MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mothballed | 2025-10-17 22:52:37+00:00
I've lived in a couple places with public transit way faster and more efficient than cars.

But because it's public, people can't be easily kicked off. Once I was caught between a knife fight; another time a schizophrenic person started to aggressively trap me in the corner while going on an increasing paranoid tirade.

Not long after that I bought a bicycle.
by _heimdall | 2025-10-17 22:52:47+00:00
Right. I buy old cars, but I'm picky as hell and buy ones that have been taken care of, still have parts availability, and are models with proven reliability.

I still recommend anyone buy a later model Buick Lesabre if you find one in good shape. They're very cheap, the 3800 motor is excellent, and are still very comfortable rides that get around 30mpg on the highway.
by entrepy123 | 2025-10-17 22:52:59+00:00
Probably a confluence of reasons. Maybe:

1. It is much more profitable to introduce new features very, very slowly.

2. If everyone's doing the same thing... one has got to wonder what the people running those companies are up to. My gut says most of the founders/boards are probably largely all on the same WhatsApp/Signal group chat(s), and feel pressure to follow a certain groupthink.

3. It's much easier to profile individual users when the signals are nice and clean. I suspect modeling individual users (building digital twins) could be a really big and mostly quiet part of the longer play for these companies. That pristine initial data might be pretty nice to have.

4. Maybe it would be really boring or doesn't test well. A good thing about talking to the computer is the lack of having to deal with pesky other humans and all the issues they have. Many people instinctively despise reading text generated by a computer that SOME OTHER HUMAN PROMPTED IT TO WRITE (with some exceptions, of course). This might be called the "default conciseness" problem.

Nothing stops one from hosting their own LLM, hooking a web UI to it in such a way that multiple users can access it. Or using a commercial/networked API to do that.

Not a bad idea to try, really. Maybe you're the first one who thought of it...
by gmuslera | 2025-10-17 22:53:08+00:00
He wrote Accelerando, a book about everything happening faster, the mythical singularity would happen, after which everything will become increasingly better, increasingly faster. Now what we have is a pivot, after which everything will become increasingly worse, increasingly faster.

At least the acceleration part will happen. And things will keep evolving. The pivot, the ones that decide that things are better or worse, are us. And probably for some of us (at least a extremely small minority, or that will die soon enough) the direction may keep going for better
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-17 22:53:13+00:00
>s probably going to outlive you

You mean "rod the block next week because it was used as an uber and before that it was owned by three successive hipsters who didn't change the oil because 'lol it's a Toyota' or whatever"

Dollar for dollar Toyotas were a bad buy as soon as Reddit started trying to tell everyone to buy them.
by godelski | 2025-10-17 22:54:16+00:00
> Meanwhile humans don't need any data at all

I don't agree with this and I don't think any biologist or neuroscientist would either.

1) Certainly the data I discussed exists. No creature comes out a blank slate. I'll be bold enough to say that this is true even for viruses, even if we don't consider them alive. Automata doesn't mean void of data and I'm not sure why you'd ascribe this to life or humans.

2) humans are processing data from birth (technically before too but that's not necessary for this conversation and I think we all know that's a great way to have an argument and not address our current conversation). This is clearly some active/online/continual/ reinforcement/wherever-word-you-want-to-use learning.

It's weird to suggest an either or situation. All evidence points to "both". Looking at different animals even see both but also with different distributions.

I think it's easy to over simplify the problem and the average conversation tends to do this. It's clearly a complex with many variables at play. We can't approximate with any reasonable accuracy by ignoring or holding them constant. They're coupled.

> The reward function can't be created by the brain, because it would be circular.

Why not? I'm absolutely certain I can create my own objectives and own metrics. I'm certain my definition of success is different from yours.

> It would be like giving yourself a high, without even needing drugs

Which is entirely possible. Maybe it takes extreme training to do extreme versions but it's also not like chemicals like dopamine are constant. You definitely get a rush by completing goals. People become addicted to things like videogames, high risk activities like sky diving, or even arguing on the internet.

Just because there are externally driven or influenced goals doesn't mean internal ones can't exist. Our emotions can be driven both externally and internally.

> Notice something?

You're using too simple of a model. If you use this model then the solution is as easy as giving a robot self preservation (even if we need to wait a few million years). But how would self preservation evolve beyond its initial construction without the ability to metaprocess and refine that goal? So I think this should highlight a major limitation in your belief. As I see it, the only other way is a changing environment that somehow allows continued survival by the constructions and precisely evolves such that the original instructions continue to work. Even with vague instructions that's an unstable equilibrium. I think you'll find there's a million edge cases even if it seems obvious at first. Or read some Asimov ;)
by michael1999 | 2025-10-17 22:54:18+00:00
We're doing something like this internally. Our monorepo context files were much too big, so we built a progressive tree of fragments to load up for different tasks.

I am struck by how much these kinds of context documents resemble normal developer documentation, but actually useful and task-oriented. What was the barrier to creating these documents before?

Three theories on why this is so different:

1) The feedback loop was too long. If you wrote some docs, you might never learn if they were any good. If you did, it might be years later. And if you changed them, doing an A/B test was impractical. Now, you can write up a context markdown, ask Claude to do something, and iterate in minutes.

2) The tools can help build them. Building good docs was always hard. Especially if you take the time to include examples, urls, etc. that make the documentation truly useful. These tools reduce this cost.

3) Many programmers are egotists. Documentation that helps other people doesn't generate internal motivation. But documentation that allows you to better harness a computer minion to your will is attractive.

Any other theories?
by TeMPOraL | 2025-10-17 22:54:53+00:00
This is where GP is wrong, I think. The problem are being solved, for now, because the businesses are still too excited about the whole AI thing to notice it's not in their interest, and properly consolidate against it.

And the problem being solved is, LLMs are universal interfaces. They can understand[0] what I mean, and they understand what those various "solutions" are, and they can map between them and myself on the fly. They abstract services away.

The businesses will eventually remember that the whole point of marketing is to prevent exactly that from happening.

--

[0] - To a degree, and conditioned on what one considers "understanding", but still - it's the first kind of computer systems that can do this, becoming a viable alternative to asking a human.
by watwut | 2025-10-17 22:55:00+00:00
Historically, it did not. What actually does lead to revolution is regime becoming weak and unable to organize. You can keep people in horrible conditions and there will be no revolution, because dissenters will get stopped long before they anywhere near organizing themselves.

It is when the powerful become the weak that revolution can happen. And it takes more then one round of it till reasonable government emerges again.
by Biganon | 2025-10-17 22:55:02+00:00
I wouldn't say necessarily "risky", it's more that it forces your hand when you wouldn't want to reveal an entity's creation time. Say you use these IDs for users of your site, and they're used in API queries / URLs etc., then it's trivial to know when a user created their account. Sure, many sites already expose this information, but not all of them do; what if you don't want it exposed? What if you consider that a user's seniority is nobody's business, that it could bias the behavior of other users towards them, etc.?
by mothballed | 2025-10-17 22:55:14+00:00
buywinesonline.com (random retailer I found) says they do

Buy Wines Online currently does not ship alcohol to AL, MI, MS, UT, HI, AK

Says it requires an "adult signature" but anyone who's signed for fedex/ups knows they don't check your ID. I can say, when I was in high school, they did not check...
by _heimdall | 2025-10-17 22:55:55+00:00
Sure, your motor or trans can go out on any vehicle and unless you still have a warranty its your problem.

It sucks if you spend $3500 on a car only to spend another $2000 because the transmission went out and the timing was bad luck. I wouldn't recommend anyone buy an old car I'd they have no emergency fund left after the purchase though.

My wife does regularly drive our old cars. If it dies on the highway we'll deal with it. I don't have a daughter, but I wouldn't worry about my kid driving the kind of old cars I pick up - I'm patients picky, and able to work on them myself. The car would be the least of my worries if I had a young daughter with a drivers license.
by ajtejankar | 2025-10-17 22:56:03+00:00
IMO LoRAs are no different from context tokens. In fact, before LoRAs tuned prompt vectors were a popular adapter architecture. Conceptually, the only difference is that prompt adapters only interact with other tokens through the attention mechanism while LoRAs allow you to directly modify any linear layer in the model. Essentially, you can think of your KV cache as dynamically generated model weights. Moreover, I can't find the paper, but there is some evidence that in-context learning is powered by some version of gradient descent inside the model.
by the_duke | 2025-10-17 22:56:15+00:00
In my experience gpt5-codex (medium) and codex-cli is notably better than Sonnet 4.5 and claude-code. (note: never tried Opus)

It is slower, but the results are much more often correct and it doesn't rush into half-baked solutions/dumb approaches as eagerly.

I'd much rather wait 5 minutes than have to clean up manually or try to coax a model into doing things differently.

I also wouldn't be surprised if the slowness was partially due to OpenAI being quite resource constrained. They are repeatedly complaining about not having sufficient compute.

Bigger picture: I think all the AI coding environments are incredibly immature. There are many improvements to be unlocked.
by linguae | 2025-10-17 22:56:34+00:00
Unfortunately, there are some apartment complexes, HOAs, and city ordinances that prohibit people from working on their cars, which means either needing to find a legal place to do your own repairs or paying a mechanic. I’ve lived in apartments my entire adult life thus far, and every lease I’ve signed has prohibited me from repairing my cars on apartment grounds. I have no choice but to either find a friend with a garage (not easy in the Bay Area when most of my friends can’t afford garages) or taking my car to a mechanic and paying Bay Area labor costs.
by ajross | 2025-10-17 22:57:00+00:00
> I care less about how they fix the problem

That's the logic that got Benioff in trouble.

FWIW: people like you have to realize that the Guard is not and has never been a law enforcement apparatus. The policy goal of "sending in the troops" to US cities is not and has never been crime (the metrics for which are getting better and not worse, yes even in SF).

The goal of putting military force in charge of directing civilians on city streets is and has always been giving the President, who commands that military, direct control over city streets. Right now if the white house doesn't like a protest or doesn't want it to happen, there's nothing they can do bureaucratically using their executive power to prevent it. It's a local thing. If the guard is already there waiting for orders, they can.

It sounds like hyperbole, but it's really not: the transparent purpose to this big National Guard kerfuffle is the military suppression of dissent at the direction of the President.
by toomuchtodo | 2025-10-17 22:57:25+00:00
Automakers realized during the pandemic they could increase prices and reduce production and come out ahead. Import tariffs means you are, as a consumer, held captive by a domestic market to extract from you for your potentially non discretionary personal transportation needs. If you must have a car, the price is the price.

This has slowly been changing as of recently, but now tariffs are eating into automaker balance sheets to the tune of ~$30B, which will have to come from somewhere in transaction volume.
by epistasis | 2025-10-17 22:58:11+00:00
Your explanation makes no sense. First, nobody thought that Trump would actually go through with the tariffs because it's an insane plan and that wiser people in the administration would restrain Trump. So the dollar started to devalue when people realized that "holy shit these tariffs might actually happen." The tariffs are way way bigger than anybody expected.

The entire goal of the tariffs were to weaken the dollar:

> The Mar-a-Lago Accord is a proposed economic and trade initiative of the Donald Trump administration during his second term. Named after Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, the Accord is a blueprint for restructuring global trade and monetary relations. Its core goal is to devalue the dollar while preserving its role as the world reserve currency, a careful balancing act intended to avoid the contradictions described in the Triffin paradox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mar-a-Lago_Accord
by jimrandomh | 2025-10-17 22:58:34+00:00
In addition to whatever other mitigations you do, you should put a deny rule for the bot's user-agent in robots.txt, and use a status code of 429 (Too Many Requests), even if the bot doesn't respect these. This will strengthen your case if you need to convince a third party (AWS, or a court, or a different part of the company that's operating the bot) that it's abusive.
by aurizon | 2025-10-17 22:59:24+00:00
Bad market analysis and production. I believe a case can be made for a well designed, rectangular vehicle with motorised wheels - 2 or 4 wheel drive. With a cube van or window van. Forget the chatter about un-sprung weight, this is not a high performance vehicle. Brakes, suspension as well as a front compression zone. Battery = 3 choices - 150/300/450 mile range. Battery flat in 3 segments arranged to balance as needed. Many people are OK with 150, some want 300 and 450 for the longer range. Some car makers in Asia have fast change stands where an old battery can be dropped and a new one picked up in under 5 minutes - perhaps fast charging will eliminate this - however fast charging has IR losses as well as degradation issues - need to be solved before ready for prime time. Tesla has plateaued due to price and the yearly design steady state ranks old/new cars as same old same. Far less in the way of e-bling = smaller screens etc, fewer assists/features. I would be quite happy at 0-60 under 10 seconds and a max of 85-90.
by alephnerd | 2025-10-17 22:59:28+00:00
As someone who knows people who fought that war on the other side, the vast majority were professionally trained soldiers, not Huy the illiterate rice paddy farmer who took an AK-47 and took pot shots at Americans.

There's a reason much of the older generation of Viet military and political leadership studied in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany, BSSR, and RSFSR and why both the Vietnamese Army and the MPS still send their officers and leadership track personnel to train in Belarus and Russia to this day.

Heck, Russian is still an fairly popular language choice for Viet students targeting civil service or police careers.

Furthermore, a ragtag army of farmers would not have been able to fight against the PLA in 1979 or overthrow the PRC's lackeys and backed by the US in Cambodia and Laos in the 1980s-1990s.

It's also why you find so many Vietnamese in Prague, Warsaw, East Germany, Minsk, and Moscow to this day.

The fiction of "illiterate paddy farmers pushed American soldiers out" is just a salve around the reality that the US abandoned South Vietnam in order to seal the US-China deal in the early 70s that helped contain the USSR in the late 20th century.
by autoexec | 2025-10-17 22:59:38+00:00
This goes way beyond the high price of cars or people taking out loans with bad terms.

Americans are struggling all over. Rent is skyrocketing. Inflation is applying massive pressure on regular expenses. Household debt is at an all time high. People all over the country are struggling to keep their utilities connected as energy prices soar. Foreclosures are surging. Individual chapter 7 bankruptcy filings are up 15% from last year too. It's really no wonder repossessions are spiking too.

Economically, things look pretty bleak for a huge percentage of Americans and I'm not seeing much to convince me that they're going to get better any time soon.
by samuelknight | 2025-10-17 22:59:42+00:00
(1) JSON requires lots of escape characters that mangle the strings + hex escapes and (2) it's much easier for model attention to track when a semantic block begins and ends when it's wrapped by the name of that section

<instructions>

...

...

</instructions>

can be much easier than

{

"instructions": "..\n...\n"

}

especially when there are newlines, quotes and unicode
by temp_praneshp | 2025-10-17 22:59:54+00:00
definitely not easy by yourself, but the whole process (change, then alignment etc) shouldn't take a decent mechanic's shop more than a couple of hours. I've changed tires on my nearly 200k mile car several times now, and it's usually a few days for the tires to be delivered (in america the mechanic will just receive it) and a 2h appt to get the work done. I'm shocked your parent comment mentioned waiting a whole day at the mechanics'.

My friend does this at Costco, and it takes longer purely because of appt mismanagement and backup, the work itself is quick.
by flumpcakes | 2025-10-17 22:59:55+00:00
> If I run a lemonade stand, and a UK citizen walks up a pays a dollar for a glass of lemonade, then that doesn't give the UK jurisdiction over the lemonade stand.

It does... to correct your example, the UK citizen is paying a dollar for the lemonade while in the UK.

Are you saying that if I had a website hosted in Russia that pretended to be your bank and stole all your money from phishing that is perfectly legal?
by watwut | 2025-10-17 23:00:33+00:00
Isn't America literally the country with longest average and median commutes to work? Like, that was always an American thing - the long commute.

Also, you cant do work in car either. You have to drive and actually pay attention. You cant (or should not) just listen to podcast or loosing yourself in the music. You dont get health benefits of walking a bit or of popping int the store on the way to buy food quickly.

My point here is that if public transport and city are semi reasonably organized, the car has to be actually seriously faster to be worth it.
by ojr | 2025-10-17 23:00:46+00:00
if it works 90% of the time that means it fails 10% of the time, to get to 1% failure rate is a 10x improvement and from 1% failure rate to a 0.1% failure rate is also a 10x improvement

First time being hearing it be called "march of nines", did Tesla make the term, I thought it was an Amazon thing
by epistasis | 2025-10-17 23:01:12+00:00
Yes, the calendar year matches what I was talking about, and more closely matches the current economic policy of the US. It wasn't until February that the real economic and foreign policy of the US became clear, and the full insanity of it all is still sinking in.

I'm not sure why your hand-picked list of currencies is revelant, or why your particular dates are relevant. The course for the future looks to be a greater devaluation of the US currency.

This is the goal of the Trump administration and what is apparent to analysts.
by K0balt | 2025-10-17 23:01:38+00:00
We will never achieve AGI, because we keep moving the goalposts.

SOTA models are already capable of outperforming any human on earth in a dizzying array of ways, especially when you consider scale.

Humans also produce nonsensical, useless output. Lots of it.

Yes, LLMs have many limitations that humans easily transcend.

But few if any humans on earth can demonstrate the breadth and depth of competence that a SOTA model possesses.

Relatively few (probably less than half) are casually capable of the level of reasoning that LLMs exhibit.

And, more importantly, as anyone in the field when neural networks were new is aware, AGI never meant human level intelligence until the LLM age. It just meant that a system could generalize one domain from knowledge gained in other domains without supervision or programming.
by jacobgkau | 2025-10-17 23:01:48+00:00
> in those times, your computer was worth next to nothing in less than a year.

> ICE are stagnant. They retain their value because they're not improving at all.

This doesn't make sense. As already pointed out, the reason computers lose value is because the same money can buy something that does the job better (faster, lighter, etc). ICE don't retain value because they're not improving; they retain value because they still do the same job X years later.

EVs, meanwhile, are losing value even though the same money as a used EV can't buy anything that actually does the job better, as pointed out earlier in the thread. So there must be something else in play (such as battery degradation lowering value of EVs quicker than engine wear & tear lowers value of ICEs).
by godelski | 2025-10-17 23:02:12+00:00
Let me understand, is your claim that a toaster can't toast bread because it cannot initiate the toasting through its own volition?

Ignoring the silly wording, that is a very different thing than what robotresearcher said. And actually, in a weird way I agree. Though I disagree that a toaster can't toast bread.

Let's take a step back. At what point is it me making the toast and not the toaster? Is it because I have to press the level? We can automate that. Is it because I have to put by bread in? We can automate that. Is it because I have to have the desire to have toast and initiate the chain of events? How do you measure that?

I'm certain that's different from measuring task success. And that's why I disagree with robotresearcher. The logic isn't self consistent.
by johnnyApplePRNG | 2025-10-17 23:02:42+00:00
Cheers!

I have never seen that site before, but damn that's an impressive set of decodability there for sure ... whoa!

My brain hurts just thinking about adding that many more different filetypes!

Can it handle batch processing, though?

OnlyJPG is designed to allow the user to drag and drop 100 images onto the screen and (assuming you have auto-download enabled) you should be prompted for a zip file containing your JPGs when you're done.
by juujian | 2025-10-17 23:02:49+00:00
> These goals are in line with the administration’s own stated priorities. Just weeks after shuttering OCS, the White House announced an executive order intended to, in its words, restore scientific integrity policies of federally funded research activities.

I get that they are trying to highlight the administrations hypocrisy, but stronger wording would really be appropriate. That scientific integrity has always just been a fig leaf that should never be taken at face value, a red herring.