MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bitwize | 2025-06-04 20:53:34+00:00
Lol, I said that about Urbit 10 years ago, back when Hackernews was still glazing it (and him). That it's a shellgame he plays to seem smart and innovative, without actually breaking new conceptual ground, and that it has that in common with his Moldbug stuff.

And for a bit of fun, I even posted an Urbit parody in those days, in which I inadvertently invented a feature of the Unison programming language: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10409837
by throwaway2037 | 2025-06-04 20:53:48+00:00
Former President Obama (of the US) calls this a "false choice". Can you be both focused on the next promotion and providing lots of value in your current role? I think the answer is yes. Of course, there are people whom seem to produce nothing, but get promoted... in the case of software engineers, they are mostly promoted on the principle of "competance" -- You are a good software dev... so now your run this team (regardless if they are a good manager!).
by masfuerte | 2025-06-04 20:54:00+00:00
Moderately recently (maybe ten years ago?) the police got the power to seize and destroy abandoned vehicles. This was intended to address the occasional obvious wreck you see at the roadside. Flat tyres, broken windows, full of rubbish, etc.

But there have been a few cases of people going on holiday for a fortnight and returning to find that their old but taxed and insured car has been taken. And they have no legal redress!

This does seem to be very rare though.
by Xmd5a | 2025-06-04 20:54:11+00:00
I guess this really depends on the problem but from the PromptWizard (PW) paper:

| Approach | API calls | IO Tokens | Total tokens | Cost ($) | |----------|-----------|-----------|---------------|----------| | Instinct | 1730 | 67 | 115910 | 0.23 | | InsZero | 18600 | 80 | 1488000 | 2.9 | | PB | 5000 | 80 | 400000 | 0.8 | | EvoP | 69 | 362 | 24978 | 0.05 | | PW | 69 | 362 | 24978 | 0.05 |

They ascribe this gain in efficiency to a balance between exploration and exploitation that involves a first phase of instructions mutation followed by a phase where both instruction and few-shot examples are optimized at the same time. They also rely on "textual gradients", namely criticism enhanced by CoT, as well as synthesizing examples and counter-examples.

What I gathered from reading those papers + some more is that textual feedback, i.e. using a LLM to reason about how to carry out a step of the optimization process is what allows to give structure to the search space.
by convolvatron | 2025-06-04 20:54:28+00:00
this is one of the most depressing things about recent turns. this directly manufactured outrage. these petty dramas, this US govt a tv show. Oh no, did you see what trump did to that foreign leader? we've been explicitly given a sham, playacting government whose primary mission to be replace honest debate with this sham soap opera. i expect soon to found out that the Elon that we see is really his secret twin.
by dylan604 | 2025-06-04 20:54:31+00:00
Lytro had dedicated cameras and inferior resolution so they failed to gain enough traction to stay viable. You might have a better chance being that it's still on the same device, but the paid for app would be a push.

However, you could just make the app connect to localhost and hoover up the user's data to monetize and then offer the app for free. That would be much less annoying than showing an ad at launch or after every 5 images taken. Or some other scammy app dev method of making freemium apps successful. Ooh, offer loot boxes!!!
by lurk2 | 2025-06-04 20:54:36+00:00
Andreessen has been interacting with Thiel’s network on Twitter for a few years now. These guys always have takes that can appear intriguing for being contrary to popular opinion, but once you see where the money originates, their attitudes become predictable.

Andreessen in particular has spent a few years flirting with the literature they send him. It might have been sincere (a lot of this literature is popular among Silicon Valley rightists), but in retrospect it seems like it was just a PR campaign to make him look like one of the “cool” billionaires. Once Andreessen gave the “Little Tech” interview, it became apparent to a lot of people where his true interests were.

Similar things happened with Elon Musk, JD Vance, Blake Masters, Palmer Luckey, and others in that sphere. I think Mark Zuckerberg tried to buy his way in in the last few years, but I’ve never seen any evidence that it worked.
by socalgal2 | 2025-06-04 20:54:38+00:00
> can't really think of a good reason why the iPhone should be a generalized computing device that is pryed open from Apple's clutches, while Nintendo, for example, can still run their own app store and would not be required to allow things like sideloading and root access while a smartphone manufacturer would. What makes one a computer, and the other an appliance?

Because the only thing people do on a Nintendo Switch is game. An iPhone on the other hand, people bank, book hotels, restaurants, flights, get directions, get taxis/uber/lift, order doordash/other takeout, make investments, plan for retirement, buy things from various businesses amazon/target/walmart, communicate via messanges/discord/fb/whatup/wechat, watch TV/youtube/tiktok, plan events/parties/get-togethers, make video calls via facetime/zoom/meet, take and share videos/phones, etc etc etc.

Apple is trying to control 100% of that and take a cut of 100% of that. They're effectively trying to be the middleman to the entire world. Nintendo maybe 1000 companies try to do business with you, selling you a game. iPhone probably > 100000 companies are trying to do business with you and Apple gets to say for each and everyone of them whether or not they are allowed to do business, how much they have to pay apple for each transaction, what payment systems they're allow/required to accept. They only recently got in trouble for requiring Apple's payment systems first. They shouldn't be allowed this control over so much.

And that's the difference between a video game console and an iPhone (or Android)
by const_cast | 2025-06-04 20:54:42+00:00
1. Consumers have no choice, so they better prefer it.

2. These anti-repair practices are anti-consumer, because they're specifically designed to make the process more difficult and expensive for consumers.

3. This is sort of along the lines of planned obsolescence. The reality is that making your product shittier on purpose is actually a viable business strategy when you have decent market share. It shouldn't be.
by behnamoh | 2025-06-04 20:55:12+00:00
> at least in the 90's when we shared software it was for the reasons we outlined...

With all due respect, that's not how most open source software is today [1]. A lot of CS students on the job market need Github stars or green tiles in case the employers check their page. So many open source projects are done only to boost resumes, not for the reasons you mentioned. Not to mention a lot of projects start as open source to lure users, only to become closed at some point (the notorious langchain is one example).

[1]: with the exception of some huge projects like ffmpeg, llama.cpp, etc.
by parliament32 | 2025-06-04 20:55:27+00:00
> Your DNS responses should not change based on what network you are connected to.

GeoDNS and similar are very broadly used by services you definitely use every day. Your DNS responses change all the time depending on what network you're connecting from.

Further: why would I want my private hosts to be resolvable outside my networks?

Of course DNS responses should change depending on what network you're on.
by sherdil2022 | 2025-06-04 20:55:32+00:00
> Reddit claims in its complaint that Anthropic’s scraper bots ignored the social network’s robots.txt files

A custom scraper can ignore robots.txt. Why couldn’t reddit detect the scraping and/or use rate limiting (which will only make it longer to scrape but not stop). Would letting the scraping proceed cause legal jeopardy and liability for Anthropic? And paying whatever fines is okay for Anthropic as cost of doing business??
by gusfoo | 2025-06-04 20:56:03+00:00
> Do we know how these apps were able to track browser activity? The only clues I see in the article are that it was on a per-website basis, and that it worked in incognito mode.

The App listens on localhost:xxyyzz when backgrounded. You open your browser and go to onesite.com and then differentsite.com the ID you are known as on those two sites is transmitted by having the JS on each site that supports Facebook functionality / ads etc for that site, and runs in your browser, make a request for an asset on your localhost with args <your ID on that website>. The app gets the args, and sends it off to HQ. That ties your signed-in account on the app to your activity on all the websites that was using this. And to be clear, FB Pixel calls are tagged with the 'event' that you're doing like "checkout" "just looking" "donate" etc. While I don't know for sure, I'd assume that the fact you're in Incognito Mode is just an aspect of the data report, I would say. Nothing would stop it.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-06-04 20:56:05+00:00
10 years.. But yeah. Just wait until these things can move through space with physical/gyro sensors on their own, at affordable costs. When orin nano super is the cost of an Esp32 (and the size of).

No gps, no fiber, no 5g, no jamming except microwaves. A python file and a target.

Scary times ahead.
by goatlover | 2025-06-04 20:56:14+00:00
It probably has a lot to do with Yarvin's influence at least partially leading the tech CEOs and the current administration down a similar authoritarian path as the USSR, North Korea, China. Or maybe better comparison, Putin's Russian and Orban's Hungary.

Why should we take those ideas seriously in liberal democratic societies? We don't take Mein Kampf's ideas seriously.
by ragnese | 2025-06-04 20:56:27+00:00
> Did things always feel like this?

I wonder about this, too. What were things like in, say, the 1960s? When you went to buy a new appliance, did you feel like the appliance was designed to intentionally screw you as much as possible via planned obsolescence, anti-consumer-repair measures, purchased "warranties" that had tons of fine print so you could never actually benefit, etc?

Even as a kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, I learned that everything was a scam. How many times did child-me watch a TV commercial (on the childrens' channels) that showed a remote-controlled toy car doing extremely cool stunts and riding on rocks and dirt, only to get it for a birthday present and have it not able to move at all unless it was on a totally flat, level, surface? Or, have you ever seen a commercial for a toy like the "Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots"? I'm sure they're on YouTube. Then once you see the toy in person it's pathetic.

I've truly been taught my whole life that everything is a scam.
by indoordin0saur | 2025-06-04 20:56:47+00:00
He got associated with the "intellectual dark web" for occasionally having opinions outside of the mainstream. The NYTimes was even planning on writing a hit piece on him back in the day that scared him so bad he shut down his original site. I think his writing today lacks the sort of honesty or novelty it once had because he's very sensitive to being called out.
by siavosh | 2025-06-04 20:57:05+00:00
Yeah I man with each day the chance of a shocking event increases to 100% with predictable outcomes. But yeah thats what I'm thinking of .. there has to be a finite number of dimensions for this and related technologies in terms of use and impact (legal, economics, PR, military, political etc), some are fuzzier than others but some should be pretty clear for some analyst to share..
by RajT88 | 2025-06-04 20:57:30+00:00
I wasn't getting at any illegal sort of collusion.

More like, connections which form because people meet each other over time. Or jump back and forth between companies, because their office location doesn't change much. That would lead to a flow of ideas between the two companies in a totally organic and not problematic kind of way. People know each other and talk shop occasionally while at the gym, or yoga or the neighborhood BBQ or whatever.
by maxerickson | 2025-06-04 20:57:44+00:00
Matt Levine is coherent though.

I would think someone intent on calling Moldbug's ideas interesting would at least try to patch up the big holes. Like the city-states that have free flowing capital and populations, but somehow avoid an analogue to international law.

Or the dictator that isn't subject to approval, except by the required committee that can fire him. There's 4 points and 2 of them are contradictory!
by _pdp_ | 2025-06-04 20:57:51+00:00
IMHO this guide should have been called "a theoretical guide for building agents". In practice, you cannot build agents like that if you want them to do useful things.

Also, the examples provided are not only not practical but potentially bad practice. Why do you need a manager pattern to control a bunch of language translation agents when most models will do fine especially for latin-based languages? In practice a single LLM will not only be more cost-effective but also good for the overall user experience too.

Also, prompting is the real unsung hero that barely gets a mention. In practice you cannot get away with just a couple of lines describing the problem / solution at a high-level. Prompts are complex and very much an art form because and frankly, let's be honest, there is no science whatsoever behind them - just intuition. But in practice they do have enormous effect on the overall agent performance.

This guide is not aimed at developers to really educate how to build agents but at business executives and decision-makers who need a high-level understanding without getting into the practical implementation details. It glosses over the technical challenges and complexity that developers actually face when building useful agent systems in production environments.
by kragen | 2025-06-04 20:58:13+00:00
In this context, three years ago, Vance was describing Yarvin as his "good friend" (when he was campaigning for a seat in the US Senate, which he won), while four months ago, Yarvin is saying he barely knows Vance. If you're suggesting that the apparent discrepancy is a result of strategic dishonesty for reputation preservation, that would mean that either:

1. Yarvin wants to distance himself from Vance because he fears reputational damage from being associated with the US Vice President. (But from other evidence, cited in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moldbug-sold-out, this seems implausible.)

2. Vance wanted to exaggerate his closeness to Moldbug in order to enhance his own reputation. This doesn't seem plausible either; it's implausible that more than 0.1% of the Ohio electorate had any idea who Moldbug was, and at the point that you're a plausible candidate for a US Senate seat, your reputation will no longer be enhanced by being associated with a little-known blogger.

A much more likely explanation is that Vance admires Moldbug and wants to encourage his followers to read him.
by ryankrage77 | 2025-06-04 20:58:19+00:00
I think AGI, if possible, will require a architecture that runs continuously and 'experiences' time passing, to better 'understand' cause-and-effect. Current LLMs predict a token, have all current tokens fed back in, then predict the next, and repeat. It makes little difference if those tokens are their own, it's interesting to play around with a local model where you can edit the output and then have the model continue it. You can completely change the track by just negating a few tokens (change 'is' to 'is not', etc). The fact LLMs can do as much as they can already, is I think because language itself is a surprisingly powerful tool, just generating plausible language produces useful output, no need for any intelligence.
by vessenes | 2025-06-04 20:58:27+00:00
OK, I hear you that OBBBA is a bad backronym. So bad it's not a backronym. But it's catchy; Trump is a master of catchy soundbites. I submit to you: we're talking about it by name on HN, when we could be discussing mechanistic interpretation theory, which IMO is much more interesting. In fact, I submit that it's the last bill I really registered the name of since the Affordable Care Act. Which was (checks notes) 15 years ago, shortly after Teddy Kennedy died.(!)

Look at Trump's career. Look at his skill set. Look at what he's doing in the white house. He's a lot of things but he's not bad at getting what he values; he is in fact perhaps the most successful American ever in those terms. If you care about America it is incredibly short sighted to think he's dumb. He's extremely effective, just not at the things that a) you might want him to be b) we hope a President will be c) he says he's doing to the media.
by boznz | 2025-06-04 20:58:34+00:00
NZ Tax system is like this, takes me an hour to do my company yearly returns on their website, an hour every month for the GST and 15 mins every month for the payroll and kiwisaver (pension) of two employees.

The fact they have an "other" category in the IR10 form that captures the breakdown means I don't have to worry too much about terms that mean nothing to me or my business and 90% of my earnings can just goes in that. No need for an accountant as long as you have good separation of business and personal transactions.

Doing tax is always going to be unpleasant, I don't see any downside to the government making it easier for the person filing the return.
by freedomben | 2025-06-04 20:58:58+00:00
> This is why I don't like open sourcing my projects anymore. Someone else with more resources just forks it and makes profits, thinking that merely acknowledging me pays my bills.

Then I would submit that you are picking the wrong license. The whole point of the GPL/AGPL family of licenses is to ensure that they can't just do this. They will be required to publish their changes, which benefits the original project (you). It's not a perfect solution, but it helps a great deal. The answer to this problem is not to close up and/or go proprietary.
by neilv | 2025-06-04 20:59:31+00:00
> Thanks for supporting our journey.

Probably just traditional "our incredible journey" exit language, but reminds me to mention a mindset misalignment that we see frequently in startups:

Providing a solution isn't about our journey (together?). It's about the solution.

I think many of us often have good alignment at some point, and really want to solve the problem.

But as it becomes a business, we also have to be thinking about the business.

That's OK, but remember that we're also still purporting to solve a problem.

The people for whom the problem is being solved don't much care about our journey -- they care about the problem being solved.

If the solution effort is ending, and we're framing it to those people as our "journey", that sounds like we missed the point of the "support".
by dannypovolotski | 2025-06-04 21:00:12+00:00
Witcher 4 is a game that is pushing UE5's limits. Unreal comes with its source available, and CPR had to write their own world partition streaming engine, create a new type of non-actor asset for environment art, introduce a lot of multi-threading improvements. That's why it serves as a good tech demo source. Lots of people in the industry are looking carefully at how this move from a proprietary engine to UE is going for CPR, and this kind of tech demo serves are great marketing towards other companies with an in-house engine considering a move to UE.
by jrflowers | 2025-06-04 21:00:35+00:00
Well, for one thing, that comment is in response to a link to a blog post that Scott wrote about how The Feudalism Blogger’s old posts about how feudalism is good were better than The Feudalism Blogger’s new posts about how feudalism is good.

He sort of panders to an audience that fancies themselves much smarter than the average person, and as such categorically demand opinions that average people do not hold — no matter how sensible they might be. To accommodate that requirement he repackages existing (more usually conservative/libertarian) cultural gripes by pairing them with some light criticism and branding it as some sort of enlightened centrist/Third Way perspective. This sort of practice in general has lost some of its illusory appeal in recent years since so many previously “politically inscrutable” rich and influential folks dropped their centrist/apolitical trappings and came out as staunchly right-wing.

That being said there are quite a few readers that still want to play the “Are they right wing? Are they left wing? Are they something magical and ascendant?” game, and audience capture is a real phenomenon, so the entrenched players have no reason for introspection or change.
by constantcrying | 2025-06-04 21:01:02+00:00
The only real alternative is a hacked together mess of open source software projects.

The "Microsoft Alternative" does not exist, despite the EU distributing billions into small companies and open source projects.

Bureocratic institutions go to Microsoft because you can get a great all in one package, on top of which you can install your custom stuff. There is no actual replacement for that basis, you can't even buy it. At best you get the pieces someone else has thrown together.
by xp84 | 2025-06-04 21:01:43+00:00
> 75 years is a long time. At lot can change.

True, but population collapse specifically is a tough headwind. You can't make more 2055 30-year-olds unless they've already been conceived today, and those will be the parents of the 2100 45-year-olds. While a lot can change, it's unrealistic to assume a birth rate will skyrocket all of a sudden (China's at 1.18 per woman and US is only at 1.6). The painful part, the bad worker:retiree ratio, is already set in stone, by the tininess of the millennial and Z generations, especially in China.

That said, I hedge my bet by saying that if AGI arrives and happens to have a wildly positive impact on human lifestyles, I can grudgingly accept the possibility of an unprecedented baby-boom in a decade, fueled by a complete end of scarcity. Wouldn't bet on that catalyst though.
by computably | 2025-06-04 21:02:08+00:00
> all you need is an IP address range, a physical link to someone willing to peer with you (another AS), some hardware, some paperwork, etc; and bam you're your own ISP.

I'm pretty sure the connotation of "self-host" entails a strictly substantially smaller scope than starting your own ISP.

Finding someone willing to peer with you also defeats the purpose. You are still fundamentally dependent on established ISPs.
by tensor | 2025-06-04 21:02:19+00:00
Originally as an experiment in using non-US services, as my company is not a US company and the possibility of tariffs on digital services is not at all unrealistic. The exercise was really enlightening. Not to derail the conversation the TLDR was that in some areas it was easy to move off US services, while in others (github) there are almost no alternatives.

I do have access to US models via Kagi to play around with and use for things Mistral doesn't work on. I've been meaning to try command a too, but haven't gotten around to it. I will say that the new mistral medium model is surprisingly good, though I've only just started using it. Codestral is definitely behind other models.
by sokoloff | 2025-06-04 21:02:22+00:00
I worked (as an intern) on autonomous vehicles at Daimler in 1991. My main project was the vision system, running on a network of transputer nodes programmed in Occam.

The core of the approach was “find prominent horizontal lines, which exhibit symmetry about a vertical axis, and frame-to-frame consistency”.

Finding horizontal lines was done by computing variances in value. Finding symmetry about a vertical axis was relatively easy. Ultimately, a Kalman filter worked best for frame-to-frame tracking. (We processed video in around 120x90 output from variance algorithm, which ran on a PAL video stream.)

There’s probably more computing power on a $10 ESP32 now, but I really enjoyed the experience and challenge.

This was our vehicle: https://mercedes-benz-publicarchive.com/marsClassic/en/insta...