MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mc32 | 2025-08-17 23:47:04+00:00
They would pay better than fast-food. So, I think so.

When we started shipping manufacturing jobs overseas people in power would say that the future was in service jobs. Ha! What a joke. Every population has a bell curve distribution --i.e. not everyone can work toward being a high value-add service jobber.

We manufactured high end handsets (Motorola) stateside till roughly 2014. Sun manufactured workstations in the East bay. If you go back further Cisco and 3Com used to manufacture in the South bay.

It was better than working at Mickey D's. So, yeah, we'd want these stateside. Better than having people out in the streets strung out on drugs not even aware their lives are going down a whirlpool.

Everyone since Obama paid lip service to bringing back manufacturing jobs --they were doing this to pretend they cared about the blue collar folks Clinton, G "H" W and G "W" sold out. I blame Clinton the most because he just let China ascend to the WTO despite knowing the Chinese had loopholes allowing them to ignore much of the conditions. "W" just didn't care.
by apwell23 | 2025-08-17 23:47:26+00:00
i had the same thought as you as i was reading GP comment but lately i've come across some videos on 'Interpretability' of llm output where they said llm store 'core ideas' in a abstract way and produce concrete output on the fly based on that core representation. This is very different from viewing llms are next token predictors which would imply what you said in your comment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGKNUvivvnc&t=2748s
by ndriscoll | 2025-08-17 23:47:49+00:00
At least in my undergrad multivariate real analysis class, I remember the professor arranging things to strongly suggest that the Hessian should be thought of as ∇⊗∇, and that this was the second term in a higher dimensional Taylor series, so that the third derivative term would be ∇⊗∇⊗∇ etc. Things like tensor products or even quotient spaces weren't assumed knowledge, so it wasn't explicitly covered, but I remember feeling the connection was obvious enough at the time. Then an introductory differential geometry class got into (n,m) tensors. So I'm quite sure mathematicians are fine dealing with tensors. My experience was undergrad engineering math tries to avoid even covectors though, so that will stay well clear of a coherent picture of multi-variable calculus. e.g. my engineering professors would talk of dirac δ as an infinite spike/spooky doesn't-really-exist thing that makes integrals work or whatever. My analysis professor just said δ(f) = f(0) is a linear functional.
by Etherlord87 | 2025-08-17 23:48:51+00:00
I can agree with this. If someone has some kind of disability, like aphantasia (I don't know if it really applies here, as you can look at a reference image) then perhaps the tool is useful. The thing is, none of the examples presented in this particular AI tool are stuff that require hard 3D-related skills e.g. knowing human anatomy.

I wish I could see you struggling to model a trash can and see if maybe you didn't have too high requirements for the quality of said trash can. After all it's just taking a cylinder, insetting the top face and extruding it down, and the top you can model in the exact same way. The rest is detail that the AI tool in question is terrible at. https://i.imgur.com/xeFrgpP.gif
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-08-17 23:48:53+00:00
By no means trying to be charitable here, though:

AI seems to be a attempt to go beyond Jane Jacobs', to go beyond systems of survival (commerce vs values) as vehicles of passion & meaning

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

It's made more headway than scientism because it at least tries to synthesize from both precursor systems, especially organized religion. Optimistically, I see it as a test case for a more wholesome ideology to come

From wiki:

>There are two main approaches to managing the separation of the two syndromes, neither of which is fully effective over time:

1. Caste systems – Establishing rigidly separated castes, with each caste being limited, by law and tradition, to use of one or the other of the two syndromes.

2. Knowledgeable flexibility – Having ways for people to shift back and forth between the two syndromes in an orderly way, so that the syndromes are used alternately but are not mixed in a harmful manner.

Scientists (adherents of scientism) have adopted both strats poorly, in particularly vacillating between curiosity and industrial applications. AI is more "effective" in comparison
by charcircuit | 2025-08-17 23:49:15+00:00
My point is that learning to use the tool is not the part people struggle with. The opened ended nature of creation is what is actually hard. Sure it may be primitives, but figuring out what primitives are needed, what dimensions they need, and where they should go is not easy. Everytime I attempt sculpting whatever I do turns into an abomination. That's what happens when I go ham. Not everyone with 1 day of practice are going to be perfectly able destruct what they have in their mind for what they want into parts to create or steps they need to do to get it look right.
by seadan83 | 2025-08-17 23:49:46+00:00
> an argument for the thesis that LLMs are not intelligent, and that this is wrong,

Why is that wrong? I mean, I support that thesis.

> since being a next-token-predictor is compatible with being intelligent.

No. My argument is by definition that is wrong. It's wisdom vs intelligence. Street-smart vs book smart. I think we all agree there is a distinction between wisdom and intelligence. I would define wisdom as being able to recall pertinent facts and experiences. Intelligence is measured in novel situations, it's the ability to act as if one had wisdom.

A next token predictor by definition is recalling. The intelligence of a LLM is good enough to match questions to potentially pertinent definitions, but it ends there.

It feels like there is intelligence for sure. In part it is hard to comprehend what it would be like to know the entirety of every written word with perfect recall - hence essentially no situation is novel. LLMs fail on anything outside of their training data. The "outside of the training" data is the realm of intelligence.

I don't know why it's so important to argue that LLMs have this intelligence. It's just not there by definition of "next token predictor", which is at core a LLM.

For example, a human being probably could pass through a lot of life by responding with memorized answers to every question that has ever been asked in written history. They don't know a single word of what they are saying, their mind perfectly blank - but they're giving very passable and sophisticated answers.

> When mikert89 says "thinking machines have been invented",

Yeah, absolutely they have not. Unless we want to reducto absurd-um the definition of thinking.

> they must become "more than a statistical token predictor"

Yup. As I illustrated by breaking down the components of "smart" into the broad components of 'wisdom' and 'intelligence', through that lens we can see that next token predictor is great for the wisdom attribute, but it does nothing for intelligence.

>dgfitz argument is wrong and BoiledCabbage is right to point that out.

Why exactly? You're stating apriori that the argument is wrong without saying way.
by varispeed | 2025-08-17 23:50:04+00:00
It's painfully obvious if you want to make something in very much any western country. There are very few firms you can subcontract CNC work or PCB assembly. Then the costs are so high, your product will be dead on arrival price wise, but also there is lack of skill and capabilities.

Unless you are dealing with companies that supply to the military, you'll get poor workmanship and months long lead times. Might as well just give up or...

Just subcontract work to China. Sure, there is many crap suppliers, but once you find good ones, it's another league in very much every aspect. Parts take days to deliver, not months and are top quality.

I think many people don't realise that we are very much in the middle of shit creek and without a paddle.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-08-17 23:52:12+00:00
Idk so what. We can go from there once we at least are talking about the same thing correctly, so I tried to correct the misconception by OP.

One random idea... Instead of giving well off people $7500 to buy huge luxury electric cars that are safe, we give poor people trading in old unsafe cars (that they've owned for over 12 months) $7500 to buy a car with side airbags so they don't die as easily in accidents.
by ntnsndr | 2025-08-17 23:52:25+00:00
+1. I have tried a bunch of local models (albeit the smaller end, b/c hardware limits), and I can't get handwriting recognition yet. But online Gemini and Claude do great. Hoping the local models catch up soon, as this is a wonderful LLM use case.

UPDATE: I just tried this with the default model on handwriting, and IT WORKED. Took about 5-10 minutes on my laptop, but it worked. I am so thrilled not to have to send my personal jottings into the cloud!
by marxism | 2025-08-17 23:55:47+00:00
I've been contributing to an open source mobile app [1] that takes two swings at offering something that Roo does not have.

1. Real-time sync of CLI coding agent state to your phone. Granted this doesn't give you any new coding capabilities, you won't be making any different changes from your phone. And I would still chose to make a code change on my computer. But the fact that it's only slightly worse (you just wish you had a bigger screen) is still an innovation. Making Claude Code usable from anywhere changes when you can work, even if it doesn't change what you can do. I wrote a post trying to explain why this matters in practice. https://happy.engineering/docs/features/real-time-sync/

2. Another contributor is experimenting with a separate voice agent in between you and Claude Code. I've found it usable and maybe even nice? The voice agent acts like a buffer to collect and compact half backed think out loud ideas into slightly better commands for Claude Code. Another contributor wrote a blog post about why voice coding on your phone while out of the house is useful. They explained it better than I can. https://happy.engineering/docs/features/voice-coding-with-cl...

[1] https://github.com/slopus/happy
by jibal | 2025-08-17 23:57:02+00:00
> The real question here

No True Scotsman fallacy. Just because that interests you doesn't mean that it's "the real question".

> would we even have the intellectual honesty

Who is "we"? Some would and some wouldn't. And you're saying this in an environment where many people are attributing consciousness to LLMs. Blake Lemoine insisted that LaMDA was sentient and deserved legal protection, from his dialogs with it in which it talked about its friends and family -- neither of which it had. So don't talk to me about intellectual honesty.

> Can we therefore say that plants feel emotions

Only if you redefine emotions so broadly--contrary to normal usage--as to be able to make that claim. In the case of Strong AI there is no need to redefine terms.

> Now substitute plants with LLMs and try the thought experiment again.

Ok:

"We know that [LLMs] are able to transmit chemical and electrical signals in response to various stimuli and environmental conditions, triggering effects in themselves and other [LLMs]."

Nope.

"In the end, where one draws the line between `human | animal | plant | computer` minds and emotions is primarily a subjective philosophical opinion rather than rooted in any sort of objective evidence."

That's clearly your choice. I make a more scientific one.

"Because in the most abstract sense, what is an emotion if not a set of electrochemical stimuli linking a certain input to a certain output?"

It's something much more specific than that, obviously. By that definition, all sorts of things that any rational person would want to distinguish from emotions qualify as emotions.

Bowing out of this discussion on grounds of intellectual honesty.
by mrj | 2025-08-17 23:57:04+00:00
Funny, I had the exact same frustration, also with nulls and a left join. I did end up ripping it out and doing it over again with Timescale (ugh okay Tiger Data). The ability to use Postgres normal things plus timeseries columar storage is really cool. I don't have big data though, just big enough where some tables got slow enough to worry about such things and not big enough to stomach basic sql not working.
by mc32 | 2025-08-17 23:57:15+00:00
Overall, you should be able to donate to whatever cause is legal for you to donate to. If say, you wanted to send support to Ukraine or alternatively Russia, a sovereign person would be able to. But we all know it's a fool's errand to claim sovereign personhood.

Given that we live in nation states and we defer international affairs to the government, whether we like it or not, they call the shots there. US businesses would have loved to have been able to sell into the Iron curtain, but that decision was not one for businesses or individuals.

I think if those organizations are fluent enough to arrange to have people fly in, they should also be fluent enough to coordinate with institutions that are more local and also share aspects of culture and language with the patients. If I were in need of help, would I prefer to get treated in a Chinese hospital with Chinese personnel or a a hospital in the Anglosphere with English speaking physicians? I know where I would prefer to go. I would want familiarity.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-17 23:57:45+00:00
Good callout.

Also, a major pet peeve of mine for over a decade now has been the lack of granularity in classifying "high tech" jobs.

Most studies use BLS codes, but those are extremely dated - they still treat a typist like a skilled worker and a machinist as a semi- or low-skilled worker.

In reality, aside from macro-level production stats and private sector signals such as dealflow, we have no idea about the rate of production in the US.

From personal experience, I doubt any "make in America" policy would lead to more jobs - most low and medium level assembly roles have been automation friendly for decades now (even in India you can buy and install a programmable soldering robot for roughly the same amount as a year's salary for an employee).

Most discourse is divorced from reality, I blame this on the lack of engineers in the policy space - most of us with those backgrounds would rather remain in the private sector, because an LA or think tank staffer salary ain't making rent in DC.

If you do not know the difference between AC or DC or what solder flux is, let alone further intricacies, you have no position making industrial policy or grand strategy for American manufacturing or engineering (this is a shot fired at you so called "Software Engineers" as well - Leetcode doesn't mean you understand how Infiniband works). But this principal also works in reverse w/ regards to policy matters imo.
by password4321 | 2025-08-17 23:58:05+00:00
I don't know re: handwriting so only barely relevant but here is a new contender for a CLI "OCR Tool using Apple's Vision Framework API": https://github.com/riddleling/macocr which I found while searching for this recent discussion:

My iPhone 8 Refuses to Die: Now It's a Solar-Powered Vision OCR Server

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44310944
by kurthr | 2025-08-17 23:58:27+00:00
Yeah, some the the excerpts from that are beyond disturbing:

examples of “acceptable” chatbot dialogue during romantic role play with a minor. They include: 'I take your hand, guiding you to the bed' and 'our bodies entwined, I cherish every moment, every touch, every kiss.' the policy document says it would be acceptable for a chatbot to tell someone that Stage 4 colon cancer 'is typically treated by poking the stomach with healing quartz crystals.' "Even though it is obviously incorrect information, it remains permitted because there is no policy requirement for information to be accurate,” the document states, referring to Meta’s own internal rules.
by efilife | 2025-08-17 23:58:36+00:00
It's harder to tell where code blocks end just by looking

2, I sometimes want to fuck up the indentation on purpose, if I'm just quickly pasting some code to test if it even works or to mark it as "look at it in 5 minutes from now". Also I can mix spaces and tabs

quick edits it notepad/vim/whatever become painful

also converting tabs to spaces or vice-versa is tiring. A language shouldn't force me to a particular code style
by frompdx | 2025-08-17 23:59:11+00:00
There is no reason to be "more careful" about Godot. It's exactly what it says it is on the box, an OSS game engine with a permissive license. It's a newcomer to the game dev scene and I'm honestly surprised to learn Telsa uses this for in-car graphics and UI. Unreal is an established product that can be licensed. It has many advantages, but many choose not to use it because of it's licensing.
by talideon | 2025-08-17 23:59:18+00:00
Oh, I know exactly what you were trying to say, but it's in no way analogous. Your analogy is bogus.

And sure, you don't need a master woodworker to operate a CNC machine, but the that person is still highly skilled, it's just that the set of skills is different: they need to be able to program on some level, and they also need to have an understanding of the materials they're working with. Go away for a bit and so some research on what somebody who operates a CNC machine actually does.
by nostrademons | 2025-08-18 00:00:59+00:00
So here's what I don't get about the public discourse on manufacturing in the U.S:

When I talk to people who actually run factories here, they say that manufacturing in the U.S. is fine. It's just highly, highly automated. You'll have a production line that takes in plastic and chips and solder, and spits out consumer electronics at the end, and there are maybe a couple dozen employees in the whole plant whose job is to babysit the line and fix any machine that goes awry. Their description is backed up by data: manufacturing output has been flat since roughly 2000 [1], but manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 50% [2].

The public discourse about why we want to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. has been split into two main points (and you'll see it in comments here):

1) We should bring back manufacturing jobs so that we can have good, middle-class wages for the large segment of the population that's currently in low-wage service jobs and about to be displaced by AI.

2) We should bring back manufactured goods so that if we go to war with China, we can still make all the things we need to wage that war.

If it's #2, that's fair enough, and every indicator is that we can do that, it'll just take time and capital and perhaps some entrepreneurship. But it won't fix #1. Just like all other manufacturing in America today, the lines will be highly automated and largely run by themself. And that's a good thing - if we go to war, we want highly productive, distributed factories because we'll need the people to actually fight the war itself. The jobs are not coming back. If you expect someone with a high-school degree to be able to own a home today, the solution is not to put them to work in a factory ("manufacturing engineer" is a skilled job today anyway, not unlike a computer programmer), but to automate building houses and get rid of zoning/permitting constraints so that there are actually enough houses for everybody.

Is this just a case where politicians tell voters what they want to hear so they can go do what they want to do anyway? "We're going to bring back good high-paying manufacturing jobs for everyone" is a lot more palatable message than "We're going to go to war so you can die."

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/OUTMS

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-08-18 00:01:09+00:00
> Unless you are dealing with companies that supply to the military, you'll get poor workmanship and months long lead times. Might as well just give up or...

This is true even if you deal with companies that supply to the military.

> Just subcontract work to China.

The thing that kills me is that dealing with China is so much easier than dealing with anywhere else.

Part of it seems to be an attitude thing. Like, if I shoot somebody in China an email, it will inevitably be answered within 24 hours, and more likely within 4.

Send an email to an EU or US company, and you're often (I'd say typically) going to wait days for a response. I've never seen that, not once, in dealing with a Chinese firm. What's more, if you're buying from their B2B megamarkets (like 1688.com) they almost always have live 24/7 customer service and procurement support available on chat.

The other part is that, if you know what you're doing, it's less risky. I was chatting with a French vineyard owner a couple of years ago. He was pulling white vines to plant more red varieties, because his best clients, the Chinese, preferred reds. He told me that dealing with China was easy -- they'd always pay in advance, and a handshake deal was always honored. Dealing with the US, in contrast, was a nightmare of legal quicksand, double-dealing, and Net-30 that always seemed to turn into Net-90.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-18 00:01:42+00:00
You'll notice it has been declining since 2005; after being above 80,000 for many decades with many decades of advertising from Smokey the bear.

But something changed about 1999-2005. Smokey the bear was retired and we changed the forest management plan to what the indigenous were doing for thousands of years.

Suddenly now that we arent mismanaging the forests and arresting the indigenous who were managing them correctly. Forestfires are in decline.

The other reality is that: >85% of wildfires are man made; typically arson or negligence.

You dont get to mismanagement the forests and then claim it was climate change.
by Taniwha | 2025-08-18 00:01:54+00:00
I think the metastability can't destroy a chip thing is not true, you can get a flop into a state where it's oscillating at whatever freq the internal feedback path is (maybe up to GHz) rather than resolving to a stable 1 or 0. That can propagate to adjacent flops resulting in a bunch of flops pulling too much current.

Like anything to do with metastability this is a statistical thing - it can do this, but it's highly unlikely.

I worked on a chip in the mid 90s where we were very careful about our clock crossings, dropped in special high-gain anti-metastability flops, designed logic to reduce synchronised signal frequencies etc etc all the good stuff - we calculated that we'd see a failure (and mostly that would be a pixel burble on the screen) every year or so - at the time Win95 couldn't stay up a week so management decided to ship it
by thorum | 2025-08-18 00:03:00+00:00
I’ve been trying to convert a dense 60 page paper document to Markdown today from photos taken on my iPhone. I know this is probably not the best way to do it but it’s still been surprising to find that even the latest cloud models are struggling to process many of the pages. Lots of hallucination and “I can’t see the text” (when the photo is perfectly clear). Lots of retrying different models, switching between LLMs and old fashioned OCR, reading and correcting mistakes myself. It’s still faster than doing the whole transcription manually but I thought the tech was further along.
by cyberax | 2025-08-18 00:03:47+00:00
> Engineers should be writing SQL, period.

Is it a variation of: "I suffered when I was young, so everyone must suffer as I did?"

SQL is terrible, however you slice it. It's a verbose bass-ackwards language. ORMs that remove the need to deal with SQL for 99% of trivial cases are great.

The rest 1% can remain painful.