MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by olivercameron | 2025-05-31 20:55:11+00:00
If I had to choose one, I'd easily say maintaining video coherence over long periods of time. The typical failure case of world models that's attempting to generate diverse pixels (i.e. beyond a single video game) is that they degrade to a mush of incoherent pixels after 10-20 seconds of video.

We talk about this challenge in our blog post here (https://odyssey.world/introducing-interactive-video). There's specifics in there on how we improved coherence for this production model, and our work to improve this further with our next-gen model. I'm really proud of our work here!

> Compared to language, image, or video models, world models are still nascent—especially those that run in real-time. One of the biggest challenges is that world models require autoregressive modeling, predicting future state based on previous state. This means the generated outputs are fed back into the context of the model. In language, this is less of an issue due to its more bounded state space. But in world models—with a far higher-dimensional state—it can lead to instability, as the model drifts outside the support of its training distribution. This is particularly true of real-time models, which have less capacity to model complex latent dynamics. Improving this is an area of research we're deeply invested in.

In second place would absolutely be model optimization to hit real-time. That's a gnarly problem, where you're delicately balancing model intelligence, resolution, and frame-rate.
by sfpotter | 2025-05-31 20:55:55+00:00
This is a great point... and Rademacher's theorem is one of my favorites. But this is in the context of a numerical algorithm which proposes to replace interval arithmetic with a direct evaluation of a gradient. For an SDF, the gradient fails to exist in many places; and since we're working with it on a computer and not doing math, this algorithm will eventually evaluate the gradient at a point where it is undefined (finite number of points, p > 0). On the other hand, it's straightforward to come up with a useful interval inclusion for the gradient which is defined even in these places (it should contain the subgradient of the function at each point). So, I am personally not convinced of the value of the proposed approach.
by lelanthran | 2025-05-31 20:56:25+00:00
> I started out with Server Side Includes on a shared host, but converted to using PHP along the way to be able to make a base file with all the stuff that is repeated (header, main, footer etc), and then injecting the content from index.php, /contact/index.php etc.

I have a static file download only webapp[1], and I managed to get the includes done with only a 99-line JS component.

Honestly, once you get a decent way to specify, in HTML tags, include files, a significant portion of what you use a framework for (DRY) becomes redundant.

[1] Dynamic data to hydrate elements on the page is via API-only URLs.
by jowday | 2025-05-31 20:56:26+00:00
Why are you going all in on world models instead of basing everything on top of a 3D engine that could be manipulated / rendered with separate models? If a world model was truly managing to model a manifold of a 3D scene, it should be pretty easy to extract a mesh or SDF from it and drop that into an engine where you could then impose more concrete rules or sanity check the output of the model. Then you could actually model player movement inside of the 3D engine instead of trying to train the world model to accept any kind of player input you might want to do now or in the future.

Additionally, curious about what exactly the difference between the new mode of storytelling you’re describing and something like a crpg or visual novel is - is your hope that you can just bake absolutely everything into the world model instead of having to implement systems for dialogue/camera controls/rendering/everything else that’s difficult about working with a 3D engine?
by cole-k | 2025-05-31 20:56:29+00:00
I wouldn't be too surprised if PL proofs were simpler to start with. Part of what I hear people say is that they also are a lot more routine. Do structural induction, apply the IH to show an invariant holds, continue. I haven't done much theorem proving, nor have I done any "mathematical" (e.g. analysis) proofs with a theorem prover, but it makes me wonder how much skill transfer there is between them if "mathematical" proofs require a much different approach.

I will also mention Software Foundations in Rocq (perhaps there is a Lean port). I worked through some of the first parts of it and found it quite pleasant.
by tgma | 2025-05-31 20:57:11+00:00
Right. The 7-day week cycle is also completely arbitrary, perhaps the most arbitrary of all time duration units, but having something of that nature has proven useful.

The 7-day week originated in ancient Mesopotamia, particularly Babylon, around the 3rd millennium BCE. It was tied to the observation of seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye: the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Each day was associated with one of these "planets," a system later adopted and refined by other cultures.

The Babylonians passed this concept to the Jews, who formalized it in their religious practices, linking it to the biblical creation story in Genesis, where God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, the Sabbath. This Jewish tradition influenced the structure of the week in the Western world.

The Romans also adopted the 7-day cycle by the 1st century CE, replacing their earlier 8-day market cycle (nundinae). They named the days after their gods, aligned with the celestial bodies: dies Solis (Sun), dies Lunae (Moon), dies Martis (Mars), dies Mercurii (Mercury), dies Iovis (Jupiter), dies Veneris (Venus), and dies Saturni (Saturn). These names persist in Romance languages (e.g., French: lundi for Moon, mardi for Mars).

The 7-day week spread through the Roman Empire and was cemented by Christianity, especially after Emperor Constantine made Sunday a day of rest in 321 CE. Other cultures, like the ancient Egyptians and early Chinese, had different cycles, but the 7-day week became dominant globally due to Western influence, trade, and colonization.

It’s not perfectly aligned with natural cycles—365.25 days in a year don’t divide evenly by 7—but its cultural and religious roots have made it a near-universal standard.
by eGQjxkKF6fif | 2025-05-31 20:57:47+00:00
Would you mind sharing information on these crawlers accessing APIs only usable for clicking around on websites?

And to clarify,

It's a part of the UI or something and only a human should be pressing it, and there's no other way to access that API or something?

AI agents exist now, there is virtually no way to distinguish between real user and bot if they mimic human patterns.
by exiguus | 2025-05-31 20:58:05+00:00
I understand your perspective. It's similar to AWS services like CloudFront, API Gateway, SQS, and Lambdas—all designed for a microservice architecture that may not be necessary if scaling isn't a priority. The same applies to frameworks and libraries such as Next.js, and even React, Vue, or Angular, in my opinion. Most products and companies are not on the scale of Netflix, Spotify, or Facebook.

This leads me to question why people still use jQuery instead of native JavaScript. From my understanding, jQuery primarily serves as a polyfill. So why jQuery and not native Javascript?
by gjm11 | 2025-05-31 20:58:12+00:00
Do you have any evidence that Dedekind's formalization of the real numbers was an essential step on the road to quantum physics and relativity? This seems very doubtful to me.

A more plausible claim: the general move towards greater rigour in mathematics, one of whose expressions was Dedekind's formalization of the real numbers, improved the state of mathematical understanding in ways that were necessary for the arrival of quantum physics and relativity. E.g., to do quantum physics you want the notion of "vector space"; to do general relativity you want the notion of "Riemannian manifold"; to do special relativity maybe you want to have encountered the "Erlangen programme".

But I'm not 100% convinced. It's not unusual for physicists to make use of mathematical notions that they don't have precise definitions of. E.g., I'm not sure anyone has an entirely satisfactory formal account of "path integrals"; string theory may or may not turn out to have anything to do with how the universe actually works, but if it doesn't it probably won't be because we don't have a complete account of what it actually is. Newton managed to do pretty impressive things with calculus before anyone had a really convincing definition of such advanced notions as, er, "derivative".
by matt_s | 2025-05-31 20:58:15+00:00
If you're going to analyze a process you have to look at all of the steps involved, including waiting time, re-work or going backwards in the process/iterating, as well as the time to do the tasks. They all matter in the economics of delivery of working software.

The slowest part is going to be the parts involving humans communicating things to each other and iterating on the requirements and designs and the waiting times in between. The technical coding or generation of assets does not take that much time in the overall process.
by ghusbands | 2025-05-31 20:59:37+00:00
It's common to assume that your solver encodes all the techniques that a human might reasonably use (without backtracking) but it's rarely the case. Someone could look at the clues in two columns and two rows at the same time, for example, and work out whether they together constrain something. (It's easier to see cases in minesweeper where quite long-range deductions can be made, especially when you're down to the last few mines.)

Look elsewhere in the thread and you'll see that there are 333,064 uniquely-solution grids that you have excluded.
by pron | 2025-05-31 20:59:39+00:00
First, this is true in any architecture. Second, in Java you can do just that with the use of semaphores guarding different resources with a different number of leases.

The one resource you can't easily schedule well is CPU, but that's not a big problem because interactive servers don't work well when the CPU needs to be scheduled (i.e. when it's at 100%). Again, this is true regardless of architecture.

Back when we first released virtual threads, many asked us why we didn't make the default virtual thread scheduler offer time-sharing (with or without priorities). The answer was that we wanted to, but were unable to find workloads for the intended domain of the default scheduler (interactive servers) where any kind of CPU scheduling could help (we said that when somebody finds such real workloads, we'll add fairer CPU scheduling to the default scheduler, assuming there was a good algorithm that would address such workloads).
by sfblah | 2025-05-31 21:00:27+00:00
According to this other thread posted on HN today, the issue isn't AI, but the end of zirp. Some even argue that AI and GenAI coding is all just hype: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44136117

Of course, I think the people in that thread have it dead wrong, and I agree with this article. I work at a large tech company that has already stopped hiring junior developers. We're getting so much more productivity out of IC engineers that I would expect to see layoffs even with increasing product velocity.

People who say GenAI isn't vastly speeding up development are just using motivated reasoning, aren't using the tools, or are just bad engineers.
by immibis | 2025-05-31 21:00:41+00:00
Eh. It's probably meant to be typedefed away. The number of bits has to be a constant, so it's not like it's a really new language feature, just a different way to write uintXX_t that's not constrained to fixed values of X.

If you ask your compiler for 1-megabyte integers, that's on you.
by fn-mote | 2025-05-31 21:01:05+00:00
I disagree. "Parsing" is the first level of understanding. If you are not moving past the parsing level, you have not achieved any kind of mastery.

My experience is that mastery means more like "you have a mental model which gives you 'intuitive' reasons to accurately classify things as true/false and provides some motivation for the reasoning".

An example: you see someone has solved a degree 4 equation by repeatedly applying the quadratic equation, getting 8 solutions. "No way."

Another example: watch a famous baking show and you see somebody put a bunch of different sized pieces of bread in the oven at the same time. Right away: "aren't they going to cook at different rates?" Sure enough, some burned, some raw.
by gruez | 2025-05-31 21:01:08+00:00
>If its not aimed correctly, where does the splash go? If you're lucky it stays in the toilet boil. However if your aim is off, you can completely miss your anus and either shoot to much under or over which will shoot the water outside of the toilet bowl.

so slowly squeeze the trigger to confirm the aim is correct, rather than going full blast at the start?
by 1659447091 | 2025-05-31 21:01:29+00:00
> Mission de Alcala in the valley

A long time ago, and for a couple years, I lived next to the stadium there and regularly bought meat from the Iowa meat farms butcher -- I did not even know Mission de Alcala existed or the areas history until today! (thanks for the post) And I drove past it all the time. These days thats the kind of historical site I travel around to visit; some variation of the phrase youth is wasted on the young comes to mind.
by yusina | 2025-05-31 21:02:02+00:00
>if a human came out living but with a brain that had zero electrical activity, that would be extraordinary, we normally come out with a baseline of pre-programming.

That statement reveals deep deficiencies in your understanding of biological neural networks. "electrical activity" is very different from "pre-programming". Synapses fire all the time, no matter if meaningfully pre-programmed or not. In fact, electrical activity decreases over time in a human brain. So, if anything, programming over time reduces electrical activity (though there is no established causal link).

> I sometimes think this debate happens because humans don't want to admit we're nothing more than LLMs programmed by nature and nurture, human seem to want to be especially special.

It's not specific to humans. But indeed, we don't fully understand how brains of humans, apes, pigs, cats and other animals really work. We have some idea of synapses, but there is still a lot unclear. It's like thinking just because an internal combistion engine is made of atoms, and we mostly know how atom physics and chemistry work, that any body with this basic knowledge of atom physics can understand and even build an ICE. Good luck trying. It's similar with a brain. Yes, synapses play a role. But that doesn't mean a brain is "nothing more than an LLM".
by Animats | 2025-05-31 21:02:21+00:00
> Not unless the model is building mini worlds with boundaries.

Right. I was never able to get very far from the starting point, and kept getting thrown back to the start. It looks like they generated a little spherical image, and they're able to extrapolate a bit from that. Try to go through a door or reach a distant building, and you don't get there.
by soulofmischief | 2025-05-31 21:02:59+00:00
I've been using web components liberally in my side projects, but for more complex SPAs I still reach for mithril as a frontend lib because it just leads to simpler, more idiomatic code which can be linted better than huge html strings.

Web Components definitely have their thorns, as well as the shadow DOM. They're still a lot more capable than people give them credit for. Nested CSS has also been great, but I still reach for SCSS because nested CSS is still missing a few syntactical goodies. However, LLMs really bridge the gap and allow me to quickly write decent small web components without worrying too much about the internals.
by sfpotter | 2025-05-31 21:03:56+00:00
For what it's worth, what you originally said was: "This is total nonsense." The points you're making are valid, but it isn't "total nonsense". Something not being exactly factually correct doesn't mean that it's "total nonsense". Different publications adhere to different levels of rigor. Just because it doesn't meet your own personal standard doesn't make it nonsense for the target audience of the article.
by int_19h | 2025-05-31 21:05:35+00:00
For starters, we have to acknowledge that capitalism isn't really a system as such. It's a set of ad hoc economic arrangements that each came into being as a result of historic evolution in many different societies, not some kind of coherent arrangement with any specific goal. If you were to have the same discussion 400 years ago, proponents of then-existing economic relationships would say, "how are you so convinced that there's a better solution than what we have right now if you can't even articulate what the replacement would be?".
by choeger | 2025-05-31 21:05:49+00:00
> People who say GenAI isn't vastly speeding up development are just using motivated reasoning, aren't using the tools, or are just bad engineers.

Then where is all that new software? Where are all the SaaS solutions, the games, the new tools?

The productivity increase that comes from working at a higher level of abstraction is a real thing, but it's not going to change the industry.
by AngryData | 2025-05-31 21:06:09+00:00
As someone in the trades, 85% of trade jobs are not any more difficult or require any more skill or amount of knowledge or experience as these other jobs. So I find it pretty messed up when people put these other jobs down as unskilled and use that to justify shit pay and conditions because that means most trade jobs are only slightly better off due to temporary social views.
by praash | 2025-05-31 21:06:33+00:00
> someone who spends all their time in Arizona would quickly get used to the fact that they now eat dinner at 12:00 UTC instead of 7pm. But it would make traveling more tedious: you'd have to re-learn the mapping every new place you went.

Following local times won't spare you from having to learn local culture anyway, such as Spanish dinner times ranging around 21-23.
by BroCoder | 2025-05-31 21:06:45+00:00
Google could do just about everything but they are such a large organization which makes them slow for development costs a lot if they miss distracts them from there core business model and not worth there while. Real question is why doesn't square accept BTC how are credit card networks and exchanges charging so much in fees and how does Africa send money with a text message for over a decade and I have to have paypal, venmo, a square card scanner that I need a headphone jack for and cash app.
by blacksmith_tb | 2025-05-31 21:07:22+00:00
My favorite thing about UTC is that the abbreviation was chosen because it doesn't make sense in French or English[1], (I like CUT a little more than TUC, though both are pronounceable as one-syllable words... unlike you-tee-see).

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinated_Universal_Time#Ety...
by int_19h | 2025-05-31 21:08:14+00:00
The whole point of collective action at large scale is to be able to say, "fuck your laws".

After all, the laws were much more hostile towards unions a century ago, and strikes would often be dispersed with outright violence using both paramilitary organizations (like Pinkertons) as well as police and military. But if doing so just means that the strike gets bigger and broader, it's not a winning strategy for the capital.
by rbultje | 2025-05-31 21:09:24+00:00
This is a weird take. Employees are supposed to be business expenses, that's the core idea of running a business: profit = revenue - expenses, where expenses are personnel / materials, and pay taxes over profit. Since the R&D change, businesses can't fully expense employees and need to pay (business) taxes over their salaries. Employees - of course - still pay personal taxes also (as was always the case).
by olivercameron | 2025-05-31 21:10:51+00:00
Great questions!

> Why are you going all in on world models instead of basing everything on top of a 3D engine that could be manipulated / rendered with separate models?

I absolutely think there's going to be super cool startups that accelerate film and game dev as it is today, inside existing 3D engines. Those workflows could be made much faster with generative models.

That said, our belief is that model-imagined experiences are going to become a totally new form of storytelling, and that these experiences might not be free to be as weird and whacky as they could because of heuristics or limitations in existing 3D engines. This is our focus, and why the model is video-in and video-out.

Plus, you've got the very large challenge of learning a rich, high-quality 3D representation from a very small pool of 3D data. The volume of 3D data is just so small, compared to the volumes generative models really need to begin to shine.

> Additionally, curious about what exactly the difference between the new mode of storytelling you’re describing and something like a crpg or visual novel

To be clear, we don't yet know what shape these new experiences will take. I'm hoping we can avoid an awkward initial phase where these experiences resemble traditional game mechanics too much (although we have much to learn from them), and just fast-forward to enabling totally new experiences that just aren't feasible with existing technologies and budgets. Let's see!

> is your hope that you can just bake absolutely everything into the world model instead of having to implement systems for dialogue/camera controls/rendering/everything else that’s difficult about working with a 3D engine?

Yes, exactly. The model just learns better this way (instead of breaking it down into discrete components) and I think the end experience will be weirder and more wonderful for it.
by lolinder | 2025-05-31 21:10:56+00:00
The most compelling argument from that other thread wasn't that AI isn't improving productivity, it's that companies never hired Junior engineers to increase productivity in the first place! Unless you win the lottery in hiring having a Junior on board slows you down as you teach them and ramp them up until they stop being a Junior.

Companies hired Juniors as a way to invest in someone who could be a valuable asset later, without having to compete quite so hard for people with strong potential. What's changed is that companies don't have as much financial flexibility as they did before (interest rate and tax code changes) and the first thing to go is risky long-term investments in hiring and retaining talent. That takes the form of cutting back on cushy benefits and it also takes the form of cutting jobs for Juniors.
by BroCoder | 2025-05-31 21:11:36+00:00
There is a whole webpage dedicated named killed by google. It is a large organization so it's expensive to and slow to build stuff especially if they get it wrong like social media for example. The real question is why does a small business owner need a square reader with a card scanner that needs a headphone jack, Venmo, Cash App, Zelle, Apple Pay and Paypal when Africa has been able to send money with a text for over a decade. Why can't the corner store take crypto and how do these credit card networks and exchanges make so much in fees.
by cavisne | 2025-05-31 21:12:46+00:00
My theory for these PM's is its basically a cheap way to take potential entrepreneurs off the market. Its hard to predict if a startup will succeed but one genre of success is having a Type A "fake it till you make it" non technical cofounder who can keep raising long enough to get product market fit.

These types all go to the same schools and do really well, interview the same, and value the prestige of working in big tech. So it's pretty easy to identify them and offer them a great career path and take them off the market.

Technical founders are way trickier to identify as they can be dropouts, interview poorly, not value the prestige etc.