MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by velcrovan | 2025-08-07 12:02:04+00:00
Since you offered: https://x.com/gwern/status/1235977354918404096 — though it seems like the intermediate commenter I mentioned has also either locked or deleted their tweets.

…But responding as though this is an attack to be countered and defeated further illustrates why I had doubts about your suitability as a creative advisor. It may be the only way you _know how_ to interpret any reference to yourself or anything anyone might compare to your work. It doesn't mean you're a bad person. You just may not have the tools to draw out the best of other people’s creative skill. And then again, maybe you do, and I just caught you on two separate really bad days five years apart.
by sevensor | 2025-08-07 12:02:10+00:00
I must have been unclear. C is faster. The Python program would be faster if I reimplemented it in C. However, Python makes it so much easier to transform the problem into a linear form that it’s a bigger win to use Python than to continue maintaining the C version.

And that’s my point: raw execution speed is only helpful when you’re executing the right thing. Don’t discount how much easier it can be to implement the right thing in Python.
by zozbot234 | 2025-08-07 12:02:11+00:00
Prompt pre-processing (before the first token is output) is raw compute-bound. That's why it would be nice if we could direct llama.cpp/ollama to run that phase only on iGPU/NPU (for systems without a separate dGPU, obviously) and shift the whole thing over to CPU inference for the latter token-generation phase.

(A memory-bound workload like token gen wouldn't usually run into the CPU's thermal or power limits, so there would be little or no gain from offloading work to the iGPU/NPU in that phase.)
by pineaux | 2025-08-07 12:02:49+00:00
The poor dont necessarily get poorer. That is not a given in capitalism. But at some point capitalism will converge to feudalism, at that point, the poor will become slaves.

And if not needed, culled. For being "unproductive" or "unattractive" or generally "worthless".

That's my cynical take.

As long as the rich can be reigned in in a way, the poor will not necessarily become poorer.
by disgruntledphd2 | 2025-08-07 12:02:53+00:00
> By now, the main reason people expect AI progress to halt is cope. People say "AI progress is going to stop, any minute now, just you wait" because the alternative makes them very, very uncomfortable.

OK, so where is the new data going to come from? Fundamentally, LLMs work by doing token prediction when some token(s) are masked. This process (which doesn't require supervision hence why it scaled) seems to be fundamental to LLM improvement. And basically all of the AI companies have slurped up all of the text (and presumably all of the videos) on the internet. Where does the next order of magnitude increase in data come from?

More fundamentally, lots of the hype is about research/novel stuff which seems to me to be very, very difficult to get from a model that's trained to produce plausible text. Like, how does one expect to see improvements in biology (for example) based on text input and output.

Remember, these models don't appear to reason much like humans, they seem to do well where the training data is sufficient (interpolation) and do badly where there isn't enough data (extrapolation).

I'd love to understand how this is all supposed to change, but haven't really seen much useful evidence (i.e. papers and experiments) on this, just AI CEOs talking their book. Happy to be corrected if I'm wrong.
by hopelite | 2025-08-07 12:03:02+00:00
> The substance behind the “Rules” was scarcely new…

It reminds me of something my grandfather would say “You can tell people a lot of things… you just can’t tell them the truth!”

The introduction also explores this theme with the explanation of how it was only the “biting” nature of the satire he was aware would not persuade, but would outrage in different ways… possibly intentional ways.

I tell people this a lot, because especially regarding historical events, the actual start dates of those events far precede the recorded date that is usually associated with martial actions.

The American Revolution had its origins starting in 1730. The American “Civil War” had its origins starting in 1820. The dates of the starts of most historical events don’t just happen on that day. It’s always bothered me immensely, because it’s so myopic and rather stupid in many ways. The lead up to and the planning of anything is always the far more important part than the execution, and if you don’t know that, you will fail under anything but the most advantageous circumstances.
by XCSme | 2025-08-07 12:03:27+00:00
I doubt LLMs will lead to AGI.

Yes, it gets "smarter" each time, more accurate, but still lacks ANY creativity or actual thoughts/understanding. "You're completely right! Here, I fixed the code!" - proceeds to copy-paste the original code with the same bug.

LLMs will mostly replace: - search (find information/give people expert-level advice in a few seconds) - data processing (retrieval of information, listening and react to specific events, automatically transforming and forwarding of information) - interfaces (not entirely, but mostly augment them, sort of a better auto-complete and intention-detection). - most content ideation and creation (will not replace art, but if someone needs an ad, a business card, landing page, etc., the AI will do a good enough job). - finding errors in documents/code/security, etc.

All those use-cases are already possible today, AI will just make them more efficient.

It will be a LONG time until AI will know how to autonomously achieve the result you want and have the physical-world abilities to do so.

For AGI, the "general" part will be as broad as the training data. Also, now the AI listens too much to the human instruction and is crippled for (good) safety reasons. While we have all those limitations set, the "general intelligence" will still be limited, as it would be too dangerous to set zero limits and see where it goes (not because it's smart, but it's like letting a malware have access to the internet).
by bsindicatr3 | 2025-08-07 12:04:39+00:00
> Free codecs only came along … and it's hardly a robust strategy

Maybe you don’t remember the way that the gif format (there was no jpeg, png, or webp initially) had problems with licensing, and then years later having scares about it potentially becoming illegal to use gifs. Here’s a mention of some of the problems with Unisys, though I didn’t find info about these scares on Wikipedia’s GIF or Compuserve pages:

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-in-1994-the-company-wh...

Similarly, the awful history of digital content restriction technology in-general (DRM, etc.). I’m not against companies trying to protect assets, but data assets historically over all time are inherently prone to “use”, whether that use is intentional or unintentional by the one that provided the data. The problem has always been about the means of dissemination, not that the data itself needed to be encoded with a lock that anyone with the key or means to get/make one could unlock nor that it should need to call home, basically preventing the user from actually legitimately being able to use the data.
by djoldman | 2025-08-07 12:04:54+00:00
Relatedly with respect to passkeys, it seems we have the following tradeoff (simplified):

1. authentication via password: accounts stolen by criminals and then inaccessible to the user.

2. authentication via passkey: accounts lost by users because passkeys have friction, to say the least, when devices are lost/stolen/transferred.

It seems that big providers would much rather scenario 2.
by tux3 | 2025-08-07 12:04:58+00:00
Daala had some really good ideas, I only understand the coding tools at the level of a curious codec enthusiast, far from an expert, but it was really fascinating to follow its progress

Actually, are Xiph people still involved in AVM? It seems like it's being developed a little bit differently than AV1. I might have lost track a bit.
by zelphirkalt | 2025-08-07 12:05:30+00:00
One thing I disliked is black, the Python formatter, with its utterly naive rules, that treat all code the same. It required me to workaround in many places, like always using a trailing comma for any list or tuple, to keep the items on separate lines, instead of black fumbling around and putting them on the same line. It was utterly annoying. This made me very vary of "opinionated" (read: inflexible unconfigurable pieces of software) formatters. Hopefully Gleam's formatter isn't as stupid as black is.
by benterix | 2025-08-07 12:09:16+00:00
Well, to use the processor analogy, with models we reached the situations where the clocks can't do that much more. So the industry switched to multiplying cores etc. but you can actually see the slope plateauing. There are wild developments for the general public like the immediate availability of gpt-oss-120b that I'm running on my MBP right now, there is Claude Code that can work for weeks doing various stuff and being right half of the time, that's all great, but we can all see development of the SOTA models has slowed down and what we are seeing are very nice and useful incremental improvements, not great breakthroughs like we had 3-4 years ago.

(NB I'm a very rational person and based on my lifelong experience and on how many times life surprised me both negatively and positively, I'd say the chance of a great breakthrough occurring short term is 50%, but it has nothing to do or cannot be extrapolated from the current development as this can go any way actually. We already had multiple AI winters and I'm sure humanity will have dozens if not hundreds of them still.)
by hopelite | 2025-08-07 12:09:46+00:00
I will presume here, but in America “character” is not just a descriptive adjective, it is also an assumed qualitative adjective with a bias towards the positive. Having “character” is akin to a combination of that you are honorable, are principled, upstanding, and often implies a higher level learning or understanding and some refinement.

It is why it is believed to be “well-deserved” as it is a function of his behaviors, actions, and words.
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-08-07 12:09:57+00:00
I remember when in high school in Utah we went on a field trip to a halfway house, for some reason - it was during the time when scared straight was real popular so of course every kid should be scared straight whether they have juvenile offenses or not. It was some sort of law class I think.

Anyway they took us to look at the inmates in the halfway house who were behind bars and then they could come out to the bars and as their part of the whole scared straight exercise they would of course yell stuff at us, which was mainly about how they wanted to have sex with the approximately 16 year old girls on the trip.

Gosh, Utah sure is a morally upstanding place.
by al_borland | 2025-08-07 12:10:06+00:00
Isn’t clicking on a link in an email also problematic? It gets users in the habit of trusting links in emails. There is a history of those being used in bad ways as well.

I still don’t really understand what recovery looks like for a lost passkey… especially if I lose all of them. Not everything has a physical location where an identity can be validated, like a bank. Even my primary bank isn’t local. I’d have to drive about 6 hours to get to a branch office.
by satyrun | 2025-08-07 12:10:12+00:00
Many of the business models were good too but they had the timing wrong.

Petfoods.com IPO for about $300 million. $573 million adjusted for inflation.

Chewy is at a 14 billion market cap right now.

I think comparing LLMs and the dotcom bubble is just incredibly lazy and useless thinking. If anything , all previous bubbles show is what is not going to happen again.
by slightwinder | 2025-08-07 12:10:14+00:00
At this point, I'm not sure whether Google is just full of people trolling the world, or people so smart and unworldly that they are trolling themselves. The website for Jules has a section for plans, yet it's neither mention the price, nor which actual plan they are talking about or where I can find those f**ing plans, not even a link. This is just ridiculous. Has Google already replaced all their people with AI?
by skeledrew | 2025-08-07 12:10:45+00:00
> recognition, attribution, social media attention

Expectation of these in particular makes your blogging a product.

> with no human actually reading my words

But it - or at least the idea - is being ultimately read by humans, as long as some article is in the top results for relevance to some LLM prompts. It just may be summarized, or particular parts extracted first, or reworded for clarity (like I may ask for an "eli5" if I encounter something that's interesting but I find concepts going over my head), or otherwise preprocessed in order to fulfill the prompt parameters. All actions which the very human users may have to do manually anyway in order to efficiently consume your content (or give up and move on if they can't be bothered), is now automatically done by LLM agents.
by 7thaccount | 2025-08-07 12:10:57+00:00
Yes. I think some are pointing out that this crazy level of surveillance is at Orwellian levels. Why are kids even messaging each other on these platforms? I know books and paper is old school, but it does the job well. If they have to use some kind of internal system, then a racist joke could've led to a detention and parent/teacher talk. It didn't need to auto-flag law enforcement and traumatize the kid for life. Involuntary commitment at school sounds as unAmerican as it gets.
by netown | 2025-08-07 12:11:28+00:00
> the people who gain the most from all these tools are not the developers—it’s all the people around who don’t write code

this insight stood out the most to me. i def agree, but what's interesting is the disconnect with the industry--it seems to be accepted rn that if coding is what ai is best at, developers must be the only ones that care, and that seems to have shown up in usage as well (i don't think i've seen much use of ai outside of personal use other than by developers, maybe i'm wrong?)
by djoldman | 2025-08-07 12:11:34+00:00
> There’s a strange disconnect in the industry. On one hand, GitHub claims that 20 million users are on Copilot, and Sundar Pichai says that over 25% of the code at Google is now written by AI. On the other hand, independent studies show that AI actually makes experienced developers slower.

From the study[0]:

> 16 developers with moderate AI experience complete 246 tasks in mature projects on which they have an average of 5 years of prior experience.

This study continues to get a lot of airtime on HN and elsewhere. Folks probably should be skeptical of a study with the combination of a small number of subjects with a broad claim.

[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.09089
by rayiner | 2025-08-07 12:11:35+00:00
Fair point. But one difference is that Trump 1.0 was still full of globalist neocons while Trump 2.0 is full of true believers. There is follow-through this time. We now have the highest tariffs since 1910, which was inconceivable a decade ago.

The landscape has also changed. In 2018, Apple could wait out Trump hoping to get the Bush GOP back. That party is dead. It will still be corporate friendly, but not on immigration or trade. Big Ag couldn’t even get carved out of the immigration raids. The Clinton Democratic Party is dead too. What’s the odds that either Vance 2028 or AOC 2028 are going to let Apple off the hook on commitments?
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-07 12:11:48+00:00
gemini-cli is a command line tool that calls Gemini and shells out to common text utilities and MCP for tool use.

This appears to just be a plugin where you do things on GitHub, that sends out notifications to gemini-cli running on cloud, then gemini-cli responds and sends notifications back.

Basically just saving you the hassle of cloning at a specific commit, calling gemini-cli manually, and then uploading the result manually.
by jacobedawson | 2025-08-07 12:13:20+00:00
Without sidetracking with definitions, there's a strong case to make that developing AGI is a winner takes all event. You would have access to any number of tireless human level experts that you could put to work at improving the AGI system, likely leading to ASI in a short amount of time, with a lead of even a day growing exponentially.

Where that leaves the rest of us is uncertain, but in many worlds the idea of status or marketing won't be relevant.
by al_borland | 2025-08-07 12:14:38+00:00
It’s also confusing if I’m being promoted to use an existing passkey or if I’m being promoted to create a passkey.

Now that I’m so paranoid about this, and not remembering which sites I have them for, I always dismiss the passkey prompt, then have to click several more times to get to the password login and fill it in with my password manager.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-07 12:14:50+00:00
> Unfortunately they involved law enforcement. Thats where I see the problem

Eh, terminal violence was potentially threatened. Calling the cops seems fine if no teacher or administrator can vouch for the kid. (Particularly if, as is true in this case, the law requires “any threat of mass violence against a school to be reported immediately to law enforcement.”)

To the extent someone fucked up, it’s the cops who allegedly caused the 13-year old to be “interrogated, strip-searched and spent the night in a jail cell.”
by elzbardico | 2025-08-07 12:15:02+00:00
Losing facial fat will only make you look older if your skin has low elasticity and/or if you lose too much fat, too much fast. Also, it is very common for people that start eating dramatically less to also reduce their water intake too much and become dehydrated.

Besides ensuring you're getting sufficient water, there are a lot of dermatologic procedures that can help you to recover at least some of your skin elasticity. And in more dramatic cases, there's a plethora of options, from fillers to lifting procedures.
by baobun | 2025-08-07 12:15:28+00:00
Looks like the "embedded networking" and therefore all network-related syncing is tightly coupled to the closed SaaS running at https://sqlitecloud.io.

It would be cool if the server-side sync API was also documented and versioned, which would allow the possibility of independent compatible self-hostable backend implementations to offset the vendor-lock-in concern.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-08-07 12:15:47+00:00
I never said anything about Republicans using chemicals to create younger adults. It was about changing the age of consent. I was saying they are arguing for a lower age to be ok.

It seemed as if the argument was just around moving the age where childhood ends. Just re-contextualizing the argument.

Like the argument "well she looked older" so it is ok.

Kind of like middle eastern countries marry off girls at 11 or 12. That would be disgusting to the west. But if Trump does it, it seems like Republicans are happy enough to slide the scale and say "well 14 isn't that bad".

Since so many Republicans and Church officials get charged with having sex with kids, and there are so many arguments trying to justify it, and they continue to vote for and support these people, that I can say Republicans support pedophiles.
by Atreiden | 2025-08-07 12:16:01+00:00
This is utterly dystopian. We say some stupid things as kids, because they're just words and we're missing greater context at that age.

Immediately and automatically engaging law enforcement, and even the FBI, is horrific. Kids have always had greatly restricted freedoms in schools, but transcending the classroom and monitoring their digital lives is just training them to accept the surveillance state.
by netown | 2025-08-07 12:16:02+00:00
> GPT-5 will have "enhanced agentic capabilities” and can handle “complex coding tasks with minimal prompting.”

this seems to be directly targeted at anthropic/claude, wonder if it leads anywhere or if claude keeps it's mystical advantage (especially with new claude models coming out this week as well).

> GPT-5 will have four model variants, according to GitHub...

i also find it interesting that the primary model is the logic-focused one (likely very long and deep reasoning), whereas the conversational mainstream model is now a variant. seems like a fundamental shift in how they want these tools to be used, as opposed to today's primary 4o and the more logical GPT-4.1, o4-mini, and o3.
by tialaramex | 2025-08-07 12:16:32+00:00
I don't work in August, so I can't (well, won't) check, but my boss had the infrastructure team turn on FIDO2 for the mandatory 2FA on our administrative accounts and I do not remember having any problems with this.

I do remember explicitly telling them (because of course having agreed to do this they have no idea how and need our instructions) not to enable attestation because it's a bad idea, but you seem to be saying that it'll somehow be demanded (and then ignored) anyway and that was not my experience.

So, I guess what I'm saying here is: Are you really sure it's demanded and then ignored if you turn it off from the administrative controls? Because that was not my impression.
by grafmax | 2025-08-07 12:17:24+00:00
Quite a lot of factual inaccuracies here.

> He meant what we now call the middle class.

Capitalists according to Marx are those that own the means of production, not the middle class.

> larger land owners were mostly outside of cities, and were well on the way to inevitable bankruptcy

He saw them as a declining class that would eventually merge with the industrial bourgeoisie. He didn’t predict their inevitable bankruptcy.

> quite a few governments in his time were individuals or families, but he didn't see them as the enemy, kind of, but not as the "source" of the evil of capitalism

Again, inaccurate. His view is that the state is an apparatus of the capitalist class structured to protect its property and interests. The state and the uber-rich are the primary enemies of the working class, in his view.

> Soviets initially offered to make Tsar Nicolas II the leader of international socialism. Only when he kept refusing did he become the enemy.

Citation needed. Are you just fabricating things? The Bolsheviks ideology was based on the idea that there would be a proletarian revolution that would dismantle the old capitalist and aristocratic order, which the Tsar represented.

> that wasn't true communism" argument!

There are many different varieties of socialism and communism. In fact many societies long into pre-recorded history have been peaceful, leaderless and without money - communist. Yet it would be a mistake to call those societies Stalinist for example.

> get everyone to work and back each day on rocket powered trams. Seriously.

Soviet plans were never that fantastical. Fabrication.

> the godess Gaia is a Titan who massacred, and then ate people. Men, women, children. Especially children

Gaia isn’t typically represented that way. She is not a Titan but mother of the Titans. Maybe you are thinking of Kronos.
by m4rtink | 2025-08-07 12:18:05+00:00
I think this again shows an unhealthy fixation on planets. Sure, they are nice and big and if you are very lucky might be even habitable.

But given that you already have a massive mobile self sufficient workstation in space it would IMHO make much more sense to start with setting up some simple in space infrastructure first upon arrival & then using that to run a space to ground transport link. That should give you all the benefits of starting with a space based civilization in the new star system rather than stranding 2000 at potentially hostile planet with no means of support and space based assistance, battling for survival.

Well, unless you really like all those lost colony novels with low tech human societies existing on exotic planets that were not able to keep their tech level. ;-)