MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by 1659447091 | 2025-08-10 20:29:57+00:00
Did you mean this is Web 3.0? (semantic web)

Where the goal was to have a site's data as machine readable so that could be mashed up into something new? Instead of making it easier to gather the big sites locked the bulk of their data down so it never gained widespread adoption

Web 2.0 is what we mostly have now -- social, user generated content and interaction
by Teever | 2025-08-10 20:30:13+00:00
Authoritarians will always try and pull this kind of shit. It's just what they do. The bigger question you should be asking is where's the coordinated pushback?

Where are the celebrities and public figures taking a stand against this?

Where are the grassroots organizations organizing protests and promoting sousveillance programs against the authoritarians who want to take away our rights and privacy?

The reason why this is all happening at once is because there's no resistance to it.

Until there's meaningful resistance you're just gonna see authoritarian policies keep snowballing.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-10 20:30:32+00:00
This is an exaggeration, or you're not comparing apples to apples.

The used market for high performance PC gear is quite efficient. You're not going to get a high-end CPU or GPU from the past several years for pennies on the dollar.

Likewise, the resale market for Apple products doesn't guarantee 50% or more unless you're only looking at resale value of very new hardware. For example, you can pick up an M1 Max MacBook Pro (not that old) for closer to 1/3 of the original price.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-10 20:31:16+00:00
As women have far fewer babies, the U.S. and the world face unprecedented challenges - https://www.npr.org/2025/07/07/nx-s1-5388357/birth-rate-fert... - July 7th, 2025

> Most demographers now say the population bomb has largely fizzled, and some predict that the long-term trend toward a smaller global population, with fewer consumers and a smaller human footprint on the planet, could benefit the environment.

> There appear to be other upsides to declining fertility. Along with growing individual freedom and economic empowerment of women, the U.N. study also found a rapid drop in the number of girls and teenagers giving birth.

> "The decline of the adolescent birth rates has been, I would say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the past three decades," said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.'s chief population scientist.

United Nations World Fertility 2024 Report - https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389 (additional citations)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392 (additional citations)

(scholar of the global demographic system; urbanization is certainly a component in a declining fertility rate, but the primary driver is women choosing to have less children, delay having them, or not having them at all, while having the means to assert those choices)
by perlgeek | 2025-08-10 20:31:43+00:00
I like 99% of this, and the thing I don't like is in the very first line of the example:

> import abs, epsilon from math

IMHO it's wrong to put the imported symbols first, because the same symbol could come from two different libraries and mean different things. So the library name is pretty important, and putting it last (and burying it after a potentially long list of imported symbols) just feels wrong.

I get that it has a more natural-language vibe this way, but put there's a really good reason that most of the languages I know that put the package/module name first:

import packageName.member; // java from package import symbol; # python use Module 'symbol'; # perl

With Typescript being the notable exception:

import { pi as π } from "./maths.js";t
by crazygringo | 2025-08-10 20:32:12+00:00
> and the new normal is that potential readers, the polite ones[^1], use the slightest hint of AI usage to discard their title and move on...

Is that the new normal?

My impression is that when it comes to reading text, nobody cares as long as the final product is good.

People don't want AI-written books, but people have been comfortably listening to AI voices reading text for a long time now. Text-to-speech isn't really a controversial thing for listening to articles or books.

(Which is very different from voice acting, for example, which requires acting not just reading.)
by gglon | 2025-08-10 20:34:16+00:00
> At the time of writing, the highest-ranking non-purely-transformer-based model on the LM Arena is Jamba, which is a transformer–state space model hybrid, at rank 96.)

Tencent's hunyuan-turbos, another hybrid, is currently ranked at 22. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.15431
by throwaway89201 | 2025-08-10 20:34:54+00:00
Please also fight mandatory age verification with prison sentences. The European Parliament has already voted in favor of a law that mandates age verification for pornography with a one year prison sentence. It was included as a last minute amendment into this bill [1]. See "Amendment 186". It has been completely missed by news organizations and even interest groups.

The full accepted article reads: "Disseminating pornographic content online without putting in place robust and effective age verification tools to effectively prevent children from accessing pornographic content online shall be punishable by a maximum term of imprisonment of at least 1 year."

It's not law yet, as the first reading is now sent back to the Council of the European Union, but I don't think it's very likely it will get a second reading.

[1] https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/TA-10-2025-011...
by kgwgk | 2025-08-10 20:35:22+00:00
Another similar story:

King Frederick, the great of Prussia had a very fine army, and none of the soldiers in it were finer than Giant Guards, who were all extremely tall men. It was difficult to find enough soldiers for these Guards, as there were not many men who were tall enough.

Frederick had made it a rule that no soldiers who did not speak German could be admitted to the Giant Guards, and this made the work of the officers who had to find men for them even more difficult. When they had to choose between accepting or refusing a really tall man who knew no German, the officers used to accept him, and then teach him enough. German to be able to answer if the King questioned him.

Frederick, sometimes, used to visit the men who were on guard around his castle at night to see that they were doing their job properly, and it was his habit to ask each new one that he saw three questions: “How old are you?” “How long have you been in my army?” and “Are you satisfied with your food and your conditions?”

The offices of the Giant Guards therefore used to teach new soldiers who did not know German the answers to these three questions.

One day, however, the King asked a new soldier the questions in a different order, he began with, “How long have you been in my army?” The young soldier immediately answered, “Twenty – two years, Your Majesty”. Frederick was very surprised. “How old are you then?”, he asked the soldier. “Six months, Your Majesty”, came the answer. At this Frederick became angry, “Am I a fool, or are you one?” he asked. “Both, Your Majesty”, the soldier answered politely.

https://archive.org/details/advancedstoriesf0000hill
by cal85 | 2025-08-10 20:36:09+00:00
nope, fire your lawyer. you get a common law trademark by trading under a name. no need to register it. TM registration is just to streamline big corps chasing after lots of small abusers in a wackamole way, that’s all. if the abuse in question is as egregious as “I used their product name, barely modified, to market my own thing, which is not just in the same general market but a literal clone of their product” then a judge is not going to say “Ah but I see they didn’t send in a form to register their trademark, so yeah carry on with blatantly stealing their work lol”
by tickettotranai | 2025-08-10 20:36:13+00:00
Technically yes, but... it's moderately tricky to get an LLM to play good chess even though it can.

https://dynomight.net/more-chess/

This is significant in general because I personally would love to get these things to code-switch into "hackernews poster" or "writer for the Economist" or "academic philosopher", but I think the "chat" format makes it impossible. The inaccessibility of this makes me want to host my own LLM...
by crazygringo | 2025-08-10 20:36:25+00:00
> I've stopped listening to plenty of audiobooks because I didn't like the narrator.

I'm with you on this, but my reaction is the opposite -- I'm wondering if there are some books I couldn't stand to listen to, that now I could with a nice neutral narration voice? Instead of the weird untrained voice with weird vocal tics that was the official narration?
by lordnacho | 2025-08-10 20:38:12+00:00
Here's what LLMs remind me of.

When I went to uni, we had tutorials several times a week. Two students, one professor, going over whatever was being studied that week. The professor would ask insightful questions, and the students would try to answer.

Sometimes, I would answer a question correctly without actually understanding what I was saying. I would be spewing out something that I had read somewhere in the huge pile of books, and it would be a sentence, with certain special words in it, that the professor would accept as an answer.

But I would sometimes have this weird feeling of "hmm I actually don't get it" regardless. This is kinda what the tutorial is for, though. With a bit more prodding, the prof will ask something that you genuinely cannot produce a suitable word salad for, and you would be found out.

In math-type tutorials it would be things like realizing some equation was useful for finding an answer without having a clue about what the equation actually represented.

In economics tutorials it would be spewing out words about inflation or growth or some particular author but then having nothing to back up the intuition.

This is what I suspect LLMs do. They can often be very useful to someone who actually has the models in their minds, but not the data to hand. You may have forgotten the supporting evidence for some position, or you might have missed some piece of the argument due to imperfect memory. In these cases, LLM is fantastic as it just glues together plausible related words for you to examine.

The wheels come off when you're not an expert. Everything it says will sound plausible. When you challenge it, it just apologizes and pretends to correct itself.
by _Algernon_ | 2025-08-10 20:38:31+00:00
When (rational) people make decisions they weigh the possible rewards of success against the possible costs of failure. We are in a situation where the costs are virtually zero ("oh no, we have to try again in 6 months!") while the rewards are immense: the potential to consolidate even more power to the rich and powerful elite.

It shouldn't be surprising that this happens again and again, and they only need to succeed once. Social movements of the past understood this well. They increased the costs to such an extent that they couldn't be ignored.

Look at the movements that brought forth societal change in the past and imitate them. I can't think of one that didn't have an "extremist" wing that was willing to target the decision makers were it hurt: economic output (eg. strikes or sabotage) and violence.
by ej88 | 2025-08-10 20:40:31+00:00
This article is interesting but pretty shallow.

0(?): there’s no provided definition of what a ‘world model’ is. Is it playing chess? Is it remembering facts like how computers use math to blend Colors? If so, then ChatGPT: https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6898fe6178b88191a138fba8824c1a2c has a world model right?

1. The author seems to conflate context windows with failing to model the world in the chess example. I challenge them to ask a SOTA model with an image of a chess board or notation and ask it about the position. It might not give you GM level analysis but it definitely has a model of what’s going on.

2. Without explaining which LLM they used or sharing the chats these examples are just not valuable. The larger and better the model, the better its internal representation of the world.

You can try it yourself. Come up with some question involving interacting with the world and / or physics and ask GPT-5 Thinking. It’s got a pretty good understanding of how things work!

https://chatgpt.com/s/t_689903b03e6c8191b7ce1b85b1698358
by tzs | 2025-08-10 20:40:38+00:00
> Things like agriculture are dangerous because the answer is "yes" - you're literally shopping the water away as an agricultural product

Very little of the water used to grow the product actually ends up shipped. For example with alfalfa (a major Arizona crop) only 0.005% of the water used to grow it end up in the alfalfa. The rest of it first ends up in the ground near the plants or in the atmosphere near the plants.

This is also the case for most high water use industries. For example making integrated circuits uses a large amount of water but very little if any actually ends up in the chips themselves.
by refulgentis | 2025-08-10 20:41:16+00:00
It was difficult enough that you were downvoted to gray, and rather than just shrugging and moving on, I assumed the best.

I also was perfectly polite in my post.

It wouldn't have been difficult for you to do the same.

To be clear, you are claiming it is time to roll back woman's rights (the right to work) so they maintain the same army size.

May I be bold, and make a conjecture?

You are aware this argument is unjustifiable and people react as such, otherwise, you wouldn't be rolling out your 9 year old anon account to do it.

You do not understand why it is unjustifiable, so, you blame some sort of conspiracy or ill in civil society for your inability to back your free-association with your name.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-08-10 20:41:43+00:00
Disclosure: I have volunteered as a guardian ad litem for a brief stint as an independent advocate for children going through the court system, my mental model and opinion comes from this experience.

You can only help children up to legal bounds. If their parents aren't making good choices for them, but parents aren't breaking the law, there is nothing else you can do. Some parents are doing their best, some parents are doing the bare minimum, some parents are actively malicious. Again, all you can do is provide the support you're legally able to until kids hit age of maturity and make better choices for themselves. If parents step out of the boundaries of the law and/or are actively hurting/harming their kids, absolutely, intervene with whatever options are available. This is a tricky dance in my experience. You can just as easily have parents come at you civilly, criminally, or with physical violence because you've dared attempt to interfere with what they consider their property. Once a child is emancipated or reaches age of maturity, you can provide any and all resources to assist them without parental interference (housing, workforce, healthcare, etc to reach self sufficiency escape velocity).
by Aurornis | 2025-08-10 20:41:44+00:00
> Wow, someone managed to beat Apple on price??

He didn't pick the equivalent Mac to compare to. The closest Mac would be a an M4 Pro Mac Mini, not a Mac Studio.

Right now I see a 64GB M4 Pro Mac Mini with 2TB SSD is $2600. Still more expensive, but not double the price. The Apple refurbished store has the same model for $2200.

The M4 Pro Mac Mini probably has the edge in performance, though I can't say how much. The Ryzen platform driver and software support is still early.

I think these Strix Halo boxes are great, but I also think they're a little high in the hype cycle right now. Once supply and demand evens out I think they should be cheaper, though.
by hk__2 | 2025-08-10 20:41:50+00:00
I think you’re confusing France with Italy. France has had Simone de Beauvoir and still has a very strong feminist culture, had Mai 1968, has same-sex marriage since 2014 and 10 years later it was the first country in the world that added the right to aborption in its constitution; it has huge pride parades every year, not so long ago had an openly-gay Prime minister. It’s fine to talk about sex at work or with the family; you can see boobs on the cover of national newspapers and nobody talks about it because it’s perfectly fine.
by fathermarz | 2025-08-10 20:41:54+00:00
Not all LLMs are created equal and can be used for different aspects and workflows. I think the important bit is to gravitate to the tool that gives you the closest to your expected outcome.

Copy pasting code into ChatGPT gives me unreliable results, because I don’t know how to talk to it. I find copilot annoying in Visual Studio. The workflow of cursor/windsurf is not intuitive for me. Gemini context is wicked but I didn’t like how it constructed its outputs. I tried Claude Code and became a believer, not because it’s perfect, but because it fits my cadence and allows me to pivot quickly.

I still use chat for the occasional MSSQL syntax check, or Gemini for writing a technical doc. But there are so many variables and trial and error involved.

I keep reading posts like this thinking that there is a flavour of fear holding people back. Nothing to fear, just level set your expectations, don’t believe the hype and be open to the vibes.
by libraryofbabel | 2025-08-10 20:43:52+00:00
I mean yeah, it’s a good essay in that it made me think and try to articulate the gaps, and I’m always looking to read things that push back on AI hype. I usually just skip over the hype blogging.

I think my biggest complaint is that the essay points out flaws in LLM’s world models (totally valid, they do confidently get things wrong and hallucinate in ways that are different, and often more frustrating, from how humans get things wrong) but then it jumps to claiming that there is some fundamental limitation about LLMs that prevents them from forming workable world models. In particular, it strays a bit towards the “they’re just stochastic parrots” critique, e.g. “that just shows the LLM knows to put the words explaining it after the words asking the question.” That just doesn’t seem to hold up in the face of e.g. LLMs getting gold on the Mathematical Olympiad, which features novel questions. If that isn’t a world model of mathematics - being able to apply learned techniques to challenging new questions - then I don’t know what is.

A lot of that success is from reinforcement learning techniques where the LLM is made to solve tons of math problems after the pre-training “read everything” step, which then gives it a chance to update its weights. LLMs aren’t just trained from reading a lot of text anymore. It’s very similar to how the alpha zero chess engine was trained, in fact.

I do think there’s a lot that the essay gets right. If I was to recast it, I’d put it something like this:

* LLMs have imperfect models of the world which is conditioned by how they’re trained on next token prediction.

* We’ve shown we can drastically improve those world models for particular tasks by reinforcement learning. you kind of allude to this already by talking about how they’ve been “flogged” to be good at math.

* I would claim that there’s no particular reason these RL techniques aren’t extensible in principle to beat all sorts of benchmarks that might look unrealistic now. (Two years ago it would have been an extreme optimist position to say an LLM could get gold on the mathematical Olympiad, and most LLM skeptics would probably have said it could never happen.)

* Of course it’s very expensive, so most world models LLMs have won’t get the RL treatment and so will be full of gaps, especially for things that aren’t amenable to RL. It’s good to beware of this.

I think the biggest limitation LLMs actually have, the one that is the biggest barrier to AGI, is that they can’t learn on the job, during inference. This means that with a novel codebase they are never able to build a good model of it, because they can never update their weights. (If an LLM was given tons of RL training on that codebase, it could build a better world model, but that’s expensive and very challenging to set up.) This problem is hinted at in your essay, but the lack of on-the-job learning isn’t centered. But it’s the real elephant in the room with LLMs and the one the boosters don’t really have an answer to.

Anyway thanks for writing this and responding!
by justonceokay | 2025-08-10 20:44:39+00:00
No but nazis have a way of presenting facts that are only relevant if you are concerned primarily with racial purity. Is Germany’s population growing because of immigrants, or is germanys “heritage” disappearing because of white replacement?

If a man is hospitalized because he is having paranoid delusions about his wife cheating on him, he is still sick even if his suspicions are true.
by smokel | 2025-08-10 20:45:02+00:00
> CUDA isn't really used for new code.

I don't think this is particularly correct, or at least worded a bit too strongly.

For Nvidia hardware, CUDA just gives the best performance, and there are many optimized libraries that you'd have to replace as well.

Granted, new ML frameworks tend to be more backend agnostic, but saying that CUDA is no longer being used, seems a bit odd.
by scarface_74 | 2025-08-10 20:45:16+00:00
It’s not anger. I get tired of employers taking advantage of naive younger developers who have “passion” and underpay them and overwork them, expect them to have open source contributions and as you said yourself, if someone is “passionate” money isn’t as important.

These are the people who don’t show “passion” unless when they get off of work they are doing side projects related to software development and usually end up getting burned out.

I’ve also avoided burn out, stress over work and I am able to survive in the industry for 30 years because I understand the transactional nature of the job and set boundaries.

Someone who does there job well doesn’t mean they are “passionate”, they are “professional”.
by ben_w | 2025-08-10 20:47:40+00:00
1900-2025 has an average of 93.6.

So, between the values of the first and last 50 years. So it backs my point and still denies yours.

This time, do you want to cherry-pick a specific date range that actually fits the results you expect from your apparently pre-existing belief there's no trend, or are you going to accept that line go up?

Save you some time, here's the rolling averages with 10, 20, and 50 year horizons: https://pasteboard.co/rQ49kvY8YeBU.png

Average is forward from any given date on the chart and standard spreadsheet use of "average" function, which is why (if you look closely) you'll see the right side is spiky and they all line up perfectly when that's clearly silly.
by PaulHoule | 2025-08-10 20:48:27+00:00
Hate to break it to you but karma doesn’t count for anything, although always spamming articles from your own blog is the rookie mistake that gets your posts to start out [dead]

Take a look at /new, choked with AI products and “Ask HN: How come Vibe Coding Doesn’t Work For Me Although It Works For Everyone Else?” Or “Show HN: I Vibe Coded Something and It Almost Works”, “Is MCP really that evil program from Tron?”, etc.

The cheat code for August 2025 is it’s not about AI and if it an AI-oriented product it doesn’t say so right out front.