MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tangerine67g | 2025-04-19 20:56:29+00:00
Hallucinations in Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely regarded as errors - outputs that deviate from factual accuracy. However, in creative or exploratory contexts, these "mistakes" may represent unexpected avenues for innovation. We introduce Purposefully Induced Psychosis (PIP), a novel approach that amplifies LLM hallucinations for imaginative tasks such as speculative fiction, interactive storytelling, and mixed-reality simulations. Drawing on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, where Pip's "madness" reveals profound insight, we reframe hallucinations as a source of computational imagination rather than a flaw. Our method fine-tunes LLMs to encourage speculative, metaphorical, and surreal outputs - hallucinations that are useful when factual accuracy is not the chief objective. Inspired by the consensual illusions of theater and stage magic, PIP situates these creative missteps in contexts where users willingly suspend disbelief, thereby transforming "errors" into catalysts for new ways of thinking. We discuss potential applications, design principles for ensuring user consent, preliminary observations, and implications for broader AI ethics and human-AI collaboration.
by dennis_jeeves2 | 2025-04-19 20:56:53+00:00
>But that's my whole point, "sex" a spectrum and it's one of the big lies perpetuated by people who insist everything was known

Yes I know it's a spectrum, and all 'intelligent' people I know this (the spectrum is unevenly distributed with 2 peaks).

Of all the things in the world that people understand or misunderstand, why, to you, is this particular subject even an issue?
by proxy_err | 2025-04-19 20:57:10+00:00
Its a fair point but very dynamic to sort out. This needs a full research team to figure out. Or you know.. all of us combined!! It is definitely a problem.

TINFOIL: Sometimes I always wondered if Azure or AWS used bots to push site traffic hits to generate money... they know you are hosted with them.. They have your info.. Send out bots to drive micro accumulation. Slow boil..
by Veserv | 2025-04-19 20:57:23+00:00
Can you please explain how a malicious node on your path truncating packets to 0x500 bytes is distinct from a 0x500 byte path MTU?

The distinction between this and a false ICMP packet is that a valid ICMP packet from a node in your path comes from a unauthenticated source. You can not generally distinguish this from a forged ICMP packet from a malicious entity not on your path.

In contrast, the model I propose results in the authenticated endpoint learning of the path MTU in a way that can only be altered by a node in the path refusing to send data beyond a certain size. The authenticated endpoint can then use a authenticated channel to feedback the data allowing the source to get authenticated path MTU information that could only come from the authenticated endpoint.
by eh_why_not | 2025-04-19 20:57:44+00:00
Seeds were also the first thing that came to my mind.

I've always found it fascinating that I could plant many spice seeds (e.g. mustard) as long as their container said "not irradiated", and they would sprout and grow just fine, several years after buying them. I.e. they are still technically alive, and can stay as such for many years, which is just amazing life resilience.

That said,

> ...except that as these organisms are simpler than seeds...

I wouldn't say any animal that can move around to be simpler than seeds. IMHO by any definition animals are a big jump up in complexity over plants.
by ryandrake | 2025-04-19 20:58:28+00:00
I think developers are paid to competently deliver software to their employer, and part of that competence is properly vetting the code you are delivering. If I wrote code that ended up having serious bugs like crashing, I’d expect to have at least a minimum consequence, like root causing it and/or writing a postmortem to help avoid it in the future. Same as I’d expect if I pulled in a bad dependency.
by reconnecting | 2025-04-19 20:58:31+00:00
Indeed, if it's a real user from a residential IP address, in most cases it will be the same network. However, if it's a proxy from residential IPs, there could be 10 requests from one network, the 11th request from a second network, and the 12th request back from the same network. This is a red flag.

Thank you for your question. tirreno is a standalone app that needs to receive API events from your main web application. It can work perfectly with 512GB Postgres RAM or even lower, however, in most cases we're talking about millions of events that request resources.

It's much easier to write a stable application without dependencies based on mature technologies. tirreno is fairly 'boring software'.
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-19 20:59:08+00:00
> It’s all short form videos and posts with a 4th grade vocabulary now

We've had more publicly available educational content than ever with 40+ minutes videos finding their public. Podcasts have brought the quality of audio content to a new level, people pay to get additional content.

People are paying for publications like TheVerge, Medium and newsletter also became a viable business model. And they're not multitasking when watching YouTube or reading on their phone.

That's where I'd put the spotlight. And the key to all of it is, content length is often not dictated by ads (Sponsors pay by the unit, paid member don't get the ads) but by how long it needs to be.

If on the other hand we want to keep it bleak, I'd remind you that the before-the-web TV was mostly atrocious and aimed at people keeping it on while they do the dishes. The bulk of books sold where "Men come from Mars" airport books and movies were so formulaic I had a friends not pausing them when going to the bathroom without missing much.

Basically we accepted filler as a fact of life, and we're now asking the you generation while they're not bitting the bullet. And honestly, I can still read research papers but I completely lost tolerance for 400 pages book that could have been a blog post.
by eitland | 2025-04-19 21:00:14+00:00
> I am certain that the vast majority of Ukrainians would vote against Zelensky and would be highly motivated to end the war.

The Verkovna Rada, many of which very much don't agree with Zelensky, has again and again very clearly confirmed his mandate.

Given the Ukrainian constitution that is the best one can aim for in a war.

Also, while polls say Ukrainians want peace, the part that is not reported says the majority of Ukrainians does not want to give up land for peace.

Meanwhile a lot of westerners keep posting the things you just did.

I think it would be great if people stopped to think instead of propagating what is just Russian talking points.
by fc417fc802 | 2025-04-19 21:02:46+00:00
> any form of capitalism won't allow it to stand

You raise an interesting point but I think that's an overly broad claim. Groups with strong internal adhesion and sufficiently high trust can remain xenophobic indefinitely.

It's also wrong on some level to refer to these things as arbitrary characteristics. They might be seemingly unrelated, but in a broader social context they are often far from arbitrary. Particularly when it comes to belief systems they can have direct and tangible impacts.
by discardable_dan | 2025-04-19 21:03:11+00:00
This sort of manual has since been gamified by Zachtronics, and I think it is genuinely a better alternative. If you are trying to pick up the basics of programming assembly and are already committed to use a "fake" language, why not enjoy the experience as a video game?

And it does not help that this page starts with a dick joke.
by Animats | 2025-04-19 21:03:43+00:00
It's not a difficult read. It's the historical context that's hard to get. The major political players of a century ago are mostly gone now.

In the early 20th century, there were still a lot of kings, emperors, and princes hanging onto power. The era of monarchy was on the way out, but it wasn't over yet. WWI started after an archduke was killed by an inept but lucky assassin. The ancient noble families still mattered.

The Marxists were quite active. They were the anti-monarchists. Today, Marxists are nearly extinct. There are still some Communist states around, but no Marxist mass movements.

The Catholic Church was still a major political power. That's gone.

Hitler was a competent craftsman and had done construction work. This was an era which required a huge number of people doing manual labor in big groups to get things done. That's when unions arise, by the way. "Working class" was very real, and that's where Hitler started. The term "macho" wasn't available yet, so he wrote: "In times when not the mind but the fist decides, the purely intellectual emphasis of our education in the upper classes makes them incapable of defending themselves, let alone enforcing their will. Not infrequently the first reason for personal cowardice lies in physical weaknesses."

There's a long rant about Jews, which seems to come from clerk jobs in the WWI German army being dominated by Jews, described as physically weak and overly intellectual. Today, that might be a rant about AI. There's a similar grumble about parliamentarians, elected legislators and their staffs, who talk too much and don't exercise enough. The ideal is a muscular, disciplined society run by strong working people. He writes approvingly of how the US exercises quality control on immigrants, rejecting the sick and weak ones.

Now, this is where a librarian can help. Someone reading this needs background reading on Europe from 1900 to 1925. Searching with Google for "The World in 1900" turns up a terrible essay on Medium that looks like LLM-generated clickbait. A good librarian will offer better choices.

Kids who get all that background will question the way things are today, of course. Which scares some people.
by rapind | 2025-04-19 21:04:41+00:00
It starts off feeling like a superpower allowing to to change a system's behaviour without changing its code directly. It quickly devolves into a maintenance nightmare though every time I've encountered it.

I'm talking more specifically about Aspect Oriented Programming though and DI containers in OOP, which seemed pretty clever in theory, but have a lot of issues in reality.

I take no issues with currying in functional programming.
by xpe | 2025-04-19 21:05:30+00:00
> GitHub copilot follows your context perfectly. I don't have to tell it anything about files. I tried this initially and it just screwed up the results.

Just to make sure we're on the same page. There are two things in play. First, a language model's ability to know what file you are referring to. Second, an assistant's ability to make sure the right file is in the context window. In your experience, how does Claude Code compare to Copilot w.r.t (1) and (2)?
by rvz | 2025-04-19 21:05:45+00:00
It is a scam. Invented by someone who is an AI researcher, but not a software engineer which the latter rigorously focuses on code quality.

"Vibe-coding" as it is defined, throws away all the principles of software engineering and adopts an unchecked approach into using AI generated code with "accept all changes" then duct-taping it with more code on top of a chaotic code architecture or none (single massive file) and especially with zero tests.

The fact is, it encourages carelessness and ignores security principles just to make it acceptable to create low quality and broken software that can be hacked very easily.

You can spot some of these "vibe-coders" if they believe that they can destroy Docusign in a day with Cursor + Claude with their solution.

Who's going to tell them?
by ogogmad | 2025-04-19 21:06:37+00:00
Maybe find an application of the subject that they might find interesting. I suppose if you can't find anything that interests them, then it's much harder to teach it.

For instance, perspective drawing might provide a nice application of 3D projective space, its subspaces, and perspectivities between those subspaces. Some of the theory of conic sections might be relevant too.

Computer graphics provides a nice application of coordinate geometry. This covers elementary algebra, Pythagoras's theorem, etc.

Even eating pizza can provide an application of differential geometry.
by agwa | 2025-04-19 21:07:09+00:00
This method may be more popular than you'd think, since it only requires the TXT record to be published once, whereas using the DNS method requires periodically updating the DNS record. Yes, that can be automated or delegated, but for a legacy/manual/dysfunctional organization, email to TXT record contact is an easy alternative to the now-banned email to WHOIS contact method that they were likely using previously.
by fallinditch | 2025-04-19 21:09:00+00:00
I'm wondering how much of the techniques described in this blog post can be used in an IDE like Windsurf or Cursor with Claude Sonnet?

My 2 cents on value for money and effectiveness of Claude vs Gemini for coding:

I've been using Windsurf, VS Code and the new Firebase Studio. The Windsurf subscription allowance for $15 per month seems adequate for reasonable every day use. I find Claude Sonnet 3.7 performs better for me than Gemini 2.5 pro experimental.

I still like VS Code and its way of doing things, you can do a lot with the standard free plan.

With Firebase Studio, my take is that it should good for building and deploying simple things that don't require much developer handholding.
by refulgentis | 2025-04-19 21:09:08+00:00
This is provocative but off-base in order to be so: why would we need to work backwards to determine architecture?

Similarly, "you can tell easily by just looking at the name of the model" -- that's an unfounded assertion. No, you can't. It's perfectly cromulent, accepted, and quite regular to have a fine-tuned model that has nothing in its name indicating what it was fine-tuned on. (we can observe the effects of this even if we aren't so familiar with domain enough to know this, i.e. Meta in Llama 4 making it a requirement to have it in the name)
by lurk2 | 2025-04-19 21:09:18+00:00
> Inside the United States.

Show me one that was banned at the federal or state level from being either owned, read, possessed, transmitted, and / or sold. This is what an ordinary person understands when you say that a book has been banned.

I know you don’t have any examples of this occurring in the United States or you would have offered up specific examples.

> Wikipedia has a complete collection of titles that have been banned.

No it doesn’t.
by xpe | 2025-04-19 21:09:43+00:00
> So, AIs are overeager junior developers at best, and not the magical programmer replacements they are advertised as.

This may be a quick quip or a rant. But the things we say have a way of reinforcing how we think. So I suggest refining until what we say cuts to the core of the matter. The claim above is a false dichotomy. Let's put aside advertisements and hype. Trying to map between AI capabilities and human ones is complicated. There is high quality writing on this to be found. I recommend reading literature reviews on evals.
by saltcured | 2025-04-19 21:09:53+00:00
I wouldn't put these in the same category. The inversion of "could care less" meaning "couldn't care less" or "unloose" meaning "loose" are similar.

But "near miss" is more a parsing ambiguity, if not a mere disagreement about grammar. People who think it is illogical seem to assume it is "nearly missing". But in actual usage it is more that "near miss" is like a "narrow miss" and a "far miss" is like a "wide miss", all encoding distance to the implied target/hit zone.
by gwerbret | 2025-04-19 21:10:10+00:00
> So I mean, you probably don't want to have any leaks or weak stitches in your uterus transplant...

With this sort of surgery, they wouldn't be cutting into the uterus (womb) itself when extracting it from the donor, but instead will cut around it to remove it, along with some very essential plumbing. The receiving mum will also be on industrial-strength immune suppressants anyway.

Where you DO have to worry about leaks and weak stitches is with said plumbing (uterine arteries and veins) -- they have to support virtual firehoses of blood through the duration of pregnancy, and their damage is one reason why a delivery can go south very, very quickly. Obstetric medicine is definitely a high-risk sport, which is why their malpractice insurance rates are head and shoulders above any other medical specialty. But I digress...
by csdvrx | 2025-04-19 21:10:13+00:00
For long term storage, prefer hard drives (careful about CMR vs SMR)

If you have specific random IO high performance needs, you can either

- get a SLC drive like https://news.solidigm.com/en-WW/230095-introducing-the-solid...

- make one yourself by hacking the firmware: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40405578

Be careful when you use something "exotic", and do not trust drives that are too recent to be fully tested: I learned my lesson for M2 2230 drives https://www.reddit.com/r/zfs/comments/17pztue/warning_you_ma... which seems validated by the large numbers of similar experiences like https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/discussions/14793
by makeitdouble | 2025-04-19 21:10:48+00:00
> The cost of all this is that nuance and the ability to have a single train of thought

People aren't watching TikToks while video gaming. The rise of video games, and the success of narrative ones, should tell us that people engage with the content and focus. For hours at a time.

But they need to care about it, expect way more quality and are way less tolerant of mediocrity. That's sure not great for Hollywood producers, cry me a river.

Libraries are reinventing themselves in many places, IMHO they'll happily outlive movie theaters by a few centuries.
by dheera | 2025-04-19 21:11:09+00:00
I absolutely hate the polarization around "vibe coding".

The whole point of AI agents is to eventually get good enough to do this stuff better than humans do. It's okay to dogfood and test them now and see how well they do, and improve them over time.

Software engineers will eventually become managers of AI agents. Vibe coding is just version 0.1 pre-alpha of that future.
by AnthonBerg | 2025-04-19 21:11:23+00:00
Interesting.

I’m betting a magnum bottle of IL-10 that neuroinflammation is part of the reason why there is less volume and thickness in those parts of the brain.

See this fascinating review paper from 2018 – it’s all I post, everywhere, ever, almost.

“Aggression, Social Stress, and the Immune System” – Takahashi, Flanigan, McEwen & Russo, 2018

https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/behavioral-neuroscience...

Spoiler: Neuroinflammation is suffering. An individual animal’s recognition of its own social defeat increases inflammation. Aggressive behavior and “winning” are anti-inflammatory. The paper puts it beautifully. (In a stark way.)

Neuroinflammation is behavior-modifying, and also brain-modifying.

A stressed, inflamed brain region is maybe not going to be making as many new connections; It is going to be a little wizened maybe?
by eastbound | 2025-04-19 21:11:46+00:00
Oh yes[1]

Then remember when we said tests should be the specs?

Then we said the end users are the specs?

All of them can be construed as a joke in our erratic search for the correct way to write software without those $150k developers that seem to be the only ones getting the job done, assuming they have a competent management hierarchy and stock options incentives.

[1] We have a waterfall software and I wonder whether Crockford’s license “JSON should be used for good, not evil” was meant for me
by owl_vision | 2025-04-19 21:13:26+00:00
Librarians are very dedicated, this was missed in the article. They are the first defenders against our freedom to think, read and express our thoughts.

Recently, I interviewed 2 librarians for an essay about recent book banning. They are vehemently against book banning, specially classics as seen in recent media.

https://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill

https://pen.org/banned-books-list-2025/

https://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2023/03/record-book-...

https://www.heinz.cmu.edu/media/2023/October/book-bans-may-h...

edit: newlines to separate links
by jfengel | 2025-04-19 21:13:32+00:00
I don't think such a thing could hold together very long, unless it was just a string in a line. Maybe in Morse code?

With multiple launches you could probably get several parallel strings, and use it like a dot matrix printer. It would be a heck of a stunt. But I wouldn't expect it to last for more than one orbit, and only part of the planet could see it.
by dragontamer | 2025-04-19 21:13:55+00:00
If you care about long term storage, make a NAS and run ZFS scrub (or equivalent) every 6 months. That will check for errors and fix them as they come up.

All error correction has a limit. If too many errors build up, it becomes unrecoverable errors. But as long as you reread and fix them within the error correction region, it's fine.
by like_any_other | 2025-04-19 21:15:14+00:00
This is what I don't get about social media censorship. I can understand complying with legal demands, even those from countries with corrupt or tyrannical governments - it's either that, or get blocked, and one could argue it is not up to a corporation to decide when a legal request is legitimate or not.

But why, why hide the censorship itself, and the reasons for it? Why not put a big red "This user blocked due to legal request from country X", or "because or moderators determined the user to be abusive" or "due to legal takedown request from company X"? Why is it always no reason given, just a passive-voice "user has been blocked", with no hint as to by who or why. Or worse, just a "user/video does not exist".
by rvz | 2025-04-19 21:15:27+00:00
> Sure they can copy paste the error into the LLM and hope for the best, but what happens when that doesn’t fix it?

Neither side cares unfortunately.

When users attempt to prompt away their problems without understanding the error and it doesn't solve it, that is still good news for Cursor and Anthropic and it is more money for them.

The influencers encouraging "vibe coding" also don't care. They need to be paid for their Twitter money or YouTube ad revenue.
by allenu | 2025-04-19 21:15:59+00:00
> The first kind of quality is the only kind that matters in the end.

From a business perspective, this is what's exciting to a lot of people. I think we have to recognize that a lot of products fail not because the software was written poorly, but because the business idea wasn't very good.

If a business is able to spin up its product using some aspect of vibe coding to test out its merits, and is able to explore product-market fit more quickly, does it really matter if the code quality is bad? Likewise, a well-crafted product can still fail because either the market shifted (maybe it took too long to produce) or because there really wasn't a market for it to begin with. Obviously, there's a middle ground here, and if you go too far with vibe coding and produce something that constantly fails or is hard to maintain, then maybe you've gone too far, but it's a balance that needs to be weighed against business risk.
by _bin_ | 2025-04-19 21:17:47+00:00
Because people take what I consider a reasonable statement (“It is immoral to pass on certain genes.”) and conflate it with an evil implementation (“We should enforce this via violence.”) It’s what I call “Germany syndrome”, where past abuses (e.g. nazism) lead to an overreaction (“let’s not elect a remotely right-wing party for decades.”)