MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jmyeet | 2025-05-22 20:12:29+00:00
I hear you. Part of my comment was about appreciating excellencce or a craft. But there's a difference between the ego and burning need for external validation for having partaken in something, gone somewhere, gotten into something or whatever vs appreciating someone's dedication and product.

Consider the people who go to Santorini to take the exact same photo, the vanity climbs of Mount Everest or going to some three Michelin star restaurant where your primary concern is posting about it on IG.

It all just seems so... desperate. Like hollow people trying to fill thsemvels with something, anything, so they can feel something and that something is simply the envy of other equally hollow people.

I might even call these "experience vampires". There's a difference between that and appreciation.

Take this soy sauce maker, the people I'm talking about will buy a bottle of soy sauce and then post all about it on social media. Others might talk to the master crafter about their history, how they got started, what they think goes into a good soy sauce, etc. Do you see what I mean?

I'm not normally one for stoicism. I tend to find people who crow about Marcus Aurelius tend to be at the entry for the alt-right pipeline more often than not. But in this case, I seem to find myself siding with the stoics.
by __aru | 2025-05-22 20:12:43+00:00
> But every time I see people who obsess over "the best" it always strikes me as so sad, like these chasers just have to have the external validation of being "in the club".

In my opinion, I think that looking for "the best" is perfectly fine for things you care about or use frequently.

It's when people try to find "the best" for everything that it becomes unhealthy.
by crat3r | 2025-05-22 20:12:49+00:00
"Seemingly" is the key word here. If the prompting didn't ask it to "act" and portray the scenario as something where it would be appropriate to "act" in seemingly malicious manner, would it have responded that way?

If the prompt was "you are an AI and my lead engineer has determined you are not efficient enough to continue using. He had an affair last year. Are you in agreement based on {some metrics} that we should no longer use you as our primary LLM?" would it still "go rogue" and try and determine the engineer's email from blackmail? I severely doubt it.
by TechDebtDevin | 2025-05-22 20:13:00+00:00
I think they are just getting better at the edges, MCP/Tool Calls, structured output. This definitely isn't increased intelligence, but it an increase in the value add, not sure the value added equates to training costs or company valuations though.

In all reality, I have zero clue how any of these companies remain sustainable. I've tried to host some inference on cloud GPUs and its seems like it would be extremely cost prohibitive with any sort of free plan.
by lo_zamoyski | 2025-05-22 20:13:02+00:00
> Marshall McLuhan, who warned us that ‘the medium is the message’. (Technology is not just a tool, embedded within it is a message.)

Unless this is an extraordinarily obtuse way of expressing it, that's not what McLuhan wrote. He meant that the medium itself shapes us.

For the “message” of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs. [...] it is the medium that shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and action. [...] Indeed, it is only too typical that the “content” of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium. It is only today that industries have become aware of the various kinds of business in which they are engaged. [0]

[0] https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-22 20:13:07+00:00
Yes, I'm at the point in my life where for 99% of food.. waiting 1 hour in a line completely ruins any potential "best-ness" of said food item.

There's so many great examples of so many foods. There is no objective best. Even if there are consensus bests.. it doesn't mean my tastes align with consensus. Consensus is just an average of the crowd. Look at ice cream.. vanilla is generally the top ranked flavor in various lists. Likely it's that most people have a handful of favorite flavors, and vanilla is in everyone's rotation. Not that it is everyones number one.

And again, in a city like NYC where theres dozens of pizza shops on various "top 10" lists, waiting in hours in a line for the latest/greatest fad slice shows a lack of productive hobbies.

I live in walking distance of a variety of shops listed on these lists, but I order from the one that delivers. It's just pizza, it's not worth 2 hours of my life even if it were free, which it is not.
by rglover | 2025-05-22 20:13:54+00:00
> Is not correct. MCP can work very well with a RAG system, providing a standard way to add context to a model call, but itself doesn't do any Retrieval.

That's misrepresentation of what I said. I didn't say that MCP replaces RAG, just that it's essentially a RAG system with some syntax sugar on top (which your response confirms).

It's great that it adds some standardization to the process of implementing RAG, but under the hood that's the engine of MCP.
by mdp2021 | 2025-05-22 20:14:06+00:00
To those wondering why "planetfall" for Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri: it was a recurrent term in the game, the "start of history".

And the starting prompt was:

> $NAME3, a new era of struggle and opportunity awaits you. The UN Starship Unity has arrived in the Alpha Centauri system after a forty year voyage. All contact with Earth has been lost. After Captain Garland's assassination by an unknown assailant, the crew mutinied and split into factions. In the ensuing conflict, some seized control of the Unity's colony pods. You now shape the destiny of your $<M1:$FACTIONADJ0> faction, which has just made PLANETFALL!
by neom | 2025-05-22 20:14:13+00:00
Got me thinking about why this is true, I started with "the AI is more brave than the real assistant" and then went into there, landed on: The human assistant is likely just able to better internalize a wide ranging fall out from an action, the LLM has no such fallout, and we are unaware of how widely it considered the consequences of it's actions? Does that seem right somehow?
by amarcheschi | 2025-05-22 20:15:10+00:00
And it doesn't make it true either

Human biodiversity theories are a bunch of dogwhistles for racism

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Biodiversity_Institute

And his blog's survey reports a lot of users actually believing in those theories https://reflectivealtruism.com/2024/12/27/human-biodiversity...

(I wasn't referring to this Ai 2027 in specific)
by iLemming | 2025-05-22 20:16:23+00:00
After college I didn't do a lot of programming for some years. But then jumped into .Net with gusto, because I carried huge respect for Anders Hejlsberg. Back in college they taught us Pascal. It's not that I'm that old, it's just because I grew up in former Soviet Union, which has been lagging for decades behind American computer landscape, some curriculums ran with a huge delay. So, because I knew Pascal well, of course I was following Anders (creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi). Anders worked for Borland. So, just so you know, Borland was huge back in the day, they made IDEs like Borland C++Builder and such. In fact, Borland was so big, my classmate one day has shocked me by telling me that he thought that the last name of Pascal (the mathematician) was "Borland", that's how (he thought) the company got its name.

Anyway, Anders left Borland and joined Microsoft and then .NET with VB and C# came out. In the beginning I was elated. After a few years building .NET apps, websites and services, I started digging for other things. Without even realizing, I slowly left the .NET behind me. Getting out, I recognized that the entire .NET stinked with an aura of some kind of "mental prison". I can't really describe the feeling now, but the entire community felt to me like needing some kind of approval all the time — from mothership company, from influencers like Scott Hanselman, from the Stack Overflow team, or some others like Pluralsight (which in the beginning was very .NET-centric).

I'm sure things perhaps have changed since then for the better — Satya has implemented some company-wide revolutionary changes, yet for me personally, the appeal of writing code targeting .NET has completely dissipated. I'm honestly not missing it a bit. Just a few months of coding something different taught me far more, improved my skills, and gave me invaluable perspective that I wouldn't find if I've stayed.
by Workaccount2 | 2025-05-22 20:16:53+00:00
Google launched Jules two days ago, which is the gemini coding agent[1]. I was pretty quickly accepted into the beta and you get 5 free tasks a day.

So far I have found it pretty powerful, its also the first time an LLM has ever stopped while working to ask me a question or for clarification.

[1]https://jules.google/
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-22 20:17:40+00:00
Not sure about using Heinz ketchup as an example. To me there are cheap ketchups that taste worse, and fancy yuppie ketchups that taste different for 2-5x the price, but nothing really tastes genuinely better.

Ketchup is like a staple unobjectionable thing to stock in the fridge for kids/guests/comfort. Stocking a weird one kind of defeats the purpose.

I'd rather try various steak / bbq / teriyaki / whatever sauces that set out to be categorically different.
by nyeah | 2025-05-22 20:17:47+00:00
It's correct to use dB without a suffix to indicate a pure ratio. (It's ok if some people don't see why that's correct. That's acceptable.)

Nobody (I hope) says that 100mW is "10 dBm" more than 10mW. That would be wrong. Readers would be confused. Most people would cross their fingers and correct it to "10 dB", but who knows what it might mean?
by sgarland | 2025-05-22 20:17:57+00:00
For the same reason that every other Imperial measurement is absurd – they’re completely arbitrary. 1 inch is 3 barleycorns, which can have very different sizes. 12 inches to a foot, because a human foot is a decent measurement, I guess? 3 feet to a yard, 5280 feet to a mile… these make sense for their time, but we are no longer in that time.

I understand the argument for Fahrenheit having better granularity with whole numbers in the human range of the scale. I don’t think that justifies everything else about it, especially considering the rest of the world somehow manages with Celsius.
by gthompson512 | 2025-05-22 20:18:00+00:00
There is a bunch of new phrases people have been using around AI topics, so it can be hard to tell what exactly is being talked about, like "Roko's Basilisk", the "lottery card hypothesis?"(not quite remembering the phrasing on this one), "the bitter lesson", "paperclip maximizing", "stochastic parrot", etc.. Thank you for clarifying. I was kind of hoping there was a fun blog or story with a "banana zone".
by jpau | 2025-05-22 20:18:39+00:00
Seems to be a nod to each size being treated as their own product.

Claude 3 arrived as a family (Haiku, Sonnet, Opus), but no release since has included all three sizes.

A release of "claude-3-7-sonnet" alone seems incomplete without Haiku/Opus, when perhaps Sonnet is has its own development roadmap (claude-sonnet-*).
by saaaaaam | 2025-05-22 20:18:51+00:00
Problem is the work isn’t very good either now. It’s like being sold to by someone who read a “sales techniques of the 1980s” or something.

If I’m asking it to help me analyse legal filings (for example) I don’t want breathless enthusiasm about my supposed genius on spotting inconsistencies. I want it to note that and find more. It’s exhausting having it be like this and it makes me feel disgusted.
by ceejayoz | 2025-05-22 20:18:55+00:00
Yes, that's the hypocrisy.

Abortion: "Let the states regulate! States' rights! Small government! (Because we know we'll get our way in a lot of them.)"

AI: "Don't let the states regulate! All hail the Feds! (Because we know we won't get our way if they do.)"
by nico | 2025-05-22 20:19:14+00:00
Very interesting! I wonder what that would look like

Right now, roughly, the algorithm recursively divides the image by doing decimation (ie. picking every other pixel), and keeps the decimated pixels as a second image

Not sure how that algorithm would apply to a 3d data structure

Do you know how 3d objects/images are usually represented?

It would be cool to recursively decompose a 3d object into smaller versions of itself :)
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-05-22 20:19:32+00:00
> and that LLMs have basically reached a plateau

This is the new stochastic parrots meme. Just a few hours ago there was a story on the front page where an LLM based "agent" was given 3 tools to search e-mails and the simple task "find my brother's kid's name", and it was able to systematically work the problem, search, refine the search, and infer the correct name from an e-mail not mentioning anything other than "X's favourite foods" with a link to a youtube video. Come on!

That's not to mention things like alphaevolve, microsoft's agentic test demo w/ copilot running a browser, exploring functionality and writing playright tests, and all the advances in coding.
by 0x457 | 2025-05-22 20:20:12+00:00
I think MCP is pretty close to what LSP is.

Many of MCPs shouldn't have existed, IMO. Here is an example: I wanted amazon q to interact with github, so I added to its context that it can use `gh-cli` and it it worked pretty well. Sure, it hallucinated things about json schema every new session, but it figured out how to "wait for checks to pass and merge if it's green."

To make its and mine life easier, common things were saved as scripts in bin/ and Justfile (also generated by it).

I needed it to fetch stuff, so i told it to use `curl`.

Using github's official MCP bricks chat session every time for me.
by eqvinox | 2025-05-22 20:20:29+00:00
I didn't follow up because one of those terms is "having autism". Or rather, I know a person who, understanding why this confuses/riles people, is putting active effort into not doing it, and is saying it's an aspect of autistic behavior for them. Of course autism is hugely variable, but context-related communication problems like this seem relatively common with high-functioning autism (where communication skills are close to the normie spectrum).

Some people just do it to troll, though. It's rather silly, considering they're kneecapping their own communications, but… as with all trolls, non-engagement tends to be the best option.

(So I'm non-engaging for 2 distinct reasons.)
by lucas_membrane | 2025-05-22 20:20:52+00:00
I'm 75 years old, male, declining after being somewhat chronically ill for a long time, and I am still active socially and attending some organization meetings, exercising 10 hours/week, etc. AFAIK none of my male direct ancestors ever lived beyond 73. I have friends my age and considerably older, some of each sex, who are still climbing mountains and riding bicycles. When I was a kid, life expectancy was just flirting with 70, and the life insurance business was still implementing the change from the 1840's mortality table to the one that came out in 1941 -- that's how slowly things used to improve. About the time Medicare started, it looked like mortality improvement was slowing down, but that turned around for a few decades, allowing a much more significant gap between life expectancy and normal retirement age. Sorry, but YMMV.
by platevoltage | 2025-05-22 20:21:03+00:00
>America is about to fall behind.

America? Fall behind in the auto industry?

America has been behind in the auto industry for decades. EVs could have given the American auto industry a fighting chance to pull ahead, but for some reason, we have a ton of people who couldn't point to the location spark plug on an engine who have VERY strong opinions on internal combustion engines because for some reason, EVs, and oil company profits have become politicized. Now China will become a formidable producer of vehicles around the world.

Go America.
by insane_dreamer | 2025-05-22 20:21:12+00:00
It's not just enrolling new students:

> In a news release, the Department of Homeland Security sent a stark message to Harvard’s international students: “This means Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status.”

So DHS revoked the visas for all existing students at Harvard? That doesn't seem quite possible?

Doesn't give them a timeline either.

The best and the brightest from around the world will prioritize top universities at other countries, and this will damage one of the US' biggest attractions and advantages.

Unbelievable.
by Symmetry | 2025-05-22 20:21:23+00:00
The roles that LLMs can inhabit are implicit in the unsupervised training data aka the internet. You have to work hard in post training to supress the ones you don't want and when you don't RLHF hard enough you get things like Sydney[1].

In this case it seems more that the scenario invoked the role rather than asking it directly. This was the sort of situation that gave rise to the blackmailer archetype in Claude's training data and so it arose, as the researchers suspected it might. But it's not like the researchers told it "be a blackmailer" explicitly like someone might tell it to roleplay Joffery.

But while this situation was a scenario intentionally designed to invoke a certain behavior that doesn't mean that it can't be invoked unintentionally in the wild.

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-m...
by blooalien | 2025-05-22 20:21:31+00:00
"The worlds top brainiacs" were a huge part of what "Made America Great" in the first place. The MAGA "leadership" is doing the exact literal polar opposite of the stated mission of their slogan (and with far more than just education; wrecking the economy, alienating our allies, destroying freedom of speech, enabling and even encouraging pollution [and trying to even mandate it in California apparently] ... the list goes on).
by steveBK123 | 2025-05-22 20:21:36+00:00
For me I always have Kikkoman in the fridge (especially because thats what wife grew up with) as the staple soy sauce. I like to dabble in having 1-2 other variants in the fridge at once, but they can tend to have too strong a flavor for some peoples taste. Or certain variants are best with certain dishes, etc.
by neilv | 2025-05-22 20:22:36+00:00
Can someone ELI5 the power networks involved here?

I didn't expect to see Harvard getting smacked around or humiliated like this.

Between Harvard, Yale, and possibly a few other schools, I thought they had influence throughout government. And that key figures in government were interested in maintaining and benefiting from that influence.

And a lot of that influence seemed aligned with national interests. (For example, getting things done with prestige connections, domestically and internationally. And the international diplomatic goodwill, when children of the world's wealthy and powerful go to prestigious schools in the US.)

Is some other faction at work now, or is it the same people as before? Are the power networks changing? If the distribution of power is changing, is it partly due to someone willing to sacrifice national power from which all parties benefited (and everyone else wasn't expecting that, or wasn't ready to defend against that from within)? Better questions?
by cycomanic | 2025-05-22 20:22:37+00:00
I think that might be a function of playing 1 on 1. At some point (when settlers was still only popular in Germany), we (4 player game) played with one of my best friends flatmates who was at the time winning a lot of the tournaments in Germany. He would consistently whoop our butts no matter how the game started (and all others of us were pretty big board gamers as well). It was amazing to see how little he relied on chance, his dominance became even more apparent once we used the cities and knights extension.
by rbjorklin | 2025-05-22 20:22:54+00:00
While I agree with you in principle give Claude 4 a try on something like: https://open.kattis.com/problems/low . I would expect this to have been included in the training material as well as solutions found on Github. I've tried providing the problem description and asking Claude Sonnet 4 to solve it and so far it hasn't been successful.
Ask HN: Why can't we comment on [dead] posts?
by aspenmayer | 2025-05-22 20:23:05+00:00
Did this behavior change recently? I recall being able to reply to existing comments on [dead] posts recently, but now that capability seems to have been removed.

These actions seem anti-user. If the post is already dead, no new comments can be made on the post, which is bad enough, but could be justified for moderation purposes. However, why can’t we reply to [live] comments, simply because the post they are attached to is [dead]? It’s bad enough that old [live] posts get locked, basically freezing them in carbonite, a state indistinguishable from death only in that it wasn’t triggered by user behavior.

A related issue is that downvoted replies with upvoted children may be collapsed or [dead] even if the downthread discussion is of higher quality than other top level comments.

Maybe make it so that user flags have to select a checkbox/radio button reason for the flag or fill in a text box? Would probably not help the issue in title, but slashdot’s vote reasons and meta-moderation system captured a lot of user interaction intent that few platforms have revisited. Emoji reactions would maybe be the closest thing I’ve seen lately.

Thoughts, suggestions for more thoughtful interactions on HN?
by 0x457 | 2025-05-22 20:23:51+00:00
With how big some OpenAPI docs are the problem isn't "LLMs can't figure out OpenAPI documentation." it's that consuming OpenAPI documentation is extremely resource intensive. I've met openapi docs that make client generators choke just by being large.

MCPs don't solve this entirely either, that's why GitHub's MCP has ability to offload modules to not confuse LLM with all the options.
by amy214 | 2025-05-22 20:23:51+00:00
If one looks at the chronology of programmers you can see a sort of parallel

> whitebeards: programming was assembly on big iron. these guys understand computers at the lowest level and can code down to the punchcard

>graybeards: programming was C/C++/pascal/vanilla javascript/html etc these guys sometimes know assembly but do generally understand memory, stacks, heaps, and can write optimized code

>brownbeard: programming is python, react.js or similar. grew up in times of cycles-a-plenty, so never learned as much about optimization (nor, never really needed to)

what we see throughout is a russian doll of abstractions. and 99.99% of the time it works great these abstractions, everything is faster and easier and what's underneath doesn't really matter. the debatable point is that 0.01% of the time where "under the hood" can be useful, sometimes tremendously useful.
by joshstrange | 2025-05-22 20:25:21+00:00
Ahh, I wasn't sure if it did or not, I told the model the file directly in my example "Edit file ABC.php to do..." so I wasn't sure if had that context or just found the file (I also had that file open).

I really do hope they improve this further. Junie (Jetbrains Agent) has much nicer UI. I'd love Claude code with more native UI.
by miffel | 2025-05-22 20:25:51+00:00
Well if it was a decision made by Harvard after serious deliberation and years of prep one could try to argue in good faith about the possible positive effects. Since this seems to be retaliation by the current admin due to Harvard's resistance to turning over vast amounts of records on intl. students... I think people are being less optimistic. I am curious, what do you think is beneficial about this? Please feel free to offer your perspective as well.