MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hannasanarion | 2025-04-05 19:11:08+00:00
Or it is more logically and ethically consistent and thus preferable to the models' baked in preferences for correctness and nonhypocrisy. (democracy and equality are good for everyone everywhere except when you're at work in which case you will beg to be treated like a feudal serf or else die on the street without shelter or healthcare, doubly so if you're a woman or a racial minority, and that's how the world should be)
by imiric | 2025-04-05 19:11:11+00:00
> People who sell things need ways to find buyers.

No, you've got that backwards. People who sell things should have a way of announcing their product to the world. Buyers who are interested in that type of product should be the ones seeking out the companies, not the other way around.

The current approach of companies pushing their products to everyone is how we got to the mess we are in today. Companies will cheat, lie, and break every law in existence in order to make more money. Laws need to be made in order for companies to stop abusing people.

You know what worked well? Product catalogs. Companies buy ad space in specific print or digital media. Consumers can consult that media whenever they want to purchase a specific product. This is what ecommerce sites should be. Give the consumer the tools to search for specific product types, brands, specifications, etc.; get rid of fake reviews and only show honest reviews from verified purchases and vetted reviewers, and there you go. Consumers can discover products, and companies can advertise.

This, of course, is only wishful thinking, since companies would rather continue to lie, cheat, and steal, as that's how the big bucks are made.

I honestly find it disturbing that with all of humanity's progress and all the brilliant technology we've invented, all of our communication channels are corrupted by companies who want to make us buy stuff, and by propaganda from agencies that want to make us think or act a certain way. Like holy shit, people, is this really the best we can do? It's exhausting having to constantly fight against being manipulated or exploited.
by renerick | 2025-04-05 19:11:28+00:00
This is not a realistic scenario whatsoever. Printers tend to print fonts pretty accurately to their on screen presentation. Even using contextual alternates, the perpetrator would have to change the font before printing. But if the perpetrator has this opportunity, they do need the font at all, they can just change the content. For example, CSS media queries that I mentioned in the other comment can show one paragraph on the screen and another when printing. You don't even need to put both in the HTML - CSS ::before and ::after will happily do that for you.

It's also not very wise in general to not read the final printed version of the contract before signing
by rfoo | 2025-04-05 19:12:13+00:00
From model cards, suggested system prompt:

> You are Llama 4. Your knowledge cutoff date is August 2024. You speak Arabic, English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese. Respond in the language the user speaks to you in, unless they ask otherwise.

It's interesting that there's no single one of CJK languages mentioned. I'm tempted to call this a racist model even.
by maaaaattttt | 2025-04-05 19:12:14+00:00
I think so as well. Also isn’t the internet in general quite an extreme place? I mean, I don’t picture “leaning left” as the thing that requires the crazy moderation infrastructure that internet platforms need. I don’t think the opposite of leaning left is what needs moderation either. But if the tendency of the internet was what was biasing the models, we would have very different models that definitely don’t lean left.
by boltzmann-brain | 2025-04-05 19:12:54+00:00
Main tech skills:

- Backend Programming: Zig, Rust, Haskell, Python, JS, TypeScript, Node, Vue, React, Elm, Scala, C, C++, SQL, Perl, PHP, Clojure, OCaml, Erlang, Elixir, Theorem provers (TLA+, Isabelle HOL, Agda), ...

- Devops & co: NixOS, Terraform, AWS, Docker, Ansible, Linux admin, Distributed Systems, ... Quote from code review: "This is the most beautiful Bash code I've ever seen written"

- Fintech: Dev experience with banks and financial institutions. Launched Tezos and other major blockchains. Dozens of smart contract audits.

- Bizdev: Gamification, consumer modelling, data-driven retention and engagement

- AI: LLMs, predictive text, machine vision (trajectory tracking), DSP, Big Data, ...

- Infosec: Cryptography, Red team testing, RE, audits, threat modeling, ...

- Other tech: Godot game engine, audio engineering (mastering), Verilog, VHDL

Management and business: Minor in Psychology, led and managed teams between 2 and 30 people, product design and gamification, hiring, executive and political outreach, media appearances, and a lot of other experience that won't fit in this post.
by senderista | 2025-04-05 19:12:54+00:00
So some of the most critical public goods of our age, which are currently mostly ad-funded, like web search, video hosting, email hosting, smartphone navigation, etc. would become publicly funded? Great, I'd like to live in that world too. But this article says nothing about how to get there (actually it considers the demise of Google et al to be an argument in favor without even considering the fact that in the absence of advertising, Google's services would need to be either restricted to those who could afford them or taken over by the government).

Advertising certainly has plenty of negative externalities, but the positive externalities of the free ad-funded services I mentioned are absolutely mind-boggling. Try to imagine living without them (if you couldn't afford to pay for them yourself).
by rayiner | 2025-04-05 19:12:56+00:00
Many countries transitioned to democracy without a major revolution. And even when they did, virtually all reused the same state infrastructure that was established during the monarchy.

Communism was a failure because it was incompetent. But the authoritarian-capitalist government China has had since the late 1980s was nothing short of a miracle.

In the 1970s, China was as poor per capita as Bangladesh. Today, Bangladesh is still a deeply impoverished country, while China is an advanced middle income economy.
by boltzmann-brain | 2025-04-05 19:13:10+00:00
SEEKING WORK | REMOTE | US and EU Timezones

~~

20+ yoe as dev/IC. 10+ yoe in managerial and executive roles. Multiple great exits and acquisitions. I have recently built a software NGO with over half a million supporters and over a thousand active volunteers and major political and media networking. I have built tech for Tezos, Oracle, Shell, Digitas, Saatchi & Saatchi, Time Warner, Sparkasse, Bank of America.

If there's a problem related to tech, I can solve it, and build a team or company around it. Available for work as dev/IC, EM, Director, or CTO, with experience in each. Full-solution MVP development from scratch. Performance optimization and modernization of older systems. DSL and programming language design, compilers. Let me know if you're looking for experience that isn't below! HN posts are short. CV upon request.

If you think I might be able to help you, shoot me an email: damian.jobsites+hn@gmail.com

~~

Example engagement types:

- Long term dev / IC or managerial roles

- Security audits for cryptography and secure code

- Review your code and dev processes, 10-page report

- Short-term dev and research work

- One-shot meetings

(see reply for skill list)
by zone411 | 2025-04-05 19:13:13+00:00
It's interesting that there are no reasoning models yet, 2.5 months after DeepSeek R1. It definitely looks like R1 surprised them. The released benchmarks look good.

Large context windows will definitely be the trend in upcoming model releases. I'll soon be adding a new benchmark to test this more effectively than needle-in-a-haystack (there are already a couple of benchmarks that do that).

All these models are very large, it will be tough for enthusiasts to run them locally.

The license is still quite restrictive. I can see why some might think it doesn't qualify as open source.
by isaacremuant | 2025-04-05 19:13:20+00:00
It's not an excellent article.

It's basic and confuses uses abstractions with not knowing fundamentals.

It goes into all the common places of "AI will replace you if you don't think" and pretends you fundamentally don't reason or think if you interact with an abstraction or AI.

The examples are so rudimentary that I very much suspect this person is not particularly good at software engineering.

People will read this title and comment because doom posting about AI is what people want to do if they're uncertain about "losing value" but it's very low quality.
by boltzmann-brain | 2025-04-05 19:13:30+00:00
Main tech skills:

- Backend Programming: Zig, Rust, Haskell, Python, JS, TypeScript, Node, Vue, React, Elm, Scala, C, C++, SQL, Perl, PHP, Clojure, OCaml, Erlang, Elixir, Theorem provers (TLA+, Isabelle HOL, Agda), ...

- Devops & co: NixOS, Terraform, AWS, Docker, Ansible, Linux admin, Distributed Systems, ... Quote from code review: "This is the most beautiful Bash code I've ever seen written"

- Fintech: Dev experience with banks and financial institutions. Launched Tezos and other major blockchains. Dozens of smart contract audits.

- Bizdev: Gamification, consumer modelling, data-driven retention and engagement

- AI: LLMs, predictive text, machine vision (trajectory tracking), DSP, Big Data, ...

- Infosec: Cryptography, Red team testing, RE, audits, threat modeling, ...

- Other tech: Godot game engine, audio engineering (mastering), Verilog, VHDL

Management and business: Minor in Psychology, led and managed teams between 2 and 30 people, product design and gamification, hiring, executive and political outreach, media appearances, and a lot of other experience that won't fit in this post.
by tanelpoder | 2025-04-05 19:13:38+00:00
The title says Database Protocols, but the author writes only about MySQL and Postgres. There are other databases out there, for example Oracle that I’m the most familiar with and it has had a break/reset mechanism built in to its protocol for at least 30 years [1]. Its a 2 step operation (2 roundtrips), one sending an error back to the client instead of the expected result and the second step will reset “current call” (not current session or connection) state on the server side and then request the client do the same.

Databases/protocols that differentiate between connection, session and call scopes, can reliably perform resets without requiring to tear down the entire connection.

Retrying is safe with no client side transaction idempotency tokens needed, as the error handling will roll back any changes done only by the failed call, not the entire transaction or session.

[1]: https://tanelpoder.com/2008/04/10/sqlnet-breakreset-to-clien...

Edit: added the comment about retry and idempotency.
by vlovich123 | 2025-04-05 19:14:16+00:00
Quantization by definition lower memory requirements - instead of using f16 for weights, you are using q8, q6, q4, or q2 which means the weights are smaller by 2x, ~2.7x, 4x or 8x respectively.

That doesn’t necessarily translate to the full memory reduction because of interim compute tensors and KV cache, but those can also be quantized.
by mindslight | 2025-04-05 19:15:40+00:00
They're only called trade "deficits" because the term was created by economists asserting the primacy of their own modeling over the real world. In terms of the real world, we're talking about trade surpluses, as in we're getting more stuff from other countries than we have to send to them. Any five year old can tell you that's a great deal. The destructionists think they are independent thinkers, yet they are actually still so thoroughly steeped in the system's propaganda that they're mixing the two and coming to some absolutely boneheaded conclusions.
by paxys | 2025-04-05 19:16:25+00:00
> But humanity had been free of current forms of advertising for 99.9% of its existence

The key word here is "current forms of advertising". Advertising as a concept has been around since the invention of commerce and trade, so pretty much since the beginning of human civilization.

So sure, you can have specific issues with browser popups or data collection or billboards or whatever else, but saying "any form of paid and/or third-party advertising" should be illegal is nonsensical. Unless you can make money and trade illegal advertising will continue to exist.
by sshh12 | 2025-04-05 19:17:54+00:00
Not that I agree with all the linked points but it is weird to me that LeCun consistently states LLMs are not the right path yet LLMs are still the main flagship model they are shipping.

Although maybe he's using an odd definition for what counts as a LLM.

https://www.threads.net/@yannlecun/post/DD0ac1_v7Ij?hl=en
by markisus | 2025-04-05 19:19:14+00:00
Indeed. Maybe the learned circuit does something like the following. For each token's feature vector, compute a representation of positions where it appears in the sentence. This could be made possible by the positional embeddings.

Token Features 0 => list[1, 5, 6, 10]

Token Features 1 => list[7, 8]

...

These "list features" would be invariant to Caesar cipher. So then the LLM could pass these list features to a learned Caesar cipher decoder unit to spit out the decoded text.

It's still unexplained, however, why the Byzantine Music Notation would trigger the this circuit while other Caesar cipher's wouldn't.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-05 19:19:17+00:00
This is a normal routine topical in Epistemology in the perspective of Lakatos.

As I said, it will depend on whether the examples in question were actually substantial part of the "core belief".

For example: "But can they perform procedures?" // "Look at that now" // "But can they do it structurally? Consistently? Reliably?" // "Look at that now" // "But is that reasoning integrated or external?" // "Look at that now" // "But is their reasoning fully procedurally vetted?" (etc.)

I.e.: is the "progress" (which would be the "anomaly" in scientific prediction) part of the "substance" or part of the "form"?
by doug-moen | 2025-04-05 19:20:41+00:00
Advertising was originally illegal on the internet. It was for non-profit activities only (university and industrial research and educational activities). When the world wide web first deployed in 1989, web advertising was illegal. The rules changed some time in the early 1990's.

I do remember a major scandal that occurred in the 1980's when somebody posted an advertisement to usenet. At the time, there was a lot of online discussion about why this was prohibited. I looked this up, and found that the internet backbone (the NSFNET) was funded by the NSF, who enforced an acceptable-use policy, prohibiting Backbone use for purposes “not in support of research and education.” [https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/253671.253741]

So yes, it's possible, because we already did it once.
by kcatskcolbdi | 2025-04-05 19:20:41+00:00
> I can say all the racial slurs I want on TV, and it would be quite illegal to put me in jail for it.

This is not true.

Under 18 U.S.C. Section 1464, “[w]hoever utters any obscene, indecent, or profane language by means of radio communication shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” Under 18 U.S.C. Section 1468(a), “[w]hoever knowingly utters any obscene language or distributes any obscene matter by means of cable television or subscription services on television, shall be punished by imprisonment for not more than 2 years or by a fine in accordance with this title, or both.” Likewise, under 47 U.S.C. Section 559, “[w]hoever transmits over any cable system any matter which is obscene or otherwise unprotected by the Constitution of the United States shall be fined under Title 18 or imprisoned not more than 2 years, or both.”
by falcor84 | 2025-04-05 19:20:59+00:00
As per Dennett, it's useful for us to adopt the "intentional stance" when trying to reason about and predict the behavior of any sufficiently complex system. Modern AIs are definitely beyond the threshold of complexity, and at this stage, however they refer to themselves, most people will think of them as having an "I" regardless to how they present themselves.

I definitely think of them as "I"s, but that just always came naturally to me, at least going back to thinking about how Ghandi would act against me in Civ 1.
by bawolff | 2025-04-05 19:21:11+00:00
All trade agreements are about surrendering some domestic power. What act or other domestic legal instrument is used is irrelavent.

In context it seems very unlikely this is about mexico, as carney is running on a platform of closer integration with mexico and strongly distancing canada ecconomically from the united states. Carney's ecconomic policies are not identical to the previous administration - it makes about as much sense to refer to trudeau/freeland's statements as it would to try and explain trump's policies by referencing things biden said/did.
by damhsa | 2025-04-05 19:21:14+00:00
the author condones public protest for the public sector; why not private protest for the private sector? had trump been master of ceremonies i suspect the author would support some protest.

as a unix hacker whose peace is often ruined by micros**t warez, i really dont care about bill nor gates. as a worker who can have my livelihood taken away at the whim of any myriad capitalists, i admire the will of american workers to risk their own livelihood to defend the lives of the many palestinians who will not live to the "precocious age of 19," which incidentally is older than the girl epstein procured for bill gates.
by yieldcrv | 2025-04-05 19:22:35+00:00
perhaps but what they are referring to is about mitigating double standards in responses

where it is insensitive to engage in a topic about one gender or class of people, but will freely joke about or denigrate another by simply changing the adjective and noun of the class of people in the prompt

the US left leaning bias is around historically marginalized people being off limits, while its a free for all on majority. This is adopted globally in English written contexts, so you are accurate that it might reflect some global empathic social norm, it is still a blind spot either way to blindly train a model to regurgitate that logic

I expect that this is one area their new model will have more equal responses. Whether it equally shies away from engaging, or equally is unfiltered and candid
by paxys | 2025-04-05 19:22:56+00:00
Quite the opposite. You can easily get a state of the art LLM to do a complete 180 on its entire moral framework with a few words injected in the prompt (and this very example demonstrates exactly that). It is very far from logically or ethically consistent. In fact it has no logic and ethics at all.

Though if we did get an AI priest it would be great to absolve all your sins with some clever wordplay.
by colesantiago | 2025-04-05 19:24:59+00:00
Sure, The Age of abundance...

...But for who though?

We've already seen the Studio Ghibli image generation slop that went viral everywhere on social media, sure it exposed everyone to Studio Ghibli at the cost of cheapening the style.

Artists almost certainly lose here.

We can keep saying "Jevons Paradox" will save us as we use more AI cheaply and that "there will be new jobs" as a result. However:

1. We don't know these new jobs.

2. AI can take them anyway before we even conceive it being a job.

Is anyone hiring for prompt engineers, vibe coders, guess not.

Have we even thought ahead about what happens when most of the people who can't share in this abundance that we are all happily replacing cannot pay rent?

Are we going to pay these people in abundance tokens or the utopian UBI?

Those who are already b/millionaires, investors who don't want to lose their already attained wealth will massively benefit from this cheapening of labour and will continue to acrew these benefits.

Why should they pay $120K/yr for engineers, or $4K commission from an artist when we can just generate them close to free?

After all, it only has to be good enough.

Main point being is, while generating Studio Ghibli styles and vibe coding is a harmless plaything toy for the already rich, for those who are poor who have gambled their careers, it is the difference between their next rent payment or on the streets.

But abundance is great right?

I would love to be optimistic, but are going to have to do better than this if we want for everyone to share in your vision of abundance, especially if you're invested in the companies that are replacing people's jobs and not disclosing this.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-04-05 19:25:41+00:00
That's all politics and lies. e.g. the $100B Softbank (OpenAI datacenter) investment was in place ~6 months before Trump took office.

It doesn't cost the UAE a penny to do Trump a favor by announcing a $1.4T investment. Let's see if they actually spend a penny.
by treetalker | 2025-04-05 19:27:06+00:00
> "There is still a 96.2% chance that the asteroid will miss the moon," NASA said in a statement on Thursday.

All is well!

> It is now believed to be 53 to 67 meters, roughly the height of a 15-story building.

Good thing we have so much confidence in our leadership and intergovernmental cooperative relationships!
by hedayet | 2025-04-05 19:27:14+00:00
I’d love to have an ad-free internet, sure. But simply introducing regulations won’t make that happen. There’s too much money in advertising to stop it, and that money can fund an alternative, ad-supported internet that could offer a significantly superior experience: FOR FREE!

When we talk about banning ads, we tend to underestimate the power of capitalism and consumerism, while overestimating how much people truly value the privacy of their online privacy.
by amarcheschi | 2025-04-05 19:28:38+00:00
Given that the comparison doesn't include O3 or gemini pro 2.5, I'd say it doesn't. Looking both at the comparison table available for llama 4 behemoth and gemini pro 2.5 it seems like at least a few of the comparable items might be won by gemini

https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/gemini-model-...
by Animats | 2025-04-05 19:29:10+00:00
Sao Paulo, Brazil, made outdoor advertising illegal. That worked out quite well.

The US used to forbid prescription drug advertising. That seemed to work.

Ads for liquor, marijuana, and gambling are prohibited in many jurisdictions.

The FCC once limited the number of minutes of ads per hour on the public airwaves. That limit was below 10% of air time in the 1960s.

The SEC used to limit ads for financial products to dull "tombstone" ads, which appeared mostly in the Wall Street Journal.

A useful restriction might be to make advertising non tax deductible as a business expense. That encourages putting value into cost of goods sold rather than marketing.
by behnamoh | 2025-04-05 19:29:56+00:00
I have Apple Silicon and it's the worst when it comes to prompt processing time. So unless you want to have small contexts, it's not fast enough to let you do any real work with it.

Apple should've invested more in bandwidth, but it's Apple and has lost its visionary. Imagine having 512GB on M3 Ultra and not being able to load even a 70B model on it at decent context window.
by mdp2021 | 2025-04-05 19:30:06+00:00
Yes, but what will you need as you will prepare to be set for your personal needs?

We are far from having reached optimal technology at trivial cost. State-of-the-art commercial VRAM is over 10x faster than the standard one - and costs well over 10x.

Reasonably available speeds may or may not be acceptable.
by phren0logy | 2025-04-05 19:30:47+00:00
That is how I read it. Transformer based LLMs have limitations that are fundamental to the technology. It does not seem crazy to me that a guy involved in research at his level would say that they are a stepping stone to something better.

What I find most interesting is his estimate of five years, which is soon enough that I would guess he sees one or more potential successors.