MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tmnvdb | 2025-08-09 22:43:17+00:00
> No, it's the entire architecture of the model.

Wrong, it's an artifact of tokenizing. The model doesn't have access to the individual letters, only to the tokens. Reasoning models can usually do this task well - they can spell out the word in the reasoning buffer - the fact that GPT5 fails here is likely a result of it incorrectly answering the question with a non-reasoning version of the model.

> There's no real reasoning.

This seems like a meaningless statement unless you give a clear definition of "real" reasoning as opposed to other kinds of reasoning that are only apparant.

> It seems that reasoning is just a feedback loop on top of existing autocompletion.

The word "just" is doing a lot of work here - what exactly is your criticism here? The bitter lesson of the past years is that relatively simple architectures that scale with compute work surprisingly well.

> It's really disingenuous for the industry to call warming tokens for output, "reasoning," as if some autocomplete before more autocomplete is all we needed to solve the issue of consciousness.

Reasoning and consciousness are seperate concepts. If I showed the output of an LLM 'reasoning' (you can call it something else if you like) to somebody 10 years ago they would agree without any doubt that reasoning was taking place there. You are free to provide a definition of reasoning which an LLM does not meet of course - but it is not enough to just say it is so. Using the word autocomplete is rather meaningless name-calling.

> Edit: Letter frequency apparently has just become another scripted output, like doing arithmetic. LLMs don't have the ability to do this sort of work inherently, so they're trained to offload the task.

Not sure why this is bad. The implicit assumption seems to be that an LLM is only valueable if it literally does everything perfectly?

> Edit: This comment appears to be wildly upvoted and downvoted. If you have anything to add besides reactionary voting, please contribute to the discussion.

Probably because of the wild assertions, charged language, and rather superficial descriptions of actual mechanics.
by godelski | 2025-08-09 22:43:18+00:00
I think the analogy makes since but I'm not sure I've met too many brilliant but volatile people. At least the volatility I see in them is more like getting distracted by some rabbit hole or doing some other task. Which I think that's easier to handle but highly depends on management... (For the mediocre dev, usually their screwups are categorically consistent too, so you know what to give extra scrutiny. You can also teach them)

FWIW, I still use LLMs, but I just don't trust them. I think people get these confused. The thing is you just use tools you don't trust very differently than other ones. A simple but common example is I'll use them to aid google searches. Ask about a topic and it'll drop a bunch of info, but you treat them as bullshitters. Take a "trust but verify" approach. Since it sounds accurate, it usually drops a bunch of vernacular to that topic. Getting these keywords can really help with searches, especially when terms are overloaded.

I think in general it is good to treat them as bullshitters. There's still utility in that, but it is less straight forward.

Side note:

LLMs have really changed the way I think about people. I never understood how used cars salesmen were so successful despite the widespread stereotype, but I guess a lot more people like sycophants than I would have expected. Honestly, I can't stand how much the things praise me. It's really belittling. Praise me for actual accomplishments, not over every little thing.

Don't give me a "yes man" give me a man that can actually do things. Never trust "yes men", they don't ever have your best interests in mind. Trust people that will say no. People who will tell you you're wrong when you are wrong. You're not the main character, no one is. The whole reason we use these tools and work with others is because we couldn't possibly know everything and do everything ourselves. Yes men just try to convince you you're the main character. They know the easiest person to fool is yourself.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-09 22:43:25+00:00
The Radeon VII Pro is not a consumer card though and works well with ROCm. It even has datacenter "grade" HBM2 memory that most Nvidias don't have. The continuing support has been dropped but ROCm of course still works fine. It's nearly as fast in Ollama as my 4090 (which I don't use for AI regularly but I just play with it sometimes)
by kentonv | 2025-08-09 22:44:07+00:00
I think if I were doing it again I would not use containers at all. Instead I'd use isolates -- like Cloudflare Workers. In fact I'd probably build in on workerd (open source Cloudflare Workers runtime).

I'm obviously a bit biased here, as the architect of Cloudflare Workers. But, I think it's a much better fit for Sandstorm than containers were. Sandstorm suffered from some really bad cold start times, especially with every "grain" (e.g. document) running in its own container. It also led to a lot of other inefficiencies.

The down side of this is of course that it'd be much harder to port existing apps to the platform (unless maybe if they were already written to target Workers). But I think:

* Sandstorm didn't support existing apps very well anyway. It took a lot of work to convert apps for Sandstorm's security model. Many of the best Sandstorm apps were written from scratch for Sandstorm -- which incidentally was a lot easier than writing a traditional app, because Sandstorm took care of a lot of the work for you.

* AI-assisted coding takes a lot of the pressure off to support existing apps, because it'll be that much easier to build new ones. A Sandstorm-like environment would be a great fit for vibe coding since it takes care of so much of the boilerplate and enforces security in a way that the app can't screw it up.

What do you think? Would this ruin it for you?
by antonvs | 2025-08-09 22:44:16+00:00
Perhaps I should have said aren't used together in that way.

You're welcome to try to invent your own language, but you shouldn't be surprised when people push back on it. Chances are people aren't going to use your invention.

"News-teller" sounds archaic at best, or like a non-native trying to literally translate something, which is in fact exactly what's happening here.

Invented words or word combinations are more likely to catch on when there's a need for them. There are various words that already exist for this, so no need to invent a new one. Announcer, reporter, and even e.g. herald and crier if one is looking for a more historical meaning, that appears in the title of many newspapers.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-09 22:44:42+00:00
I simply ask the candidate what a B-Tree is and how a database engine would use one.

If they don’t know that, then the database engine internals will forever remain a mysterious black box to them.

Explaining each of the four letters in ACID is the follow-up question if they pass.

These are the equivalent of “why do we put steel rebar into concrete?” If you can’t answer these questions immediately upon graduating then you cannot ever be responsible for anything. You can only be entrusted to copy or “fill in the blanks” where an anctual engineer worked out the design.
by saubeidl | 2025-08-09 22:45:08+00:00
> I think we can all agree not many great and global cities have tons of free housing emptied by a prolonged period of decline

That is not the case in Vienna, either. The government built enough units to supply ten percent of the total market and used that leverage to drive down prices. Before that, a large portion lived in squalor.

> But from 1923 to 1934, in a period known as Red Vienna, the ruling Social Democratic Party built 64,000 new units in 400 housing blocks, increasing the city’s housing supply by about 10 percent. Some 200,000 people, one-tenth of the population, were rehoused in these buildings, with rents set at 3.5 percent of the average semiskilled worker’s income, enough to cover the cost of maintenance and operation
by homebrewer | 2025-08-09 22:45:37+00:00
> in what way has it gone uphill versus just using Debian?

Their lawyers' willingness to risk shipping pre-built zfs kernel modules (that are always in sync with the kernel). Pretty important if you're into that sort of thing, it's easier to remove cruft once post-install than to keep an eye on DKMS for years (making sure that it hasn't disassembled itself and continues working).
by avtar | 2025-08-09 22:46:27+00:00
I guess it depends on how much care you're taking with maintaining the client's position and focus post-submission/page load, and then also announce what data changed on the page. And if someone with cognitive disabilities has to reorient themselves in the now updated page then that's probably not going to result in a great experience.

Example table for comparison: https://www.w3.org/WAI/ARIA/apg/patterns/table/examples/sort...
by whoknowsidont | 2025-08-09 22:46:31+00:00
>The toolchain is parsing, validating, and mapping the data into the format preferred by the chosen models promot template, the LLM has nothing to do with doing that

The LLM has everything to do with that. The LLM is literally choosing to do that. I don't know why this point keeps getting missed or side-stepped.

It WILL, at some point in the future and given enough executions, as a matter of statistical certainty, simply not do that above, or pretend to do the above, or do something totally different at some point in the future.
by inglor_cz | 2025-08-09 22:47:19+00:00
This isn't so straightforward. I would argue that they have some effect on the customers as well.

In the US, fast food restaurants are remarkably cheap, which is probably caused by low wages as well. If the workers were paid Danish or Swiss wages, quite a non-trivial part of the US population would be no longer able to afford a visit.

Now there is a wider question if that wouldn't actually improve their health, but that is already a bridge too far from the conversation. Miserly wages of restaurant workers do make the restaurants themselves more affordable to the general public, and the customers seem to be content about it.
by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF | 2025-08-09 22:47:41+00:00
The owner isn't neglecting it, it's a tragedy of the commons.

If the owner was to overhire, it might reduce the homeless population a little, but at great cost. And other businesses nearby will benefit for free.

Only large coordination at the level of state or national government can afford to implement welfare as a real investment in their citizens. If you do it at the city, county, or corporate level, it's just charity.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-09 22:47:44+00:00
You can't sanitize any data going into an LLM, unless it has zero temoerature and the entire input context matches a context already tested.

It’s not SQL. There's not a knowable-in-advance set of constructs that have special effects or escape. It’s ALL instructions, the question is whether it is instructions that do what you want or instructions that do something else, and you don't have the information to answer that analytically if you haven't tested the exact combination of instructions.
by Animats | 2025-08-09 22:47:45+00:00
FRED (the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), has useful data.

First, all food/beverage hospitality workers in California.[1] Huge COVID transient, followed by recovery to almost the pre-COVID level. But no further increases.

Full-service restaurants had a similar transient, but never came back to pre-COVID levels. Employment peaked in mid-2023, and has declined since. Full-service restaurants didn't get the $20 fast food minimum wage. But workers there may have tip income. California does not have a lower "tipped minimum wage", and all tips go to workers.

What FRED calls "limited service restaurants and other eating places" shows about the same curve as full-service restaurants.[3] This includes both the fast food chains and the fast-casual restaurants. If you have to order at a counter, it's "limited service", even if they bring out the food later.

So, the part of the restaurant industry that wasn't affected by the increase shows about the same trend as the part that was. Basically, post-COVID, onsite eating never fully came back. Food delivery became a much bigger part of the industry.)

Those stats are regardless of business size. California's minimum wage law for "fast food" applies only to businesses with at least 60 locations. But it also includes such things as 7-11 stores that sell hot dogs and pizzas heated up on site. So, not an exact match to the FRED categories.

Overall, the COVID transient and its aftermath is bigger than all other visible effects.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000007072200001SA

[2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000007072251101A

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000007072259001SA
by Squeeeez | 2025-08-09 22:47:50+00:00
Maybe... Someone should teach kids about the pareto principle early on. Or is it about morality?

One might argue that a stone mason or a miner has less left of his body after 40 years of work.

Office work is slightly kinder to the body, although even here one reads worrying studies.

But when you're 12, nothing of that matters really.
by jsnell | 2025-08-09 22:47:52+00:00
The reason I'm asking this is exactly their blog post, which says says that their goal is to roll this out to 50% of the French queries at the end of the year.

That's a rather limited slice of traffic (50% of French queries, 0% of everything else), and it's not described as the current state but their goal for the end of the year. The obvious implication is that right now even their French rollout is lower than 50%. How much lower, we don't know for certain, but 5 months is a long time. I have to imagine it is far lower than 50% right now. 1%? 10%? Hard to believe it is any higher than that.

So I think my original question was very fair. The answer could for example have been that they indicated on the results page, or maybe they had some kind of a per-user opt-in toggle that you switched. From your reply, I gather that's not the case, and you're just assuming that your results must be from the new index. That seems like a bad assumption to make.
by mixdup | 2025-08-09 22:47:56+00:00
>As I understand matters, it started in the 70s and 80s as states pulled back from funding public institutions.

Yes, absolutely this, and accelerating heavily in the late 00s after the financial crisis. In some states, especially for non-flagship universities, you can overlay the decrease in state funding and tuition increases and they're nearly the same line

Tuition explosion isn't all just the proliferation of assistant deans and VPs (although that is a problem, too), a huge portion of it is that public higher education is essentially public in name only these days
by jeroenhd | 2025-08-09 22:48:19+00:00
You don't need to as long as you don't use LLMs like these in cases where incorrect output isn't of any consequence. If you're using LLMs to generate some placeholder bullshit to fill out a proof of concept website, you don't care if it claims strawberries have tails, you just need it to generate some vaguely coherent crap.

For things where factuality is even just a little important, you need to treat these things like asking a toddler that got their hands on a thesaurus and an encyclopaedia (that's a few years out of date): go through everything it produces and fact check any statement it makes that you're not confident about already.

Unfortunately, people seem to be mistaking LLMs for search engines more and more (no doubt thanks to attempts from LLM companies to make people think exactly that) so this will only get worse in the future. For now we can still catch these models out with simple examples, but as AI fuckups grow sparser, more people will think these things tell the actual truth.
by bravesoul2 | 2025-08-09 22:48:29+00:00
They might get another job.

People dont think holistically about the economy. They think there are jobs. When they go there are that fewer jobs. Immigrants come in a steal jobs. Etc.

But in an economy, each richer consumer creates more jobs. The McD employees now buy better food, creating work for that supply chain. Or they can pay for education. Or they buy a takeaway coffee more often.

The immigrants who come and do jobs work hard for lower pay them spend that money into the economy.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-09 22:48:30+00:00
By the way, I usually use the AI for filtering, summarisation etc. Not for facts (like "what would be the best model of CPU I could buy" or "what is the capital of Estonia". When I do that I will link it to web searches anyway. Small models are indeed pretty useless for asking facts from. But big models can't be relied on either. They still hallucinate a lot. So I tend to combine it with web searches so I also have the references. But in general the whole fact thing for me is not a big usecase for AI.
by throwanem | 2025-08-09 22:48:44+00:00
Sure, if you wanted to deal with configuring Apache. Or getting your hosting provider to do that. If you knew to ask, and didn't mind waiting, and your hosting provider knew how...and was willing to do it, a condition I forgot to add in my last comment here, but which applies equally there. (User-provided .htaccess files were the source of a number of relatively high-profile early CVEs, as I recall. Apache grew a number of options for trusting their content, and I want to say before very long you could not rely on anything working past simple HTTP-Basic credential management.)

Oldschool shared web hosting was a shockingly deprived environment by modern standards, which is why my Linode account turned old enough a few months ago to buy a drink in a bar: $20 a month in 2004 was amply worth gaining a degree of control over web server configuration which is broadly the default assumption now.

Since I was also administering some shared web hosting in my own right at the time - partially overlapping with my web design work targeting shared hosting, since some customers preferred to BYO - I don't blame admins for being difficult to work with; we all had good reason to be, with the afterthought security typically was everywhere in those days. But you begin perhaps to see why bypassing the whole rigamarole with a hint to the client was attractive.
by runako | 2025-08-09 22:49:12+00:00
They consider all those factors and then aim for a mix. No admissions board wants a class of 100% track stars or 100% economic hard-luck cases or 100% rich kids, etc. But they are faced with a bunch of kids who meet the GPA etc. criteria and also fit into each of these buckets.

Result is it's effectively random for each qualified kid.
by andrewmcwatters | 2025-08-09 22:49:23+00:00
These aren't wild assertions. I'm not using charged language.

> Reasoning and consciousness are seperate(sic) concepts

No, they're not. But, in tech, we seem to have a culture of severing the humanities for utilitarian purposes, but no, classical reasoning uses consciousness and awareness as elements of processing.

It's only meaningless if you don't know what the philosophical or epistemological definitions of reasoning are. Which is to say, you don't know what reasoning is. So you'd think it was a meaningless statement.

Do computers think, or do they compute?

Is that a meaningless question to you? I'm sure given your position it's irrelevant and meaningless, surely.

And this sort of thinking is why we have people claiming software can think and reason.
by dend | 2025-08-09 22:50:22+00:00
One of the MCP Core Maintainers here. I want to emphasize that "If you see something, say something" very much works with the MCP community - we've recently standardized on the Spec Enhancement Proposal (SEP) process, and are also actively (and regularly) reviewing the community proposals with other Core Maintainers and Maintainers. If there is a gap - open an issue or join the MCP Contributor Discord server (open for aspiring and established contributors, by the way), where a lot of contributors hang out and discuss on-deck items.
by ben_w | 2025-08-09 22:50:32+00:00
What history has shown us is somewhat weaker than you say — for all the stuff they did badly, for all that they wildly missed their own raison d'être and became just another power structure for just another bunch of essentially aristocrats, it did also get Russia from the Tzars to orbit in 40 years.

But that aside, when you're already getting failed and the people failing you specifically hate one thing, it's very easy to reach for that thing.

To your quote: Well, I'm not a communist (unlike a previous partner)… but I'm also not a capitalist, because I see that capitalism also is a deeply flawed ideology doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results, and that history has shown us this, too, repeatedly.

I'm also not "anti-" either of them, because I'd rather see someone take the best of both and find some new mechanism to deal with the other repeatedly observed historical fact: that a non-trivial fraction of the population are power-hungry sadistic arses. To quote, albeit from fiction: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdas...

(Both capitalism and communism have failure modes separate from the problem of dark triad personalities, but both sets are much easier to deal with if your society has also solved the problem of dark triad personalities, and a society does also need to solve the problem of dark triad personalities irregardless of what else it does).
by KennyBlanken | 2025-08-09 22:51:21+00:00
According to Passmark the Pentinum 4 1.3Ghz is 55 times slower than a Raspberry Pi 5, so I'd guess it's at least two orders of magnitude. The original Pi is 16 times faster than a P4 1.3Ghz...

You can recycle e-waste (and yes, I know SOME e-waste ends up in China/India/etc. Not all does.)

The e-waste is of substantially less concern than the massive difference in carbon footprint from power consumption.
by wonderwonder | 2025-08-09 22:51:27+00:00
As frustrating as it is as an employee to lose hours, customers are also frustrated by this as quality and speed are reduced. You have fewer employees being forced to perform the same quantity of work. Everything goes downhill and then people eat less fast food, causing the business to lose income and then reducing staffing and the cycle continues.

I avoid all fast food now except for Chick Filet not due to the food itself, which isn't great but just due to the terrible customer service I get everywhere else.

My kid asked me for McDonalds the other day and for once I said yes, we pulled in at 10:20am and ordered 3 chicken biscuits before breakfast ended at 10:30am. They of course asked us to park and after 15 minutes I went inside and asked what was going on. they apologized and said they were out of chicken as they got a rush when I ordered and it takes 7 minutes to cook. There were a grand total of 4 employees in the store sitting at a busy intersection with a double drive through line and an indoor eating area. Just utter lack of management and employees and customers pay the price.

its 10 minutes before breakfast ends, I'm pretty confident the same rush happens every day at that time. Just such a terrible experience. Definitely saying no next time my kids ask for McDonalds, its not worth 30 minutes of my life to drive through and order a chicken sandwich.
by codazoda | 2025-08-09 22:52:37+00:00
I’m planning to deploy a 1B model, feed it all the documents I’ve ever written, host it on a $149 mini-PC in my bedroom, and enable you to chat with it.

I’ve released similar projects before.

I’ll drop a post about my plans in the coming days and I’ll build and document it about two weeks later if there’s enough interest.

joeldare.com