MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
No More Companies
by johanneskanybal | 2025-04-23 22:18:59+00:00
This forum is filled with posts about dumbing down whatever llm you're using and fitting it into an ci/cd pipeline. Meanwhile I haven't had conversations like this with anyone at anytime, it feel's like the discourse is missing the mark or at least just covering a pretty boring part of what is truely amazing. Posting something so fluffy on hackernews is surely a bit stupid but here we go.

For me it begun with an early version of word2vec by google. From an machine learning background focused on training specific classifiers the promise was: "Here's something that understands, in general, about the world, how they are related".

This was a very new approach, one of my first tries that I'll remember forever was when I punched in "Olof Palme", the 80's Swedish social prime minister that got murdered 1986. I punched it in and in the top 3 things the model associated it with was "Anna Lindh" a Swedish foreign minister that also got murdered in 2006. By today's standard this seems so trivial it might seem silly but to me it was mind blowing of an somewhat "general" ai making actually meaningful associations between events in an close to infinite space. I was already sold and doing my first ai-startup but it hinted of something beyond the rule based world of making computers understand language and answer basic questions which we where doing and about actually understanding the complex context of the world.

Many years later and I'm an user of AI rather than an developer of it for many practical reasons, yet It still puts me in awe sometimes.

I want to write about how ai should take over all forms of company governance at every level until 0 human ceo's exist but at the same time I'm just happy there's this stupid ai bot just listening and being more insightfull than anything that ever came before.
by FireBeyond | 2025-04-23 22:19:29+00:00
Yeah, no.

I'm not going to go 'gentle' on the team of clowns who have done things like make employees work for 36 hours straight to issue RIF notices while shouting at them for "incompetence", or "created new admin accounts that were within minutes attempting to log in from Russian IPs, immediately after demanding all logging be turned off", or "repeatedly lied about savings and contracts on their own website" in some ... "assume good faith" type scenario.

Whatever good faith they deserved, they burned within days (hours, even) of being let loose.

They're already plenty of evidence that they've exfiltrated sensitive information to a variety of non-government entities that are not even remotely entitled to that data, either at NLRB or elsewhere.

Your claim is that "it's entirely possible that these are all just innocent bureaucratic errors" and I would put it to you that that claim, in the face of everything already known, also needs substantiation, and yes, not that thin veneer of Wikipedia-like "assume the absolute possible best intention, regardless of plausibility" that we're getting.
by satanfirst | 2025-04-23 22:19:58+00:00
I stopped finding their search competitive around 2015 but kept checking with gradually less frequency, so I can't really comment on whether anything new has added or hurt their results.

Some of their semantic web based info results seemed good and would have benefited by more complex algorithms to figure out when to show it.. But I kind of got the sense that they went into the Amazon territory where no one was authorized to sort anything out any more to get out of some kind of local optimums.
by koderr | 2025-04-23 22:20:18+00:00
I recently compiled 1,000 Python exercises to practice everything from the basics to OOP in a level-based format so you can practice with hundreds of levels and review key programming concepts.

A few months ago, I was looking for an app that would allow you to do this, and since I couldn't find anything that was free and/or ad-free in this format, I decided to create it for Android users.

I thought it might be handy to have it in an android app so I could practice anywhere, like on the bus on the way to university or during short breaks throughout the day.
Show HN: An all-in-one blog for learning Large Language Models (LLMs)
by zljdanceholic | 2025-04-23 22:21:13+00:00
An all-in-one blog for learning LLM ins and outs: tokenize, attention, PE, and more Project I've been diving deep into the internals of Large Language Models (LLMs) and started documenting my findings. My blog covers topics like:

Tokenization techniques (e.g., BBPE)

Attention mechanism (e.g. MHA, MQA, MLA)

Positional encoding and extrapolation (e.g. RoPE, NTK-aware interpolation, YaRN)

Architecture details of models like QWen, LLaMA

Training methods including SFT and Reinforcement Learning

If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of LLMs, feel free to check it out: http://comfyai.app/
by gkoberger | 2025-04-23 22:21:53+00:00
That's not true at all. You think games would feel as immersive if everything was Calibri? Magazine-style articles would feel as tactile if they all used the same system fonts? Etc.

You may not care about fonts, but to say they don't matter is a misunderstanding. For example, I could glibly say we only need one programming language (the user doesn't care what syntax you used before it was compiled down to 1s and 0s!), but any engineer would make the case why that's not true at all.
by petekoomen | 2025-04-23 22:22:04+00:00
One of the interesting things I've noticed is that the best experiences I've had with AI are with simple applications that don't do much to get in the way of the model, e.g. chatgpt and cursor/windsurf.

I'm hopeful that as devs figure out how to build better apps with AI we'll have have more and more "cursor moments" in other areas in our lives
by indrora | 2025-04-23 22:22:21+00:00
Short answer: Nobody fucking knows because the accounting is more non-GAAP than your typical investment fraud house.

A few spots for folks interested in some amount of numbers:

https://slate.com/culture/2024/04/book-sales-publishing-indu...

https://archive.is/nGY6D

https://janefriedman.com/book-pl/
by namaria | 2025-04-23 22:23:20+00:00
I think you have the right intuition, i.e. "can there be a self improving machine?" is akin to asking "can entropy be lowered?".

And I agree that yes, the self improving machine actually exists. It's the living cell. But it is self improving in time scales where it reproduces exponentially with tiny variations and they get pruned so over time they find a way to climb some gradient in some complexity space.

I think that human intelligence is not inside the human brain per se, but it's a feature of the global ecosystem - and since the matter combination on Earth and the Solar system itself exist because of the particular cosmology and physics of this Universe, then human intelligence is a feature of the Universe. So trying to compare computers with human brains is misleading. But computers are also features of the Earth ecosystem and the Universe.

What I think limits computers fundamentally are the limits to computation itself and more generally to formal systems, because computers are formal systems.

However, I don't think AI is a pie in the sky because it is created by humans. I think it is because it is a contradiction. Computers are fundamentally limited in that they can only perform computations, and natural intelligence can do things that are not computationally bound. Like, for example, create computers. Formal systems cannot bootstrap themselves, and computers cannot solve the halting problem generally. So how could we ever expect computers to extrapolate natural language to software of unbounded complexity? Or create useful information that is out of the distribution of data previously available?

Now, could I conceive of machines that left alone around some star and given enough time would be able to catch up to us?

Sure, a self replicating nanomachine might. The Universe has already solved the problem of intelligence. It created us. We know what it takes. Any attempt by us to re-create it would approximate the solution the Universe came up with.

I find it very interesting the virtually all recorded human cultures have a creation myth, a fundamental believe that we are artificial. It is also remarkable that the spontaneous generation hypothesis for the origin of life is completely discredited and for all we know life can only come from life. We have know idea how to bootstrap it. I think life and intelligence are NP-complete. If we solve one, we solve the other. And I think we are quite far from that. And I also don't think we will find some shortcut that 13 billion years of search has missed.
by elihu | 2025-04-23 22:24:08+00:00
> Elon Musk is right to shift his focus back to carmaking

No. The damage to Tesla's reputation has already been done, and the only way to fix it is for the board to fire Elon Musk as CEO.

> Listings for the Model 3 have increased by 63%; those for the Model Y have rocketed by 80%. The pattern can be seen in both left-leaning states, such as Massachusetts and New York, and right-leaning ones, such as Indiana and South Carolina.

Many Democrats live in red states and many Republicans live in red states. It may be true that Republicans are selling their Teslas in increasing numbers, but this isn't a convincing argument. Even in a red state, I would expect EV owners to be mostly Democrats.
by mschuster91 | 2025-04-23 22:24:16+00:00
The problem is, those tasked with upholding and enforcing the laws aren't doing their job (Congress), are swamped with a deluge of blatant lawbreaking but still have to maintain professional decorum to not open themselves up to attacks (the justice system), or are outright corrupt (higher level federal courts including, sadly, the Supreme Court).
by BrenBarn | 2025-04-23 22:26:38+00:00
> Laws are only as strong as the enforcement.

This is one of the fundamental issues that underlies our broken system in the US. The gaps between what the law actually is, what people think it is, what people want it to be, and what it in practice is, are enormous.

Some of the recent deportation cases highlight this. You have cases where people were living in the US illegally for decades but faced no repercussions, and now people are upset because they were suddenly detained and/or deported. Virtually all the framing I see is about how it's a sudden and horrible injustice that they were detained during a "routine" ICE check-in --- very little about how we have accumulated this palimpsest of rules and enforcement policies resting on laws which don't actually encode the state of affairs most people want.

If we want people to be able to immigrate easily and safely (and I do), we need to stop breathing sighs of relief when a new president comes in and issues some kind of temporary executive order that makes things okay in the short term. We need to fix the laws at all levels, including criminalizing enforcement actions that are contrary to the law. That would likely mean massive purges of many individuals in local and state governments and law enforcement agencies, with many of them sentenced to considerable prison terms for the kind of enforcement discretion that we currently accept as normal. It's not going to be pretty. But it has to be done if we want to return to a system grounded in the actual rule of law and not the rule of law enforcement.
Show HN: A fast command-line tool for solving Queens puzzles
by dschafer | 2025-04-23 22:27:40+00:00
I've been hooked on Queens puzzles (https://www.linkedin.com/games/queens/) for the last few months, and decided to try and build a solver for them.

Rather than doing a traditional solution search, I tried to model it instead on how humans solve these puzzles, iteratively eliminating and confirming possible squares for Queens.

And since this was a side-project, I decided to go overboard, and try and make it as fast as possible (avoiding HashMap/HashSet in favor of bit fields, for example).
by gnabgib | 2025-04-23 22:28:01+00:00
https://archive.is/iyGrb

Related Plastic Found Inside More Than 50% of Plaques from Clogged Arteries (83 points, 1 year ago, 52 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39630498

Previously (10 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43767959
by bob1029 | 2025-04-23 22:28:01+00:00
An L1-resident algorithm can outperform one that needs to talk to DRAM each iteration by 100x or more. In terms of wall clock time, this can mean the difference between minutes and days.

Would you be willing to try a fleeting idea if it took 2 days to test? How about if we could bring that down to 15 minutes?
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-23 22:28:12+00:00
There is a phenomena I've noticed in this industry where people who lack a skill compensate by convincing themselves that they are a savant at seeing and exploiting that skill they lack in others. They find and encircle themselves with people who they believe are the Best of the Best, at least in their imagination, and it is critical for their ego that this is never challenged. They will be blind to any evidence to the contrary because they need the people they "identify" to be extraordinary, justifying their great people curation.

I mean, I guess this really happens in all industries. Art, music, leadership, software development. People who maybe once had credibility in something and now desperately try to foist Their People as the best in the industry.

I feel like that is what is happening here. None of the people who Elon surrounds himself are notable in any way, and their skills are hugely suspect, but he has to have his harem of "Super Coders" to prop up his own mythology.
by rbanffy | 2025-04-23 22:28:49+00:00
> Tesla is a crazy competent company

Tesla is a curious company. They got the difficult parts - energy management, motors, batteries, software - but can’t get the most fundamental things even Trabant got right such as not have parts falling off the car. Tesla is famous for build quality issues and a five year old Tesla makes all sorts of cabin noises cheaper cars don’t.
by BrenBarn | 2025-04-23 22:29:24+00:00
> I think it's been used properly in a lot of instances, especially when you consider that federal law can quickly become out-of-step with modern sensibilities, so being able to relieve those harmed by laws flawed under contemporary standards is important.

No, that is exactly what we don't need. When law becomes out of step with modern sensibilities, the law needs to be changed. Precisely the problem we currently have is that we have become too accustomed to dealing with a sort of "shadow law" system where the way things actually work is not the way they're supposed to work according to the law. That is a recipe for confusion, bias, favoritism, and inequity. What we need is a system of laws that actually lets the people fix things when they are broken instead of patching around them. (This is, in my view, a byproduct of other aspects of our legal system, in particular the grossly over-restrictive process for amending the constitution.)
by andrepd | 2025-04-23 22:29:38+00:00
Kinda how the European """parliament""" works. It's the only body called "parliament" in the entire world that I'm aware of which does not have the power to propose laws.

Therefore: if the commission wants a law, all they have to do is keep trying. If it fails, they try again. If it passes, well it only has to pass once. Because the parliament can't introduce bills which means it can't repeal existing laws.
by petekoomen | 2025-04-23 22:29:40+00:00
It was mind blowing seeing the picture I had in my head appear on the page for e.g. this little prompt diagram:

https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages/#system-prompt...

MDX & claude are remarkably useful for expressing ideas. You could turn this into a little web app and it would instantly be better than any word processor ever created.

Here's the code btw https://github.com/koomen/koomen.dev
by mindwok | 2025-04-23 22:30:01+00:00
Software products with AI embedded in them will all disappear. The product is AI. That's it. Everything else is just a temporary stop gap until the frontier models get access to more context and tools.

IMO if you are building a product, you should be building assuming that intelligence is free and widely accessible by everyone, and that it has access to the same context the user does.
by jonplackett | 2025-04-23 22:30:46+00:00
Why can’t the LLM just learn your writing style from your previous emails to that person?

Or a your more general style for new people.

It seems like Google at least should have a TONNE of context to use for this.

Like in his example emails about being asked to meet - it should be checking the calendar for you and putting in if you can / can’t or suggesting an alt time you’re free.

If it can’t actually send emails without permission there’s less harm with giving an LLM more info to work with - and it doesn’t need to get it perfect. You can always edit.

If it deals with the 80% of replies that don’t matter much then you have 5X more time to spend on the 20% that do matter.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-23 22:31:11+00:00
Consider what it takes just to keep McMurdo Station (staffed by only 200-1000 people) running on Antarctica, and that's on our own planet. I don't know what the cost is, but according to [1] the budget for the US's Antarctic program overall was $356M in 2008. And it depends on reliable logistics to get people and things to and from it.

From there, step up to the ISS, which costs about $4B/year to maintain and operate, an order of magnitude more.

It's likely another order of magnitude (tens of billions/year) and probably more like two (hundreds of billions/year) to do the same thing on Mars.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Antarctic_Progra...
by llm_nerd | 2025-04-23 22:31:41+00:00
It's an interesting detail because if true -- and I fully assume it is -- the intention likely wasn't to dissuade him from going public, but instead to make him look like a conspiratorial nut. When I first saw this story and heard that "drone shot of him / threatening note" I admit that I immediately assumed it was a flake, but on further details I think that was actually the reason for doing that.
by babypuncher | 2025-04-23 22:32:04+00:00
My problem with this analogy is that there are dozens if not hundreds of free typefaces that are exceptionally high quality and have stood the test of time.

The "problem" with free typefaces isn't their quality, it's their ubiquity. Since everyone can use them, they are used everywhere. Licensing something less common can help your product stand out from the crowd.
by Smaug123 | 2025-04-23 22:32:06+00:00
Basically false, I think? From the first couple of pages of the top-of-all-time HN posts:

* War stories (e.g. "How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26296339 )

* Anything by ciechanow.ski (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42443229 )

* Strange bits of personal whimsy (e.g. "I sell onions on the Internet" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132 )

* Neat toys (e.g. 2048, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7373566 )
by plumarr | 2025-04-23 22:32:34+00:00
Do you seriously think that ? My experience is so dissociated that I think it unbelievable. I don't remember ever seeing an ad for a small business on the web, even less discovered one through them.

I discovered most small businesses that I use through word of month, seeing them while traveling or active search through google or google maps. The ones that I may have discovered through ad where through local physical add such as any box fliers or fliers/posters in other local businesses.
by voidspark | 2025-04-23 22:32:43+00:00
So what? Then it's at 2% now?

It's an insignificant part of their business even if it doubled or tripled in size.

Apple is obviously not "an advertising company" as opposed to Google which has been an advertising company since the beginning.

Apple was founded as a computer company ~50 years ago which sold the Apple I. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Nothing to do with ads. Now 50 years later they are starting to make some extra money on the side from ad revenue.
by adamweld | 2025-04-23 22:33:04+00:00
A recent Ezra Klein Interview[0] mentioned some "AI-Enabled" CAD tools used in China. Does anyone know what tools they might be talking about? I haven't been able to find any open-source tools with similar claims.

>I went with my colleague Keith Bradsher to Zeekr, one of China’s new car companies. We went into the design lab and watched the designer doing a 3D model of one of their new cars, putting it in different contexts — desert, rainforest, beach, different weather conditions.

>And we asked him what software he was using. We thought it was just some traditional CAD design. He said: It’s an open-source A.I. 3D design tool. He said what used to take him three months he now does in three hours.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/15/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...
by IIsi50MHz | 2025-04-23 22:33:52+00:00
Kansas City airport (KCI) was replaced a few years ago. The previous design was three c-shaped terminals, each of which had a curb-to-plane distance that, before 9/11, meant coming or going was very fast. Arriving 15 minutes before takeoff was overkill. Time from deplaning to leaving the airport curb could be 2 minutes. People didn't pass more than one or two shops or restaurants, typically (sometimes none). Even after 9/11, despite public advice to arrive 2 hours in advance, it seemed that 1.5 hours or more was wasted just sitting next to the gate.

But for airlines, I seem to recall servicing KCI was expensive. I think more than once, various airlines left or threatened to leave due to the high fees, which affected ticket prices. Fees which could not be offset by charging vendors the typical enormous rental prices. The new security barriers prevented much of the already limited foot traffic.

DHS also didn't like the proximity to the curb, and threatened to close the airport. A new design was sought (and ended up being partly designed by a friend of mine), and so now the new one follows the typical pattern: funnel everybody into far-too-few security check points (always leaving some unmanned), then into a large concourse with lots of expensive ways to spend money.

Seems that people are more willing to pay airport markup while waiting, than to pay higher ticket prices.