MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by MarkusQ | 2025-09-03 21:34:03+00:00
I am increasingly convinced that a significant fraction of the population (or possibly _everyone_, a significant fraction of time) ignores content and relies solely on form to assess what they are being told. If something is structured properly, they will accept it, no matter how absurd.

LLMs take advantage of this and produce things that are sufficiently similar statistically to what's expected that people's critical facilities just shut down (or are never engaged in the first place). They apparently seem perfectly cogent when even a moment's thought would show they are utter bilge.
by blackqueeriroh | 2025-09-03 21:34:09+00:00
While I appreciate that you don’t particularly care what I’ve shared, or what any social science research says, instead seeking to fair your own subjective experience and generalizing it to others, and going so far as to say that as an educator you believe people who need modified learning methods or methodologies, or even additional help and assistance to learn concepts that others may find simple don’t deserve to be engineers, some of us prefer to actually engage with data and reality.

You can operate on your own opinion all you want, but here we value data and science and facts. You have provided nothing but your own fulminations and prejudices. Enjoy them while you can, I will warn students away from taking your classes because you, sir, at a minimum, believe that anyone with a learning disability shouldn’t be an engineer, which is the fundamental definition of ableism, and failing to give accommodation, as an educator, is a violation of the ADA.
by dizlexic | 2025-09-03 21:34:38+00:00
I hate to agree because I hate WordPress, but when building something for others especially in a volunteer community it's still the go-to solution.

Pros, a ton of docs, easy non-technical customization, long term support, many already experienced users, made for basically exactly what you're doing.

Cons, it's WordPress, and the actual wp-loop is a nightmare of bad choices.
by busymom0 | 2025-09-03 21:35:15+00:00
> Traditional queues are like having one massive line at the DMV. Everyone gets served in the order they arrived, which sounds fair until someone shows up with paperwork for 100 vehicles.

TLDR with the DMV example where someone shows up with paperwork for 100 vehicles is that this person's single vehicle paperwork is served and then they are sent back in line with remaining 99 vehicle paperworks.
by causal | 2025-09-03 21:35:52+00:00
Many examples were given, please read the linked article. And again, in a society where everything is monetized, you can argue that creditworthiness is a just proxy for anything. So if basic water and electric access or housing access can be, so can anything else where you pay money for a service. You could argue dating apps should have access to credit scores and I wouldn't be surprised if some tried.

> Which institutions?

Credit bureaus...
by xwowsersx | 2025-09-03 21:36:09+00:00
I'm speculating here, but my guess is that the urgency for OpenAI isn't that the Alex team has a "secret prompt." It's that they've already done the heavy lifting to make LLM coding assistants actually usable in a domain (Apple platforms) where OAI doesn't have integrations yet.

Acquiring them gives OAI:

- ready-made team that understands the IDE plumbing and the developer UX at a deep level

- head start in a platform ecosystem that's hard to crack

3. team that knows how to push the models into productized, developer-ready experiences

So it's not the prompts. It's engineering the scaffolding and UX around the model so it feels like magic to the user. That's what OpenAI is buying.

Also possible that Alex solved a lot of UX and integration challenges that could translate to other Apple contexts (productivity apps, design tools, even consumer-facing AI on macOS/iOS).

Without having used Alex myself (I don't do iOS or macOS development), I would guess that all the retrieval, context slicing, editor integration yada yada that they've built aren't necessarily unique to coding. Same scaffolding could support things like AI-driven writing, design, or general productivity in an Apple-native way.
by justsomehnguy | 2025-09-03 21:36:34+00:00
There are a lot of full-sized keyboards there aka 100%, for example look at Keychron, there are 39 100% and 30 96% along with some variants.

But the obsession with <80% keyboards are steaming from a couple of factors and less soldering as other commenters said is one of them. Other one is what "the community" as many others were overwhelmed at some point by "the influencers" who adored that "digital nomad" lifestyle[1] and ~65% is surely more convenient than 100% one. Another point though I'm not sure it's conscious one is what a lot of people not even using 100% in their life anymore because their devices has a not 100% keyboard from the start - laptops, or don't have a keyboard at all - smartphones. So there is no attachment or "spatial memory" of quickly punching some number on keypad or using navigational block naturally. And at last but not least if you have 100+ keys it's hard to justify all that layers shenanigans and whatnot, heh.

As N=1 I can tell what despite what I ended with K3 Pro (it's 75%) accidentally I'm pretty happy with it because it's compact enough what I can toss it in the laptop bag (though rarely) with my 14" or postman-like[3] with an 8" Android tablet but I still do have the function keys (I was aiming at 65% at first), don't need another keyboard at the desk and 65% isn't that much smaller than 75% despite the looks.

EDIT: oh and don't forget what 90% of the market is just [stupid] fashion anyway, you can't be a serious about MK, DIY and all that when you can buy "solid mega gaming mechanical keyboard with cool anime girl themed keycaps and 95 modes of RGB backlight! (only 3 keycaps btw, but it's not mentioned)" for less than $50 not only from no-name (or RJELTHKETG) Chinese shop but from the big names too.

[0] https://www.keychron.com/collections/all-keyboards

[1] from the home to Starbucks and back making a lot of photos and selfies in process, if you understand what I mean

[2] https://www.keychron.com/collections/keychron-k-pro-series-k...

[3] albeit it's thinner and vertical https://www.victorinox.com/en/Products/Travel-Gear/Backpacks...
by jibal | 2025-09-03 21:37:39+00:00
> You're getting a little ahead of yourself.

Nonsense.

> First, ontological assertions need to reflect reality.

You're getting ahead of yourself to imply that somehow physicalism does not reflect reality, or that an assertion has to be proven to reflect reality before being made.

> That is, they need to be true or false

No, that's not what reflecting reality means. Of course ontological assertions are true or false, if they aren't incoherent, but that's neither here nor there.

> and many philosophers, including prominent scientists, don't think they qualify.

What's this "they" that don't qualify? The subject was physicalism, and again almost all scientists and most philosophers of mind subscribe to it ... which leaves room for some not doing so. Whether or not the outliers are "prominent" is irrelevant.

> Indeed, the arguments against ontological realism are more airtight than any particular metaphysical theory.

That's a much stronger claim than that physicalism is wrong ... many dualists are ontological realists. And it's certainly convenient to claim that there are airtight arguments for one's views, and easy to dismiss the claim.
by yahoozoo | 2025-09-03 21:38:07+00:00
I’m not sure if I’m just misunderstanding or we are talking about two different things. I know at a high level how transformers/LLMs decide its next token in the response it is generating.

My question to the post I replied to was basically: given a coding problem, and a list of possible solutions (candidates), how can a LLM generate a meaningful numerical score for each candidate to then say this one is a better solution than that one?
by jasonlotito | 2025-09-03 21:38:31+00:00
> At conferences I've attended I think it's extremely rare to have a speaker be compensated (maybe outside of the cost of flights/hotels)

Flights, hotels, and tickets are all compensation and what I was referring to. These conferences are all open to newer speakers.

> Also, it's more than reasonable to expect someone to rehearse,

Apparently not, judging by comments.

> but I don't think there is any substitute for the real thing.

But you don't need to go from not speaking to speaking at a conference. There are many other steps in between where you can get experience in public speaking.
by afarcryfromhome | 2025-09-03 21:38:39+00:00
this is very naively reductive. it's been shown time and time again throughout human history that being an asshole/ruthless/competitive leads to better outcomes for you and the people around you that you care about.

humans are not bonobos. sitting around being nice to each other is not what got us to be the apex species on the planet. people break rules (social norms or legal laws) to get ahead, it is happening continually around you and can't just wish it out of existence.
by mitjam | 2025-09-03 21:39:01+00:00
In my experience, the cheapest way to serve content on the web is static, for convenience rendered with a static site generator.

It's admittedly more editor-less than headless, but anything that constantly needs to runs on a server will cost more, in the end, even if it's a freemium service, right now.

Editing content with Obsidian and rendering it with Hugo is no too bad, btw. (see eg. https://www.nickgracilla.com/posts/obsidian-is-my-hugo-cms/ for a setup).
by palata | 2025-09-03 21:39:15+00:00
> We could live in a world where services are inaccessible unless you use Google/Apple/1Password/etc as your password manager

If services want to force you to use whatever authentication they want, they can. That's what already happens with any service that is serious about security. In big companies, you have to use their authenticator app, their mail client, their messaging system, etc. Often it's Microsoft software. Banks have their own systems, etc.

Now, if a service allows you to use a passkey instead of their own 2FA app, I'd say it's a win. I'm happier using a security key than a Microsoft authenticator. But if they give up on using their own app, they may well set conditions on the passkey you use. And that condition may be "it has to be backed by a trusted secure element".

You won't be able to use a passkey that's deemed unsecure just like right now, you already are not able to just use a weak password with some services.

Again, I'm not saying that being forced to depend on TooBigTech is not a problem: it very much is. But nothing says that services have to do it with passkeys: they could (and should) also accept secure passkeys that don't come from TooBigTech. But they still have a say in what they find secure or not, and that part is okay.
by agwa | 2025-09-03 21:41:20+00:00
I would caution against generalizing from the actions of a CA that only Microsoft is willing to trust. This incident says way more about Microsoft's mismanagement of their root store than it does about the WebPKI security model.

Also, DNSSEC tampering is no more obvious than WebPKI tampering (how would anyone know if Verisign served a rogue DS record for someone's .com domain to certain resolvers?). Just as with WebPKI, you need a transparency system if you want to make tampering discoverable. (Such a transparency system has been proposed for DNSSEC but went nowhere.)
by aredox | 2025-09-03 21:41:47+00:00
>Colbert’s “The vax scene” episode did more to damage the reputation of vaccines than I think anyone realizes.

Oh yeah, perfectly rational to make health decisions based on a mediocre skit by a comedian you don't like and almost never watch... The people around you are perfectly sane people who are not trying to find any excuse to justify their tribal, cultish beliefs.

The solution is easy: vaccine proponents, whoever they are must be absolutely perfect in every way, shape and form.

Otherwise vaccine sceptics will instead prefer to believe the rich son of a political dynasty (who is certainly not a member of the establishment!) who had a brain worm and dumped a dead bear in central park and who has been proven a liar dozens and dozens of times.

Really wonder why vaccine "sceptics" apply a double standard... What could be the motivation behind this inconsistency? Truly a mystery. We should engage them in debate, we could certainly convince them (if we, and everyone and anyone who could be linked to vaccines, are perfect).
by FloorEgg | 2025-09-03 21:42:22+00:00
The problem I am facing in my domain is that all of the data is human generated and riddled with human errors. I am not talking about typos in phone numbers, but rather fundamental errors in critical thinking, reasoning, semantic and pragmatic oversights, etc. all in long-form unstructured text. It's very much an LLM-domain problem, but converging on the existing data is like trying to converge on noise.

The opportunity in the market is the gap between what people have been doing and what they are trying to do, and I have developed very specialized approaches to narrow this gap in my niche, and so far customers are loving it.

I seriously doubt that the gap could ever be closed by throwing more data and compute at it. I imagine though that the outputs of my approach could be used to train a base model to close the gap at a lower unit cost, but I am skeptical that it would be economically worth while anytime soon.
by godelski | 2025-09-03 21:42:24+00:00
> you learned less about everything surrounding it.

I think one of the big acceleration points in my skills as a developer was when I moved from searching SO and other similar sources to reading the docs and reading the code. At first, this was much slower. I was usually looking for a more specific thing and didn't usually need the surrounding context. But then as I continued, that surrounding context became important. That stuff I was reading compounded and helped me see much more. These gains were completely invisible and sometimes even looked like losses. In reality, that context was always important, I just wasn't skilled enough to understand why. Those "losses" are more akin to a loss you have when you make an investment. You lost money, but gained a stock.

I mean I still use SO, medium articles, LLMs, and tons of sources. But I find myself just turning to the docs as my first choice now. At worst I get better questions to pay attention to with the other sources.

I think there's this terrible belief that's developed in CS and the LLM crowd targets. The idea that everything is simple. There's truth to this, but there's a lot of complexity to simplicity. The defining characteristic between an expert and a novice is their knowledge of nuance. The expert knows what nuances matter and what don't. Sometimes a small issue compounds and turns into a large one, sometimes it disappears. The junior can't tell the difference, but the expert can. Unfortunately, this can sound like bikeshedding and quibbling over nothings (sometimes it is). But only experts can tell the difference ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
by elpakal | 2025-09-03 21:42:39+00:00
Something mentioned in WWDC stuck out to me (think it was Craig) about current state of LLMs not living up to their high standard of quality. Because they absolutely could (and kind of are, with the foundation models stuff) build their own. Letting Claude or OpenAI handle the Xcode changes via their integration in the next Xcode makes more sense in that context.
by rjh29 | 2025-09-03 21:43:03+00:00
So far it's about as subtle as a slap to the face. If you set ChatGPT's personality to 'straight-shooting' it starts every answer with "blunt", "tell it like it is" or "unvarnished" and permeates that across the whole reply; by its very nature, it is unable to be subtle about anything.
by biophysboy | 2025-09-03 21:43:16+00:00
If he were capable of describing subjective experience in words with the exactitude you're asking for, then his central argument would be false. The point is that objective measures, like writing, are external, and cannot describe internal subjective experience. Its one thing to probe the atoms; its another thing to be the atoms themselves.

Basically his answer to the question "What is it like to be a bat?" is that its impossible to know.
by hex4def6 | 2025-09-03 21:43:19+00:00
Yeah, utterly laughable.

I'm not even sure who he's railing against with that. Is it violation of my human rights that I'm "forced" to use IPv4 or TCP/IP by my ISP, or HTTPS by my bank?

As far as being "forced" to use encryption; unless I'm missing something, I can't think of a law that would preclude my transmission of communications with another individual in plaintext. I'm free to use HTTP instead of HTTPS on my website, should I so choose.

And even if there were such a law, I'd be hard-pressed to figure what harm is being done to me (much less deprivation of human right).
by sfn42 | 2025-09-03 21:43:20+00:00
I have never been asked to reverse a red black tree. Maybe they all do that in SV but in my corner of the world I haven't seen nor heard about anyone doing that. I've been asked to write a class to store Car objects and get them by plate number and some stuff like that. I've been asked to write a simple tax calculator with the specific tax rules and brackets provided.

I thought these were perfectly reasonable tasks, certainly within my capabilities. To me, being "interview ready" is simply being competent at my job. Nobody's expecting me to memorize obscure algorithms that I could just look up if I needed them. They're just asking me to demonstrate that I can solve a simple task by programming. That's totally fair, I wouldn't want to work with the people who went through 3 years of university (and even years of actual work afterwards) without learning how to solve these kinds of basic tasks.

I don't even remember what a red black tree is, I think they were covered in our DSA class but not much. Despite that I think I could give a pretty solid go at reversing one, given an implementation and maybe a summary of how it works. I wouldn't mind getting that task, sounds like a fun challenge. Maybe I'd complete it in 30 minutes, maybe I wouldn't, in either case I'm sure I'd be able to show that I'm pretty good at programming. That's all I've ever needed for my interviews. Haven't done an interview that hasn't resulted in a job offer.

Meanwhile I see all you people on the internet complaining that interviews are so unfair and require this "interview prep", so I'm left to conclude that either employers in my country are way less selective than they are in yours, or you're only applying to the most selective employers, or you're simply exaggerating the difficulty of the interviews. If you want to work at Google earning $500k then you're going to have to be exceptional. For everyone else there's plenty of very lucrative jobs that aren't nearly as hard to get. And if you can't even get those then maybe you're just not particularly good?
by orwin | 2025-09-03 21:43:29+00:00
Yes, ideologically, i had no issue with people being rich, it's people having undue power over other people that i found morally wrong. I was a libertatian almost in the american meaning of the word, a liberal libertarian. Then, i tried to put my ideas real conditions, and came to the realisation that as long as money could buy you power, you can never be free. I don't realistically see how we can limit money influence on power, when you can offshore your company in two days, so in a practical manner, the only way to limit how rich one can get, until we figure out the rest.
by Quarrelsome | 2025-09-03 21:43:58+00:00
You're obfuscating the truth. I'm a Brit and clearly more aware than you on how Elon likes to try to interfere with the democratic choices this country has made. In the past day or two, his personal account has been attempting to buoy up Tommy fucking Robinson (for the umpteenth time) who is a violent thug, convicted criminal and renowned Islamophobe. Your "facts" are just sea-lioning misdirection that takes us away from the blatently obvious.

Elon Musk has made his political intentions entirely clear, in writing, on his personal account. Anyone still trying to give him the benefit of the doubt is either being insincere or is a useful idiot.
by fuzztester | 2025-09-03 21:44:18+00:00
It's not only a meme, it's a Tumblog too, and I first saw it many years ago.

Google "our incredible journey".

https://www.google.com/search?q=our+incredible+journey

https://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2013/02/27/our-incredibl...

https://www.tumblr.com/ourincrediblejourney
by bigyabai | 2025-09-03 21:44:39+00:00
You actually don't understand the consumer desire for free, if you necessarily conflate it with class warfare and moral grandstanding. It seems to be a karma sink insisting upon this, but this is the hacker ethos. Nobody lords information over anyone, any paywall you erect will eventually fall. For fuck's sake, children are being firebombed in Gaza right now, and this is the imperative ethical hill you choose to die on?

Draw out this line of reasoning long enough, and one could argue that Richard Stallman is the worst human alive for "moral grandstanding" the software industry and taking glee in destroying software jobs with copyleft licensing. But more accurately, he ushered in the information age for everyone and prevented it from being cordoned-off behind a proprietary paywall. Yes, he predicated Napster and ThePirateBay and 4chan and all the horrible examples you're apt to draw upon. But he also invariably pushed technology forward - we're better people, that we aren't slaving away remaking the Cairo library for the 30,000th time. Common access to at least some information enables a great deal of art and provides countless value to would-be artists.

I'd like to think that the entire human race is bettered with access to information. It would certainly be idyllic if we could compensate artists, authors and scientists along the way, but humanity would be ruined if all information came at-cost. I am willing to fight for a world where individuals have free access to information, and I reckon my tools are more powerful than the publishers who seek to thwart me. I won't stop when the musicians scream out bloody murder, and if you think that's the most immoral thing imaginable then don't ask how 15-year-old me found the money to afford Jimmy John's.
by rhubarbtree | 2025-09-03 21:45:24+00:00
We’re in a golden period where AI results are ad-free.

One thing I’ve been doing is querying and storing results. For example, “what are the best books on X topic” for every topic I can possibly think that I may want to read about in the future.

I’ve found the results to be amazing if you give a sufficiently detailed prompt. I have enough reading to see me through to exit.