MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by dzink | 2025-10-18 13:44:47+00:00
Why the padding self on the back after a few opinions? You have large tech and government players and then you have regular people.

1. For large players: AGI is a mission worth perusing at the cost of all existing profit (you won’t pay taxes today, the stock market values you on revenue anyway, and if you succeed you can control all people and means of production).

2. For regular people the current AI capabilities have already led to either life changing skill improvement for those who make things for themselves or life changing likely permanent employment reduction for those who do things for others. If current AI is sufficient to meaningfully reduce the employment market, AGI doesn’t matter much to regular people. Their life is altered and many will be looking for manual work until AI enters that too.

3. The AI vendors are running at tremendous expense right now and the sources of liquidity for billions and trillions are very very few. It is possible a black swan event in the markets causes an abrupt end to liquidity and thus forces AI providers into pricing that excludes many existing lower-end users. That train should not be taken for granted.

4. It is also possible WebGPU and other similar scale-ai-accross-devices efforts succeed and you get much more compute unlocked to replace Advertising.

Serious question: Who in HN is actually looking forward to AGI existing?
by stingraycharles | 2025-10-18 13:44:50+00:00
This is not a really valuable article. The Apple paper was widely considered as a “well, duh” paper, GPT5 being underwhelming seems to be mostly a cost cutting / supply can’t keep up issue, and the others are just mainly expert opinions.

To be clear, I am definitely an AGI skeptic, and I very much believe that our current techniques of neural networks on GPUs is extremely inefficient, but this article doesn’t really add a lot to this discussion; it seems to self congratulate on the insights by a few others.
by latexr | 2025-10-18 13:45:27+00:00
It is paramount to not ignore the state of the world. Poverty, wars, inequality in the distribution of resources, accelerated natural disasters, political instability… Those aren’t going to be solved by a machine thoughtlessly regurgitating words from random text sources.

Even if a world where people don’t use their brains were desirable (that’s a humungous if), the present is definitely not the time to start. If anything, we’re in dire need of the exact opposite: people using their brains to not be conned by all the bullshit being constantly streamed into our eyes and ears.

And in your world, what happens when a natural disaster which wasn’t predicted takes out the AI and no one knows how to fix it? Or when the AI is blatantly and dangerously wrong but no one questions it?
by christkv | 2025-10-18 13:45:44+00:00
They are probably right and that is not anywhere close to a general intelligence but it still provides a bunch of value as long as it’s used in your own expert domain and you are not a lazy slob. We really get used to magic quickly these days. It’s not that long ago the Google employee was warning the world about skynet (internal early llm I guess) and got fired.
by uecker | 2025-10-18 13:45:52+00:00
For example cyclone, checked C, safe-c, deputy etc.

I agree that memory safety is useful, but I think the bigger problem is complexity, and Rust goes in the wrong direction. I also think that any investment into safety features - even if not achieving perfect safety - in C tooling would have much higher return of investment and bigger impact on the open-source ecosystem.
by badsectoracula | 2025-10-18 13:46:27+00:00
AFAIK Borland C++ (even on Windows) used to read the source from whatever editor buffers you had already in the IDE and since the compiler was part of the IDE, it cached various states in memory, which is why it was so fast (for a C/C++ compiler anyway - Delphi was much faster) even on slow hardware. Meanwhile Visual C++ (and modern IDEs) had you autosave the file to disk so the compiler, that was launched as a separate program (often for each file), could read it (and rebuild its internal state from scratch for every single file).
by Brian_K_White | 2025-10-18 13:46:48+00:00
A hundred years ago I found something called XWPE and managed to build it for sco osr5, and then pretty much never used it for real.

(That doesn't imply I went with VS or similar fat ide, just that I didn't end up using xwpe for real. I tried code::blocks for a while but mostly just use geany or a plain editor.)
by ziotom78 | 2025-10-18 13:46:57+00:00
It has been said that Italy is extremely vulnerable to fake news. I am not sure that we are more vulnerable than others, but it is a fact that local media provide news that is sloppy at best if not even willfully deceitful.

A couple of examples found in a book I read recently about the Fukushima incident:

- “Tokyo, a capital in agony. «We will never live here again.»”, from La Repubblica (March 20th, 2011) [1] The lead paragraph of the article reads, “Fear and nightmare of radiations: four million have already fled what was perceived as a model city”. At the time, Tokyo had 13 million people; a loss of 4 million would have meant a catastrophic collapse of the city and would have been recorded by the local media. None of this happened.

- “Fukushima, ten years after the tsunami and nuclear disaster. A return to normalcy amid abandoned lands and fears of radiation”, from Il Fatto Quotidiano (March 11th, 2021, ten years later) [2]. The lead paragraph says, “It was the worst nuclear disaster since the Chernobyl accident in 1986. Twenty thousand people died.” The number 20,000 refers to the victims of the tsunami, but there is only one (disputed) victim caused by the nuclear accident.

[1] https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2011/03/20/news/tokyo_capit...

[2] https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2021/03/11/fukushima-dieci-...
by riskable | 2025-10-18 13:47:22+00:00
I don't think it's possible to say how far away or "never" it is. All we know is that LLMs cannot become AGI.

My prediction: AGI will come from a strange place. An interesting algorithm everyone already knew about that gets applied in a new way. Probably discovered by accident because someone—who has no idea what they're doing—tried to force an LLM to do something stupid in their code and yet somehow, it worked.

What wouldn't surprise me: A novel application of the Archimedes principle or the Brazil nut effect. You might be thinking, "What TF to those have to do with AI‽ LOL!" and you're probably right... Or are you?
by middayc | 2025-10-18 13:48:32+00:00
This is another subject but mathematical operators are and behave (for better and worse - there are also negative consequences of this consistency) like all other op-words, they just don't need . in front and correct, non-op-word is prepended by _.

12 + 23 ; is technically 12 ._+ 23 ; or not using op-word is _+ 12 23 ; or if we bind function _+ to add add: ?_+ ; we get 12 .add 23 ; and add 12 23

It has downside because op-words don't behave exactly as math expressions would, but you can use parenthesis and we have a math dialect which includes full math precedence rules.

math { 12 * 2 + 23 * 3 }
by ghusto | 2025-10-18 13:48:38+00:00
Many comments here are on the premise that 4chan is "operating in"/"providing services in"/"broadcasting in" the UK, or similar.

As I understand it, _the UK_ is the one performing the importing of this content (through the backbones). 4chan is involved at no part of that pipeline other than connecting their servers to the Internet.

There are two ways in which a country could control content:

1. Through a governing body capable of regulating global content, like an Internet UN (with actual power)

2. Banning content locally via (broken) technical means

The UK is pretending that there's a third option: Telling other country's they have to abide by UK law.
by bgwalter | 2025-10-18 13:48:50+00:00
Always on the side of the bureaucracy and against the individual, no matter if it is IETF vs. Bernstein or Ruby Central vs. Arko?

Personally I also think the monetization proposal was silly, but that was in August and Ruby Central rejected it.

He logged into the root account because he thought he was on call and that someone was taking over Ruby Central, so he reacted in real time. With the obvious chaos and incompetence in Ruby Central and the ill defined takeover that does not seem far fetched.

What exactly would he have gained by openly changing the root account for malicious reasons? He knows he would have been found out. It is not even a hack.
by jeroenhd | 2025-10-18 13:48:50+00:00
The vast amount of debug info does make the problem worse, but it doesn't take long before a moderately complex Rust programs grows to 100MB even after stripping.

When I tried to compare Rust programs to their C(++) equivalents by adding the sizes of linked libraries recursively (at least on Linux, that's impossible for Windows), I still found Rust programs to have a rather large footprint. Especially considering Rust still links to glibc which is a significant chunk of any other program as well.

I believe many of Rust's statically linked libraries do more than their equivalents in other languages, so I think some more optimisation in stripping unused code paths could significantly reduce the size of some Rust applications.
by voidhorse | 2025-10-18 13:49:58+00:00
I also blame the modern business culture more, but we shouldn't act like McCulloch and Pitts were innocent. They well could have introduced neural nets without making the wild claims they did about actual neural equivalence. They are largely responsible for much of the brain = computer naivety and, in my view, they put forward this claim with shockingly little justification. The reasoned analogically without actually understanding the things they were trying to analogize. They basically took something that had the status of hypothesis at best and used it in the same manner one might if one had understanding.

To be clear, I'm not at all criticizing their technical contribution. Neural nets obviously are an important technical approach to computation—however we should criticize the attendant philosophical and neurological and biological claims they attached to their study, which lacked sufficient justification.
by subjectivationx | 2025-10-18 13:50:02+00:00
The taste of chocolate is also assuming information-theoretic models are correct and not a use-based, pragmatic theory of meaning.

I don't agree with information-theoretic models in this context but we come to the same conclusion.

Loss only makes sense if there was a fixed “original” but there is not. The information-theoretic model creates a solvable engineering problem. We just aren't solving the right problem then with LLMs.

I think it is more than that. The path forward with a use theory of meaning is even less clear.

The driving example is actually a great example of the use theory of meaning and not the information-theoretic.

The meaning of “driving” emerges from this lived activity, not from abstract definitions. You don't encode an abstract meaning of driving that is then transmitted on a noisy channel of language.

The meaning of driving emerges from the physical act of driving. If you only ever mount a camera on the headrest and operate the steering wheel and pedals remotely from a distance you still don't "understand" the meaning of "driving".

Whatever data stream you want to come up with, trying to extract the meaning of "driving" from that data stream makes no sense.

Trying to extract the "meaning" of driving from driving language game syntax with language models is just complete nonsense. There is no meaning to be found even if scaled in the limit.
by cs702 | 2025-10-18 13:51:02+00:00
I wouldn't call it "game over." That's too harsh. The truth is, we don't know.

Sure, there's a ridiculous amount of hype, fueled by greed and FOMO, often justified by cargo-cultish science, but... progress in AI seems inevitable, because we have the human brain as physical proof that it's possible to build an intelligent machine with 100's of trillions of interconnections between neurons that consumes only about as much energy as an incandescent light bulb.

Today's largest AI models are still tiny in comparison, with only 1-2 trillion interconnections between neurons, each interconnection's weight specified by a parameter value. And these tiny AI models we have today consume many orders of magnitude more energy than a human brain. We have a long way to go, but we have proof that a human-brain equivalent is physically possible.

The timing of progress is of course unpredictable. Maybe we will need new breakthroughs. Maybe not. No one knows for sure. In any case, breakthroughs don't come along on a predictable schedule. It's possible we will go through a period of stagnation that lasts months, or even years. We cannot rule out another "AI winter" just because we don't want one.

Even if progress is punctuated by high peaks and deep valleys, I believe we'll get there, eventually.
by ben_w | 2025-10-18 13:51:06+00:00
University of Washington in collaboration with Microsoft: https://www.washington.edu/news/2025/08/25/ai-simulates-1000... and https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/15/a-i-model-shows-p... the latter being a factor of 7000x improvement, reducing it to 0.014% of the required compute.

I'm surprised you missed it, given there's several other models in this space:

From NVIDIA: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/high-performance-computing/eart...

Google: https://deepmind.google/science/weathernext/

And this is different model from Microsoft, this time a collaboration with Cambridge University: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/introducing-au...
by greatgib | 2025-10-18 13:51:13+00:00
A little bit later, there was visual editors for gui app like Delphi and Visual Basic and co.

Despite VB to be a little bit shitty, I think that a big loss happened in the GUI software development world since web apps became the norm.

Not many remember this world where you could easily graphically create your UIs by placing components and that reactive interface were a given without effort.

I really miss the original Delphi before things went DotNet shitty...
by Spivak | 2025-10-18 13:51:42+00:00
Honestly, thank god. I hope we get more of this and it penetrates the zeitgeist so we can finally bring non-technical people back to earth. Folks, even on HN, are losing their damn minds over this tech. The writing has been on the wall for a while that there's not another breakthrough hiding in our current methodology. We invented the computer from Star Trek—that's an insane accomplishment, literally science fiction become reality. Maybe we can finally sit with that for a while instead of chasing the dragon. As we scale these AIs we're going to make a smarter Computer, we're not going to suddenly have Data. And that avenue is worth pursuing on its own.
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by sailingparrot | 2025-10-18 13:52:13+00:00
> Quite a wide variety of people find AI deeply ego threatening to the point of being brainwormed into spouting absolute nonsense, but why?

He is not brainwashed, this just happens to be his business. What happens to Gary Marcus if Gary Marcus stops talking about how LLM are worthless? He just disappears. No one ever interviews him for his general thoughts on ML, or to discuss his (nonexistent) research. His only clame to fame is being the loudest contrarian person in the LLM world so he has to keep doing that or accept to become irrelevant.

Slight tangent but this is a recurring pattern in fringe belief, e.g. prominent flat earther who long ago accepted earth is not flat but can’t stop the act as all their friends and incomes are tied to that belief.

Not to say that believing LLM won’t lead to AGI is fringe, but it does show the danger (and benefits I guess) to tying your entire identity to a specific belief.
by grafmax | 2025-10-18 13:52:40+00:00
Strange that this is framed as a national sovereignty issue not an issue of UK government’s overwrought free speech repression and its utilization of corporate bullying to that end. This is exactly the thing we don’t want democratic governments to do - congeal with corporate power against their people. Appealing to legality when the laws are themselves unjust is not a defense. The online safety act is broad and vague and not in the interests of UK citizens, so sovereignty appeals are completely disingenuous here. When we talk about sovereignty what we are really referring to is the power of the UK government over its people and the subservience expected of entities like 4chan to that end.

We see these exact same mechanisms in the US and that’s precisely why we should not manufacture rationalizations for this kind of policy - the societal decline as a result of this cynical trend is clear.
by quapster | 2025-10-18 13:54:02+00:00
Interesting point about the color analysis! It kinda reminds me of how album art used to be such a significant part of music culture. I’ve noticed that with videos, especially on platforms like YouTube, the visual style can really draw you in or turn you off immediately. It’s wild how much emotion can come from a simple palette choice or color scheme.

Back when I was tinkering with some video editing, I became really fascinated by how specific colors can evoke specific feelings. After messing around with different filters and palettes, I realized it’s a whole language in itself. Wonder if this tool could track viewer engagement based on those color schemes? I mean, does a certain color set get more clicks or shares? Could be fun to see the data on that! And there’s always the ethical side—using someone’s video for this without their consent could lead to some interesting discussions in the community. Anyone else tried something similar?
by ciconia | 2025-10-18 13:54:12+00:00
Strictly speaking there's never been an energy transition in the sense of replacing one source of energy with another. Instead, the different sources of energy have been piling on top of each other. [1]

So while PV is growing at an unprecedented pace, it still represents only 2-3% of total energy production. About 75% still comes from fossil fuel. Today we burn more fossil fuels (and incidentally more wood) than ever before in human history. So the term "energy transition" is inaccurate at best.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitutio...
by markus_zhang | 2025-10-18 13:54:13+00:00
Good article.

I'm more of a GUI guy who is contend with VSCode. I'm intrigued to learn Emacs but don't have the time for it.

Back in the 90s, however, Borland TUI was indeed the pinnacle. I remember I played with Turbo C for a while but did not learn anything, but it was fun just to use the IDE.
by sgarland | 2025-10-18 13:54:36+00:00
> Detecting V7 uuids in the API contract would probably require me to enforce a special key name (uuidv7 & uuid for v4) for easier audit.

Unless I'm missing something, check it on receipt, and reject it if it doesn't match. `uuid.replace("-", "")[12]` or `uuid >> 76 & 0xf`.

Regardless of difficulty, this comes down to priorities. Potential security concerns aside (I maintain this really does not matter nearly as much as people think for the majority of companies), it's whether or not you care about performance at scale. If your table is never going to get over a few million rows, it doesn't matter. If you're going to get into the hundreds of millions, it matters a great deal, especially if you're using them as PKs, and doubly so if you're using InnoDB.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-18 13:54:54+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China

> On 26 January 2006, Google launched its China-based google.cn search page, with results subject to censorship by the Chinese government.

> In January 2010, Google announced that, in response to a Chinese-originated hacking attack on them and other US tech companies, they were no longer willing to censor searches in China and would pull out of the country completely if necessary.

They never had a problem censoring their results. They claimed to pull out "in retaliation" for being hacked; realistically, they noticed that China didn't want them to succeed, and gave up on trying.
by ben_w | 2025-10-18 13:55:04+00:00
> It doesn't learn what a noun is or english is, its a statistical mapping that just tends to work well.

The word for creating that statistical map is "learning".

Now, you could argue that gradient descent or genetic algorithms or whatever else we have are "slow learners", I'd agree with that, but the weights and biases in any ML model are most definitely "learned".
by jasode | 2025-10-18 13:55:31+00:00
For a government website like Social Security, the fallback is for the citizen to go to the local office instead of authenticating credentials remotely at home. Same situation with the IRS tax refund website. The ID.ME identity website used by the IRS rejected VOIP numbers. If a person wants their tax refund released without giving up their phone # to ID.ME, they need to drive to the IRS office and verify their identity in-person.

For the software-verify-phone#-with-SMS, there was no other option. If one theoretically didn't have a real mobile phone #, there was no way to buy that software.
by cmrdporcupine | 2025-10-18 13:55:46+00:00
I definitely feel like the UI choices made in these "agents" are based on the fantasy of managers and executives (and maybe tech-optimists) more than they are the ones that actual software engineers would choose -- because they present a world in which they take over completely in a mostly unguided fashion.

I want something far more interactive that leaves me far more in control and forces me to be responsible for the choices.

For the last two months as I've been out of paid work I've been working like mad on my open source project, and fell into the pattern of heavily using Claude Code and some of the results have been amazing but some I have let my judgment and oversight lapse and come back later with a completely "WTF did it do here?" surprise.

That shouldn't be allowed to happen. A responsible SWE culture would demand that these tools engage in a way that encourages heavy oversight review and engagement.

Almost everybody does mandatory code review process these days (they didn't earlier in my career) ... despite its lower velocity... because of lessons learned -- and yet now we're allowing agent coding to produce large quantities of code that doesn't even lend itself to review by the party in charge of producing it.