MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by yusina | 2025-06-14 10:30:13+00:00
These discussions remind me an awful lot of discussions between my religios and my atheist and my agnostic friends.

Reglious friend: Well there must be a god, I can feel him, and how else would all this marvellous reality around us have come to existence?

Atheist friend: How can you claim that? Where is the evidence? There could be many other explanations, we just don't know, and because of that it doesn't make sense to postulate the existence of a god. And besides, it's just a marketing stunt of the powerful to stay in power.

Agnostic friend: Why does any of this matter? Nature is beautiful, sometimes cruel, I'm glad I'm alive, and whether there is a god or not, I don't know or really care, it's insubstantial to my life.

That's exactly how the discussions around LLM consciousness or intelligence or sentience always go if you put enough tech folks into the conversation.
by urbandw311er | 2025-06-14 10:30:39+00:00
There is still a significant problem with sycophancy in the way they're training these models. I have a horrible feeling it might be a re-run of the "engagement vs healthy behaviour" we saw with social media, i.e. profit before ethics. Or best-case a side-effect of over-reliance on RLHF training. The behaviours that get people to use ChatGPT more aren't necessarily the ones that are best for truthful, helpful responses.

TL;DR - people tend to click the "thumbs up" icon on the A/B tests on the more sycophantic replies. This results in a feedback loop.
by XenophileJKO | 2025-06-14 10:40:04+00:00
Have you used them to code? I think that is the tipping point where the level of interaction is so high, when the models are troubleshooting. That is when you can start to get a little philosophical.

The models make many mistakes and are not great software architects, but watch one or even two models work together to solve a bug and you'll quickly rethink "text transformers".
by rkagerer | 2025-06-14 10:40:52+00:00
This point is so salient. It's all just candy.

Neat eye candy, granted. I'm glad so much emphasis went into legibility, and that accessibility variants are baked in.

But I'd still love a modern device with very basic UI. Palm had it nailed, and I had no beef with the basic shapes of Windows 3.11 or colored squares of the NT/XP eras. Buttons, window edges and other controls you can readily distinguish that simply stay out of your way when you don't need them. No need for every pixel to scream out "look at me" when you trail your finger over it.
by imiric | 2025-06-14 10:42:41+00:00
Personal experience?

I don't care about benchmarks, nor LLMs' capability to solve puzzles. This is the first thing AI companies optimize their training for, which is misleading and practically false advertising.

I care about how good LLMs are for helping me with specific tasks. Do they generate code that on the surface appears correct, yet on closer inspection has security and performance issues, is unnecessarily complex, often doesn't even compile, which takes me more time to troubleshoot and fix than if I were to write it myself? Do they explain concepts confidently while being wrong, which I have no way of knowing unless I'm a domain expert? Do they repeat all these issues even after careful re-prompting and with all the contextual information they would need? Does all this waste my time more than it helps?

The answer is yes to all of the above.

So while we can argue whether LLMs can think and reason, my personal experience tells me that they absolutely cannot, and that any similarity to what humans can do is nothing but an illusion.
by jiggawatts | 2025-06-14 10:49:08+00:00
Numbers interpretable as ratios are the Rational numbers, by definition, not the Reals.

This entire discussion is about mathematical concepts, not physical ones!

Sure, yes, in physics you never "need" to go past a certain number of digits, but that has nothing to do with mathematical abstractions such as the types numbers. They're very specifically and strictly defined, starting from certain axioms. Quantum mechanics and the measurability of particles has nothing to do with it!

It's also an open question how much precision the Universe actually has, such as whether things occur at a higher precision than can be practically measured, or whether the ultimate limit of measurement capability is the precision that the Universe "keeps" in its microscopic states.

For example, let's assume that physics occurs with some finite precision -- so not the infinite precision reals -- and that this precision is exactly the maximum possible measurable precision for any conceivable experiment. That is: Information is matter. Okay... which number space is this? Booleans? Integers? Rationals? In what space? A 3D grid? Waves in some phase space? Subdivided... how?

Figure that out, and your Nobel prize awaits!
by teddyh | 2025-06-14 10:50:32+00:00
“Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.”

— <https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html>
by fleebee | 2025-06-14 10:53:26+00:00
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I hated that the UI was just rectangles in a grid with a single fill color. Few icons. The customization options were really poor from what I can remember, making it so that everyone's UI looked almost identical.

To be fair, I was getting seriously fed up by the poor software support at the same time which may have amplified my resentment.
by imiric | 2025-06-14 10:53:53+00:00
> Right here on HN, where you'd think that most people would be able to think better, there's no shortage of AI fanboys who seriously try to frame the idea that LLMs may be conscious

Why does this surprise you? This is a community hosted by a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, and many of its members are either employed by or own companies in the AI industry. They are personally invested in pushing the narrative being criticized here, so the counter arguments are expected.
by anenefan | 2025-06-14 10:54:45+00:00
https://archive.md/ZbqeI

Land management group that grows cattle in partnership with public and private landowners.

The movement might be unique but their main technique is not exactly unique ... long ago fencing off usually hard to service strips of land at ends or sides of otherwise manageable paddocks and rotating livestock such as cattle eat the majority down before being moved on was called strip grazing. It had many advantages but mainly some cattle would learn to try some of the weeds they might ordinary overlook. Present times some tool decided strip grazing was named for grazing using temporary strips throughout a otherwise manageable paddock ...

Of course since bison were long part of the landscape in Colorado, the native grasses respond well / better as compared to introduced vegetation.
by tough | 2025-06-14 10:55:07+00:00
> Literally imagine if you could type as fast as you could think

This is exactly how vibe coding has been feeling to me lately, I do read all the code while it writes it, and I command the AI to write/edit/fix the code, so its like faster programming but we're still on the director seat

also focusing on logic, and the problems at hand, and not syntax, API, or function signatures, allows one to build at much faster speed and focusing on architecture and actual UX and not just code
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-06-14 10:57:03+00:00
> When I re-read Flowers for Algernon recently I was just sad. The second half of the story, where his mind is going away, is just brutal, especially when he can remember how smart he was but knows it's gone for good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21544149

"Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my 3-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." - Edward Teller

I watched a documentary from the 80ies a long time ago. A mathematician (can't remember his name) who worked with von Neumann in Los Alamanos was interviewed. He described von Neumann's last weeks in the hospital - the cancer had already metastasized into his brain. The mathematician said something along this lines (I am citing from memory): "von Neumann was constantly visited by colleagues, who wanted to discuss their latest work with him. He tried to keep up, struggling, like in old times. But he couldn't. Try to imagine having one of the greatest minds maybe in the history of mankind. And then try to imagine losing this gift. I was terrible. I have never seen a man experience greater suffering."

Marina von Neumann (his daughter) later wrote this about his final weeks:

"After only a few minutes, my father made what seemed to be a very peculiar and frightening request from a man who was widely regarded as one of the greatest - if not the greatest - mathematician of the 20th century. He wanted me to give him two numbers, like 7 and 6 or 10 and 3, and ask him to tell me their sum. For as long as I can remember, I had always known that my father's major source of self-regard, what he felt to be the very essence of his being, was his incredible mental capacity. In this late stage of his illness, he must have been aware that this capacity was deteriorating rapidly, and the panic that caused was worse than any physical pain. In demanding that I test him on these elementary sums, he was seeking reassurance that at least a small fragment of this intellectual powers remained."
by tombrandis | 2025-06-14 10:57:15+00:00
There was a plan in ~2016 backed by Zuckerberg, Hawking and some entrepreneur but it didn't really get anywhere (in a literal sense). Research for it stopped in 2022 because of a "lack of funding".

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

https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/mark-zuckerber...
by tsoukase | 2025-06-14 10:57:45+00:00
Every degenerative CNS disease is caused by death of non replicating cells. By definition, the cure of such diseases is equivalent to immorality. This already highlights the importance and difficulty of such achievement.

The amyloid hypothesis seems too simple and superficial to account for a decades long process (it is speculated that Alzheimer's starts up to 20 years before symptom onset). The ultimate problem is to find the underlining cause(s) and not correlations.
by rxtexit | 2025-06-14 10:58:52+00:00
I think they can make abstract links across domains.

Like the prompt "How can a simplicial complex be used in the creation of black metal guitar music?" https://chatgpt.com/share/684d52c0-bffc-8004-84ac-95d55f7bdc...

It is really more of a value judgement of the utility of the answer to a human.

Some kind of automated discovery across all domain pairs for something that a human finds utility in the answer seems almost like the definition of an intractable problem.

Superintelligence just seems like marketing to me in this context. As if AGI is so 2024.
by qnleigh | 2025-06-14 11:00:45+00:00
For VR goggles, I agree. But if we're headed toward AR glasses, most (all?) technologies in that space don't support opaque screen content. They project images into your eyes, but they can't block light coming in from the real world.

So if that's the next big thing, Apple had to get consumers used to translucent UIs.
by charcircuit | 2025-06-14 11:01:31+00:00
>For example, the core-dump handler is launched by the kernel as a user-mode helper, meaning that it runs fully privileged in the root namespace.

Why is it not run as a dedicated core dump user?

>the core-dump socket to a helper can be intercepted

There have been several vulnerabilities related to this feature of passing core files to a container. I question if this feature is actually worth it considering one probably wants to have shared infrastructure for crash reporting anyways.
by cantor_S_drug | 2025-06-14 11:01:38+00:00
Have you noticed how predictable humans are when they have Transient Global Amensia?

https://www.radiolab.org/podcast/161744-loops/transcript

*The Prisoner of Memory*

In August 2010, Mary Sue Campbell became trapped in the most peculiar prison—a 90-second loop of her own consciousness. After experiencing transient global amnesia, she lost the ability to form new memories, resetting every minute and a half like a human record player stuck on repeat.

What made her condition haunting wasn't just the forgetting, but the eerie predictability. Every cycle, she asked the same questions in identical phrasing: "What's the date?" followed by "My birthday's already passed? Darn." She'd listen to her daughter's explanation, widen her eyes at the mention of paramedics, and declare "This is creepy!" The nurses began mouthing her words along with her.

Dr. Jonathan Vlahos, who treated similar cases, found this mechanical repetition deeply unsettling. It suggested that beneath our illusion of free will lies something more algorithmic—that given identical inputs, the brain produces identical outputs. Mary Sue's loop revealed the uncomfortable truth that our sense of spontaneous choice might be far more fragile than we imagine.
by nonameiguess | 2025-06-14 11:02:26+00:00
It's rare as hell, but you can commission directly at higher ranks if you have the required experience and credentials and there is sufficient need in the service. The CO of the dental unit at Fort Hood that did my gum grafts 14 years ago direct commissioned at O6.

As there isn't really any civilian equivalent to combat branches of service, however, they won't direct commission anyone into the infrantry at that level, sure, at least not since the civil war era.
by sylware | 2025-06-14 11:02:37+00:00
What? It all depends on the sizes of the strings. Hardware benchmarks, for each significant hardware µarchitectures, must be done on combinations of string sizes in order to know "when" the SIMD setup code is worth it.

Often the setup code is not worth it, even the SIMD complexity is not bringing enough performance in many use cases (basically, kept for niche applications, little lib statically linked for those).
by brianolson | 2025-06-14 11:03:08+00:00
"In select GC-heavy microbenchmarks ... we observed anywhere from a 10–50% reduction in GC CPU costs"

- Yay!

"The Go compiler benchmarks appear to inconsistently show a very slight regression (0.5%)"

- Boo

"Green Tea is available as an experiment at tip-of-tree and is planned as to be available as an opt-in experiment in Go 1.25"

I definitely know some application code that spends 30% of CPU time in GC that needs to try this.
by basisword | 2025-06-14 11:05:48+00:00
>> I am trying it out and aside from being unpolished it’s also slower. My phone used to be buttery smooth. No longer.

IT'S A BETA! Seriously. Of course it's slower. Your phone will run hot. Your battery life will drop. And in three months when it's released it will run nicely - just like each of the last 18 years.
by pfortuny | 2025-06-14 11:06:52+00:00
OK, interesting take which I had not realized: the problem is also different because there is a limited amount of cash, I now realize.

However, the idea that “the mean distribution (the uniform, in this case)” needs to be near the N-th step one is what is statistically wrong, that is why I turned to the coin example.

But yes, thanks for pointing out the differences!
by tempodox | 2025-06-14 11:07:17+00:00
> Yegge says that using AI to write software is evolving into its own—slightly risky—art form. “It’s about how to do this without destroying your hard disk and draining your bank account,” he says.

And this is now, in the honeymoon phase, when VCs are OK with burning mountains of money. We'll see what happens to our bank accounts once the bills come due.
by imiric | 2025-06-14 11:08:12+00:00
This a balanced take on the subject. As usual, opinions on extreme ends should not be taken seriously. Modern ML tools are neither intelligent nor apocalyptic. What they are is very good at specific tasks, and the sooner we focus on those, the less time and resources will be wasted on tasks they're not good at.

Benchmarks and puzzles don't matter. AI companies will only use them to optimize their training, so that they can promote their results and boost their valuation on hype alone. They're more useful for marketing than as a measurement of real-world capabilities.

Judging by the increase of these negative discussions, we seem to be near or at the Peak of Inflated Expectations w.r.t. AI, and we'll be better off once we surpass it.
by basisword | 2025-06-14 11:08:53+00:00
They have the public betas (available to anyone) but this is a developer beta and requires a developer account (albeit you don't need to pay the $99 anymore). They should probably put it behind the $99 barrier again. It astounds me that people on a site like HN can install a developer beta and then act shocked that it's not 'buttery smooth'. Companies either need to educate people or make it difficult to access beta software again.
by porphyra | 2025-06-14 11:09:04+00:00
Also, in the US people have a deathly fear of bedsharing with the baby due to concerns about sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and yet bedsharing is common in places like Japan while they also have a much lower infant mortality rate. Apparently, newborns just sleep very poorly lying on their backs alone in cold, hard cribs rather than nuzzling against their moms' breasts. As a result, the common advice in the US has not only led to skyrocketing cases of postpartum depression, but also delayed milestones such as head lifting, plus more cases of plagiocephaly and torticollis.

(that said, as a new dad, I'm also deathly afraid of SIDS so I still stuck by the American recommendations, sleep be darned)
by msgodel | 2025-06-14 11:10:51+00:00
As someone who's career has involved managing large numbers of deployed Linux and BSD machines: what's wrong with scripting? It's expressive, debugable, repeatable, easy to communicate about verbally and on wikis. If you want something that's more constrained there are tools like puppet and ansible.

I guess this is another one of those "smalltalk people" vs "unix people" talking past eachother because they have shared vocabulary with different implications kind of situations.
by whiteboardr | 2025-06-14 11:11:36+00:00
Plus, to be truly realistic it also would need to take into account ambient lighting scenarios surrounding the device displaying it.

Like this it’s really just another try in recreating glass which never made sense to be used in UI.

It is beyond me, how this got chosen as a way forward - taking visual design which makes sense in a VR/AR environment, to ruin their rectangular display UI.

It will make implementation way more complex than it is already and worse it will set off an avalanche of badly done imitations creating a mess throughout all touchpoints across companies taking years to clean up again - just as I thought that UI design finally reached an acceptable level of maturity.

Sad, really sad for a company like Apple to throw out precision, clarity and contrast for “effect”.

Sad.
by ainewelectr2001 | 2025-06-14 11:11:50+00:00
Hi HN — I'm Harshit, a solo founder. I built Memolect, an AI meeting assistant for software teams.

It joins your meetings (Google Meet or MS Teams) via a bot, transcribes them, and does the tedious stuff you normally do after — summarizing discussion points, answering follow-up questions, and suggesting updates to Jira, Linear, or Confluence.

Why I built this

I work as an engineer on an agile team, and I found myself spending too much time post-meeting: writing notes, summarizing decisions, and updating Jira and Confluence. None of it felt like engineering — just overhead. So I built something to automate the whole loop.

What it does

1. A bot joins Google Meet/MS Teams as a participant

2. After the meeting, it transcribes and generates summaries

3. Ask it natural-language questions (“What did we decide about X?”)

4. It suggests contextual updates to Jira, Linear, or Confluence (click to apply)

Everything is asynchronous — no real-time UI or Chrome extension needed.

What I’d love feedback on

- How accurate/useful are the summaries?

- Are the Q&A responses genuinely helpful?

- Do the update suggestions fit your dev workflow?

- What’s confusing or clunky in the UX?

If you're on a software team and tired of post-meeting admin, I’d love for you to try it and share feedback.

I’ll be here to answer questions!
by jayantrao94 | 2025-06-14 11:12:32+00:00
I’m a design agency founder + a recent indie builder, and I recently launched a tool that uses AI to roast website designs. Brutally. Trust me when I say it's brutal.

It’s called UGH.design (gotta roll the eyes when u see crappy designs), this AI gives your site a score (the higher the UGH, the worse you did) and flags your worst design crimes, like “Font Size Felony” or “Contrast Denial.”

Right now you can:

- Upload up to 5 screenshots - Choose your roast level (Honest, Brutal, Undigestable) - Get a roast with scoring + violations - See it on the public gallery

I’d love feedback from from everyone here:

- The concept itself (too weird? too fun?) - How to improve the roast logic or interface
by fhd2 | 2025-06-14 11:13:55+00:00
The reaching out might work, I know some people actually appreciate it. I personally don't, it feels like an attempt to circumvent the system, and the system is in place for a reason: It attempts to make the insane volume of candidate messages manageable. It's not perfect, I wish more people would work on better systems rather than ways to circumvent them.

There is one notable exception to this, a guy I actually ended up hiring: The job ad link I posted stopped working after a few days, and he wrote a nice message to the company (!) email address telling us about that, and saying he's interested if the role is still open. That's proactiveness I really appreciate. It's very different from random people reaching out on my personal LinkedIn account or email, which I simply ignore.

I'd _love_ it if there wasn't so much noise, then I would probably think about it differently. But the volume does burn you out, and any attempts at circumventing systems put in place to try and manage this is not helpful.

And that's for manually written messages. Automating that - Jesus.
by xg15 | 2025-06-14 11:14:18+00:00
> Rule #13: AI-Assisted Coding is for the Weak

Me reading this article: yup, yup, yup, yup, wait a minute!

This part feels a bit snuck in, in a "leading and pacing" kind of way: All the other points are long-established no brainers, but this one is still controversially discussed and I'd say - in the general form it's presented here - wrong.

The author is still right that it's wrong to categorically dismiss AI tools when coding. But you'd have to apply a lot more caution to this point than to the others.

I hope sneaking this in wasn't the real motivation of the article.
by ghaff | 2025-06-14 11:14:22+00:00
But initial Opteron success was pretty much unrelated to 64-bit. As a very senior Intel exec told me at the time, Intel held back on multi-core because their key software partner was extremely nervous about being forced to support a multi-core world.

I'm well aware of Opteron's impact. In fact, the event when that info was related to me, was partly held for me to scare the hell out of Intel sales folks. But 64-bit wasn't really part of the equation. Long time ago and not really disposed to dig into timelines. But multi-core was an issue for Intel before they were forced to respond with Yamhill to AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86.