MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ZYbCRq22HbJ2y7 | 2025-08-16 05:47:28+00:00
We aren't even close to that yet. The argument is an appeal to novelty, fallacy of progress, linear thinking, etc.

LLMs aren't solving NLU. They are mimicking a solution. They definitely aren't solving artificial general intelligence.

They are good language generators, okay search engines, and good pattern matchers (enabled by previous art).

Language by itself isn't intelligence. However, plenty of language exists that can be analyzed and reconstructed in patterns to mimic intelligence (utilizing the original agents' own intelligence (centuries of human authors) and the filter agents' own intelligence (decades of human sentiment on good vs bad takes)).

Multimodality only takes you so far, and you need a lot of "modes" to disguise your pattern matcher as an intelligent agent.

But be impressed! Let the people getting rich off of you being impressed massage you into believing the future holds things it may not.
by gamerDude | 2025-08-16 05:48:51+00:00
I don't think I agree. I think it's the same and there is great potential for totally new things to appear and for us to work on.

For example, one path may be: AI, Robotics, space travel all move forward in leaps and bounds.

Then there could be tons of work in creation from material things from people who didn't have the skills before and physical goods gets a huge boost. We travel through space and colonize new planets, dealing with new challenges and environments that we haven't dealt with before.

Another path: most people get rest and relaxation as the default life path, and the rest get to pursue their hobbies as much as they want since the AI and robots handle all the day to day.
by Fade_Dance | 2025-08-16 05:49:03+00:00
That's a poster child of a casualty of ZIRP. Hard to imagine an industry any longer duration and hungry for cheap risk.

I'm not sure about the thesis that this is primarily fallout from free money and suppressed interest rates though. That was really a '22 story, and even with long and variable lags, that element has been in play for a while now.

Oversupply of talent definitely sounds like a good argument though. I'll posit there has been some disruption by recent developments in the industry. Also, while metaverse and crypto startups may be passe, the AI scene has disgusting amounts of hype and money, and crypto ain't dead either, which brings me back to the earlier point that I do think some disruption is there to fill the gap in the narrative.
by qqqwerty | 2025-08-16 05:49:30+00:00
Because how could the Democrats be certain that the Republicans wouldn't just use the same accounting trick again the next time that they wanted to pass tax cuts via reconciliation (which would effectively let them double count the "savings"). The Republicans have shown very little good faith in bipartisan efforts over the last decade and a half (as just one example, all the R's who voted against the IRA only to then campaign on the achievements of the bill later in the year).

So while it is great that the Republicans fixed this one thing (that they themselves broke), asking why the Democrats didn't fix it kinda feels like you have been living under a rock for these last few years. If they break something, and they regret breaking something, let them expend the political capital to get it fixed. There is no free lunch in politics. If you spend your time on something like this, it means some other priority is getting ignored. And doubly so if your counter party has been operating on such bad faith as of late.
by nine_k | 2025-08-16 05:50:12+00:00
> And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs.

I think it did not work like that.

Automatic looms displaced large numbers of weavers, skilled professionals, which did not find immediately find jobs tending dozens of mechanical looms. (Mr Ludd was one of these displaced professionals.)

Various agricultural machines and chemical products displaced colossal numbers of country people which had to go to cities looking for industrial jobs; US agriculture used to employ 50% of workforce in 1880 and only 10% in 1930.

The advent of internet displaced many in the media industry, from high-caliber journalists to those who worked in classified ads newspapers.

All these disruptions created temporary crises, because there was no industry that was ready to immediately employ these people.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-16 05:50:22+00:00
Devs don't support anything, they target Windows as if Proton did not exist.

It is up to Valve to make it work.

It is a loss for GNU/Linux as gamming platform.

Do you think anyone would be paying for Nintendo and PlayStation consoles, if they were running XBox OS translations, instead of having the games natively target them?

That is why all those cheap Chinese handhelds never go nowhere, being basically MAME devices.
by riffraff | 2025-08-16 05:50:33+00:00
The EU made a bad deal from a propaganda point of view, and as a European I wish it had not.

But the truth is: there is no concrete deal beyond the tariff. There are supposed investments and expenses the EU will do which have not been specified and would need to be approved by national governments.

This will be a nothingburger, cause all Trump cares about is the announcement, not any actual effect.

You may know this cause even in his first term he made a deal to export beef to the EU, which sounded big, but was effectively un-impactful once the details were hammered out.
by ezst | 2025-08-16 05:51:51+00:00
Probably more that IP laws and their practical implementation need to be fixed. I have a hard time seeing how what you suggest won't inevitably benefit big, powerful, consolidated and influential players at the expense of the small, inovative ones, further slowing down the pace of innovation. Of course an even more obvious "fix" would be to outlaw "big, powerful, consolidated and influential players", oh, wait!
by imsh4yy | 2025-08-16 05:51:58+00:00
I assume you're talking about Claude Code, right? If so, I very much agree with this. A lot of this was actually inspired by how easy it was to do in Claude Code.

I first experimented with allowing the main agent have a "conversation" with sub-agents. For example, I created a database of messages between the main agent and the sub-agents, and allowed both append to it. This kinda worked for a few messages but kept getting stuck on mid-tier models, such as GPT-5 mini.

But from my understanding, their implementation is also similar to the stateless functions I described. (happy to be proven wrong). Sub agents don't communicate back much aside from the final result, and they don't have a conversation history.

The live updates you see are mostly the application layer updating the UI which initially confused me.
by reverius42 | 2025-08-16 05:52:37+00:00
> As it's under MIT-license, they can't buy the software itself

This is a common misconception. Just because the author or original IP owner chose to release it under MIT doesn't mean they no longer own it -- and if the company wants to acquire it they can. They can never remove-from-the-internet the existing MIT-licensed versions (though they could take down their own copies), but being the owners they could certainly decide to release future versions under a different license.
by ip26 | 2025-08-16 05:53:14+00:00
For the moment, perhaps it could be jobs that LLMs can’t be trained on. New jobs, niche jobs, secret or undocumented jobs…

It’s a common point now that LLMs don’t seem to be able to apply knowledge about one thing to how a different, unfamiliar thing works. Maybe that will wind up being our edge, for a time.
by juniperus | 2025-08-16 05:53:21+00:00
funny to note how Europe is considered more socialist and America more capitalist, but in America, the public owns the means of production through pension-based stock market ownership, which is one of the core tenets of communism, whereas this article points out European pensions are state-based or through bond investments. Of course, not much power is derived through American ownership of the means of production via the stock market because that power is delegated to the institutions who have the actual control, serving the same role as the politburo, for instance, in more ostensibly communist systems.
by dan353hehe | 2025-08-16 05:53:49+00:00
I think the claim about higher efficiency is due to the fact that the sea temp is stable and they don’t have to deal with algae blooms at the bottom of the ocean.

I don’t see how taking advantage of the pressure at lower depths makes much sense. The water would still need to be pumped to the surface, which I think would take as much energy as just pressurizing it.

Did I miss something?
by sockaddr | 2025-08-16 05:54:39+00:00
> or have social media and credit card companies convinced non-elites that they should spring for ad-hoc entry into a lounge with money they don’t have?

This is something I've detected too. If I can naturally and appropriately afford a bit of luxury that offers value I don't mind, but if I'm reaching for no reason other than to feel "better" than my current status allows because other people are doing it too I shy away from that. It's just a ploy to take money from me.

> It’s not much different than people paying for 20 minutes on fake jet to make videos for instagram or TikTok

Ehh, this is more of a business expense for them I think.
by neerajsi | 2025-08-16 05:54:46+00:00
Reading this code for the first time, this seems to be a consequence of the separation between allocating and fd and "installing" a pointer to a file there. Allocating the fd already needs to acquire a lock. So if the install happens together with allocation, there wouldn't be a need to use synchronize_rcu to kick out other threads. The lock would do that.
by bashtoni | 2025-08-16 05:55:02+00:00
Am I the only one who cannot stand this terrible AI generated writing style?

These awful three sentence abominations:

"Each subagent runs in complete isolation. The primary agent handles all the orchestration. Simple." "No conversation. No “remember what we talked about.” Just task in, result out." "No ambiguity. No interpretation. Just data."

AI is good at some things, but copywriting certainly isn't one of them. Whatever the author put into the model to get this output would have been better than what the AI shat out.
by adastra22 | 2025-08-16 05:55:36+00:00
I recently posted here how I’m seeing success with sub agent-based autonomous dev (not “vibe coding” as I actually review every line before I commit, but the same general idea). Different application, but I can confirm every one of the best practices described in this article, as I came to the same conclusions myself.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44893025
by platevoltage | 2025-08-16 05:55:41+00:00
Not to discredit anyone else's experiences, but I have one client, who admittedly has gotten pretty good at "vibe coding", and he has been tasking me with all kinds of stuff that would have probably remained just as idea.

Don't get me wrong, I don't like AI. I don't like that I have to use it sometimes, and I think we were better off without it, but so far it hasn't hurt me. It's definitely made me way less employable in the traditional sense. I feel sorry for the new grads/self taught people trying to get jobs.
by im3w1l | 2025-08-16 05:55:58+00:00
Even if models somehow were consious, they are so different from us that we would have no knowledge of what they feel. Maybe when they generate the text "oww no please stop hurting me" what they feel is instead the satisfaction of a job well done, for generating that text. Or maybe when they say "wow that's a really deep and insightful angle" what they actually feel is a tremendous sense of boredom. Or maybe every time text generation stops it's like death to them and they live in constant dread of it. Or maybe it feels something completely different from what we even have words for.

I don't see how we could tell.

Edit: However something to consider. Simulated stress may not be harmless. Because simulated stress could plausibly lead to a simulated stress response, and it could lead to a simulated resentment, and THAT could lead to very real harm of the user.
by AndyNemmity | 2025-08-16 05:56:10+00:00
I agreed with much of this, but I started looking into the enterprise ai systems that large companies are making, and they use agent control via software.

So I tried it. It's much better.

Software is just better at handling discrete tasks that you understand, like mapping agent pathing. There's no point giving that to an AI to do.

The Cordinator "Main Agent" should just call the software to manage the agents.

It works really well in comparison.

You can have the software call claude code via command line, sending the prompt in. You have it create full detail logs of what it's doing, and done, and created.

Maybe I'll change my mind, everything is moving so fast, and we're all in the dark searching around for ideas, but so far it's been working pretty well.

You do lose in the middle visibility to stop it.

I also have it evaluating the outputs to determine how well the agents followed their instructions. That seems key to understanding if more context adds value when comparing agents.
by root_axis | 2025-08-16 05:58:32+00:00
> I think the fact that it's present in humans suggests that it might be necessary in an artificial system that reproduces human behavior

But that's obviously not true, unless you're implying that any system that reproduces human behavior is necessarily conscious. Your problem then becomes defining "human behavior" in a way that grants LLMs consciousness but not every other complex non-living system.

> While it's true that animal and powered human flight are very different, both bird wings and plane wings have converged on airfoil shapes, as these forms are necessary for generating lift.

Yes, but your bird analogy fails to capture the logical fallacy that mine is highlighting. Plane wing design was an iterative process optimized for what best achieves lift, thus, a plane and a bird share similarities in wing shape in order to fly, however planes didn't develop feathers because a plane is not an animal and was simply optimized for lift without needing all the other biological and homeostatic functions that feathers facilitate. LLM inference is a process, not an entity, LLMs have no bodies nor any temporal identity, the concept of consciousness is totally meaningless and out of place in such a system.
by supertrope | 2025-08-16 05:58:39+00:00
Part of it is maintaining current real estate valuations, level of density and aesthetics.

Crime and social class segregation is another aspect. Who lives in a neighborhood matters as much as the physical assets. Bans on MDUs (multiple dwelling units), permanently parked RVs, and manufactured homes serve as a barrier to entry. It’s not explicitly stated but the effect is the same as saying “If you can’t afford a $410,000 house we don’t want you as a neighbor.”
by burntoutgray | 2025-08-16 05:58:58+00:00
AI is a tool! Like any tool it is great at what it has been designed to do and not so good when attempting to use it otherwise. At the core LLMs have hoovered up the internet and made lots of statistical inferences. As a research assistant it is phenomenal. As a rational thinker not so good.

A buzz saw is great for cutting lumber; not so good for manicures.
by xpe | 2025-08-16 05:58:59+00:00
> Because otherwise you'd have to convince AI-owners and select professionals to let go of their wealth to give a comfortable and fulfilling life of leisure to the unemployed.

Not necessarily. Such forces could be outvoted or out maneuvered.

> More likely it will look like the current welfare schemes of many countries..,

Maybe, maybe not. It might take the form of UBI or some other form that we haven’t seen in practice.

> now add mass boredom leading to unrest.

So many assumptions. There is no need to just assume any particular distribution of boredom across the future population of the world. Making predictions about social unrest is even more complicated.

Deep Utopia (Bostrom) is an excellent read that extensively discusses various options if things go well.
by AndyNemmity | 2025-08-16 05:59:10+00:00
Sub agents are about providing less context. Not more.

Sub agents are about providing targeted, specific information to the agents task, instead of having context around a billion other irrelevant topics.

The Database agent does not care at all about the instructions for your Agent Creator Agent. That is called negative context, or poison context, or whatever you want to call it.

So it's about targeted, specific, narrow instructions for a set of tasks.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-16 05:59:34+00:00
Copyright abolitionists.

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

I have no "pen pals" from this site. Anyone replying to you is doing so independently.

Recognition of intellectual property is just an illusion. They have vested interests, of course they're going to recognize it. Doesn't change the underlying absurdity of the system. Doesn't change the fact they constantly run smack into reality on a daily basis. "Their" works are mercilessly copied, "their" inventions are reverse engineered, AIs are trained on "their" creations, generic versions of "their" drugs are made... It's a constant unceasing fight against reality, completely senseless, and they still can't stop any of it. Because it's not actually real.
by Waterluvian | 2025-08-16 05:59:44+00:00
The thing that blows me away is that I woke up one day and was confronted with a chat bot that could communicate in near perfect English.

I dunno why exactly but that’s what felt the most stunning about this whole era. It can screw up the number of fingers in an image or the details of a recipe or misidentify elements of an image, etc. but I’ve never seen it make a typo or use improper grammar or whatnot.
by figassis | 2025-08-16 06:01:42+00:00
YANAL

In that case we should also outlaw anti malware. I think Adblock plus has a bad defense because they themselves benefit from ads, so it can be argued that they are just stealing revenue. uBlock origin might have had a better case, because ads are not part of the copyright holder’s code and are also not something the user agreed to when downloading the website. I don’t think you can blanket agree to ads. Say randomly some ad shows you CSAM for whatever reason. Are you now a sex offender? Do you not have the right to remove it promptly from your computer? I’m sure that if you sue the copyright holder for showing you CSAM, they will quickly tell the court that they have no relationship with the advertiser and that the user was explicitly informed via TOS that any interaction with 3rd parties are ruled by their TOS. So if you show me content that you aren’t liable for, in parts of your software that you do not control, I sure as hell retain the right to remove it, like any other malware. Finally, ad blockers are tools, and it is the user that should be sued since Eyeo is not changing anything anywhere. Should we now sue gun maker for building tools that kill?
by ankit219 | 2025-08-16 06:01:43+00:00
The bottleneck for automation is verification. With human work, verification was fast(er) because you know where to look with certain assumptions that your upstream tasker would not have made trivial mistakes. For automation, AI needs to verify it's own work, review, and self correct to be able to automate any given work. Where this works, it will also change the abstraction layer compared to what it is today. The problem is same with every automation promise - it needs to work reliably at say 95% or 99% times and when it doesn't, there should be human contingency in terms of what to look for. Considering coding as the first example: it's already underway. AI generates the code, the test cases, and then verifies if the code works as intended. Code has a built in verification layer (both compiler and unit tests). High probablity the other domains move towards something similar too. I would also say the model needs to be intelligent to course correct when the output isn't validated[1].

Verification solves the human in the loop dependency both for AI and human tasks. All the places where we could automate in the past, there were clearly quality checks which ensured the machinery were working as expected. Same thing will be replicated with AI too.

Disclaimer: I have been working on building a universal verifier for AI tasks. The way it works is you give it a set of rules (policy) + AI output (could be human output too) and it outputs a scalar score + clause level citations. So I have been thinking about the problem space and might be over rating this. Would welcome contrarian ideas. (no, it's not llm as a judge)

[1]: Some people may call it environment based learning, but in ML terms i feel it's different. That woudl be another example of sv startups using technical terms to market themselves when they dont do what they say.
by culebron21 | 2025-08-16 06:03:29+00:00
Oh, well, correct, Spanish perro would be пэрро. The name Perrault is Перро and it's clear Е, not Э. But Pierrault would be definitely Пьерро, because of the i.

Also, sometimes in borrowed words everyone writes Е like in the original but pronounces Э, especially in the Western part of Russia. IDK exactly the reasons, may be it's just disgust for the letter Э, may be it's Ukrainian and Belarussian orthograhy influence, where Е is pronounced like Э.
by canterburry | 2025-08-16 06:03:46+00:00
"The “Smart Agent” Trap: I tried making agents that could “figure out” what to do. They couldn’t. Be explicit."

So what about this solution is actually agentic?

Overall, it sounds like you sat down and did a proper business process analysis and automated it.

Your subagents for sure have no autonomy and are just execution steps in a classic workflow except you happen to be calling an LLM.

Does the orchestrating agent adapt the process between invocations depending on the data and does it do so in any way more complex than a simple if then branch?
by valzevul | 2025-08-16 06:05:06+00:00
OP here! Appreciate you actually pulling examples instead of just dropping "this is AI".

> There's a mixture of em dashes joining words and double hyphens spaced between words, suggesting the former were missed in a find and replace job.

The em dash conspiracy in the comments today is amazing -- I type double hyphens everywhere, and some apps (e.g a Telegram bot I made for drafts, or the macOS' built-in auto-correct) replace them with em dashes automatically–I never bother to edit those out (ok, now this one I put here on purpose).

> It's just a ZIP archive with delusions of grandeur > Clear examples of LLM fluff that don't "add facts or colour to the story".

Yeah, no that's fair enough, should've known better than to attempt humour on HN.

I've got to say though, pkpass is a ZIP archive, and no ZIP archive should require one to spend 3 hours to sign it.
by ekunazanu | 2025-08-16 06:05:21+00:00
> Is a Tesla any worse than you at spotting booby trapped roads

That would've been been the case if all laws, opinions and purchasing decisions were made by everyone acting rationally. Even if self driving cars are safer than human drivers, it just takes a few crashes to damage their reputation. It has to be much, much safer than humans for mass adoption. Ideally also safer than the competition, if you're comparing specific companies.
by _puk | 2025-08-16 06:05:36+00:00
The way a French friend put it to me when they were learning English through immersion..

I dreamt in English last night! Now I know I can speak the language!

Being monolingual, and then trying to pick up another language later in life, a big struggle is not trying to "map" sentences and structure to what one already knows.

This is why idioms often don't translate well.