MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by lapcat | 2025-09-28 14:36:40+00:00
It should be noted that the article author is an AI researcher at Anthropic and therefore benefits financially from the bubble: https://www.julian.ac/about/

> The current discourse around AI progress and a supposed “bubble” reminds me a lot of the early weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic. Long after the timing and scale of the coming global pandemic was obvious from extrapolating the exponential trends, politicians, journalists and most public commentators kept treating it as a remote possibility or a localized phenomenon.

That's not what I remember. On the contrary, I remember widespread panic. (For some reason, people thought the world was going to run out of toilet paper, which became a self-fulfilling prophesy.) Of course some people were in denial, especially some politicians, though that had everything to do with politics and nothing to do with math and science.

In any case, the public spread of infectious diseases is a relatively well understood phenomenon. I don't see the analogy with some new tech, although the public spread of hype is also a relatively well understood phenomenon.
by jsnell | 2025-09-28 14:36:42+00:00
Indeed you can't be sure. But on the other hand a bunch of the commentariat has been claiming (with no evidence) that we're at the midpoint of the sigmoid for the last three years. They were wrong. And then you had the AI frontier lab insiders who predicted an accelerating pace of progress for the last three years. They were right. Now, the frontier labs rarely (never?) provide evidence either, but they do have about a year of visibility into the pipeline, unlike anyone outside.

So at least my heuristic is to wait until a frontier lab starts warning about diminishing returns and slowdowns before calling the midpoint or multiple labs start winding down capex. The first component might have misaligned incentives, but if we're in a realistic danger of hitting a wall in the next year, the capex spending would not be accelerating the way it is.
by zebomon | 2025-09-28 14:37:25+00:00
It's a combination of never having learned the basics of science and now seeing the falsehoods they've been fed as equivalent to science.

Take the Tylenol thing. You can explain to one of them the scientific method, what a survey of studies is, why correlation often appears when there is no causation, etc. I experienced this last week: at the end of my explanation, the person (a 45-year-old) replied that he "simply disagreed."

The coal, the climate, etc. are all the same. There is a broad sense that because they've been convinced of the value of expanded oil drilling through lines like "Drill baby drill," their current perspective on it is of the same merit as actual scientific research.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-28 14:37:55+00:00
> The talent pipeline was shut down because adtech sucked most of the oxygen out of the room, and consolidation by hyperscalers finished off what was left

I've been in this space as an IC, a Manager, and a VC and trust me when I say the education standards have been watered down in CS for 10 years now, that I no longer have a pipeline to train detection engineers, exploit developers, eBPF developers, and others out of college in the US.

Just take a look at the curriculum changes for the CSE major (course 6-3) at MIT in the 2025 [0] versus 2017-22 [1] versus pre-2017 [2] - there is a steady decrease in the amount of EE/CE content and an increased amount in math. Nothing wrong with increasing the math content, but reducing the ECE content in a CSE major is bad given how tightly coupled software is with hardware. We are now at a point where an entire generation of CSE majors in America do not know what a series or parallel circuit is.

And this trend has been happening at every program in the US over the past 10 years.

[0] - https://eecsis.mit.edu/degree_requirements.html#6-3_2025

[1] - https://eecsis.mit.edu/degree_requirements.html#6-3_2017

[2] - https://www.scribd.com/document/555216170/6-3-roadmap
by ocdtrekkie | 2025-09-28 14:38:23+00:00
Solid is a sort of poor way of doing what it wants to do. The idea is to cleave the data from the application so that the user keeps their data and offers applications access to it. But this is a naive choice, in the same way the Internet was, perhaps!

First, most data is not useful without the application that created it. One of the most ironic issues with Google Takeout is you can download data for all of your Google services but import it into almost nothing, there's a handful of nerd projects that can import some of it but most of it requires you be a programmer yourself to use. So the user really should own their data and the app needed to use it.

Second, as soon as a company-hosted app can access your data it can copy it. So keeping your data separate in a pod isn't meaningfully helpful for privacy either. If you are connecting to their servers to use an app, it can be proprietary and you can't see what it does with your data, so you can assume it isn't private anymore.

There are a lot of better implementations than Solid. But since Tim invented the Web, his implementation continues to get press on major news outlets even though it's a bad idea that's gotten no traction in over a decade.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-09-28 14:38:35+00:00
I have a lot of electronics that accept 100-240v doesn’t mean I think they’re close together, just that they have compensating mechanisms to handle such voltages.

The margins are generally lower for higher power devices because the electronics are more expensive. Thankfully these electronics in general are becoming cheaper which is one reason why they’re ending up in the hands of people inexperienced with them.

Also try to tell someone they need an extra 30% in margin and often they'll think they’re being upsold.
by alephnerd | 2025-09-28 14:39:57+00:00
> None of the Arab countries have ever fully aligned with the US

That's patently false. The Gulf States have been aligned with the US for almost 90 years now.

The US's intervention in Iraq to protect Kuwait in 1991, to overthrow Saddam Hussein in 2004 (the way Kim Jong Un is lampooned in American media is how Saddam is still lampooned in Saudi media [0]), our backing of Saudi-aligned Hariri in Lebanon, and various other foreign policy interventions and alignments in Western Asia were aligned with the Gulf States and vice versa.

The difference is,

1. Obama and later Biden decided to cut off American support for the Saudi war against the Houthis in Yemen

2. Trump was "convinced" by Rex Tillerson to stop Saudi and the UAE from invading Qatar and hoisting the Thani family with a construction crane.

This convinced all the Gulf States that US foreign policy can no longer be trusted, and they need to be like Qatar and build their own alliances with regional powers.

[0] - https://www.facebook.com/masameer/videos/%D9%83%D9%8A%D9%81-...
by bartread | 2025-09-28 14:40:08+00:00
Paging YouTube devs. ^^^ This is how YouTube ads should work.

I do not want to see an unskippable 60 second ad for a skincare product I do not care about whatsoever in the middle of a video about replacing the cambelt on a 90s French hot hatch. I especially don’t want that ad to bisect a word or sentence.

At least try to show me something that might have some passing relevance to what I’m watching, will you, please?
by fhe | 2025-09-28 14:40:22+00:00
I am getting the sense that the 2nd deriative of the curve is already hitting negative teritory. models get updated, and I don't feel I'm getting better answers from the LLMs.

On the application front though, it feels that the advancements from a couple of years ago are just beginning to trickle down to product space. I used to do some video editing as a hobby. Recently I picked it up again, and was blown away by how much AI has chipped away the repetitive stuff, and even made attempts at the more creative aspects of production, with mixed but promising results.
Show HN: Toolbrew – Free little tools without signups or ads
by andreisergo | 2025-09-28 14:40:46+00:00
I got tired of fighting through spammy tool sites just to do something simple, so I made Toolbrew in a few hours on Replit. Just a bunch of free little tools in one place. Text converters, SEO checks, video downloaders, that kind of stuff. No signups, no ads.

If there is a tool you wish existed, you can request it on the site and I will build it. Do your worst. Seriously, ANY tool.

Maybe it helps, maybe not. Enjoy!
by olokobayusuf | 2025-09-28 14:41:17+00:00
I'm founding a company that is building an AOT compiler for Python (Python -> C++ -> object code) and it works by propagating type information through a Python function. That type propagation process is seeded by type hints on the function that gets compiled:

https://blog.codingconfessions.com/i/174257095/lowering-to-c...
by analog31 | 2025-09-28 14:42:05+00:00
It's possible to understand both exponential and limiting behavior at the same time. I work in an office full of scientists. Our team scrammed the workplace on March 10, 2020.

To the scientists, it was intuitively obvious that the curve could not surpass 100% of the population. An exponential curve with no turning point is almost always seen as a sure sign that something is wrong with your model. But we didn't have a clue as to the actual limit, and any putative limit below 100% would need a justification, which we didn't have, or some dramatic change to the fundamental conditions, which we couldn't guess.

The typical practice is to watch the curve for any sign of a departure from exponential behavior, and then say: "I told you so." ;-)

The first change may have been social isolation. In fact that was pretty much the only arrow in our quivers. The second change was the vaccine, which changed both the infection rate and the mortality rate, dramatically.
by cogman10 | 2025-09-28 14:42:28+00:00
I think the major worry is that the body rejects the transplant. If that happens, things can turn really bad really fast. The body will attack the kidney and completely wreck it. They'd probably need surgery to remove it.

He'd probably need to go on dialysis if that were to happen. How long he'd survive IDK. I think I've read that people survive around 2 years on dialysis.

> Insulin from pigs can be used by humans, right? But maybe there's more to diabetes than just a new pancreas.

It can be. That was the first developed insulin. I believe it's completely synthetic at this point.
by zzzeek | 2025-09-28 14:42:47+00:00
> Can somebody explain the psychology behind these beliefs? I'm pretty sure they know how coal is mined. They must surely have heard about the black lung disease and COPD.

Of course they have? I'm sure you've seen pictures of miners back in the 19th century covered in soot? Why would the wealthy and powerful care about people who aren't them? You can't assume that everyone everywhere thinks "powerless people suffering and dying is wrong", that's quite demonstrably false. It might even be a plurality of people on earth who could not care less about the suffering of those outside of their immediate family and friends.

> I'm looking for an answer that doesn't assume that they're stupid or insane.

they just dont care! Why assume that people who ran for political office actually care about the welfare of others?

if the question is "why do this coal stuff when it's also unnecessary", well that gets into another MAGA value which is "dominance". That is, making people suffer and accept things that are horrible is also a big power play. Just watch any Game of Thrones episode for examples.
by tolerance | 2025-09-28 14:42:48+00:00
> Cern was created in the aftermath of the second world war by the UN and European governments who identified a historic, scientific turning point that required international collaboration. It is hard to imagine a big tech company agreeing to share the world wide web for no commercial reward like Cern allowed me to. That’s why we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research.

CERN’s Wikipedia page is surprisingly sparse on its history. I say that because I’m curious whether such thing like it as it’s being described here can be achieved today outside of the historical contexts that lead to efforts like CERN and DARPA (world wars, atomic bombs, etc.)
by GenerocUsername | 2025-09-28 14:42:51+00:00
In a way it is? Let me explain.

The USA is big, but China bigger. If the USA over optimizes on reducing greenhouse gas today, at the expense of our long term economic and world power, China, who cares for less about preserving the world will continue to destroy the world and claim the most power simultaneously.

So while we can reduce OUR footprint by taking ourselves out of the game, the world still loses.

So now try to find a less myopic solution where we remain powerful enough to get the whole world to tamper down their impacts.

We don't win by removing ourselves from the competition. And the competition has a high chance of killing us all. But rolling over is a guaranteed way to lose everything everywhere.

Oh and the prior commitments like the Paris accord were engineered to harm us while allowing China to dominate.
by dfxm12 | 2025-09-28 14:43:32+00:00
This speaks to what should be the biggest concerns with AI. The world wide web is free as in speech and free as in beer. Because of this, it grew into the incredible tool it is today, equally beneficial for Apple computers, Apple records, and even a random apple orchard in Washington.

If monopolized like social media networks, not only will relatively few get the benefits of AI, but we might also see AI output bend to the whim of their owners. We've already seen this a few times with grok.
by tdb7893 | 2025-09-28 14:43:56+00:00
Personalized ads are more effective than non-personalized ads, to try to argue that personalized ads are ineffective is incorrect and the "without any proof" claim is absurd seeing the amount of specific data they collect on effectiveness measures. I used to work for ad tech companies and while that led me to hate them more than most people I'm not gonna say the data isn't their supporting their effectiveness.

Edit: I'm not familiar with data on context based ads but I'm very skeptical they are significantly better in the general case. They are already used in things where it makes sense like when you're searching for something.
by animuchan | 2025-09-28 14:44:11+00:00
Point taken, thanks!

Re: Russia deliberately targets civilians, but being totally inept, misses and hits different civilians. -- Yep, absolutely, but this is unfalsifiable I guess. I mean, maybe they're targeting hostile aliens from space, but being inept, [...]

Re: Why do you think that? -- I extrapolate from Putin's allies really. Hamas specifically (and very vocally / proudly) targets civilians, Hezbollah targets civilians, Iran and Houthis routinely fire ballistic missiles at residential areas. (I'm only listing things I've actually witnessed, as a noncombatant.)

So intuitively they're all in the same bucket. I'll be happy to be completely wrong about Russia in this regard.
by proactivesvcs | 2025-09-28 14:44:25+00:00
> And you’re ignoring we’re also in the stages of getting the surveillance from 1984 and the social class divide from Brave New World. Those are not good tradeoffs.

Not disagreeing with you at all, but the surveillance on Starfleet vessels and facilities is almost complete and all-encompassing. Real-time location, bodily attributes, eavesdropping, access to all communication and computer data, personal and otherwise, I don't think there's anything that is private in their world! Remember that time The Doctor started a two-way video call with (I think) B'Elanna while she was in the shower? That being said, Starfleet is a paramilitary organisation, perhaps it's less awful in civilian life when one isn't wearing a Comm badge.

I wonder if you and I would consider this degree of invasiveness an acceptable compromise with a life almost completely without illness, any form of capitalism and the opportunity to pursue pretty much any life path we wish, in a society which is largely at peace with itself.
by yojo | 2025-09-28 14:46:07+00:00
Capex requirements might be on a different curve than model improvements.

E.g. you might need to accelerate spending to get sub-linear growth in model output.

If valuations depend on hitting the curves described in the article, you might see accelerating capex at precisely the time improvements are dropping off.

I don’t think frontier labs are going to be a trustworthy canary. If Anthropic says they’re reaching the limit and OpenAI holds the line that AGI is imminent, talent and funding will flee Anthropic for OpenAI. There’s a strong incentive to keep your mouth shut if things aren’t going well.
by argomo | 2025-09-28 14:46:23+00:00
Energy corporations and wealthy individuals funded the Heartland Institute who then ran public influence campaigns to discredit climate change. Conspiracy theorists and talk radio hosts predictably made a buck amplifying it. Conservative politicians, ever eager to lower taxes and reverse the growth of government, latched onto it as a wedge issue. Rural and blue collar America, angry at being left behind after deindustrialization, bought into the lies.

It didn't help that the threat was remote and abstract, that the cost was to be paid by future generations (mostly elsewhere), and that the elites who advocated fighting it were conspicuous in their own consumption.

All of these actors were entirely motivated by money and power. No whiteness required.
by thegrim33 | 2025-09-28 14:46:32+00:00
AI company employee whose livelihood depends on people continuing to pump money into AI writes a blog post trying to convince people to keep pumping more money into AI. Seems solid.

The "exponential" metric/study they include is pretty atrocious. Measuring AI capability by how long humans would take to do the task. By that definition existing computers are already super AGI - how long would it take humans to sort a list of a million numbers? Computers can do it in a fraction of a second. I guess that proves they're already AGI, right? You could probably fit an exponential curve to that as well, before LLMs even existed.
by sanex | 2025-09-28 14:46:36+00:00
I don't think people understand the price we pay for these ads. Companies _generally_ are going to operate so they don't lose money. In an industry I am familiar with, I booked someone to clean my home. The total cost was somewhere around $350, about 125 of that went to the actual person cleaning the house. The rest went to a combination of google for the ad and the company I booked through. This industry generally has a 35% marketing expense (sometimes way more) so somewhere around $75 of what I paid to get my house cleaned went to Google. How much better of a job could have been done if the cleaner got a 60% raise? How much better would the local economy be if all of that money stayed local?
by izacus | 2025-09-28 14:46:46+00:00
Ah, employee of an AI company is telling us the technology he's working on and is directly financially interested in hyping will... grow forever and be amazing and exponential and take over the world. And everyone who doesn't believe this employee of AI company hyping AI is WRONG about basics of math.

I absolutely would NOT ever expect such a blog post.

/s.
by cnlevy | 2025-09-28 14:47:37+00:00
I was asking why the post-1948 ceasefire lines are more legal than the post-1967 lines ? If you decide to go after the 1947 UN partition, keep the 1947 lines as the only legal border. If the 1948 war can redefine what's legal, then the 1967 war can do it as well.

I personally think the borders should be decided between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The only agreement to date between them has been the 1991 Oslo accords, with A, B and C zones. Further talks about definitive borders stopped with the Second Intifada in 2000.
by Ambolia | 2025-09-28 14:48:58+00:00
I will worry when I see Startups competing on products with companies 10x, 100x, or 1000x times their size. Like a small team producing a Photoshop replacement. So far I haven't seen anything like that. Big companies don't seem to be launching new products faster either, or fixing some of their products that have been broken for a long time (MS teams...)

AI obviously makes some easy things much faster, maybe helps with boilerplate, we still have to see this translate into real productivity.
by FrustratedMonky | 2025-09-28 14:49:14+00:00
"I'm sure people were saying that about commercial airline speeds in the 1970's too."

But there are others that keep going also. Moore's law is still going (mostly, slowing), and made it past a few pinch points where people thought it was the end.

The point is, that over 30 decades, many people said Moore's law was at an end, and then it wasn't, there was some breakthrough that kept it going. Maybe a new one will happen.

The thing with AI is, maybe the S curve flattens out , after all the jobs are gone.

Everyone is hoping the S curve flattens out somewhere just below human level, but what if it flattens out just beyond human level? We're still screwed.
by closewith | 2025-09-28 14:49:33+00:00
> But had Ireland not had a monoculture that all rotted away, things would've been less severe.

Ireland didn't have a monoculture. It exported other crops and meat throughout the famine and required calories never exceeded food production on the island.

The only monoculture was on tenant farmer's personal gardens, which were monocultures by necessity.
by cramcgrab | 2025-09-28 14:49:44+00:00
Aah, the PowerPC architecture! Very nice! Remember working on the ibm P5 series, really nice machines with both hot swap and cold swap components, color coded for convenience. Great operating system, aix was solidly integrated into the architecture. Lpars and soft partitions, really flexible. And available too, we rarely rebooted the whole machine, in fact can probably count on one hand the number of times we rebooted it
by Nevermark | 2025-09-28 14:49:47+00:00
Progress in information systems cannot be compared to progress in physical systems.

For starters, physical systems compete for limited resources and labor.

For another, progress in software vastly reduces the cost of improved designs. Whereas progress in physical systems can enable but still increase the cost of improved designs.

Finally, the underlying substrate of software is digital hardware, which has been improving in both capabilities and economics exponentially for almost 100 years.

Looking at information systems as far back as the first coordination of differentiating cells to human civilization is one of exponential improvement. Very slow, slow, fast, very fast. (Can even take this further, to first metabolic cycles, cells, multi-purpose genes, modular development genes, etc. Life is the reproduction of physical systems via information systems.)

Same with human technological information systems, from cave painting, writing, printing, telegraph, phone, internet, etc.

It would be VERY surprising if AI somehow managed to fall off the exponential information system growth path. Not industry level surprising, but "everything we know about how useful information compounds" level surprising.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-09-28 14:51:05+00:00
I don't know too much about POUM, but my understanding was that in Homage to Catalonia he's concerned with the Spanish Communist Party's suppression of POUM. So I think that is consistent with what I said above.

I haven't forgotten that Orwell was an anti-Stalinist socialist. But there weren't any anti-Stalinist socialist states at the time.
by hedora | 2025-09-28 14:51:22+00:00
The CPU on the iPhone 13 mini (apple’s last phone, in my opinion) wins:

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-sony_playstation_5...

Shader throughput (shader count times base clock) is similar too: https://gadgetversus.com/processor/apple-a15-bionic-vs-amd-l...

The iPhone wins on boost shader throughput by a lot, but that’ll throttle. The ps4 has more, slower gpu cores. Not sure how gpu memory bandwidth compares.