MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by timr | 2025-04-14 02:31:22+00:00
> Solving hard math problems requires understanding the structure of complex mathematical reasoning. No animal is known to be capable of that.

Except, it doesn't. Maybe some math problems do -- or maybe all of them do, when the text isn't in the training set -- but it turns out that most problems can be solved by a machine that regurgitates text, randomly, from all the math problems ever written down.

One of the ways that this debate ends in a boring cul-de-sac is that people leap to conclusions about the meaning of the challenges that they're using to define intelligence. "The problem has only been solved by humans before", they exclaim, "therefore, the solution of the problem by machine is a demonstration of human intelligence!"

We know from first principles what transformer architectures are doing. If the problem can be solved within the constraints of that simple architecture, then by definition, the problem is insufficient to define the limits of capability of a more complex system. It's very tempting to instead conclude that the system is demonstrating mysterious voodoo emergent behavior, but that's a bit like concluding that the magician really did saw the girl in half.
by wavewrangler | 2025-04-14 02:32:09+00:00
You know how certain professions are known for attracting certain pathologies? CEOs/narcissism, car salesman/ lmachiavellianidm and surgeons/God? Reddit moderator/d-bag is not exempt from that phenomenon and for reasons unknown to me, because it’s volunteer (Ok, I can’t say 100%, but mostly it’s volunteer) seems to be some kind of mental illness XP multiplier attractant for the role. Perhaps it empowers people because they’re giving so much of their lives to their own perceived cause, that no one asked for. But there are a lot of good, great even, mods out there. Surely. But anyhow, I’m going back to irc.
by WorldPeas | 2025-04-14 02:32:27+00:00
Just a trick out there for the pram-frusturated, on my very own G4 pinstripe I was able to get it working without a (correct) battery, instead alligator-clipping on a pack of 3 triple a batteries. Worked like a charm (Connecting three AAA batteries in series [1.5V + 1.5V + 1.5V] provides a total of 4.5V, slightly exceeding the required 3.6V but it did work, and for a while). RIP if you want to revive a TIbook battery though.
by arthurcolle | 2025-04-14 02:32:40+00:00
It is an API. You can implement all this stuff from scratch with raw requests library in python if you want. Its the idea of a standard around information interchange, specifically geared around agentic experiences like claude code, (tools like aider, previously, that are much worse) - its like a FastAPI web app framework around building stuff that can helps LLMs and VLMs and model wrapped software in ways that can speak over the network.

Basically like Rails-for-Skynet

I'm building this: https://github.com/arthurcolle/fortitude
by jakelazaroff | 2025-04-14 02:34:03+00:00
> car ownership remains high in the US, so for personal travel, the independence of driving would still outcompete rail.

I mean, this is the catch-22 that prevents a lot of public transit projects from being built. Car ownership is high largely because in most places there is no viable public transit. Then people oppose building public transit because car ownership is high!
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-14 02:34:15+00:00
It’s a basic lack of empathy. Many founders do have the privilege of choosing opportunities and seemingly cant or are unwilling to relate to people just working with integrity and sometimes being fulfilled by their choice of trade, without needing to be married to someone else’s idea and cause.

Also most founders ideas aren't unique and there is often a tone deafness there. Employees with experience have already seen their idea even if it was in a prior cycle.
by doktorhladnjak | 2025-04-14 02:34:52+00:00
This is not true at all. It only has to do with if you have "substantial risk of forfeiture". If they are your shares to own forever, the IRS considers receiving them taxable. This is why double trigger RSUs have expiration dates. It's possible they never become liquid. Therefore they're not your property yet. Therefore you don't owe tax until they are. Or they expire worthless someday, and you don't owe anything.
by colonial | 2025-04-14 02:35:17+00:00
I've actually been pleasantly surprised by how well most Linux stacks work in resource constrained environments.

I have a first-generation Framework - the ones with the shitty Intel CPUs that don't support proper S3 sleep, only the awful "modern standby" - and I often throttle the clock to 400 MHz to save battery. GNOME's performance doesn't degrade at all; the only place it feels "un-snappy" is when starting heavier apps.
by WorldPeas | 2025-04-14 02:35:42+00:00
I am prone to defend them, but they do it in a sensical way (most of the time), I plugged in a G3 whose hard drive was last written to when I was playing hopscotch and when I connected it to wifi it had an official update patch ready for me. They aren't perfect but how many other companies do that. I'd argue that their unflinchingness to move on hardware-wise, and long software support is what gave them success.
by hattmall | 2025-04-14 02:37:15+00:00
I would absolutely get that same feeling from reddit. But like do you not interact in the actual world? Trump would have a rally and areas 45 minutes away are backed up with traffic for 8 hours. Kamala had one and you can't even reliably figure out how to get tickets and other than motorcade closures traffic is nothing.

So much anti-Kamala and pro-Trump stuff in the communities that are supposed to be strong for her.

That Kamala did as well as she did was really shocking to me. I mean it wasn't close, but Kamala couldn't even make past the very first debate in 2020 and her list of accomplishments is basically nothing. I never met anyone in real life with an actual compelling or supportive argument for her. At best it was "she's not Trump".

Taking Biden out and having no primary is probably the worst thing Democrats could have done.
by gnabgib | 2025-04-14 02:38:11+00:00
https://archive.is/X6dpP

Related:

Singapore: Right to own a car costs $76,000. And that doesn't include the car (63 points, 2 years ago, 139 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37779018

Singapore to Stop Adding Cars in February 2018 (108 points, 2017, 76 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15536481
by choppaface | 2025-04-14 02:38:19+00:00
A candidate wants a _competitive_ offer. While stock is almost impossible to compare across offers, candidates can at least stack-rank the company’s funding and check to see how the proffered percentage compares to the mean for the funding round. So if a company has high-percentile funding, and gives a high-percentile equity fraction, it’s a good sign to the candidate. But of course, the company could be WeWork, or even OpenAI could get risky if the tender offers stop (which will happen when/if the market crashes).

At the end of the day, it means a lot to the candidate if the company _wants to compete_ for a hire, especially in the current economy (layoff-friendly and SWE saturated, especially versus 10 years ago). A story like “your options could be worth $XXX in 4 years” I hope is not seen as competitive today.
by inopinatus | 2025-04-14 02:38:21+00:00
> I don't exactly know what it means to be conservative

That could undoubtedly lead to misapprehension. As the GP indicated, and as the word itself means, it references systemic stability and self-preservation behaviour. Reciprocally, however, the obligation to be liberal absolutely does not mean absolving faulty inputs of their flaws. For example, it would not excuse a dud response to an SSH handshake like trying to negotiate RC4. Both Steve Crocker and Eric Allman have been at pains to unpack the understanding of robustness, forgiveness, and format canonicalisation in security context, and they're hardly wrong. It's also why I'm particularly an advocate of the "do", not the "send", formulation. This is a much more systemic and contextual verb in its consequences for implementatation.

> staying away from generating inputs for other programs that exercise dark corner cases

This is exactly the kind of focus-solely-on-the-wire misdirection that I identified above as a common misinterpretation. Conforming to the most precise and unambiguous interpretation of a protocol, if there is one, in regards to what an implementation puts on the wire, can most certainly be a part of that, but that isn't always what being conservative looks like, and processing is equally if not more important.

The introduction of Explicit Congestion Notification (ECN) aka RFC 3168 (2001) springs to mind. RFC 791 (1981) defined bits 14 & 15 of the IPv4 header as "reserved for future use" and diagrammatically gave them as zero. RFC 1349 (Type of Service, 1992, now obsoleted) named them "MBZ" (Must Be Zero) bits but gave them to be otherwise ignored. RFC 2474 (DSCP, 1998) did much the same with what it termed the "Currently Unused field". When ECN was introduced, making use of those bits as a supposedly backwards-compatible congestion signalling mechanism, we discovered a significant proportion of IP implementations aboard endpoints, routers, and middleboxes were rejecting (by discard or reset) datagrams with nonzero values in those bits. Consequently, ECN has taken two decades to fully enable, and this is where both sides of the principle prove their joint and inseparable necessity; to this day many ECN-aware TCP/IP stacks are passive, stochastic, or incremental with their advertisement of ECN, and equally forgiving if the bits coming back don't conform, because an implementation that resets a connection under the circumstances where the developer comprehends the impedance mismatch would be absurd. Thus fulfilling both sides of the maxim in order to promote systemic stability and practical availability and giving ECN a path to the widespread interoperability it has today.

The exposition on page 13 of RFC 1122 (Requirements for Internet Hosts, 1989) broadly anticipated this entire scenario, even though the same section misquotes Postel (or, rather, uses the "send" restatement that I find too reductive).

The statement of the robustness principle is an integrated whole. A partial reading is, perhaps ironically, nonconformant; as with Popper's paradox of tolerance, one thing it cannot be liberal about is itself.
by panny | 2025-04-14 02:39:49+00:00
You're not going to drive 18 hours straight. It would be wildly dangerous for you to try as you will fall asleep at the wheel. Even if you tried it, you're going to have to make stops for gas, bathroom, and to eat, which will push the trip beyond one day. Which means you're going to have to get at least one hotel room along the way (more expense and time). And, you're assuming perfect traffic conditions, which doesn't exist, we all know.

You can go to the bathroom on the train. You can sleep on the train. You can eat on the train. Which means the 28 hours is the total time and the $175 is total price. Avg gas price is 3.37/gal. (https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_gas_price) Avg new car milage is 25 mpg, 52*3.37 is ... $175. Same as the train fare, but that's just the gas.

Taking the car is just dangerous and miserable IMO. Train wins.
by theamk | 2025-04-14 02:40:39+00:00
The mechanical watches are not open source at all - most (all?) of them do not come with engineering drawings nor with list of materials.

Even if you have a watch in front of you, it does not mean you can create a copy of it without a lot of work - you need to measure every gear, guess the materials used (how stiff should this spring be?), and re-draw mainplate and dial.

Compare to things like old electronics, which came with full schematics, service manual and sometimes even debugging guide.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-04-14 02:41:56+00:00
Presumably STDIO depends on the local AuthN/PAM that enabled the user space IO to begin with? I suspect what people are concerned about is the authorization of the LLM to the agent and its data rather than authN. AuthN in stdio would be the user that started the processes, or went through some AuthN chain allowing stdio to forward (I.e., ssh, sudo, etc). Am I missing something?
Show HN: Nissan's Leaf app doesn't have a home screen widget so I made my own
by kcon | 2025-04-14 02:42:27+00:00
Nissan's official mobile app for their LEAF electric car doesn't have a widget for quickly checking the car's battery charge status on your phone's home screen, so for a fun side project I decided to make my own using free tools like GitHub Actions, Appium, Tailscale, and Apple Shortcuts.
by jmclnx | 2025-04-14 02:43:40+00:00
Depends on distro

OpenBSD uses it. So off to /opt

NetBSD I use it for my items, no need for /opt

Linux I use /opt for my items because some distros throw items there or messes around with /usr/local. Also some proporatary packages I used at work on RHEL tosses items there.
by LeFantome | 2025-04-14 02:44:54+00:00
The incentives are very different (or used to be).

Microsoft was selling software and needed that software to work. Making it work in as much hardware as possible was a good thing.

Apple was selling hardware and needed customers to upgrade that hardware over time.

Microsoft sells hardware now too, and cares more about the cloud. So, they are not so much about deep compatibility anymore.
by hibikir | 2025-04-14 02:45:44+00:00
When the founders still control the board, in practice the buying company understands that what makes the acquisition work is that said founders end up happy, and that the outcomes for your typical employee can be sacrificed to the edge of what the law allows.

Maybe there's management carve-outs. Maybe the total value of the acquisition is lower, but as part of the negotiation, there are great transaction bonuses, or retention bonuses. The investors with preferred shares still get their liquidation preferences, but the common stock is worth a pittance. Maybe instead of an acquisition, some of this is turned into an asset sale, or there's some considerations for founders that involve very friendly rollover equity. Maybe the founders add a new kind of stock, or create a new legal entity as part of the acquisition that does... "interesting" things. An inventive legal team cannot do miracles, can make sure that the employees feel robbed either way.

The acquirer, the founders and the VCs with the biggest share will get what they want, and come up with something neither will challenge. So it can be down to just the workers to pool together and decide to sue for violation of fiduciary duty, which might not be fast or easy to prove. You aren't in the room where it happens, but everyone else is.
by chongli | 2025-04-14 02:46:10+00:00
There's nothing inherent to the Chinese Room thought experiment that prohibits the operator inside from using a random number source combined with an arbitrarily sophisticated sequence of lookup tables to produce "stochastic parrot" behaviour. Anyone who has played as a Dungeon Master in D&D has used dice and tables for this.

Similarly for feedback. All the operator needs to do is log each input in a file marked for that user and then when new input arrives the old input is used as context in the lookup table. Ultimately, arbitrarily sophisticated intelligent behaviour can be produced without the operator ever having any understanding of it.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-04-14 02:47:22+00:00
Linux desktops certainly handle low-resource environments well, particularly compared to Windows, but even so it has some omnipresent elevated latency relative to late 90s/early 00s commercial operating systems, which can be felt even on powerful hardware.

It’s hardly a dealbreaker and not even really a problem (which is probably why it’s still there) but making software instantaneous does wonders for improving how it feels to use.
by agentultra | 2025-04-14 02:48:10+00:00
The conclusion goes into that glassy-eyed realm of, “what if we’re no better than the algorithm?”

Problem is, we don’t even know what makes us think. So you can jump to any conclusion and nobody could really tell if you’re wrong.

We do know how transformers and layers work. They’re algorithms that crunch numbers. A great deal of numbers. And we can use the training set to generate plausible outputs given some input. Yes, stochastic parrot is a reduction of all the technical sophistication in LLMs. But it’s not entirely baseless. At the end of the day it is copying what’s in the training data. In a very clever way.

However, resist the temptation to believe we understand human brains and human thought. And resist the temptation to anthropomorphize algorithms. It’s data and patterns.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-04-14 02:48:22+00:00
can you imagine saying something like > The fradlis language encourages your average reader to think of essays as syntax [instead of content]. and thinking it reflects well on the language

A reciprocating saw[0] is a great tool to have. It can be used to manipulate drywall, cut holes in various material, and generally allow "freehand cutting."

But it is not the right tool for making measured, repeatable, cuts. It is not the right tool for making perfect right-angle cuts, such as what is needed for framing walls.

In other words, use the right tool for the job.

If a problem is not best expressed with an AST mindset, LISP might not be the right tool for that job. But this is a statement about the job, not about the tool.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocating_saw
by robocat | 2025-04-14 02:48:40+00:00
A core idea of Richard Dawkins's second book “The extended phenotype” is that genes can also select for anything affecting the environment of the organism - i.e. genes for characteristics/behaviours that are external to the organism itself.

So there could be a gene selecting for getting watered by humans (e.g. via wilting or colour).

This can also create a connection between genes and memes e.g. a new flower characteristic could be genetic but affect popular memetic choice.

The concept is hard to grok & explain, so beware that there's a good chance I've misunderstood and mistranslated the idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extended_Phenotype#Summary
Ask HN: How do I handle that my AI SaaS idea can be copied and out-executed?
by _DeadFred_ | 2025-04-14 02:49:01+00:00
I have an AI SaaS concept, but realistically once I launch someone with more resources and a bigger team could copy it and out-execute me. I'm solo, so I can't compete on scale. How do others in this position deal with that? Is it just about moving fast, building a community, and hoping to stay ahead?
by p_ing | 2025-04-14 02:49:30+00:00
There's no reason today's macOS couldn't support a Classic environment, like the early releases of OS X. There are a lot of support costs surrounding such an environment, so I don't blame Apple for dropping it.

It supports x86 emulation, for now.

I believe Windows has seen more architectures than Mac OS Classic and OS X combined.

Windows 3rd party software often drops support because Microsoft doesn't support the OS. It could be the desire to use new APIs that aren't included in 7/8 (or soon to be 10), but it's hard to support an operating system as an app vendor that the OS vendor doesn't support.

I always liked VMware's statement that they would support NT4 and above -- like, no you can't.
by pierotofy | 2025-04-14 02:50:21+00:00
The inference process via ONNX (where most of the CPU time is spent) is multi-threaded. I briefly explored adding multiprocess capabilities for the tiling/downsampling/result merging parts of the codebase, but the improvements were marginal with a trivial implementation, so I didn't explore further (although I'm sure it could be improved).
by magicalhippo | 2025-04-14 02:50:23+00:00
A nice, comprehensive yet accessible blog post about it can be found here[1], got submitted earlier[2] but didn't gain traction.

[1]: https://aaronparecki.com/2025/04/03/15/oauth-for-model-conte...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43620496
by gwern | 2025-04-14 02:50:26+00:00
It was not 'strictly philosophical' in the way some things like the Chinese Room argument are; in Chinese Room, it's stipulated that the Room is pragmatically capable of responding like a native Chinese speaker (it is somehow implemented super-fast and can chat in Mandarin with you and pass a Mandarin Turing Test).

However, the stochastic parrot arguments (and Gary Marcus in many of his writings) made specific, unambiguous empirical predictions about how LLMs would never be able to do many things, such as 'add numbers'. For example, in the original Bender & Koller 2020 paper "Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data" (which lays out the core ideas which are the justification for the 2021 paper that actually introduced the rhetoric of 'stochastic parrot') made many clear, falsifiable statements about what LLMs would never be able to do; here's one of them: https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf#page=14

> To get a sense of how existing LMs might do at such a task, we let GPT-2 complete the simple arithmetic problem 'Three plus five equals'. The five responses below, created in the same way as above, show that this problem is beyond the current capability of GPT-2, and, we would argue, any pure LM.

One could say many things about this claim, but not that it is a 'strictly philosophical one'.
Ask HN: How are you storing your personal Git repos?
by jasonm23 | 2025-04-14 02:51:12+00:00
I am, as I'm sure many of you are, not confident in the integrity of Github, BitBucket etc. when it comes to hosting git repos, in the long term.

Censorship, or incompetence could lead to my work being zapped for any number of reasons.

During last year, I hosted all my repos on a local machine via Gitea, which then pushes commits on to Github where I keep my repos publicly.

I'm sure my paranoia is fairly mid among the community, but I wonder what are you doing about your open source work and how do you store your repos?

And is my concern warranted?
by pseudo0 | 2025-04-14 02:51:23+00:00
My family used to do a very similar distance for summer road trips every year, and we always did it in a single day. Just pack the car the night before, leave early, and swap drivers every few hours when you stop for food or gas. The benefit is that it's way cheaper than five plane tickets or train tickets, and you have an entire car to fill up with stuff.

Like I said the train would probably work better for a solo traveller, but then why not fly? It's crazy to spend 28+ hours on a train when a plane ticket is around the same cost and 2 hours.
by throw310822 | 2025-04-14 02:51:37+00:00
I'm not sure I get it too. I get the idea of a standard api to connect one or more external resources providers to an llm (each exposing tools + state). Then I need one single standard client-side connector to allow the llm to talk to those external resources- basically something to take care of the network calls or other forms of i/o in my local (llm-side) environment. Is that it?
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-14 02:53:33+00:00
By accepting that you only need enough subscribers to support your lifestyle.

Forget the billion dollar capital infusion and exit.

Aim to get a couple thousand subscribers paying $8/month and its $24,000/mo

what do you really need? be honest. sell the business to someone at a 10x multiple which means 10 years of $24,000/months at once.

launch multiple passive and SaaS businesses.