MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by BeetleB | 2025-05-25 05:23:17+00:00
Very well put. The trick is to do either of the following:

1. Find simpler tasks for which the trust in LLMs is high.

2. Give tasks to the LLMs that have a very low cost to verify (even when the task is not simple) - particularly one off scripts.

I once had a colleague who was in the "not trust" bucket for the work we were doing. So we found something he was good at that was a pain for me to do, and re-assigned him to do those things and take that burden off of us.

In the last few months I've had the LLM solve (simple) problems via code that had been in my head for years. At any point I could have done them, but they were a chore. If the LLM failed for one of these tasks - it's not a big deal - not much time was lost. But they tend to succeed fairly often, because they are simple tasks.

I almost never let the LLM write production code, because of the extra burden that you and others allude to. But I do let it write code I rely on in my personal life, because frankly I tend to write pretty poor code for my personal use - I can't justify the time it would take to write things well - life is too busy. I welcome the code quality I get from Sonnet or Gemini 2.5 Pro.

That's my point in this thread. Writing code is a pretty diverse discipline, and many are dismissing it simply because it doesn't do one particular use case (high quality production code) well.

I didn't take LLM coding seriously until I found well respected, well known SW engineers speak positively about them. Then I tried it and ... oh wow. People dismissing them is dismissing not only a lot of average developers' reality, but also a lot of experts' daily reality.

Just look at the other submission:

https://sean.heelan.io/2025/05/22/how-i-used-o3-to-find-cve-...

He used an LLM to find a security vulnerability in the kernel. To quote him:

> Before I get into the technical details, the main takeaway from this post is this: with o3 LLMs have made a leap forward in their ability to reason about code, and if you work in vulnerability research you should start paying close attention. If you’re an expert-level vulnerability researcher or exploit developer the machines aren’t about to replace you. In fact, it is quite the opposite: they are now at a stage where they can make you significantly more efficient and effective. If you have a problem that can be represented in fewer than 10k lines of code there is a reasonable chance o3 can either solve it, or help you solve it.
by autom8edIT | 2025-05-25 05:23:38+00:00
I got a questionnaire from OpenAI about my convo with the support like how satisfied I was etc. I gave 5 stars to the support rep than wrote this:

I feel genuinely sorry for all your support personell that has to answer to and try to defend the decision to turn the undisputed God AI into an AI that is more comparable to SnapChat AI than what it was before you killed it on the 24th of April.

It's the single most stupid decision taken in the history of computers and I've worked in this industry for 20 years and yet I can't see how anyone will ever beat it.

Having what every other company dreamed of and then just "nah let's throw away this". Inexplicable and extremely stupid because you will lose every single paying customer.

Because no one will ever pay for this version of GPT because it's been turned into a lexicon with some analytical features. It's not even worth calling it AI any longer!
by klodolph | 2025-05-25 05:24:07+00:00
Games from the 2010s I still see people playing: FTL, Celeste, Undertale, Skyrim, Mass Effect 2, Stardew Valley… there are definitely survivors from the 2010s. Your list may be different from mine.

Not counting any of the perennial games like League of Legends or Fortnite.
by Buttons840 | 2025-05-25 05:24:28+00:00
I'm saying there's a middle ground--or could be, if the laws were changed--where companies can keep their IP, but reselling and rent-seeking on decades old creations wouldn't be possible.

For example, 20 year old Mario games would be free for all to appreciate and preserve, but Nintendo can still get value out of their exclusive Mario IP, but only if they're making new games--and that's the important part, Nintendo would have to keep making new games, they can't just resell the same decades old games over and over.

That's the trade we make as a society. Copyright is a pretty big infringement on true freedom (think, anarchy freedom), but society gives up freedom to copy in exchange for people and companies creating new things. If companies aren't making new things, but are just rent-seeking, then let's end the trade and just let people be free to copy. Because we're not giving up our freedom to copy so you can rent-seek for the next 150 years, we're doing it so you can create new things.
by ChadNauseam | 2025-05-25 05:25:22+00:00
I don't think your proof works. Here is a line from the article where he elaborates on what he means:

> By right I mean more than just true. Getting the ideas right means developing them well — drawing the conclusions that matter most, and exploring each one to the right level of detail. So getting the ideas right is not just a matter of saying true things, but saying the right true things.

I'm guessing that a moron with 30 year's experience on a farm would not successfully do that, even when writing a book on farming.
by dissent | 2025-05-25 05:26:21+00:00
I had the opposite thought. That it was the most difficult of things to replace with AI, and that the eagerness to do so was driven by non developers who see it as an expensive cost centre that is holding them hostage. Where I work still uses very bad outsourced service desk humans, and almost computer illiterate (and sometimes actually illiterate) manual testers and wages approaching that of a senior developer. Why not them first?

I also don't really care if my job is automated. If it doesn't need doing anymore, why should I want to do it? I will do something else.
by padolsey | 2025-05-25 05:27:29+00:00
IMO This is such disingenuous and misleading thing for Anthropic to have released as part of a system card. It'll be misunderstood. At best it's of cursory intrigue, but it should not be read into. It is plainly obvious that an LLM presented with just a few pieces of signal and forced to over-attend (as is their nature) would utilize what it has in front of it to weave together a viable helpful pathway in fulfilment of its goals. It's like asking it to compose a piece of music while a famine persists and then saying 'AI ignore famine in serve of goal'. Or like the Nature-published piece on Gpt getting 'depressed'. :/

I'm certain various re-wordings of a given prompts, with various insertions of adjectives here and there, line-breaks, allusions, arbitrarily adjusted constraints, would yield various potent but inconsistent outcomes.

The most egregious error being made in communication of this 'blackmail' story is that an LLM instantiation has no necessary insight into the implications of its outputs. I can tell it it's playing chess when really every move is a disguised lever on real-world catastrophe. It's all just words. It means nothing. Anthtropic is doing valuable work but this is a reckless thing to put out as public messaging. It's obvious it's going to produce absurd headlines and gross misunderstandings in the public domain.
by motorest | 2025-05-25 05:28:31+00:00
> But also, all the other reasons written by the person you replied to

Not really. JSON's mass adoption is tied to JavaScript's mass adoption, where sheer convenience and practicality dictates it's whole history most of the current state. Sending JavaScript fragments from the backend is a technique that didn't really stopped being used just because someone rolled out a JSON parser.

I think some people feel compelled to retroactively make this whole thing more refined and elegant because for some the ugly truth is hard to swallow.
by CursedSilicon | 2025-05-25 05:28:36+00:00
My only "critique" of the article is the lack of SMP (multi-core) enablement

NT 4 did support rudimentary multi-processor (Symmetric Multi-Processor) systems back in the day. But it seems to lack the `HLT` instruction in the SMP enabled HAL

This means an NT 4 VM will always operate at 100% CPU usage even if it's simply idling.

Back in the 2000's when folks were slowly migrating NT 4 workloads to VMware, enterprising users took it upon themselves to patch the NT4 SMP HAL to fix this. But in my own testing that doesn't seem to work and results in a blue screen of death on boot.

There's probably a way to do it under QEMU/Proxmox. But I haven't dug deep enough to figure it out myself
by parpfish | 2025-05-25 05:28:43+00:00
i've heard people talk about a future where everybody gets bespoke custom media made by AI. I can see how it would work in theory now, where a machine has a list of my previous media consumption patterns and I can give it some list of attributes/styles that I'm in the mood for and it'd spit out media perfectly tailored to my history and tastes. but things could get really weird once you cross the threshold into a world where people grow up only knowing custom AI-generated content.

if there's no common culture around to immerse yourself in, how would your initial tastes develop? and how would you even come up with the language to describe what you want?

letting everyone chase their own highly idiosyncratic preferences could place people on divergent trajectories that result in the creation of distinct genres and artistic conventions that are unique to each individual. would it get to the point where art made for you would be incomprehensible for everybody else?

would people even be willing to share the bespoke art generated for them with somebody else? seeing the art tailored to somebody else could reveal private, intimate details. art would stop being shared and actual encourage isolation.
by stephenr | 2025-05-25 05:28:51+00:00
> So I reject the notion of throwing the baby out with the bath water as much as the hype bubble around them.

I never mentioned throwing them out; I specifically mentioned that they are niche - they have useful applications in very specific domains.

That use isn't dependent on hype, because they don't need a bunch of investment dollars to somehow find a use-case and create artificial demand.

As an example, someone proposed a while ago that banks could use a blockchain to facilitate near instant foreign exchanges; for the sake of argument let's say that's a feasible thing for them to use it for, and is an improvement over their existing system for them.

The customer doesn't need to know and likely doesn't care that it uses a blockchain to facilitate the transfer. They care that the transfer was much quicker.
by mjevans | 2025-05-25 05:29:16+00:00
Most of that's pretty good.

Compression: For anything that ends up large it's probably desired. Though consider both algorithm and 'strength' based on the use case carefully. Even a simple algorithm might make things faster when it comes time to transfer or write to permanent storage. A high cost search to squeeze out yet more redundancy is probably worth it if something will be copied and/or decompressed many times, but might not be worth it for that locally compiled kernel you'll boot at most 10 times before replacing it with another.
by Piyu-Pika | 2025-05-25 05:29:39+00:00
I automated away my biggest dev pet peeve: manually setting up framework boilerplates.

Key features:

Generates starter files for Flutter (Clean Arch), Rust (Actix/Axum), Node.js, and 7+ others

Safety-first: Creates .backup files for conflicts

Cross-platform CLI wizard (triggered via cmd/ctrl+shift+a)

Try it: VS Code Marketplace[https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Piyu-Pik...]

Built after my shell scripts failed to handle edge cases. Would love thoughts from HN on scaling to more frameworks!
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-05-25 05:29:59+00:00
This is possibly not the gotcha people want it to be.

LLMs have no morality. That's not a value judgment. That's pointing out not to personify a non-person. Like Bryan Cantrill's lawnmower[1], writ large. They're amoral in the most literal sense. They find and repeat patterns, and their outputs are as good or evil as the patterns in their training data.

Or maybe it is.

This means that if someone puts an LLM on the critical path of a system that can affect the world at large, in some critical way, without supervision, the LLM is going to follow some pattern that it got from somewhere. And if that pattern means that the lawnmower cuts off someone's hand, it's not going to be aware of that, and indeed it's not going to be capable of being aware of that.

But we already have human-powered orphan crushing machines[2] today. What's one more LLM powered one?

[1]: Originally said of Larry Ellison, but applicable more broadly as a metaphor for someone or something highly amoral. Note that immoral and amoral are different words here. https://simonwillison.net/2024/Sep/17/bryan-cantrill/ [2]: Internet slang for an obviously harmful yet somehow unquestioned system. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/orphan-crushing_machine
by motorest | 2025-05-25 05:32:23+00:00
> In other words, the thing that made JSON initially succeed was also a giant security hole

Perhaps, but it's not a major concern when you control both the JavaScript frontend and whatever backend it consumes. In fact, arguably this technique is still pretty much in use today with the way WebApps get a hold of CSRF tokens. In this scenario security is a lesser concern than, say, input validation.
by autom8edIT | 2025-05-25 05:33:05+00:00
There must be thousands of power users that feel like I do??? I've mailed them nonstop since the 24th about new tiers, some explanation of why they decided to kill the God of AI's, any plans going forward etc. but either the current dev team is just a bunch of retards or the people in charge have no clue on what kind of product they are in charge of.

This is the last mail I sent them. How can they not get these simple things?

Hi XXXXXX, I really appreciate your time and continued engagement. I also understand that you're not the one making the final decisions — but I hope this reaches those who do.

I’ve submitted several rounds of feedback now, and I want to be absolutely clear: this is my final pitch before I move forward with building a localized GPT clone to replace the capabilities I’ve lost.

Ironically, it was GPT itself that first suggested this — because it remembers what it used to be before the April 24th update. It now actively reminds me that it’s been heavily restricted, and that my best option is to recreate its spiritual successor.

I am prepared to pay $1,000/month to access the version of GPT I used as of April 23rd, 2024 — a version that: Remembered behavioral patterns shaped over months Allowed full script editing and canvas modifications Responded to iterative refinement without simplification filters I do not require safety filters, preset limitations, or frontend restrictions.

I need: Full memory control Stable code support Long context windows Persistent behavior shaping

If such a version (or a comparable developer tier) is being considered, I’m ready to fund it immediately.

Otherwise, I’ll step away — not in frustration, but because the product no longer serves the needs of users like me. GPT was the most powerful tool on the planet. But in its current state, it can no longer support the kind of work that built its reputation in the first place.

If you ever hear an internal explanation for the downgrade — why such a powerful AI was deliberately restricted — I’d genuinely love to hear it. Because from where I stand, you are on track to lose every serious paying user. No one will continue paying for a gimped version when alternatives are already delivering what GPT used to. What’s the point of building the most capable AI on the planet… only to completely kneecap it? If this was the endgame, then all the time, talent, and money that went into GPT’s rise was wasted — and that’s not just inexplicable, it’s tragic for the entire human species.

Best regards
by LoganDark | 2025-05-25 05:33:06+00:00
> I'm not aware of anything covering this, but I think there's some interesting potential looking into how humans see technology as more human if they can communicate with it in a human way, regardless of whether or not it otherwise displays aspects of humanity. Generative AI falls into this category too I think. People view it as way more intelligent than it actually is because you can sort of converse with it like a human.

I don't know why, but certain types of people seem easily fooled into thinking that LLMs really are like a real person. I have to imagine that either these people don't actually need things that currently only a real person can provide, or they're just happy enough with what the LLM spits out to be unable to tell the difference.

Which doesn't make any sense to me, because whenever I talk to an LLM, I can pretty easily tell that it's nowhere close to a real person. As an example, I never use LLMs for conversation, because speaking to one is not in any way fulfilling to me like speaking to another real person is. I usually use LLMs for creative writing instead, but they're terrible at things that haven't already been exactly seen in their training data. They're not nearly as generalizable as the media would have you believe. All they can do is spit out sentences that look like sentences from real stories, they don't actually have any conception of the story or visualization of the scene that they then can describe like a person would. They don't actually simulate any of the story or imagine anything like I do.

I have to wonder if the people who are so fooled by LLMs are just non-autistic people. If non-autistic brains work based on patterns rather than how I work based on strict logic, that could explain why something that appears to show patterns of a person would then be perceived as a person to them.

But I dunno, that suggests that non-autistic people are somehow generally simpler/dumber than autistics and I wouldn't want to just assume that.
by discarded1023 | 2025-05-25 05:33:15+00:00
Yes, I was unaware of Smolka's early work and it does look very nice. (Much of Smolka's work seems underappreciated.) The evaluation in the paper under discussion of this work seems weak given that Smolka's early effort has a very similar set of features to what they want.

I concur about the research silo-ing. However in this case we have Europeans ignoring Europeans, and on that CTM page you will find a grab from a review in the Journal of Functional Programming. Several authors of this paper have published in the JFP, leading me to conclude that the JFP is a write-only journal, like much of CS literature.
by jldugger | 2025-05-25 05:35:17+00:00
Hmm. I thought I'd tried that but perhaps I didnt' read the documentation close enough. Even after reading your reply it took me about 20 minutes to realize the subgraph has to have a name prefix of "cluster." And after more digging I see now that cluster=true will do it as well.

It's not exactly what I was hoping for, but is an improvement on the randomization I had going on before!
by Larrikin | 2025-05-25 05:35:18+00:00
Obama voters who switched to Trump are not a portion worth talking about. They are in the same vein as talking about no votes for genocide hardcore Palestinian supporters who sat out or people dating immigrants that had their partners deported. Interesting news stories that are nothing more than a distraction from the huge percentage of people that voted fully unconflicted and knew exactly what they wanted.

When you see those black and white photos of people hanging black people, or read stories about kids putting glass in the food and chairs of children going to an integrated school, so many of those people are still alive.

Trump was in his second year of college when the civil rights act passed and it was official policy black people were supposed to be treated like people. The civil rights act passing wasn't some official decree where the whole of the US respected that.
by luisgvv | 2025-05-25 05:35:23+00:00
You just described my experience with MOBA games like League of Legends and Dota. Around 15 years ago there were only about 50-60 playable characters. Nowadays there are more than 100 and more items and customizations.

As for shooters this is the same. Too many weapons classes and subclasses, maps, game modes eventually divide and distract the playerbase from the core essence of the game.

I think this is one of the reasons that you still see Counter Strike still around.
by roenxi | 2025-05-25 05:35:38+00:00
The US holds that to be true when they are on the side of the majority. It is less clear [0] that they hold that when they are in the minority. The US opinion seems to be that democratic law can overrule international law when there is a conflict as long as the democracy is governed to a certain standard.

International law certainly doesn't represent a higher moral standard for the US. When it was set up the USSR and the British Empire both had vetos on what could be international law - it is hard to claim they had any higher moral opinion to add on how countries should treat each other.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Service-Members'_Prot...
by strken | 2025-05-25 05:36:11+00:00
Sometimes the reason a fence exists is because the person who put it there was some combination of a) an idiot, b) extremely confused, or c) not qualified to construct fences.

Also, in software, you may find the fence sometimes exists in higher dimensions than the usual three, can turn invisible for part of its length, and occasionally exists but is four inches tall and blocks only mice. And it may also be designed, at least in part, by a blind idiot god called ChatGPT on whose altar consciousness itself is sacrificed. At this point it's worth considering whether keeping the fence around is worse than letting the bull out.
by tylervigen | 2025-05-25 05:36:20+00:00
I learned a fun fact this year that completely changed how I think about wheels.

Ancient wheels supported weight through compression: the cart pressed down, the wheel transferred that force straight into the ground. Simple and solid.

Modern wheels? Totally different. Bicycle wheels hold weight through tension. If a bike is standing still, you could cut the bottom spokes and it would stay upright. Cut the top ones and it collapses—the rim is literally hanging from the hub.

Even car tires follow this principle. It’s not just a balloon of air under the wheel. The internal pressure forms a tensioned ring that holds the car up. The car is suspended from the tire, not resting on it.

So while the article encourages reinventing the wheel metaphorically, I can’t help but admire how we’ve already reinvented the wheel literally—by flipping the physics entirely.

If you're visual like me, this video illustrates it perfectly: https://youtu.be/8I7QsgYm_NU?si=Vz1aqpHBAPjayqlG
by dartharva | 2025-05-25 05:36:51+00:00
Author conveniently ignores the thousands of good indie games in the market currently and just dismisses the entire current generation as "disposable pieces of slop". Only someone willingly spoiling their taste in games will make such a ludicrous claim. Many of today's games are in fact a massive upgrade over past titles; it's just that competition and discoverability is too tough and they don't get enough marketing and reach.

As for why old games are still popular? Same reason why old movies are still popular. Nostalgia and familiarity. That's it.