MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by auggierose | 2025-08-12 21:57:44+00:00
First: true propositions (that are not provable) can definitely be expressed, if they couldn't, the incompleteness theorem would not be true ;-)

It would be interesting to know what the percentage of people is, who invoke the incompleteness theorem, and have no clue what it actually says.

Most people don't even know what a proof is, so that cannot be a hindrance on the path to AGI ...

Second: ANY world model that can be digitally represented would be subject to the same argument (if stated correctly), not only LLMs.
by drusepth | 2025-08-12 21:58:43+00:00
I feel this, honestly. I get so much more work done (currently: building & shipping games, maintaining websites, managing APIs, releasing several mobile apps, and developing native desktop applications) managing 5x claude instances that the majority of my time is sucked up by just prompting whichever agent is done on their next task(s), and there's a real feeling of lost productivity if any agent is left idle for too long.

The only time to browse HN left is when all the agents are comfortably spinning away.
by rootjknak | 2025-08-12 21:58:51+00:00
It mentions it in the article, which technically references Lighthizer's book passage:

" ‘A crucial mistake,’ according to Lighthizer, had been to let China into the WTO and treat it as just another country like America’s free-market allies. The result was that millions of well-paid jobs in US manufacturing disappeared, as more and more work was outsourced and offshored. "

A close examination of the passage appears to be correct: accordingly, China only met about 50% of the WTO entry requirement in the last 20 years. They were in essence, acting as a bad actor. Not only that, now they were seeking, prior to covid, to replace the current rule based trading system, with one where they got to have unlimited export to other countries, while the government suppressed wages and consumer spending internally, in order to strengthen the state. All other countries production be damned. The low wage low cost export would destroy all of the production capabilities in other countries.

And now with China openly claiming to Europe that Russia must not fail, they are blatant in their desire to destroy the western democracies, in support of authoritarian dictatorships in the world.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-08-12 21:59:38+00:00
Every company trades on the labor of someone else somewhere via expenses. It could be electricity, or cement, or LLM access, or employees.

In the end every company is a one person company, because usually on person is in charge of what the company is doing.

So I guess we're asking, will there be huge companies where money is spent on everything but other humans?
by trawy081225 | 2025-08-12 22:00:16+00:00
> I feel like the internet has led to an explosion of these such groups because it abstracts the "ideas" away from the "people". I suspect if most people were in a room or spent an extended amount of time around any of these self-professed, hyper-online rationalists, they would immediately disregard any theories they were able to cook up, no matter how clever or persuasively-argued they might be in their written down form.

Likely the opposite. The internet has led to people being able to see the man behind the curtain, and realize how flawed the individuals pushing these ideas are. Whereas many intellectuals from 50 years back were just as bad if not worse, but able to maintain a false aura of intelligence by cutting themselves off from the masses.
by shinycode | 2025-08-12 22:00:23+00:00
« autonomously » what happens when subtle updates that are not bugs but change the meaning of some features that might break the workflow on some other external parts of a client’s system ? It happens all the time and, because it’s really hard to have the whole meaning and business rules written and maintained up to date, an LLM might never be able to grasp some meaning. Maybe if instead of developing code and infrastructures, the whole industry shifts toward only writing impossibly precise spec sheets that make meaning and intent crystal clear then, maybe « autonomously » might be possible to pull off
by cthalupa | 2025-08-12 22:00:38+00:00
Gun smuggling is not the kind of crime that national guardsman standing around looking menacing stops. This is the sort of work detectives and specialized units do. Specialized surveillance, physical and digital, informants, etc. People taking plea deals in exchange for additional info.

How would a military force without the training or skillset required to do this help? Without the community knowledge? Without the contacts in it?

The issue isn't whether or not more (and better trained) police would help - they almost certainly would. But that is different from deploying the national guard.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1805161115 https://www.csis.org/analysis/sending-national-guard-dc-wron...

The other problem is that even if crime rates are reduced, that is one statistic in a vacuum - how much damage does it do to public perception of the police? We know it does - see above. What incidents might occur from the lack of training the NG has in policing civilians? What damages does it do to the fundamental freedoms within the country?
by brucehoult | 2025-08-12 22:00:39+00:00
For CLI-based programming work an SSD is unnecessary, an SD card is perfectly fine as long as it's large enough to hold all your stuff and you have enough RAM to cache the frequently-used bits. The difference will be measured in a couple of dozen seconds on an hour-long build.

SD cards have the very great advantage that you can have multiple ones with different OSes or versions and swap them in seconds.
by MrDOS | 2025-08-12 22:00:53+00:00
> YouTube works admirably well.

This is what really kills me. I spent a lot of time in 2020 on a 4G connection throttled to 384 Kbps. Video calls? Fine (once you gave it a few seconds to notice the poor throughput and readjust its target bitrate). Most of the web? Not fine. Crazy reversal from the dial-up days when pushing even an audio call over the connection was difficult, and real-time video was a pipe dream that sunk more than one overly-enthusiastic would-be media streaming companies.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-08-12 22:01:02+00:00
The "bad actor" strategy in question has been known for ages: it's called mercantilism. It's so old that it convinced Alexander Hamilton away from "free trade laa dee dah" so that he could enact the protectionism which eventually industrialized America.

More recently, China has been running the same playbook to great effect. It's really funny to watch the free trade crowd laud/fear the rise of China with one breath while calling the mercantilist playbook old and outdated with the next.
by fredfoobar | 2025-08-12 22:01:10+00:00
> Soon AI can do your job easily, but it can't do an electrician's job. [he said gleefully]

do you really want an Amercian to lose a job to AI?? Also, why do you think I can't become an electrician after AI apparently "does my job" (or a plumber, I'm a better plumber than an electrician)

anyway, it's fine, you don't seem to have any idea about software development or how AI is actually going to help me more.
by bluGill | 2025-08-12 22:01:25+00:00
I want them auctioned by how much you pay the person hired. Want top talent, a million ensures you win and they get compensated well. Want cheap labor - train someone locally as you won't win the auction.

there is the downsides of what if they treat the emplopee baddly, of the emblopee commits fraud - I'm not sure how to handle that. However I still think the idea is right despite that issue.
by hax0ron3 | 2025-08-12 22:01:35+00:00
Headline: "OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman says in 10 years’ time college graduates will be working ‘some completely new, exciting, super well-paid’ job in space".

Actual Altman quote: "In 2035, that graduating college student, if they still go to college at all, could very well be leaving on a mission to explore the solar system on a spaceship in some completely new, exciting, super well-paid, super interesting job".

Verdict: Nothingburger.
by calf | 2025-08-12 22:01:39+00:00
It was a Royal Institution public lecture, "Will AI outsmart human intelligence? - with 'Godfather of AI' Geoffrey Hinton", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkdziSLYzHw

Ultimately I somehwat disagreed with some of Hintons points in this talk, and after some thought I came up with specific reasons/doubts, and yet at the same time, his intuitive explanations helped shift my views somewhat as well.
by MangoCoffee | 2025-08-12 22:01:43+00:00
At the end of the day, all tools are made to make their users' lives easier.

I use GitHub Copilot. I recently did a vibe code hobby project for a command line tool that can display my computer's IP, hard drive, hard drive space, CPU, etc. GPT 4.1 did coding and Claude did the bug fixing.

The code it wrote worked, and I even asked it to create a PowerShell script to build the project for release
by Dardalus | 2025-08-12 22:03:23+00:00
This is not a serious prediction... this is just Altman's way of saying that things are going to be very futuristic in a decade. He is NOT predicting physics and engineering breakthroughs that specifically will enable a boom in space exploration. I think it's disingenuous of the media to take this quote and run with it... it's really kind of taken out of context.
by schmidtleonard | 2025-08-12 22:05:30+00:00
> It's not perfect

See, if anyone who said that took it seriously, or even partway seriously, I would find the prospect of free trade much less offensive. Yet the beneficiaries of "current account deficit equals capital account surplus" squeal like stuck pigs and cry "socialism! communism!" if one even hints at the possibility that they might pay a tax to help counterbalance the extent to which the asset pump / export dump negatively affects employment and drives inequality.
by anvuong | 2025-08-12 22:06:11+00:00
The action of sifting through through poop to find gold actually positively develops my critical thinking skill. I, too, went through a phase of just asking LLM for a specific concept instead of Googling it and weave through dozens of wiki pages or niche mailing list discussions. It did improve my productivity but I feel like it dulls my brain. So recently I have to tone that down and force myself to go back to the old way. Maybe too much of a good thing is bad.
by fredfoobar | 2025-08-12 22:06:54+00:00
To the poster (nunez?) who was lamenting about me apparently claiming blue collar jobs are easier (and then deleted it when I was writing this reply):

1. I didn't claim that.

2. Yes, I did say it's "high consequence", but technically, comparing skill to skill, it's MUCH easier. I've done a ton of electrical work (along with plumbing) on our old home, there are a great set of safety rules to follow (and gear to use) before "touching the wrong wire".
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-12 22:07:41+00:00
Some would say you lack empathy if you want to force mentally ill people on the street to get treatment. Other people will say you lack empathy if you discount how they feel about the “illegal” bit in “illegal immigration” —- that is, we all obey laws we don’t agree with or take the risk we’ll get in trouble and people don’t like seeing other people do otherwise any more than I like seeing people jump the turnstile on the subway when I am paying the fare.
by simonh | 2025-08-12 22:07:50+00:00
Now you need to move and re-house the people to when it needs doing, train them, invest the capital costs needed, build out the administrative overhead, and tax the productive profitable economy to pay for it all.

If there are things that need doing, you need to consider is it better for the government to do it, or to pay the private sector to do it. In principle the latter will still need to employ people.
by brandall10 | 2025-08-12 22:07:54+00:00
When I initially have it built from a feature file, it pulls in the most pertinent high level details from that and creates a supercharged task list that is updated w/ implementation details as the feature progresses.

As it links to the feature file as well, that is pulled into the context, but status.md is there to essentially act as a 'cursor' to where it is in the implementation and provide extended working memory - that Claude itself manages - specific to that feature. With that you can work on bite sized chunks of the feature each with a clean context. When the feature is complete it is trashed.

I've seen others try to achieve similar things by making CLAUDE.md or the feature file mutable but that IME is a bad time. CLAUDE.md should be lean with the details to work on the project, and the feature file can easily be corrupted in an unintended way allowing things to go wayward in scope.
by brucehoult | 2025-08-12 22:08:37+00:00
I don't think it's dumb. There are very strong hints that we can expect SpacemiT K3 RVA23 boards from possibly multiple vendors by perhaps the end of the year and certainly not long after that.

Leaving RVA23 support until 28.04 LTS would be FAR too long.

It would be nice to see both RVA20 and RVA23 supported in the same OS but the problem is that it's not actually practical to do runtime selection of alternative functions or libraries for all extensions in RVA23. It is possible and sensible for things such as V, perhaps, but extensions such as Zba and Zbb (not in RVA20, but supported by VisionFive 2) and Zicond, Zimop, Zcmop, Zcb have instructions which want to be sprinkled all through just about every function.

You'd have to either deny your main program code the use of all those extensions, or else completely duplicate every program binary.
by LinXitoW | 2025-08-12 22:08:47+00:00
Ironically, AI mirrors human developers in that it's far more effective when working in a well written, well documented code base. It will infer function functionality from function names. If those are shitty, short, or full of weird abbreviations, it'll have a hard time.

Maybe it's a skill issue, in the sense of having a decent code base.
by slt2021 | 2025-08-12 22:08:52+00:00
this use case of postgres + CDC + iceberg feel like the wrong architecture.

postgres is for relational data, ok

CDC is meant to capture changes and process the changes only (in isolation from all previous changes), not to recover the snapshot of the original table by reimplementing the logic inside postgres of merge-on-read

iceberg is columnar storage for large historical data for analytics, its not meant for relational data, and certainly not for realtime

it looks like they need to use time-series oriented db, like timescale, influxdb, etc
by ofalkaed | 2025-08-12 22:09:10+00:00
I think things like compilation speed are fairly low on their priority list because they are focusing on the user and not the developer, the people who are not going to bother compiling anything and want the OS to be something they never have to think about. Lack of focus on the user seems a big part of why I think linux has failed to gain a real foothold, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that the linux community pushed too hard long before it viable for that use case and now there are alot of people out there who tried linux a decade ago and remember spending a lot of time fiddling with their system and jumping through hoops instead of just using the computer for those things they use a computer for. Some distros are viable these days for the average person, but a lot of those average people have a bad taste left in their mouth from when they tried <my favorite distro is perfect for you!>.
by auggierose | 2025-08-12 22:09:43+00:00
Well, you don't get it. The LLM definitely can state propositions "that satisfy", let's just call them true propositions, and that this is not the same as having a proof for it is what the incompleteness theorem says.

Why would you require an LLM to have proof for the things it says? I mean, that would be nice, and I am actually working on that, but it is not anything we would require of humans and/or HN commenters, would we?
by bithive123 | 2025-08-12 22:09:50+00:00
Right. It's a dead thing that has no independent meaning. It doesn't even exist as a thing except conceputally. The referent is not even another dead thing, but a reality that appears nowhere in the map itself. It may have certain limited usefulness in the practical realm, but expecting it to lead to new insights ignores the fact that it's fundamentally an abstraction of the real, not in relationship to it.
by cthalupa | 2025-08-12 22:09:53+00:00
The Royal Marechaussee is 1/10th the size of the National Police Force and as you noted have quite specialized tasks. They are not the people handling day to day crime and interactions with civilians for mundane police actions. They also receive plenty of training related to the policing duties and are trained on how to police civilians. The national guard does not, and even MPs receive very different training and operate in a very different manner to the regular police.

This is very different than universally militarizing your police force across the nation or employing soldiers untrained in policing as police.

What do you believe the venn diagram of soldier and police skillsets looks like?
by doubleunplussed | 2025-08-12 22:10:16+00:00
On the other hand, I'm baffled to encounter recursive self-improvement being discussed as something not only weird to expect, but as damning evidence of sloppy thinking by those who speculate about it.

We have an existence proof for intelligence that can improve AI: humans.

If AI ever gets to human-level intelligence, it would be quite strange if it couldn't improve itself.

Are people really that sceptical that AI will get to human level intelligence?

It that an insane belief worthy of being a primary example of a community not thinking clearly?

Come on! There is a good chance AI will recursively self-improve! Those poo pooing this idea are the ones not thinking clearly.
by imiric | 2025-08-12 22:10:42+00:00
To be fair, the Surface Pro 11 ARM is really good. It's the best actual computer in a tablet form factor I've ever used. iPads and Android tablets are crippled by their OS, and x86 tablets are bulky, hot, underperform, and/or have poor battery life.

Performance of every day tasks on the Surface is excellent, it sips power, and Microsoft has done a great job with their x86 emulation layer (Prism). Most x86 apps (including games!) work without any involvement from the user. In the few cases I ran into issues, tweaking the emulation settings for the app fixed the issue, and I think there was only one app that refused to run, though I don't remember what it was right now. Performance even with emulation is pretty good.

This experience is light years ahead of Windows RT, and even Windows on ARM from a few years ago.

So I don't think Microsoft's interest in ARM is waning anytime soon. They're clearly heavily invested in it, and the hard work has been paying off.
by bee_rider | 2025-08-12 22:11:18+00:00
Basically yes it is luck, in the sense that evolution is just randomness with a filter of death applied, so whatever brains we happen to have are just luck.

The brains we did end up with are really bad at creating that sort of knowledge. Almost none of us can. But we’re good at communicating, coming up with simplified models of things, and seeing how ideas interact.

We’re not universe-understanders, we’re behavior modelers and concept explainers.
by AndrewKemendo | 2025-08-12 22:11:19+00:00
Isn’t this exactly handled with IFTTT?

I know I’ve used IFTTT for precisely that because it’s the simplest and often free (when no major hardware installation is needed) off the shelf way to do it

Or is the author asking that a service host user defined notifications?

If the latter that’s a different design pattern

The http protocols already allow for this, if that’s the case then the op just seems like he wants other people to instrument their systems for his desired interface type (user defined notifications)
by LinXitoW | 2025-08-12 22:11:34+00:00
In my experience in a Java code base, it didn't do any of this, and did a good job with exceptions.

And I have to disagree that these aren't errors that beginners or even intermediates make. Who hasn't swallowed an error because "that case totally, most definitely won't ever happen, and I need to get this done"?
by scarmig | 2025-08-12 22:11:40+00:00
> If we accept the incompleteness theorem

And, by various universality theorems, a sufficiently large AGI could approximate any sequence of human neuron firings to an arbitrary precision. So if the incompleteness theorem means that neural nets can never find truth, it also means that the human brain can never find truth.

Human neuron firing patterns, after all, only represent a thing; they are not the same as the thing. Your experience of seeing something isn't recreating the physical universe in your head.
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-12 22:11:58+00:00
>EST-type training still exists today

It's called the "Landmark"[0] now.

Several of my family members got sucked into that back in the early 80s and quite a few folks I knew socially as well.

I was quite skeptical, especially because of the cult-like fanaticism of its adherents. They would go on for as long as you'd let them (often needing to just walk away to get them to stop) try to get you to join.

The goal appears to be to obtain as much legal tender as can be pried from those who are willing to part with it. Hard sell, abusive and deceptive tactics are encouraged -- because it's so important for those who haven't "gotten it" to do so, justifying just about anything. But if you don't pay -- you get bupkis.

It's a scam, and an abusive one at that.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landmark_Worldwide
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-12 22:13:01+00:00
> The claim is always made that if Americans have to do the work, food prices will skyrocket, but it's just not true

My claim isn't that "if Americans have to do the work", my claim is that "Americans don't want to do the work", even at $30-40/hour most Americans still don't want to pick apples, and that is already an unreasonable price.

It might be that (barring automation) we simply don't grow/pick apples in the USA anymore, for the same reason that other industries/jobs have become obsolete because the economics simply don't make sense anymore. Farmers will grow something else that is more economical to deal with given the labor costs they have to deal with, they simply won't grow apples anymore if it no longer makes sense.
by jldugger | 2025-08-12 22:13:18+00:00
> As such the billion dollars is because that is my real (lifetime?) income from it

Okay, but you need to apply some kind of time discounting for future earnings. And then you're still left with the thorny question of whether the company is worth anything without some kind of perpetual employment contract. Hence the very low multiplier of 2-3x for newsletters.