MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by alganet | 2025-04-20 15:11:39+00:00
Primates do display acquired learning. Like the knowledge to hunt ants with sticks. A non innate ability that requires planning and is passed along to members of the same social group.

It has been reported that some eagles and hawks spread fire to drive out prey from dense vegetation. Whether that is learned behavior and planning for the future, a previously undiscovered innate behavior, or just a myth, depends on results of further research.

Whales wearing salmon hats is a story that, if happens to be true, would also be a non-innate behavior, whose purpose we don't know, that could point to something close to what you described.

Humans are different, I cannot disagree.

My play was to challenge our assumptions of what that perceived distance from humans to animals is consisted of.

We can come up with increasingly more convoluted ways of defining what we are. Animals can't. Maybe that is our innate ability.
by firesteelrain | 2025-04-20 15:13:07+00:00
Windsurf/Codeium has an enterprise version that can be used by corporations to provide AI assisted coding environments using their own HW stack (non cloud). This is beneficial for privacy and proprietary reasons especially if your data cannot be exfiltrated off premises. The hardware recommended to run Codeium is a lot cheaper than if you were to have 700 developers generate tokens. This model has the chance to generate many paying customers. Whether that has a $40b market cap is unclear
by gwern | 2025-04-20 15:13:50+00:00
What fancy things? There's not a single equation in the whole thing. (I don't think this is even using Computer Modern, is it? It looks like a considerably thicker serif, and some of the characters like the lower-case 'g' look different.) Or are you referring to 'having 4 short, simple footnotes' as 'fancy' now? And also the graph makes perfect sense and tracks my own impression of RL history, what are you talking about?
by NiloCK | 2025-04-20 15:14:18+00:00
Slightly shameless, but easier than typing a longer reply.

https://www.paritybits.me/think-toggles-are-dumb/

https://nilock.github.io/autothink/

LLMs with broad contextual capabilities shouldn't need to be guided in this manor. Claude can tell a trivial task from a complex one just as easily as I can, and should self-adjust, up to thresholds of compute spending, etc.
by tom89999 | 2025-04-20 15:14:26+00:00
But should the parent decide if the kid will become a musician? What if its not talented and pushing it with force to mechanically play Mozart? I later became interested in playing bass guitar, nobody forced me. I did it for leisure. Children are and will not be experts in all fields. Sure you are right that some discipline is needed to move forward and to keep up with something. Do you remember and use everything you ever learned in school, if its not needed for your current job? Kids nowadays spent half to 3/4 of the day in school or outside their own home. When should they be kids? I understand the pressure of parents to make sure they have good grades, some is necessary, but not really all of it. I never learned touch type in school. I did that on my own after work within half a year. I did it because i was interested in. Worked 20 years in IT. Now i am currently trying to get my amateur radio license, i use my knowledge that i collected so far, allthough i was bad at math in school. Life is a journey, i got three professions so far.
by osanseviero | 2025-04-20 15:14:38+00:00
Hi! Omar from the Gemma team here.

Last time we only released the quantized GGUFs. Only llama.cpp users could use it (+ Ollama, but without vision).

Now, we released the unquantized checkpoints, so anyone can quantize themselves and use in their favorite tools, including Ollama with vision, MLX, LM Studio, etc. MLX folks also found that the model worked decently with 3 bits compared to naive 3-bit, so by releasing the unquantized checkpoints we allow further experimentation and research.

TL;DR. One was a release in a specific format/tool, we followed-up with a full release of artifacts that enable the community to do much more.
by subb | 2025-04-20 15:15:15+00:00
No, they are all constructed, including blue.

If I shine some wavelength to your eyeball and you say "it looks blue", but then I change the surrounding and now it looks white, I don't think you would conclude that the original wavelength is blue.

We have a many examples like this, which prescribe that vision is not at all an accurate wavelength measurement device.
by nico | 2025-04-20 15:16:40+00:00
Been playing with that, but doesn’t seem to have much effect. It works very well to limit output to smaller bits, like setting it to 100-200. But above 2-4k the output seems to never get longer than about 1 page

Might try using the models with mlx instead of ollama to see if that makes a difference

Any tips on prompting to get longer outputs?

Also, does the model context size determine max output size? Are the two related or are they independent characteristics of the model?
by mbreese | 2025-04-20 15:16:49+00:00
I don’t think the utility of Windsurf was the question. There is clearly a benefit for a tool/service like this.

The questions raised by the article (as I saw it) were price and timing. $3B is a lot. Is that overpaying for something with a known value but limited reach? Not to mention competitors with deep pockets. And the other question is - why now? What was to be gained by OpenAI by buying Windsuf now.
by nativeit | 2025-04-20 15:17:28+00:00
This isn't really relevant to the article's topic, but I noticed something in their stylesheet that has me intensely curious--can anyone explain to me what's happening with this CSS rule?

* { --index: calc(1 * var(--prime2) * var(--prime3) * var(--prime5) * var(--prime7) * var(--prime11) * var(--prime13) * var(--prime17) * var(--prime19) * var(--prime23) * var(--prime29) * var(--prime31) * var(--prime37) * var(--prime41) * var(--prime43) * var(--prime47) * var(--prime53) * var(--prime59) * var(--prime61) * var(--prime67) * var(--prime71) * var(--prime73) * var(--prime79) * var(--prime83) * var(--prime89) * var(--prime97) * var(--prime101) * var(--prime103) * var(--prime107) * var(--prime109) * var(--prime113) * var(--prime127) * var(--prime131) * var(--prime137) * var(--prime139) * var(--prime149) * var(--prime151) * var(--prime157) * var(--prime163) * var(--prime167) * var(--prime173) * var(--prime179) * var(--prime181) * var(--prime191) * var(--prime193) * var(--prime197) * var(--prime199) * var(--prime211) * var(--prime223) * var(--prime227) * var(--prime229) * var(--prime233) * var(--prime239) * var(--prime241) * var(--prime251) * var(--prime257) * var(--prime263) * var(--prime269) * var(--prime271) * var(--prime277) * var(--prime281) * var(--prime283) * var(--prime293) * var(--prime307) * var(--prime311) * var(--prime313) * var(--prime317) * var(--prime331) * var(--prime337) * var(--prime347) * var(--prime349) * var(--prime353) * var(--prime359) * var(--prime367) * var(--prime373) * var(--prime379) * var(--prime383) * var(--prime389) * var(--prime397) * var(--prime401) * var(--prime409) * var(--prime419) * var(--prime421) * var(--prime431) * var(--prime433) * var(--prime439) * var(--prime443) * var(--prime449) * var(--prime457) * var(--prime461) * var(--prime463) * var(--prime467) * var(--prime479) * var(--prime487) * var(--prime491) * var(--prime499) * var(--prime503) * var(--prime509) * var(--prime521) * var(--prime523) * var(--prime541) * var(--prime547) * var(--prime557) * var(--prime563) * var(--prime569) * var(--prime571) * var(--prime577) * var(--prime587) * var(--prime593) * var(--prime599)); }
by westurner | 2025-04-20 15:18:06+00:00
But a lack of string types (or tagged strings) results in injection vulnerabilities: OS, SQL, XSS (JS, CSS, HTML), XML, URI, query string,.

How should template autoescaping be implemented [in Zig without string types or type-tagged strings]?

E.g. Jinja2 implements autoescaping with MarkupSafe; strings wrapped in a Markup() type will not be autoescaped because they already have an .__html__() method.

MarkupSafe: https://pypi.org/project/MarkupSafe/

Some time ago, I started to create a project called "strypes" to teach or handle typed strings and escaping correctly.

"Improper Neutralization of Special Elements in Output Used by a Downstream Component ('Injection')" https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/74.html
by gedy | 2025-04-20 15:18:26+00:00
I'm impressed Hiroyuki Watanabe was only 24 years old when he invented/led this.

> “I didn’t have a period where I studied engineering professionally. Instead, I enrolled in what Japan would call a technical high school that trains technical engineers, and I actually [entered] the electrical department there,” he told me.

I think this approach is sorely needed again, in the US at least.
by xyst | 2025-04-20 15:18:57+00:00
The "case study" [1] in the author’s post is unsubstantiated. The author of the "case study" (it’s a short e-mail depicting a conviction of a C-level executive) even tries to parallel it with Aaron Schwartz conviction which is disgusting to me.

The C-level executive and his lackeys were committing _insider trading_ and profited from it. You getting caught with your pants down is not government overreach, it’s blatant greed. This does not have any similarity to Aaron Schwartz wrongful conviction.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130614024309/https://mailman.s...
by perching_aix | 2025-04-20 15:19:08+00:00
This is my first time trying to locally host a model - gave both the 12B and 27B QAT models a shot.

I was both impressed and disappointed. Setup was piss easy, and the models are great conversationalists. I have a 12 gig card available and the 12B model ran very nice and swift.

However, they're seemingly terrible at actually assisting with stuff. Tried something very basic: asked for a powershell one liner to get the native blocksize of my disks. Ended up hallucinating fields, then telling me to go off into the deep end, first elevating to admin, then using WMI, then bringing up IOCTL. Pretty unfortunate. Not sure I'll be able to put it to actual meaningful use as a result.
by _jab | 2025-04-20 15:19:39+00:00
A few thoughts:

1) I agree that the moat for these companies is thin. AFAICT, auto-complete, as opposed to agentic flows, is Cursor's primary feature that attracts users. This is probably harder than the author gives it credit for; figuring out what context to provide the model is a non-obvious problem - how do you tradeoff latency and model quality? Nonetheless, it's been implemented enough times that it's mostly just down to how good is the underlying model.

2) Speaking of models, I'm not sure it's been independently benchmarked yet, but GPT 4.1 on the surface looks like a reasonable contestant to back auto-complete functionality. Varun from Windsurf was even on the GPT 4.1 announcement livestream a few days ago, so it's clear Windsurf does intend to use them.

3) This is probably a stock deal, not a cash deal. Not sure why the author is so convinced this has to be $3B in cash paid for Windsurf. AFAIK that hasn't been reported anywhere.

4) If agentic flows do take off, data becomes a more meaningful moat. Having a platform like Cursor or Windsurf enables these companies to collect telemetry about _how_ users are coding that isn't possible just from looking at the repo, the finished product. It opens up interesting opportunities for RLHF and other methods to refine agentic flows. That could be part of the appeal here.
by jim_lawless | 2025-04-20 15:21:44+00:00
There was a pretty detailed article in the May 1985 Radio Electronics that mentioned interfacing it to a VIC-20:

https://archive.org/details/radio_electronics_1985-05/page/n...

Transactor Magazine volume 7, issue 4 (1987 ) had an article on interfacing it to a C64:

https://archive.org/details/transactor-magazines-v7-i04/mode...
by pvg | 2025-04-20 15:22:50+00:00
That's cool but a couple of useful things to be aware of:

Show HN prefix is mostly for things that people can try themselves https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

And how HN handles follow-up posts https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

So you should definitely post your stuff on HN but you probably need to space it out somewhat.
by rfoo | 2025-04-20 15:23:30+00:00
Codeium's completion model is better than whatever GitHub Copilot has. For me it's Cursor > Codeium >>> Copilot. Yes, Copilot is that bad.

And yes Codeium/Windsurf focuses on enterprise customers more. As GP said they have an on-prem [0], a hybrid SaaS offering and enterprise features that just make sense (e.g. pooled credits). Their support team is more responsive (compared to Anysphere). Windsurf also "feels" more finished than Cursor.

[0] but ultimately if you want to "vibe-coding" you have to call Claude API
by csense | 2025-04-20 15:24:11+00:00
To me, it sounds like the two theories represent two different sets of people.

If you have a high-risk high-stress job / life, playing a cozy city builder lets your brain turn off the "we need to be on max alert because things could go south at any moment" switch and turn on the "we're safe, let's relax" switch.

If you have a boring job / life, you might enjoy running into a horde of demons at low health and ripping their faces off with your bare hands while dodging bullets and fireballs. That way all the built-up "Danger! Run for your life!" hormones get spent in the high intensity experience and don't activate when you're trying to sleep, or at low levels throughout the day causing chronic low-grade mental and physical health issues.
by firesteelrain | 2025-04-20 15:24:15+00:00
It’s a Copilot competitor and it’s used by Zillow, Dell, and Anduril (newish Defense company). Cursor can’t work in airgapped environments right now. I don’t know what Codeium charges to run an on prem licensed version but they boast over 1000 enterprise customers. Codeium is on a rapid growth trajectory from $1.25b to $2.85b in such a short period.

Codeium can be fine tuned. Though it’s trained on similar open source it does provide assurances that they do not inadvertently train on wrongly licensed software code.

https://windsurf.com/blog/copilot-trains-on-gpl-codeium-does...
by Someone | 2025-04-20 15:25:17+00:00
> It's kind of funny to picture the kings racing across the board to capture or reactivate the last inert queen.

That would never happen. Because of the “of either color” clause, a king can’t even move to a square adjacent to a queen of the other color, as that activates the queen, moving the king into check.

Also, if the kings are included in the “piece” category of “a piece may only move if it is adjacent to another piece of either color” (which, I think/guess the OP didn’t consider), a lone king cannot race across the board.
by anthk | 2025-04-20 15:26:06+00:00
Electronics themselves work by understanding integration.

It's full circle. But with Lisp and Lambda Calculus even an Elementary school kid could understand integration, as you are literally describing the process as if they were Lego blocks.

Albeit in Forth would be far easier. It's almost telling the computer that multiplying it's iterated addition, and dividing, iterated substraction.

Floating numbers are done with specially memory 'blocks', and you can 'teach' the computer to multiply numbers bigger than 65536 in the exact same way humans do with pen and paper.

Heck, you can set float numbers by yourself by telling Forth how to do the float numbers by following the standard and setting up the f, f+, f/... and outputting rules by hand. Slower than a Forth done in assembly? Maybe, for sure; but natively, in old 80's computers, Forth was 10x faster than Basic.

From that to calculus, it's just telling the computer new rules*. And you don't need an LLM for that.
by freeamz | 2025-04-20 15:26:53+00:00
>I'm also interested in their applications for journalism, specifically for dealing with extremely sensitive data like leaked information from confidential sources.

Think it is NOT just you. Most company with decent management also would not want their data going to anything outside the physical server they have in control of. But yeah for most people just use an app and hosted server. But this is HN,there are ppl here hosting their own email servers, so shouldn't be too hard to run llm locally.
by mppm | 2025-04-20 15:27:02+00:00
Yes, I've seen such research, but I am highly skeptical, to put it very mildly. This actually being the case is simply implausible from the physiological perspective, considering the very high (and constantly changing) concentration of CO2 in the lungs and in the bloodstream. Early research with Navy submariners was consistent with this -- no detectable impairment below 1% (10,000 ppm) and clear impairment at 3-4%. Later long term studies with 0.5% exposure (5,000 ppm) also found nothing. I put the recently popular research showing cognitive impairment as low as 600 ppm in the same mental niche as vitamin megadosing -- underpowered, low quality research with no basis in human physiology.

That said, CO2 can often serve as an easily measurable proxy for stuffy air, which can contain particulates, formaldehyde and other organic exhalations which may actually have some effect (psychological, if nothing else). But this just calls for ventilation and air filtering, not CO2 scrubbing.
by overfeed | 2025-04-20 15:27:16+00:00
> Whereas on local LLM, I watch it painstakingly prints preambles that I don't care about, and get what I actually need after 20 seconds.

You may need to "right-size" the models you use to match your hardware, model, and TPS expectations, which may involve using a smaller version of the model with faster TPS, upgrading your jardware, or paying for hosted models.

Alternatively, if you can use agentic workflows or tools like Aider, you don't have to watch the model work slowly with large modles locally. Instead you queue work for it, go to sleep, or eat, or do other work, and then much later look over the Pull Requests whenever it completes them.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-04-20 15:28:00+00:00
What makes you think these states only developed after WW2, and how does this explain the US having the world's best passenger rail system in 1920?

Here's a map of it; see how densely it links up this vast country: https://vizettes.com/kt/rta/maps/usa-rr-1920.gif

Meanwhile, the Netherlands was completely car centric just like the USA until the 1990s, when they decided to start redesigning roads to prioritize walking and cycling. Are you sure these things are really inexorably linked to geography?
by cushychicken | 2025-04-20 15:29:05+00:00
Id have bought a lot of lunches for myself if I had a dollar for every time I’ve pushed my team for documentation and had it turn into a discussion of “Well, how does that stack up against other priorities?”

It’s a pretty foolproof way for smart political operators to get out of a relatively dreary - but high leverage - task.

AI doesn’t complain. It just writes it. Makes the whole task a lot faster when a human is a reviewer for correctness instead of an author and reviewer.
by cameron_b | 2025-04-20 15:29:08+00:00
The attempt is surely to solve for an abundance of beetles, but it is often helpful to think of many of these 'problems' as imbalances.

Nature does not work in two-variable equations, and the abundance or absence of an element typically has repercussions that are difficult to study.

An often-cited example of missing the bigger picture in controlling one variable would be the Chinese campaign against the Four Pests - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
by gruez | 2025-04-20 15:29:54+00:00
>he wasn't doing anything that other CEOs weren't doing too

Source? Are you making the claim that "other CEOs" (all? most? many?) trade on material nonpublic information? CEOs basically always have material nonpublic information on them, even without secret government contracts. That's why there's rule 10b5-1, to allow them to pre-declare their trades ahead of time to avoid such allegations.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-20 15:30:13+00:00
The worst part about working in JavaScript is the insecurity. Everybody likes to act like they know what they are doing, but very few people really do. So, for most people its entirely a game to remain employed when they probably aren't qualified to be there in the first place. Its like musical chairs where everybody hopes when the music stops its the next guy left standing.

For the few people who do know what they are doing its an impossible situation. People simultaneously expect magic from you, because they know you can do it, but at the same bitch and cry about the output. They know they cannot write original code or extend somebody else's original solution so they demonize it out of self-preservation. When people are universally that insecure its convenient to hate on that one person who doesn't share that insecurity.

That is why I switched careers. I have never seen a salary high enough to justify going back to that.
by TrevorFSmith | 2025-04-20 15:30:42+00:00
I see folks suggesting emacs and others saying that they must use VSCode (or forks) because of the ecosystem of plugins. Folks, we made this mistake with Eclipse and many other IDEs. The root problem is binding the build and instrumentation tools to the editor. Here's how to solve the problem once and for all: Use a programmer's editor that's great at manipulating text and run all tools on the command line. Never mix them. All else is folly.
by MarkSweep | 2025-04-20 15:31:02+00:00
It's to create random numbers to make the star field on the home page:

https://hoverbear.org/

It's defined in this file:

https://github.com/Hoverbear/hoverbear.org/blob/root/sass/_m...

Which links to an explanation here:

https://medium.com/hypersphere-codes/counting-in-css-unlock-...
by vacuity | 2025-04-20 15:31:20+00:00
On a general note, if this feels natural and right to you, don't be quick to dismiss others' views as having less substance or credibility and being conditioned. But I appreciate that you earnestly believe this, and for that there is nothing prima facie wrong with your view either.

> Our bodies are machines. We should do everything we can to repair them and make them better. It appalls me that we aren't making progress here.

I feel like this is not obvious. Many people seem to want to enjoy life more than anything else, and if this biotech means curing cancer so they can do so for longer, sure, but at some point it may be too invasive. Like if you have to undergo a procedure every year to get diminishing returns. A lot of the features you mention are nice to have, but not strongly appealing to me personally. Particularly for something like immortality: if I'm going to have that, I want a lot of other things too that biotech won't obtain.

Also, at that level of biotech, it seems like we could forgo the clones and enhance our bodies directly. That would remove the ethical concerns of cloning, in particular the notion of creating clones for our own purposes instead of letting them reach their own. Beliefs that boil down to "I was here first" or "I beat you" are common, but I find them problematic.

Birth/creation is a fascinating philosophical topic. I have a radical view which isn't quite "life is suffering so being born is a net harm", but I think that life is not all that valuable. I won't go out of my way to harm existing life, but I'm not sure I should go out of my way to accomodate new life. If humans all died off naturally, would that be such a bad thing? Life is great, but it's not that great. If we do gain cloning technology, I think we should afford clones the potential to do as they will, just as we want for ourselves. Again, we could probably obviate clones for the purposes you see.