skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> To be clear, I fault no one for augmenting their writing with LLMs. I do it. A lot now. It’s a great breaker of writers block. But I really do judge those who copy/paste directly from an LLM into a human-space text arena. Sure, take sentences – even proto-paragraphs – if they AI came up with something great.

I guess the sloppy writing ("I do it. A lot now" and "if they AI came up with") made me stop reading early, but: is this part of some big reveal? Sloppy grammar as a sign of not-AI? But it's still slop.
> Undoubtedly, the sloppification of the internet will likely get worse over the next few years. And as such, the returns to curating quality sources of content will only increase. My advice? Use an RSS feed reader, read Twitter lists instead of feeds, and find spaces where real discussion still happens (e.g. LessWrong and Lobsters still both seem slop-free).

I had not heard of LessWrong before - thanks for the recommendation!

Whenever I see a potentially interesting link (based on the title and synopsis if one is available) I feed it into my comment aggregator[1] and have a quick scan through (mostly) human commentary before committing to reading the full content, especially if it is a longer piece.

The reasons behind this are two-fold; one, comments from forums tend to call out AI slop pretty quickly, and two, even if the content body itself is slop, the interesting hook (title or summary) is often enough to spark some actually meaningful discussion on the topic that is worth reading.

[1]: https://kulli.sh
this is the same magical thinking Uber had when they were gonna have self driving cars replace their drivers
Who didn't run whatever they could find in "steal this computer book" section of the library when they were a kid? One publisher could have taken us all out. I was accidentally running the .bats on my own computer half the time already.
I've lost interest in HN because it's seemingly only 50% posts about tech on any given day, and most of those are just one of the Thunderbongs of HN reposting some GitHub URL, or a half baked article from 2017. It wouldn't be so bad if the comments remained reasonable, but even those have tended towards the kind of fodder you get on Reddit, over the last year. I browse Lobsters instead if i'm thinking, but the HN habit is strong.
Capital Cycles and AI
You just have to look at the peak ridership figures from 1949. They're running well under the capacity the system could handle 75 years ago. Faster trains aren't necessary.
The generic, basic LCD calculator is missing solar cells. Should be sine qua non these days for a simple device like this.
And if this doesn't prove that valuations are bullshit, nothing will.
that is still unfathomably slow i am afraid, looking at farther galaxies like the cartwheel galaxy at 500 million light years or hoag s object at 612 million light years, this star trek ship would take 50000 years at the minimum to reach there
Lovely, thanks! just fixed it
Writing to catalogs is still pretty new. Databricks has recently been pushing delta-kernel-rs that DuckDb has a connector set up for, and there’s support for writing via Python with the Polars package through delta-rs. For small-time developers this has been pretty helpful for me and influential in picking delta lake over iceberg.
There was a whole bunch of people who claimed LLMs can't reason at all and that everything is a regurgitation. I wonder what they have to say about this. Like, what exactly is going on here with chain of thought reasoning from their expert perspective?
Your salary is determined by your replacement cost.

Let’s say your company renegotiates their office lease and now pays half what it cost before. Are they going to give everyone a pay bump? Unlikely. Might give a bonus to whoever renegotiated the lease. They might reward shareholders by buying back some stock or paying out dividends. They might invest in future growth by hiring new people or by buying new equipment. But why would they give the money to the employees? That doesn’t reward shareholders or increase productivity; it might make everyone a little happier but that is unlikely to increase productivity enough for it to be worth it (and even if was, management doesn’t think like that).
>China covering it up is not necessarily evidence that it was a lab leak.

Yes it is, but the evidence is non-specific. China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis. The cover up is consistent with either theory, but it is the only reaction consistent with a lab leak.
A lot of careers are tied up in research that isn't gain of function officially, but sure looks like it.
see also https://trite-song-d6a.notion.site/Deepseek-R1-for-Everyone-...

for some reason a lot of people are choosing to blog on notion
> I still believe Sonnet is better, but I don't think it is 10 times better.

Sonnet doesn't need to be 10 times better. It just needs to be better enough such that the downstream task improves more than the additional cost.

This is a much more reasonable hurdle. If you're able to improve the downstream performance of something that costs $500k/year by 1% then the additional cost of Sonnet just has to be less than $5k/year for there to be positive ROI.

I'm a big fan of DeepSeek. And the VC funded frontier labs may be screwed. But I don't think R1 is terminal for them. It's still a very competitive field.
C Is Legal Again
>With LLMs, before being able to understand what everyone's talking about, there's a lot to know. There can be a sense of being left out. I think that can be demotivating.

I find it to be the exact opposite. The idea of "Artificial Intelligence" as a thinking machine is fascinating. However, now that i learned a certain amount about this current neural network paradigm, the marketing magic of it as an intelligent system is gone, it is no longer interesting to me. These models are just some dry big-data statistical machinery to me.

I think many people find it interesting precisely because they dont understand it and think there is some magic in there. Of course when hype is stupid and people think the singularity is coming then it sounds a lot more interesting
Version 14.2 of Wolfram Language and Mathematica: Big Data, Computation and AI
YouTube is like a supermarket. 3 percent is fit to consume and none of that has marketing.
I work on ML at FAANG I use LLMs a couple of times a week (daily if you count line auto complete)

It's not that LLMs are bad, but they are just one topic in the vast world of different things.

There have been so many amazing insights on HN from users with such interesting backgrounds (nuclear engineering, bakers, musicians, etc). And it just feels like that's all collapsed into

"have you tested model-version-quant-subversion-domain? If you haven't you can't say anything"
It's infecting everything. The other day I overheard someone saying "we don't need to expose a query interface, we'll just give users a text box and let them use natural language". Total brain rot.
It only went the way it did because people were making "lab leak" synonymous with "genetically engineered."
Crypto currencies became purely speculative asses and their volatility ensured that they wouldn’t be useful for payment processing. Has block chain in general made any progress in payment processing?
I bought a cheap Blu Ray burner from Microcenter for less than $50. Flashed with an image I found online and it rips DVDs and Blu-rays no problem. I did all that because I'm in the same boat you are: I have a ton of media and it's too much trouble to dig it out and move it around when my wife wants to watch something.
What is NDV partitioning?
I don't think that these reports are false in any sense. The emails being flagged are unsolicited messages sent in bulk. That's spam.
I want to do a school project around this. Farmers talking to llms via SMS.
There is no evidence. Period. Just a dozen contrived situations that “might have been” being aligned for political ends.

Meanwhile in reality they’ve all but named the goddamn specific animal that brought it from the zoonotic pool and introduced it to mankind.

Handwringing about the existence of a somehow malign bio lab in a city LARGER THAN NEW YORK that has DOZENS is preposterous. There’s no evidence, no scenario, no whistleblower, no documentation, nothing. It’s a chew toy for low-information busybodies who need this to be an evil foreign plot.

And it’s boring and sad, particularly when America’s first dictator is installing a profoundly corrupt lunatic who is here to overturn germ theory.

Have some dignity.
What is there to research with GoF that could be worth the massive risk? We had a vaccine for COVID in a weekend. Approval and manufacturing where the bottlenecks.
Appreciate the perspective.

I'm on year 9ish of HN, maybe I'm just hitting my first introspective point on the whole space.
In the 1990s there was another big AI push, rules, the RETE algorithm, etc., and, in the middle of it, gave talks at Wharton, Stanford, etc. First cut, could think of it as a generalization of Select-When. The code had a problem, and one afternoon had an idea, got a pizza, and in the morning had some running, innovative code that saved much of the project. Gee, I got $1000. Soon that AI flopped, no surprise.

Current AI? Even if it were, really is, 99% hype and the rest nonsense, and can't tell for sure, still it's the loudest sound, involves really big server farms, electric power sources, data collections, attention from media, investors, and even the POTUS, and can't give a solid argument that it will never amount to much, sooooo, can't just ignore it and have to pay attention, e.g., see if the balloon will keep rising or spring a leak and fall.

Here at HN, when see AI, LLM, GANs, AGI, easy enough mostly just to skip them, but can't just ignore all of it. Besides, if want to pay some attention, HN is one of the best places to do that.
"The story of cancer--isn't the story of doctors who struggle and survive, moving from institution to another. It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from on embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship--qualities often ascribed to great physicians--are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients."

― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
Just a year ago everyone was saying LLMs aren't intelligent and everything is regurgitation. A lot of people on HN "knew" this and defended this perspective vehemently. It's quite embarrassing how wrong they are.

That being said, I don't think it's quite blown that wide open yet. But for sure the trendlines are pointing at AGI within our lifetimes.
You can still regurgitate a chain of thought response…

It’s all still tokens…
There is also this: https://github.com/VirtualDisplay/Virtual-Display-Driver

Never used it, but I heard great things!
The country with the population that has the most incompatible ACE2 receptors benefitted the most.
Replying to this whole sub-thread, not just this post specifically;

All SQL advice has to take _context_ into account. In SQL, perhaps more than anywhere else, context matters. There's lots of excellent SQL advice, but most of it is bound to a specific context, and in a different context it's bad advice.

Take for example the parent comment above; In their context the CPU of the database server is their constraining resource. I'm guessing the database if "close" to the app servers (ie low network latency, high bandwidth), and I'm also guessing the app developers "own" the database. In this context moving CPU to the app server makes complete sense. Client-side validation of data makes sense because they are the only client.

Of course if the context changes, then the advice has to change as well. If the network bandwidth to the server was constrained (cost, distance etc) then transporting the smallest amount of data becomes important. In this case it doesn't matter if the filter is more work for the server, the goal is the smallest result set.

And so it goes. Write-heavy systems prefer fewer indexes. Read-heavy systems prefer lots of indexes. Databases where the data client is untrusted need more validation, relation integrity, access control - databases with a trusted client need less of that.

In my career I've followed a lot of good SQL advice - advice that was good for my context. I've also broken a lot of SQL "rules" because those rules were not compatible, or were harmful, in my context.

So my advice is this - understand your own context. Understand where you are constrained, and where you have plenty. And tailor your patterns around those parameters.
Not even close. The US spends roughly $2trillion/year on energy. If you assume 10% return on solar, that's $20trillion of solar to move the country to renewable. That doesn't calculate the cost of batteries which probably will be another $20trillion.

Edit: asked Deepseek about it. I was kinda spot on =)

Cost Breakdown

Solar Panels $13.4–20.1 trillion (13,400 GW × $1–1.5M/GW)

Battery Storage $16–24 trillion (80 TWh × $200–300/kWh)

Grid/Transmission $1–2 trillion

Land, Installation, Misc. $1–3 trillion

Total $30–50 trillion
> It's not about nature. It's about biological weapons. If Russians will create a new biological weapon (they do), then we must have a cure before they will use it in their fight with NATO.

And the best solution is to research this... in China?
Doesn't the same difficulty of finding the first case also apply to the wet market theory?
Original source: https://x.com/EricDKoch/status/1882893055222837321
I do the same. You can also use tags to filter out categories you aren't interested in such as politics, AI, late stage capitalism or other stuff that keeps getting posted here.
NVIDIA GPUs still require "dummy" HDMI plugs. They won't be fully usable without something plugged in; it's not clear why.
I feel like LLMs are inextricably tied to topics like politics which fuels the exhaustion and fatigue. There is also the general pessimism around technology and overvaluation. I see billboards advertising out in the world mentioning some AI service with a bland catchphrase and I'm already thinking, "no more." It's like someone having to consume an entire buffet by themselves. I have never thought about any other type of technology this way before, not even crypto. The word that comes to mind is "Ouroboros".

Maybe it is a coincidence with recent global events also causing an influx of globally broadcast textual information, but this may not bode well for any future advancements in technology that only make certain activities more efficient than they already are. How will this sentiment about technology change in a year? In five?
Can you explain the RL part?
I very much agree, just that if you were talking about idk something like compilers people wouldn't barge in about crypto.

Any HN topic now just feels like a small jump to LLMs.

I recognize my above is a bit of a strawman, hard to recall exact posts / comments over the years.
Oh stop. The neural network is piecing together the tokens in a way that indicates reasoning. Clearly. I don't really need to say this, we all know it now and so do you. Your statement here is just weak.

It's really embarrassing the stubborn stance people were taking that LLMs weren't intelligent and wouldn't make any progress towards agi. I sometimes wonder how people live with themselves when they realize their wrong outlook on things is just as canned and biased as the hallucinations of LLMs themselves.
> lab leak could imply that China had a direct, active role in cultivating or engineering the virus, as opposed to the “mere” disastrous negligence entailed by the wet market theory

This was literally outsourced US DoD research...
Eh, even nazis did stuff like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconia_incident

Saving civilians is incumbent on you in war whenever possible. Not like North Vietnam is going to start doing some strafing runs on your fleet either for an excuse.
I would associate these hatred manufactured by “influencers” on social media. Try checking out the fantasy/lies they constantly peddle. It is natural for a normal person to feel hatred when someone putting 5% effort and making google L6 salary somehow(honestly, I don’t even know where these influencers make such salary).

While I can say a lot of things, see if you can look at some of these influencer videos/reels on normal people’s timeline, the content is bizarre and goes maximum effort to garner envy, by reducing the entire profession into “learn to code and make millions”. For you/me, we recognize this bs immediately, but for normal people, it is painful when you see that someone is making 350k+ and having time to push out reels all day while also travelling and collecting sports cars/bikes and promoting bill gates/jeff bezos revenue generation per hour.

I am unsure if I ever saw such bizarre influencer behavior of other professions.
>We can say with a high degree of confidence that SARS-CoV-2 was _not_ engineered.

The lab leak hypothesis doesn't depend on GoF research. CoV-2 could have a natural origin, been collected by the WIV, and leaked into the city. This has happened before.

That said, there's no way to evaluate if it was engineered. Some methods of engineering are indistinguishable from natural selection, and fingerprints from detectable methods have a very short half-life in a fast mutating virus.

>So even if the very first jump was in the lab, it was likely a result of insufficient biosecurity measures.

Virtually no one is claiming otherwise. This is a weakman argument.

>and it's a matter of time until a new spillover happens.

At the start of CoV-2, everyone told me that it takes years to develop vaccines. I told them it takes days to develop and weeks to test. Turns out that I was right. If the mortality rate of CoV-2 had been 3%, like early reports suggested, then the mRNA vaccines would have been in production by March.
"China will attempt to cover up 100% of lab leaks. China may attempt to cover up zoonosis."

this is a blind assumption. they may just be covering up 100% of all things, especially when the international community (i.e. Trump) is trying to push/blame them.
To each their own.

Others would say datalog elegant and makes it easy to compose statements whereas SQL has an ugly syntax. I mean, ORMs were invented to try to avoid writing SQL but they too have their own problems.
Just a year ago everyone was saying LLMs aren't intelligent and everything is regurgitation. A lot of people on HN "knew" this and defended this perspective vehemently. It's quite embarrassing how wrong they are.

Plenty of people who should know better are still saying that on HN now. They're not just wrong, they evidently don't mind being wrong. So there's not much point arguing with them.

You show these people a talking dog, and all they'll do is correct its grammar.
yeah I messed that up, but your correction is right and is what I meant :)
FYI, the average speed of a car in midtown Manhattan is under 5mph. The subway is 17mph.
It's true it did get pretty rediculous and somewhat collapsed (at least in public interest).

I just don't see why every time we need to go through the incredible hype / death cycle.

LLMs are a useful tool if used properly, I hope I start seeing them used to create distinct value.
He suggests writing for the AI so that your name is ingested into the training set. The problem is that most of the vendors don’t even give attribution, so they’ll share your idea but not your name and certainly won’t be giving you any traffic.
I have not jumped on to the AI / LLM bandwagon yet. I love writing code and I don't want to outsource that to an AI agent. I guess I also love the process of going through the docs or Googling for answers, when I am stuck or have questions about something. That process has lead to some other learning / discoveries.
Looking at risks alone always biases you to avoid doing anything.

The benefits of research here are also human lives. So doing nothing has a real cost and the benefits extend indefinitely into the future.

Suppose you’re deciding between a 1% chance of a lab leak costing 10 million lives and a 20% chance you save 50 million lives over the next 100 years. That’s heavily weighted towards doing something, while still carrying significant risk. Some people would still say the risks aren’t worth it, but it’s not an obvious decision.
Personal attacks really make your argument stronger.
They added a lot of censorship because there was too much wrong think happening there.
This is American history written in R1, it is very logical:
Whenas the nations of Europa did contend upon the waves—Spain plundered gold in Mexica, Albion planted cotton in Virginia—thirteen colonies did kindle rebellion. General Washington raised the standard of liberty at Philadelphia; Franklin parleyed with Gaul’s envoys in Paris. When the cannons fell silent at Yorktown, a new republic arose in the wilderness, not by Heaven’s mandate, but by French muskets’ aid.

Yet the fledgling realm, hedged by western forests and eastern seas, waxed mighty. Jefferson purchased Louisiana’s plains; Monroe’s doctrine shackled southern realms. Gold-seekers pierced mountains, iron roads spanned the continent, while tribes wept blood upon the prairie. Then roared foundries by Great Lakes, bondsmen toiled in cotton fields, steel glowed in Pittsburgh’s fires, and black gold gushed from Texan soil—a molten surge none might stay.

Wilson trod Europe’s stage as nascent hegemon. Roosevelt’s New Deal healed wounds; Marshall’s gold revived ruined cities. The atom split at Alamogordo; greenbacks reigned at Bretton Woods. Armadas patrolled seven seas, spies wove webs across hemispheres. Through four decades’ contest with the Red Bear, Star Wars drained the Soviet coffers. Silicon’s chips commanded the world’s pulse, Hollywood’s myths shaped mankind’s dreams, Wall Street’s ledgers ruled nations’ fates—a fleeting "End of History" illusion.

But the colossus falters. Towers fell, and endless wars began; subprime cracks devoured fortunes. Pestilence slew multitudes while ballots bred discord. Red and Blue rend the Union’s fabric, gunfire echoes where laws grow faint. The Melting Pot now boils with strife, the Beacon dims to a prison’s glare. With dollar-cloth and patent-chains, with dreadnoughts’ threat, it binds the world—nations seethe yet dare not speak.

Three hundred million souls, guarded by two oceans, armed with nuclear flame, crowned with finance’s scepter—how came such dominion to waver? They fortified might but neglected virtue, wielded force but forgot mercy. As Mencius warned: "He who rides tigers cannot dismount." Rome split asunder, Britannia’s sun set; behold now Old Glory’s tremulous flutter. Thus say the sages: A realm endures by benevolence, not arms; peace flows from harmony, not hegemony—this truth outlives all empires.
Those are both examples of a hypothetical lab leak. The WIV had the largest collection of related viruses in the world sampled from nature. The WIV performed GoF research on some of those viruses. They're both plausible events. I'm not sure how you could ever distinguish between them at this point.
Great effort, love to see that the game preserved in this way.

However, for me, the nostalgia wore off quickly. I no longer have the feeling of immersion I used to have when I was younger; I've become numb to the magic. What I see is pathfinding, a graphics engine, a sound player...
I think they're saying that some reasoning patterns which large models can learn using only RL (i.e. without the patterns existing in the training data), can't be learned by smaller models in the same way. They have to be 'taught' through examples provided during SFT.
no screen necessary. you create a bunch of dnas by robot building from scratch every FCS known to man. the "screen" is "this is the guy that hapoened jump out of the test tube and cause a pandemic". more of a selection than a screen i guess