MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by InkCanon | 2025-04-06 20:21:51+00:00
People are really fundamentally asking two different questions when they talk about AI "importance": AI's utility and AI's "intelligence". There's a careful line between both.

1) AI undoubtedly has utility. In many agentic uses, it has very significant utility. There's absolute utility and perceived utility, which is more of user experience. In absolute utility, it is likely git is the single most game changing piece of software there is. It is likely git has saved some ten, maybe eleven digit number in engineer hours times salary in how it enables massive teams to work together in very seamless ways. In user experience, AI is amazing because it can generate so much so quickly. But it is very far from an engineer. For example, recently I tried to use cursor to bootstrap a website in NextJS for me. It produced errors it could not fix, and each rewrite seemed to dig it deeper into its own hole. The reasons were quite obvious. A lot of it had to do with NextJS 15 and the breaking changes it introduces in cookies and auth. It's quite clear if you have masses of NextJS code, which disproportionately is older versions, but none labeled well with versions, it messes up the LLM. Eventually I scrapped what it wrote and did it myself. I don't mean to use this anecdote to say LLMs are useless, but they have pretty clear limitations. They work well on problems with massive data (like front end) and don't require much principled understanding (like understanding how NextJS 15 would break so and so's auth). Another example of this is when I tried to use it to generate flags for a V8 build, it failed horribly and would simply hallucinate flags all the time. This seemed very likely to be (despite the existence of a list of V8 flags online) that many flags had very close representations in vector embeddings, and that there was almost close to zero data/detailed examples on their use.

2) In the more theoretical side, the performance of LLMs on benchmarks (claiming to be elite IMO solvers, competitive programming solvers) have become incredibly suspicious. When the new USAMO 2025 was released, the highest score was 5%, despite claims a year ago that SOTA when was at least a silver IMO. This is against the backdrop of exponential compute and data being fed in. Combined with apparently diminishing returns, this suggests that the gains from that are running really thin.
by wruza | 2025-04-06 20:22:08+00:00
Which adds complexity and solves nothing. We'd better have a standard markup (we already have) than this half-assed wannabe-markup that is so complex and a minefield that modern forums tend to filter it anyway. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_subscripts_and_super... – The wikipedia article about unicode sub/superscripts can't even render half of these symbols on neither of my {ios,windows,android} devices. In theory we have it, in practice it's dead baggage.
by arcticbull | 2025-04-06 20:22:33+00:00
There’s absolutely a place in the market for small apartments. In fact the end of SROs is a large contributor to homelessness. But hey if you don’t want to live in one don’t buy one.

Your position amounts to “you can only buy what I consider nice, and if you can’t afford that, then you get nothing — get out.” It doesn’t make nicer housing more affordable, it makes all housing less affordable. Zoning imposes a $400,000 per unit premium in SF.

Which is exactly how we got single family zoning, btw. It was created in early 1900s Berkeley to prevent minorities and the poor from living there by making sure the kind of housing they could afford wasn’t built.
by liamdgray | 2025-04-06 20:23:46+00:00
Abstract: "Despite the surge of interest in autonomous scientific discovery (ASD) of software artifacts (e.g., improved ML algorithms), current ASD systems face two key limitations: (1) they largely explore variants of existing codebases or similarly constrained design spaces, and (2) they produce large volumes of research artifacts (such as automatically generated papers and code) that are typically evaluated using conference-style paper review with limited evaluation of code. In this work we introduce CodeScientist, a novel ASD system that frames ideation and experiment construction as a form of genetic search jointly over combinations of research articles and codeblocks defining common actions in a domain (like prompting a language model). We use this paradigm to conduct hundreds of automated experiments on machine-generated ideas broadly in the domain of agents and virtual environments, with the system returning 19 discoveries, 6 of which were judged as being both at least minimally sound and incrementally novel after a multi-faceted evaluation beyond that typically conducted in prior work, including external (conference-style) review, code review, and replication attempts. Moreover, the discoveries span new tasks, agents, metrics, and data, suggesting a qualitative shift from benchmark optimization to broader discoveries."
by timewizard | 2025-04-06 20:24:08+00:00
The largest fraction, totaling about $300b itself, is military retirement programs and funding. The other largest fraction is internal spending on healthcare for active duty members and their families.

The individual agencies collectively spend only around $100b.

Likewise the other large fraction of the total budget outside the DoD is healthcare spending. We spend a huge amount of money and we don't seem to have healthcare outcomes which justify these costs.

Right now 1 out of every 5 dollars of spent GDP comes from the government. 85% of that money comes from individual tax payers and only 7% from businesses. The system is flailing from top to bottom.
by SvenL | 2025-04-06 20:25:24+00:00
I agree, content is just a rant about failed attempts to improve things.

There is kind of a meme/general advice to be risky, to try things out, fail and iterate on failure. Everything mentioned in the article sounds like that.

I mean, why have houses? They are pretty hard and expensive to build…what was wrong with caves?

Yes, we could say that something’s are „done“/„finished“ and don’t need improvement - or we try and see.
by Balgair | 2025-04-06 20:25:37+00:00
I mean, if you're up to reading Brave New World, I'd think that scanning through a list to rate and date isn't that difficult.

Aside: The rating and date for reading is just strange for this level of reader, also the having an adult sign off on it. It just seems so juvenile for anyone that is really reading Don Quixote, Lord of the Flies, or many of the other books in the list. Something like a 4th grader would need to do, not a 17 year old. I get that it's mostly following the formula from the earlier grade levels, but still, it should be revised.
Show HN: A fast, minimal and offline-friendly web playground
by evenoroddman | 2025-04-06 20:25:55+00:00
I built a web-based HTML/CSS/JS editor focused on speed, simplicity, and offline access. No bloat — just open and start coding.

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Offline support – Works without internet. You can even install it as a PWA and use it like a native app.

No Login Required – Just visit, code, and preview. Login only if you want to save/share.

Savable & Shareable Links – Save scripts in the cloud and get shareable links.

Customizable Editor – Themes, fonts, auto-format on save, layout tweaks, line wrapping, etc.

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Download as ZIP – Export your project with HTML/CSS/JS files separated.

Ideal for tinkering, prototyping, teaching, or even building micro-tools. It’s intentionally simple and fast — more features coming soon.

Try a sample snippet: https://scriptpad.dev/?id=z5VydF5TrdbPiygCLIao&o=1&c=1
by simonw | 2025-04-06 20:25:56+00:00
I'm beginning to suspect that a substantial portion of users don't habitually do that, for two reasons:

1. They don't understand URLs. That's not too surprising to be honest, URLs are pretty complex things.

2. They've been burned enough times by crap SPAs that they don't instantly assume something they are looking at has a dependable URL they can copy and share.

Thanks to 2 I've recently started rethinking a bunch of my own projects - I think I need to add explicit "share" buttons that copy URLs to people's clipboards for them.
by Freak_NL | 2025-04-06 20:26:12+00:00
This was already happening, unfortunately. The user's mail agent is deemed untrustworthy (and so is the user), so every service which needs to send confidential data just turns your email into a notification with a link. There are so many of these, but often they are limited in scope. For sectors like healthcare you have companies offering this type of service to companies which need to adhere to security theatre standards such as ISO 27001, and because nations often have their own added requirements for specific sectors (think HIPAA in the US or NEN 7510 in the Netherlands) these services tend to remain focussed on single countries.

Then there are the national governments and things like insurance companies. All happily sending message notifications where you need to sign in to their own portals.

Securing email is too complex, so everyone builds their own secured portal thingy, and your mailbox has become a receptacle for notifications. Figuring out a solution would require cooperation, pragmatic lawmaking, and giving up those nice cashcows of moated portals, so it won't happen.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-04-06 20:26:44+00:00
> or more tech startups in Louisville.

Strongly agree, the Midwest is the future of advanced manufacturing, not California. Rivian is in Normal, IL, and expanding currently [1] for example. If we're going to spend the next 5-10 years building China's equivalent supply chain, the Midwest is a better location imho (cost of living, land costs, logistics, etc). If you were an investor, where would you build? Very wealthy people couldn't get California Forever built [2], and that was mostly non industrial residential/commercial development.

[1] Rivian: Building for R2 - Expanding our manufacturing footprint in Illinois - https://stories.rivian.com/r2-expansion-03-2025

[2] HN Search: California Forever - https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
by lukev | 2025-04-06 20:27:04+00:00
Objectively speaking a chess engine is artificially intelligent. Just because it's not human level doesn't mean it's not intelligent. Repeat for any N of 100s of different technologies we've built. We've been calling this stuff "thinking machines" since Turing and it's honestly just not useful at this point.

The fact is, the phrase "artificial intelligence" is a memetic hazard: it immediately positions the subject of conversation as "default capable", and then forces the conversation into trying to describe what it can't do, which is rarely a useful way to approach it.

Whereas with LLMs (and chess engines and every other tech advancement) it would be more useful to start with what the tech _can_ do and go from there.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-06 20:27:05+00:00
There’s a simpler explanation than that’s that the model weights aren’t an information retrieval system and other sequences of tokens are more likely given the totality of training data. This is why for an information retrieval task you use an information retrieval tool similarly to how for driving nails you use a hammer rather than a screw driver. It may very well be you could drive the nail with the screw driver, but why?
by pmags | 2025-04-06 20:27:12+00:00
I'm not a big fan of the Cato Institute, but here's an interesting take on Navarro's evolution on trade and tariff's from 2018:

https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2018/peter-navarros-con... Lemieux, Pierre. 2018. Peter Navarro's Conversion. Regulation, Volume 41, Issue 3, pp. 36 - 43
by throwaway173738 | 2025-04-06 20:27:14+00:00
Calling someone a communist or socialist is the latest duckspeak from minitrue. It’s intended to suppress all thought. It’s also intended to be impossible to refute. It’s like if you were trying to muscle in on a cave dive rescue of some kids and suggested the rescuers use your submarine, and then they tell you your submarine is useless, so you insinuate that they are pedophiles. It’s a meaningless tar-baby statement meant to distract from meaningful discussion.
by wrsh07 | 2025-04-06 20:28:14+00:00
This is fun! I like the timing challenge but for many people this is a turnoff (there's a great interview with Zach Gage^ where he discusses research - some people are unable to critically think / learn new things while under pressure)

So giving a sandbox where there is no pressure will probably be more fun for a large subset of players

My only real complaint: please include a puzzle version number in the auto copied share link so that if I solve yesterday's you know that's different from you solving today's

Incidentally you could probably let people try historic puzzles from the link if you wanted (compete on that one vs play today's), that would be a nice wordle feature

^ I think the humans make games podcast
by InkCanon | 2025-04-06 20:29:21+00:00
That's fair. But look up the recent experiment on SOTA models on the then just released USAMO 2025 questions. Highest score was 5%, supposedly SOTA last year was IMO silver level. There could be some methodological differences - ie USAMO paper required correct proofs and not just numerical answers. But it really strongly suggests even within limited domains, it's cheating. I'd wager a significant amount that if you tested SOTA models on a new ICPC set of questions, actual performance would be far, far worse than their supposed benchmarks.
by os2warpman | 2025-04-06 20:29:53+00:00
> The US cannot cover even all of its own citizens,

The US already spends enough on healthcare to provide gold-standard best-in-the-world coverage to all of its citizens.

It could take any random system better than the one extant in the United States, CTRL-F the country's names in all of the rules and regulations for that system and change it to "The United States", implement that system, and have enough money left over to cure poverty, hunger, and homelessness for $0.00 in extra spending.

We choose not to.

There is too much money to be made so a constant campaign of disinformation and vilification is waged to stop that from happening.
by WillAdams | 2025-04-06 20:30:11+00:00
Find a chunk of raw metal (possibly meteoric iron, more likely copper) of a suitable size/shape, find a tree, using a sharp rock, saw off a suitable branch, split it open, insert the metal chunk, using vines or the intestines of a small animal secure it in place --- if desired, allow the tree to grow around the inclusion for a couple of years, then use a sharp rock to saw off the branch at a suitable length.
by Hammershaft | 2025-04-06 20:30:20+00:00
Bruh it's econ 101 and has been empirically validated across the world: ceteris paribus more housing supply = lower housing prices.

Housing supply constrictions like housing regulation & zoning are responsible for all of the rise in measured inequality since the 70's, have prevented roughly %50 of the growth in incomes we'd have achieved if housing supply was built out, are partially responsible for the explosion of homelessness and the decline of family formation.
by liamdgray | 2025-04-06 20:30:21+00:00
Abstract: "We present ScienceWorld, a benchmark to test agents' scientific reasoning abilities in a new interactive text environment at the level of a standard elementary school science curriculum. Despite the transformer-based progress seen in question-answering and scientific text processing, we find that current models cannot reason about or explain learned science concepts in novel contexts. For instance, models can easily answer what the conductivity of a known material is but struggle when asked how they would conduct an experiment in a grounded environment to find the conductivity of an unknown material. This begs the question of whether current models are simply retrieving answers by way of seeing a large number of similar examples or if they have learned to reason about concepts in a reusable manner. We hypothesize that agents need to be grounded in interactive environments to achieve such reasoning capabilities. Our experiments provide empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis -- showing that a 1.5 million parameter agent trained interactively for 100k steps outperforms a 11 billion parameter model statically trained for scientific question-answering and reasoning from millions of expert demonstrations."
by jeffbee | 2025-04-06 20:30:37+00:00
Apple sources batteries mostly outside of China and generally has avoided the Chinese batteries (which are almost uniformly garbage) preferring Samsung and TDK production in Japan, S. Korea, and India.

There is an absolutely insane amount of fraud in the Chinese component industry and for a high-risk item like a phone battery the risk simply is not worth it. Google sources Pixel batteries in China, and they also have a reputation for shipping problematic batteries.
by hovav | 2025-04-06 20:30:49+00:00
Standard operating procedure for both the Chrome [https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/docs/s...] and Firefox [https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/governance/policies/secu...] bug tracking systems.

But the fix itself is public in both the Chrome [https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/36dbbf3...] and Firefox [https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/ac605820636c3b96...] source repos, and it makes pretty clear what the bug is.
by archagon | 2025-04-06 20:30:55+00:00
By what twisted logic is housing “interstate commerce”? It’s local commerce by definition.

> If the city thinks we need rent controlled housing, they can buy you out, put up a tenement and charge exactly what they want.

Eliminating rent control would likely force me and my friends out of a city we’ve lived in for years. You bet your ass we’d fight anything like this tooth and nail. (Fortunately, the policy you describe would be illegal while we still have democracy.)
by adgjlsfhk1 | 2025-04-06 20:31:36+00:00
The other option would be to change how floating point works. IEEE specifies operations, not names, so it would be totally valid to have <= on floats be a total order (using integer cpu instructions), and make a function called IEEEAreIdiotsWhoThinkThisIsFloatingPointLessThan which is the partial order that sucks.
by cmurf | 2025-04-06 20:31:53+00:00
It's too late, the American age is finished. Even if the tariffs are reversed, the world knows we're indecisive chaos monkies. Trump once is a mistake. There's zero plausible deniability for a second round.

We are getting exactly what he said he was going to do. Elect an abuser, get abused. And the world is going to move on without the U.S.

Trump uses tariffs to consolidate his power. He will reduce them to reward fealty and bribes made to him personally. And as punishment for his enemies. It's the same with his attacks against institutions, law firms, universities, and states governments. Worship him, and get rewarded. Refuse, and be punished. Just like how he runs his business.

Tariffs reduce American spending abroad, leaves less dollars exported abroad, means less excess dollars for foreign governments to spend on U.S. treasury securities funding our budget. Unless interest rates go up. But Trump has said he wants lower rates immediately, and will eventually fire Powell to get there.

This is akin to an American Brexit. Our 401k's will have flat growth for our lifetimes, so I expect they will make the case of privatizing Social Security again. Redirecting payroll taxes will help existing 401k holders, so I assume most will approve or at least hold their nose. What's the alternative?

Meanwhile the U.S. government is threatening allies with annexation, and that they arm themselves with American made arms. It's just not a serious country.

The country elected an untrustworthy liar. Yesterday's millions of peacefully assembled could not be bothered to do so prior to the election when it might have mattered - as a society we are enamored with inconsequential social media protests over elections that matter.

John Adams told us the Constitution only works for a moral people. But we seem out of virtue. He also said republics are empires of laws, not of men. And we're unwinding that paradigm too.

The easy path was the election. All of the other options are significantly more difficult.

Removing Trump from office is a good idea, but sadly it also just promotes the next diarchy: Thiel-Vance.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-06 20:32:05+00:00
> Zoning problems can be completely fixed at the state government level, and the optimal solutions are likely to be different in each state

States and local governments have dropped the ball. You know who knows better than the state what to do with their property? The people who own it.

> giving it more power and authority would be utterly un-American

No need. You’d just limit what states can do (if they want highway funds or whatever).
by BeetleB | 2025-04-06 20:32:13+00:00
> What happens if other companies aren’t putting self driving cars out yet because they aren’t happy with the current rate of accidents, but Tesla just doesn’t care?

You handle it the same way any new technology is introduced. Standards and regulations, and these evolve over time.

When the first motor car company started selling cars, pedestrians died. The response wasn't to ban cars altogether.

The appropriate response would be to set some rules, examine the incidents, see if any useful information can be gleaned.

And of course, once more models are out there with self driving abilities, we compare between them as well.

Here, we can get better data than what's in the article: What is the motorcycle death rate with cars with no automated driving? If, per mile, it's higher than with Teslas with automated driving, then Tesla is already ahead. The article is biased right from the get go: It compares only cars with "self-driving" (whatever that means) capabilities, and inappropriately frames the conversation.

If I'm a motorcyclist, I want to know two things:

1. If all cars were replaced with Teslas with self driving capabilities, am I safer than the status quo?

2. If all self driving cars were replaced with other cars with self driving capabilities, am I safer than the status quo?

The article fails to answer these basic questions.
by api | 2025-04-06 20:32:22+00:00
Only regulation can fix this, because for the company it's nothing but upside. They can double-dip by selling data, gather data on their users, etc. There is no downside. There are nowhere near enough knowledgeable people who will balk at this stuff, and even if there are it won't matter if/when everyone does it.

All economic incentives encourage maximum invasion of user privacy. That's almost universally true in my experience.
by the8472 | 2025-04-06 20:32:58+00:00
A stochastic parrot with a sufficiently tiny residual error rate needs a stochastic model so precisely compressing the world and sophisticated decompression algorithms that it could be called reasoning.

Take two 4K frames of a falling vase, ask a model to predict the next token... I mean the following images. Your model now needs include some approximations of physics - and the ability to apply it correctly - to produce a realistic outcome. I'm not aware of any model capable of doing that, but that's what it would mean to predict the unseen with high enough fidelity.
by kergonath | 2025-04-06 20:33:20+00:00
Right. My point is that there are things we can argue about. "Is it better to have this road here or to keep the forest?", for example. Reasonable people can argue differently, and sensibility is important. Some would be biased towards business and economy, and others would be biased towards conservation. Having these debates in the media is helpful, even if you disagree.

But "is the Earth flat?" is no such question. Reasonable people cannot disagree, because the Earth is definitely not flat. Pretending like this is a discussion worth having is not being impartial, it’s doing a disservice to the audience.