MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rlpb | 2025-10-19 14:04:31+00:00
It was always possible to create these kinds of images. Only you needed to be (or find) a highly skilled yet unscrupulous artist to do it, which didn't happen in practice. Now AI has commoditised this. It's not going to go away.

Regulating services can only go so far because as long as general purpose computing exists people will eventually be able to perform all of these abuses locally.

I think the only solution that will work in practice is to go after the abusers based on their intent. Going after technology providers is never going to work because the technology is fundamentally general purpose. Wherever the line is drawn, it will always be possible for abusers to take it and specialise it for abuse locally.

Edit: to be clear, I can't think of a legitimate use for this service and it sounds like their behaviour is abusive and they should be shut down. But that won't stop the abuse because sooner or later abusers won't need a service to carry out this abuse. They'll be able to use a generic tool to do it locally instead.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-19 14:04:38+00:00
It's true that the big public-facing chatbots love to admit to mistakes.

It's not obvious to me that they're better at admitting their mistakes. Part of being good at admitting mistakes is recognizing when you haven't made one. That humans tend to lean too far in that direction shouldn't suggest that the right amount of that behavior is... less than zero.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-10-19 14:05:38+00:00
While Yann is clearly brilliant, and has a deeper understanding of the roots of the filed than many of us mortals, I think he's been on a debbie downer trend lately, and more importantly, some of his public stances have been proven wrong in mere months / years after he made them.

I remember a public talk, where he was on the stage with some young researcher from MS. (I think it was one of the authors of the "sparks of brilliance in gpt4" paper, but not sure).

Anyway, throughout that talk he kept talking above the guy, and didn't seem to listen, even though he obviously didn't try the "raw", "unaligned" model that the folks at MS were talking about.

And he made 2 big claims:

1) LLMs can't do math. He went on to "argue" that LLMs trick you with poetry that sounds good, but is highly subjective, and when tested on hard verifiable problems like math, they fail.

2) LLMs can't plan.

Well, merely one year later, here we are. AIME is saturated (with tool use), gold at IMO, and current agentic uses clearly can plan (and follow up with the plan, re-write parts, finish tasks, etc etc).

So, yeah, I'd take everything any one singular person says with a huge grain of salt. No matter how brilliant said individual is.

Edit: oh, and I forgot another important argument that Yann made at that time:

3) because of the nature of LLMs, errors compound. So the longer you go in a session, the more errors accumulate so they devolve in nonsense.

Again, mere months later the o series of models came out, and basically proved this point moot. Turns out RL + long context mitigate this fairly well. And a year later, we have all SotA models being able to "solve" problems 100k+ tokens deep.
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-19 14:06:07+00:00
That I cannot help with. There are numerous smaller companies producing micro controllers for various different kinds of hardware. The low level magic that you are building your career around is very different population than where I live as a form JavaScript guy.

In my world it has become almost impossible to get an interview by applying to a company directly. There are just too many people and most of them are not even remote qualified and those that are still probably aren't very good. So, everybody is reliant upon recruiters to serve as match makers.

I suspect your world is exceedingly different because its a high barrier of entry and the people who do that kind of work tend to be better educated.

Maybe try completing a profile on major job boards like dics.com and indeed. That way companies can be searching for you while you are searching for companies to apply to.
by StackRanker3000 | 2025-10-19 14:06:23+00:00
Yes, it’s similar in the UK.

If you make over £100k, you lose your personal tax-free allowance. That means that your effective tax rate from £100k-£125,140 is 60%

That doesn’t in itself make you worse off than people making less than you, but when one parent makes over £100k, that’s the cut-off for receiving 30 hours of free childcare, as well as additional tax-free childcare up to £2000

So if you have small children with childcare needs, you can suddenly be worse off as soon as you or your partner hit £100k

One way to avoid both of these is to pay the additional money into your pension instead
by Topfi | 2025-10-19 14:07:43+00:00
If holding the CTO of OpenAI accountable for his wildly inaccurate statement constitutes "dunking on OpenAI", then I'd say dunk away.

He, more than anyone else, should be able to for one parse the original statements correctly and for another maybe realize that if one of their models had accomplished what he seemed to think GPT-5 had, that may require some more scrutiny and research before posting it. That would have, after all, been a clear and incredibly massive development for the space, something the CTO of OpenAI should recognize instantly.

The amount of people that told me this is clear and indisputable proof that AGI/ASI/whatever is either around the corner or already here is far more than zero and arguing against their misunderstanding was made all the more challenging because "the CTO of OpenAI knows more than you" is quite a solid appeal to authority.

I'd recommend maybe a waiting period of 48h before any authority in any field can send a tweet, that might resolve some of the inaccuracies and the incredibly annoying need to just jump on wild bandwagons...
by skeeter2020 | 2025-10-19 14:07:43+00:00
Pretty tough to have a non-compete when you're casual and/or a contractor. Some jurisidctions make this illegal in even more of an employer/employee relationship, most aren't going to enforce it in an Uber-style job, and it would never be cost-effective for Uber et al. to go after a contractor. They would just kick the "offender" off the platform - which might still be very bad for them.
by noir_lord | 2025-10-19 14:07:48+00:00
> Why are countries just allowing them to clown on established worker protections?

Money - directly towards politicians.

Money - buys them the best lawyers for when they sit down with the government lawyers.

Money - allows them to move faster than the legal system can catch up.

Money - they focus all of their resources on doing the things we'd prefer they didn't, governments have other things to do deal with.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-19 14:07:59+00:00
This land isn't "abandoned". Nobody is sitting on vacant RE in Texas and getting fucked by sky high TX property taxes for the fun of it.

It's fundamentally a long bet that basically the same people (demographically if not often individually) who are complaining about this will turn around and pass legislation that makes development even more onerous and therefore makes their existing cheap 30-60yo building with a simple uninterrupted parking lot and un-engineered drainage ditches (the typical form vacant commercial RE seems to take) even more valuable.
by reaperducer | 2025-10-19 14:08:02+00:00
"OpenAI Researcher Hallucinates GPT-5 Math Breakthrough" could be a headline from The Onion.

Off topic, but I saw The Onion on sale in the magazine rack of Barnes and Noble last month.

For those who miss when it was a free rag in sidewalk newsstands, and don't want to pony up for a full subscription, this is an option.
by dangus | 2025-10-19 14:08:51+00:00
I think that the statistical risk of having the cops unlawfully break in to your house is extremely low, and that incidents of it happening on video/social media/the news greatly over-reports that risk.

I’d certainly like to have surveillance if that were to happen to me but I think the likelihood is extremely low, to the point where I’m pretty sure tossing money at the problem will be a waste.
by austin-cheney | 2025-10-19 14:09:03+00:00
Yeah, I just like simple light weight code editors that open quickly. Notepad++ is super old, but its still incredibly popular and maintains a faithful following. VS Code is super popular because it tries to not be an IDE like the actual Microsoft Visual Studio IDE. Its also why I never liked Eclipse, because it just feels really slow.

At any rate, I was thinking about what I wrote earlier. Why is it that there is a direct correlation between code vanity and self-orientation?

I think the answer is anxiety. Some people cannot start from a clean slate. There is too much uncertainty in making original decisions. They just need a little bit of guidance and some people need so much guidance it feels like copy/paste. The more fearful or cowardly a person becomes the more fear avoidance becomes the paramount concern. At the extreme end, like layers of frameworks super-imposed upon each other in JavaScript land, the more autistic it feels to me. At the extreme end nothing matters more than immediate comfort from already known patterns, and everything else becomes a holy war.
by Timsky | 2025-10-19 14:09:04+00:00
> GPT-5 is proving useful as a literature review assistant

No, it does not. It only produces a highly convincing counterfeit. I am honestly happy for people who are satisfied with its output: life is way easier for them than for me. Obviously, the machine discriminates me personally. When I spend hours in the library looking for some engineering-related math made in the 70s-80s, as a last resort measure, I can try to play this gambling with chat, hoping for any tiny clue to answer my question. And then for the following hours, I am trying to understand what is wrong with the chat output. Most often, I experience the "it simply can't be" feeling, and I know I am not the only one having it.
by frou_dh | 2025-10-19 14:09:19+00:00
Certain domains are a lot more wide open than others though. If you want to develop a command-line program that does something with files and possibly the network, then many many languages are suitable. If you want to develop a proper desktop GUI application (using mature design/layout tooling, naturally) then the field of suitable languages is cut down massively, and trying to shoehorn one in is indeed inadvisable.
by owkman | 2025-10-19 14:09:41+00:00
Karpathy is biased when it comes to self driving. Example: You can't both have humans teleoperating like he claimed, AND have cones disabling Waymos. Waymo's mistakes such as one where they were going around a parking lot honking at each other tells you they don't have humans in the loop except in the most extreme cases. He's likely correct that it's not self driving 100% of the time, but what if it's 99.999% and in the 0.001% the humans have to tell the Waymo how to get out of a very tricky situation?
by jdiff | 2025-10-19 14:10:08+00:00
We're not even solving problems that humanity can solve. There's been several times where I've posed to models a geometry problem that was novel but possible for me to solve on my own, but LLMs have fallen flat on executing them every time. I'm no mathematician, these are not complex problems, but they're well beyond any AI, even when guided. Instead, they're left to me, my trusty whiteboard, and a non-negligible amount of manual brute force shuffling of terms until it comes out right.

They're good at the Turing test. But that only marks them as indistinguishable from humans in casual conversation. They are fantastic at that. And a few other things, to be clear. Quick comprehension of an entire codebase for fast queries is horribly useful. But they are a long way from human-level general intelligence.
by QuiEgo | 2025-10-19 14:10:20+00:00
You could get hit by a meteorite walking down the street, taking a train, or driving a car too.

There's some degree of things we just can't do anything about. We just have to accept it and move on. There's something about the human condition that makes it easy to say, and hard to do, and harder for some people than others - wishing you luck on your journey.

Focus on what you can control (exercise is a miracle drug that will lower your risk of so many problems! Don't smoke! Use sunscreen!) and enjoy life as best you can.
by pols45 | 2025-10-19 14:10:44+00:00
Competence is not magic.

There are unpredictable and complex problems that competence can't solve - see The Theory of Bounded Rationality.

So what happens when the "competent" can't solve what falls in their lap given constraints like resources/time/team etc?

They will either say we can't do it (someone else like Trump will put up his hand immediately and say but I can, I can do anything, Hilary is just a clown choose me). Or they will say we need to buy more time/resources/team etc.

The point here is - if they can't fend of the Opportunists and if they can't buy more time/resources etc by themselves but end up being reliant on some one that can easily be framed as incompetence and will be framed as such by Opportunists.

So you want to change the game, be honest about what "competent" people do when faced with unpredictability and complexity ie understand their limits. They generally exit the space. And others fill the space.
by nativeit | 2025-10-19 14:11:13+00:00
To quote several other people who have made thoughtful pieces around this in the past: the futurism espoused by people like Elon Musk seeks to engage with the aesthetics of Star Trek, whilst ignoring entirely the post-scarcity socialism that Roddenberry’s worlds very clearly represented.

That’s not quite as apt today, as it seems he’s just as happy to engage with the aesthetics of Blade Runner while also cheerfully engaging with the fascist dystopia of Blade Runner…
by SJC_Hacker | 2025-10-19 14:11:21+00:00
> Combine this with the fact that AI is like what - 30% of the US economy? Magnificent 7 are 60%?

Nowhere close. US GDP is like $30 trillion. Open AI revenue is ~$4 billion. All the other AI companies revenue might amount to $10 billion at most, and that is being generous. $10 billion/ $30 trillaion is not even 1%.

You are forgetting all those "boring" sectors that form the basis of economies like agriculture and energy. They have always been bigger than the tech sector at any point, but they aren't "sexy" because there isn't the potential "exponential growth" that tech companies
by Theodores | 2025-10-19 14:11:53+00:00
I inherited a rare vintage LEGO advent calendar set, unopened and still in its plastic sleeve. I tried to 'cash in' on this find but there was a surprising lack of interest and we ended up keeping it in the family. Maybe I was just trying to sell at the wrong time of the year.

Regardless, this made me wonder about how strong the secondary marketplace for LEGO actually is. How much of it is people buying LEGO for their kids and how much is it adults buying for their inner nine year old selves?

Nonetheless, LEGO definitely is attractive to thieves when there are these secondary marketplaces. With stolen goods the goal is to get rid as quickly as possible to get cash as quickly as possible. With the price of LEGO being what it is, with $1000 sets, the thief only has to undercut legitimate retailers. For the likes of myself with a rare and collectable set to find a buyer for, I want the premium and I am not going to sell cheap, hence I might have been understandably disappointed by the secondary market for LEGO.
by potato3732842 | 2025-10-19 14:12:29+00:00
Given the state of regulation I wouldn't put it beyond anyone with a brain to build now and just accept that the building is a cheap investment to get their floor plan and unit count grandfathered in and while they might have to deal with low vacancy and high ongoing/refit costs it'll pencil out in 5-15yr when every new development is saddled with costs they didn't pay and they'll be able to under-cut the market.

(This is the whole reason "old mill into apartments" conversions exist, obviously not in NYC though. You literally couldn't build those footprint buildings on those lots today without non-starter size investments in compliance stuff).
by steveBK123 | 2025-10-19 14:12:40+00:00
Worth noting that dubious concrete is not the only way in which this developer pushed the envelope. The height itself was only possible by using a loophole that was quickly closed.

To summarize - a quarter of the floors of the building are uninhabited mechanical floors, which exist purely to push up the total height of the building. This allowed pushing inhabited floors higher more desirable views and pricing.

The loophole was more or less that only inhabited floors counted against the building square footage / height zoning. No one contemplated that a developer would be willing to waste 25% of floors to juice the height, but given the 0.1% market he was selling into.. it worked.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/20/nyregion/tallest-building...
by jcranmer | 2025-10-19 14:12:48+00:00
There's a few variables which can make it much worse.

The first is how much of the capital expenditures are being fueled by debt that won't be repaid, and how much that unpaid debt harms lending institutions. This is fundamentally how a few bad debts in 2008 broke the entire financial system: bad loans felled Lehman Brothers, which caused one money market fund to break the buck, which spurred a massive exodus from the money markets rather literally overnight.

The second issue is the psychological impact of 40% of market value just evaporating. A lot of people have indirect exposure to the stock market and these stocks in particular (via 401(k)s or pensions), and seeing that much of their wealth evaporate will definitely have some repercussions on consumer confidence.
by doctorpangloss | 2025-10-19 14:13:11+00:00
Where do you plan to get your time machine, to find a 1971 cohort of ACT test takers that looks like the 2025 one?

Why assume that the OECD is measuring something well? What do you know about them and the PISA test?

RFKJR, an idiot, has charts from the CDC, a reliable source, that show autism prevalence is going up and to the right.

There are two explanations for the chart: one is toxic environment increases and causes autism (RFKJR), and one is more screenings, broader criteria and diagnostic substitution (CDC). Who do you think is right? What do we call CDC's explanation?

Does the chart have "complexity" (you criticize this elsewhere)? Can a chart be both "real" (as in not "fake") but also flawed? Do we pick and choose which charts we use which words for, depending on our politics? (Yes).

Why do you think politically-influenced thinking doesn't apply to you? Do you think "blaming smartphones" is apolitical?

How does your analysis about smartphones differ structurally from an RFKJR presentation? Remember, he's an idiot. You bring out some charts, there's a lot of coincidence time series, and the sources on the face of it are reliable. Does that make "it" true?

RFKJR (an idiot) also talks about "rigor," like you do. He goes and mooks his theories on Fox News instead of Hacker News. Okay, does he ever take down the stuff he was wrong about? (No). Do you see? So even if you are "wrong", you go and talk about rigor, are you going to take down your website? Or bring it down until you fix its flaws? (No.)

Finally. We only talk about charts and benchmarks that align with vibes. Apolitical example: all the AI benchmarks show Anthropic, Google and OpenAI as the "top 3", because if you made a benchmark, as rigorous as it is, that showed something else, people would not believe it. It doesn't matter if what it measures is real. For something political, this problem is acute.

Does this vibes phenomenon exist for "charts" about "crime"? (Yes). Does this phenomenon describe test scores?
Is YouTube throtting some content?
by OOvsuOO | 2025-10-19 14:13:19+00:00
I am looking for some youtube tools to search for lesser posted content. Strange that I clicked a lot of content and I get nothing in my feed. But If I click on other content instantly more of it shows up. No kings. Nothing. I wish youtube would give us more control over our feed content. There's endless possibilities and we have no control it's not right. We could have a lot more filter controls than what they're giving us. We could have number of subs filter to look for lesser posted and more organic stuff. I guess it's really difficult to make a video still.
by qrios | 2025-10-19 14:14:22+00:00
> Finally, companies may have reached the ceiling of what can be achieved with prompting alone. Some want models that know their vocabulary, their tone, their taxonomy, and their compliance rules.

Together with speed and const, this is from my point of view this is the only "case" for the return of fine-tuning here. And this can be managed by context management.

With growing context sizes, first RAG replaced fine-tuning and later even RAG was replaced by just a good-enough prompt preparation for more and more usage pattern.

Sure, speed and costs are important drivers. But like with FPGAs vs. CPUs or GPUs, the development costs and delivery time for high-performance solutions, eliminate the benefit most the time.
by pessimizer | 2025-10-19 14:16:11+00:00
This doesn't make any sense. Allowing people to build infinite height towers with no parking instantly makes land worth far more, and the people that pay for this "movement" are all large-scale landowners. Holding land and keeping it trash is an investment; they're sure that pouring money into YIMBY groups will eventually make them a fortune, and the fact that they're leaving the land trashed will just help YIMBY arguments.

The people who fight it are the people who actually live there. You know, the "demographics."
Show HN: Pyversity – Fast Result Diversification for Retrieval and RAG
by Tananon | 2025-10-19 14:16:12+00:00
Hey HN! I’ve recently open-sourced Pyversity, a lightweight library for diversifying retrieval results. Most retrieval systems optimize only for relevance, which can lead to top-k results that look almost identical. Pyversity efficiently re-ranks results to balance relevance and diversity, surfacing items that remain relevant but are less redundant. This helps with improving retrieval, recommendation, and RAG pipelines without adding latency or complexity.

Main features:

- Unified API: one function (diversify) supporting several well-known strategies: MMR, MSD, DPP, and COVER (with more to come)

- Lightweight: the only dependency is NumPy, keeping the package small and easy to install

- Fast: efficient implementations for all supported strategies; diversify results in milliseconds

Re-ranking with cross-encoders is very popular right now, but also very expensive. From my experience, you can usually improve retrieval results with simpler and faster methods, such as the ones implemented in this package. This helps retrieval, recommendation, and RAG systems present richer, more informative results by ensuring each new item adds new information.

Code and docs: github.com/pringled/pyversity

Let me know if you have any feedback, or suggestions for other diversification strategies to support!
by gdiamos | 2025-10-19 14:16:19+00:00
Just coming out of founding one of the first LLM fine tuning startups - Lamini - I disagree

Our thesis was that fine tuning would be easier than deep learning for users to adopt because it was starting from a very capable base LLM rather than starting from scratch

However, our main finding with over 20 deployments was that LLM fine tuning is no easier to use than deep learning

The current market situation is that ML engineers who are good enough at deep learning to master fine tuning can found their own AI startup or join Anthropic/OpenAI. They are underpaid building LLM solutions. Expert teams building Claude, GPT, and Qwen will out compete most users who try fine tuning on their own.

RAG, prompt engineering, inference time compute, agents, memory, and SLMs are much easier to use and go very far for most new solutions