MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by cbondurant | 2025-11-14 14:16:43+00:00
Leaves me wondering if this will allow for superconducting cryogenic transistors? If my hobby level understanding of how silicon doping works, this new superconducting germanium would be a p-type? I could imagine something like ion implantation could be able to establish n-type regions within the germanium while allowing bulk regions of the lattice to maintain superconducting properties.

Though admittedly, I'm not actually aware what parts of a semiconductor circuit are the biggest power dissipation sources, so I guess its entirely possible that most of the power is dissipated across the p-n junctions themselves.
by frikk | 2025-11-14 14:16:45+00:00
This technique is surprisingly powerful. Yesterday I built an experimental cellular automata classifier system based on some research papers I found and was curious about. Aside from the sheer magic of the entire build process with Cursor + GPT5-Codex, one big breakthrough was simply cloning the original repo's source code and copy/pasting the paper into a .txt file.

Now when I ask questions about design decisions, the LLM refers to the original paper and cites the decisions without googling or hallucinating.

With just these two things in my local repo, the LLM created test scripts to compare our results versus the paper and fixed bugs automatically, helped me make decisions based on the paper's findings, helped me tune parameters based on the empirical outcomes, and even discovered a critical bug in our code that was caused by our training data being random generated versus the paper's training data being a permutation over the whole solution space.

All of this work was done in one evening and I'm still blown away by it. We even ported our code to golang, parallelized it, and saw a 10x speedup in the processing. Right before heading to bed, I had the LLM spin up a novel simulator using a quirky set of tests that I invented using hypothetical sensors and data that have not yet been implemented, and it nailed it first try - using smart abstractions and not touching the original engine implementation at all. This tech is getting freaky.
by throwaway0123_5 | 2025-11-14 14:16:58+00:00
If they're truly Chinese state-sponsored actors, does it really matter if their actions/methods are exposed? What is Anthropic going to do, send the Anthropic Police Force to China to arrest them?

I suppose I could see this argument if their methods were very unique and otherwise hard to replicate, but it sounds like they had Claude do the attack mostly autonomously.
by ArcHound | 2025-11-14 14:17:01+00:00
"As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment)."

As a businessman, I want to make money. E.g. by automating away technologists and their pesky need for excellence and ethics.

On a less cynical note, I am not sure that selling quality is sustainable in the long term, because then you'd be selling less and earning less. You'd get outcompeted by cheap slop that's acceptable by the general population.
by blub | 2025-11-14 14:17:55+00:00
You’re mixing up developers becoming more competent with the language becoming easier.

Neither C++ nor Rust are becoming easier unless new features are added which make them simpler to use in some circumstance.

C++11 & co did make many things simpler. For Rust I don’t know the details of what’s upcoming; it doesn’t seem to be getting simpler.
by geerlingguy | 2025-11-14 14:18:45+00:00
I like the conclusion; like for me, Whisper has radically improved CC on my video content. I used to spend a few hours translating my scripts into CCs, and tooling was poor.

Now I run it through whisper in a couple minutes, give one quick pass to correct a few small hallucinations and misspellings, and I'm done.

There are big wins in AI. But those don't pump the bubble once they're solved.

And the thing that made Whisper more approachable for me was when someone spent the time to refine a great UI for it (MacWhisper).
by fallingfrog | 2025-11-14 14:19:16+00:00
I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it. The people working on AI are very smart and they will solve the associated challenges soon enough. The problem of how to slow down the development of these technologies- a political problem- is much more pressing right now.
by wltr | 2025-11-14 14:19:29+00:00
I used X when I started with Linux in my high school. When I finally stopped tolerating macOS almost a decade ago, I started with Wayland only, and never looked back. I even ditched Krita in favour of Gimp, solely because Gimp supports Wayland (from version 3, and on 2.99 before that). To this day, I don’t understand X, like at all. It’s all some super complicated pile to me. While I don’t understand Wayland either, it’s super simple to interact with as a user. That’s all I care about, especially given that Wayland is better with security, multiple displays, has a smaller code base, and whatnot. Each time I see someone says Wayland is unusable to them, I wonder whether that’s some edge case they have, or is it just some habit. I’m happy I don’t need X for anything, so I just wait till most apps would support Wayland.
by surajrmal | 2025-11-14 14:19:33+00:00
Bugs don't need to be exploitable to be a problem. The program is incorrect and invariably will fail to act correctly due to those bugs.

Modern c++ has none of the advantages I mentioned. std::variant is cumbersome to use and you cannot easily match on it exhaustively, std::optional and std::expected have UB if you look at the stored types without checking if it's valid first. I love c++ and still use it daily, but I also know I write more bugs when I use it compared to rust. I don't have hard proof that rust is less prone to other types of bugs but wouldn't be surprised if someone produces a blog post with evidence. If you're trying to make judgement without experience, then that's simply foolish.

I'm not sure why you would point to "bigness" of the language as a problem when you're fine with considering c++ a systems language. If you don't like cargo, you don't have to use it. There are other build tools that can integrate with the rust toolchain the same way you would do so with c++. If some libraries are not suitable, don't use them. There are plenty of c++ libraries like boost which I avoid because they don't work well for me too. Consider the way in which The Linux kernel is using rust the language. The key to whether a systems programming is useful is whether I can meet the constraints the software must run in, typically in terms of binary size, memory usage, and runtime performance. Rust delivers here and can be used anywhere c/c++ have found success.
by schnitzelstoat | 2025-11-14 14:20:04+00:00
I'm surprised the companies fascinated with AGI don't devote some resources to neuroscience - it seems really difficult to develop a true artificial intelligence when we don't know much about how our own works.

Like it's not even clear if LLMs/Transformers are even theoretically capable of AGI, LeCun is famously sceptical of this.

I think we still lack decades of basic research before we can hope to build an AGI.
by daemonologist | 2025-11-14 14:20:09+00:00
I think they're suggesting doing that with BERT for text and CLIP for images. Which in my experience is indeed quite effective (and easy/fast).

There have been some developments in the image-of-text/other-than-photograph area though recently. From Meta (although they seem unsure of what exactly their AI division is called): https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05014 and Qihoo360: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27350 for instance.
by jgeada | 2025-11-14 14:20:15+00:00
Would be interesting to see the historical trends for operating margins.

These days it seems that 30%+ operating margins are what VCs and stock market are expecting now, which seems unsustainable. Software and similar businesses can easily do it because cost of manufacturing one more unit is close to zero, all the costs are primarily NRE. Not all business fit that model and but yet they all aspire to the same margins.
by jodrellblank | 2025-11-14 14:20:41+00:00
The word "reason" came into this thread with the original comment:

3. LLMs are bad at solving reasoning problems. 4. Prolog is good at solving reasoning problems.

I agree with you. In Prolog "?- 1=1." is reasoning by definition. Then 4. becomes "LLMs should emit Prolog because Prolog is good at executing Prolog code".

I think that's not a useful place to be, so I was trying to head off going there. But now I'll go with you - I agree it IS reasoning - can you please support your case that "executing Prolog code is reasoning" makes Prolog more useful for LLMs to emit than Python?
by simonw | 2025-11-14 14:21:42+00:00
Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule.

Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you complain about water usage I think it risks discrediting the rest of your argument.

(Aside from that I agree with most of this piece, the "AGI" thing is a huge distraction.)

UPDATE an hour after posting this: I may be making an ass of myself here in that I've been arguing in this thread about comparisons between data center usage and agricultural usage of water, but that comparison doesn't hold as data centers often use potable drinking water that wouldn't be used in agriculture or for many other industrial purposes.

I still think the way these numbers are usually presented - as scary large "gallons of water" figures with no additional context to help people understand what that means - is an anti-pattern.
by dwohnitmok | 2025-11-14 14:21:42+00:00
> And this is all fine, because they’re going to make AGI and the expected value (EV) of it will be huge! (Briefly, the argument goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of AGI delivering an extremely large amount of value, and 99.999% chance of much less or zero value, then the EV is still extremely large because (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% * small_value) = very_large_value).

This is a strawman. The big AI names aren't making a Pascal's wager type argument around AGI.

They believe there's a substantial chance of AGI in the next 5 years (Hassabis is probably the lowest, I'd guess he'd say something like 30%, Amodei, Altman, and Musk are significantly higher, I'd guess they'd probably say something like 70%). They'd all have much higher probabilities for 10 years (maybe over 90%).

You can disagree with them on probabilities. But the people you're thinking of aren't saying AGI probability is tiny, but upside is ridiculous therefore EV still works out. They're biting the bullet and saying probability is high.
by andai | 2025-11-14 14:21:51+00:00
Anthropic found a similar result for retrieval: embeddings + BM25 keyword search (variant of TF-IDF) produced significantly better results.

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/contextual-retrieval

They also found improvements from augmenting the chunks with Haiku by having it add a summary based on extra context.

That seems to benefit both the keyword search and the embeddings by acting as keyword expansion. (Though it's unclear to me if they tried actual keyword expansion and how that would fare.)

---

Anyway what stands out to me most here is what a Rube Goldberg machine it is. Embeddings, keywords, fusion, contextual augmentation, reranking... each adding marginal gains.

But then the whole thing somehow works really well together (~1% fail rate on most benchmarks. Worse for code retrieval.)

I have to wonder how this would look if it wasn't a bunch of existing solutions taped together, but actually a full integrated system.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-11-14 14:22:47+00:00
That one struck me as... weird people on both ends. But this is Musk, who is deep into the Roko's Basilisk idea [0] (in fact, supposedly he and Grimes bonded over that) where AGI is inevitable, AGI will dominate like the Matrix and Skynet, and anyone that didn't work hard to make AGI a reality will be yote in the Torment Nexus.

That is, if you don't build the Torment Nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus, someone else will and you'll be punished for not building it.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
by LightBug1 | 2025-11-14 14:23:03+00:00
No one doubts the technical prowess of SpaceX or the skill of the team. So I'm unsure why you felt the need to write that?

What's in doubt is a wanker CEO who may, or may not, do something strategically ridiculous - perhaps because an advertising executive looked at him the wrong way.

I don't care if the alternative is a Soviet jalopy propelled to the sky with compressed fart power.

We need an alternative.
by ascagnel_ | 2025-11-14 14:23:55+00:00
> every publisher with more than one game has their own launcher (usually shitty and brings no value)

I view this as a positive -- it's not feasible to maintain a build for every game and storefront's DRM/auth (unless you go DRM-free, which is the ideal but not something publishers and developers do on release). A launcher is the layer that sits between -- the games are written to auth against a launcher, and the launcher has builds for each storefront.

Otherwise you're just further entrenching Steam as the de facto monopoly on sales.
by zahlman | 2025-11-14 14:24:07+00:00
> You might wonder: 5% seems awfully conservative. However, note that this figure is the geometric mean. The number can range from slower to significantly faster. All numbers are pyperformance figures.

Any way you slice it, this is unimpressive. The effort spent on making CPython jit-able seems entirely unjustified if this is the rate of progress we can expect. Especially given that PyPy has existed for over half of Python's lifetime now.
by lazide | 2025-11-14 14:24:15+00:00
You do know COINTELPRO and MKULTRA not only existed, but were organized efforts with significant funding and energy behind them, right?

And that Area 51 not only exists, but does a lot of work under the veil of explicit, organized, secrecy? And has for a very, very long time now?

Just because there are bullshit conspiracy theories doesn’t mean there aren’t very real conspiracies going on too.
by kps | 2025-11-14 14:24:45+00:00
Long ago, users looked forward to updates. Users were positively excited about updates. Users were willing to pay for updates.

What changed?

> If you are using my service and I need to make backwards incompatible changes to my system, you can bet I'm going to force you to update.

Now, users universally understand that updates solve your problems, not theirs.
by CrzyLngPwd | 2025-11-14 14:24:47+00:00
I want AI in VSC as an assistant, but that's it.

If I could have set a systemwide setting to say "Only add AI to things I want", then I would have ticked that box a long time ago.

Maybe YT could add an option for "filter out AI slop". I might pay for YT if they did that.
by paperplaneflyr | 2025-11-14 14:24:57+00:00
After reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao, actually changed my perspective towards these AI companies, not that they are building world-changing products but the human nature around all this hype. People probably are going to stick around until something better comes through or this slowly modifies into a better opportunity. Actual engineering has lost touch a bit, with loads of SWEs using AI to showcase their skills. If you are too traditional, you are kind of out.
by getnormality | 2025-11-14 14:25:02+00:00
Other red (or at least yellow) flags:

1. Typeset in (what appears to be) Microsoft Word. Anyone under the age of 90 who knows enough math to prove the Riemann Hypothesis will have learned and strongly prefer LaTeX.

2. Casually introduces novel terminology like "entropy-spiral coordinate" without explanation, inconsistent with norms of mathematical exposition.

3. Social absurdities characteristic of crankery. Nobody with enough knowledge to prove the Riemann hypothesis thinks they need to put "rights holder" after their name in the proof.
by qcnguy | 2025-11-14 14:25:15+00:00
No they aren't. I don't buy the fastest internet available to me because it costs a lot more and none of my computers would be able to use it without special upgrades. If I did for some reason upgrade, nothing would get faster because bandwidth isn't the bottleneck for anything I do, latency is (and latency is mostly server side). Most people are in that situation in the country where I live. FTTH can deliver more bandwidth than there is demand for.

I mean, come on. This is HN. Aren't we supposed to be engineers here? Increasing bandwidth only matters if some useful activity is constrained by the lack of it. You can't just say more of X is always a good thing, for any X. Ignoring tradeoffs is the mistake that creates leftism, but there are always tradeoffs.
by mschuster91 | 2025-11-14 14:25:16+00:00
> And it also doesn't make any sense, since defintionally a material can't be superconducting and semiconducting at the same time

I'd say it gets interesting if one can get at least part of a die made out of superconductors. Getting power in into the die is a huge damn challenge, we're talking about hundreds of amps for modern CPUs and GPUs - if even a part of that could be shrunk that would be a huge gain.
by IgorPartola | 2025-11-14 14:25:21+00:00
It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be small and fast and energy efficient enough with our manufacturing capabilities today. A human brain has something like 80 or 90 billion of them and there are other types of cells that outnumber neurons by I think two orders of magnitude. The entire architecture is massively parallel and has a complex feedback network instead of the LLM’s rigid mostly forward processing. When I say massively parallel I don’t mean a billion tensor units. I mean a quintillion input superpositions.

And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and several KW to run.

Given this I am not certain we will get to AGI by simulating it in a GPU or TPU. We would need a new hardware paradigm.
by apothegm | 2025-11-14 14:25:33+00:00
It might just be an unintentional side effect of an older rule. They don’t want people running full-on nested VMs probably due to security concerns (inability to properly lock down the nested VMs). They wrote that rule in, say, 2005, and haven’t revisited it since the emergence of containerization as a best practice. Possibly because like most banks their software practices lag by decades.
by amundskm | 2025-11-14 14:25:41+00:00
I wonder what you consider regular, not because I disagree with you, but because I wonder if the term "moneyed" means something different to you than the author.

I am always fascinated by the normal human bias to assume that a single person's experience is that "average" experience.

To me "moneyed" in terms of being an entrepreneur would mean that if everything failed catastrophically I would have somewhere to go to have a roof over my head and food to eat while I got back on my feet.

My personal bias would lead me to believe that most people have less of a support system then the wonderful people on HN. Most of us have degrees and/or well paying STEM type jobs.
by forinti | 2025-11-14 14:25:52+00:00
There's actually a third group: many folks in poor countries have no option but to start some sort of business as jobs pay very little.

There's a supermarket chain in Uruguay that started from selling vegetables on a street corner.

There's this guy near my house that sells electronics at a traffic light. I've been witnessing his business grow and grow and now he has a car full of stuff parked nearby.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-11-14 14:25:53+00:00
It's intellectual charlatanism or incompetence.

In the former case (charlatanism), it's basically marketing. Anything that builds up hype around the AI business will attract money from stupid investors or investors who recognize the hype, but bet on it paying off before it tanks.

In the latter case (incompetence), many people honestly don't know what it means to know something. They spend their entire lives this way. They honestly think that words like "emergence" bless intellectually vacuous and uninformed fascinations with the aura of Science!™. These kinds of people lack a true grasp of even basic notions like "language", an analysis of which already demonstrates the silliness of AI-as-intelligence.

Now, that doesn't mean that in the course of foolish pursuit, some useful or good things might not fall out as a side effect. That's no reason to pursue foolish things, but the point is that the presence of some accidental good fruits doesn't prove the legitimacy of the whole. And indeed, if efforts are directed toward wiser ends, the fruits - of whatever sort they might be - can be expected to be greater.

Talk of AGI is, frankly, just annoying and dumb, at least when it is used to mean bona fide intelligence or "superintelligence". Just hold your nose and take whatever gold there is in Egypt.
by hannasanarion | 2025-11-14 14:26:04+00:00
That is true for all media purchases since the invention of copyright in 1662.

You think you own the Silmarillion because you have a paper copy? Hah! No, you have a transferrable license to read it.

Every hard copy movie you have starts with a big green FBI warning reminding you that having that disc does not means you own the movie, it means you have a transferrable license to play it for yourself and small groups on small screens.

Digital media with DRM allow content distributors to remove the "transferrable" part of the license if they want, which often allows them to sell for cheaper since they know that each sale represents only one person recieving the experience. The license comes with less rights (no transferrance), so it can be priced lower.
by wkat4242 | 2025-11-14 14:26:05+00:00
Welllll.. Yes and no.

If it works with my local ollama servers then yeah I don't mind it. I already use the existing AI integration sometimes (which is very basic) for translation and summarisation. It's not bad (translation is definitely better than the builtin one because it is much better at context)

But if it has to be cloud crap then no. I don't want big tech datamining my behaviour.

It's definitely not a viable way for them to make money on services when it comes to me. And I think most firefox users will feel that way. If they didn't care about such things they'd be using chrome.
by jmathai | 2025-11-14 14:26:06+00:00
There are some really cool ways that AI/LLMs can enhance the web browsing experience. I just saw Tweeks on here yesterday and it's a very cool idea to bring the power of greasemonkey to the masses.

What's often missing nowadays when integrating AI is creativity and understanding what people really want. It's not easy, but that's what makes products great.

I agree with the article that the AI being introduced into Firefox isn't very compelling and I'd rather it not exist. But I disagree that people don't want AI features in Firefox - they just don't want what they're getting.

Tweeks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45916525