MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by starchild3001 | 2025-08-15 05:16:53+00:00
> This assessment fits with my anecdotal evidence. LLMs just cannot reason in any basic way.

LLM reasoning is brittle and not like human cognition, but it is far from zero. It has demonstrably improved to a point where it can solve complex, multi-step problems across domains. See the numerous successful benchmarks and out of sample evals (livebench.ai, imo 2025, trackingai.ai IQ, matharena.ai etc).

I gained multiple months of productivity from vibe coding personally in 2025. If being able to correctly code a complex piece of software from a vague, single paragraph description isn't reasoning, what else is? Btw, I don't code UIs. I code complex mathematical algorithms, some of which never found in textbooks.

> LLMs have a large knowledge base that can be spit out at a moment notice. But they have zero insight on its contents, even when the information has just been asked a few lines before.

LLMs have excellent recall of recent information within their context window. While they lack human-like consciousness or "insight," their ability to synthesize and re-contextualize information from their vast knowledge base is a powerful capability that goes beyond simple data retrieval.

If anything LLMs show polymath-level ability to synthesize information across domains. How do I know? I use them everyday and get great mileage. It's very obvious.

> Most of the "intelligence" that LLMs show is just the ability to ask in the correct way the correct questions mirrored back to the user. That is why there is so many advice on how to do "proper prompting".

Prompting is the user interface for steering the model's intelligence. However, the model's ability to generate complex, novel, and functional outputs that far exceed the complexity of the input prompt shows that its "intelligence" is more than just a reflection of the user's query.

To summarize, I'm appalled by your statements, as a heavy user of SoTA LLMs on a daily basis for practically anything. I suspect you don't use them enough, and lack a viceral feel or scope for their capabilities.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-15 05:20:09+00:00
Tangential, but you don't need anywhere near millions to have a 'world-touring adventure'. The nice thing about the ability to earn money online now a days is that the cost of living in the overwhelming majority of the world is a small fraction of what you pay in the US/EU.

And the ability to speak English natively is already in high demand throughout most the world, meaning if you ever get tired of online work and want some people time, you can have a job in like 5 minutes, particularly if you look decent and have a college degree.

Making that jump is obviously scary, but I think many people could find much greater contentedness (not a fan of seeking "happiness", as it's something that I think should be seen as liminal, not a desired constant state) if they only realized that the world is their oyster.
by conradev | 2025-08-15 05:20:26+00:00
It feels hard to include enough context in the system prompt. Facebook’s content policy is huge and very complex. You’d need lots of examples, which lends itself well to SFT. A few sentences is not enough, either for a human or a language model.

I feel the same sort of ick with the puritanical/safety thing, but also I feel that ick when kids are taken advantage of:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...

The models for kids might need to be different if the current ones are too interested in romantic love.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-15 05:20:30+00:00
Some states are biasing property taxes more toward land value to get some trade off. The problem with a pure land value tax is that you can be forced to sell your home ir redevelop (if you can afford it) if your land value appreciates over time (this should happen eventually, but will happen perusals too quickly with an LVT). Also, services (schools) rendered with property tax money scale as more people live there, and if you go for pure land value, you wind up with some whacky rates to support schools.
by Der_Einzige | 2025-08-15 05:20:52+00:00
Btw, creative writing is something where good sampler settings uniquely improve your experience a lot. That's why the coomer/ERP crowd is usually the first to implement a new sampler technique.

You should explore high temperature (far above 2) sampling with good truncations like min_p, top n sigma, TFS, mirostat, typicality sampling, etc. Basically anything that isn't top_p/top_k. This is the path to highly diverse outputs.
by ximm | 2025-08-15 05:21:24+00:00
> Hundreds of thousands of cars physically move along roads and have to break, accelerate and change lanes in traffic to safely get to their destination. Future work: Other modes of transport (pedestrians, light & heavy rail, airports, etc.). Multi-modal pathfinding (combining walking, public transport, taxis and driving to reach destinations).

So this is a US simulator.
by ttiurani | 2025-08-15 05:22:33+00:00
> I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zeppelin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding.

I didn't know about these recent attempts, they're impressive for sure. However they write[1] about zeppelin:

"The cost to run this is about US $200/mo, primarily due to the 16 terabytes of storage it currrently uses"

So when you here give that $200/mo cost as a price point for "organized groups", you are forecasting that the cost of storage will go down as fast as the BlueSky data size grows? At what rate right now is the data size growing? Because the last numbers I saw were something like 2TB, so it being already 16TB sounds like $200/mo is not going to be enough very soon.

[1] https://whtwnd.com/futur.blue/3ls7sbvpsqc2w
by lisbbb | 2025-08-15 05:22:44+00:00
Back around, I don't even know, 2013? A colleague and I were working on updating a system that scanned in letters with mail order forms. The workers would lay the items from the envelopes in order on a conveyor type scanner. They had to lay them down in order: order form, payment check, envelope. The system would scan each document and add two blank fake scanned pages after each envelope. The company that set it up billed by scanned page. We figured out that you didn't need the blank pages as a delimiter because the envelope could reliably serve as that. By the way, the OCR was so bad that they never got the order forms to scan automatically, but people had to examine the order form as a pdf doc and key in everything instead. By eliminating the fake, nonsensical blank scanned pages, we saved the company over $1M/year in costs. We never got a single accolade or pat on the back or anything for that. Can AI do that, though?
by davydm | 2025-08-15 05:22:46+00:00
This is my experience of all the codegen ais I've seen, and, honestly, it's more efficient for me to just figure the problem out on my own instead of sifting through the slop.

I don't think I'm an outlier either. I think most people using these tools are wasting their time having to debug hallucinated bullshit, instead of learning how to solve the problem themselves, by reading accurate, authoritative resources on the subject, ingesting and compiling that data, and experimenting to make it stick. It just feels like less work when the ai botches it and you have to fix it, vs the mental mountain you have to climb to truly get there, but the journey is overall more efficient when you do take the uncomfortable path.
by NobodyNada | 2025-08-15 05:23:50+00:00
> Rust has no magical ways of turning unsafe code safe

Fully agreed on that -- the unsafe keyword means it's unsafe.

> nor is it in any way special in being able to create statically-verifiable abstractions around an unsafe core.

This isn't really true. Rust's type system has:

- Affine types

- Lifetimes

- Borrowed and exclusive references

- Thread-safety

- Explicit delineation between safe and unsafe code -- with no UB in safe code, and a (cultural) design principle that unsafe code is not allowed to make unchecked assumptions about the behavior of safe code

Most mainstream languages do not have any one of these features, let alone all of them. Thus, Rust's ability to "create statically-verifiable abstractions around an unsafe core" is in practice far more powerful than in C, C++, or Zig. You certainly have the ability to create some such abstractions in other languages, but you cannot statically verify nearly as many properties. (And of course there are languages like SPARK that can verify even more statically than Rust.)

In my experience, as a systems programmer who heavily uses Rust to interact with FFI, hardware MMIO and DMA, interrupt handling, networking code, etc., Rust's ability to safely abstract unsafe primitives is easily the most practically useful aspect of the language. It's not a silver bullet that turns incorrect code into correct code, but it is incredibly good at verifying the correctness of a large application built from small low-level primitives. If you're interfacing with buggy C code, Rust certainly isn't going to help you much -- but it does makes a huge difference in preventing "you're holding it wrong" bugs when interacting with a C API.

An unsafe block declares an axiom: you're asserting to the compiler that you've verified (statically with the type system or dynamically with runtime assertions) all preconditions necessary for some primitive to be sound (free of UB). The compiler can then use that axiom to prove the soundness of all code that interacts with that primitive. When I write a driver to perform a DMA transfer, I only have to think through all the concurrency, alignment, lifetime, moveability, caching, and cancellation requirements once, and the compiler will check them for me every time I (or anyone else) use that driver in an application.
by refurb | 2025-08-15 05:25:20+00:00
Yup, this article isn't great.

As someone close to pharmaceutical manufacturing, the reason why the manufacturing is done in Ireland is for tax benefits for sales in Europe.

So why not have a US factory for US sales? Because it's much more expensive and complex to have two separate factories making the same drug. It's far easier to just scale the Irish factory to serve all global sales.

Even the same companies with Irish factories have US factories as well. It's not like any tax benefit moved that out of the US as well.
by readthenotes1 | 2025-08-15 05:25:23+00:00
Not at all. It only explains why a pharmaceutical company has an overseas office.

Your parents medication cost more than a car payment because there's no motivation in the US system to reduce prices for most drugs. Quite the opposite for insurers who provide ACA--they're actually incentivized to increase the cost of care so that the 20% they are allowed to spend on marketing, executive compensation, etc can grow as well.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-08-15 05:26:07+00:00
Following up, "Prime Video Channels" seem to be an Amazon offering in which you have your subscription to a separate video service (the "Channel") billed through Amazon, for "convenience". (And you can also watch their stuff on Amazon's website.) So Pokemon has licensed about half of their series to Amazon, and they reserve the remaining half for people who subscribe to the Pokemon Channel.
by eigenform | 2025-08-15 05:26:08+00:00
I'm all for giving programmers a way to flush state, and maybe this is just a matter of taste, but I wouldn't characterize this as "taking care of the problem once and for all" unless there's a [magic?] way to recover from the performance trade-off that you'd see in "normal" operating systems (ie. not seL4).

It doesn't change the fact that when you implement a RISC-V core, you're going to have to partition/tag/track resources for threads that you want to be separated. Or, if you're keeping around shared state, you're going to be doing things like "flush all caches and predictors on every context switch" (can't tell if thats more or less painful).

Anyway, that all still seems expensive and hard regardless of whether or not the ISA exposes it to you :(
by lisbbb | 2025-08-15 05:28:09+00:00
I had a professor in grad school, Computer Engineering, that begged me not to get an MBA--he had worked in industry, particularly defense, and had a very low opinion of MBAs. I tend to agree nowadays. I really think the cookie-cutter "safe" approach that MBA types take, along with them maximizing profits using data science tools, has made the USA a worse place overall.
by aitooltrek-com | 2025-08-15 05:28:12+00:00
Honestly, I’m surprised to learn there are developers who don’t use AI tools at all in 2025.

I’ve been a software engineer for about 10 years, and these days Claude Code is basically my coding buddy and documentation assistant(and yes, I’m one of those devs who doesn’t love writing docs or design docs encouraged by big corporate) — and I use ChatGPT daily for research, quick explanations, or brainstorming. At this point it feels weird to work without them.

Though they’re not as magic as I want. I have to do the followings with AI: - review everything AI spits out, because it can sound confident but be dead wrong - Clear instruction and rules make a huge difference (like claude.local.md) yes, writing them can feel like doing documentation ...

Even with those quirks, the net gain is huge for me, I just need to learn how to mentor them — AI saves time on documentation, debugs, gives me new ideas, and helps on side projects.

From my perspective, AI is unstoppable. We’re at the start of a new era in software development, and within 5 years it’s going to replace many different roles in our circle or other indurstry : )
by Closi | 2025-08-15 05:28:19+00:00
I guess different small models will have different points/goals, but you can still have a small model with lots of training effort or a large model with little training effort.

I think the point of most (frontier) small models is usually to provide the best answer possible given small inference resources, rather than to reduce training time.

This is more of a toy model, so fun and an interesting project but it doesn't necessarily tell us what the art of the possible is for small models.
by SCdF | 2025-08-15 05:28:42+00:00
So I watched about 15 minutes. I'm not already aware of this person, and their website isn't too illuminating, and there is an hour left. So I have to confess I closed the tab.

His ideas feel, frankly, like catnip for developers. Each dev writes there own modules, so you get to do whatever you want without having to deal with other people's coding styles or philosophies (or better ideas), and no meetings, and you also spend the "right" amount of time building everything.

But it doesn't sound like it would work on "LARGE" (his capitals) software projects, at least none that I've worked on. In those, creating modules small enough to be built once by one dev would just push all discussion (and dreaded meetings) into the API layer, with double the meetings because you should get it right first time, actually double them again because the strategy if someone leaves and their modules aren't right is to just reimplement them so you have to be even more sure they are thoughtfully designed.

It actually sounds like a pitch for agentic coding: if you define your APIs small enough and correctly enough, you don't need to worry about implementation quality, so just let the api do it. I think it's a good way of thinking about it, and thinking about all the ways in which you might not be comfortable with that.

Anyway, what do I know? Maybe he's a super expert on this stuff. I would gentle suggest, if he redid the talk, to open with a) what he means by LARGE software projects, and b) an example where this strategy he is about to explain has been implemented.
by taneq | 2025-08-15 05:31:00+00:00
No, this is a good thing, assuming the overall global inflation rate (whatever that is) hasn't outpaced the increase. It's a measure of our increasing expectations for an acceptable human existence. Yes, "the poor will always be with you" unless you brutally cap individual rewards for results, but if the cutoff for "poor" 100 years ago was "literally starving to death" and the cutoff for "poor" today is "not literally starving to death" then I think that's a bar we should raise.

Sure, someday soon the global definition of extreme poverty will allow for clean water, adequate nutrition, clothing, and safe housing. Isn't this why we're doing... gestures around this?
by cess11 | 2025-08-15 05:31:02+00:00
Currently I only pay for streaming services that allow me to make local copies, either as part of the service or by ripping the network stream. Preferably a one-time payment.

I'm not interested in feeding someone else's lust for behaviour profiling and 'analytics', mainly, but I also don't want to be shut down entirely because there's a main power or coverage issue.

Though I'm considering making an exception for https://www.cultpix.com/, because I'd like to support their rather niche business.
by 8bitsrule | 2025-08-15 05:31:02+00:00
There are SO many things he might have done, with no pre-determined rules. Like, algo-scramble.

Starting with the n-char plaintext, make it a loop. Now move the second letter two places to its right, the third three places, and so on ... until arriving at the original nth letter (painted red?) Or, starting with the digits of pi, move the second letter 3 to the right, the third 1, the fourth 4, und so weiter.

Doing a frequency on 97 weird letters wouldn't help much.
by hackandthink | 2025-08-15 05:31:28+00:00
Interestingly, constructive mathematics cannot prove that the Cauchy and Dedekind constructions are isomorphic:

"As often happens in an intuitionistic setting, classically equivalent notions fork. Dedekind reals give rise to several demonstrably different collections of reals when only intuitionistic logic is assumed"

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.00641
by kindkang2024 | 2025-08-15 05:31:37+00:00
Thanks for the kind reminder.

After reviewing the definition and interacting with an AI, I see that it does indeed exclude this type of use. However, I feel these definitions create unnecessary divisions and discrimination.

It seems unfair to projects with open source code under non-standard licenses, as they are prevented from using the term that aligns with how most people worldwide perceive it. The definition has also effectively made an enemy of money, which may be the root reason the author advocates for funding open source like public infrastructure.

Personally, I wish “Open Source” could simply reflect its literal meaning—the one that most people perceive: that the source is open for any purpose, provided the specified rules are met. In my view, as long as the rules set by the maintainers apply to everyone equally, they do not constitute discrimination. You just have to follow the rules of the game if you want to play.
by airbreather | 2025-08-15 05:33:38+00:00
I prefer the state table, with columns for states, this forces you to consider every possible transition of every state and this means the definition is unambiguous and exhaustive.

Additionally, you can easily define what output conditions are for every output in every state.

Where more than one possible to state transition exists, then you put multiple columns (one for each possible transition destination) and it is a matter of first solved wins, I usually go left to right, top to bottom.

I have developed a PyQt desktop application that allows building such tables, simulating them one scan at a time and generates code and documentation. Also, it allows for hierarchal state machines so you can build up very complex systems. I initially used it to develop Burner Management System compliant to IEC61511.
by fragmede | 2025-08-15 05:35:28+00:00
The responsibilities haven't changed, but the amount of time I have to spend reading documentation to regurgitate something that matches the docs in just the right way has plummeted. That wasn't the whole job, no, but that was a component of my job and to pretend otherwise would be dishonest of me. I don't know you so I don't know how much of your job was that aspect. I will be transparent and say that it did add up over a month though. Says more about me and my job than anything else though, I suppose.
by isoprophlex | 2025-08-15 05:35:59+00:00
Browsing through their store I see only the "overpriced balenciaga-tier bullshit" category though...

Edit: i kinda take that back, as two people pointed out that EP-133 sampler actually has an okay feature-to-price ratio.

But $250 leather wraps to "transport" your OP-1 in tho, or $250 singing wooden dolls without obvious interfaces except bluetooth midi... i guess I'm not the target market
by rvz | 2025-08-15 05:36:29+00:00
You might know this already but we are in the middle of an AI bubble.

The valuations are meaningless and that is the massive ponzi scheme that is hoping that another company acquires it for more than the valuation or even better - the founders sell shares onto the secondary market before the company collapses.

Hopin was once 'valued' at $4B - $9B. Clubhouse was once 'valued' at $4B with little to no revenue to back up their valuations or even accounting for the risk of direct competitors.

Given that Anthropic is the supplier AND competitor (with Claude Code) to both Cursor and Devin you will find that unless both of them find a way to enter a new market which doesn't already benefit Anthropic, they are going to find it extremely difficult to justify their valuations.
by lisbbb | 2025-08-15 05:36:45+00:00
My take is that nearly all military technology, particularly mass surveillance tech, will be applied to the civilian sector eventually. That's why everyone using China as the baseline for human rights worldwide is so terrifying.

As far as Palantir goes, they're just another in a long line of corporations that sell such services to the government. Ever heard of RAND Corp? They undertook all kinds of weird studies during the Vietnam era.

So please, spare me the concealed distaste for the current Administration, as if the previous one was some kind of wonder for America! The left is, on the whole, far more totalitarian than the right in the US. I sleep better knowing our borders are secure, racist or not. I also sleep better knowing that criminals are getting locked up once again--that's an important aspect of even having and maintaining civilization! It's such a simple concept, yet many of you ignore it or misunderstand it or something.

Anyways, if Palantir was anything special, the war in Afghanistan would have turned out much differently. They failed to predict that the Afghan government and military would completely collapse the instant Uncle Sam stopped paying the bills there. It was all a giant scam.
by brewdad | 2025-08-15 05:37:56+00:00
Better hope that Apple pays you really well for your sevices. In six months they won't need you anymore and your former employer will have been sure to burn all the bridges you thought were left.

I mean, get that money, but don't expect that you can make a career out of being poached repeatedly. If you're really that good, you probably could have done better working for yourself.
by simianparrot | 2025-08-15 05:38:04+00:00
I am doing both because while learning to write the symbol for a sound/meaning and identifying the symbol’s sound/meaning are separate skills, they enhance the fluidity of _thinking_ in Japanese significantly for me. It has a synergistic effect and to me seems to improve the brain’s understanding and efficiency in compressing the knowledge.

But my goal is not just to read and understand but to talk conversationally. While Japanese is very different from my other languages, I’m already multilingual (Norwegian, English, Dutch and German) and this approach has always worked best for me.