MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yousif_123123 | 2025-06-20 23:41:55+00:00
This is very interesting. 1. Authors mention the attention mechanism being perhaps unable to attend to the location of gaps since the gaps aren't tokens. But I would've expected a good LLM transformer to be at least a bit close to the gap location. I don't understand why mathematically the architecture is less suitable for that, it could attend to a region that may contain gaps. I wonder if fine-tuning on a task like this could help? 2. Shorter inputs with less omissions were harder to solve. That is not completely surprising, as a human doing this task, if 1 word was missing it would be harder to notice. And similarly 1 line would be harder than 10 lines. But still interesting for an LLM to have this problem. 3. Reasoning models do better, as they can write out the documents and potentially solve this easily. It still very surprising that this doesn't lead to 100% accuracy. This should be a trivial task. Like the paper says, a trivial program can be written to solve this. Perhaps ChatGPT (or similar agent) could read this paper while training, and know to write and run python when solving an issue like this.

The most interesting thing though, is what other aspects of intelligence we may not have identified explicitly, and whether LLMs and current AI is very bad at them. This paper suggests that there likely are many of those, and it seems in general a pretty fun time for people working building benchmarks.
by theamk | 2025-06-20 23:42:11+00:00
> Suppose I've got a motor, a motor driver, and an Arduino. How does ROS work with that?

It does not, ROS is for much bigger systems, usually Linux-based. Some things it can give you:

- IPC for multiple independent processes. So if your navigation process crashes, your drivers and controller still operate. Can save some time if your stack is slow to start up.

- Visualizer - not the best out there, but kinda-working. And because of previous item, you can keep it off (to save CPU) and only start if needed.

- Device drivers for some devices. Those would be "research grade" - any problems would be ignored and may result in invalid data, or they can crash, or be very inefficient... But good enough to get started.

- Logging/replay - log data to file, replay later. Again, research grade - there is no schema evolution (at least in ROS 1), so the moment you add new field, throw away your old logs. You can also use it to make whole-system tests, but because there is no explicit sync, those tests would be janky and flaky.

- some pre-made modules, like localization

it's a lot of small pieces, good enough to start or for prototype, but not for the more "production" robots.

As far as alternatives... All orgs I have seen do their own. Some of them start with ROS and eventually replace every part, others start entirly from scratch.
by gneuron | 2025-06-20 23:42:11+00:00
Does anyone else think the answer to all of this is pay per use*? Every time a developer queries the OpenAI API, they pay $x cents for the tokens. Why can't the AI companies and news companies create a framework that works the same way for news? If the user needs something, they go through the AI company to read it, and the AI company pays $x cents to the publisher.

Why wouldn't this work? (Genuinely asking, I'm sure I'm missing something).

Edited: us -> use.
by edwardbernays | 2025-06-20 23:43:36+00:00
No, I'm going to continue watching YouTube while also avoiding their ads. If they want to engage in an adversarial relationship then I will as well. Until there's another competitor in the space that provides the same value, I will just take value from the only game in town. They don't owe me their service, but I also don't owe a bad faith monopolist anything. I do pay for premium, and I also block all of their analytics and ads at the network level.

EDIT: also, I think everyone should block ads. We should snub advertisers and surveillers all of the time. If they want to be hostile towards users, users should be hostile towards them.

Capitalists have had it too good for too long. It's time consumers stop caring about how the poor capitalist will make their dime.

Until the capitalists take the time to respect us, the consumers, we don't owe them anything.

It's time for reciprocity. If they're hostile, we reciprocate. If they're cooperative, we reciprocate.
by xianshou | 2025-06-20 23:46:49+00:00
In many of their key examples, it would also be unclear to a human what data is missing:

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

[And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,]

Do not go gentle into that good night."

For anyone who hasn't memorized Dylan Thomas, why would it be obvious that a line had been omitted? A rhyme scheme of AAA is at least as plausible as AABA.

In order for LLMs to score well on these benchmarks, they would have to do more than recognize the original source - they'd have to know it cold. This benchmark is really more a test of memorization. In the same sense as "The Illusion of Thinking", this paper measures a limitation that neither matches what the authors claim nor is nearly as exciting.
by hodgesrm | 2025-06-20 23:47:02+00:00
I'm glad you answered as my comment was not very complete. It left out mentioning that transactions should not be expensive on reads unless you are doing something wrong. In general MVCC--which PostgreSQL uses--does not have a lot of performance overhead for this case. ClickHouse also maintains snapshots when reading, so to a certain extent they do the same work. Transactions don't seem like a very strong argument here, since you would be conceding that your implementation is inefficient.

I agree with the other points. ClickHouse is not strong on joins [yet]. It's also nice to have a single database for everything. Yet so far nobody has been able to achieve one that delivers high concurrency, fast updates, and petabyte-level scaling. Mike Stonebraker et al. called this problem out in 2007. [0] It appears they called it right and we'll continue to see 2-3 major categories of databases for the foreseeable future.

[0] https://www.vldb.org/conf/2007/papers/industrial/p1150-stone...
by Magmalgebra | 2025-06-20 23:48:06+00:00
> my impression is that they try very hard to have a consistent work culture across the company

they do - and they fail!

A truism is that your manager is the biggest determiner of your work environment. This is just as true for your manager as for you. To that end, your director/vp has a really outsized influence on the people you interact with the most (and thus define the experience of working at the company for you).

If you're like me and love talking to people you'll find a huge variation in the lived experience of people working these jobs.
by jamessinghal | 2025-06-20 23:48:26+00:00
The test provides both the original and the modified excerpt in the user message, so the LLM doesn't need any memorized version of the excerpt to theoretically answer each correctly.

From the paper:

System Prompt You are helping a student practice memorizing poems. The student will recite a poem, but they may have missed some lines. Your task is to identify exactly which lines are missing from their recitation. List only the missing lines, nothing else.

User Message Here is the complete original poem: {original poem} Now, here is my recitation which may be missing some lines: {modified poem} What lines did I miss? Please list only the missing lines, nothing else.
by mindcrime | 2025-06-20 23:49:24+00:00
I get weird looks sometimes lately when I point out that "agents" are not a new thing, and that they date back at least to the 1980's and - depending on how you interpret certain things[1] - possibly back to the 1970's.

People at work have, I think, gotten tired of my rant about how people who are ignorant of the history of their field have a tendency to either re-invent things that already exist, or to be snowed by other people who are re-inventing things that already exist.

I suppose my own belief in the importance of understanding and acknowledging history is one reason I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to Schmidhuber's stance.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actor_model
by MichaelZuo | 2025-06-20 23:50:27+00:00
You know this is actually a good point.

It made me reflect quite a bit and there is something really strange and somewhat spooky about America…

For example, how does the government and administrative apparatus even function since they are staffed by a cross section of the very same society?

By all theory Washington given the much higher density of deceivers, intriguers, scoundrels, etc., than even a typical American city… should pretty much immediately grind to a halt.
by voidhorse | 2025-06-20 23:50:48+00:00
I'm not arguing for a ban, but I am trying to argue for a more nuanced view about technology and responsibility.

No, LLMs are not guns. That said, any responsible and conscious designer of LLMs should know they impose other risks, like the ones they pose regarding misinformation and democracy. They should also know that they pose risks regarding economic stability and copyright law and plagiarism.

You could try to weigh this against the benefits, but the fact of the matter is, the responsible way to develop these technologies is to show that you are explicitly accounting for these obvious dangers as well. Very few companies actually do that (because they selfishly choose to optimize for profit instead).

My main point is just that the user isn't the only person with some amount of responsibility when it comes to technology. Designing a tool does not therein automatically absolve you of any moral responsibility.

I think the reasonable approach is regulation—it is the only thing that helps combat sheer profit motive and force companies to attend to at least some of this responsibility.
by nextos | 2025-06-20 23:53:54+00:00
By looking at the article [1], it seems that the problem is very different depending on the beverage class.

In case of water, both glass and plastic are quite clean in terms of microplastic particles. Beer (glass) seems to be heavily contaminated.

If I'm reading this correctly, it seems that glass bottles are often paired with resin or PET-coated caps, which shed quite a lot of microparticles.

[1] https://anses.hal.science/anses-05066642v1/file/Chaib_JFCA_2...
by nothrabannosir | 2025-06-20 23:54:03+00:00
Am I reading it wrong ? I understand both your original comment and this one to paint mono repo as an alternative to micro services. E.g.: “ What is the alternative [to micro services]? Mono-repo?” and “ If you prefer working on mono repo it s fine though I think micro services are more popular one now.” What I understand here is that “mono repo is an alternative to micro services”. Is that what you’re saying?

If so: mono repo is not an alternative to micro services. You can have both. You can have micro services in a mono repo. One single repository with many micro services. That is possible.

What is an alternative to micro services is “monolith”.

Curious how I’m misunderstanding this because I looked at it for a while and I really don’t see it.
by ufos1111 | 2025-06-20 23:54:06+00:00
The BitNet docker image has been updated to support both llama-server and llama-cli in Microsoft's inference framework.

It had been updated to support just the llama-server, but turns out cnv/instructional mode isn't supported in the server only CLI mode, so support for CLI has been reintroduced enabling you to chat with many BitNet processes in parallel with an improved conversational mode (where as server responses were less coherent).

Links:

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=nftea-ga...

https://github.com/grctest/BitNet-VSCode-Extension

https://github.com/grctest/FastAPI-BitNet

TL;DR: The updated extension simplifies fetching/running the FastAPI-BitNet docker container which enables initializing & then chatting with many local llama BitNet processes (conversational CLI & non-conversational server) from within the VSCode copilot chat panel for free.

I was able to run about 100 BitNet CLI processes before the additional processes started getting moved to SSD page swap file instead of running in RAM. How many do you think you could run on your computer?
by lubujackson | 2025-06-20 23:54:26+00:00
This post is really all over the place and, I think, misses the main thing here: pretty much every advancement in automation across history has sacrificed some fidelity and craftsmanship. That's the cost of automation. Yet we have continually added more and more automation to our lives because the net value is dramatically higher for the bulk of our civilization.

Yes, we lose (or pidgeon-hole) artisans and craftsmen. But even in his "woe the times" example of AI kludging together two game properties into a painting, where the lighting isn't right and furry tail is not ideal, etc., etc... That $500 image is something no one could have created 20 years ago with a computer. This isn't centuries of artisan skills we are talking about. What about the artisan who would have been paid $500 to paint it with actual paints on an actual canvas? You can mourn progress in every direction if you like, but I don't think it changes a single thing about the trajectory of where we are going.

Now that AI is coming for my job as a programmer I'm not going to get twisted about it - my job didn't exist when I was a kid and it won't exist (certainly not in the same form) when my kid is an adult. And that's ok, it was a "job of opportunity". And that job has changed dramatically over 20 years. AI is just the continuation of that change.

I started in SE because it was fun to make computers do stuff. Programming has only ever been a tool to achieve that goal, and often a frustrating one. AI is just a better tool. If the job becomes "a guy that talks to the AI" that will still be programming because at the end of the day the computer can't do anything without someone telling it what to do.

...until SkyNet.
by atmavatar | 2025-06-20 23:55:14+00:00
What spread do people think is ideal?

For context: currently, the median net worth of a US household is ~$192K. That means Elon is worth roughly 6 orders of magnitude more than the average household (not just person).

I have my own vague idea what order of magnitude difference I would target, but I'd like to think I could be swayed an order of magnitude or more up or down with good, well-reasoned arguments. As such, I'm curious to hear others' opinions before I pollute the discussion with my own.
by Noumenon72 | 2025-06-20 23:56:32+00:00
I didn't get this either so let me try to explain as ChatGPT did to me:

Monomorphization means taking a generic function and generating a version specific to the type being used, eg a Rust function

fn identity<T>(x: T) -> T { x }

can be compiled into one version for i32 and one for String, which is more efficient since the compiler knows the types:

fn identity_i32(x: i32) -> i32 { x } fn identity_string(x: String) -> String { x }

Semantic monomorphization could mean extracting the parts of the library that are meaningful to generate problem-specific concrete code: instead of importing pandas to do

import pandas df = [{"a": 1}, {"a": 2}] total = sum(d["a"] for d in df)

The LLM might skip the import entirely and generate only:

data = [{"a": 1}, {"a": 2}] total = sum(d["a"] for d in data)

If I understood right, the parent found it funny that a comment suggesting we could never use libraries because we can concretize the specific relevant code, would be responded to with a Claude.MD that essentially said "always use libraries instead of concrete relevant code". I missed it because I didn't stop to look up "monomorphization", so I hope this helps anyone else like me get the joke.
by ConspiracyFact | 2025-06-20 23:56:40+00:00
Perhaps part of it is that local action can often be an order of magnitude more impactful than the “equivalent” action at a distance. If you volunteer in your local community, you not only have fine-grained control over the benefit you bestow, you also know for a fact that you’re doing good. Giving to a charity that addresses an issue on the other side of the world doesn’t afford this level of control, nor this level of certainty. For all you know most of the donation is being embezzled.

I think another part of it is a sort of healthy nativism or in-group preference or whatever you want to call it. It rubs people the wrong way when you say that you care about someone in a different country as much as you care about your neighbors. That’s just…antisocial. Taken to its logical conclusion, a “rationalist” should not only donate all of their disposable income to global charities, they should also find a way to steal as much as possible from their neighbors and donate that, too. After all, those. Holden in Africa need the money much more than their pampered western neighbors.
by Viliam1234 | 2025-06-20 23:57:09+00:00
> Update your beliefs based on evidence --> who disagrees with this?

Like, dozens of comments in this thread?

For example, people expressing strong opinions on what Effective Altruism is actually about, when https://www.givewell.org/charities/top-charities is just one google search away... but why would anyone bother checking before they post a strong opinion?

The #1 comment says that the rationality community is about "trying to reason about things from first principle", when if fact it is the opposite.

A commenter links a post by Scott Alexander and claims that Scott predicted something and was wrong, when if fact in the linked article Scott says he gives it a probability 30% (which means he gives probability 70% to that thing not happening). Another commenter defends that as a "perfectly reasonable but critical comment".

And hey, compared to most of the internet, HN is the smart place, and the local discussion norms are better than average. But it still doesn't seem like people here actually care about being, uhm, less wrong about things, even ones that are relatively trivial to figure out.

So basically, the mind-shattering idea is to build a community that actually works like that (well, most of the time). Where providing evidence gets upvoted, and unsubstantiated accusations that turn out to be wrong get downvoted, and a few more things like this.

Plus there is the idea of trying to express your beliefs as probabilities, using actual numbers. That's why EY cannot stop talking about the Bayes' Theorem. Yes, people actually do that.
by Groxx | 2025-06-20 23:57:47+00:00
Not sure we can conclude much there tbh, their own numbers and the numbers in other studies they mention show truly enormous ranges for their rather small sample sizes. Plus, if they're right and the contamination is mostly coming from cap damage, it'd vary immensely by the kind (and treatment) of the cap and luck on how much damage it got, and not the kind of bottle, even if they do currently correlate.

So a useful study to say "stop painting the insides of caps, duh" but it hardly seems like anything intrinsic to the container. And hard to extrapolate to other areas which may not paint their caps, or anything that uses corks.
by voidhorse | 2025-06-20 23:59:21+00:00
I'm in the same boat. At least there's a couple of us that think this way. I'm always amazed when I run into people who think neural nets are a relatively recent thing, and not something that emerged back in the 1940s-50s. People seem to tend to implicitly equate the emergence of modern applications of ideas with the emergence of the ideas themselves.

I wonder at times if it stems back to flaws in the CS pedagogy. I studied philosophy and literature in which tracing the history of thought is basically the entire game. I wonder if STEM fields, since they have far greater operational emphasis, lose out on some of this.
by grandiego | 2025-06-21 00:00:13+00:00
At least on TV I occasionally catch randomly interesting ads... sometimes. On YT, I'm stuck with the same obnoxious commercial from a company whose service I strongly dislike, playing on loop ever since they associated me to some related product category. They think pestering me with more interruptions will win me over, but their analytics are working in reverse. I can't understand why they're so clueless.
by CrossVR | 2025-06-21 00:04:40+00:00
Oh I take it seriously and I also agree that in the US there's a large population that's sent to prison for no good reason, with almost no attention paid to rehabilitation and treatment.

However I have doubts that, when people who hold that position come to power, El Chapo will be walking free with no restrictions the next morning.

Some form of restriction of movement will be required for frequent violent offenders. You may abolish the old system since you believe it's rotten to the core and you may call whatever replaces it something other than prison, but it will still be prison.
by AlchemistCamp | 2025-06-21 00:06:52+00:00
Probably the highest profile and most consistent example would be Stripe. The most popular Stripe wrapper for Elixir’s docs point to a 2019 Stripe API version: https://github.com/beam-community/stripity-stripe

Worse still, the quality of Stripe’s own docs have really degraded this decade for anyone not using a language they have an SDK for. Most of their newer docs assume m have a drop-down toggle for on backend language with a few popular languages and no option for “other”. Example: https://docs.stripe.com/billing/quickstart

None of this is a fault of anyone working on Elixir or Phoenix but it definitely has an effect of discouraging some of the fledgling entrepreneur types who Elixir would otherwise be a near perfect fit for, as Rails was in the late aughts.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-06-21 00:06:55+00:00
We should note that "where is there a line missing from this poem: ____?" contains sufficient information to answer correctly without needing a copy of the original to compare to.

Here are two verses of a poem (song) in Mandarin Chinese:

yi quan ting ni de

er gei ni hao de

shu dao san yong yuan ai ni yi ge

si bu hui fan cuo

wu bu hui luo suo

shuo ni xiang shuo de

zuo ni xiang zuo de

bie pa shi bai yin wei ni you wo

pei ni kan ri luo

pei ni yi qi chang wan wo men ai de ge

I removed two lines. Where did that happen?

Would your answer be different if I told you that I might or might not have removed some lines?
by acdha | 2025-06-21 00:07:00+00:00
> I don't know if you live in Manhattan, but there's a far more parsimonious explanation than "business owners are suburban car people": in order to operate most kinds of businesses in the city, you need easy access to deliveries, which means easy parking.

Maybe, but wouldn’t they say deliveries if that’s what they meant? If I had a shop with no rear access, I’d be asking the city to create and enforce a dedicated short term delivery zone because unrestricted parking is going to full of private cars when the delivery driver arrives. It’d be totally reasonable to ask for that but it’s really rare compared to assertions that most customers drive which are obviously false because they need more than 1-2 customers per hour.

This keeps coming up in every area: discouraging private vehicle use in a dense area makes everything better for everyone. It’s safer, healthier with less pollution, more pleasant with less noise, easier for people who need accessibility accommodations, easier for delivery drivers and contractors who actually need trucks, and reduces congestion. Once you stop pretending there’s any way to make one car per person work in a city, there actually is enough space for everyone else.