MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by didibus | 2025-08-08 03:20:16+00:00
There's already so many comparable models, and even local models are starting to approach the performance of the bigger server models.

I also feel like, it's stopped being exponential already. I mean last few releases we've only seen marginal improvements. Even this release feels marginal, I'd say it feels more like a linear improvement.

That said, we could see a winner take all due to the high cost of copying. I do think we're already approaching something where it's mostly price and who released their models last. But the cost to train is huge, and at some point it won't make sense and maybe we'll be left with 2 big players.
by throwaway1004 | 2025-08-08 03:22:21+00:00
This is a narrative I've heard many times, with very little evidence to back it up. An alternative and more accurate view is that, as the world came online, people became exposed to the very low-effort scams, representative of criminal elements from around the world, which befuddled most due to their child-like naivety. None of those confused individuals would fall for it but they require an explanation. Someone came up with a theory that it's actually a stroke of 4D genius and it stuck.

edit: ok, I bothered to look this up: Microsoft had a guy do a study on nigerian scams, the guys who wrote Freakonomics did a sequel referencing that study and drew absurb unfounded conclusions, which have been repeated over and over. Business as usual for the fig-leaf salesmen.
by ungreased0675 | 2025-08-08 03:25:34+00:00
Many restaurants could shrink portions to reasonable sizes, and that would be a good thing.

But when I spend a lot of money on a meal, and I’m considering stopping at a drive-through on my way home… it ruins the experience. I never go back because it feels like being scammed.

I wonder why expensive restaurants tend to have small portions? High quality ingredients are expensive, but that can’t be the whole reason.
by ModernMech | 2025-08-08 03:25:47+00:00
> now id like to ask you for evidence that none of these aspects have been improved

You're arguing against a strawman. I'm not saying there haven't been incremental improvements for the benchmarks they're targeting. I've said that several times now. I'm sure you're seeing improvements in the tasks you're doing.

But for me to say that there is more a shell game going on, I will have to see tools that do not hallucinate. A (claimed, who knows if that's right, they can't even get the physics questions or the charts right) reduction of 65% is helpful but doesn't make these things useful tools in the way they're claiming they are.

> sorry i cant provide every single chat log ive ever had with these models to satisfy your vagueness-o-meter

I'm not asking for all of them, you didn't even share one!

Anyway, I just had this chat with the brand new state of the art Chat GPT 5: https://chatgpt.com/share/68956bf0-4d74-8001-88fe-67d5160436...

Like I said, despite all the advances touted in the breathless press releases you're touting, the brand new model is just a bad roll away from like the models from 3 years ago, and until that isn't the case, I'll continue to believe that the technology has hit a wall.

If it can't do this after how many years, then how is it supposed to be the smartest person I know in my pocket? How am I supposed to trust it, and build a foundation on it?
by sterlind | 2025-08-08 03:25:57+00:00
on the other hand, Musk et al are building AI-powered thirst traps, like Grok's "Ani", or the accursed Replika bots (whose user base went on suicide watch when the company abruptly decided to digitally neuter their "companions.")

erotic roleplay, imo, is much less harmful than using LLMs as surrogate partners. porn and sex workers have existed for millenia. they're an outlet for sexual tension. they don't alleviate feeling lonely or provide an alternative to human companionship.

I'm worried we'll produce a generation of hikkikomoris, who eschew human connection for sycophantic machines that always listen and never breaks their heart.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-08 03:27:44+00:00
True, we can't say for certain. But there is a lot of theoretical evidence too, as the leading theoretical models for neural scaling laws suggest finer properties of the architecture class play a very limited role in the exponent.

We know that transformers have the smallest constant in the neural scaling laws, so it seems irresponsible to scale another architecture class to extreme parameter sizes without a very good reason.
by trwy1990 | 2025-08-08 03:28:12+00:00
I know someone who founded one of these companies, and they seem to be doing well financially, just closed another funding round. Privately, he admits he’s in it purely for the money, having started with a crypto scheme before pivoting. Publicly, though, he spins a story about his bad experiences with interviews, inherent biases, and so on.

To me, these folks are nothing more than grifters, milking the cut-throat, penny-scraping era of capitalism.
by HocusLocus | 2025-08-08 03:28:48+00:00
Back in 2011 my gut reaction was to treat the embedding of Discus comments and 'roll yourself a quickie comment section' as the end of something good and the beginning of something bad. Completely invisible to your average user, both the potential for 'central lockdown'and cross site tracking that was 'invisible'. Outsourcing a common webmaster maintenance task in a way that affected other people in ways they didn't realize. At first. We Men Who Yell At Clouds remember the before times. Discus was the first commonly used script embed, even when people were copying and downloading,installing,serving their own libraries instead of linking to creepy sites.

Security's better now in general. But the same hands-on approach sometimes brought us widely exploited 0-days. Drupal was obnoxious. Yet people knew throbbing banner ads were cross-site things in a way you could turn off.
by refulgentis | 2025-08-08 03:29:22+00:00
This is really irresponsible, there's actual data on quality and this is just crazy to assert: "Any small online community for people who run local models is at least 50% perverts." --- I get what he's saying, there's def. communities where that's predominant, but it's simply not true in the vast majority of communities. Sort of like, in 1997, saying any small community on this here Internet thing is half perverts looking at porn

It's extremely frustrating to try and reply to this because that which is asserted without evidence can't really be debunked by evidence.

I find it especially shameful that he's dragging someone's name into this wildly histrionic review, in service of trying to find a sole person to attribute to, the sole attribute that led to whatever experience he had with it.

The model is insanely good, wildly exceeded my expectations for local models, and will generate at least 18 months of sustainable value. I maintain a llama.cpp wrapper and this is quantum leap in quality. I despair that this will become a major source of people's opinions on it. We desperately need big companies actually investing here, Gemma ain't it, and pretending it doesn't work because ??? and then using it to create a corporate chickenshit narrative isn't exactly gonna help.
by alexey-salmin | 2025-08-08 03:29:58+00:00
Supposedly the idea was, once you get closer to AGI it starts to explore these breakthrough paths for you providing a positive feedback loop. Hence the expected exponential explosion in power.

But yes, so far it feels like we are in the latter stages of the innovation S-curve for transformer-based architectures. The exponent may be out there but it probably requires jumping onto a new S-curve.
by NikolaNovak | 2025-08-08 03:31:31+00:00
My wife has recently joined board of directors for a local non-profit helping victims of childhood sexual abuse. They are not religious or pornography prescriptive - they are liberal atheist whose entire focus is essentially sessions to help people who are currently adults and carrying baggage and impact of dreadful acts committed to them decades ago.

Anyhoo, The current "state of the art", as-scientific-as-we-currently have it findings are that for pedophilia, consuming content unfortunately normalizes and drives increasing urges, instead of giving them same outlet. It's a very very tricky area because current thought is also that pedophilia is "not curable" - it is sexual orientation thay we as society find unacceptable (me included, fwiw), so... Repression, wildly and rightly disawowed for other sexual orientations, is the current direction for pedophilia - I.e. Current thinking is that "victim-free" pornography consumption nevertheless tremendously increases actual risk to actual kids in the vicinity of the consumer.

Until relatively recently I was the technologist on a highty horse about online freedoms and largely still very much am. But in this specific area I've also had some semi personal experiences with pedophiles and my level of empathy to them has dropped to near zero and my level of empathy toward their victims has gone even further through the roof. Sometimes in technologist circles we think of this as edge case not worth consideration, but reality, very very unfortunately, is much much darker.

Don't get me wrong : I'm pro pornography freedoms, think it'd be huge fun to have a sexy high quality chatbot, and I find vast majority of those railing against it to be hypocrites with dishonest ulterior motives - and don't get me started on all the tangential "for the children" crap that religious rights tries to enact, as opposed to actually help children and families ;-<

But to the question of "is harmless pornography Indulgence better for paedophile and society", current thinking is "very much no".
by hirvi74 | 2025-08-08 03:32:19+00:00
Many other things like war, animal cruelty, child abuse, wealth disparity, etc.. Hell, we are speed-running the destruction of the environment of the one and only planet we have. Humans are quite clever, though I fear we might be even more arrogant.

Regardless, my claim was not to argue that LLMs are more capable than people. My point was that I think there is a bit of a selection bias going on. Perhaps conjecture on my part, but I am inclined to believe that people are more keen to notice and make a big fuss over inaccuracies in LLMs, but are less likely to do so when humans are inaccurate.

Think about the everyday world we live in: how many human programmed bugs make it past reviews, tests, QA, and into production? How many doctors give the wrong diagnosis or make a mistake that harms or kills someone? How many lawyers give poor legal advice to clients?

Fallible humans expecting infallible results from their fallible creations is quite the expectation.
by mulmen | 2025-08-08 03:33:30+00:00
So the bad guys scope out a Hyundai or whatever and then listen to the scanner for a while until they're confident there are no cops in the area and then steal the car? Is it feasible to call in a distraction and listen for that?

I'm not saying there's no concern. I'm just not sure if this 30 min delay is as effective as it sounds at first glance. My gut reaction has been wrong enough times in my life that I have gotten in the habit of challenging my own assumptions.
by bruce511 | 2025-08-08 03:33:31+00:00
You're not really competing with those though. Unless you are in the streaming space. Or entertainment space.

For example my recycler might charge $15 per month. My alarm monitoring might charge $15. I'm not forgoing either of those to get Netflix.

For an indie hacker creating $15 of value is not hard because $15 is not much money. An app that made my commute simpler would be worth $15, even if I use it for 30 seconds a day. It's irrelevant how long i watch Netflix for.

Finding $15 of value isn't terribly hard. Connecting either people who would benefit is hard. Convincing those people to try the app is harder. Getting them to use it everyday (so they dont want to leave) is hardest.

People will pay to remove pain. People will pay for convenience. But people have huge inertia. Getting them to try something new is hard.
by tonyhart7 | 2025-08-08 03:34:38+00:00
I think its doable tbh, if you pour enough resources (smart people,energy,compute power etc) like the entire planet resources

of course we can have AGI (damned if we don't) because we put so much, it better works

but the problem we cant do that right because its so expensive, AGI is not matter of if but when

but even then it always about the cost
by Elendil214 | 2025-08-08 03:35:02+00:00
You would much rather work at a company that is growing and able to stay private than a company trying to IPO as early as possible. Unstable growth or minor dips are typical, especially with volatility in the world right now, and going public makes you extremely, extremely exposed to minor performance variance. The last thing you want is leadership destroying long-term value in pursuit of quarterly targets but this is exactly what going public incentivizes.

It's a rare company that can train their public investor base to behave rationally and allow them to invest in future growth even at the expense of immediate quarterly performance.
by ethagnawl | 2025-08-08 03:35:58+00:00
I'm currently driving a rental which has this feature and I can't stand it. There is no added value and this feature exists solely to appeal to people who think it's "cool". (They must exist, right?) I guess you get used to it with time but I find myself constantly having to throw the key back into the car so I can do things like exit momentarily and keep the air conditioning going. I also don't trust that the car won't then lock itself with the key and my child inside, so I also have to remember to roll down the window.
by FridgeSeal | 2025-08-08 03:39:34+00:00
The short form doesn’t match the word form though.

If you wanted a short form to match the word form, you go with something like:

“mmmm/dd/yyyy”

Where mmmm is either letters, or a 2-character prefix. The word form “August 7th…” is packing more info that the short form.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-08-08 03:39:57+00:00
It's possible that what you describe is true but I think that assuming it to be guaranteed is overconfident. The existence of loyal human-level AGI or even "just" superhuman non-general task specific intelligence violates a huge number of the base assumptions that we make when comparing hypothetical scenarios to the historical record. It's completely outside the realm of anything humanity has experienced.

The specifics of technology have historically been largely irrelevant due to the human factor. There were always humans wielding the technology, and the loyalty of those humans was subject to change. Without that it's not at all obvious to me that a dictator can be toppled absent blatant user error. It's not even immediately clear that user error would fall within the realm of being a reasonable possibility when the tools themselves possess human level or better intelligence.
by nomel | 2025-08-08 03:42:55+00:00
How is that scary, when we don’t have a good definition of sentience?

Do you think sentience is a binary concept or a spectrum? Is a gorilla more sentient than a dog? Are all humans sentient, or does it get somewhat fuzzy as you go down in IQ, eventually reaching brain death?

Is a multimodal model, hooked to a webcam and microphone, in a loop, more or less sentient than a gorilla?
by panarchy | 2025-08-08 03:43:14+00:00
What biased incentives does a government have that isn't even worse than a corporation or an individual who has large sway in corporation? How exactly would Dow Chemical funding research for understanding cancer effects on chemicals they produce not be extremely biased? Why would other rich people who are friends of the CEO of Dow fund that research? How exactly would a private donor fund something like the Apollo missions? Why would they bother when they could just reinvest their money to make more money? These billionaires could be donating billions right now and in large they aren't.
by merksoftworks | 2025-08-08 03:43:41+00:00
My experience has been more like this: - Write small library as contract work. - Client vibe codes with it. Code doesn't work. - End up doing good faith assurance work to fix the vibe coded bug in the client code, the issue was not in my small library.

People are programming out on a limb - and blame goes to the library maintainer if the user lacks the fundamental skills to do troubleshooting.
by cojo | 2025-08-08 03:43:49+00:00
Oli (Oliver? Not sure which you prefer, which I realize now I should have asked a long time ago in our first call) -

Just wanted to reiterate that I really appreciate what you have done with both OpenRegulatory and Formwork, as it was a big unlock for one of the companies I helped a few years ago as we navigated our way into the QMS / FDA / med. reg. world.

While reading this as a many-times-over-founder myself, I deeply felt multiple emotions which this would bring upon me if I were in your shoes after all the work I know you’ve put in.

I hope you are able to navigate this to a happy / successful outcome for yourself and any others involved for the relevant compan(y/ies)!

I am grateful for what you have contributed over the years on the software and documentation fronts with OpenRegulatory and Formwork both.
by da_chicken | 2025-08-08 03:43:54+00:00
It's not dumb. You're not allowed to close a business in the US until you check a lot of boxes, too. You have to show you don't have outstanding debts and so on. The banks won't let you do that because it's an easy way to escape debt. That's exactly why bankruptcy is an extended legal process.

If an employee is guaranteed X months salary upon notice of layoff in the contract, that's debt you have to resolve before you legally close. If you have a 5 year lease agreement for the property, that's also debt you have to resolve. It's exactly the same idea.
by burnt-resistor | 2025-08-08 03:44:16+00:00
Wherever there is pain impeding capital, there is opportunity. And there is always a set of current pain points. There can only be no pain in a fully-autonomous organization with autonomous investors and customers too.

It seems like the future is converging on there will 5 Matrix savant architects who make $1B/y who keep things operating while everyone else lives in a shanty or a pod.
by NikolaNovak | 2025-08-08 03:44:22+00:00
As an end user I have never asked for a chatbot. And if I'm calling support, I have a weird issue I probably need human being to resolve.

But! We here are not typical callers necessarily. How many IT calls for general population can be served efficiently (for both parties) with a quality chatbot?

And lest we think I'm being elitist - let's take an area I am not proficient in - such as HR, where I am "general population".

Our internal corporate chatbot has turned from "atrocious insult to man and God's" 7 years ago, to "far more efficiently than friendly but underpaid and inexperienced human being 3 countries away answering my incessant questions of what holidays do I have again, how many sick days do I have and how do I enter them, how do I process retirement, how do I enter my expenses, what's the difference between short and long term disability" etc etc. And it has a button for "start a complex hr case / engage a human being" for edge cases,so internally it works very well.

This is a narrow anecdata about notion of service support chatbot, don't infere (hah) any further claims about morality, economy or future of LLMs.
by pfannkuchen | 2025-08-08 03:44:58+00:00
I’m not aware of anything stopping it except for perhaps how the system is set up.

Like if I want to fund a pet study that I’m interested in, can I just call up Harvard and offer the lab $1M to work on it? I’ve never heard of anyone doing that, but I’m not really sure why it doesn’t exist (which is why I’m asking if anyone else knows).
by an0malous | 2025-08-08 03:45:33+00:00
@dang why is this post allowed to be flagged off its #1 spot? Is that not clearly a misuse of the flagging system, which is not supposed to be just for posts that people don’t like?

From the HN FAQ:

> What does [flagged] mean?

> Users flagged the post as breaking the guidelines or otherwise not belonging on HN.

> Moderators sometimes also add [flagged] (though not usually on submissions), and sometimes turn flags off when they are unfair.
by RSHEPP | 2025-08-08 03:48:44+00:00
I would love to figure out why I don't see this at my company. People still shipping at the same rate as before, customers bringing up more and more bugs, problems that require planning for scale are not being thought about (more bugs), zero tests still being written. All the code I am seeing generated is like one shot garbage, with no context around our system or the codebase as a whole.
by defrost | 2025-08-08 03:49:58+00:00
But they didn't.

An Australian nuclear scientist working for the UK Rutherford (New Zealander) labs | Tube Alloys | MAUD program told them how to.

It took a while to convince the US scientists who were mainly interested in making big hot piles for power.

The actual building of atomic weapons (Trinity, Fat Man and Little Boy) took place under a fully authoritarian ultra secret State directed militarily controlled program that cost a significant chunk of national GDP.

The example you chose appears to be both incorrect and the very opposite of whatever point you wanted to make.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_Alloys

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Oliphant
by tejohnso | 2025-08-08 03:50:25+00:00
I think the expectation is that it will be very close until one team reaches beyond the threshold. Then even if that team is only one month ahead, they will always be one month ahead in terms of time to catch up, but in terms of performance at a particular time their lead will continue to extend. So users will use the winner's tools, or use tools that are inferior by many orders of magnitude.

This assumes an infinite potential for improvement though. It's also possible that the winner maxes out after threshold day plus one week, and then everyone hits the same limit within a relatively short time.
by jodrellblank | 2025-08-08 03:51:00+00:00
Don’t malign the beautiful Zeppelins :(

Titanic - people have been boating for two thousand years, and it was run into an iceberg in a place where icebergs were known to be, killing >1500 people.

Hindenburg was an aircraft design of the 1920s, very early in flying history, was one of the most famous air disasters and biggest fireballs and still most people survived(!), killing 36. Decades later people were still suggesting sabotage was the cause. It’s not a fair comparison, an early aircraft against a late boat.

Its predecessor the Graf Zeppelin[1] was one of the best flying vehicles of its era by safety and miles traveled, look at its achievements compared to aeroplanes of that time period. Nothing at the time could do that and was any other aircraft that safe?

If airships had the eighty more years that aeroplanes have put into safety, my guess is that a gondola with hydrogen lift bags dozens of meters above it could be - would be - as safe as a jumbo jet with 60,000 gallons of jet fuel in the wings. Hindenburg killed 36 people 80 years ago, aeroplane crashes have killed 500+ people as recently as 2014.

Wasn’t Challenger known to be unsafe? (Feynman inquiry?). And the 737 MAX was Boeing skirting safety regulations to save money.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LZ_127_Graf_Zeppelin
by modeless | 2025-08-08 03:52:50+00:00
Lithium carbonate was tested and didn't help the mice at all because it was just absorbed by the plaques. The exciting thing is they found a form of lithium (already commonly available as a supplement) which is not absorbed by the plaques and showed a reversal of symptoms with P=0.00007. That's the kind of statistical significance I like to see in my medical papers.