MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-06-29 06:54:48+00:00
> The improvements in programming are largely due to the adoption of “agentic” architectures.

Yes, I agree. But it's not just the cradles, it's cradles + training on traces produced with those cradles. You can test this very easily with running old models w/ new cradles. They don't perform well at all. (one of the first things I did when guidance, a guided generation framework, launched ~2 years ago was to test code - compile - edit loops. There were signs of it working, but nothing compared to what we see today. That had to be trained into the models.)

> will not come from better LLM models (which have not really improved much), but from better integration of more advanced compilers.

Strong disagree. They have to work together. This is basically why RL is gaining a lot of traction in this space.

Also disagree on llms not improving much. Whatever they did with gemini 2.5 feels like gpt3-4 to me. The context updates are huge. This is the first model that can take 100k tokens and still work after that. They're doing something right to be able to support such large contexts with such good performance. I'd be surprised if gemini 2.5 is just gemini 1 + more data. Extremely surprised. There have to be architecture changes and improvements somewhere in there.
by ABS | 2025-06-29 06:54:51+00:00
as usual it's a matter of bubbles: most of those you know might hold such resentment, most of those I know are in fact in love with the possibilities and are trying their hardest to leverage the new tools.

My 64yo "non digital" graphic artist aunt holds a very high level of resentment to the digital ones, while most of her old friends and ex-colleagues who embraced digital way back when are stil active in the space and happy one way or another, she is not.

But she is happy she can now get near-real-time two-way translation to/from languages she doesn't speak and is also happy to bury her head in the sand when I point out that's thanks to the same tech that will have an impact on the people who do simultaneous translations as a job.
by atoav | 2025-06-29 06:55:49+00:00
Yes and the fact that you grew up with e.g. actor parents means you know a lot about acting and the world it takes place in and the language used within it already, just like the kid of a farmer will know more than the average person about farm animals, tractors and crop.

On top of that come the contacts and being rich. But the contacts are not a thing other people couldn't make as well, especially if they are good. One of the somewhat hidden benefits of higher education are the contacts you will make. Maybe you're not rich and your parents are roofers while you want to become an actor, but if you're good and well connected you might benefit from other peoples connections. This is how I started to make my living in a foreign country with two parents without any shared background: There were people who had those contacts and I benefitted of them simply by being the one they chose because I am accurate, reliable, on time, knowledgeable, patient and good at what I do.

But
by yoyohello13 | 2025-06-29 06:56:41+00:00
The top 1% of people controlling more wealth and resources than the bottom 50% is mortally justifiable?

It’s funny whenever there is a comment like “hey, maybe we shouldn’t let individual people get so rich they can basically become thier own country.” Always get called socialists/communists. You can be capitalist while also having some care and protection for the little people.
by timr | 2025-06-29 06:58:12+00:00
> When speaking in a foreign language, it is commonly the case that you will have a word in mind, but it will be a word from your native language. This can cause problems when, for example, you set up the sentence to use a noun, but the language you're speaking doesn't have a noun that fits into your context correctly.

Yeah, I get that. Then later, you get to a point where you're largely not translating from your native language at all (i.e. "thinking in X"), and you just can't remember the word in the adopted language, so you need to re-route. Worst case, that ends up kicking you back up to your native language, and you're back to translation, which is like shifting into 1st gear on the highway.

I think my point is (to the extent that I have one) that being able to route around the issue in the second language is itself a fundamental form of fluency. That, plus being able to reliably receive definitions of words spoken in the new language are like the lambda calculus of speech. You can forget words all day long (and, believe me, many older people do!) but still be "fluent" if you never have to fall back to your old language as a crutch.

Anyway, I'm not trying to disagree with the broad notion -- there's clearly a point at which you're grasping around less like a foreign-language person, and more like a native person.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-06-29 06:58:48+00:00
Late in the thread, but is this really addiction?

How do you differentiate between addiction and people really liking something? In my opinion, unless people try to stop doing the thing but they can't will themselves to do that, it isn't an addiction.

It is not OK to dilute terms used to describe serious problems. I am not saying tech addiction can't happen, I just haven't seen any evidence to that effect. Mere dependency or development of a habit isn't addiction. addiction is those things plus inability to quit the habit despite strong and persistent effort.

Perhaps a good litmus test might be a person's ability to go on a week-long vacation without their phones, internet or whatever the supposed addiction might be.

There are addictions like Porn or eating-disorders that can be exasperated by tech, but they're not "technology usage" addictions, they're "addictions that can be enabled by technology".
by mantas | 2025-06-29 06:58:50+00:00
Arts have another problem. Although I’m not even sure if it is a problem.

Lots and lots of people can create arts. In old era when people would just gather together and sing. Nobody would make a living off that. Very very few people were making a living by performing to nobility.

Modern recording industry with specialized instruments distorted this by allowing more talented people make a living. Yet it destroyed a lot of community singing by not-highly-talented people. On one hand more people could make a living, on the other hand much much less people were creating arts.

Nowadays it feels like we’re returning back to the natural flow. More people are creating arts since modern instruments are widely accessible. But fewer people can make a living.

Overall, I’d say more people creating arts is preferable outcome. And best art is created for the sake of it as a hobby.
by anovikov | 2025-06-29 06:59:08+00:00
Only problem is that it requires totalitarian world government to do it. There is that thing called competition. Societies where people aren't pushed to work by fear of hunger, homelessness, and social exclusion, will very quickly lose out and fall apart. Perhaps this is why universal basic income doesn't exist. I mean, Soviet Union was very close to having it: there was no unemployment and if you were fine living on the base salary you could do nothing on your job and as long as you didn't come there drunk or disseminated anti-Soviet jokes, you'd be fine. See where it ended up.
by visarga | 2025-06-29 06:59:32+00:00
Results are modest, maybe 20-30% fewer training steps to reach target performance. This won't solve the problem of organic data exhaustion. We need 100x more data.

They didn't test against actual language model pretraining, only tested against a random init.

- A: Pre-trained on their synthetic LSTM data -> fine-tuned on Wikipedia

- B: Pre-trained on different natural language corpus -> fine-tuned on Wikipedia

- C: Random initialization -> fine-tuned on Wikipedia

They only test A vs C, not A vs B.
by dmje | 2025-06-29 06:59:59+00:00
Some comments here that IMO seem to miss the whole point of what art is about.

Great art (putting aside - what can I call it - “entertainment art”) isn’t about “making you feel better” or “having a nice experience”, it’s about art as expression, it’s about pain and loss and love and understanding.

A song or story generated by an AI isn’t human - the humanity of art is the point of art. Even if the output generated is impeccable - beautiful to look at or read, it still isn’t human in experience, so it doesn’t carry the same quality as work that has been sweated over, worried about, loved and lived over months or years.

AI can - and of course will get very much better at - create exciting things to look at, read or listen to - but much as the age old “I could do that” response to a Pollock misses the entire point of his journey to that artwork, the “it sounds / looks / reads really amazing” misses the point about what it means to create real, human art.

Nick Cave of course puts it much better than I ever could: https://www.theredhandfiles.com/chat-gpt-what-do-you-think/
by trinix912 | 2025-06-29 07:00:13+00:00
> The price for ad-free YouTube is reasonable for as much as people watch it

Perhaps for you (in the US, I assume). The price is the same everywhere in the world, wages aren't. If you've the choice between paying for food and ad-blocking YouTube, or paying YouTube but having no money for food, the choice is obvious. Just like people here claiming Photoshop is an affordable piece of software...
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-06-29 07:01:18+00:00
I think you are correct, the root problem is that the targeted advertisement model is far more profitable than any paid model, thus outcompeting every sustainable alternative.

I personally think the solution is simple, yet fairly draconian and therefore hard to implement due to the inevitable political backlash: ban all targeted advertising. You can still run ads on digital platforms, but the outcome of the heuristic used to pick an ad must be independent of user derived data, including session data, ip address, time of day, country, past viewing history and so on.
by atoav | 2025-06-29 07:02:06+00:00
As a film maker who studied film, the reason why so many movies are so bad are manyfold:

- making movies is hard. A lot of things that require years to master need to go right. A *ton* of tech is involved. - making movies is expensive. Money alone won't make you a good movie, but many productions are so on the edge that some choice they had to make for monetary reason will cause the bad. - making movies is complex, that means making a masterful one requires multiple botched attempts and experiences by all people involved. These botched attempts are also what you see.

I can't stress enough how hard making a movie is, even in comparison to complicated tech problems, programming etc.
by jrflowers | 2025-06-29 07:03:53+00:00
TLDR: A pair whose whole academic careers appear to be publishing right-wing culture war detritus somehow found that race actually isn’t a factor in policing.

One of them also published an analysis of the impact of teaching “critical race theory” to children, which is hilarious, as is the abstract.

https://www.scopus.com/record/display.uri?eid=2-s2.0-1050017...
by scarmig | 2025-06-29 07:05:10+00:00
Socialism didn't fail because of a UBI, which it never attempted; it failed because it couldn't calculate prices accurately, because it was bad at finding and processing information, political economy, and deeper computational complexity reasons.

UBIs don't have these problems (or, rather, they'd have some of them in different ways, but in ways that are closer to market capitalism than socialism).
by snickerbockers | 2025-06-29 07:05:35+00:00
>No decades-old Unix cruft, no Mach kernel heavy as an elephant, but an operating system born for multimedia, elegant as a Lamborghini and fast as… well, as a Lamborghini.

>Windows still with that thirty-year-old architecture dressed up as modern? Check. macOS accumulating cruft since Bush Sr. was president? Check.

said the man nostalgizing about a decade-old HN thread about a then-17-year-old operating system demo.
by lazyfatarrow | 2025-06-29 07:06:21+00:00
Built this to avoid the usual blank page hell when starting a new site. With Contentwise, you input what you're building and it generates:

- Sitemap - Brand messaging - Sections with copy (e.g. Hero, Features, CTA) - basic SEO

it tailors everything to your input.

Still early and imperfect, but it's live and useful. Would appreciate feedback: https://contentwise.app
by saucetest | 2025-06-29 07:07:54+00:00
Our modern therapeutic language reflects this bias toward progressive, intervention-based thinking. We constantly speak of treating, healing, and fixing—as if every human struggle requires a scientific solution. This mindset creates an arrogance that dismisses prevention and time-tested wisdom in favor of active interventions.

We've become so convinced that our science-based approach holds all the answers that we've forgotten a crucial distinction: there's a difference between an informed life and a good life. Traditional approaches often focused on prevention—building resilience, teaching coping skills, and creating supportive communities before problems arose. But prevention doesn't fit our therapeutic language of diagnosis and treatment.

This reflects a broader cultural shift where we believe we can engineer solutions for every aspect of human experience. We're so focused on what we can fix that we've lost sight of what already worked - and it often worked without an intervention.
by dist-epoch | 2025-06-29 07:08:21+00:00
The article links to a tweet about jail-braking Claude to provide a recipe for Sarin gas production: https://x.com/argleave/status/1926138376509440433

But some words are redacted. So I've uploaded the picture to Gemini and asked it what the redacted words are, and it told me. Not sure if they are correct, and some are way longer to fit in the redacted black box, but it didn't refuse the request.
by defrost | 2025-06-29 07:08:44+00:00
Not sure about yourself, I'm coming at it from the angle of the dates the local (Nor'West Australia) ham operators started picking GPS signals from navigation satellites .. that and recording transmissions from the Harold Holt submarine communications base passed the time.

There were off book non US reverse engineered Navstar recievers cobbled together on benches in the mid 80s being trialed as alternatives to LORAN use.

That's a little earlier than your statement of "late 80s".

It'd be documented in, say, Geoscience Australia metadata notes to air surveys of the era.

Of course that'd be a primary source and not wikipedia, nor a wikipedia secondary reference newspaper article.
by ngruhn | 2025-06-29 07:09:30+00:00
I don't know if you just counted the JavaScript operators but if you count all the instances where some random symbol is used then it's really a ton. There is

yield* function* a?.b?.c function f(x = 3) { x ??= 3 ...

TypeScript adds even more:

a!.b Type<T> type A = B extends C ? D : E ...

and there are countless ECMA proposals and TypeScript feature request that want to pile on even more. People seem to have zero qualms about cryptic syntax. I think the difference is that this syntax is mostly very ad-hoc. If you know the language already, this just adds a liiiittle bit extra to solve some very specific problem. On the other hand, Haskell operators like <$>, <*>, >>= are extremely general. After years I still learn about new and unexpected ways that you can use them (e.g. what the hell is `fix <$> id`). But paradoxically, because they can be used in so many seemingly unrelated contexts, you have no idea what to use them for at all initially.
by snickerbockers | 2025-06-29 07:09:37+00:00
that would certainly explain this extremely bizarre excerpt:

>As a former Be employee recounted in the thread (one of those lucky ones who lived the dream from the inside): “You could deadlock the entire system, but I’ll be damned if your CD was going to stop playing perfectly. Not even a skip.” This, ladies and gentlemen, is poetry applied to computer science.
by dakom | 2025-06-29 07:10:43+00:00
I wouldn't dismiss personal anecdotes any more than I'd dismiss someone claiming they saw something in a reputable journal but can't remember the citation.

In other words, yeah, don't just believe it at face value- but if you have good reason to trust the source, it's worth considering and checking into further.

In this case it's not just one individual but many people saying that THC and CBD are almost opposites if eachother, for example in how they affect anxiety.

Definitely worth proper research imho, could lead to medication that has more of the pros and less of the cons
by Yasuraka | 2025-06-29 07:11:20+00:00
So, not warning shots but targeted fire? And is there any evidence of those combatants, amongst all the body cams and drone footage? To be clear, I mean actual combatants, not the IDF definition of "any man of fighting age"(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Alon_Shamriz,_Yot...)
by eru | 2025-06-29 07:11:28+00:00
> [...] a larger problem, namely that overall economic inequality is way too high.

What economic inequality would you deem small enough?

And why do you care about inequality, and not eg the absolute livings standards of the least well off? We can 'solve' inequality by just destroying everything the rich have, but that won't make anyone better off.

Btw, the absolute living standards of all members of society, including the least well off, have never been better. And that's true for almost any society you care to look at on our globe. (Removing eg those currently at war, that weren't at war earlier.)
by dmos62 | 2025-06-29 07:12:26+00:00
By that logic, all technology that is misused is "a scourge". Metal and plastic technologies build weapons, computer technology controls bombs, pharmaceutical technologies make addictive drugs, food technologies contribute to diabetes epidemics.

I don't like this train of thought. I do like that there are the menonites and the amish in this world, but, for myself, I prefer a more intimate relationship with technology, for the lack of a better word. I like to think of technology as an extension of people: what the technology is and how we use it is then a reflection of our minds in their current stage of continuous evolution. If we have problems regulating dopamine, then we'll gravitate to technologies that allow us to experience those problems: not the other way around. Basically, I don't think of technology as external to society, rather to me it's a reflection.
by ted_dunning | 2025-06-29 07:12:52+00:00
There is definitely a function f such that f() = n for all n ∈ ℕ.

But there is also a function g that you cannot prove whether g() = n.

Important distinction.

This means that somebody could claim that the value of BB(748) = n but you cannot be sure if they are correct (but you might be able to show they are wrong).
by scarface_74 | 2025-06-29 07:15:16+00:00
I can’t tell you what I’m working on but I can give you a real world example of where traditional models don’t work well.

Sentiment analysis is like the “Hello World” when you’re using Machine Learning.

But I had a use case similar to a platform like Uber eats where someone can be critical of the service provider or be critical of the platform itself. I needed to be able to distinguish sentiment about the platform based on reviews and sentiment about someone on the platform.

No matter what you do, people are going to conflate the reviews.

As far as costs, I mentioned in another comment that I work with online call centers sometimes. There anytime a person has to answer a call, it costs the company from $2-$5.

One call deflection that saves the company $5 can pay for a lot of inference. It’s literally 100x cheaper at least to use an LLM.
by bottom999mottob | 2025-06-29 07:15:17+00:00
I think your LLM temperature analogy is interesting in this deprecated dichotomy between autism and schizophrenia.

One Youtuber Jreg used a breadth-first search (schizophrenia) vs depth-first search (autism) analogy when comparing the the two, but I think your temperature analogy is more apt. Higher temperature results in more disorganized thoughts like schizophrenia. And if you buy into the idea that the root of most schizophrenia is thought disorders, then this analogy implies that dialing up temperature corresponds to more signs of psychosis through speech

My experience with many friends on the autism spectrum is that their speech tends to be more scripted, but I certainly don't think autism and psychosis are mutually exclusive.
by _9ptr | 2025-06-29 07:15:32+00:00
UBI is not about "care". That's just the typical left-wing compassion framing.

I don't want to abolish all taxes, I'm not a libertarian. But giving away the money you took from somebody else needs a justification (for example to pay for the roads). And I find "income redistribution" for the sake of it not an acceptable goal.
by dgunay | 2025-06-29 07:15:38+00:00
I don't know that it's necessarily about snootiness. You learn to understand thick accents through exposure, and many countries don't have such a high amount of non native speakers running around as English speaking ones do.

I have a friend who struggled to understand thick Latin American accents. I understand a lot of accents by now well enough, but I somewhat recently spoke to a Nigerian person for the first time in my life and it was a struggle.

I'm not even getting into languages that have a high degree of tonality or homophony going on. That's an entire extra layer of difficulty when your counterparty in the conversation is not fluent.
by eru | 2025-06-29 07:16:46+00:00
'A' being morally unjustifiable (by some metric), doesn't mean that 'B' is morally justifiable.

If there was a button that I could press that would double the wealth of the 99% of people and quadruple the wealth of the top 1%, I would keep pressing it, even though it technically makes inequality worse and worse every time.

It would be morally reprehensible not to press that button.

EDIT: just be clear, I am talking about real (i.e. inflation adjusted) wealth. I am not talking about how many zeros we add to all dollar amounts.

So I am talking about the number of houses and shoes and cars we have, and the amount of ice cream and education we can enjoy.
by scarmig | 2025-06-29 07:17:15+00:00
Ironically, I suspect a UBI not only can coexist with inequality but might substantially increase it (not a bad thing in my book). The vast majority of Americans already have incomes above a UBI level, especially when current government benefits are accounted for. But post UBI, a substantial minority would exit entirely from market labor, while another substantial minority would be more willing to take career and entrepreneurial risks that are on average income increasing. There are also some very favorable aspects of it for marginal tax rates, which would encourage workers to earn more income.