MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by gaigalas | 2025-12-08 04:20:58+00:00
Let's go the other route.

What would change your mind? It's an exercise in feasibility.

For example, I don't believe in time travel. If someone made me time travel, and made it undeniable that I was transported back to 1508, then I would not be able to argue against it. In fact, no one in such position would.

What is that equivalent for your conviction? There must be something, otherwise, it's just an opinion that can't be changed.

You don't need to present some actual proof or something. Just lay out some ideas that demonstrate that you are being rational about this and not just sucking up to LLM marketing.
by Animats | 2025-12-08 04:21:42+00:00
What he's missing is that scaling started working around 1900, when railroads started consolidating. Railroads were the first businesses that had overwhelming economies of scale. No small co-op could possibly compete. Over the next century, more obstacles to scaling were overcome. Container shipping, freeways, cheap communications, mass market products and advertising, and computers removed the obstacles to scaling businesses up to planetary size.

Why it's the Uneeda biscuit made the trouble, Uneeda Uneeda, put the crackers in a package, in a package, the Uneeda buscuit in an airtight sanitary package, made the cracker barrel obsolete, obsolete Obsolete! Obsolete!

Cracker barrel went out the window with the mail pouch, cut plug, chawin by the stove. Changed the approach of a traveling salesman, made it pretty hard.

Gone, gone Gone with the hogshead, cask, and demijohn, Gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan Gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce. - The Music Man
by bawolff | 2025-12-08 04:22:18+00:00
In theory it helps people who have some sort of trade and just want to do that trade, focus on that, while the business experts from the PE firm handle the business side. Running a business is a skill, and people who want to sell some other skill often don't have it as you can't be good at everything.

Are there other ways of addressing that gap, like hiring experts? Sure, but its not like PE is entirely evil.

Keep in mind there is some selection bias here. You only hear about private equity when its being comic book evil. When things work out or its a non scummy PE company, you never hear about it.
by protocolture | 2025-12-08 04:22:21+00:00
Windows 11 25H2 introduces several exciting new AI features. Its also being reported as a massive memory hog and its causing a lot of consternation online.

There's no reason to be a first mover on AI. There's still no moat, and it is unlikely one will be found. A computer firm we have never heard of could spin up tomorrow and be the true leader of the much prophesied AI Revolution. Apple can let other people burn their brands to the ground chasing the dream.

Colloquially, 2025 is the year of the linux desktop, thanks in part to Microsofts AI approach (And valve opening up games). In 10 years the ramifications of that might even be felt in enterprise. We could have enterprise users looking for Linux/MacOS clients to run Microsoft Office 365. Really one should be asking why Microsoft thinks it can ruin the client experience. "What the heck is going on at Microsoft". We know whats going on, no one in the upper echelons of Microsoft can be seen to ignore the next big thing. They are compelled to grasp at anything labelled AI and ship it.

I dont like Apple, at all really. But not going all in on AI is to be lauded. In fact they could have done even less. Consumers want them to release the next iBrick with another 200 dollars attached to the pricetag. Thats it. They can meet consumer expectations by doing nothing other than Business as Usual.
by kianN | 2025-12-08 04:22:32+00:00
> How does our imagination shrink when we consider our options of what we create with code to be choosing between the outputs of the LLM rather than starting from the blank slate of our imagination?

This has been my biggest hesitancy with adopting these technologies. All of the things of which I’m most proud of building were built from a foundation of deep understanding of several domains, not from the solutions of a series of one offs problems, but from the process of solving them.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-12-08 04:22:45+00:00
According to OpenAI, ~4% of tokens generated are for software.[1]

LLMs are not a tech tool. SWE is practically a fringe use of LLMs.

See page 16: [1]https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34255/w342...
by iamartech | 2025-12-08 04:22:49+00:00
Location: New Delhi, India Remote: yes Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: Tokio, Rust lang, Golang, python, linux, concurrent programming, systems programming, databases, REST, GRPC, Git

Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cEYCjcbzGXPWnWAxLT1OHqyf...

Email: ar9tech@outlook.com

I am a systems software engineer specializing in low-level software design for backend systems. My professional experience spans multiple compiled languages, including Rust, C++, and Go. I have developed REST API servers, gRPC programs, and background job handlers/schedulers.

In Rust, I have extensive hands-on experience building low-level applications using the Tokio runtime, applying strong principles of distributed systems, and working with synchronization primitives such as Mutexes, RwLocks, and concurrent data structures. I also focus on performance optimizations that leverage the language’s zero-cost abstractions and memory model.

I place strong emphasis on building reliable test environments, using real-world testing methodologies such as unit tests, integration tests, concurrency stress tests, and fixture-based simulations.

I have worked with clients across several domains, including: - Image processing - Blockchain network layer design - Cloud infrastructure solutions

One of my most significant Rust projects was developing and deploying a web-based terminal access system for LXD containers running on bare-metal servers. This system leveraged Tokio for concurrency, TTYD for terminal emulation, and Caddy as the reverse proxy, with communication over Unix Domain Sockets. The solution also supported authentication. Efficient and scalable under configuration of environment.

I love playing with distributed system a lot and challenging myself to learn new concepts under this domain.
by vlovich123 | 2025-12-08 04:25:21+00:00
This is also true of LLMs. I’m really not sure of OP’s point - AI (really all ML) generally is like the canonical “trivial to preallocate” problem.

Where dynamic allocation starts to be really helpful is if you want to minimize your peak RAM usage for coexistence purposes (eg you have other processes running) or want to undersize your physical RAM requirements by leveraging temporal differences between different parts of code (ie components A and B never use memory simultaneously so either A or B can reuse the same RAM). It also does simplify some algorithms and also if you’re ever dealing with variable length inputs then it can help you not have to reason about maximums at design time (provided you just correctly handle an allocations failure).
by OgsyedIE | 2025-12-08 04:25:24+00:00
The point of jobs is for those who don't own appreciating assets to sell their work in exchange for income in the form of payment from those who do own appreciating assets.

This article misses the key problem with the end of jobs. How else are 98% of the human population going to get income? With the coming of drones and old-timey 1900s chemical weapons they are probably no longer equipped as a class to win a military contest over redistribution against the asset holders.

Much like replacing religion with nothing has turned out, replacing jobs with nothing is going to be bad at best.
by ssl-3 | 2025-12-08 04:25:35+00:00
Yes. According to my understanding of the lore: Microcenter was once just a small computer shop on High Street. A little mom-and-pop place -- you've probably been to one at some point. It got bigger. (That was all before my time, too.)

The Greek place that stands out so favorably in my memory is Lashish the Greek. It's right across Bethel from Microcenter, in the strip mall behind the McDonald's. Looks like it's still running. I should stop in there again sometime.

Last time I was there it was empty except for us and the owner. Friendly dude. He stopped at our table after we had some time to finish eating and we chatted about food, food quality, and the Gipsy Kings album that he was playing.
by _aavaa_ | 2025-12-08 04:26:51+00:00
If you look at the situation logically, the rule on the competition site says:

> The submission must be available for free for the public (and not only the judges). Submission will be published and kept online for free on the competition website, while you are free to keep working on it (and eventually charge for it/make commercial usage).

“Must be available to the public.”

It was.

“Submission will be published and kept online for free on the competition website”

It was. But also, it isn’t mandatory based on their own wording.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-12-08 04:26:56+00:00
> Everyone is out here acting like "predicting the next thing" is somehow fundamentally irrelevant to "human thinking" and it is simply not the case.

Nobody is. What people are doing is claiming that "predicting the next thing" does not define the entirety of human thinking, and something that is ONLY predicting the next thing is not, fundamentally, thinking.
by akersten | 2025-12-08 04:27:14+00:00
Bag of words is actually the perfect metaphor. The data structure is a bag. The output is a word. The selection strategy is opaquely undefined.

> Gen AI tricks laypeople into treating its token inferences as "thinking" because it is trained to replicate the semiotic appearance of doing so. A "bag of words" doesn't sufficiently explain this behavior.

Something about there being significant overlap between the smartest bears and the dumbest humans. Sorry you[0] were fooled by the magic bag.

[0] in the "not you, the layperson in question" sense
by gls2ro | 2025-12-08 04:28:20+00:00
Here are four small things to remember when working with Ruby:

1. Everything is an object and the main thinking is that you send messages to objects not call methods on objects. This is very important and the core of how the language works and moreso important when reading Ruby code.

2. `false` and `nil` are falsey. Everything else is truthy when used directly in conditionals. Eg: if variable will go on true-branch when variable is anything else than `false`/`nil`. Else it will go on the else-branch.

3. Start irb (the interactive console) and use <object>.inspect + <object>.class to see what is happening. Ruby has great introspection. Remember the first thing I said here (everything is an object) so you can inspect almost anything.

4. In Ruby paranthesis are optional. Eg: user.upgrade_to "admin" is actually user.upgrade_to("admin")
by tibbar | 2025-12-08 04:28:36+00:00
The problem with these metaphors is that they don't really explain anything. LLMs can solve countless problems today that we would have previously said were impossible because there are not enough examples in the training data. (EG, novel IMO/ICPC problems.) One way that we move the goal posts is to increase the level of abstraction: IMO/ICPC problems are just math problems, right? There are tons of those in the data set!

But the truth is there has been a major semantic shift. Previously LLMs could only solve puzzles whose answers were literally in the training data. It could answer a math puzzle it had seen before, but if you rephrased it only slightly it could no longer answer.

But now, LLMs can solve puzzles where, like, it has seen a certain strategy before. The newest IMO and ICPC problems were only "in the training data" for a very, very abstract definition of training data.

The goal posts will likely have to shift again, because the next target is training LLMs to independently perform longer chunks of economically useful work, interfacing with all the same tools that white-collar employees do. It's all LLM slop til it isn't, same as the IMO or Putnam exam.

And then we'll have people saying that "white collar employment was all in the training data anyway, if you think about it," at which point the metaphor will have become officially useless.
by FarmerPotato | 2025-12-08 04:28:54+00:00
One metaphor is to call the model a person, another metaphor is to call it a pile of words. These are quite opposite. I think that's the whole point.

Person-metaphor does nothing to explain its behavior, either.

"Bag of words" has a deep origin in English, the Anglo-Saxon kenning "word-hord", as when Beowulf addresses the Danish sea-scout (line 258)

"He unlocked his word-hoard and delivered this answer."

So, bag of words, word-treasury, was already a metaphor for what makes a person a clever speaker.
by stego-tech | 2025-12-08 04:29:38+00:00
I mean, would I like the article to be correct? Gods yes I would. Jobs suck, and the mandate of “work = survival” means you get a whole bunch of shitty personalities arbitrarily holding back progress in the name of personal wealth or power; the end of jobs would mean those of us who approach our professions with passion and love can flatly eject the dead weight insisting that we schedule progress to a future fiscal year’s backlog, instead of just doing what we love, when we want to.

That being said, do I think it’ll happen? No, I don’t, for the simple reason that we still cannot fundamentally get a plurality of society to agree - on any conceivable level - that every human is entitled to and guaranteed shelter, nutritious foodstuffs, healthcare, and education. It’s 2025, we’re literally destroying resources to drive up profit margins and investment returns instead of dispersing surplus appropriately, and yet anyone who mentions this is slandered as a “socialist” and ostracized.

So instead, I fret that what will happen is the cementing of a two-tiered society indefinitely: one of immense wealth who owns the securities, the land, the datacenters that makes the world work, and a serf class who must engage with these ever-more-expensive systems for the gains of Capital, including via increasingly precarious gig work instead of reliable, structural jobs.

And I think folks roundly dismissing these sorts of posts as “unrealistic” just don’t appreciate how far and how fast we’ve gone from “humans have to engage in subsistence farming” to an interconnected global marketplace and digitized society. We have quite literally thrown out the “status quo” dozens of times since the end of Feudalism, and this time is no different.

Those who dare to dream big are often the victors of such profound change, provided they can craft a message relatable to the populace.

And a message of, “you don’t need a job anymore because necessities got so expensive that governments made them part of tax dollars, and are therefore free to live where you want, do what you want, and live an authentic life” is quite compelling to folks who have struggled harder for less and less their entire lives.
by cameldrv | 2025-12-08 04:30:24+00:00
Not an engine, but some friends of mine got a mylar sheet that's black on one side and reflective on the other. We tried it out in the desert tied onto trees/vehicles. You put the shiny side down, so the hot IR radiation of the earth is reflected away, and the black side sees the extremely cold (in IR) desert sky. If you put a little hole in the middle and put a bucket under it, you get a fair bit of water, because the mylar sheet gets about 20 degrees C below ambient and a lot of water condenses on it. (even in the desert)
by mothballed | 2025-12-08 04:30:42+00:00
Sure but at some point if literally everything tangible and essentially every imaginable commercial service can be done by robots and also designed by AI better than a human, humans are basically relegated to what kind of work? Something like being the exotic dancer or baby factory for a robot factory heir, or maybe a meat sacrifice on a Ukraine-esque battlefield to fight the other group of capital holders.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-12-08 04:31:28+00:00
Could an LLM trained on nothing and looped upon itself eventually develop language, more complex concepts, and everything else, based on nothing? If you loop LLMs on each other, training them so they "learn" over time, will they eventually form and develop new concepts, cultures, and languages organically over time? I don't have an answer to that question, but I strongly doubt it.

There's clearly more going on in the human mind than just token prediction.
by ipdashc | 2025-12-08 04:31:56+00:00
If there's one person in a team discriminating unfairly, that should be pretty obvious if they're the only one objecting while everyone else thinks an employee is doing a fine job.

If the entire team is discriminatory, then as the sibling comment said, metrics aren't really going to save you either, they will find a way to push their will through. And that is probably a horrible place to work that won't be made more palatable by being promoted.

Again, I'm not saying these aren't real issues, but relying solely on metrics is not the solution. You need both qualitative and quantitative data for a healthy environment and to make good decisions. Just because some humans are bad people doesn't mean the solution is to become inhuman altogether.
by kyledrake | 2025-12-08 04:32:59+00:00
Why does Apple need a different AI strategy? They make good laptops and people like them (I say this as someone that runs Linux on a framework laptop). Anyone using AI is using their MacBook laptops to use AI already. They're perfectly capable of running LLMs locally if anyone actually wants to do that. I'm not sure shoving a bunch of weird AI crap into the UI is actually what end users want.
by danpalmer | 2025-12-08 04:33:34+00:00
Not the previous commenter, but co-working spaces are few and far between in most of the world, plus they can be expensive if the employee is the one paying.

As for the coworkers not knowing your boss thing, I agree, although in a more positive framing – it can be helpful to have a work social group that isn't in your reporting chain. You can get this at many medium sized and up companies.
by mr_windfrog | 2025-12-08 04:33:41+00:00
I've always been intrigued by the whole "decentralized and fixed supply" argument around Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies.

But the more I look into it, the more I wonder: if one Bitcoin can be split into 0.1, 0.01, 0.001 or even smaller fractions for transactions, doesn't that kind of undermine the whole “fixed total supply” idea?

Also, sure, cryptocurrencies are decentralized in theory and the transactions are hard to trace. But at the end of the day, anyone holding crypt is still very much under the control of governments. You can't magically escape regulations or enforcement just because the currency is "decentralized." It's an interesting tension between theory and reality that I don't think enough people talk about.
by Ferret7446 | 2025-12-08 04:34:19+00:00
The economy is not a charity, nor is it a person. But if we're going to personify it, then it exists for the benefit of those who actively participate in it. It is indifferent to those who do not participate in it.

Most humans do not see themselves as existing to provide for others who either cannot or won't provide for themselves. As stated above, the economy is not a charity, it is about equal exchange. Those who have nothing to offer will receive nothing in return.
by xethos | 2025-12-08 04:34:32+00:00
BlackBerry hasn't been OEM for their last few phones - the KeyOne, 2LE, and 2 were all outsourced to TCL, who is still making handsets. This would also fit with BlackBerry's security image, and even pull in the OnwardMobility vapourware.

I'm every bit as skeptical as you are, and in no universe is BlackBerry the OEM in question, but I would like to live in my delusion until GrapheneOS proves me wrong - I want a keyboard, dammit!
by gnh1201 | 2025-12-08 04:35:45+00:00
People questioned why library files must be distributed with the build, even suggesting that unnecessary files appear due to lack of skill. For a long time, I was asked to resolve the issue of Windows apps shipping many DLLs alongside the EXE. Although it wasn’t a priority, I eventually solved it with an unconventional approach, and I may expand its use if it proves effective.
by MyOutfitIsVague | 2025-12-08 04:35:50+00:00
These discussions often end up resembling religious arguments. "We don't know how any of this works, but we can fathom an intelligent god doing it, therefore an intelligent god did it."

"We don't really know how human consciousness works, but the LLM resembles things we associate with thought, therefore it is thought."

I think most people would agree that the functioning of an LLM resembles human thought, but I think most people, even the ones who think that LLMs can think, would agree that LLMs don't think in the exact same way that a human brain does. At best, you can argue that whatever they are doing could be classified as "thought" because we barely have a good definition for the word in the first place.
by d3Xt3r | 2025-12-08 04:35:56+00:00
No, but that's only because I hate Excel. But I'm sure developers who don't hate it but also appreciate FOSS solutions might be interested, if the pay is good.

Access = LibreOffice Base

Visio = LibreOffice Impress

Outlook = Schleswig-Holstein already switched successfully to Open-Xchange and Thunderbird, I've not heard of them running into any major issues with this setup.
by Panzer04 | 2025-12-08 04:36:21+00:00
If you read my comment you'll note that I acknowledge that building cars is complicated. I don't think the electric powertrain is complicated (at least, not compared to the explosion-propelled mechanical marvels of legacy ICE - maybe that's because I'm an EE and have a much harder time imagining how a modern ICE works as reliably as it does :D)
by terminalshort | 2025-12-08 04:37:08+00:00
To calculate the amount of your childcare benefit take the negative of the your adjusted gross income (box 26a), divide it by 10,000, and add 2. Then take the arctan of that result and multiply by 5,000. Add 2500π and write the result in box 46. You may round the value of π to 2 digits. If you are filing as head of household, divide the amount in box 46 by the definite integral from 0 to your adjusted gross income (box 26a) divided by 10,000 of sin^2(x)/(x^2 + 1) dx, and write that amount in box 48. If you are unable to find the function of the anti-derivative, IRS rules allow you to approximate with a Riemann sum using the midpoint rule and a rectangle width of 0.1.
by nrhrjrjrjtntbt | 2025-12-08 04:37:20+00:00
Their point is there is not "nothing"

As an analogy imagine you had a 6 hour driving commute each day (3 each way)

Imagine if now you move next to the office.

Will it be bad you get those 6 hours back?

If 15->9 is good then 9->0 is even better!

The problem is adjusting to that at scale. Will we get addicts or people who never leave the home? Maybe.
by coppsilgold | 2025-12-08 04:37:36+00:00
If you come up with a genetic algorithm scaffolding to affect both the architecture and the training algorithm, and then you instantiate it in an artificial selection environment, and you also give it trillions generations to evolve evolvability just right (as life had for billions of years) then the answer is yes, I'm certain it will and probably much sooner than we did.

Also, I think there is a very high chance that given an existing LLM architecture there exists a set of weights that would manifest a true intelligence immediately upon instantiation (with anterograde amnesia). Finding this set of weights is the problem.
by sien | 2025-12-08 04:37:57+00:00
You want to check out Superannuation in Australia.

It's been a pretty successful program to reduce the amount of support retirees need.

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

From :

https://www.aman-alliance.org/Home/ContentDetail/97783#

"At the other end of the scale are Australia, Chile, Iceland, Ireland and South Korea, with spending on pensions below 4% of GDP, albeit for different reasons."