MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by rijoja | 2025-07-07 08:22:10+00:00
You can of course run consider running your own LLM.

I suppose the problem isn't really the technology itself but rather the quality of the employees. There would've been a lot of people cheating the system before, lets say just by copy pasting or tricking your coworkers into doing the work for you.

However if you are working with something actually interesting, chances are that you're not working with disingenuous grifters and uneducated and lazy backstabbers, so that's less of a concern as well. If you are working on interesting projects hopefully these people would've been filtered out somewhere along the line.
by zimpenfish | 2025-07-07 08:22:24+00:00
See also Polari[0] and the Grass Mud Horse Lexicon[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polari

[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6538 (CDT links broken, use [2])

[2] https://chinadigitaltimes.net/space/Grass-Mud_Horse_Lexicon_...
by 14 | 2025-07-07 08:22:49+00:00
Yes if you search youtube you can find people showing how to boil water inside a plastic bag. Typically they show this in survival situation scenarios. You apparently can also do it in a wooden container if done right.

But as to your question wouldn't they need to have pots? Well I know we don't have evidence of that but it wouldn't surprise me. Another method show for survival shows a person taking a fallen tree and building a fire by it. Then you place some hot burning pieces on top of the log. Keep adding them and burning on top of the log until it burns a bowl sized indentation. Then you take a rock or stick and scrape the hole and get it clean sort of. Then you put water into that and if no container to carry water is shows soaking a shirt and carrying it that way. After the large bowl sized hole is filled with water you take a few rocks that were sitting in the fire and drop them in. You will be amazed how fast it will boil the water. This is done to allow you to drink from a potentially unsafe water source.

I guess what I am thinking is that there are probably dozens of ways they could have achieved it. Ways that with our knowledge of today escapes us but to them it was common knowledge. If I had to take a guess they would have used rocks and use a large flat rock and encircle that rock with rocks making a pit or rocks then covered the sides with dirt. Then dug a hole under part of the large flat rock and made fire under it. This primitive pot would not work well at first but my guess is that as fat melted and oozed into the cracks it would eventually seal and then would work very well to boil things. Anyways just fun to think about I know very little about the time period.
by diogolsq | 2025-07-07 08:22:51+00:00
Portuguese and German are like that.

You’ve never seen the word before, but when reading it for the first time, you’ll probably pronounce it correctly.

English is awful, but French takes the crown on this one—though more because it has the same pronunciation for many different words and written forms.

English, on the other hand, the alphabet doesn’t map well.

Mood and flood both have “oo”, yet each is pronounced differently. You need to know the word beforehand to know exactly how it’s pronounced.
by gynvael | 2025-07-07 08:23:33+00:00
Author here :)

> a belief by the author of this post that Info-ZIP is the canonical implementation

↑ Where did you get this from?

I don't think nowadays there's such a thing as a canonical implementation — ZIP implementation world is too fragmented and implementations are too widespread.

One more note is that the article isn't about who's right or wrong in terms of interpreting APPNOTE.TXT — this is besides the point. The point there is that a parser discrepancy can cause security issues, and the article documents just another discrepancy found in the real world implementations (and there are A LOT of these with regards to the ZIP format).
by supriyo-biswas | 2025-07-07 08:23:36+00:00
I believe the "granular mango serpent" is an uncommon testing phrase that they use, although now with this discussion it has suffered the same fate as "correct horse battery staple.

The more concerning thing is that some of the locales like it-IT have a blocklist that contains most countries' names; I wonder what that's about.
by vladms | 2025-07-07 08:24:15+00:00
Glad it somehow worked out for you. I find it very sad though that you felt somehow "guilty" (based on "selfish malformations in my personality and social skills"), which I would see as a toxic society pressure.

Not sure how, since as long as I can remember I thought all people are different, so it's just about finding some that you like and that can also accept you. I don't want to force my quirks and preferences on others, but they don't get to do that either. Of course that can mean some periods and/or situations when you are not part of "the group", but looking back, although it did not feel cool all the time, that was mostly beneficial, got to know more people and do more stuff while looking for people I like.
by seadan83 | 2025-07-07 08:24:32+00:00
I believe the author is rather drawing this distinction:

LLMs: (R^n)^c -> (R^n)^c

Humans: [set of potentially many and complicated inputs that we effectively do not understand at all] -> (R^n)^c

The point is that the model of how consciousness works is unknown. Thus the author would not present such a model, it is the point.
by xtal_freq | 2025-07-07 08:25:16+00:00
Not that this is your main point, but I find this take representative, “do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics?”There are things “about humans”, or at least things that our words denote, that are outside physic’s explanatory scope. For example, the experience of the colour red cannot be known, as an experience, by a person who only sees black and white. This is the case no matter what empirical propositions, or explanatory system, they understand.
by dijit | 2025-07-07 08:26:08+00:00
English regularly violates its own rules and additionally has no correcting body (Swedish has central body that dictates language rules for example).

That's part of why it's so difficult to fully master, and there are rules (sentence structure) for clarity, but there's no actually solid rules for pronunciation (it differs depending on word) or even what words are really proper words (there are central dictionaries that largely agree, but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the other creole dialects).

English steals aggressively from other languages, since that's its history. Other languages might borrow some words but there's multiple branches of these inside english. You can use English with only latin-root words, or English with only Germanic-root words and both are as valid english as each other.

Easy to learn; awful to master.
by Roark66 | 2025-07-07 08:26:18+00:00
And how could they've done this without language? I've heard this statement that neanderthals were "outcompeted" because homo sapiens had language and they did not (something about the way their anatomy didn't allow for making complex sounds). I call BS on that now. You can't do this kind of stuff without ability to communicate your intentions, future plans, rewards for other people and so on.

Next we'll discover they were rendering that fat to grease their wheel axles with...
by NitpickLawyer | 2025-07-07 08:26:21+00:00
> Anyone who recommends LLM to replace a doctor or a therapist or any health profession is utterly ignorant or has interest in profiting from it.

I disagree. There are places in the world where doctors are an extremely scarce resource. A tablet with a LLM layer and webmd could do orders of magnitude more good than bad. Not doing anything, not having access to medical advice, not using this already kills many many people. Having the ability to ask in your own language, in natural language, and get a "mostly correct" answer can literally save lives.

LLM + "docs" + the patient's "common sense" (i.e. no glue on pizza) >> not having access to a doctor, following the advice of the local quack, and so on.
by gwd | 2025-07-07 08:26:24+00:00
Pinyin was written by Chinese speakers for Chinese speakers. There are other romanizations written by westerners, and these are easier to see where the sounds come from; e.g., "tsai" rather than "cai".

What use is "q" as a letter at all in English? It makes a "k" sound and always occurs with a "u" after it. Why not use it for the "tch" sound? (Which, btb, is different than the "ch" sound.)

"C" is about the same -- by itself it always sounds exactly like "k" or "s". Why not use it for the "ts" sound?

As for "zhou" -- in English, z is very similar to an s, but voiced. So in pinyin, zh is just like ch, but voiced.

Lots of languages do this BTW. When people from Wycliffe want to translate a Bible into an obscure language without a writing system, they first have to invent a writing system. They could invent all new characters, but why? All it would do is make that language hard to type. So they take the sounds that language has, and map them onto Latin characters. Sometimes there's an obvious mapping, sometimes not.

Look up Welsh's spelling for another example of this.
by brainless | 2025-07-07 08:27:03+00:00
I have a very different experience. I have built https://github.com/pixlie/SmartCrawler almost entirely on Claude Code with some usage of Google Jules. Even all GitHub workflows are from CC. I still have tokens left since I try multiple other ideas in parallel.

I have coded a few landing pages and even a full React Native app with the same Claude Pro account in the last month. I do not consider this huge usage, but this is similar to a couple months of my own programming with AI assistance (like Zed + Supermaven).

Please note: SmartCrawler is not ready for usage, you can surely try it out though but I am changing the inner workings and it is half-complete.

Also, there are many branches of code that I have thrown away because I did not continue that approach. Example, I was trying a bounding box way to detect what data to extract, using the HTML element's position and size on browser. All coded with Claude Code. Generating such ideas is cheap in my opinion.
by Cthulhu_ | 2025-07-07 08:27:07+00:00
I grew up in the province of Friesland [0], which is part of the Frisia cultural region, an area that was not occupied by the Romans back when so it retained some of its identity and culture - although a lot of that was erased by Christian missionaries and subsequent invasions and government takeovers etc etc etc.

Anyway, super local accent changes are a thing there as well, go north a few kilometers from where I grew up and you go from the "woods" to the "clay", which has its own intonation and possibly words. Then there were town specific stereotypes - people from this town will knife you, that town is full of inbreds, etc. That's probably a lot of made-up intentional drama though, lol.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friesland

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisia
by wahern | 2025-07-07 08:27:07+00:00
Reminds me of this 1996 essay, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died": http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/courses/psy115w/Fall02/TomWolf...

TL;DR: It argues that what comes after "God is dead" (Nietzsche) is "the soul is dead" (or less poetically, "the self is dead"), i.e. we become convinced we have no agency, but mere biological and environmental automatons with the concomitant lack of moral accountability.

(Credit to earljwagner's 2023 post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37950313)
by easyThrowaway | 2025-07-07 08:27:10+00:00
My godfather was a safety engineer in an absolutely massive refining plant in the middle of the mediterranean. The amount of handwashing, grants, political appeasement and local populace straight-up subjugation required to keep the pretense that thing is an economic net positive rather than a polluting, cancer-causing, money wasting black hole is immense.

I know I can't prove it, but I strongly believe that much of the "Big Oil" dominance is due to political pressure to bend the market forces rather than any kind of real economic advantages compared to renewable energy sources.
by falcor84 | 2025-07-07 08:27:16+00:00
My advice to protect yourself is just the usual - "manage up". Build a good relationship with your manager (and preferably their manager) and do what you can to confirm that the work you're doing is seen as impactful to their goals. It won't 100% protect you, as sometimes there are circumstances outside their control too, but if you have a good relationship, they will fight to keep you.
by jacquesm | 2025-07-07 08:27:20+00:00
Before you know it you'll be going down the compute fabric and 'fleet' rabbit hole. For a long time I thought that was the future (I even worked with Transputers back in the day) but now I'm not so sure. GPUs have gotten awfully powerful and are relatively easy to work with compared to trying to harness a large number of independently operating CPUs. Debugging such a setup is really hard. That said, I still have this hope that maybe one day such an architecture will pay off in a bigger way than what has happened so far. If someone cracks the software nut in a decisive manner then it may well happen.
by jbstack | 2025-07-07 08:28:09+00:00
Humans can achieve more within one (or two, or a few) narrowly scoped field(s), after a lot of hard work and effort. LLMs can display a basic level of competency (with some mistakes) in almost any topic known to mankind. No one reasonably expects a LLM to be able to do the former, and humans certainly cannot do the latter.

You're comparing apples and oranges.

Also, your comparison is unfair. You've chosen an exceptional high achiever as your example of a human to compare against LLMs. If you instead compare the average human, LLMs don't look so bad even when the human has the advantage of specialisation (e.g. medical diagnostics). A LLM can do reasonably well against an average (not exceptional) person with just a basic grade school education if asked to produce an essay on some topic.
by ozgrakkurt | 2025-07-07 08:29:03+00:00
Because they literally don’t need to, there is so much more in life than money. Current tech culture is garbage in terms of defining success, whole social media is filled with posts defining success as working 24/7, exploiting people around you and making exorbitant amounts of money.

A hardworking and smart person in tech really doesn’t need to try hard or sacrifice much to live a comfortable life in terms of finances. Hard part is the rest of the things in life really.
by aroojjaved | 2025-07-07 08:29:06+00:00
I built this tool to automate and improve technical support workflows in JIRA. It uses machine learning to predict SLA breaches and route tickets more efficiently—based on historical patterns, resolution times, and ticket categories.

The goal was to reduce manual triage efforts, improve response SLAs, and give engineering teams a smarter way to handle support load. It’s open-source, simple to integrate, and designed to work with real JIRA data. You’ll find full documentation, training dataset samples, and a working dashboard in the repo.

Would love feedback from folks working in DevOps, support engineering, or anyone interested in AI applications in project management.
by ggm | 2025-07-07 08:29:25+00:00
Wish more of the 12 was freebsd enabled. They're making progress but things like sleep state and tablet mode aren't there.

I think the guardian complaint about bezel is silly. Screen dimensions are what they are. Either you make a device too small for a keyboard and touch pad or you make a bigger device like a 13.

Optioned up it gets about the same as a macbook air. Interesting decision point.

The chonky IO device things are cute. Making sure you can swap them in and out live is useful. Obviously things like mounted storage and live network come to play.
by gynvael | 2025-07-07 08:29:36+00:00
Author here :)

Are you saying that parser discrepancy is a well known problem OR that this exact technical issue described (CD offset vs CD size used to derive CD location) is a well known problem?

If the prior, you are of course right — parser discrepancy and the existence of these kinds of "multiple personality" files isn't a new thing. I'm pretty sure this can be traced back to at least the '80 :)

However, if you mean the latter, I would appreciate a link if you can recall where you've seen it before / read about it — I can then add it to the article.
by Jarwain | 2025-07-07 08:31:03+00:00
I tried this at work but ran into issues where if the server had some error or issue or took longer than expected, the job queue grew too large and caused OOM issues. I had to turn it into a manual list in order to debug the problem, though.

Plus we have a case where a certain type of request should skip to the front of the queue.

Leaning on promises does cut out a lot of the user space complication though.
by lmm | 2025-07-07 08:31:10+00:00
> You're not doing that with the built-in tooling of e.g. Erlang/elixir either, because you're still missing all the other parts of your infrastructure.

If you're deploying on managed serverless infrastructure, you can; certainly you want to manage the other parts of the infrastructure and co-ordinate changes (with terraform or similar), but you do it all at a higher level than what K8s offers you. And if you're deploying on an internal cloud or bare metal, I still find K8s is the wrong abstraction level (at least if your language offers a better deployment model than Linux VMs); probably you want to draw a boundary more similar to what serverless infrastructure providers do, and maintain everything "below the line" as part of your infrastructure rather than your applications. Yes, that means you've got to manage patching your OS and language runtime and rolling out those updates in a safe way, but you'll always need to update the "platform" at some point - even on K8s you end up having to spin up new clusters and shuffle apps from one to another - and drawing the boundary between the platform and the application at the place where it was traditionally done fits with the grain of the tools much better most of the time.
by dtj1123 | 2025-07-07 08:31:42+00:00
It's possible to construct a similar description of whatever it is that human brain is doing that clearly fails to capture the fact that we're conscious. If you take a cross section of every nerve feeding into the human brain at a given time T, the action potentials across those cross sections can be embedded in R^n. If you take the history of those action potentials across the lifetime of the brain, you get a path through R^n that is continuous, and maps roughly onto your subjectively experienced personal history, since your brain neccesarily builds your experienced reality from this signal data moment to moment. If you then take the cross sections of every nerve feeding OUT of your brain at time T, you have another set of action potentials that can be embedded in R^m which partially determines the state of the R^n embedding at time T + delta. This is not meaningfully different from the higher dimensional game of snake described in the article, more or less reducing the experience of being a human to 'next nerve impulse prediction', but it obviously fails to capture the significance of the computation which determines what that next output should be.
by microtherion | 2025-07-07 08:31:57+00:00
I started at Apple a few years after the original author, and by then the policy on Easter Eggs was that they were allowed within reason, but had to be declared internally, so they could be tested. There were even "official" Easter Eggs that listed all the engineers in the team.

There were lots of Easter Eggs in Apple products: https://www.mackido.com/EasterEggs/

I believe they were prohibited (at least officially) starting with Mac OS X.

In addition to genuine Easter Eggs, there were numerous instances of "products with attitude". One good example are some of the error messages that MPW C produced: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/personal/humor/compile.html

I snuck what technically might be a copyright violation into the EXAMPLES section of the say(1) manpage.
by seadan83 | 2025-07-07 08:32:08+00:00
FWIW, in another part of this thread I quoted a paper that summed up what Neurophysiologists think:

> Author's note: Despite a century of anatomical, physiological, and molecular biological efforts scientists do not know how neurons by their collective interactions produce percepts, thoughts, memories, and behavior. Scientists do not know and have no theories explaining how brains and central nervous systems work. [1]

That lack of understanding I believe is a major part of the author's point.

[1] "How far neuroscience is from understanding brains" - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10585277/#abstract1
by jama211 | 2025-07-07 08:32:38+00:00
Not “no effort to make sure it performs well in the first place”, that isn’t fair. Lots of effort probably went into it performing well, just this case isn’t handled yet and to be fair this only impacts some people currently and there is a chance to update it.

This just reads like “if they haven’t handled this specific case they’ve made no effort at all across the board” which seems extreme.
by jdietrich | 2025-07-07 08:33:03+00:00
For a relatively literate and high-functioning patient, I think that LLMs can deliver good quality psychotherapy that would be within the range of acceptable practice for a trained human. For patients outside of that cohort, there are some significant safety and quality issues.

The obvious example of patients experiencing acute psychosis has been fairly well reported - LLMs aren't trained to identify acutely unwell users and will tend to entertain delusions rather than saying "you need to call an ambulance right now, because you're a danger to yourself and/or other people". I don't think that this issue is insurmountable, but there are some prickly ethical and legal issues with fine-tuning a model to call 911 on behalf of a user.

The much more widespread issue IMO is users with limited literacy, or a weak understanding of what they're trying to achieve through psychotherapy. A general-purpose LLM can provide a very accurate simulacrum of psychotherapeutic best practice, but it needs to be prompted appropriately. If you just start telling ChatGPT about your problems, you're likely to get a sympathetic ear rather than anything that would really resemble psychotherapy.

For the kind of people who use HN, I have few reservations about recommending LLMs as a tool for addressing common mental illnesses. I think most of us are savvy enough to use good prompts, keep the model on track and recognise the shortcomings of a very sophisticated guess-the-next-word machine. LLM-assisted self help is plausibly a better option than most human psychotherapists for relatively high-agency individuals. For a general audience, I'm much more cautious and I'm not at all confident that the risks outweigh the benefits. A number of medtech companies are working on LLM-based psychotherapy tools and I think that many of them will develop products that fly through FDA approval with excellent safety and efficacy data, but ChatGPT is not that product.
by steve_taylor | 2025-07-07 08:33:09+00:00
DSM-5 took a bunch of distinct disorders and rolled them into one new disorder called Autism Spectrum Disorder. The only problem it solved is to reduce the number of disorders with unknown pathologies.

My classically-autistic son who needs a lot of support apparently has the same disorder as a nerdy guy who comes across as a bit abrasive, doesn't understand the point of small talk, and would rather work on Linux kernel patches on a Saturday night than hit the town.
by chgs | 2025-07-07 08:33:10+00:00
People think a trillion dollar brainwashing industry is absolutely fine because of “democracy”, completely ignoring that all you have to do is use a century of experience convincing people to act against their own interests can deliver whatever you want.

Often the same people who think America is fine and safe are the ones who whine about the “main stream media” and “sheeple”.