MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by daemonk | 2025-05-21 17:48:33+00:00
Learning biology is a great insight to how humans think about complex systems. We tend to utilize a reductionist and engineering approach to figure out how things work. This is a perfectly valid approach when building up a complex system from knowable individual parts.

But when analyzing a complex biological system, we tend to make analogies to our own engineered components (motherboards, power sources, circuits). There are definitely a lot of similarities and it is a great way to understand one facet of the system. But it can also sometimes make us lose sight of the intertwining relationships among all of these parts through evolution.

The analogy of our genome to an informational blueprint is one of the best examples of the multi-faceted nature of biology. While the sequence of bases contained within DNA (primary structure) is informational, the complex structures the molecule itself (chromatin structure) also have mechanistic purposes.

We build engineered components to be controllable and independent so we can better assess how the system is working. However, that is not an explicit goal with biology. Biological "components" settle into the best form for the given environment over time even if it creates a potential "mess" of connections and relationships.

I think this is also why biology takes a long time to "sink in" while learning compared to other technical fields. It's very easy to over-train your mental biological model on one facet of the system and lose sight of the others.

It is not uncommon to see the same terminology used in very different ways in various sub-fields of biology. Gene Ontology is also a great example of this as people have found there are biases associated with what the originator lab is studying at the time. Genes with pleiotropic function will tend to get assigned function that's more relevant to what the lab is interested in.

Sometimes I wonder if we are really equipped to navigate it and understand it. Maybe AI/computation is really the only way to try to have a holistic view of the complexities. Perhaps trying to understand biology with our biological brain has inherent limitations like a piece of software trying to understand the hardware it resides in.
by yunwal | 2025-05-21 17:48:48+00:00
I don’t see why the device has to be in a significantly different form factor than current phones. AI alleviates one of the major problems phones have right now, which is that typing on them is slow.

If you can type a half-assed message, and have AI fill in the blanks, or reliably transcribe your voice, that’s a huge improvement to the phone in its current form factor. No reason the screen or interfaces have to undergo a radical transformation
by jerkstate | 2025-05-21 17:48:51+00:00
I know you aren’t the other guy, but it’s a really interesting argument that despite spending more and more money every year to solve this kind of problem, and seeing that the problem is getting worse (quality of life and economic security for uneducated people, in this case), one can still argue that the government is actually efficient and competent. It seems obvious to me that they are not successfully solving this problem with spending. I know a natural reaction is to blame one political party or the other for being especially bad, but you can see a lot of examples of failures to improve outcomes despite increasing spending at the state and local levels for both parties in the US. So if a politician comes along and says you know what, let’s try to solve this problem with policy instead of spending, the people who are suffering listen to that, even if the outcome isn’t certain.
by codyvoda | 2025-05-21 17:48:51+00:00
it’s not magic. it can make meaningful contributions (if you actually invest in learning the tools + best practices for using them)

you’re taking an anecdote and blowing it out of proportion to fit your preformed opinion. yes, when you start with the tool and do literally no work it makes bad PRs. yes, it’s early and experimental. that doesn’t mean it doesn’t work (I have plenty of anecdotes that it does!)

the truth lies in between and the mob mentality it’s magic or complete bullshit doesn’t help. I’d love to come to a thread like this and actually hear about real experiences from smart people using these kind of tools, but instead we get this bullshit
Ask HN: Is Hackers and Painters still relevant today?
by grandimam | 2025-05-21 17:49:05+00:00
I want to get to know the community's thoughts on H&P in the AI world that we live in now.

And also -

There’s also one aspect I’m not sure Paul Graham touched on directly: the relationship between hackers and the job market.

From my (limited) understanding of Hackers & Painters, a "hacker" is someone who uses existing tools to build something fun or useful. They’re not necessarily domain experts — they’re just 'really good' at building things.

I am having a hard time comprehending that idea from an employment perspective. When I look at the job market today, even roles labeled as “generalist” seem to demand a specific kind of expertise. Day-to-day responsibilities often require deep specialization, which doesn’t always align with the hacker mindset.

So I’m wondering — is the concept of the hacker still relevant in today’s employment landscape?
by arbuge | 2025-05-21 17:49:18+00:00
This could be true... but only if there is an actual specific problem that they can put their finger on that requires the device to be AI-first. What is that problem exactly?

It's also not obvious to me that a concerted effort by Apple (unlike what we've seen so far, admittedly) wouldn't eventually be successful in converting the iPhone to something effectively indistinguishable from a platform designed from the ground up to be "AI-first".

Designing things from the ground up is hard by the way. It's not just the design itself; it's the ecosystems around them which are really hard to get going. Apple has the world's biggest flywheel in motion there already.
by asadotzler | 2025-05-21 17:49:52+00:00
"brand new"? really? we've had these slop bots for years now. what's with all the fanboys pretending it was just released this month or something. it's not brand new. it's old and failing and executives who bet billions are now dismantling their engineering capabilities to try to make something out of those burned billions. claiming it's brand new is just silly.
by ChuckMcM | 2025-05-21 17:51:22+00:00
> It's not true that every piece of software is trivial to copy in a clean-room way, that is, only being able to observe its behaviour and not any implementation details.

Ideally, you can change the way you look at this slightly. We can agree that software isn't "trivial" to create. You limit your claim 'observing its behaviour' however and that isn't as precise as we'd like. I'd make the claim this way:

"Any piece of software, for which you have both the requirements that define its use and a working example that putatively meets those requirements, is straight forward to re-create from first principles."

It is the very definition of the job description that a programmer/engineer can take "requirements" and turn them into "product." That doesn't say anything about how easy or hard that is, just that its the job and people do it all the time. When you have a working example, it both facilitates the engineer's understanding through observation, and provides a test by which the engineer can measure their own progress in meeting the requirements. That allows for iterative development which happens, in my experience, more quickly than when there is not a working example to compare against.
Show HN: I built a platform to solve the "YC cofounder matching" problems
by Jun_ | 2025-05-21 17:51:50+00:00
Over the past year, my remote team and I have been building LaunchWith, a platform designed to go beyond cofounder matching and helping early stage builders from the right teams through structured collaboration.

LaunchWith supports two types of users: - Visionaries: people with ideas but no team - Contributors: people with skills but no project

Features include project dashboards, team management (kanban, team chat, etc.), and skill tagging to help connect the right collaborators. It’s like if cofounder matching, Upwork, and Trello had a baby—built specifically for student and early-stage teams.

We’ve tested it with global users across different time zones and backgrounds and found it especially helpful in places with limited startup infrastructure.

Would love feedback, critiques, or collaboration from the HN community. Happy to answer questions!
by waleedlatif1 | 2025-05-21 17:52:13+00:00
we bet that its just because they pre-dated LLMs and don't really allow for granular control. the goal is to make it easier to develop automations/workflows, not harder. we think the future of development is 90% transformations/routing/fallbacks (boring) and the only part that actually impacts the end result is the call to the LLM (fun), the tools you give it, and a memory component. if we abstract away all the boring stuff, and only leave the stuff that impacts the results then it makes iterating and building with AI much faster and easier.
by elAhmo | 2025-05-21 17:52:47+00:00
> it's because AI is still universally being strategized as a solution in search of a problem

What Apple showed seems quite useful. It is a shame they failed spectacularly at execution. Even the simplest things that should be answerable by an LLM and their data, which is what a lot of people want, should be a very low hanging fruit - so much utility without building a complete experience from scratch.

Why cant I just say 'do I have any notifications from a bank?' or 'show me emails that require my attention'. Those things are simple if done with a combination of multiple tools (e.g. feeding email content somewhere, asking it to classify, show the results), yet a three trillion dollar company, with dedicated hardware release just for this purpose, failed to achieve it.

I might be over simplifying things, but with infinite resources, they should be able to do better.
by adastra22 | 2025-05-21 17:53:04+00:00
If a C program accesses uninitialized memory (UB), it is perfectly compliant with the language spec for the compiler to reformat your hard drive and replace your OS code with crypto mining.

I'm not exaggerating by a legalistic interpretation, and I'm only slightly exaggerating in practice. UB can do some really weird, unintuitive stuff in practice on real hardware:

https://mohitmv.github.io/blog/Shocking-Undefined-Behaviour-...

The point is that this extreme UB should never happen. It was a choice of the compiler implementors, and rather than fix this, they allowed the escape hatch of UB in the spec. It would be more sensible for the compiler to say that, e.g., accessing uninitialized memory results in a nonspecified value, or even possibly multiple different nonspecified values if accessed from different threads. That captures what we expect to happen, but would be (according to C language spec lawyers) defined behavior.

In practice, it would mean that compliant compilers will ensure that any situation in which uninitialized memory could be accessed would not result in weird edge case page faults on certain architectures or whatever that could in fact lead to wacky UB situations.

This is not an unreasonable ask.
by jqpabc123 | 2025-05-21 17:53:21+00:00
... growing in the vacuum left by institutional faith

Simply not possible. There can't be a "vacuum left by institutional faith" for the simple reason that "faith" has never been firmly established in China.

Most of what some in the west might call a "religion" (Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism) in China are really not built around "faith" and are more philosophical in nature.

Buddha and Confucius are revered as great thinkers and philosophers but not for being "supernatural" in any way.

And there is no "boom" because superstition has always been a significant part of eastern culture and tradition. For example, symbolic or "lucky" colors.

https://travelchinawith.me/china-facts/lucky-colors-in-china...

This article is colored by a western/religious viewpoint.
by lenerdenator | 2025-05-21 17:54:06+00:00
I like the cut of Zitron's jib, but have to disagree with this point here:

> We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.

We have redefined competence, but we haven't redefined it to be measured in nebulous ways. Far from it. Nadella does one thing and he does it well: he makes number go up. And that's all that matters.

Number gotta go up. If you don't make number go up, then how Grugg Ugug, MBA, to figure out how company doing? You no seriously expect Grugg to approach enterprise of measuring benefit of a business to society without one simple number.

We used to measure the worth of investment and expenditures of capital by their holistic benefit to society. That was way more thinking than business school graduates in this country wanted to do, so we distilled it down to the quarterly profit. At the very least, these people could understand addition, subtraction, and which number was bigger than the other. The "nebulous" way was what we got away from as a result.
by neom | 2025-05-21 17:54:13+00:00
We have to carefully select the yardstick by which progress and success are measured. If we don't, we inevitably drift towards meaningless, short-term, and ultimately destructive forms of growth instead of progress. Incentive failures are more nuanced than “Friedman = root of all evil.” Venture capital structure, indexing, and monetary policy also drive the short termism. It's part of why I'm skeptical the next wave of amazing technology companies will come out of America.
by mikestew | 2025-05-21 17:54:18+00:00
TFA is a lengthy slog, but it seemed to be mostly worth it. If nothing else, TFA ties together a lot of the business folk wisdom with its origins, repeatedly pointing out that this one is based on the thoughts of a blatant racist, this other one used as the basis for RTO came from someone talking about factory workers, not office workers, etc.
by albumen | 2025-05-21 17:54:24+00:00
I agree. Humane tried with a new form factor. An audio-only interface is too limited. A watch screen is too small. There's a lot going for a decently sized screen that lets you look images, maps, emails, webpages that you control (rather than projecting onto the nearest (in)convenient surface), that fits in your pocket. Good enough BCIs are still years/decades away.

I could imagine AirPods that connect to various screens embedded in the environment, which you temporarily use when next to them. But it's still jot as convenient as a screen in your pocket.
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-05-21 17:54:25+00:00
That's not solved, that's a bothersome thing that wastes millions of man hours and does nothing in the end.

Mandating browsers (preinstalled on devices sold in EU) auto-delete cookies on window close, and add a button to whitelist 1st party cookies on specific domains, would solve many more problems without wasting time with annoying popups.
by kingbob000 | 2025-05-21 17:54:26+00:00
Very cool! I liked many of the results just trying a few random things

I noticed a few things related to the site itself that make it feel unfinished and basically an incomplete site template:

* The "About us" and "Blog" links are broken.

* The social media links (X, Discord, GitHub) don't actually link anywhere.

* The pricing page is for a different product altogether.
by belter | 2025-05-21 17:54:27+00:00
This whole thread from yesterday take a whole different meaning: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44031432

Comment in the GitHub discussion:

"...You and I and every programmer who hasn't been living under a rock knows that AI isn't ready to be adopted at this scale yet, on the premier; 100M-user code-hosting platform. It doesn't make any sense except in brain-washed corporate-talk like "we are testing today what it can do tomorrow".

I'm not saying that this couldn't be an adequate change some day, perhaps even in a few years but we all know this isn't it today. It's 100% financial-driven hype with a pinch of we're too big to fail mentality..."
by 0x500x79 | 2025-05-21 17:54:33+00:00
Theres a 3 point way to say this. Usually technology: * More efficient * Higher Quality * Less effort

Most successful technologies provide multiple of these benefits. What is terrible, and the direction we are going right now, is that these new systems (or offshoring like we are talking about here) seem/are "Less Effort" but do not hit the other two axioms. This is a very dangerous place to be.

People would rather be lazy than roll their sleeves up and focus, especially in our attention diverting world.
by airylizard | 2025-05-21 17:54:35+00:00
As more and more people use brute force loops to make their AI agents more reliable, this hidden inference giant will only continue to grow. This is why I put my framework together, using just 2 passes as opposed to n+ can increase accuracy and reliability by a far greater amount than brute force loops while using significantly less resources. Supportive evidence and data can be found in my repo: https://github.com/AutomationOptimization/tsce_demo
by tsumnia | 2025-05-21 17:55:03+00:00
I think OP is more referring to examples on how to set a workflow, like what would the equivalent "Hello World" / "FizzBuzz" / "Send an alert notification to [location] if [condition]". We're still trying to identify when and where using an agent is beneficial, so some use cases that I can review and fiddle with to match my workflow will help.

Really cool platform, so I'm interested in using it!
by the-lazy-guy | 2025-05-21 17:55:10+00:00
That is exactly what you want to evaluate the thechnology. Not make a buggy commit into softwared not used by nobody and reviewed by an intern. But actually review it by domain professionals, in real world very well-tested project. So they could make an informed decision on where it lacks in capabilities and what needs to be fixed before they try it again.

I doubt that anyone expected to merge any of these PRs. Question is - can the machine solve minor (but non-trivial) issues listed on github in an efficient way with minimal guidance. Current answer is no.

Also, _if_ anything was to be merged, dotnet is dogfooded extensively at Microsoft, so bugs in it are much more likely to be noticed and fixed before you get a stable release on your plate.
by solarwindy | 2025-05-21 17:56:30+00:00
The managers may believe that's what they're asking their developers to do, but doesn't this whole charade expose the fact that this technology just does not have even close to the claimed capabilities?

I see it as wishful thinking in the extreme to suppose that probabilistic mashing together of plagiarized jigsaw pieces of code could somehow approach human intelligence and reasoning—and yet, the parlour trick is convincing enough that this has escalated into a mass delusion.
by Closi | 2025-05-21 17:56:47+00:00
Bill Gates saw computers and extrapolated that there would be one in every home, Gordon Moore produced Moores Law which literally extrapolated compute in the 60s and almost still holding, and you can extrapolate that GPT-5 will perform better than GPT-4, and that there will probably be a GPT-6 that will be even better than that.

Extrapolating that technology will get better in the future when it has got better in the past isn’t a sure bet, but it’s a reasonably reliable one.
by trgn | 2025-05-21 17:57:22+00:00
It's circular. Sure it's pegged to metal, but won't tell you how much corn or land or homes you can buy with it. What should one oz of gold, hoarded in 2025, be able to buy you in 2050? Many factors will determine that. Theres no such thing as fixed value, unless the definition is self referential.

The only thing to do is turn present day savings in capital, it's the only claim one can have on wealth in the future.
by beloch | 2025-05-21 17:57:26+00:00
It's an ironic choice to choose longform as the vehicle for this message. This is the one form of blog-post/journalism for which it is worth using a bot to generate an abstract, just to decide if you'll read it. I've been burned by a link-bait title and an author who veers off the promised road into a ditch or an entirely different alleyway one too many times.
by abelanger | 2025-05-21 17:57:27+00:00
> Most execution environments are stateful (e.g., they may rely on running Jupyter kernels for each user session). This is hard to manage and expensive if users expect to be able to come back to AI task sessions later. A stateless-but-persistent execution environment is paramount for long running (multi-day) task sessions.

It's interesting how architectural patterns built at large tech companies (for completely different use-cases than AI) have become so relevant to the AI execution space.

You see a lot of AI startups learning the hard way that value of event sourcing and (eventually) durable execution, but these patterns aren't commonly adopted on Day 1. I blame the AI frameworks.

(disclaimer - currently working on a durable execution platform)
by cj | 2025-05-21 17:57:29+00:00
1) AI pane of glass

2) It runs your own agent

3) It has your best interest in mind

4) It's a broker between you and the "wild wild west internet"

That's cool, but is it "iPhone killer" cool? Maybe, but still unclear why. What's the mission statement of the device, to the OP's original point? It runs an agent, who cares?

Is the mission statement for this device basically "Use the internet without ads" -- if so, that's a pretty narrow market. People have learned to tolerate ads, I don't think people will throw away their iPhones for a better ad blocker.
by wim | 2025-05-21 17:57:50+00:00
Very cool! This is so clever and makes deploying it so simple. I just wasn't able to use it yet because we'd have (many) thousands of SQLite DBs to backup. I quickly hacked something together using fanotify + SQLite's Backup API to have some copies at least, but I'm going to try to switch to Litestream if this amount of files would be supported by the wildcard replication.
Proof that we are information
by zombiej5 | 2025-05-21 17:58:06+00:00
The very fact that matter is shaped any shape at all is because it contains information... information exchanged between particles that describe every property about that matter.

The universe is constantly seeking to maximize randomness.... entropy.

Information is therefore resistance to entropy.

Noise is entropy.

A signal is lack of entropy.

Life fights the very force of the universe trying to maximize entropy because if we were just scattered particles we would be dead.

Now, there are non living things that are also matter, but whether they are scattered or not does not affect the fact that they are not living, and since all things eventually progress towards a maximum state of entropy, even they will be scattered in time.

But living things cannot be in a max state of entropy, as it takes complex structure to sustain life.

So life is resistance to entropy.

And resistance to entropy is information, as otherwise it would be noise.

So we are information, because otherwise we would be dead.