MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by troupo | 2025-04-20 17:56:27+00:00
> You would rather read all of <law> than pipe it into an LLM to answer a few questions about it?

yes, yes I would.

> How long would it take you to read that thing? I'm a reasonably fast reader and it would take me hours.

For most of the "few questions" you can skim most of it

> Are you a dedicated member of the "LLMs have no legitimate uses" camp?

I'm in the camp of "do not offshore your thinking process to a non-deterministic black box whose whole mode operandi is to always generate plausible-looking answer and then profusely apologize if it was caught to produce invalid output".

---

Also, "five hours to read an important legislation written in a surprisingly clear language is too long and nigh impossible" is the premier reason about so much bullshit disinformation about EU AI Act, DMA, GDPR and plethora of other, less important regulations
by dannyobrien | 2025-04-20 17:56:58+00:00
So I just gave your blarghl line to Claude, and it replied "It seems like you included a mix of text including "blarghl unorthodox babble" followed by the phrase "The rain in Spain."

Did you mean to ask about the well-known phrase "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain"? This is a famous elocution exercise from the musical "My Fair Lady," where it's used to teach proper pronunciation.

Or was there something specific you wanted to discuss about Spain's rainfall patterns or perhaps something else entirely? I'd be happy to help with whatever you intended to ask. "

I think you have a point here, but maybe re-express it? Because right now your argument seems trivially falsifiable even under your own terms.
by jakewins | 2025-04-20 17:58:20+00:00
My primary issue here was actually more about TikTok - I don’t think it’s right that software engineers get rich writing code that pushes “bullying challenges” on children to increase engagement and ad sales.

But: all other things equal, of I get to pick between “10-year-olds primary daily public forum is completely, cryptographically, devoid of any moderating adult presence whatsoever” and - what I had - 10-year olds have privacy but there are adults around that have a chance at picking up that things are going off the rails”
by sinenomine | 2025-04-20 17:59:39+00:00
Reading should be considered a basic ability not hindered much even by average intelligence and being amenable to rote learning. A tangent, but I also wouldn't rule out specific adaptations for reading having been evolved during the last 10k years.

Math is a very specific ability and interest, requiring not just high general intelligence but some additional elusive factor (also likely heritable, as anybody observing "academic dynasties" would note). There is research on this [1] [2], but not nearly enough to say much more.

Anyway, I hope I explained my position on this. It's not the specific gene variants or mechanisms that matter, but basic threshold effects over polygenically heritable traits, and hard diminishing returns on teaching someone who does not meet the talent requirement.

1. https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou... 2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5290743/
by geye1234 | 2025-04-20 18:00:12+00:00
If you mean "sometimes a particular animal can be on the cusp between life and death and it's therefore hard to tell which term applies", you may have a point, although for most animals (including people) observation tells us the cusp is very small.

If you mean "life" or "death" are merely mental categories that don't have existence in reality, then saying "this is alive" or "this is dead", or "this is close to life" or "this is close to death", would all be meaningless. We can't predicate a purely mental category of something and then claim that the statement has a meaning outside our minds. Nor can we say our mental categories are approximations of anything real unless we categorize based on something that really exists in the first place.
by simonw | 2025-04-20 18:00:44+00:00
No, I think the "reasoning" step really does make a difference here.

There's more than just next token prediction going on. Those reasoning chain of thoughts have undergone their own reinforcement learning training against a different category of samples.

They've seen countless examples of how a reasoning chain would look for calculating a mortgage, or searching a flight, or debugging a Python program.

So I don't think it is accurate to describe the eventual result as "just next token prediction". It is a combination of next token production that has been informed by a chain of thought that was based on a different set of specially chosen examples.
by tomrod | 2025-04-20 18:01:10+00:00
I agree with Professor Mollick that the capabilities in specific task categories are becoming superhuman -- a precursor for AGI.

Until those capabilities are expanded for model self-improvement -- including being able to adapt its own infrastructure, code, storage, etc. -- then I think AGI/ASI are yet to be realized. My POV is SkyNet, Traveler's "The Director", Person of Interest's "The Machine" and "Samaritan." The ability to target a potentially inscrutable goal along with the self-agency to direct itself towards that is true "AGI" in my book. We have a lot of components that we can reason are necessary, but it is unclear to me that we get there in the next few months.
by famouswaffles | 2025-04-20 18:01:21+00:00
Text Completion is just the objective function. It's not descriptive and says nothing about how the models complete text. Why people hang on this word, I'll never understand. When you wrote your comment, you were completing text.

The problem you've just described is a problem with humans as well. LLMs are assuming all the time. Maybe you would like to call it another word, but it is happening.
by bbor | 2025-04-20 18:01:21+00:00
The critical discovery was a way to crack the “Frame Problem”, which roughly comes down to colloquial notions of common sense or intuition. For the first time ever, we have models that know if you jump off a stool, you will (likely!) be standing on the ground afterwards.

In that sense, they absolutely know things that aren’t in their training data. You’re correct about factual knowledge, tho — that’s why they’re not trained to optimize it! A database(/pagerank?) solves that problem already.
Ask HN: WhatsApp Alternatives?
by ALLTaken | 2025-04-20 18:02:18+00:00
Hi,

are there any alternative other than using Signal? Is there an OTR Encryption tool that integrates into the keyboard/clipboard on iOS/Android devices?

Even as an early adopter in most tech, including in WhatsApp, I did hope I'd never see the scale of illegal surveillance that is happening today on the entire consumer industry.

I feel nothing but powerlessness over the elimination of privacy.

WhatsApp communication is considered public in court and is credibly being monitored (source: friends at criminal investigation units and https://www.google.com/search?q=whatsapp+communication+monitoring ).

You don't need anything to hide to be criminally investigated. It could just be "dissent" to a government or a corruption case you want to blow the whistle on or any coincidental messages that in the wrong context appear in a different meaning. The state-level eaves-dropping has grown to a perverse level and a precise tool to identify key-persons. Even HN has fingerprinting to identify who said what independent of accounts.

Looking for any choices that are left or ideas on howto keep (team) communications outside of total surveillance.

Do you think privacy and encrypted communication that can't be cracked by the government should be outlawed or considered illegal?
by Borealid | 2025-04-20 18:02:22+00:00
I think there's a single definition of AGI that will stand until the singularity:

"An AGI is a human-created system that demonstrates iteratively improving its own conceptual design without further human assistance".

Note that a "conceptual design" here does not include tweaking weights within an already-externally-established formula.

My reasoning is thus:

1. A system that is only capable of acting with human assistance cannot have its own intelligence disentangled from the humans'

2. A system that is only intelligent enough to solve problems that somehow exclude problems with itself is not "generally" intelligent

3. A system that can only generate a single round of improvements to its own designs has not demonstrated improvements to those designs, as if iteration N+1 were truly superior to iteration N, it would be able to produce iteration N+2

4. A system that is not capable of changing its own design is incapable of iterative improvement, as there is a maximum efficacy within any single framework

5. A system that could improve itself in theory and fails to do so in practice has not demonstrated intelligence

It's pretty clear that no current-day system has hit this milestone; if some program had, there would no longer be a need for continued investment in algorithms design (or computer science, or most of humanity...).

A program that randomly mutates its own code could self-improve in theory but fails to do so in practice.

I don't think these goalposts have moved in the past or need to move in the future. This is what it takes to cause the singularity. The movement recently has been people trying to sell something less than this as an AGI.
by unethical_ban | 2025-04-20 18:04:14+00:00
Step back from "legal" and think about what most people expect the lottery to be: Regular people buying somewhere between 1-100 (maybe, if in a big work pool or something) tickets to try to win a low-chance lottery.

Further, as I read it, the cartel bought all combinations of numbers, so there was no risk for them.

Ask yourself if you think this is something that should happen every time the jackpot goes above $25,000,000 - or if the lottery could survive with people knowing this was happening.

It clearly is against the spirit of the game, and any competent lotto administrator would see the red flags in facilitating it.
by sebastiennight | 2025-04-20 18:04:22+00:00
> Having a platform like Cursor or Windsurf enables these companies to collect telemetry about _how_ users are coding that isn't possible just from looking at the repo, the finished product.

If you are powering the API for the underlying model, then don't you know exactly how users are coding?

Since all of it is included in the context fed to your model.
by 3np | 2025-04-20 18:04:28+00:00
If you love games that much, why not get a dedicated gaming device? One that you use purely for gaming and don't expose your non-gaming accounts or info on. There's no reason why the entertainment device and the personal communication device need to be the same one, right? Just like there is no reason why you should log in with your old hotmail account on your Xbox just because they are both MS.

Ideally it wouldn't even have an enabled web browser.

If you find yourself unable to do this, that's a sign that "love" is actually addiction which means the upside for actually decoupling is probably a lot bigger than you imagine if you disregard the idea.
by simianwords | 2025-04-20 18:04:37+00:00
I want to clarify whether the "learn from experience" is still done through RL offline and not autonomously and continuously?

I think the core idea from the paper is that while we have already hit the ceiling of normal kind of data; there's a new kind of data from agents acting in the real world and users (or some one else?) providing rewards based on some ground truth.

Somehow I misinterpreted from this paper that this kind of learning would be autonomous and continuous.
by Y_Y | 2025-04-20 18:04:43+00:00
> In Greek mythology, the Pierian Spring of Macedonia was sacred to the Pierides and the Muses. As the metaphorical source of knowledge of art and science, it was popularized by a couplet in Alexander Pope's 1711 poem An Essay on Criticism: "A little learning is a dang'rous thing; / Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring."
by conartist6 | 2025-04-20 18:04:49+00:00
Isn't the real scary thing here that the AI agent is empowered to control your life?

You're imagining that if you get the answer you want from the AI you hang up the phone, and if you don't you're imagining a human will pick up and have the political power and will to overrule the AI. I think it's more realistic is the way things have played out here: nobody took or had any responsibility because "they made the AI responsible" and second-guessing that choice isn't second-guessing the AI, it's second-guessing the human leaders who decreed that human support had no value. This with the result that the humans would let the AI go about as far as setting fire to the building before some kind of human element imbued with any real accountability steps in. The evidence of this is all the ignored requests presented here.
by claiir | 2025-04-20 18:06:00+00:00
Yea they mention a “perplexity drop” relative to naive quantization, but that’s meaningless to me. > We reduce the perplexity drop by 54% (using llama.cpp perplexity evaluation) when quantizing down to Q4_0.

Wish they showed benchmarks / added quantized versions to the arena! :>
by bbor | 2025-04-20 18:06:02+00:00
Well I think the point being made is an instrumental one: it’s general enough to matter, so we should use the word “general” to communicate that to laypeople.

Re:”traits we associate with general intelligence”, I think the exact issue is that there is no scientific (ie specific*consistent) list of such traits. This is why Turing wrote his famous 1950 paper and invoked the Imitation Game; not to detail how one could test for a computer that’s really thinking(/truly general), but to show why that question isn’t necessary in the first place.
by bob1029 | 2025-04-20 18:06:31+00:00
> It’s easy to get hooked on fast answers and forget to ask why something works

This is really a tragedy because the current technology is arguably one of the best things in existence for explaining "why?" to someone in a very personalized way. With application of discipline from my side, I can make the LLM lecture me until I genuinely understand the underlying principles of something. I keep hammering it with edge cases and hypotheticals until it comes back with "Exactly! ..." after reiterating my current understanding.

The challenge for educators seems the same as it has always been - How do you make the student want to dig deeper? What does it take to turn someone into a strong skeptic regarding tools or technology?

I'd propose the use of hallucinations as an educational tool. Put together a really nasty scenario (i.e., provoke a hallucination on purpose on behalf of the students that goes under their radar). Let them run with a misapprehension of the world for several weeks. Give them a test or lab assignment regarding this misapprehension. Fail 100% of the class on this assignment and have a special lecture afterward. Anyone who doesn't "get it" after this point should probably be filtered out anyways.
by Borealid | 2025-04-20 18:06:55+00:00
Do you believe it's possible to produce a given set of model weights with an infinitely large number of different training examples?

If not, why not? Explain.

If so, how does your argument address the fact that this implies any given "reasoning" model can be trained without giving it a single example of something you would consider "reasoning"? (in fact, a "reasoning" model may be produced by random chance?)
by wavemode | 2025-04-20 18:07:46+00:00
> there was nothing said about circular imports being esoteric

If you aren't saying that circular imports are not common and natural, then don't reply to the statement "circularity between modules is very common and natural" with the statement "In theory, but in practice it isn't"

I have no quarrel with you. If there has been a misunderstanding, then simply correct it and elaborate. That could have been a 2-second interaction - I would have replied "oh, my mistake, I misunderstood what you were saying" and this conversation would be over.

On the other hand, if your goal is just to look smart or superior, or make me look dumb because you believe I'm incapable of reading, then feel free. I have better things to do with my time.

I won't be replying further.

> How could it be awkward in Go? It doesn't support circular references. It cannot be awkward – it isn't possible at all!

There are workarounds. That was the whole point of the beginning of this entire comment chain - me pointing out that these workarounds are worse quality code than if the compiler just supported doing things in a more straightforward way.
by solatic | 2025-04-20 18:08:09+00:00
> It just has to be cheaper than you

There's an ocean of B2B SaaS services that would save customers money compared to building poor imitations in-house. Despite the Joel Test (almost 25 years old! craxy...) asking whether you buy your developers the best tools that money can buy, because they're almost invariably cheaper than developer salaries, the fact remains that most companies treat salaries as a fixed cost and everything else threatens the limited budget they have.

Anybody who has ever tried to sell developer tooling knows, you're competing with free/open-source solutions, and it aint a fair fight.
by assimpleaspossi | 2025-04-20 18:08:17+00:00
Here's my story:

I'm retired (sort of) and my son lost his job. He had a house payment and that worried me. I noticed a girl at my local grocery store who seemed to be there every day. After questioning her, that's how I found out about Instacart. So I started with them.

I struggled with deliveries as most people do at first but eventually got quite good at it making a decent, even surprising amount of money. But, one day, I was scheduled to deliver groceries to an apartment with an address for the complex but no apartment number and no name on the apartment doors.

I contacted support who called the customer who asked if I could wait 15 minutes for them to come home. Having nothing going on that day I said, "Sure." 25 minutes later I called support again. Customer says they're almost there. "I'll wait," I said.

Customer doesn't show. Called support. They tell me to return the groceries to the store and that I would be paid anyway. (Note: grocery stores won't accept returns.)

Much of the driver support question was covered by text messages which I saved. Interestingly, later, the customer tipped me and apologized for not showing up. I saved all that along with a photo of the apartment complex.

The next day, I was deactivated for not abiding by the TOS for not delivering. I emailed them all the text messages including those from the customer and driver support along with screenshots and photos but to no avail.
by qingcharles | 2025-04-20 18:08:23+00:00
In Illinois (and probably other states) it is illegal to violate the T&Cs of a web site:

720 ILCS 5/17-51 Computer tampering. (a) A person commits computer tampering when he or she knowingly and without the authorization of a computer's owner or in excess of the authority granted to him or her: (1) Accesses or causes to be accessed a computer or any part thereof, a computer network, or a program or data; (a-10) For purposes of subsection (a), accessing a computer network is deemed to be with the authorization of a computer's owner if: (2) the owner authorizes the public to access the computer network and the person accessing the computer network complies with all terms or conditions for use of the computer network that are imposed by the owner;
by gregw2 | 2025-04-20 18:08:45+00:00
Perhaps I was foolish. I appreciate your point in hindsight. Having setup websites on Linux and on S3 in past work, both years ago, I somehow thought AWS would be easier....

After dealing with trying to avoid using more expensive AWS Amplify to just have a simple static s3 website, the IAM probably took me more time to straighten out than installing linux on his laptop and setting up Apache to work through our ISP's router. Or maybe not...
by Borealid | 2025-04-20 18:09:09+00:00
I don't see that as a problem. I don't particularly care how human intelligence works; what matters is what an LLM is capable of doing and what a human is capable of doing.

If those two sets of accomplishments are the same there's no point arguing about differences in means or terms. Right now humans can build better LLMs but nobody has come up with an LLM that can build better LLMs.
by ALLTaken | 2025-04-20 18:09:30+00:00
Wasn't Pavel Durov the billionaire CEO under investigation and put into jail in France to be coerced/forced to build a backdoor into Telegram for the French Government?

He just recently came free. I don't know if there is any proof that Telegram is not backdoored by now.

Even if someone can analyse all binary releases and reverse engineer the code. It's more likely Telegram servers are backdoored and not the clients.
by Borealid | 2025-04-20 18:10:46+00:00
If you feed Claude you're getting Claude's "system prompt" before the text you give it.

If you want to test convolution you have to use a raw model with no system prompt. You can do that with a Llama or similar. Otherwise your context window is full of words like "helpful" and "answer" and "question" that guide the response and make it harder (not impossible) to see the effect I'm talking about.
by dang | 2025-04-20 18:11:17+00:00
Recent and related:

OpenAI looked at buying Cursor creator before turning to Windsurf - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43716856 - April 2025 (115 comments)

OpenAI in Talks to Buy Windsurf for About $3B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43708725 - April 2025 (44 comments)
by stanleykm | 2025-04-20 18:12:07+00:00
Centrists dont have a very good track record of actually accomplishing much more than lifting the foot off the accelerator a little bit. I think our problems are intractable right now under the current way we have our economy setup. But left wing solutions are fundamentally incompatible with the people we aim to please the most, so we see this rightward push instead.
by mgraczyk | 2025-04-20 18:12:45+00:00
Stories like this are fun and I think they resonate well with a lot of people, but unfortunately the details are actively harmful cynicism that ignore fact that would ruin the narrative.

Look around San Francisco today. What has changed recently? Crime is way down, lower than it has been in 15 years. Homelessness is down, lower than the past 4 years.

Did tech companies decide to start paying more taxes? Did the city start spending more? No, the actual cause is boring and simple, but makes anti-establishment folks very uncomfortable.

The truth is that our government started operating more effectively, intentionally trying to solve problems that it previously pretended were insoluble. This change was instigated by a relatively small number of rich people where were fed up and decided to and spend their own money to fix the city.

Some other nitpicks I have with the sentiment expressed in the article:

* Police and firefighters in SF make more on average than tech workers. Is that a source of injustice? Or is unequal pay more complicated? Is inequality only bad when the groups benefitting are aesthetically undesirable to you?

* SF remains one of the highest tax cities in the country, and is the highest in the Bay Area. At the margin, businesses are leaving (including Twitter, mentioned in the article). Raising more taxes on these businesses seems unlikely to increase revenue long term.

* We spent more per resident on most services than nearly every other city in the country. Aren't you curious why that is, and doesn't it seem like understanding that problem would lead to insights more interesting than "tech bad"?