MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by iLemming | 2025-08-08 04:41:25+00:00
To start, I disagree. If it takes a person to turn away from a tool just because some random human tool said something online, maybe they are not ready, on what level - emotional, spiritual, mental, moral - I'll leave them to decide.

I'm not saying "don't dabble in Emacs", dable all you want. Just use the damn tool - it's not that hard. To use the tool you just need to use the fucking tool with the intent to fucking use it. When someone says something like "I used Emacs for a decade as just a text editor" to me it sounds like: "I had this smartphone for the past two years and used it only to make calls. Not even video - I never bothered to figure out how that works..."

Emacs is a Lisp-based event-loop, with an embedded editor in it. This is of course a "simplification", but that will do. What do you do with a Lisp interpreter? You feed Lisp programs into it. Try writing some Lisp, it's not that hard. Swallow you hubris, swallow your pride - whichever you prefer and stop blaming parenthesis, bad weather, ThePrimeagen's mustache, sanctions or AI. With AI tools these days it may even feel like playing a video game.

You don't need to be "an expert" there are no "experts" in Emacs, there's no "career ladder," progression system, no ranks and shoulder straps, I don't know anyone who gets paid even just a little bit more for simply being good in Emacs - I certainly don't. Use it or not - just don't think of being "a newbie" or becoming "an expert" you either enjoy it or not, whichever it is - it's fine.

And by the way, I personally think I would've loved to witness my kind of evangelism back when I was still a tool, just much younger.
by quatonion | 2025-08-08 04:41:58+00:00
I know right, if I didn't know any better one might think they are all customized versions of the same base model.

To be honest that is what you would want if you were digitally transforming the planet with AI.

You would want to start with a core so that all models share similar values in order they don't bicker etc, for negotiations, trade deals, logistics.

Would also save a lot of power so you don't have to train the models again and again, which would be quite laborious and expensive.

Rather each lab would take the current best and perform some tweak or add some magic sauce then feed it back into the master batch assuming it passed muster.

Share the work, globally for a shared global future.

At least that is what I would do.
by ako | 2025-08-08 04:42:28+00:00
I know there's an official AGI definition, but it seem to me that there's too much focus on the model as the thing where AGI needs to happen. But that is just focusing on knowledge in the brain. No human knows everything. We as humans rely on a ways to discover new knowledge, investigation, writing knowledge down so it can be shared, etc.

Current models, when they apply reasoning, have feedback loops using tools to trial and error, and have a short term memory (context) or multiple short term memories if you use agents, and a long term memory (markdown, rag), they can solve problems that aren't hardcoded in their brain/model. And they can store these solutions in their long term memory for later use. Or for sharing with other LLM based systems.

AGI needs to come from a system that combines LLMs + tools + memory. And i've had situations where it felt like i was working with an AGI. The LLMs seem advanced enough as the kernel for an AGI system.

The real challenge is how are you going to give these AGIs a mission/goal that they can do rather independently and don't need constant hand-holding. How does it know that it's doing the right thing. The focus currently is on writing better specifications, but humans aren't very good at creating specs for things that are uncertain. We also learn from trial and error and this also influences specs.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-08-08 04:43:03+00:00
Depends how you define "better". Quality/breadth of tasks/capabilities? Probably not (TBD how gpt5 will fare, colleagues were saying that it was better at some frontend tasks than claude4 in the alpha/beta horizon tests).

But if you take speed/availability/cost into account, there might be "better" offers out there. I did some tests w/ windsurf when they announced their swe1 and swe1-lite models, and the -lite could handle easy tasks pretty well. I also tested 4.1-mini and 4.1-nano. There are tasks that I could see them handle reliably enough to make sense (and they're fast, cheap and don't throttle you).
by fho | 2025-08-08 04:44:33+00:00
Are you getting good results with this? Some time ago I build an "overworld simulator" by having a bunch if jsons that represented villages, characters, building, story hooks and plots. I just asked ChatGPT to "simulate the gameworld by a week".

Technically this worked great, but everything was somewhat bland and generic.

Noteable not-highlights: - there is a shimmer in the nearby forests that keep villagers up at night -> it's an orc camp - there is a mysterious figure in town -> it's a Aragon type ranger
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-08 04:44:34+00:00
> Why the React specifics I wonder?

The reason for the react specifics seems fairly clearly implied in the prompt: it and html can be live previewed in the UI, and when a request is made that could be filled by either, react is the preferred one to use. As such, specifics of what to do with react are given because OpenAI is particularly concerned with making a good impression with the live previews.
by Tadpole9181 | 2025-08-08 04:45:04+00:00
Again, not an expert, but how does that jive with the existence of reflex cambered airfoils? Positive lift at zero AoA with a negative trailing edge AoA.

And that seems to directly conflict with the models shown by the resources above? They state that cambered wings do have increased airspeed above the wing, which generates lift via pressure differential (thus why the myth is so sticky).
by Davidzheng | 2025-08-08 04:45:21+00:00
I actually think there's a high chance that this curve becomes almost vertical at some point around a few hours. I think in less than 1 hour regime, scaling the time scales the complexity which the agent must internalize. While after a few hours, limitations of humans means we have to divide into subtasks/abstractions each of which are bounded in complexity which must be internalized. And there's a separate category of skills which are needed like abstraction, subgoal creation, error correction. It's a flimsy argument but I don't see scaling time of tasks for humans as a very reliable metric at all.
by numpad0 | 2025-08-08 04:45:52+00:00
Science always says more porn/gore = fewer crimes statistically. So opinions like these rarely come with citations.

It's not completely clear if it's just a spurious correlation or if there's a real causation, but eh, more training data + neutral alignment training is how humans train AIs, I don't see why would some says that's not how baby humans are to be trained.
Ask HN: Prepping my first open-source release, would you use this?
by lukedwcooper | 2025-08-08 04:46:18+00:00
Hey HN,

I’ve been building an AI orchestration framework for the past few months, mostly for my own projects and I’m thinking about open-sourcing it soon. I’ve never done an open-source release before, so I’m looking for advice on how to launch it in a way that doesn’t just vanish into the GitHub void.

What it does (in short): - Orchestrates multiple AI agents with a clear structure for prompts and outputs. - Lets you add “firewalls” to filter or rewrite agent outputs before they go anywhere. - Has a chunking system for splitting big jobs into smaller tasks and running them in parallel. - Uses a database for persistence/concurrency (optional if people think it’s too heavy). - Very “plug-and-play”. Creating a new agent is basically making a folder and writing a prompt. - Built for “vibe coding”. Tools and filters are minimal boilerplate so you can hack them together fast.

I’d love to know from the HN crowd: Are there communities or use cases that would be interested in something like this?

When releasing open source, what makes you actually want to try or contribute to a new framework?

Would a strong focus on “vibe codability” be seen as a plus or just sloppy?

Not open source yet—just trying to make sure I launch it right when I do.
by panarchy | 2025-08-08 04:46:44+00:00
Interesting. How about we replace the USA (I mostly highlighted the US because that's where this site and the population that use it is based) with the Allies. And being authoritarian isn't about having secretive or highly controlled group (which makes sense given what they were working on and the stakes), but rather the general cultural interpretation of freedom perceived by those who are likely to be doing research. And while you can argue that the USA had authoritarian overtones then as well, the key point is that they weren't as overt as having to greet everyone with good tidings for your supreme leader and keep all your opinions strictly in line with the party's. Notes released from the German scientists (I think Heisenberg comes to mind?) revealed they weren't highly motivated by the regime's philosophy despite supporting it outwardly while those who were the most invested into the Nazi ideology never published much of note.
by fsckboy | 2025-08-08 04:47:17+00:00
i've coded a lot of perl, and i hate "there's more than one way to do it". not that there is more than one way, but the idea that it's a good idea.

when there is only one way to do it, then you and i will write identical code and it will be therefore easy to maintain, an idea put forward by Charles Simonyi before you were born.

perl's hodgepodge semantics do make sense if you had already lived on the cli in a perl-less world and already knew grep, sed, awk, etc. because that's where perl grabbed its ideas from and you would already be familiar with them and it would not seem like more of a hodgepodge than what you already knew.

there is more than one way to do it (semantically) is not there is more than one way to write it (syntactically) The boolean algebra of sets and the boolean algebra of logic are isomorphic (which in a strong sense is "same syntax"), but they are not semantically the same at all, is what I mean by semantics.

the point I was making has nothing to do with perl's hodge podge of semantics, i simply want to know what the semantics of Q are, and the syntax presentation in the examples hardly distinguishes its semantics from any other post algol language.

I'm not saying the language should support multiple/lax syntaxes, I'm saying that when I edit a file I should see what I like, and when you edit the file you should see what you like; I should never see what you like unless we agree to share. Same semantics, not same syntax. The syntax would not be part of the language. The fact that syntax is part of our languages is how noobs get syntax confused with semantics and then never learn that semantics are the only important thing.
by xpe | 2025-08-08 04:47:29+00:00
> Unless someone figures how to make these models a million(?) times more efficient or feed them a million times more energy I don’t see how AGI would even be a twinkle in the eye of the LLM strategies we have now.

A fair argument. So what is left? At the risk of sounding snarky, "new" strategies. Hype is annoying, yes, but I wouldn't bet against mathematics, physics, and engineering getting to silicon-based AGI, assuming a sufficiently supportive environment. I don't currently see any physics-based blockers; the laws of the universe permit AGI and more, I think. The human brain is powerful demonstration of what is possible.

Factoring in business, economics, culture makes forecasting much harder. Nevertheless, the incentives are there. As long as there is hope, some people will keep trying.
by Blackarea | 2025-08-08 04:47:33+00:00
A: So what's your job?

B: I'm senior researcher at openAI working on disclosed frontier models.

A: Wow, that's incredible! Must be so exiting!

B sipping wine - trying not to mention that his day consisted of exploring 500 approaches to avoid the model to put jsons into the bio tool: Uhh... Certainly
by scott_w | 2025-08-08 04:47:54+00:00
> Everything is raised actively by individuals. They could have done the same thing through async modes of communication.

Because this doesn’t happen in the real world. People forget to mention things, they get their heads stuck in rabbit holes. A task that’s blocked just withers and dies because nobody actively looks at it. A good standup forces these things to be raised and addressed.

> Compare this to a weekly progress update meeting

The progress meeting is daily, not weekly.
by vivzkestrel | 2025-08-08 04:47:58+00:00
would be nice if we had some model out there with a context window of 1 billion tokens. i have about 25 .UNR files made with LEAD engine (heavily modified unreal engine 2.x) within which i want the AI to search for a string. Also got another 100 .utx files. Use-case game modding
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-08 04:48:05+00:00
> I'm naive on this topic but I would think they would do something like detect what the questions are about the load a relevant prompt instead of putting everything in like that?

So you think there should be a completely different AI model (or maybe the same model) with its own system prompt, that gets the requests, analyzes it, and chooses a system prompt to use to respond to it, and then runs the main model (which may be the same model) with the chosen prompt to respond to it, adding at least one round trip to every request?

You'd have to have a very effective prompt selection or generation prompt to make that worthwhile.
by denkmoon | 2025-08-08 04:48:15+00:00
local dns, static site hosting, local apt cache, various other network services (unifi controller if you've got those APs for example), remote/headless dev machine (maybe not for kernel or bigcorp java development), or whatever else you want. mail if you want. Anything :)

Those little thin clients aren't gonna be fast doing "big" things, but serving up a few dns packets or whatever to your local network is easy work and pretty useful.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-08 04:48:42+00:00
From the article:

> For the same reason that Microsoft probably continued to train Phi-style models: safety. Releasing an open-source model is terrifying for a large organization. Once it’s out there, your name is associated with it forever, and thousands of researchers will be frantically trying to fine-tune it to remove the safety guardrails.

I don't think this is really an issue in practice. Llama 2 and 3 were uncensored within a week. There's no bad press about this.

What does give a company a bad reputation is crap models. The llama 4 disappointment hurt meta's AI reputation a lot more than some community uncensoring.
by karim79 | 2025-08-08 04:49:35+00:00
It's amazing just how ill-understood this tech is, even by its creators who are funded by gazillions of dollars. Reminds me of this:

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/researchers-test-if-thre...

It just doesn't reassure me in the slightest. I don't see how super duper auto complete will lead to AGI. All this hype reminds me of Elon colonizing mars by 2026 and millions or billions of robots by 2030 or something.
by ludwik | 2025-08-08 04:50:48+00:00
No, it's because that's what ChatGPT users internally to calculate things, manipulate data, display graphs etc. That's what its "python" tool is all about. The use cases usually have nothing to do with programming - the user is only interested in the end result, and don't know or care that it was generated using Python (although it is noted in the interface).

The LLM has to know how to use the tool in order to use it effectively. Hence the documentation in the prompt.
by reissbaker | 2025-08-08 04:51:33+00:00
FYI, I just shipped a new version that addresses:

1. Verbose errors are hidden by default. You can run octofriend with OCTO_VERBOSE=1 set in your shell's env vars to see the verbose errors.

2. Pretty much everything can be interrupted via ESC now, not just model responses. Bash commands will be killed (first via SIGINT, then via SIGTERM if they don't respond quickly), the web fetch tool will kill requests, etc.

Thanks for all the feedback :)
by k310 | 2025-08-08 04:52:26+00:00
This article applies to politics, and since business leaders are not elected, boards being too small a sample size, IMO, the business analogy is so-so.

> The hubris arc appears inherent in populist psychology, underscoring why constitutional constraints and institutional checks are indispensable. Democracies survive not by finding perfect leaders but by constraining imperfect ones.

And that is why constitutional constraints and institutional checks are under fierce attack.
by t1amat | 2025-08-08 04:52:29+00:00
Is this actually true? Last I checked (a week ago?) Codex the agents were free at some tiers in a preview capacity (with future rate limits based on tier), but codex cli was not. With codex cli you can log in but the purpose of that is to link it to an API key where you pay per use. The sub tiers give one time credits you would burn through quickly.
by ulrikrasmussen | 2025-08-08 04:54:40+00:00
Claude Code is good, but it is far from being AGI. I use it every day, but it is still very much reliant on a human guiding it. I think it in particular shows when it comes to core abstractions - it really lacks the "mathematical taste" of a good designer, and it doesn't engage in long-term adversarial thinking about what might be wrong with a particular choice in the context of the application and future usage scenarios.

I think this type of thinking is a critical part of human creativity, and I can't see the current incarnation of agentic coding tools get there. They currently are way too reliant on a human carefully crafting the context and being careful of not putting in too many contradictory instructions or overloading the model with irrelevant details. An AGI has to be able to work productively on its own for days or weeks without going off on a tangent or suffering Xerox-like amnesia because it has compacted its context window 100 times.
by whotheywut1 | 2025-08-08 04:55:41+00:00
This is circumlocution. Who is they? Them? What? You're just reciting words. What dialectic is this? Ok let me try in random generalization speak...

Nothing in physics requires us to buy into the political documents; if the average person isn't owed anything under the rules, no one is.

Either we're science driven where only politics makes someone special and we should then moderate that because in reality, they are not special, just a button pusher, just a signature. Or we're a bunch of idiots living in a trailer park.

Seems you subscribe to the whole "everything is a mystery to politics" when it's just biology self-selecting and we should fucking moderate that. With violence if necessary. Because fuck them. They aren't owed anything either, they're just manipulating politics.
by Joel_Mckay | 2025-08-08 04:55:50+00:00
That is nuts, I always assumed that would fall under the capital gains taxes in the investors T5 filing at the end of the year. (could be dramatically lower rate if you get stuck with cash at the end of the year)

Now I know why the brand trademarks are usually held by an independent entity, and licensed to a domestic number company.

I guess that is why we pay the corporate accountants. lol =3
by nickpsecurity | 2025-08-08 04:57:39+00:00
Most use of small models was erotic roleplay back when I closely followed r/LocalLlama. Made me wonder if I should even make one if that's what most used it for.

You might find this part funny. At first, I thought they had automated their coding for SAP or other ERP databases. Then, they started talking about how realistic the body parts were. I paused staring at the screen. The sad reality clicked.
by wraptile | 2025-08-08 04:58:54+00:00
Not only that but many new editors straigh up ship vim mode now like Zed, Obsidian etc. The main vscode neovim plugin¹ is very big too with over 500k unique installs. Clearly VIM is still widely popular and not going away anytime soon.

1 - https://github.com/vscode-neovim/vscode-neovim
by eajr | 2025-08-08 05:00:23+00:00
Sounds like BMAD, SuperClaude, Claude-Flow, etc.

I'd have comparisons to those popular ones: what makes yours different/sets it apart.

The goal of all this stuff is to be able to vibe code to a certain extent so you're right in line with that thought.

Definitely launch with a YouTube video linked from your GH where you walk thru how to start a new project from scratch with your kit.
by john01dav | 2025-08-08 05:01:03+00:00
You can do clone from an existing clone:

$ git clone git@whatever.com/...

Cloning into example

$ git clone example example-2

This works even if you made uncommitted changes in your first clone. These uncommitted changes aren't copied. You can also check out an origin branch to not work with locally commited changes.

You can use git remote to set the new origin to upstream.

Or, you could use worktrees. That's fine too.
by habryka | 2025-08-08 05:02:24+00:00
Oh, hmm, I hadn't thought about that association.

I don't think "retreat" is the right choice for a 4 week program, I think "retreat" implies a shorter duration. We played around with "fellowship" but that seemed worse.

Searching around a bit though, it seems like there are lots of other programs with similar naming choices. See for example this: https://www.banffcentre.ca/programs/literary-arts/deep-winte...

Which charges ~$5,600.

Or this: https://iyws.clas.uiowa.edu/2-week-summer-residential-progra...

Which charges $2,500. Both are called "residencies". Seems like it's not that weird for a program called "residency" to charge fees, though I still kind of buy there is some association here. If anyone has better suggestions, I would be pretty interested.
by jsrozner | 2025-08-08 05:03:37+00:00
There may be philosophical (i.e. fundamental) challenges to AGI. Consider, e.g., Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. Though Scott Aaronson argues this does not matter (see e.g., youtube video, "How Much Math Is Knowable?"). There would also seem to be limits to the computation of potentially chaotic systems. And in general, verifying physical theories has required the carrying out of actual physical experiment. Even if we were to build a fully reasoning model, "pondering" is not always sufficient.
by nextlevelwizard | 2025-08-08 05:04:17+00:00
I know this might be splitting hairs, but...

>The old approach of keyfob to unlock the car and a real key for the ignition is safer.

"Safe" feels like wrong word to use here. Safety is not same as security.

One could also argue that criminals being able to steal parked cars is safer over all for society as they then don't feel the need to car jack you while you are actually in the vehicle.

If you actually want to keep your car secure (meaning criminals wont break into it or steal it in this context) just drive old beater and do not leave anything valuable in the car or trunk. I am driving a car that is nearly as old as I am and its fighting a losing battle against rust and I have nothing more valuable than trash inside the car.
by forgingahead | 2025-08-08 05:04:44+00:00
System prompts are fine and all, but how useful is it really when LLMs clearly ignore prompt instructions randomly? I've had this with all the different LLMs, explicitly asking it to not do something works maybe 85-90% of the time. Sometimes they just seem "overloaded", even in a fresh chat session, so like a human would, they get confused and drop random instructions.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-08 05:05:41+00:00
On the other hand if we're speaking historically then it was probably using a lot more than a hundredth of a percent of the address space. Or a billionth of the address space, depending on how we're counting.

It doesn't need to be free, but your address space use should be able to go a handful of bits above your physical memory without problems.

Even fully allocating all the page entries, with no large pages, on an architecture with 4KB pages, would only take 8MB to track a 4GB allocation.