MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by Brendinooo | 2025-10-21 16:29:54+00:00
> These kinds of memorization feats are just status seeking showoffs

If it feels this way it's only because 1) it's an optional skill in our society as it's currently constructed and 2) for pi specifically, once you get past 15 significant figures you're kinda wasting your effort anyways[0].

I mean, sure. Anyone can flaunt their excesses. But if the functioning of society depended on people memorizing pi, more people would do it and would be less likely to do it in a showoffy way.

> Why should imagine the brains of people a 1000 years ago were somehow different

Because, in the lifetimes of a bunch of people who hang around here, we've experienced in real time how reliance on search engines can alter our memory processes. It's not a reach at all to extrapolate that to the question of memorization vs. relying on books.

[0]: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/news/how-many-decimals-of-pi-do...
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-10-21 16:30:02+00:00
Human audio perception is based on detecting the frequency components, which we detect via what amounts to a filter bank in the inner ear (different length hairs with different resonant frequencies).

Speech perception builds upon frequencies and is based on "formants" - the frequency bands that are attentuated via the vocal tract resonances created by articulation when the speech was generated. More specifically, most speech information is contained in formant changes since these correspond to articulatory changes. There are also other articulatory artifacts in speech such as the onsets of speech energy corresponding to plosives ("puh", "buh"), and the high frequencies generated by fricatives like "sss".

One problem with embedding MP3 frames as audio tokens would be that although MP3 compression is based on frequency representation, you've then got quantization, huffman encoding and the MP3 frame structure all on top of that, so the frame as a whole is going to be more of a black box. Presumably a transformer could still use MP3 frames to predict the text transcription, or any arbitrary encoding of speech audio for that matter (similar to how an LLM can predict text from Base64 representation, or vice versa), but it's certainly not making it easier if the input is obfuscating the frequency components and formants etc that correspond to the generating process.

Not having direct access to the frequency/formant information is also going to make generalization more difficult since that is based around formant structure and changes. When articulating the same word, the specific formant frequencies will differ between individuals, primarily based on vocal tract length, but humans have no problem generalizing across these and understanding speech from different individuals. I'm not sure if an LLM only trained to predict MP3 speech from, say, male adults, would necessarily have generalized enough to also be able to recognize child speech or that from a speech synthesizer.
by aaronSong | 2025-10-21 16:30:29+00:00
Thanks for reaching out about the hosting platform! really interested in the European market, will definitely drop you an email once we get things more organized on our end. You make a great point about the messaging. claude code is definitely comfortable for many devs right now. but we're seeing people constantly switch between codex, claude, and now newer agents like droid and glm. we're positioning ourselves as a mixture of agents platform where you can leverage the best tool for each task. also yeah, CLI agents are amazing for coding but not great for instant previews or deployments. that's exactly the gap we're filling. the positioning will probably evolve as we learn more from users, but that's the core idea: bring your favorite CLI agents, get the missing pieces (preview + deploy) without paying for another full coding platform. appreciate the feedback on making this clearer upfront!
by intalentive | 2025-10-21 16:30:34+00:00
Basically. Some people are even saying, hey, if you encode text as an image then you don’t need tokenizers any more, and you get more expressivity from the graphic styling.

Another takeaway is that you don’t need to pass a tensor of shape (batch_size, sequence_length, d_model) through your transformer. Not every token needs its own dedicated latent embedding. You can presumably get away with dividing sequence_length by a constant.

This isn’t super ground breaking but it does reinforce the validity of a middle ground between recurrent models, where context is compressed into a single “memory token”, and transformers, where context is uncompressed. 1 < n/k < n
by consumer451 | 2025-10-21 16:31:01+00:00
I know it's making me work more, and I am thrilled. I have not shipped production code for 20 years, and it was desktop back then.

I am now able to single-handedly create webapp MVPs, one of which is getting traction. If anything actually takes-off, there will certainly be need for a real dev to take over. Also, my commits are not "vibe coded." I have read every single loc, and found so many issues that I am stunned that "vibe coding" is actually a thing. I do let the models run wild on prototypes though.

I think that I happen to be in some magical sweet spot as a person who knows the words, kept up with tech, but not the syntax of framework xyz.

I thought this sweet spot was very transient, and I am very happy that the tools appear to be reaching a plateau for now, so I still have at least another year of being useful.

Since agentic dev tools arrived, I am having the time of my life while gladly working 60hrs per week.

I realize that I am an outlier, but is anyone else in this same boat? If you have product ideas, is this not the best time ever to build? All of our ideas are being indirectly subsidized by billions of VC & FAANG dollars. That is pretty freaking cool.
by davydm | 2025-10-21 16:31:24+00:00
would love to see how this pans out:

- too weak and it's the same problem as wireless chargers for phones - they do the job, but no hurry included, so sucks if you need charge now - too strong and the charging "mat" becomes a hazard - that charge is going to be induced via magnetic fields - the stronger, the faster, but also the more likely to absolutely ruin your day if you step on it or have a paint can in the garage
by marshfarm | 2025-10-21 16:31:31+00:00
> They respond in much smarter ways than traditional multi-layer perceptrons or traditional RNNs like LSTM networks because their attention mechanisms helps them to make much better sense of the input they were provided by selectively paying more or less attention to different parts of the input (including their output generated so far). This is similar to what humans do.

This is not in any way similar to what humans do.
by ticulatedspline | 2025-10-21 16:31:50+00:00
Was wondering when we'd start to see this, seems like the natural evolution. Have highly automated systems that work 99% of the time and have remote-in capabilities to utilize a pool of humans to bridge the gap.

I suspect that will be a growth sector for jobs (though likely oversea jobs like we already did with support centers). Robo Taxi unsure what to do? human remotes in and drives it till automation picks up. Service bot stuck in a loop? human to the rescue.

Probably eventually see merging like we did with tech support. instead of dedicated support a single center where people basically "pick up a call" to any number of automated things and look in the book to see what to do.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-10-21 16:32:57+00:00
I think the problem is if/when AGI enables "someone else" to not need human employees for ~anything. The people that own physical capital (land, farms, mines, etc.) would have robots and GPT-N to extract value from it. The people who survive based on their labor are SOL. I think it is reasonable that many people won't be excited about that kind of automation.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-10-21 16:33:06+00:00
> Your alien might have some 3rd property that you do not, and thus may farm you.

It is irrelevant, because reason and free will are sufficient to guarantee rights. Whether someone respects them is a separate question.

Also, it is a vacuous posit. You can't approach these properties superficially. Intellect and free will are not some arbitrary, contentless properties in some bag of properties of equally arbitrary status. They determine essentially and intrinsically what it means to be human. They are constitutive of humanity. It means something to have an intellect and free will, and they have consequences for things like body plan. You're approach is basically that of a child playing a game thinking he can just mix and match properties arbitrarily in a bucket without any consideration given to cohesion or causal relations. This is perhaps the effect of teleological blindness, which renders the universe unintelligible and ultimately undermines the viability of the entire discussion.

> A future AI that can produce and consume the sum total of all recorded human knowledge within the amount of time that you have a single thought will likely have many emergent properties that you do not, and thus may farm you as well.

First, AI is not intelligent and doesn't possess agency, as I have already explained elsewhere. To attribute these to AI is pure science fiction and fantasy rooted in a failure to grasp what computation is and what it lacks in relation to intellect. Second, even if we assume what you've written, it's not clear what your point is. What you seem to be describing is an evil being. I mean, I can farm people today, right? But I have no right to do so. I would be committing an immoral act.

> Your whole argument rests on sentiment and convention, and would have been summarily rejected by the slave owner based on his own.

Ha! No, it is absolutely not. It is rooted in natural law theory. NLT is one of or the most defensible moral theory there is.
by fragmede | 2025-10-21 16:33:47+00:00
The two other things that come immediately to mind are clothes; if a shirt cost $4,000 per, our closets would look way different, and cars. No matter your personal opinion on cars vs public transportation, if even if the cheapest vehicle cost $500,000, society would look way different. The real thing it exposes though, is which side of the capital vs labor you work on. If the widget factory suddenly is able to make 10x the widgets in the same amount of time thanks to a new automated widget machine, if you're capital, you now have 10x the widgets to sell. Awesome! However, if you're labor, you still have a 40/hr a week job, regardless of how many widgets you make in a week. And the boss is counting how many widgets you make on the new machine they bought. At the edges of this in the tech industry we have website building. The market haven't yet totally adjusted to the lower costs of labor. What used to take 10 hours to build and you'd charge a client $3,000 for, now takes 2 hours but since the client was previously paying $3,000 for that service, you're not going to charge them less, you're going to take on additional clients. Or spend more time at the beach. In this scenario, the programmer is capital, not labor, and gets to reap the rewards of automation. Until the market catches up, anyway. Given that the industrial machine in the website builder's factory is a laptop and a cloud hosting bill, it's unclear if the Marxist division between capital and labor, burgousie and proletariat is still the right place to draw the lines, but the trade off is still there. If you're selling your time in exchange for money, automation means a faster conveyor belt that you need to adapt to, but you're still working 40/h a week. If you're selling widgets, automation means more widgets to sell.
by DonHopkins | 2025-10-21 16:34:10+00:00
When Mitch Bradley put OpenFirmware on the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), he implemented this easter egg:

>You may be amused to know that the firmware has an Easter Egg of the Conway's Life. If you press the rocker pad (left side of screen) to the right after powering on, you will get a randomly-select amusement, one of which is Life. It uses the traditional life-death rule with a wrap-around field, and initial conditions that result in a fairly long number of generations before steady-state. Specificially, the initial state is a glider gun and an R-pentomino. The pentomino evolution eventually wrecks the gun, but things get pretty wild for awhile as gliders wrap around and interact with the debris from the pentomino. It almost stabilizes several times, but then something will set off another burst of activity for awhile before it finally dies out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21049568

DonHopkins on Sept 23, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: OLPC’s $100 laptop was going to change the world (...

That's Mitch Bradley's Open Firmware Forth, which was also on Suns, post-NuBus PowerPC Macs, Pegasos, and IBM Power Systems!

I used to call it "L1-A Forth", because that's the Forth you got when you pressed "L1-A" on a Sun keyboard to get into the boot monitor. He also made a great version of that Forth system with a metacompiler that ran under Unix (Forthmacs), which I used a lot.

https://github.com/MitchBradley

https://github.com/MitchBradley/openfirmware

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Firmware

https://web.archive.org/web/20121119070656/https://elinux.or...

http://macos9lives.com/smforum/index.php?topic=1965.0

https://github.com/ForthHub/ForthFreak/blob/master/Forthmacs

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38689282

>Mitch Bradley came up with a nice way to refactor the Forth compiler/interpreter and control structures, so that you could use them immediately at top level! Traditional FORTHs only let you use IF, DO, WHILE, etc in : definitions, but they work fine at top level in Mitch's Forths (including CForth and Open Firmware).

More about Mitch and OpenFirmware:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29261810

https://web.archive.org/web/20090920123423/http://radian.org...

>And lest you think this is some kind of Apple-paid rant, I'll mention Mitch Bradley. Have you read the story of Mel, the "real" programmer? Mitch is that guy, in 2008. Firmware superhacker, author of the IEEE Open Firmware standard, wrote the firmware that Sun shipped on its machines for a good couple of decades, and in general one of the few people I've ever had the pleasure of working with whose technical competence so inordinately exceeds mine that I feel I wouldn't even know how to start catching up. Mitch's primary laptop runs Windows.
by c0balt | 2025-10-21 16:34:17+00:00
To be very fair here, a long time before gpt-5 porn was already being produced with stable diffusion (and other open models). Civitai in particular was an open playground for this with everything from NSFW loras, prompts to fined tuned models.

I had to work for a bit with SDXL models from there and the amount of porn on the site, before the recent cleanse, was astonishing.
by hellotheretoday | 2025-10-21 16:34:45+00:00
I don’t know if it was the pod8 or what but the idea that you pay several hundred dollars (or more) for hardware to only need a monthly subscription fee to make it actually function is absurd.

Also this is absolutely insane in the currently climate. I would be interested in data from analysis of my “output” but there is not a chance I would trust any company in the modern age to not sell the resultant data. If I develop signs of colon cancer or something is that going to silently impact my insurance rates because of data brokering?
by infogulch | 2025-10-21 16:35:44+00:00
Yes, the term block chain does has a specific technical meaning: a sequence of hashed values where each contains the hash of the previous, similar to the way a git commit includes the hash of its parent commit. But the term blockchain has also taken on a broader colloquial meaning of "log with certain cryptographic properties", which both block chain and merkle tree implementations can satisfy with various advantages and disadvantages. I think it's fair to allow usage of the broader definition.
by neilv | 2025-10-21 16:36:10+00:00
Today, that site gives an odd impression, and people will think like you did.

The nice thing about the Scheme community's aggressive inability to do practice advocacy is that there's very little noise like you get in employable languages.

For example, if you Google something about Scheme, there won't be a thousand redundant SEO 'tutorials' that were written in bad faith to attract eyeballs, rather than to fill a need and inform. (The closest Scheme comes to noise is when bloggers get a blog post out of trying Scheme, but most of the rest of it tends to be high quality relative to popular languages.)
by Flamingoat | 2025-10-21 16:36:18+00:00
> I agree with your assessment of KDE lacking "taste". Imo, it looks like a system designed by engineers, not designers.

TBF, I was linked their more up to date screenshots in a sibling thread and it does look more consistent but it still seems off.

> I currently use KDE, but am not happy with it for the reasons you described. I used to use GNOME, but wasn't happy with it for the reasons above.

I don't like any of the Linux DEs tbh. They all have issues.

I might give KDE a go. But I think Debian does a poor job at packaging it and I don't really want to change distros.

> I have high hopes for Cosmic [0]. It seems like that one might get the balance right.

I tried compiling Cosmic on source on Debian 12. I ran out of memory on the VM I was doing it on. I also found out that on Debian 12 their rustc was broken!
by judahmeek | 2025-10-21 16:37:00+00:00
When you make the term "general intelligence" so broad that it expands beyond the realm of human senses & concepts, statements about it become unfalsifiable because you, a human, can't conceive of a way to test said statement.

Unfalsifiable statements are worthless because they can't be tested.

So, at the very least, there's no point in humans trying to theorize about intelligence so general that it expands beyond human comprehension.

Basically, in the context of universal intelligence, I'm an atheist & you're agnostic.
by constantcrying | 2025-10-21 16:37:22+00:00
The German mainstream center left Media has been warning about the rise of the far right PVV, many Dutch people speak German and German magazines are being sold in the Netherlands. Should these Dutch people not read these magazines, should politicians warn voters against reading these German magazines? To me this does not seem sensible.

And another question: supposing a LLM 100% trained in the Netherlands was in use. Would that be an appropriate source of opinion?
by guerrilla | 2025-10-21 16:37:57+00:00
I still don't understand what you're trying to say.

What I was saying is if you ask an LLM to generate an image of a poor person, it makes sense they'd be brown or black because if you were to randomly pick actual poor people from Earth, the chances are very high it'd be a brown or black person. In this case, it's just accurate representation.
by Jugglewhoa | 2025-10-21 16:38:14+00:00
This is a lost cause. The person you're replying to does nothing but make comments about how evil Republicans are. Hence why your comment will be lost on them and mentioning things like Clinton making the first attempt at internet censorship, or Obama supressing whistleblowers, tracking journalists, or him legalizing propaganda by intelligence agencies will be completely ignored.

No idea why they'd be on hackernews when they just sound like a run of the mill reddit bot.
by icyfox | 2025-10-21 16:38:16+00:00
Yes - garbage in / garbage out still holds true for most things when it comes to LLM training.

The two bits about this paper that I think are worth calling out specifically:

- A reasonable amount of post-training can't save you when your pretraining comes from a bad pipeline; ie. even if the syntactics of the input pretrained data are legitimate it has learned some bad implicit behavior (thought skipping)

- Trying to classify "bad data" is itself a nontrivial problem. Here the heuristic approach of engagement actually proved more reliable than an LLM classification of the content
by oezi | 2025-10-21 16:39:15+00:00
> generated from text via a text-to-speech

Yes, frustratingly we don't have good speech-to-text (STT/ASR) to transcribe such differences.

I recently finetuned a TTS* to be able to emit laughter and hunting for transcriptions which include non-verbal sounds was the hardest part of it. Whisper and other popular transcription systems will ignore sigh, sniff, laugh, etc and can't detect mispronounciations etc.

* = https://github.com/coezbek/PlayDiffusion
by aborsy | 2025-10-21 16:39:20+00:00
It’s not straightforward.

The developers (at least important ones) could register with Debian project, just like they would with a company: submit identity and government documents, proof of physical address, bank account, credit card information, IdP account, .. It would operate like an organization.

The lead developers could meet and know each other through regular meetings. Kind of web of trust with in person verification. There are already online meetings in some projects.
by willchen | 2025-10-21 16:39:30+00:00
Really interesting project! I tried it last week and ran into same errors and today I tried it again and it worked.

I'm curious how the Clink desktop app connects to the web app. Is it sending some kind of oauth token so you can use call Claude Code, etc, on behalf of the user?

FWIW, I created an open-source project in this space https://github.com/dyad-sh/dyad/ and it's great to see people trying different approaches :)
by brendoelfrendo | 2025-10-21 16:39:40+00:00
> For instance, I had to rename a collection of files almost following a pattern. I know that there are apps that do this and normally I’d reach for the Perl-based rename script. But I do it so irregularly that I have to install it every time, figure out how I can do a dry run first, etc. Meanwhile, with the Raycast AI integration that also supports Finder, I did it in the 10-15 seconds that it took to type the prompt.

> On the other hand LLMs constantly mess up some algorithms and data structures, so I simply do not let LLMs touch certain code.

See, these two things seem at odds to me. I suppose it is, to a degree, knowledge that you can learn over time: that an LLM is suitable for renaming files but not for certain other tasks. But for me, I'd be really cautious about letting an AI rename a collection of files, to the point that the same restrictions apply as would apply to a script: I'd need to create the prompt, verify the output via a dry run or test run, modify as necessary, and ultimately let the AI loose and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, I probably have a script kicking around somewhere that will rename a batch of files, and I can modify it pretty quickly to match a new pattern, test it out, and be confident that it will do exactly what I expect it to do.

Is one of these paths faster than the other? I'm not sure; it's probably a wash. The AI would definitely be faster if I was confident I could trust it. But I'm not sure how I can cross that threshold in my mind and be confident that I can trust it.
by zorgster | 2025-10-21 16:39:48+00:00
Now you can buy a portable thermocycler with 13k rpm centrifuge all-in-one with gel electrophoresis - BentoLab for £1299 in UK. Carry case £54. (They sell a Dipstick DNA Extraction kit for £38.50, pipettes, and mastermix...)

A portable lab with a thermocycler, 13k rpm centrifuge, and gel electrophoresis https://bento.bio/bento-lab/
by inshard | 2025-10-21 16:40:00+00:00
Native South African is a debatable word. You could argue that the Khoisan are the natives. But I doubt these are the affected populations that are the subject of this article. There were multiple migrations into South Africa, some from the south by the Europeans and some from the north by the Bantu. All around a 200-year primary window. Even today, the northern migration routes are still active.