skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Near as I can tell, folks have no idea (really) how bad it could be, since most of the really significant shifts have been in removing a lot of major problems.

For example, eradicating Smallpox. Controlling Measles, Polio, Tetanus. Synthetic fertilizers eliminating famines in all but the most dysfunctional areas, etc.

It used to be dying of disease or famine was a huge problem in much of the world. Now it is only in tiny, very broken areas, for relatively small portions of the population.
You seem to be assuming "the amount of rice consumed" is high, but are you taking into consideration that the average portion may be small?
This sounds great, except I don't live in those places.

Is there a similar product that works in the USA?
It’s just compounding.

If your environment is isolating and the internet replaces easy socialization then you become isolated.

If your environment is low friction for socializing it is less likely.
Flintstones, meet the Flintstones

There the modern stone age family

From the town of Bedrock

There a page right out of history
Not the person you asked, but I (in 2004) was part of sysadmin team at the school. I helped developing tools for automating many tasks around teacher and student performance measurement and tracking.

I also wrote a piece of software that went super viral among sysadmins all over the city and I was getting "thank you" emails for years after.

Had anyone been developing RSS spec next to me I'd definitely jump on it. As any 14 y/o would.

I don't think I'm particularly brilliant or even smart. Your circle defines you.

Surround any healthy teenager with interest in tech with the right people and they'll have a lot to show in no time
It’s not even just the lack of access to the data, so much hidden information to make decisions is not documented at all. It’s intuition, learned from doing something in a specific context for a long time and only a fraction of that context is accessible.
There's still even a more fundamental question before getting there, how are we defining AGI?

OpenAI defines it based on the economic value of output relative to humans. Historically it had a much less financially arrived definition and general expectation.
I'm all in favor of intellectuals, it's academic bureaucracies I'm not fond of.

I think Socrates was a hoot, and he taught in a cave or something like that.

Priests teaching rural peasants to read in their monasteries, and collegial colleges for the public benefit are definitely meritorious.

But,I mean, there is enormous corruption going on.

How did Ren Youzai get into MIT? He was a body guard. Just because you've married into a billionaire's family MIT says "hey, send anyone you want in"?

And I'm sure MIT isn't alone in mysteriously average students who not only get in but graduate when linked to massively rich and powerful families. A recent US president comes to mind. Is that anti-intellectual?
Anyone that thinks this is just years away is utterly ignoring human history, nature, and relationship with technology. My own view is that this will never be achieved, and it's not even just about the tech.

Let's imagine for a moment that this is even achieved. Then, there is still complex engineering required in the world: to maintain and continually improve the AI engines and their interfaces. Unless you want to say that, past some point, the AI will be self-improving without any human input whatsoever. Unless the AI can read our minds, I'm not sure it can continue to serve human interests without human input.

But, never mind, we will never get there. At this very moment, tech is capable of so much more, but most sites I visit have bad UI, are bloated downloading and executing massive amounts of JS, riddled with annoying ads that serve no real useful purpose to society, and riddled with bugs. Even as an engineer, I really struggle to find any good no-code tools to create anything truly sophisticated without digging into hard-core code. Heck, they are now talking about adding more HTTP methods to HTML forms.
Yet another phone with Android Go edition, four very slow Cortex-A53 cores (https://www.unisoc.com/en_us/home/TZNSJ-9832E-7), 2GB of RAM (https://www.hmd.com/en_int/hmd-key/specs?sku=1GS009MPG3001), 2GB of “virtual RAM” (swap space)…

Destined to become immediate e-waste like all the other phones in its class. Wanna bet that it can only run 32-bit apps despite having a 64-bit CPU, because it's so memory-starved? That's extremely common in this segment.

The “Upgrade without overspending” pitch is rather bizarre considering that the specs on low-end phones seemingly do not change. Five years ago they were selling four very slow Cortex-A53 cores with 2GB of RAM, today they are selling four very slow Cortex-A53 cores with 2GB of RAM, in five years the phone manufacturers will have somehow continued twisting Google's hand to be able to continue selling four very slow Cortex-A53 cores with 2GB of RAM.
I know that in other languages, one obstacle for "just compile the C files" is that the target language might not have pointers and thus have difficulty representing things such as return-by-pointer.

I suppose in D this was less of an issue because D has pointers?
Elon is that you, again? This is your mother. You know you should be in bed playing D4 at this time.
Email Signatures Without the Fuss
Desktop application, for classic client/server should allocate a transient IPv6 local address only for one session (namely a desktop policy system must give that right to user selected applications only), and I even wonder if browsing one site should not get its own IPv6. Ofc, the local ISP IPv6 router should be scaled for a reasonable domestic usage.

Ofc, server like desktop applications should randomly choose an IPv6 there, but it has to stay stable since this number will have to be given to other people to connect to such server (I am talking dodging DNS $$$ racketeering or Big Tech "name<->IPv6" mapper service, aka for the smhol internet).

Only if the ISP is providing a /64 prefix ofc.

In my country, nearly 100% of domestic internet lines are working like that, and it has been the case for years. The main issue, is IPv6 on mobile internet: in my country most mobile internet has IPv6 enabled... but it seems you don't get a /64 prefix but a different /128 ip address at each authentication of your sim card.

If it ends up not being a trick of my current IPv6 mobile internet modem, this is very bad, REALLY bad: I cannot give a stable mobile internet IPv6 to my contacts for communication (sort of a phone number dedicated to them). Mechanically, it will force people to use classic centralized client-server services, hence force people into Big Tech.
MCPAdapt leverage 650 MCP server as tools in any agentic framework
Hello there,

I just open-sourced a repository that allows to seamlessly integrate Model Context Protocol (MCP) server as tools in any agentic framework starting with smolagents.

Have a look let me know what you think and join me in adapting MCP servers for other frameworks.
Looks pretty interesting.. Wonder if this can be done with nothing but browser, CSS, html and a JS without those extra CDNs.
I do it the old school way, taglines. http://crn.hopto.org/taglines.html
AI is taking the US in a new direction
> Is it worth making the algorithm slower just to have it work on extreme edge cases?

Yes! If an API has no documented (and preferably enforced) limits on its arguments, the caller has every right to assume the full range of the argument types is supported.

Else it is very much a bug.

“Be reasonable, dude” is ok when you order 1,000 beers. It’s not an appropriate response when calling a binary search API.
I guess part of the point is that the value of the UX will quickly start to decrease as more tasks or parts of tasks can be done without close supervision. And that is subject to the capabilities of the models which continues to improve.

I suggest that before we satisfy _everyone_'s definition of AGI, more and more people may decide we are there as their own job is automated.

The UX at that point, maybe in 5 or 10 or X years, might be a 3d avatar that pops up in your room via mixed reality glasses, talks to you, and then just fires off instructions to a small army of agents on your behalf.

Nvidia actually demoed something a little bit like that a few days ago. Except it lives on your computer screen and probably can't manage a lot of complex tasks on it's own. Yet.

Or maybe at some point it doesn't need sub agents and can just accomplish all of the tasks on its own. Based on the bitter lesson, specialized agents are probably going to have a limited lifetime as well.

But I think it's worth having the AGI discussion as part of this because it will be incremental.

Personally, I feel we must be pretty close to AGI because Claude can do a lot of my programming for me. I still have to make important suggestions, and routinely for obvious things, but it is much better at me at filling in all the details and has much broader knowledge.

And the models do keep getting more robust, so I seriously doubt that humans will be better programmers overall for much longer.
It’s time for a 5150 now, right? Dude is a danger to himself and others.
Don't bother me Mom, I'm playing PoE2 on hardcore mode again, on my totally not boosted account.
There is a circular argument going on in this article. Basically:

> "Flexible is better. Why? Because specific has been consistently worse"

I mean, I don't deny the historical trend. But really, why is it so? It makes sense to follow the trend, but knowing more about the reason why would be cool.

Also, I feel that the human cognitive aspects of "engineering some shit" are being ignored.

People are engineering solutions not only to be efficient, but to get to specific vantage points in which they can see further. They do it so they can see what the "next gen flexible stuff" looks like before others.

Finally, it assumes the option to scale computation is always available and ignores the diminishing returns of trying to scale vanguard technology.

The scale requirements for AI stuff are getting silly real fast due to this unshakable belief in infinite scaling. To me, they're already too silly. Maybe we need to cool down, engineer some stuff and figure out where the comfortable treshold lies.
Show HN: Pyper – Concurrent Python Made Simple
Hello and happy new year!

We're excited to introduce the Pyper package for concurrency & parallelism in Python. Pyper is a flexible framework for concurrent / parallel data processing, following the functional paradigm.

Source code can be found on [github](https://github.com/pyper-dev/pyper)

Key features:

Intuitive API: Easy to learn, easy to think about. Implements clean abstractions to seamlessly unify threaded, multiprocessed, and asynchronous work.

Functional Paradigm: Python functions are the building blocks of data pipelines. Let's you write clean, reusable code naturally.

Safety: Hides the heavy lifting of underlying task execution and resource clean-up. No more worrying about race conditions, memory leaks, or thread-level error handling.

Efficiency: Designed from the ground up for lazy execution, using queues, workers, and generators.

Pure Python: Lightweight, with zero sub-dependencies.

We'd love to hear any feedback on this project!
That strikes me as boomer stuff though. Not as many millennial++ doing that, and I figure that number will just decline (especially given that you can easily just go be socially repulsive with anonymity and no repercussions on other mainstream networks now).
Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, a explorer/anthropologist. He and a group of other volunteers sailed across the pacific on a raft built using ancient methods to prove that the pacific isles were settled by south americans (this turned out to be wrong based on population genetics). Great read!
Related article from CNN, yesteday, "More than a dozen states have passed new laws that led to restrictions on pornography. Now, the Supreme Court will weigh in"
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/11/politics/invs-porn-age-verifi...
HMD is a mobile phone brand; "Key" is a line of phones.

I thought it was something like a YubiKey, but it appears instead to be a really cheap phone running Android Go.
Thanks you, I have it at last! Been watching from the sidelines for 10 years!
1. TypeScript (and Dart, which influenced it) would not exist without the research on gradual and optional typing. Many other of the type system features in TypeScript – like type inferencing, intersection and union types, and type-level programming (e.g. conditional types) – find their origin in PL research, and were uncommon in mainstream but common in academic programming languages before TypeScript appeared.

2. Similarly, mypy was created by Jukka Lehtosalo as part of his PhD [1] and part of a wave of research in applying gradual typing to dynamically typed programming languages.

3. Rust's ownership types and borrowing are based on PL research, such as linear logic / linear types. Same for traits. Early Rust even had typestates.

4. Several of the core developers of Rust, Go, TypeScript, C#, Dart, Scala, have a PhD in PL or a background in research.

5. Generics are another feature that was heavily researched in academia (admittedly a longer time ago) before becoming part of mainstream programming languages.

So I completely disagree with you: most modern languages have been heavily influenced by programming language research. In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to find a modern PL that hasn't been in some way influenced by PL research.

(One thing I agree with in your comment, is that current PL research focuses too heavily on type systems and should look more at other interesting PL features. My recommendation to InkCanon would therefore be to look broader than type systems. The problem with research on type systems is that, because it looks math-y, it feels more like "science" and hence "cures impostor syndrome". But cool stuff can be real science too!)

[1] https://mypy-lang.org/about.html
"That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."
Pair this with impact of mega constellations with 10k+ satellites , which not only destroy optical imaging, but also interfere with radio-astronomy
And how do you call all their allocated IP ranges which have been performing attacks and scans for months without anything done?

I don't want to be that specific, but it is the same for aws(cloudflare), gogol cloud, etc. Basically, it seems the clouds are now used by hackers for their deeds.

(I am self hosted)
I truly feel sorry for those that will use this phone for anything that is not just calling and writing sms. I've had relatives with slow phones, and especially if old and not tech savvy, they click, wait, click again because nothing happened. Then, the feedback of the first click arrives, but the 2nd click will now click something different because what is being displayed has now changed. So they go back, but it's so slow they have to wait and press back again (...). And so, the eternal cycle of slow mobile phones restarts
Palisades Reservoir Was Closed to Repair Its Cover
Show HN: Breather – Forced, meaningful breaks fixed my anxiety and productivity
I have had terrible anxiety (and related physical symptoms) for the last couple years. It would trigger mostly when I was engaged in work (software dev), even for shorter periods. One day while I was completely obsessed with a work related problem, there was a sudden power failure. It was just long enough to break my "obsession loop" and forced me to attend to some household chores while waiting for the power to be restored. A few mins in, I noticed that I felt a lot better/lighter/loose physically and also, spontaneously had multiple other solutions to the problem I was stuck on.

That inspired me to build this app. It acts just like that external “intervention” to break my infinite/obsession loops and helps fix my anxiety while boosting productivity/creativity.
Grok finally talked itself into a corner and admitted that there is no education/nutrition/etc induced IQ increase:

In essence, while the context of education and IQ today is vastly different from the agricultural and genetic science debates of Lysenko's time, the core idea of inheriting acquired traits has a historical parallel in Lysenkoism. Modern science, however, does not support the notion that education-induced IQ gains are genetically inherited.
So isn’t cursor just a tool for Claude or ChatGpt to use? Another example would be a flight booking engine. So why can’t an AI just talk direct to an IDE? This is hard as the process has changed, due to the human needing to be in the middle.

So Isn’t AI useless without the tools to manipulate?
Yet another Trump win cascade.

Better to prepare for more. Some did it out of conviction. But as we saw with FB the ones that did for other reasons are going to back pedal
Small info piece: Chrome isn't open source.

Otherwise I agree (even if it means agreeing with Peter Thiel in this case).
> if left to my own devices I would do research anyway.

Then you're going to have a great time during your PhD, good luck and have fun!

> screw all of you!

"Disregard!" https://stepsandleaps.wordpress.com/2017/10/17/feynmans-brea...
I'm 100% with you on the nebulous value of AI, however given the "theme" of HN I think the bias is here towards such an assumption.

I am not dismissing the value of dance or culture or social science or even event management (or farming or any of the dozens and dozens of things people can get Ph.D's in).

And I note that in my post above.

I am seriously not being sarcastic by saying it's worthwhile. Probably to her. Maybe her department. Maybe even to break dancing (well, maybe not break dancing).

But the presumption that someone getting a Ph.D has somehow "uplifted us all" as a default seems highly improbable to me.

It no doubt uplifts a number of the degree holders, if statistics bear out.

But that's like saying "If Elon Musk becomes rich, we all become rich" and I don't think that's true. Not even in some "trickle down" economics kinda way.

If Elon gets a Ph.D we have all to assume some intrinsic benefit to humanity?

Uhm, I don't think so.
Wow. How I long to be in the position you are! I got burnt out, and then learnt to emotionally detach myself from my work so that I don’t get hurt by things that are beyond my control.

But I sorely miss not being 100% dedicated. What I do for work has always been a big part of my identity. And half-assing something feels like not being true to myself.
Agreed. There's a difference between developing new AI, and developing applications of existing AI. The OP seems to blur this distinction a bit.

The original "Bitter Lesson" article referenced in the OP is about developing new AI. In that domain, its point makes sense. But for the reasons you describe, it hardly applies at all to applications of AI. I suppose it might apply to some, but they're exceptions.
This is a pretty crazy comment
Wordpress is more of an OS today.

I took a 12 years hiatus from WP and just went back into actively using it since a couple of weeks now.

The shift went clearly into massive plugins that frees you from all the grunt work that was necessary 10+ years ago.

To me as someone who once wrote plugins on my own, had to develop themes totally by hand using the infamous WP loop etc. this is like going from command line to drag and drop UI.

WP is a OS and Divi, ThriveTheme etc. took over.

I like it, it saves a ton of time.
The latest childish tantrum Mullenweg has thrown is this passive-aggressive post where, ostensibly to get a Wordpress fork off the ground, he's deactivated the Wordpress.org accounts of 5 people, including the people who just asked for a change in the governance model of Wordpress. That entire post is a huge ball of bitter passive-aggressive shit couched in "howdy" language. [1]

This includes the account of someone who has not been involved with Wordpress development since 2020. [2] [3]

[1] https://wordpress.org/news/2025/01/jkpress/

[2] https://heatherburns.tech/2025/01/12/another-day-of-stochast...

[3] https://bsky.app/profile/mor10.com/post/3lfgqcge62c2d
I don’t know why I’ve been down voted.

Women are woefully represented and under paid in pretty all work forces.

The same also applies to people of colour.

If the developed west didn’t have an issue with these groups we would have equality, from where I’m sitting things don’t look that equal!
Apple Likely to Face Fiercer Challenges in 2025
Again, not much use for the locals at this elevation . That’s super dry area
I think there is value in companies built around AI. The value comes from UX, proprietary supplementary datasets, and market capture. Businesses built now will be best positioned to take advantage of future improvements in general AI. That is why I am building in the AI space. I’m not naive to the predictable improvement in foundational models.
Conceptually that seems right, but think there is a decade+ worth of runway left on working in the "glue" space. i.e. connecting the AI and our lived realities.

I don't see the general-ness of AI overcoming the challenges there...cause there is a lot of non-obvious messiness there.
Accurate and nicely written article.

There's a worse angle I've seen on the same story: A different engineer, who was already running the good open source solution successfully with their team, heard the other engineer had an enterprise sales assault dumped on them, for some load of trash, and so tried to sound the alarm, but it was already out of the other engineer's hands, because upper subtrees of the org chart had already signed on with political capital (and in a couple cases, it's somehow become an express personal performance metric that they spend the company's money on this specific product). So all alternatives are blocked, everyone has to wait the next couple months for the sale to finalize, and then another month for IT to set up the SSO and databases, and forced to migrate from working solutions to garbage. Then eventually the contract doesn't get renewed, with appropriate face-saving for those who pushed it through, but half the people upon whom it was inflicted have already found jobs in better companies, a quarter got PIP'd or stalled careers for being sabotaged by the trash, and the remaining quarter will mostly be laid off next year.

Just say NO to enterprise sales.

The only thing worse than having to do enterprise sales to sell your own product, is being the employees forced to use the likely bad purchasing decisions of other enterprise sales.
You think it will be 25 years before we have a drop in replacement for most office jobs?

I think it will be less than 5 years.

You seem to be assuming that the rapid progress in AI will suddenly stop.

I think if you look at the history of compute, that is ridiculous. Making the models bigger or work more is making them smarter.

Even if there is no progress in scaling memristors or any exotic new paradigm, high speed memory organized to localize data in frequently used neural circuits and photonic interconnects surely have multiple orders of magnitude of scaling gains in the next several years.
But can you run llms that easily with vllm? do you have to fiddle with formats to get it to run?
I did this once with a rectifier, long antenna and an earpiece. In those days (50 years ago), strong AM radio stations were common, and I did indeed listen to several stations at the same time. If nothing else, it builds an appreciation for all the other junk in an AM receiver.
I've had a fair bit of success making miniature "local HTML with embedded JS, no external resources" apps like this. You just have a single file that runs in the browser like an Excel macro but much more secure. You can have the JS and CSS embedded within the HTML file too, which makes it even easier.

I'd use a plain file picker for loading instead of the file system access API. That's even less security cross-section.
According to Wikipedia, it still exists with wetlands and marshes, but the majority of the time it’s dry.

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