MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 0xbadcafebee | 2025-05-26 00:10:10+00:00
Can LLMs actually parse human languages? Or can they react to stimuli with a trained behavioral response? Dogs can learn to sit when you say "sit", and learn to roll over when you say "roll over". But the dog doesn't parse human language; it reacts to stimuli with a trained behavioral response.

(I'm not that familiar with LLM/ML, but it seems like trained behavioral response rather than intelligent parsing. I believe this is part of why it hallucinates? It doesn't understand concepts, it just spits out words - perhaps a parrot is a better metaphor?)
by kordlessagain | 2025-05-26 00:10:28+00:00
Yes, absolutely. Can be done without it and fairly easy to even make it call remotely. The value is a framework that a client can use to make calls, however. And if I want to use Claude Desktop, much easier to use MCP to deal with the interconnect. Consider VSCode integration there is much there for me to learn. Here it's easy to use the MCP stuff but it certainly isn't necessary in a server deployment, for example. Although you may want to write a MCP server for your endpoints, if you make money off that stuff.
by broken-kebab | 2025-05-26 00:10:31+00:00
That's not how it works unless you try to say that adults in general are interested in kids survival. This would be true but it's not what drives larger efforts, and resources allocation. For that there are always related kids which get the most of one's resources, and other kids which may get something sometimes. And there are your elders and others' elders as well. Actually, there are plenty of countries where pensions either not a thing, or too small even for basics. I lived in some of them and I dare to say I know what I'm talking about.
by smeeger | 2025-05-26 00:11:18+00:00
consider what humans did before society. they followed herds of ruminant animals and hunted them. they were working 90% of their waking hours. their work was their lives. but at night they would spend a few hours looking at the stars. what we have now is pretty similar. except instead of stars we have screens. i would say life is ok if you can read something interesting every day and have a job that you enjoy. i would say you should prioritize having impact or having a job you love. everyone accumulates as much money as possible at the expense of everything else… there are people with millions saved up at the age of 60… who then die shortly after and did a bunch of work for nothing. keep enough saved to cover modest expenses for a year. beyond that, priotize other things
by mmooss | 2025-05-26 00:12:03+00:00
In fact, they were seen as very different cultures and the exact same things were said about them. Only in hindsight do people say what you are saying (and in hindsight they will say the same about today's immigrants). In fact, the world has never been smaller or more homogenous - people in countries all over the world dress like us, are exposed to our culture a great many already speak English. Before you spread damaging misinformation - there are few evils inflicted by and on humanity than those based on these prejudices - shouldn't you know what you are saying? Shouldn't we talk great care?

Here's Benjamin Franklin (Palatine refers to the Holy Roman Empire or Germanic regions, depending on the source):

"[W]hy should the Palatine Boors be suffered to swarm into our Settlements, and by herding together establish their Language and Manners to the Exclusion of ours? Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased. And while we are, as I may call it, Scouring our Planet, by clearing America of Woods, and so making this Side of our Globe reflect a brighter Light to the Eyes of Inhabitants in Mars or Venus, why should we in the Sight of Superior Beings, darken its People? why increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by excluding all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White and Red? But perhaps I am partial to the Complexion of my Country, for such Kind of Partiality is natural to Mankind."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/02/swarthy...
by skissane | 2025-05-26 00:12:09+00:00
I live in Australia where individuals are expected to fund their own retirement, and the government pension is intended just as a back-up for those who are too poor to do so. Everyone has an investment account ("superannuation", or "super" for short) which is taxed at at a reduced tax rate, and your employer is required to pay 12% of your salary into it. There are many providers of such accounts ("superannuation funds") to choose from (normally your employer has a recommended fund, but you aren't obliged to use the one they recommend) – and if you really want to you can set up your own superannuation fund (a Self-Managed Super Fund or SMSF) in which case you can make all the investment decisions yourself (subject to certain legal restrictions–you risk legal trouble if you make non-arms-length investments, like invest your superannuation into your own business, but other than that you can put the money in whatever you like.)

So, lack of young workers is not an inherent problem – you can invest your superannuation overseas (most funds invest a certain percentage of the money overseas, but if you want to take the risk of putting 100% of your superannuation into international investments, that's allowed), so even if the Australian economy were struggling with lack of young workers, you could still live off the investment returns from other global economies which lack that problem. And the reality is that Australia is unlikely to run out of young workers, because even though we have similar problems with low fertility as many other Western countries (although significantly higher than most of Western Europe), we've also always had a relatively high immigration rate, so younger workers immigrating makes up for the insufficient births.
by belter | 2025-05-26 00:12:36+00:00
> whether or not an LLM is conscious in the same way as a human being

The problem is... that there is a whole amount of "smart" activities humans do without being conscious of it.

- Walking, riding a bike, or typing on a keyboard happen fluidly without conscious planning of each muscle movement.

- You can finish someone sentence or detect if a sentence is grammatically wrong, often without being able to explain the rule.

- When you enter a room, your brain rapidly identifies faces, furniture, and objects without you consciously thinking, “That is a table,” or “That is John.”
by hbartab | 2025-05-26 00:13:24+00:00
That is such a terrible piece. StackOverflow was already in decline before ChatGPT was released. The authors cherry-picked their data to show charts to prove their point.

ChatGPT accelerated the decline ever so slightly but it was already dying: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/stack-overflow-is-almost-...

Typical for product management literature: story over substance.
by rxtexit | 2025-05-26 00:13:29+00:00
Yes, this is the nature of being spoiled rotten.

I am not a software engineer and have never felt stable in my 30 year career.

It always feels like the rug could get pulled out from under me at any time.

So what? It is still better than working in coal mine. It is still more interesting than working at a gas station.

Hard to feel sorry for people basically complaining the work ping pong table doesn't have quite the quality ping pong balls they were expecting.

It is an interesting mix of being both super elitist and completely infantile at the same time.
by samsartor | 2025-05-26 00:13:50+00:00
I'm doing my PhD in ML shit. Before that I was a systems programming guy, lots of C++, bit of CUDA, big fan of Rust. On the side I'm obsessed with RISC-V. Own a couple of boards. I made a stupid little cuda-like-compiler on top of the RISC-V vector extensions, just for fun.

What I'm saying is, tensorrent couldn't find a more excitable third-party developer if they grew one in a lab. And you know what? I can't make heads or tails out of all their various abstractions. I've tried! I've read the docs, I've read the examples, I've gone to meetups. I think OP is right that "one more abstraction bro" probably doesn't solve the problem.

At a guess, the problem isn't a technical one, it is an organizational one. They don't have anybody to stand in for me, or devs like me (eg dumb people). There is no product leadership on the API design. Just a lot of really brilliant engineers obsessively tuning for their own usecases, unwilling to ever trade-off a hit in performance or expressivity for readability or writeability.
Furthur – PromptNet (Early Beta Open to HN)
by nordic_lion | 2025-05-26 00:13:52+00:00
Furthur is a network built around the primitive unit of the prompt.

We’re opening up early beta access to the HN community. Would love feedback.

Join waitlist (furthur.ai) and when we reach out to you, let us know you joined via this HN post
by fny | 2025-05-26 00:13:55+00:00
A policy, however good an idea, must be implemented properly for lasting success.

“Wealth-class parasites” as you call them did that for decades under the guise of stability.

Why are none of the new protectionist policies implemented with a modicum of stability? Why must everything be done with flip-flipping gusto? Why do we have to become the laughing stock of the world?

For some reason, every sensible person arguing for protectionism (e.g. Oren Cass) at no point argues that how it’s being implemented is detrimental to the cause.

Do you really think tarrifs or any other policy experiments will survive if congress flips? The implementation of these ideas is a farce that will only encourage their elimination. This is not how policy persists for decades.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-26 00:14:15+00:00
> Why should ticket sales be regulated? Why should the government care about what price event tickets sell for?

Simple: because a government should take care about what its citizens want. And on top of that, the economy (aka artists and venues that really REALLY don't want to deal with TM but have no other choice) also wants it.

That's why anti-trust legislation was created. It just fell out of practice to actually use it.
by catigula | 2025-05-26 00:15:32+00:00
Unfortunately you've undermined your point by making sweeping claims about something that is the literal hardest known problem in philosophy (consciousness).

I'm not actually comfortable saying that LLMs aren't conscious. I think there's a decent chance they could be in a very alien way.

I realize that this is a very weird and potentially scary claim for people to parse but you must understand how weird and scary consciousness is.
by bsder | 2025-05-26 00:15:49+00:00
> but it will definitely fix the scalpers problem

Nobody wants to fix the scalpers problem because, to the Ticketmaster monopoly, scalpers aren't a problem. The Ticketmaster monopoly values known, consistent, derisked revenue over possible lottery ticket windfalls with the possibility of complete wipeout. Scalpers do exactly that.

Scalpers are only a problem to fans. And scalpers are only a problem online because they can wipe out the entire ticket base. The "solution" is to introduce offline friction to the problem--anything which requires a person to show up and buy only a limited number of tickets. Unfortunately, that introduces a lot of uncertainty into the system instead of guaranteed cash flow and the business side finds that to be anathema.

However, the real solution is to bust up the Ticketmaster monopoly. If each of the individual actors (ticket sales, venue owner, performers) have to operate independently and have to de-risk at each point, scalpers become an enemy to be neutralized.

I also have a completely unjustified suspicion that scalping is hiding a lot of money laundering so lots of people have vested interest in it continuing.
by Ilasky | 2025-05-26 00:16:13+00:00
https://dailytokki.com

It's an email-only Korean (and English) language learning service started by me and my partner! We've both been interested in language and, since I've been learning Korean and she's been improving English, I've been looking for a modality that works for me -- apps don't click for me for some reason.

It started by me sending myself an email everyday with new Korean vocab/grammar, but we thought it would be nice if it responded with corrections and learned from my common mistakes to make better questions. So, we've built it out to work for us, and turns out other people also like it and are growing everyday!
by platevoltage | 2025-05-26 00:16:35+00:00
I was about to say. I'm just happy that I was able to start a trial without having to sign up for something. We are inundated with Adobe-style subscription nonsense in the modern day, and then when someone builds software and uses a classic trial/purchase model, we all start complaining about that too because we aren't entitled to an upgrade for when macOS 20 comes out 7 years from now.
by lolinder | 2025-05-26 00:17:00+00:00
When I think of OpenAI hardware I can't help but think of Akins Laws of Spacecraft Design [0]:

> 39. Any exploration program which "just happens" to include a new launch vehicle is, de facto, a launch vehicle program.

Having a Jony Ive project on the side isn't going to do squat for OpenAI—if they're going to go into consumer hardware that's going to need to be an all-consuming strategic pivot, which their other moves suggest they're not doing. They're currently in spaghetti at the wall mode with Jony Ive as just one bet among many, which is a very bad way to approach a new piece of consumer hardware that's meant to compete with Apple.

[0] https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-26 00:17:13+00:00
> If your problem is scrappers making money the solution could not be creating a bigger problem like sending people to jail for a decade.

My problem is the profiteering, the concentration and subsequent abuse of power by the rich. It used to be the case that rich overlords who abused their power got deposed by their population, driven off with pitchforks if they were lucky, decapitated by guillotine if not. Personally I don't want a return to such grisly times, hence I call for at least punishing abusers by putting them behind bars.

> Comming recently from visiting Ukraine I can't help thinking how insignificant those pet problems are, while real crimes like kids being killed go impune every day...

Now Putin and his command chain, I don't think anyone but rabid tankies would have an issue with their lives being condemned in a repeat of the Nuremberg Trials.
by rz2k | 2025-05-26 00:17:47+00:00
In fact this probably gets to the most important fact on American vehicle import taxes. The rate on imported “cars” may be 2.5%, but it is 25% on foreign made light trucks.

This 25% tariff in 1964 was technically written to address an entire category in order to comply with GATT rules against retaliatory tariffs, but was specifically targeting the VW bus, because the EU had implemented a tariff against all foreign chicken. Because the EU taxed Europeans on foreign chicken to protect its domestic chicken production, the US taxed Americans on foreign made trucks to protect its domestic automakers, and these tariffs have been referred to as the “Chicken Tax” ever since.

The end result of chicken tax was the transformation of American roads, where the F-150 is the highest selling vehicle in most states. Rather than improving a product class, American automakers over time switched away from making cars and improving their offering, and toward making trucks where they would not need to compete.

The weakness of domestic trucks as a product might even contradict an argument for protective tariffs. Protection was not important for allowing a fledgling industry to flourish; instead it largely lead to abandoning one product class, and shifting development toward a class that was artificially protected from competitive pressure. This was especially problematic because these trucks were not marketable overseas. Partially, that is because American roads were always larger, but also because these were weak products that had been developed in an overprotected environment.
by nradov | 2025-05-26 00:17:53+00:00
There are approximately 87,296 people in Denmark who are already doing nothing when they would be willing to work.

https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/arbejde-og-indkomst/be...

As for how much we "need", sure we can technically survive on very little. Most people choose aim to higher. Reducing inequality through a more progressive tax system is generally a good idea but taken too far that cuts overall economic growth and hurts everyone. At some point the most productive people just emigrate to countries with lower taxes; we've already seen that happen with numerous high profile entrepreneurs and companies moving from Europe to the USA.
by jumploops | 2025-05-26 00:18:38+00:00
Good question! He can't type and the local voice assistants can't really understand him...

He simply asked it to make toy trains, all I did was clean up the text to "create toy trains"

From that prompt, it goes through steps to build out a UI and any back-end functionality (Loops) needed.

To use it, he tells me what type of train to generate ("underwater"[0]) and I type in the prompt. He has a lot of fun with it!

[0]https://app.magicloops.dev/storage/v1/object/public/images/d...
by Aurornis | 2025-05-26 00:19:39+00:00
> geohot has a loud mouth ... but he has earned the cred

Sadly, I think geohot is an example of someone who earned some cred for impressive accomplishments in the past and then tried to cash in that cred over and over again in unrelated future domains.

His brief and very public flame out at Twitter after mysteriously abandoning another project and the bold claims about his AMD work that never really translated to anything have really detracted from whatever past “cred” he built up. I really hope he can find a new niche and succeed, but until then it might be time to lie low on social media and avoid throwing more mud.
by godelski | 2025-05-26 00:19:43+00:00
I agree. Lots of evidence to suggest that this would allow humans to be the most human they could be. Calling it a new Renaissance is not a stretch. Nor reminding those that much of the scientific advancements in the past were made by those who had the luxury of enough free time to sit around and think. But I think too many confuse this message with suggesting some form of Communism or Socialism. I'm not advocating for that (personally, I'm strong believer in Capitalism, even if not the Laissez-faire kind. You can't control a wild horse, but neither should you let it freely destroy your farm). Those notions are related, but not the same thing. You can clearly, as demonstrated by rich elite and people retiring, have post scarce lives without the need for such direct control.
by mschuster91 | 2025-05-26 00:19:45+00:00
People managed to shoot Wikipedia off the Internet as recently as 2019.

Anyone not behind one of the major CDNs can be targeted and taken down. And bandwidth-exhausting a few routers in front of the target is certainly possible, it's just not profitable for cybercriminals - but for a nation-state? No problem at all to muster a few terabit/s of capacity for them.
by ahupp | 2025-05-26 00:20:41+00:00
Can you quantify what you think that choice looks like?

Say you seized the entirety of Elon Musk’s assets: that could pay for a year and a half of the Dept of Transportation. Say you seized all the wealth (somehow) of the world’s 100 richest people. That’s 2 years of US non-discretionary spending (social security, Medicare and Medicaid). I often see comments that assume all problems could be solved by just taxing the rich more, but I just don’t think that’s true.

The Nordic countries pay for their social safety nets by taxing the middle class more heavily than we do in the US. If you want to change that, it’s less about capital vs labor, and more about your dentist vs labor (dentists be the classic example of jobs that earn high incomes without being “capital owners”).
by krackers | 2025-05-26 00:20:44+00:00
>is something implicitly present in both our minds and an LLM

The LLM doesn't start with any real structure besides the network of ops though. If there is any induced structure, it's learnable from the data. And given enough data the base network is sufficient to learn the "grammar" of not just human language but more complex CFGs and things you wouldn't traditionally consider "languages" as well (e.g. audio, images). In a sort of chicken/egg scenario, the morasses of data gives rise to the structures needed to parse and generate that data.
by smeeger | 2025-05-26 00:22:15+00:00
old games will die as soon as all the millennials die. its so weird how much millennials love to read historical accounts of things that they already know. 90% of HN knows what it was like to play CS 1.6… but this article relates that information as if it were ancient knowledge being unearthed for the first time in centuries.

seriously, does anyone really think that a bunch of zoomers are going to be playing CS 1.6 in 20 years? of course not. those games will be dead
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-05-26 00:22:34+00:00
Denmark has nice a nice page for fertility rates:

https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/borgere/befolkning/fer...

I think GDP is somewhat disconnected from that rate though.

https://www.dst.dk/en/Statistik/emner/oekonomi/nationalregns...
by 1oooqooq | 2025-05-26 00:23:53+00:00
the network is bs.

I've seen people add "list of top universities" retirement to positions just because they're from the list and like to justify it.

candidate came from the regular channels, no network of any sort involved.

it was more vetting good candidates because of some exec diploma buyers remorse.

but in the end, your comment is perfectly correct, but not for the reason you thought.
by rchaud | 2025-05-26 00:24:12+00:00
> We should be trying to reinvent the wheel

Especially now as web browser vendors are openly trying to get you off the web and into their walled gardens. Apple and Google have no interest in pushing web capabilities forward because they don't see any money from doing that. Mozilla has long since given up, they don't even support "save to homescreen"/"save as web app" functionality.
by int_19h | 2025-05-26 00:24:34+00:00
The thing that we can do is emphasize electoral reform (of the kind that enables viable third parties: runoff voting etc) as the major item in primaries. Basically no Democrat should win the primary unless this is a major item in their platform.

Note that, unlike many other reform suggestions, this one is actually viable because Congress can mandate it nation-wide, like it does today with single-member districts. All it takes is majority vote in both chambers (and yes, they should throw the filibuster in the Senate out to pass this if that's what it takes).