MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: Recursive Intelligence – Theory and Artifact (600 Downloads on Zenodo)
by bazifti | 2025-07-15 15:24:22+00:00
I’m an independent builder—just shipped a general-purpose, recursive agent kernel, designed for risk-managed, auditable decision-making in any regime-driven environment (trading, robotics, anomaly detection, etc).

Theory Paper & Artifact:

Zenodo (600+ downloads in under a month): https://zenodo.org/records/15713252 — Full theory, architecture, and open artifact — PDF, code skeleton, results, and methodology

Latest live demo/report:

LinkedIn (clean, out-of-sample test vs. SPY, posted July 16): https://www.linkedin.com/posts/basil-iftikhar-34399318a_recu... — Transparent, auditable, with pilotable code and trade logs — Sharpe 1.12, Max Drawdown -3.97%, competitive returns, full exec summary/report

Happy to answer any technical or practical questions—feedback and critique welcome!
by zerkten | 2025-07-15 15:24:38+00:00
I feel exactly the same way. Scoring, or high scoring draws along with metrics like attempted shots would be an interesting element to look at. A team like Manchester United where there is data for long periods of droughts and success show how some of these metrics go through the floor in what fans would identify as bad times (there are so many poor-quality draws since Ferguson left.)

I found it particularly interesting that someone from the UK (as the author appears to be) suggested that draws might be boring. In my personal experience, that tends to be a North American phenomenon (not that others don't or can't express that feeling).

On a related note, Cricket draws can be epic. There are many examples like https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2009/dec/06/michael-athert....
by slacktivism123 | 2025-07-15 15:24:59+00:00
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Aside from that, I don't see how the collection of simple one-shot JavaScript wrappers (like "Extract URLs", "Word Counter", and "Pomodoro Timer") that you keep bringing up is related to your argument.
by mjd | 2025-07-15 15:25:03+00:00
Eben Moglen observed that at one time people were building giant stone pyramids, then the social and technological conditions changed, and people stopped making new ones. That's OK, it's not a sad thing that there are no new pyramids, we still have the old ones and people still find them awesome.

And he says maybe big-budget movies are like that too, something that culture will do for a while and then move on to something different when the conditions change.
by bombcar | 2025-07-15 15:25:05+00:00
Containerization (either the docker stuff or the literal 40 foot steel boxes) was a huge revolution in their respective industries.

There was a ton of work and howling and news about them for years, decades.

Now they’re so boring and standard that they’re just table stakes. Nobody cares about them enough to get into long discussions about them.

The same in a best case will happen with LLMs - the things they can do will become boring and assumed, and people will eventually stop trying to make them do things they can’t.
by PhunkyPhil | 2025-07-15 15:25:22+00:00
Why would the DoD give them money just to break-even (not even likely. oai has easily put > 10m into their compute) with companies that already have the infrastructure? This isn't a stimulus package, it's a service they're buying.

Even then, these companies aren't doing research into LLMs, they're just wrapping the endpoints and creating some abstractions.
by snozolli | 2025-07-15 15:25:50+00:00
1997 was an absolutely phenomenal year for movies. Life Is Beautiful, Boogie Nights, Jackie Brown, Titanic, Donnie Brasco, The Fifth Element, Good Will Hunting, As Good as It Gets, Austin Powers International Man of Mystery, Gattaca, LA Confidential, Men in Black, Liar Liar, Amistad, The Game, Con Air, Contact.

There was a lot to do in 1997, just not as much to do without leaving home. We went to movies because they were affordable and great movies were being released.

Also, that was the era where new multiplex theaters were being built with great sound systems, so it was worth going to a theater for the high-quality experience. While quality consumer electronics are more readily available today than ever before, I feel like the vast majority today only watch media with headphones, TV speakers, or maybe a 2.1 stereo+sub setup.
by FearNotDaniel | 2025-07-15 15:26:12+00:00
Really? I tend to associate it more with bourgeois folks who are well-off but certainly not wealthy, but most definitely want to remain in their own cultural bubble and do everything to avoid learning the local language or integrating with the society of their host country. “Little Britain” types basically. I tend to steer clear of them in my adopted corner of the EU.
by simpaticoder | 2025-07-15 15:26:34+00:00
An interesting example of both LLMs' strengths and weaknesses. It is strong because you wrote a useful tool in a few minutes. It is weak because this tool is strongly coupled to the problem: filtering HN. It's an example of the more general problem of people wanting to control what they see. This has existed at least since the classic usenet "killfiles", but is an area that, I believe, has been ripe for a comprehensive local solution for some time.

OTOH, narrow solutions validate the broader solution, especially if there are a lot of them. Although in that case you invite a ton of "momentum" issues with ingrained user bases (and heated advocacy), hopelessly incompatible data models and/or UX models, and so on. It's an interesting world (in the Chinese curse sense) where such tools can be trivially created. It's not clear to me that fitness selection will work to clean up the landscape once it's made.
by pavel_lishin | 2025-07-15 15:26:43+00:00
> To anyone saying this post was written by AI—yes, of course it was. That’s how things work now. I speech to text in my own words, then I use ChatGPT to sharpen it into something clearer and more readable. It’s a tool, like any other.

> If that bothers you, maybe it’s time to stop reading or reconsider how you use the internet. This is modern communication. If you can’t get past the fact that AI helped tighten the language, that’s your problem—not mine.

> Welcome to the future. Good luck keeping up.

This does bother me. Again, I'm reminded of the quote - "why would I bother reading something that nobody wrote?"
by duxup | 2025-07-15 15:26:54+00:00
>there is something appealing about being able to have a conversation and change somebody's mind with new information

I think the only information he is interested in is personal favors and that's it. All indications are that Trump is very uncurious and takes little input even from his own staff.

I don't think that's so much bad info as, he honestly doesn't care.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-07-15 15:28:01+00:00
> I have seen this question asked on subreddits, "Should we divide this group into A and B, A stays here and B goes over there and that way everybody is happy" To me this seems like the subtext is "Those people are not welcome here"

I don't disagree with this observation about Reddit. However, I feel HN readers are more topic-oriented. Folks really do come to HN to read the articles and then maybe get drawn into a discussion.

I grant there are some topics here that tend to be more engagement driven but on balance I think the above holds.
by pama | 2025-07-15 15:28:02+00:00
> I can't find a single open source codebase, actively used in production, and primarily maintained and developed with AI

This popular repo (35.6k stars) documents the fraction of code written by LLM for each release since about a year ago. The vast majority of releases since version 0.47 (now at 0.85) had the majority of their code written by LLM (average code written by aider per release since then is about 65%.)

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider

https://github.com/Aider-AI/aider/releases
by pjmlp | 2025-07-15 15:28:24+00:00
Indeed, but they weren't being released at the same rate as they are nowadays worldwide via digital stores.

As gamer in the 1980's, I only cares about what could actually get on a few shops around my hometown, and they were mostly games coming out from UK, and Iberian Penisula.

With the Amiga, German and French studios also became relevant.

Everything else was almost inexistent.

Also arcades had what they had, owners weren't changing games all the time.
by ptero | 2025-07-15 15:28:34+00:00
Yes, but for a while google was head and shoulders above the competition. It also poured a ton of money into building non-search functionality (email, maps, etc.). And had a highly visible and, for a while, internally respected "don't be evil" corporate motto.

All of which made it much less likely that users would bolt in response to each real monetization step. This is very different to the current situation, where we have a shifting landscape with several AI companies, each with its strengths. Things can change, but it takes time for 1-2 leaders to consolidate and for the competition to die off. My 2c.
by fleebee | 2025-07-15 15:28:43+00:00
My job security is pretty low on my list of concerns about LLMs. I wish this technology existed only for vibe coding.

I worry about the impact of LLMs to the society at large. These models hit the mainstream only a couple years ago and they already have disastrous effects. Not only people send LLM generated emails to each other, that's actually a selling point for many products. I regularly hear about people using LLMs as doctors and therapists. For many, a chatbot could be their only friend or even a partner. Genuine human-to-human interaction is being replaced by chatbots from a handful of megacorporations. It's hard to avoid it. The internet is being flooded by LLM generated garbage that looks like a human could've written it. It's easier than ever to generate misinformation and propaganda, and as a cherry on top the LLMs even help distribute it.

I don't particularly want to live in a society where any of that's considered normal. And that's not even considering the negative impact on the environment. It's hard to be excited about a technology with these downsides that I think severely outweigh any benefits.
by digitalPhonix | 2025-07-15 15:29:35+00:00
The sentence isn’t relevant to the jury bias discussion (unless the jury is involved in sentencing in the UK?)

> We also have to ask - if the biases in that study were flipped, if White jurors were far more likely to convict BME defendants, and pardon White defendants, and BME jurors were the more even-handed ones, would this not be trumpeted as conclusive evidence of racism?

Yes, but why is this relevant? That’s not the case in the statistics you cited.

My comment was pointing out that there are multiple possible (probably simultaneous) causes for the jury statistics.
by IAmBroom | 2025-07-15 15:29:43+00:00
> There is nothing special about US in itself that makes it lucrative for any one to stay.

Aside from increased average wages, more amenable environment to starting businesses, a gigantic pool of natural resources, no (current and past) threat of military invasions or coups, and so on.

You're proposing that the only reason people immigrate here is because they heard about the US on the TV. We can argue whether it's "nicer" to live in Madrid or New York City, but most would-be immigrants and past immigrants came here to escape famine, impoverishment, oppression, and the like.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-15 15:29:43+00:00
You left out the DIVX pushed by Circuit City with the DRM crap limiting the number of plays. I never truly looked into the format, but I once heard that the format would use IPB long-GOP encoding, but left out the B-frames and used in their place the code that made it locking. It's demise couldn't come fast enough. I seem to recall it needing a phone cable to work as well, but the wiki page does not mention that, but does mention something implying connectivity "The player's Security Module, which had an internal Real-Time Clock, ceased to allow DIVX functions after 30 days without a connection to the central system."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIVX
by jihadjihad | 2025-07-15 15:29:56+00:00
Mainstream films (or works of art writ large) rarely trust their audience. Artists imbue their work with a lot of handholding for the audience's sake; if it's a need or a want on the audience's part, conscious or unwitting, who can say.

I don't particularly enjoy having my hand held through a narrative, but I know plenty of people who don't mind, don't care, or don't know. It's easier to "participate" as an audience by passively consuming the art than to engage with it actively, and no doubt such art is easier to produce.

Many people seemingly desire a contract to be enforced between artist and audience, where the artist constructs a narrative that is sensible and palatable and neat and tidy. Look at the reviews for Birdman (2014), for example. Plenty of people couldn't tolerate the ending, even if it thematically and tonally made sense.

Gone with the Wind (Mitchell, 1936) upholds such a contract; Light in August (Faulkner, 1932) does not. With no slight against the former, the latter could be used as an example of a work with a radical trust of its audience.
by probably_wrong | 2025-07-15 15:30:05+00:00
My take is that "expat" immediately indicates that someone has no intention to stay for good (unlike immigrants) and that they'll leave as soon as it's convenient because of course they won't stay here for good. It implies a mild disdain for the local culture - the person has no intention to integrate and, more often than not, will self-segregate into the expat bubble.
by Retr0id | 2025-07-15 15:30:17+00:00
Previously, a convenient and low-latency way to bypass UK internet censorship was to proxy via a local datacentre - it's only the residential ISPs that are under pressure to censor traffic, commercial ones less so.

But if the blocking is happening somewhere other than the ISP, this is less effective. A hypothetical TPB user might want to proxy via Luxembourg now (seems like the shortest hop to somewhere with sane legislation)
by arlort | 2025-07-15 15:30:27+00:00
This could realistically incur the same issue as term limits, where you end up moving power and know how away from visible (no matter how flawed) and (somewhat) accountable elected official to the staff and interest groups that are not subject to such limits

I do like sortition for certain scenarios (definitely favour that over a referendum for instance), but I think it'd work better as something that either has to veto some piece of law or can offer amendments or the likes
by leshow | 2025-07-15 15:32:40+00:00
I kinda feel this way too. Reading some of the blog posts by AI "luminaries" I'm struck by how Stalinist they sound. They hold out some utopia that exists in their minds, and they are ready to feed people into the meat grinder to try and make it a reality. Stalin said that this generation would suffer so that the next lived in utopia, and that's kind of the same pitch they are making.

I think if we actually cared about making a better world, you'd take steps where each successive step is a positive one. Free healthcare, clean energy investments, etc..
by anarazel | 2025-07-15 15:32:48+00:00
> The fundamental problem is that a synchronous, lock-based approach is being used in an asynchronous, event-driven context (logical replication).

This isn't hit in ongoing replication, this is when creating the resources for a new replica on the publisher. And even there the poll based thing is only hit due to a function being used in a context that wasn't possible at the time it was being written (waiting for transactions to complete in a hot standby).

> The Postgres team needs to go back to the drawing board and avoid polling altogether and more importantly have event-listener based approaches for primary and replicas separately

That's, gasp, actually how it already works.
by m0llusk | 2025-07-15 15:33:11+00:00
Communism used to be thought of in this way. It enabled societies to cast off old limitations and make remarkable progress. Until it didn't and Communists found themselves and their modernized society stuck well behind the rest of the world. Perhaps LLMs are a similar trap that will generate many lines of code and imagined images but leave us all stupid and with impaired executive function.
by jdiff | 2025-07-15 15:33:27+00:00
I understand the importance of having data, and that any measurement can be gamed, but this one seems so tailored for tailoring that I struggle to understand how it was ever a good metric.

Even being generous it seems like it'd be too noisy to even assist in informing a good decision. Don't the overwhelmingly vast majority of businesses see periodic ebbs and flows over the course of a year?
by delfinom | 2025-07-15 15:35:03+00:00
Older article from 2019:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/05/12/7222165...

>Internal divisions and pressure from Congress also limited the FDA's response to overseas violations,

whistles

>delays in launching a generic version of Lipitor could cost Americans up to $18 million a day, according to a 2011 letter from a group of U.S. senators to the FDA commissioner.
by antonvs | 2025-07-15 15:35:07+00:00
> The least privileged don't have any money, so by definition aren't hurt by KYC.

A very privileged perspective.

What about, for example, undocumented immigrants? Countries allow them in to exploit for cheap labor, so they do have some money. But using banks is difficult and risky because of their documentation situation.

Now, if you're a certain kind of conservative, you'll say that's the way it's supposed to be, because these people having committed a civil violation are "criminals" which the KYC laws are attempting to punish.

But that's not how a compassionate human thinks.
by GuinansEyebrows | 2025-07-15 15:35:12+00:00
the number of people who work for (or defend those who work for) firms like raytheon, northrop grumman, palantir, meta, amazon, microsoft, alphabet, flock et al leads me to believe there are not enough people left to care about building this technology. we're cooked. too many developers lack the moral position necessary to turn the tide in a meaningfully widespread way - at best, it's "if not me, someone else will do this work anyways, so i might as well be the one collecting the paycheck/stock options." at worst, it's "i think it's a good thing to create tools to surveil/manipulate/kill people."

mourn the loss of the internet we knew and be ready to sacrifice ease of use to return to lower-tech/still-underground options.
by Qem | 2025-07-15 15:35:22+00:00
> A poll for the report carried out by YouGov in 14 countries found almost a fifth of people said they did not have the size of family they desired, with one in nine believing they would have fewer children than they wanted and 7% that they would have more.

1/9 ~ = 11.1%. This is bad news. If 11.1% wish they had less, and only 7% wish they had more, that probably means if people had exactly what they wanted we would get even worse sub-replacement rates. We spent 2-3 generations brainwashing people into believing parenting was undesirable and borderline moral failure to pursue before your 30s. Probably at least another two generations will be necessary to reverse this.
by the_af | 2025-07-15 15:35:36+00:00
I agree with some of the sentiment in TFA, but I think the author goes way overboard and ends up disliking some of the movies "just because".

I do agree that the dialogue from Gladiator II is awful, but what did we expect? The movie shouldn't have been made at all, Gladiator didn't need a sequel.

As for literalism: it's always been there in mainstream movies, I think. That we got so many (non-auteur) movies that are not so literal is surprising, actually.
by gedy | 2025-07-15 15:35:45+00:00
> But this also tends to make us forget sometimes that those things aren't always a big deal. It's the distinction between solving an immediate problem vs. building a proper solution.

I agree about the "code quality" not being a huge issue for some use cases, however having worked at places with entrenched spreadsheet workflows (like currently), I think that non engineers still need help seeing they don't need a faster horse - e.g. automate this task away. Many, many times a "spreadsheet" is ironically used for a very inefficient manual task.
by quietbritishjim | 2025-07-15 15:35:46+00:00
That's very promising.

Boost ASIO seemed to be the first serious coroutine library for C++ and that seemed complex to use (I'm saying that as a long-time user of its traditional callback API) but that's perhaps not surprising given that it had to fit with its existing API. But then there was a library (I forget which) posted to HN that was supposed to be a clean fresh coroutine library implementation and that still seems more complex than ASIO and callbacks - it seemed like you needed to know practically every underlying C++ coroutine concept. But maybe there just needed to be time for libraries to mature a bit.
Ask HN: Anyone try AI Agents (dev/sales/etc.) in a 1-50 ppl team? How did it go?
by galllaxy | 2025-07-15 15:35:56+00:00
I’m working on something to make non-dumb AI Agents easier to create and deploy. Now, we're researching how teams integrate AI agents into daily workflows. It seems like AI buzz is everywhere, but it's still hard to adopt it and then make it work for real processes.

If your company (1-50 ppl or a series A/B startup) tried AI agents for any purpose, or considered it but dropped the idea, what's your experience?

What worked, what didn’t? Biggest friction (setup, prompting, cost, trust)? Did you keep it in production or roll back — why?

Trying to map where agents add value vs. where they stall now.
by mlyle | 2025-07-15 15:36:23+00:00
> Why should we care what refurbishment costs? We know the installation cost. We know the cycle life as per the chosen depth of discharge.

Because if we're making an argument purely based on the cost of a cycle on a battery, that's not reasonable. New batteries do not appear in the system for the cost of buying them. Old batteries do not disappear, perfectly recycled for free.

> Renewables don't stop working after 20 years.

I wasn't talking about renewables. Maybe we can extend renewable amortization times as we gain experience.

Amortization is an imperfect tool, but a crucial one to know what stuff really costs. Amortizing batteries over 20 years seems reasonable (many people advocate for 10).

> Nuclear powers problem is that it takes 20 years to get built.

Yes, and if we'd listened to me 25 years ago when I was making this same argument, we'd have more zero-carbon electricity on the grid today. ;) "It'll show up too late" is an argument that's false until it's true.

> Why do you want to make us poorer by wasting money?

OK, and now we have reached another of the kind of comments that I find problematic, so I've stopped reading here.
by dmoy | 2025-07-15 15:36:59+00:00
> European

It's not restricted to European languages. 贝果 is bagel, just sounded out phonetically, and 三明治 is sandwich.

Idk if there's anything super odd about it.

Of course, English is the worst offender of loan words. As someone else said somewhere, "[English doesn't] just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."

Gung ho, monsoon, filibuster, herbivore, vacation, etc etc etc. Thousands upon thousands of loanwords.