MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Async/Batch AI Agents
by aikin-nivedit | 2025-05-21 18:17:35+00:00
Hey everyone,

I've been working on a project called exosphere.host. It's a platform focused on running batch AI agents at scale. It’s built for handling large data, supporting open source models, and plugging into common tools and workflows easily. We’re also working on Orbit, our orchestration engine, which will be open sourced soon.

I'm hoping to get community thoughts on a few things: - What are some real-world use cases where you’ve used batch inference or background AI jobs? - Are there any tools or services you often connect with in those setups (e.g. storage, queues, databases)? - What pain points have you faced when scaling AI workflows across large datasets? - How do you currently schedule, retry, or monitor long-running AI tasks? - Do you prefer cloud-hosted solutions or self-hosted orchestration for these workloads? Why? - If you could snap your fingers and fix one thing in your current AI pipeline, what would it be?

Would love to feature community use cases and feedback as we improve the platform. Happy to chat if anyone wants to try it out!
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-21 18:17:45+00:00
I see a lot of replies suggesting agreement: LLMs are nowhere close to AGI.

I agree — it may well be a completely different path we need to go down to get to AGI ... not just throwing more resources at the path we've pioneered. As though a moon landing were going to follow Montgolfier's early balloon flights in "about five years".

At the same time, there is suddenly so much attention + money on AI that maybe someone will forge that new path?

"Money is All You Need".
by geocrasher | 2025-05-21 18:18:41+00:00
This is my first project of this type. Look in the source code and see that I am not a real dev, and I don't even play one. But with some cool tools I had some fun and wanted to share it here. We all start somewhere, and if you read the source you'll see that I definitely had fun doing it. Is it super amazing techy cool? Nah. But I had fun. And that was the point.

Plus, some of the password combinations are truly funny!
by jngiam1 | 2025-05-21 18:18:43+00:00
Agree, the smolagent premise is good; but the hard part is handling execution, errors, etc.

For example, when the code execution fails mid-way, we really want the model to be able to pick up from where it failed (with the states of the variables at the time of failure) and be able to continue from there.

We've found that the LLM is able to generate correct code that picks up gracefully. The hard part now is building the runtime that makes that possible; we've something that works pretty well in many cases now in production at Lutra.
by theahura | 2025-05-21 18:19:04+00:00
I disagree for two reasons.

1) the two decisions do not seem related to each other. OpenAI has capital to spend and is seeking distribution methods to shore up continued access to future capital. That strategic decision seems totally unrelated to their estimated timelines for when AGI (whatever definition you are using) will show up. Especially because they are in a race against other players. It may be a soft signal that more capital is not going to speed up the AGI timeline right now, but even that is a soft signal.

2) I think we already have AGI for any reasonable definitions of the terms 'artificial' 'general' and 'intelligence'. To wit: I can ask Gemini 2.5 a question about basically anything, and it will respond more coherently and more accurately than the vast majority of the human population, about a vast array of subjects.

I do not understand what else AGI could mean.

(In case it matters, I am also an AI researcher, I know many AI researchers, and many-but-not-all agree with me)
by ysavir | 2025-05-21 18:19:10+00:00
Sure, but there's a massive difference between an actor joining a chat and maintaining indefinitely, constant access to it vs an actor joining a chat and having access to the full history automatically.

> All these researchers have done is expose the kind of archiving was always possible and always happening.

What they've done is brought forward another instance of "this is why we can't have nice things". A useful feature being used in unintended ways without regard for ethics and privacy. The authors of this paper did not have respect for people's data and privacy. They did the bare minimum to make the claim they took privacy measures, regardless of whether the claim is true or not. I guess that's enough for them.
by dvt | 2025-05-21 18:19:17+00:00
> If you were trying to plan for retirement; and had a specific number you were trying to hit, who are you going to give your money to?

This has nothing to do with the broader point of drafting policies that further social flourishing (there's disagreements as to what this means, of course) as opposed to drafting policies that further "line go up." In fact, I'd argue that the latter is meaningless without a foundational underpinning (we see this in imploding hyper-inflated economies).

In other words, who cares if I have a zillion Funbucks if the country is falling apart?
by mrweasel | 2025-05-21 18:19:19+00:00
55 engineers and the opportunity to be associated with Apple products via Jony Ive.

Honestly with OpenAI buying Windsurf, and now this (whatever this is) I'd say that the company is in trouble and is now desperately attempting to buy it's way into relevancy. Either OpenAI wants to become a developer tools company (which can't be that profitable), or a consumer goods company. Trying to become the next Apple is really the only way to ever make the money they spend back.

OpenAI is a failing company. They made the first move, that will be their claim to fame. Sadly it turned out that what they are doing isn't that hard to replicate, just hard to profit from.
by oofbaroomf | 2025-05-21 18:19:31+00:00
The SWE-Bench scores are very, very high for an open source model of this size. 46.8% is better than o3-mini (with Agentless-lite) and Claude 3.6 (with AutoCodeRover), but it is a little lower than Claude 3.6 with Anthropic's proprietary scaffold. And considering you can run this for almost free, this is a very extraordinary model.
by earthnail | 2025-05-21 18:19:35+00:00
German has a word for second hand embarrassment. Fremdschämen. Comes in very handy here. If Sam continues like this it won’t be long until it becomes part of the regular English language like other German words such as Kindergarten.

And I’ll be happy that I don’t have to explain Fremdschämen anymore. Everything has its upsides.
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-05-21 18:20:00+00:00
I really hope so.

I went through a bout of cronic fatigue after a nose surgery that lasted ~4 months and it was utter hell. It really feels like the life has been drained from your body and on top of that, random things go wrong with your body seemingly every day. One day you’ll have strange stomach bloating and feel nauseous, another day you’ll barely be able to stand without fainting, another day you’ll feel heart palpitations, etc.

What made it so much harder to deal with was it’s an invisible illness. Nobody knows about it, and it generally doesn’t show up on tests. The only test that showed anything significant was a tilt-table test where I fainted in the middle of it.

Otherwise I went to the hospital multiple times because I thought I was having a heart attack, I’ve had doctors get angry at me for “wasting their time”, thinking I’m faking it, and friends/family not understanding.

Not to mention having to pretend everything was fine at work. There were times I had to lie down on the bathroom floor to keep myself from fainting or due to heart palpitations. Luckily we had clean, private bathrooms.

As I said, I slowly got better over the course of months, and not everyone is that lucky unfortunately. Honestly if I didn’t get better I probably wouldn’t be here to write this…

Not to trauma dump but a lot of people don’t know about these illnesses or think they’re fake so I wanted to relay my experience.
by LunaSea | 2025-05-21 18:20:38+00:00
Microsoft closed their recently acquired advertisement buy-side platform Xander Invest because they are replacing it with an AI-only platform.

They only gave their customers 9 months to migrate away.

I'm expecting that Microsoft did this to artificially pump up their AI usage numbers for next year by forcibly removing non-AI alternatives.

This only one example in AdTech but I expect other industries to be hit as well.
by sumibi | 2025-05-21 18:21:12+00:00
I tend to use the query syntax a lot for this exact reason.

It would be even better if it supported exposing pattern matching variables and null safety annotations from where clauses to the following operations but I guess it's hard to translate it to methods.

Something like this:

from x in xs where x is { Y: { } y } select y.z

Another feature I'd like to see is standalone `where` without needing to add `select` after it like in VB.net.
by waleedlatif1 | 2025-05-21 18:22:37+00:00
appreciate it!

1) we are completely open source and you can self-host it if you so please. for the hosted platform, we have a free tier to let you tinker and get some free inference credits, and then we have a pro plan with is $20 worth of inference, team plan with $40. we only charge for inference, not to use the platform

2) we are planning on integrating with MCP servers, although hesitatn because its a newer protocol and may not be here to stay (might be a hot take). in the meantime, we have pre-built integrations for whatsapp & supabase, so you can definitely build this out today
by bflesch | 2025-05-21 18:22:38+00:00
Shopify currently has a scandal in Germany because they blocked payouts for a TV-famous startup which "ships too slowly".

The startup locally produces clothing from sheep wool and only starts production once the order is in. Shopify is unable to understand the concept of make-to-order-production, it's a bit ridiculous to see what their support people are writing.

More on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovRpTsHO13U
by mpweiher | 2025-05-21 18:22:57+00:00
> it's not a "fringe legal theory"

1. It is a legal theory

"judicial theory". -- your source

2. Fringe

"federal courts have increasingly limited how and when plaintiffs may file disparate-impact claims. As a result, disparate-impact suits have become less successful over time."

Also your source.

3. Off topic

a) The research I cited was not about fringe legal theories but about reality in the world.

b) I am not interested in your hypotheticals that have nothing to do with that research, nothing to do with the publishing bias against research showing no bias against women or bias against men, and probably also nothing to do with the actual legal theory of disparate impact.
by fragmede | 2025-05-21 18:23:27+00:00
Just a guess, but I'd bet that Johnny Ive isn't exactly hurting for money. Still, the funny thing about paper money is if you have enough of it, and you're well connected (which, again, just guessing, but Johnny Ive might be) you can just borrow against it without having to make a sale or have liquid buyers. Just hope there's no margin call.
by vessenes | 2025-05-21 18:23:29+00:00
To chime in on one point here: I think you're wrong about what an LLM is. You're technically correct about how an LLM is designed and built, but I don't think your conclusions are correct or supported by most research and researchers.

In terms of the Jedi IQ Bell curve meme:

Left: "LLMs think like people a lot of the time"

Middle: "LLMs are tensor operations that predict the next token, and therefore do not think like people."

Right: "LLMs think like people a lot of the time"

There's a good body of research that indicates we see emergent abilities, theory of mind, and a bunch of other stuff that shows models do deep levels of summarization, pattern matching during training from these models as they scale up.

Notice in your own example there's an assumption models summarize "male-coded" vs "female-coded" names; I'm sure they do. Interpretability research seems to indicate they also summarize extremely exotic and interesting concepts like "occasional bad actor when triggered," for instance. Upshot - I propose they're close enough here to anthropomorphize usefully in some instances.
by therobot24 | 2025-05-21 18:23:50+00:00
So my interpretation of how Friedman drew his theories of market (and granted I'm no expert, just a layman reading things online) are about every business should optimize as much as utterly possible even if this results in exploitation, because the market will accept exploitation until it can't and correct. I think you and i are aligned in this belief. Where i think we're separated, likely cause i just didn't explain it very well, was that to me, this means you as a CEO are accepting exploitation under the guise that you have the ability to react to the market forces to correct for it. That you 'know the market' and can adapt as needed. Such as described in the Friedman quote within the article which expresses an extremely libertarian view of how companies should be able to hire and fire workers:

> “...consider a situation in which there are grocery stores serving a neighborhood inhabited by people who have a strong aversion to being waited on by Negro clerks. Suppose one of the grocery stores has a vacancy for a clerk and the first applicant qualified in other respects happens to be a Negro. Let us suppose that as a result of the law the store is required to hire him. The effect of this action will be to reduce the business done by this store and to impose losses on the owner. If the preference of the community is strong enough, it may even cause the store to close. When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity, that is, prohibits him from pandering to the tastes of the community for having a white rather than a Negro clerk. The consumers, whose preferences the law is intended to curb, will be affected substantially only to the extent that the number of stores is limited and hence they must pay higher prices because one store has gone out of business.”

In my view, the scenario and reasoning by Friedman in how he applies market forces applying to business decisions is a view where you have an assumption of 'knowing the result' of any decision and using that 'knowledge' as justification for reasoning. When in reality, you don't know the result, you can estimate, but that's about it. So when an exec is applying Friedman principles they're trying to 'know the market' and that's a fundamental error in my mind due to the chaos of the world how it can manifest across all avenues of life.
by ysavir | 2025-05-21 18:24:03+00:00
> Is it? Discord's been around for a decade; as far as I'm aware, it's always had message history, unlike IRC.

Almost a decade, yeah. And Slack had similar functionality in the few years before Discord arrived. But chat services have been around since, what, the late 80s or early 90s? Services like Discord are still the new kid on the block. Now we're seeing it being taken advantage of (or at least the first instance of someone publicly and proudly taking advantage of it), prompting curiosity of what comes next: Will this disregard for privacy simply become the default expectation, will people shift to more private spaces less susceptible to abuse, or privacy regulations protecting people?
by qubex | 2025-05-21 18:24:04+00:00
There was much marketing directed at the fact that as of Windows 95, applications developed with the 32-bit API onwards would benefit from preemptive multitasking. Legacy 16-bit applications coexisted in some kind of virtual machine (maybe it was called Windows On Windows, WOW for short, or maybe that was an NT thing) but they could accidentally trip each other up and bring each other down, but in theory the system and the 32-bit apps were safe. So yes, the text in the article is pretty confusing and misleading. I exited Windows in the XP SP1 days (2003) and by then most of the mishaps happened due to third-party drivers.
by hem777 | 2025-05-21 18:24:28+00:00
It wasn’t really that we wanted to have a CRDT per se, but as it was implemented on top of an op-based append-only log CRDT, it turned out to hold those properties, which makes it a CRDT. We wanted to have the edits to be able to arrive in any order or after delays due to network partitions (this was for a p2p network).
by JKCalhoun | 2025-05-21 18:25:16+00:00
> Sometimes two collaborators make each other better than either are alone.

I don't disagree. Lennon + McCartney were able to fill in bridges, suggest lyrics, etc.

I've always been bothered by Ive's form-over-function though. Or perhaps it is too easy to call out a designer's very public mistakes when on the whole he has done well. For all I know it was Jobs that pushed the design choices that I dislike.

But just to iterate a couple things I dislike: the round mouse on the iMac (obv.), connectors on the back of the modern iMacs (that uncomfortable scratching sound when you're trying to find the USB slot and grate against anodized aluminum)....

You wonder, did he actually use the thing or just admire looking at it?
by math_dandy | 2025-05-21 18:26:00+00:00
This is a natural point of confusion. The true (IMO) primitive concept here is the probability measure. Probability measures on the real line are in canonical bijection with CDFs, the latter being axiomatizable as càdlàg functions (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Càdlàg) asymptotic to 0 (resp. 1) at minus infinity (resp. infinity). On the other hand, not every probability measure has a density function. (If you want the formalism of densities to capture all probability measures, you need to admit more exotic generalized functions à la Dirac.)
by solomatov | 2025-05-21 18:26:23+00:00
IMO, it's not about ethics, it's about legal risks. What if you want to fine tune a model on output related to your usage? Then my understanding is that all these derivatives need to be under the same license. What if G will change their prohibited use policy (the first line there is that they could update it from time to time)? There's really crazy stuff in terms of use of some services, what if G adds something in the same tune there which basically makes your application impossible.

P.S. I am not a lawyer.
by bityard | 2025-05-21 18:26:27+00:00
Wow, not being able to have an off-grid system AT ALL without the utility's approval just sounds bonkers to me. I guess PG&E is even more evil than I thought.

Used solar panels are a pretty brisk business right now. Lots of places are replacing their 10-15 year-old panels with new ones just due to the better efficiency and capacity alone. And now that we have over a decade of large-scale solar experience to draw from, we are finding that they tend to degrade a lot slower than expected and that the original 30-year lifespan was highly conservative. I'm surprised you couldn't find someone from out of state to buy them.
by hinkley | 2025-05-21 18:26:49+00:00
Yeah and I think this and radiological tools are why chemo tattoos exist. The system has to react to the twitch you can’t control when a weird noise happens next to your head. Instead of stabbing bolts into your skull through your skin with a device Torquemada would have been proud of, they target versus the dots and if the dots move? Well this is where my knowledge runs out. Either they shut down the beam or they target in realtime. But either way the payload is delivered where it’s supposed to be or not at all.

I don’t know if they are using laser scalpels in surgery. My medical fascination mostly ends at diagonostics and experimental procedures. If I don’t know anyone with a disorder I tend not to hear about new procedures. My friend in college was helping a prof work on picosecond violet lasers and now we are on femtosecond.
by adastra22 | 2025-05-21 18:27:29+00:00
Legitimate bugs in hardware is probably out of scope for compilers. That would be an unreasonable ask, yes. But I believe it should be the job of the compiler to make sure that a correctly executed program on a reference machine strictly adhering to the architecture specs should not result in UB.

I'm not saying that a computer architecture should be UB-free. That would be awesome if it could be done, but in practice probably a bridge too far. But a compiler should map high-level directives into low-level implementations on a specific architecture using constructs that do not result in UB. This is not too much to ask.

A compiler can't reasonably protect you from rowhammer attacks. But it should guarantee that, barring hardware errors, accessing uninitialized memory has no effect other than something sensible like returning unspecified contents, or causing a memory access exception, or whatever. It should be defined up front what the behavior is, even if some of the runtime values are unpredictable.

As a more concrete example, most languages these days clearly define what happens in signed integer overflow: the thing that you expect to happen in any two's complement machine (char)127 + (char)1 == -128. C treats this as undefined behavior, and as mentioned in my link above that can cause what should be a finite loop (with or without overflow) to compile as an infinite loop. This "optimization" step by the compiler should never have happened. C resists changing this because C compilers exist for non-twos-complement architectures where the behavior would be different. IMHO the correct approach would be to require THOSE weird esoteric architectures to compile in extra overflow checks (possibly disabled with opt-in compiler flags that explicitly violate the standard), rather than burden every C developer everywhere with the mess that is signed arithmetic overflow UB.

It's a matter of expectations. Any but the most junior programmers expect that signed integer overflow will not be portable. That's fine. But they expect a sensible result (e.g. wrap around on two's complement machines), even if it is non-portable. They don't expect the compiler to silently and sneakily change the logic of their program to something fundamentally different, because UB means the compiler can do whatever tf it wants.
by qubex | 2025-05-21 18:27:30+00:00
You’re projecting a ‘modern’ concept onto a bygone time. Applications could (and in unfortunate cases, would) monopolise the system and if they got themselves stuck in a loop they’d never relinquish control of system resources back to the operating system. Your system would freeze or you’d get a blue screen of death. You can call it wait/async if you really want, but it’s hugely misleading in the present context of the term. It was a more fragile system, not a more robust one.
by chasil | 2025-05-21 18:27:55+00:00
The article appears to contradict this.

“Adding an incline is a great way to increase the challenge for your cardiovascular system and get the same kind of benefits that you can get from jogging or running without the same amount of wear and tear on your knees,” says Tyler Spraul, a Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist and the Head Trainer at Exercise.com.