MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kenjackson | 2025-07-19 15:16:26+00:00
I went through the thread and saw nothing that looked like this.

I don’t think developers will be obsolete in five years. I don’t think AGI is around the corner. But I do think this is the biggest breakthrough in computer science history.

I worked on accelerating DNNs a little less than a decade ago and had you shown me what we’re seeing now with LLMs I’d say it was closer to 50 years out than 20 years out.
by macintux | 2025-07-19 15:16:40+00:00
I’ll hazard some guesses, since no one has replied.

- Big fish small pond. Because so few people are tackling problems like this, it’s much easier to get noticed and appreciated.

- Nostalgia. I think most people have a soft spot for the computers they grew up with. For me, it’s the TI-99/4A that I learned how to program on.

- Technical challenge. Making a decades-obsolete computer work with the modern world is not trivial.

>25 years ago I worked for BBN, and they had a warehouse of old equipment, including the IMPs that made Arpanet work, a pallet of early Macs, etc. I grabbed a hard drive to use with a routing project; it had 1GB of disk, and was the size of two rack units. Working with very old computers can be fascinating as well as frustrating.
by K0balt | 2025-07-19 15:16:54+00:00
Ai is useful in closed loop applications, often it can even do a decent job of closing the loop itself… but you need to understand that it is a fundamentally extractive, not creative, process. The body of human cultural knowledge is the underlying resource , and AI is the drill with which we pull out the parts we want.

Coding, robotics, navigation of constrained data spaces such as translation, tagging, indexing, logging, parsing, data transformations… those are all strong target candidates for transformer architecture automation.

Creative thought is not.
by tomrod | 2025-07-19 15:17:27+00:00
When applied to non-human life, the alleged benefits of eugenics goes by the names domestication, husbandry, and similar.

Correct me if I am wrong because I am absolutely not a historian. Eugenics was horrible not because we understand Mendellian genetics but because it was forced on people in the intent to allegedly "improve" a (political boundary placeholder)'s population in some way that was outright obscene, including use by Nazi Germany and many other places and regimes. US courts, etc.

I think the difference here is that the technology is not forced to be used.
by sgarland | 2025-07-19 15:17:32+00:00
Agreed, though containers and K8s aren’t themselves to blame (though they make it easier to get worse results).

Debian Slim is < 30 MB. Alpine, if you can live with musl, is 5 MB. The problem comes from people not understanding what containers are, and how they’re built; they then unknowingly (or uncaringly) add in dozens of layers without any attempt at reducing or flattening.

Similarly, K8s is of course just a container orchestration platform, but since it’s so easy to add to, people do so without knowing what they’re doing, and you wind up with 20 network hops to get out of the cluster.
by seth123456 | 2025-07-19 15:17:41+00:00
The Bafin (german banking regulator) seems to want to restrict that freedom. I have worked for a company where the business model is related to cash and the Bafin tries to find reasons to make it harder every couple of years, stating that the money could come from anywhere and because people are not fully KYCed (as it is only legally required for payments of 1000 EUR or more within 24h) there is no way to know. The business model is legal, but they can also make it harder to operate by putting more pressure and scrutiny to banks the company worked with.
by klabb3 | 2025-07-19 15:18:47+00:00
Wow, that’s incredible. Cats are progressing so fast, especially unreleased cats seem to be doing much better. My two orange kitties aren’t doing well on math problems but obviously that’s because I’m not prompting the right way – any day now. If I ever get it to work, I’ll be sure to share the achievements on X, while carefully avoiding explaining how I did it or provide any data that can corroborate the claims.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-07-19 15:19:01+00:00
Can someone tell me where your average every day human that’s walking around and has a regular job and kids and a mortgage would land on this leaderboard? That’s who we should be comparing against.

The fact that the only formal comparisons for AI systems that are ever done are explicitly based on the highest performing narrowly focused humans, tells me how unprepared society is for what’s happening.

Appreciate that: at the point in which there is unambiguous demonstration of superhuman level performance across all human tasks by a machine, (and make no mistake, that *is the bar that this blog post and every other post about AI sets*) it’s completely over for the human race; unless someone figures out an entirely new economic system.
by spease | 2025-07-19 15:19:26+00:00
Personally, I’d really like a crossplatform declarative package manager in a mainstream or mainstream-style language, where the nixpkgs equivalent can be JITed or AOTed including the shell scripts, so it isn’t painful to work with and can switch into an environment almost instantly.

Though nix the language syntactically isn’t that complex, it’s really the way that nixpkgs and things like overrides are implemented, the lack of a standard interface between environments and Darwin and NixOS, needing overlays with multiple levels of depth, etc that makes things complex.

The infuriating thing about nix is that it’s functionally capable of doing what I want, but it’s patently obvious that the people at the wheel are not particularly inclined to design things for a casual user who cannot keep a hundred idiosyncrasies in their head memorized just to work on their build scripts.
by samat | 2025-07-19 15:19:39+00:00
Thanks for speaking sense. I think 99% of people saying IMO problems are not hard would not be able to solve basic district-level competition problems and are just not equipped to judge the problems.

And 1% here are those IMO/IOI winners who think everyone is just like them. I grew up with them and to you, my friends, I say: this is the reason why AI would not take over the world (and might even not be that useful for real world tasks), even if it wins every damn contest out there.
by throw_m239339 | 2025-07-19 15:19:43+00:00
This is just the beginning of all that. "Designer babies" will obviously be a big business in the future, and one can take that logic VERY far, even for an entire nation where all babies will be mandated to have certain genes or characteristics... or worst, mandated specializations...

Of course, science fictions authors,scientists and philosophers have written plenty of material on the matter and the danger of such societies... and it might blow up in our face one way or another, but nothing aside of our demise can stop scientific progress...
by gmd63 | 2025-07-19 15:20:13+00:00
I don't understand this assumption that crypto transactions are nobody's business. That's a feature of cash payments, which from what I understand can only be emulated in crypto by transferring control over a non-custodial wallet, which is cumbersome to the average person.

If you're crypto banking with a third party that muddles your wallet's transactions you've already added one of the institutions you claim to be against.

If you transact on the blockchain, you're broadcasting who your wallet transacts with on levels that are far more publicly transparent than how fiat is traded via institutions.
by washadjeffmad | 2025-07-19 15:20:27+00:00
There have always been attempts to launder fraud through intermediaries - computerized, bureaucratic, or otherwise. They think (well, know) if they abstract or obfuscate things in a novel way, that they'll have enough time to hit markets across states without sophisticated legislation before the legal immune systems can respond, potentially years later.

This type of algorithmic grift is transparent to judges and people with common sense, but there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest at or outside of the federal level through regulators like the FTC to prevent it, just curtail certain circumstances.
by Andrew_nenakhov | 2025-07-19 15:20:43+00:00
Thing is, history has shown that nothing is reliably enough for Google, once it flags you suspicious. You've entered password and totp code? Nah, you're still suspicious. Gave one time backup-code? Hah, still suspicious. Have a hardware key? Nice, but you know you are really suspicious. How else can you prove that it's you?!
by dathinab | 2025-07-19 15:20:44+00:00
> is absolutely easier to parse/interop with than a legacy binary format

depends

you can have well, clean and fully documented binary formats which are relatively easy to parse (e.g. msgpack, cbor, bson)

you might still not know what the parsed things mean, but that also applies to text formats (including random documented binary blob fields, thanks to base64 they also fit into any text format)
by ranger_danger | 2025-07-19 15:21:32+00:00
If you want a look at how this (doesn't) work in practice, just look at Libreoffice. I once made 3 hours worth of comments on a Word doc, and as soon as I saved it, they all vanished into thin air.

And for the pedantic, yes it warns you when saving as a .docx that "not all features are supported", but it does that every time, for every document, so nobody pays attention to it or has any idea what it even means. To me the way it handles this is just completely unacceptable.
by sgarland | 2025-07-19 15:21:32+00:00
> way too complicated for what they do

Notably, this is subjective. I’ve had devs tell me that joins (in SQL) are too complicated, so they’d prefer to just duplicate data everywhere. I get that skill is a spectrum, but it’s getting to the point where I feel like we’ve passed the floor, and need to firmly state that there are in fact some basic ideas that are required knowledge.
by megh-khaire | 2025-07-19 15:22:00+00:00
I completely get where you're coming from. There’s a ton of noise in the space right now, and the hype is very real. I think that's mostly because the AI wave reached a broader, non-technical audience pretty quickly. That visibility has created a lot of excitement.

However, this AI wave does feel a bit different. What stands out is the speed of progress in multiple directions. We’ve seen new model architectures, prompting techniques, and agent frameworks. And every time one of those advances, it opens up new possibilities that startups are quick to explore.

I’m with you that chasing every shiny thing isn’t practical or even useful most of the time. But as someone curious about the space, I still find it exciting.
by baobabKoodaa | 2025-07-19 15:22:17+00:00
There's 3 distinct things:

A) The ability of walking a tightrope

B) The ability of overcoming your fears to the extent of being able to walk a tightrope at a dangerous height

C) The risk of falling

I would argue that the audience cares about A and C. The audience doesn't care so much for B.
by bwfan123 | 2025-07-19 15:22:42+00:00
> At this point, I think it can only be explained by ignorance, bad faith, or fear of becoming irrelevant.

Based on the past history with frontier-math & AIME 2025 [1],[2] I would not trust announcements which cant be independently verified. I am excited to try it out though.

Also, the performance of LLMs was not even bronze [3].

Finally, this article shows that LLMs were just mostly bluffing [4].

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1i53ih7/fro...

[2] https://x.com/DimitrisPapail/status/1888325914603516214

[3] https://matharena.ai/imo/

[4] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.21934
by okanat | 2025-07-19 15:23:29+00:00
That's the thing: the amount of sysadmin role I would like to play for my family is nearly 0. And, no simple file sharing or accessing NAS systems shouldn't require a "sysadmin".

They should work out of the box for a consumer computer system with minimal configuration and updates shouldn't break functionality. Windows provides this Linux doesn't.

Windows OS design, the overall mentality of the developers designing software for Windows also reinforces this pattern. A consumer system should keep working without asking user unnecessary questions. They have to be designed to be somewhat future proof so breaking binary and configuration compatibility is minimal. With Linux systems (or any bazaar-style OS) this is impossible.
by vladgur | 2025-07-19 15:23:38+00:00
A lot more than 2 people die on Everest per year according to Wikipedia and I’m sure oxygen bottle theft plays a role but I haven’t read anything attributing deaths to “Israeli team stealing oxygen bottles”.

Mind sharing where you got these news from?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_who_died_climbi...
by didntcheck | 2025-07-19 15:23:46+00:00
I suppose in theory you could have a device which doesn't have the storage or bandwidth to record/transmit full audio, but does some heuristics on the device and then transmits a small payload of flags. But in any case I wouldn't want to stay anywhere with an unaccountable black box ready to unfalsifiably charge me

The other commenter is absolutely right that partyers in AirBnBs cause nuisances for local residents, but the owners will have to find another way to sort that out or close up shop
by wat10000 | 2025-07-19 15:23:51+00:00
LLMs are really good with words and kind of crap at “thinking.” Humans are wired to see these two things as tightly connected. A machine that thinks poorly and talks great is inherently confusing. A lot of discussion and disputes around LLMs comes down to this.

It wasn’t that long ago that the Turing Test was seen as the gold standard of whether a machine was actually intelligent. LLMs blew past that benchmark a year or two ago and people barely noticed. This might be moving the goalposts, but I see it as a realization that thought and language are less inherently connected than we thought.

So yeah, the fact that they even do this well is pretty amazing, but they sound like they should be doing so much better.
by sgarland | 2025-07-19 15:24:04+00:00
> Just because everything else is bad, doesn't invalidate the idea that you should do better.

I get this all the time at my job, when I recommend a team do something differently in their schema or queries: “do we have any examples of teams currently doing this?” No, because no one has ever cared to try. I understand not wanting to be guinea pigs, but you have a domain expert asking you to do something, and telling you that they’ll back you up on the decision, and help you implement it. What more do you want?!
by AnotherGoodName | 2025-07-19 15:24:32+00:00
Expired certificates should also at worst be a skippable warning. No one’s relying on certificates expiring for security. If you did you might have to wait many years for the expiration of a stolen certificate - lol!

It’s absolutely a minor “hey btw the certificate expired, check for an update” yet various systems treat certificate expiration as an end of the world lock it down scenario.
by bgwalter | 2025-07-19 15:25:17+00:00
So the gold medal claims in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44613840 look exaggerated.

The whole competition is unfair anyway. An "AI" has access to millions of similar problems stolen and encoded in the model. Humans would at least need access to a similar database; think open database exam, a nuclear version of open book exam.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-19 15:26:04+00:00
the value of human beings isn't in their capacity to do routine tasks but to respond with some common sense to all the critical issues in the 2% at the tail.

This is why original problems are important, it's a measure of how sensible something is in an open-ended environment, and here they're completely useless, not just because they fail but how they fail. The fact that these LLMS according to the article "invent non-existent math theorems", i.e. gibberish instead of even being able to know what they don't know, is an indication of how limited this still is.
by andix | 2025-07-19 15:26:34+00:00
This really needs to be configurable on a per-account basis. I'm using YouTube mostly on mobile devices and TVs, without the possibility to use addons.

The required settings are quite simple (a lot of social media platforms have them): Setting a list of languages that should never be translated, and setting a preferred language the other ones should be translated to.

I guess the silicon valley people who develop YouTube can't grasp the concept that there are people out there who speak multiple languages.
by jcranmer | 2025-07-19 15:27:14+00:00
We have literal decades of experience showing that the problem isn't "get good"--no matter how many best practices are followed, it turns out that the next generation of fuzzers or analyzers or whatnot is able to uncover yet more problems in the most perfect codebases we're aware of.

In my experience--and most others' too--it is far better to design APIs so that they are impossible to misuse, rather than relying on developers to remember the rules to prevent misuse. This is where maxims like "parse, don't validate" come from. C's type system is simply too weak for API misuse to be made compile-time failures, which means you have to rely on convention, and anyone who thinks that convention can be made robust across a multimillion line codebase is delusional. One of the advantages of Rust is that you can create newtypes which rewrap the APIs to make misuse impossible. I've been working on some numerics code in Rust, and the first thing I did was to make different types for the different kinds of indices (rows, columns, permuted rows, etc.) so that it's simply impossible to use the wrong index for a given array.

Also, one of those things I've noticed is that most of the people who are dismissive of Rust is that they point to its protection against 'missing "free()" here and there.' Which is strange, because it probably doesn't even make the top 10 list of problems in C that Rust protects against. The C issue that keeps me up at night when I write C code is pointer invalidation, which is what Rust's lifetimes + mutability xor aliasibility rules are meant to protect against. So why talk about free and not pointer invalidation?
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-19 15:28:20+00:00
Makes sense. Everyone here has their pride and identity tied to their ability to code. HN likes to upvote articles related to IQ because coding correlates with IQ and HNers like to think they are smart.

AI is of course a direct attack on the average HNers identity. The response you see is like attacking a Christian on his religion.

The pattern of defense is typical. When someone’s identity gets attacked they need to defend their identity. But their defense also needs to seem rational to themselves. So they begin scaffolding a construct of arguments that in the end support their identity. They take the worst aspects of AI and form a thesis around it. And that becomes the basis of sort of building a moat around their old identity as an elite programmer genius.

Tell tale sign you or someone else is doing this is when you are talking about AI and someone just comments about how they aren’t afraid of AI taking over their own job when it wasn’t even directly the topic.

If you say like ai is going to lessen the demand for software engineering jobs the typical thing you here is “I’m not afraid of losing my job” and I’m like bro, I’m not talking about your job specifically, I’m not talking about you or your fear of losing a job I’m just talking about the economics of the job market. This is how you know it’s an identity thing more than a technical topic.
by benjiro | 2025-07-19 15:28:32+00:00
Here is my question. Who is paying for it all to get to a 1000 bucks bounty per person / year?

The same question, who is paying for all the data collection they do on customers?

You keep hearing about xxx billion dollar industries but where is that money coming from? The add and data collection industry in the US is probably a trillion dollar market or more, but ... does it really work? Sure, focused ads on some youtube channel about product that may be of interest, but all the rest is such a mess.

I do not buy more stuff because some ads showed up. Sure, they can be informative that there is a new car released, or something like that. But there is no desire to buy XXX cleaning product because they spammed it on TV.

Same argument with "what use is getting all my personal data, down to the things we do in bed". Sell it to specific companies? But what do they really gain from it. It does not feel like we are getting better products as a result of all that user data. O, people are not happy about Y product. You do not need invasive data collection for that, you see it in your revenue numbers.

It often feels like a lot of industries are just there to self sustain themselves. Nobody ever got fired for buying advertisement or personalized data. So companies keep spending on it, people keep pouring over the data, analyzing it, but its like nobody has common sense and its all a scam that inner feed itself.

I am not saying that advertisement does not work to grow a product, but especially unknow one's but the moment product reach a specific mass...
by b112 | 2025-07-19 15:28:42+00:00
I wonder if the company making the detectors, pitched them on a free install.

They sound networked, so what if they only get cash, every time there is a hit? So the hotel is getting 1/2.

And with contracts like these, come with hefty fines if people back out. Even if the hotel now realises it's too sensitive, lots of false positives, the hotel now has to prove it, or pay big.

If the hotel refunds the guest, the hotel still owes the fee!

Quite the trap for the hotel.
by bluecalm | 2025-07-19 15:29:14+00:00
My view is that it's less impressive than previous go and chess results. Humans are worse at competitive math than at those games, it's still very limited space and well defined problems. They may hype "general purpose" as much as they want but for now it's still the case that AI is super human at well defined limited space tasks and can't achieve performance of a mediocre below average human at simple tasks without those limitations like driving a car.

Nice result but it's just another game humans got beaten at. This time a game which isn't even taken very seriously (in comparison to ones that have professional scene).
by weitendorf | 2025-07-19 15:29:39+00:00
I have been getting into this too. I caution anybody with self-hosting/tinkering tendencies against starting a tech company because it just makes it so much easier to justify this stuff...

Eventually serving a regular old container doesn't cut it anymore and you find yourself needing to pay these weird newspapers nobody reads to publish your business' alias because it's a requirement for a legal DBA which ASIN needs to let you get your own IPV6 block, which you need to truly own you and your customers' IPs and it's not worth becoming an AS without it, but then you can actually move towards physically become your own ISP and then...

The ingress problem people solve with tailscale is one of the hardest. I'm curious to see if it's possible to implement STUN/TURN [0-1] with a generally good mechanism for exposing the server to the Internet by caching all static files and blocking dynamic access to the backend with a loginwall, which authenticates allowed users with email "magic links" -> nonrenewable access tokens. In theory it should not be excessively difficult, expensive, or risky to do this.

It's just relevant enough to what we're doing with remote development environments for me to justify another rabbit hole

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traversal_Using_Relays_around_...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STUN