MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by joe_the_user | 2025-04-09 19:15:10+00:00
LLMs did scale with huge data, symbolic AI did not. So why? [1]

Neural networks, not LLMs in particular, were just about the simplest thing that could scale - they scaled and everything else has been fine-tuning. Symbolic AI basically begins with existing mathematical models of reality and of human reason and indeed didn't scale.

The problem imo is: The standard way mathematical modeling works[2] is you have a triple of <data, model-of-data, math-formalism>. The math formalism characterizes what the data could be, how data diverges from reality etc. The trouble is that the math formalism really doesn't scale even if a given model scales[3]. So even if you were to start plugging numbers into some other math model and get a reality-approximation like an LLM, it would be a black box like an LLM because the meta-information would be just as opaque.

Consider the way Judea Pearl rejected confidence intervals and claimed probabilities were needed as the building blocks for approximate reasoning systems. But a look at human beings, animals or LLMs shows that things that "deal with reality" don't have and couldn't access to "real" probabilities.

I'd just offer that I believe that for a model to scale, the vast majority of it's parameters would have to be mathematically meaningless to us. And that's for the above reasons.

[1]. Really key point, imo [2]. That innclude symbolic and probabilistic model "at the end of the day" [3]. Contrast the simplicity of plugging data into a regression model versus the multitudes of approaches explaining regression and loss/error functions etc.
by jsheard | 2025-04-09 19:15:13+00:00
I mean how CF has advertises "unlimited bandwidth" and "unmetered DDOS protection" on their free and flat-rate paid plans, which abruptly turns into not-unlimited pay-per-gigabyte if they decide you're using them too much, but you're not allowed to know where that line is so you can plan around it. It's a fun surprise where they suddenly ask you to pay 10x more out of nowhere.
by H1Supreme | 2025-04-09 19:15:30+00:00
I have 4 pairs of Allen Edmonds shoes. The oldest pair is 6 or 7 years old. With some light care (conditioning / polishing) they've held up very well. To address another comment about comfort: They're quite uncomfortable at first. Over time the leather (and cork insoles) mold to your foot. Making them comfortable.

These are leather dress shoes though. As far as I know, this doesn't exist in the athletic shoe world. Considering the materials used in athletic shoes, I don't know how a "repairable" athletic shoe could exist without some serious re-engineering.
by impalallama | 2025-04-09 19:16:05+00:00
the crawlers are working hard today because I got lead here just by searching for a better man page on kagi

I liked the idea of using nvim but i rewrote it with bash function for easier argument handling

nman () { if [ $# -ne 1 ]; then echo "Usage: nman <command>" return 1 fi command nvim "+hide Man $1" }
by steveBK123 | 2025-04-09 19:16:07+00:00
You should care because uncertainty leads to cancelled & deferred projects, which leads to reduced demand, which leads to reduced jobs.

If I don't know if Trump is literal or serious about re-shoring to normalize trade deficits, or its just a revenue gimmick, or if its all going to be delayed, or negotiated away ... am I moving any production back to the US? No.

Plants are cancelling orders as they are uncertain what the tariff might be by the time goods ship.

Etc.

Burn it all down is not a governing philosophy.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-04-09 19:16:15+00:00
I don't think you have lived experience to back that up. There are definitely people being turned away at customs in the US, and China has targeted nationals of other countries they have disputes with (e.g. during the Huawei daughter incident and putting two Canadians in jail for two years while she got house arrest in her mansion). And anyways, having your passport in a Beijing subway station is just the way things are now (never was needed before, but they random check all the time before I left in 2016).
by bastard_op | 2025-04-09 19:16:40+00:00
This sounds like some marketing stunt so microsoft can claim to be the most widely deployed website in the world, mostly by virtue of it installing itself to every windoze 11 desktop like most malware/potentially unwanted programs (pup).

It wouldn't be the first time they pull some shenanigans like that such as when they paid GoDaddy to switch their web parking from Apache to IIS circa 2005, and suddenly IIS was the most-used web server across (mostly parked) domains on the internet overnight as their marketing team quickly disseminated.
by magicloop | 2025-04-09 19:16:49+00:00
"It’s the T-bills wot dun it."

That’s my read on why the U.S. just paused the global tariff hike to 10%.

From the beginning, I’ve believed the executive branch's real goal was to push down the yield on the 10-year Treasury. Why? Because Uncle Sam has to refinance a mountain of debt this year, and the cost of that depends heavily on Treasury yields — especially the 10-year. That’s the rate that sets the tone for everything from mortgages to corporate borrowing.

So they tried to spook markets. Introduce global tariffs. Stir up uncertainty. And it worked—at first. Yields dipped. Traders moved to Treasuries as a typical flight-to-safety.

But then something flipped.

Instead of being seen as a safe haven, U.S. debt itself started to look shaky. Maybe it was the deficit outlook, maybe the global response to tariffs — but whatever it was, yields started climbing. Fast.

At that point, the strategy backfired. The executive branch had no choice but to walk it back. So they paused the tariffs.

Because when your national budget depends on cheap debt, you can't afford a crisis of confidence in your bonds.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-04-09 19:16:49+00:00
Not at all. I thought twice before discussing this because brazilian politics aren't the point of this thread. The fact is Brazil is facing a major crisis due to stupid fiscal policy. Government spending is high and taxes need to make up for it. They were stupid enough to increase taxes on fuels, thereby making everything more expensive.

This is a country with obscenely high interest rates, currently at over 14% per year. It's just ridiculous. And inflation is still hovering between 4% to 5% per year, just under pandemic levels. The solution is for the government to stop spending money. They don't want to do that, they want to increase taxes instead. As a result, we're at record breaking taxation levels, last year Brazil achieved its highest tax revenue since 1995.

The current administration spent the last two years crying about the central bank's high interest rates. I can't even fathom what'd happen to this country if they got what they wanted. Mercifully, central bank has some degree of autonomy from their stupidity. After a couple years they get to appoint the head of the central bank. It turned out even their own guy wasn't stupid enough to lower the rates.

I think the only reason they haven't taxed Pix yet is the fact Pix is too popular already. I have no doubt they're still gonna manage to increase revenue by cross referencing Pix data for tax purposes.
by TZubiri | 2025-04-09 19:17:06+00:00
Sure, but all of those you mentioned are part of a base OS.

I'm not sure what the fallacy is called, but you say we have an excess of X and then the fallacy is "we can't live without X".

Modern projects especially in the javascript realm have like 10K dependencies. Having one dependency in an Operating System(even though it may itself have their own dependencies) is a huuuuuuuuuge difference.

You can pay cash money to Windows or Red Hat and have either a company that owns all of the deps, or a company that vets all of the dependencies, distributes some cash through donations, and provides a sensible base package.

It may sound extreme, but you don't need much more than a Base OS. If you reaaallly want something else, you can check the OS official package repository. Downloading some third party code is what's extreme to me.
by blixt | 2025-04-09 19:17:07+00:00
I'm not sure I see the behavior in the Gemini 2.0 Flash model's image output as a strength. It seems to me it has multiple output modes, one indeed being masked edits. But it also seems to have convolutional matrix edits (e.g. "make this image grayscale" looks practically like it's applying a Photoshop filter) and true latent space edits ("show me this scene 1 minute later" or "move the camera so it is above this scene, pointing down"). And it almost seems to me these are actually distinct modes, which seems like it's been a bit too hand engineered.

On the other hand, OpenAI's model, while it does seem to have some upscaling magic happening (which makes the outputs look a lot nicer than the ones from Gemini FWIW), also seems to perform all its edits entirely in latent space (hence it's easy to see things degrade at a conceptual level such as texture, rotation, position, etc.) But this is a sign that its latent space mode is solid enough to always use, while with Gemini 2.0 Flash I get the feeling when it is used, it's just not performing as well.
by nineplay | 2025-04-09 19:17:09+00:00
Permanent damage has been done to our relationships with countries that have always been our allies.

Permanent damage has to our economic markets, since everyone now knows that everything can change on the whim of a single man.

Permanent damage has been done to any reputation we've had as a supporter of democracy worldwide now that we've abandoned our support of Ukraine.

Permanent damage has been done to our own faith in our country. Any pride I had in our values and democracy has slipped away, now I know that they were all illusions.
by ta1243 | 2025-04-09 19:17:13+00:00
I fly into a random city, say Denver.

I could start hunting around for a local taxi app, which may or may not work, may or may not have any cars

I could get in a waiting taxi at the airport, but then I run into issues with cash etc

I could use uber while I'm still collecting my bag and have a known car and known experience waiting for me
by JackC | 2025-04-09 19:17:34+00:00
This might be what you mean, but for anyone reading -- the point of Simon's article is the whole agent and all of its tools have to be considered part of the same sandbox, and the same security boundary. You can't sandbox MCPs individually, you have to sandbox the whole system together.

Specifically the core design principal is you have to be comfortable with any possible combination of things your agent can do with its tools, not only the combination you ask for.

If your agent can search the web and can access your WhatsApp account, then you can ask it to search for something and text you the results -- cool. But there's some possible search result that would take over its brain and make it post your WhatsApp history to the web. So probably you should not set up an agent that has MCPs to both search the web and read your WhatsApp history. And in general many plausibly useful combinations of tools to provide to agents are unsafe together.
by nemothekid | 2025-04-09 19:17:43+00:00
Ever since the tariffs were first announced I've been trying to understand if there is any method to the madness.

There is sound reasoning behind the tariffs, and I can at least understand the motivations. However, to execute the vision behind the tariffs would be tantamount to severely contracting the American economy, and the voters would never agree to go hungry in order to militarily independent.

He knows what he's doing, but him and his ilk are openly lying to the American public because no one would ever agree to it.
Ask HN: Where Is the FOSS Alternative to Merge, Paragon, Unified, etc.
by sak84 | 2025-04-09 19:18:19+00:00
MCP servers aren't going to cut it for enterprise use cases. N8n and Composio are interesting, but license restriction make it hard to use.

Maintaining integrations is a pain and the number of integrations is increasing exponentially. Feels like this is perfect for open-source. Surprised I can't find anything here.
by hbarka | 2025-04-09 19:18:22+00:00
There’s no shortage of YouTube videos aware of the uptalk or upspeak annoyances but I found this one from 1994. It seems to have spread from California Valleygirl-speak and then nationwide to college campuses. How does LLM training get influenced (weighted) by pop culture speaking styles?

https://youtu.be/z756L_CkakU
by bdangubic | 2025-04-09 19:18:29+00:00
This rationale can explain many actions he’s taken. Is it reckless? Risky? For sure. Does it work? It has in the past, let’s hope it does for the global financial system, for everyone’s sake.

Global financial reacted to the idiocy adequately enough to tell you what it thinks of it… You are trying to rationalize something that is as far from rational as it gets…
by cryptonector | 2025-04-09 19:18:35+00:00
According to a sibling top-comment this is not a decision to not pursue cryptocurrency fraud altogether, just to leave some such crimes to other agencies in the federal government. That is, if the SEC wants charges filed against some person, then presumably the DOJ will prosecute, but the DOJ will not prosecute w/o the SEC (or other regulator) requesting it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43636390
by dtquad | 2025-04-09 19:18:48+00:00
>Too early for the people fundraising to build US manufacturing capabilities.

It's a good idea to hedge against future trade uncertainties.

After COVID some Danish and German companies began looking for non-Chinese alternatives for electronics manufacturing. The only area where China is the absolute better alternative is PCB manufacturing without mounting chips/components. The Danish and German companies get tens of thousands of these bare PCBs from China. The chips/components are from Taiwan, South Korea, the US, Italy, and Germany and can be cost effectively mounted in Denmark and Germany.
by nico | 2025-04-09 19:19:19+00:00
> fraudulently obtaining citizenship

It seems like they are claiming that “not saying you intended to protest” is essentially lying on the initial visa application, thus fraud and grounds for revocation of residence and deportation

So, if CBP confiscated someone’s laptop or phone (because they don’t want to unlock it), then break into it, and find social media posts against genocide, and/or against the Trump administration… given how they’ve acted, who knows what they’d do
by JeremyNT | 2025-04-09 19:19:28+00:00
This is a hilarious assertion. Their stated objectives have been all over the map, so any outcome can fit at least some of their statements.

Admin proxies have said tariffs are to pay for tax cuts, they've stated they're intended to bring back manufacturing jobs, they've stated we should prepare for a lengthy trade war and accept the higher prices like men, and while some proxies have said this is a negotiation tactic others have stated unequivocally that this is not a negotiation tactic.

Bold assertions like yours are easy to make with the benefit of hindsight. What do you predict tariff rates to be in a week? A month? A year?
by throw0101c | 2025-04-09 19:19:28+00:00
> US voters disagree.

Some polls would disagree with your assessment:

> A Wall Street Journal poll released Friday[1] found 52 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, compared to 44 percent who approve. The disapproval is 12 points higher than the 40 percent who said in October that they had an unfavorable view of Trump’s economic plans.

> Pollsters found 54 percent said they oppose placing tariffs on imported goods, while the percentage who said tariffs will raise prices on consumer products rose from 68 percent in January to 75 percent in March.

* https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5236712-trump-tariffs-...

[1] "Americans Were Souring on Trump’s Economic Plans Even Before Tariff Bloodbath":

* http://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/americ...
by grayhatter | 2025-04-09 19:19:52+00:00
> Yes, but not all failure modes, only the ones in scope for the goals of the system. From the outside you can't tell what the goals are.

Is basic availability not a goal of a blog?

Phrased differently: given two systems, one that fails if a theoretically possible, but otherwise "unpredictable" number requests arrive. And one without that failure mode. Which is better?

> From the outside you can't tell what the goals are.

I either don't agree, not even a tiny bit, or I don't understand. Can you explain this differently?

> This is the core of engineering.

I'd say the core of engineering is making something that works. If you didn't anticipate something that most engineers would say is predictable, and that predictable thing instead of degrading service, completely takes the whole thing down, such that it doesn't work... that's a problem, no?
by cab11150904 | 2025-04-09 19:20:11+00:00
t weekend was looking into setting up a personal networking solution- and looked hard at TailScale and their competitors. I do not like- that Tailscale has chosen to only allow SSO sign-in - as that forces one to have a Microsoft,Github[MS], Google, or Apple account- and I presume that leaves one at the mercy of those companies for the free option.

What is going on with your sentences man.
by xracy | 2025-04-09 19:20:36+00:00
I'm gonna say 'yes, but' instead of 'yes, and'.

Yes, but the big problem is that these same business leaders and politicians are going to be the ones who get first bite at the apple. And so how they plan is going to impact what's left for everyone else.

I don't care because they burned the system to the ground, I care because they're gonna salvage what they need and nothing else.
by KennyBlanken | 2025-04-09 19:21:03+00:00
Not really sure why you left out the tens of thousands of people who were almost immediately laid off when companies and their suppliers idled factories?

In the automotive sector alone - GM, Ford, and Stellantis all flipped the master breaker to "off" on a number of plants and sent everyone packing.

That hire-back will not be instant. People are going to miss payments for rent/mortgage, car loans, utility bills, etc.

Let's not forget that many companies hit the brakes, hard, on exporting goods to the US - so there's going to be the shipping equivalent of those traffic "waves" because two hours ago someone on the highway panic-braked
by smj-edison | 2025-04-09 19:22:06+00:00
Huh, I didn't realize pipewire had builtin support for this! I've been using a different piece of software called Easy Effects[1] on my framework laptop.

To equalize my laptop, I ended up buying a umik-1, and using REW to calculate all the filter coefficients (you can import REW's filter export right into Easy Effects). It's a subtle difference at first, but it's much cleaner (I also usually have a compressor and loudness effect enabled, as the framework speakers are pretty quiet).

[1] https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects
by 7thaccount | 2025-04-09 19:22:13+00:00
I think there is a very big difference between Stewart and Tucker.

You might not agree with Stewart's principles, but he has them and will fight his own party over it. Tucker flew over to Russia to kiss Putin's behind and even Putin made fun of how bad it was. He then tried to show how awesome it was in Russia and made it obvious that he hasn't been in a grocery store in ages.
by junon | 2025-04-09 19:22:28+00:00
A side effect of this that I've started to notice on a few of my repositories are fake accounts trying to bolster their perceived credibility when they are very obviously (terrible) AI accounts - down to their profile READMEs (on GitHub) that have obvious LLM output, pointing to links that don't exist, etc. and in some cases even LinkedIn profiles that are completely fabricated.

I just had a PR opened that was a two character change, in Javascript, changing `if (!warned)` to `if (!== warned)`. They assured me, in an H1 no less, that they had tested everything and that it was fixing some problem, but didn't say what.

What the hell is happening, and what are we supposed to collectively do about this? Or is this just some new norm we'll have to adapt to?
by dinfinity | 2025-04-09 19:22:51+00:00
> I said that learning visual reasoning from video is probably not enough

Fair enough; you did indeed say that.

> if you claim it is enough, you have to reconcile that with failures in Sora, Veo 2, etc.

This is flawed reasoning, though. The current state of video generating AI and the completeness of the training set does not reliably prove that the network used to perform the generation is incapable of physical modeling and/or object permanence. Those things are ultimately (the modeling of) relations between past and present tokens, so the transformer architecture does fit.

It might just be a matter of compute/network size (modeling four dimensional physical relations in high resolution is pretty hard, yo). If you look at the scaling results from the early Sora blogs, the natural increase of physical accuracy with more compute is visible: https://openai.com/index/video-generation-models-as-world-si...

It also might be a matter of fine-tuning training on (and optimizing for) four dimensional/physical accuracy rather than on "does this generated frame look like the actual frame?"
by nineplay | 2025-04-09 19:23:01+00:00
I like to believe that no other countries are kissing his ass and all the calls were from the few true patriots that are hiding out in his administration.

"Hello President Trump, I am the leader of Bigorgia. I know you are a big strong manly man and I will beg you to stop the tariffs please."

But I agree, Xi Jinping is a real strongman, not a sad old man with delusions of grandeur.
by swah | 2025-04-09 19:23:40+00:00
I don't know about Crocs but brazilian flip-flops "Havaianas" never lost market share even though it feels so trivial to clone it.

The only two modes of failure of this sandal is "drying up" after a couple years and broken thong straps (yes, 3rd parties sell those as replacements..)

I guess they make sure they have cheap offerings and are always investing in design and marketing so no one can enter this market..
by mvdtnz | 2025-04-09 19:23:57+00:00
I didn't get a single result for product segments I know well which I would agree with. I know this isn't your fault but this doesn't feel like a task AI is especially good at.

A feature that is entirely missing here is price constraints. I can search for "trail mountain bike" and get a Giant Trance X and Yeti SB130 in first and second place. Those are both great bikes in their categories but it's a meaningless comparison because one is twice as expensive as the other - it's objectively better but it's not necessarily better value.
by dcow | 2025-04-09 19:24:09+00:00
I don’t get the outrage. Trump did this with Mexico. He imposed tariffs and then immediately eased them when Mexico started negotiating. It worked. Wouldn’t a rational market understand his behavior by now (not agree with it, but understand it). Especially since his stated goal has been “impose tariffs to spur renegotiation of trade terms”. Why would a rational market actor be acting like Trump isn’t doing what he’s said he’s doing?
by joe5150 | 2025-04-09 19:24:19+00:00
Being able to do basic math in your head is valuable just in terms of basic practicality (quickly calculating a tip or splitting a bill, doubling a recipe, reasoning about a budget...), but this is a poor analogy anyway because 3x2 is still 3x2 regardless of how you get there whereas creative work produced by software is worthless.