MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by addaon | 2025-05-31 18:45:36+00:00
> These numbers are certainly close, but to my naive interpretation, the ranges don't overlap?

As is typical, the tolerances given are sigma values for an assumed normal distribution, not the width of a uniform distribution. The disagreement is less than five sigma, so (in the domain of physics) the disagreement is not considered significant enough to be a high-confidence indicator of new physics.
by puzzledobserver | 2025-05-31 18:45:46+00:00
A natural follow-up to your question might be: "If everything is expanding, then wouldn't the ruler itself be expanding, so the expansion becomes unobservable?"

I'm not a physicist, but from my understanding, the situation is a bit more complicated than the phrasing in your question suggests.

Observation #1: The light from far-away galaxies is redshifted (spectral lines are a bit off from where we'd expect them to be). This suggests that these galaxies are moving away from us. The farther away the galaxy, the more it is redshifted. This suggests that the farther away the galaxy, the faster it is moving. Observations indicate that the recession speed is directly proportional to distance.

This observation is consistent with general relativity, which suggests an expanding universe with homogeneous mass.

But on a smaller scale, gravitational binding somehow takes over, and on even smaller scale, things like electromagnetic and nuclear interactions start having a greater impact, and that's why the Milky Way isn't itself expanding. For that matter, even Andromeda (0.8 Mpc) is too close to be affected by Hubble-style expansion, which only becomes observable at the multi-megaparsec scale.
by hansmayer | 2025-05-31 18:45:59+00:00
So to summarise - the quality of code you generated with LLM is increasing a lot faster, but somehow never reaching senior level. How is that a lot faster? I mean if it never reaches the (fairly modest) goal. But that's not the end of it. Your mid-junior LLMs are also enforcing quality gates and harnesses on the rest of your LLM-mid-juniors. If only there was some proof for that, like a project demo, so it could at least look believable...
by umanwizard | 2025-05-31 18:46:47+00:00
Using UTC for everything strikes me as attempting to apply thinking that's convenient for machines to humans.

In the vast majority of cases, the most salient property of a timestamp, for humans, is what point it occurred in the 24-hour day/night cycle (and, secondarily, where it occurred in the 7-day week cycle).

Local time is an approximation of exactly that 24-hour cycle; the local time anywhere is approximately the elapsed time since the last solar midnight in that location. (Yes, it's not perfect, because in some places local time has a persistent offset from solar time, or even one that changes twice a year, but it's close enough).

UTC is an approximation of the elapsed time since the last solar midnight in England. Most people don't live in England, so this just isn't relevant most of the time.

If we all used UTC, sure, people living in one place would get used to the new correspondence to solar time; 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. It'd also make communicating with people abroad more difficult. If someone tells you "I went to bed at 08:00 last night", you have to know that in New Zealand that means they're an early riser or were sick; in New York it means they had a wild party and in Poland it means they worked the night shift.

There are a few cases where having a shared absolute time reference is useful; for example, scheduling meetings with people in many different countries, but in those cases people tend to spontaneously settle on a time standard and it doesn't cause many problems in practice. And even in many of those cases, the local solar time is still relevant (you wouldn't want to schedule a meeting for someone around their solar midnight), so you have to have some way of expressing it anyway.
by ciprian_craciun | 2025-05-31 18:46:58+00:00
There is:

* press `reset` (to clear the checkboxes);

* press `tab` (to select the first checkbox);

* if the current bit is `1` (i.e. there is a hole in the pattern), press `space`;

* move to step 2 (i.e. press `tab`);
by rjakob | 2025-05-31 18:47:25+00:00
I wish my own manuscripts would be that important...

Regarding security concerns: there is an open-source version for those who want full control. The free cloud version is mainly for convenience and faster iteration. We don’t store manuscript files longer than necessary to generate feedback (https://www.rigorous.company/privacy), and we have no intention of using manuscripts for anything beyond testing the AI reviewer.
by throwanem | 2025-05-31 18:47:28+00:00
Okay, okay, you've got me there, though we should really also talk about Humane and Rabbit. Still. YC's approach in this space thus far is probably the decision of theirs I've respected most in the last half decade, and though it is not surprising to see a Son-style cash binge counseled here instead, I don't really see why I should take that too seriously. Who doesn't love money? Who doesn't love to feel that it's flying around almost as if free for plucking off the wind?
by DenisM | 2025-05-31 18:47:32+00:00
It’s an interesting argument, thanks.

A good analogy would be web development transition from c to java to php to Wordpress. I feel like it did make web sites creation for small business more accessible. OTOH a parallel trend was also mass-scale production of industry-specific platforms, such as Yahoo Shopping.

It’s not clear to me which trend won in the end.
by xpl | 2025-05-31 18:47:34+00:00
Only at first glance. It can easily render things that would be very hard to implement in an FPS engine.

What AI can dream up in milliseconds could take hundreds of human hours to encode using traditional tech (meshes, shaders, ray tracing, animation, logic scripts, etc.), and it still wouldn't look as natural and smooth as AI renderings — I refer to the latest developments in video synthesis like Google's Veo 3. Imagine it as a game engine running in real time.
by yusina | 2025-05-31 18:49:02+00:00
IMO that's what this focus on. Language. That's what LLMs excel at. Perhaps branch out to providing localized papers to markets like China or France (hah, sorry).

Judging the actual contents may feel like the holy grail but is unlikely to be taken well by the actual academic research community. At least the part that cares about progressing human knowledge instead of performative paper milling.
by marcosdumay | 2025-05-31 18:49:34+00:00
I don't think extra productivity in software development ever reflected in established companies building things faster.

The more likely scenario is that if those tools make developer so much more productive, we would see a large surge in new companies, with 1 to 3 developers creating things that were deemed too hard for them to do.

But it's still possible that we didn't give people enough time yet.
by zzo38computer | 2025-05-31 18:49:58+00:00
I think that if you want to use UTC, you should make it clear by adding "Z" (or "UTC") on the end of the numbers which tell you what time it is. This makes it more clearly, avoiding some of the confusion they mention in that article.

However, I think that local time should be used as well as UTC, for different purposes, but that the local time should just use solar time, rather than using time zones and DST.
by pavlov | 2025-05-31 18:50:03+00:00
Clearly everybody should use Swatch Internet Time, also known as “.beat”:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Nothing is more rad than checking the dot-beat on my translucent plastic watch while waiting for dial-up to connect so I can update my ICQ status to let my global friends know I’m listening to “Barbie Girl” from a 128k MP3 in WinAMP. Pre-emptive multitasking baby.
by mattmanser | 2025-05-31 18:50:46+00:00
I had a quick look at the repo as I wondered what you meant by multiple specialized agents.

Funsamentally each of those 24 agents seem to be just:

"load from pdf > put text into this prompt > Call OpenAI API"

So is it actually just posting 24 different prompts to a generalist AI?

I'm also wondering about the prompts, one I read said "find 3-4 problems per section....find 10-15 problems per paper". What happens when you put up a good paper, does this force it to find meaningless, nit-picky, problems? Have you tried papers which are acknowledged to be well written on it?

From a programming perspective the code has got a lot of room from improvements.

The big one is if you'd used the same interface for each "agent" you could have had them all self register and call themselves in a loop rather than having to do what you've done in this file:

https://github.com/robertjakob/rigorous/blob/main/Agent1_Pee...

TBH, that's a bit of a WTF file. The `def _determine_research_type` method looks like a placeholder you've forgotten about too, as it use a pretty wonky way to determine the paper type.

Also, you really didn't need specialized classes for each prompt, you could have just had the prompts as text files a single class loaded as templates that you just replace text into. That will mean you're going to have a lot of work whenever you need to update the way your prompting works, having to change 24 files each time, probably cut/pasting which is error prone.

I've done it before where you have the templates in a folder, and the program just dynamically loads them. So you can add more really easily. Next stage is to add pre-processor directives to your loader that allows you to put some config at the top of each text file.

I'm also not looking that hard at the code, but it seems you dump the entire paper into each prompt, rather than just the section it needs to review, which seems like an easy money saver if you asked an AI to chop up the paper, then just inject the section needed to reduce your costs for tokens. Although you then run the risk of it chopping it up badly.

Finally, and this is a real nitpick but it's twitch inducing when reading the prompts, comments in javascript are two forward slashes not a hash.
by dragonwriter | 2025-05-31 18:51:25+00:00
> Deregulation is how we got into the mess of housing!

No, its not, restrictive zoning preventing actually building housing is. Which is why the mess is most acute in places which have the most such restrictions, and least in places that have less of them, wven when they are similar across all the dimensions you suggest are the real issues.

> Rent controls would also do a great deal.

At further reducing supply of housing by discouraging development? Yes, they would do a great deal of that.
by umanwizard | 2025-05-31 18:51:29+00:00
> sun is most likely not halfway at noon for most of the zone

Being able to express where you are in the 24-hour cycle is useful. That's what local time is: an approximation of the time since the last solar midnight.

To the extent that the approximation is poor, it's an argument for improving it (Spain for example should really set their clocks back an hour), not for getting rid of it entirely.
by yusina | 2025-05-31 18:52:03+00:00
> I came to the realization “Code Reviews Are Dead”.

If that's how it works at your company then run as fast as you can. There are many reasonable alternatives that won't push this AI-generated BS on you.

That is, if you care. If you don't then please stay where you are so reasonable places don't need to fight in-house pressure to move in that direction.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-31 18:52:12+00:00
Yes, I agree with the article. I think the internet was a net negative on society even if there are some benefits to specific individuals, and often those individuals are the ones with the most say. But I do disagree with this final statement in the article:

> So when it comes to the internet, if switching off entirely isn’t possible any more, then surely the words of MGMT can be useful: control yourself, take only what you need from it.

One can't simply do that. The problem is the internet has replaced a lot of things that were more interesting and genuine in the past. Turning off the internet from time to time and controlling yourself does not allow you to live in a pre-internet world.

Moreover, the internet is like refined sugar: tastes good but is inherently not so great for us. It is the refined sugar of the mind by its nature and its speed and cannot be reformed. The only solution probably is to find a sufficient mass of people who feel the same and go against that.

Personally, I lived in a pre-internet world and I thought overall, it was better. Now that the internet is required for some parts of life (applying for a job for example, making a living), we have to use it but that doesn't mean it is a good thing for humanity in general.
by djoldman | 2025-05-31 18:53:21+00:00
This is not a problem with charts, it is a problem with the interpretation of charts.

1. In general, humans are not trained to be skeptical of data visualizations.

2. Humans are hard-wired to find and act on patterns, illusory or not, at great expense.

Incidentally, I've found that avoiding the words "causes," "causality," and "causation" is almost always the right path or at the least should be the rule as opposed to the exception. In my experience, they rarely clarify and are almost always overreach.
by vouaobrasil | 2025-05-31 18:54:10+00:00
Of course not. But sometimes you get paid to do something, and that's the only way you can do what you love. And then others want to create an AI to do what you love and it takes it away. AI by its nature WILl replace what we love to do whether we like it or not simply because some people have the means to use AI to divert the flow of resources to many smaller individuals to their large company.

AI is a horrible net negative for everyone except those at the top.
by morkalork | 2025-05-31 18:56:25+00:00
Yeah this is mind boggling to me as a millennial. I didn't set out to learn touch typing either. Hell, my sister who isn't a techie learned to do it just be spending all afternoon on LiveJournal and AIM chat. I don't understand how one could be an avant reader of hn and be interested in an article about this like... you don't? You can't? Whaaaa?
by kelseyfrog | 2025-05-31 18:56:29+00:00
> Pointing out the lack of precision and accidental aspects of custom in discussing morality is typically used as an excuse for immoral behavior.

I guess I just don't see it the same way. When I examine the most immoral acts, I see moral certainty being a necessary component.

The Spanish Inquisition: "For the good of their souls."

Stalinist purges: "To protect the revolution."

U.S. manifest destiny: "To civilize the savages."

Terrorist movements: "In the name of God."

When I examine the faults of moral relativism I see the blandness of inaction at worst - "I suppose that's what works for them."

At an individual level, I see cynicism as the defining feature of immorality - "No one else is doing good, so why should I?" or "If I don't do bad, someone else will," but these aren't based in relativism. Relativism or absolutism simply isn't part of the moral calculus.

If anything the relativistic approach is harder than then absolutist one. An absolutist may have the burden of knowing what actions are right and wrong within a moral framework, but someone who is a relativist wanting to do good doesn't even have that. They have the additional burden of having to perform meta-ethics from which to derive ethical positions. I hate to turn this into an "I have it worse," discussion, but the grass ain't always greener.

It may be surprising to learn that moral relativists even have a history of taking moral positioning and opposing atrocities. Franz Boas opposed scientific racism, eugenics, and the use of anthropology to justify colonial domination and publicly condemned anthropologists who collaborated with the U.S. military. Ruth Benedict argued that morality is culture-bound and opposed Western ethnocentrism and the moral superiority claimed by colonial powers while critiquing the racism behind Nazism in her wartime work The Races of Mankind. Finally, Margaret Mead promoted tolerance of cultural diversity and critiqued Western sexual and gender norms. She used her platform to oppose war, advocate for civil rights. My point is that one can be a relativist and take a strong moral position - one I'd be surprised either of us would be opposed to.
by ciprian_craciun | 2025-05-31 18:56:35+00:00
This is how much I could pack on a standard (CR80 ID) card sized plate, while still being able to punch the holes without power (or precision) tools. (The aspect of ease of creation with household items was paramount for my design.)

There is also the problem of long term durability. Not being a construction engineer, or metallurgist, I have no idea what is considered "survivable" in case of an unlikely accident (such as fire, flood, crash, etc.), especially if one uses aluminium as the material. The more holes, the smaller the holes, I think the less likely chance they wouldn't degrade easily if not treated with care. (Aluminium is cheap, easy to work with just a cutter, screwdriver, and ruler.)

Moreover, 128 bits is plenty enough for encryption purposes. The AES standard uses key sizes of 128, 192 and 256 bits, but at the moment even the 128 bit keys provide plenty enough security.

Thus, if one needs to store more than 128 bits, one could just use a standard encryption tool like Age or GnuPG, and backup just the password. (The encrypted file could be mirrored all over the place without fear of brute-forcing.)
by djoldman | 2025-05-31 18:58:12+00:00
> Should You Use ed As Site Generator?

> No, not at all.

Well, it (totxt.ed) looks pretty inscrutable to me:

H !# Include proxy title !# Insert fallback values ?<head>?a <SUBTITLE></SUBTITLE> <DESCRIPTION></DESCRIPTION> <IMAGE></IMAGE> <IMAGE_ALT></IMAGE_ALT> . w !# Include the template files via script g/\(<!--\)*[<#]include \(file=\)*"*\([^">]*\)"* *-*\/*>*/s//&\ \/[<#]include\/d\ -1r \3\ wq\ / g/[<#]include "*\([^">]*\)"*\/*>*/d\ .,+3w !ed % E !# Repeat the second time for recursive includes g/\(<!--\)*[<#]include \(file=\)*"*\([^">]*\)"* *-*\/*>*/s//&\ \/[<#]include\/d\ -1r \3\ wq\ /
by ryao | 2025-05-31 18:58:42+00:00
I did the math last year to estimate how many wafers per year Nvidia had, and from my recollection it was >50,000. Cerebras with their ~300 per year is not able to handle the inference needs of the market. It does not help that all of their memory must be inside the wafer, which limits the amount of die area they have for actual logic. They have no prospect for growth unless TSMC decides to bless them or they switch to another foundation.

> While you may need several WSE-3s to load the model, if you have enough demand that you are running the WSE-3 at full speed you will not be using more area in the WSE-3.

You need ~20 wafers to run the Llama 4 Behemoth model on Cerebras hardware. This is close to a million mm^2. The Nvidia hardware that they used in their comparison should have less than 10,000 mm^2 die area, yet can run it fine thanks to the external DRAM. How is the CSE-3 not using more die area?

> In fact, the WSE-3 may be more efficient, since it won't be loading and unloading things from large memories.

This makes no sense to me. Inference software loads the model once and then uses it multiple times. This should be the same for both Nvidia and Cerebras.
by layer8 | 2025-05-31 18:58:48+00:00
You can’t have standard seconds with solar time though (or minutes or hours), unless you live at the equator [0]. So it will be interesting to calculate at what local time your CI build is expected to complete, or if you have enough time to watch that 120-minute movie before whatever the equivalent of 10 o’clock would be in solar time.

Or alternatively, each day would have to end at a different time, but then 12 o’clock wouldn’t be solar noon (or midnight).

[0] http://wordpress.mrreid.org/2014/10/19/rate-of-change-of-day...
by mike_hearn | 2025-05-31 18:58:50+00:00
It's an internal system that exposes implementation details all over the place, so I understand why they do it that way. You have to know a staggering amount about the architecture of macOS to use it correctly. This isn't a reasonable expectation to have of developers, hence why the formal sandbox API is exposed via a set of permissions you request and the low level SBPL is for exceptions, sandboxing OS internals and various other special cases.

Is AI a special case? Maybe! I have some ideas about how to do AI sandboxing in a way that works more with the grain of macOS, though god knows when I'll find the time for it!
by ciprian_craciun | 2025-05-31 19:00:57+00:00
If the CNC machine is not connected to a network, and (I don't know much about CNC, but I do wonder) if one can provide a generic program, then just fill in the parameters before execution, right at the machine, the secret would be confined to just the CNC machine.

Regardless, provided the CNC machine is not networked, and provided it doesn't have any solid state (only RAM), one could perhaps load a large job to overrite the previous one.

Although, perhaps the CNC machine could be used to just provide templates, with small indentations for where the holes could be punched, and additional engraving to provide a link to a document on how to use the card in case of disaster recovery.
by sfpotter | 2025-05-31 19:01:36+00:00
Worth pointing out that these ideas were already well known by Moore, the founder of interval arithmetic. Chapter 3 of his monograph "Methods and Applications of Interval Analysis" has the basic ideas worked out.

The folks working on the Taylor model were coming from physics where they had some nasty (very ill-conditioned) nonlinear systems that they needed to solve and developed a package called COSY which implements it.

My understanding is that the Taylor model is effective in practice, but there might have been some confusion around what it was actually capable of. I believe the Taylor model people claimed that their interval inclusions had better than quadratic excess, but this turned out not to be the case. Other people were able to push past the quadratic limit of the well known interval inclusions using other techniques. There are some recent papers by Hormann and Yap along these lines, although I think the first interval inclusion that is better than quadratic dates back further...
by theptip | 2025-05-31 19:03:21+00:00
It’s all relative. While there is skill, pretty much anyone can learn it in short order. Vs “skilled labor” like trades which require many years of apprenticing.

And no, it’s not a proxy for “physical labor”. Trades are highly skilled, picking groceries from a list is not. (To be clear, not being pejorative here. These jobs are needed.) The key difference is the supply of workers; the lower the bar for entry, the more supply and therefore the bid is lower.

(Or in the other direction from the workers perspective, demand is much higher for jobs requiring less training/certification.)

I don’t think working class jobs are going to go first as a group; I bet paralegals will be automated before plumbers.
by rjakob | 2025-05-31 19:03:25+00:00
Cool! We'll get back asap.

We'd be happy to hear what kind of feedback you find useful, what is useless, and what you would want in an ideal review report. (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1EhQvw-HdGRqfL01jZaayoaiTWLS)