MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-18 03:20:23+00:00
> A next token predictor by definition is recalling.

I think there may be some terminology mismatch, because under the statistical definitions of these words, which are the ones used in the context of machine learning, this is very much a false assertion. A next-token predictor is a mapping that takes prior sentence context and outputs a vector of logits to predict the next most likely token in the sequence. It says nothing about the mechanisms by which this next token is chosen, so any form of intelligent text can be output.

A predictor is not necessarily memorizing either, in the same way that a line of best fit is not a hash table.

> Why exactly? You're stating a priori that the argument is wrong without saying way.

Because you can prove that for any human, there exists a next-token predictor that universally matches word-for-word their most likely response to any given query. This is indistinguishable from intelligence. That's a theoretical counterexample to the claim that next-token prediction alone is incapable of intelligence.
by lilyball | 2025-08-18 03:20:58+00:00
Your argument here is basically just "I already know Markdown". Sure, the Markdown image syntax is similar to its hyperlink syntax, so if you know the hyperlink syntax then the image syntax is easy, but the same argument works for reST but even better, the image syntax is the same as any other directive, so if you know how to write a directive then you know how to write an image.
by kronatus | 2025-08-18 03:22:03+00:00
I agree with your point that most of us probably couldn't direct much worthwhile, but surely art/game/movie directors have more than an "idea". Granted the only creative directors that I know of are the ones that did an exceptional job, so that might be a skewed perspective. I guess my objection is largely that the creative process is the fumbling around, treating LLMs as a shortcut to a creative product because you "haven't mastered the medium" is skipping the whole creative process; if you haven't bothered to fail at it, why should I be bothered to read it?
by voidhorse | 2025-08-18 03:23:27+00:00
I completely agree. If nothing else, the discourse around LLM use in the creative space has just shown me that many people in technology simply have little to no comprehension of the arts and humanities and have no clue what it is that artists actually do, or even how to intelligently engage with artistic works. The 20th cen transformation of art into time-filling idle entertainment by way of mass media has been a great success. The internet helped reset some of that, but not by much. I guess that shouldn't necessarily be surprising, but I am always kind of astonished at the fact that our society has produced a large number of specialists who are profoundly good at what they do but who clearly lack exposure to other spheres of life.
by to11mtm | 2025-08-18 03:23:45+00:00
> dating apps

Well played.

Fun story, once upon a time I remember seeing a dating profile where they flat out gave a cashapp if you wanted to talk to them. Within 3 months somehow I discovered they worked at the same shop I did, and when I asked about their 'diffuser' they were more than happy to send me an amazon link to buy one, which was an affiliate link.
by yuanchuangAI | 2025-08-18 03:25:06+00:00
In the past two years, we’ve witnessed an explosion of AI tools — chatbots, code copilots, image generators, productivity apps. But the problem is not “lack of tools”, it’s too many of them.

We built ToolVerse, a curated AI tools discovery platform. Currently it lists 500+ AI tools, categorized across: Conversational AI, Image Generation, Dev Tools, Video Editing, Productivity, Business Intelligence, etc.

Tech stack: Next.js 14 + Supabase + crawler system. Fully responsive, schema-based SEO, multi-language support.

Features:

Real-time search & advanced filtering (pricing, ratings, categories)

Tool comparisons and usage scenarios

Community-driven ratings (planned)

Why? Because right now AI is like the early “App Store” era — lots of experiments, but poor discoverability. ToolVerse aims to be that discovery layer.

Would love to hear feedback from devs and AI enthusiasts here:https://www.toolsverse.tools/
by spauldo | 2025-08-18 03:25:37+00:00
That doesn't jive with my experience.

When I look at the people I've worked with over the years, all having a blank profile says to me is that they don't care about their LinkedIn profile. I know the quality of their work and it seems to have no relationship with how detailed their profile is.

Personally, I list every project I've worked on, what my role was for that project, and the technologies used. I do that for my own benefit as well as for recruiters.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-08-18 03:25:40+00:00
There's a constant drum-beat of NUMA related work going by if you follow phoronix.com .

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.17-NUMA-Locality-Rando... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.13-Sched_Ext https://www.phoronix.com/news/DAMON-Self-Tuned-Memory-Tierin... https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.14-FUSE

There's some big work I'm missing thats more recent too, again about allocating & scheduling IIRC. Still trying to find it. The third link is in DAMON, which is trying to do a lot to optimize; good thread to tug more on!

I have this pocket belief that eventually we might see post NUMA post coherency architectures, where even a single chip acts more like multiple independent clusters, that use something more like networking (CXL or UltraEthernet or something) to allow RDMA, but without coherency.

Even today, the title here is woefully under-describing the problem. A Epyc chip is actually multiple different compute die, each with their own NUMA zone and their own L3 and other caches. For now yes each socket's memory is all via a single IO die & semi uniform, but whether that holds is in question, and even today, the multiple NUMA zones on one socket already require careful tuning for efficient workload processing.
by graeme | 2025-08-18 03:25:45+00:00
Huh, glad you dug into that. Below that chart they link the youth rates, and they're way down. Teenage labour force participation peaked in 1978, with a mini peak in 1989, and 20-24 in 1989, with a mini peak in 2001.

The answer there is likely we're keeping them in school longer + filling downtime with school or social media or "extracurriculars". Alongside a growing NEET cohort that doesn't feel motivation to do anything or is disabled.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300036

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300012

As for 55+, I'd be very interested to see the relative age distribution within that pool over that period. I suspect there's a lot more 65+ within the pool now than when the rate was higher. That trend is set to grow.
by laffcollie | 2025-08-18 03:26:28+00:00
Oh thanks, I did not know that at all! But the way I am trying to do it, there's a back and forth process ... you see the remaining letters in the clue and KNOW they are NOT in the answer, because common letters are gone... this helps to try to guess the answer.. then you get a hint, and suppose a letter is revealed in the answer, but NOTHING gets filled in for the clue... then, vice versa, that letter is not in the CLUE... so that makes it fun, at least for me... I thought this would be a cool mechanic... and the hint system is progressive so if you really want to, you can get more hints and get it done quickly.
by int_19h | 2025-08-18 03:27:01+00:00
> This is speculation at best. Models are black boxes, even to those who make them. We can't discern a "meaningful internal representation" in a model, anymore than a human brain.

They are not pure black boxes. They are too complex to decipher, but it doesn't mean we can't look at activations and get some very high level idea of what is going on.

For world models specifically, the paper that first demonstrated that LLM has some kind of a world model corresponding to the task it is trained on came out in 2023: https://www.neelnanda.io/mechanistic-interpretability/othell.... Now you might argue that this doesn't prove anything about generic LLMs, and that is true. But I would argue that, given this result, and given what LLMs are capable of doing, assuming that they have some kind of world model (even if it's drastically simplified and even outright wrong around the edges) should be the default at this point, and people arguing that they definitely don't have anything like that should present concrete evidence ot that effect.

> We're just highly advanced "stochastic parrots" with a game loop.

If that is your assertion, then what's the point of even talking about "stochastic parrots" at all? By this definition, _everything_ is that, so it ceases to be a meaningful distinction.
by stego-tech | 2025-08-18 03:27:19+00:00
100% with you there. I can count one time in my entire 15 years where I had to pin a production workload for performance, and it was Hyperion.

In 99% of use cases, there’s other, easier optimizations to be had. You’ll know if you’re in the 1% workload pinning is advantageous to.

For everyone else, it’s an excellent explainer why most guides and documentation will sternly warn you against fussing with the NUMA scheduler.
by chasil | 2025-08-18 03:27:23+00:00
I've read pages at the Alcor site on cryonics that address these issues.

They had posted many years ago that a rabbit kidney had been vitrified, stored for a month in liquid nitrogen, then thawed and restored in a live rabbit.

While I am finishing the article, it appears that the field of cryonics has advanced.

https://www.alcor.org/library/alcor-presentation-at-cambridg...

From the above article: "What works perfectly for preserving a rat heart might be disastrous for a human heart - not because bigger organs are inherently harder to preserve, but because the physics of heat flow and mechanical stress changes with size in surprising ways...

"To solve this problem, scientists developed an ingenious approach: they add magnetic nanoparticles to the preservation solution. By exposing these particles to an alternating magnetic field, they can generate heat throughout the tissue rather than just at its surface. But Rabin's computational studies revealed a catch: the nanoparticles don't distribute evenly through the tissue. The heart chambers end up with higher concentrations than the heart muscle—with chambers containing nearly seven times more nanoparticles than the surrounding tissue—creating a variable distribution based on the heart's anatomy. This uneven heating creates complex thermal gradients that can actually amplify mechanical stress rather than reduce it. Rabin's models showed that optimizing nanoparticle concentration isn't just about getting enough particles, it's about achieving the right distribution pattern to counterbalance the natural stress profiles that develop during warming. Too few particles in the myocardium means insufficient warming, too many in the chambers means excessive thermal expansion—both scenarios leading to potential structural failure."
Decimal FP faster than binary?
by newbie-02 | 2025-08-18 03:28:05+00:00
Mike Cowlishaw recently pointed me to the decNumber library, and I see fantastic I/O performance that can often compensate for slower calculations. For example, the telco benchmark with output to file runs faster here with decDoubles than with binary64, 0.629 versus 0.720 seconds. In software emulation, not on a Power or z9 processor. Before I spread misinformation, I would appreciate it if someone could double-check this. It would also be nice to have the following statements/results/questions checked: - decNumber lacks trigonometric and some other functions, - as does mpdecimal, which calculates faster but is slower in I/O than decNumber, - libdfp using BID encoding is okay for basic arithmetic, but terribly slow in I/O and often slow and inaccurate for more complex calculations, - does anyone have experience with libdfp using DPD encoding? - IRDFPML (Intel (R) Decimal Floating-Point Library) calculates various functions in binary rather than decimal and therefore has good speed but occasional outliers in accuracy.
by nrds | 2025-08-18 03:28:56+00:00
This is the worst kind of advertisement.

Other ads just take up screen space and bandwidth: they displace more useful uses of these scarce resources, but they don't cause any direct harm. By contrast, ads targeting people in the market for a good or service actively displace quality signals. In doing so they make quality uneconomical and thus destroy it. They make the world a worse place.
by int_19h | 2025-08-18 03:29:09+00:00
> It seems like the industry is just trying to do a cool parlor trick in convincing the masses this is somehow AI from science fiction.

If you gave a random sci-fi writer from 1960s access to Claude, I'm fairly sure they wouldn't have any doubts over whether it is AI or not. They might argue about philosophical matters like whether it has a "soul" etc (there's plenty of that in sci-fi), but that is a separate debate.
by thwarted | 2025-08-18 03:29:52+00:00
> LLMs seem to revel in throwing layer after layer of decorative paint in the hope that people will fail to notice that they're not actually painting anything.

Length or duration is considered, erroneously IMO, to be a measure of completeness or thoroughness. Pithiness is valuable, and is a skill that can be honed. I guess padding out your writing using an LLM is equivalent to adjusting the font size and margins on a "three page essay" to meet the minimum requirements.
by nrds | 2025-08-18 03:30:10+00:00
> How do you define the language to be parsed? It's with a grammar.

False. This is how you define a language _to a parser generator_, but it is not how humans (and/or developers) define languages to each other.

> you won't realise you've made it

This is literally impossible in a recursive descent parser. I'm not saying getting it wrong is impossible, of course not. But what you literally cannot do (without concerted intentional effort) is make it ambiguous. Your parser will parse one first, or the other first, or either one left-to-right; and you will know which of these it does by reading the code.
by nl | 2025-08-18 03:30:38+00:00
I don't work in the field but I observe it pretty closely and my feeling is that comments like this remind me of the people I spoke to in the 1990s who said that Windows and Intel would never replace their Unix workstations.

Right now if I go on LinkedIn most header images on people's posts are AI generated. On video posts on LinkedIn that's a lot less, but we are beginning to see it now. The static image transition has taken maybe 3 years? The video transition will probably take about the same.

There's a set of content where people care about the human content of art, but there is a lot of content where people just don't care.

The thing is that there is a lot of money in generating this content. That money drives tool improvement and those improved tools increase accessibility.

> Have you ever asked yourself why this revolution hasn't come yet?

We are in the middle of the revolution which makes it hard to see.
by yanaimngvov | 2025-08-18 03:30:38+00:00
One of the most fascinating (and challenging) parts of building this was seeing just how wildly different the "best" model can be depending on the document type.

For example, during testing, I found that Marker is an absolute champion for clean, single-column layouts like blog posts. But throw a dense, multi-column academic paper at it, and MinerU often produces a far superior, structured output with proper LaTeX. Then, for a complex invoice table, PP-StructureV3 frequently beats both of them.

This really solidified my belief that a "one-size-fits-all" parser is a myth. The future seems to be less about finding a single perfect model and more about building a quick, effective workflow for selecting the right specialist for the job. It's a classic "routing" problem, and this tool is my attempt at solving the first step of that puzzle.
by k310 | 2025-08-18 03:31:00+00:00
In effect, start fresh. Archive all mail and empty the mailboxes. Emails are files. Now, take all unsorted files and move them to a big external drive (with a backup plan).

I read that many young people have no concept of a folder or directory. They search. I search. You can keep the old drives as emergency backups.

Anything in frequent use can go to or stay in the customary home tree.

This is how I clean my dresser drawer.

1. I really need this. 2. It goes in a box. Repeat.

The worst deal for me is photos. After infinite years[0], Apple has really ludicrous image search. There should be free or cheap Image Categorization on desktops, safe from Google and others. and not locked in some file tree where leaf nodes are dates, or database. (Rant deleted)

Sorting and finding would be infinitely easier, like those files and emails above.

I am sorting books, because, like a bookshelf, I prefer to go somewhere and browse rather than search. Collections are pretty static and 1:1, so tags, which allow multiple values per file, are not really needed, but photos tend to be re-grouped from time to time and tags would be fine. If automated.

In a bit of irony, I am replacing purchased tree books with digital, preparing for a move. The books were perfectly organized but very heavy. My book directory re-org starts with them, because they were/are priority, worthy of shelf space, earned just before the previous move.

[0] It only FEELS like infinity.
by MarkSweep | 2025-08-18 03:31:01+00:00
Sure, "It's satisfying to write software I believe is a net positive to society used by millions". But, if there was no increase in compensation, you would try to move up the corporate ladder?

I'm not trying to invalidate your post; I think your essay is great. I think it just does have enough cynicism. These $ENTERPRISE companies basically set up their employees some kinda game. There are certain rules (some written, some unwritten) for how you get a good performance review and how you get promoted. Just like there were dumb rules for you had to write code on a whiteboard to get the job despite the fact that you have never written algorithms ever, much less on a white board. So you have to balance how much you are doing something actually useful with jumping through whatever hoops that are downstream of whatever idea your VP has come up with this week. In the ideal case you move yourself to a part of the company that aligns with your values and interests so that the promotion comes easily, but sometimes it is easier to stay where you are and just grind through whatever absurdity it takes to stay employed.
by ajxs | 2025-08-18 03:31:43+00:00
> ...interviewing hazing ritual...

In my experience it's the small shops who are more likely to batter you with 12-stage interview processes, LeetCode-style tests, and creepy 'Record a video of yourself talking about why you want to work for BONTO' exercises. I've worked nearly my entire career at enterprise companies, and I can safely say they've always treated me with more respect in both the interview process and the job itself, than the smaller companies. Keep in mind, I live in Australia, and I've never worked for FAANG, which will skew my perspective.
by jijijijij | 2025-08-18 03:31:44+00:00
Joking aside, I think small nuclear power sources tend to use much, much more problematic stuff than enriched uranium. Stuff that’s producing enough thermal energy through natural decay, rather than criticality in a reactor. You know, the Mars rover‘s pictures are censored in some areas… that’s where the radioisotope batteries are located.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_battery

Proper reactors are impractical scaled down, as far as I know. Inside a large submarine or aircraft carrier is probably the smallest practical scale for a reactor and I bet there is a ton of trade-offs.
by int_19h | 2025-08-18 03:31:45+00:00
Have you considered that perhaps tying dignity and status to work is a major flaw in our social arrangements, and AI (that would actually be good enough to replace humans) is the ultimate fix?

If AI doing everything means that we'll finally have a truly egalitarian society where everyone is equal in dignity and rank, I'd say the faster we get there, the better.
by somenameforme | 2025-08-18 03:31:48+00:00
No, for the average person the cost of a basic computing device and the rent attached to operate it, is probably eating up the extremely modest gain in income. And in modern times that's not really a luxury so much as a necessity, meaning people today are in effect earning less, significantly less for many, than they did 45 years ago.

I intentionally avoided entertainment, which is of course also greatly increasing costs even further - though that's probably at least partially balanced by the internet which provides an immense amount of entertainment for just the already accounted for baseline cost.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-18 03:32:19+00:00
The author goes into the weeds on the vulnerabilities that can be left following some rooting methods. All to the good.

Meanwhile, it's non-rooted phones that get endlessly compromised

by state sponsored cellbright attacks (LEO), by blackhatted Israeli exploitive malware platforms and from an endless array of general crapware, much of it from handset manufacturers, wireless carriers and their bloatware affiliates.

All that said, the article really does go into detail. I know enough to follow along but probably not enough to spot issues (if there are any).
by AnthonyMouse | 2025-08-18 03:32:20+00:00
The problem is this is set up as a dichotomy. Either you have privately owned infrastructure (and then a private monopoly), or make the utility company a government entity which then becomes an unaccountable bureaucracy captured by public sector unions etc.

Whereas the better thing to do is have the government own the physical plant (utility poles and conduits etc.) and then hire private contractors -- large numbers of small entities, not small numbers of large entities -- to do all the actual work of operating and maintaining it.

Make each contracted role simple and fungible so that none of them are too big to fail and they're all in competition with each other.

You don't want a public monopoly. You don't want a private monopoly. But who says those are the only options?
by Jedd | 2025-08-18 03:32:35+00:00
In Australia it's common to have Time of Usage (ToU) billing.

Figures depend on provider and plan, but sometimes cheap (as per parent's 6c / kWh), but during the midday to 6pm range it may be up to 60c.

So, grid rates aren't subsidised, but having a storage medium means you can arbitrage power quite easily.
by kasajian | 2025-08-18 03:33:02+00:00
Funny. I was just thinking about dismissing Clojure for a project I'm going to work on because I was concerned about it's lack of ability to work with async calls. I'm too used to how async in JavaScript and C#, and I'm not sure I'd want to work in an environment that doesn't have a simple way to structure async calls. It doesn't necessarily have to be async / await. Just some attention to the issue rather than completely ignoring it.