MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jerf | 2025-07-11 13:41:04+00:00
When I was being a bad HN reader and just reacting to the title, my initial impulse was to be placating, and observe that they are probably just immature. After all, for all that has happened, this is still only a couple year's worth of development, and it does tend to take a long time to develop good benchmarks.

However the article does seem to be pointing out some fundamental issues. I'm particularly annoyed by using LLMs to evaluate the output of LLMs. Anyone with enough experience to be writing benchmarks of this sort in the first place ought to know that's a no-go. It isn't even just using "AI to evaluate AI" per se, but using a judge of the same architecture as the thing being judged maximizes the probability of fundamental failure of the benchmark to be valid due to the judge having the exact same blind spots as the thing under test. As we, at the moment, lack a diversity of AI architectures that can play on the same level as LLMs, it is simply necessary for the only other known intelligence architecture, human brains, to be in the loop for now, however many other difficulties that may introduce into the testing procedures.

Tests that a "do nothing" AI can pass aren't intrinsically invalid but they should certainly be only a very small number of the tests. I'd go with low-single-digit percentage, not 38%. But I would say it should be above zero; we do want to test for the AI being excessively biased in the direction of "doing something", which is a valid failure state.
by 9rx | 2025-07-11 13:41:08+00:00
> How do you propose to determine the worst athletes?

Given the aforementioned process to discover the best athletes (which, I assume, means tryouts, but the exact mechanism wasn't specified, granted), the worst athletes should be revealed in that.

Sure, there is room to game that, but:

1. Who wants to be known as a poor athlete where one is already playing at a high level outside of school?

2. Who wants to keep up the ruse of being a poor athlete throughout the year? If you are suddenly amazing at the sport after making it look like you've never seen the sport before, you won't be long for the team.

If someone who is skilled is able to play up that they are weak continuously, oh well. It need not be perfect. A best effort attempt to try and give those who don't have opportunities outside of school is good enough.

> Maybe another approach would be to use a lottery among applicants.

That seems reasonable as well.
by cess11 | 2025-07-11 13:41:13+00:00
Anti-monopoly is left wing and doesn't fit the neo-liberalist compartment?

The social charter is firmly liberalist, though not distinctly of the neo- flavour.

Due to the institutional structures and processes EU rule making tends to be quite resistant to immediate political fashion. For one the power of framing from interest and lobby groups is quite strong, hence the influence from expert groups and lawyer like people. It's why conservatives are pushing towards a kind of United States of Europe direction, they'd prefer a centralisation of power in areas currently governed by the founding agreements.
by neuroelectron | 2025-07-11 13:41:45+00:00
Yes but sometimes it doesn't work, weirdly. The cursor just doesn't go where you put it, jumping to the end of the line or next line entirely, where it gets lost in limbo because it's a single line text box. It's ridiculously broken sometimes.

Now that's not a big deal until it happens 3 times in a row randomly and now something that would take less than half a second on a keyboard is taking over 20 seconds. Not only that the random behavior is extremely frustrating which just makes you avoid it in the future.
by lmeyerov | 2025-07-11 13:41:52+00:00
Gotcha - and yep, I did a small internal natural qualitative experiment with our AI head. It lines up with what I was writing around the benefit being throughput after 2-3 week investment:

* Setup: I did a whole cloth clean room rewrite at production-grade an MCP server that was previously prototyped by the AI head. I intentionally went all-in for this "first serious" agentic coding project: ultimately < 100 lines of code manually edited, while the final AI-generated PR stack was big.

* Baseline: If both of us did manually, I had already estimated similar times to completion due to differences in task scope naturally matching differences in proficiency for those tasks. Despite being new to agentic coding at the time, key aspects were in my favor: senior dev, 2 years of ~daily prompt engineering experience (tactics), PhD in code synthesis (strategy), and the repo setup with various lint/type/test guardrails.

* Result: About the same 1-2 weeks as a junior vibes coder vs the manual coder

* Experience: It was clear the first 1-2 weeks were slow due to onboarding myself and the codebase to agentic coding. That first week was especially rough. While I could get long runs going during it, I was doing the more confidently week 2, and switching to figuring out how to do parallel agents. Near the end, I was switching to doing multiple long runs in parallel on different tasks, where I could maintain maybe 2-4, but managing more gets exhausting, and especially when any are shorter runs.

Separately, we have a genAI team and a GPU Python team both switching to agentic coding. The natural difference in prompt engineering experience across teams seems to have individuals on one team picking up faster than the other, when gauged by the ability to do long runs

The initial experiment is part of why I view current agentic coding being more about overall coding throughput, and not latency within any specific task. If someone can reliably trigger long runs, do multiple in parallel, and doesn't waste time in interactive chatting, the difference is stark.

Likewise, reinforced by both of the above cases, looking for throughput improvements in the first 2-3w seems aggressive. A lot of blogposts seem to be from people new to high-quality prompting, tackling repos/tasks not setup for agents, and as limited nights & weekend efforts. To get to clear throughput multipliers from multiple agents working in parallel on good long runs.. I'd expect that to hit at month 2 or 3 when someone isn't as all in as I was able to be. It's more like a skill with setup, so takes investment before you reap the rewards.
by bayindirh | 2025-07-11 13:41:55+00:00
Even in the middle of that turmoil, we managed to compile some code with Intel's ICC and make it go faster on AMD Opterons, breaking Intel's own numbers.

When my colleague said that they managed to go faster than intel with icc with some hand tuned parameters, I remember answering "youdidwat?".

Good times.
by nonelog | 2025-07-11 13:42:00+00:00
While DMT definitively has its merits (and is produced naturally in the human body), know also that Psilocybin allows for an increases of the human lifespan of over 50%, which is absolutely massive. [0]

It's entirely natural, easy to do, has no side effects, costs next to nothing, and can even be "fun". As usual, the media will not talk about this discovery, as it is too much of a game-changer for our current systems.

[0] https://neurosciencenews.com/psilocybin-longevity-aging-2942...
by reliabilityguy | 2025-07-11 13:42:05+00:00
> which allows state to confiscate Palestinian land - Jewish Nation state law that stipulates that Jews only have the right to self determination

Similar law exists in Palestinian Authority -- no land can be owned by Jews. Selling land to jews is punishable offense.

> They are being occupied illegaly for decades, remember?

Who? You have to be specific.

> by a supremacist ethno state, remember?

Israel is not supremacist ethno state. Multiple ethnicities live in Israel and have the same rights. Find me another state in the Middle East that offers at least the same rights as Israel to its own minorities.
by dogleash | 2025-07-11 13:42:20+00:00
edit: lol wut? The more I think about this the less it makes sense. The stigma of suicide is from the societal attitude that it's wrong and you should never do it. Using a verb isn't the bit that tells everyone it is wrong. If you want to remove the stigma take away all the signs for 998 and perfunctory statements that help is available, and replace them all with "do it. no balls, do it."

Isn't the stigma desired anyway? It keeps people from going through with it. That's why society deliberately creates and actively cultivates the stigma.

I doubt removing "committed" removes any stigma to seek help. What sucks about suicidality is that everyone is so sterile about it. Removing the word is more of that. IMO the sterility discourages the not-yet-at-rock-bottom suicidal from reaching out.

My pre-edit comment was that just about sterility and linking to: "Envying the dead: SkyKing in memoriam" https://eggreport.substack.com/p/rehosting-envying-the-dead-...
by watwut | 2025-07-11 13:42:35+00:00
> Although the passive voice is designed to conceal or obscure the actor, which doesn't accomplish anything here.

No, passive voice is not in general designed to conceal or obscure the actor. Especially not in the sentence here.

There were valid similar complains about crime reporting. But the language there was different. The sentence "The innocent McKay family was inadvertently affected by this enforcement operation" is trying to hide culpability. We can discuss that. These two are incomparable:

- A deputy-involved shooting occurred. (Ok, we are avoiding the actor. We do not know who was shooting.)

- A person died by Suicide. (Clear to anyone who done what.)
by rpaddock | 2025-07-11 13:42:50+00:00
One of the known side effects of this drug is Suicidal Ideation.

My late wife was taking this crap when she killed herself; see the documentary Pain Warriors for that whole saga.

I've been warning people about this drug for years. One lady told me, months after a warning to her group: "Bob, I was standing on the railing of a bridge ready to jump, when I heard your voice. I got off of the bridge and got help."

This stuff really needs to be removed from the market. I acknowledge that I've been told by a very few that it helps them. I've been told by far more how it harmed them.

See also from the Journal Cell Oct 16 2009, relating to both Gabapentin and Lyrica, because other comments here are speculating about how it works:

"... α2δ-1 is the high-affinity receptor for two commonly prescribed antiepileptic, antineuropathic pain medications, gabapentin (GBP, Neurontin) and pregabalin (Lyrica) (Gee et al., 1996). GBP and pregabalin were initially designed as hydrophobic gamma amino butyric acid (GABA) analogs that could cross the blood-brain barrier. Further studies have shown that even though they posses anticonvulsant properties, they do not bind to GABA receptors or transporters. A recent study using a knockin mouse that expresses a mutant α2δ-1 that cannot bind GBP or pregabalin has shown that α2δ-1 is the in vivo target for these drugs and that these drugs mediate their therapeutic action through binding to α2δ-1 (Field et al., 2006). GBP and pregabalin do not affect the single-channel kinetics of calcium channels and have only modest effects on neurotransmission (Dooley et al., 2007). Thus, the cellular mechanisms underlying the mode of action of these drugs are unclear. ..."

https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(09)01185-4
by athenot | 2025-07-11 13:42:50+00:00
The difficulty here is professional skill entails money, money entails risk management, risk management entails legalities.

The only way in the US is to have a powerful lobby that can fight to ensure broad waivers stand up in court, like the NRA: you can buy a gun and literally shoot yourself in the foot.

But if transaction, money, service, profession are all removed, then under a co-op / non profit this might work. Of course, those structures are also vulnerable to well-funded legal opponents.

Some European countries do provide a framework for this but it's more from a public health perspective and to eliminate the raison-d'être of criminal drug organizations.
by foldr | 2025-07-11 13:42:57+00:00
UK law said that there was a presumption that computer systems were working correctly unless there was evidence to the contrary. That’s not inherently nuts. It makes roughly as much sense as assuming that, say, a dishwasher is in working order unless there’s evidence to the contrary. This presumption in and of itself could just as well aid a person’s defense as hinder it (e.g. if they have an alibi based on computer records).

In this case it should have been very easy to provide evidence to override the presumption that the Horizon system was working correctly. That this didn’t happen seems to have resulted from a combination of bad lawyering and shameless mendacity on the part of Fujitsu and the Post Office.

Don’t get me wrong — the whole thing is a giant scandal. I’m just not sure if this particular presumption of UK law is the appropriate scapegoat.
by sgarland | 2025-07-11 13:43:09+00:00
> "We discovered X about Postgres" is a eng blog cliché by this point.

It really is, and it’s often surprising to me how basic some of the issues are being discovered. Like Figma, when they waited a shocking amount of time add [0] PgBouncer and read replicas. This is such a well-trod path that it’s baffling to me why you wouldn’t add it once it’s clear you have a winning product. At the very least, PgBouncer (or PgCat, or any other connection pooler / proxying service) - it adds negligible cost per month (in comparison to DB read replicas) to run a couple of containers with a load balancer.

Re: Oracle, as much as I despise the company for its litigious practices, I’ll hand it to you that the features your DB has are astonishing. RAC is absolutely incredible (on paper - I’ve never used it).

[0]: https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figma-scaled-to-multiple-data...
by troupo | 2025-07-11 13:43:14+00:00
> especially considering that non-determinism is a red herring to begin with, and not a thing to care about for practical use

That is, it really is important in practical use because it's impossible to talk about stuff like in the original article without being able to consistently reproduce results.

Also, in almost all situations you really do want deterministic output (remember how "do what I want and what is expected" was an important property of computer systems? Good times)

> The only reason it was mentioned in the article is because the author is basically reverse engineering a particular model.

The author is attempting reverse engineering the model, the randomness and the temperature, the system prompts and the training set, and all the possible layers added by xAI in between, and still getting a non-deterministic output.

HN: no-no-no, you don't understand, it's 100% deterministic and it doesn't matter
by bee_rider | 2025-07-11 13:43:20+00:00
Not super digging with Apple’s push back on EU laws nowadays, will probably not get another Apple phone… but, the competition is not very good so far. Currently on an iPhone 12. So, hopefully by like 2030 the Linux phone ecosystem will really be there for day-to-day use (maybe it already is there, I haven’t checked lately).

And I must admit, this phone has already had a good run. If it lasts that long, I’ll be impressed for sure.
by lompad | 2025-07-11 13:43:26+00:00
Trauma only appearing in super-deep going therapy sessions can often be False Memory Syndrome, which is an entirely different can of worms and extremely problematic. If you search really really deeply, you're going to find it, wether it exists or not.

Generally: While suppressed memory of trauma exists, the vast majority of people are aware of trauma and there is no evidence suggesting otherwise. And there is clear evidence that lots of mentally well people get addicted as well, so just claiming "it's always some underlying condition" is probably not a great idea. It can, often even, be, sure. But that doesn't make it mandatory and especially doesn't allow the "I struggle with addiction, so there _must_ have been a problem beforehand" conclusion.

So honestly, I'd just not search any deeper to not risk inducing any false memories.
by throwawayHpCvfn | 2025-07-11 13:43:40+00:00
As someone who attempted suicide almost ten years ago, I'm disheartened by how cold-hearted the comments on this article are. Accusations of certain wording being "woke" or "PC" and completely ignoring the substance of the article itself, as if the wording were the tragedy here. If we must have this discussion, I stopped using the phrase "committed suicide" when I found out it was a relic of when it was illegal and stigmatized by the justice system. I prefer "died by suicide", and I appreciate when others use it too. Not in the sense that I will correct people when they say committed (because most people, the ones in this comment section excepted, don't know the origins), but rather "oh hey, that person knows about this, and they care too."
by orwin | 2025-07-11 13:44:28+00:00
Two points:

one, it's extremely likely that the article is incomplete and lack critical info like a presence of lead, or genetic predisposition.

Two: 10g is crazy. That's how you get kidney stones. Put so curcuma and black pepper in your meals. In EU, supplements (and recently, tea) are tested for heavy metal and plastic, and to see if the ingredient list is correct, but their effectiveness is not.
by 63 | 2025-07-11 13:45:33+00:00
What I'm hearing is "I would rather let millions of kids get victimized than allow even the remote possibility of being held accountable for what I say on the internet."

In my mind it's all of our problems that children are getting groomed and manipulated online and the downside is minimal here. Like the worst case scenario is we have to assume people know who we are when we tweet... which doesn't even sound like a downside to me.
by MSFT_Edging | 2025-07-11 13:46:05+00:00
> You subbed in "ends" for "purpose to is to validate." They're different. Without the seduction of violence and racism, fascism is a much less convincing argument.

Yeah I generally meant that there are people who desire violence. Their targets of choice vary, be it along boundaries of race, sex, etc.

Fascism uses this reactionary tendency to amass a following. It's a weapon that is wielded inconsistently. Many Homosexuals were part of the early brown shirts. Hitler publicly said their sexuality wasn't opposed to Nazism.

These brownshirts would attack union meetings, violently break strikes, and generally act as an unofficial arm of violence for the Nazis. Once power had been gained, and enemies squashed, there was now an issue with their sexuality and the Nazi party acted as they are to do.

There's no logic behind the scapegoat. It's fluid and can change on a whim to suit the emotional reactions of whoever they're trying to garner support from.
by RamblingCTO | 2025-07-11 13:46:07+00:00
As a European I never understood this American way of labeling yourself after your supposed heritage. Nothing italian about "italian americans" and nothing african about "african american". Sure, there are maybe traces of the original culture in the respective subculture and we like to mingle with people who are like us. And for that labels like these help. But this heritage is so far gone that it really doesn't matter anymore. I also understand that it describes a new culture, but by using the "old" names it puts a claim on something it just can't.

I also don't get this: “Whenever I go to Africa, I feel like a person with a legitimate place to stand on this earth. This is the name for all the feelings I’ve had all these years.”

And the "return to africa" thingy (or the new return to europe thingy). Africa is a big ass continent and there is really no cultural homogeneity. They never ever stepped foot on african, italian or german soil before. You're all american, period. This feels like self-segregating. A culture isn't something you can just consume or put on yourself.

PS: I'm very understanding of the issue that you want to cling to some roots. But I don't like that it's becoming a "I vs them" thing and that it gets consumed and is used for projection.
by Willingham | 2025-07-11 13:46:07+00:00
It’s important to understand that all 12 step programs(all of which are based on AA) approach addiction as a spiritual disease, and the program offers a spiritual solution. 12 step programs also teach that addiction is a progressive disease, and there is no permanent ‘fix’, but rather a daily reprieve contingent on the maintenance of one’s spiritual condition. Here is a concise summarization of the 12 step design for living: ‘reverse selfishness, get out and help others’. According to 12 step programs, if you stop working the program, addiction will come back in full force.
by gilbetron | 2025-07-11 13:46:14+00:00
Holy crap, I've never seen a Janathan Richman recommendation on the Internet ever ;) I listened to him like crazy in college (1988ish) and saw him play once. My favorite still remains https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR6Ns3AcDco

I know two other people that know of Richman, four if you count my wife and son who I made listen to him!

edit: had to add Richman was a big influence on the Talking Heads :)
by JonahJanzen | 2025-07-11 13:47:03+00:00
Hey! Thanks for your interest :)

It's not open source yet, but I do plan on releasing it as such in a few months, or maybe sooner - I have a few personal reasons for waiting but we'll see. I'll be putting out more updates on the same Youtube channel or on operese.com once I actually get a website set up there.

If you'd like, feel free to shoot me an email at hello@operese.com and I could discuss getting you an account on my Gitea instance to be able to contribute, or I could just keep your email in reserve and let you know when there's more to look at.
by hollerith | 2025-07-11 13:47:38+00:00
I was addicted for years (to the flow state, to which by the way I've never seen or heard a report of anyone else's being addicted).

I also wasted too much time, thousands of hours, reading and writing on the newsgroups and on the web.

There are similarities between these 2 things. For example, both reduce the amount of motivation and drive available in a life. But they feel very different, and in my experience, avoiding the former is extremely important whereas avoiding the latter is merely one more important thing in a life full of important considerations.

In an ideal world, there would be a word or short phrase for the second thing so that "addiction" could be reserved for the first thing. "Insufficient vigilance against superstimuli" is the shortest phrase I can think of right now. (I'm sad that I cannot use the word "vices" without provoking an immediate negative reaction: "vices" is shorter than "superstimuli".)
by vintagedave | 2025-07-11 13:47:47+00:00
That's Musk's line, for sure.

The article gives it more nuance: 'I presume that what happened was not deliberate, but it was the consequence of something that was deliberate, and it’s something that was not really predictable.' And goes on to discuss how LLMs can behave in unpredictable ways even when given what we expect to be prompts without side effects, and touches on the post-training processes.
by mark_l_watson | 2025-07-11 13:47:51+00:00
Interesting article! My take is that AI Addiction is a subset of Digital Addiction. A few weeks ago, I was with extended family and everyone but me was staring ‘lovingly’ at their phones. I tend towards Digital Addiction myself, and I fight back by not carrying my phone when I run errands and try to spend at least a little time every day in nature.

The Apple Watch is a good compromise: some ability to get calls and text messages, but not a very ‘addictive device.’