MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stego-tech | 2025-07-10 20:06:43+00:00
That’s because you’re conflating “understanding” with “comprehension”. You can understand every component in a chain and its function, how it works, where its fragilities lay or capabilities are absent, without reviewing the source code for everything you install. To comprehend, however, you must be intimately familiar with the underlying source code, how it compiles, how it speaks to the hardware, etc.

I believe this is the crux of what the author is getting at: LLMs are, by their very nature, a black box that cannot ever be understood. You will never understand how an LLM reached its output, because their innate design prohibits that possibility from ever manifesting. These are token prediction machines whose underlying logic would take mathematicians decades to reverse engineer even a single query, by design.

I believe that’s what the author was getting at. As we can never understand LLMs in how they reached their output, we cannot rely on them as trustworthy agents of compute or knowledge. Just like we would not trust a human who gives a correct answer much of the time but can never explain how they knew that answer or how they reached that conclusion, so should we not trust LLMs in that same capacity.
by singleshot_ | 2025-07-10 20:06:46+00:00
I know that I reply to a post written by someone who refuses to capitalize at my own risk, but

> yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity

You seem to have inadvertently discounted the experiences of people like my dad’s African-born eye doc, who came to this county for the opportunity of medical training which he now uses to make injections into my elderly dad’s eyes every few months.

(Either that or you’re an idiot).
by gylterud | 2025-07-10 20:07:05+00:00
Not a contradiction to anything you said, but O3 will sometimes whip up a python script to analyse the pictures I give it.

For instance, I asked it to compute the symmetry group of a pattern I found on a wallpaper in a Lebanese restaurant this weekend. It realised it was unsure of the symmetries and used a python script to rotate and mirror the pattern and compare to the original to check the symmetries it suspected. Pretty awesome!
by Animats | 2025-07-10 20:07:27+00:00
It's not just the US. The nightclub and bar industry is tanking in the UK and Europe, too. UK: [1][2] Berlin.[3] Paris.[4]

[1] https://ntia.co.uk/nightclub-industry-struggles-with-over-10...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk-pub-closures-beer-taxe...

[3] https://www.dw.com/en/is-berlin-in-a-club-death-spiral/a-703...

[4] https://www.latribunedelhotellerie.com/paris-society-cession...
by imiric | 2025-07-10 20:08:21+00:00
I agree that the intentional spreading of disinformation is harmful to civilized discourse. It's definitely not practical to give it the same attention as you would factual information. But I think we can do something about it.

The reason disinformation dominates our communication channels is because the people who engage in it are given the same voice and platform as reliable sources of information. I'm not a believer in censorship or deplatforming, but we should attack this from the other side. Make factual sources even more prominent, give them more visibility, and make the signal louder than the noise. The way to fight (m|d)isinformation is to drown it with factual information.

The first step towards this is to establish trustworthy sources of information, both in the form of traditional media and online. This can be done by making news outlets non-profit public services, and journalism a licensed profession. An international standards body with independent oversight can be established to hold official news outlets accountable. By removing the profit incentives and ensuring that reporting is done with transparency and integrity, the public will rely on official sources more than random social media influencers. The noise will continue to exist, but it won't matter if people know who can be trusted.

I don't see another way out of our current situation. Those who believe that the truth will float to the top among the noise, and that people are smart enough to tell them apart, are deluding themselves. This will only get worse now that we have AI out in the wild, and it's easier than ever to generate content that appears accurate. If nothing is done about this we will continue to regress into chaos, while the 1% in power only grow richer and more powerful. Perhaps we are past the point of no return already.
by bogwog | 2025-07-10 20:09:34+00:00
TIL about the existence of a passionate #pragma once hating subculture.

Since you seem to be more knowledgeble about this, I'm curious to know which C++ compilers lack support? I know that at least the 3 big ones do (GCC, Clang, and MSVC) and they have for a very long time.
by godelski | 2025-07-10 20:09:59+00:00
Okay, let's assume more diagnostics and guards were added.

Now re-answer the above questions with these assumptions.

- How do you fix a bug you can't reproduce? - How do you *close* a bug report when you can't reproduce?

Being generous here, we're assuming there's 17 years worth of diagnostics and safety guards added but through that time the bug still isn't reproducible. Let's try to answer the questions under these assumptions.
by jstummbillig | 2025-07-10 20:10:27+00:00
Convenient for whom and what...? There is nothing tangible to gain from you believing or not believing that someone else does (or does not) get a productivity boost from AI. This is not a religion and it's not crypto. The AI users' net worth is not tied to another ones use of or stance on AI (if anything, it's the opposite).

More generally, the phenomenon this is quite simply explained and nothing surprising: New things improve, quickly. That does not mean that something is good or valuable but it's how new tech gets introduced every single time, and readily explains changing sentiment.
by dekhn | 2025-07-10 20:10:36+00:00
I go back and forth on this all the time. Generally, I consider applications in browsers an example of the inner-platform effect because I believe native applications are typically better (faster, resource efficient, more consistent UI).

On the other hand, look at ChromeOS: a (previously) successful operating system based on the idea that nearly everything can be implemented in the browser. Microsoft even toyed with this a long time ago, when they made ActiveX controls and integrated Internet Explorer into the desktop. The browser provides a number of security benefits, and allows remote applications (Visual Studio code can be run in the browser, although it looks like the terminal doesn't work, which is a huge probelm).

Personally, I find VS Code's performance to be fine on extremely fast machines, and tolerable on slow machines, but I also think that a truly native VS Code (probably based on Qt) would be 100X better.
by jfengel | 2025-07-10 20:10:55+00:00
That was new, though I wish they'd listed any of the reasons to think that.

They hint that it's stylographic, the details of which would not make terribly interesting reading. Still, I wish they could have picked out something, rather than irrelevant stuff about what a massive undertaking it was.

If they've got nothing more than "We ran it through the algorithm and this is what it popped out", then I'm not really all that interested in their conclusion. Stylometry provides hints but if you can't back it up with some sort of historiographic argument then it doesn't really inform history much.
by politelemon | 2025-07-10 20:11:18+00:00
Very nice, good work. I think you should add the chat app links on the readme, so that visitors get a good idea of what the framework is capable of.

The performance is quite good, even on CPU.

However I'm now trying it on a pixel, and it's not using GPU if I enable it.

I do like this idea as I've been running models in termux until now.

Is the plan to make this app something similar to lmstudio for phones?
by Arainach | 2025-07-10 20:11:22+00:00
This isn't about national security threats. It's about any excuse for racism and xenophobia.

Posting social media comments protesting the actions of Israel is not a national security threat but is something we've seen this administration invoke penalties for.

The hatred, bigotry, and raw short sightedness are horrifying. To the degree that America is "great" it is great because it was a place where great people from around the world wanted to come to and wanted to live in. Turning away students - the most likely source of new scientific and artistic greatness in the future - is throwing away any leadership we had and actively harming the country.

It is in fact harming national security if these brilliant minds study, live, and work in other countries.
by dang | 2025-07-10 20:11:34+00:00
We've banned this account for posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-10 20:11:43+00:00
sure, but after having spent some time trying to get anything useful - programmatically - out of previous models and not getting anything once a new one is announced how much time should one spend.

Sure you may end up missing out on a good thing and then having to come late to the party, but coming early to the party too many times and the beer is watered down and the food has grubs is apt to make you cynical the next time a party announcement comes your way.
by striking | 2025-07-10 20:12:02+00:00
> My mental model for LLMs is that they work as a repository of vector programs. When prompted, they will fetch the program that your prompt maps to and "execute" it on the input at hand. LLMs are a way to store and operationalize millions of useful mini-programs via passive exposure to human-generated content.

from https://arcprize.org/blog/oai-o3-pub-breakthrough.

This doesn't directly answer your question, but does it help?
by deathlock | 2025-07-10 20:12:19+00:00
> I might be guessing, but in this order probably by Optimization 3 you would reach already a high throughput that you wouldn't bother with manual simd nor Multithreading.

I agree with you though from my experience Memory Mapping is only useful if you need to jump through the file or read it multiple times (as is the case after the author added simd and a two pass step, the first to identify whitespaces and the second to parse the operation and the operants). If you just need to read the file once it's better to avoid memory mapping as it adds a little overhead.

On the other hand parsing directly from the input bytes avoiding the UTF-8 validation needed to have &str type is easy enough to do but still improves performance quite a bit. Even the rust csv crate, which does much more, is around 30% faster with this optimization. https://docs.rs/csv/latest/csv/tutorial/index.html#amortizin...

This is to say, my list for "easy optimizations, big gains", would be 1) Do not allocate a Vector — 2) Do not use peekable — 3) Avoid utf8 validation. I'm still guessing, but I think memory mapping can be skipped, and might be worth it only if you plan on also implementing simd.
by furyofantares | 2025-07-10 20:12:20+00:00
I agree, that's fair. I think a lot of people are playing around with AI on side projects and making some bad extrapolations from their initial experiences.

It'll also apply to isolated-enough features, which is still a small amount of someone's work (not often something you'd work on for a full month straight), but more people will have experience with this.
by braska | 2025-07-10 20:12:24+00:00
I created A Game About Typing The Alphabet, where you type the alphabet as fast as possible in three different ways: Standard, reverse and scramble.

The game is playable for free in the browser, no download needed.

The project is the first game I ever publicly publish and it’s a tribute to when I learned programming, almost two decades ago. This is a re-create of the first software I ever created.
by rawgabbit | 2025-07-10 20:13:27+00:00
This is another variant of the argument who should business corporations serve. On one side, you have the argument the client or stockholder is the only stakeholder. (An extreme example is the Sackler's Purdue Pharma peddling Oxycontin which delighted stockholders for a while). On the other side, you have the argument there are many stakeholders including customers, employees, and the community they live in. (An extreme example of this was Google who promised to do good for society and treat their developers as prized not commodities; now Google appears to swinging to the other direction.)
by jmbwell | 2025-07-10 20:13:43+00:00
Looking at public profiles is one thing… requiring people to switch their profiles to “Public” so they can be looked at seems like another thing. How is that even enforceable? What if they find some profile that happens to have my name and is private, but isn’t mine? To say nothing of the legitimate reasons to have a private profile in the first place. And who defines “hostility?”

It’s hard not to see this as another “freedom of speech (but only for the kind of speech we like)” situation.
by kube-system | 2025-07-10 20:13:52+00:00
> Placing handcuffs on someone to prevent them from abusing others is not the same as someone who loves you.

I don't really think public representatives or public interest organizations love us either. They just have a different set of "handcuffs" that hold them accountable to their stakeholders, whether that be an obligation to donors, electors, etc.

> automobile manufacturers did not add seatbelts and airbags out of the goodness of their hearts

... just as our representatives don't fight for political change until broad public sentiment changes first.
by narush | 2025-07-10 20:14:08+00:00
We attempted to! We explore this more in the section Trading speed for ease (C.2.5) in the paper (https://metr.org/Early_2025_AI_Experienced_OS_Devs_Study.pdf).

TLDR: mixed evidence that developers make it less effortful, from quantitative and qualitative reports. Unclear effect.
by vlod | 2025-07-10 20:14:24+00:00
I've installed a lot of Wemo (old) devices in my house and they worked well. Tried to buy some new ones (simple socket switch) and they pretty much didn't work. Extremely frustrating. I spent a lot of time futzing with it and swore a lot about closed-systems.

Yesterday was getting tempted by Zigbee again and then this arrived at my email. This is the last straw and decided to go full steam ahead [0]. btw the dongle is 25% off on amazon atm (prime day).

[0] It's this one, not tried it yet (fingers crossed it will work): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09KXTCMSC
by felarof | 2025-07-10 20:14:39+00:00
+1, I bought perplexity pro annual subscription last year, and hardly use it now.

chatGPT+o3 search is much better.

My typical workflow is fire the question to Google AI mode and chatGPT+o3 at the same -- AI mode is fast but meh answer, chatGPT is slower but pretty good answer always.
by nalllar | 2025-07-10 20:14:43+00:00
If you interact with internet comments and discussions as an amorphous blob of people you'll see a constant trickle of the view that models now are useful, and before were useless.

If you pay attention to who says it, you'll find that people have different personal thresholds for finding llms useful, not that any given person like steveklabnik above keeps flip-flopping on their view.

This is a variant on the goomba fallacy: https://englishinprogress.net/gen-z-slang/goomba-fallacy-exp...
by throwaway323929 | 2025-07-10 20:15:03+00:00
As terrible as the current US policy system is, a really good sanity check for any policies like this is "would you be able do this in Japan":

If you drove a car drunk and it turned into a police chase, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

If you snuck across the Japanese border with intention to live there undocumented, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

If you posted social media saying you wanted to overthrow the Japanese government, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

Literally anything involving a gun and a crime, would Japan be okay with it or would they put you in jail and/or deport you?

If the answer is "no", you're probably feeding too heavily from ideology. The reality is that most countries, including far more stable and peaceful countries than the US will ever be, are far less tolerant of crossing borders illegally, drunk driving, gun offenses, etc. With their own citizens, to say nothing of foreigners on visas.
by mattmanser | 2025-07-10 20:15:14+00:00
Do you really see a massive jump?

For context, I've been using AI, a mix of OpenAi + Claude, mainly for bashing out quick React stuff. For over a year now. Anything else it's generally rubbish and slower than working without. Though I still use it to rubber duck, so I'm still seeing the level of quality for backend.

I'd say they're only marginally better today than they were even 2 years ago.

Every time a new model comes out you get a bunch of people raving how great the new one is and I honestly can't really tell the difference. The only real difference is reasoning models actually slowed everything down, but now I see its reasoning. It's only useful because I often spot it leaving out important stuff from the final answer.
by apparent | 2025-07-10 20:15:40+00:00
It seems pretty unclear what is happening with the app. The article says

> After this date, several Wemo products will no longer be controllable through the Wemo app.

That makes it sound like some Wemo products will still be controllable through the Wemo app. But when you read the rest of the article, there are zero details that indicate this, or even imply it. This bit seems to contradict that notion entirely

> The Wemo app will no longer be updated after January 31, 2026, and can manually be removed from your smart device.

It would be great if these devices could still be controlled/configured locally via the app, but I'm guessing that won't be the case. If they froze the functionality in time, I wouldn't be as unhappy. But if they're basically turning their products into bricks, I'm pretty not thrilled.
by shadowgovt | 2025-07-10 20:15:43+00:00
Probably not. This mostly just tips the balance towards constraining what foreign students can say, and they are a tiny, tiny sliver of the criticism of the US online.

It's mostly about creating a climate of fear. This administration wants people who are vulnerable to shut up so they don't have to work so hard to shut people up. I don't doubt that they will move on to testing the waters on how to shut up citizens too; the paths for non-citizens are just more obvious (since the US government carved out clear delineations that indicate non-citizens don't enjoy Constitutional protections to allow them to be tortured after September 11).
by schwartzworld | 2025-07-10 20:16:12+00:00
> I've raised three kids who have not had repeated meltdowns

Mazel tov. Unfortunately for parents who aren't you, the act of providing the "consistency" you're advocating for, often DOES require dealing with repeated meltdowns, or even just maddeningly repetitive questions of "why not". Children are born wild animals (not yours, of course), and raising them is the act of civilizing them.

If there's one thing that annoys me about other parents, its seeing or hearing about someone dealing with a difficulty that your kids didn't have, and then patting yourself on the back for being a better parent. Every time you explain something to your kids, they just got it and stopped bothering you about it? Trust me when I say, you are in the minority.

> meltdowns over hearing an ice cream truck

I know for a fact, it just wasn't an issue when I was a kid, or even in our neighborhood until this year, when the trucks started parking on our street after school. For many children, that is a time of the day when they are exhausted and unlikely to be reasoned with. Maybe it's a sign their parents are "inconsistent" or whatever, but I maintain that there is a difference between a truck stopping by once every hour or 4-5 times per hour, and also a difference between an ice cream truck at the park vs stopping on residential streets one by one every day. There's no other business that works this way, it's not like they have some fundamental right, and that's not even talking about the noise pollution aspect.
by mnhnthrow34 | 2025-07-10 20:16:24+00:00
"To facilitate this vetting, all applicants for F, M, and J nonimmigrant visas will be instructed to adjust the privacy settings on all of their social media profiles to “public.”"

It leaves me with a lot of questions.

What even constitutes a social media profile? For how long do you have to mark it public? What if marking all your social media profiles public exposes you to harm? Is it acceptable to delete all your posts (that were previously _private_) before making a profile public, or to delete whole profiles, or would that desire for privacy be seen as concealing some threat? How is it known if there are non-public profiles? Would govt believe somebody who has no social media presence at all?

"screening visa applicants for threats" is a very simplistic summary of the situation. I think visa applicants are just gonna go eleswhere.
by lmeyerov | 2025-07-10 20:16:42+00:00
As someone has been doing hardcore genai for 2+ years, my experience has been, and what we advise internally:

* 3 weeks to transition from ai pairing to AI Delegation to ai multitasking. So work gains are mostly week 3+. That's 120+ hours in, as someone pretty senior here.

* Speedup is the wrong metric. Think throughput, not latency. Some finite amount of work might take longer, but the volume of work should go up because AI can do more on a task and diff tasks/projects in parallel.

Both perspectives seem consistent with the paper description...
by Ntrails | 2025-07-10 20:17:29+00:00
Some of it is just that (probably different) people said the same damn things 6 months ago.

"No, the 2.8 release is the first good one. It massively improves workflows"

Then, 6 months later, the study comes out.

"Ah man, 2.8 was useless, 3.0 really crossed the threshold on value add"

At some point, you roll your eyes and assume it is just snake oil sales
by nec4b | 2025-07-10 20:17:47+00:00
At one point almost 40% of the world population lived in communist countries. They had more then enough people and resources to make it. If by pressure of capitalism you mean pressure of reality, then yes they mostly folded one by one and switched to economic systems that were closer to reality. North Korea is mostly crippled by their own idiotic ideology in which they are persisting. But going back to your original point, communist countries had much worse pollution and more environmental disasters then their capitalist counterparts.
by sparkie | 2025-07-10 20:17:57+00:00
LN is an onion routed network, and has some privacy - notably, sender privacy, as the sender does not need to be known to the recipient. The recipient however is not private, but there have been proposals for rendevouz routing which could also anonymize them.

LN payments are based on Sphinx[1], but they don't leverage the full capabilities of it. Sphinx only allows for single-use replies.

The proposals for bidirectional anonymity involve using HORNET[2], which builds on Sphinx (specifically, it uses Sphinx's single-reply message to establish a HORNET connection), and enables sender-receiver anonymity and bidirectional transfer beyond single-reply messages.

It has also been proposed to include the use of TARANET[3] to prevent deanymization via traffic analysis.

[1]:https://cypherpunks.ca/~iang/pubs/Sphinx_Oakland09.pdf

[2]:https://arxiv.org/pdf/1507.05724v1

[3]:https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1802.08415