MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by conductr | 2025-04-03 17:55:48+00:00
I'm thinking not much support is needed for user's that are willing and able to do all these tasks over SSH. They've pre-filtered for low support load

Back in early 2000s I ran a shared webhosting business, most customer's were savvy at the time and it was kind of a "you're on your own, let me know if the infra is acting up" type arrangement. I ran it with about 2000 customers for a year or so solo and only got about 2 support emails a day. Back then, 24-72 hour response was acceptable so I never needed to be a 24/7 resource.
by csmpltn | 2025-04-03 17:56:11+00:00
I don't really care what you invest the money into, the point is that the VAT is a mechanism which messes with the concept of a free global market and it leads to unfair competition and an unleveled playing field. If you combine it with other factors (such as the fact that the US is the sole guarantor of Europe's defense) - the US is in the right for challenging the European economy.
by hansvm | 2025-04-03 17:56:30+00:00
I think the usual bearish sentiment comes from:

1. The marketing (even "research" papers) vastly overstates these systems' capabilities

2. We've observed unacceptable failure rates for the majority of useful tasks

3. Despite a bunch of money being poured into it, failure rates are decreasing slowly even with exponentially more training and inference resources, and there are precious few tasks where we've arrived at an alternative reframing making those errors tolerable

4. The capabilities are increasing slowly, and it's not obvious that pouring resources into the problem will lead to the phase shift necessary to either overcome (3) and (4) or to generate some novel application that makes it all worth it

Almost every attempted application I've seen has "worked" by using the AI to push externalities to other parties. It hasn't actually made the composite system meaningfully more efficient, with notable exceptions (e.g., the chat interface, once you learn the tool, if you use it correctly, can meaningfully improve certain kinds of productivity).

Plus, for people who actually work in AI, the current approach is obviously wrong. There are roughly two sorts of architectures in use for variable-width data: recurrent networks which store everything and process everything (e.g., transformers), and recurrent networks which compress everything and process the entire compressed space (e.g., mamba), with a special mention for compression-based architectures which have a large enough state space that compression is unnecessary, and another special mention for slight variations yielding constant speedups like MoE. The problem with all of those ideas is that you're necessarily trading off accuracy for compute. To have sufficient accuracy on arbitrary problems, you _must_ store everything, and you _cannot_ meaningfully compress it. The thing that isn't necessarily required though is processing everything at every iteration (a direction MoE works toward), and past a certain scale, unless we get vastly more efficient chips in a hurry (even if we do, depending on the target application), it's obvious that you need a new architecture to build around.

And so on. I work in AI (old-school ML for $WORK, new-school at home). I'm more bullish than a lot of people, especially since I see a direct cause and effect in things that make the business and my life better, but I'm still skeptical of the current craze. At a minimum, it's one of the most wasteful ways we could possibly do this research, and society isn't yet in a good place for the meager results we're getting. New-school AI is, currently, a net-negative to society, and I don't see that changing in the next several years.
by nickff | 2025-04-03 17:56:56+00:00
Even the language that the different parties use is targeted at certain sets of values; Arnold Kling wrote this short book on the subject ("The Three Languages of Politics"): https://cdn.cato.org/libertarianismdotorg/books/ThreeLanguag...

"The Righteous Mind" by Jonathan Haidt is another, more nuanced (and complicated), but extremely interesting take on the subject of how values drive political affiliation.
by packetlost | 2025-04-03 17:57:12+00:00
> multithread scalability is a well understood, if not easy, problem

As someone fairly well versed in MESI and cache optimization: it really isn't. It's a minority of people that understand it (and really, that need to).

> Building your application on top of message passing not only gives away some performance

This really isn't universally true either. If you're optimizing for throughput, pipelining with pinned threads + message passing is usually the way to go if the data model allows for it.
by lolinder | 2025-04-03 17:57:21+00:00
Since you edited to reply to my comment I'm stuck leaving a second reply: the conflicts with Indians were not at all the same as the kind of total war we're talking about with the wars of religion, Napoleonic Wars, and the World Wars. The subject of this thread is wars that lead to mass destruction of national power and lead to other countries taking the lead.

For future reference, it makes for much easier reading if you just reply to me instead of editing your comment to respond. This isn't a Notion doc, it's a forum, and I'm not leaving feedback on an artifact, I'm engaging you in a discussion.
by atemerev | 2025-04-03 17:57:25+00:00
What is this, some OpenAI employee fan fiction? Did Sam himself write this?

OpenAI models are not even SOTA, except that new-ish style transfer / illustration thing that made all us living in Ghibli world for a few days. R1 is _better_ than o1, and open-weights. GPT-4.5 is disappointing, except for a few narrow areas where it excels. DeepResearch is impressive though, but the moat is in tight web search / Google Scholar search integration, not weights. So far, I'd bet on open models or maybe Anthropic, as Claude 3.7 is the current SOTA for most tasks.

As of the timeline, this is _pessimistic_. I already write 90% code with Claude, so are most of my colleagues. Yes, it does errors, and overdoes things. Just like a regular human middle-stage software engineer.

Also fun that this assumes relatively stable politics in the US and relatively functioning world economy, which I think is crazy optimistic to rely on these days.

Also, superpersuasion _already works_, this is what I am researching and testing. It is not autonomous, it is human-assisted by now, but it is a superpower for those who have it, and it explains some of the things happening with the world right now.
by lsy | 2025-04-03 17:57:48+00:00
The fact that it was ever seriously entertained that a "chain of thought" was giving some kind of insight into the internal processes of an LLM bespeaks the lack of rigor in this field. The words that are coming out of the model are generated to optimize for RLHF and closeness to the training data, that's it! They aren't references to internal concepts, the model is not aware that it's doing anything so how could it "explain itself"?

CoT improves results, sure. And part of that is probably because you are telling the LLM to add more things to the context window, which increases the potential of resolving some syllogism in the training data: One inference cycle tells you that "man" has something to do with "mortal" and "Socrates" has something to do with "man", but two cycles will spit those both into the context window and lets you get statistically closer to "Socrates" having something to do with "mortal". But given that the training/RLHF for CoT revolves around generating long chains of human-readable "steps", it can't really be explanatory for a process which is essentially statistical.
by ben_w | 2025-04-03 17:58:10+00:00
They definitely tell people what they want to hear. Even when we'd rather they be correct, they get upvoted or downvoted by users, so this isn't avoidable (but is is fawning or sychophancy?)

I wonder how deep or shallow the mimicry of human output is — enough to be interesting, but definitely not quite like us.
by geye1234 | 2025-04-03 17:58:27+00:00
>> If a tiger is distinct from a brain state, which I think we agree on, and if our thoughts are about real things such as tigers, which I assume we agree on, then how can there not be more to thought than the associated brain state?

> We also have thoughts about unreal things. I don't see why such thoughts should be any different than the ones we have about real things.

Let me rephrase then:

If a tiger is distinct from a brain state, which I think we agree on, and if our thoughts can be about real things such as tigers, which I assume we agree on, then how can there not be more to thought than the associated brain state?

A brain state does not refer to a tiger.
by huevosabio | 2025-04-03 17:58:39+00:00
> the upside of this system is felt by the entrepreneurs, investors and high-skill employees in tech and finance, while the downside is concentrated with low-skill workers whose jobs are offshored to lower wage countries.

This is true only if we impose barriers to geographic mobility, which we do via artificial scarcity of housing in our major cities.

If we produced housing like we did cars, all the "low-skill" people would be able to move to the city and find a job in the many other services that require human labor.

> the government to lower the cost of high-quality education, build out social systems, and invest into onshoring select strategic industries by raising taxes at the high end.

We don't need more high-quality education nor do we need to onshore. We need to deregulate the housing market, we make it easier to migrate to the US (funny enough, yes that would help with inequality). And I do agree we need better social systems.

There is no way to frame this admin's policies that makes it look reasonable. It's a Crony Clown Club show.
by JadeNB | 2025-04-03 17:58:59+00:00
> Would you mind giving more details about your use case? I'm curious.

That would definitely have enriched my comment, but, unfortunately, I couldn't think of anything in particular in the moment, and can't now. seb1204 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43564922) mentions one common kind of use case for me: I want to buy some small utility item that I'm used to finding in the hardware store, but it's sufficiently specialty that it's not worth it for the hardware store to carry it, and it's sufficiently small that its price would triple or quadruple if I paid the manufacturer's shipping costs.

> I've been Amazon-free for a while and generally I've had very good luck simply going directly to manufacturer's websites, but it seems like you might be searching for a class of products for which that strategy is ineffective?

As I say, I'm stuck in the situation of being vague because I can't think of the last specific time this affected me, but I have definitely dealt with relatively small sellers where the purchase option on their webaite is "here's a link to buy from our Amazon store."
by pqtyw | 2025-04-03 17:59:02+00:00
> then you must accept

I don't, because this argument is nonsensical (I mean your point about source specifically). Unless you disagree with some of the core principles of modern economics (not saying that you have to agree with them..) that would be the most obvious outcome.

> So what if there is no reason to own property beyond a certain age?

Well that would mean that the savings rate would go down (for better or for worse).
by nottorp | 2025-04-03 17:59:09+00:00
> If properly refrigerated, milk can last for months especially if pasteurized.

But why take the risk when you can have fresh?

> You can also evaporate milk and it will last nearly forever unrefrigerated if kept dry

Is that still milk?

Cheeses yes, I randomly buy fancy cheeses. But most of my purchases are still boring predictable recent local cheese.
by brutal_chaos_ | 2025-04-03 17:59:17+00:00
You may enter our site iff you use software we approve. Anything else will be seen as malicious. Papers please!

I, too, am saddened by this gatekeeping. IIUC custom browsers (or user-agent) from scratch will never work on cloudflare sites and the like until the UA has enough clout (money, users, etc) to sway them.
by Blackcatmaxy | 2025-04-03 17:59:19+00:00
> This idea of humanity transcending our genetic (due to geographic proximity) tribal groups is a uniquely European one. Pretending we can abandon all tribalism and integrate the entire world into a European model is either immensely incompetent or intentionally malicious (I tend to think the latter).

I did not realize Star Trek is uniquely European, that explains all the accents they have. It's a good thing Gene Roddenberry was European otherwise all this nonsense would make us Americans less isolationist.

> The current billionaire class profits immensely from all the diversity (both generic and ideological) in the west. It's much easier to parasitically rule a divided people than a unified one. Nationalism is a defense against these parasites.

For as much evidence as you present I'll assert that nationalism in fact profits the billionaire class much more than anyone else, thinking of most marketing campaigns, most nationalist leaders are all backed by the billionaires to win over the hearts of the working class. It's almost like you say yourself, "It’s much easier to parasitically rule a divided people than a unified one" and nationalism is just as much about dividing a nation's people from others than about real unity.
by ianburrell | 2025-04-03 17:59:30+00:00
Also, the now $2 trillion is the total program cost. It is development, cost to buy 2500 aircraft at $80-120 million each. Mostly, it is the maintenance cost for aircraft for decades of future service. The program cost is spread out over decades.

The important thing is that if the US wants to have air forces, it needs fighters and needs to replace the current ones. The F-35 is better and similar price to older fighters so it is the best option to replace them.
by geocrasher | 2025-04-03 17:59:41+00:00
My T420 has a couple of upgrades: Memory (16GB) and SSD (250GB). That's it. It's bone stock otherwise. When my buddy's laptop screen cracked, we had a hard time finding a new one. He took my T420 to work every day for a few months, and it came back to me more banged up than when it left. It's fine. And it did the job admirably.

I need to do some automotive tuning/testing and guess what, the T420 is where its at for that, too. It's no longer good as a daily driver, but it'll do everything else just fine.
by MichaelMoser123 | 2025-04-03 17:59:42+00:00
Thanks for your comment, it explains why there seems to be a high degree of support for these measures in some quarters (was looking at the youtube comments to the liberation day speech) vs the consensus here at HN.

Let's suppose these policies are to the benefit of some Americans over other the benefit of other Americans. The open question now is: does it matter? does it really have an influence on the gross profit numbers? Will an isolationist foreign policy destroy the international order and how could this effect the US in return?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-04-03 17:59:44+00:00
> This is the US political process seeing a major problem and cycling through options to check for alternatives other than raising taxes on a voting constituency

It’s the political process using a known problem to distract people. There is no intent to not take any new revenue or budget savings and convert it into more spending and/or tax cuts. We don’t have anyone in the government serious about deficit reduction. That’s clear in the policy proposals being put forward.
by singingboyo | 2025-04-03 17:59:48+00:00
There's a difference between contempt (i.e. "users are stupid") and realism, though. And realism can range from "users don't want to troubleshoot" to "some users are near-violently anti-tech and won't read errors", depending on context.

The unfortunate truth is that if you're doing B2C or even B2B outside of tech companies, the second one will often come up...

Bad devs exist. Bad users do too. Thing is, you can't usually fire the bad users.
by gostsamo | 2025-04-03 18:00:05+00:00
I see many in the US thinking that Trump is an idiot. No, he is not. He is a blatant liar. The fact that many people cannot believe how blatantly he lies does not mean that he is unaware of reality, means that he knows how to detach other people from it. If you look at him and the people around him as people who lie with every breath that they take for the express purpose of ensuring their own wellbeing at the expense of everyone else, the underlying logic of their actions becomes painfully obvious.
by technojamin | 2025-04-03 18:00:16+00:00
This seems like the obvious solution to me. You don't know what the user's eyes are looking at, so making the highlighting a visual representation of what's in the viewport seems preferable than nominating a single section as "current".

In fact the final solution is pretty bad. Sure, it looks nice when I scroll down, but when I use the alternative navigation method of clicking the sidebar items, it just scrolls to unexpected places.

Beautiful article, though.
by joshdickson | 2025-04-03 18:00:45+00:00
There's an in-depth review of the reasoning for undertaking this project in general and this approach in particular in the Methodology/About section below, see "Current State of Nutritional Data".

Millions of people use food logging apps to drive behavioral change and help adhere to healthy lifestyles. I believe there is immense societal good in continuing to offer improved tools to accomplish this, especially for free, and that's why I created the project and chose to open source the data.

https://www.opennutrition.app/about#current-state-of-nutriti...
by PollardsRho | 2025-04-03 18:01:19+00:00
It seems to me that much of recent AI progress has not changed the fundamental scaling principles underlying the tech. Reasoning models are more effective, but at the cost of more computation: it's more for more, not more for less. The logarithmic relationship between model resources and model quality (as Altman himself has characterized it), phrased a different way, means that you need exponentially more energy and resources for each marginal increase in capabilities. GPT-4.5 is unimpressive in comparison to GPT-4, and at least from the outside it seems like it cost an awful lot of money. Maybe GPT-5 is slightly less unimpressive and significantly more expensive: is that the through-line that will lead to the singularity?

Compare the automobile. Automobiles today are a lot nicer than they were 50 years ago, and a lot more efficient. Does that mean cars that never need fuel or recharging are coming soon, just because the trend has been higher efficiency? No, because the fundamental physical realities of drag still limit efficiency. Moreover, it turns out that making 100% efficient engines with 100% efficient regenerative brakes is really hard, and "just throw more research at it" isn't a silver bullet. That's not "there won't be many future improvements", but it is "those future improvements probably won't be any bigger than the jump from GPT-3 to o1, which does not extrapolate to what OP claims their models will do in 2027."

AI in 2027 might be the metaphorical brand-new Lexus to today's beat-up Kia. That doesn't mean it will drive ten times faster, or take ten times less fuel. Even if high-end cars can be significantly more efficient than what average people drive, that doesn't mean the extra expense is actually worth it.
by dezzadk | 2025-04-03 18:01:25+00:00
> The Steam Deck is a great gaming system. This isn’t because of it’s great battery life. A Nintendo Switch would probably have better battery life. It’s not because of its great performance. I don’t usually play AAA games, so I wouldn’t know.

First paragraph pretty much confirms my belief that some people who aren't hardcore gamers don't buy the Steamdeck to play games, they buy it because they are Steam/Valve fanboys.

Steam doesn't give a flying f if it runs the games on Xorg or Wayland - the Wine project made Wine run on Wayland, not Steam. What Steam does is hire Crossover developers to hack compatability to newer games, because thats all that matters from a business perspective and Valve is as corporate as any other.

Don't forget that Wine has been a a several decades long project before Steam hired some Crossover devs to fork it and take the limelight from the original project, the gamer-stupidity seems to forget this and give all credit to Valve which is ignorant and disrespectful to the work Wine has put in over several decades.

Lots of Linux ports have been cancelled since this is becoming the norm.. Rocket League and many other games simply don't see the reason to maintain their Linux ports. Linux ports are being cancelled more than ever.

Honestly, this shift towards running everything in Wine disgusts me. If you told me before the Steamdeck released that they would try to sell a handheld running wine on battery I'd be pissing myself laughing from how inefficient and terrible that sounds. Software crash can happen at any time, thats life with Wine.

Another thing is that I know people who own Steamdecks who have zero clue what games to play on it. It ends up being pirated Nintendo games or emulator games. Often they have to fiddle with control maps, settings before playing.

My idea of a handheld is that I don't want to tinker with it. I want the integrated out-of-the-box experience - maintaining another system despite my own PC is not something I prioritize my time on, same reason I don't buy an Android phone, really..

Native Linux ports matters!
by mywittyname | 2025-04-03 18:01:47+00:00
> If the tariffs remained in effect for three decades, or more, there may have been incentive to move manufacturing back to the US;

I don't understand why people take this as a given.

Tariffs are a two-way street. What incentive does a company have to move a billion dollar facility to the USA when it will face reciprocal tariffs on any exported goods from the USA?

The calculus is pretty complicated. Economies of scale become a factor - is one large global factory more efficient than separate regional facilities? Also income disparities; Americans can more afford to pay a 25% premium on a good than most of the rest of the world can; so maybe you just make Americans pay more. Or, maybe you do both, have a world-wide facility and a American facility, but still charge Americans the tariff premium, and pocket the 25% as profit instead (steel producers model; also pickup trucks); this works well in conjunction with the USA's low business taxes.

Then there's "hacks" like shipping goods to a country that has lower tariffs with the USA, then using cheap local labor to do the bare minimum to have the goods considered to be produced there. There are some obvious good choices here, supposing the country's leadership is willing to play ball into the ninth inning.

So it's not a given that that long-term effects are increased domestic production. It's just as likely to be a siphon of prosperity and a impediment to wealth generation since it will be hard to start companies in the USA that export products.
by yencabulator | 2025-04-03 18:01:57+00:00
I was actually positively surprised at how well even qwen2.5-coder:7b managed to talk through a file of Rust. I'm still a current-day-LLM-programming skeptic but that direction, code->English, seems a lot safer, since English is ambiguous anyway. For example, it recognized some of the code shapes and gave English names that can be googled easier.
by numpad0 | 2025-04-03 18:03:06+00:00
Sounds like a case of "it's always the PSU" in figurative sense... e.g. half-blown fuses, dried up caps, good +12V but weakened 3V3 lines, oxidation on sockets, things of that nature.

Or it could be platform quirks, or more interesting failures like crystal oscillator degrading, but I'd leave those to later.