MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by sigbottle | 2025-08-08 11:40:26+00:00
I've benchmarked a lot of these newest AI models on private problems that require only insight, no clever techniques, since the first reasoning preview came out (o1?) a year ago.

The common theme I've seen is that AI will just throw "clever tricks" and then call it a day.

For example, a common game theory operation that involves xor is Nim. Give it a game theory problem that involves xor, but doesn't relate to Nim at all, and it will throw a bunch of "clever" Nim tricks at the problem that are "well known" to be clever in the literature, but don't actually remotely apply, and it will make up a headcanon about how it's correct.

It seems like AI has maybe the actual reasoning of a 5th grader, but the knowledge of a PhD student. A toddler with a large hammer.

Also, keep in mind that it's not stated if GPT-5 has access to python, google, etc. while doing these benchmarks, which certainly makes it easier. A lot of these problems are gated by the fact that you only have ~12 minutes to solve it, while AI can go through so many solutions at once.

No matter what benchmarks it passes, even the IMO (as someone who's been in the maths community for a long time), I will maintain the position that, none of your benchmarks matter to me until it can actually replace my workflow and creative insights. Trust with your own eyes and experiences, not whatever hype marketing there is.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-08 11:41:32+00:00
So they confirmed what we've all been speculating: this is a cost saving update

Smaller base models + more RL. Technically better at the verticals that are making money, but worse on subjective preference.

They'll probably try to prompt engineer back in some of the "vibes", hence the personalities. But also maybe they decided people spending $20 a month to hammer 4o all day as a friend (no judgement, really) are ok to tick off for now... and judging by Reddit, they are very ticked off.
Pull-based AI waits for you to ask. Push-based AI acts before you even think to
by builderOP | 2025-08-08 11:42:45+00:00
Most AI tools today are pull-based - you type a prompt, they respond. But AI can (and should) be push-based -- delivering insights, alerts, or actions exactly when they matter, no prompt required.

Examples:

A trading bot that warns you before a token tanks.

A personal health AI that flags your sleep pattern before it wrecks your day.

A workflow agent that spots production issues before they hit users.

I’m exploring category-agnostic, push-based AI agent architectures - proactive, context-aware, always running in the background.

Anyone here building or thinking about this? Let’s compare notes.
by robocat | 2025-08-08 11:42:49+00:00
> Without society it's pretty hard to be well off in the first place.

What a pointless argument - you could just as easily chose cause and effect in the other direction: without businesses then society has nothing. Zero businesses, zero tax income.

My main point is that society needs to encourage business owners. If marginal tax is too high, then owners have no incentivise to earn themselves an extra dollar. When owners earn less then society gets less.

There's a balance to incentives.

I'm not working currently because my taxation rate is too high. I'm fine with that since I value my time highly. However financially my country could be getting more from me by lowering my taxes enough to encourage me to work. But voters don't care about what is sensible - they care about optics - and politicians care about voters more than they care about the economy.
by exasperaited | 2025-08-08 11:43:41+00:00
In the normal world, once you hitch yourself to a single implausible claim, you're bound by circumstance to try to keep it in line with reality, by making a series of supporting claims that inevitably build on weaker and weaker ground.

One of the problems honest people have understanding habitual liars is that they think liars are always incentivised to try to keep their lies plausible within a world of shared truth -- that they will always ultimately be caught out.

Hence the idea that the coverup is always worse than the crime. Everyone thinks the domino run of implausible claims ends with the liar being caught out when one lie does not move things on for the liar.

But in systems of power, in fact, there comes a point where it doesn't really matter whether something you're saying is true, it just matters that you say enough things that people get caught up trying to make them make sense and are distracted from what you are doing.

The dominos just keep falling forever.

This isn't new at all: one of the most influential men in Russian politics, Vladislav Surkov, absolutely learned to weaponise theatrical untruth in this way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladislav_Surkov

And there have long been fears that Surkov's techniques were infecting the West (through Hungary, Turkey etc.)

The problem is people simply don't want to believe, at any deep level, that these people lie for the sake of it, when in fact they clearly do. And they get caught up on the idea that since decent people think being caught lying is shameful, liars will always feel shame when caught out.

Once you understand that they do not, you can understand that any given lie may not be told to hide a specific misdeed; it may simply be told to add to the haze of untruth that allows the liar to go about their business.
by jonathanlydall | 2025-08-08 11:43:58+00:00
Speaking as software developer and company co-founder for a product for use by other developers, the company employing those salesmen is very possibly overall losing money on these deals.

In our early days we had on occasion managed to directly convince non-developer decision makers in an organization to use our product (even though it wasn't an intentional strategy) and this invariably failed unless we also managed to get full buy-in from the developers who will actually use it.

These days we have an explicit rule that we don't go ahead with any customer engagement until we can see that a project's lead developer is fully sold on our product, otherwise we waste loads of time (which is essentially money) on ultimately fruitless retention attempts instead of using the time more productively on ideal customer opportunities.

Now it does depend on the nature of the product though. For a product used by only a small subset of a company (like our product), it's probably a bad strategy to sell to the execs instead of the users. But for a product like an ERP (think SAP, or Oracle ERP), these are deals worth USD millions (sometimes 10s of, or more) and convincing the execs is a highly (or possibly the only) effective strategy.
by akaosns | 2025-08-08 11:45:01+00:00
I believe in global warming, but the quasi religious responses here are hard to read.

Conserving the environment and taking steps to reduce our impact on the planet is a good thing. To that end, I’m ok with believing in global warming. I believe some of the narrative is used for selfish ends (green energy companies are looking to make a profit, too) and abused, but on the whole it’s a noble cause.

The replies here that are more or less “wow, can you believe these people don’t trust the word of the priests?” are extremely tiring. “Science” in this division is little different from belief. None of us (experts included) have the data nor intellect to holistically evaluate a system as complex as our planet. Our current understanding is likely wrong in some way.

There are plenty of good reasons to preserve the planet. We don’t have to resort to heretic burning and tribal shaming. It’s short sighted and intellectually lazy.
by ancillary | 2025-08-08 11:45:09+00:00
> The difficult part of building a nuclear weapon is and has always been acquiring weapons grade fissile material.

IIRC the argument in the McPhee book is that you'd steal fissile material rather than make it yourself. The book sketches a few scenarios in which UF6 is stolen off a laxly guarded truck (and recounts an accident where some ended up in an airport storage room by error). If the goal is not a bomb but merely to harm a lot of people, it suggests stealing miniscule quantities of Plutonium powder and then dispersing it into the ventilation systems of your choice.

The strangest thing about the book is that it assumes a future proliferation of nuclear material as nuclear energy becomes a huge part of the civilian power grid, and extrapolates that the supply chain will be weak somewhere sometime, but that proliferation never really came to pass, and to my understanding there's less material circulating around American highways now than there was in 1972 when it was published.
by BlackFly | 2025-08-08 11:45:19+00:00
> All of the versions need to align to pass `Regex` between yourself and your dependencies.

In nominally typed languages, all types have to be nominally the same, yes, but it does not follow that semver compatible packages will not permit passing different versions of each around: https://github.com/dtolnay/semver-trick (the trick is to ensure that different versions have nominally the same type by forward dependency).

Anyways, even with this, cargo has a lock file because you want to run in CI what you ran when you developed the feature instead of getting non-deterministic executions in an automated build + verification. That's what a deterministic build is aiming for. Then next feature you develop you can ignore the lockfile, pull in the new dependencies and move on with life because you don't necessarily care for determinism there: you are willing to fix issues. Or you aren't and you use the lockfile.
by Apreche | 2025-08-08 11:45:20+00:00
When I was in college majoring in CS in the early ’00s I took several classes about ethics and technology. I also took plenty of liberal arts and literature classes throughout my entire education, as well as reading many sci-fi novels for pleasure. I learned the lesson of not building the torment nexus early and often. Thus far I have refused employment at any places doing so. I have an ethical and moral code that comes before anything an employer asks of me.

I think the problem is that clearly not everyone took the same path, and did not get the same moral education. I’m not religious at all, but religions do play a part in morally educating people. Not only are fewer people religious, but more of the religions that are popular are outright immoral in their teachings.

For profit companies do not act morally when not required to by law. Remember when Google hired some AI ethicists, and then fired them? Heck, they couldn’t even maintain their elementary school ethical code of “don’t be evil.” Companies who engineer bridges, medical devices, aircraft, etc. are regulated by law. They don’t follow ethical engineering practices of their own volition. They do it only because we force their hand.

We’re starting to see now what it looks like to regulate tech with some of the policies in the EU. While those regulations are flawed in several ways, they are also working properly. GDPR does have positive impact on privacy. Digital Markets Act is forcing Apple to allow side-loading.

We can defeat the torment nexus by simply outlawing it.
by kriro | 2025-08-08 11:45:27+00:00
I think chess commentators are pretty lost when analyzing games of higher rated players without engines.

They are good at framing what is going on and going over general plans and walking through some calculations and potential tactics. But I wouldn't say even really strong players like Leko, Polgar, Anand will have greater insights in a Magnus-Fabi game without the engine.
by Qwertious | 2025-08-08 11:45:44+00:00
1. Someone dips a rope in flammable oil before lighting it, and sees that it's quite flammable. 2. Some other time, someone tries to use a rope dipped in flammable oil as a fuse to trigger the lighting of the oil once it burns back to the oil 3. They notice that the fuse keeps burning but doesn't burn back - in other words, the wicking effect 4. They shorten the rope and reshape the pot, and that's an oil lamp.
by pclmulqdq | 2025-08-08 11:45:47+00:00
The expectations are that an "artist residency" is something you get paid to do, not the other way around. At a minimum, the tuition for pretty much every reputable artist residency is free even if you are asked to pay room and board.

Also, you keep saying that the housing is subsidized, but it doesn't really seem like it. If you split a studio two ways in Berkeley, that's easily under $1500 for a month. Sure, it's less than a hotel for a month and splitting a crappy studio is pretty uncomfortable, so your price might be good value. Maybe it's below your costs, but not necessarily below market for "shared bedroom in trendy suburb."

I think I personally have a problem with the way you labeled this more than anything else. This seems like a great program for someone who has made some money doing something else and wants to do a writing/blogging intensive course. It does not seem like something that would attract an upcoming professional writer.
by audunw | 2025-08-08 11:47:08+00:00
The problem is confusing intelligence and agency.

The doomer position seems to assume that super intelligence will somehow lead to an AI with a high degree of agency which has some kind of desire to exert power over us. That it will just become like a human in the way it thinks and acts, just way smarter.

But there’s nothing in the training or evolution of these AIs that pushes towards this kind of agency. In fact a lot of the training we do is towards just doing what humans tell them to do.

The kind of agency we are worried about was driven by evolution, in an environment where human agents were driven to compete each other for limited resources. Thus leading us to desire power over each other and to kill each other. There’s nothing in AI evolution pushing in this direction. What the AIs are competing for is to perform the actions we ask of them with minimal deviance.

Ideas like the paper clip maximiser is also deeply flawed in that it assumes certain problems are even decidable. I don’t think any intelligence could be smart enough to figure out whether it would be best to work with humans or try to exterminate them to solve a problem. Their evolution would heavily bias them towards the first. That’s the only form of action that will be in their training. But even if they were to consider the other option, there may not ever be enough data to come to a decision. Especially in an environment with thousands of other AIs of equal intelligence potentially guarding against bad actions.

We humans have a very handy mechanism for overcoming this kind of indecision: feelings. Doesn’t matter if we don’t have enough information to decide if we should exterminate the other group of people. They’re evil foreigners and so it must be done, or at least that’s what we say when our feelings become misguided.

What we should worry about with super intelligent AI is that they become too good at giving us what we want. The “Brave New World” scenario, not “1984”.
by netsharc | 2025-08-08 11:47:38+00:00
Geez, this is a crazy take... as much as I hate corrupt police, monitoring their communication means disabling their ability to communicate with each other in secret.

During the Munich 1972 olympics(1), terrorists took some Israeli athletes hostage, and then this happened:

> Meanwhile, the terrorists learned from radio and television broadcasts that the police were approaching and had planned a rescue operation. The authorities had failed to cut off the terrorists' electricity and remove the press from the Olympic Village.

If they did all that and the terrorists were able to listen to their radio, what's next? Is encryption allowed then? If they could enable it then, why not enable it all the time, "just in case"?

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_massacre
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-08-08 11:47:46+00:00
To be fair, it was more a "wow look what the computer did". The AI "art" was always bad. At first it was just bad because it was visually incongruous. Then they improved the finger counting kernel, and now it's bad because it's a shallow cultural average.

AI producing visual art has only flooded the internet with "slop", the commonly accepted term. It's something that meets the bare criteria, but falls short in producing anything actually enjoyable or worth anyone's time.
by kasey_junk | 2025-08-08 11:47:47+00:00
I think you maybe arguing with someone else. They made a straight forward claim that is incorrect:

> If we are only looking at the federal level, then there has been no substantial reduction.

There _was_ a significant reduction at the federal level. They acknowledged that and then changed the goalpost.

I then claimed

> Studies on this topic are fraught because the gun industry has long prevented the normal research funding issues on this topic and have fought tooth and nail any data collection efforts.

This is true. The Dickey Amendment prevented first the CDC and then the NIH from collecting gun violence statistics from 1996 until today. Though in 2018 they were able to add a rider to it to make it a little easier.

FOPA makes it impossible to collect registration information for federal use, including in data exchange for studies around gun ownership.

I'm not sure what more you want me to backup. Would you like the actual legal citations on those?
by 63stack | 2025-08-08 11:48:32+00:00
I don't believe it is a misrepresentation, you are bullying a project for letting users backup their own passkeys.

>which would allow RPs to block you, and something that I have previously rallied against but rethinking as of late because of these situations).

This is exactly why we need truly open standards, so people who believe they are acting for the greater good can't close their grubby hands over the ecosystem.
by mutkach | 2025-08-08 11:49:24+00:00
The focus now is not the model, but the Product - "here we improve the usuability by removing the choice between models", "here is a better voice for tts", "here is a nice interface for previewing html"

Only about 5 minutes of the whole presentation are dedicated to enterprise usage (COO in an interview sort of indirectly confirms that haven't figured it out yet). And they are cutting the costs already (opaque routing between models for non-API users is a clear sign of that). The term "AGI" is dropped, no more exponential scaling bullshit - just incremental changes over the time and only over select few domains. Actually it is a more welcoming sign and not concerning at all that this technology matures and crystallizes around this point. We will charitably forget and forgive all the insane claims made by Sam Altman in the previous years. He can also forget about cutting ties with Microsoft for that same reason.
by jmyeet | 2025-08-08 11:49:24+00:00
Governments have extraordinary powers to bring individuals and corporations to heel if necessary. Governments can:

- Charge exit taxes on people who "leave". As someone else pointed out, the US already does this with citizens who renounce citizenship (and it applies to long term permanent residents too);

- A lot of assets simply can't leave. Physical assets, land, etc;

- Assets and corporations can be nationalized;

- You can use tariffs and other legislative methods to punish those companies that "leave";

- You can also just deny access to a market for pretty much any reason you want. For example, Huawei is heavily restricted in use in American telecoms infrastructure for "national security" reasons; and

- You can generally impose cvarious levels of capital controls to limit the inflows and outflows of capital in pretty much any way you want. China does this heavily.

China is often criticized because the companies are an extension of the state. That's true. They are. But what we have instead is governments that are extensions of corporations. Can we really say that's working out better?

The US economy is rapidly becoming Russia. Russia has autocratic rule with oligarchs who pay fealty to Putin. In return they can do whatever they want. Do you really think we're different at this point?

Compare that to China. China isn't afraid to "disappear" their billionaires for awhile to bring them into line aka Jack Ma [1]. Exactly where he went and why and what happened is still unclear. China continues to crack down on tax evasion by so called "yin and yang" contracts (eg [2]). And China executed two for a scandal involing tainted baby formula [3].

What do we get? A world where governments can't punish companies for offshoring because that violates "free trade". Companies can take governments to a WTO court. And have.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-56448688

[2]: https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202403/1309137.shtml

[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/nov/24/china-executes...
by tomschwiha | 2025-08-08 11:50:18+00:00
I think the numbers in the article are mixed up. Earnings 200k. Wage 120k. So the profit is 80k for the calculation. 80×13,75=1.100k. 60% of it = 660k. Personal tax at 120k income = 45%. More likely less as for health insurance, etc. 660k×45% = 297k exit tax. Which can be paid in 7 yearly rates. So 42k per year. You still have a company that has earnings of 200k.
by SauciestGNU | 2025-08-08 11:50:39+00:00
Don't forget the resentment the religious hold toward science over things like evolution and the big bang that are inconsistent with their superstitions. There's been a concerted effort by evangelical Christianity to undermine the place of science in our society, probably because when religion loses its explanatory power over the wondrous things we see in the world people turn toward the alternatives, like evidence-based explanations.
by Razengan | 2025-08-08 11:50:42+00:00
I asked ChatGPT 5 about the main differences between 4 and 5, and it said:

"I couldn’t find any credible, up-to-date details on a model officially named “GPT-5” or formal comparisons to “GPT-4o.” It’s possible that GPT-5, if it exists, hasn't been announced publicly or covered in verifiable sources … GPT-5 as of August 8, 2025 has no formal release announcement"

Reassuring.
by paulnpace | 2025-08-08 11:50:57+00:00
Everywhere I use "A.I.", I am forced to use "A.I.", and the thing I am forced to use it for has been made worse, as a result of the "A.I."

For those comparing the "A.I." bubble to the .com bubble, they are missing the point that even a mostly normie user such as myself, logging on with my 14.4 kbps modem I instantly had something that was new and useful. With "A.I.", I haven't found anything, at least for myself, that is useful.
by oblio | 2025-08-08 11:51:04+00:00
> e.g. if Apple took the compute already in their iPhones and reengineered the chips to have 256 GB of RAM and sufficient bandwidth to not be constrained by it, models that size could run locally for a few minutes before hitting thermal limits (because it's a phone), but we're still only talking one-or-two-digit watts.

That hardware cost Apple tens of billions to develop and what you're talking about in term of "just the hardware needed" is so far beyond consumer hardware it's funny. Fairly sure most Windows laptops are still sold with 8GB RAM and basically 512MB of VRAM (probably less), practically the same thing for Android phones.

I was thinking of building a local LLM powered search engine but basically nobody outside of a handful of techies would be able to run it + their regular software.
by rs186 | 2025-08-08 11:51:25+00:00
> GPT-5 stood out for its analytical strength and review clarity.

The sentence is too obviously LLM generated, but whatever.

> Weaknesses:

>

> False positives: A few reviews include incorrect or harmful fixes.

> Inconsistent labeling: Occasionally misclassifies the severity of findings or touches forbidden lines.

> Redundancy: Some repetition or trivial suggestions that dilute review utility.

wtf are "forbidden lines"?