MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by jhanschoo | 2025-07-07 02:39:01+00:00
> They are not intrinsically truth seekers

Is the average person a truth seeker in this sense that performs truth-seeking behavior? In my experience we prioritize sharing the same perspectives and getting along well with others a lot more than a critical examination of the world.

In the sense that I just expressed, of figuring out the intention of a user's information query, that really isn't a tuned thing, it's inherent in generative models from possessing a lossy, compressed representation of training data, and it is also truth-seeking practiced by people that want to communicate.
by asielen | 2025-07-07 02:39:36+00:00
That is the fun thing about English. There isn't really a single right way to speak or write it. It is defined by common usage. As long as your audience understands you, it is correct.

As someone else pointed out, loan words often have accents. At what point does jalapeño become en english word? There is no other english word to refer to the pepper, therefore it is now an english word and therefore english words can have diacritics.

The closest thing we have to a source of truth for the english language is the OED. It isn't prescriptive, it just lists how words are used rather than how words should be used.

Jalapeño is in the OED with the tilde https://www.oed.com/dictionary/jalapeno_n?tab=factsheet#1253...
by sleepybrett | 2025-07-07 02:39:54+00:00
Every few weeks I give LLMs a chance to code something for me.

Friday I laid out a problem very cleanly. Take this datastructure and tranform it into this other datastructure in terraform. With examples of the data in both formats.

After the seventh round of back and forth where it would give me code that would not compile or code that gave me a totally different datastructure, giving it more examples and clarifications all the while I gave up. I gave the problem to a junior and they came back with the answer in about an hour.

Next time an AI bro tells you that AI can 'replace your juniors' tell him to go to hell.
by opan | 2025-07-07 02:41:21+00:00
While the Doom stuff seems like it's kinda soulless attempts at e-cred, this is more interesting because 1) it's an old/historical product (SuperCard DSTWO) that was actually in use rather than something someone made recently and 2) it was made with functionality in mind rather than showing off for the sake of it. Specifically it allowed SNES and I think GBA emulation on a system that would normally be way too weak for it. I remember hearing the chip in this flashcart was roughly equivalent to a PSP. I had one back in the 2010s and it remained useful even with a 3DS as for years you couldn't run DS games off the SD card on 3DS, and I think trying to emulate SNES/GBA on 3DS was also not great. Later on this flash cart became less desirable than the more basic DS-only ones because it had a big power draw even when not being actively played (IIRC), so if you left it in your 3DS and played digital 3DS games it was an extra drain.

I will agree, though, with the general Doom sentiment as well as the clickbait title. Seeing the description say it was the SuperCard DSTWO restored my faith.

These days with TWiLightMenu, a DSi or 3DS doesn't have much use for this flashcart, or any other, but it remains useful for a DS Phat/Lite.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-07 02:41:24+00:00
That FAQ doesn't address my issues with their UTF-8 variants. And I don't want more extensions, I want it to be simpler. Once your prefix bits fill up, go directly to storing the number of bytes. Don't have this implicit jump from 7 to 13. And arrange the length encoding so you don't have to do that weird B4 thing to keep it in order.
by shagie | 2025-07-07 02:41:38+00:00
During the Norman Conquest, England was ruled by the French... and that is when those words entered the language.

Also from that time was many culinary words. The word for the meat in English is the word for the animal in French (the word for the animal in English is likely germanic in origin). That was in part because the when the French speaking nobility wanted boef (French for cow), they didn't want a cow (German Kuh) - they wanted the meat of a cow. So English got beef. Pork? French asked for porc, but didn't want a swine.
by SV_BubbleTime | 2025-07-07 02:41:51+00:00
Right, because the European models coming out are super SOTA? Minstrel is decent, but needs to be mixed with a ton of uncensored data to be useful.

I’m convinced the only reason China keeps releasing banging models with light to no censorship is because they are undermining the value of US AI, it has nothing to do with capitalism, communism or un“safety”.
by Spivak | 2025-07-07 02:42:02+00:00
I can second the assertion. It's absurd that people really believe folks are getting benefits from having a mental disorder. It's literally the "welfare queen" nonsense just directed at a new group.

You don't even get social benefits, no one excuses your behavior just because it has a label. You get told it's your fault for not managing your disorder properly. Have you seen how we treat people with visible, obvious, undeniable disabilities? Like shit.
by 8note | 2025-07-07 02:42:57+00:00
the idea of "its capitalisms fault" is that capitalism is responsible for placing these "self control" constraints on people.

capitalism is the thing making too much choice, and to many choices over time.

capitalism set the context for you snapping at your friend, where you are doing work you dont want to to avoid being homeless, while they are doing different work and you feel like its unfair that their work is different from yours.

if you werent fighting your friend to pay off some capitalist to pay them the most rent, you wouldnt be snapping at them
by muzani | 2025-07-07 02:43:59+00:00
What I hate about these questions is that they're exactly what's asked in exams, so you're expect to make assumptions or fail. At this point, LLMs etc have more critical thinking to dodge these than humans who are conditioned into doing this after a decade of schooling.

There was a little entrepreneurship workshop I went to once. The trainer put a pen on the floor, gave us a ball, and asked us to stand behind the pen and throw the ball into a box. It was to demonstrate that most people didn't practice throwing before entrepreneurship and then blamed the environment for their lack of planning. I picked up the pen and moved it right next to the box so that I could walk there and put the ball in. I thought this was the actual solution (e.g. entrepreneurs were supposed to be creative), but was "failed" for "cheating".
by vitro | 2025-07-07 02:44:07+00:00
Sometimes I think about what I've read in a book about Japan.

Something along the lines that Japanese people are analog while Westerners are digital.

We try to explain everything, every emotion, feeling, how things are. But sometimes talking about things strips them of their mystery, of the unknowns. We talk too much and get entangled in meanings and what was formless and fluid before suddenly becomes defined and limited.
by positron26 | 2025-07-07 02:46:18+00:00
> Is it too anthropomorphic to say that this is a lie?

Yes. Current LLMs can only introspect from output tokens. You need hidden reasoning that is within the black box, self-knowing, intent, and motive to lie.

I rather think accusing an LLM of lying is like accusing a mousetrap of being a murderer.

When models have online learning, complex internal states, and reflection, I might consider one to have consciousness and to be capable of lying. It will need to manifest behaviors that can only emerge from the properties I listed.

I've seen similar arguments where people assert that LLMs cannot "grasp" what they are talking about. I strongly suspect a high degree of overlap between those willing to anthropomorphize error bars as lies while declining to award LLMs "grasping". Which is it? It can think or it cannot? (objectively, SoTA models today cannot yet.) The willingness to waffle and pivot around whichever perspective damns the machine completely belies the lack of honesty in such conversations.
Ask HN: I feel several times more fatigue when coding with AI
by jujumilk3 | 2025-07-07 02:48:45+00:00
Does anyone else experience this?

I used to code for nearly 14 hours a day on weekends, and before AI code agents existed, this felt manageable.

However, now that I'm building products at breakneck speed with AI assistance, I'm experiencing severe cognitive overload combined with serious mental burnout.

I'm curious whether others are facing similar challenges.
by positron26 | 2025-07-07 02:48:47+00:00
> because it's perceived as good marketing

We are making user interfaces. Good user interfaces are intuitive and purport to be things that users are familiar with, such as people. Any alternative explanation of such a versatile interface will be met with blank stares. Users with no technical expertise would come to their own conclusions, helped in no way by telling the user not to treat the chat bot as a chat bot.
by soufiane001 | 2025-07-07 02:49:09+00:00
LoRA is amazing for finetuning large models cheaply, but WHERE you place the adapters makes a huge difference. Most people are just guessing where to put them (Attention, MLP, etc).

Our solution: PLoP (Precise LoRA Placement)

Instead of guessing, it automatically identifies the optimal modules for LoRA placement based on a notion of module-data alignment.
by paulmooreparks | 2025-07-07 02:50:13+00:00
Singlish says, "Hi." It's fascinating to watch that in action here in Singapore, as I find Singlish to be a compact and efficient form of English that greedily borrows words from Mandarin, Hokkien, Hakka, Teochew, Malay, Tamil, and a few other languages to enable rich communication among the various cultures, ethnicities, and language groups found here. It even borrows the grammatical structures of some of those languages, and yet the meaning still gets through. It didn't take me long to get comfortable with it, and it helped me appreciate the promiscuous nature of English even more.
by brogdan | 2025-07-07 02:50:41+00:00
As these other countries become more wealthy and lucrative in and of themselves due to the sheer industriousness of their citizenry rather than trying to “extract value” through shameless and country-destroying corruptive exploitation, we won’t have much of a reason to look up to places like Jane Street. I don’t particularly care what the interns have wrought because quite frankly the company is a parasitic entity that should not be looked up to as an example, but as something to immediately investigate as a nest of illegal activity that leaves the country worse off.

Am I surprised they were cut off? No, not at all. They should be cut off in the West altogether.
by lostmsu | 2025-07-07 02:51:42+00:00
> Current LLMs can only introspect from output tokens

The only interpretation of this statement I can come up with is plain wrong. There's no reason LLM shouldn't be able to introspect without any output tokens. As the GP correctly says, most of the processing in LLMs happens over hidden states. Output tokens are just an artefact for our convenience, which also happens to be the way the hidden state processing is trained.
by obirunda | 2025-07-07 02:52:46+00:00
The thing that's assumed in "proompting" as the new way of writing code is how much extrapolation are you going to allow the LLM to perform on your behalf. If you describe your requirements in a context-free language you'll have written the code yourself. If you describe the requirements with ambiguity you'll leave enough of narrowing it down to actual code to the LLM.

Have it your way, but the current workflow of proompting/context engineering requires plenty of hand holding with test coverage and a whole lot of token burn to allow agentic loops to pass tests.

If you claim to be a vibe coder proompter with no understanding of how anything works under the hood and claim to build things using English as a programming language, I'd like to see your to-do app.
by thangalin | 2025-07-07 02:53:43+00:00
Sure!

* Review of wealth sources with respect to food

* Socioeconomic ramifications of a free food distribution system

* Implications of artificial wombs, longevity pills, and nefarious people

* Benefits of personal, real-time DNA analysis devices

* Organic, bioluminescing street lamp replacements with 500+ year lifetimes (a bathtub curve extension analog)

* Robotaxi services using machine learning to optimize owner income

* How optimal prisoner's dilemma strategies resolve Hume's guillotine

* Strategies for evading capture in a surveillance state

* What plans an AGI would give itself (that don't involve conquering humanity)

* Ways an AGI could completely disable our emergency call centers

* Rationale behind a Galactic race towards harnessing black hole energy

and more.
by jcranmer | 2025-07-07 02:56:06+00:00
A few plausible answers to that:

In general, it's not transliteration into English characters, it's transliteration into the Latin alphabet. That means that transliteration tends to be shared across the various European languages that use the Latin alphabet. And given that the English were one of the last powers to actually engage in the naval trade war, they're less likely to be the basis of a major transliteration effort.

In the case of the q and x, I believe it comes from 500-year old Portuguese.
by gsf_emergency_2 | 2025-07-07 02:56:32+00:00
Optimize/redesign the low-D from high-D mechanism to be self-amplifying :)

Gen-A/Z, low-D (cool,IT-immune) by surfeit of youth & dearth of means, growing up in high-D millennial culture (rich,online & cringe)

Low-key (paywalled) epicenter of memes "vibe shift" AND "hype dad" https://web.archive.org/web/20210610081555/https://www.8ball...

(Subtext lifted from old goat Gramsci!!)

Cited but not linked here https://www.vice.com/en/article/an-obituary-for-millennial-c...
by echaozh | 2025-07-07 02:57:57+00:00
What do you think of the donations to open source project maintainers or photographers or musicians? What about gifts sent to tiktok hosts?

I'm from a country where there're no tips, and I'm not defending tips at all. But I do think the tiktok gifts are basically tips right? Is it a good idea to live off the gifts like the tips?
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-07-07 02:58:02+00:00
> You can't even verify the build you get off Github was compiled from the same posted source

Sure you can: build it and check the hash. If the maintainer prepared for such a check ahead of time it can be as simple as:

wget https://github.com/owner/foo-project/releases/download/.../foo sha256sum foo # make note of this nix build github:owner/foo-project sha256sum result/bin/foo # it should match this

A pinky promise from a corporation can never be more trustworthy than something that we can all verify locally.

Of course there's still the should-you-trust-this-code part of the problem, but at least bad guys in that case must operate in public view, which is--once again--a stronger deterrent to shenanigans than anything that happens behind closed doors at Apple.
by umbra07 | 2025-07-07 02:59:13+00:00
SBF wasn't as successful though. His success wasn't even in the same stratosphere as Zuckerberg. His company was around for 3 years. Facebook has been around for over two decades. In terms of net worth, SBF was somewhere around 60th, I think? Zuckerberg was no. 2. Same thing with their respective companies.
by js8 | 2025-07-07 03:00:39+00:00
No, voting is not dumb. Direct voting (referendum), representation and sortition (random selection) are 3 basic democratic mechanisms (they distribute power equally among people).

But each mechanism has different tradeoffs. How much you get involved, how much expertise you need, and how well your interests are represented. A good political system uses all 3 to public's advantage, to reinforce each other.
by Mtinie | 2025-07-07 03:00:56+00:00
That does not help me understand why I should pay for this service. I personally have zero concern for why this service should make money beyond operating costs. “Why should I should pay for it” is the question I asked.

In my experience the problem it proposes to solve isn’t something I consider so problematic that a subscription would improve things. My experience may not be the norm, and that’s definitely a consideration I’m aware of. Still, I can’t see a reason to subscribe as such.
by strogonoff | 2025-07-07 03:01:05+00:00
It makes intuitive sense and maybe is true in many places (I’m not in the US, for example), but some of the quietest flats I happened to have seen were in subsidized government housing or cost almost half of my rent. I simply did not luck out with one of those.

If you are in top N% then yes, you probably just do not have to worry about noise. However, at this point we are just arguing about the definition of “the poor”. If you mean anyone who lacks cash to forfeit the tenancy agreement like it was nothing, then yes.
by m3kw9 | 2025-07-07 03:01:37+00:00
When someone talks about AGI and then there is a public discussion about it, it’s very analogous to a cat talking to a duck. Everyone responds with a different fantasy version of of AGI in their minds.

Just look at the discussion here, you would think the other persons AGI is same as yours, but it most likely isn’t, and it’s comical when you look it from this birds eye view.
by umbra07 | 2025-07-07 03:01:48+00:00
Nobody involved with Epstein was as successful as Zuckerberg. Howard Hughes's net worth is 55B adjusted for inflation. And I don't think, "he became known for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle—oddities that were caused in part by his worsening obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), chronic pain from a near-fatal plane crash, and increasing deafness." fits my "total moron" criteria.
by paulmooreparks | 2025-07-07 03:02:27+00:00
It's best not to think of Hanyu Pinyin as using "English characters" to pronounce Mandarin. It's just a mapping of the initial, medial, and final sounds onto the Latin alphabet in a consistent way, so that once you know the mapping, you know the pronunciation right away, and more practically, you can _type_ it right away.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
by jhanschoo | 2025-07-07 03:03:35+00:00
> Wouldn't it be more profitable to solve the issue?

Profitable for what entity? You need to find an entity that agrees with itself enough to have a notion of revenue that is hurt by deteriorating climate, and that has the means to "solve the issue" in an economical way.

The case against is obvious: the energy industry has a clear notion of revenue that is hurt by climate actions, and it has the means to combat it by political capture; whole countries are created and destroyed for oil.
by chrismorgan | 2025-07-07 03:04:13+00:00
The most important bit of that is the “Unicode Assignables” subset <https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-bray-unichars-15.html#...>:

unicode-assignable = %x9 / %xA / %xD / ; useful controls %x20-7E / ; exclude C1 controls and DEL %xA0-D7FF / ; exclude surrogates %xE000-FDCF / ; exclude FDD0 nonchars %xFDF0-FFFD / ; exclude FFFE and FFFF nonchars %x10000-1FFFD / %x20000-2FFFD / ; (repeat per plane) %x30000-3FFFD / %x40000-4FFFD / %x50000-5FFFD / %x60000-6FFFD / %x70000-7FFFD / %x80000-8FFFD / %x90000-9FFFD / %xA0000-AFFFD / %xB0000-BFFFD / %xC0000-CFFFD / %xD0000-DFFFD / %xE0000-EFFFD / %xF0000-FFFFD / %x100000-10FFFD
by snvzz | 2025-07-07 03:04:45+00:00
If you re-read above, you might figure out this is about X11 on Linux on the m68k Amiga platform, specifically.

Which is broken, and has been for years now.

Whereas it works on Netbsd, thanks to patches written by Netbsd developers.

I am hopeful they will eventually be upstreamed to XLibre.
by Tijdreiziger | 2025-07-07 03:04:59+00:00
But it sounds like this is not really meaningfully true outside of France, then?

Here in the Netherlands, there isn’t any such thing as an ‘autism benefit’ or ‘ADHD benefit’. Only if your condition is so debilitating as to make you unfit for work, then there is a benefit that you could apply for, but not in all circumstances, and only if an unemployment doctor is convinced by your case.
by samrus | 2025-07-07 03:05:09+00:00
I see two issues with this.

First is the lack of internal consistency. Games are an artform, even though most studios put out slop right now, and that means they need to say something. This will allow us to interact with environments at a shallow level but will it maintain those environments in a logically consistant level? Will it be able to recreate something like Skyrim or New Vegas, where the whole point is the expansive and context heavy world and how you interact with it? It might even do that because of technological advancements (that i dont think are trivial like the agi-bulls seem to think) but then will it mamange to have the self referencial artistic vision behind it that something like DDLC or Undertale have? That self reference requires actual mechanics that mess with your filesystem. This thing wont do things like that because thats just not part of its world system. And making a whole new world system to facilitate that doesnt seem feasible for some indie games

Second is the classic radioactive steel problem of data. If this becomes used more and more, then itll canibalize its own training data. Its not producing a utility, its producing art/entertainment. People might e joy the things it produces initially, but eventually they'll get bored and demand will plummet, at which point novel nad original games wil be needed. Which this wont be able to produce. This phenomenon happened recently with the rise of battle royales. Brendan Greene was inspired to make a game out of the 90s japanese film, but will this AI? and if it cant, then will it flodding the gaming market with slop make it so real game dev knowledge isnt even prevalent enough that someone could have an idea and just implement it?
by ajkjk | 2025-07-07 03:06:31+00:00
It's weird how... servile... this person sounds. They're wondered why they weren't fired, when their prank had no negative side effects and the only issue was a department head being a dick about it? hey think the lesson here was that they needed to learn professionalism? They should be bemoaning the world of power-tripping unreasonable bosses. No need to warp your idea of what's right around what someone got mad at you about.
by RainyDayTmrw | 2025-07-07 03:06:56+00:00
It may be a squeamish ossifrage[1] or a seraphim proudleduck[2], which is to say that it was an artificial phrase chosen to be extremely unlikely to occur naturally. In this case, the purpose is likely for QA. It's much easier to QA behavior with a special-purpose but otherwise unoffensive phrase than to make your QA team repeatedly say allegedly offensive things to your AI.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Words_are_Squeamish_... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEO_contest
by tptacek | 2025-07-07 03:07:03+00:00
I don't see that distinction at all, for what it's worth, and while there are things I have liked about Lobste.rs, I don't think it's a more authentic community than this one. Either way, so long as there is karma, there's an arb to run between Lobste.rs and HN, and people are going to run it. Fighting it seems like a waste of energy.