MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kaashif | 2025-06-14 00:56:18+00:00
Okay, that hits the third question but the second question wasn't about whether there exists a situation that can be talked out of. The question was about whether this is possible for ANY situation.

I don't think it is. If people know you're trying to escape, some people will just never comply with anything you say ever. Others will.

And serial killers or rapists may try their luck many times and fail. They cannot convince literally anyone on the street to go with them to a secluded place.
by majormajor | 2025-06-14 00:56:39+00:00
You can make a better tool by training the service (some of which involves training the model, some of which involves iterating on the prompt(s) behind the scene) to get a lot of the iteration out of the way. Instead of users having to fill in a detailed prompt we now have "reasoning" models which, as their first step, dump out a bunch of probably-relevant background info to try to push the next tokens in the right direction. A logical next step if enough people run into the OP's issue here is to have it run that "criticize this and adjust" loop internally.

But it all makes it very hard to tell how much of the underlying "intelligence" is improving vs how much of the human scaffolding around it is improving.
by giusman | 2025-06-14 00:56:43+00:00
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by lithocarpus | 2025-06-14 00:56:45+00:00
I'll bite.. what's the most compelling study showing that saturated fat causes heart disease? (Not a meta analysis, a single study or two, so I can actually look at the methods and results.)

Each time I've done this on a given topic I've found that the "established science" is making claims with certainty that are not really well supported. But I'm always open to learning something new.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-06-14 00:57:30+00:00
> Just because it worked once with one set of inputs means nothing about it working in the general case.

A C example of same could look like:

#include <limits.h> #include <stdio.h> const char *is_positive (int value) { return value < 0 ? "false" : "true"; } int main (int ac, char *av[]) { printf (" 1 is positive? %s\n", is_positive (1)); printf (" 2 is positive? %s\n", is_positive (2)); printf (" -1 is positive? %s\n", is_positive (-1)); printf (" -2 is positive? %s\n", is_positive (-2)); printf ("%ld is positive? %s\n", (long)INT_MAX, is_positive (INT_MAX)); printf ("%ld is positive? %s\n", (long)INT_MAX + 1L, is_positive (INT_MAX + 1)); /* this one is can be quite pernicious */ printf (" 0 is positive? %s\n", is_positive (0)); return 0; }
by Davidzheng | 2025-06-14 00:58:06+00:00
I don't think forgetting correctly is something humans are really good at. I'm not convinced human brains are "exceptionally good" at much of what we do tbh. I think human brain memory capacity is so large that most of forgetting is nowhere near "clearing space for new info" but because the brain correctly knows that some past bad information interferes with learning new things.
by rabbits77 | 2025-06-14 00:59:18+00:00
I’d argue that is not the most ideal Prolog solution. More like it’s simply a recursive implementation of an imperative solution.

For fractals you’ll want to be able to recognize and generate the structures. It’s a great use case for Definite Clause Grammars (DCGs). A perfect example of this would be Triska’s Dragon Curve implementation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMdiPC1ZckI
by teleforce | 2025-06-14 01:00:47+00:00
>The discovery of "something akin to DNA fingerprinting that lets people discover ancestry" would be the type of major discovery that would completely upset our understanding of things.

It's already available, and ever heard about Mitochondrial Eve? [1]

But this narrative somehow does not fit the non-intelligent design believer thus is not made popular and well-known to the rest of the world.

What we have now is the illogical conjecture that human ancestry is originated from monkey while Darwin himself did not condone it. His actual conjecture is that man and monkey probably has the same ancestry.

Ironically it's reported in one of the major holy books that some people were turned into monkey because of working during their God's assigned holidays (read holy days) thus braking their covenant and got transformed into monkey [2].

[1] Mitochondrial Eve:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve

[2] The Jews breach the Sanctity of the Sabbath:

https://quran.com/al-baqarah/65/tafsirs
by kennywinker | 2025-06-14 01:01:01+00:00
Egypt doesn’t claim that gaza is part of egypt, while simultaneously denying that they aren’t occupying them.

Also there has been plenty of violence in gaza in that time period. 6,407 palestinians and 308 israelis. On the palestinian side that’s about two 9/11s, or around six oct 7ths.

Check the fatalities section of this article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli%E2%80%93Palestinian_...

As for equality:

“Many Arab citizens feel that the state, as well as society at large, not only actively limits them to second-class citizenship, but treats them as enemies”

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

So while they may be equal in law, that doesn’t mean they have full equality. Hence my wording “some degree of equality”
by gibbitz | 2025-06-14 01:01:21+00:00
By paycheck my company's CEO is worth 95 senior engineers and that's before stock options. With stock options he's worth 265 senior engineers! (Or 240 and 670 junior developers respectively)

He's so skilled he splits atoms with his mind. He probably should be president, except he's nowhere near the highest paid executive in the US. Probably not in the top 500.
by dinfinity | 2025-06-14 01:02:53+00:00
Nope, still bullshit. The world does not consist of Americans. For billions of people it is very very easy to get their body into a low blood glucose state. No 'super heavy physical activity' required.

Don't get me wrong: In most of those cases eating something else would be better, but that does not make sugar 'bad in general'. Nutrition discourse does not benefit from such bad and misleading vilifications and simplifications. It causes people to think in 'silver bullets' and distrust science and government when that silver bullet turns out not to work.
by ahartmetz | 2025-06-14 01:03:09+00:00
Such ranks tend to be mostly for pay grade and they count for some formal but mostly meaningless stuff like who salutes whom first and who gets to tell off whom (in practice for such officers, it's more a shield than a weapon - everyone knows which kind of officers they are) in general situations. These officers aren't going to be leading direct fighting or anything like that.

Source: Was a draftee once, talked to a technical officer later.
by dgunay | 2025-06-14 01:04:10+00:00
I don't usually forget to eat, but this happens to me all the time for tasks that don't have a physical feedback mechanism.

I missed a doctor's appointment today because I didn't remember to schedule a corresponding "you need to leave the house _now_" alarm to go with the calendar event, which I forgot about because I looked at my calendar once in the morning and the appointment was in the afternoon.

I will remember _some_ tasks if they "are important", but those are typically things that cause me enough anxiety that I just don't ever actually stop thinking about them until they are done. I can't really do reliable just in time recall of tasks unless it is for something I have deeply internalized into a habit.
by ravenstine | 2025-06-14 01:05:10+00:00
Unless something changes, I think that even the idea of AI being your "friend" is a giant meme. Kind of like dating apps, people will claim all the kids today have AI friends and AI therapists and talk it up as if it's just ad good, but there's a good chance that, given a decade, everyone will recognize that it's crap.

Human knowledge is not the same thing as human experience. Create an AI that experiences the world autonomously, experiences trauma and come back to me.

I say this as someone who uses AI and doesn't completely dismiss it like many on HN these days. So far, I don't see it replacing the human being for connection and understanding. Replacing coders? That's a whole other question.
by jchw | 2025-06-14 01:06:00+00:00
I see this sort of argument a lot, but I think it's too oversimplified, there's definitely a category difference between the kinds of automation we were doing before the recent generative AI boom and that we are now doing with generative AI. The type of stuff we were automating before was largely (though obviously, not entirely) stuff that I think nobody really wanted to have to do in the first place, like manually inputting a bunch of data or what have you. If there wasn't a category difference, then this wouldn't have been a big deal worth so much VC funds and market cap.

That said, that's not my real reason to not use generative AI. My real reason to not use generative AI is that it still kinda sucks at fine details, and that annoys me greatly. These images have a great consistent style to them, but you can see that they're not really that clean. It's possible to tell at a glance, but really possible to see when you zoom in on them, especially depending on the icon. Whether this matters to you is up to taste; Personally, I'd rather have less detailed vector icons that are less technical but are very clean. If I really could do it, though, what I'd actually prefer is hand-crafted icons that are similar to these but with careful attention to detail and no weird artifacts when you pay too close of attention.

I can see that people largely don't care. Some people just have no taste and will jam ugly image generations with obvious, blatant artifacts into their blog posts; you do you. Others will use generative AI carefully in a way where you're not immediately sure if it's gen AI or not, but you probably suspect it; I kinda dislike this, but I can 100% understand it. Thiings is kind of in that group.

Very possible that some day soon genAI will be able to just produce perfect looking icons like this, no text errors, no weird artifacts, maybe even produce them in flawless looking vector SVGs or something. Maybe. For now though, it's tempting, but probably not for me.

I would happily use these as inspiration or reference, though. The broad strokes are good, it's the details that bug me to no end.
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-14 01:06:33+00:00
The vast majority of people, especially groups of people- can be manipulated into doing pretty much anything, good or bad. Hopefully that is self-evident, but see also: every cult, religion, or authoritarian regime throughout all of history.

But even if we assert that not all humans can be manipulated, does it matter? So your president with the nuclear codes is immune to propaganda. Is every single last person in every single nuclear silo and every submarine also immune? If a malevolent superintelligence can brainwash an army bigger than yours, does it actually matter if they persuaded you to give them what you have or if they convince someone else to take it from you?

But also let's be real: if you have enough money, you can do or have pretty much anything. If there's one thing an evil AI is going to have, it's lots and lots of money.
by carlosjobim | 2025-06-14 01:07:44+00:00
Well if you go straight to the elephant in question - Apple - their laptops have looked essentially the same for 10 years or even 15 years if you squint. Because they found a design that's near perfect. So it doesn't need to be renewed to communicate reliability and quality.

Motorcycles of the classic cut are still being manufactured and sold in massive quantities, even though the design is about 50 years old. Same for them, customers know that the quality is high so it doesn't need to say "new".

And I'm positive that people would line up to buy cars with classic designs if the manufacturers started caring about what customers actually want. Not that I dislike modern car design, but it hit the sweet spot about 5 years ago IMO.

So at least for hardware I think a classic design works well to communicate quality.

And I think we're soon reaching a similar mood in software GUI as well.
by magicalhippo | 2025-06-14 01:08:07+00:00
I worded that exceptionally poorly.

What I meant was, when I pay some money for a ticket, not all of that goes back up the chain. The movie theater keeps some of it, yet box office numbers are before that as I understand it[1][2].

[1]: https://stephenfollows.com/i/150400340/what-share-of-box-off...

[2]: https://newsletter.oscars.org/news/post/bond-and-broccoli-al...
Show HN: SharkMCP, a Tshark MCP Server
by PranaFlux | 2025-06-14 01:08:47+00:00
I created a tshark MCP server! This is useful for an agent to debug packet issues.

Async: your agent can run a curl command and get the packets for it Flexible: You choose the capture and display filters Configs: Reusable configs to not go through the hassle of creating filters again or trusting the LLM to know what you need

Let me know what you think!
by roxolotl | 2025-06-14 01:08:48+00:00
The risk is real and should be accounted for. However it is regularly presented both as surprising, and indicative that something more is going on with these models than them behaving how the training set suggests they should behave.

The consequences are the same but it’s important how these things are talked about. It’s also dangerous to convince the public that these systems are something they are not.
by GMoromisato | 2025-06-14 01:08:51+00:00
I'm sure this article resonates with many people; it doesn't resonate with me.

I get value out of (and even enjoy) lots of software, commercial and otherwise (except for Microsoft Teams--that's an abomination).

Ultimately, everything (not just software) is a trade-off. It has benefits and hazards. As long as the benefits outweigh the hazards, I use it. [The one frustration is, of course, when an employer forces a negative-value trade-off on you--that sucks.]

I'm suspicious of articles that talk about drawbacks in isolation, without weighing the benefits: "vaccines have side-effects", "police arrest the wrong people", "electric cars harm the environment".

Ironically, the best answer to many of the article's suggestions (thousands rather than millions, easy to modify, etc.) is to write your own software with LLMs. The future everyone wants is, I think, one where users can ask the computer to do anything, and the computer immediately complies. Will that bring about a software paradise free from the buggy, one-size-fits-none, extractive software of today? I don't know. I guess we'll see.

We live in interesting times.
by cjbgkagh | 2025-06-14 01:09:44+00:00
ME/CFS shows up as immune system dysfunction and for most people is likely downstream from dysautonomia. Given the huge overlap of people with long covid and hEDS, and that long covid presents as dysautonomia, the math likely works out that most people with ME/CFS actually have hEDS. It’s massively underdiagnosed. It’s likely one of many TNXB SNPs, these are overlooked for a few main reasons - it’s considered too common for a rare condition and it’s hard to sequence and only detectable with modern high quality deep WGS.

The other thing is that GLP-1As actually do appear to help with autoimmune conditions and has been, in my case and in the case of many others, one of the most effective medications for treating ME/CFS.

I wish it was a lack of a profit motive that caused medical researchers to be so off base but it appears what is more likely that they’re not very good with stats, as being good at stats would get in the way of all the ‘accidental’ p-hacking they’re so addicted to.

Edit: Added an email to my hacker news user details
Show HN: A visual, knowledge map based interface for deep research/deep dives
by kanodiaashu | 2025-06-14 01:09:53+00:00
I found myself jumping between ChatGPT, tabs, and docs, but never building real understanding. This is my attempt at fixing that — for researchers, curious readers, and lifelong learners.

Would love your thoughts on the interface, and whether this would be useful in your own work or otherwise.
by vvern | 2025-06-14 01:13:20+00:00
Some time ago I worked on cockroachdb and I was working on implementing planning for complex online schema changes.

We really wanted a model that could convincingly handle and reasonably schedule arbitrary combinations of schema change statements that are valid in Postgres. Unlike mysql postgres offers transactional schema changes. Unlike Postgres, cockroach strives to implement online schema changes in a protocol inspired by f1 [0]. Also, you want to make sure you can safely roll back (until you’ve reached the point where you know it can’t fail, then only metadata updates are allowed).

The model we came up with was to decompose all things that can possibly change into “elements” [1] and each element had a schedule of state transitions that move the element through a sequence of states from public to absent or vice versa [2]. Each state transitions has operations [3].

Anyway, you end up wanting to define rules that say that certain element states have to be entered before other if the elements are related in some way. Or perhaps some transitions should happen at the same time. To express these rules I created a little datalog-like framework I called rel [4]. This lets you embed in go a rules engine that then you can add indexes to so that you can have sufficiently efficient implementation and know that all your lookups are indexed statically. You write the rules in Go [5]. To be honest it could be more ergonomic.

The rules are written in Go but for testing and visibility they produce a datomic-inspired format [6]. There’s a lot of rules now!

The internal implementation isn’t too far off from the search implementation presented here [7]. Here’s unify [8]. The thing has some indexes and index selection for acceleration. It also has inverted indexes for set containment queries.

It was fun to make a little embedded logic language and to have had a reason to!

0: https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c... 1: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 2: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 3: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 4: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 5: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 6: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/master/pkg/sql... 7: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa... 8: https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach/blob/f48b3438a296aa...
by bandrami | 2025-06-14 01:13:25+00:00
I worked on a very early iteration of LMs (they weren't "large" yet) in grad school 20 years ago and we drove it with a Makefile. The "prompt" was an input file and it would produce a response as an artifact. It never even occurred to us to structure it as a sequential "chat" because at that point it was still too slow. But it does make me wonder how much the UX changes the way people think about it.
by computator | 2025-06-14 01:15:59+00:00
Given the great distances and how small the planets seem at that scale, I'm surprised that we can see any of the planets with the naked eye. Thinking about Jupiter, it's 140K km in diameter and about 629M km from Earth. That's a ratio of 1:4500. So imagine a U.S. dime that is 1.8cm in diameter placed 1.8 x 4500 = 8100 cm away. Would you be able to see a dime that it 81m or 266ft away at nighttime, assuming it slightly illuminated? We can see Jupiter, so I guess we should be able to see the illuminated dime too.
by mystified5016 | 2025-06-14 01:16:05+00:00
Does anyone else remember maybe ten years ago when the meme was to mash the center prediction on your phone keyboard to see what comes out? Eventually once you predicted enough tokens, it would only output "you are a beautiful person" over and over. It was a big news item for a hot second, lots of people were seeing it.

I wonder if there's any real correlation here? AFAIK, Microsoft owns the dataset and algorithms that produced the "beautiful person" artifact, I would not be surprised at all if it's made it into the big training sets. Though I suppose there's no real way to know, is there?
by b00ty4breakfast | 2025-06-14 01:18:01+00:00
can it? the only example we have of something reasoning on this level is humans and we are most definitely sentient despite our best efforts to sometimes appear otherwise.

And even if the two could theoretically be separated, how sure are we that these AI agents are in that category? I'm pretty sure they are neither, but that doesn't mean it isn't a pretty abhorrent possibility that should be addressed.
by photochemsyn | 2025-06-14 01:18:57+00:00
When that ChatGPT flattery module rolled out and the aftermath ensued, I was incredibly pissed. I actually thought for a few days that I had finally figured out how to structure prompts correctly and thought that when ChatGPT said "that's perfect" that I had given it a well-structured prompt and it was congratulating me on the structure of the prompt.

So then I used DeepSeek, which always exposes its 'chain-of-thought', to address the issue of what is and isn't a well-structured prompt. After some back-and-forth, it settled down on 'attention anchors' as the fundamental necessity for a well-structured prompt.

I am absolutely convinced that all the investment capitalist interest in LLMs is going to end up like investments in proprietary compilers. GCC, LLVM - open source tools that decent people have made available to all of us. Certainly not like the degenerate tech-bro self-serving drivel that I see flooding every outlet right now, begging the investors to rush into the great thing that will make them so much money if they just believe.

LLMs are great tools. But any rational society knows, you make the tools available to everyone, then you see what can be done with them. You can't patent the sun, after all.
by psb217 | 2025-06-14 01:20:28+00:00
Comparing the process of research to tending a garden or raising children is fairly common. This is an iteration on that theme. One thing I find interesting about this analogy is that there's a strong sense of the model's autoregressiveness here in that the model commits early to the gardening analogy and then finds a way to make it work (more or less).

The sorts of useful analogies I was mostly talking about are those that appear in scientific research involving actionable technical details. Eg, diffusion models came about when folks with a background in statistical physics saw some connections between the math for variational autoencoders and the math for non-equilibrium thermodynamics. Guided by this connection, they decided to train models to generate data by learning to invert a diffusion process that gradually transforms complexly structured data into a much simpler distribution -- in this case, a basic multidimensional Gaussian.

I feel like these sorts of technical analogies are harder to stumble on than more common "linguistic" analogies. The latter can be useful tools for thinking, but tend to require some post-hoc interpretation and hand waving before they produce any actionable insight. The former are more direct bridges between domains that allow direct transfer of knowledge about one class of problems to another.