MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by elcritch | 2025-05-04 21:25:38+00:00
So a single company that claims to detect AI writing says these two linked books were AI written? The one book that was actually read doesn’t seem linked or the name actually given, so it’s hard to verify.

The article makes good click bait, but the substance seems lacking. The two actual linked books have decent reviews. Perhaps there were written by someone with ADHD who leveraged LLMs to help write a book that others also found helpful? Honestly I’m more worried about fake reviews, AI or human.

The content of the anonymous ADHD book that offended the person the article centers on? Well they apparently read seemingly horrible AI generated nonsense like people with ADHD are “four times more likely to die significantly earlier”. Well unfortunately that’s actually generally true. Maybe it’s AI written sentence but there’s plenty of research showing folks with untreated ADHD die earlier and are much more likely to die in accidents. I don’t care to quote research here but it’s readily found.

The other complaint about ADHD outbursts resulting in lasting scars? Well unfortunately that can also be true. Folks with ADHD are more prone to saying things they don’t mean or even if true said in a hurtful way.

One ADHD book I read years back pre-LLMs, was written by a counselor whose ADHD client snapped back something like “I’m glad your mother died” to their spouse without meaning too. The counselor said it took years for the couple to heal from that and never fully recovered. So yes, ADHD can result in injuries that leave lasting scars. Sometimes ADHD can really suck.

Overall the article seems to be “personal read unpleasant things about their ADHD diagnosis” and blames it on LLM tools with scant evidence. It’s about as annoying an article as posts on HN claiming another comment sounds AI written. Maybe it is, maybe not, but crap writing existed before LLMs. The article has less overall thought IMHO than an actual LLM might show.
by doright | 2025-05-04 21:25:50+00:00
People just have to want to like things. If they don't like something enough then a near-ubiquitous form of outsourcing is now available for them to get carried away with.

The "wanting to like things" is a highly undervalued skill/trait. It comes down to building a habit through repetition - not necessarily having fun or getting results, but training your mind like a muscle to think putting in effort isn't that bad an activity.

For those growing up I think this is not something that is taught - usually it is already there as a childlike sense of wonder that gets pruned by controlling interests. If education forcing you to do math removes any enthusiasm you had for math, that's largely determined by circumstance. You'd need someone else to tell you the actual joys of X to offset that (and I'd guess most parents/teachers don't practice math for fun), or just spontaneously figuring out how interesting X is totally on one's own which is even rarer.

I didn't have either so I'm a mathophobe, but I'm alright with that since I have other interests to focus on.
by Animats | 2025-05-04 21:25:54+00:00
Right. This is a demo.

A more impressive demo is that it can do precise turns in place without skidding.[1] That's the U8, BYD's answer to Rivian. The U9 can do that too.

Rivian did demo a turn in place, but they were spewing dirt all over.[2] Rivian took the feature out.

Now, those are BYD's high end supercars, to show off the technology. The high-end volume vehicle, the U7, just came out.[3] That is under US$90K (depending on what tariffs are on this week) and competes with Tesla's higher end products. All the fancy torque and suspension control of the supercar, but at a lower price point.

BYD isn't offering it in the US. Just the rest of the world.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhvjPwshME0

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BkxjHkOvYY

[3] https://electrek.co/2025/03/27/byd-launched-first-ultra-luxu...
by neilv | 2025-05-04 21:25:58+00:00
> [...] but not so distinctive to be worth passing along to an honor council. Even if I did, I’m not sure the marginal gains in the integrity of the class would be worth the hours spent litigating the issue.

The school should be drilling into students, at orientation, what some school-wide hard rules are regarding AI.

One of the hard rules is probably that you have to write your own text and code, never copy&paste. (And on occasions when copy&paste is appropriate, like in a quote, or to reuse an off-the-shelf function, it's always cited/credited clearly and unambiguously.)

And no instructors should be contradicting those hard rules.

(That one instructor who tells the class on the first day, "I don't care if you copy&paste from AI for your assignments, as if it's your own work; that just means you went through the learning exercise of interacting with AI, which is what I care about"... is confusing the students, for all their other classes.)

Much of society is telling students that everything is BS, and that their job is to churn BS to get what they want. Early "AI' usage popular practices so far looks to be accelerating that. Schools should be dropping a brick wall in front of that. Well, a padded wall, for the students who can still be saved.
by comex | 2025-05-04 21:26:48+00:00
That's true, but it illustrates a point about 'jagged intelligence'. Just like there's a tendency to cherry-pick the tasks AI is best at and equate it with general intelligence, there's a counter-tendency to cherry-pick the tasks AI is worst at and equate it with a general lack of intelligence.

This case is especially egregious because of how there were probably two different models involved. I assume Marcus' images came from some AI service that followed what until very recently was the standard pattern: you ask an LLM to generate an image; the LLM goes and fluffs out your text, then passes it to a completely separate diffusion-based image generation model, which has only a rudimentary understanding of English grammar. So of course his request for "words and nothing else" was ignored. This is a real limitation of the image generation model, but that has no relevance to the strengths and weaknesses of the LLM itself. And 'AI will replace humans' scenarios typically focus on text-based tasks that use the LLM itself.

Arguably AI services are responsible for encouraging users to think of what are really two separate models (LLM and image generation) as a single 'AI'. But Marcus should know better.

And so it's not surprising that ChatGPT was able to produce dramatically better results now that it has "native" image generation, which supposedly uses the native multimodal capabilities of the LLM (though rumors are that that description is an oversimplification). The results are still not correct. But it's a major advancement that the model now respects grammar; it no longer just spots the word "fruit" and generates a picture of fruit. Illustration or no, Marcus is misrepresenting the state of the art by not including this advancement.

If Marcus had used a recent ChatGPT output instead, the comparison would be more fair, but still somewhat misleading. Even with native capabilities, LLMs are simply worse at both understanding and generating images than they are at understanding and generating text. But again, text capability matters much more. And you can't just assume that a model's poor performance on images will correlate with poor performance on text.

The thing is, I tend to agree with the substance of Marcus's post, including the part where portrayals of current AI capabilities are suspect because they don't pass the 'sniff test', or in other words, because they don't take into account how LLMs continue to fall down on some very basic tasks. I just think the proper tasks for this evaluation should be text-based. I'd say the original "count the number of 'r's in strawberry" task is a decent example, even if it's been patched, because it really showcases the 'confidently wrong' issue that continues to plague LLMs.
by shrell | 2025-05-04 21:26:52+00:00
I sincerely doubt a single person you thought had subtle hacks was hacking.

People constantly cry that the other team is hacking and reviewing the demo shows that they almost never are. The reality is they were just better. That seems to be hard for a large portion of the player base to handle. Low ranks and low trust factor are full of obvious hacks because they make an account, get banned and repeat. You don't see the decent hacks until the upper ranks because you need to be good enough at the game to hide it and would just rank up fast through the middle rankd
by dhamidi | 2025-05-04 21:27:02+00:00
Modash.io | Senior Product Engineer | Remote (EU) | Full-time

Modash is an end-to-end influencer marketing platform for Shopify stores.

We help every creator earn a living.

Headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, with engineering distributed across Europe.

60 person team, raised $12M in Series A funding, ARR growing 2x YoY.

We're on the hunt for Senior Product Engineers who love working with AWS, Vue, NodeJS, Typescript and a passion for product: you are eager to talk to customers and anticipate their needs.

If you're all about remote work, and can't wait to make a real impact, we'd love to chat!

Interview Process

Option A: https://www.modash.io/blog/engineering-interviews-at-modash

Use https://apply.workable.com/modash/j/C1507B65C3/ to apply

Option B: showcase your project!

- It's live somewhere, - It has users - You built it yourself/you are the main contributor

send us two videos about your project and we'll get back to you

Use this link https://forms.gle/K4GcyxT1zbmHGdsRA to apply.
by whatnow37373 | 2025-05-04 21:27:32+00:00
I have a more maximalist view of what democracy means which is I believe more common in Europe and I suspect that's where most of your disagreement stems from.

First of all no single judge will be capable of upholding this, but let's say the entire judiciary has indeed decided to disenfranchise half the population I'd say they are grossly failing at their job. But anyway, your question was: is that democracy?

Well, it depends. In my democracy it would not be, because freedom is a big part of what democracy means here - even if The People decide freedom is unimportant. That's what we don't like about naked democracy, it easily leads to mob rule in which freedom is stripped and the tyrannical majority overrides all other concerns.

In my mind democracy is a broad system of checks, balances and institutions in which the will of the people is just one element. An important one, but definitely not the only one.

Just for entertainment consider this: if The People vote to keep women out of the electoral process, is that democracy?
by necovek | 2025-05-04 21:28:14+00:00
It's not a "test", it's an "assignment". Assignment is a way to practice what you've learned, and a (good) teacher would want to get your original thoughts so they could adjust their instruction and teaching material to what they believe you missed in order to improve your mental model around the topic (or in other words, to teach you something).

Perhaps the problem is that they are "graded", but this is to motivate the student, and runs against the age-old problem of gamification.
by ghaff | 2025-05-04 21:28:26+00:00
My example is that I have a pile of laserdiscs that some retro collector probably wants but I'm not going to individually list them on ebay for $3 each. Maybe I'll put the whole package on Facebook for a few hundred and see if someone bites but that's about as far as I'll go.

I do live at the end of a long driveway on a busy road and I've found that a good way to dump old lawn equipment and furniture for free.
by bigbadfeline | 2025-05-04 21:28:43+00:00
> "But the people who yap about democracy are the educated intelligentsia."

Are you a time-traveler or something? Nowadays the language is shaped by privately owned bot farms and media - be it social or legacy. They work for pay, the truth is social or not for pay, etc. "The educated intelligentsia" is being defunded and investigated to help them shut up sooner.
by palata | 2025-05-04 21:29:24+00:00
> A typical belief among students is that classes are a series of hurdles to be overcome; at the end of this obstacle course, they shall receive a degree

Yes, totally. Unfortunately, it takes time and maturity to understand how this is completely wrong, but I feel like most students go through that belief.

Not sure how relevant it is, but it makes me think of two movies with Robin Williams: Dead Poet's Society and Will Hunting. In the former, Robin's character manages to get students interested in stuff instead of "just passing the exams". In the later, I will just quote this part:

> Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you, who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in.

I don't give a shit about whether a student can learn the book by heart or not. I want the student to be able to think on their own; I want to be able to have an interesting discussion with them. I want them to think critically. LLMs fundamentally cannot solve that.
by orbital-decay | 2025-05-04 21:29:54+00:00
Ban delay is a standard practice, as is raising the entry barrier, but everything both did was creating a culture that made cheaters adapt and get more and more involved, to the point where the cheating itself is the game. What anticheat companies brag about in your link and in the PR piece in OP is entirely irrelevant, the reality is pretty different. I know because I'm pretty familiar with it, having studied it for years in a low-energy mode.

>If you think it is an issue then don't play their game.

This is a hypothetical example which would affect everyone regardless of playing any games. Not an existing thing, thankfully.

(although I wouldn't be surprised if the pressure will eventually be enough to make this happen. The fact that you can't fix a rotten culture with authoritarian measures without affecting everyone else never stopped anyone)
by exiguus | 2025-05-04 21:30:57+00:00
Btw, this comment was created by AI.

Now in short:

Static code analysis, aka your linter, is your friend; if it's not in place to catch human errors, the problem will only worsen with AI-generated code. And this is only half the truth, as AI will add another level of stupidity that your current linter can't detect yet. And for now, i will not start with non-functional or business requirements.
by ysavir | 2025-05-04 21:31:43+00:00
A codebase doesn't need that toolset to be an SPA. An SPA is just a website where all the site's functionality is done on the "root page", and it uses JS to load the data, handle navigation, etc. Doesn't matter whether that's all done through React in TypeScript and compiled by Vite or by handrolled JavaScript fetched in .js files.
by mrshadowgoose | 2025-05-04 21:32:11+00:00
A black hole in our solar system is basically "in our backyard" in relation to typical interstellar distances.

Sure, we wouldn't be able to get there for many decades, but "within a century" would be feasible.

There are so many unknowns surrounding the nature of black holes. Having one in our backyard would give us a chance to test our guesses.
by ComputerGuru | 2025-05-04 21:32:30+00:00
White House communications director previously revealed (after “Signalgate”) that Signal was an approved and whitelisted app for gov’t officials to have on work phones and even discuss top-secret matters on. But I haven’t heard that TeleMessage was approved (and I’d have serious questions if it were given the foreign intelligence factor). Anyone know if there is a clear answer to whether it’s been approved?
by dmillar | 2025-05-04 21:32:38+00:00
DuckDB > geopandas, certainly for anything out of core. Though, I recently gave up on importing 70GB worth of large multipolygons (from a csv in hex wkb), and just used a postgis container. In concert with DuckDB's growth, I'd also mark the advent of geoparquet.

The big change, in my view, over the past decade in GIS software, is in compute and storage efficiency across the typical stack. DuckDB has become a part of this, but h/t to the advances from shapely, geopandas, geoparquet, and GDAL. There's a lot of overlap in that venn diagram, and credit should be spread around. QGIS is great, too, though I feel there is market opportunity to apply 90/10 to its massive feature set and move it to the web.
by PJDK | 2025-05-04 21:32:38+00:00
Populism is definitely a part of democracy, but it is a criticism from "responsible" politicians for "irresponsible" ones.

Obviously this is all politics so you needn't worry about the specifics of what actually is populist.

But, imagine two "responsible" politicians.

One who believes in lowering taxes as a worthwhile thing, and acknowledges cuts to services as a negative impact that is outweighed by the good.

The other believes in higher public spending, with the negative being higher taxes, outweighed by the better services.

Both would be angered by a third candidate that came along promising both lower taxes and higher public spending - just the "popular" parts of their respective manifestos.
by rscho | 2025-05-04 21:33:05+00:00
> I fear the general trend of "medication bad" will get us back to those dark times.

I think this won't ever happen. Modern docs would absolutely not accept working under such conditions. Anesthesia is not only comfort for the patient, but also for care providers. As you can often see when surgeons advise patients on refusing local anesthesia or nurses demanding benzos for the screaming demented patient at 2 a.m.
by skupig | 2025-05-04 21:33:24+00:00
CS has a concept of "trust factor" which groups people more likely to be cheating in the same game. If you ever queue with a friend with a low trust factor (which happens a lot if they're on a smurf account), there are cheaters in pretty much every game... seeing that many blatant cheaters has really made me think there must be a lot of smarter cheaters flying under the radar in regular games. It's basically impossible to tell whether someone is wallhacking or if they have really good game sense.
by throwforfeds | 2025-05-04 21:33:31+00:00
> I don’t want to end up with some weird ass world view, so I’ve avoided LSD and mushrooms.

I'd be with you if you said ayahuasca, or maybe iboga, but mushrooms are really pleasant and I don't know anyone that has come back weird from a strong mushroom trip. LSD is one of my favorites, but it's definitely life altering if given the right set and setting, and many people are looking for escape rather than deep internal work. I still think most people would benefit from it at least once in their lives, as long as the conditions are right for it.

But I agree with you overall, you can certainly take drugs here and there and be a perfectly well adjusted individual. I'd argue maybe even more so than the masses out there drinking alcohol every night!
by laurentlb | 2025-05-04 21:33:56+00:00
There are many ways to use LLMs.

The issue, IMO, is that some people throw in a one-shot, short prompt, and get a generic, boring output. "Garbage in, generic out."

Here's how I actually use LLMs:

- To dump my thoughts and get help organizing them.

- To get feedback on phrasing and transitions (I'm not a native speaker).

- To improve tone, style (while trying to keep it personal!), or just to simplify messy sentences.

- To identify issues, missing information, etc. in my text.

It’s usually an iterative process, and the combined prompt length ends up longer than the final result. And I incorporate the feedback manually.

So sure, if someone types "write a blog post about X" and hits go, the prompt is more interesting than the output. But when there are five rounds of edits and context, would you really rather read all the prompts and drafts instead of the final version?

(if you do: https://chatgpt.com/share/6817dd19-4604-800b-95ee-f2dd05add4...)
by globnomulous | 2025-05-04 21:33:58+00:00
Both terms are flexible, sure. And I agree that debating definitions is boring.

> The point is that the guy was a genius.

Is that the point? Are we discussing the man himself, or are we discussing his work? Both, I guess, according to the following:

> He’s written some of the best songs ever by many definitions. That makes him a genius.

It doesn't. Genius is a capacity, not an accomplishment. One can be a genius without accomplishing anything, and one who isn't a genius can do high-level, history-making work.
by qustrolabe | 2025-05-04 21:35:10+00:00
It's actually doesn't matter. I hated this hassle of writing various texts while studying so much. Like does it really matter whether student would generate this text or just go google and copy paste some paragraphs from somewhere? And don't even hope for them to genuinely write all that stuff themselves because it's a huge waste of time even for those who actually cares and interested in the subject.
by crazygringo | 2025-05-04 21:35:13+00:00
I've read the whole thing and I'm not convinced at all.

First of all, nowhere does he prove archers didn't volley fire. All he says is there's no written evidence of it, and then claims that the TV battle starting with a volley of arrows is false.

But it still seems perfectly reasonable to me. You wait until the enemy starts charging with infantry and cavalry so they're not huddling under shields, the general makes a visible signal, and all the archers immediately draw at the same time and let forth a single volley at the ideal moment for the volley to meet the enemy. Of course it's not going to "mow down" the enemy -- that's a strawman -- but the article makes clear all the significant damage it does cause.

I totally buy that after the intial volley, it's just randomly spaced shooting at whatever rate individual archers can draw. And I buy that the initial volley wouldn't have archers holding the bow taut for 30 seconds until a dramatic command to shoot -- rather, upon command, they would draw and fire in a single motion.

But nothing in this article suggests that the initial archery attack wouldn't be a volley. And common sense suggests that it would be, just as infantry and cavalry charge in a synchronized way in response to a command. In other words, quite similar in fact to how movies and TV shows do depict it -- just without the separate first "draw" command that gets held for drama.

Am I missing something here?
by Bassilisk | 2025-05-04 21:35:40+00:00
No one knows what would have happened had the blackout continued for more than one night. On the first night, even the criminals and predators were unprepared, police and emergency services would still respond, people had food and water. Already at the second day those things might start to change when phones run out of power and unrefrigerated food begins to go bad and people start to run low on water or cash.
by CuriouslyC | 2025-05-04 21:36:10+00:00
There's something to be said for using the right tool for the job. There's also something to be said for maximizing your ability to hire developers. Software is a game of tradeoffs, and while I can and do still pick up modern hotness when warranted (e.g. Zig), sometimes the path to minimum total software cost (and thus maximum company value) is to take well trodden paths.

As fun side anecdote, if you're doing scientific computing in a variety of fields, Fortran 95 is mostly still fine ;)
by anonymars | 2025-05-04 21:37:36+00:00
There are many ways for food to not be 100% absorbed, which I think can most easily be demonstrated by eating a bag of nuts and waiting a day or two

I don't think it's unreasonable to think that different bodies absorb food in different ways (or proportions), particularly given what we've seen about the gut microbiome

Apparently even just changing the time of food intake can affect obesity (in rats) if this study is to be believed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22608008/

In response to, "but those are rats", I think it's a lot easier to cast doubt on "100% of food is always absorbed" vs "I don't think that always holds true"

I mean, heck: if there are no residual calories in human waste, how can it burn?