MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by photonthug | 2025-04-08 21:47:50+00:00
I enjoyed this read and agree Lenat was a grifter, which is easy to see based on contracts and closed source. But I dislike how the article seems tilted towards a hit piece against search, heuristics, reasoning, symbolic approaches in AI, and even striving for explainable/understandable systems. It's a subtext throughout, so perhaps I'm misinterpreting it.. but the neats vs the scruffies thing is just not really productive, and there seems to be no real reason for the "either/or" mentality.

To put some of this into starker contrast.. 40 years, 200 million dollars, and broken promises is the cost burned on something besides ML? Wait isn't the current approach burning that kind of cash in a weekend, and aren't we proudly backdating deep-learning to ~1960 every time someone calls it "new"? Is a huge volume of inscrutable weights, with unknown sources, generated at huge costs, really "better" than closed-source in terms of transparency? Are we not very busy building agents and critics very much like Minky's society of mind while we shake our heads and say he was wrong?

This write-up also appears to me as if it were kind of punching down. A "hostile assessment" in an "obituary" is certainly easy in hindsight, especially if business is booming in your (currently very popular) neighborhood. If you didn't want to punch down, if you really want to go on record as saying logic/search are completely dead-ended and AGI won't ever touch the stuff.. it would probably look more like critiquing symbolica.ai, saying that nothing like scallop-lang / pyreason will ever find any use-cases, etc.
by taeric | 2025-04-08 21:48:35+00:00
I mean, not wrong. But optimizing over a megabyte's worth of text is almost certainly not going to take a lot of time. Especially as there will be chapter stops. Such that we are down to, what 100k of text per chapter to layout?

Again, I won't claim it is absolutely free. It is almost certainly negligible in terms of processing power involved with any of the things we are talking about.
by somat | 2025-04-08 21:49:35+00:00
A good joke, I like it, but...

Look up videos of escalators breaking, it is a bit horrifying. all that moving metal eating itself.

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=escalator+break...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulnZGVZZLRA

I assume, like elevators, quite a bit has to go wrong before things get that bad.
by mkolodny | 2025-04-08 21:50:13+00:00
“Got caught” is a misleading way to present what happened.

According to the article, Meta publicly stated, right below the benchmark comparison, that the version of Llama on LMArena was the experimental chat version:

> According to Meta’s own materials, it deployed an “experimental chat version” of Maverick to LMArena that was specifically “optimized for conversationality”

The AI benchmark in question, LMArena, compares Llama 4 experimental to closed models like ChatGPT 4o latest, and Llama performs better (https://lmarena.ai/?leaderboard).
by mNovak | 2025-04-08 21:50:48+00:00
Congrats, that's a great achievement!

I'd be very curious if you could share what that process looked like in general? Did they reach out to you, how did they find you?

Were they interested in the gameplay alone, or the player count / growth?

Was it much work, technically, to get integrated on their website?

And of course, how long does it take you generate one full puzzle?
by JohnFen | 2025-04-08 21:50:56+00:00
> the fact of the matter is every system is hackable to an extent.

True, but the extents can differ quite a lot. A system that requires someone to physically mount media has an inherent security benefit just from not being available until someone physically mounts the media.

> not these pesky hackable digital records every other business on the planet uses.

Not every other business on the planet uses always online digital records, and those that do don't exactly have a stellar security history.

I'm not arguing here that one is better than the other in this particular case. Making that determination requires balancing a lot of factors that I have no data about. But removable physical media does have some advantages here.
by fngjdflmdflg | 2025-04-08 21:51:06+00:00
>There's no "correct" way to typeset a document

They can add multiple typesetting properties and allow the develop to decide which one to use. Besides, letting each browser decide what the "best" line break looks like doesn't solve the problem of there not being a definitive answer to that question. Even here, I don't think the Chrome developers have a vastly different opinion on what a good line break looks like. It's possible they didn't like the performance implications of webkit's version or had some other tangential reason, although the blog says performance is not an issue.
by Garlef | 2025-04-08 21:51:07+00:00
> How many William Shakesmans did we lose with all the war, famine, disease?

(Just a small comment out of context of the remaining discussion:)

Maybe not many? It could be that "cultural attention" is limited and there's not much space at the top anyways. In other words: It might be that there's always a few famous artists that get remembered and the rest is forgotten. Same as winning the world cup: There's always a team that wins and it says nothing about the quality in a universal way. At best it says something about quality relative to the competition.

(Not sure I'd fully get behind the argument i composed here. But I found it interesting.)
by razemio | 2025-04-08 21:51:38+00:00
You know how a presenter asks questions on a topic where he is the expert? Same goes for this animation. It does not show but hide information to keep the reader engaged. I found myself guessing who will be first and boy was I wrong. My ego would have prevented me from noticing, if the chart would have been presented to me right away.

On YouTube you can see how well this works. There are channels with a huge follower base just existing because of this animation.
by fesoliveira | 2025-04-08 21:51:42+00:00
> GNU Taler ensures that the paying customer is anonymous

This right here is the reason why governments won't use it. Governments want transactions to be traceable so that they can audit your taxes. I don't have any issues with that, I actually don't mind paying taxes, but I would never expect a government, no matter how progressive, to use a privacy-based protocol or solution.
by crazygringo | 2025-04-08 21:52:22+00:00
I think the difficulties are, how close do spaces need to be to be considered connected? Rivers aren't only perfectly vertical. And to what degree do they need to maintain the same angle across consecutive lines? How much can they wiggle? And a river is still visible across 10 lines even if one line in the middle doesn't have the space, so it needs to be able to handle breaks in contiguity.

There's no problem with paragraph-level optimizations inherently. Reducing raggedness is paragraph-level and that's comparatively easy. The problem is the metric in the first place.
by dreghgh | 2025-04-08 21:52:40+00:00
I understood that 1/2 converts to 2-Jan (or 1-Feb depending on settings).

That is desired behaviour. If you want the string 1/2 you need to use an apostrophe. If you want the fraction one half you need to use an equals sign. Both of these are vastly less likely to be what a user wants than the date interpretation, so it makes sense for that to be the default.
by perrygeo | 2025-04-08 21:53:27+00:00
The article implicates high-fructose corn syrup as the enemy. Which is partially true. But table sugar is also 50% fructose. And fruit, juice, honey and "natural" sweeteners are higher. If we're going to try for low fructose (and all the medical evidence say we definitely should), cutting out HFCS is a good start but not sufficient.

From the FDA: https://www.fda.gov/food/food-additives-petitions/high-fruct...

"We are not aware of any evidence ... that there is a difference in safety between foods containing HFCS 42 or HFCS 55 and foods containing similar amounts of other nutritive sweeteners with approximately equal glucose and fructose content, such as sucrose, honey, or other traditional sweeteners."

A better rule of thumb might be "avoid sugar entirely". Like alcohol, the more we learn about it, the more we learn that it's a unambiguous poison at moderate-to-high doses. But fructose being ubiquitous and hidden in food form makes it an even greater danger to public health. In fact, the metabolism of both alcohol and fructose involve similar pathways in the liver. Fructose has been called "Alcohol without the buzz". In 20 years, we'll look at serving a glass of soda or juice to a child like serving them a glass of whiskey.
by convolvatron | 2025-04-08 21:53:30+00:00
learning to operate a lathe for alot of the low-precision work that goes on for mass market production is really pretty easy. but those job are _never_ coming back, anywhere except places that lack sufficient capital or prototyping/research environments. you can program a swiss machine to take in stock from behind the head and dump completely finished parts in a tray at the bottom. depending on parts complexity you can easily vomit out 1000s of parts per hour with a single unskilled operator dumping out trays and loading new stock across several machines.
by jiggawatts | 2025-04-08 21:53:46+00:00
> Let’s be real: improving load times doesn’t directly impact the bottom line

Yes, it does!

I was agreeing with the article until this point, which is simply false.

When the GTA bug made headlines, several articles about it estimated that it cost about a billion dollars in lost revenue because players got fed up waiting and switched to a different game.

This, right here, is the real tragedy: Performance is a feature — but practically nobody recognises it as such.

Apple does.

Remind me, what are they worth again? How many trillion dollars?

Would they be worth that much if the iPhone just froze for seconds at a time, randomly, all the time? Or took ten seconds to unlock? Or any number of similar issues that aren’t “features” in the minds of incompetent management, but was a key requirement enforced by Steve Jobs?

No, they wouldn’t.
by josephg | 2025-04-08 21:53:49+00:00
I doubt it. The human mind is a probabilistic computer, at every level. There’s no set definition for what a chair is. It’s fuzzy. Some things are obviously in the category, and some are at the periphery of it. (Eg is a stool a chair? Is a log next to a campfire a chair? How about a tree stump in the woods? Etc). This kind of fuzzy reasoning is the rule, not the exception when it comes to human intuition.

There’s no way to use “rules and facts” to express concepts like “chair” or “grass”, or “face” or “justice” or really anything. Any project trying to use deterministic symbolic logic to represent the world fundamentally misunderstands cognition.
by neuralRiot | 2025-04-08 21:53:59+00:00
>All you need is a little bit of investment and will.

We’re cooked then. To give you some perspective I had some Chinese sales reps visiting my shop, they saw us working on some designs and casually asked about working hours i told them about 40hs/wk they laughed and said “in China engineers work 12hs a day 7 days a week”.
by chubot | 2025-04-08 21:55:45+00:00
I dunno I actually think say Claude AI SOUNDS smarter than it is, right now

It has a phenomenal recall. I just asked it about "SmartOS", something I knew about, vaguely, in ~2012, and it gave me a pretty darn good answer. On that particular subject, I think it probably gave a better answer than anyone I could e-mail, call, or text right now

It was significantly more informative than wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SmartOS

But I still find it easy to stump it and get it to hallucinate, which makes it seem dumb

It is like a person with good manners, and a lot of memory, and which is quite good at comparisons (although you have to verify, which is usually fine)

But I would not say it is "smart" at coming up with new ideas or anything

I do think a key point is that a "text calculator" is doing a lot of work ... i.e. summarization and comparison are extremely useful things. They can accelerate thinking
by teachrdan | 2025-04-08 21:55:51+00:00
It will never stop being funny to me that these assholes self-righteously told government to step out of the way so that they (and by extension the rest of the Silicon Valley investor class) could show how they could build their way out of all of our social, economic, and political problems.

They even end this self-righteous screed with "There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build."

This all sounds nice, if completely empty of all substance. And then what do these rich jerkwads actually build? AI Avatars! You can't make this up! They talk big about building tens more nuclear power plants and a replacement for the VA and the capacity for Harvard to teach a million students at a time. But when push comes to shove they are only capable of trying to make some easy money with more AI bullshit no one actually needs.

https://a16z.com/its-time-to-build/
by jhp123 | 2025-04-08 21:56:04+00:00
> Most of that is false

What is false specifically? The fact that an immigration judge determined Garcia was deportable does not contradict the fact that the same order was withheld later on, much as you try to imply it.

>> the Trump administration admitted they made a mistake in deporting him.

> Incorrect.

Actually you are incorrect, quoting from [0]: "the Government conceded during the district court hearing, “The facts -- we concede the facts. This person should -- the plaintiff, Abrego Garcia, should not have been removed. That is not in dispute.”"

[0] https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25881148/ca4-ag.pdf
by yencabulator | 2025-04-08 21:59:18+00:00
> Imagine if they were aware of their mortality and short relative lifespans...

Having had dogs live with other dogs growing old and passing away, I think this might be a lower threshold than understanding (a subset of) human language. Surely even without humans, a pack of social animals has individuals getting sick and growing old, and that changes how they interact with each other. Elephants are known to keep visiting bones of relatives over multiple years.

I'm personally more surprised at how well my 12-year old mutt picks up new routines, and the words that are said at the start of the routine, than at the thought that she would know that everyone's getting older and will die at some point. I'm anecdotally actually quite convinced she used to live with older people before -- she comes to "take care of me" every time I cough or sneeze.
by mnky9800n | 2025-04-08 21:59:21+00:00
I find it hard to find someone who can get through a technical degree program who isn’t about as intelligent as everyone else who got through that program. I find that most people who I have worked with, especially junior people, lack the motivation. There is only one person who simply couldn’t do it and she constantly needed help with everything and didn’t ever seem to learn no matter how much you tried to teach her. Everyone else just seemed like they weren’t actually that interested or maybe they were but had some personal issue standing between them and their motivation.

They say they want someone who has long distance potential. But I doubt that will include being actually super intelligent as opposed to meshing with their culture well.
by spwa4 | 2025-04-08 21:59:36+00:00
No it didn't.

The only thing saving the Irish government from bankruptcy is special (illegal according to EU law) Irish tax deals with MAG7 companies. Facebook. AWS. Microsoft. Oracle. Google. Salesforce.

Ireland was forced to renegotiate those tax deals after the action taken against the "double dutch sandwich" ... and it looks like they decided to just cut out the Netherlands.

Why does that matter? Ireland has veto power over what the EU does, and has already used it to prevent taxation of the internet giants. The EU cannot put serious effort in this, because that veto would just be used again.
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-04-08 21:59:49+00:00
Exactly this.

I'm desperately looking for a new job. I hate my current job, the constant stress is taking a real toll, and I'm more tired than I've been ever before.

I'm quite literally applying to all sorts of developer jobs that I'm well overqualified for, in any honest assessment, for a lot less than I make now. These roles are far from "premium" gigs. I've no diva expectations or hope at this point.

The only places I even get rejection emails from are places I've had a referral.

Things are bleak.

I'm in a similar place wrt job "security."

Current gig will end soon, one way or another, and the future doesn't look great.
by archduck | 2025-04-08 22:00:12+00:00
I'm the same, for the most part. I worked at a small dev shop with two coworkers. One liked to put on classical music, and the other would often play whatever the hell kind of music Pat Metheny is, and while the richness of those particular genres appeared to _stimulate_ their ability to code heads-down, it rendered me pretty much useless. My attention would glom onto the scales and arpeggios of Vivaldi's Four Seasons or onto the weird proggy time signatures of the other stuff.

However, I have had much success with black metal bands that shriek (or whatever) in a foreign language. The fullness of the sound - blast beats, distorted guitars - just really does it for me for some reason. And I don't get distracted by the vocals because I don't understand e.g. Finnish (and with bands like Horna, it's probably better that way). It makes finding that flow state much easier, and I suspect it may be working as a fidget spinner does: a certain base level of constant but predictable sensory input soothes whatever it is in my brain that gets me antsy when engaging in an activity that requires a lot of energy expenditure without proportional immediate feedback. But as soon as you up the complexity of the music past a certain point, it swings all the way the other way and makes willful concentration pretty much impossible.

Yep. It's ADHD and its weirdness with the rewards system, for sure.
by JohnFen | 2025-04-08 22:00:54+00:00
I would strongly shy away from hiring anyone who took part in the DOGE effort for a number of reasons, but primarily because the tech team involved seems so ham-handed and amateurish.

However, I would be willing to bet there are plenty of potential employers that wouldn't, or would even consider it a positive. Unless things turn much uglier, I suspect having that on your resume would simply affect which set of companies would be willing to hire you, not whether or not you're hireable.
by ricardobeat | 2025-04-08 22:01:16+00:00
The LLM passes the HTML back in their response, translated, so it can be rendered to the user as-is. The tool description is self-explanatory: https://github.com/TuanKiri/weather-mcp-server/blob/master/i...

You could have it respond with JSON, but then the rendering of the weather widget would have to be defined by the consumer instead of the tool server -- now the 'chat' part of your system needs to be aware of all possible content types, how to detect and render them; it's also doable but a different set of trade-offs.
by timewizard | 2025-04-08 22:01:21+00:00
> when you do something a private company doesn't like?

Well, it's completely different, because ostensibly I can switch to another private company. Is there an option, ever, for me to just change which government I subscribe to?

> If the government says you're a terrorist, you're not accessing any banking.

In the US this can only be true for foreign citizens. Broad classes of assets and liquidity are well protected for US citizens unless you end up in the unusual situation where they sue the money itself. If you have cash in your hand nothing can stop you from spending it.

Thank you for introducing political relativism into this conversation, although, I'm not sure it's advanced anything in particular.
by kittikitti | 2025-04-08 22:01:35+00:00
For me at least, the 10M context window is a big deal and as long as it's decent, I'm going to use it instead. I'm running Scout locally and my chat history can get very long. I'm very frustrated when the context window runs out. I haven't been able to fully test the context length but at least that one isn't fudged.
by rstuart4133 | 2025-04-08 22:03:37+00:00
One thing intelligence seems to require is a lot of energy to drive it. You have to get that energy from somewhere. Humans probably get it by cooking food. Normally animals have to use a lot of energy to break down the food, humans solved that by using an external energy source to break it down before eating it.

Birds need a lot of energy for flying. They don't cook. They solved the energy problem by developing the most efficient mitochondria on the planet. They pay a fairly high price for that in terms of infant mortality, but I guess the ability to fly is worth it. It means when they aren't flying, they have a lot of excess energy to power an highly intelligent brain. They could then use that brain to detect when their mate was screwing around, and decide if it was worth ditching them.

That's all guess work of course. I'm no expert, just belly button gazing really.
by austin-cheney | 2025-04-08 22:03:43+00:00
Here is what my experience has taught me about software employment just in case you still want to do this.

To get employed:

1. Deck out your resume with a bunch of keyword nonsense. If it doesn't look like word salad when you are done its not competitive. Find a laundry list of tools, frameworks, run time engines, and other third party tools that you never wrote.

2. If you want to get hired and aren't already a senior principle don't be an expert. Experts are intimidating. Refer back to point 1.

3. Don't use AI during a job interview. People hate that. Instead just have a static script of key points as hints. The goal is to be at the center of a bell curve and know just enough to fit in.

4. Get really good at throw away leet code insanity. Go fast and memorize programming patterns by name. You will never use any of this at the job, but it looks impressive during interviews.

5. Answer all interview questions with confidence in 3 words or less. Be quick and ensure it does not look like you are reading or waiting for answers to materialize. Always remember the only thing most programmers fear more than writing original code is unoriginal job candidates.

Once you are hired:

1. Do all that is asked of you with as little as possible. Make it a game to see just how efficiently you can accomplish what is asked of you. The people that get promoted are the ones that shine at this and do as little work as possible. That screams to management that you don't produce regression, are not burdened with stressed, and have potential to do twice as much.

2. Automate the shit out of your job, but keep this a secret to yourself. Most of your peers cannot program. If they see that you are doing more than the copy/paste what is required they will be intimidated.

3. Save video calls with your peers for educational moments only. Video calls suck up a lot of time and your peers will want to do them only because they cannot write emails. When in doubt do as little work as possible, which includes being efficient and thorough with your communication. See point 1.

4. If you are in a toxic environment learn from the best and become a complete narcissistic asshole. Fair warning, though. This will randomly blow up in your face because you are likely surrounded by narcissists looking out for themselves. If you are in a healthy environment then be a complete team player and save all your disposable time for helping your teammates with testing and documentation. In a healthy environment take as little credit for accomplishments as possible and openly praise teammates who are worthy of praise.