MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Animats | 2025-05-16 20:02:55+00:00
Ah. The linked paper goes into that in more detail.

This was a hot idea right after WWII because servomechanisms were finally working. In movies of early WWII naval gunnery, you see people turning cranks to get two arrows on a a dial to match. By late WWII, that's become automatic. Anti-aircraft guns are hitting the target more of the time. Early war air gunner training.[1] Late war air gunner training - the computer does the hard part.[2] Never before had that much mechanized feedback smarts been applied to tough real-world problems.

This sort of thing generated early AI enthusiasm. Machines can think! AGI Real Soon Now! Hence the "cybernetics" movement. That lasted about a decade. They needed another nine orders of magnitude of compute power. Psychology picked up on this concept, but didn't do much with it.

Looks like it's coming around again.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWYqu1Il9Ps

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJExsIp4yO8
by curl-up | 2025-05-16 20:02:57+00:00
> The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will.

So the fun, all along, was not in the process of creation itself, but in the fact that the creator could somehow feel superior to others not being able to create? I find this to be a very unhealthy relationship to creativity.

My mixer can mix dough better than I can, but I still enjoy kneading it by hand. The incredibly good artisanal bakery down the street did not reduce my enjoyment of baking, even though I cannot compete with them in quality by any measure. Modern slip casting can make superior pottery by many different quality measures, but potters enjoy throwing it on a wheel and producing unique pieces.

But if your idea of fun is tied to the "no one else can do this but me", then you've been doing it wrong before AI existed.
by randycupertino | 2025-05-16 20:03:14+00:00
First Elizabeth Holmes is back with her husband's new blood testing venture, and now Neumann!

> "Flow seemed overvalued — it had a $1 billion valuation right off the bat, thanks in part to $350 million from Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z venture-capital firm, the largest single investment the firm had made at that point."
by woah | 2025-05-16 20:03:23+00:00
> But now, when my brain spontaneously forms a tiny sliver of a potentially interesting concept or idea, I can just shove a few sloppy words into a prompt and almost instantly get a fully reasoned, researched, and completed thought. Minimal organic thinking required.

No offense, but I've found that AI outputs very polished but very average work. If I am working on something more original, it is hard to get AI to output reasoning about it without heavy explanation and guidance. And even then, it will "revert to the mean" and stumble back into a rut of familiar concepts after a few prompts. Guiding it back onto the original idea repeatedly quickly uses up context.

If an AI is able to take a sliver of an idea and output something very polished from it, then it probably wasn't that original in the first place.
by apsurd | 2025-05-16 20:03:26+00:00
If you are in the camp of "ends justify the means" then it makes sense why all this is scary and nihilistic. What's the point doing anything if the outcome is infinitely better done in some other way by some other thing/being/agent?

If the "means justify the ends" then doing anything is its own reason.

And in the _end_, the cards will land where they may. ends-justify-means is really logical and alluring, until I realize why am I optimizing for END?
by ankit219 | 2025-05-16 20:03:49+00:00
Familiar scenario. One thing that would help is to use AI as someone you are having a conversation with.

(most AIs need to be explicitly told before you start this). You tell them not to agree with you, to ask more questions instead of providing the answers, to offer justifications and background as to why those questions are being asked. This helps you refine your ideas more, understand the blind spots, and explore different perspectives. Yes, an LLM can refine the idea for you, especially if something like that is already explored. It can also be the brainstorming accessory who helps you to think harder. Come up with new ideas. The key is to be intentional about which way you want it. I once made Claude roleplay as a busy exec who would not be interested in my offering until i refined it 7 times (and it kept offering reasons as to why an AI exec would or would not read it).
by sanderjd | 2025-05-16 20:04:38+00:00
Yeah I haven't found the right language for this yet, but it's something like: I'm happy and optimistic about LLMs when I'm the one doing something, and more anxious about them when I'm supporting someone else in doing something. Or: It makes me more excited to focus on ends, and less excited to focus on means.

Like, in the recent past, someone who wanted to achieve some goal with software would either need to learn a bunch of stuff about software development, or would need to hire someone like me to bring their idea to life. But now, they can get a lot further on their own, with the support of these new tools.

I think that's good, but it's also nerve-wracking from an employment perspective. But my ultimate conclusion is that I want to work closer to the ends rather than the means.
by palmotea | 2025-05-16 20:04:50+00:00
>> It's not a silly piece of trivia, it's a completely different thing than what people think of as the "Nobel Prize", which is the set of prizes established by Nobel's will, not an unrelated prize named after him to leech off the prestige associated with his name.

> AFAICT your take exists entirely to delegitimize economics as a science. Very childish and frustrating.

You know, real sciences don't need shiny medallions to make them legitimate. I'd say your comment delegitimizes economics more than the GP's.
Show HN: KVSplit – Run 2-3x longer contexts on Apple Silicon
by dipampaul17 | 2025-05-16 20:04:58+00:00
I discovered that in LLM inference, keys and values in the KV cache have very different quantization sensitivities. Keys need higher precision than values to maintain quality.

I patched llama.cpp to enable different bit-widths for keys vs. values on Apple Silicon. The results are surprising:

- K8V4 (8-bit keys, 4-bit values): 59% memory reduction with only 0.86% perplexity loss - K4V8 (4-bit keys, 8-bit values): 59% memory reduction but 6.06% perplexity loss - The configurations use the same number of bits, but K8V4 is 7× better for quality

This means you can run LLMs with 2-3× longer context on the same Mac. Memory usage scales with sequence length, so savings compound as context grows.

Implementation was straightforward: 1. Added --kvq-key and --kvq-val flags to llama.cpp 2. Applied existing quantization logic separately to K and V tensors 3. Validated with perplexity metrics across context lengths 4. Used Metal for acceleration (with -mlong-calls flag to avoid vectorization issues)

Benchmarked on an M4 MacBook Pro running TinyLlama with 8K context windows. Compatible with Metal/MPS and optimized for Apple Silicon.

GitHub: https://github.com/dipampaul17/KVSplit
by sigzero | 2025-05-16 20:05:08+00:00
> I can run THE SAME CODE on DOS, BeOS, Amiga, Atari ST, any of the BSDs, Linux distros, macOS, OS X, Windows, HP/UX, SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, OSF/1, Tru64, z/OS, Android, classic Mac, and more.

No, you really can't. Not anything significant anyway. There are too many deviations between some of those systems to all you to run the same code.
by kccqzy | 2025-05-16 20:05:21+00:00
You are way too pessimistic. It would help if you find ways to make yourself more optimistic, whether that's through a long break or exercise or nature or your hobbies. I suggest starting with a long break.

> I’m 40.

If you think that's too old, no it's not. My manager is older than that when he got the current job.

> I struggle with networking, so I have no professional connections.

If you have coworkers you have professional connections.

> My savings can last about two year

That's not bad at all. Feel free to spend a half year to one year taking a break and the rest of the time preparing your next steps.

> I haven’t interviewed in years and get extremely anxious in interviews.

You need to be more confident in yourself. Interviewing is a skill that can be learned. Not being anxious also can be learned.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-16 20:05:27+00:00
> someone had modified the AI bot’s system prompt,

If you were responsible for the releases of your flagship chat bot, how many layers of control do you think you would have over the system prompt, arguably its most important (and potentially damaging) component?

Either:

1. There was no rogue employee.

2. xAI doesn't know how to ship production code.
by patcon | 2025-05-16 20:05:50+00:00
Yeah, I think you're onto something. I'm not sure the performative motivation is necessarily bad, but def different

Maybe AI is like Covid, where it will reveal that there were subtle differences in the underlying humans all along, but we just never realized it until something shattered the ability for ambiguity to persist.

I'm inclined to so that this is a destabilising thing, regardless of my thoughts on the "right" way to think about creativity. Multiple ways could coexist before, and now one way no longer "works".
by mahirsaid | 2025-05-16 20:06:16+00:00
Interesting enough i still hear people say the error messages from rust is confusing and none informative. I wouldn't say that i am proficient in Rust but i know enough about it and it;s tooling to distinguish the difference between different (LV " Low Level " ) languages. When you get a grasp of the Rust lang then you will know how helpful the compiler is in Rust compared to other languages. Highlighting the progress of the Rust lang compiler messages in this post really Depicts the refinement of their ( Rust lang team ) compiler messages.
by regurgist | 2025-05-16 20:06:22+00:00
You are in a maze of twisty little passages that are not the same. You have to figure out which ones are not.

Try this. The world is infinitely complex. AI is very good at dealing with the things it knows and can know. It can write more accurately than I can, spell better. It just takes stuff I do and learns from my mistakes. I'm good with that. But here is something to ask AI:

"Name three things you cannot think about because of the language you use?"

Or "why do people cook curds when making cheese."

Or how about this:

"Name three things you cannot think about because of the language you use?"

AI is at least to some degree an artificial regurgitarian. It can tell you about things that have been thought. Cool. But here is a question for you. Are there things that you can think about that have not been thought about before or that have been thought about incorrectly?

The reason people cook curds is because the goal of cheese making was (in the past) to preserve milk, not to make cheese.
by steamrolled | 2025-05-16 20:06:26+00:00
More generally, prior to LLMs, you were competing with 8 billion people alive (plus all of our notable dead). Any novel you could write probably had some precedent. Any personal story you could tell probably happened to someone else too. Any skill you wanted to develop, there probably was another person more capable of doing the same.

It was never a useful metric to begin with. If your life goal is to be #1 on the planet, the odds are not in your favor. And if you get there, it's almost certainly going to be unfulfilling. Who is the #1 Java programmer in the world? The #1 topologist? Do they get a lot of recognition and love?
by fkfyshroglk | 2025-05-16 20:06:34+00:00
Not all processes are the same, though. I strongly suspect any efficiency improvements will come in processes that didn't require much "thinking" to begin with. I use it daily, but mostly as a way to essentially type faster—I can read much faster than I can type, so I mostly validate and correct the autocomplete. All of my efforts to get it to produce trustworthy output beyond this seem to trail behind the efficiency of just searching the internet.

Granted, I'm blessed to not have much busywork; if I need to produce corporate docs or listicles AI would be a massive boon. But I also suspect AI will be used to digest these things back into small bullet points.
by agotterer | 2025-05-16 20:07:09+00:00
I appreciate your thoughts and definitely share some of your sentiments. But don’t underestimate the value and importance of continuing to be a creative.

Something I’ve been thinking about lately is the idea of creative stagnation due to AI. If AI’s creativity relies entirely on training from existing writing, anrchitecture, art, music, movies, etc., then future AI might end up being trained only on derivatives of today’s work. If we stop generating original ideas or developing new styles of art, music, etc., how long before society gets stuck endlessly recycling the same sounds, concepts, and designs?
by criddell | 2025-05-16 20:07:21+00:00
> I have mentored junior developers and found it to be a rewarding part of the job.

That's really awesome. I hope my daughter finds a job somewhere that values professional development. I'd hate for her to quit the industry before she sees just how interesting and rewarding it can be.

I didn't have many mentors when starting out, but the ones I had were so unbelievably helpful both professionally and personally. If I didn't have their advice and encouragement, I don't think I'd still be doing what I'm doing.
by AStonesThrow | 2025-05-16 20:07:28+00:00
Yes, I agree that this may be beyond the scope of a mere "payments system".

"BuyMeACoffee" appears to be a Patreon-like platform for "artists and creators". I would say it is more than a payment platform, because it is a marketplace and a venue for people to do business.

Now we have plenty of marketplaces, such as eBay, or Etsy or Amazon. These marketplaces have strict requirements on what vendors and customers can do and how they can transact business. If you went on Amazon and purchased art+drugs, that would quickly be shut down. It's also Amazon's responsibility. Now they are brokering those payments from customer to vendor but they are more than a payment platform, because they are hosting both parties.

BMAC is not merely, blindly transacting payments like Visa or Mastercard. They're providing a venue for stuff to be put out there. If they are collecting payments from fans and disbursing it to creators and artists, then I say that they have a responsibility to ensure no illicit activity goes on and people are getting what they paid for.

"Getting what you paid for" is obviously an extremely subjective thing when we're talking about electronic art or media, and especially when customers can buy "memberships" or send "tips" because now we're just funnelling money to a personality influencer who is into crowd-pleasing. And the opportunities are vast for organized crime and nation-state threat actor sort of activities when you scale that up and go crossing international borders with your service, wouldn't you agree?

In meatspace, you're going to have a comedy club or a concert venue, an art gallery, you know, someplace that showcases artists and may sell their work, or enable them to work for money. And any such venue will necessarily have controls that protect the customers, and protect the artists, and if there is money changing hands for illicit purposes, the venue is on the hook for this. Because they're doing the matchmaking.

And there are mainstream marketplaces that are doing this, but to do it large-scale and internationally is going to run up against legal and regulatory hurdles and it's not as simple as turning a blind eye.
by neonsunset | 2025-05-16 20:07:32+00:00
In the end, .NET is going hybrid route. Circa .NET 10/11 Roslyn will stop emitting state machines and something state-machine-like will be produced by the compiler itself iff the asynchronous execution suspends, and will be otherwise practically free.

https://github.com/dotnet/runtime/blob/main/docs/design/spec...

Mind you, short-lived operations are much cheaper with stackless co-routine model like in C#/F# or Rust than spawning an entire, even if virtual, thread/process.
Show HN: An extensible personal assistant server
by theOGognf | 2025-05-16 20:08:02+00:00
This project is less about the personal assistant and AI part, and more about integrating a bunch of interesting Rust crates together to get something that's easily extensible.

Turns out that it wasn't too bad. I think the most challenging part was figuring out how different dependencies could fit together rather than figuring out the best model or prompts. It's in a state now where it maybe takes an hour or so to add a new command by defining database migrations, adding new structs, and then adding the API endpoint definitions.

However, I don't want to take this any further; I just thought folks might find this interesting.
by codedokode | 2025-05-16 20:08:07+00:00
Actually data-binding UIs (UIs that automatically update themselves when model variable changes) allow to do more in less time. So you just spend more time to reach the same result.

For example, I don't want to use non-reactive UIs (like vanilla JS or GTK) anymore. And it's sad to see that many (or maybe even most of) open-source projects still manually write code to update the UI and lose time on this. It's like trying to build a house using ancient tools.
by __turbobrew__ | 2025-05-16 20:08:40+00:00
If you are a Canadian citizen you don’t need a visa — due to the visa waiver program — for business purposes as long as your stay is less than 90 days.

You cannot be employed in the US under these conditions, but as a founder you are most likely doing things which are permitted:

* negotiating contracts * business meetings * board meetings * conferences * purchasing property in the US
by lucb1e | 2025-05-16 20:09:50+00:00
> I find it pretty tough to have a deep technical conversation in German

...loan words?

Dutch doesn't have a word for computer other than computer, SSD is SSD, machine learning is machine learning, WiFi is WiFi (with a 50/50 split on people saying it the english or the dutch way), generative AI is generatieve AI and I don't think anyone would count loaning generative as-is as a typo either (maybe if you work for a publisher with a strict rulebook)

And from there you apply the normal grammar. To do stuff on the computer is computering (or, actually, we make verbs with -en so it's actually computeren) and machine learning applications are machinelearning-toepassingen. At least, to me it's normal to mix languages like that. It's also not like we avoid the word fingerspitzengefühl or überhaupt just because they once came from german, or like the english don't throw in a kindergarten or zwischenzug where applicable. It just gets mixed into the existing language
by ionwake | 2025-05-16 20:09:57+00:00
Im sorry if Im being silly, but I have paid for the Pro version, $200 a month, everytime I click on Try Codex, it takes me to a pricing page with the "Team Plan" https://chatgpt.com/codex#pricing.

Is this still rolling out? I dont need the team plan too do I?

I have been using openAI products for years now and I am keen to try but I have no idea what I am doing wrong.
by cess11 | 2025-05-16 20:10:08+00:00
Shouldn't be too hard to get AtomVM onto chips now, according to rumour that's been worked on and made simpler.

This recent talk, https://www.elixirconf.eu/keynotes/the-atomvm-and-new-horizo..., probably showcases the process to some extent so it's a good idea to keep an eye on their YouTube channel for a recording.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-16 20:10:10+00:00
1. Google didn't claim it was some rogue employee. It was a flaw in their model weights (they'd had others before).

2. Apple's case is more similar, but their dictation feature is not a core product in the way that xAI's chat bot is. In other words, you'd expect more checks to ensure that something like your system prompt can't just be modified by some employee (on purpose or inadvertently).
by dylan604 | 2025-05-16 20:11:06+00:00
I'd like to know more about that solitary picture. How far away was the camera, and what lens was used?

There's a similar full moon rising shot I've been dying to shoot in my home town, but there's no safe place to set up with a lens long enough to have the moon's size be impressive. Wide angle shots to establish location with the moon leaves the moon a tiny size in the image. Telephotos zoom in past the interesting scenery unless moved far enough away--the longer the lens the further away. My current plan is a big drone to support the lens but the location puts me closer to a highway than I'd like to fly a drone. Oh well, I can see it in my mind's eye
by nyarlathotep_ | 2025-05-16 20:11:17+00:00
Continue applying--the lead time to finding a new job is often months for people in similar positions/already laid off.

You might need 6 months or more to find a new gig, and the response rate for applying is very low across the board.

I'm in a similar position, and would love to take time off, but I'm actively launching resumes into the ether to see what happens in the interim.

Plenty of scams, and lots of "ghosting."
by nand_gate | 2025-05-16 20:11:38+00:00
We're not going to waste days chasing them when we could waste days writing a blog post to advertise our product.

Genius marketing, I guess Rocket Company is supposed to be exploiting the OSS community, but who built Xen ;)

Before you soapbox on the 'open source moral contract' consider repaying the OSS works you gladly derived.
by poobear22 | 2025-05-16 20:12:13+00:00
I had a good time with R for statistical process control. I don't think I used any libraries at the time (this was a long time ago) except maybe Pareto charts, but I primarily worked with mean time between failures of events. My issue was I did not control the faulty applications, but received a lot of "blame" for their failures as we managed the high performance computer systems. I wanted to be able to shine a flashlight on the various operational jobs and the frequency of their failures. I generally felt the application owners were often times lazy in getting to a root cause analysis, and it was never my job to do this with their specialized applications. It did a pretty good job taking the heat off my team, the results were automatically generated and always available. But, changing the culture was always difficult.
by zdragnar | 2025-05-16 20:12:19+00:00
Anyone who has learned a second language can tell you that you aren't proficient just by memorizing vocabulary and grammar. Having a conversation and forming sentences on the fly just feels different- either as a different skill or using a different part of the brain.

I also don't think the nature of LLMs being a negative crutch is new knowledge per se; when I was in school, calculus class required a graphing calculator but the higher end models (TI-92 etc) that had symbolic equation solvers were also banned, for exactly the same reason. Having something that can give an answer for you fundamentally undermines the value of the exercise in the first place, and cripples your growth while you use it.
by jerf | 2025-05-16 20:12:30+00:00
Google put something out like this recently too. The original is https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphaevolve-a-gemini-p..., but it's sort of buried in there. Here's the YouTube video that introduced it to me, forwarded to the spot where the host talks about the improved 4x4 matrix multiplication algorithm: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGCmu7YKgPA&t=396s It's only a slight tweak, but it's a slight tweak to something pretty highly studied and still impressive.