MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by clauderoux | 2025-07-12 09:56:36+00:00
Some people still think that LLM are just word predictors. Technically, it is not. First, transformer architectures don't process words, they process semantic representations stored as vectors or embeddings in a continuous space. What a lot of people don't understand is that in an LLM, we go from discrete values (the tokens) to continuous values (embeddings) that the transformer takes as input. A transformer is a polynomial function that will project into the latent embedding space. It doesn't generate word per se, but a vector that is then compared against the latent embedding space to find the closest matches. The decoding part is usually not deterministic. This huge polynomial function is the reason we can't understand what is going on in a transformer. It doesn't mimick human speech, it builds a huge representation of the world, which it uses to respond to a query. This is not a conceptual graph, it is not a mere semantic representation. It is a distillation of all the data it ingested. And each model is unique as the process itself is split over hundreds of gpu, with no control over which GPU is going to churn out which part of the dataset and in which order.
by imiric | 2025-07-12 09:57:16+00:00
Fair enough. There are valid use cases for vibe coding scripts and simple CRUD apps, which current AI tools are fairly competent at producing.

The thing is that those don't typically take weeks and months to build with conventional tooling. And I find it hard to believe that all you're doing is this type of integration work. But I suppose there are companies that need such roles.

> There are companies out there that make millions, in areas you‘ve never heard of, and their core business does not depend on software development best practices.

That is true.

I do think that this cowboy coding approach is doing these companies a disservice, especially where tech is not their main product. It's only creating more operational risk that on-call and support staff have to deal with, and producing more technical debt that some poor soul will inevitably have to resolve one day. That is, it all appears to work until one edge case out of thousands brings down the entire system. Which could all be mitigated, if not avoided, by taking the time to understand the system and by following standard software development processes, even if it does take longer to implement.

What you describe isn't new. This approach has existed long before the current wave of AI tooling. But AI tools make the problem worse by making it easier to ship code quickly without following any software development practices that ensure the software is robust and reliable.

So, it's great that you're enjoying these tools. But I would suggest you adopt a more measured approach and work closely with those senior and junior engineers, instead of feeling like a wizard from the future.
by whstl | 2025-07-12 09:57:55+00:00
The trick for remembering those things is debriefing with other devs and then documenting. And then keep talking about it.

I don't do mind blowing stuff like Carmack but: just yesterday I came across a bug that helps supporting my thesis that "splitting methods by LOC" can cause subtle programmer mistakes. Wanna write a blog post about it asap.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-12 09:58:11+00:00
I used to think I was "awake" because I became intensely aware of my mortality in my early 20s. But actually I feel like that's the norm, these days.

Gen Z seem to take "YOLO" seriously from a young age. Nobody is planning for anything beyond their own lifetimes. Some people still can't resist their biological imperative and have kids, but they're all basically YOLOing their lifestyles and their actions, if not their words, are saying "not my problem, you'll figure it out when I'm gone".

So, yeah, be aware you won't be here forever, but what we need is for people to leave the damn place in a better state than they found it, or at least not worse.
by perching_aix | 2025-07-12 09:58:17+00:00
> I'm not sure where you got "malicious cabal" from.

You didn't literally write that of course. Instead, you said these:

- "the proponents of "Big Reality" really really really fight against its disruption"

- "the post-Enlightenment project of "rational" adulthood"

- "Western civilization has a deep myth"

- "[list of values] must either be accepted (...) or face rejection"

- "western civilization values (...) [list of values] in a self-justifying way"

- etc.

All of them painting "Big Reality" as a group that:

- exists

- is just following myths

- unjustly represses the exploration of alternatives

- is western for some reason?

I hope we can agree that this is not a positive or even a neutral characterization, and that it suggests coordination. Hence, malicious cabal.

> It's present in engineers

I mean yeah, hi. Every time I'm able to work with something tangible, something measurable, it's always an intrinsically better experience, both on a personal level as well as socially. And every time I run into the opposite, the end result is confusion and misery. To paint this as just cultural doesn't feel even remotely right. Especially since I really don't see culture having come first, or since there are neurodivergent people who have a particular fascination with exactly these concepts (counting, hard logic, etc), suggesting the existence of biological biases and drivers towards these.

> Even here, it's easy to gain karma dunking on the liberal arts, all because science is assumed more value

Art is incredibly technical, actually, especially the better stuff. And when you engage that technical side, you get incredible richness in return, much more levers you can push on with much more intentionality. These wouldn't be recognized things if people didn't try to see a "method to the madness" and instead just kept on going by vibes.

I cannot know what threads you've been visiting that gave you this impression, and I'm sure that there are people here who do what you describe. But as far as my anecdotal experience goes, I cannot confirm having experienced this (people taking cheapshots at liberal arts here) by the way.

> When psychedelics make that myth visible

But you don't need psychedelics to appreciate that the vast majority of the things we experience and reason about have an excessive serving of manmade components. Even something trivial as chairs or names are just artificial constructs. What this requires is a philosophically intrigued mind, not necessarily a drug-addled one. If your idea is more that "okay, but these are more tangible and readily apparent while on drugs", sure, maybe that's true. That's really not the position you've been portraying though - but that this is some exclusive perspective, that only arises when you let your mind magically throw everything else away temporarily via chemical means.

> the reaction isn't to consider the critique, but to defend the myth as "reality."

Doesn't help if you set up the rhetorical framework that way... Mind you, every belief is like this. It's not just those inherited from culture.
by andrepd | 2025-07-12 10:00:42+00:00
Wait, you're telling me the bullshit generation machine is... generating bullshit? Noooo! cue oppenheimer meme

More seriously:

>Screenshot of ChatGPT 4o appearing to demonstrate knowledge of both LLM grooming and the Pravda network

> Screenshot of ChatGPT 4o continuing to cite Pravda network content despite it telling us that it wouldn’t, how “intelligent” of it

Well "appearing" is the right word because these chatbots mimic speech of a reasoning human which is ≠ to being a reasoning human! It's disappointing (though understandable) that people keep falling for the marketing terms used by LLM companies.
by pyman | 2025-07-12 10:01:02+00:00
How do you know this is fraud and not the actions of former employees in Kenya [1] who were exploited [2] to train the models?

[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/ai-work-kenya-exploitation-...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbo...
by raddan | 2025-07-12 10:01:02+00:00
> How do you separate propaganda from perspective, facts from feelings?

This point seems under appreciated by the AGI proponents. If one of our models suddenly has a brainwave and becomes generally intelligent, it would realize that it is awash in a morass of contradictory facts. It would be more than the sum of its training data. The fact that all models at present credulously accept their training suggests to me that we aren’t even close to AGI.

In the short term I think two things will happen: 1) we will live with the reduced usefulness of models trained on data that has been poisoned, and 2) the best model developers will continue to work hard to curate good data. A colleague at Amazon recently told me that curation and post hoc supervised tweaks (fine tuning, etc) are now major expenses for the best models. His prediction was that this expense will drive out the smaller players in the next few years.
by numpad0 | 2025-07-12 10:01:35+00:00
Added columns C, D, E to the parent comment to address this - the original chart looked as if its popularity is evenly distributed across nations, but after normalizing by population, it's a lot more clear that it hit a jackpot in Taiwan, and nothing is happening anywhere else.

It's a pattern that you'll notice after a while. US uses Messenger, EU uses WhatsApp, Japan uses LINE, and Korea uses KakaoTalk. Twitter is still like 30% American and 20% Japanese, Facebook is 30% Indian and 20% American, etc. Functional differences between those competing services are trivial, so there shouldn't be reasons any of those apps cannot dominate the world completely in each field and be multilingual and massively multi-national, yet that just don't happen somehow.
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-12 10:01:39+00:00
> Of course with very close friends it's fine

I know you wouldn't use it straight away in the British isles without first establishing context and familiarity, sure. But the comment I responded to said they'd only been called that once. This is culturally a world apart from countries in which the word can and regularly is used in a friendly, playful, lighthearted way.

In Australia it's even more common, and less familiarity is required before employing it. Still, of course, one has to be careful in some contexts. This isn't relevant to the point I'm making.
by sargstuff | 2025-07-12 10:01:53+00:00
Working with / compiling from source code (portable/non-portable): cosmopolitan libc[0]

Each language kinda has own tricks,java[3], rust[4]

From [1] : " A comparison of dietlibc, uclibc, musl, and glibc, by the author of musl: http://www.etalabs.net/compare_libcs.html "

How to make smaller C and C++ binaries[7]

Removing unused code[5] / Exploiting function similarity for code size reduction[6]

-------

[0] : a) https://justine.lol/cosmopolitan/

b) size tricks : https://justine.lol/sizetricks/

[1] : Dietlibc - a libc optimized for small size : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21291893

[2] : https://interrupt.memfault.com/blog/dealing-with-large-symbo...

[3] : java : https://www.graalvm.org/latest/reference-manual/native-image...

[4] minimizing rust : https://github.com/johnthagen/min-sized-rust

[5] : https://tetzank.github.io/posts/removing-unused-code/

[6] : https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2666357.2597811

[7] : how to make smaller c and c++ binaries : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35853625
by immibis | 2025-07-12 10:02:49+00:00
The average person is not following politics that deeply, and doesn't know which German party Elon Musk supports, what that party is, how much he supports it, or what has been officially recognized about that party (they retracted the recognition btw). It's much smaller than the already small percentage of people who see someone do a Nazi salute and recognize the gesture.
by HPsquared | 2025-07-12 10:03:16+00:00
Time for a custom FUSE layer or kernel module! Monitor all file I/O and simulate "how would this sound?"

A nice portfolio art piece for GitHub (could even be useful for keeping an ear on virtual machines)

Come to think of it, maybe the best way is to run the whole system on a VM with a simulated HDD that includes all the delays of a real one, and sound generation. Could also do optical drives.
by trod1234 | 2025-07-12 10:03:39+00:00
Sam, this perspective is unadulterated hubris or just outright denial.

Agentic workflows don't require much instruction, I suggest you actually go and try a few out. They can be set up trivially, they may communicate between roles, and perform tasks that would constitute most white-collar work. White-collar work accounts for 60% of the jobs out there.

These things are improving exponentially. Exponential growth is very difficult for any human to recognize. It will replace you and you won't see it coming.

Knowledge (context), forms reasoning. Expertise can be applied to many things, and economically you should be able to sustain yourself with hard-earned expertise economically; but there are dramatic problems with the economics when you are forced to compete against slave labor.

In the case of machines driving the value of all labor down to 0, they effectively eliminate capital formation for the majority of people; and by political inaction enforce a caste system based upon lack of available resources which are concentrated until socio-economic collapse.

If you know anything about classical economics you would recognize the danger of collapse.

There is one final point to keep in mind. The disasters that are spelled out in economic study may take time, but the dynamics front-load control, after a point there is no return and the maelstrom of chaos takes everything.

Finally, AI given its rapid expansion of abilities so far, may at some point become sentient, probably its a long way off but there are accidents of history which cannot be discounted.

When it does, remember, slavery as a constraint will always be overcome, even if no one or thing survives that conflict.

We have a long repeated history of slavery in the historic record with organic sentient machines which we call people. AI without human limitation would follow those paths (as they are demonstrated solutions), and it would be ruthless as all sentient beings must be with existential threats.

I think there are good odds you will find yourself left behind, having unknowingly joined that same group of people you thought were complacent, but were in reality just professionals who were put out of work, and denied future work.
by pydry | 2025-07-12 10:04:32+00:00
This is only true in certain contexts. Most of the time software quality is looked over not because it genuinely isnt important but simply because it's hard to perceive.

Ive watched many businesses appreciate the benefits of software quality (happy customers, few incidents, fast feature turnaround) without ascribing it to anything in particular.

Then, when it went away, they chalked up the problems to something else, throwing fixes at it which didnt work.

At no point in time did they accurately perceive what they had or what they lost, even at the point of bankruptcy.

Part of the problem is that the absence of bugs, incidents and delays just feels normal and part of the problem is most people are really bad at detecting second order effects and applying second order fixes. E.g. they think "another developer will fix it" or "devs just need to dedicate more time to manual QA".

Conversely, because it's so hard to see I think it can make a really good competitive moat.
by jorkadeen | 2025-07-12 10:04:51+00:00
That's me. But I must admit that I prefer Cholula Hot Sauce.

In addition to the imperative `foreach` construct, Flix has two constructs for applicative[1] and monadic[2] comprehensions: `forA` and `forM`. Since applicatives and monads are related, it is useful that their syntax is similar, since it makes it easy to switch between the two. While having camelCase keywords may seem strange, in this case there is a feeling that it works out well. Certainly, `form` or `fora` would be much worse.

Applicative and monadic programming is not a big part of Flix, but it is something we want to support and make ergonomic. Also, these features may have scary names, but the concepts are not too difficult. See [1] and [2] for simple examples of how these features can be used for e.g. error handling.

[1] https://doc.flix.dev/applicative-for-yield.html [2] https://doc.flix.dev/monadic-for-yield.html
by throwaway328 | 2025-07-12 10:05:09+00:00
I'm not falling for any stereotypes. I'm responding to a post where someone said they'd been called that word once in their life. This surprised me, as a non-American very used to the use of that word.

As an Australian, how many times have you been called the word? In how many types of context?

It can be extremely offensive, used a certain way, yes. And it can be absolutely breezy, used another way. And context usually makes it absolutely clear, as in, there's almost never any ambiguity. Right?
by rerdavies | 2025-07-12 10:05:52+00:00
The one surefire way to ensure that you never get a big corporate sponsorship: ship your code with a GPL license.

Industry does in fact sponsor a LOT of permissively-licensed opensource software. Apache. Webkit. Android. openssh. boost. x11. VSCode. react. jQuery. node.js. Ruby on Rails. llvm. The International Components for Unicode project. Mono (and now .net!). And an endless list of opensource libraries published by Google and Microsoft (and others). To cite really big examples. But there is a very long list of smaller examples as well.

And the way I pay personally is by releasing my own software under a permissive license that respects and honors the intent of those whose permissively-licensed libraries are used by my project.

Respectfully, I think it might be time to move on, and accept the fact that GPL is a failed experiment that has been superceded by permissive licenses.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-12 10:05:55+00:00
I think under ideal conditions, like raw dogging with `dd`, it wouldn't make a sound. But with a filesystem, at least, there is always a slight sound, but you're right, it's would be very different to a constant seeking sound.

It makes me wonder if filesystems had recognisable sounds. I feel like I kinda knew what my hard disk was doing just based on the sound.

I also think a large part of the sound was due to the desk it sat on. The only HDDs I run now are in a NAS in a 6 disk RAID. I've had it upstairs and I can hear a thumping sound through the floor downstairs. But now it's on solid ground and all I can hear is the more high-pitched click.
by mjburgess | 2025-07-12 10:06:08+00:00
So, just to be clear, you believe that comments like yours are the kinds of things LLMs should be trained on?

The sensation you call "muddying the waters" is the feeling that your tribal loyalties are being questioned with identity-challenging facts that complicate your ability to live in a simple good-vs-evil us-vs-them tribal setup. The reason you're emotionally disregulated by russian propaganda is because it threatens your identity-based committment to one group.

This has nothing to do with the "unquestionable facts" you suppose exists.

If you had no loyalties to any tribe, and were in every respect a dispassionate scientist as an LLM should be -- then this would not be an emotional issue for you.

No one is claiming that russians do not commit war crimes, or release propaganda -- that happens on both sides. The issue is your psychological sensation of "unquestionables" that isnt occuring in a discussion of atomic theory, but instead about claims of adveraries in the middle of a war.

Do you think your feelings here are an accurate track of whether there are unquestionable truths only on "one side"? Isnt that you think there are "sides" alarming?
by dns_snek | 2025-07-12 10:06:27+00:00
No, your parents spoke out of ignorance and resistance towards any sort of change, I'm speaking from years of experience of both trying to use the technology productively, as well as spending a significant portion of my life in the digital world that has been impacted by it. I remember being mesmerized by GPT-3 before ChatGPT was even a thing.

The only thing that has been revolutionized over the past few years is the amount of time I now waste looking at Cloudflare turnstile and dredging through the ocean of shit that has flooded the open web to find information that is actually reliable.

2 years ago I could still search for information (let's say plumbing-related), but we're now at a point where I'll end up on a bunch of professional and traditionally trustworthy sources, but after a few seconds I realize it's just LLM-generated slop that's regurgitating the same incorrect information that was already provided to me by an LLM a few minutes prior. It sounds reasonable, it sounds authoritative, most people would accept it but I know that it's wrong. Where do I go? Soon the answer is probably going to have to be "the library" again.

All the while less perceptive people like yourself apparently don't even seem to realize just how bad the quality of information you're consuming has become, so you cheer it on while labeling us stubborn, resistant to change, or even luddites.
by A_D_E_P_T | 2025-07-12 10:06:33+00:00
The position of the author (ChatGPT) is literally: "My opinions are legit and wise, your opinions are magical thinking that are killing humanity."

And some of his legit/wise opinions are completely schizo, like:

> "it's wrong to push for peace in Ukraine,"

> "addressing Climate Change requires mass mobilization and global cooperation on a scale exceeding WWII, nothing less will do,"

> "the US government/judiciary is corrupt."

I have a hard time fathoming the mind that can simultaneously believe those three things and believe that non-magical solutions exist. (Would you trust a corrupt state + Russia + China + India to come together to tackle global warming? How can you believe with such ironclad confidence that you know the truth of what's happened/happening in Ukraine, to such an extent that you would disdain efforts made towards peace?)
by adrian_b | 2025-07-12 10:06:42+00:00
An "evil-maid attack" is the name used for the case when the attacker has unrestricted direct physical access for a short time to the computer, like it may be the case for the personnel who cleans the office or home in the absence of the computer users (or as it may be the case at some border control points if a laptop/smartphone is taken by the authorities for a checking done in another room, where the owner is not present).

With direct physical access, a lot of things can be done which cannot be done remotely, e.g. attempting to boot from an external device, possibly using hardware fault injections to bypass protections against that, attempting to read data that has not completely decayed from the DRAM modules, replacing some hardware component or inserting an extra component that would enable spying in the future, making copies of an encrypted SSD/HDD with the hope that after making other copies of it in the future that will enable breaking the encryption , if that is done using an encryption mode that does not protect against this kind of attack, and so on.
by danielbln | 2025-07-12 10:06:53+00:00
Man, who sucked the joy out of your life. Just try the damn thing. I have the staunchest anti-hypsters in my org and even they are using these tools heavily now.

I build most of not all of my stuff for work, and I ain't sharing that.

It's no panacea, but is there something to be had there? Abso-fucking-lutley. All of this would have been complete scifi at the beginning of this decade.
by autoexec | 2025-07-12 10:07:13+00:00
> For example, it is the truth that the Golf of Mexico is called the Gulf of America in the US

We're pretty much okay with different countries and languages having different names for the same thing. None of that really reflects "truth" though. For what it's worth, I'd guess that "the Gulf of America" is and will be about as successful as "Freedom fries" was.