MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-22 02:30:37+00:00
I keep wondering whether people have actually examined how this work draws its conclusions before citing it.

This is science at its worst, where you start at an inflammatory conclusion and work backwards. There is nothing particularly novel presented here, especially not in the mathematics; obviously performance will degrade on out-of-distribution tasks (and will do so for humans under the same formulation), but the real question is how out-of-distribution a lot of tasks actually are if they can still be solved with CoT. Yes, if you restrict the dataset, then it will perform poorly. But humans already have a pretty large visual dataset to pull from, so what are we comparing to here? How do tiny language models trained on small amounts of data demonstrate fundamental limitations?

I'm eager to see more works showing the limitations of LLM reasoning, both at small and large scale, but this ain't it. Others have already supplied similar critiques, so let's please stop sharing this one around without the grain of salt.
Show HN: Filelock – AES-GCM file&folder encryption with hardware acceleration
by mrjam4516 | 2025-08-22 02:31:41+00:00
I built a desktop app for encrypting and decrypting files or directories using AES-GCM, with support for AES hardware instructions for better performance. It has a easy/straightforward GUI.

The motivation was lack of free/open source desktop tools offering both GCM mode and hardware acceleration out of the box.

Repo: https://github.com/constantin9845/File-lock-desktop

Would love feedback and suggestions for features and what you’d want in a desktop encryption tool.
by calmbonsai | 2025-08-22 02:31:43+00:00
Google needs deal this due to flights away from its cloud.

It can't compete with Azure for simple/coarse-grained services and AWS for complex/fine-grained services.

Atm, Google cloud is only good for cheap high-ram one-run-centric compute (AWS is cheaper for generic compute and reserved compute), simple container execution (Cloud Run), and ~100 TB bulk storage.
by SamvitJ | 2025-08-22 02:32:03+00:00
I'm far from being a fan of the company, but I think this article is substantially overstating the extent of the "freeze" just to drum up news. It sounds like what's actually happening is a re-org [1] - a consolidation of all the AI groups under the new Superintelligence umbrella, similar to Google merging Brain and DeepMind, with an emphasis on finding the existing AI staff roles within the new org.

From Meta itself: “All that’s happening here is some basic organisational planning: creating a solid structure for our new superintelligence efforts after bringing people on board and undertaking yearly budgeting and planning exercises.”

[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta-ai-hiring-freeze-fda6b3c4?s...
by throw0101c | 2025-08-22 02:32:16+00:00
The author of https://ofdollarsanddata.com/ has a new book that has a couple of chapters that go into this:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/the-wealth-ladder/

The research he cites finds that happiness starts levelling out at Levels 3-4 of his framework. Some of his posts on the subject:

* https://ofdollarsanddata.com/?s=happiness
by pveierland | 2025-08-22 02:32:37+00:00
Super fun to try a playable world model for the first time! I picked a random picture and got ChatGPT to write a game description, then could move within that world. Very laggy and buggy, but very fun to try!

Hackers screenshot + file system context = Ideal navigation

https://i.imgur.com/dBXdcd9.png
by zahlman | 2025-08-22 02:32:42+00:00
> Cultural Marxism is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory

No, it isn't. I've observed people to espouse it without any reference to Judaism whatsoever. (I don't care how Wikipedia tries to portray it, because I know from personal experience that this is not remotely a topic that Wikipedia can be trusted to cover impartially.)

> Greedy bankers is not a conspiracy theory

I didn't say it was. It is, however, commonly a dogwhistle, and even more commonly accused of being a dogwhistle. And people who claim that Jews are overrepresented in XYZ places of power very commonly do get called conspiracy theorists as a result, regardless of any other political positions they may hold.

> Terrorists targeting minorities very frequently use Cultural Marxism to justify their atrocities.

This is literally the first time in 10+ years of discussion of these sorts of "culture war" topics, and my awareness of the term "cultural Marxism", that I have seen this assertion. (But then, I suspect that I would also disagree with you in many ways about who merits the label of "terrorist", and about how that is determined.)

> honestly I fear you might be operating under some serious misinformation about the spread of anti-Semitism among the far-right.

There certainly exist far-rightists who say hateful things about Jews. But they're certainly not the same right-wingers who refuse to describe the actions of Israeli forces as "genocide". There is clearly and obviously not any such "spread"; right-wing sentiment on the conflict is more clearly on Israel's side than ever.

The rest of this is not worth engaging with. You are trying to sell me on an accounting of events that disagrees with my own observations and research, as well as a moral framework that I fundamentally reject.

I should elaborate there. It doesn't actually matter to me what you're trying to establish about the depth of these atrocities (even though I have many more disagreements with you on matters of fact). We have a situation where A accepts money from B, who has a business relationship with C, who demonstrably has said some things about X people that many would consider beyond the pale. Now let's make this hypothetical as bad as possible: let's suppose that every X person in existence has been brutally tortured and murdered under the direct oversight of D, following D's premeditated plans; let's further suppose that C has openly voiced support of D's actions. (Note here that in the actual case, D doesn't even exist.) In such a case, the value of X is completely irrelevant to how I feel about this. C is quite simply not responsible for D's actions, unless it can be established that D would not have acted but for C's encouragement. Meanwhile, A has done absolutely nothing wrong.
by lmm | 2025-08-22 02:33:02+00:00
> and as such it's an almost pitch-perfect example of exactly what's difficult with rust as a language. what this program does is trivial to describe and should have a commensurately simple implementation. but rust makes the programmer care about a dozen? dozens? of details that have no relevance to the problem domain at hand.

As the other comments have said, in other languages you face the same problems, those languages just won't help you handle them. Not all filenames are printable, but most languages don't help you deal with this. Almost all languages have some way that functions can fail and not return the kind of value you wanted - in Rust this is done by having a return type that shows it might return a different kind of value, in other languages this is done by having a novel concept of "exceptions" and you have to worry about whether every function is "exception safe", which is not actually simpler even if it looks like it at first glance. Etc.
by bix6 | 2025-08-22 02:33:09+00:00
”The modern labourer…becomes an appendage of the machine” Marx

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity” Einstein

“Our souls have become corrupted as our sciences and arts have advanced toward perfection” Rousseau

“We do not ride on the railroad; it rides on us” Thoreau

And on and on. Who said technology is good? The simple things in life are the best.
by wombatpm | 2025-08-22 02:34:38+00:00
Water used for nuclear reactor cooling can only be returned to the environment if its temperature is within 0.5 deg F of the local source temperature. I live near a facility that is on the river with several man made cooling lakes. During the winter, there is constant fog and ice by the roads. So much so, that the road to the facility itself has covered bridge crossing one of the lakes.

During drought, the capacity of the plant is reduced due to lack of cooling capacity.

And remember, the reactor is used to generate high pressure steam which produces electricity, hot water and low grade steam. Even with high efficiency gas turbines and heat integration, there is a significant amount of steam that needs to be condensed before it can be feed back into the reactor.
by davidcbc | 2025-08-22 02:34:44+00:00
The author explains why

> While we aren't obligated to in any way, I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.

If it's bad code from a person he'll help them get it fixed. If it's bad code from an AI why bother?
by dwd | 2025-08-22 02:34:48+00:00
Personally, I find they are more health-conscious and likely to do some sort of exercise.

They may not have had the free-roaming childhood of many Gen-Xers where you spent all day out riding bikes and playing ball games in the street, but they seem more aware of the risk of sitting at an office job through the day, and then sitting in front of the TV in the evening.
by octomind | 2025-08-22 02:36:08+00:00
It can be simultaneously true that human understanding is just a firing of neurons but that the architecture and function of those neural structures is vastly different than what an LLM is doing internally such that they are not really the same. Encourage you to read Apple’s recent paper on thinking models; I think it’s pretty clear that the way LLMs encode the world is drastically inferior to what the human brain does. I also believe that could be fixed with the right technical improvements, but it just isn’t the case today.
by lotyrin | 2025-08-22 02:37:42+00:00
It's my favorite thing about "Inside Job" conspiracies. Whether authority has covertly orchestrated an event behind the scenes or if they were quietly and deliberately lax in preventing the event, if they were just incompetent, or simply failed through no fault of their own: the event has now happened, so the important bit is that they have overtly capitalized on it to create policies with harmful consequences.
by austin-cheney | 2025-08-22 02:37:59+00:00
1. ChatGPT is just LLM.

2. Consider why these companies want AI to replace human developers. AI is expensive and error prone so it isn’t about money. It’s that company leaders don’t trust their developers. If developers cannot work outside a very narrow lane, like CRUD apps, or require colossal frameworks to just put text on screen then why bother having humans in the first place? AI can do this without lying about its self importance.

3. Consider what AI is currently capable of versus what people are wanting. That is a huge gap that answers your questions.

4. Finally, consider why AI output is not trusted and thus why its actual value, before expenses, is flat despite being so expensive and so desired. Numerically this is completely defeating.

If you looked at this subject only in terms of measurements it’s stupendously damning and makes you realize investment is an exercise of social behavior.
by muzani | 2025-08-22 02:39:58+00:00
It's only exponential because people extrapolate. This wasn't something the "insiders and VCs" promised - the Singularity was a concept from science fiction.

When you cut coding time by 80%, it doesn't mean things go 5x faster, it just means that the non-coding things now take up 80% of your time.

For big companies, the bottleneck was never productivity, it's sustainability. If McDonald's sold 3x as many burgers per customer, they'd need 3x the meat. Customers would get fat and lead to a negative feedback loop where they start eating elsewhere.

AI means some people can now send out thousands of resumes... but it also means companies are being flooded with resumes. People who are searching for jobs and candidates have a harder time; there's some form of pollution going on here.

Things that were exponential (startup growth) are going up a little more. The old standard was 7% growth/week, now it's closer to 10%. A big part of this is because we can release prototypes in a week rather than 3 months and $90k. Prototypes are not products, but they get feedback earlier and are more likely to hit survivability earlier.
by voidhorse | 2025-08-22 02:42:18+00:00
You should read some of the papers written in the 1940s and learn about the history of cybernetics. Your glowing perception of the "demon summoning" nature of ML might change a bit.

People want others to think this tech is mysterious. It's not. We've known the theory of these systems since the mid 1900s, we just didn't fully work out the resource arrangements to make them tractable until recently. Yes, there are some unknowns and the end product is a black box insofar as you cannot simply inspect source code, but this description of the situation is pure fantasy.
by bediger4000 | 2025-08-22 02:43:05+00:00
I think it's good that we as a nation found Trump to make these decisions, to decide winners and losers in the market, to set interest rates and so forth. Trump makes the decision, and it's done and good, no media frenzy, no court cases, no endless congressional hearings. Just a very few dispassionate, factual articles. The voting populace is happy, the Supreme Court is happy, job creating billionaires are happy. It would have been such a mess if Obama or Biden or even G.W. Bush made these decisions. They'd have made wrong decisions, and we'd be unhappy.
by jruohonen | 2025-08-22 02:44:38+00:00
So there is this sentence:

> Check out the full thread and the quote-posts, and you can see I found more such troubling AI-generated ‘definitions’, even embedded via hyperlinks in scientific articles on ScienceDirect.

I warned about this not so long ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274487

Plenty more are coming soon, I suppose, and it will be interesting to see what the effect will be upon Elsevier's brand.
by jmpman | 2025-08-22 02:45:47+00:00
I despise these wheels. About 15 years ago, my wife and I went to Target and first went to lunch at the far end of the parking lot. After lunch we headed into the store, grabbed a cart, now loaded with our newborn in his car seat, and our two year old sitting in the cart. A quick shopping trip later, we headed back to the car. When crossing the Target parking lot, the wheels locked up, in the middle of the road. Cart wouldn’t budge. Traffic all over the place, and now I have to pull both my children out, along with the shopping, and carry them all to my car. Pissed is an understatement. After my wife and kids were secured back in the car, I retuned to Target, complaining to the manager. A shrug was the best I received. Why did they need to put the wire in the middle of the road???

I hope someone attaches Bluetooth speakers to their shoes and locks every cart in target, so they have to remove the system.
by freetime2 | 2025-08-22 02:46:13+00:00
I highly recommend watching this debate (I use the term very loosely here) between Weinstein and Sean Carroll - and particularly this exchange about 37 minutes in: https://youtu.be/5m7LnLgvMnM?&t=2269

Carroll basically reads off two sections from Weinstein's paper [1] and points out that the reason the physics community isn't paying attention to it is because it's not a serious paper worthy of most working physicists' time. In fact, Weinstein even goes out of his way to actively discourage rigorous consideration of his paper:

On the first page:

> The Author is not a physicist and is no longer an active academician, but is an Entertainer and host of The Portal podcast. This work of entertainment is a draft of work in progress which is the property of the author and thus may not be built upon, renamed, or profited from without express permission of the author.

And again on the "Notes on the present draft document" section:

> As such this document is an attempt to begin recovering a rather more complete theory which is at this point only partially remembered and stiched together from old computer files, notebooks, recordings and the like dating back as far as 1983-4 when the author began the present line of investigation. This is the first time the author has attempted to assemble the major components of the story and has discovered in the process how much variation there has been across matters of notation, convention, and methodology. Every effort has been made to standardize notation but what you are reading is stitched together from entirely heterogeneous sources and inaccuracies and discrepancies are regularly encountered as well as missing components when old work is located.

> The author notes many academicians find this unprofessional and therefore irritating. This is quite literally unprofessional as the author is not employed within the profession and has not worked professionally on such material since the fall of 1994. If you find this disagreeable, please feel free to take your professional assumptions elsewhere. This document comes from a context totally different from the world of grants, citations, research metrics, lectures, awards and positions. In fact, the author claims that if there is any merit to be found here, it is unlikely that it could be worked out in such a context due to the author’s direct experience of the political economy of modern academic research. This work stands apart from that context and does so proudly, intentionally, and without apology.

And then upon having these sections from his own paper read out loud to him, Weinstein says "how dare you" and basically flies off the handle resorting to personal attacks on Carroll. It's absolutely wild. I am not qualified to assess Geometric Unity or theories of everything, but it is clear from this exchange that Weinstein is a grifter with delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex.

[1] https://saismaran.org/geometricunity.pdf
by jibal | 2025-08-22 02:46:15+00:00
P.S. Note that "self reported happiness levels, mental health medication prescription rates, suicide rates at all ages, number of self reported close relationships, birth rates" lists 5 measures, only 2 of which are self reported. And how else could they be measured? The point is that the evidence shows that happiness levels have declined. Talk about "your opinion" is ... ironic.
by danpalmer | 2025-08-22 02:46:31+00:00
> For the past 15 years, mobile has been the main revenue source for Facebook. As big as Facebook is, they're at the mercy of the 2 competitors

Before mobile was this big, Facebook tried their own platform and bottled it. This was during the period that the market was still diverse, with Windows phones, Blackberries, etc.

They also tried to make mobile web a thing for a few years past when it was obvious that native apps were the way forward.
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-22 02:47:19+00:00
"Letting the terrorists win" is an expression from not long after 9/11 using a combination of the following logic. First, the Bush administration said something along the lines of "they hate us for our freedom" about the 9/11 terrorists, and if the terrorists hate freedom then enacting freedom-reducing policies in response to an act of terrorism is playing into their hands. Second, a common definition of terrorism is using fear to achieve political ends, so anyone who uses an act of violence to justify oppressive policies is sadistically taking political advantage of a tragedy at best and even meets that definition of a terrorist. Therefore enacting oppressive policies in response to an act of terrorism is letting the terrorists win.
by hombre_fatal | 2025-08-22 02:48:28+00:00
I see two things here.

1. The world has fundamentally changed due to LLMs. You don't know where a code submission falls between "written thoroughly with eternal vigilance" vs "completely vibe-coded" since it's now trivially to generate the later. There's no going back. And a lot of comments here seem stuck on this point.

2. The maintainer naively or stubbornly imagines that he can get everyone to pre-sort their code between the two buckets through self-reporting.

But that's futile.

It's like asking someone if they're a good person on a date because you don't want to waste your time with bad people. Unfortunately, that shortcut doesn't exist.

Now, maybe going forward we will be forced to come up with real solutions to the general problem of vetting people. But TFA feels like more of a stunt than a serious pitch.
by kjellsbells | 2025-08-22 02:49:39+00:00
> Meta has a massive corpus of posts, comments, interactions, etc to train AI

I question whether the corpus is of particularly high quality and therefore valuable source data to train on.

On the one hand: 20+ years of posts. In hundreds of languages (very useful to counteract the extreme English-centricity of most AI today).

On the other hand: 15+ years of those posts are clustered on a tiny number of topics, like politics and selling marketplace items. Not very useful unless you are building RagebaitAI I suppose. Reddit's data would seem to be far more valuable on that basis.
by akoboldfrying | 2025-08-22 02:49:54+00:00
That may have been done in the underlying paper by Mitzenmacher et al., but I haven't checked.

I'm more confident that that paper established that firing n requests at n servers will result in a max server load proportional to log(log(n)) with high probability, vs. proportional to log(n) for random -- IOW an exponential improvement in max server load over random.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-22 02:50:20+00:00
The media was saying nfts are a reasonable investment and web3 is the future, so I am not sure if they have any remaining credibility.

We are at the awesome moment in history when the AI bubble is popping so I am looking forward to a lot of journalists eating their words (not that anybody is keeping track but they are wrong most of the time) and a lot of LLM companies going under and the domino crash of the stocks of Meta, OpenAI to AWS, Google and Microsoft to Softbank (the same guys giving money to Adam Neumann from WeWork).
by jrm4 | 2025-08-22 02:50:33+00:00
It's very odd, I was looking around and none of the guides really clearly explain it, but basically, there are "Pages" (files) and "Blocks." Every page is itself a "Block," but may also contain multiple more blocks as an outline hierarchy. But what logseq seems to do differently is to let you zero in on a single block so that the block is all you see, despite ACTUALLY being merely part of a page.
by ares623 | 2025-08-22 02:51:38+00:00
I get trying and improving until you get it right. But I just can't make the bridge in my head around

1. this is magic and will one-shot your questions 2. but if it goes wrong, keep trying until it works

Plus, knowing it's all probabilistic, how do you know, without knowing ahead of time already, that the result is correct? Is that not the classic halting problem?
by therobots927 | 2025-08-22 02:52:35+00:00
The fact that the author is a data scientist at Anthropic should start ringing alarm bells for anyone paying attention. Isn’t Claude supposed to be at the front of the pack? To be honest I have a suspicion that Claude wrote the lions share of this essay. It’s that incomprehensible and soaked in jargon and formulas used completely out of context and incorrectly.