MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by magic_hamster | 2025-07-19 17:36:22+00:00
There have been quite a few skeptic blog posts recently about LLM. Some say they won't use it for coding, others for getting creative ideas, and others won't use it for editing and publishing. However, the silent issue all these posts have in common is that resistance is futile.

To be fair, I also don't like using Copilot when working on code. In many cases it turns into a weird experience when the agent generates the next line(s) and I basically become a discriminator judging if the thing really understands my problem and solution. To be honest, it's boring even if eventually it might make me turn in code faster.

With that said, I cannot ignore that LLMs are happening, and this is the future. The models keep improving but more importantly, the ecosystem keeps improving with things like MCP and better defined context for LLM tools.

We might be looking at a somewhat grim prospect. But like it or not, this is the future. Adapt and survive.
by e-dant | 2025-07-19 17:36:53+00:00
What's all this controversy with GNOME? I must be missing something. Isn't it perfectly reasonable to say that some security issue in a dependency (which is maintained and open and funded, like WebKit or Linux) is not the fault of someone down the line to fix?

I can't imagine someone reporting a bug to one of my repos about some race condition in the kernel. Why the hell are you bothering me with that? Tell the LKML.

That's not to say I'm not sympathetic, it's just, like, what do you expect me to do?
by echelon | 2025-07-19 17:37:13+00:00
Wow. What a good giveaway.

I wonder what others there are.

I occasionally use bullet points, emdashes (unicode, single, and double hyphens) and words like "delve". I hate it think these are the new heuristics.

I think AI is a useful tool (especially image and video models), but I've already had folks (on HN [1]!) call out my fully artisanal comments as LLM-generated. It's almost as annoying as getting low-effort LLM splurge from others.

Edit: As it turns out, cow-orkers isn't actually an LLMism. It's both a joke and a dictation software mistake. Oops.

[1] most recently https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44482876
by majormajor | 2025-07-19 17:38:59+00:00
That's not really true at all, at least at the end user level.

You can have a very thoughtful LLM prompt and get a garbage response if the model fails to generate a solid, sound answer to your prompt. Hard questions with verifiable but obscure answers, for instance, where it generates fake citations.

You can have a garbage prompt and get not-garbage output if you are asking in a well-understood area with a well-understood problem.

And the current generation of company-provided LLMs are VERY highly trained to make the answer look non-garbage in all cases, increasing the cognitive load on you to figure out.
by zer00eyz | 2025-07-19 17:39:00+00:00
> dismissing any claim from employees of large tech companies

Me: I have a way to turn lead into gold.

You: Show me!!!

Me: NO (and then spends the rest of my life in poverty).

Cold Fusion (physics not the programing language) is the best example of why you "Show your work". This is the Valley we're talking about. It's the thudnderdome of technology and companies. If you have a meaningful breakthrough you don't talk about it you drop it on the public and flex.
by tech2 | 2025-07-19 17:39:03+00:00
The issue with the lack of intermediates in the cert isn't browsers (they'll just deal with it). Sure, if they aren't already in the cache then there's a small hit first time. The problem is that if your SSL endpoint is accessed by any programming language (for example, you offer image URL to a B2B system to download so they can perform image resizing for you, or somesuch) then there's a chance the underlying platform doesn't automatically do AIA chasing. Python is one-such system I'm aware of, but there are others that will be forced to work around this for no net benefit.
by overfeed | 2025-07-19 17:40:25+00:00
The level of proof for the latter is much higher, and IMO, OpenAI hasn't met the bar yet.

Something really funky is going on with newer AI models and benchmarks, versus how they perform subjectively when I use them for my use-cases. I say this across the board[1], not just regarding IpenAI. I don't know if frontier labs have run into Goodheart's law viz benchmarks, or if my use-cases that are atypical.

1. I first noticed this with Claud 3.5 vs Claud 3.7
by akshayka | 2025-07-19 17:40:42+00:00
Hi! molab is not available for self-hosting. For self-hosting, you have a few options:

Use marimo open source. This can be self-hosted in the same way that Jupyter can. Repo: https://github.com/marimo-team/marimo

Use marimo's WebAssembly notebooks (exporting to WASM-powered HTML). For example, that's how Cloudflare is sharing marimo notebooks currently: https://notebooks.cloudflare.com/. Docs: https://docs.marimo.io/guides/exporting/#export-to-wasm-powe...

Use within JupyterHub: https://github.com/jyio/jupyter-marimo-proxy
by raverbashing | 2025-07-19 17:40:49+00:00
> A: Our sophisticated smoking detection algorithm has been tested for accuracy in real-world scenarios, backed by years of development, and tens of thousands of hours of rigorous testing and validation.

I would be willing to bet a good amount of money they have a huge pile of nothing on this

On the other comment they say they monitor PM2.5, CO2 and humidity. Congratulations, your hot water shower with hard water just triggered the sensor. $500 fee.
by acheong08 | 2025-07-19 17:40:49+00:00
I'm of the same stance. I've been using Matrix for 3 years now, primarily to communicate with family located where there is high censorship and most messengers are blocked. Probably due to the complexity of the system and inherent design, performance is horrible. Good enough for usage but just unpleasant. Their new Element X client is meant to solve a lot of problems but they're starting to deviate from common standards (e.g. TURN/STUN for calling) and towards "Element Call" and livekit which are a nightmare to set up. There's been more and more encryption problems lately where I'd sync the keys but still fail to decrypt messages on certain clients and lose history on others. I'm sticking with the old Element client but it's obvious the Vector people aren't putting much effort into it anymore seeing as there are very old but critical bugs (main one being the fact that it automatically reaches out to matrix.org when trying to sign in with other homeservers and freezes if the domain is blocked. This is fixed by Element X.) I can fix it myself but until IOS allows sideloading, I have no way of getting my fork onto my family's devices.

If anyone knows an alternative that has web, IOS, and Android clients, easily self hostable, and can do calling, please let me know.
by spauldo | 2025-07-19 17:41:04+00:00
That's what I know. I wasn't hired to program Windows machines, I was hired to program PLCs and SCADA systems. But every now and then something best done in .NET comes up and none of the Windows guys can get off their butts to do it. So then they get to whine about having to deal with Linux and I get to tell them to suck it up.

Sure, I could learn to program on Windows... Or I could pick up another PLC or SCADA platform that looks good on my resume. Guess which I choose to do?
by andersmurphy | 2025-07-19 17:41:11+00:00
Thing is short/medium term VC subsidies require lots of users to embrace AI. If they don't the money dries up and you end up paying the full price for these models. Which are currently heavily discounted (this is an understatement). How much are you currently paying for your usage 20$/m? 200$/m? How does that look when it's 2000$/m? 20000$/m?
by bryanrasmussen | 2025-07-19 17:41:20+00:00
I generally let it slide because these copyright discussions tend to be about America, and as such it can be assumed American law and what it inherits from British law is what pertains.

>Copyright is 1) presented as being there to protect the interests of the general public, not creators,

yes, in the U.S in the EU creators have moral rights to their works and the law is to protect their interests.

There are actually moral rights and rights of exploitation, in EU you can transfer the latter but not the former.

>But it is also increasingly dubious that the public gets a good deal out of copyright law anyway.

In the EU's view of copyright the public doesn't need to get a good deal, the creators of copyrighted works do.
by labrador | 2025-07-19 17:41:29+00:00
The author was thinking "boring and uninteresting" but settled on the word "rude." No, it's not rude. Emailing your co-workers provactive political memes or telling someone to die in a fire is rude. Using ChatGPT to write and being obvious about it marks you as an uninteresting person who may not know what they are talking about.

On the other hand, emailing your prompt and the result you got can be instructive to others learning how to use LLMs (aren't we all?) We may learn effective prompt techniques or decide to switch to that LLM because of the quality of the answer.
by sansseriff | 2025-07-19 17:42:00+00:00
There's a weird insecurity I've noticed cropping up. I want to design the codebase 'my way'. I want to decide on the fundamental data structures. But there's this worry that my preferred architecture is not massively better than whatever the machine comes up with. So by insisting on 'my way' I'm robbing everyone productivity.

I know most true programmers will vouch for me and my need to understand. But clients and project managers and bosses? Are they really gonna keep accepting a refrain like this from their engineers?

"either it gets done in a day and I understand none of it, or it gets done in a month and I fully understand it and like it"
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-19 17:42:25+00:00
The problem here is that I’ve been accused multiple times of using LLMs to write slop when it was genuinely written by myself.

So I apologized and began actually using LLMs while making sure the prompt included style guides and rules to avoid the tell tale signs of AI. Then some of these geniuses thanked me for being more genuine in my response.

A lot of this stuff is delusional. You only find it rude because you’re aware it’s written by AI. It’s the awareness itself that triggers it. In reality you can’t tell the difference.

This post, for example.
by pqtyw | 2025-07-19 17:42:35+00:00
Not inherently disagreeing with you at all. I'm not just sure whether we should look as far back as the 1600s. Yes some American colonies were founded by religious extremists.

But the divergence between US and Europe didn't happen until the late 1800s if not the early 1900s.

e.g. according to the census of 1851 ~40% of people in Britain were regularly attending religious services. No hard figures for the US from the time but from what I can find the proportion in the US was comparable. Except while mid 1800s was pretty much the peak in Britain in US it kept rising and reached its highest point in the 1950s while in UK religious participation had almost reached current levels by then.

IMHO the rise of political secularism, socialiam and the near societal collapse across much of Europe during and after WW1 and WW2 had a much bigger impact than whatever happened 400 years ago.
by crazygringo | 2025-07-19 17:42:39+00:00
>> "I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said: <...>".

> Whoa, let me stop you right here buddy, what you're doing here is extremely, horribly rude.

How is it any different from "I read book <X> and it said that..."? Or "Book <X> has the following quote about that:"?

I definitely want to know where people are getting their info. It helps me understand how trustworthy it might be. It's not rude, it's providing proper context.
by Takennickname | 2025-07-19 17:42:52+00:00
I said most of the same things in the Matrix foundation's server. The general response from the team was: "Pay money or shut up and accept what we give you". The number of gigantic changes in direction this project has had in the past couple of years is enough to sink any project. Jitsi to Webrtc, complete change in auth system, Element to Element X. There's two clients. One that's fast, and one that's full featured. You can either skip out on features, or use something slow.

I try to be positive and supportive of project, but my experience with these guys is that they're incredibly arrogant.

It's tough finding an open-standards based IM application for corporate use.

XMPP is kinda fragmented, with no nice clients. Matrix is a clusterfuck with a BDFL who is probably too smart for his own good. Signal is open source but hostile towards self hosting.

P.S I suspect the organization is being led by Architecture Astronauts [1]. Every (including the naming) is abstracted to the point of meaninglessness.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...
by kjkjadksj | 2025-07-19 17:43:07+00:00
> A great use of AI in this situation would be to automate the collection and checking of data. Search all of the data sources and aggregate links to them in an easy place. Use AI to search the data sources again and compare against the spreadsheet, flagging any numbers that appear to disagree.

Why would you need ai for that though? Pull your sources. Run a diff. Straight to the known truth without the chatgpt subscription. In fact by that point you don’t even need the diff if you pulled from the sources. Just drop into the spreadsheet at that point.
by hakfoo | 2025-07-19 17:43:15+00:00
There used to be the claim that "if you overclock your CPU/GPU, it would blow a fuse and the manufacturer could deny a RMA". Not sure if it ever actually happened, or if it was just an urban legend.

I could see a system management controller that blew fuses to track known potentially hazardous situations-- "Internal temperature while operating exceeded NNN degrees for XXX seconds" or "power surge in excess of NNN volts registered on this rail." Maybe a case for "paired part replaced" but that's more informational than accusatory-- a legitimate repair or upgrade could be an increase on any "health metric" they want to show.

But you'd want it someplace like, as I said, fuses on a SMC, maybe viewable in the setup screen, rather than a SSD which is not only easy to swap, but has legitimate reasons to do so (plenty of refurbishers install new SSDs because they're a cheap boost, or because they're sourcing from companies who have a "destroy the old drive on retirement" policy.
by mikae1 | 2025-07-19 17:43:46+00:00
From https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/faq/:

> According to Google reCAPTCHA, Hcaptcha and Cloudflare Turnstile, I’m a robot. Although I haven’t seen an engraved plate with the label T-800 on myself yet, these days I might as well just be a rogue LLM. Does it even matter anymore?

:)
by maksimur | 2025-07-19 17:44:16+00:00
I wouldn't mind and I would actually prefer if things were translated correctly, adapting to local slang, cultural references and the likes. As of now translations are weird if not outright cringey. This is a problem with LLMs in general (probably because they're trained mostly on English data), although to a lesser degree, but enough that I have to correct them daily.
by fnordpiglet | 2025-07-19 17:45:31+00:00
We already have highly advanced deterministic software. The value lies in the abductive “reasoning” and natural language processing.

We deal with non determinism any time our code interacts with the natural world. We build guard rails, detection, classification of false/true positive and negatives, and all that all the time. This isn’t a flaw, it’s just the way things are for certain classes of problems and solutions.

It’s not bad software - it’s software that does things we’ve been trying to do for nearly a hundred years beyond any reasonable expectation. The fact I can tell a machine in human language to do some relative abstract and complex task and it pretty reliably “understands” me and my intent, “understands” it’s tools and capabilities, and “reasons” how to bridge my words to a real world action is not bad software. It’s science fiction.

The fact “reliably” shows up is the non determinism. Not perfectly, although on a retry with a new seed it often succeeds. This feels like most software that interacts with natural processes in any way or form.

It’s remarkable that anyone who has ever implemented exponential back off and retry, has ever implemented edge cases, and sir and say “nothing else matters,” when they make their living dealing with non determinism. Because the algorithmic kernel of logic is 1% of programming and systems engineering, and 99% is coping with the non determinism in computing systems.

The technology is immature and the toolchains are almost farcically basic - money is dumping into model training because we have not yet hit a wall with brute force. And it takes longer to build a new way of programming and designing highly reliable systems in the face of non determinism, but it’s getting better faster than almost any technology change in my 35 years in the industry.

Your statement that it “very often produces wrong or nonsensical output” also tells me you’re holding onto a bias from prior experiences. The rate of improvement is astonishing. At this point in my professional use of frontier LLMs and techniques they are exceeding the precision and recall of humans and there’s a lot of rich ground untouched. At this point we largely can offload massive amounts of work that humans would do in decision making (classification) and use humans as a last line to exercise executive judgement often with the assistance of LLMs. I expect within two years humans will only be needed in the most exceptional of situations, and we will do a better job on more tasks than we ever could have dreamed of with humans. For the company I’m at this is a huge bottom line improvement far and beyond the cost of our AI infrastructure and development, and we do quite a lot of that too.

If you’re not seeing it yet, I wouldn’t use that to extrapolate to the world at large and especially not to the future.
by sdbrady | 2025-07-19 17:45:53+00:00
I'm not sure what you mean by "statements" in Prolog as it's not a term the language defines. If you're referring to clauses, it's not true that execution is unordered: the Prolog interpreter attempts to unify a goal with clauses from the knowledge base in the order they appear. This ordering is semantically significant for control flow.

If instead you're referring to goals within the body of a clause, this is also incorrect. Goals are evaluated strictly left-to-right, and each must succeed before the next is attempted. This evaluation order is likewise required and observable, especially in the presence of side effects.
by psifertex | 2025-07-19 17:46:28+00:00
IDEs have changed a lot in the last 50 years. Just like we shouldn't advocate for hand writing assembly for all code, we shouldn't be stuck using CLI tooling the same way.

I share your apprehension regarding the current AI landscape changing so quickly it causes whiplash but I don't think a mindset of "it's been fine for 50 years" is going to survive the pace of development possible by better LLM integration.
by nyclsrmn | 2025-07-19 17:46:40+00:00
Could not agree more!

> "I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said: <...>". ... > "I vibe-coded this pull request in just 15 minutes. Please review"

This is even nice. You have outlined here an actual warning. Usually there is none.

When you get this type of request you are pretty much debugging AI code on the spot without any additional context.

You can just see when text/code is AI generated or not. No matter text or code. No tools needed.
by bruce343434 | 2025-07-19 17:47:16+00:00
When every eligible piece of code becomes automatically constexpr, as you suggest, the compile time will just balloon. The code still needs to be compiled and executed, just all at once now. Optimization is one of those annoying problems for which we currently don't have the compute to fully bruteforce it. We need to be selective with which code is marked constexpr.
by dzaima | 2025-07-19 17:47:18+00:00
The issue of broken rooms was reportedly the database having gotten corrupted indexes, which affected a bunch of rooms (2/55 of ones I was in): https://github.com/element-hq/synapse/issues/18606#issuecomm....

Not much a protocol/implementation can do about that. It did take over 2 weeks for it to be resolved though, which is a rather long period of time.

Also on the status page - https://status.matrix.org/incidents/8gljb3gtlv11 (shows start at Jul 2, but I noticed it on Jun 28)

After that was resolved, messages that were sent and received by/on other homeservers during that time never ended up on matrix.org, so much for federation :/
by drewvlaz | 2025-07-19 17:47:39+00:00
One of the largest issues I've experienced is LLMs being too agreeable.

I don't want my theories parroted back to me on why something went wrong. I want to have ideas challenged in a way that forces me to think and hopefully lead me to a new perspective that I otherwise would have missed.

Perhaps a large portion of people do enjoy the agreeableness, but this becomes a problem not only because I think there are larger societal issues that stem from this echo-chamber like environmental but also simply that companies training these models may interpret agreeableness as somehow better and something that should be optimized for.
by ivape | 2025-07-19 17:47:41+00:00
I also feel like command line agents are pretty simple. It's tailor made for tool-use.

while(true):

>> User requests something

<< The LLM picks a cli tool from an index

<< LLM grabs the manual for the tool to get the list of commands

<< Attempts to fulfill the request

I would not be shocked if engineers have already managed to overcomplicate these agents.
by dismalaf | 2025-07-19 17:47:45+00:00
Rich countries, even with inequality, will generally still have good institutions and infrastructure and poor people are better off there despite their income being low.

Measuring median also ignores that the upper middle can be doing very well, as it's literally just a slice from the 50th percentile.

It's like the US, where the top 10% make as much as the top 1% in Canada (as an example), but if you simply take the median it ignores the massive middle and upper middle class in the US.
by EliRivers | 2025-07-19 17:47:51+00:00
"Taken at face value, you couldn't even use a pocket calculator to back up a management decision."

That makes no sense. I am the manager. I make the decision. The calculator gives me some numbers but I am still the manager, still the decision maker, and I can use any tools appropriate to inform my decisions. Even a calculator. Taken at face value, that's what it says. That the calculator doesn't make the management decision; a person does.
by seanhunter | 2025-07-19 17:47:58+00:00
Well to start with, in your theory

1) If all that exists is vibrations, what is vibrating?

2) You say the vibrations are not three-dimensional, but you don’t say what they are. What are they?

3) If it would explain Hawking radiation, how would it explain it, and why do you consider Hawking not to have explained Hawking radiation?

4) What causes the oscillation to resist change? What does that mean and why does that create mass?
by recipe19 | 2025-07-19 17:48:21+00:00
I disagree. The most obvious message this telegraphs is "I don't respect you or your argument enough to parse it and articulate a response, why don't you argue with a machine instead". That's rude.

There is an alternative interpretation - "the LLM put it so much better than I ever could, so I copied and pasted that" - but precisely because of the ambiguity, you don't want to be sneaky about it. If you want me to have a look at what the LLM said, make it clear.

A meta-consideration here is that there is just an asymmetry of effort when I'm trying to formulate arguments "manually" and you're using an LLM to debate them. On some level, it might be fair game. On another, it's pretty short-sighted: the end game is that we both use LLMs that endlessly debate each other while drifting off into the absurd.