MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by namibj | 2025-08-14 13:56:56+00:00
Basically re-ranking is similar to how RAG functions for normal LLM tasks, in that you smash the fragment down into an embedding vector you use for a vector database to coarsely search, and then you use a powerful model with the task/query/prompt in context to digest the raw fragment(s) and then produce some more query-aware scoring/sorting (re-ranker) or text-output/response (LLM with RAG).

For example, LeanDojo[0], a LLM based proof search automation helper — or rather specifically it's LeanCopilot interface — had two modes[1] of operation:

One where it was fed the state of the interactive proof search [akin to what a human would be provided in the interactive mode, facilitated by hooking the existing breath-first brute-force exploration machinery that used hard-coded rules for what patterns to (try to) apply which tactics to; this is basically like semantic/AST-with-types "regex"-like search-and-replace except that it's searching a tree/DAG of "proof states" ("multiverse/branching") instead of performing destructive replacing] and fine-tuned to output a command step/"substitution" like a human (or rather, the fixed pattern matching) would, utilizing beam search decoding (IIRC instead of setting a "temperature") to generate several candidates along with native probability ascriptions to each candidate based on just multiplying the token probabilities along the generation.

The other was to do vector database RAG using a specifically fine-tuned (via contrastive learning, based on digested official library semantic information as to which of these is utilized in which context, and contrasted with which are not utilized in said context) embedding model to index what they call "premises" (basically "theorem"-definitions (just the full definition but without the proof of it's truthiness) and other theorem+like things) into a vector database, from which they then picked as many top (but, without re-ranking first!) hits from the vector DB as would fit into the prompt context [they used Google's ByT5 as a base for all, which is a fairly small (IIRC about 0.3B, aka 300M) LLM in encoder-decoder architecture (almost; they extended the input vocabulary by some helper/special tokens) without tokenization (directly on UTF-8 bytes) pre-trained to do translation, reasoning, cloze (fill-in-the-blank, IIRC even multiple in the same prompt, which it used some of the special tokens for to reference them), etc.] after first putting in the current state.

Last I checked they sadly didn't have functioning on-the-fly vector DB filling with current project premises, but from looking at the front page to link here I noticed they appear to have worked on some (possibly substantial) improvements since then.

[0]: https://leandojo.org/ [1]: https://github.com/lean-dojo/ReProver?tab=readme-ov-file#usi...
by sdenton4 | 2025-08-14 13:57:03+00:00
It depends, actually... The data and train time requirements seen to increase exponentially for linear gains in performance. As a result, you can often trade a 10x reduction in training time to get a model with 90+% of the real deal. And as we accumulate more architecture and efficiency tricks, the ceiling in what you can do locally goes up commensurately.

There's also a whole world of data curation to improve training, which is likely to be great for small models and seems still underexplored.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-14 13:57:38+00:00
Some corporate entity will just take it over and Linux will just be another piece of software constantly trying to figure out ways to rob you.

Fragmentation, though ugly and inconvenient, works as a defense. systemd, along with all of the other goofy all-encompassing subsystems that were inflicted on Linux over one hot decade from Red Hat, was obviously a ploy to do the above. The jury is still out as to whether it will be successful.
by bayindirh | 2025-08-14 13:58:07+00:00
> Making more money allows you to donate more to organizations that hire full time staff to achieve your broader goals for the world.

> More money means more options, more wiggle room.

Generally while having less time for yourself and suffering more.

That's brilliant. I'll take a dozen.

> Also, to me personally, the choice between hybrid and full remote isn’t even a choice.

Exactly. Being able (have) to commute to a campus which has a forest inside and ample place to walk with fresh air beats having to stay in a flat 9 hours 5 days a week by a mile.
by hibikir | 2025-08-14 13:58:08+00:00
It's a very difficult belief to have in the long run, because if the source of the "error" is always in one direction, it will compound to price level differences impossible to hide.

It's like the traditional view on GDP growth. Be a little slower than a similar country (say 0.5% a year) wait 20 years, and your formerly similar neighbor now sees your country as quite poor.
by lmm | 2025-08-14 13:58:21+00:00
>> a) new language does some unique thing that the old language didn't do, even if the unique thing is useless and irrelevant

>> b) new language has a bigger number than old language on benchmarks, even if the benchmark is irrelevant to your use case

> * no GC, while being memory safe.

> * high performance on par with C while offering no-cost high level conveniences.

My point exactly!

> was initially backed by a big, trusted company, Mozzila, while OCaml comes from a Research Lab

Mozilla is not large and trustworthy, as you can see by the fact they haven't kept funding Rust development (because they can't afford to)! People weren't picking Rust because it had better backing or a bigger ecosystem, not in the early stages that made the difference - it didn't.
by jefftk | 2025-08-14 13:58:22+00:00
> Not all of them know the better or have the gravitas to tell "go fix yourself", and this allows exploitation to continue.

Agreed there, but then this is what I think we should be arguing for. Not "companies are wrong to use software without paying" but "companies are wrong to demand work from (and especially to make threats to) volunteers" and "volunteer maintainers should be well supported by the community (and anticipate such) when they decline to extend software".
by kbolino | 2025-08-14 13:58:56+00:00
What matters in the long run for making a good wiki are the people and policies.

Young and niche wikis are happy to take any contributions they can get. The quality and timeliness of any given bit of text soon ends up wildly different from page to page or even section to section. Some people may decide to take their time not just contributing new content but also editing existing content. However, it becomes difficult to balance creation vs. curation. Too much creation, and the editors get overwhelmed, and then the users can never be sure what to trust, and so the wiki becomes irrelevant. Too much curation, and the information becomes uniformly stale and lowest-common-denominator, so the users start going elsewhere, and so the wiki becomes irrelevant.

Different wikis means each one can have its own people and policies. If the people who made one wiki great leave, there are still other wikis out there. If the policies choke the life out of one wiki, there are still other wikis out there. Some wiki can be full of deletionists while another wiki is full of inclusionists. Some wiki can be full of mergers while another wiki is full of splitters.

Forcing everybody onto one wiki forces them all to work together, but this is an entirely volunteer effort, and so many will just leave. Even if they were paid, some individuals would dominate while others would get crowded out. One can point to Wikipedia as a glaring exception, standing as basically the only wiki of note of its kind, but I think it's the exception that proves the rule.
by seanmcdirmid | 2025-08-14 13:59:18+00:00
Technically speaking, the deficit peaked in 2020, fell a hit in 2021, and then fell a lot more in 2022, and then rose a bit in 2023 and 2024. The deficit on 2025 Inauguration Day was way smaller than on 2021 in Inauguration Day, so I’m not sure it would be fair to claim that Biden increased the deficit. See the graph at https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/natio...

Downvotes on this are weird, it’s just basic math (the deficit bar in 2025 is way lower than the deficit bar in 2021). I get FoxNews thinking math is a liberal conspiracy, but not HN.
by brianwawok | 2025-08-14 14:00:58+00:00
Is that a surprise? A chemical company doesn't have the in house chops to build a tech hardware?

Same things happens all over. Ford (a car company) completely failing to make a reasonable UI / App / Interface for their infotainment systems (something a tech company would do). Pivoting away from what you are good at is hard for a 3 person startup, but nearly impossible for a giant corporation.
by ferguess_k | 2025-08-14 14:01:07+00:00
OP is not complaining about how much the tax covers, but who (people who drive and who don't) pays what percentage.

> we subsidize private transport (our taxes pay for the roads, traffic police, etc.)

My point is: this "we" includes all those drivers too. That is, whatever the $$ that gets paid into maintaining the infra, it comes from "we", which include the drivers. And since the non-drivers also need private companies/drivers to move things around, they are also part of the story. They do not subsidize anything.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-14 14:02:08+00:00
Finally! A good take on that paper. I saw that arstechnica article posted everywhere, and most of the comments are full of confirmation bias, and almost all of them miss the fineprint - it was tested on a 4 layer deep toy model. It's nice to read a post that actually digs deeper and offers perspectives on what might be a good finding vs. just warranting more research.
by mikeyouse | 2025-08-14 14:02:44+00:00
Shadow stats is a crank blog with absolutely no validity. Choose your debunking source, but the owner of the blog literally just adds an amount to the official rate that he thinks represents the government error. There’s no calculation, there’s no “pre-1980 methodology”, just one dude’s vibes. If the rate has averaged 9% over the past 25 years, you’d be talking about over 750% inflation since 2000. You can buy any manner of new car today for $35k - could you buy a new car for $5k in 2000? Did a gallon of gas cost $0.40/gallon? Could you rent a modern $1,500 apartment for $200/month?

https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/no-the-real-inflation-r...
by discardedrefuse | 2025-08-14 14:02:45+00:00
You are correct. Someone posted about Radicle here a couple days ago[1] and went down that rabbit hole. The user docs say that their p2p network draws inspiration for Secure Scuttlebutt's gossip protocol.

I'm not 100% sold on federation / activitypub in its current state. I think p2p is far more interesting. With Radicle, you don't have to run a server (which, if Mastodon is anything to go by, is a lot of overhead). So anyone can try it! Radicle is ready to use right now.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44874945
by azemetre | 2025-08-14 14:02:57+00:00
I mean it totally depends what your views on democracy are. Juries are one of the few, likely only, practices taken from Ancient Athenian democracy which was truly led by the people. The fact that juries still work this way is a testament to the practice.

With this in mind, I personally believe groups will always come to better conclusions than individuals.

Being tried by 12 instead of 1 means more diversity of thought and opinion.
by carlosjobim | 2025-08-14 14:03:19+00:00
Exactly, that's the biggest down side. But you're wrong that anybody would be paid more than their labour is worth. Companies never pay any worker more than they are worth, unless it's a mistress, a nephew or an old buddy, etc.

Increasing wages (or increasing taxes on labour) are methods of forcing and increasing the minimum level of productivity for all jobs. If you have a business and suddenly have to pay your employees 20% more, then you have to make sure they are 20% more productive as well. If you are able do that with training them and/or investing in more effective processes and practices, then everybody wins. Or you have to this in combination with raising prices, which is not a bad thing if that means higher worker compensation.

Now let's say your business is not able to train, invest, and price increase enough to cover for a 20% increase in wages. Perhaps your customers simply do not accept a higher price? Perhaps the kind of business you are in has a very low return margin and thus cannot motivate investments in better tools for your workers? Then that kind of business generally goes under - or more realistically there won't be new businesses of that kind opening. For the economy as a whole this is good, that people are not wasting their time with inefficient ventures which customers are not willing to pay for.

Even considering some unemployment, this can be beneficial. Instead of two workers producing for example 100 units per day, you might have one worker producing 1000 units per day and the other being unemployed.

But for all of this to work as intended, it is absolutely necessary to have enough opportunity for workers to switch into different jobs. And why shouldn't we be able to have that?
by apical_dendrite | 2025-08-14 14:03:21+00:00
Most US students don't go to selective private universities that charge $80,000 a year (and most students at those universities don't pay $80,000 a year). Only about a quarter of students go to private universities and most of those are not particularly selective. Most students go to state schools that are a lot cheaper and where tuition is subject to different economic forces.

You can't decide that official inflation figures are inaccurate based on a specific, outlier example, when the official figures are based on averages.
by lentil_soup | 2025-08-14 14:03:21+00:00
> EDIT: The democrat brigade is busy downvoting me to deny reality. Poor children!

Per the guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like

Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
by faangguyindia | 2025-08-14 14:03:23+00:00
I am using AI to write full projects, complete code generation and haven found any model which comes close to Gemini Pro2.5 in code generation reasoning and generation.

While other models like qwen3, glm promise big in real code writing they fail badly, get stuck in loops.

The only problem right now i run into gemini is i get throttled every now and then with empty response specially around this time.
by elzbardico | 2025-08-14 14:03:46+00:00
Let's unpack this. The real, objective reality of people living their lives is not the Truth.

But, instead a single index based on what is basically a bunch of arbitrary choices of a bunch of bureaucrats, subject to all kind of agendas and political/economical/social pressure, and based on an simulacrum of science that stands upon a bunch of questionable premises and unfalseable propositions is Truth.

The pythagorean cult of number has been a disgrace for the human race.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-14 14:04:12+00:00
> Their documentation as a result can get much more in-depth, just by virtue of having less to cover than Arch does.

But the entire point is how much better Arch's wiki is than anyone else's. I've never run Arch, I've only ever used Arch's wiki to help with Debian. Doing this ironically helps you keep in mind every weird Debianism to figure out how to apply what you're reading.
by dcreager | 2025-08-14 14:05:08+00:00
> competing with PyPI

pyx doesn't compete with PyPI; it's a private registry that companies can use e.g. to host internal-only packages, or to provide curated views of things like PyPI for compliance reasons.

> making changes which seemingly require their client (uv) be used

That's an explicit non-goal: "You won't need to use pyx to use uv, and you won't need to use uv to use pyx."
by MontyCarloHall | 2025-08-14 14:05:09+00:00
Until you've worked at a job where you're genuinely excited to get up every morning and hack, it's very hard to empathize with this sentiment. Doubly so because employers compelling enough to make employees passionate about their jobs often exploit this and have extremely substandard working conditions (exhibit A: academia). Despite that, once you've been genuinely passionate about a job, it's very hard to see the world any other way.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-14 14:05:17+00:00
> Yeah and CCC is in one of the most expensive seasons (between Christmas and New year) in the most expensive country in Europe.

From where did you get the idea that Germany is the most expensive country in Europe? My experience differs.

> It was around €200-250 a night

Get a hotel that is a little away and use public transport to get to the event venue. Using this, rather 100-150 € per night is realistic (if you find a good offer, even below 100 € is very possible).
by jerf | 2025-08-14 14:05:23+00:00
The default %v does leave some to be desired, but don't underestimate the utility of being able to shove anything at it and get something back. This is especially important because this applies recursively; you can have a structure that may have something "unprintable" buried deeply in it, but at least it won't prevent you from printing everything else.

Strongly-typed languages that do not force any sort of stringification on values, and thus refuse to compile if you try to dump a simple log message of one of these values out, are really annoying to work with. I understand the conceptual purity of saying "Hey, maybe not everything even has a string representation" but it makes debugging a real pain. If I were writing a new language today I think I'd mandate that everything gets a default debugging string output by default because the alternative is just so rough.

Even a not-great printer that may have a sort of "*unprintable*" bailout, or print something not terribly useful, but doesn't actually stop you from printing anything, is better than a language that completely rejects it at compile time.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-08-14 14:06:27+00:00
Because business is not a single monolith, and because it is greedy, it kills the naive idea that "businesses raise prices because they can".

Any gouging price increase is a gaping hole for a competitor (businesses are greedy and therefore will take money from other businesses) to come in and steal business. This is something that is obvious to people who have been on the business side and mostly opaque to people who have only ever been on the consumer side.
by jasonlotito | 2025-08-14 14:06:36+00:00
HN Guidelines

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Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data.

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-14 14:06:40+00:00
I used to share that dream too. But there’s so much proprietary hardware needed to make a smart phone that I just can’t see it happening. Or at least not for anything that would be remotely practical to use.

I think the best we can hope for is something that allows us to run a sandboxed vanilla Linux container. Which I think is already possible on Android?
by atomicnumber3 | 2025-08-14 14:07:06+00:00
It is also kind of handy that we get aircraft carriers out of it too.

Mind you, I'm a socialist, so like, I personally wish we could move a bunch of the "jobs program" stuff over so that instead of carriers, we get well-educated, fed, and cared-for children and good medical care for all, and stuff like that. And that if we want a certain number of aircraft carriers, we should just try to actually get that many carriers on purpose for the cost that building the carriers entails. Without also trying to do 10 million other things on top of it to the point that the carrier output is a side-effect.

But like, it's probably better than no carriers at all, which is how it's going for lots of other countries. So I guess that's something to hold on to.
by scott_s | 2025-08-14 14:07:59+00:00
You train on data. Context is also data. If you want a model to have certain data, you can bake it into the model during training, or provide it as context during inference. But if the "context" you want the model to have is big enough, you're going to want to train (or fine-tune) on it.

Consider that you're coding a Linux device driver. If you ask for help from an LLM that has never seen the Linux kernel code, has never seen a Linux device driver and has never seen all of the documentation from the Linux kernel, you're going to need to provide all of this as context. And that's both going to be onerous on you, and it might not be feasible. But if the LLM has already seen all of that during training, you don't need to provide it as context. Your context may be as simple as "I am coding a Linux device driver" and show it some of your code.
by mikestew | 2025-08-14 14:08:07+00:00
Sounds like my wife’s AW6, which used to have this feature but doesn’t after sending it in for battery replacement (Apple replaces the Watch with a refurb), will continue to not have this feature anymore. IOW, watch that had this feature, doesn’t after battery replacement.

I’m curious why this isn’t settled. Apple has surely floated an offer, and it would appear that Apple isn’t going to budge on this. Were I in charge at Massimo, I’d think some money is better than no money.
Anyone melding GPT-level intelligence with physical world?
by iamnnk | 2025-08-14 14:09:22+00:00
The current state of LLMs (ChatGPT, Gemini) give the impression of having 'solved digital experience' completely. They are self contained to the extent that the 2023 technique of building wrappers on top of them to customise experiences seems redundant.

I intuitively sense scope for a meld of such intelligence with the physical world.

Are there startups that are building anything cool in this space?
by chollida1 | 2025-08-14 14:09:26+00:00
> A model companies and people actively avoid outside of Twitter.

That's an absurd statement. And one that shows your bias.

> Nobody is choosing Grok unless they want to make spicy/racist meme or show an active support for Elon.

I pay for Grok and Gemini as they are arguably the best two models available right now.

By your logic and your logic alone, this also mean that no one choses OpenAi unless they want to show active support for Sam Altman.
by athrowaway3z | 2025-08-14 14:09:27+00:00
> "Master This AI Prompt Template and Earn $10K Monthly!" "I Made Enough for My First House in 3 Months of AI Side Hustles!" "Former Google Engineer Reveals How to Surf the AI Wave!"

I once had the displeasure of talking with a guy who essentially sold FOMO "get rich" schemes. What he sold was expensive and imo useless - but mostly suckers signed up, so the inevitable 1/5 reviews were the exception.

He made a decent living with it, but in terms of hours worked it really wasn't a good deal.

But one of the things he was self-aware enough to laugh about, was that in literal years of giving his course to hundreds of people, only once had somebody asked him: "The marketing claims you're rich and successful so why are you still giving this course?"

If you read those headlines and find a tingle of FOMO coming on, ask yourself that question.

Or more general: When would you personally ever write a blog designed to triggers FOMO, and does that match the results promised in the title?