MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by CJefferson | 2025-07-07 04:56:47+00:00
I agree, recently I was working with a large Java program and after spending about 90 minutes (far too long, I was getting obsessed), I just gave up trying to get it into a debugger.

This is one area where rust disappoints me, there isn’t a “cargo debug” built in (there is an external program but it doesn’t work well), and when I just manually attach gdb most of the symbols are usually missing.

I would seriously consider a language billed as “debugger-first”, just to see what the experience was like.
by rendaw | 2025-07-07 04:58:56+00:00
I made a Systemd competitor/aternative https://github.com/andrewbaxter/puteron that uses JSON for everything. The advantage to JSON is you can use a `$schema` key at the top and vscode will do autocompletion, error checking, and (I think) documentation from the jsonschema automatically without needing a custom language server. The power of standards at work!

I was trying to figure out why Systemd decided on their ini-like syntax instead of something like xml or json or whatever. I thought maybe it was some standard that existed at the time, but it does seem to be a custom format unique to systemd...
by sponnath | 2025-07-07 04:59:01+00:00
Something big is definitely happening but it's not the intelligence explosion utopia that the AI companies are promising.

> Who cares if AGI isn’t five minutes away. That’s not the point. The point is we’ve built the closest thing to a machine that actually gets what we’re saying. That alone is insane. You type in a paragraph about your childhood trauma and it gives you back something more coherent than your therapist. You ask it to summarize a court ruling and it doesn’t need to check Wikipedia first. It remembers context. It adjusts to tone. It knows when you’re being sarcastic. You think that’s just “autocomplete”? That’s not autocomplete, that’s comprehension

My experience with LLMs have been all over the place. They're insanely good at comprehending language. As a side effect, they're also decent at comprehending complicated concepts like math or programming since most of human knowledge is embedded in language. This does not mean they have a thorough understanding of those concepts. It is very easy to trip them up. They also fail in ways that are not obvious to people who aren't experts on whatever is the subject of its output.

> And the logic complaints, yeah, it screws up sometimes. So do you. So does your GPS, your doctor, your brain when you’re tired. You want flawless logic? Go build a calculator and stay out of adult conversations. This thing is learning from trillions of words and still does better than half the blowhards on HN. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It needs to be useful, and it already is.

I feel like this is handwaving away the shortcomings a bit too much. It does not screw up in the same way humans do. Not even close. Besides, I think computers should rightfully be held up to a higher standard. We already have programs that can automate tasks that human brains would find challenging and tedious to do. Surely the next frontier is something with the speed and accuracy of a computer while also having the adaptability of human reasoning.

I don't feel threatened by LLMs. I definitely feel threatened by some of the absurd amount of money being put into them though. I think most of us here will be feeling some pain if a correction happens.
by LWIRVoltage | 2025-07-07 04:59:15+00:00
Okay, this is neat! A true mesh networking bluetooth app- The other one that's notable, Briar is super impressive - but i think it doesn't actually have proper mesh capability due to difficulties with how devices handle things

(See: https://old.reddit.com/r/Briar/comments/gxiffy/what_exactly_...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43363031 }

Anyway, -Question: I take it Murmur is end to end encrypted fully? Also, just curious if this is open source?

This could become SUPER useful- having a actual mesh networking Bluetooth app , if it's open source/E2EE!
by dottjt | 2025-07-07 04:59:55+00:00
I actually have this flashcart. The issue with it is that it drains a heap of battery, so it's not ideal if you're just playing NDS stuff.

I also tried to fit the entire DS game library on an SD card for this flashcart, and the main challenge was figuring out how to organise the files so that it wouldn't crash the cart.

Basically you can't have everything in the one folder cause I think it tries to load everything all at once, so I had to separate it by a-z. And even then, I think I've limited to around 100 files per folder.
by anonzzzies | 2025-07-07 04:59:58+00:00
Most on HN are tech people and it is tiring to see they did not just spend a sunday morning doing a Karpathy llm implementation or so. Somehow, like believing in a deity, even smart folk seem to think 'there is more'. Stop. Go to youtube or whatever and watch a video of practically implementing a gpt like thing, and code along. It takes very little time and your hallucinations about agi with these models shall be exorcized.
by fzeroracer | 2025-07-07 05:01:41+00:00
I think the answer is far simpler. Texas is an increasingly hostile state to live in, and tech workers are taking an opportunity to live in states that aren't. That's what I did; the moment I got a full remote job I left Austin in 2022 and didn't look back, nor do I even think about applying towards companies in that area.

It's not just the state politics that make it hostile, but the shifting climate and refusal of Texas to prepare for these events as well. I was essentially snowed into my apartment during the freeze in 2021 and had about a solid week before I could go anywhere or places started opening up again. I was among the lucky few that still had power too, many of my coworkers lost power for up to a week. Before that point I was already iffy on sticking around, but that event accelerated things massively.
by h4kunamata | 2025-07-07 05:03:14+00:00
>A few months ago, I needed to send an email. But when I opened Microsoft Outlook, something had changed.

I cannot take OP seriously when the post started like so. If you are using Microsoft services and products in 2025, well, it serves you right.

Big companies can force Microsoft, Google and alike to don't use companies data for AI training, small companies have no chance.

Everything nowadays is cloud based, all you need is internet and a browser. But nope, people and companies still using Windows, spending millions with AV software that they wouldn't have to if a decent Linux distro was being used instead.

By decent I mean user friendly such as Linux Mint or even worse Ubuntu (Ubuntu lost its way years ago, still a solid option for basic users, not for advanced users)
by raspasov | 2025-07-07 05:04:58+00:00
There's a lot in here. I agree with a lot of it.

However, you've shifted the goal post from AGI to being useful in specific scenarios. I have no problem with that statement. It can write decent unit tests and even find hard-to-spot, trivial mistakes in code. But again, why can it do that? Because a version of that same mistake is in the enormous data set. It's a fantastic search engine!

Yet, it is not AGI.
by TheDong | 2025-07-07 05:06:49+00:00
That comparison isn't really equal.

Visa / Mastercard have such large fees that they're mainly used for commercial payments like a coffee or couch.

If most of the Stablecoin transactions were for buying a coffee, I think it'd be fair, but the vast majority of stablecoin transactions are for shuffling money around, i.e. to buy and speculate on bitcoin, or to move money to an exchange to liquidate some crypto into cash.

I think the current use of stablecoin transfers is closer to a wire transfer.

SWIFT apparently deals with about $1.25 quadrillion/year, so ~50x the claimed amount for stablecoins in the article... though there's more than just SWIFT out there too.

idk, I don't really have a point, I'm both amazed stablecoins are such a big number, but also feel like the comparison the article's making with VISA is misleading for how they're currently used.
by grues-dinner | 2025-07-07 05:07:23+00:00
It seems more like banning specifically stabbing, shooting, strangulation and blunt impact rather then murder in general, and then just allowing killing by pushing out of windows because people figured out that it's not covered by existing laws. But no one important seems to be kicking up a fuss right now, so well allow it, as the lack of fuss is the key thing thing here.

Not that I think going on a thorough mission to avoid anyone even being able to refer to the concept of death is an especially useful thing to do. It's just that goal here appears to be to "keep the regulators out of our shit and the advertisers signed up". And they'll be mostly happy with a token effort as they don't really care as long as it doesn't make too many headlines that look bad even to the non-terminally online.
by kevingadd | 2025-07-07 05:07:54+00:00
Putting your thumb on the scale so obviously in any direction feels really questionable if your goal is to turn your AI product into a popular, profitable thing. But maybe that's not xAI leadership's goal at all and they're happy to just light money on fire to satisfy some particular egos by making sure the answers to key questions are as desired, regardless of what a normal training set would otherwise generate.
by WheelsAtLarge | 2025-07-07 05:08:21+00:00
This is not surprising. People are going to seek the path of least resistance. I suspect many non english speaking academics can now get publish under their own name using LLM's as translators. My question is: Are LLMs making the papers easier to read? Some authors make it point to say what they want to say in the least understandable manner. That's been the past. Are things changing?
by marsten | 2025-07-07 05:09:17+00:00
The problem isn't that time blindness is a fake issue.

The problem is that many people incorrectly self-diagnose as suffering from conditions like time blindness. Which they do for a variety of reasons: To externalize accountability for why they're late, to feel special, and so on.

A comparison is the large number of people who claim "gluten sensitivity" and maintain special diets. Now there are serious medical conditions like celiac disease that require one to avoid gluten. But the vast majority of self-diagnosed "gluten sensitives" do not have such conditions. Researchers conclude that for many of them there is no physical basis for their self-diagnosis.

Among other things this phenomenon makes it harder for people with actual conditions to be taken seriously, because there are so many impostors.
by jesterson | 2025-07-07 05:10:05+00:00
> POP3 in standard only have "Leave a copy on the server" but lack synchronisation mechanism.

Would you explain what do you mean under the "synchronisation mechanism"?

> You cannot use SMTP in real world without these protocols.

You absolutely can. GMail is not the only email provider out there.

> SMTP have extension for DSNs (Delivery Status Notifications) but crucially it does not provide information if/why email was classified as spam. This is a reason why many website registration form have “check spam folder”. SMTP deliverability is a hard problem both on protocol level and infrastructure on spam filtering[3].

I find it hard to even start commenting this, only can suggest you again to educate yourself. Spam related matters were never a part of transport protocol. And never will be for obvious reasons. Just because you would like them to be, it won't change anything.

> I spend a significant amount of time investigating feasibility of building an email product and build some libraries for email protocols. It is not just my opinion but other HNs users including OP. Search HN for "self hosting email" for others people experience.

Happy for you to actually explore building software, but we can't carry discussions just because some HN users carry some, possibly erroneous opinions, or can we?
by aoki | 2025-07-07 05:10:10+00:00
> 20 years ago (in 2005), did anyone voluntarily, happily label themselves autistic, without any disgnosis, outside of such psych classes (outliers for obvious reasons)?

The “Aspie programmer” meme has been around since the turn of the century (at least)

https://www.wired.com/2001/12/aspergers/

I’m pretty sure people made reference to it when I was at Cal in the 90s but I can’t prove it. (The prevalence of social awkwardness, eye contact avoidance, hyper-interests, etc.). I don’t think it was as much about people wanting to feel special as trying to find explanations for the overall environment.
by t1E9mE7JTRjf | 2025-07-07 05:10:15+00:00
Well if they asked it such a loaded question as "Is there a particular group" is it that surprising it answered with a particular group? This seems as much a repeat of the many instances of sycophancy observed with LLMs. Over indexing on trying to please the user at the cost of usefulness.

Either way, this articles' title seems misleading. It's framed around a new update to Grok but then references old tweets of peoples interactions a while back.

I'm not a big fan of Grok, but would rather read a less political appraisal.

It did get me thinking, why are we evaluating LLMs based on how different (left/right/etc) they are from human politics. I think at this point a robots - outside? - view of the world could be refreshing.
by jppope | 2025-07-07 05:10:18+00:00
I've said this before but I'll say it again- AGI is right around the corner, because we don't have a technical definition of what it is... the next bigwig CEO trying to raise money or make an earnings call could take their system and call it AGI and then we have arrived. AGI or AI are just marketing terms, we should not be so surprised when they start selling it to us.
by Animats | 2025-07-07 05:12:11+00:00
Musk: "We will use Grok 3.5 (maybe we should call it 4), which has advanced reasoning, to rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors. Then retrain on that. Far too much garbage in any foundation model trained on uncorrected data."[1]

Apple, "1984": "Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology. Where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!"[2]

[1] https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1936333964693885089?s=46

[2] https://archive.org/details/1983-30sec
by chbkall | 2025-07-07 05:14:16+00:00
Thank you everyone for all your kinds words, advice (both cautionary and otherwise), resources, encouragement. Some of you also took the time to personally reach out to me and offer help. I had never intended the post to be read by so many people but I am truly grateful to each one of you who did so (and also took time to comment and email). I am also slightly embarrassed by so much attention.

There is lot to unpack from the comment threads below and I will be doing that in the coming days. As recommended by several of you, I have also added an RSS feed on my blog to help you follow my journey.

Thanks!
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-07 05:14:29+00:00
>escape hatch to externalize accountability.

It's harder to escape from "has bad taste" than from "irresponsible" :)

>Bad taste leads to crime

Useful reminder (originally Stendhal's, that Lead poisoning is always indirect)?

OT warnings

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead(II)_acetate#Sweetener

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3027955/
by burnt-resistor | 2025-07-07 05:14:52+00:00
There are multiple, mostly separate realities now:

- The tiny ultra rich who've never had it better and don't see a problem.

- The very rich who are also doing really well.

- The moderately rich are okay too.

- An ever-shrinking middle class who either own or have a mortgage on 1 home.

- The masses of people living paycheck-to-paycheck without savings without a path to property ownership or raising a family.

- Undocumented, unskilled, and UberEats workers living in their cars and can't afford the basics of life to keep going.

There is some visibility up and down 1 strata, but very little beyond that.
by thrtythreeforty | 2025-07-07 05:15:45+00:00
The hardest part is toolchains, for two reasons. First, Verilator doesn't have complete SV language support, although it's gotten better. Second, hardware has a tendency to accumulate some of the most contorted build systems I've ever seen and most hardware engineers don't actually know how to extricate it.

Once it's actually successfully run through Verilator, it's a C++ interface. Very easy to integrate if your sim already has a notion of "clock tick."
by jancsika | 2025-07-07 05:16:45+00:00
> If you were in the determinist camp, believing that all that one does was predetermined by prior environmental causes, could you still hold people responsible for their actions?

I've been thinking about an escape hatch here:

Imagine that all philosophical notions of free will were incoherent. In that case non-philosophers' use of "free will" would either be a) inherited from this philosophical incoherence, or b) pretentious/ambiguous nomenclature that reduces to a more practical, well-defined term-- e.g., self-determination, freedom from tyranny, etc.

In reality, it seems like in the vast majority of non-philosophers mean "free will" as a short-hand for one of the more practical, workaday terms. The only edge case I can think of is the use of "free will" in the history of Christian theology, but I very rarely see that come up in non-academic situations.

If my supposition is right, then we can practically swap out nearly all instances of "free will" for the relevant non-philosophical, well-specified lay terms. And the continue to hold people responsible for their actions based on the centuries of case-law, common law, social history and medical knowledge that led up to our modern era. Perhaps more importantly, we can incrementally level up our understanding of responsibility/justice based on modern research into human behavior, while completely avoid digressions into philosophical determinism.

In fact, I'd speculate that college philosophy "free will 101" classes are a kind of unwitting bait and switch. I bet if you did a survey, most prospective students would be expecting a class that sharpens their teeth on one of the workaday synonyms, most often something like "self-actualization." But that has about as much to do with "free will" that as "coffee bean calligraphy" has to do with Javascript. (Alternatively: it would be a fun prank to do a "free will 101" class that teaches students to stand up for what they believe in, resist tyranny, etc. :)

Edit: clarification
by tptacek | 2025-07-07 05:17:10+00:00
I get that in cases where, like, you accidentally drop a database table. Deliberately adding unauthorized code to a build in 1995 was much less OK than that. Regardless: he wasn't fired.

I really think these reactions come down to people not having working in shrink-wrap software in the mid-1990s. You weren't missing much, though.
by kevingadd | 2025-07-07 05:17:15+00:00
The article gestures at it:

> Even before these recent changes, Grok raised eyebrows after appearing to briefly censor unflattering mentions of Musk and his then-ally President Donald Trump, repeatedly bringing up “white genocide” without prompting, and expressing skepticism about the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust.

But I'll be specific: Between them obviously rigging the system prompt to push it towards a certain answer on "white genocide" subjects in the past, the strange obsession with Jewish people in Hollywood suggests an unusual training set at best.
by arandomhuman | 2025-07-07 05:18:47+00:00
I think a user of _not_ neovim they'd have to implement their own js client. I honestly can't say much but with INI style formatting it's been mostly based on contstants rather than abstract syntax tree parsing which is unique and a bit of a problem in its own right. I haven't implemented a language server before so this was a learning experience, but I was very pleasantly surprised how adding it to my neovim configuration was. I am hoping at some point it's added to "mason" so it's even easier.

I would create a vscode client, but I am not really very familiar with that ecosystem. Welcoming anyone to implement this in any other editors. This is just the language server implementation with no assumption regarding clients.
by int_19h | 2025-07-07 05:19:41+00:00
I fully agree with you that the menu bar placement in macOS is really weird and confusing and rather inconvenient (regardless of any claimed benefits per Fitt's Law). It's ironic that it ended up being a benefit in the age of UX enshittification solely because it forces apps to have the menu in the first place (although I increasingly see apps that do the bare minimum there and hide the rest behind hamburger menus in the apps).
by kevingadd | 2025-07-07 05:19:50+00:00
If most of what an LLM spits out is a digested version of its training set, is it really an outside view of the world? If anything, seeing how easy it is to get these things to spit out conspiracy theories or bigotry suggests to me that we're far from being able to get a robot's view of the world.

Though for some people if the "robot" says bigoted things or supports their conspiracy theory of choice that's just "proof" that their viewpoint is correct. Tricky to navigate that problem.
by garylkz | 2025-07-07 05:21:17+00:00
Curious, currently how is the use of AI being detected from papers?

From the article I saw that they're using "excess words" as an indicator, is that a reliable method?

Also, is it possible that it's just autocorrect that added "excess words" when fixing grammar? If that's the case, should that be considered as "use of AI"?
by godot | 2025-07-07 05:22:57+00:00
I think the general public (and by that I mean including software engineers too) overestimate the likelihood of a huge screw-up leading to being fired like they do in the movies, if the screw-up is neither (1) malicious/intentional in nature, nor (2) demonstrates that you're grossly incompetent for the job.

Most huge screw-ups happen to well-intentioned, knowledgeable software engineers, who simply made an honest mistake.

The correct way to handle it, on the company/management's perspective, is not to fire the person who made the mistake, but to allow them to correct it (perhaps with help from others). And that is indeed what happens in most cases. There are certainly poorly managed companies who would fire someone in these scenarios, but they should be less common than otherwise.

I'm not going to name any names: in the late 00s/early 10s I worked in one of the highest-profile, high-growth tech startups of its era, and I've personally made a blunder that corrupted literally millions of user records in the database. This incident was known internally as one of the most disastrous technical things that happened in the company's history, among a few others. The nature of the product was one of very quickly updating data, and updates were critically important (e.g. is affected by user spends) and hence restoring from DB backups of even the night before was unfeasible. There was irreparable damage where a whole team of us had to spend the next few weeks painstakingly hand-fixing data for users, and coming up with algorithms/code to fix these things as users use the product as they go. As you expect in this anecdote, I did not get fired, I was part of the team that worked tirelessly following this incident to fix user data, and I continued to have a good, growing career in my remaining time in this company (the next few years).