then, they're a net time sink, aren't they? Unless the projects you've got to deliver are fantastically boring.

So is this really what it's all about? Perpetual onboarding?
by foresto | 2025-08-05 02:56:36+00:00
This reminds me of how Boeing introduced an automatic nose-down feature in the 737 MAX, meant to compensate for its higher-mounted engines causing nose-up during takeoff. According to a video I saw, they didn't make pilots aware of this change from the older 737, nor train them in how to recognize it or turn it off, and its behavior in response to a bad angle of attack reading turned out to be deadly.

I think this is the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5KQ0g_-qJs

Keywords: 737 MAX MCAS trim
by calvinmorrison | 2025-08-05 02:57:20+00:00
I'll bite. I am a ERP consultant in the SMB manufacturing and distribution space. Primarily we operate on Acumatica, Sage and Netsuite.

The most important thing about ERP systems is - customization. IE: Scripting (netsuite), or even core programming (Sage100 for example). Not just user defined fields but workflows and being able to override and hook into core parts of the system. Say you want to override your cost basis for a certain productline or maybe serve different prices based on the shipping warehouse.

How do you approach that?

EDIT:

How do you handle the finances, G/L auditing, and allt hat financial wizardy?

customers.. they love PDFs. How do you handle generating things like pick lists, invoice sheets, etc? templating?

EDIT2:

One thing big ERPs provide is basically a cohesive way to extend. Not just an API in a RESTFUL sense, it's more akin to an IDE or like GTK+, there's almost everything rolled in for extension inside the 'world view' of the ERP. Every ERP makes some decisions and the rest of the world may flow, be that how you issue credit memos, handle multiple financial entities (do they all have the same chart of accounts? do they all have the same modules? Are there shared users) and so forth. How do you approach that? IE: when you need to slap something like PO's on top of AP, so basically AP + Items and a whole bunch more, does that "flow"? Do you receive those goods and they end up in your inventory for AR? etc.... Having an extensible system is great for addons and consulting, but the bigger piece is - for you, letting your ERP grow and add capabilities.

EDIT3: "Stripe" is not a billing techstack. Mostly CFOs make decisions about billing options, not us lowly tech monkies. Do you support pluggable vaults or anything akin?
by sky2224 | 2025-08-05 02:58:30+00:00
If you view life as just this thing that's perpetually going until you're dead, then there's really no "making it". You're just living right now and in the future until you're not, and that's nothing you should be afraid of or set an expectation around.

How you choose to poke at the world and react to the things that poke back is up to you.
by crazygringo | 2025-08-05 02:58:40+00:00
That is not my experience at all. To the contrary, those who write fiction read mostly fiction, and those who write non-fiction read mostly non-fiction.

They're incredibly different skill sets. One is all about argumentation, convincing, facts, and citations. The other is all about imagination, beauty, evocation, flavor.

Obviously they both require assembling nouns and verbs and other parts of speech in sentences, but they seem to be virtually entirely different capabilities at the end of the day.

Writing excellent short stories doesn't really help with crafting effective business communications, design documents, etc. And vice-versa. In fact, I think they can sometimes even be harmful -- the kind of clarity required for non-fiction can constrain imagination in fiction, while the creativity celebrated in fiction can be quite counterproductive when it comes to functional communication -- what is intended to be clever or unique often gets misunderstood.
by maga_2020 | 2025-08-05 02:58:45+00:00
I also agree with your sentiment. Excel is coding for people who are not programmers.

But I think the author conflates 1) engineering practices

2) Programming

3) Expressing domain knowledge using tables, charts and numbers

Most excel users do 3) They are certainly not programmers, and the do not follow engineering practices we associated with programming: modularity, hiearchical or functional re-usability, testability, etc

Excel creators do not reproduce bug reports, do not measure their success by the number of bugs they fixed, they do not do SDLC...

These are not particularly fault of excel. But as soon as there is a recognition that 'oh that excel workbook needs to be managed by programmers' -- then after a few month programmers realize that Excel and VBA macros are subpar programming environment, and will just argue that the way that the author does -- that it does not make sense to maintain a complex, business critical code within Excel.

So they will re-write it in Python or something else.

---

I think Ex cell's success in the business world is precisely because it allows non-programmers to bypass the whole SDLC and express their domain knowledge in a computational system.

As programmers, we want to replace Excel with something that

a) allows business users to do what they want to do, without SDLC

b) when their work reaches a certain level of complexity, we want the tool to allow us to gradually transition the work the domain users have done into an engineered piece of software with minimal effort, free of cost, easy to debug.

I do not think such as system exists yet, but that would be a killer app
by LegionMammal978 | 2025-08-05 02:59:17+00:00
What annoys me with Monte Carlo methods is trying to get self-consistent statistics at multiple parameter values. E.g., in your example, what is the derivative of the solid angle as the detector is moved? Or more generally, if we have some 'net goodness' measure for a system depending on parameters, how can we efficiently maximize it, when simulations are noisy and basins are shallow?

My understanding is that these sorts of questions come up in ML, and there are ways of dealing with it, but they can't converge nearly as fast as simple iterations like Newton's method. Even if I have to take a series approximation instead of a simple formula, I'll be able to use autodiff (or at worst, symbolic differentiation) to get quick and precise answers to these questions.
by shmerl | 2025-08-05 02:59:22+00:00
Well, I'm talking about definition of the spec and principle here. If they start dictating impossibility of looking at your own private keys by design of the spec, it should be strongly pushed back against. There is enough of abuse in taking away control from the user with all kind of opaque stuff.

And what you can do or want to do with your private key is really up to you. Copy it and import into another password manager could be a reasonable use case, besides simple curiosity. Basically, slapping on it some kind of DRM-like restrictions in the name of security isn't right.

You can make it non trivial to make it more clear that it has risks, but not prevent users from accessing it if they insist.
by gecko6 | 2025-08-05 02:59:23+00:00
I was startled when I was interviewed by an AI interviewer, since I wasn't expecting anything like that (perhaps I'm naive). It asked a series of questions about my job experience and technologies I had not worked with, then at the end I was informed that my application had been rejected - for a position that was not the one I was applying to. I only regret that I did not think to just repeat "banana banana banana" over and over agin to see whether I could drive the AI into a weird state. That would have made it all worthwhile.
by nullc | 2025-08-05 02:59:26+00:00
> Would this prevent banks from targeting marijuana companies?

The EO isn't out yet-- it might. Might not.

Right now the incentives are such that banks are likely to crap on anything they think the federal government may not like, because there are infinity penalties available for displeasing the government and nothing but losing a customer on the other side.

So anything that shifts the balance at all may have a fairly broad effect at improving access to banking.
by ggm | 2025-08-05 03:00:02+00:00
If you have paid for google one, as I have, the help desk is real people and they are nice and responsive.

I appreciate the corner case catch-22 "you need to be logged on to prove your status" but please, don't perpetuate the meme there is no google help desk.

If you want google help desk, pay Google for support.
by shrikrishna | 2025-08-05 03:00:51+00:00
AFAIK, the relinking requirement only applies if you distribute the software to someone.

If you’re running Sidequest entirely on your own infrastructure to orchestrate jobs across your backend, you’re not distributing the software at all, you’re providing a service. The tight coupling does not itself trigger extra obligations. What matters legally is distribution, not architecture.

Edgecase is if you give your software to a customer to run on their own servers (self‑hosted deployment/docker image shipped to customer). In those cases, you would need to allow them to replace Sidequest.js (ie, not obfuscating it away).

Someone more knowledgeable can correct me, if I'm wrong
by montroser | 2025-08-05 03:00:52+00:00
It's probably not a grand plot at this moment. But yeah, it seems like I'm going to eventually be forced to involve a third party in my login processes, and it will come with not much benefit to me, and will come with a bunch of risks and downsides.

It might actually be net positive across the Internet, especially for the most vulnerable people. But at the same time, it could also easily become yet another source of sweet behavioral data ripe for abuse by big tech and government
by hintklb | 2025-08-05 03:02:02+00:00
it's called renting.

Americans are obsessed with owning a home at all cost. This means that you are effectively bidding against people that do not even do the math. They are ready to spend Millions of dollar on something that is comparatively cheap to rent.

The fact that absolutely everyone wants to buy pushed prices through the roof. The good news is that you can take the other side of this bet. it's called renting.

Currently in most places in the US you will save literally millions over the 30 year mortgage by renting and investing in the market instead.

Reminder that renting and owning is functionally almost exactly the same thing.

Never trust your realtor and never trust other homeowner that most of the time never did the math (We all know those people: "I bought my home for 500k 15 years ago. It is now worth 1M$, therefore I made 500k$").

In other words, let other people take the irrational side of this bet and take the rational side by renting. It's an arbitrage opportunity.
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-05 03:02:43+00:00
I agree, but that does not mean that you should use excessive requests and unnecessary scraping and overloading the servers to access them. The files should be mirrored. Some may be better copied in other ways, e.g. a git repository can be cloned and mirrored in that way, and should not need to crawl the web pages to do so.
by girvo | 2025-08-05 03:03:40+00:00
I cannot agree with this enough :)

I live right in Red Hill. Bluey is literally my home! This is my neighbourhood! This is the first time I've ever felt that... and its amusing to feel that as a person in my mid 30s from a childrens show.

I love Brisbane so much, and this article captures the uniqueness so well.
by rurp | 2025-08-05 03:04:34+00:00
Big tech initiatives can, and often do, have more than one motivation. I'm sure many folks working on AMP only cared about serving web pages faster to users, just like I'm sure many other folks involved loved the lockin potential.

I expect the same is happening with passkeys. Many are just trying to make their customers more secure, but I don't for a second think that companies who are constantly looking for more ways to lock in users don't see any potential for that here.
by SilverElfin | 2025-08-05 03:04:48+00:00
Knowing IAM’s aggressive tactics and demands in their recent strike, I would expect them to do exactly this once again. Still, it is shocking to see them reject what sounds like a fair offer:

> "We're disappointed our employees rejected an offer that featured 40% average wage growth and resolved their primary issue on alternative work schedules," Dan Gillian, Boeing Air Dominance vice president and general manager and senior St. Louis site executive, said in a statement on Sunday. "We are prepared for a strike and have fully implemented our contingency plan to ensure our non-striking workforce can continue supporting our customers."

I suspect this will continue Boeing’s demise and lead to more technologically advanced startups replacing labor based products with automated ones. It’s too difficult to deal with these problems, and it shows in Boeing’s stagnation and profits (losses).
by zzo38computer | 2025-08-05 03:05:01+00:00
I would want to see a search engine which will not index paywalled articles and will not execute JavaScripts and CSS (so that any part of the document that requires JavaScripts to be displayed will not be indexed, and search queries involving such parts of the documents will not find those documents; documents that require JavaScripts to be displayed at all will not be indexed at all).
by hintklb | 2025-08-05 03:05:08+00:00
Understanding the concept of Opportunity Cost and how it applies to everything in life.

- Buying a house: Is this the best return I can get on a downpayment. (Spoiler: It is not).

- Accepting a specific job offer: Is this the best way to spend 8 hours a day?

- Not making a successful trade, is as much as a loss than losing money explicitely on a trade.

- If you own something, you should consider what could you do with it's cash value if you sold it instead.

- If you have a paid off home, could you sell it and get a better ROI with the cash equivalent and rent instead? (The answer is yes and you should do it).
by marcus_holmes | 2025-08-05 03:05:23+00:00
> One problem with your assumption here is that "humanity" has no definition of "benign" and "malign".

Agreed. One can think of any number of actions that would be impossible to rate on a benign/malign scale. E.g. as a trivial example: aliens destroy 80% of humanity, which leads to restoration of Earth ecosystems and prevention of the inevitable future war that would destroy 100% of humanity; in 100 years humanity is in a much better position than it would have been if left alone [0] [1]

And that doesn't even include intentions. We often do bad things for good reasons, with good intentions. Malignity includes or infers the intention to cause harm. That may not be present, or the intention may have been benign.

Morality is complicated and subjective. Even judging the outcome of an action as positive or negative is complicated and subjective.

[0] I don't really want to argue whether this is true, possible, etc. Pick your own variant of example where a seemingly-malign action is actually benign in the long term.

[1] Also raises the problem of estimating "better" in this context. Exercise left for the reader.
by wmorgan | 2025-08-05 03:05:35+00:00
This so-called traditional definition returns too many false negatives. It would exclude, for example, the inflammatory newspapers of the Jim Crow era. Americans learned with tragic regularity in the Post-Reconstruction era why spreading racial rumors is so reckless. It doesn’t matter to the moral calculus that the rumors were "truthy." The norm against expressing racial prejudice predates the most recent party realignment; it's amply represented in WW2 training materials. This is not a new thing.
Show HN: I Wrote a Chat CLI for Ollama with MCP Support
by SamInTheShell | 2025-08-05 03:05:56+00:00
Something I did over the weekend. There's some really cool projects out there, but what I was finding for Ollama was lacking in various places. I addressed the first two things I wanted: 1) MCP Server Support and 2) Scheduling LLM Tasks
by ottodacat | 2025-08-05 03:05:57+00:00
We’ve rolled out multi-arch support and wrote up how we’re deploying to both ARM64 and x86_64 — without maintaining two pipelines or duplicating YAML. Using Docker Build Cloud + CAEPE, we build once, test both, and deploy based on arch health. Covers routing workloads, running per-arch smoke tests, and handling selective rollbacks. Would love to hear how others are approaching this in prod.
by windexh8er | 2025-08-05 03:06:07+00:00
Can the Terms of Service of individual content creators leverage a "death of a thousand cuts" model to produce a legal honeypot which would require organizations like Perplexity to be bound up in 10s of thousands of conciliation court cases?

Big Tech has hidden behind ToS for years. Now, it seems as though it only works for them, but not against. It seems as though this would be easy to orchestrate and prove forcing these companies into a legal nightmare or risk insolvent business stature due to the high load of cases filed against.

Why couldn't something like this be used to flip the table? A conciliation brigading, of sorts.
by sleepybrett | 2025-08-05 03:06:15+00:00
I came to post about Rosin's work as well. I personally love that he uses clever lighting and angles to create the shading for his pixels instead of just painting one side. It makes it feel like a mirror, all one material like a magic wallhanging.

That said the one I experienced was an earlier work had was fully driven by hobby servos (or something that sounded very much like them) and when you get even one of those going it's loud as hell. I didn't get to look at the construction too closely and this was many years ago. I expect that he did some kind of sound dampening because it wasn't as.. deafening as I expected. But it still kinda 'took me out of it' a bit.
by GMoromisato | 2025-08-05 03:06:24+00:00
I would bet a large sum that 3I is a natural object, but if it's artificial, I would bet that it's malign.

When it comes to alien civilizations, the probability is that they are millions of years more advanced than us.[1]

Millions of years is enough for natural genetic change to have an impact, and we already know what that impact will be: individuals that have more offsprings will spread through the population and displace individuals with fewer offsprings.[2]

But if you're a technological species, the only limit to having more offsprings is competition with other members of your species.[3]

In effect, over a million-year time-scale, you get into an arms-race to harness as much power/energy as possible to prevent others from killing you and to kill others who are using resources you need.[4]

So if any alien civilization deliberately decides to visit Earth, you can be pretty sure that their intentions are hostile. Maybe, if they are hydrogen-breathers who evolved on gas giants, they will leave Earth for last. But if they are carbon-based, oxygen breathers, they will squash us like bugs.

------------

[1]: Imagine that, over the 10 billion-year history of the galaxy, 100 civilizations appear. What's the chance that a randomly chosen civilization (say, the closest one to us) is less than 1 million years old? Using a Poisson distribution, the chance is 0.01%: a 1 in 10,000 chance.

[2]: This is just a restatement of Darwin's theory. Note that Darwin's theory holds even for intelligent/technological people. E.g., imagine some civilization decides that 2.1 kids is the limit because that yields a stable society. That civilization will be destroyed by one that has no such limit, because the latter civilization will have a need for more resources and will have the power to take it. After millions of years, only expanding civilizations will be left because they will have destroyed all the others.

[3]: Non-technological species are limited by their environment. Ants cannot colonize the ocean or the moon. But technological humans can. Our only limit is physics and other humans.

[4]: As long as there is more than 1 civilization, there will be competition because, over millions of years, the galaxy is a zero-sum arena. If one civilization expands to a star system, then the other one cannot. [And, as I said earlier, if one expands but one doesn't, the expanding one will take over.]

The only possible benign scenario is if there are very few civilizations who don't compete with each other. But in that scenario, they wouldn't be sending probes to our solar system.
by hollandheese | 2025-08-05 03:06:40+00:00
>plenty of the people in it would already know a lot of the material that's covered (so why not ditch?)

Their test scores show that they don't already know a lot of the material that's covered.

>Isn't it basically a remedial class, or rather a class for people who did the minimum of HS math?

It's College Algebra (or the non-trig part of Precalculus).
by markatlarge | 2025-08-05 03:07:26+00:00
We agree I fully support systems that protect children,

Read my medium article

"When You’re Accused, You’re Erased" https://medium.com/@russoatlarge_93541/7a09ebe8bf6a In the article I say:

"A Necessary Fight — But Accountability Matters

Let me be clear: I deeply appreciate Google’s efforts to detect and report CSAM. These systems are vital for protecting children and stopping abuse, and I fully support that mission.

But good intentions are not a substitute for fairness. Right now, individuals who are falsely flagged have no way to defend themselves, no way to clear their name, and no meaningful path to restore their livelihood.

If a system is powerful enough to destroy someone’s life, it should also be strong enough to offer transparency, review, and correction. That’s all I — and others like me — are asking for: a fair process to protect the innocent while continuing the fight against real harm."