MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
Show HN: SAI – A Reinforcement Learning Competition Platform
by jeaniebeir | 2025-10-03 19:47:15+00:00
We’ve been building something for the reinforcement learning (RL) community in stealth for the past two years, and I'm really excited to finally be able to share it here.

Before diving into what we’ve built, here’s the baseline we started from:

- AGI won’t emerge from isolated algorithms. It will require a shared ecosystem where researchers can train, benchmark, and learn together in open environments.

- We believe RL is the most promising pathway toward general intelligence.

- Most RL researchers are still publishing results in isolation, on tasks that can’t easily be compared.

So, we built SAI, a RL competition platform designed to make RL progress more accessible, standardized, and measurable.

SAI is a platform where you can train, benchmark, and submit models to a global leaderboard. A proving ground for reproducible RL research:

- Competitions designed to surface real research challenges (generalization, transfer, and adaptation)

- Infrastructure for reproducible experiments and shared results

- Community through discussion forums, visible progress and collaboration

With SAI live, the next step is competition, and our second one launches October 6: the Booster Soccer Showdown, in partnership with Booster Robotics.

The challenge itself asks a core AGI question in miniature:

Can one agent generalize across different environments without per-task tuning?

Competitors will need to train a humanoid soccer agent to succeed at three related tasks - testing policies for adaptability, transfer, and generalization, the very qualities real-world intelligence requires.

If you’re into RL or just curious about ML, feel free to try out the platform. All feedback and ideas are welcome!

Platform: https://competesai.com/

Booster Soccer Showdown: https://competesai.com/competitions/cmp_xnSCxcJXQclQ
by n4r9 | 2025-10-03 19:47:19+00:00
I'm not trying to suppress anything, but I want people to be aware. Conversely, I would gladly point out that an article on mathematics written by Terence Tao is likely to be high quality and insightful. Such guides are helpful in a world where not everyone has the time or energy to fully get to grips with the minutiae.
by mattias-moody | 2025-10-03 19:47:25+00:00
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Kind and driven engineers looking for exciting challenges.

5+ years of experience building web-based products, ideally in B2B SaaS startups

Strong fullstack development skills with TypeScript, Node.js, and API design

Proven track record shipping AI-powered features in production with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) and understanding of how to translate machine intelligence into user value. We're looking for experience building end-to-end systems.

Deep understanding of AI fundamentals: agent architectures, chat completion roles, embedding vectors, vector databases, and chunking strategies

A user-focused mindset: you care about delivering features that solve real problems

A bias for shipping and learning - fast iteration is second nature to you

Careers website: https://n8n.io/careers/

Connect with me on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattiaspettersson1/
by bigyabai | 2025-10-03 19:47:30+00:00
> only reinforces the notion that those who oppose the state of Israel are generally unreasonable and lack the morals which form the basis of a stable, productive Western society.

I bet most IDF personnel would think that. You really need to disclose this sorta thing before you accuse other people of lacking moral fabric or international perspective.

I would have an honest discussion on-grounds with you about this, because it seems like we're in agreement that the detention is bad. But your (quoted) conclusion is hysterically disproportionate, and does not reflect any opinion you are qualified to tender. Furthermore, the parent is right; you know exactly what I am referring to, admit it is an issue, then pretend that we're the dumb ones when we demand accountability. It is a bad-faith tactic that you are deliberately employing to deflect valid criticism of Israel. So instead of stimulating discussion I will just tell you this, expedite some shit slinging and let you react however you like.

Most of us here are willing to put things in perspective. I'll show some vulnerability, I'm a US citizen. Abu Ghraib turns my stomach, the 1953 coup and the SAVAK files make me appalled. But I also know those aren't the scariest skeletons in the closet, so do you. Neither of us probably want to talk about the lingering consequences of apartheid, or the fact that the US has knowingly supported no fewer than three genocides in the past century (Bangladesh, Rwanda, now Gaza). They're horrible, world-defining revelations. Which is why we both have to look past the phenomena, which tells us they are justifiable, to interact directly with the geist, the actual truth.

As Americans and Israelis, we are partners whether we like it or not. We have the benefit of hindsight (both countries individually!), to admit that empire politics are worthless. 21st century colonialism is pointless. It is a waste of human life, and for what? To subvert a free market economy we're both ultimately at the whims of? If Israel wants to play the long game, my wholly empathetic opinion is that they need international credibility. There is still a road for the Israeli state to persist with international - perhaps even Arab - support. The first step on that road starts by unseating a president who only demands war and resists his corruption charges. Supporting this war is literally killing Israel as a functioning nation, which sickens me, as an American. I'm still advocating for an expedient and fair trial for those prisoners because someone has to care about Israel even if Netenyahu won't.
by lmm | 2025-10-03 19:47:48+00:00
> One reason this is particularly useful is that you can now treat the commit as if it had already landed on the main branch. (It is easier to share, cherry-pick, rebase, etc. — easier than doing so with a branch of many commits, in my experience.)

> Prospective changes do not change type (from branch to squashed commit or merge commit) either, when they are approved, which simplifies these workflows.

You can do that even earlier if you simply never squash or otherwise edit history, which is my approach - any pushed feature branch is public as far as I'm concerned, and my colleagues are encouraged to pull them if they're e.g. working on the same area at the same time. It comes at the cost of having to actually revert when you need to undo a pushed commit (and, since cherry-pick is not an option, if you're making e.g. a standalone fix and want your colleagues to be able to pull it in unrelated branches, you have to think ahead a little and make it on a new branch based from master rather than sticking it in the middle of your incomplete feature branch), but it's very much worth it IME.
by andsoitis | 2025-10-03 19:48:36+00:00
> Why do you need one? Or why is there always a presumption of an incentive that maps to capitalist modes?

it could be that I'm misinterpreting your angle, but I would just point out that "incentives" are not tied to a particular economic model. Incentives are simply things that motivate or encourage people to do something, acting as either a reward for desired behavior or a penalty for unwanted actions.
by jameshilliard | 2025-10-03 19:48:37+00:00
> Israel is a settler colonial project, as far as I'm concerned they cast the first stone.

One problem with this conflict is you can credibly call either side the indigenous population depending on how far back in history you go.

> Or rather, the British sending them here did.

At a minimum you should go back to the 1800s during the Ottoman period which is when Jews started buying land from the Arab landowners.

> Not that it matters much in the end, but today Israel plays the role of the oppressor and Palestine of the oppressed.

This sort of entirely one-sided narrative is a huge impediment to peaceful coexistence.
by zackmorris | 2025-10-03 19:49:03+00:00
+1 this.

IMHO async is an anti-pattern, and probably the final straw that will prevent me from ever finishing learning Rust. Once one learns pass-by-value and copy-on-write semantics (Clojure, PHP arrays), the world starts looking like a spreadsheet instead of spaghetti code. I feel that a Rust-like language could be built with no borrow checker, simply by allocating twice the memory. Since that gets ever-less expensive, I'm just not willing to die on the hill of efficiency anymore. I predict that someday Rust will be relegated to porting scripting languages to a bare-metal runtime, but will not be recommended for new work.

That said, I think that Rust would make a great teaching tool in an academic setting, as the epitome of imperative languages. Maybe something great will come of it, like Swift from Objective-C or Kotlin from Java. And having grown up on C++, I have a soft spot in my heart for solving the hard problems in the fastest way possible. Maybe a voxel game in Rust, I dunno.
by throwaway-18 | 2025-10-03 19:49:36+00:00
My employer has been around 40 nearly 50 years. We still run COBOL for 90% of our business operations. Day-to-day employees work in bluescreens built in RM/COBOL and RM/PANELS.

As recently as the 2010s, we used to emit HTML out of COBOL, but fell short of it directly responding to HTTP requests. Instead, we licensed an RPC layer that sits behind Apache and translates HTTP calls through CGI to a listener on the COBOL side that then invokes COBOL programs. Those programs send back HTML strings through the CGIRPC interface and, well, out comes a webpage in your browser.

We're still using it to serve XML and have turned it into a makeshift web service that helps power a traditional web application.

But, honestly, this is way cooler.
by ajross | 2025-10-03 19:49:44+00:00
> People use Waze to avoid speed traps. Not protest them.

Exactly! So it is about protest then? You don't want people to show up and display their displeasure at the execution of a particular policy? Y'know, peaceably assembling and petitioning for redress of grievances and all? You don't maybe see a first amendment argument here?

Upthread commenter dropped "malicious" to imply something presumably worse, like threats to law enforcement officers that haven't been made. But if it's just about protest then we have a prior restraint on speech. And that's worse.
by awesome_dude | 2025-10-03 19:49:59+00:00
Yeah - I often hear politically motivated speakers talk about "bloat" in various parts of organisations, but I've never (literally) seen anything beyond "numbers"

That's not really helpful, because, as I said to the other poster and have subsequently been down voted for it - that's not genuine analysis, we don't know anything about who is being described as "administration" nor do we know why they're there in the first place.
by Alir3z4 | 2025-10-03 19:50:15+00:00
Me neither.

Introducing new keyword has become a recent thing in Python.

Seems Python has a deep scare since Python2 to Python3 time and is scared to do anything that causes such drama again.

For me, the worst of all is "async". If 2to3 didn't cause much division, the async definitely divided Python libraries in 2. Sync and Async.

Maybe if they want backward compatible solution, this can be done by some compile or runtime flag like they did with free threading no-gil.
by staplung | 2025-10-03 19:50:17+00:00
"Difficult to tell from this vantage point if they will consume the captive Earth-men or merely enslave them...one thing is for certain: there is no stopping them; the ants will soon be here! And I for one welcome our new insect overlords. Like to remind them that as a trusted TV personality I could be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground sugar-caves."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4jWAwUb63c
by chermi | 2025-10-03 19:51:40+00:00
Intro bugs me. Second law is "violated" all the time at small enough scales. Aka, fluctuation theorems. Of course the violation just means you're not really in the thermodynamic regime. Thermodynamics is kind of circularly defined, and that's fine. Thermodynamics is valid when it works. Temperature is emergent, it's only well defined, quantum or classically, for sufficient large system or sufficient strong coupling to bath. Rest of the articles seems fine, but I just hate these kind of set ups trying to make things more mysterious than they are.
by claytongulick | 2025-10-03 19:51:44+00:00
> I'm sure there are plenty of men downright eager to sign a contract relinquishing any paternity claim/liability as a condition of dating.

Are there?

I don't know. I don't think most men are as mercenary as that.

As someone who was literally offered this situation (a lesbian couple I was friends with that wanted a child) I can say that it simply wasn't something I could seriously consider.

How could I exist knowing that I had a child that I had little or no relationship with? A child who would constantly wonder about their father and why I wasn't part of their life?

I don't think it's just me, I think most guys would have a problem with that.

And maybe the ones that don't wouldn't be the best choice for being a father?
by jocaal | 2025-10-03 19:52:17+00:00
> let them hire the best of the best

The sooner people realize that there is no such thing, the better. People are extremely incompetent in judging competence. With that said, the solution isn't to then just hire the person willing to do the work for the least amount of money. You americans should realize you live in a society together and have obligations to give each other chances. Plenty of bright people around. This new top down command and control culture that has taken root in the American corporate world will be the downfall of the nation. Everyone is just trying to screw over the next guy for a quick buck.
by varispeed | 2025-10-03 19:52:21+00:00
If terrorism is defined as using violence or threats to intimidate a population for political or ideological ends, then “Chat Control” qualifies in substance.

Violence doesn’t have to leave blood. Psychological and coercive violence is recognised in domestic law (see coercive control offences) and by the WHO. It causes measurable harm to bodies and minds.

The aim is intimidation. The whole purpose is to make people too scared to speak freely. That is intimidation of a population, by design.

It is ideological. The ideology is mass control - keeping people compliant by stripping them of private spaces to think, talk, and dissent.

The only reason it’s not “terrorism” on paper is because states write definitions that exempt themselves. But in plain terms, the act is indistinguishable in effect from terrorism: deliberate fear, coercion, and the destruction of free will.

You can argue legality if you like, but the substance matches the textbook definition.

These people should be arrested.
by marstall | 2025-10-03 19:52:37+00:00
bubble bursting data point: I am about to throw away my side project's vibe coded front end (~5000loc) and rewrite it by hand. At the scale it's gotten to, its become too difficult to change. i try to tweak it and it doesn't quite get it right, and then breaks some other thing, ad infinitum. maybe this is the "AI developer" skill - to somehow do it so you dont get to this point - but I ENJOY programming, so i'm going back to doing it by hand. It will have less (probably unnecessary) features but i will be able to craft it to my needs and achieve the daily flow my mental health requires ...
by CooCooCaCha | 2025-10-03 19:52:55+00:00
I’ve never been good at banter so this speaks to me.

But it’s interesting to think that when people like you, they tend to want more from you and that leads to social obligations. And you can either go along with these social obligations or decline and come off as rude.

So in a sense, social connections give people some amount of control over your life and that can feel restricting and draining sometimes.

Even something as simple as a text message can be thought of as a task that someone gave you without your consent. And if you don’t respond within a certain time window then you’re rude and risk damaging the relationship. Or if you respond poorly that can damage it as well.

Sometimes I wonder if this is social anxiety or just being extra aware of the realities of life.
by kulahan | 2025-10-03 19:53:20+00:00
Everything in tech is a depreciating asset. If you're talking about GPUs used for mining crypto, yeah - most people run them well below max load, keep temps stable, and pay close attention to their crypto farm. Buying a used crypto farm GPU is great.

If you're talking about purpose-built ASICs, probably still yes? It's not like it's performing some incredibly unique action when farming for crypto.

The secondhand electronics market is fairly strong.
by strogonoff | 2025-10-03 19:53:48+00:00
> unless your objective is actually to build a derivative of that software

The objective of a for-profit corporation may well be to build a derivative of free software, benefitting from the work volunteer engineers put into it. Previously, if that software is GPL, it would imply a clean-room reimplementation of a massive codebase. With LLM laundering, relevant companies could as well simply claim “we got this from copilot” and they would be right (note that they don’t need to have used an LLM—the mere legality of these license-laundering LLMs means you can simply copy this from a GPL codebase and claim that an LLM output it due to its non-deterministic nature). This goes contrary to the promise of copyleft licenses that volunteer contributor work will remain to benefit the public and could not be expropriated this way, which led to OSS explosion in the first place.
by jijijijij | 2025-10-03 19:54:19+00:00
Pretty cynical and tone-deaf comment in this context, in my opinion.

Molecular evidence was notably described in nematodes, so epigenetic inheritance is a very old mechanism. I don't think you could describe molecular transgenerational trauma as beautiful, or useful adaptation regarding human life. Especially considering the artificial nature of every famine in today's world, where we are producing enough food to feed all humans on earth three times over.
by simonw | 2025-10-03 19:54:23+00:00
Love this. My https://llm.datasette.io/ CLI tool supports plugins, and people were complaining about really slow start times even for commands like "llm --help" - it turned out there were popular plugins that did things like import pytorch at the base level, so the entire startup was blocked on heavy imports.

I ended up adding a note to the plugin author docs suggesting lazy loading inside of functions - https://llm.datasette.io/en/stable/plugins/advanced-model-pl... - but having a core Python language feature for this would be really nice.
by hibikir | 2025-10-03 19:54:48+00:00
If you look at year over year chip improvements in 2025 vs 1998, it's clear that modern hardware just has a longer shelf life than it used to. The difficulties in getting more performance for the same power expenditure are just very different than back in the day.

There's still depreciation, but it's not the same. Also look at other forms of hardware, like RAM, and the bonus electrical capacity being built.
by andsoitis | 2025-10-03 19:55:10+00:00
Thanks.

I don't know about this line of thinking. If you truly believe this, then you could point to just about anyone on earth and state they're complicit in some atrocity or oppression.

I would concede there are degrees of proximity, but this particular example, that if you are in any way contributing to Apple's success (not matter the size) that you are complicit, and by implication be held responsible, for fasicm is truly whacky in my books.
by motoxpro | 2025-10-03 19:55:26+00:00
If everyone has access to your data it becomes even more worthless and you will definitely not get aid for it. At least now I can keep it somewhere and they can use it to fund engineers to keep the service up, lawyers to make sure your data stays safe, etc.

You are free to leave and delete your data, unlike if everyone has access to it then it is out there in perpetuity.

You definitely can't sue a data broker to pay you/stop using your data.
by kqr | 2025-10-03 19:55:39+00:00
Sure, and there are people who stuff themselves full of fast food, alcohol, and/or cigarettes. I get that those things are different in that it is possible to levy vice taxes on them, but the primary defense is and will be education.

What we can do as technologists is establish clear norms around information junk food for our children and close acquaintances, and influence others to do the same.

It's not going to happen overnight -- as with many such things, I expect it'll take decades of mistakes followed by decades of repairing them. What we've learned from other such mistakes is that saying "feel bad about the dumb thing" ("be worried") is less effective than "here's a smart thing you can do instead".
by somewhereoutth | 2025-10-03 19:55:56+00:00
My understanding is that the cost of training each next model is very very large, and a half trained model is worthless.

Thus when it is realised that this investment cannot produce the necessary returns, there will simply be no next model. People will continue using the old models, but they will become more and more out of date, and less and less useful, until they are not much more than historical artifacts.

My point is that the threshold for continuing this process (new models) is very big (getting bigger each time?), so the 'pop' will be a step function to zero.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-10-03 19:56:06+00:00
Personally I think people should stop trying to reason from the past.

As tempting as it is, it leads to false outcomes because you are not thinking about how this particular situation is going to impact society and the economy.

Its much harder to reason this way, but isnt that the point? personally I dont want to hear or read analogies based on the past - I want to see and read stuff that comes from original thinking.
by tln | 2025-10-03 19:57:02+00:00
The esoteric part is the combination of "Setting preferred fonts for generic font families" AND the security adjustments necessary to trigger "Request for font XYZ blocked at visibility level 2"

Sure if you want to set browser prefs for fonts, go for it. It'll make the OG sites with almost no stylesheet a little more readable (looking at you, wiki.c2.com). But you should not expect or ask web page authors to not use their preferred fonts. If you want to override web page fonts, use a more invasive or pervasive tool.

Font/page size preferences, on the other hand, web page authors should respect and do a better job with.
by rhetocj23 | 2025-10-03 19:57:16+00:00
Thats not true actually.

The technology - for what it is being used vs what is invested - does not match up at all. This is what happened to the dot-com bubble. Theres was a whole bunch of innovation that was needed to come to bring a delightful UX to bring swathes of people onto the internet.

So far this is true about LLMs. Could this change? Sure. Will it change meaningful? Personally I dont believe so.

The internet at its core was all about hooking up computers so they they could transform from just computational beasts to communication. There was a tremendous amount of potentitial that was very very real. It just so happens if computers can communicate we can do a whole bunch of stuff - as is going on today.

What are LLMS? Can someone please explain in a succint way...? Im yet to see something super crystal clear.