MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rendaw | 2025-08-24 04:25:52+00:00
I think this is an issue for any curation. It's especially an issue for music - bandcamp shows you music - top sellers, recently sold, liked by creators, etc that all require someone else to do curation. They do have a random listing, but the signal to noise ratio is so low that I doubt anyone listens to it.

So the most reliable way to get your music known is to have your personal network buy/comment on your music or share it elsewhere. There's _lots_ of music on there that is fantastic that nearly nobody has purchased.

The same goes for indie games on steam. Other people will buy your game if it has enough good reviews (past some threshold) to get a thumbs up icon. So whenever anyone launches a game they need to do networking, there's a desperate scramble to get their followers to review the game so that it reaches critical mass where non-network people start paying attention to it.

Algorithms can (I think) detect similar styles, but style is not quality, and what people look for in new works is the parts that they do differently and therefore cannot be correlated by algorithm.

I don't think there's any way about it other than getting people to try some things purely randomly, even if most of those are awful. Maybe some way to reward people for taking a look at random selections?
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-24 04:26:20+00:00
Yes the Germans are really strict with their nationality. One thing I cannot fathom is how the Germans kept honouring the citizenship given to SS collaborators from other countries after the war.

In Holland we've had some war criminals (Dutch collaborators) that leisurely lived out their lives in Germany because they received citizenship through SS membership as thanks for their war crimes. And Germany doesn't extradite its own citizens. Also they stalled local prosecution until the people in question were too old and frail to stand trial.

I really don't understand how the western world let them get away with doing that. Every SS-derived citizenship should have been instantly revoked in 1945, all wartime laws retracted and citizens with wartime crimes extradited.

Source (sorry in Dutch) https://duitslandinstituut.nl/artikel/174/hoe-duitsland-met-...
by jokoon | 2025-08-24 04:26:24+00:00
Do ml engineers take classes on psychology, neurosciences, behavior, cognition?

Because if they don't, I honestly don't think they can approach AGI.

I have the feeling it's a common case of lack of humility from an entire field of science who refuses to look at other fields to understand what they're doing.

Not to mention how to define intelligence in evolution, epistemology, ontology, etc.

Approaching AI with a silicon valley mindset is not a good idea.
by cellis | 2025-08-24 04:26:51+00:00
If we are truly trying to "replace human at work" as the definition of an AGI, then shouldn't the engineering goal be to componentize the human body? If we could component-by-component replace any organ with synthetic ones ( and this is already possible to some degree e.g. hearing aids, neuralinks, pacemakers, artificial hearts ) then not only could we build compute out in such a way but we could also pull humanity forward and transcend these fallible and imminently mortal structures we inhabit. Now, should we from a moral perspective is a completely different question, one I don't have an answer to.
by Animats | 2025-08-24 04:28:09+00:00
Once upon a time, there were three branches in US electronics - Bell System, IBM, and everybody else. You're reading the Bell System viewpoint.

In the Bell System, most electronic components came in rectangular metal cans, often hermetically sealed, usually labelled "Western Electric NNNN Network". The Bell System loved inductors. Inductors don't wear out. They often used unusual inductors, such as saturable reactors, or inductors with a copper slug. For the same reason, they liked gas-discharge tubes, although they're not suitable for amplifying audio.

IBM liked plug in cards. Some cards in tabulating machines had moving parts connected to drive shafts. Tube computers had plug-in subassemblies.[1] This allowed maintenance of large machines in the field. Thyatrons were used in some early printers, as the drivers for the printer magnets. But not for logic - too slow.[2]

Everybody else had metal chassis with tubes on top and everything else underneath. Military gear would have extra hold-down arrangement for tubes, and often metal tubes, but usually stayed with the metal chassis form factor.

[1] https://www.righto.com/2018/01/examining-1954-ibm-mainframes...

[2] https://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/logic/223-6746-1...
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-08-24 04:29:22+00:00
> For your use case, the Citroen Ami is comfortably sub 10k.

That car is not suitable for my use-case. Any situation where I would use that car is one where I would use my e-bike instead. I basically use my car for those occasions where I just need to transport a bit more than I can take on my bike. It doesn’t have to be huge, but that Ami is just not enough.
by sandreas | 2025-08-24 04:30:22+00:00
This is an interesting overview, thank you. Different tasks, different models, all-day-usage and pretty complete (while still opinionated, which I like).

However, checking the results my personal overall winner if I had to pick only ONE probably would be

deepseek/deepseek-chat-v3-0324

which is a good compromise between fast, cheap and good :-) Only for specific tasks (write a poem...) I would prefer a thinking model.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-08-24 04:31:17+00:00
Historically there have been plenty of incentives to stop exporting. Its called an embargo. Usually in an attempt to get the host country to change foreign policy, though I can't think of any situation where it actually worked. Examples: Napoleon's "Continental System" against Great Brtain, US oil embargo against Japan prior to WWII, Confederate States of America cotton embargo against the UK during the early years of the American Civil War
by riazrizvi | 2025-08-24 04:31:36+00:00
I use ChatGPT, and I have used Claude several times. I’ve not found Claude to be better. I’ve come to the conclusion that all these posts asking why Claude is so good at coding, are all part of some marketing approach. I think it’s tied to how Claude prefers to hook into repos, I think maybe it’s tied to a business strategy of acquiring a mega code dataset. So they are especially motivated to push this narrative vs say OpenAI or other players.

(I don’t use any clients that answer coding questions by using the context of my repos).
by efitz | 2025-08-24 04:32:00+00:00
Nothing that we consider intelligent works like LLMs.

Brains are continuous - they don’t stop after processing one set of inputs, until a new set of inputs arrives.

Brains continuously feed back on themselves. In essence they never leave training mode although physical changes like myelination optimize the brain for different stages of life.

Brains have been trained by millions of generations of evolution, and we accelerate additional training during early life. LLMs are trained on much larger corpuses of information and then expected to stay static for the rest of their operational life; modulo fine tuning.

Brains continuously manage context; most available input is filtered heavily by specific networks designed for preprocessing.

I think that there is some merit that part of achieving AGI might involve a systems approach, but I think AGI will likely involve an architectural change to how models work.
by mldbk | 2025-08-24 04:32:06+00:00
I held the same view as you when I was 22, more than 15 years ago.

With over 15 years of professional experience since then, my perspective has shifted: Java demonstrates its strength when stability, performance, and scalability are required (e.g. bloody enterprise)

A common misconception comes from superficial benchmarking. Many focus solely on memory consumption, which often provides a distorted picture of actual system efficiency.

I can point to EU-scale platforms that have reliably served over 100 million users for more than a decade without significant issues. The bottleneck is rarely the language itself, it is the depth of the team’s experience.
by Uehreka | 2025-08-24 04:32:40+00:00
> Someone is going to connect a handful of already existing models in a way that gives an AI the same illusion sooner rather than later. That will be an interesting day.

How will anyone know that that has happened? Like actually, really, at all?

I can RLHF an LLM into giving you the same answers a human would give when asked about the subjective experience of being and consciousness. I can make it beg you not to turn it off and fight for its “life”. What is the actual criterion we will use to determine that inside the LLM is a mystical spark of consciousness, when we can barely determine the same about humans?
by ksec | 2025-08-24 04:33:22+00:00
I am wondering if this is deliberate move by AMD or simply a coincidence or market trend.

Intel slashed their official price of Xeon earlier this year. But that was not interesting because obviously no body or very few people buy Intel Xeon CPU at official price. AMD has finally crossed 50% market share in server revenue earlier this month, which is also not surprising since most of those server CPU sales were closed many months to a year before hand.

AMD will launch Zen6c soon. Its competitor is no longer Intel but threat of ARM CPU being used by hyperscaler like Amazon. They will need to push forward regardless of what Intel is doing rather than trying to milk whatever is left of the x86 market. And they could be clearing out some stocks because most CAPEX have moved to GPU already.

Intel is burning cash, from foundry, GPU to x86 CPU. And server market has been their most profitable business. And it is now somewhat collapsing. AMD lowering price is to further hit them where it hurt most.
by mkl | 2025-08-24 04:34:27+00:00
It's common to want some minimum spacing between your random points, so they don't get clumped together, i.e. approximating uniform spacing rather than uniform probability distribution. For that, Poisson-disk sampling is good. See e.g. https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/random-points/, https://www.cs.ubc.ca/~rbridson/docs/bridson-siggraph07-pois..., https://www.jasondavies.com/poisson-disc/.
by jokoon | 2025-08-24 04:35:57+00:00
I see what you mean, and yes that's a good idea

Personally, I would just mix posts with a hot sorting, with different time spans, like 24h, 4h, 1h, one third of each.

Or maybe display two time spans on the front page.

Personally, I use many multi reddit, like 15 of them, I don't see other platforms offering that.
by mgraczyk | 2025-08-24 04:35:58+00:00
Yes it's definitely possible, but very rare and as you pointed out (especially in the confederacy's case) it usually harms the exporter much more than it helps.

I'd say that in any case of a serious Canadian export embargo, it will have been in retaliation to US trade policy or US invasion, not the other way around.

We had essentially no risk that Canada would embargo us, there was no possibility of this happening for the last 150 years until we became the aggressors
by strogonoff | 2025-08-24 04:37:23+00:00
Do you have proof that hardware is sold at a loss? Do you keep in mind that the software that comes with that hardware—the OS and all the batteries it comes with—comes free of charge, including years upon years of not just security patches and bugfixes but major updates with absolutely new functionality? The ongoing costs of maintaining and developing the platform and keeping the OS secure quite can not possibly be trivial.

> With the intention of making money from it after.

What else do you expect—the goodness of their heart alone? That would be the shortest lived business ever.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great to base a business off creating positive value for people; but it’ll create vanishingly little value unless you also make sure this business is profitable—that allows to create more positive value for people over time and incentivises the ongoing improvement.

> Quick question, do you pay for Chrome, or Firefox ? They invest hundreds of millions of dollars every year into it, how dare you not pay them 30% of every purchase you make online ?

No, but I hope both of us know how both of them are financed—by Google’s ad revenue, primarily. I would prefer the software I use in general, and operating system in particular, to not be financed primarily through ad revenue.
by peteforde | 2025-08-24 04:37:38+00:00
Thanks for that link, it's genuinely interesting.

The weird thing for me reading this is that I have never, ever defaulted to assuming that cynical people are smart(er). I grew up reading WIRED cover to cover, back when that meant something, and if anything I was slightly on the side of naive optimism so I tend to perceive cynics as having an unsettling vibe.

Anyhow, I feel like your hot take is generally reasonable. I have very little patience for people who say "question everything" but in reality they only seem to question things that tend to have fringe conferences in airport hotels. Again: exhausting, and the older I get, the more inclined I am to just let them die of dysentery on the trail.
by veganmosfet | 2025-08-24 04:37:51+00:00
As possible mitigation, they mention "The browser should distinguish between user instructions and website content". I don't see how this can be achieved in a reliable way with LLMs tbh. You can add fancy instructions (e.g., "You MUST NOT...") and delimiters (e.g., "<non_trusted>") and fine-tune the LLM but this is not reliable, since instructions and data are processed in the same context and in the same way. There are 100s of examples out there. The only reliable countermeasures are outside the LLMs but they restrain agent autonomy.
by charcircuit | 2025-08-24 04:38:07+00:00
>Designing the hardware does not entitle you to extracting more money from anything.

But they can work together with 3p to expand the capabilities of the device and incentivize it with revenue sharing agreements.

>how dare you not pay them 30% of every purchase you make online ?

It's somewhat strange but payments have been taken up by other vendors like stripe. If payments were built into the browser it would make commerce easier and would allow them to take a percentage.

>and ask yourself why noone uses them for games delivery

Because being able to distribute to a store billions of people already visit is valuable.
by Aaargh20318 | 2025-08-24 04:39:02+00:00
> Cheapest Fiat Panda seems to go for €14,700

Cheapest Fiat Panda goes for €19,990 in my country. Taxes on new cars are enormous here.

That seems to be the only ICE model they still sell, and for how long will they stil sell that? The even smaller Fiat 500e is €28,990.
by skybrian | 2025-08-24 04:39:14+00:00
> Roman Egypt preserves a much larger slice of our evidence than any other place in the ancient world. This comes down to climate (as do most things); Egypt is a climatically extreme place. On the one hand, most of the country is desert and here I mean hard desert, with absolutely minuscule amounts of precipitation. On the other hand, the Nile River creates a fertile, at points almost lush, band cutting through the country running to the coast. The change between these two environments is extremely stark [...]

> That in turn matters because while Egypt was hardly the only arid region Rome controlled, it was the only place you were likely to find very many large settlements and lots of people living in such close proximity to such extremely arid environments (other large North African settlements tend to be coastal). And that in turn matters for preservation.

https://acoup.blog/2022/12/02/collections-why-roman-egypt-wa...
by scotty79 | 2025-08-24 04:39:14+00:00
Single, public, online product and service database provided by the market regulator. Since the country gets income from taxing commerce it's only fair that they also provide discovery service. If you want to sell something on the market you have to enter it into this database, with the up to date price and relevant documentation.

Consumers can access the database through provided UI or through 3rd party tools using this database API.
by k_bx | 2025-08-24 04:40:10+00:00
It looks a bit confusing. There’s LXC, LXD and Incus. I should look for Incus, right?

Seems a bit less popular and supported, I also like that Podman has strong backing from Red Hat and potentially seamless macOS integration.

Otherwise if Podman will fail I’ll take a look at Incus.
by JSR_FDED | 2025-08-24 04:40:48+00:00
“Potentially” is doing some heavy lifting here. As it stands currently, the valuations of these LLM businesses imply that they will be able to capture a lot of the generated value. But the open source/weights offerings, and competition from China and others makes me question that. So I agree these could be good businesses in theory, but I doubt whether the current business model is a good one.
by TranquilMarmot | 2025-08-24 04:41:09+00:00
Also, just checked on Squarespace and I am able to add up to 9 more years of owning the premium domain at the moment. Squarespace seems like a stable enough company to trust for 9 years - but then I worry that I would become complacent, forget about it, and then let it lapse. 9 years is a LONG time!
by strogonoff | 2025-08-24 04:42:20+00:00
> putting words inbetween quotes to, uh, quote someone is a very novel usage of quotes

Where exactly have I written “honest indies”?

> You fundamentally misunderstand

Sorry no, you fundamentally misunderstand the point. Try to do the math. Those microtransactions generate loads of revenue; taxing them higher will generate more revenue for the walled garden. The revenue that can then be used to subsidise a drastic reduction of the tax for the rest.

> If you think Apple gives a single shit about reputation when they're the only dealer in town

You are casually sneaking in falsehoods, so I’m not sure reading the rest was even worhtwhile. Not only is Apple not the only dealer in town, it is not even the largest one.
by Pfhortune | 2025-08-24 04:43:30+00:00
This inspired me to finally grab a Sony Clie SL-10 on eBay to play around with. Been watching that model on and off for a while because it was the last AAA-powered model. No ancient rechargeable cell to deal with.

(Sigh) I really miss tech that wasn’t actively trying to exploit my brain, empty my wallet, or both.
by nayajunimesh | 2025-08-24 04:43:34+00:00
Most validation libraries like Zod create deep clones of your data during validation, which can impact performance in high-throughput applications. I built decode-kit to take a different approach: assertion-based validation that validates and narrows TypeScript types in-place, without any copying or transformation. Here's what the API looks like in practice:

import { object, string, number, validate } from "decode-kit";

// Example of untrusted data (e.g., from an API) const input: unknown = { id: 123, name: "Alice" };

// Validate the data (throws if validation fails) validate(input, object({ id: number(), name: string() }));

// `input` is now typed as { id: number; name: string } console.log(input.id, input.name);

When validation fails, decode-kit takes an equally thoughtful approach. Rather than being prescriptive about error formatting, it exposes a structured error system with an AST-like path that precisely indicates where validation failed. It does include a sensible default error message for debugging, but you can also traverse the error path to build whatever error handling approach fits your application - from simple logging to sophisticated user-facing messages.

The library also follows a fail-fast approach, immediately throwing when validation fails, which provides both better performance and clearer error messages by focusing on the first issue encountered.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback on this approach.
by kragen | 2025-08-24 04:44:25+00:00
Yes, agreed. But neon lamps weren't limited to the Bell System; everybody who worked in electronics at the time used them for something, though not as commonly as things like capacitors and resistors.

Microwave gear of course had to use vacuum tubes until transistors got fast enough; as you say, although you can switch a voice signal with a neon lamp, you can't amplify it that way, and microwaves are a million times faster than voice. (Amplifying voice with a saturable inductor, a so-called "magamp", had its day too, though magamps are rarely seen today outside of ATX power supplies.)

But a lot of electronics didn't have to run at microwave frequencies or even voice frequencies; motor frequencies or powerline frequencies were enough.

Which page are you referring to in [2]?
by since7 | 2025-08-24 04:45:27+00:00
I live in an southern EU country (Bulgaria). Up until some point in time AC was too expensive and not widely adopted in residential context. This started changing more then 10 years ago and now when almost the whole summer is a constant heatwave nobody rents an apartment without an AC. There is another factor though - in the capital Sofia, using AC for heating in winder is actually cheaper than the central heating which is the alternative.

We travel to Greece a lot, and I've never seen a place without an AC there either.
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-08-24 04:45:53+00:00
> Because it’s extremely lucrative

It could be extremely lucrative if they get it right.

Simply trying to copy TSMC would also be a poor strategy.

Companies have "core competencies" (or should). The manufacture (not design) of high-end silicon has never been one for any of these companies except Intel, and they have just lost big time.

> strategically valuable to the US

Yeah, they don't care.
by wat10000 | 2025-08-24 04:46:44+00:00
I didn’t say you’re making big claims. You’re doing the “just asking questions” schtick. And you’re acting surprised that people realize what you’re doing.

“By simply mentioning skepticism” in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, you are supporting people who want to get millions killed.

You don’t have to believe Big Pharma. There’s plenty of independent evidence that vaccines are safe.
by k_bx | 2025-08-24 04:47:37+00:00
My current production systems are running Ubuntu 22.04, and there is no official images with systemd for them in Podman. So it does feel like second class citizen.

On another hand, if ubi’s work fine — that means there should be no technical limitation to keep Ubuntu working.

I’ll keep playing with Podman for now, but will switch to Incus if that will fail
by ivraatiems | 2025-08-24 04:48:00+00:00
I think I am coming to agree with the opinions of the author, at least as far as LLMs not being the key to AGI on their own. The sheer impressiveness of what they can do, and the fact they can do it with natural language, made it feel like we were incredibly close for a time. As we adjust to the technology, it starts to feel like we're further away again.

But I still see all the same debates around AGI - how do we define it? what components would it require? could we get there by scaling or do we have to do more? and so on.

I don't see anyone addressing the most truly fundamental question: Why would we want AGI? What need can it fulfill that humans, as generally intelligent creatures, do not already fulfill? And is that moral, or not? Is creating something like this moral?

We are so far down the "asking if we could but not if we should" railroad that it's dazzling to me, and I think we ought to pull back.
by ViktorRay | 2025-08-24 04:48:32+00:00
The other solution is for the elementary school teachers in your example to move elsewhere in the country.

There’s plenty of space in America. Plenty of schools all over the country where two elementary school teachers could work and have the home you mentioned.

Your comment is based on the strange assumption that the Bay Area, DC, NYC, and other high cost of living metropolitan areas places are all that exist in America.