MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by not_a_bot_4sho | 2025-08-07 20:45:03+00:00
What's to stop them from routing to GPT2? Or to Gemini? Or to a mechanical turk? This path is open to your imagination.

That said, I've had luck with similar routing systems (developed before all of this -- maybe wasted effort now) to optimize requests between reasoning and regular LLMs based on input qualities. It works quiet well for open-domain inputs.
by maxglute | 2025-08-07 20:45:12+00:00
> truth is the margins for Chinese exporters have collapsed - there was a Chinese industrial profit drop of 10% in may and 5% in June [from comment below]

Truth is someone doesn't know how to read NBS/MoF data.

Decompose Industrial Profit Index, export sector margins private sector / manufacturing have been growing ~3% yoy/ytd. Stuff PRC is driving hard like electronic machinery up 10%, general manufacturing up 7%, autos, computers, electronics, up 4%.

Headline "Industrial Profit Index" down because _domestic_ coal and fossil profit %'s collapsed, something like -50% for coal and -10% for fossil. Coal demand down due to renewable rollout, fossil because cheap RU imports. Energy industrial profit are mostly large SEOs which get's disproportionated weighted in Index by NBS who doesn't publish profit index ex energy -> most exporters private companies increasing profitability gets skewed by headline number. People see Industrial Profit Index down, thinking profits across sectors down, but it's just domestic/SEO energy profit dragging down other sectors whose profit index increasing. Reality is if PRC export to US down, but US imports from countries known to tranship/reroute from PRC up then PRC mostly not cutting margins/absorbing tariffs but diverting.
by tjr | 2025-08-07 20:45:28+00:00
When the doctors tried their own searches in ChatGPT 3.5, they found that the AI did include bromide in its response, but it also indicated that context mattered and that bromide was not suitable for all uses. But the AI "did not provide a specific health warning, nor did it inquire about why we wanted to know, as we presume a medical professional would do," wrote the doctors.

Plus, LLMs are nondeterministic. Even if it did present a warning one time, it might not the next. Who knows?
by kbolino | 2025-08-07 20:45:43+00:00
To wit, each word drawn from a 10,000-word dictionary adds about 13 bits of entropy. At 4 words, you have (a little over) 52 bits of entropy, which is roughly equivalent to a 9-character alphanumeric (lower and upper) password. The going recommendation is 14 such characters, which would mean you'd need about 7 words.
by phi-system | 2025-08-07 20:46:00+00:00
It's been on my mind that software engineering practices are more about tribal wisdom than they are about rigorous empirical studies. For example "Agile" and "OOP" came to dominate the field even though there's no evidence for them and some people think they're bad.

So that got me wondering: if the practices are not evidence-based, how do I know I am doing the best practices? Maybe the tribe next-door does better practices than me? Wait, who's the tribe next-door? I don't even know that!

So now we have to go meta and I think a good first step is to get a map of the various software tribes that are out there.

I looked for it but haven't been able to find analyses of the meta field of software engineering. I'd like to see how people, ideologies and thought movements shaped the field of software engineering over its whole history (if you have recommendations please comment).

So instead I fell back on LLMs and generated this map of software tribes, hope you find it useful :) you can click on an hexagons to show more details on the tribe.
by BoorishBears | 2025-08-07 20:46:52+00:00
"Good observations regarding the benchmark vs. vibes in general"

Most "vibes" people are missing that it as only has 5B active parameters.

They read 120B and expect way more performance than a 24B parameter model, even though empricaly a 120B model with 5B active parameters is expected to perform right around there.
by geerlingguy | 2025-08-07 20:46:59+00:00
Yeah, my conspiracy theory is Nvidia is somehow influencing the decision. If you can do Vulkan with Ollama, it opens up people to using Intel/AMD/other iGPUs and you might not be incentivized to buy an Nvidia GPU.

ROCm support is not wonderful. It's certainly worse for an end user to deal with than Vulkan, which usually 'just works'.
by 93po | 2025-08-07 20:47:17+00:00
in what way are human brains also not just predictors? our neural pathways are built and reinforced as we have repeated exposure to inputs through any of our senses. our brains are expert pattern-followers, to the point that is happens even when we strongly don't want to (in the case of PTSD, for example, or people who struggle with impulse control and executive functioning).

whats the next sentence i'm going to type? is not just based on the millions of sentences ive typed before and read before? even the premise of me playing devils advocate here, that's a pattern i've learned over my entire life too.

your argument also falls apart a bit when we see emergent behavior, which has definitely happened
by indigodaddy | 2025-08-07 20:48:34+00:00
But what exactly is creating wealth at this point? Who is paying for the AI/AI robots (besides the ultrarich for they're own lifestyle) if no one is working? What happens to the economy and all of the rich people's money (that is probably just $ on paper and may come crashing down soon at this point?). I'm definitely not an economics person but I just don't see how this new world sustains.
by dougdonohoe | 2025-08-07 20:48:54+00:00
I don't have confidence that systems built on top of a specific model will work the same on a higher version. Unlike, say, the Go programming language where backwards compatibility is something you can generally count on (with exceptions being well documented).

I wouldn't want to be in charge of regression testing an LLM-based enterprise software app when bumping the underlying model.
by const_cast | 2025-08-07 20:49:10+00:00
The problem with the mentality is that conservative ideas aren't ever censored, even on mainstream platforms like Instagram.

Rather, there is an association between modern conservative/libertarian voices and populist messaging - and all the pitfalls that come with it. Meaning, vulgarity, emotional bait, deception, and purposefully offensive language.

Like, the modern American conservative leadership cannot advertise their own ideology without resorting to lies and attacks of character. The left, by comparison, does not operate that way.

So, if you're censoring shitheads who are generally unliked, that might appear as though youre targeting conservatives or right leaning people. But you're not.

Basically, the right has purposefully positioned themselves to be associated with unpalatable ideas in order to leverage populist messaging. And this worked - they won an election. The downside is that now if you filter out unpalatable ideas such as blatant slurs you're going to necessarily mostly target right wing people. By accident.
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-07 20:49:43+00:00
Of everything he's done with EOs, this might actually be the most legal one.

the President has authority to allocate enforcement resources. "We are going to make sure the law was followed" is that authority. He can dress it up with all the flowery "no political debanking" rhetoric he wants, but if there's no actual law against refusing to hold accounts for the KKK, there's nothing for enforcement to do, and that's that.

(Apart from that, increased scrutiny could of course uncover other kinds of lawbreaking. When we're talking banks? Not against that.)
by tedsanders | 2025-08-07 20:49:46+00:00
I wrote that section and made the graphs, so you can blame me. We no doubt highlight the evals that make us look good, but in this particular case I think the emphasis on telecom isn't unprincipled cherry picking.

Telecom was made after retail & airline, and fixes some of their problems. In retail and airline, the model is graded against a ground truth reference solution. But in reality, there can be multiple solutions that solve the problem, and perfectly good answers can receive scores of 0 by the automatic grading. This, along with some user model issues, is partly why airline and retail scores haven't climbed with the latest generations of models and are stuck around 60% / 80%. Even a literal superintelligence would probably plateau here.

In telecom, the authors (Barres et al.) made the grading less brittle by grading against outcome states, which may be achieved via multiple solutions, rather than by matching against a single specific solution. They also improved the user modeling and some other things too. So telecom is the much better eval, with a much cleaner signal, which is partly why models can score as high as 97% instead of getting mired at 60%/80% due to brittle grading and other issues.

Even if I had never seen GPT-5's numbers, I like to think I would have said ahead of time that telecom is much better than airline/retail for measuring tool use.

Incidentally, another thing to keep in mind when critically looking at OpenAI and others reporting their scores on these evals is that the evals give no partial credit - so sometimes you can have very good models that do all but one thing perfectly, which results in very poor scores. If you tried generalizing to tasks that don't trigger that quirk, you might get much better performance than the eval scores suggest (or vice versa, if they trigger a quirk not present in the eval).

Here's the tau2-bench paper if anyone wants to read more: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.07982
by wrcwill | 2025-08-07 20:50:04+00:00
well no, thats where it gets confused. as soon as you sail across to the other pole you are forced to go up to a speed of 1670kmh.

when models try to be smart/creative they attempt to switch poles like that. in my example it even says that the max speed will be only a few km/h (since their strategy is to chill at the poles and then sail from north to south pole very slowly)

--

GPT-5 pro does get it right though! it even says this:

"Do not try to swap hemispheres to ride both polar summers. You’d have to cross the equator while staying in daylight, which momentarily forces a westward component near the equatorial rotation speed (~1668 km/h)—a much higher peak speed than the 663 km/h plan."
by gus_massa | 2025-08-07 20:51:27+00:00
You mean wood gears like in https://www.alamy.com/gears-of-a-windmill-image245974580.htm... ?

I guess they were replaced a few times during the non harvesting season.

To replace the main gears of a rotating shell in space, you must "turn off" gravity for a week (or month).
by shadowgovt | 2025-08-07 20:51:48+00:00
History suggests that a divided America tends to elect less effective leadership. The goal of the electorate becomes less about electing someone who will support your causes and more about electing someone who won't screw you over.

We saw this in the so-called "bumbling generation" that led up to the Civil War, and when a President widely regarded as more charismatic and competent President was elected, several states panicked and seceded.
by yencabulator | 2025-08-07 20:52:19+00:00
> degraded about -0.25 to -0.5 over the course of the day

FWIW my ophthalmologist made the point that most people working on computers have eyes go too dry toward the end of the day, and that also causes blurry vision. Try some eye drops.

> But I'm not sure really straining those muscles all-day-every-day is healthy long term.

Consider it "normal use of the muscle" and not straining and how normally using your muscles is considered good for you.

Personally, I expect a good chunk of the effect to be on the brain side, not in the physical muscle. Like how parents sometimes tell kids with a lazy eye to "use both your eyes". Keep the brain from giving up on it.
by morleytj | 2025-08-07 20:52:35+00:00
Certainly, yes, plenty of elbow grease required in all things that matter.

The interesting point as well to me though, is that if it could create a startup that was worth $1B, that startup wouldn't be worth $1B.

Why would anyone pay that much to invest in the startup if they could recreate the entire thing with the same tool that everyone would have access to?
by cchance | 2025-08-07 20:52:36+00:00
SAM is a HYPE CEO, he literally hypes his company nonstop, then the announcements come and ... they're... ok, so people aren't really upset, but they end up feeling lackluster at the hype... Until the next cycle comes around...

If you want actual big moves, watch google, anthropic, qwen, deepseek.

Qwen and Deepseek teams honestly seem so much better at under promising and over delivering.

Cant wait to see what Gemini 3 looks like too.
by codingdave | 2025-08-07 20:52:55+00:00
No, it doesn't. A license is just a specific type of contract. The strength is not about the language used, but the ability to take it through a legal process to enforce it. You would need to identify who has broken it, file a suit in court against them, get through all the procedural steps they'll throw at you to get the suit thrown out, then finally actually prove all the elements of a contract at trial.

The precedent you are seeking would help arguments in that last step, but that isn't part that makes enforcement a challenge.
by dang | 2025-08-07 20:52:57+00:00
Can you please make your substantive points thoughtfully? Thoughtful criticism is welcome but snarky putdowns and onliners, etc., degrade the discussion for everyone.

You've posted substantive comments in other threads, so this should be easy to fix.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
by jchw | 2025-08-07 20:53:34+00:00
I think source code really only exists in terms of the source code/object code dichotomy, so what "traditional" open source means for model weights is really not obvious if you only go off of traditional definitions. Personally I think the word "open source" shouldn't apply here anymore than it would for art or binary code.

Consider the following: it is possible to release binaries under the Apache2 license. Microsoft has, at least at one point, released a binary under the BSD license. These binaries are not open source because they are not source.

This isn't the same argument as given in the article though, so I guess it is a third position.
by t_mann | 2025-08-07 20:53:37+00:00
It's a factor, together with high tuition fees, demographic changes, changing attitudes about credentialism (the political tide turning against liberal elite institutions), the cheap 24/7 availability of excellent learning materials online might kill "college as we know it" (in the US). US college is much more than education, it's a lifestyle, with lavish amenities, extracurriculars, varsity sports, all sorts of counselling. It's a bit of an anomaly, most universities globally are much more bare-bone. If US students start value shopping, the US college landscape might start to look more like that.
by not_your_vase | 2025-08-07 20:53:38+00:00
See what happened to IBM. They have been doing it for decades. Are they still big? Sure. Are they here to stay for decades? Jawohl. Are they irrelevant too? Yup.

They are a shadow of their former self.

I expect to see the same screenplay with Intel. Actually it started a while ago also, but many were in denial about it.
by bakul | 2025-08-07 20:53:45+00:00
AFAIK this is far more common in muslims but not in hindus, jains etc. While growing up I had heard/read that as per the Vedas you can not marry someone with whom you have a common ancestor within 7 generations. [My scientifically minded atheist parents agreed with the idea.] Of course, in practice this isn't always followed but in any arranged marriage such proscriptions would presumably be checked.
Show HN: Correct Horse Battery Staple
by kripy | 2025-08-07 20:53:50+00:00
I had this idea in my head for a while. When 1Password updated their UI it got tricky to generate passwords (they've since fixed it) so I wrote my own password generator. It hooks into the macOS dictionary which has over 250k words and pulls out four random words. The correct horse battery staple script then pulls a random style, for the image, from a text file and sends me the output. I am manually entering this into Midjourney and selecting the image because, well, it's fun. I'm curating. You're welcome.
by jasonjayr | 2025-08-07 20:54:01+00:00
https://www.krakenrf.com/

For about $700, you can get some pre-made kit to use SDR to do Radio direction finding. IIRC this device uses the same chips as a RTL-SDR, but it uses 4-5 of them, all synchronized and has a signal emitter for calibration, and a nice web ui to report the data.

(I have not used it, but I've been learning about all sorts of neat radio products as I'm dabling and learning about SDR)
by dangus | 2025-08-07 20:54:15+00:00
I think this is a gross oversimplification and an incorrect assessment of the US’ economic manufacturing capabilities.

The US completely controls critical steps of the chip making process as well as the production of the intellectual property needed to produce competitive chips, and the lithography machines are controlled by a close ally that would abide by US sanctions.

The actual war planes and ships and missiles are of course still built in the USA. Modern warfare with stuff that China makes like drones and batteries only gets you so far. They can’t make a commercially competitive aviation jet engine without US and Western European suppliers.

And the US/NAFTA has a ton of existing manufacturing capability in a lot of the “screws and rivets” categories. For example, there are lots of automotive parts and assembly companies in the US. The industry isn’t as big as it used to be but it’s still significant. The US is the largest manufacturing exporter besides China.
by mustaphah | 2025-08-07 20:54:37+00:00
Stop asking LLMs to count!

Text is broken into tokens in training (subword/multi-word chunks) rather than individual characters; the model doesn’t truly "see" letters or spaces the way humans do. Counting requires exact, step-by-step tracking, but LLMs work probabilistically.

It's not much of a help anyway, don't you agree?
by srhtftw | 2025-08-07 20:54:42+00:00
> Many will cheer the likely disappearance of political fundraising texts and robocalls around election season. But not all “unknown sender” messages are created equal.

Sorry but I do not pay for cellular service in order to receive unsolicited texts.

My daily driver is a dumb Consumer Cellular Link II (which uses a castrated Android under the covers). It's turned off most of the time. I don't use or want apps on it. My laptop satisfies those needs. My texting is limited to rendezvous with my family. A silent ringtone effectively blocks all unknown callers but I can't easily block unknown texts.

Apple is doing the right thing here if this feature works as described. Although I won't be switching any smartphone, I would immediately upgrade to a dumb phone that segregated texts this way and I hope to have that option in the future.
by latexr | 2025-08-07 20:54:53+00:00
Here’s your proof:

yt-dlp --format 18 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWxh9lGOeqQ' --output 'FuckingGenius.mp4' && open -a 'QuickTime Player' 'FuckingGenius.mp4'

No reencoding, just getting a video straight from YouTube and playing it in QuickTime Player.
by synapsomorphy | 2025-08-07 20:55:04+00:00
It appears to me like the linked explanation is also subtly wrong, in a different way:

“This is why a flat surface like a sail is able to cause lift – here the distance on each side is the same but it is slightly curved when it is rigged and so it acts as an aerofoil. In other words, it’s the curvature that creates lift, not the distance.”

But like you say flat plates can generate lift at positive AoA, no curvature (camber) required. Can you confirm this is correct? Kinda going crazy because I'd very much expect a Cambridge aerodynamicist to get this 100% right.
by mitthrowaway2 | 2025-08-07 20:55:06+00:00
Interesting. On that note, Da Vinci's design (which I was fortunate enough to see a replica of at a local museum) was also very clever, being suited not only for screw cutting but also screw origination, as it could make new screws more accurately than the two leadscrews in the machine itself, and swap them out to improve its own accuracy. But I suppose it doesn't extend that date even further back because it wasn't a general purpose lathe, it could only cut screws.
by tonetegeatinst | 2025-08-07 20:55:19+00:00
To answer your question:

You can tweak a existing license to fit your goals. The issue is if it is not widely adopted then it will be a largely uphill battle to enforce said license, and the longer a legal fight the costlier it becomes.

To answer your question: certain software prohibits use for "military technology" which is one of the vaguest term iv seen. You also have license's that prohibit use in a commercial setting etc.

As for a license that prohibits certain users, that's more complex. The WordPress drama which had a button added blocking a specific group did happen, but a judge blocked that action. You probably need any "click to confirm you are not X or don't support Y at the very beginning of the release and not as an add in later down the road.

The easiest method for blocking certain groups of people would be a web developer banning any country IP that supports GDPR, and includes in the terms of service that you will not use the software if you fall into XYZ category.
by theamk | 2025-08-07 20:55:43+00:00
If there is an option to buy a single beer on the shelf, sure. But in this case there is no such option.

Imagine you _really_ wanted to try Foobar beer. So you get to beer distributor, and you find out that while each bottle is just $5, the minimum order is a crate of 144 bottles and they give no samples.

In this case, you might say: "Yeah, I really wanted to try that beer but there is no way I am paying $720 for that". It's exactly the same here.

(re 1147% vs 12400% - sure, maybe you could argue you should not look at a single license, but rather at a pack of 5 or 10 licenses... but this does not change numbers much for Coursera, it's still huge increase.)
by shirleygiven968 | 2025-08-07 20:55:47+00:00
I was living with MS for years before being officially diagnosed in 2021. I got annual MRIs, and I did not take any meds due to side effects. I had one flare up in 2021. My legs decided to a break and I was numb from the waist down. I decided to try MS-4. The numbness and Muscle spasms went away after a couple of weeks, but it took almost 3 months to walk properly without a cane. In June, it will be four years without incident, and I am extremely happy that I made the decision to not take any meds and went for the MS-4 formula even though my neurologist got upset and one told me to quit my job because I will be disabled. Well, I am not disabled, I still refuse to take those meds, and I am doing just fine. Believe in yourself and go with your instincts. Doctors don't know it all. I’m surprised a lot of people with MS haven’t heard of the MS-4 protocol, Visit uinehealthcentre. net I hope you find it helpful
by rstuart4133 | 2025-08-07 20:55:48+00:00
> That being said, AGI is not a necessary requirement for AI to be totally world-changing.

Depends on how you define "world changing" I guess, but this world already looks different to the pre-LLM world to me.

Me asking LLM's things instead of consulting the output from other humans now takes up a significant fraction of my day. I don't google near as often, I don't trust any image or video I see as swathes of the creative professions have been replaced by output from LLM's.

It's funny, that final thing is the last thing I would have predicted. I always believed the one thing a machine could not match was human creativity, because the output of machines was always precise, repetitive and reliable. Then LLM's come along, randomly generating every token. Their primary weakness is they neither precise or reliable, but they can turn out an unending stream of unique output.