MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tim333 | 2025-06-12 14:43:24+00:00
The article is a bit weird - says lies are growing bolder, then Altman says "0.000085 gallons of water" per query and then calculates that's 31 million gallons per year. Which is quite a lot of water but doesn't show Altman is lying.

It seems more the author doesn't like Altman and is trying to show he's lying but is not doing a very good job at doing so.

And other bollocks - Altman advocates UBI but knows it won't work and then links an article not showing that. I think the article much more convincingly shows Gizmodo lying than Altman, not that I especially trust the latter.
by mbb70 | 2025-06-12 14:43:32+00:00
I'm reminded of Rich Hickey's Hammock Driven Development talk, whose thesis for design is basically:

1. Think about the problem and write it all down

2. Research what other people have done to solve this problem

3. Think about it some more and write all that down too

4. Sleep on it

I think the conclusion is the same: Good design does not naturally arise from good programming, and background/domain knowledge is essential
by iDont17 | 2025-06-12 14:43:42+00:00
Why make AI then if intelligence is electrical activity in a substrate is everywhere.

We’re engineering nothing novel at great resource cost and appropriation of agency.

Good job we made the models in the textbook “real”?

Wasted engineering if it isn’t teaching us anything physics hadn’t already decades ago, then. Why bother with it?

Edit: and AGI is impossible… ones light cone does not extend far enough to accurately learn; training on simulation is not sufficient to prepare for reality. Any machine we make will eventually get destroyed by some composition of space time we/the machine could not prepare for.
by Zaphoos | 2025-06-12 14:44:05+00:00
> Oh wow. My respect for Anthropic just dropped to zero; I had no idea they were entertaining ideas this stupid. > > In full agreement with OP; there is just about no justifiable basis to begin to ascribe consciousness to these things in this way. Can't think of a better use for the word "dehumanizing."

We cannot arbitrarily dismiss the basis for model welfare until we defined precisely conciousness and sapience, representing human thinking as a neural network running on an electrochemical substrate and placing it at the same level as an LLM is not neccessarily dehumanizing, I think model welfare is about expanding our respect for intelligence and not desacralizing human condition (cf: TNG "Measure of a man").

Also lets be honest, I don't think the 1% require any additional justification for thinking of the masses as consumable resource...
by jonpurdy | 2025-06-12 14:44:31+00:00
Yes, since I got my first TV (in 2013) I've had Mac Minis connected via HDMI, and the Minis also being the file server and BitTorrent downloading machine. Prior to that, downloaded to my MacBook or watched on YouTube.

There was never a cord for me to cut (and I refused to pay for cable when in uni since I downloaded everything anyway).

Now just have the Mini in the closet and serving files via SMB to an AppleTV connected to the TV HDMI.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-06-12 14:44:36+00:00
TP shortages in Hong Kong were rational, based on an expectation of bulk shipping issues. Stocking up in North America based on shortages in Hong Kong was idiotic. If there are shortages of TP in Hong Kong that means there would be a surplus of TP in North America, since North America is where the pulp for most TP is made.
by wbharding | 2025-06-12 14:44:49+00:00
It's hard to reconcile how 59% of devs in their survey are "confident" AI is improving their code quality, with prior empirical research that shows a surge in added & copy/pasted lines w/ a corresponding drop in moved (refactored) lines https://www.gitclear.com/ai_assistant_code_quality_2025_rese...

My experience (using a mix of Copilot & Cursor through every day) is that AI has become very capable of solving problems of low-to-intermediate complexity. But it requires extreme discipline to vet the code afterward for the FUD and unnecessary artifacts that sneak in alongside the "essential" code. These extra artifacts/FUD are to my mind the core of what will make AI-generated code more difficult to maintain than human-authored code in the long-term.
by chrisweekly | 2025-06-12 14:44:52+00:00
Related tangent - here's my carefully-curated "flowstate" Spotify playlist consisting of tracks w/ no lyrics and a variety of moods. I pick one that suits me in the moment and put it on repeat. I find it boosts my focus and energy and is very helpful in attaining flowstate, for problem-solving or Cal Newport-style "deep work" sessions.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6UScdOAlqXqWTOmXFgQhFA?si=...
by kortex | 2025-06-12 14:45:00+00:00
"I got a shiny task!"

Absolutely brilliant. It's so stupid (in that it's kind of silly how easy it is to game our mammal brain) but I can absolutely see this giving an extra kick of motivation.

Have you heard of the INCUP model for ADHD? Interest, Novelty, Challenge, Urgency, and Passion. The more factors an activity has, the more drive the ADHD mind has. Rarity system adds novelty and a bit of passion.

Also if you have looked into operant conditioning at all, you know that variable interval reward schedules are the strongest behavior-forming systems (hence, slot machines and every game that act like them).
by kibwen | 2025-06-12 14:46:35+00:00
I think it's important to clarify that the question of whether or not everything has a cause is itself outside of science. Science is about determining what a cause is likely to be, using the universe itself as a source of truth, and constrained by fundamental limits on our ability to observe and experiment. Which is to say, even if the philosophers conclude that everything must have a cause, there is still no law that says that we (as scientific agents of a universe that is attempting to understand itself) are capable of determining every possible cause.
by mountainriver | 2025-06-12 14:46:49+00:00
I love how people say things like this with complete disregard for research.

Most LLM research involves fine tuning models, and we do amazing things with it. R1 is a fine tune, but I guess that’s bad?

Our company adds knowledge with fine tuning all the time. It’s usually a matter of skill not some fundamental limit. You need to either use LoRA or use a large batch size and mix the previous training data in.

All we are doing is forcing deep representations. This isn’t a binary “fine tuning good/bad” it’s a spectrum of how deep and robust you make the representations
by InSteady | 2025-06-12 14:46:54+00:00
You think the prospect of injuries in among military personell are going to prevent policies and practicalities that increase operational fitness? There are about 1.5 million injuries in the US military per year that require medical treatment and documentation (so more than a first aid kit). A few burns per year vs a 13 billion dollar carrier in a dysfunctional state... even an idiotic beaurocracy (which the miltiary is not) can figure that one out.
by johnQdeveloper | 2025-06-12 14:47:05+00:00
> Keep calling normal things people like or need fascism and you'll find yourself surrounded by legitimate fascists.

M8, it is hilarious how easy conservatives trying to normalize that stuff in the wild is.

I was just curious since you were trying to play the "I am playing devil's advocate" card when you are clearly a card carrying conservative.

Look, idk how you are concluding this kind of craziness but it _is_ craziness from a fact based point of view. I'm only opposed to conservatives in the US for three reasons:

1) They are against my access to life saving medical care, potentially forcing me to flee the country to where I can afford it.

2) They are very comfortable courting anti-Jewish extremism in the US which is why I have to keep track of which bigoted asshole cares I'm jewish so I know who will try to knife me in the back professionally/personally.

3) They are less fiscally conservative (when it comes to the debt/deficit) than Democrats with their tax giveaways, guaranteeing the eventual failure of the United States financially. Similarly, their economic policies are sprinkling fairy dust and pray the long term consequences away.

As a supporter of Israel (the part that isn't hurting the cooperating palestianians anyway), a fiscal conservative, and so forth, it is bizarre to me I have no party in the United States but the Democratic Party to vote for.
by thomassmith65 | 2025-06-12 14:47:07+00:00
If there's any chance at all that LLM's might possess a form of consciousness, we damn well ought to err on the side of assuming they are!

If that means aborting work on LLMs, then that's the ethical thing to do, even if it's financially painful. Otherwise, we should tread carefully and not wind up creating a 'head in a jar' suffering for the sake of X or Google.

I get that opinions differ here, but it's hard for me really to understand how. The logic just seems straightforward. We shouldn't risk accidentally becoming slave masters (again).
by xmprt | 2025-06-12 14:47:25+00:00
I don't know what kind of backwards logic that is. Banks help first time homebuyers purchase their house. Builders build houses and add supply that helps meet demand (everyone needs a place to live). Real estate agents help navigate the process for people who are unfamiliar with all the different steps.

There are bad actors in all of these (banks caused the financial crisis and agents are probably paid more than they're worth for $1M+ houses in CA), but the biggest root cause that's missing from your comment is NIMBYs blocking new development almost everywhere.
by davydm | 2025-06-12 14:48:02+00:00
Responses to the facts: 1. Cool! No-one wants to maintain X11. People are so stuck on the sunken cost in Wayland that they will stick to their guns and disparage anything else. It's more of an indicator about Wayland than X11... 2. Sounds like they're not popular for recognizing that Wayland _still_ isn't fully-baked, and the X11/Wayland debate is _still_ going because people like me have had way more issues win Wayland than under X11. The Wayland project has some cool and lofty goals, mostly centered (from what I can tell) around improving user and developer experiences - which is a good thing. But replacing something as big as X11 without api compatibility is an herculean task. One that is _still_ ongoing. 3. Their opinions about vaccines which have not undergone the same level of testing as vaccines we've had in the past and which have now been proven to be harmful to quite a few people, should have nothing to do with their code. But we're talking about humans here. I literally had my boss tell me a while back that my opensource projects would be more popular if I was nicer. That's the kind of bullshit that's out there.

Responses to your questions: 1. no - anyone can fork anything that's FOSS at any time, license permitting, to do with as they please. Anyone telling them they can't is a draconian overlord who disregards the opensource ethos (and quite possibly violates licensing). Oh wait, we're talking about Red Hat here. Of course. 2. no, except that it's yet another "poke in the eye" towards Wayland fans who continue to tell everyone how much better than X11 it is. Perhaps it is for them - it's not for me, and plenty others, from what I've read, but people tend to get emotionally attached to their creations. The fact that someone wants to fork and support it means that they have to recognize that Wayland isn't going to sweep X11 under the carpet, that it _doesn't_, in fact, provide an all-round better solution, that all things suck in their own special way, with Wayland having issues for certain users and workloads, and X11 being rock-solid, but architected in a way that means that applications don't have to run and be rendered on the same machine (yes, you can run a graphical app over ssh if there's X11 involved at both ends - it will display locally, run remotely.

So to me, the backlash is just people who are sore that their precious Wayland will have more competition, and that it's likely to be adopted over Wayland if it maintains proper compatibility as well as receiving improvements. It's not a good look for anyone involved.
by nipah | 2025-06-12 14:48:07+00:00
Your view is incomplete. It did lowered lifespans, but also increased them MUCH MORE than before. It was not "oh, it got worse, now it is recovering". It was "it got worse, now it is much better than before". The amount of infant deaths it lowered, for example, is massive.

And it is true, those people did not got an iPhone and died, but this is also you saying this for them. You don't know all the specifics of history or all their motivations, the industrial revolution had a bloody story, but it's origins were also organic, it also had aspects of improvement. The world population grew almost 10x.

I don't think we are in a position to judge those past events to the lens you are posing.
by toast0 | 2025-06-12 14:48:25+00:00
Even if news reading informs an electorate, there's no need to be informed constantly when I only have limited opportunities to vote.

When an election happens, I can do a search of news on the candidates, and for discussions of the other issues put to the voters. In the meantime, by avoiding news, I can save a lot of distress about news that I can't change and doesn't have an immediate effect on me. (Nobody in this thread, including me, is great at avoiding news, me included... really important events tend to bubble up anyway, and all of us clicked into a discussion of an event that's probably not personally relevant)

It'd be different if a cat delivered tomorrow's paper to my door; I might not like it, but I'd have a duty to read that paper and try to make right what once went wrong.
by micromacrofoot | 2025-06-12 14:48:39+00:00
I've been trying to keep an open mind about this stuff for a few years now... but at this point it's wearing on me. I'm at the point of no. Just no. This is not something I want.

I do not want to wear this on my face. I do not want to talk to uncanny personas. This is not something I want to be between me an interacting with another person. I do not want widgets on my walls.

At best for the next 10 years these will be the size of ski goggles (and we're not even there yet).

This isn't the next iPhone, it's not the next iPad, it's not even the next Apple Watch. It's an expensive toy for rich people who are desperately trying to look at anything except what's actually in front of them.
Ask HN: What have the LLMs ever done for us?
by pprunty | 2025-06-12 14:48:55+00:00
This is a play on Monthy Python’s sketch “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

But in all seriousness, what have LLMs ever done for us?

If you've never seen it before, here is the Monthy Python sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qc7HmhrgTuQ&list=RDQc7HmhrgTuQ&start_radio=1
by reverendsteveii | 2025-06-12 14:49:00+00:00
my receipt printer is a whiteboard in the gym. I went from "I do some scattered, random assortment of lifts when I feel like it" to "I have 3 routines I cycle through every day" and what it took was writing down each routine and tracking the weight I did last time. Checking off my daily workout is my pulling a ticket down off the chore kanban. Every once in a while, as I get stronger, I get to "take a number off the board" meaning I've surpassed that amount of weight in my routine (eg: after a few weeks of doing 25 pound lateral shoulder raises I'm able to bump my routine up to 30. if no other exercises use 25 pound dumbbells I can erase the 25 off the board). That's my "dumping out the jar". It's worked for 2 years, I've gone from being at best a dilettante in this space to losing 50 pounds, gaining the ability to bench press my weight and, and this is the important part, I feel good about my body for the first time in my forty years. I think the difference is that it's several gameplay loops at once. The short loop is "do today's workout, get today's dopamine pop", the medium term loop is "let me see if I can work out more days this month than last month" and the long term loop is "let me see if I can get strong enough that 30 pounds is trivial for me". With those multiple, simultaneous loops there's a variety in the (ephemeral, immaterial, entirely made up and internal) reward that stops it from becoming meaningless. I think OP's system has a parallel structure: the two reward loops are completing a ticket and emptying the jar.
by dragonwriter | 2025-06-12 14:49:13+00:00
> Agile isn't a methodology; it's a meta-methodology, which is why it's so hard to productize

More specifically, its a meta methodology that specifically rejects methodology as a one-size-fits-all, or even custom but top-down-imposable, product, but explicitly holds that methodology is an emergent product of continuous optimization within and specific to the team doing the work.
by _trampeltier | 2025-06-12 14:49:15+00:00
It is cery common for Frequency Inverter for AC Motors to have a break resistor. It's expensive to push energy back to the grid with from an inverter. So in most case just a break resistor is used. Just if you break a lot and a long time it is worth to buy an inverter who can do it. If you have multiple axis in a machine, often they are coupled with DC, so the break energy is used by another drive.
by rickdeckard | 2025-06-12 14:49:15+00:00
...and have Cingular pay a revenue-share of the monthly user-bill back to Apple in exchange for exclusivity.

It cannot be overstated what a gamechanger it was to have a recurring revenue stream incrementing with each new user. Beside Blackberry, no cellphone company was able to finance maintenance based on its userbase AND hardware sales, they all only worked (and mostly still work) based on hardware-sale alone.
by unshavedyak | 2025-06-12 14:49:49+00:00
On the note of language choice, i've been experimenting with Claude Code recently and thought the other day how happy i am to be using Rust with it and how afraid i'd be in Python, JS, etc.

I've noticed Claude Code introduces quite a few errors and then walks through the compile errors to fix things up. Refactors/etc also become quite easy with this workflow from CC.

I'm sure it does well in dynamic languages, but given how much the LLM leans into these compile errors i get the feeling it would simply miss more things if there was none/less.

So far though my #1 concern is finding ways to constraining the LLM. It produces slop really, really quick and when it works more slowly i can avoid some of the review process. Eg i find stubbing out methods and defining the code path i want, in code, rather than trying to explain it to the LLM to be productive.

Still in my infancy of learning this tool though. It feels powerful, but also terrifying in hands of lazy folks just pushing through slop.
by wat10000 | 2025-06-12 14:50:04+00:00
It is absurd, but consciousness is fundamentally absurd.

Why would doing a bunch of basic arithmetic produce an entity that can experience things the way we do? There's no connection between those two concepts, aside from the fact that the one thing we know that can experience these things is also able to perform computation. But there's no indication that's anything other than a coincidence, or that the causation doesn't run in reverse, or from some common factor. You might as well say that electric fences give rise to cows.

On the other hand, what else could it be? Consciousness is clearly in the brain. Normal biological processes don't seem to do it, it's something particular about the brain. So it's either something that only the brain does, which seems to be something at least vaguely like computation, or the brain is just a conduit and consciousness comes from something functionally like a "soul." Given the total lack of evidence for any such thing, and the total lack of any way to even rigorously define or conceptualize a "soul," this is also absurd.

Consciousness just doesn't fit with anything else we know about the world. It's a fundamental mystery as things currently stand, and there's no explanation that makes a bit of sense yet.
by jasonthorsness | 2025-06-12 14:50:08+00:00
There's so much potential with the Vision Pro held back by one of two things:

1) being just as good as multi-monitor setup for real work

2) cost not being insanely high

I would dearly love to try one but the cost to me means investment, not toy.

I am hoping they keep investing in VisionOS and when it meets one of those criteria the software will be _really good_.
by leumon | 2025-06-12 14:50:11+00:00
“Thirty seconds after take off, there was a loud noise and then the plane crashed. It all happened so quickly,” said Ramesh, speaking to the Hindustan Times. He said he “impact injuries”, including bruising on his chest, eyes and feet but was otherwise lucid and conscious. https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jun/12/air-india...
by m3kw9 | 2025-06-12 14:50:15+00:00
Yeah I do the time “ticket” concept for this, I create a timer. But I do have hard time jumping to create these tasks.

To me I sometimes see past these patches for my problem, which is a pain threshold that I need to resist running away from when facing a complicated problem, and why is there pain at all? It all becomes a math equation where you have a better thing to do vs the one you are doing and how to rework your mind to calculate it differently
by bko | 2025-06-12 14:50:35+00:00
Because they're numbers represented in digital form. In inference, you're doing simple math with those numbers. So what's alive, the numbers? Maybe the silicon holding the numbers? What if we print them out? Does the book become conscious?

Even if you're a materialist, surely you think there is a difference between a human brain and a brain on a lab table.

You take a dead persons brain, run some current through it and it jumps. Do you believe this equivalent to a living human being?
by clan | 2025-06-12 14:50:59+00:00
These listings are fun to explore.

As a teenager I got my first 8-bit computer. A lot of my friends had Commodore 64. But a good computer salesman sold me and my dad on the british Amstrad CPC 6128[0]. It had the disk drive and a green monitor. Great computer. Great salesman. They had this newfangled Commodore Amiga but he did not know much about it. It was at the same price but without a monitor so my dad reasoned it would be better as I would then not occupy the living room TV with my computer. I could have jumpstarted my career on 16 bit. I could have been a contender!

The Amstrad had a Z80 CPU and ran Locomotive Basic when powered on. But it came with a disk containing CPM Plus 3.0. That was used for "business-like" things such as copying files using "pip to_me from_you".

That in turn made me the local über-geek in the computer room in my public school. They had 2 expensive danish made and rather rare Intel 80186 (yes - 80 one 86) based RC Piccoline[1] computers. They in turn each had 4 terminals and 1 dot matrix printer (a typical school setup at the time). A fact which never really dawned upon me at the time what "Concurrent" in CCP/M meant. My geek flex was when the vice principal fetched me during a regular class to help him remove a defamatory text file from a 5,25" floppy disk. He was not able to delete the file himself. I identified the "read-only" attribute was set and such wizardry was rarely seen around those parts.

Back in the day when computing was much more heterogeneous and fun. I am sitting here behind my Ryzen monster but still yearn for those days.

Now, kids. Get off my lawn :-)

[0] https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/2666/Amstrad-CPC-612...

[1] https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/RC_Piccoline
by vitaflo | 2025-06-12 14:51:00+00:00
It’s difficult to do the hard work of you haven’t done the easy work 10,000 times. And we tend to get paid for the hard work.

LLMs remove the easy work from the junior devs task pile. That will make it a lot more difficult for them to do the actual hard work required of a dev. They skipped the stepping stones and critical thinking phase of their careers.

Senior devs are senior because they’ve done the easy things so often it’s second nature.