MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by aeontech | 2025-08-07 22:26:02+00:00
Oh, I just realized I am guilty of the drive-by-free-association comment without actually saying anything about the subject of the post - sorry!

Very cool to see a team use Jepsen for super early pre-release testing of the system.

I wonder if you wish you had waited for the runtime to be a bit more stable, or you feel this was already well worth the effort, even with some of the identified failures being in "known incomplete" areas? (I could see either side of the argument - waiting longer might give you more valuable failures, but testing early gives you a chance to catch problems before they become baked into the foundation and become more difficult to fix...)

Another tool that feels like sci-fi to me any time I hear a mention of it, is Antithesis [1] - written by the people who built FoundationDB. Could be another interesting integration to investigate in the future to help bulletproof the language runtime?

[1]: https://antithesis.com
by nullc | 2025-08-07 22:26:10+00:00
Incentives in academia as things are is ... uh. Not so awesome.

My expectation from experience when implementing something from a DSP paper is that the result will be unreproducable without contacting the authors for some undisclosed table of magic constants. After obtaining it, the results may match but only for the test images they reported results on. Results on anything else will be much worse.

Also it's normal for techniques from the literature to have computational/memory bandwidth costs two orders of magnitude greater than justified for even their (usually exaggerated) stated levels of performance.

And then their comparison points are almost always inevitably implemented so naively as to make the comparison useless.

It's always difficult because improvements in this domain (like many other engineering domains) are significantly about tradeoffs ... and tradeoffs are difficult to weigh in a pure research environment without the context of concrete applications. They're also difficult to weigh with implementation cleverness having such a big impact particularly since industry heavily drains academia of naturally skilled software engineers.

And as other comments have pointed out, academia is in some sense among the worst of the patent abusers. They'll often develop technology just far enough to lay patent mines around the field, but not far enough to produce something useful out of it. The risk that you spend the significant effort to turn a concept into something usable only to have some patent holder show up with a decade old patent to shake you down is a big incentive against investment.
by jona777than | 2025-08-07 22:26:56+00:00
You have seemed to pinpoint where I believe a lot of opportunity lies during this era (however long it lasts.) Custom integration of these models into specific workflows of existing companies can make a significant difference in what’s possible for said companies, the smaller more local ones especially. If people can leverage even a small percentage of what these models are capable of, that may be all they need for their use case. In that case, they wouldn’t even need to learn to use these tools, but (much like electricity) they will just plug in or flip on the switch and be in business (no pun intended.)
by morleytj | 2025-08-07 22:26:56+00:00
I suppose what I'm getting at is that if there are performance increases on a steady pace, but the investment needed to get those performance increases is on a much faster growth rate, it's not really a fair comparison in terms of a rate of progress, and could suggest diminishing returns from a particular approach. I don't really have the actual data to make a claim either way though,I think anyone would need more data to do so than is publicly accessible.

But I do think the fact that we can publicly observe this reallocation of resources and emphasized aspects of the models gives us a bit of insight into what could be happening behind the scenes if we think about the reasons why those shifts could have happened, I guess.
Show HN: A radial and a not-so-radial menu for macOS [video]
by segev_s | 2025-08-07 22:27:02+00:00
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https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dory-app-switcher/id6746273626...
by ivape | 2025-08-07 22:27:27+00:00
Two years ago Elon actually sounded a warning about Dojo. I recall him mentioning this in an earnings call:

“And we’re pursuing the dual path of Nvidia and Dojo. But I would think of Dojo as a long shot. It’s a long shot worth taking because the payoff is potentially very high. But it’s not something that is a high probability. It’s not like a sure thing at all. It’s a high‑risk, high‑payoff program. Dojo is working, and it is doing training jobs, and we are scaling it up, and we have plans for Dojo 1.5, Dojo 2, Dojo 3, and whatnot. So I think it’s got potential, but I can’t emphasize enough: high risk, high payoff.”

https://thetranscript.net/transcript/5550/tesla-q4-2023-earn...

In other words, he admitted it’s a long shot to replace Nvidia with their own chip awhile ago. It’s interesting because Google hasn’t given up on their TPUs, but Elon being a hardware guy mostly, has.
by frozenseven | 2025-08-07 22:27:39+00:00
>is talked to death by zitron

Yes, Zitron talks all the time. Loudly and insultingly. Here's a suggestion: he should put his money where his mouth is. If he honestly thinks the market for AI is actually 100x smaller than reported and ready to collapse any moment now, he could easily bet against the market. He could earn millions and look like a genius. Make it all public, let his fans join too. You could join. Why not? He supposedly knows the hard truths, he brought the receipts, etc.

But he won't. That's too real. Endlessly prophesying the end of AI is more lucrative.

>You can't just "no" this.

Fundamentally my argument is that the media has little say in this. Take all the new releases this week. Another ~200 million new users will shuffle their way in. Not through fear or fervor, just basic curiosity and a need for getting things done. Models will continue to get better and this trend will continue. It's just how it is.

>I didn't say that and I don't think that. That last paragraph's basically bait.

In any case, I'll leave the Sam Altman discussion to you and Ed.
by tamimio | 2025-08-07 22:27:48+00:00
Cool, I was planning to get a spare car key, not anymore!

Also, glad I have one before they would ban it. It’s a neat tool that I have everything I want there, instead of having 4 fobs, one garage remote, plenty of IR remotes, it’s AIO. Plus I don’t have to pay fees to replace my lost fobs
by godelski | 2025-08-07 22:28:04+00:00
But how would you verify? Are you constantly asking questions you already know the answers to? In depth answers?

Often the hallucinations I see are subtle, though usually critical. I see it when generating code, doing my testing, or even just writing. There are hallucinations in today's announcements, such as the airfoil example[0]. An example of more obvious hallucinations is I was asking for help improving writing an abstract for a paper. I gave it my draft and it inserted new numbers and metrics that weren't there. I tried again providing my whole paper. I tried again making explicit to not add new numbers. I tried the whole process again in new sessions and in private sessions. Claude did better than GPT 4 and o3 but none would do it without follow-ups and a few iterations.

Honestly I'm curious what you use them for where you don't see hallucinations

[0] which is a subtle but famous misconception. One that you'll even see in textbooks. Hallucination probably caused by Bernoulli being in the prompt
by criddell | 2025-08-07 22:28:10+00:00
There are some thresholds where I think it would be obvious that a machine has.

Put the AI in a robot body and if you can interact with it the same way you would interact with a person (ie you can teach it to make your bed, to pull weeds in the garden, to drive your car, etc…) and it can take what you teach it and continually build on that knowledge, then the AI is likely an instance of AGI.
by giantg2 | 2025-08-07 22:28:15+00:00
And what does that access mean? How many of the weapons used in school shootings would have been banned? They've done studies on the effectiveness of the ban and showed no real effect over that decade, but speculated that there could have been an effect if it went on longer. The other issue is that the ban was largely cosmetic and could easily be avoided by not including certain features that have limited utility in most domestic shootings anyways (launcher lug, flash hider, etc) as evidenced by continued AR-15 post-ban model production. So to me, the claim that there is more accessibility doesn't provide any evidence of causality.
by cherryteastain | 2025-08-07 22:29:02+00:00
> I'd argue that, for software companies, not very much

If you build any successful business, including a software business, in a lawless and corrupt country you will have local mafias try to extort you for money the moment they hear about it. In especially corrupt countries, corrupt cops/prosecutors etc will be in on it so there will be nothing to protect you. Blackouts will be common due to a poor power grid. Likewise, internet access will be unreliable, slow and expensive due to poor infrastructure.

A country like Germany is absolute godsend compared to, say, Nigeria or Cambodia.
by crazylogger | 2025-08-07 22:29:23+00:00
I wouldn’t worry about job safety when we have such utopian vision as the elimination of all human labor in our sight.

Not only will AI run the company, it will run the world. Remember: a product/service only costs money because somewhere down the assembly line or in some office, there are human workers who need to feed their family. If AI can help gradually reduce human involvement to 0, with good market competition (AI can help with this too - if AI can be capable CEOs, starting your business will be insanely easy,) and we’ll get near absolute abundance. Then humanity will be basically printing any product & service on demand at 0 cost like how we print money today.

I wouldn’t even worry about unequal distribution of wealth, because with absolute abundance, any piece of the pie is an infinitely large pie. Still think the world isn’t perfect in that future? Just one prompt, and the robot army will do whatever it takes to fix it for you.
by sneak | 2025-08-07 22:30:44+00:00
Entire countries have ceded their b2b and b2c communications channels to WhatsApp.

End users don't give any thoughts to privacy, generally speaking. Either they've "nothing to hide", or they have given up due to an overwhelming sense of helplessness and loss of agency on the matter.

It's not even a decision anymore. They just type their phone number (aka permanent tracking unique identifier) into the new app and smash "agree".
by lisperforlife | 2025-08-07 22:31:43+00:00
I don't think models are fundamentally getting better. What is happening is that we are increasing the training set, so when users use it, they are essentially testing on the training set and find that it fits their data and expectations really well. However, the moat is primarily the training data, and that is very hard to protect as the same data can be synthesized with these models. There is more innovation surrounding serving strategies and infrastructure than in the fundamental model architectures.
by tamimio | 2025-08-07 22:32:03+00:00
Car manufacturers are like automation/control manufacturers; they existed before cybersecurity and never caught up to the pace. If you ever audited any SCADA system, you will see nightmares. For cars, some new models of popular brands (not specifying any), you can access the CANbus from the headlight where you can reprogram the ECM to your new key. It's that simple to "own" a modern car.
by clolege | 2025-08-07 22:32:14+00:00
> There is no intent

I'm not an ML engineer - is there an accepted definition of "intent" that you're using here? To me, it seems as though these GPT models show something akin to intent, even if it's just their chain of thought about how they will go about answering a question.

> nor is there a mechanism for intent

Does there have to be a dedicated mechanism for intent for it to exist? I don't see how one could conclusively say that it can't be an emergent trait.

> They don't do long term planning nor do they alter themselves due to things they go through during inference.

I don't understand why either of these would be required. These models do some amount of short-to-medium term planning even it is in the context of their responses, no?

To be clear, I don't think the current-gen models are at a level to intentionally deceive without being instructed to. But I could see us getting there within my lifetime.
by nielsbot | 2025-08-07 22:32:39+00:00
Your comment is all paranoia and tired Habara tropes.

> Your demand is nothing short of the end of Israel

Israel as an apartheid state.

> you're asking millions of people to live under constant physcial threat

And yes that's exactly what Israel (with US support) has done to Gaza and the West Bank.

> the end of self-determination of a large population that cannot even run away

This is not a request for Israelis to run away or leave.

> to say nothing of the cost

Sure, fall back to "practical issues"

> On top of that, the muslims of the middle east have been eradicating minorities, and a lot of them, since the end of WW1

Smear an entire religion now. Also, "we can commit war crimes and steal land because they would do that same". Fear not based in reality.

> become a minority without self determination is nothing short of asking them to die

Sorry but being a minority in a democracy is not a death sentence. That's absolute racist hysteria.

> Palestine, if truly left to itself, would face immediate economic collapse

They must be subject to occupation, control, starvation and murderous war crimes because they'd be poor on their own! Never mind that the reason for Gaza's poverty is the Israeli embargo. Nothing gets in our out of Gaza without Israel's permission.

We haven't even started on the cruelty and dispossession happening illegally, with the government's support, in the West Bank.
by throwaway_2898 | 2025-08-07 22:33:37+00:00
TBH Claude Code max pro's performance on coding has been abhorrent(bad at best). The core of the issue is that the plan produced will more often than not use humans as verifiers(correctness, optimality and quality control). This is a fundamentally bad way to build systems that need to figure out if their plan will work correctly, because an AI system needs to test many plans quickly in a principled manner(it should be optimal and cost efficient).

So you might get that initial MvP out the door quickly, but when the complexity grows even just a little bit, you will be forced to stop and look at the plan and try to get it to develop it saying things like: "use Design agent to ultrathink about the dependencies of the current code change on other APIs and use TDD agent to make sure tests are correct in accordance with the requirements I stated" and then one finds that even the all the thinking there are bugs that you will have to fix.

Source: I just tried max pro on two client python projects and it was horrible after week 2.
by hypercube33 | 2025-08-07 22:34:15+00:00
Many many years ago a buddy of mine loved listening to the scanners.

One evening we are on AIM chatting and he explains what is going on: noise complaint at a house down the block (kids partying)

He looks the address up and calls them to warn them and sits back to see if they do anything.

sounds like they managed to bail before anyone showed up to the address.
by kmacdough | 2025-08-07 22:34:36+00:00
What does AGI mean to you, specifically?

As is, AI is quite intelligent, in that it can process large quantities of diverse unstructured information and build meaningful insights. And that intelligence applies across an incredibly broad set of problems and contexts. Enough that I have a hard time not calling it general. Sure, it has major flaws that are obvious to us and it's much worse at many things we care about. But that's doesn't make it not intelligent or general. If we want to set human intelligence as the baseline, we already have a word for that: superintelligence.
by Seanambers | 2025-08-07 22:34:47+00:00
Trumps Playbook will actually work, so MAGA will get results.

Tariffs will force productivity and salaries higher (and prices), then automation which is the main driver of productivity will kick in which lowers prices of goods again.

Globalisation was basically the west standing still and waiting for the rest to catch up - the last to industrialise will always have the best productivity and industrial base. It was always stupid, but it lifted billions out of poverty so there's that.

The effects will take way longer than the 3 years he has left, so he has oversold the effectiveness of it all.

This is all assuming AGI isn't around the corner, the VLAs, VLM, LLM and other models opens up automation on a whole new scale.

For any competent person with agency and a dream, this could be a true golden age - most things are within reach which before was locked down behind hundreds or thousand of hours of training and work to master.
by Uehreka | 2025-08-07 22:36:19+00:00
If it ever leaked that OpenAI was training on the vast amounts of confidential data being sent to them, they’d be immediately crushed under a mountain of litigation and probably have to shut down. Lots of people at big companies have accounts, and the bigcos are only letting them use them because of that “Don’t train on my data” checkbox. Not all of those accounts are necessarily tied to company emails either, so it’s not like OpenAI can discriminate.
by m463 | 2025-08-07 22:36:22+00:00
This all reminds me of this really interesting book "The Inevitable" by kevin kelly.

It had a fascinating look into the future, and in this case one insight in particular.

It basically said that in the future, answers would be cheap and plentiful, and questions would be valuable.

With AI I think this will become more true every day.

Maybe AI can answer anything, but won't we still need people to ask the right questions?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitable_(book)
by thewebguyd | 2025-08-07 22:37:17+00:00
> There are too many WebGL effects on startup websites that were built to run on a M4 Max.

Tale as old as time. When the retina display macs first came out, we say web design suddenly no longer optimized for 1080p or less displays (and at the time, 1376x768 was the default resolution for windows laptops).

As much suffering as it'd be, I swear we'd end up with better software if we stopped giving devs top of the line machines and just issued whatever budget laptop is on sale at the local best buy on any given day.
by aphyr | 2025-08-07 22:37:33+00:00
Author here--from discussions with Capela's team, I think this sort of early testing can be remarkably helpful, because it offers a test suite that Capela's team can check their work against as they move forward.

I would suggest against this kind of integration test when the data model or API are in constant flux, because then you have to re-write or even re-design the test as the API changes. Small changes--adding fields or features, changing HTTP paths or renaming fields--are generally easy to keep up with, but if there were, say, a redesign that removed core operations, or changed the fundamental semantics, it might require extensive changes to the test suite.
by jacob_a_dev | 2025-08-07 22:37:44+00:00
1. Attract software companies

While minimal infrastructure investments would need to be made to entice software companies, their is a political price to pay by allowing young business people into your country who likely will out-earn the average resident (many historical examples of this). This makes the majority of people unhappy, but brings in educated-non-criminal customers and tax dollars. Lets say Germany does (1) great, they attract 1000 smart europeans to found companies, and 10 years later 1 of those companies becomes a megacorp.

2. Keep software companies happy

10 years has passed, new politicians are in charge. Pursuing #1 is a separate strategy to #2. I would hope i live in a country that wants to (1) attract young talent and (2) keep talent happy, but of course thats not necessarily true. The new politicians in charge need to appease the majority of people again as its election season!

I think Germany / USA can't really have an honest conversation about this as Germany + USA already have highly progressive tax systems. A significant % of USA and Germany residents don't pay any reasonable amount of tax, and are drains on the tax system. I assume these %s are likely projected to grow in the future rather than decline.

If the price of bread happens to rise? Then our politicians and voters will support squeezing more tax out of productive sects of society for the short term gains. Then those productive and mobile members of society will slowly move elsewhere.
by maerF0x0 | 2025-08-07 22:38:20+00:00
> “They’re generating unprecedented amounts of free cash flow,” Cembalest told me. “They make oodles and oodles of money, which is why they can afford to be pouring hundreds of billions of dollars of capital spending each year into AI-related R&D and infrastructure.”

IMO this should be a trigger for investors that they have not been receiving their profits, and instead the profits are being dumped into CEOs next big bets that will fuel their stockbased compensation gains. Also to blame is the government's culpability here for creating both tax incentives and a lack of laws that say profits must be returned as dividends (they can always be DRIP'd back into the company as new shares if desired, it's absurd to say its better for investors, when the alternative actually gives more choice).
by mceachen | 2025-08-07 22:38:28+00:00
On a desktop browser, tap YouTube's "show transcript" and "hide timecodes", then copy-paste the whole transcript into Claude or chatgpt and tell it to summarize with whatever resolution you want-a couple sentences, 400 lines, whatever. You can also tell it to focus on certain subject material.

This is a complete game changer for staying on top of what's being covered by local government meetings. Our local bureaucrats are astounding competent at talking about absolutely nothing for 95% of the time, but hidden is three minutes of "oh btw we're planning on paving over the local open space preserve to provide parking for the local business".
by mmcconnell1618 | 2025-08-07 22:38:36+00:00
Self-learning opens new training opportunities but not at the scale or speed of current training. The world only operates at 1x speed. Today's models have been trained on written and visual content created by billions of humans over thousands of years.

You can only experience the world in one place in real time. Even if you networked a bunch of "experiencers" together to gather real time data from many places at the same time, you would need a way to learn and train on that data in real time that could incorporate all the simultaneous inputs. I don't see that capability happening anytime soon.