skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Impressive numbers, but have you ever tried to use one of these things to get actual work done? They're terrible at it! Until these companies start demonstrating some actual value this is merely a hype bubble. Nvidia is slightly different categorically because they're selling the picks and shovels in this hype gold rush--but they were also in the last one (web3/crypto/nfts). At some point if these folks don't actually start delivering the value they're hyping it's all coming crashing down.
There's also this annoying dissonance between 'evangelists' and reality. Evangelists often feign that we're on the cusp of artificial general intelligence, while in practice LLMs remain stupid, error prone, and unreliable for anything beyond tasks that have a vast number sources for highly relevant training. Which also somewhat dilutes the utility, because I could just as well find those sources!

Oh right, that must just be because I'm not giving it the magic prompt that makes them magically turn into geniuses.
Cheers, that looks nice.
I appreciate your positive experience with the tech / content.

It's helpful for me to understand the other side of the coin.
Wow! Thank you for sharing this. I am bookmarking this article for future use!
( Truth be told, I did not fully understand everything but hopefully future me would )

Reminds of that article about Postgres for everything: https://github.com/Olshansk/postgres_for_everything
> Like through taxes on the sale of the property

That just encourages corporate ownership of property (unless you mitigate that), but overall I don’t know why we’d disincentivize moving closer to a new workplace or into a smaller home once it will do for you.
It doesn't matter who you "commission" to do the actual work, most of the additional cost is in legal battles over rights of way and environmental impacts and other things that are independent of the construction work.
I'm kinda tired of seeing the first comment to a totally unrelated topic be, "you know, LLMs these days can actually..."

Where is the creativity? Are we doomed to solve every problem, technological, social, and political with an LLM now? Is this the slow descent into Idiocracy?
The Colorado River Delta Series (2021)
With lots of talk lately about California's river water management, I thought it would be neat to share these photos of the Colorado River Delta, where 100% of the water is diverted to human use and none of it to the sea.

We have very nearby and valuable evidence to demonstrate the impact of short-sighted freshwater release policies.
Are you boycotting LLMs or something? They're one of the best hacker tools around lately. Tasks I would have frustratedly scoured stack overflow to solve in three hours I'm solving in 30 seconds using cursor in agent mode and just letting it run whatever it wants as root on my MacBook. Maybe your sadness is rooted in the fact that we interacted with computers one way for a few decades and some of that's becoming quite obsolete as the months whizz by on this tech freight train.
Silicon Valley is full of techno-religious, socially awkward people trying to find God in technology. AGI promises to understand them in a way normies never could. A dream that will never happen, just like proof in God is impossible... but people believe anyways. Hope in finding an answer to the unanswerable. The human brain processes information in narrative form, lovers of a good story are the ones most enamored with AI, with hype and trends, because it's a vision of the future where the unanswerable questions about existence are answered, finally. Well, let's speculate and burn our sacred planet down one computing plant at a time. And yet, we'll find ourselves still questioning, still trying to answer the unknowable.
Datawave: Open source data fusion across structured and unstructured datasets
That said, "lab leak" still doesn't mean "virus built or engineered by humans for nefarious reasons."

I think the conversation about this has been repeatedly horrendous because it seems like people don't really understand that there are lots of degrees between "virus in research lab" and "genetically engineered bio-weapon." Though obviously there's more embarrassment and culpability on China's side (by most standards) with a poorly controlled lab situation than some rando, basically serf by implication, selling bush meat at a bazaar.
this should be faster https://github.com/webfft/webfft.github.io technically because it is using hardware for fft whereas current library is doing them on cpu but there is additional overhead with hw so we would actually have to test it.
> I wouldn't have stuck around with my family, either

Which is a major plot point of stories like Handmaid's Tale where you get caught in a civil war with opposing views of the territory you're in when it starts. You didn't start the war, but now you're an enemy for just living in your home. Do you just give up your beliefs or do you try to get out of there?

All war is hell, but civil wars especially
Not even a week into this administration. 207 weeks and 2 days to go! Woot!
> As we've discussed, the greatest abundance of related viruses occurred around Yunnan and Southeast Asia. Dr. Shi herself didn't expect spillover in Wuhan:

And SARS-CoV-1 occurred in Guangzhou. The closest known relative virus (WIV16) is 96% homologous to SARS-CoV-1 and was found in Yunnan as well, which is over 1,000 km away from Guangzhou. Either the range of the bats carrying these coronaviruses is much larger than anyone in the world (including Dr Shi) knows about, or else the "blast radius" of the animal trade in China is considerably larger than anyone knows about.
I have been on HN for 16.5 years and I don’t plan to stop now. It’s been worse.

Trends come and go. The stories and comments come and go. HN is constantly changing. You can’t attach yourself to how something was before. It will change again.

Thats just life.
Run it on Computerless for maximum DevSecCloudOps!
Interesting article, I didn’t realize how much content/interaction on onlyfans is faked. I don’t know anyone who admits to using this kind of parasocial pornography. In my social circles it would be embarrassing to admit that this is how you spend your money.

I used to watch [regular] porn when I was younger and had little real-life sexual experience, but coming back to it as an adult I mostly find it kind of weird and off-putting. I’d assume onlyfans gets most of its business from men who have a hard time finding connection in the real world, and maybe don’t even have a sense of what genuine connection looks and feels like. I have a lot of empathy for them.
You can learn italic handwriting at https://handwritingsuccess.com/handwriting-for-adults/
What I don't really get is why that concept doesn't apply to both the wet market and the lab leak scenarios.
I really enjoyed the concepts in "Artificial Intelligence, a Modern Approach" which really grounds a first-principles foundation of automated reasoning. Warning: The first 80% of the book doesn't have any sexy new deep learning approaches, but I still think it is very valuable to see the history.
Recently started using replit and I'm pretty impressed. I'm using it to generate a static marketing website for a side project I'm working on and have been pretty happy with the results. It generates simple code that I can easily debug, and also has a pretty complete ecosystem that the AI can fully access, including configuring deployments and debugging server errors. It's the latest thing I've come across that's genuinely impressed me

I probably wouldn't use it full time as an IDE, but I have been using it as a second programmer to push out features, while I work on other corners of the codebase
Bitter lesson says any kind of specialization is not worth it[0]. Also, you want to be able to have mixed language conversations, like defining a Chinese word in English.

[0] but it might be worth it if you need a smaller model because then there are tradeoffs again.
Unfortunately, not any time soon.
I think that depends heavily on what your existing background is. If you are more product-minded then it may make sense to take a project-oriented approach and crank out prototypes for small functional units.

I'm not sure its possible to predict the evolution of AI with respect to coding in a way that actually matters to career planning, but if you want to hedge your bets, I suggest learning high-level descriptions of e.g. algorithms and programming patterns & paradigms instead of focusing on specific implementations. You can always specialize a generalist, but going the other way is widely regarded as more difficult.

If AI replaces 90% of coders, then we'll still need architects, mathematicians and planners (maybe) but if for some reason the market implodes (supply chain failures, regulation, etc.) general-purpose programming skills and a decent understanding of CS theory should be a good safety net.
> We demonstrate that the reasoning patterns of larger models can be distilled into smaller
models, resulting in better performance compared to the reasoning patterns discovered
through RL on small models

I found this statement from the paper to be at odds with what you cited, but I guess they mean SFT+RL would be better than either just SFT and RL
But then the comments are a deluge of breathless hype about "agi" and "changing the world". Just like it was for the fake internet money people--decentralized banking is gonna change everything!!!11oneeleven.
Tufte Font

https://resilientwebdesign.com/
Even in the wildlife spillover case don't you still blame it on people doing business with bat carcasses or was there some kind of obviously fine as an animal product intermediary between the bats and the people?
Nvm this has been around for a while. Still a simple file explorer would be nice for when you want to browse the structure.
There is nothing wrong with that. You should worry about those, who do such experiments secretly. (Russians)
What about a simple software equalizer?
The federal bureaucracy has been making moves for months to prevent Trump from effectively changing policy[0].

Moving ADA protected accessibility concerns into the literal DEI departments (I don't mean individual people) is clearly part of that attempt to "harden" themselves from executive orders and top down policy changes.

Indeed the ATF has just blatantly violated the executive order ending DEI programs[1].

Ultimately it's the bureaucracy using accessibility as a shield who are responsible for it being attacked.

What I say is certainly... pithy but I take exception with saying any of it is un-substantive or flamebait.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/22/politics/resistance-trump-lib...

[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/atf-accused-of...
Why? It’s not necessary to watch new stuff , and the new stuff is mostly terrible .

Consider that new doesn’t mean good .
People get so tangled up in the geopolitics of these types of conflicts, and forget that every person the war touched has a personal story.

I’ve known quite a few Vietnamese who lived through the conflict and their stories, no matter how lucky they were, the stories are incredible and hard to comprehend, no matter which side and whether they suffered horribly or made it out real relatively unscathed.

Whether fleeing at a moments notice from your country of birth, never knowing where you are going or whether you’ll ever return. Or even the stories of people seeing the end and planning in advance what they will need and how to make sure family is ok.

Then you think about the scale of it and that tens of millions of humans went through it and it’s impossible to comprehend the scale of it.

What is really remarkable is the resiliency of humans. You speak to people who went through it and realize many have the perspective of “you did what you had to do” and “its a part of my life that is over now”, but try and imagine how hard it must be to live in a country of relative peace and see all these people around you who have never, and will never, go through anything similar, and try and have it all make sense.

It’s also really fascinating talking to people who stayed in South Vietnam after. The entire system is reset. The police, the government, even where you get your food is swept away and rebuilt. I’ve noticed many people thrive on rumors as the government isn’t known for transparency. Days after the war order is restored and you hear rumors of what will come. Neighbors gossip, you do your best to prepare and wait.
I never knew there were AI Icon Generators. As someone who can't make graphics if my life depended on it, I will need to try this out.
Desktops shouldn't be simple. They should work reliably and predictably like every good procduct. Everyone wants something simple until they want to do something that's not supported because it's not a simple use case. So unless you are a very simple person who always only does very simple things and lead a uniquely simple life (i envy you), a simple desktop is not for you.
Sometimes I wish I had the drugs that would make me believe in things like "we're on the cusp of AGI", everything would be so much more exciting.
+1, I'm a few chapters in and its highly instructive. Gives me a deeper appreciation for the modern deep learning regime. Also, as we enter the agent supercycle, I think many of the basic algorithms for search, planning, etc. will make comeback a in a huge way.
Funny, everything I see (not actively looking for DeepSeek related content) is absolutely raving about it and talking about it destroying OpenAI (random YouTube thumbnails, most comments in this thread, even CNBC headlines).

If DeepSeek's claims are accurate, then they themselves will be obsolete within a year, because the cost to develop models like this has dropped dramatically. There are going to be a lot of teams with a lot of hardware resources with a lot of motivation to reproduce and iterate from here.
i think eddie chang's paper on voice synthesizing is published, i forget if it was nature or neuron. it's prob on pubmed but i'm too lazy/sleepy to pull it. doris tsao and a number of collaborators have a few nice papers out w ML applications to single unit/LFP recordings
Well the best thing to come out of the RTS engines were the custom maps in SC1, SC2, WC3 anyway.

Which is to say that so much money has been spent on those designers, whether at Blizzard or Westwood, or later in the near billion dollars that has been handed out to former Blizzard people starting their own thing. And then, some guy Tya in his bedroom in China designed better games.

They should be credited for building communities first and foremost. It wasn't ever really about the games.
On Hacker News, those get downvoted very quickly.
Perfect timing! I got annoyed by Ads in streaming services and decided to build something to mute the TV when an Ad comes on. Simple vision based system.

I'll post a write up in a few days.
It's true-- just like in Marvel the comic book movie, where the bad guy causes upwards of 50% casualties on the entire planet!
The use of `push_bind` here is strange to me. The idomatic way would be do something like:

let mut builder = Query::select();

then you could (optionally) add clauses like so:

builder.and_where(Expr::col("id").eq("A"))

it shouldn't matter if a where clause exists or not, the builder should figure that out for you.

If you are going to treat your QueryBuilder as glorified StringBuilder, then of course you won't see the value of a QueryBuilder.
DataFrames might be an underrated Entity Component System for game development
Sorry it wasn’t more clear; I’ll have to update the docs to make it more obvious.

But in the README, specifically in this section here https://github.com/scottvr/chimeracat/?tab=readme-ov-file#cl... , if you click/tap the rightward-facing triangle/arrow, it should expand a pasted example report.
Author here, thank you for the kind words :-)

I haven't yet written a "formal launch post" of the CatBench Postgres/pgvector app that I used for examples in the current article, but all the source code and install instructions are already available here:

https://github.com/tanelpoder/catbench
You haven't quoted anything about this supposed "duty of due diligence" which is what I asked for.

> In the case of a work made for hire...

Per what I quoted in my last post, commissioned works in the usual sense are not normally "works made for hire" so none of that applies.

> respondeat superior, a common law principle that holds employers legally responsible for the acts of an employee, if such acts are within the scope and nature of the employment.

i.e. exactly what I said a couple of posts back: "If your employee violates copyright in the course of working for you then you might be responsible for that, but that's for the same reason that you might be responsible for any other crimes your employee might commit in the course of working for you, not because you have some special copyright-specific responsibility."
I must be on the wrong site :/ where can I find this Hacker News?
Appeals are generally based on erroneous judge's decisions, mostly pre-trial, but sometimes things like evidence foundation and objections during trial.

Appellate courts very rarely touch jury decisions. I know someone who was found guilty at trial and a week later a jury member wrote a letter saying she was persuaded to change her "not guilty" verdict by two other jury members who hadn't declared their relationship to each other, were using their cellphones in the jury room and had looked up the criminal history of the defendant in the newspapers (which turned out to be completely wrong). Even with that letter the trial court said it didn't affect the verdict, but in this case the appeals court made the rare decision to overrule. Interestingly they mentioned a racial issue too: "where a juror makes a clear statement that indicates he or she relied on racial stereotypes or animus to convict a criminal defendant, the Sixth Amendment requires that the no-impeachment rule give way in order to permit the trial court to consider the evidence of the juror's statement and any resulting denial of the jury trial guarantee."
Interesting design choice. One alternative would be to not send any output to speakers until the controls work? I would wonder what else is wrong that isn't immediately obvious.
I believe making corporations actually pay high taxes is an example of this. IIRC that did occur in the 50's and 60's in America.....
they clearly missed out on the fact that they could've trained their $5bn model for much less
Edit: name checks out.

>It makes the pandemic deterministic

I don't understand why determinism comforts you, but you do you. Unfortunately, a lab leak is totally stochastic, and I hope this revelation doesn't keep you up at night.

>It's a popular topic ... because it moves the pandemic back into ... policy, etc. It becomes a human problem with human solutions.

Zoonosis is a wet market hypothesis, not a random encounter. China failed, and continues to fail, to ban or regulate the wet markets to solve the problem. Zoonosis is clearly policy and human problem.

>It appeals to the contrarian mindset.

The lab leak appeals to anyone who groks statistics. Wet market zoonosis could happen at any one of 40,000 Chinese wet markets. But a lab leak could only happen at one of ~2 Chinese laboratories. Zoonosis happens more overall, but lab leaks are more probable in the direct vicinity of the lab specializing in collecting and studying samples of this exact family of viruses.

>finding the source of spillover events is the work of decades

The reservoirs for both SARS and MERS were found quickly with much less interest. The probability of the lab leak increases every day that we don't the reservoir. Worse, at this point even finding a reservoir isn't definitive, because we would need to establish that the reservoir predates the pandemic, and that it didn't spillover into the animal population from humans.

Given all publicly available information, the lab leak is far more likely. The uncertainty is very high, because China destroyed or concealed the data. Unless someone's memoirs leak it in 50 years, it's unlikely that we'll ever know.
For me it's that it's all so obviously a grift. With crypto there was at least some legitimate value to blockchains. ML is a valid science and has led to major breakthroughs in other sciences.

But AGI/genAI LLMs come across like just another scam from the Worst Guys You Know who were all cryptobros in the 2010s. The output integrity problems get dismissed. The traceability/repeatability problems get dismissed. The data ownership problems get dismissed. There's the endless problems with aggressive feeder bots causing real (financial/operational) harm to others. All of the people selling it have the smell of timeshare salesmen.

And now with China releasing open source models that seemingly embarass their U.S. counterparts, it makes the whole thing feel even more like a ponzi scheme.

LLMs as a whole have a severe credibility problem.
> What if [various "AI" claims are] intended to exhaust our ability to consider other possibilities?

> Could AI be a con?

Oh my, yes. However I think they want us to believe their claims and send them money, as opposed to using the claims to misdirect from something else. The direct profit motive is sufficiently compelling.

To be more specific, there are people out there creating cons ("investment opportunities") based on misrepresenting LLM-generated story characters as real-world entities.

For example, suppose I make a program trained on all the human stories of detectives and Christmas, and it generates a story of SherlockSantaBot, a fictional character depicted as being extremely clever and also able to know the good/ bad quotient of all children in the world. Does that mean I actually invented an real AI with those capabilities? Nope.
It was forbidden since users were banned for talking about it. That is what is meant by forbidden. When an authority exercises their power over you to stop you.
> China would rather shut it down than relinquish control

That's what I meant when I said 'Americans see Chinese as NPCs'

Chinese gov only forbidden ByteDance to export(sell) its algorithm, and pressure it due to nationalism

You guys say this like ByteDance is a department of CPC, it's not work like this

And, sincerely, Americans do need to think about what changed that made TikTok no longer a 'national security threat' now

12h ealier, it's a national security threat with votes by Democrats and Republicans, 12h later, it's just fine.

what changed?
I’ll give a “wtf does this mean” view.

We have observed that LLMs can perform better on hard tasks like math if we teach it to “think about” the problem first. The technique is called “chain-of-thought”. The language model is taught to emit a series of sentences that break a problem down before answering it. OpenAI’s o1 works this way, and performs well on benchmarks because of it.

To train a model to do this, you need to show it many examples of correct chains of thought. These are expensive to produce and it’s expensive to train models on them.

DeepSeek discovered something surprising. It turns out, you don’t need to explicitly train a model to produce a chain of thought. Instead, under the right conditions, models will learn this behavior emergently. They found a way for a language model to learn chain of thought very cheaply, and then released that model as open source.

Thought chains turn out to be extremely useful. And now that they’re cheap and easy to produce, we are learning all the different ways they can be put to use.

Some of the open questions right now are:

- Can we teach small models to learn chain-of-thought? (yes) How cheaply? On which tasks?

- Can we generate thought chains and just copy/paste them into the prompts of other models? (yes) Which domains does this work for? How well does it generalize?

That’s what this post is going after.