MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by michaelhoney | 2025-07-07 09:14:26+00:00
But a sufficiently advanced LLM could do all of those things, and furthermore it could do it at a fraction of the cost with 24/7 availability. A not-bad therapist you can talk to _right now_ is better than one which you might get 30 minutes with in a month, if you have the money.

Is a mid-2025 off-the-shelf LLM great at this? No.

But it is pretty good, and it's not going to stop improving. The set of human problems that an LLM can effectively help with is only going to grow.
by yetihehe | 2025-07-07 09:15:13+00:00
I think that money would only be used to send messages, as a way to prevent excessive spam. There needs to be some limitation. In whatsapp it's unique number or phones. Once you send too much spam from one number, it's burned. If you have anonymous network, how do you otherwise prevent from making new accounts for sending spam? If it is invite-only network, then it's pretty small problem.

I don't think relaying messages would require that much power and as you said, "You join the mesh because you want to use it yourself".
by satisfice | 2025-07-07 09:15:49+00:00
I was a manager at Apple in 1990. It was very hard to be fired from Apple in those days, because they were very buttoned up about labor law. There were layers of corrective action you would have had to go through.

I left Apple in 1991 because they disbanded the testing department, sending a clear signal about not wanting there to be people who lived and breathed testing. I am probably the only person in that building who still has an active career as a tester, today.
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-07 09:16:09+00:00
People anthropomorphize just about anything around them. People talk about inanimate objects like they are persons. Ships, cars, etc. And of course animals are well in scope for this as well, even the ones that show little to no signs of being able to reciprocate the relationship (e.g. an ant). People talk to their plants even.

It's what we do. We can't help ourselves. There's nothing crazy about it and most people are perfectly well aware that their car doesn't love them back.

LLMs are not conscious because unlike human brains they don't learn or adapt (yet). They basically get trained and then they become read only entities. So, they don't really adapt to you over time. Even so, LLMs are pretty good and can fake a personality pretty well. And with some clever context engineering and alignment, they've pretty much made the Turing test irrelevant; at least over the course of a short conversation. And they can answer just about any question in a way that is eerily plausible from memory, and with the help of some tools actually pretty damn good for some of the reasoning models.

Anthropomorphism was kind of a foregone conclusion the moment we created computers; or started thinking about creating one. With LLMs it's pretty much impossible not to anthropomorphize. Because they've actually been intentionally imitate human communication. That doesn't mean that we've created AGIs yet. For that we need some more capability. But at the same time, the learning processes that we use to create LLMs are clearly inspired by how we learn ourselves. Our understanding of how that works is far from perfect but it's yielding results. From here to some intelligent thing that is able to adapt and learn transferable skills is no longer unimaginable.

The short term impact is that LLMs are highly useful tools that have an interface that is intentionally similar to how we'd engage with others. So we can talk and it listens. Or write and it understands. And then it synthesizes some kind of response or starts asking questions and using tools. The end result is quite a bit beyond what we used to be able to expect from computers. And it does not require a lot of training of people to be able to use them.
by raincole | 2025-07-07 09:16:17+00:00
I've said that before: we have been anthropomorphizing computers since the dawn of information age.

- Read and write - Behaviors that separate humans from animals. Now used for input and output.

- Server and client - Human social roles. Now used to describe network architecture.

- Editor - Human occupation. Now a kind of software.

- Computer - Human occupation!

And I'm sure people referred their cars and ships as 'her' before the invention of computers.
by bjackman | 2025-07-07 09:16:43+00:00
IIUC the easiest way to boil stuff without ceramics is usually in an animal's stomach or intestines. I believe you can also do it in a lined wicker basket.

I'm not sure exactly how these things are done but both of them seem much easier to figure out than how to fire a pot! (Requires very high temperature and a good understanding of the material to stop it cracking)
by nradov | 2025-07-07 09:16:45+00:00
You're really missing the point. I'm trying to help by giving you practical, actionable advice which has worked well for other people. When it's time to leave, take the kid out the door even if that means carrying them out in the middle of a meltdown. This teaches children discipline and makes them understand that they can't get their own way by acting like spoiled brats.
by dohguy | 2025-07-07 09:16:55+00:00
"It was the first time I felt like I could write up a large prompt, walk away from my laptop, and come back to a lot of work having been done. I've been super happy with the experience so far." - this yet-to-be-defined "happiness" metric will be important moving forward. Apart from Opencode & Leap.new (so far) I still haven't found something where I feel as happy.

I don't know if others share this sentiment but with all these tools/agents coming out, the main personal "metric" I look at when using them is happiness, rather than other more traditional metrics that I look at when evaluating tools.
by pbmonster | 2025-07-07 09:18:36+00:00
It's always confusing how those DNA comparisons are worded. We share almost 99% of our DNA with chimps, for example. But this just means that if you go down the genome, we have 99% of the same types of genes. And that's true even though we don't even have the same number of chromosomes as chimps! (We also share 50% of DNA with bananas - which just shows how incredibly complex basic stuff like cell respiration is.)

This is different than the statement that you share 50% of your DNA with your siblings, of course. Because in that case, you actually have the exact identical alleles as your siblings in 50% of your DNA.

The 3% neanderthal DNA is the second type of comparison.
by ttoinou | 2025-07-07 09:18:47+00:00
I learned vector spaces in maths and I'm aware of your definition, that's how I learned it. I'm also aware that the same word can be used with different meanings depending on the context.

(Imagine/remember what it feels like when children first learn that the integers aren't the only number, there are also fractions, then irrationals, then complex numbers...this is a very similar situation).

Imagine now an article saying "complex numbers are just natural numbers, you can apply euclidean division to them the exact same way"
Ask HN: Is it worth investing on gamifying your app early on?
by harlequinetcie | 2025-07-07 09:19:05+00:00
My assumption is that with AI taking on a lot of the menial tasks we are forced to do, a new way of thinking UX should start bubbling up.

That way is to have an experience similar to a RTS, whereas you can distribute resources, ie. tokens, into different actions to prioritize how your area/project/company is investing their resources to achieve goals.

For example, for Growth marketing, having a mission control centre to be able to split investments between generating new blogposts, personalized multi-channel campaigns, paid ads, branding videos, hacky growth tools, etc.

I believe the principle can be applied to everything really, so wondering if others are trying the same, and when it's the right moment to try this on your app.
by mijoharas | 2025-07-07 09:19:56+00:00
I don't think the goal is performance (and I don't think a well optimised gcc implementation will improve performance). I think the comment you are replying to is speaking about performance because of things like this line from the article:

> ...with the emphasis on limp. At some points, we are using over 100 GB of RAM... not ideal.

(so performance will be the next thing to be worked on to make this useable).

I think the goals of using gcc for rust is that it can provide a parallel implementation, which can help uncover bugs and provide more stability to the entire language, and because if there is a large gcc project already, they may be reticent to introduce LLVM as a dependency as well.
by latexr | 2025-07-07 09:20:02+00:00
Respectfully, that is a reflection of the places you hang out in (like HN) and not the reality of the population.

Outside the technical world it gets much worse. There are people who killed themselves because of LLMs, people who are in love with them, people who genuinely believe they have “awakened” their own private ChatGPT instance into AGI and are eschewing the real humans in their lives.
by bubblyworld | 2025-07-07 09:20:56+00:00
Thanks for explaining. I went and wrote a bunch of simulations of billiard ball dynamics with coarse-graining schemes applied and watched this stuff happening in front of my eyes. Pretty cool to see how entropy, energy and time are all directly related in these toy systems - the idea of a clock as a meter for entropy is making a lot more sense to me now =)
by sublinear | 2025-07-07 09:21:06+00:00
> "the product is simply too large for any one person to "fully" understand. Humans have a finite context window too."

Not personal towards you, but we're gonna wheel that one out again? Bullshit.

We're living in a time where people who can't code and aren't organized enough by anyone's standards who actually gets shit done are under serious threat and hoping their AI god(s) will save them. None of these arguments surprise me.
by Timwi | 2025-07-07 09:21:15+00:00
The author seems to want to label any discourse as “anthropomorphizing”. The word “goal” stood out to me: the author wants us to assume that we're anthropomorphizing as soon as we even so much as use the word “goal”. A simple breadth-first search that evaluates all chess boards and legal moves, but stops when it finds a checkmate for white and outputs the full decision tree, has a “goal”. There is no anthropomorphizing here, it's just using the word “goal” as a technical term. A hypothetical AGI with a goal like paperclip maximization is just a logical extension of the breadth-first search algorithm. Imagining such an AGI and describing it as having a goal isn't anthropomorphizing.
by Y_Y | 2025-07-07 09:22:26+00:00
If you're wondering what a Hilbert space, know that you're in good company.

> Dr. von Neumann, ich möchte gerne wissen, was ist denn eigentlich ein Hilbertscher Raum? (Dr. von Neumann, I'd would really like to know, just what exactly is a Hilbert space?)

Asked to John von Neumann to David Hilbert at a lecture.

https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/Hilbert+space#fn:1

I'd like to add, as a physicist by training, that anything can be a Hilbert space if you wish hard enough. You can even use results about countable vector spaces if you need them!
by stared | 2025-07-07 09:22:27+00:00
On multiple occasions, I've gained insights from LLMs (particularly GPT 4.5, which in this regard is leagues ahead of others) within minutes—something I hadn't achieved after months of therapy. In the right hands, it is entirely possible to access super-human insights. This shouldn't be surprising: LLMs have absorbed not just all therapeutic, psychological, and psychiatric textbooks but also millions (perhaps even hundreds of millions) of real-life conversations—something physically impossible for any human being.

However, we here on the Hacker News are not typical users. Most people likely wouldn't benefit as much, especially those unfamiliar with how LLMs work or unable to perceive meaningful differences between models (in particular, readers who wouldn't notice or appreciate the differences between GPT 4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, and GPT 4.5).

For many people—especially those unaware of the numerous limitations and caveats associated with LLM-based models—it can be dangerous on multiple levels.

(Side note: Two years ago, I was developing a project that allowed people to converse with AI as if chatting with a friend. Even then, we took great care to explicitly state that it was not a therapist (though some might have used it as such), due to how easily people anthropomorphize AI and develop unrealistic expectations. This could become particularly dangerous for individuals in vulnerable mental states.)
by jjav | 2025-07-07 09:22:49+00:00
> That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules

Not really. There's no way to guess how many english words are pronounced based on the written form, unless you've heard it before. And of course the pronunciation may vary wildly based on region/country as well.

The most telling evidence of this is the existence of Spelling Bee competitions in english language countries. The fact that hearing a word being spoken is challenging enough to figure out how it is written that it is a competitive sport, says it all.

There are many languages where the concept of a spelling bee competition makes no sense at all, because as soon as you hear the word being spoken, it is 100% deterministically obvious how it is written. English, not so much.

But, french is much worse!
by devnull3 | 2025-07-07 09:22:51+00:00
The irony is that these companies will make you sign & enrol trainings for "code-of-ethics" and the same management will indulge into shady practices (like the OP mentioned). Btw, there are other ways to get rid of employees which do not even need PIP.

I have made peace with the fact employees are just means to an end. Always have been. Nothing less or nothing more. The power is extremely lopsided in favour of the companies. This makes so many things beyond the control of an individual [1]. Focus on things in your control:

1. Keep learning

2. Be debt free as soon as possible.

3. Invest and build a financial cushion

4. Eat healthy and exercise (I am pretty bad at this but trying to improve)

5. Develop an alternative skill(s) which can you put to use if needed

6. Never burn the bridges, no matter what.

All of the above are easier said than done but I see no sustainable way of coping up.

[1] My current employer (which is a listed company) got acquired by a private equity. I have no idea what will happen but I am relaxed.
by hackpelican | 2025-07-07 09:23:16+00:00
How does routing work?

How do I know that for device A to reach device B, I need to go through device C but not D?

And if I try to go through device D but device C actually delivers the message, then does device D get paid? How would you validate which devices actually participated in the transmission of the message? How does this not turn into a privacy nightmare?
by oc1 | 2025-07-07 09:23:32+00:00
That was a solved problem in the 00's with the advent of Rails, or so i thought. Then came the JS framework craze and everything needed to be reinvented. Not just that, but frameworks which had all these battle-tested boring parts were not trendy anymore. Micro framworks became the new default and idiots after idiots jumped on that bandwagon only to reimplement everything from scratch because almost any app will grow to a point where it will need authn, user mgmt, mail, groups and so on...
by flohofwoe | 2025-07-07 09:24:06+00:00
> K-pop is probably the most commercial genre that ever existed

Italo Disco would like to have a word I think ;)

Arte TV aired a really good documentary about the Italo Disco phenomenon recently, unfortunately it doesn't seem to be officially available on the internet yet - but they basically had it all, factory-line produced music with singers and "stage artists" being entirely different people, but among all that trash also sometimes really good stuff.

And they used synthesizers as "shameless" as nobody else, today they would go full AI slop I think.
by AIPedant | 2025-07-07 09:24:55+00:00
This is a bad faith reading of the comment. They meant that “theories” of consciousness often rely on semi-mystical woo-woo with very little actual evidence and no plausible causal explanation. And that is exactly what has happened here - some intriguing results about anesthesia buried under a pile of pseudoscientific nonsense about quantum computing, and making unfalsifiable claims that this solves “problems of consciousness” which are themselves too vague to be scientific.

I don’t think the author is dishonest - lots of smart and honest people get misled by ideology or aesthetics - but I am confident this paper is 95% bullshit.
by junon | 2025-07-07 09:25:17+00:00
Also feels like some of these would match totally innocuous usage.

"I'm overloaded for work, I'd be happy if you took some of it off me."

"The client seems to have passed on the proposed changes."

Both of those would match the "death regexes". Seems we haven't learned from the "glbutt of wine" problem of content filtering even decades later - the learnings of which are that you simply cannot do content filtering based on matching rules like this, period.
by mercer | 2025-07-07 09:25:33+00:00
I get the impression after using language models for quite a while that perhaps the one thing that is riskiest to anthropomorphise is the conversational UI that has become the default for many people.

A lot of the issues I'd have when 'pretending' to have a conversation are much less so when I either keep things to a single Q/A pairing, or at the very least heavily edit/prune the conversation history. Based on my understanding of LLM's, this seems to make sense even for the models that are trained for conversational interfaces.

so, for example, an exchange with multiple messages, where at the end I ask the LLM to double-check the conversation and correct 'hallucinations', is less optimal than something like asking for a thorough summary at the end, and then feeding that into a new prompt/conversation, as the repetition of these falsities, or 'building' on them with subsequent messages, is more likely to make them a stronger 'presence' and as a result perhaps affect the corrections.

I haven't tested any of this thoroughly, but at least with code I've definitely noticed how a wrong piece of code can 'infect' the conversation.
by lompad | 2025-07-07 09:25:50+00:00
Germany is similar. Especially in more rural areas, a couple villages away people are going to have a hard time understanding you.

Though there's typically a common dialect variant everybody speaks, usually the one spoken by the largest city in the region.

E.g. every middle-franconian understands Nuremberg franconian dialect and is able to talk in a way they would understand.
by kadoban | 2025-07-07 09:25:56+00:00
Is it me or is it odd that that first paper doesn't seem to cite any source for the misconception they're trying to argue against? I don't see any cites for people who believed that boiling could not happen in fragile containers.

So my question would be: how many anthropologists believed that, and when did that stop being a majority belief, if it ever was?
by dijit | 2025-07-07 09:26:01+00:00
Well, mostly hearing people say the words will be telling.

Gävle in Sweden: https://forvo.com/word/g%C3%A4vle/

Linnanmäki in Finland: https://forvo.com/word/linnanm%C3%A4ki/

In the Finnish example you can hear both the soft “en” (linnan) and the higher pitched “Â” (maki) which is triggered with umlauts;

Where the Swedish A is softened by umlauts in the Gävle example.
by defrost | 2025-07-07 09:26:44+00:00
See Also: 'Improved' Grok Criticizes Democrats and Hollywood's 'Jewish Executives'

https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/06/improved-grok-criticizes-d...

46 points | 4 hours ago | 20 comments | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44486818
by lowsong | 2025-07-07 09:29:30+00:00
You don't have to see a game as "high art" to want to engage with its creators, their process, and the context in which the game was made.

Interviews with game designers, game studio development blogs, developer commentary in games, and "behind the scenes" content have long drawn huge audiences of people who wanted to know more about how the games they loved were made. Beyond that there is a massive industry of third-party content that is about games. Most popular games have hundreds or thousands of hours of video essays about them on YouTube, or have spawned dedicated fan groups, or attract people to engage with their worlds and themes in a way the creators may never have intended.

There is a huge desire and appetite to engage with process and people that create art, including games. I'd argue that's actually the far bigger part of why people enjoy and play games. It's far more than simple "is it engaging", even if you don't realize it consciously.
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-07 09:30:50+00:00
Such a cool review! thanks for posting it. Great to see that authoritative experts are sharing their time and thoughts, lots to learn from this review. Despite the caveats mentioned by Neil, I still think this is a good example of a "non trivial / not boilerplate thing done w/ LLMs". To think we got from chatgpt's cute "looks like python" scripts 2.5 years ago to these kinds of libraries is amazing in my book.

I'd be curious to see how the same exercise would go with Neil guiding claude. There's no debating that LLMs + domain knowledge >>> vibe coding, and I would be curious to see how that would go, and how much time/effort would an expert "save" by using the latest models.
by KronisLV | 2025-07-07 09:31:03+00:00
> I don't fully follow this, so what has been gained with the new models?

There were power efficiency gains, as well as nice productivity improvements for some workloads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjPXOurg0nU

For gaming, those CPUs were a sidegrade at best. To be honest, it wouldn't have been a big issue, especially for folks upgrading from way older hardware, if only their pricing wasn't so out of line with the value that they provide (look at their GPUs, at least there the MSRP makes the hardware good value).
by jillesvangurp | 2025-07-07 09:31:47+00:00
There's also the notion that some people have a hard time talking to a therapist. The barrier to asking an LLM some questions is much lower. I know some people that have professional backgrounds in this that are dealing with patients that use LLMs. It's not all that bad. And the pragmatic attitude is that whether they like it or not, it's going to happen anyway. So, they kind of have to deal with this stuff and integrate it into what they do.

The reality with a lot of people that need a therapist, is that they are reluctant to get one. So those people exploring some issues with an LLM might actually produce positive results. Including a decision to talk to an actual therapist.
by latexr | 2025-07-07 09:33:02+00:00
> People anthropomorphize just about anything around them.

They do not, you are mixing up terms.

> People talk about inanimate objects like they are persons. Ships, cars, etc.

Which is called “personification”, and is a different concept from anthropomorphism.

Effectively no one really thinks their car is alive. Plenty of people think the LLM they use is conscious.

https://www.masterclass.com/articles/anthropomorphism-vs-per...