MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by AIPedant | 2025-04-09 17:43:27+00:00
This seems to ignore the mixed record of video generation models:

For visual reasoning practice, we can do supervised fine-tuning on sequences similar to the marble example above. For instance, to understand more about the physical world, we can show the model sequential pictures of Slinkys going down stairs, or basketball players shooting 3-pointers, or people hammering birdhouses together.... But where will we get all this training data? For spatial and physical reasoning tasks, we can leverage computer graphics to generate synthetic data. This approach is particularly valuable because simulations provide a controlled environment where we can create scenarios with known outcomes, making it easy to verify the model's predictions. But we'll also need real-world examples. Fortunately, there's an abundance of video content online that we can tap into. While initial datasets might require human annotation, soon models themselves will be able to process videos and their transcripts to extract training examples automatically.

Almost every video generator makes constant "folk physics" errors and doesn't understand object permanence. DeepMind's Veo2 is very impressive but still struggles with object permanence and qualitatively nonsensical physics: https://x.com/Norod78/status/1894438169061269750

Humans do not learn these things by pure observation (newborns understand object permanence, I suspect this is the case for all vertebrates). I doubt transformers are capable of learning it as robustly, even if trained on all of YouTube. There will always be "out of distribution" physical nonsense involving mistakes humans (or lizards) would never make, even if they've never seen the specific objects.
by RandallBrown | 2025-04-09 17:43:29+00:00
> I'm curious as to why that is

Seattle has added some extra fees and pay requirements for drivers that drive up the cost of a ride share. In retaliation to these laws, ride share companies have also raised prices.

An Uber from my house to the SeaTac airport used to cost about $30 5 or 6 years ago. It's now around $100. A taxi is about $80 now. Paying for parking is cheaper now than either of those options.
by ramesh31 | 2025-04-09 17:43:36+00:00
>How does separation of powers work in the US? could Trump decide not to prosecute let say financial fraud in general?

He can "do" essentially anything, per the supreme court. For 250 years we had norms and customs and decorum and shame that kept things from escalating to a constitutional crisis. But that has all been so thoroughly broken at this point that literally no one knows what will happens next. One thing is certain, that there will be no way out of this but elections.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-04-09 17:43:53+00:00
That's an interesting paper and worth reading. Not sure it has answered my question but I did learn some things from it that I had not considered.

This was the quote I resonated with :-)

"... the discoveries we highlight here only capture a small fraction of the mechanisms of the model."

It sometimes feels a bit like papers on cellular biology with DNA discussions in which descriptions of the enzymes and proteins involved are insightful but the mechanism that operates the reaction remains opaque.
by mceoin | 2025-04-09 17:43:56+00:00
I'm curious why people think business is so underrepresented as a user group, especially since "analyzing" 30% of the Bloom Taxonomy results. My dual theories are:

- LLMs are good enough to zero or few-shot most business questions and assignments, so n.questions is low VS other tasks like writing a codebase.

- Form factor (biased here); maybe threads-only aren't best for business analysis?
by 9283409232 | 2025-04-09 17:44:30+00:00
If you didn't see this coming when he launched a memecoin then I don't know what to tell you.

> Per Blanche’s memo, which was circulated on Monday, the Justice Department is dropping litigation and enforcement actions “while President Trump’s actual regulators do this work outside the punitive criminal justice framework.”

Elon Musk and Russell Vought have been trying to kill the CFPB and the SEC is toothless now so what financial regulators is he talking about?
by dogman1050 | 2025-04-09 17:44:33+00:00
Cool indeed, but this is my favorite cycle picture. [1] It's technically a tricar, but given the handlebar controls and lack of bodywork, I think it qualifies. The vehicle is a Mototri Contal practicing for the 1907 Peking to Paris race [2]. These guys look like they want to win! They didn't, almost dying in the process. The passenger is a journalist. Motor-journalist Denis Jenkinson [3] did something similar later, acting as navigator for Stirling Moss in the 1955 Mille Miglia race, which they won.

[1] <https://ccnwordpress.blob.core.windows.net/journal/2019/02/M...>

[2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peking_to_Paris>

[3] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Jenkinson>
by sijuntan | 2025-04-09 17:44:39+00:00
Through a joint collaboration between the Agentica team and Together AI, we release DeepCoder-14B-Preview, a code reasoning model finetuned from Deepseek-R1-Distilled-Qwen-14B via distributed RL. It achieves an impressive 60.6% Pass@1 accuracy on LiveCodeBench (+8% improvement), matching the performance of o3-mini-2025-01-031 (Low) and o1-2024-12-17 with just 14B parameters. We’ve open-sourced our dataset, code, training logs, and systems optimizations for everyone to progress on scaling and accelerating intelligence with RL.
by shagie | 2025-04-09 17:45:02+00:00
In a computer lab I hung out in back in college...

We used rcp to keep passwords in sync. Add the account on the main machine, rcp the password file to the other machine. sudo rcp /etc/password other:/etc/passwd was muscle memory.

One day, someone was getting added to the groups file to be able to work in the server web project. sudo rcp /etc/group other:/etc/passwd

Ooops. Couldn't log in to fix it.

"Is anyone logged into the other machine?" (someone said yes). "Type while 1 sync" ... (ok) ... And we flipped the power switch and brought it up in single user mode (since the password file was invalid). Next, need to establish a minimal /etc/passwd ... emacs /etc/passwd (nope) vi /etc/passwd (nope - invalid terminal 300h not in termcap). "Uhm... cat > /etc/passwd ?" (possible, but a PITA when there is a typo in transcription)

I was a wizard on a lpmud. "I know ed".

And we got a minimal password file restored while reading the hashed values over (no way where we going to have root::0:0:... as the file even for a second) and then rcp'ed the proper /etc/passwd and /etc/group file over to the other machine.

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.txt
by roguecoder | 2025-04-09 17:45:09+00:00
If you have strong evidence for your proposal, I haven't come across it in my literature reviews.

The only food I am aware of that has strong evidence that it contributes to poor health outcomes is sugary sodas. (The only other nutritional thing that consistently shows a negative impact on BMI is dieting: for everything else, populations are too heterogeneous for effects to be consistent. There are people whose combination of genetics + lifestyle make two or more triple cheese burgers a day a perfectly healthy diet.)

Outright bans and limitations on size of soda cups were both struck down by the courts, but soda taxes have been an effective public health intervention that reduce consumption and improve health outcomes: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/... And they do get widespread support among technocrats.
by iAMkenough | 2025-04-09 17:45:16+00:00
Border patrol agents have the authority to compell you to give them your password or passcode. If you refuse, they can detain you and seize your device (same for FaceID/TouchID).

That's assuming border patrol operates within the law and constitution.

https://informationsecurity.princeton.edu/sites/g/files/toru...
by wqaatwt | 2025-04-09 17:46:05+00:00
> is still same

No it’s not the same. But at this point I’m pretty sure you don’t understand the concept of nuance.

Sure, 10 vs 0 years is obvious. Why even bring up such an example?

What about 7 vs 10 or 3 vs 5? Maybe it’s technically lying but who cares if it works out at the end? What do these numbers even mean? A person who has 3 years of experience in Java can be better than someone who technically has 5..

Especially when those N years requirements are not necessarily put in there by the people who you’re actually going to work in.
by District5524 | 2025-04-09 17:46:27+00:00
Why do other people's criticism ("talking shit") destroy your fun? They make you unsure of your opinion? If you believe this emotional investment in AI tools gives you a competitive edge in the long run, then so much the better for you. AI tools should work the same way with or without your love. The only difference is that if you have fun using these tools, you'll be better motivated to use these tools better then the others. (Regardless, existing knowledge probably helps more in using these tools effectively in the longer run than pure fun.)
by CRConrad | 2025-04-09 17:46:32+00:00
Actually, if you format your numbers properly, you get "285 368 737 954–285 368 783 645". Or "285.368.737.954–285.368.783.645".

Or, sure, sometimes you get "285,368,737,954–285,368,783,645". But it's not like that's some kind of default. Except if you suffer from defaultism --- typically prefixed by "American".
by knowaveragejoe | 2025-04-09 17:46:38+00:00
It's a hard question to answer and one I've been mindful of in using LLMs as tutoring aids for my own learning purposes. Like everything else around LLM usage, it probably comes down to careful prompting... I really don't want the answer right away. I want to propose my own thoughts and carefully break them down with the LLM. Claude is pretty good at this.

"productive struggle" is essential, I think, and it's hard to tease that out of models that are designed to be as immediately helpful as possible.
by logifail | 2025-04-09 17:46:48+00:00
> The UK stepped on its own rake because it was obsessed with tiny, already vanished industries like fishing

This isn't just a UK issue:

"Fishing is a relatively minor economic activity within the EU. It contributes generally less than 1 per cent to gross national product."[0]

and if you look beyond fishing, agricultural policy as a whole is - not sure how to put this politely - not easy to understand:

"The CAP is often explained as the result of a political compromise between France and Germany: German industry would have access to the French market; in exchange, Germany would help pay for France's farmers [..] The CAP has always been a difficult area of EU policy to reform [..]"[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Fisheries_Policy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_Policy
by Herring | 2025-04-09 17:47:34+00:00
> What will be America’s competitive edge in that scenario?

Comparative advantage means countries benefit from specializing in producing goods or services where they have the lowest relative opportunity cost - not necessarily where they're the best overall. Even if China focuses on technology (and this is far from decided), America can still thrive by specializing in other areas where its relative efficiency or unique capabilities are better.

Examples: Germany specializes in high-precision manufacturing, India does well with software development, IT services, and medicines, Australia exports minerals, natural resources, and agricultural products, etc. Everybody brings something to the table. The world economy cannot possibly get worse by adding 1B people doing top-level work.

> Ricardo's theory implies that comparative advantage rather than absolute advantage is responsible for much of international trade.

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

BTW these would have been great ECON 101 discussions to have before the election.
by awkward | 2025-04-09 17:47:46+00:00
Not to get too off topic, but ORMs are bags of design flaws. They are definitional technical debt, the kind that gets you from proof of concept but needs to be reworked once you get to your target scale.

There are a large number of fundamental impedance mismatches between relational data and object based data. Any ORM can fix some of them at the cost of ignoring others, but the fundamental character of ORMs is such that taking an opinionated line on tough tradeoffs is as good as you can hope for.

This is why ORM guy is wasting everyone's time - his problem is almost definitely not going to have a unique or even valuable perspective on all of those tradeoffs.
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-09 17:48:06+00:00
The partners didn’t want to establish strong trade ties because of national animus between their peoples stemming from WW2 and regional security concerns, not because China is an unreliable trading partner. From what I’ve read, China is actually a very reliable trading partner and generally asks a lot less of countries than the US does. Obviously that’s how they attempt to gain influence and leverage in US spheres of influence longer term to make larger asks, but most politicians only think of short term consequences.
by brudgers | 2025-04-09 17:48:12+00:00
Color models always involve engineering tradeoffs because human color perception can involve:

1. The human perception of particular colors involves negative response in the cones. You can simulate this mathematically, but you can't reproduce it in a gamut.

2. Some humans have tetra-chromatic visual experience to the point of awareness. A larger group have tetra-chromatic visual experience that is measurable based on their response to testing.

3. Scientifically there is nothing different about the "visible spectrum" beyond anthropocentric interests and our experience of it is based on adaptation to particular survival events, not on theory or mathematics.
by kolanos | 2025-04-09 17:48:25+00:00
> Their population is declining, ...

This can not be overstated. China is on the verge of the largest population collapse in human history.

By 2080 China's population will drop by 600 million. If that trend continues, by 2150 China's population will drop to 280 million.

Other asian countries such as South Korea and Japan are on a similar trajectory.
by quantumHazer | 2025-04-09 17:48:29+00:00
Universities still teach you calculus and real analysis even though Wolfram Alpha exists. It boils down to your willing to learn something. An LLM can't understand things for you. I'm "early genz" and I write code without llm because I find data structure and algorithm very interesting and I want to learn the concepts not because I'm in love with the syntax of C or Rust (I love the syntax of C btw).
by hackyhacky | 2025-04-09 17:48:32+00:00
> The peer commenter shared the Heinlein quote, but there's really something to be said for /society/ of being peopled by well-rounded individuals that are able to competently turn themselves to many types of tasks

Being a well-rounded individualist is a great, but that's an orthogonal issue to the question of outsourcing our skills to machinery. When you were growing crops, did you till the land by hand or did you use a tractor? When you were making clothes did you sew by hand or use a sewing machine? Who made your sewing needles?

The (dubious) argument for AI is that using LLMs to write code is the same as using modern construction equipment to build a house: you get the same result for less effort.
by zoogeny | 2025-04-09 17:48:54+00:00
I was unfortunate enough to work with SOAP and WSDL. There was a pipedream at the time of automatically configuring services based on WSDL but it never materialized. What it was very good at (and still has no equal to my mind) was allowing for quick implementation of API boilerplate. You could point a service at the WSDL endpoint (which generally always existed at a known relative URL) and it would scaffold an entire API client for whatever language you wanted. Sort of like JSON Schema but better.

This also meant that you could do things like create diffs between your current service API client and an updated service API client from the broadcasting service. For example, if the service changed the parameters or data objects, deprecated or added functions then you could easily see how your client implementation differed from the service interface. It also provided some rudimentary versioning functionality, IIRC. Generally servers also made this information available with an HTML front-end for documentation purposes.

So while the promise of one day services configuring themselves at runtime was there, it wasn't really ever an expectation. IMO, the reason WSDL failed is because XML is terrifically annoying to work with and SOAP is insanely complex. JSON and REST were much simpler in every way you can imagine and did the same job. They were also much more efficient to process and transmit over the network. Less cognitive load for the dev, less processor load, less network traffic.

So the "runtime" explanation isn't really valid as an excuse for it's failure, since the discovery was really meant more in practice like "as a programmer you can know exactly what functions, parameters, data-objects any service has available by visiting a URL" and much less like "as a runtime client you can auto-configure a service call to a completely new and unknown service using WSDL". The second thing was a claim that one-day might be available but wasn't generally used in practice.
by jplusequalt | 2025-04-09 17:49:12+00:00
>They don't exist. Instead they'll take low-paying jobs that can't (yet) be automated. Maybe they'll work in factories

>or maybe we'll revert to a feudal society of property owners and indentured servants.

We as the workers in society have the power to see that this doesn't happen. We just need to organize. Unionize. Boycott. Organize with people in your community to spread worker solidarity.
by dicytea | 2025-04-09 17:49:14+00:00
There's this other team that built an MMORPG with SpacetimeDB, in 3 months with 8 people: https://youtu.be/kzDnA_EVhTU&t=717

Seems to have paid off for them: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lightfoxga...
by Xelynega | 2025-04-09 17:49:16+00:00
This just furthers my theory that people pushing for MCP don't understand how networking and protocols work.

stdio is a file that your computer can write to and read from

HTTP is a protocol typically used over TCP

websockets is a protocol initiated via HTTP, which again is typically over TCP

Both HTTP and websockets can be done over stdio instead of TCP.

It sounds like MCP has a lot more "irrelevant baggage" I need to learn/consider.
by skybrian | 2025-04-09 17:49:27+00:00
Inventory costs money not just due to the cost of storage, but also because it’s bought on credit. The higher the price, the more money needs to be borrowed. The longer it takes to sell it, the more interest needs to be paid.

(If it's not bought on credit, there is still opportunity cost, since that money could have been used for something else.)
by aeturnum | 2025-04-09 17:49:42+00:00
IMO it's more that there is value...but the chance that any random developer (i.e. me) is going to be able to realize it is much lower. Your instincts about how do to things will be predictably wrong in this new, different paradigm. You generally want a guide or you risk foot-gun'ing any project through misunderstanding.
by axegon_ | 2025-04-09 17:49:54+00:00
There was an interview with the local marketing managers for Coca Cola and Pepsi when I was a kid. I vaguely remember it (and also the idea was somewhat foreign to me since the world had just started opening for eastern Europe and it was the first time many of us heard the names such as Coca Cola, McDonald's, etc). The one thing that stood out was the Pepsi manager raging about campaigns, failed products and whatnot. The Coca Cola manager calmy looked at him and said: "Sir... Look at our product... Who in their right mind would pay for a rusty-colored liquid as a beverage? Absolutely no one. It's all about the advertisement".

Same story here - would you buy a pair of shoes from anyone, seeing the horrible conditions they work in, sleep deprivation and poverty if you knew they'd still get close to nothing? Probably not. You see a fancy store (or website these days), you see a product you like and you're invited to open up your wallet for a fancy pair of shoes. Deep down you still know they came from the people working in horrible conditions but, you know, out of sight, out of mind. And thus, you are willing to pay the extra price.
by 0xCE0 | 2025-04-09 17:50:31+00:00
"Safe" programming languages and development approaches are not the most effective way for safe programs - removal of code == removal of attack surface is. Of course, companies/economy rewards for more code lines/gross domestic product, not with less. If you don't originally need the code, there is nothing to hack.

So much sadness created by low quality meaningless products, so much time wasted for continual updating, so much money wasted for poor resource allocation.
by mdhb | 2025-04-09 17:51:14+00:00
This account you’re replying to is unironically pro authoritarian just so you know.

Not saying that as trying to start a flame war but their comment history is clearly and openly in line with incredibly partisan and pro authoritarian views and so if you’re looking to understand what they are saying I’m pointing out that it’s not a particularly deep and nuanced view they are trying to make
by danabramov | 2025-04-09 17:51:46+00:00
I didn't really attempt to motivate it from the practical standpoint in the article. The article aims to be more of "reinvent some old ideas from first principles, while explaining some novel parts" kind of thing.

In particular, the callback to Miguel's article about async/await (https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Aug-15.html) is intentional. I'd like to see some parts of my article as making a similar argument for 'use client' / 'use server' and the concept of first-class cross-environment references module system.

And as for practical benefits, I think the main benefit is composition--ability to compose and weave Server/Client building blocks together. Of course there's been myriads of approaches to server/client apps but I've never seen anything with the same compositional properties as RSC. I think Sam's talk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=9CN9RCzznZc) makes an amazing argument in favor of that viewpoint so I'll defer to him.
by dehrmann | 2025-04-09 17:51:47+00:00
> using trade flows to measure the health of the economic relationship with these countries — any country, really, but particularly final assembly countries — is legitimately stupid

A simple way to see this is you have can a system of three countries, A, B, and C, where A only exports to B, B to C, and C to A. All have net neutral trade, but are in a deficit with someone.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-09 17:51:59+00:00
That's not the fundamental cause, though. Companies can't just raise prices to achieve whatever return they want, because once you go above the profit-maximizing price, the fall in demand outweighs additional revenue per item, and once you go above competitor's prices, demand similarly falls.

Yes investors look for maximal returns, but those are limited. Fundamentally the ceiling is set by demand and by your competitor's prices.
by rappatic | 2025-04-09 17:52:33+00:00
> mass appeal might go down

I don't think Fermi questions have mass appeal anyway. I don't think most people know what "order of magnitude" means, let alone understand dimensional analysis (ie., the conceptual idea of what it means for units to cancel).

I don't think making the game a little more complex would really affect its appeal, because it's already targeted at people with a certain level of scientific understanding.