MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-20 18:34:46+00:00
>Calculators are different, but why? Can an ensemble of a calculator, a Prolog interpreter, Alexnet and Stockfish be considered "jagged superintelligence"?

Those are all different things with little to nothing to do with each other. It's like saying what if I ensemble a snake and cat ? What does that even mean ? GPT-N or whatever is a single model that can do many things, no ensembling required. That's the difference between it and a calculator or stockfish.
by nonrandomstring | 2025-04-20 18:34:47+00:00
> Losing focus as a skill is something I see with every batch of new students.

Gaining focus as a skill is something to work on with every batch of new students

We're on the same page. I'm turning that around to say: let's remember focus isn't something we're naturally born with, it has to be built. Worked on hard. People coming to that task are increasingly damaged/injured imho.
by ivape | 2025-04-20 18:34:48+00:00
The bigger picture goal here is to explore using prompts to generate new prompts

I see this as the same as a reasoning loop. This is the approach I use to quickly code up pseudo reasoning loops on local projects. Someone had asked in another thread "how can I get the LLM to generate a whole book", well, just like this. If it can keep prompting itself to ask "what would chapter N be?" until "THE END", then you get your book.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-04-20 18:34:53+00:00
I do agree with the overall premise of encouraging children's creativity and the things that they enjoy doing. You don't want math to become a chore.

On the other hand, some things require study and practice to be really good at, and that is "work", and many kids don't want to do the work.

Our boy, who just turned 9, is very good at math (his school's standardized tests put him at 99th percentile in the US for his grade level, though 1) I don't put a lot of stock in those standardized tests, and 2) the US doesn't exactly rank high in math skills, so this is less impressive than it sounds). He's not a genius, but he grasps concepts quickly and fairly intuitively. He's curious about the world, asks lots of questions, and is capable of understanding and retaining many scientific concepts that kids older than him would struggle with. (Example: two days ago, he was asking me about quantum computers and I mentioned that they need to be kept very cold, he asked whether they use oxygen, because oxygen turns to liquid at -173C. I thought he just made that up, but when I checked (I didn't know myself), he was pretty close (the actual number is -183C.) So he has the innate talent to work with.

But despite his gifts, he still needs practice for the math concepts to take root, and without that he makes a fair share of basic mistakes; and he still needs to improve his logic reasoning skills. So he has daily math homework after school (because math instruction in elementary schools in the US is low). We use Singapore Math workbooks (I've tried various apps and online programs, and honestly, paper workbooks are just better--but that's another topic).

He knows he's good at math and wants to continue to excel at it. (Just like a talented basketball player doesn't reach his full potential without working at it, something I repeatedly emphasize to him.) BUT he still struggles every single day to do his homework, because he prefers to play video games, shoot hoops, etc. (loves basketball, football, soccer, but has a lifelong physical disability that will prevent him from ever playing a team sport, to his great chagrin). I have to push him every single day or he would simply not do it. He actually wants to do math, and when we talk about it, he'll confirm that, but when it comes time to actually do it, he just doesn't have the willpower. (I mean, what kid prefers to practice math problems instead of play video games?). Hopefully he'll get the willpower at some point when he's older. But that day has not yet come.

That was a long reply to say: it sometimes does take a lot of pushing.
by DJHenk | 2025-04-20 18:36:44+00:00
> More and more I start to realize that cost saving is a small problem for local LLMs. If it is too slow, it becomes unusable, so much that you might as well use public LLM endpoints. Unless you really care about getting things done locally without sending information to another server.

There is another aspect to consider, aside from privacy.

These models are trained by downloading every scrap of information from the internet, including the works of many, many authors who have never consented to that. And they for sure are not going to get a share of the profits, if there is every going to be any. If you use a cloud provider, you are basically saying that is all fine. You are happy to pay them, and make yourself dependent on their service, based on work that wasn't theirs to use.

However, if you use a local model, the authors still did not give consent, but one could argue that the company that made the model is at least giving back to the community. They don't get any money out of it, and you are not becoming dependent on their hyper capitalist service. No rent-seeking. The benefits of the work are free to use for everyone. This makes using AI a little more acceptable from a moral standpoint.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-04-20 18:37:24+00:00
> If you are powering the API for the underlying model, then don't you know exactly how users are coding?

You have the code, but not all the other signals. An easy example is "acceptance signal" where someone gets an autocompletion and accepts it / rejects it. It can get more complicated with the /architect mode and so on, but there's probably lots of signals that you can get from an IDE that you can't just by serving API responses.
by rob_c | 2025-04-20 18:37:37+00:00
As I've said in my lectures on how to perform 1bit training of QAT systems to build classifiers...

"An iteration on a theme".

Once the network design is proven to work yes it's an impressive technical achievement, but as I've said given I've known people in multiple research institutes and companies using Gemma3 for a month mostly saying they're surprised it's not getting noticed... This is just enabling more users but the none QAT version will almost always perform better...
by throwawaymaths | 2025-04-20 18:37:46+00:00
no you just need analysis with a dependent type system (which linear types are a subset of). it doesn't have to be in the compiler. there was a proof of concept here a few months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42923829

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43199265
by johnisgood | 2025-04-20 18:37:51+00:00
The body has several well-regulated mechanisms for handling it.

If semen isn't ejaculated, the body reabsorbs the sperm in the epididymis and recycles the cellular material. Seminal fluids, which are produced during arousal, are either reabsorbed or, in cases like retrograde ejaculation (e.g., with alpha-blockers), pass into the bladder and are later urinated out. The system self-regulates; there's no harmful buildup to worry about. :)

So, TL;DR: You will just urinate it out in our case.
by ss-13 | 2025-04-20 18:37:58+00:00
I’ve been experimenting with MLflow’s Prompt Engineering UI, which lets you do no-code prompt tuning across multiple LLMs. While it officially supports models like OpenAI out of the box, I wanted to try it with Japanese open-source models from the LLM-jp project.

This repo shows how to serve these models locally using MLflow’s pyfunc model interface, expose them via the MLflow AI Gateway, and compare prompt performance through the UI.

It includes a working setup with: - Hugging Face LLM-jp models (e.g. llm-jp-3-3.7b-instruct) - MLflow Model Serving - MLflow Gateway - Prompt Engineering UI - Streamlit UI for experiment tracking

GitHub: https://github.com/suzuki-2001/mlflow-llm-jp-integration Japanese article explaining the project: https://zenn.dev/shosuke_13/articles/21d304b5f80e00
by serf | 2025-04-20 18:38:00+00:00
>a good text will tell you that the system will function correctly in even completely paralyzed women. Just how do you think that works?

the body has a lot of messaging systems; 'completely paralyzed' people still enjoy the use of many chemical messaging signals; they just generally have a hindered spinal cord or neurological interface element.

A paralyzed person will still go into shock after a dismemberment, blood-flow will be affected by vaso-constriction, and so on. It doesn't surprise me to hear that childbirth can trigger a similar set of conditions to occur.

And that belittles the existence of the underlying support nervous system and the secondary elements. Many completely paralyzed men can achieve erection and ejaculation even with a near total disconnect from the rest of the nervous system. Why? The parasympathetic nervous system and secondary nervous materials in the region in question are taking up the slack from the brain and still allowing 'normal' function.
by intermerda | 2025-04-20 18:39:16+00:00
> In a way, places like Texas and Georgia and Ohio are far more progressive than SF or California as a whole because a working class person can afford a home.

Ah the famously progressive Texas where women regularly die because of abortion ban, weed is illegal, and you can’t buy booze on a Sunday, and lawmakers want to overturn Obergefell to ban same sex marriage. Very progressive, much freedom.

> Housing costs are the shame and great hypocrisy of most “blue” cities.

Yes, housing costs are often high where people want to live.
by rfoo | 2025-04-20 18:39:18+00:00
> I've already seen this story play out with low-code. The pitch was the same

That's the point. Unlike low-code or no-code bullshit, this somehow worked. People "magically" want to design solutions, and are able to, now.

> People executing small scripts all over the place sounds to me like the stuff of nightmares.

Me too. However, watching how eager people want to (and they indeed can!) make progress with these LLM generated horror, I believe it's time to give up and start designing secure systems despite the existence of massive slightly broken scripts.
by OxfordOutlander | 2025-04-20 18:39:40+00:00
It is a talent and a distribution play. Talent: obvious.

Distribution: OpenAI believes the marginal token they sell will be accretive to their bottom line, so the goal then is to deliver as many tokens as possible. Windsurf already has 1k+ enterprise logos and allegedly millions of downloads. 2 m tokens × $0.00001 gross / token = $20/seat/mo; if windsrf runs 500k seats, oai books $120 m/yr gross @ 90% margin.

I saw a similar dynamic play out in the UK with Pub (bar) companies. By mid-2000s, the major players were failing. Margins were nearly zero, thanks to rising costs, and securlar decline in demand, plus they had too much expensive term debt.

But they represented profitable sources of distribution for the beer makers. So Heineken went on a buying spree. They didn't care about making money from the pubs themselves and were happy to run them break-even. This is because they then had a controlled channel of distribution for their beer (and they made a profit on every pint they shipped).

The switching costs are very different here, and the market is still so nascent. It is a thin product and vscode‑copilot can catchup. But 1% of enterprise value ($3bn of $300bn) is not a lot to gamble on owning the #2 horse in the most promising AI end market today.
by margalabargala | 2025-04-20 18:39:58+00:00
> is quite safe

Taking outside sources of testosterone permanently alters your body's ability to make testosterone naturally, to the extent that many people who previously took steroids find they have be on testosterone therapy for the rest of their lives.

I wouldn't call "creating a lifelong requirement to take artificial hormones in order to function at your previous baseline" qualifying as "no particularly good reason".
by ein0p | 2025-04-20 18:40:06+00:00
Sometimes TPS doesn't matter. I've generated textual descriptions for 100K or so images in my photo archive, some of which I have absolutely no interest in uploading to someone else's computer. This works pretty well with Gemma. I use local LLMs all the time for things where privacy is even remotely important. I estimate this constitutes easily a quarter of my LLM usage.
by goopthink | 2025-04-20 18:40:14+00:00
Why couldn’t OpenAI vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor competitor? (Serious question).

OpenAI is a technology company constantly in search of productization (ChatGPT, Sora, Dall-e), and they’ve been really good at creating product interest that converts to acquisition. An IDE is much more complex than a chat app, but given their literal billions of dollars and familiarity with developer tooling, this is a down-stack build that they could dogfood off their own tech. And especially given that some of these tools were built by tiny teams (Cursor is what, 10 people?), is this like Google and Facebook’s implicit admission that they can’t “build and grow” anymore, and need to turn to acquisitions to fuel growth?
by qingcharles | 2025-04-20 18:41:55+00:00
Might as well go the full insanity.. if you can get it work on the ACE, then surely you can make it work on a ZX81 with a rampak?

I remember as a kid in the 80s writing a program in BASIC to get my Spectrum 128 to connect over serial to my Sirius 1 PC so my buddy and I could have a chat application across my bedroom. Wild times.
by hinkley | 2025-04-20 18:41:56+00:00
We’ve gone through rounds of working out if the leafy vegetables absorb the heavy metals or if it’s mostly in the dust and last I read we’re back to the latter.

White vinegar is better at cleaning vegetables than so called vegetable soaps, and more importantly the acid dissolves soot and heavy metals.

Gallon bottles of white vinegar are cheap. It’s also good for laundry especially if you have hard water, or a humid climate. Some people put it in the rinse cycle for their dishwasher as well, instead of rinse aid which is hell on your intestines.
by naet | 2025-04-20 18:42:02+00:00
I had the opposite experience. I had rented a house that had an empty patch of dirt and asked the landlord if we could plant some vegetables there (which I didn't have a lot of experience in). My older neighbor saw me and said that we had great soil in our neighborhood but I didn't really think about it. The vegetables grew amazingly well, we had way too many tomatoes and tons of broccoli that kept growing back and more. I barely took any care with it after planting, other than very sporadic watering and harvesting.

The next year we moved from that house to a new place, where we couldn't plant directly in the ground but the landlord was happy for us to use pots and planters. I eagerly planted my broccoli again thinking we'd have the same endless supply... but this time it barely produced anything and looked nothing like the last year. I bought some kind of soil bags from the gardening store after asking an employee which would be good for vegetable pots and planters. Something about the pots or the soil or otherwise made a gigantic difference even though we had moved probably less than a mile distance wise.

I'm a very amateur gardener so I may have made some other mistakes, but I think I treated the plants very similarly both years.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-20 18:42:05+00:00
>Boilerplate… is bad, right?

It's tough to say in a vacuum. Generally, the lower level you go, the more "boilerplate" you'll need. That cost of iteration is to give such programmers more control over the task.

So python may sneer at such boilerplate. Whereas Rust would prefer being more verbose.
by aerhardt | 2025-04-20 18:42:22+00:00
I wouldn't qualify the suggestions I'm getting as boneheaded, but rather disastrous. I have completions turned off by default because they're so stupid it's unbearable. But then maybe a few times a month I'm low on energy and faced with the typical repetitive task: fill out this large dictionary with predictable values, type these classes which are variations of another, write some very grindy tests, what-have-you. I turn it on in the hopes that it will save me some work, see what it's suggesting, and turn it off back again in seconds. It literally cannot pick up on blatantly predictable local patterns anymore. I don't know what's happened to it because it used to be able to at least do that.
by elcritch | 2025-04-20 18:44:34+00:00
Definitely, you can do most of those things in Nim without macros using templates and compile time stuff. It’s preferable to macros when possible. Julia has fantastic compile time abilities as well.

It’s beautiful to implement an incredibly fast serde in like 10 lines without requiring other devs to annotate their packages.

I wouldn’t include Rust on that list if we’re speaking of compile time and compile time type abilities.

Last time I tried it Rust’s const expression system is pretty limited. Rust’s macro system likewise is also very weak.

Primarily you can only get type info by directly passing the type definition to a macro, which is how derive and all work.
by stevenjgarner | 2025-04-20 18:44:39+00:00
I would put the HERO (Heathkit Educational RObot) in both the same category and the era. [1] HERO came with "an optional arm mechanism and speech synthesizer was produced for the kit form and included in the assembled form". Huge influence on my own life.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HERO_(robot)
by xyst | 2025-04-20 18:45:03+00:00
This comment is also unsubstantiated stating "he wasn’t doing anything that other CEOs weren’t doing".

Where’s the proof? If this is true, then ask yourself. Why the fuck isn’t the government [in the 2000s] doing their job? Why aren’t the people demanding executives be held accountable?

6 years in club fed for a $52M+ profit in insider trading is peanuts.

The neoliberal/neoclassical economy we live is wild.
by the_af | 2025-04-20 18:45:12+00:00
I have to agree with the article's author that what he calls "overzealous" removal of movie mistakes seems wrong. It wouldn't matter so much if the original movie was still readily available, but it's often the case that only the latest "fixed" version remains available.

With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and frequently making the movies worse.

More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-20 18:45:23+00:00
Popular in:

2021 (62 points 22 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26085987

~2012 (28 points, 10 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4940918

Can't imagine this is reproduced with permission.
by add-sub-mul-div | 2025-04-20 18:45:44+00:00
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6305868/

"Testosterone as a contraceptive can suppress spermatogenesis and lead to azoospermia in 65% of normospermic men within 4 months of use"

Does this sound like a convenient and effective contraceptive? Where are you really coming from with this statement?
by johnnyanmac | 2025-04-20 18:45:58+00:00
>It doesn't matter if it sometimes disengages to have an operator step in

I'd say that breaks the entire concept of "self driving" at that point. If people are fine with some of those "actually Indian" stories where supposedly AI powered tools turned out to have a significant human element to it, why not just go back to the taxi? You clearly don't care about the tech, you care about being driven to a destination.
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-20 18:46:04+00:00
I think you are begging the question here.

For one thing, LLMs absolutely form responses from conceptual meanings. This has been demonstrated empirically multiple times now including again by anthropic only a few weeks ago. 'Language' is just the input and output, the first and last few layers of the model.

So okay, there exists some set of 'gibberish' tokens that will elicit meaningful responses from LLMs. How does your conclusion - "Therefore, LLMs don't understand" fit the bill here? You would also conclude that humans have no understanding of what they see because of the Rorschach test ?

>There exists no similar set of tokens for humans, because our process is to parse the incoming sounds into words, use grammar to extract conceptual meaning from those words, and then shape a response from that conceptual meaning.

Grammar is useful fiction, an incomplete model of a demonstrably probabilistic process. We don't use 'grammar' to do anything.
by ephaeton | 2025-04-20 18:47:50+00:00
zig's comptime has some (objectively: debatable? subjectively: definite) shortcomings that the zig community then overcomes with zig build to generate code-as-strings to be lateron @imported and compiled.

Practically, "zig build"-time-eval. As such there's another 'comptime' stage with more freedom, unlimited run-time (no @setEvalBranchQuota), can do IO (DB schema, network lookups, etc.) but you lose the freedom to generate zig types as values in the current compilation; instead of that you of course have the freedom to reduce->project from target compiled semantic back to input syntax down to string to enter your future compilation context again.

Back in the day, where I had to glue perl and tcl via C at one point in time, passing strings for perl generated through tcl is what this whole thing reminds me of. Sure it works. I'm not happy about it. There's _another_ "macro" stage that you can't even see in your code (it's just @import).

The zig community bewilders me at times with their love for lashing themselves. The sort of discussions which new sort of self-harm they'd love to enforce on everybody is borderline disturbing.
by _emacsomancer_ | 2025-04-20 18:48:59+00:00
And in Spanish here: https://www.poeticous.com/borges/el-disco?locale=es

(Not having much Spanish, I at first thought "Odin's disco(teque)" and then "no, that doesn't make sense about sides", but then, surely primed by English "disco", thought "it must mean Odin's record/lp/album".)
by mystraline | 2025-04-20 18:49:11+00:00
There is absolutely a difference between a professional 1099 contractor charging $500/hr with a custom negotiated contract, and this garbage that we call 'gig work'.

And if the laws were actually enforced, most of it is blatantly illegal.

Illegal online taxi. Illegal online food delivery. Illegal residential hotel chain.

Etc.

Many people who do this do so because they don't have other choices. And much of it is also illegal for the people "working", cause commercial driving requires commercial license.

It is a scam on everyone, except for the 'app companies' that basically added 'internet' to a regulated career and turned it into unregulated enshittified garbage.
by AstralStorm | 2025-04-20 18:49:45+00:00
Closer to 90%, and generally the side effects are a bit annoying too. Circulatory ones. Sometimes even to floppy. (Like 1% dosage dependent)

Plus the thing does not stop the drip so you do have to pull out sooner rather than later or else. It does not stop sperm production.

Also dry ones tend to result. They're sometimes uncomfortable.

Tamsulosin is I believe the modern one but all of them are for long term. Probably least side effects.

Otherwise if taken as a single dose fresh, side effects like orthostatic hypotension are vastly increased.