MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by bob1029 | 2025-10-21 14:16:37+00:00
Why not normal audio codecs? How are JPEG and MP3 (i.e., DCT/MDCT) not a reasonable way to go about tokenizing spatial and time domain signals for these kinds of models?

Each MP3 frame is entirely self-contained and can completely reconstruct a few tens of milliseconds of original audio. It does not require other frames to do this. I think this is the most important element. At 128kbps CBR, each MP3 frame is ~418 bytes and covers ~26 milliseconds of time. This is a reduction of 10-11x over the raw PCM waveform. MP3 is also designed to eliminate the information that humans don't seem to care about.

I don't know if it's possible to use 400 byte tokens in a transformer model, but I would be very compelled to try.
by xpe | 2025-10-21 14:16:43+00:00
For those in the know... Do you have any recommended reading for Merkle-curious people that may have some scars from blockchain-related hype? It would be nice to find a nice introductory resource that covers some interesting use-cases that may not be well-known. Perhaps with nice graphics, interactivity, etc.?

For example, here is a slick web site that shows how certificate transparency uses Merkle trees: https://certificate.transparency.dev/howctworks/
by barbazoo | 2025-10-21 14:16:47+00:00
Im really impressed by this. If I understand correctly they classify the tweet but then embed the class in the vector space and find the closest neighbour. If it’s really close it means it’s semantically similar and if it’s close enough it’s a “cache hit”. Beautiful.

But when I read this:

> In order to train an AI model to tweet like a real human

Ugh, we’re doing this again, trying to fool people to believe some AI Twitter account is a real person, presumably for personal gain. Am I wrong?
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-21 14:17:45+00:00
That's one reason for the corporate backing of globalism. It's sold as "mobility", but what it actually means is having the upper hand. It's not about a lack of "talent". It's about a lack of a pool of people who will put up with their crap.

Consumerism rewards this process, because the glut of mediocre goods remains cheap.
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-21 14:18:04+00:00
History suggests the US is pretty good at acting when it perceives existential threat.

I suspect that is a truism the current administration is attempting to leverage. Unfortunately / inconveniently for them, instead of focusing on actual existential threats (climate change), they've tried to rally people behind a pretend existential threat (immigration). The people smell the rat and it seems to be back-firing.

Why they don't do the obvious thing and co-opt the green energy initiative, get into a space-race equivalent with China on solar panels and wind turbines, is a mystery to me.
by consumer451 | 2025-10-21 14:18:28+00:00
There is a lot to be said about Zuck, but in his last Dwarkesh interview I remember him being a realist about fast take-off. It was something like "If I look at team xzy, I don't see the bottleneck being a lack of smart devs."

However, to be fair, since that podcast, he has spent insane money on ML researchers...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-10-21 14:19:36+00:00
> Why is Musk allowed to be worth half a trillion dollars again?

Because he founded a company that turned into PayPal, single-handedly launched the Western EV revolution and single-handedly secured American access to space. He's been a fuckup for the last few years. But he's "allowed" to be worth a lot because if he were doing what he's doing elsewhere, he'd facilitate a multi-trillion dollar wealth transfer from America to that place.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-21 14:19:52+00:00
Yeah, expired a while ago, its a pretty old site and we have to get the old gang back together to fix it.

Thanks for checking out the magicShifter3000!

I've got a new one designed, currently in prototyping stages .. a bit more powerful and a lot more oriented towards audio/synthesis. Same form-factor, and probably MS3000 and midiShifter will have an ecosystem ..
by runako | 2025-10-21 14:20:12+00:00
I hate to lean on credentialism and experience, I really do. But is Karpathy the only one of these who is a) an engineer and also b) over the age of 30?

Why are these relevant? Engineer, because we are talking about a set of technologies that are engineering projects. There is no substitute for hands-on experience in systems. And likely an engineer has taken at least one course that included some history of AI to give a sense of the time scales involved in getting from the perceptron to Sonnet 4.5.

Over 30 primarily because that's roughly old enough to have seen at least one tech hype cycle through which to filter the AI hype cycle. (Some people are old enough to remember the predictions that nobody would use screens in 2025, everything would be a voice interface. Or how economics had fundamentally changed and companies didn't need to make money in the New Economy. Or how Tesla would for sure have 1 million robot axis on the road in 2020. Etc.)

IMHO it's a bearish sign that boosters are not looking to experienced engineers for this kind of analysis.
by ecshafer | 2025-10-21 14:20:15+00:00
Wasn't Elon kind of treated like a child to be distracted and kept at arms length at Spacex? He is apparently really really good at fundraising, marketing and publicity (well he used to be anyways). But the stories that have come out of Tesla, and Paypal and SpaceX seem to me like the people actually running the show have tried to distract him as much as possible, and any of his actual decisions have been awful. I recall a story from PayPal's early days where he wanted to swap the servers to windows, and then he got canned as the CEO.
by MomsAVoxell | 2025-10-21 14:20:23+00:00
Donated to metalab through a member connection. Austria/Vienna has a bit of a 'recycle/re-use/repurpose' scene, and this was an early example of a metalab win:

https://metalab.at/

We devoured the panels and did all kinds of funky things with them.

https://metalab.at/wiki/Blinkofant/LED-Display_History
by AntonioEritas | 2025-10-21 14:20:28+00:00
Yeah, that's why I created this in the first place. The original sucks and I want to use something better, which is just as fast, but better looking. The fontsize, layout, colors are really bad in the original.

I think they're afraid to improve it because a lot of people are attached to the original version and will freak out (see all the comments lol).
by kayba | 2025-10-21 14:20:32+00:00
Thanks for the great questions! Here's how we're tackling these:

1. Context growth management:

We avoid full context rewrites entirely, they cause context collapse where the LLM compresses away important details. Instead, we use delta updates as the foundation and are exploring:

- Semantic de-duplication to remove redundancy - Keeping deltas as the source of truth with optional summarization layers on top - Pre-filtering the playbook to feed the model a more focused version, with tooling to let it explore further when needed

Delta updates remain our core principle, but we're actively working on preventing context bloat as playbooks scale.

2. Role separation:

Our library lets you select different models for each role, with prompts specifically tailored to each function. So far we've mostly used the same model for all three roles, but we're actively exploring model mixing as a promising direction.

3. Success signals:

The system shows strong self-assessment capabilities using execution feedback (code pass/fail, API responses, and model interactions with the environment). However, you're right that ambiguous domains are trickier, this is still an open challenge for us. Our vision is to pre-seed domain knowledge through curated playbooks or training samples, then let models self-explore and discover their own success patterns over time.

What I'm curious about:

- What feedback signals work for your Django agent?

- How do you handle planner-executor coordination overhead?

- Have you hit similar brevity bias issues?

Would love to continue this conversation on Discord if you're interested: https://discord.com/invite/mqCqH7sTyK
by constantcrying | 2025-10-21 14:20:35+00:00
>Because it is biased.

But so are most pieces of opinion journalism. What is the distinction here?

>You are essentially giving up your decision making to people who don't even live in the same country as you.

I am sure that your opinion does not depend on the country of origin. Should Dutch people not read German or English Media covering election issues? Would your argument not apply to the US, where the models were trained?

Why should voters be allowed to get opinions from journalists and not from LLMs. Certainly journalists have a bias and often make arguments that certain parties should be supported over others. Why is it not fine if an LLM does that?

What I am asking of you is an actual reason these LLMs should be treated as distinct from a piece of opinion journalism.
by sroerick | 2025-10-21 14:20:42+00:00
I actually completely agree. I am learning OpenBSD and the man pages are very good, but all too often I find myself reading them, beating my head against the wall, and then googling or using tdlr or gippity.

For example, I just was digging into BSD_auth and authenticate, and I don't know much about how auth works generally. I found it pretty tough to grok from the man page. I love the idea of learning everything from directly within the system and man pages, but I might just not be smart enough for that.
by Aurornis | 2025-10-21 14:21:10+00:00
> 30 seconds vs 3-4 minutes on my previous laptop (14" M1 16GB) is a big deal. It was more constrained for memory (swapping)

This is why data driven purchasing is key. Running some tests and having some data to show how much time will be saved by a laptop upgrade makes the decision process much easier.

The companies that only decide based on prices and budgets set by someone making blanket decisions for the company always get it wrong.

It’s also possible to go too far on the spending path. I remember some people who demanded brand new maxed out MacBook Pros every generation until someone ran some tests and proved that it wasn’t making any noticeable difference at all year over year despite costing upwards of $5-6K per person. That’s money that could have gone to something else.
by panick21 | 2025-10-21 14:21:41+00:00
SLS was 6 years and like 10-20 billion $ over budget and nobody ever complainged, in fact they got consistantly more and more money. And that is for technology that is fundamentally from the 1970s.

Starship is trying to do the hardest thing in the history of space flight. And of course its not on schedule, its schedule was always insane.

The way of approching things as 'is X on schedule' is a fundamentally false way of approching the problem. The question is who makes the schedules and why. Who decides the budget and why. Who planes for the architecture and why.

Just thrwing around and accusing different groups about who is 'delayed' is kind of counter-productive.

The fact is, the schedule is something Trump made up to sound cool in his first term, and has since been revised for multible reasons. And the demand for a lander was equally rushed. So the schedule is mostly just whatever politics at the moment wants to project.
by ssk42 | 2025-10-21 14:21:46+00:00
Context engineering is a critical part of being able to use the tool. And it's ok to not understand how to use a new tool. The different models combined with different stacks require different ways of grappling with the technology. And it all changes! It sucks that you've tried it for your stack (Elixir, whatever that is) in your way and it was disappointing.

To me, the tool inherently makes sense and vibes with my own personality. It allows me to write code that I would otherwise procrastinate on. It allows me to turn ideas into reality, so much faster.

Maybe you're just hyper focused on metrics? Productivity, especially when dealing with code, is hard to quanitfy. This is a new paradigm and so it's also hard to compare apples to oranges. Does this help?
by seszett | 2025-10-21 14:22:01+00:00
Nice, but it's only available in English sadly, there's a link that says "see kalenderpuzzel "Ruit" for the Dutch version" (I'd prefer French but Dutch would do as well) but that page says "De maanden en dagen van de week zijn in het Engels".

The "square" one is in Dutch but sold out and the Rotterdam one in English only.

But I like that idea, apparently it's not the first puzzle of this kind but I didn't know about them.
by bravetraveler | 2025-10-21 14:22:08+00:00
Their words, not mine; the first header: "It's already on your machine". We can belabor it, but the domain is 'justuse'. No room for 'except' [unless you're reasonable, of course].

The 'egregious' things are charging to share what will fit very well in SCM (preventing real automation)... and breaking due to Online First/only. It makes sense to require the endpoint I'm talking to. Why would Postman need AWS/us-east-1 [0] for a completely unrelated API? Joyful rent-seeking.

cURL, your suggestion (hurl), or HTTPie all make far more sense. Store what they need in the place where you already store stuff. Profit, for free: never go down. Automate/take people out of the button-pushing pattern for a gold star.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45645172
by Symmetry | 2025-10-21 14:22:27+00:00
As the article you link says:

> The high p-n junction built-in voltage (4.9V, compared to 2.8V in SiC) and short carrier lifetimes limit the advantages of bipolar diamond devices to only ultra-high voltages (> 6kV) and low switching frequencies.

Nobody is thinking about using diamond for the silicon CMOS logic in a computer, though they may replace the gallium arsenide we use for motor control some day.
by friendzis | 2025-10-21 14:22:29+00:00
> Major problems reported with Tesla vehicles include vehicle reliability issues like suspension failures ("whompy wheels") and sudden power loss, alongside quality control concerns such as paint defects and poor build quality. Additionally, there are safety concerns surrounding the Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems, software glitches, and issues with customer service. Other problems include battery degradation over time, resulting in reduced range, and recurring HVAC system failures.

This is what google spews out when I type in "tesla major problems". The first result is Wiki entry "Criticism of Tesla, Inc.", where first section is literally "Fraud allegations".

All I had to do was look if there's negative feedback and it's not something mild what you would get replacing Telsa with e.g. Peugeot, but some really troublesome issues. If you don't agree that this is basic, rudimentary overview and instead argue that this is some deep research, well I don't believe we can agree on anything much at all. I invest more effort in picking a place to eat at than some people in buying their car.

Sorry, but there's no such thing as "bought it before Elon went crazy".
by PaulDavisThe1st | 2025-10-21 14:23:19+00:00
> An experienced engineer can look at a waveform in a DAW and identify specific consonants, vowels, specific words, etc quite fluently.

As an experienced DAW author, I very, very much doubt this.

What can be done relatively easy is to "see" or rather "follow along" in the waveform when listening to the audio. But I read your claim as being that someone could look at the waveform (which is already decimated from the original) and identify words or phonemes without hearing the associated audio. I am extremely skeptical that there is anyone anywhere in the world who can do this.
From Repetitive to Revolutionary: How AI Is Transforming Project Management
by trustedit | 2025-10-21 14:23:42+00:00
Project management has always been a paradox. It’s supposed to drive innovation — yet much of it feels like manual labor. Spreadsheets, Gantt charts, progress updates, and resource allocations consume time that should be spent on strategy.

AI is starting to change that. What used to be routine and reactive is now becoming predictive and automated.
by googamooga | 2025-10-21 14:23:44+00:00
I fully support this approach! When I first started experimenting—rather naively—with using tool-enabled LLMs to generate documents (such as reports or ADRs) from the extensive knowledge base in Confluence, I built a few tools to help the LLM search Confluence using CQL (Confluence Query Language) and store the retrieved pages in a dedicated folder. The LLM could then search within that folder with simple filesystem tools and pull entire files into its context as needed. The results were quite good, as long as the context didn’t become overloaded. However, when I later tried to switch to a 'Classic RAG' setup, the output quality dropped significantly and I refrained from switching.
by trustedit | 2025-10-21 14:23:56+00:00
Automation: The Quiet Revolution

Modern AI agents are getting very good at repetitive work. They can scan documentation, extract key information, track deliverables, and even update dashboards automatically. In a world where LLMs can summarize a 200-page report in seconds, the days of manual status reports are numbered.

Tools like Microsoft Copilot and Power Platform already plug into enterprise ecosystems, handling scheduling, task creation, and data entry behind the scenes.
by kayba | 2025-10-21 14:24:17+00:00
You're right that cost and latency are important considerations. However, the research shows this isn't just about finding better templates, it's about enabling agentic systems to learn and improve from their previous attempts and failures.

We believe in-context learning is one of the missing pieces to make agentic systems feasible in production. The key is that systems can adapt without expensive fine-tuning or retraining. The paper shows *86.9% lower adaptation latency* and significant reductions in rollout costs compared to existing methods, making this approach more practical than previous optimization techniques.

The real value is in systems that progressively get better at their tasks through experience, not just one-time prompt optimization.

If you want to continue this conversation just hit me up on Discord: https://discord.com/invite/mqCqH7sTyK
by jpfromlondon | 2025-10-21 14:24:26+00:00
I didn't want the post to end I didn't want to return to an existence where people don't share these transgressive impulses with me.

This is a robust and comprehensive antidote to nihilism and anyone who has ever missed the internet of the nineties or early 00s as I have would be doing themselves an enormous favour by reading it, and then rereading it as I intend to.

It lost me for a moment at Implicity and I was worried the spell had be broken but the profound blows didn't stop.
by raducu | 2025-10-21 14:24:38+00:00
> So it’s several rounds of “yes yes, the previous time the criticisms were right, but this time it’s different, trust me”. So everyone else is justified in being skeptical.

True, but even the boy who cried wolf too many times eventually got his sheep eaten by the wolf.

I have my own personal anecdotal benchmarks and I never hyped LLMs before GPT-5.

Things that simply did not work before GPT-5 no matter how many shots I gave them, GPT-5 breezed through.

For me, it would take at least 2 generations of no felt progress in the models to call for diminishing returns, and I'm not seeing them.
Sell tickets to concerts agentically – Hive (YC S14) is hiring
by patman_h | 2025-10-21 14:24:40+00:00
Hi HN fam - we’re www.hive.co.

1500+ concert venues sell tickets to their shows via our CRM/email/SMS/ads product. We’ve been building Hive for 12 years, we’re a remote team of 70+ in CAN/USA, and we’re breakeven / profitable (when we want to be!).

We have the largest database of past ticket buyers (next to live nation) and we know what marketing works to sell tickets and what doesn’t (from ~millions of prev deployed email/sms/ad campaigns).

We’re building the future of Hive: moving from a SaaS tool that marketers use themselves to (effectively!) sell tickets, to an agent that strategizes, recommends, builds, and sends the marketing campaigns on their behalf.

We have 4 critical roles open that will have outsized impact on the future outcomes we’re driving for our customers:

- Staff Software Engineer (Data Systems)

- Senior Product Engineer (Agentic AI)

- Senior AI Product Manager

- Senior AI UX Designer

Please apply to https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/hive.co
by nostrademons | 2025-10-21 14:24:40+00:00
My dad was born in the Philippines in 1939. He came over to the U.S. on a Taiwanese passport in 1959, part of a group of students that MIT imported from the Philippines based on letters of recommendation from their Atomic Energy Commission, and then bounced around on various visas for a decade. Finally got citizenship upon marrying my mom in 1971.

When McCain was running for president, there was a big court case about whether being born in the Canal Zone (a U.S. territory) qualified as being a "natural born citizen". And I made the connection - "Wait. The Philippines was a U.S. territory in 1939. Shouldn't dad have had birthright citizenship?"

Moot point by then, he'd already been a citizen for ~40 years, and died the next year. But it was wild to think that the 10+ years of immigration hassles were basically due to an administrative fuck-up, and that legally, he should have had citizenship all along. The process you link wouldn't work for him, either, because the Philippines is not a U.S. territory now.
by shadowgovt | 2025-10-21 14:24:40+00:00
TBH, I believe him on this one.

Knowing some folks who are working with their psychiatrists on their mental health and using ketamine under supervision: it seems ketamine is starting to prove effective for depressive issues.

The challenge is it's extremely potent and the dose is extremely patient-dependent. Miss a dose, mis-dose, or fail to realize you don't have the calibration right yet, and the risk for side-effects is high. Depression itself can also mask other conditions (like, counter-intuitively, mania; when you're too depressed to be manic you don't show the mania symptoms) that only surface for potential treatment when the depression is treated.

Most importantly: Musk can afford the kind of calibre of psychiatrist (and the time for observation) necessary for the therapy to be maximally effective. So if he's working with someone and serious about being treated, I wouldn't doubt ketamine therapy would be on the table.

(All of that having been said: mixing marijuana and ketamine is risky as hell; if Musk smoking on Rogan wasn't a one-off, he's doing his psychiatrist no favors introducing a second drug to his system that interacts with the same neural pathways and can create overshoot and bounce-back effects).
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-10-21 14:24:42+00:00
Could they? The Apollo program took 9 years from conception to landing the first person on the moon, and cost $257 billion adjusted for 2020 dollars ($25.4B at the time). For comparison, the Artemis program was budgeted for $86B [0], with less to spend due to NASA budget cuts. The SpaceX Artemis contract is "only" worth $2.9B. Finally, the Starship program has cost an estimated $5-8B so far [1].

Some conclusions / opinions: Starship so far is relatively cheap compared to the previous program that took Americans to the moon. Developing a moon capable rocket takes a long time, especially if they don't just copy the existing designs from 60 years ago. And a single purpose rocket will long-term be more expensive than a more generalised / reusable platform, but that's more capitalist objectives than political (e.g. beating the commies).

[0] https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/nasa-ig-artemis-will-cost...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Starship