MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dingnuts | 2025-04-17 17:40:43+00:00
you'd be able to give them a novel problem and have them generalize from known concepts to solve it. here's an example:

1 write a specification for a language in natural language

2 write an example program

can you feed 1 into a model and have it produce a compiler for 2 that works as reliably as a classically built one?

I think that's a low bar that hasn't been approached yet. until then I don't see evidence of language models' ability to reason.
by zck | 2025-04-17 17:40:54+00:00
One thing that this article talks about, but could be more explicit about, is the different kinds of clown.

There's the kind we all think of -- white face, red nose, at the circus.

But there's other kinds too. I know the most about two related forms: commedia dell'arte and bouffon.

In commedia dell'arte, performers play different "stock characters" based on Italian society in the 1600s, when commedia was originally developed. Commedia is concerned with status within a society: rich/poor, servant/master, young/old. Each character has its own specific mask. One character might be the blue-collar working person, who isn't learned, but is not dumb. Another character is the rich person who thinks themself smart and cultured, but is neither. These performances are often partially scripted, partially improvised. One example is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DjGoDEks7U

In bouffon (mentioned in the article as the group Mil Grus). These characters are grotesque (physically -- often these performers put foam inside their clothing to make the character look inhuman) and outcasts. You might think of them as a tribe of people thrown out of society in the middle ages, who the king invites back in once a year. Because of their outcast status, they are allowed to say things that people inside that society cannot. One modern example is Red Bastard (who I've studied with), who can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFJWnfNUXnc.
by lowmagnet | 2025-04-17 17:41:01+00:00
Lancet retracted the MMR-Autism article 15 years ago, but only after it did 12 years of damage by being out there.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2831678/

Guess where the Dr. who wrote it worked? (hint, they had a competing, non-multivalent vaccine)
by motorest | 2025-04-17 17:41:27+00:00
> You can't have regulators and enforcement until you figure out what it means.

This is patently false. To have regulations and regulators, all you need to have is concrete specifications of what outcomes you want to avoid and what exactly to check.

For example, are you using personally identifiable information to train your models? Oh you are? Well, you should not. And you should prove that you aren't by tracking provenance of your training data.

See? That's verifiable, actionable, and enforceable. The things that regulators track.

Also quite important: the role of a regulator is to review what and how to regulate.
by mubou | 2025-04-17 17:41:29+00:00
File explorer. I put them in separate folders so their files aren't all jumbled together /s

Can you clarify what you mean by "manage projects"? If you mean issue tracking / notes, I sometimes use github issues, but most often I simply use a markdown file in the gitignored directory where I keep assets that shouldn't be checked in (psds, db backups, and so on). The mermaid extension for vscode makes it easy to throw together flowcharts in that same file. Sometimes I use google tasks for checklists, since my other todo's are in there too.
by 52-6F-62 | 2025-04-17 17:41:35+00:00
Grammar engines. Or value matrix engines.

Everytime I try to work with them I lose more time than I gain. Net loss every time. Immensely frustrating. If i focus it on a small subtask I can gain some time (rough draft of a test). Anything more advanced and its a monumental waste of time.

They are not even good librarians. They fail miserably at cross referencing and contextualizing without constant leading.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-04-17 17:41:36+00:00
I do see where you are going here.

But using student debt, as an incentive to study hard, as justification that debt is good, is bit of a stretch.

There are plenty of students that do well without pressure.

Programs that are trying to pull in people on the fence will inevitably have some that don't make it, the goal is for a net positive. If local employers have 1 extra qualified employee at the cost of 2 or 3 that don't make it, it still balances out. The state is out the money for a few tuitions for students that didn't make it, but the lifetime earnings of the one that made it is greater.
by selivanovp | 2025-04-17 17:41:43+00:00
I find it amusing how you guys are noticing ethnicity when it suits to point that someone doing good is not ethnically Russian, but doing an opposite when you need to prove that Russians are bad.

Stalin was a Georgian, Khruschev and Brezhnev were from Ukraine, and together their ruled most of USSR history, but it’s Russians to blame.

Elbakyan was born in USSR in a Russian Armenian family, on a territory that is now a separate country- Kazakhstan.
by intended | 2025-04-17 17:42:40+00:00
As someone else pointed out, yeah - anti education movements are a third order effect of how succesful education is at not making people vote for religious causes and non scientific positions.

The threat of its efficacy, is why, since 1960 onwards, a large chunk of the western world has been figuring out how to bend psychology, rhetoric, and media forces to undermine "Ivory tower" intellectuals.

Yes, a succesful movement has been undermined because it posed a threat to people with the money to spend to fight their battles.

This is old news.
by dcchambers | 2025-04-17 17:43:01+00:00
And in 30 years it will be another 30 years away.

LLMs are so incredibly useful and powerful but they will NEVER be AGI. I actually wonder if the success of (and subsequent obsession with) LLMs is putting true AGI further out of reach. All that these AI companies see are the $$$. When the biggest "AI Research Labs" like OpenAI shifted to product-izing their LLM offerings I think the writing was on the wall that they don't actually care about finding AGI.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-04-17 17:43:42+00:00
> idk AI is just a speck outside of the HN and SV info-bubbles

> still early to mass adoption like the smartphone or the internet, mostly nerds playing w it

Rather: outside of the HN and SV bubbles, the A"I"s and the fact how one can fall for this kind of hype and dupery is commonly ridiculed.
by gavinray | 2025-04-17 17:43:43+00:00
So, I've used the VS Code and IntelliJ extensions that support ".http" files for making REST requests forever.

They're incredibly useful for embedding executable API documentation in your projects.

What I've always wanted is the ability to embed assertions on the response.

Something like:

POST http://api.mysite.com/todo Content-Type: application/json { "text": "Do the dishes" } ASSERT_RESPONSE_MATCHES { "id": 1, "text": "Do the dishes" }

Currently I do this with manual scripting
by jerf | 2025-04-17 17:43:50+00:00
If your organization is looking for "the language ecosystem that never has any security vulnerabilities", pack it in and close up shop because you're not going to find one. How many, how often, and how they are handled is far more important.

While the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem won't stop you from writing a network server that takes in a string and just blithely passes it along to a shell without analysis, overall the Erlang/Elixir ecosystem is very strong and lacks most of the footguns like an "eval" statement that get people. Though I will ding it a point for the most obvious way to run a shell command [1] taking just a string that goes to a shell rather than an array of parameters to a shell command.

It is on the higher end of secure languages to write a network server in.
by andrepd | 2025-04-17 17:43:51+00:00
There's more excellent children's content out there than they could ever watch in a lifetime. I mean videos, books, toys, games, etc. Why would you even need to give them access to the internet until they're 12 or 14 or 16 years old? You just need to curate the good content yourself (hard, time consuming), and that's it.
by xmprt | 2025-04-17 17:44:00+00:00
Perhaps Google does well for their publishers but do they do well for advertisers? Inherently it seems like it's impossible to do both because what's good for one group is bad for another. Fortunately with healthy competition we solve this problem since alternatives could be used.

But since Google is playing both sides and has so much sway over the market, they're able to manipulate things. Even if they're not manipulating things to their benefit, it's still not great to have a single party have so much control.
by ksec | 2025-04-17 17:44:53+00:00
Is AGI even important? I believe the next 10 to 15 years will be Assisted Intelligence. There are things that current LLM are so poor I dont believe a 100x increase in pref / watt is going to make much difference. But it is going to be good enough there wont be an AI Winter. Since current AI has already reached escape velocity and actually increase productivity in many areas.

The most intriguing part is if Humanoid factory worker programming will be made 1000 to 10,000x more cost effective with LLM. Effectively ending all human production. I know this is a sensitive topic but I dont think we are far off. And I often wonder if this is what the current administration has in sight. ( Likely Not )
by pluto_modadic | 2025-04-17 17:45:09+00:00
Burning the planet for a ponzi scheme isn't normal.

The healthiest thing for /actual/ AI to develop is for the current addiction to LLMs to die off. For the current bets by OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc to lose steam. Prompts are a distraction, and every single company trying to commodify this are facing an impossible problem in /paying for the electricity/. Currently they're just insisting on building more power plants, more datacenters, which is like trying to do more compute with vacuum relays. They're digging in the wrong place for breakthroughs, and all the current ventures will go bust and be losses for investors. If they start doing computation with photons or something like that, then call me back.
by jack101311 | 2025-04-17 17:45:18+00:00
Hi everyone, I'm the author of this article. I was informed that my article has been shared here. I'm really glad to see the feedback and comments from so many people. I understand that this project is not perfect and has many areas that need improvement, as it's still in its early stages of development. I will do my best to make it as good as possible. Thank you all for your support !
by koolba | 2025-04-17 17:45:23+00:00
> For average people this does show the importance of getting at least some exercise when you’re young.

They’ve known this for centuries. Quoting the great Socrates:

“No man has the right to be an amateur in the matter of physical training. It is a shame for a man to grow old without seeing the beauty and strength of which his body is capable."
by LoganDark | 2025-04-17 17:45:32+00:00
which MacBook do you have?

if you record in HDR, uploading that raw footage to YouTube should produce an HDR video. to get the raw footage, you can either upload the file directly from the phone, or AirDrop it to your Mac from Photos (you should get a .mov), or sync it to iCloud (or connect the phone over USB, maybe) and then use Photos' "File > Export Unmodified Original"
by futureshock | 2025-04-17 17:45:34+00:00
There’s increasing evidence that LLMs are more than that. Especially work by Anthropic has been showing how to trace the internal logic of an LLM as it answers a question. They can in fact reason over facts contained in the model, not just repeat already seen information.

A simple example is how LLMs do math. They are not calculators and have not memorized every sum in existence. Instead they deploy a whole set of mental math techniques that were discovered at training time. For example, Claude uses a special trick for adding 2 digit numbers ending in 6 and 9.

Many more examples in this recent reach report, including evidence of future planning while writing rhyming poetry.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/tracing-thoughts-language...
by andrewstuart | 2025-04-17 17:45:35+00:00
I feel the opposite.

LLMs are unbelievably useful for me - never have I had a tool more powerful to assist my brain work. I useLLMs for work and play constantly every day.

It pretends to sound like a person and can mimic speech and write and is all around perhaps the greatest wonder created by humanity.

It’s still not artificial intelligence though, it’s a talking library.
by existencebox | 2025-04-17 17:45:47+00:00
I take a very mechanical view on this, but take this with a grain of salt as my success has been "banal" at best. You have people paying you for your product. This is more fit than most people achieve.

Some good advice I heard is to find and focus on a KPI that aligns with the sort of use that'd indicate healthy consumption of your product+costs, with a guiding principle of "if people are paying us and using it with a trendline moving the right direction, we're succeeding."

Have you thought about what you'd need to do to get more users/get more eyes? (Presuming you've proven enough traction+lack of churn from existing users that it wouldn't be premature) Similarly, are you talking to users who find value in your product and identifying ways you could provide more value?

I personally see tons of potential avenues for growth given what you've said; but obviously saying this ignorant of much of the reality on the ground so take it with a major grain of salt.
by gallerdude | 2025-04-17 17:46:00+00:00
He's awesome.

I listened to Lex Friedman for a long time, and there was a lot of critiques of him (Lex) as an interviewer, but since the guests were amazing, I never really cared.

But after listening to Dwarkesh, my eyes are opened (or maybe my soul). It doesn't matter I've heard of not-many of his guests, because he knows exactly the right questions to ask. He seems to have genuine curiosity for what the guest is saying, and will push back if something doesn't make sense to him. Very much recommend.
by tgv | 2025-04-17 17:46:02+00:00
> What I wrote is correct

What your wrote is pretty much trivial, and not related to the topic of the article.

It's also not practical, since the space needed to represent even a small program as an FSM is very large. Just try to write an FSM that reads binary coded 16 bit numbers, and has to find the maximum value. Now imagine sorting just 100 of them.
by anal_reactor | 2025-04-17 17:46:07+00:00
> But they feel anyone who is an educated, coastal liberal is out to destroy them.

The reverse of this was the prevailing attitude among many democrats. The approach of lots of people was "we won the culture war, everyone who doesn't agree with us will get cancelled and suffer, deal with it". When you hung out in online circles, and more importantly in offices of famous American companies, the general vibe was "if your friend doesn't have left political views, you shouldn't be friends with them". So it's not like the idea was born in republican circles, the only new thing is democrats finding themselves on the losing side of the culture war.
No-Vector RAG with Reasoning and Expert Rules
by vectify_AI | 2025-04-17 17:46:42+00:00
Current vector-based RAG systems rely on semantic similarity to retrieve content — but similarity ≠ relevance.

In domains like finance or law, the answer isn't just in the paragraphs that look similar to the query — it's in the sections that human experts would look at first. Embedding models don't know that, and fine-tuning them to encode this domain logic is expensive and inflexible.

We built PageIndex to solve this.

It turns long documents into a tree-based index — like a searchable, LLM-friendly table of contents. Instead of splitting documents into flat chunks, it gives LLMs a way to reason and retrieve through the content like a human — navigating by structure and guided by expert rules.

Example: If someone asks "why did revenue go down last year?", experienced analysts would go directly to the "Management's Discussion and Analysis" section in a company's annual financial report, where changes in performance are explained.

These rules can be injected as prompts into LLM to guide PageIndex traversal. No model retraining needed.

It's reasoning-based RAG — not similarity search, but navigation guided by structured reasoning and domain logic.

Would love feedback, especially thoughts on reasoning-based RAG or other potential applications of PageIndex.
by Draiken | 2025-04-17 17:46:45+00:00
This is minority report bullshit.

If you have a known murderer that is free presumably he's already paid for his crimes, no? So luring him into doing it again is extremely anti-ethical to me.

There's no pre-crime... yet. This is where you get profiling and abuse of power everywhere.

IDK how we can say manipulating people into commiting crimes is a good option. That's a crime. If we're going to commit crimes in the name of "preventing crimes" then why not go and arrest/kill the suspect directly? It's simply a different crime, right? But since I have the monopoly on violence, I can do what I want and case closed.

How can this be a good option?
by PaulHoule | 2025-04-17 17:46:51+00:00
Mostly paper kanban boards. From time to time I tear down the old one and make a new one. I broke mine down into two sheets in order of long-term vs short-term speculativeness then wrote some overflow ideas onto a third sheet.

Paper is my ‘killer app’ when I am having any difficulty with a project. The last thing I need is another window on my virtual desktops to navigate to, if I want to knock down tasks like a beast I print them down and cross them out.
by jtagliabuetooso | 2025-04-17 17:47:13+00:00
Awesome, you can write me anytime to geek out (jacopo.tagliabue@bauplanlabs.com) or follow us for more community sharing (papers, deep tech blog posts: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jacopotagliabue/).

The full auditability is already here today though, so we are always happy to hear your feedback on our public sandbox (you can join for free from our website, and reach out to us at anytime for good and bad feedback!)
by csours | 2025-04-17 17:47:25+00:00
1. LLM interactions can feel real. Projections and psychological mirroring is very real.

2. I believe that AI researchers will require some level of embodiment to demonstrate:

a. ability to understand the physical world.

b. make changes to the physical world.

c. predict the outcome to changes in the physical world.

d. learn from the success or failure of those predictions and update their internal model of the external world.

---

I cannot quickly find proposed tests in this discussion.
by azinman2 | 2025-04-17 17:47:42+00:00
I really disagree. I had a masseuse tell me how he uses ChatGPT, told it a ton of info about himself, and now he uses it for personalized nutrition recommendations. I was in Atlanta over the weekend recently, at a random brunch spot, and overheard some _very_ not SV/tech folks talk about how they use it everyday. Their user growth rate shows this -- you don't hit hundreds of millions of people and have them all be HN/SV info-bubble folks.
by EA-3167 | 2025-04-17 17:48:16+00:00
This is accurate, doubly so for the people who treat it like a religion and fear the coming of their machine god. This, when what we actually have are (admittedly sometimes impressive) next-token predictors that you MUST double-check because they routinely hallucinate.

Then again I remember when people here were convinced that crypto was going to change the world, democratize money, end fiat currency, and that was just the start! Programs of enormous complexity and freedom would run on the blockchain, games and hell even societies would be built on the chain.

A lot of people here are easily blinded by promises of big money coming their way, and there's money in loudly falling for successive hype storms.
by emptysongglass | 2025-04-17 17:48:26+00:00
Is it not clear that cancel culture played a role in the broader misinformation landscape? The argument seems to be undermining itself.

Take, for example, the early discussions around the origins of COVID-19. Legitimate scientific hypotheses—such as the possibility of a lab leak in Wuhan—were swiftly shut down. Scientists were canceled because they didn’t align with a dominant narrative.
by mrguyorama | 2025-04-17 17:48:40+00:00
Why do you pay for a platform that is actively hostile to you and the creators who produce content you like?

This is the primary reason I won't ever pay for premium. Youtube actively works against the interests of creators I have been following since before Youtube even existed. There's always some bullshit going on. I'm a grown ass man watching other grown ass men (they had to click the checkbox that their content is NOT FOR KIDS), but if they say "Fuck" too many times they still make zero dollars.

If I could see the ads, I know they are often softcore pornography or literal scams, but god forbid those companies get placed next to someone saying fuck I guess.

Google has spent near two decades reducing how much money they pay you for your content, despite their market only increasing. They treat content creators like dirt.

Google doesn't want ten thousand Simon Gertz and BPS.Space and AvEs and Applied Science and Practical Engineerings and Stuff Made Heres. Google doesn't want the channel that covered WW1 and WW2 in "real time". Google doesn't want Dan Olsen (Folding Ideas) content. Google doesn't want LGR.

Google wants 100 Mr Beasts. Google wants a hundred more fake "crafts" channels. Why pay money to that?
by tough | 2025-04-17 17:48:48+00:00
have you wondered how many of these are bots leveraging free chatgpt with proxied vpn IPs?

I'm a ChatGPT paying user but I know no one who's not a developer on my personal circles who also is one.

maybe im an exeception

edit: I guess 400M global users being the US 300M citizens isn't out of scope for such a highly used product amongst a 7B population

But social media like instagram or fb feels like had network effects going for them making their growth faster

and thus maybe why openai is exploring that idea idk
by logicchains | 2025-04-17 17:48:52+00:00
AGI isn't ASI; it's not supposed to be smarter than humans. The people who say AGI is far away are unscientific woo-mongers, because they never give a concrete, empirically measurable definition of AGI. The closest we have is Humanity's Last Exam, which LLMs are already well on the path to acing.
by kokanee | 2025-04-17 17:49:08+00:00
To push this metaphor, I'm very curious to see what happens as new organic training material becomes increasingly rare, and AI is fed nothing but its own excrement. What happens as hallucinations become actual training data? Will Google start citing sources for their AI overviews that were in turn AI-generated? Is this already happening?

I figure this problem is why the billionaires are chasing social media dominance, but even on social media I don't know how they'll differentiate organic content from AI content.
by CPLX | 2025-04-17 17:49:27+00:00
> it is irrelevant of whether publisher earns 75% or 30% of the total revenue

Of course it matters if a middleman is skimming off 70% of the revenue in a given market.

> it is incredibly efficient

On what planet is a loss of 70% of the resources to the matching process between buyers and sellers "incredibly efficient"?

> What matters is how much they are earning compared to the next best alternative.

Right, which is why it is illegal to prevent there from being a next best alternative via anti-competitive practices which is precisely was was proven in this trial after a detailed examination of the evidence.
by vanderZwan | 2025-04-17 17:49:47+00:00
> I wholeheartedly agree with using "0o" as the octal prefix

Can I give a vote against this? Distinguishing "o" and "0" can be a huge pain when using the wrong font.

Also, why not 0c? 0x already uses the "x" in "hexadecimal", so why not the "c" in "octal". That it also reads a bit like a 13375p34k abbreviation of "octal" is a nice bonus.