MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by highfrequency | 2025-08-07 19:29:41+00:00
> OpenAI bungling its 15-month product lead

Do you mean from ChatGPT launch or o1 launch? Curious to get your take on how they bungled the lead and what they could have done differently to preserve it. Not having thought about it too much, it seems that with the combo of 1) massive hype required for fundraising, and 2) the fact that their product can be basically reverse engineered by training a model on its curated output, it would have been near impossible to maintain a large lead.
by reissbaker | 2025-08-07 19:30:11+00:00
I'll add docs! Tl;DR: in the onboarding (or in the Add Model menu section), you can select adding a custom LLM. It'll ask you for your API base URL, which is whatever localhost+port setup you're using, and then an env var to use as an API credential. Just put in any non-empty credential, since local models typically don't actually use authentication. Then you're good to go.

IMO gpt-oss-120b is actually a very competent local coding agent — and it should fit on your 128GB Macbook Pro. I've used it while testing Octo actually, it's quite good for a local model. The best open model in my opinion is zai-org/GLM-4.5, but it probably won't fit on your machine (although it works well with APIs — my tip is to avoid OpenRouter though since quite a few of the round-robin hosts have broken implementations.)
by alistairSH | 2025-08-07 19:30:12+00:00
Which gets us into a whole other debate about zoning in (most of) the US.

Why shouldn't a land owner be able to use that land in the most profitable way possible (within reason)?

Example: In my area, there's an intersection about 1/4 mile away. I think it would be a great place to have a corner shop/cafe/bodega. It's close to the schools, the other shopping options are another mile away. It's walking distance to several thousand housing units.

But, I can't build such a shop because the entire area is zoned residential (and also covered by HOAs, which are yet another debate).

Quite a few blogs and articles out there comparing US zoning to typical Japanese zoning, if you're interested. Cliffs: Japan often has mixed-use zoning by default (ie, anything from detached homes to small apartments to small office/shops is ok in the same zone)
by calmbonsai | 2025-08-07 19:30:24+00:00
Oh ffs, these guys again?! See "Devin demo". It's very disappointing this person continues to be given a platform to spout heinous bullshit.

FWIW, I don't believe in work/life balance over short intervals as I feel intensity beats consistency, BUT work/life balance over long (months) intervals is absolutely critical to being a healthy decent human.

One also must consider timing wrt perceived opportunity costs. It's fine for folks with real skin in the game to make these sorts of decisions for themselves, but it's amoral to force them upon others who are playing the same game for vastly different stakes.
by eqvinox | 2025-08-07 19:30:47+00:00
> And then your exit tax is calculated by taking the average of the past 3 years of earnings of that company, multiplied by 13.75 (which is crazy), and then taking 60% of that which is taxed at your personal income tax rate (likely 42%; Teileinkünfteverfahren)

This does not match the results from 5 minutes of googling, not for individuals at least. What is being taxed is the shares you're holding, as if you're selling them, which results in a tax on their increase in value compared to when you've bought them. [disclaimer: I just did a quick search on this, I'm not a tax consultant or lawyer.]

I haven't looked for the regulations on companies moving their headquarters away from Germany. It's possible those rules are the above, and the author confused them with the rules for individuals.

Either way, if the author believes they're right, they should dig up some citations. There are none in that article. Is this based on advice they've received? Did they do their own research? Are they a tax consultant or lawyer? 13.75 is a very "spottable" number, how about a link to the law that has that number?
by ZeroGravitas | 2025-08-07 19:31:02+00:00
Part of the reason h.264 was such a big percentage of video was that they messed up the licencing of the follow up so badly which was supposed to supplant it.

Not that the licencing of h.264 wasn't a mess too. You suggest it was free for web use but they originally only promised not to charge for free streaming up until 2015 and reserved the right to do so once it was embedded in the web. Pressure from Google/Xiph/etc's WebM project forced them to promise not to enforce it after that point either.

https://www.wired.com/2010/08/mpeg-la-extends-web-video-lice...

Cisco paid for a binary version of a decoder that could be downloaded by Firefox as a plugin. They could only do so because of a loophole around a cap in fees that they were already hitting so it wouldn't cost them more to supply to every Firefox user.
by Alive-in-2025 | 2025-08-07 19:31:12+00:00
It's not about super liberal views. The truck is a disaster, a complete creature of a vapid overpaid oligarch. You don't have to care about his politics to be disappointed with the loss of opportunity with the silly things going on in the CT design (a loss for the world really, with Tesla just deciding not to even try any more on cars). It's really a loss for humanity. We need great electric vehicles of all kinds.
by hansmayer | 2025-08-07 19:31:15+00:00
Meh. For all the hype over the last several weeks, I'd had expected at least a programming demo that would blow even us skeptics off our feet. The folks presenting were giving off an odd vibe too. Somehow it all just looked, pre-trained :), shall we say? No energy or enthusiasm. Hell I'd even take the Bill Gates' and Steve Balmer's Win95 launch dance over this very dull and "safe" presentation.
by almostgotcaught | 2025-08-07 19:31:36+00:00
the only secret to the LSAT is to grind practice tests. back in the day (~10 years ago) i torrented all the available tests (~70) and all the practice books. I did one of the books to learn the "tricks" and then just took all the tests. scored a 178 (and then never went to law school lol).
by lazyeye | 2025-08-07 19:32:43+00:00
This was actually a significant problem during the Biden administration. The rules were so vague that de-banking could be used in whatever context the administration found convenient. Apparently many companies were pushed offshore as a result.

Andreessen/Horowitz talk about it here

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n_sNclEgQZQ
by JohnBooty | 2025-08-07 19:32:48+00:00
Well here's the interesting thing to think about for me.

Human memory is.... insanely bad.

We record only the tiniest subset of our experiences, and those memories are heavily colored by our emotional states at the time and our pre-existing conceptions, and a lot of memories change or disappear over time.

Generally speaking even in the best case most of our memories tend to be more like checksums than JPGs. You probably can't name more than a few of the people you went to school with. But, if I showed you a list of people you went to school with, you'd probably look at each name and be like "yeah! OK! I remember that now!"

So.

It's interesting to think about what kind of "bar" AGI would really need to clear w.r.t. memories, if the goal is to be (at least) on par with human intelligence.
by Bender | 2025-08-07 19:32:49+00:00
In the past I reported massive amounts of spam to SpamCop [1] but it only helps the businesses that utilize data from SpamCop. Some do this transparently in the background so it's hard to say how effective it is. I used SpamCop, UceProtect, SpamHaus on my servers so it helped me. I also accepted the fact that by reporting them with full headers also increased the spam sent to me but I was OK with that.

[1] - https://www.spamcop.net/
by jmull | 2025-08-07 19:33:16+00:00
I love the setup, but this sadly fails to deliver. The author doesn't seem to have any idea how to fit the twists and turns of frontend software development trends onto the metaphor of koalas and crows.

BTW, jQuery has waned not because it got out-completed by something else, but because it won outright. All the useful things jQuery gave us have been migrated into the base.
by runako | 2025-08-07 19:33:39+00:00
> presumably LLM output is going into the training data of later LLMs

The LLM vendors go to great lengths to assure their paying customers that this will not be the case. Yes, LLMs will ingest more LLM-generated slop from the public Internet. But as businesses integrate LLMs, a rising percentage of their outputs will not be included in training sets.
by jstummbillig | 2025-08-07 19:34:14+00:00
Things have moved differently than what we thought would happen 2 years ago, but lest we forget what has happened in the meanwhile (4o, o1 + thinking paradigm, o3)

So yeah, maybe we are getting more incremental improvements. But that to me seems like a good thing, because more good things earlier. I will take that over world-shattering any day – but if we were to consider everything that has happened since the first release of gpt-4, I would argue the total amount is actually very much world-shattering.
by belval | 2025-08-07 19:34:26+00:00
Maybe you are right actually, I fact checked myself and seems like while there is a slight underestimate, it's still nowhere near the stock market returns (roughly 100%).

Housing (34%): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS New car (38%): https://caredge.com/guides/new-car-price-trends-in-2025 Food (29%): https://www.in2013dollars.com/Food-and-beverages/price-infla...
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-08-07 19:34:48+00:00
Sorry, I should clarify. The system is designed to have moderation be opt in. It isn't opt-in or opt-out on the default client. On the default client it is mandatory.

The reason I said it's opt-in is because moderation is added client-side by including the moderation service's DID in the `atproto-accept-labelers` HTTP header when sending requests to the appview.

So it is by-design opt-in, just in practice the "first party bluesky client" makes the choice for you for legal compliance reasons, and with an increasing hint-hint-nudge-nudge from the devs to use third party or forked clients to bypass the various legal restrictions countries keep trying to impose on them.
by ilaksh | 2025-08-07 19:34:59+00:00
This is key info from the article for me:

> -------------------------------

"reasoning": {"summary": "auto"} }'

Here’s the response from that API call.

https://gist.github.com/simonw/1d1013ba059af76461153722005a0...

Without that option the API will often provide a lengthy delay while the model burns through thinking tokens until you start getting back visible tokens for the final response.
by Soupy | 2025-08-07 19:35:35+00:00
Stoke | Bellevue, WA | ONSITE (hybrid)

Stoke is a 5-month-old startup (founded in Feb 2025 by insuretech veterans with $4B+ in previous exits across 2 bootstrapped companies) building real-time Voice AI agents to make insurance purchases easier, faster, and more affordable.

PROBLEM: Insurance is a critical product, and the current system is broken. Policies are the main shield between American households and financial ruin. At 5% of income, it’s the fourth largest household expense after housing, transportation, and food. The majority of people have insufficient coverage and are paying too much for it. This is primarily driven by human agents who frequently have insufficient expertise and are driven by ~$200B a year in perverse incentives. Customers eat the costs of all of this through higher premiums.

SOLUTION: AI agents that enable personalized, unbiased, expert product recommendations at scale and at a fraction of the cost. We can simultaneously raise the bar of service while stripping out unnecessary costs, delivering those savings directly back to consumers in the form of lower premiums.

TEAM: 5 engineers (ex-Facebook, NYT, ScaleAI, AssuranceIQ), growing fast.

HIRING: Founding principal engineers/leaders with expertise in distributed systems, infra, real-time pipelines, agentic AI.

TASK: Shape architecture (AWS, Kafka, Python, Kubernetes, WebRTC); scale for 1000s of concurrent calls under 400ms latency; mentor as we hit 50+ engineers; directly help families save on premiums.

YOU: Obsess over reliable code, solve tough problems, ship fast, explain concepts clearly, learn quickly.

PERKS: Competitive salary/equity, full benefits, top tools, encouraged recharge time, quarterly retreats (hackathon + vacation).

Email Kyle Moseley: kyle@stoke.com with resume and why Stoke.
by kaindume | 2025-08-07 19:36:20+00:00
My 2 cents

There would be no GPT without Google, no Google without the WWW, no WWW without TCP/IP. This is why I believe calling it "AI" is a mistake or just for marketing, we should call all of them GPTs or search engines 2.0. This is the natural next step after you have indexed most of the web and collected most of the data.

Also there would be no coding agents without Free Software and Open-Source.
by JohnBooty | 2025-08-07 19:36:47+00:00
That being said, AGI is not a necessary requirement for AI to be totally world-changing

Yeah. I don't think I actually want AGI? Even setting aside the moral/philosophical/etc "big picture" issues I don't think I even want that from a purely practical standpoint.

I think I want various forms of AI that are more focused on specific domains. I want AI tools, not companions or peers or (gulp) masters.

(Then again, people thought they wanted faster horses before they rolled out the Model T)
by throwanem | 2025-08-07 19:36:51+00:00
Beautiful! I wonder if Jimmy Maher's heard about this; he wanted something like it for The Analog Antiquarian back ages ago before he kicked that off, as a way of reflecting the span of history in the structure of the index/TOC, but we never could figure out really how to get it to go anywhere we liked. It's a surprisingly tricky problem, and this is an impressive realization!
by fsckboy | 2025-08-07 19:37:02+00:00
pizza got bigger (than in Italy) first in America, and that started to happen well before the actual Fascists. So, no, pizza standards are not a nostalgic defense against contamination.

French winemakers started defending their region names as trademarks in the middle of the last century (picked up steam in 1960s to 1970s) and cheese followed, and the rest of the Europe too. That's where the joke "real Existentialism must come from France, otherwise you just have sparkling anxiety" comes from.

As one rather benign example, Hungary and Slovakia asserted rights to the name of the wine Tokaji/Tokai and in 2007 Friuli Italy had to stop using that name for their wine, a name they had been using for hundreds of years (though the grape is still called Tokai in Italy). In Hungary, the measure of quality/sweetness of the wine (it's a dessert wine) is called Puttonyos. The Italians now call their wine Friulano (not a dessert wine in particular); I want the Italians to start measuring their quality in Putanas just to give the finger to Hungary.
by bell-cot | 2025-08-07 19:37:16+00:00
26 comments a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44295132

178 comments 17 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698398

I recall a detailed US DOE(?) research study on the concept being linked from HN a couple-ish years ago...but my quick searches failed to find that.
by missedthecue | 2025-08-07 19:37:23+00:00
People aren't "choosing annihilation". There is no weekly meeting. One Japanese person having 10 kids does not change the headline. Birth rates are a textbook-perfect example of a tragedy of the commons coordination problem scenario. Furthermore, if we believe that social or institutional trust is an input to birth rates, the implication is that Sweden is a low trust civilization and South Sudan is high trust. It just doesn't pass the smell test.

People have fewer kids when the medium-term alternatives are better. This is why desperately poor people have tons of kids and why fabulously rich societies like Japan have fewer. An extremely poor person does not lose opportunity by having children. A rich person does. We fix it by inverting the cost and benefit. If being single and childless has fewer medium term rewards than being a parent, people will become parents.

And the "medium term" is I think an illuminating point to emphasize. Humans, I have noticed, tend to operate on 2-3 year time horizons. If humans operated on a 5 minute time horizon we'd have more kids because unprotected sex is fun. If we operated on a 50 year time horizons we'd have more kids because being 75 years old with no surviving family is for many a terribly lonely thought. I think it's also why so much of the birth rate conversation focuses on childcare, diaper changes, and sleep loss, in spite of the fact that the years involving those challenges are an extremely small portion of the life-long parenting experience.
by bigmadshoe | 2025-08-07 19:38:00+00:00
Sure, all of machine learning involves making assumptions. The bitter lesson in a practical sense is about minimizing these assumptions, particularly those that pertain to human knowledge about how to perform a specific task.

I don't agree with your interpretation of the lesson if you say it means to make no assumptions. You can try to model language with just a massive fully connected network to be maximally flexible, and you'll find that you fail. The art of applying the lesson is separating your assumptions that come from "expert knowledge" about the task from assumptions that match the most general structure of the problem.

"Time spent thinking" is a fundamental property of any system that thinks. To separate this into two modes: low and high, is not necessarily too strong of an assumption in my opinion.

I completely agree with you regarding many specialized sub-models where the distinction is arbitrary and informed by human knowledge about particular problems.
by hnuser123456 | 2025-08-07 19:38:37+00:00
I agree, we have now proven that GPUs can ingest information and be trained to generate content for various tasks. But to put it to work, make it useful, requires far more thought about a specific problem and how to apply the tech. If you could just ask GPT to create a startup that'll be guaranteed to be worth $1B on a $1k investment within one year, someone else would've already done it. Elbow grease still required for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, figuring out how to train them to make less of their most common mistakes is a worthwhile effort.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-08-07 19:38:40+00:00
Performance is doubling roughly every 4-7 months. That trend is continuing. That's insane.

If your expectations were any higher than that then, then it seems like you were caught up in hype. Doubling 2-3 times per year isn't leveling off my any means.

https://metr.github.io/autonomy-evals-guide/gpt-5-report/
by abeppu | 2025-08-07 19:38:51+00:00
I think 1. is still pretty bad. It's sounds like students are often obligated to use school-issued accounts for their own school work, and contents are searched and reviewed by the vendor's staff before either the student or the school are notified, and without any prior reason for individual suspicion -- that _does_ seem like a 4th amendment issue.

But also, is the school creating a blindspot for itself where it has _less_ information than if these systems were not in place? From one of the court documents linked in the article:

> The District and Gaggle—acting at the District’s behest—do not merely infringe students’ Fourth and First Amendment rights—they do so in a way that actively undermines the very safety concerns the District claims to address. Acting with the District’s knowledge, Gaggle automatically and unilaterally seizes student materials containing an undisclosed list of “trigger words” or phrases, without regard to context. This sweeping censorship extends to all student documents and content within the Google Workspace/Suite on District platforms. As a result, when students use their school-issued accounts to seek help or report concerns—particularly about mental health—Gaggle frequently intercepts and seizes those communications before they can reach their intended recipients, including teachers, counselors, and even parents. Such censorship denies some students the help they may need, contrary to Defendants’ articulated purpose for using Gaggle.

... i.e. the school is inadvertently quashing students attempts to ask for help or report problems

> When The Budget’s editor-in-chief investigated via requests under the Kansas Open Records Act why Gaggle continued to operate in violation of the purported exemption for student journalism, the findings responsive to her requests were, ironically, suppressed—apparently unbeknownst to the District officials tasked with responding to the requests—by Gaggle. Like the fox guarding the henhouse, Gaggle prevents parties from learning about how and when it operates.The District was made aware of Gaggle’s actions with respect to student journalists, but took no action to eliminate the problem.

... i.e. the school is generally unaware when it is itself silenced by its "safety management" software, even when this brings it out of compliance with legal requirements.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/26040279-lawrence-bo...
by 12_throw_away | 2025-08-07 19:38:58+00:00
Yes, almost single line of remote communication is now clogged with unsolicited spamming, scamming, and other money-raising schemes. If we want to be able to talk to each other remotely, we need some form of automated filtering and signal boosting.

The market-research/political-consulting/horse-race-polling firms are in fact part of the problem here, and casting it as a "threat to democracy" is ... well ... about what I would expect from Jeff Bezos' opinion page.
by TimBurman | 2025-08-07 19:39:25+00:00
That's an interesting question. According to Rich and Greg's Airplane Page[1], the A320 has three generators rated for 90kVA continuous each, one per engine and a third in the auxilary power unit that isn't normally deployed. Cruising demand is around 140 kVA of the 180 kVA supplied by the engines, leaving 40 kVA to spare. The A380 has six similar generators, two in reserve. They give the percentages so you could calculate how much fuel each system is consuming.

[1] https://alverstokeaviation.blogspot.com/2016/03/

This page also has a rendered image of the generator:

https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/43490/how-much-...
by jjk166 | 2025-08-07 19:39:32+00:00
Looks like a lot of players getting closer and closer to an asymptotic limit. Initially small changes lead to big improvements causing a firm to race ahead, as they go forward performance gains from innovation become both more marginal and harder to find, nonetheless keep. I would expect them all to eventually reach the same point where they are squeezing the most possible out of an AI under the current paradigm, barring a paradigm shifting discovery before that asymptote is reached.
by tucnak | 2025-08-07 19:39:37+00:00
I say, this is indeed the case in view of LLM lessons we have learnt along the way—most importantly, Wittgenstein had argued that in order to model language, you first need to model arbitrary discourses—this turned out to be the case (symbolic v. probabilistic) as LLM have shown to perform symbolic computation from learned representations, whilst the inverse has not been shown _ever_. Layman way of formulating this would be along the lines of "word definitions do not matter, application of words alone is what matters." IMHO, the language-game framework is so much more valuable, in terms of intuition, than anything outside of language philosophy, & pretty much all of linguistics in the first place: think Chomsky et al.

Wittgensteinians won, and we should hope that philosophy department freaks eventually catch on to this reality.