MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by majormajor | 2025-08-24 03:50:14+00:00
> It is extremely important to identify the most important task the LLM needs to perform and write out the algorithm for it. Try to role-play as the LLM and work through examples, identify all the decision points and write them explicitly. It helps if this is in the form of a flow-chart.

I get lost a bit at things like this, from the link. The lessons in the article match my experience with LLMs and tools around them (see also: RAG is a pain in the ass and vector embedding similarity is very far from a magic bullet), but the takeaway - write really good prompts instead of writing code - doesn't ring true.

If I need to write out all the decision points and steps of the change I'm going to make, why am I not just doing it myself?

Especially when I have an editor that can do a lot of automated changes faster/safer than grep-based text-first tooling? If I know the language the syntax isn't an issue; if I don't know the language it's harder to trust the output of the model. (And if I 90% know the language but have some questions, I use an LLM to plow through the lines I used to have to go to Google for - which is a speedup, but a single-digit-percentage one.)

My experience is that the tools fall down pretty quickly because I keep trying to make them to let me skip the details of every single task. That's how I work with real human coworkers. And then something goes sideways. When I try to pseudocode the full flow vs actually writing the code I lose the speed advantage, and often end up with a nasty 80%-there-but-I-don't-really-know-how-to-fix-the-other-20%-without-breaking-the-80% situation because I noticed a case I didn't explicitly talk about that it guessed wrong on. So then it's either slow and tedious or `git reset` and try again.

(99% of these issues go away when doing greenfield tooling or scripts for operations or prototyping, which is what the vast majority of compelling "wow" examples I've seen have been, but only applies to my day job sometimes.)
by toastercat | 2025-08-24 03:50:16+00:00
I'm torn. I'm not a huge fan of ads and I don't have a lot of respect for the modern ad networks. However this culture of expecting websites to host the data then freeloading off it by blocking the tracking and ads is also a bit ugly.

There is an unwritten social contract here. Websites are willing to host and organise a vast number of content because that'll attract an audience for ads. If there are too may freeloaders resisting the ads then services won't host the content, and on the path to that the freeloaders are really just leeching off a system in an entitled way (unless their goal is to destroy the services they use in which case good on them for consistency and for picking a worthy target).

If people aren't going to be polite and accept that contract then fine, enforcement was always by an honour system. But strategically if a service's social contract doesn't work for someone then they shouldn't use that service - they'd just be feeding the beast. They should go make their own service work or investigate the long list of alternative platforms.
by saagarjha | 2025-08-24 03:50:52+00:00
Maybe I'm just venting but you can probably eject Docker from this setup. If your dependencies are pretty well-defined then you don't really need a base image; just install Caddy and let uv handle the Python dependencies. Among us on Hacker News you'd think that there's a bunch of Docker hate but I really think that you don't need it if your dependencies are really simple and you don't need a specific version of things.
by nikkwong | 2025-08-24 03:52:10+00:00
I found it strange that John Carmack and Ilya Sutskever both left prestigious positions within their companies to pursue AGI as if they had some proprietary insight that the rest of industry hadn't caught on to. To make as bold of a career move that publicly would mean you'd have to have some ultra serious conviction that everyone else was wrong or naive and you were right. That move seemed pompous to me at the time; but I'm an industry outsider so what do I know.

And now, I still don't know; the months go by and as far as I'm aware they're still pursuing these goals but I wonder how much conviction they still have.
by MisterMower | 2025-08-24 03:52:31+00:00
> Your takes are really, really ignorant.

Thank you for sharing that. I hope you feel better now.

> Allowing cyclists to run red lights significantly reduces mortality. Waiting at an intersection is provably one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists.

The second sentence of the abstract of this study would imply you're ignorant, but I won't stoop to name calling:

"Red light running violation of bicyclists is the major contributory factor to the crash involvement of bicyclists worldwide."

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22143...

> Your "obvious" example is something that's unknowable to you as an individual. You have no knowledge of the effective throughput of the road ahead of you.

If I'm following a cyclist who is going 20mph in a 30mph zone, they're contributing to congestion. This is obvious to every human, even those who have never even seen modern infrastructure or the vehicles that operate on it. It happens when walking in hallways or on stairways. When someone is slow and people can't get around them, you get congestion.

> The disdain you have for cyclists seems bizarre and misplaced

I don't have any disdain for cyclists, only those dumb enough to try and coexist with motorists and arrogant enough to try and change traffic laws and infrastructure to fit their needs at the expense of everyone else.

I ride my bicycle at the park with my kids, and partly why I feel so passionately about this is because I don't want my kids riding in situations where they are very likely to get themselves injured or killed.

You're absolutely right, waiting at an intersection is one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists. This is because riding on roads with motorists is the most dangerous moment for cyclists.

There is no way to make it safe for cyclists to coexist with motorists. Mixing the two results in more people getting injured and dying. This should be reason enough to ban them from roads with motor vehicles, putting aside every other issue I've raised.

Allowing them to run red lights is a recipe for disaster. Use your brain: motorists reasonably and rightfully expect to have the right of way when the light is green. Literally every other moving object yields to them at intersections with a signal. Making an exception for cyclists will result in more people running red lights, and more corresponding injuries and deaths.

> The idea that it's a double standard is wrong — the standards are set to minimize harm and maximize effective throughput.

Go look up what the phrase double standard means. It is by definition a double standard. You can defend the double standard, but that doesn't change the fact that it is one.

> If we subsidized the lifestyle of cyclists as much as motorists, this would be a non-problem.

If by this you mean we should reduce the amount of subsidization to zero for both, I agree completely. Infrastructure should be paid for with use fees. If cyclists want to use it they should pay for it. If motorists want to use it, they should pay for it. Currently motorists contribute, while cyclists do not.
by favflam | 2025-08-24 03:53:09+00:00
Are there going to be Congressional hearings at least where Citizens can see a debate with witnesses testifying under oath? Will the Congressional research office publish statistics and data we can read together to debate?

Or will some backroom deal be made without any Congressional approval? I got a lot of questions and basically there is no way to get answers since Republicans gave the president: 1. unilateral authority to set tax rates (tariffs and illegal export levies) 1. impound Congressionally appropriated funds on an ad-hoc basis 1. unilaterally close down federal agencies created by Congress

I refuse to debate the merits of this industrial policy while the above three things are true. There is nothing to debate here because no one outside the administration's inner circle (industrialists bribing) who knows what is going on.

I feel like my 7th grade Civics class has been a complete waste. Or, it lets me see what is happening in the correct light.
by nucleardog | 2025-08-24 03:54:11+00:00
> Interruptions suck for everyone because there are always leaky abstractions and messy dependency trees

I think the "dependency trees" is usually the most obvious killer. You're putting tables away... who made sure everyone's even out of the building? Who cleared the stuff off the tables?

Even ignoring that... Even if the job is just purely "move tables", I'd propose a simple thought experiment: We're operating a venue for events. Imagine a church basement. We have 75 tables and a large closet we keep them all in between events.

You can choose one of two people to clean up after an event:

Person A has put these tables away 176 times over that past year.

Person B has put these tables away 3 times over the past year.

(If you're not looking and going "yeah those two things look exactly equal", than intuitively I think you have some sense that even unskilled positions benefit from experience and skill.)

If I'm the venue owner and I'm paying hourly for cleanup, I'd put my full faith in Person A. It's not a "skilled" position or a "knowledge" job, but someone that has done it that many times has likely found the easiest and quickest way to get it done with minimal wasted time. When exceptions come up they know what to do or who to talk to. They've also realized that carrying a rag in their pocket and wiping the table before they put it away costs them 5% extra time now, but saves us overall a bunch of time because the event set up shift no longer needs to run around with paint scrapers to remove dried cheese from half the tables after fondue night.

I think, in general, the idea of "unskilled" labour should be applied more to "the barrier to entry" more than "the people that work in that labour". Many "unskilled labours" _can_ be done by someone with no skill. They are done _well_ by someone with a lot of experience and effort that I think make a lot of "knowledge jobs" look pathetic in comparison.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-24 03:54:54+00:00
There were sometimes quite notable differences between 32-core ThreadRipper at quad channel ddr5 6400mhz vs 4800mhz. https://www.phoronix.com/review/threadripper-9000-ddr5-6400-...

Indeed yes it seems like the dual channel 6000MHz wasn't the limiting factor in many* tests. But also the lower power 395 has a couple massive wins, and I suspect it was almost entirely the memory bandwidth. For example the LLM test on page 2: it was that memory bandwidth making that colossal difference.

There were also tests like OpenVINO where memory bandwidth was the factor, but the x3d's cache was evidently big enough, with it easily scoring first place, the Strix Halo second, then the regular 9950 last place!

In a lot of tests, it seems like the extra 100w the 9950's were getting probably helped a lot!
by bfung | 2025-08-24 03:55:03+00:00
Yep, the Attention mechanism in the Transformer arch is pretty good.

Probably need another cycle of similar breakthrough in model engineering before this more complex neural network gets a step function better.

Moar data ain’t gonna help. The human brain is the proof: it doesnt need the internet’s worth of data to become good (nor all that much energy).
by afro88 | 2025-08-24 03:55:23+00:00
I'll give you that - you can't vibe code, not look at the output, and push to main of a production codebase. Same as writing code normally.

But you can vibe code and auto-edit your way to a good PR. But you're reviewing the code being output when the agent finishes each task. Maybe that's not pure vibe coding?
by robocat | 2025-08-24 03:55:37+00:00
Actually I read the other day that it is because indexes rebalance. If you buy the shares in an index and then hold, your returns are much lower than an index fund that is rebalanced. Unfortunately I can't find reference.

I also like this quote:

For US stocks, Wu of Sparkline estimates that accounting for intangible assets would cut perceived overvaluation by about 25 to 50 per cent, relative to headline valuation metrics. “While the market is by no means cheap, once firms are given credit for their intangible assets, valuations look far less frothy than the headlines imply,” he says.

- https://archive.is/t1On8
by mindcrime | 2025-08-24 03:55:38+00:00
We claim that biological humans have general intelligence because we are biased and arrogant, and experience hubris.

No, we say it because - in this context - we are the definition of general intelligence.

Approximately nobody talking about AGI takes the "G" to stand for "most general possible intelligence that could ever exist." All it means is "as general as an average human." So it doesn't matter if humans are "really general intelligence" or not, we are the benchmark being discussed here.
by throwaway290 | 2025-08-24 03:55:54+00:00
> No we think flat earthers are crazy because it's trivial to prove wrong, whereas religious belief is a matter of faith that can't really be proven one way or the other, regardless of how silly the belief is.

that you even say this may show how you learned to live with it because majority around you believes it and your human brain considers it suicide to go against the tribe. (Or maybe you believe it yourself)

it's trivial to prove there's no heaven or hell. Maybe as trivial as disprove flat earth.

Flat earth is very similar to religion. It's a belief. It perpetuates because people around you believe in flat earth and if you tell them how they are crazy then you will be outcast and lose friends and family. And hey spoiler alert this is the same reason you don't call religion crazy, because anywhere in the world 99% you have religious friends or family (except maybe north korea or china, then replace religion with dictator cult). Flat earthers are just unlucky because they are very small minority
by walleeee | 2025-08-24 03:56:10+00:00
Sure, you can simulate a brain. If and when the simulation starts to talk you can even claim you understand how to build human intelligence in a limited sense. You don't know if it's a complete model of the organism until you understand the organism. Maybe you made a p zombie. Maybe it's conscious but lacks one very particular faculty that human beings have by way of some subtle phenomena you don't know about.

There is no way to distinguish between a faithfully reimplemented human being and a partial hackjob that happens to line up with your blind spots without ontological omniscience. Failing that, you just get to choose what you think is important and hope it's everything relevant to behaviors you care about.
by Mister_Snuggles | 2025-08-24 03:56:40+00:00
I had a number of PalmPilots over the years, I loved those little devices! I also remember using a keyboard dock with one of them to take notes during meetings.

I'm pretty sure I had a PalmPilot Professional, a Palm V, and a Tungsten T (which slid open). The Palm V was easily my favourite, it was a very good looking device that worked very well. In comparison, the Tungsten T was somewhat clunky.
by 1zael | 2025-08-24 03:56:57+00:00
Yeah, so I continuously maintain a claude.md file with the feature roadmap for my product (which changes every week but acts as a source of truth). I feed that into a claude software architecture agent that I created, which reviews proposed changes for my current feature build against the longer-term roadmap to ensure I don't 1\ create tech debt with my current approach and 2\ identify opportunities to parallelize work that could help with multiple upcoming features at once.

I have also a code reviewer agent in CC that writes all my unit and integration tests, which feeds into my CI/CD pipeline. I use the "/security" command that Claude recently released to review my code for security vulnerabilities while also leveraging a red team agent that tests my codebase for vulnerabilities to patch.

I'm starting to integrate Claude into Linear so I can assign Linear tickets to Claude to start working on while I tackle core stuff. Hope that helps!
by galangalalgol | 2025-08-24 03:57:16+00:00
I think Metzinger nailed it, we aren't conscious at all. We confuse the map for the territory in thinking the model we build to predict our other models is us. We are a collection of models a few of which create the illusion of consciousness. Someone is going to connect a handful of already existing models in a way that gives an AI the same illusion sooner rather than later. That will be an interesting day.
by mbrochh | 2025-08-24 03:57:22+00:00
Isn't that totally normal?

When I have to touch Android or Windows, I feel absolutely awful because I am used to MacOS and iOS.

Likewise, Android and Windows users will feel awful when having to use MacOS and iOS.

It's simply a matter of habit and experience.

Having used Windows and Android for 10+ years before switching to the Apple ecosystem, I can say with confidence though that MacOS is not weird at all. It makes far more sense than the insanity that is Windows/Android.
by mindcrime | 2025-08-24 03:58:05+00:00
But my half baked instinct is that LLMs in and of themselves will never constitute true AGI.

I agree. But... LLM's are not the only game in town. They are just one approach to AI that is currently being pursued. The current dominant approach by investment dollars, attention, and hype, to be sure. But still far from the only thing around.
by DaveZale | 2025-08-24 03:58:58+00:00
Absolutely correct about online advice! I know how youtube or other online advice is often very specific to the creator's region. It's best to connect with competent locals with decades of experience. Gardeners are very generous with hard won local knowledge and tips.

Being in an arid place, I keep a three gallon plastic bin in the kitchen sink to capture all dishwater. Several times a day, I carry it outside to water some lucky plants. It would be even better to get the shower and washing machine drainage to be plumbed such that more "gray water" makes it outside to the trees. Most soaps and detergents are pretty safe to vegetation nowadays.
by dsign | 2025-08-24 03:59:54+00:00
I have colleagues that want to plan each task of the software team for the next 12 months. They assume that such a thing is possible, or they want to do it anyway because management tells them to. The first would be an example of human fallibility, and the second would be an example of choosing the path of (perceived) least immediate self-harm after accounting for internal politics.

I doubt very much we will ever build a machine that has perfect knowledge of the future or that can solve each and every “hard” reasoning problem, or that can complete each narrow task in a way we humans like. In other words, it’s not simply a matter of beating benchmarks.

In my mind at least, AGI’s definition is simple: anything that can replace any human employee. That construct is not merely a knowledge and reasoning machine, but also something that has a stake on its own work and that can be inserted in a shared responsibility graph. It has to be able to tell that senior dev “I know planning all the tasks one year in advance is busy-work you don’t want to do, but if you don’t, management will terminate me. So, you better do it, or I’ll hack your email and show everybody your porn subscriptions.”
by mike1o1 | 2025-08-24 04:00:27+00:00
If you haven’t yet, you should try out usage_rules mix package. I mostly use Ash, which has great support for usage rules and it’s a night and day difference in effectiveness. Tidewave is also really nice as an MCP as it lets the agent query hexdocs or your schema directly.

https://hexdocs.pm/usage_rules/readme.html
by inkyoto | 2025-08-24 04:00:55+00:00
Yes, that is the problem that is impossible to address with git due to its decentralised nature, which is a feature.

A typical scenario that disqualifies git in certain scenarios is as simple as a master repository and a few local copies of varying degree of vintage. Then the master has had its commit history changed, reflogs purged and GC'd, and the local copies will never have the knowledge of what the master could have had in the past.

git is perfectly acceptable in many scenarios, but if the immutability has to be enforced, in regulatory WORM requirements (SEC 17a-4, ISO 14641 or similar) with

1. Certified write-once, read-many retention, legal holds and tamper-evidence anchored to trusted time sources are mandatory; 2. Authoritative time and ordering – git commit timestamps are user-supplied and easily forged; 3. Granular access control and selective disclosure – git tends to replicate whole histories and the ledger can provide the proof of single record only; 4. Structured queries and point-in-time views at scale – git has no native time-travel queries, secondary indexes or ACID multi-record transactions across millions of records with consistent snapshots; 5. Independent third-party verification – if external parties (e.g. state auditors) must verify recorded events, verifiable receipts or Merkle proofs that stand alone are needed. git commits and optional signatures are not receipts and are hard to validate without access to the repository. 6. Consensus or anchoring needs – if integrity must be prove against a hostile or nefarious party, anchoring or consensus is required. git has no native consensus; ledger databases can anchor state hashes to public chains or quorum-backed authorities.

… git is not a really option.

git can be hardedned, though, by signing commits and tags, forbidding force-pushes server-side, mirroring to append-only storage and periodically anchoring repository state to a public timestamping service. It still will not meet strict ledger-grade assurances, but it can raise the bar for internal use. The sheer amount of work required to accomplish that makes a solid case for a dedicated ledger database.
by jasonwatkinspdx | 2025-08-24 04:02:18+00:00
With Carmack it's consciously a dilliante project.

He's been effectively retired for quite some time. It's clear at some point he no longer found game and graphics engine internals motivation, possibly because the industry took the path he was advocating against back in the day.

For a while he was focused on Armadillo aerospace, and they got some cool stuff accomplished. That was also something of a knowing pet project, and when they couldn't pivot to anything that looked like commercial viability he just put it in hibernation.

Carmack may be confident (ne arrogant) enough to think he does have something unique to offer with AGI, but I don't think he's under any illusions it's anything but another pet project.
by mbrochh | 2025-08-24 04:02:43+00:00
Great effort! For photos I can highly recommend Ente. Fully E2E encrypted. Works on all systems, syncs reliably, has great on-device AI stuff to build a vector database of your images, has very good UI/UX and is reasonably priced. Once I had all my 20k+ photos uploaded into Ente, I was finally able to delete all my photos from iCloud and cancel my iCloud subscription.
by OutOfHere | 2025-08-24 04:02:46+00:00
What happens is that some people routinely use your purported reason "it's LLM generated" as an excuse to try to discredit anything at all, and it's not right, irrespective of whether the material is LLM generated or not. Any material should be critiqued on the basis of its own merits and demerits, irrespective of who or what authored it. We need to shed the pro-human bias.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-24 04:02:49+00:00
The question is whether people will still want to put up with this. Why even bother going to the US anymore? I certainly won't even visit for work events any longer. I will refuse such requests. Privately I don't want to anyway.

I'm not going to go to a country that eyes me with suspicion. Especially because I'm very LGBT friendly too.