MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by benoau | 2025-07-06 21:45:01+00:00
For NodeJS I like to use a .env.local that can be copied to .env to provide all the configuration necessary for local development. I use a .nvmrc to pin the nodejs version managed by nvm, and all package.json scripts use packages installed to that project not globally, and "scripts" run `nvm exec npx ...`. All of this means when I go into the directory it automatically use the right node, the right packages, the right secrets and configuration, and the next project can use an entirely different combination of versions and packages.

Infrastructure I put into a docker compose file, everything gets a non-default port to coexist, .env.local is preconfigured with relevant addresses.

Databases I use Sequelize migration and seeder scripts to create and populate.
by dangus | 2025-07-06 21:45:10+00:00
Sounds like the product is stagnating and the only way to get the better thing is to pay more, which is kind of like saying you can get a faster server if you pay more. That isn’t moore’s law-style progress.

If AI is truly progressing at the amazing rate that everyone is claiming then we should be continually getting better capability at the same price.
by Sharlin | 2025-07-06 21:45:38+00:00
There is only one definition of "vector space" (up to isomorphism anyway), and that's what the author uses. You'll note that he doesn't talk about bases at all, the assumption of a basis is entirely in your mind. The entire point of the article is that the ℝ→ℝ function space is a vector space. A vector space is not required to have a basis, but assuming the axiom of choice, every vector space does have (at least) one, including that of ℝ→ℝ functions.
by esafak | 2025-07-06 21:47:44+00:00
Come on man, the BLBG stack is where it's at! What are you using, Github Copilot?!

Seriously, though: Charm creates CLI tools, not coding agents: https://charm.sh/ https://github.com/orgs/charmbracelet/repositories

Also, https://github.com/kujtimiihoxha 's recent commits are in https://github.com/opencode-ai/opencode .

But what does https://sst.dev/ (org behind https://github.com/sst/opencode) have to do with either charm or opencode?? Like Charm, it has nothing to do with coding agents.

Not for me.
by alganet | 2025-07-06 21:47:48+00:00
I don't consider Thanksgiving a starving myth because it has coalesced in a ritual that celebrates abundance.

There's something about a simple dish made with simple cheap ingredients that makes it require no Wikipedia to pass on memory. You know what it is all about immediately. People starved, came up with clever ways to survive, and made those into culture. Poisonous plants that require arduous processing (like cassava or lupin beans), then make into crops, also carry that memory.

> And that's before you get to the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era that gave us The Grapes of Wrath, migrant agricultural workers eating boiled weeds or flour mixed with lard, Hoover Stew, etc.

That's more likely. I had never heard of these.
by colechristensen | 2025-07-06 21:48:27+00:00
>I don't think being able to regurgitate information in an understandable form is even an adequate or useful measurement of intelligence.

Measuring intelligence is hard and requires a really good definition of intelligence, LLMs have in some ways made the definition easier because now we can ask the concrete question against computers which are very good at some things "Why are LLMs not intelligent?" Given their capabilities and deficiencies, answering the question about what current "AI" technology lacks will make us better able to define intelligence. This is assuming that LLMs are the state of the art Million Monkeys and that intelligence lies on a different path than further optimizing that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
by kragen | 2025-07-06 21:48:33+00:00
For the specific question, I gave some examples upthread: for example, there isn't something that "it takes" to marry a spouse who confers high status on you, except for luck later in life, which Yale's admissions office can't predict and thus can't use as an admission criterion. There are persistent attributes that improve your chances of marrying well and staying married—pre-existing high status, conventional attractiveness, health, intelligence, sanity, etc.—but none of them are either necessary or sufficient.

If we're talking about the abstract problem in classical propositional logic, there's no requirement in classical logic that a proposition Q be true for some external reason. It can just be true. Causality is outside the scope of propositional logic.

It's true that, in classical propositional logic, there is necessarily a proposition that is necessary for Q's truth, that is, a proposition that Q implies. There are infinitely many of them, in fact. Q implies Q, for example. It also implies Q or not Q, because in classical propositional logic, any proposition implies all tautologies. You can't list them all, and it wouldn't help.

If you have some finite list of atomic propositions to try to compose your set S from, there is no guarantee that listing all of the sufficient conditions from that list (other than Q itself) will give you an S whose disjunction is a necessary condition. A simple model of this is P = no, Q = yes, S = {P}.
by crackrook | 2025-07-06 21:48:33+00:00
> Most people have the common sense to avoid using the stuff without very good reason

I agree that most (not all) people have the common sense to avoid the stuff most of the time. I think things would get dangerous if these substances were to be available at all times to just about anyone; that would mean them being available to people who are at their lowest or least-rational, as well as the intersection of people with an innate lack of self-preservation and those who previously lacked ready-access to drugs. If someone just lost a loved one or had a few too many drinks I think they're a lot more likely to make reckless decisions - I think policy should protect our most vulnerable.

> And decriminalization of possession doesn't really do much. Cops don't focus on possession in the first place. It lets people be more open about possessing (which is a good thing for opiate users--much more likely to get Narcan if needed) but does nothing about the quality problems from the supply chain.

If I were to believe these claims I'd need to see some evidence, it doesn't align with my intuition. My sense is that drug users would be more likely to test their drugs if they didn't have to fear the law and I haven't seen any reason to believe otherwise - of course the government ought want to ensure that drug-testing solutions were more readily available before decriminalization policy went into effect.

I think decriminalizing the sale of all drugs, without a great deal of research supporting the conclusion that it wouldn't catastrophically increase the rate of drug abuse, would be highly reckless from a policy perspective. Decriminalizing possession seems like a good first step to precede more research, I think we agree about the harms and immoral motives behind the war on drugs - I don't yet have reason to believe that the war on drugs is a loose Jenga piece that we can freely remove.
by Waterluvian | 2025-07-06 21:48:50+00:00
I think the only way that it’s actually impossible is if we believe that there’s something magical and fundamentally immeasurable about humans that leads to our general intelligence. Otherwise we’re just machines, after all. A human brain is theoretically reproducible outside standard biological mechanisms, if you have a good enough nanolathe.

Maybe our first AGI is just a Petri dish brain with a half-decent python API. Maybe it’s more sand-based, though.
by kachapopopow | 2025-07-06 21:48:50+00:00
I don't feel like the AGI people are talking about isn't necessary, something like that would at minimum require as much compute as neurons and synapses that of a teen (minus the requirements to maintain a body).

I think what we have right now with some (very difficult to achieve, but possible in the forseeable future) tweaks we can already see 95% of what an "AGI" could do come true: put most of the population out of jobs, work together and improve itself (to a limited degree) and cause general chaos.
by jebarker | 2025-07-06 21:49:01+00:00
Whenever I hear this claim about younger mathematicians I wonder if it still holds true (or really did historically). For example, Andrew Wiles proved Fermat’s Last Theorem in his 40s and there are numerous examples of productive older mathematicians. But also I think the claim skews towards big flashy problems rather than the work of building mathematical frameworks, finding structural insights and finding connections between disparate areas (which requires broad experience rather than just young intensity).
by omoikane | 2025-07-06 21:49:25+00:00
This scheme skips over 80 through 9F because they claim it's never appropriate to send those control characters through interchangeable text, but it just seems like a very brave proposal to intentionally have codepoints that can't be encoded.

I think the offset scheme should only be used to fix overlength encodings, and not trying to patch over an adhoc hole at the same time. It seems safer to make it possible to encode all codepoints whether those codepoints should be used or not. Unicode already has holes in various ranges anyways.
by Redoubts | 2025-07-06 21:49:51+00:00
> However at most half of this increased energy demand is expected to come from renewables through 2030

You know that’s actually very good, right?

> Nuclear energy has long build outs of 10+ years.

Good news is degrowthers have left us with a long list of deactivated plants that can simply be restarted much sooner than that.
by tmsh | 2025-07-06 21:49:54+00:00
I think the timelines are more like half that. Why? The insane goldrush when people start using autonomous agents that make money.

Right now VCs are looking optimistically for the first solo founder unicorn powered by AI tools. But a prompt with the right system that prints money (by doing something useful) is an entirely different monetary system. Then everyone focuses on it and the hype 10x’s. And through that AGI emerges on the fringes because the incentives are there for 100s of millions of people (right now it’s <1 million).
by vmxdev | 2025-07-06 21:50:09+00:00
I opened shownew just to make sure, 10 out of 30 posts there are AI-related. I caught myself thinking that because of this AI-hype I read HN less and less. Sure, it is clear that AI is interesting to people (or at least someone wants more hype around AI), but it would be nice to read about real hacker news and projects somewhere.
by handfuloflight | 2025-07-06 21:50:48+00:00
https://clickup.com/careers?gh_jid=5505998004

I don't agree with the vibe coding methodology (or lack thereof) myself but here's a direct lowest common denominator counterexample of a natural language programming job position.

In practice, we are seeing and will continue to see developer adjacent positions submitting PRs. Not on a whim but after having understood the codebase or parts of it using the AI to translate syntax to English.
by beeflet | 2025-07-06 21:51:11+00:00
>Most people in my life I imagine I could kill with my bare hands. But I don’t, because like you said that isn’t how life works.

You don't, not because you are such a great guy, but because society's protection of physical systems is rigorous through thousands (millions?) of years of evolution. If you assault someone in the modern day, you will probably get thrown in jail or you will get shot.

Our information systems (such as the internet) are systemically weak. They are poorly designed and have not gone through the same evolution. I think it is good to exploit these weak information systems so that they can evolve.
by skissane | 2025-07-06 21:51:13+00:00
A PhD by publication sounds very similar to a higher doctorate (DSc, DLitt, etc). Substantive (as opposed to honoris causa) higher doctorates are awarded based on publication record only. To be eligible for a substantive higher doctorate, you generally are expected to have a PhD first - but it might not be an absolute requirement. You’d generally expect a bunch of papers, but in principle a single publication (if sufficiently groundbreaking) could be enough. While this is very impressive for a 17 year old (I wish I could have done that at 17, or at any other age for that matter), it probably isn’t significant enough for a higher doctorate all by itself. If she’d proved P=NP, different story. (Who knows, maybe she shall-well, probably not, but I’d be very happy to be proven wrong about that.)
by izzydata | 2025-07-06 21:51:41+00:00
I'm not an expert by any means, but everything I've seen of LLMs / machine learning looks like mathematical computation no different than what computers have always been doing at a fundamental level. If computers weren't AI before than I don't think they are now just because the maths they are doing has changed.

Maybe something like the game of life is more in the right direction. Where you set up a system with just the right set of rules with input and output and then just turn it on and let it go and the AI is an emergent property of the system over time.
by jiggawatts | 2025-07-06 21:51:42+00:00
This is a low-value article that reads like it is AI generated even if it’s not.

Almost every instance of downtime I’ve experienced in the cloud was due to a global outage of some sort that no amount of regional redundancy could fix.

Regional redundancy is typically twice as expensive at small scales and decidedly non-trivial to implement because… where do you put your data? At most one region can have low-latency access, all others have to deal with either eventual consistency OR very high latencies! What happens during a network partition? That’s… “fun” to deal with!

Most groups would benefit far more from simply having seamless DevOps deploys and fast rollback.

Neither is available by default in most cloud platforms, you have to build it from fiddly little pieces like off-brand LEGO.

Proprietary pieces with no local dev experience such as syntax validation and emulators.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-07-06 21:52:11+00:00
Trades on this scale move the big indexes, and everybody in the market is exposed to the passive investing ETF complex.

Even if you are purely a stock picking buy and hold value investor, you will feel the reverberations. The modern market is deeply interconnected, and what Jane Street is doing here is literally moving the entire index volatility complex to pick up a modest billion a year. Let's say your small cap value stock issues some converts. A hair of that trading strategy will be embedded in the pricing model for the converts, and it will slightly change the cost of the debt for the company. Once you get out to 3rd 4th 5th order effects, it becomes a very faint influence, but when you consider that some of these market making/HFT trading practices at the core of the market are so deeply interlinked to just about everything that prints a price on a screen, it should be apparent that there is value in keeping the core areas of the market like the index volatility complex as clean as possible. Now weather Jane street's trading is just Irving price differences and improving the efficient market, or market manipulation, well that's another question, but the general rule of thumb is if you're using gigantic size to force bids and asks around, that's at high risk of being considered market manipulation that is toxic to market function.
by vessenes | 2025-07-06 21:52:16+00:00
Good take from Dwarkesh. And I love hearing his updates on where he’s at. In brief - we need some sort of adaptive learning; he doesn’t see signs of it.

My guess is that frontier labs think that long context is going to solve this: if you had a quality 10mm token context that would be enough to freeze an agent at a great internal state and still do a lot.

Right now the long context models have highly variable quality across their windows.

But to reframe: will we have 10mm token useful context windows in 2 years? That seems very possible.
by cxr | 2025-07-06 21:53:05+00:00
> technically there's no reason for the central directory to be right before the EOCD so seeking backwards from the EOCD by the size of CD is just incorrect

Yes, and in fact APPNOTE.TXT expects implementations to deal with discontiguous CD/EOCD records; it actually mandates that some records appear between them. (It's where ZIP64-specific records go, for example.)

The whole thing seems to stem from a belief by the author of this post that Info-ZIP is the canonical implementation. (This is of course wrong. That would be PKZIP.)

If Info-ZIP is exhibiting the behavior described, then the Info-ZIP implementation is flat out wrong.

(This has happened before. See <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27925393> where the author of that post provides pushback to Mark Adler, receives pushback from Adler in response, and then just stops pushing and defers to Adler's reading. Adler is an expert in his domain, and he's made valuable contributions to free software, but his expertise is in compression, and he's not the authority on the spec or the format; Adler didn't create ZIP or write APPNOTE.TXT—Phil Katz did.)
iOS app using color filter manipulation
by camputer_ | 2025-07-06 21:53:33+00:00
i have used iphone ios color filters often for global readability control and wanted to make an app using some of the accessibility functions of apples api but cant seem to determine if its feasible

essentially i have been considering a matrix wall/live visual wall app that could have basic visual features on a top layer of the "system" for vj/live visuals in a performative environment similar to resolume. it could have pixel grid, color cycling, zoom controller, feedback echo, pixel sin, saw, smooth overlays etc. could someone help me to confirm that there would be enough access to the accessibility api functions for this to be even possible?

an example would be a dj playing a youtube music track and controlling visual features with their fingers/osd overlay controls
by alsetmusic | 2025-07-06 21:54:10+00:00
Not even the people predicting it think so. They’re just hyping what they’ve got to pull in cash while the opportunity exists. Soon, AI will be viewed the same as crypto mid-2022. Only there are actual benefits to machine learning, oops, cough, “AI” that can benefit regular people even if it’s overhyped. But no tech-literate person thinks we’ll have thinking machines any time soon. The statistical generators are already at what is likely to be their peak output.
by dinkumthinkum | 2025-07-06 21:54:11+00:00
I think you are very right to be skeptical. It’s refreshing to see another such take as it is so strange to see so many supposedly technical people just roll down the track of assuming this is happening when there are some fundamental problems with this idea. I understand why non-technical are ready to marry and worship it or whatever but for serious people I think we need to think more critically.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-07-06 21:54:27+00:00
It's amazing how many people on hn are experts on things they do not have the qualifications to be expert on.

> It's literally axiomatic.

You've made up some axiomatic definition of "by publication" that does not bear any resemblance to the actual definition. Consider that it's possible to

1. Submit a preprint to arxiv and have it count

2. Submit a preprint to a journal and defend before it accepted (or rejected)

3. Not submit anything anywhere and have the PhD itself count (almost all PhDs get an ORCID)
by ayaros | 2025-07-06 21:54:42+00:00
I haven't gone as far as verifying puzzles are solvable - right now I only verify the state of the puzzle is valid. Maybe in the future. For now I guess it will be like solitaire, where if you can't solve it you'll have to reshuffle it.

Incidentally, I'm planning on adding solitaire as the next game!
by BlueFalconHD | 2025-07-06 21:54:47+00:00
There is definitely some testing stuff in here (e.g. the “Granular Mango Serpent” one) but there are real rules. Also if you test phrases matched by the regexes with generation (via Shortcuts or Foundation Models Framework) the blocklists are definitely applied.

This specific file you’ve referenced is rhetorical v1 format which solely handles substitution. It substitutes the offensive term with “test complete”
by dathinab | 2025-07-06 21:54:57+00:00
I _hope_ AGI is not right around the corner, for social political reasons we are absolutely not ready for it and it might push the future of humanity into a dystopia abyss.

but also just taking what we have now with some major power usage reduction and minor improvements here and there already seems like something which can be very usable/useful in a lot of areas (and to some degree we aren't even really ready for that either, but I guess thats normal with major technological change)

it's just that for those companies creating foundational models it's quite unclear how they can recoup their already spend cost without either major break through or forcefully (or deceptively) pushing it into a lot more places then it fits into
by jschveibinz | 2025-07-06 21:55:34+00:00
The value proposition (tuition vs. vocational outlook) and demographic changes (reduced population of young adults) are both changing higher education--at least in its current form--more significantly than chatGPT. There is no way to cheat through a "blue book" midterm or final exam, so just adjust the syllabus accordingly. That should kill the chatGPT cheating.
by breuleux | 2025-07-06 21:56:39+00:00
I think the issue is going to turn out to be that intelligence doesn't scale very well. The computational power needed to model a system has got to be in some way exponential in how complex or chaotic the system is, meaning that the effectiveness of intelligence is intrinsically constrained to simple and orderly systems. It's fairly telling that the most effective way to design robust technology is to eliminate as many factors of variation as possible. That might be the only modality where intelligence actually works well, super or not.
by Nition | 2025-07-06 21:58:12+00:00
Yeah, my suspicion is that current-style LLMs, being inherently predictors of what a human would say, will eventually plateau at a relatively human level of ability to think and reason. Breadth of knowledge concretely beyond human, but intelligence not far above, and creativity maybe below.

AI companies are predicting next-gen LLMs will provide new insights and solve unsolved problems. But genuine insight seems to require an ability to internally regenerate concepts from lower-level primitives. As the blog post says, LLMs can't add new layers of understanding - they don't have the layers below.

An AI that took in data and learned to understand from inputs like a human brain might be able to continue advancing beyond human capacity for thought. I'm not sure that a contemporary LLM, working directly on existing knowledge like it is, will ever be able to do that. Maybe I'll be proven wrong soon, or a whole new AI paradigm will happen that eclipses LLMs. In a way I hope not, because the potential ASI future is pretty scary.
by Barrin92 | 2025-07-06 21:59:34+00:00
>2025 were so close

we're not even close right now. Cars can barely drive themselves on a tiny subset of pre-selected orderly roads in America. We sort of have driver assistance on virtual rails. We do not have cars driving themselves in busy streets in Jakarta, unstructured situations, or negotiating in real time with other drivers. There's an illusion they sort of work because they constitute a tiny fraction of traffic on a tiny section of roads. Make half of all cars in Rome autonomous for a day and you'd have the biggest collection of scrap metal in the world

And that's only driving.
by miles | 2025-07-06 21:59:35+00:00
After several hours, the HN title has been modified again to match the original much more closely, from "Hannah Cairo has solved the Mizohata-Takeuchi conjecture"[1] to "Hannah Cairo: 17-year-old teen refutes a math conjecture proposed 40 years ago".

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20250706185220/https://news.ycom...