MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rvz | 2026-02-04 15:30:12+00:00
> Our work enables unbounded token generation at modest fixed cost, substantially reducing the infrastructure and energy demands of large-scale Transformer models. The mathematical techniques we introduce are of independent interest.

Now this is a very interesting paper, which hopefully should address the chronic inefficiencies of the AI lack of efficient methods and approaches in reducing their significant computational and energy demands which are off the charts.

> These factors penalize performance relative to what a fused, hardware-optimized implementation could achieve, and the reported runtime results should therefore be interpreted conservatively.

It's still early with several limitations, but the need for wasting billions on GPUs will begin to not make any sense soon.
by bayindirh | 2026-02-04 15:30:12+00:00
I have chatted with someone else, and they pointed me to a blog post (will attach if I can find).

The general idea is deliberately doing something triggering some people and if the person you're interacting with is triggered by what you're doing, they are not worthy of your attention because of their ignorance to see what you're doing beyond the form of the thing you're doing.

While I respect the idea, I find it somewhat flawed, to be honest.

Edit: Found it!

Original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39028036

Blog post in question: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html
by toastal | 2026-02-04 15:31:17+00:00
It’s weird being literate enough in a language now without a bicameral script (or spaces). When I was younger, I thought this stuff wasn’t so important, but then when you learn a new language, you are trying to figure out what a “robert” is, to then be told “oh, it’s just a name”—which is obvious if know standard `en-Latn` conventions.
by wat10000 | 2026-02-04 15:31:26+00:00
If we define a data center as a place where computers run primarily to serve distant users, then we've had data centers in space for decades.

Nobody should doubt that it's possible, since it's been done. It just doesn't make any sense to do it purely for the sake of having computers do things that could be done on the ground.

There's nothing weird about using jet engines to make electricity. The design of a turbine designed to generate thrust isn't necessarily that different from a turbine designed to generate electricity. You can buy a new Avon gas turbine generator today, the same engine used in the Canberra, Comet, Draken, and many others. It makes about a million times more economic sense than putting GPUs in space to run LLMs.
Why we stopped allowing autonomous fixes in production (even when tests pass)?
by v_CodeSentinal | 2026-02-04 15:31:29+00:00
Over the last few months, I’ve been experimenting with removing humans from a very narrow
engineering execution path: fixing failing CI automatically.

The goal was not speed. It was correctness under pressure.

What I learned surprised me.

Autonomous fixes can work reliably in some cases — but there are classes of failures
where allowing automatic execution is actually more dangerous than slow human intervention,
even with full test coverage.

Some examples:

- Tests that validate behavior but not in-variants
- Implicit contracts that aren’t encoded anywhere
- Fixes that restore correctness locally while degrading system-wide guarantees
- “Successful” patches that narrow future recovery paths

In several cases, the correct action for the system was to stop entirely,
even though a patch existed and tests were green.

I ended up introducing hard constraints where autonomy must halt,
and treating refusal as a valid outcome — not a failure.

I’m curious how others reason about this boundary:

Where should autonomous systems stop,
even if they can technically proceed?

How do you encode that line without just re-introducing humans everywhere?
by dragonwriter | 2026-02-04 15:31:40+00:00
> LLMs have access to the same tools --- they run on a computer.

That doesn't give them access to anything. Tool access is provided either by the harness that runs the model or by downstream software, if it is provided at all, either to specific tools or to common standard interfaces like MCP that allow the user to provide tool definitions for tools external to the harness. Otherwise LLMs have no tools at all.

> The problem here is the basic implementation of LLMs. It is non-deterministic (i.e. probabilistic) which makes it inherently inadequate and unreliable for a lot of what people have come to expect from a computer.

LLMs, run with the usual software, are deterministic [ignoring hardware errors ans cosmic ray bit flips, which if considered make all software non-deterministic] (having only pseudorandomness if non-zero temperature is used) but hard to predict, though because implementations can allow interference from separate queries processed in a batch, and the end user doesn't know what other typical hosted models are non-deterministic when considered from the perspective of the known input being only what is sent by one user.

But your problem is probably actually that the result of untested combinations of configuration and input are not analytically predictable because of complexity, not that they are non-deterministic.
by crazygringo | 2026-02-04 15:31:45+00:00
Funny, you're definitely right -- I've done it probably just 2 or 3 times over a decade, when I felt like I had two meaningful but completely unrelated things to say. And it always felt super weird, almost as if I was being dishonest or something. Could never quite put my finger on why. Or maybe I was worried it would look like I was trying to hog the conversation?
by anonymous908213 | 2026-02-04 15:32:03+00:00
There are two notable differences between when the AGI-posters do it and when IRC-posters do it. AGI-posters extend their lowercase posting to what would normally be seen as more formal communication. They also tend to stick to using punctuation despite the lowercase. IRC posters usually keep it to informal communications, where it's a sign of casualness. That said, there is overlap, and it's of course not possible to instantly distinguish someone as a Sama devotee because of how they type; but it is clear that a lot of people in that bubble are intentionally adopting the style.
by Octoth0rpe | 2026-02-04 15:32:11+00:00
> I'm surprised you never noticed it

Probably due to social circles/age.

> I hate it, needless to say.

It certainly invokes a innate sense of wrongness to me, but I encourage you (and myself) to accept the natural evolution of language and not become the angry old person on your lawn yelling about dabbing/yeeting/6-7/whatever the kids say today.
by zuminator | 2026-02-04 15:32:23+00:00
In this case I think "valid concerns about locked down computing" is referring to the owner's use of the phone being restricted, so that they can't download applications they want to use, they don't have unrestricted access to the filesystem, they are forced to pay an Apple commission to engage in certain forms aloft commerce, etc. These may be acceptable tradeoffs but they're valid concerns nonetheless.
by JeremyNT | 2026-02-04 15:32:35+00:00
I did similar with incus!

I'm convinced that VMs are the right primitive here, for now. Being able to give an agent full root and passing it in just the stuff you want it to have is super easy and it's extremely foolproof. I have my assistants free to install software, run docker, build their own nested VMs, etc. knowing that the boundary is sound and that no capabilities will ever be sacrificed.

I might switch to LXC to reduce the weight somewhat (easy with incus) but this requires providing a more limited set of tools (i.e. podman instead of docker).

bwrap is great, but you're stuck with the limitations of the environment, which depending on what you're doing may neuter the agent.
by georgemcbay | 2026-02-04 15:32:43+00:00
> Because the first company to have a full functioning AGI will most likely be the most valuable in the world.

This may be what they are going for, but there are two effectively religious beliefs with this line of thinking, IMO.

The first is that LLMs lead to AGI.

The second is that even if the first did turn out to be true that they wouldn't all stumble into AGI at the same time, which given how relatively lockstep all of the models have been for the past couple of years seems far more likely to me than any single company having a breakthrough the others don't immediately reproduce.
by Symmetry | 2026-02-04 15:33:20+00:00
The formula for the equilibrium temperature for a sphere in sunlight is

2 * pi * r^2 * L / (4 * pi * d) * (1 -a) = 4 * pi * r^2 * sigma * T^4

As you can see there are pi*r^2 on both sides of the equation, the surface area to cross section ratio of a sphere doesn't change as it gets bigger and so the equilibrium temperature doesn't change no matter how big the sphere is. (d is the distance to the Sun, nothing to do with the sphere itself).
by thomasahle | 2026-02-04 15:33:26+00:00
There's a graveyard of 100s of papers with "approximate near linear time attention."

They always hope the speed increase makes up for the lower quality, but it never does. The quadratic time seems inherent to the problem.

Indeed, there are lower bounds showing that sub n^2 algorithms can't work: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2302.13214
by zackmorris | 2026-02-04 15:33:49+00:00
Just wanted to +1 this as a deep thinker who disagrees with the blog post's conclusion. I remember back on the years and decades I wasted dealing with the conceptual flaws inherent to nearly all software, and it breaks my heart.

90-99% of programming is a waste of time. Most apps today have less than a single spreadsheet page of actual business logic. The rest is boilerplate. Conjuring up whatever arcane runes are needed to wake a slumbering beast made of anti-patterns and groupthink.

For me, AI offers the first real computer that I've had access to in over 25 years. Because desktop computing stagnated after the 2000 Dot Bomb, and died on the table after the iPhone arrived in 2007. Where we should have symmetric multiprocessing with 1000+ cores running 100,000 times faster for the same price, we have the same mediocre quad core computer running about the same speed as its 3 GHz grandfather from the early 2000s. But AI bridges that divide by recruiting video cards that actually did increase in speed, albeit for SIMD which is generally useless for desktop computing. AI liberates me from having to mourn that travesty any longer.

I think that people have tied their identity to programming without realizing that it's mostly transcribing.

But I will never go back to manual entry (the modern equivalent of punch cards).

If anything, I can finally think deeply without it costing me everything. No longer having to give my all just to tread water as I slowly drown in technical debt and deadlines which could never be met before without sacrificing a part of my psyche in the process.

What I find fascinating is that it's truly over. I see so clearly how networks of agents are evolving now, faster than we can study, and have already passed us on nearly every metric. We only have 5-10 years now until the epiphany, the Singularity, AGI.

It's so strange to have worked so hard to win the internet lottery when that no longer matters. People will stop buying software. Their AI will deliver their deepest wish, even if that's merely basic resources to survive, that the powers that be deny us to prop up their fever dream of late-stage crony capitalism under artificial scarcity.

Everything is about to hit the fan so hard, and I am so here for it.
by mattmaroon | 2026-02-04 15:34:25+00:00
Yes but as OP pointed out, that requires you (or them) to spec it all out. And if you do, that’s how it works, and that’s probably exactly what happened when you buy any well-made product that was designed in America and built in China.

But a whole lot of manufacturing relies on the OEM not just for the production but also some of the engineering. They probably don’t communicate to you all of the little parts you didn’t spec because they don’t think you want them to.

A friend of mine worked for a major vacuum company that has 3 well-known lines. The very high end line is manufactured in the USA. The mid range line is fully designed here but manufactured there.

The low end line they basically tell a Chinese OEM what it should look like and certain parts of it and let the OEM fill in the blanks. OEM makes vacuums for other brands too, they know what size wires to use where, why waste money on American salaries speccing all the tedium?

OP is making something fundamentally different than what exists in some ways. It’s a lamp, but obviously it has some considerations other lamps don’t.

Also hardware (as OP pointed out) has long development cycles during which prices can actually fluctuate significantly. You don’t want to lock in cost plus pricing or you’ll end up buying components from their sister company at astronomical prices. You might not have time to source 100 different parts from Chinese OEMs yourself. Etc.

The whole thing is a complex guessing game. I’ve only manufactured approximately the simplest objects imaginable (stuff like gaskets and cups) and found it to be far more complex than I thought it would be. Manageable but something like a lamp I could see being a lot of unexpected work. I did not see, for instance, how much effort I had to put in speccing out the packaging for simple objects but then I found myself repacking things here.
by sporkland | 2026-02-04 15:35:06+00:00
As a collector of off kilter bigotry, I love finding new forms of it. Gave me a smile thinking about how much you must have nursed this grudge against morning people (they are a judgey holier than thou group on average). The particular group I harbor bigotry towards is car drivers with tinted front windows, which I find to display anti social behaviors as a group.
by greenavocado | 2026-02-04 15:35:10+00:00
Washington state lawmakers, led by Democrats, have introduced bills like HB 2320 and HB 2321. HB 2320 is sponsored solely by Rep. Osman Salahuddin (D-48th District), focusing on prohibiting 3D printers and CNC machines for untraceable firearms. HB 2321, pushing printer DRM requirements, similarly lacks Republican co-sponsors based on available details. In Washington where this is going on in the state House Democrats hold 59 seats, Republicans hold 39 seats and in the state Senate Democrats hold 30 seats, Republicans hold 19 seats. These Democrat-sponsored bills passed initial House committees along party lines, with no Republican co-sponsors or primary support
Virginia Democrats are advancing multiple gun ban bills in the 2026 session, including assault weapon sales bans and magazine capacity limits, primarily through Democrat-controlled committees. Virginia's General Assembly has a slim Democratic majority sponsoring and pushing these measures without Republican support.

In VA, bills like house SB 217 (assault weapon ban) and HB 271 (semi-auto ban) were approved in the Democrat-led Senate Courts of Justice Committee strictly along party lines. Sponsors such as Sen. Saddam Azlan Salim (D) lead these efforts, facing opposition from Republicans like Del. Terry Kilgore (R). They await full Assembly votes and signature from Democratic Gov. Abigail Spanberger.

In NY State, Democrats, holding supermajorities in the Assembly (103-47) and Senate (42-20), champion Governor Hochul's 2026 State of the State proposals. These include criminalizing unlicensed possession/sale of CAD files for 3D-printed guns (via Penal Law amendments), mandating 3D printer safety standards to block firearm production, and requiring recovery reports to state police. Key bills like S.227A (Sen. Hoylman-Sigal, active in 2025 session) target 3D-printed ghost guns/silencers as felonies; related A2228 pushes printer background checks.

Republicans offer no sponsorship or support, labeling Hochul's agenda and bills like S.227A "anti-gun, anti-speech" infringements on Second Amendment rights and innovation for non-gun printing. NRA-ILA criticizes them as futile against criminals while burdening hobbyists

In my opinion the ICE unrest is a smoke screen. During Obama's presidency (roughly 2009-2017), 56 people died in ICE custody, averaging about 7 per year. There were no major protests over the 56 deaths under Obama because the current situation is a psychological influence operation led by the same criminals who seek to exterminate the rights of ordinary Americans (showcased above). There is a separate fully frontal assault on personal liberties impacting normal American citizens happening right now and it is happening while all the attention is on Minneapolis!

https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=2320&Year=202...

https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=2321&Year=202...

https://www.nraila.org/articles/20260127/virginia-gun-contro...

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S227/amendme...

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A2228
by fl0ki | 2026-02-04 15:35:32+00:00
It really bothers me how many comments on this topic (here and elsewhere) draw a false parallel between LLM-based coding as an abstraction and frameworks and compilers as an abstraction. They're not the same thing and it matters.

Frameworks and compilers are designed to be leak-proof abstractions. Any way in which they deviate from their abstract promise is a bug that can be found, filed, and permanently fixed. You get to spend your time and energy reasoning in terms of the abstraction because you can trust that the finished product works exactly the way you reasoned about at the abstract level.

LLMs cannot offer that promise by design, so it remains your job to find and fix any deviations from the abstraction you intended. If you fell short of finding and fixing any of those bugs, you've just left yourself a potential crisis down the line.

[Aside: I get why that's acceptable in many domains, and I hope in return people can get why it's not acceptable in many other domains]

All of our decades of progress in programming languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. has been in trying to build up leak-proof abstractions so that programmer intent can be focused only on the unique and interesting parts of a problem, with the other details getting the best available (or at least most widely applicable) implementation. In many ways we've succeeded, even though in many ways it looks like progress has stalled. LLMs have not solved this, they've just given up on the leak-proof part of the problem, trading it for exactly the costs and risks the industry was trying to avoid by solving it properly.
by mmahemoff | 2026-02-04 15:35:54+00:00
Giving access to "my bank account", which I take to mean one's primary account, feels like high risk for relatively low upside. It's easy to open a new bank (or pseudo-bank) account, so you can isolate the spend and set a budget or daily allowance (by sending it funds daily). Some newer payment platforms will let you setup multiple cards and set a separate policy on each one.

An additional benefit of isolating the account is it would help to limit damage if it gets frozen and cancelled. There's a non-zero chance your bot-controlled account gets flagged for "unusual activity".

I can appreciate there's also very high risk in giving your bot access to services like email, but I can at least see the high upside to thrillseeking Claw users. Creating a separate, dedicated, mail account would ruin many automation use cases. It matters when a contact receives an email from an account they've never seen before. In contrast, Amazon will happily accept money from a new bank account as long as it can go through the verification process. Bank accounts are basically fungible commodities, can easily be switched as long as you have a mechanism to keep working capital available.
by cmsp12 | 2026-02-04 15:35:59+00:00
Location: Panama city, Republic of Panama
Remote: Yes, Remote Global
Willing to relocate: No
Technologies: Python, Java, Javascript, PHP, Go, Elixir, Django, React, NodeJS, MySQL, Postgresql
Résumé/CV: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tYkkxUA6tZ2Z3N3Zr3hbVnHW...
Email: sisnett2050@gmail.com

Hi! I'm a software engineer from Panama who loves building things and working with awesome people. Open to work full-time or contract based. I'm at EST time so I can work within American continental hours. God bless you!
by mh2266 | 2026-02-04 15:36:05+00:00
> amongst smart people i know there's a surprisingly high correlation between those who continue to be unimpressed by AI and those who use a hobbled version of it

is it "hobbled" to:

1. not give an LLM access to personal finances
2. not allow everyone in the world a write channel to the prompt (reading messages/email)

I mean, okay. Good luck I guess.
by thorGaze | 2026-02-04 15:36:17+00:00
Current Location: India
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Yes, if visa sponsored

Technologies: React Native, Android (Java/Kotlin), TypeScript, full-stack web development

Résumé/CV: https://rizvan.work

Email: rizvan.g.h@gmail.com

Mobile & Full Stack Engineer with 14 years of experience specializing in high-quality mobile applications and cross-platform solutions. Strong focus on performance optimization, clean architecture, and complex state management.
by luma | 2026-02-04 15:36:41+00:00
If your goal is to buy the cheapest machine you can find in the world, chances are good everything you buy is going to come from China. That Prusa Mk3 you bought ages ago can be upgraded to the latest model, which means you have the option of turning that device into a lifetime machine, something ONLY Prusa offers.

Yes, the initial purchase price is higher, the lifetime price might not be.
by stouset | 2026-02-04 15:36:53+00:00
Absolutely every aspect of it?

What’s so hard about adding a feature that effectively makes a single-user device multi-user? Which needs the ability to have plausible deniability for the existence of those other users? Which means that significant amounts of otherwise usable space needs to be inaccessibly set aside for those others users on every device—to retain plausible deniability—despite an insignificant fraction of customers using such a feature?

What could be hard about that?
by sceptic123 | 2026-02-04 15:36:58+00:00
You cherry picked a line and didn't include the rest:

> But the gains for middle‑ and lower‑income households were less than the gains for upper‑income households

And you're making claims that are only talking about income (where the evidence suggests that inequality is increasing) to suggest that people are better off.

Where is the evidence that "all income levels are doing better"?
by robot_jesus | 2026-02-04 15:37:19+00:00
Citation needed?

Apple does a lot of things I don't agree with in the interest of share price (like cozying up to authoritarian governments) but this seems like a reach to criticize them for a feature they have put extensive effort into, rather than applauding that they resist spying and enhance customer privacy. Sure, it's an optional feature and maybe they don't push broad acceptance of it, but it's important for those that need it.
by prophesi | 2026-02-04 15:37:22+00:00
You can choose to exclude Safari from these protections[0]. Honestly, looking at the list of "limitations" you'll have while running Lockdown mode, I'm surprised most of them aren't the system default.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/105120 - under "How to exclude apps or websites from Lockdown Mode"