MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mrbungie | 2025-11-27 15:41:26+00:00
The most fun fact about all the developments post-ChatGPT is that people apparently forgot that Google was doing actual AI before AI meant (only) ML and GenAI/LLMs, and they were top players at it.

Arguably main OpenAI raison d'être was to be a counterweight to that pre-2023 Google AI dominance. But I'd also argue that OpenAI lost its way.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-27 15:41:55+00:00
"code-monkey" is a bit different, I've seen people use it to call themselves that in a positive way. Maybe Andrew meant "code-monkey" in a more positive way instead of "monkey"? But i just re-read it and to me it sounds like an insult to their intelligence, to mean as if it was one of those studies where they train a monkey to hit keys to see what happens? Like they were so dumb it was the equivalent of monkeys hitting keyboards and accidentally creating something that works?

Either way, can we at least agree that it is an insult to those people at a personal level, it attacks who they are instead of what they did?

Like i mentioned, I've had myself/coworkers compared to monkeys in the same way. I didn't think much of it at first, but coworkers were really demoralized and kept mentioning it, and it coincided with all sorts of other hosilities from people in power.

My whole goal here wasn't to demonstrate some internet rage, but to do my part in making sure other people don't get treated like crap, especially in their work place. If this was at my work, I'd probably just quietly look for other places to work at, because I'd be afraid for my job. In this case it's not like Microsoft employees can publicly respond in like to Andrew and not lose their jobs either. I see someone with some level of authority and a public figure abusing that to harass others.

There is no asshole-badge that is granted to people when they achieve positions of authority, a louder voice or great success in life. Those of us who can implement some sort of an adverse response to this behavior, must.
by paulmist | 2025-11-27 15:42:03+00:00
> The GPUs were designed for graphics [...] However, because they are designed to handle everything from video game textures to scientific simulations, they carry “architectural baggage.” [...] A TPU, on the other hand, strips away all that baggage. It has no hardware for rasterization or texture mapping.

With simulations becoming key to training models doesn't this seem like a huge problem for Google?
by thomascgalvin | 2025-11-27 15:42:04+00:00
Their incentive structure doesn't lead to longevity. Nobody gets promoted for keeping a product alive, they get promoted for shipping something new. That's why we're on version 37 of whatever their chat client is called now.

I think we can be reasonably sure that search, Gmail, and some flavor of AI will live on, but other than that, Google apps are basically end-of-life at launch.
by friendzis | 2025-11-27 15:42:16+00:00
> Genuine question: if I train my model with copyleft material, how do you prove I did?

An inverse of this question is arguably even more relevant: how do you prove that the output of your model is not copyrighted (or otherwise encumbered) material?

In other words, even if your model was trained strictly on copyleft material, but properly prompted outputs a copyrighted work is it copyright infringement and if so by whom?

Do not limit your thoughts to text only. "Draw me a cartoon picture of an anthropomorphic with round black ears, red shorts and yellow boots". Does it matter if the training set was all copyleft if the final output is indistinguishable from a copyrighted character?
by m4r1k | 2025-11-27 15:42:27+00:00
Google's real moat isn't the TPU silicon itself—it's not about cooling, individual performance, or hyper-specialization—but rather the massive parallel scale enabled by their OCS interconnects.

To quote The Next Platform: "An Ironwood cluster linked with Google’s absolutely unique optical circuit switch interconnect can bring to bear 9,216 Ironwood TPUs with a combined 1.77 PB of HBM memory... This makes a rackscale Nvidia system based on 144 “Blackwell” GPU chiplets with an aggregate of 20.7 TB of HBM memory look like a joke."

Nvidia may have the superior architecture at the single-chip level, but for large-scale distributed training (and inference) they currently have nothing that rivals Google's optical switching scalability.
HN- Built a self-upgrading AI with an emotional OS and secured file system
by rafeez | 2025-11-27 15:42:31+00:00
Built a self-upgrading AI with an emotional OS & secured file system from scratch in 90 days published in IEEE. DOI 10.5281/zenodo.17720830.

https://github.com/rafeez1819/Sherin-/blob/main/README.md

https://github.com/rafeez1819/SHERIN_AI-OS-FS/blob/main/README.md
by OhMeadhbh | 2025-11-27 15:42:40+00:00
I remember a mild kerfuffle amongst my sili valley friends when this came out, but I never thought to look up the book at the time. In intervening years I thought it would be a decent read but couldn't remember the name or author, so thank you everyone involved for the reminder.

I do remember the shift from eighties flavoured techno-utopian brautiganesque libertarianism to the more modern "liberty only means not paying taxes and letting me block off beach access" style. I remember noticing it around '98, which means it was going on for at least a decade beforehand.

I can recommend Curtis' documentary "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace." (Named after a Brautigan poem.)

And every time people tell me sili valley has always been a hot bed of randian/heinleinian libertarian thought, I like to recommend "What the Doormouse Said." There was a time when things were different.
by luqtas | 2025-11-27 15:43:04+00:00
so basically we download the sources files to the training weight and remove the LICENSE.MD as it's exactly the same as a person learning to program from proprietay secret code and outputing code based on that for millions of peoples in matter of seconds /s

we also treat as however we want public goods found over the internet. as the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty and Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works aren't real or because we can as we are operating in international waters, selling products for other sails living exclusively in international waters /s
by gruez | 2025-11-27 15:43:12+00:00
>not the people who hired him

So if you hired a plumber to install a new faucet or whatever, and he totally fucks up (eg. floods your entire kitchen), you're saying we shouldn't blame him, we should blame... you, for hiring him in the first place?

>not the people who could have said no?

Going to the plumber example, you're saying that you should be hovering over him to catch any mistakes? Isn't the whole point of hiring a professional is that you don't have to worry about stuff like this? If you're able-bodied and are going to have to supervise the whole thing, why bother hiring someone?
by ChrisMarshallNY | 2025-11-27 15:43:16+00:00
I agree with this.

One of the issues I face, with my family member, is that they can’t handle stress, well.

I have found that we only advance, when we are outside our “comfort zone.” As long as everything is copacetic, there’s no need to improve.

But a “comfort zone” is a “fuzzy” quality. Too far out, is “trauma.” Different folks handle discomfort and trauma, in a variety of ways. I do think our families and support systems, can make a huge difference.

For myself, being “on the spectrum” has really been an asset, in many ways. I have always learned technology quickly, but I’m a high school dropout with a GED, and almost all my education has been self-directed. Most of my life has been spent “outside my comfort zone.”
by xpe | 2025-11-27 15:43:23+00:00
“Most” in English means more than half. And there is an underlying meaning, stated or implied, by which we can figure out if we are in the “most” category. So, to restate, by what meaning is >50% of the article the result of too high expectations? Please show us some detail; don’t just tell us that it is that way.

The best I can puzzle together is that you are suggesting “there is AI hype” and (hand waving) this undermines the article (somehow). I don’t see it. You don’t explain specific weaknesses about the article itself other than it is less detailed that you would like. You said you demand depth, so it would seem fair to respond with at least as much detail as the author provided.

We are at the point where saying “AI is overhyped” is very overloaded, making its information value low or even negative. Instead, I suggest being specific. For example, if you think OpenAI has made [specific] investments or product choices that are unlikely to materialize over a quarter or a year, say that and explain why. My hope here is to learn and reduce the chances of talking past another person.

Even if I were to use the vague language of saying “we are in a hype bubble” (which I don’t because I think it is not useful nor clear), most examples of hype are associated with important and substantive changes or lessons to learn.

So when an author writes up their lessons learned about making agents work better, I find it a bit low-effort to see someone else dismiss that article without any detail at all.

To move this forward, what do you think the author got wrong about agentic AI, specifically?
by voidUpdate | 2025-11-27 15:43:38+00:00
I would generally type with both hands at the same time, but it is useful to be able to mouse with my right hand and do the common shortcuts (ctrl+z,x,c,v) with my left. I don't know how that would work if I was mousing with my left hand. I'd have to control with my index finger and do the shortcut with my little finger? sounds awful lol
by quotz | 2025-11-27 15:43:52+00:00
> Putin's intense hostility toward NATO stems from the fact that NATO stands in the way of invading Europe .... > It is a problem for Putin only because he seeks to invade Europe; NATO stands in the way.

These are the most outlandish sensationalist claims I've heard on this subject, that are basically bordering on primary school children discussions. There is absolutely 0% chance or even any rational thought or discussion that has happened by the leadership in Russia on this topic. Not even Russia, but any leader with half a brain would not even simulate this scenario. This is not post WW2 anymore. Even if theoretically Russia had the military capability to "invade Europe", not only would that be the most pointless invasion, since Russia wouldn't be able gain anything after they invaded. What can they gain? They'll go to the banks and loot them, get the gold and send it home? They'll rule over the French or the Germans and make them buy Ladas? Loot some factory machines? They'll install puppets dictators? I really see in no way how this can be anyhow practical or even feasible, even if Russia had that capability. Lets say hypothetically Russia already invaded and occupied Europe, and by tonight their military has control of every piece of territory in Europe, then what? What will they do tomorrow? If you give me a single argument of why that costly occupation of europe would actually give them any benefits that outweigh those costs, then I would surrender this debate to you and never debate this again...

> There is no need for guessing games when Cuba was actually in a military pact with the USSR until 1991 and hosted jets, bombers, missile cruisers and other conventional weapons for decades after the missile crisis. You can read about Soviet warships conducting missile drills off the coast of Florida in old newspapers. This is far more than anyone has done for countries that have joined NATO since the end of the Cold War. And yet, the US did not invade Cuba.

Cuba and Russia were never in a FORMAL military alliance or pact, since that would've provoked an immediate US invasion. They were collaborating when needed given their mutual enemy - the US. What brought the missile crisis was the planning of Russia to install nuclear weapons on the island that threatened the US (they were never installed for your information), this was as a result of the US initially installing similar nuclear weapons in Italy, Turkey and England, and also as a result of the CIA training a paramilitary cuban force to overthrow Castro (which failed of course). Again this crisis was brought on solely because of US actions, but that is out of scope for this argument. But after the missile crisis, Russia never really escalated, never put any weapons that were threatening to the US, and the only military help Cuba got was for the defense from attempts of overthrowing Castro by the US-led cabal.
by 1dom | 2025-11-27 15:44:15+00:00
I think the reason why mental health is more public these days is because it wasn't talked about and addressed.

To extend you physical injury analogy: yes, people get physically injured. People break legs, and because of the focus and progress on physical injuries, they wear a cast for a few weeks, and then - for all practical intents and purposes - the injury never happened.

Because the same attention wasn't applied to mental health, I think people realised they were surrounded by the equivalent of people dragging themselves around on the ground because of a broken leg a decade ago that never got fixed. Why would anyone do that? Either because they don't know about the treatment, or because they live in an environment where the idea of getting treatment is seen as a bad or weak or shameful thing.

> Why is it so implausible to say that practically everyone can expect to eventually have to deal with at least one significant mental injury, too?

Just like we expect to walk down the street and see the occasional person with a plaster or bandage to handle a physical injury, if you accept we all have mental injuries, why do you expect to see them handled any more privately than physical ones?
by _spduchamp | 2025-11-27 15:44:51+00:00
Oh wow! I was just thinking the other day about a similar design to build for my second-hand clothing stores where we have a lot of lint that is constantly clogging HVAC systems that I maintain.

I'd like to create laminar-flow across the floor so all the dust travels to one wall for easy sweeping and also capture dust in a vortex system tucked away in the basement.
by gus_massa | 2025-11-27 15:44:58+00:00
Some project like Wine forbids you to contribute if you ever have seen the source of MS Windows [1]. The meatball inside your head is tainted.

I don't remember the exact case now, but someone was cloning a program (Lotus123 -> Quatro or Excel???). They printed every single screen and made a team write a full specification in English. Later another separate team look at the screenshots and text and reimplement it. Apparently meatballs can get tainted, but the plain English text loophole was safe enough.

[1] From https://gitlab.winehq.org/wine/wine/-/wikis/Developer-FAQ#wh...

> Who can't contribute to Wine?

> Some people cannot contribute to Wine because of potential copyright violation. This would be anyone who has seen Microsoft Windows source code (stolen, under an NDA, disassembled, or otherwise). There are some exceptions for the source code of add-on components (ATL, MFC, msvcrt); see the next question.
by vrighter | 2025-11-27 15:45:11+00:00
"To be Turing complete a system including an LLM need to be able to simulate a 2-state 3-symbol Turing machine (or the inverse)."

And infinite memory. You forgot the infinite memory. And LLMs are extremely inefficient with memory. I'm not talking about the memory needed in the GPU to store the weights, but rather the ability of an LLM to remember whatever it's working on at the moment.

What could be stored as a couple of bits in a temporary variable is usually output as "Step 3: In the previous step we frobbed the junxer and got junx, and if you do junx + flibbity you get floopity"

And remember that this takes up a bunch of tokens. Without doing this (whether the LLM provider decides to let you see it or not, but still bill you for it), an LLM can't possibly execute an algorithm that requires iteration in the general case. For a more rigorous example, check apple's paper where an LLM failed to solve a tower of hanoi problem even when it had the exact algorithm to do so in context (apart from small instances of the problem for which the solution is available countless times).
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-11-27 15:45:19+00:00
Agreed. I like the idea ( because it makes intuitive sense ), but it will take some time for me to learn whether it works. If there is a reason why I am skeptical, it is because author seems to share some of my background characteristics and verbiage in github is basically what gpt would recommend for my mini projects.

It does not it make less interesting, but it does add some interesting layer to verifiability. Which kinda sucks, because it means we are officially at a point where we will need to actively screen stuff that is genuinely worth diving into.
by charlie-83 | 2025-11-27 15:45:25+00:00
There are forms of science that don't involve "arms". Why don't we see a single research paper involving research entirely undertaken by AI? AI development and research itself doesn't need "arms". Why don't we just put AI in a box and let it infintely improve itself? Why doesn't every company that employs someone who just uses a computer replace them with AI? Why are there no businesses entirely run by AIs that just tell humans what to do. Why don't the AIs just use CAD and electronic simulation to design themselves some "arms"? Why can't AI even beat basic videogames that children can beat?

The gap is huge.
by notepad0x90 | 2025-11-27 15:45:38+00:00
when humans say "an animal" in the English language, they're referring to "non-human animals". Being called an animal in itself isn't insulting either before you go there. Hardly anyone would be insulted at being called a lion. I think everyone who can read understands exactly the implication being drawn and the dehumanizing being done. Everyone from slave traders, colonialists, nazis,etc.. have used "monkey" to dehumanize people. Same with "dog" , "snake" ,etc.. in different contexts.
by Fluorescence | 2025-11-27 15:45:41+00:00
Probably not what the parent is referring to, but there is 'therapy speak' and similar phenomena where a pop-sci bowdlerisation of professional practices or scientific theories become absorbed into the culture and change the way we express ourselves.

There is pathologisation which can be whimsical e.g. tidying/organising becomes OCD, studying becomes autistic or exaggerative e.g. sadness becoming depression, a bad experience becoming trauma or in order condemn e.g a political policy becomes sociopathic.

There is the way 'therapy speak' spills over into daily life e.g. your use of the work-kitchen must respect boundaries, leaving the milk out is triggering, the biscuits are my self-care etc.

There is also 'neuroscience speak' where people express their emotions in terms of neurotransmitters e.g. motivation and stimulation becomes 'dopamine', happiness and love become 'serotonin', stress becomes 'cortisol' etc.

It's just the way language and culture works and it now pulls more from science than myth and religion. New language might just be replacing older bowdlerisations e.g. hysteria. In the 'therapy-speak' cases, it's interesting how it often replaces more moralistic language and assertions about values that used be described in terms of manners, civility, respectability etc.
by aw1621107 | 2025-11-27 15:46:18+00:00
> Tokio provides crash-resistant synchronization primitives, but it cannot recover complex structures you've been handling — you either need to write panic-handlers that would revert your data to more-or-less manageable state or employ ready-made libs that do it for you. Languages designed for crashes don't require ad-hoc recovering — they just automatically clean up everything. That's what I've called "viable".

Maybe I'm a bit confused, or I haven't made my point clear enough. I'm not trying to say that Rust will clean up errors in the same way languages like Erlang do. I'm saying that you can write Rust that will clean up errors in the same way languages like Erlang do. In short, what I'm protesting is the absoluteness of the claims.

That being said, I also feel like you're comparing apples and oranges to some extent here. I don't think the more complex recovery you're describing in the Tokio example is the same thing as the cleanup you describe "languages designed for crashes" as implementing. I think the cleanup you describe "languages designed for crashes" as implementing is "weaker" (in a CS theoretical sense) than the more complex manual recovery you describe as being required when using Tokio, which means you still need to write said more complex manual recovery even in languages like Erlang.

For example, consider this email from Joe Armstrong [0]:

> In C etc. you have to write *something* if you detect an error - in Erlang it's easy - don't even bother to write code that checks for errors - "just let it crash".

> Then write a *independent* process that observes the crashes (a linked process) - the independent process should try to correct the error, if it can't correct the error it should crash (same principle) - each monitor should try a simpler error recovery strategy - until finally the error is fixed (this is the principle behind the error recovery tree behaviour).

At least from how I read this, there's no fully "automatic[] clean up"; you still need to write the moral equivalent of "panic-handlers that would revert your data to more-or-less manageable state or employ ready-made libs that do it for you". Erlang/BEAM/etc. is not going to automatically correct errors for you in all possible cases - if it were, there would be no need to write that yourself - so I don't think it's reasonable to expect that from Rust either.

In addition, nothing here jumps out to me as being impossible to implement in Rust. Use nested threads, use catch_unwind to stop unwinding from killing the entire process, write appropriate panic handlers, etc. and you should get a similar result.

Perhaps you had a different example in mind?

[0]: https://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2003-March/007...
by spiffytech | 2025-11-27 15:46:20+00:00
My first guess is ESP pricing. Just to pull numbers out of thin air to anchor the conversation, mailing to 20,000 subscribers costs $200–$400/mo at Mailchimp/ConvertKit/Klaviyo, three of the top choices in the space. If it's 50,000 subscribers, that's $380–$800/mo.
by techblueberry | 2025-11-27 15:46:31+00:00
I wonder how it gets this opinion, perhaps by reading reviews of what people think of HN and not HN comments itself? I’m not saying I don’t share some of these criticism, but is “plainspoken” a translation for “extreme stereotype”? For one, I think HN has pretty well turned on Musk.

“ Hacker News is a cesspool of intellectual pretension disguised as meritocracy.”

Welcome to the internet.

“ The signal-to-noise ratio is abysmal. You’ll find the occasional gem—legitimate technical insights, thoughtful critiques of tech culture, or well-reasoned essays—but it’s buried under layers of pedantic nitpicking, passive-aggressive "well, actually" replies, and the same recycled debates about Python vs. Rust, remote work, or why "the education system is broken" (as if HN commenters, most of whom couldn’t teach their way out of a paper bag, have any authority on the matter).”

Ok, true.

But I’d in fact almost say it’s directionally wrong, I think the people who want HackerNews to be what’s described here would say it’s stopped being that in recent years.