MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mi12-root | 2025-08-28 21:41:22+00:00
We’ve begun internally evaluating the model and will share our findings more in details later. So far, we’ve found that it performs well on tasks such as summarization, writing, and data extraction, and shows particular strength in areas like history and marketing. However, it struggles with STEM topics (e.g., math and physics), often fails to follow long or complex instructions, and sometimes avoids answering certain queries. If you want us to evaluate a certain use case or vertical, please share it with us!
by krapp | 2025-08-28 21:41:40+00:00
It seems to be more of a problem in the US than elsewhere, but I admit I may be biased by living here and experiencing it firsthand. I don't see Japan tearing down its medical and research infrastructure, for instance, or their government grifting crypto, or doing half the clownshit things the US is. The UK may be getting there, I don't know.
by dotancohen | 2025-08-28 21:42:14+00:00
I spent years driving, modifying, and racing V-8 Fords from the mid sixties to the early seventies. I've replaced the 2.3 TurboCoupe with a 351W I built myself. I'm very familiar with muscle cars, both carbureted and FE, with points and with electronic injection, smog-legal and without carbs.

My electric family sedan (Tesla model 3 long range) has everything I've ever liked about muscle cars - in abundance. 498 horsepower, a "first gear" that will wind up past 200 kph, instant throttle response. The only thing missing are the impracticalities - the noise, the small back seat, the smell of tires and soot and oil leaking from somewhere. Oh, and the oil changes, and the plug changes, and the stolen catalytic converters, and the coils that go bad, and the fan clutch, and the PCV system, and the fuel/oil/air filter maintenance, and the drive belt, and the injectors, and the exhaust manifold gaskets, and the muffler, and the yearly smog checks.
by dragonwriter | 2025-08-28 21:43:04+00:00
Its kind of weird that someone would think that ChatGPT doing analysis of a set of text messages that they choose to provide to it would have any probative value to anyone on the questions at issue.

People may believe one side of the other, but “I gave ChatGPT access to my private messages and ChatGPT agrees with me” is not going to help your case.
by adamfisk | 2025-08-28 21:43:41+00:00
@reisse is 100% right. Most people outside of heavily censored regions have no clue what technology is actually used in those countries. The well-known, well-established providers don't actually work in censored regions because:

1) The problem is very difficult and requires a lot of engineering resources 2) It's very hard to make money in these countries for many reasons, including sanctions or the government restricting payments (Alipay, WeChatPay, etc)

The immediate response would be: "If the problem is so difficult, how can it be solved if not be well-known, well-established providers?"

The answer is simple: the crowdsourcing power of open source combined with billions of people with a huge incentive to get around government blocking.
by 77pt77 | 2025-08-28 21:44:23+00:00
Obfs4proxy and Shapeshifter are an absolute PITA to install.

Get your own VPS server (VPS in EU/US with 2GB of ram, 40GB of disk space and TBs/month of traffic go for $10 a year, it's that cheap). Never get anything in the UK and even USA is weird. I'd stick with EU.

Install your software (wireguard + obsfuscation or even tailscale with your own DERP server)

Another simpler alternative is just `ssh -D port` and use it as a SOCKS server. It's usually not blocked but very obvious.
by furyofantares | 2025-08-28 21:44:32+00:00
These metaphors all suck. Well, ok, yours is funny. But anyway, LLMs are just very different from any human.

They are extremely shallow, even compared to a junior developer. But extremely broad, even compared to the most experienced developer. They type real fuckin fast compared to anyone on earth, but they need to be told what to do much more carefully than anyone on earth.
by tliltocatl | 2025-08-28 21:44:59+00:00
Nah, vibe coding is the wrongest use of technology, this is way to go. Why? Because good rendering isn't the necessarily most physically accurate one. You might actually want non-realistic rendering, and (depending on the specific style) it might be hard to impossible to get the right one on traditional pipeline. E. g. take "cartoonish" look - toon shading is, frankly said, total crap, because the artists rely on explicitly non-physical geometry to provide visual clues. This is definitely the future. Render on a normal pipeline (maybe with no lighting model at all), then put it through a style transfer network.
by chillee | 2025-08-28 21:45:15+00:00
This article's math is wrong on many fundamental levels. One of the most obvious ones is that prefill is nowhere near bandwidth bound.

If you compute out the MFU the author gets it's 1.44 million input tokens per second * 37 billion active params * 2 (FMA) / 8 [GPUs per instance] = 13 Petaflops per second. That's approximately 7x absolutely peak FLOPS on the hardware. Obviously, that's impossible.

There's many other issues with this article, such as assuming only 32 concurrent requests(?), only 8 GPUs per instance as opposed to the more efficient/standard prefill-decode disagg setups, assuming that attention computation is the main thing that makes models compute-bound, etc. It's a bit of an indictment of HN's understanding of LLMs that most people are bringing up issues with the article that aren't any of the fundamental misunderstandings here.
by aaroniba | 2025-08-28 21:45:34+00:00
To what extent do tight-knit teams adjust their interpretation of confidence levels on an individual basis to reflect their ratio? Like, "Overconfident Oscar expressed a tiny bit of doubt, so he must not really have high conviction at all." Or, "Underconfident Uma expressed slightly more conviction than usual, so we should pay attention."

Also, from my experience, it seems like (and this isn't a strong opinion) doing competitive high school debate teams turns people into Overconfident Oscars.
by crote | 2025-08-28 21:45:52+00:00
Because they are trying to capture the market, obviously.

Nobody is going to pay the same price for a significantly worse model. If your competitor brings out a better model at the same price point, you either a) drop your price to attract a new low-budget market, b) train a better model to retain the same high-budget market, or c) lose all your customers.

You have taken on a huge amount of VC money, and those investors aren't going to accept options A or C. What is left is option B: burn more money, build an even better model, and hope your finances last longer than the competition.

It's the classic VC-backed startup model: operate at a loss until you have killed the competition, then slowly increase prices as your customers are unable to switch to an alternative. It worked great for Uber & friends.
by sfink | 2025-08-28 21:45:54+00:00
> Sure, we may see many lacking fundamentals, but I suppose that isn't so different from the criticism I heard when I wrote most of my first web software in PHP.

It's not just the fundamentals, though you're right that is an easy casualty. I also agree that LLMs can greatly help with some forms of learning -- previously, you kind of had to follow the incremental path, where you couldn't really do anything complex without have the skills that it built on, because 90% of your time and brain would be spent on getting the syntax right or whatever and so you'd lose track of the higher-level thing you were exploring. With an LLM, it's nice to be able to (temporarily) skip that learning and be able to explore different areas at will. Especially when that motivates the desire to now go back and learn the basics.

But my real fear is about the skill acquisition, or simply the thinking. We are human, we don't want to have to go through the learning stage before we start doing, and we won't if we don't have to. It's difficult, it takes effort, it requires making mistakes and being unhappy about them, unhappy enough to be motivated to learn how to not make them in the future. If we don't have to do it, we won't, even if we logically know that we'd be better off.

Especially if the expectations are raised to the point where the pressure to be "productive" makes it feel like you're wasting other people's time and your paycheck to learn anything that the LLM can do for you. We're reaching the point where it feels irresponsible to learn.

(Sometimes this is ok. I'm fairly bad at long division now, but I don't think it's holding me back. But juniors can't know what they need to know before they know it!)
by dakial1 | 2025-08-28 21:46:44+00:00
Make no mistake here, Brazil is just not in the same situation as the US because Bolsonaro couldn't manage to equip the Superior Court with a majority of loyalists.

Also Alexandre de Moraes is crossing the line of his role responsibility (and power) a lot to go after everyone in Bolsonaro's gang.

So it is not quite a democracy, is just that Bolsonaro has stronger enemies than Trump.

And this brings the question if to fight someone who does not care about the rules, you must become them and break the rules as well.
by cluckindan | 2025-08-28 21:47:18+00:00
Relevant: https://ghaemi.substack.com/p/why-dsm-is-mostly-false

> All psychopathology was about unconscious emotional conflicts, mainly dating to childhood; if the conflicts were normal or mild, they produced “neuroses”; if they were severe, they produced “psychoses.”

> In addition to 14 validated diagnoses published in the RDC in 1978, a mere two years later DSM-III came out with 292 claimed diagnoses. There is no metaphysical possibility that 278 psychiatric diagnoses suddenly were discovered in two years. They were invented.
by Llamamoe | 2025-08-28 21:47:33+00:00
Why assume it's the diets rather than antibiotics? Your gut microbiome develops during the first ~3y of life(including partial heritability from your mother), after which the total set of microbes in it remains approximately constant throughout your life, with only the relative proportions of them shifting with diet changes.

In contrast, antibiotics often kill a strain of a few off completely, while suppressing everything else except for a few strains that resist the antibiotic, which also creates a massive opportunity for new bacteria to colonize. And these deficits are partially heritable.
by romanhn | 2025-08-28 21:47:52+00:00
Google is usually pretty on top of fast-changing sources like HN. My mind was blown more when I saw that ChatGPT seemed to ingest and regurgitate an HN comment of mine as an answer within 10-15 minutes of my posting (see the thread in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42649774). Sadly this is no longer verifiable as the answer does not match my comment, but at least it correctly answers the original request, which it did not prior to my response.
by anthonyot | 2025-08-28 21:48:28+00:00
Totally agree on the luck factor, it's humbling how much of it comes down to timing and being in the right place. The persistence part is what got me thinking about this though. Like, if most of us are going to fail multiple times anyway, why not at least fail with someone who's been through it before? The pattern I keep seeing is founders who are incredible builders but treat each launch like their first time (because it usually is). Seems like there's got to be a better way than just grinding through the same mistakes everyone else made and rolling the dice??
by 77pt77 | 2025-08-28 21:49:42+00:00
Which is ridiculous because OpenVPN is trivial to identify, even when over TCP since it's different from "regular" HTTPS/SSL traffic.

Why they chose this I have no idea.

You can even port share.

443 -> Web server for HTTPS traffic 443 -> OpenVPN for OpenVPN traffic

Still trivial to identify and not uncommon for even public WiFi to do so.

Since I changed to tailscale+headscale with my own derp server all these issues have disappeared (for now).
by capitainenemo | 2025-08-28 21:49:48+00:00
It's more efficient if you plug it into an existing plant which is burning fossil fuels anyway (maybe even an existing natural gas plant, which if the loop was closed would basically make it a really stable chemical battery, which isn't really defeating the purpose at all!).

But, if you read the wikipedia article, you can see there are prototype plants using ambient air capture. It's probably a bit less efficient, but since it's actually reducing carbon levels, it's even better than just a battery.
by Frummy | 2025-08-28 21:49:56+00:00
The way people normally live is that it's a pretty slow life and they have like a specialised skill, a hammer, a solid area that they know completely and it's connected to their primary experience through their work. Then they read tons and tons of what AI says which isn't connected to any lived experience, it activates the pattern seeking back of the mind to try and make sense of it, and while normal life is like a focused brush that touches reality all the time, spend too much time with something that is just not part of the category of direct lived experience and the brush becomes like a frizzy stump with hairs aiming everywhere, cognition going everywhere. The AI sticks to your interaction with it like glue and you can hover away from lived experience while it still seems like not a big step from the previous chat, and if you're not used to anything of the sort you don't have a cognitive tool to ground back to reality with. I think that's what happens. 'Don Quijote read so many chivalric romances that he loses his mind and decides to become a knight-errant' is an example from the literary age. I personally read too much than is practical. Now the emotional driver is more esoteric than need for courage, like people think they're 'chosen', their souls are 'starseeds', it's like twilight where the boring person with nothing to offer gets the attention of the cool glittering immortal just because. Good reason is usually too slow to keep up with the sort of flicker of daydreams that can whisk away attention if not aware of any 'cognitohazard'. It's a new symptom of the usual case of the 'mouse utopia' + 'rat park' + 'bowling alone' thing. But I think there's always an emotional reason that makes the 'choice' of entertaining falsities, in a sense understandable with empathy, but with obvious consequences. What can be said, causes are structural, people have different circumstances, different ways to fix it.
by girvo | 2025-08-28 21:50:19+00:00
The only thing I dislike is what it chooses to test when asked to just "generate tests for X": it often chooses to build those "straitjacket for your code" style tests which aren't actually useful in terms of catching bugs, they just act as "any change now makes this red"

As a simple example, a "buildUrl" style function that put one particular host for prod and a different host for staging (for an "environment" argument) had that argument "tested" by exactly comparing the entire functions return string, encoding all the extra functionality into it (that was tested earlier anyway).

A better output would be to check startsWith(prodHost) or similar, which is what I changed it into, but I'm still trying to work out how to get coding agents to do that in the first or second attempt.

But that's also not surprising: people write those kinds of too-narrow not-useful tests all the time, the codebase I work on is littered with them!
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-08-28 21:50:28+00:00
The Charger GT is essentially the rental-spec charger. Not a great comparison.

Besides, Muscle cars are often more about torque and the front-engine rwd layout. In the 70s they were all slow as shit but could still peel tires and do burnouts.

Also, for those in-the-know, the mid 2000s Honda Accord v6 was about as fast as the mustang of that time, but obviously drove very different.
by bsder | 2025-08-28 21:51:01+00:00
> It’s a bit puzzling because there’s Chinese companies like Retroid and AYN pumping out Snapdragon 8 Gen 2/3

There is no path from "I made a cellular phone" to "I can place calls" that doesn't involve tens of millions of dollars paid to the gatekeeping cellular carriers.

Without the equivalent of Carterfone for cellular, this will never change.
by nkurz | 2025-08-28 21:51:09+00:00
The 1989 Baird and Thieret paper referenced in the article might be my favorite research paper ever. I read it soon after it came out in the reading room of my college library. After finishing it, I genuinely was uncertain whether it was a real paper or a Borgesian spoof. Bletted for months before it's edible? A Shakespearean insult? On the Unicorn Tapestry and I'd never heard of it?

Here's a full copy of the paper if this intrigues you: https://sci-hub.se/10.1007/BF02858732

Since then, I've confirmed that it actually exists. I've even tasted the fruit. It's... OK. It's a reasonably tasty spiced brown apple/pear sauce with a grainy texture, but with the spices already built in. I've got my own tree planted---more for the novelty than desire for the fruit---and hope I'll finally get a few of my own this year.

Edit: If you are looking for more bizarre ways the Medlar pops up in strange places, here's a page about its traditional use in Basque culture as a symbol of authority: https://alberdimakila.com/en/medlar-tree-wood-basque-walking...
by jc4p | 2025-08-28 21:51:28+00:00
I do a lot of AI work and right now the story for doing LLMs on iOS is very painful (but doing Whisper or etc is pretty nice) so this is existing and the API looks Swift native and great, I can't wait to use it!

Question/feature request: Is it possible to bring my own CoreML models over and use them? I honestly end up bundling llama.cpp and doing gguf right now because I can't figure out the setup for using CoreML models, would love for all of that to be abstracted away for me :)
by RatchetWerks | 2025-08-28 21:52:38+00:00
As a die hard car enthusiast. This makes perfect sense.

We are going through a culture change in society.

Many younger kids don’t view cars as the gateway to freedom and coming of age experiences. (Which is fine)

Combined with the brutal performance of modern EV cars. Muscle cars seem like a waste of time/energy/money/complexity. Logically it makes no sense.

I’m currently going through an identity crisis (as a gearhead) as a result of this.
by wkat4242 | 2025-08-28 21:53:05+00:00
Many have unlockable bootloaders (though the number is rapidly declining with Samsung closing up). But not many have relockable bootloaders. This is one of the things that grapheneos have set as a minimum standard, hence the reliance on pixels. There's a few other specific things that the titan chip provides which they rely on but the relocking is the main thing.
by hnlmorg | 2025-08-28 21:53:36+00:00
ahhh fair enough then. I did admittedly only have a quick look at their site.

The NetBook market was such a good one. It really is a pity the Microsoft killed off the spirit of it, and then Apple convinced everyone that pretty and expensive things without keyboards are nicer than cheap and practical things.

I do miss EeePCs. The death of the netbook was probably the biggest blow for desktop Linux becoming mainstream.
by rvz | 2025-08-28 21:54:05+00:00
> It feels like Tdd/llm connection is implied — “and also generate tests”.

That sounds like an anti-pattern and not true TDD to get LLMs to generate tests for you if you don't know what to test for.

It also reduces your confidence in knowing if the generated test does what it says. Thus, you might as well write it yourself.

Otherwise you will get these sort of nasty incidents. [0] Even when 'all tests passed'.

[0] https://sketch.dev/blog/our-first-outage-from-llm-written-co...
by lawlessone | 2025-08-28 21:54:30+00:00
>That LLMs were nothing but glorified stochastic parrots.

Well yes , now we know they make kids kill themselves.

I think we've all fooled ourselves like this beetle

https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2013/06/19/193493225/t...

for thousands of years up until 2020 anything that conversed with us could safely be assumed to be another sentient/intelligent being.

No we have something that does that, but is neither sentient or intelligent, just a (complex)deterministic mechanism.
by anthonyot | 2025-08-28 21:54:57+00:00
The network/connections point hits hard. It's wild how much easier launches are when you already know the right people in your space. That 'always be launching' mindset makes sense too - treat it like a skill you have to develop, not a one-time event. Most of us approach our first launch like it's some magical moment instead of just another thing to get good at through practice. It really is alot work and you have to keep motivated, i find i switch between projects too much which doesn't help too
by IshKebab | 2025-08-28 21:55:07+00:00
> it's basically not possible to run any kind of outbound VPN connection (even to private servers) from inside of China anymore.

Really? Because the paper you linked says they don't block any TLS connections so you can just run a VPN over TLS:

> TLS connections start with a TLS Client Hello message, and the first three bytes of this message cause the GFW to exempt the connection from blocking.
by arp242 | 2025-08-28 21:55:13+00:00
> My thesis is something like "any authoritarian can sail a ship in calm seas". The government of China's hard times are ahead of it. It's too early to write an epitaph for democracy.

This applies to neither Russia nor China. Especially not China – authoritarian China if the 50s-70s was a complete clusterfuck every which way, in no small part due to Mao's staggering incompetence. A key part of Xiaoping's reforms of the 80s – which lifted hundreds of millions out of extreme poverty – was renouncing some of Mao's more mad notions.

There are plenty of other examples where authoritarians screwed over their countries quite badly, from Mugabe to Suharto to Maduro. To say nothing of people like Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, and similar jolly fellows who outright murdered their own people by the millions.

In authoritarian regimes you have no meaningful pushback. When Putin says "we're going to invade Ukraine real quick, stoke me a kipper, back before supper" then no one is going to say "you idiot, that's fucking mental" because you risk brutally accidentally falling out of the window while taking a shower. And now Russia is "stuck" in this pointless war because Putin has painted himself in a corner, and there is not going to be a peaceful change of governance in Russia, after which a new administration can change course.

In addition authoritarians are free to be as corrupt as they like of course. Who is going to hold them to account?

In the short term an authoritarian can do the right thing (Xiaoping is an example), but in the long term it never works out because sooner or later an idiot and/or asshole will plant their arsecheeks on the throne, after which you're fucked.
by cosmic_cheese | 2025-08-28 21:55:47+00:00
The noise aspect is actually one of the things that’s keeping me away from cheap used ICE and hybrid cars right now. Some amount of premium for full electric is worth not having to listen to an engine, particularly on models that aren’t expensive enough to come with good sound isolation.

The sound profile of a V8 is very different from the 4-cylinder and similar I’m shopping for of course, but the principle still applies. I also just don’t want to be my neighbor who finds it necessary to come and go at odd hours in the most abrasive manner possible.
by RajT88 | 2025-08-28 21:55:49+00:00
Somewhat dated read here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tailscale/comments/16zfag4/travelin...

Some good ideas, though. There seems to be OSS alternatives for TailScale control servers which would make it harder to block - I'd go that route. The top recommendation boils down to, "Set up several different methods, and one will always work".