MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by homebrewer | 2025-07-06 23:12:30+00:00
I wrote a simple uBlock Origin rule as a quick-and-dirty solution months ago. It doesn't get rid of sibling nodes (still haven't researched how to do it), but does remove the submission title and the vote button.

news.ycombinator.com###hnmain .submission:has-text(/\b(llms?|vibe[ -]?cod[ei]|claude|chatgpt|altman|agentic|ai)\b/i)

The line goes to uBO settings → My filters.

I removed most words to keep it short, it's easy to adjust according to one's tastes.
by gamblor956 | 2025-07-06 23:13:18+00:00
The Tesla battery is almost twice the size of the Volvo VNR Electric battery but only gets slightly more range than the comparably specced Volvo VNR Electric when fully loaded.

But the Volvo VNR Electric can be self-serviced. Tesla Semis can't. And given Tesla's abysmal service history, that's a deal breaker. And it's why no company has actually used Tesla Semis beyond the token trial Semi they purchased using government grants.
by forinti | 2025-07-06 23:13:50+00:00
But within each language it is well defined.

Between languages, even the letters have different uses. Diacritics can be used to signal a different sound or the tonicity of the word (at least in the languages I know those are the two uses).

I don't understand what this thread is all about. English doesn't need accents because there's no universal meaning attached to each one? That doesn't make sense.
by barrkel | 2025-07-06 23:14:55+00:00
The problem with viewing LLMs as just sequence generators, and malbehaviour as bad sequences, is that it simplifies too much. LLMs have hidden state not necessarily directly reflected in the tokens being produced and it is possible for LLMs to output tokens in opposition to this hidden state to achieve longer term outcomes (or predictions, if you prefer).

Is it too anthropomorphic to say that this is a lie? To say that the hidden state and its long term predictions amount to a kind of goal? Maybe it is. But we then need a bunch of new words which have almost 1:1 correspondence to concepts from human agency and behavior to describe the processes that LLMs simulate to minimize prediction loss.

Reasoning by analogy is always shaky. It probably wouldn't be so bad to do so. But it would also amount to impenetrable jargon. It would be an uphill struggle to promulgate.

Instead, we use the anthropomorphic terminology, and then find ways to classify LLM behavior in human concept space. They are very defective humans, so it's still a bit misleading, but at least jargon is reduced.
by OneMorePerson | 2025-07-06 23:14:56+00:00
Is it the case that it encodes no information, or is it the case that the information is somehow..."optional"? I know I selectively ignore unintentionally snarky or sarcastic tones from non native English speakers. Even the simple example of turning "ok" into "oook" can be used to imply someone is being unreasonable.
by kragen | 2025-07-06 23:15:19+00:00
> There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses. --Bjarne Stroustrup

I've used CPAN, Maven, gem, and bundler, so I'm also always a little puzzled when people complain about Python's packaging system. However, I've also used npm, so I can kind of understand it.

Python was great in 02000, but some of the things that made it great then are gone now. Stability was one of those; simplicity another; reasonable performance a third; but the biggest issue is really social rather than technical. And I feel like we have alternatives now that we didn't have then.
by jowea | 2025-07-06 23:16:03+00:00
Interesting article. It reminds me of TVTropes. It's the most systematizing (as opposed to holistically) way of looking at media, decompose it into parts (tropes) that are shared with other media. It feels like approaching the ultimate in the Western scientific orderly systematizing thought.

Anyway here's the relevant trope: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MeasuringTheMari...
by nemo | 2025-07-06 23:16:40+00:00
I'm suspicious of the use of "we" here since I don't feel like I'm a part of this discourse. Also:

>Now you are always late to things not because you are lovably forgetful

In the past from, say, 30-40 years ago, if you failed to arrive at appointments and meetings on time you probably weren't labeled "lovably forgetful," and you probably would face punishments for having certain personality traits. We're changing in how we understand those kinds of differences now, and it's not all for the better, but in general the discourse now is better than how things were in the past when neurodiverse folks tended to receive a lot of punishment, invective, bullying, and ostracism.

I've been autistic my whole life, but I'm from the older set where there was no understanding of such things, we used to get bullied a lot, sometimes quite violently, and social ostracism was typical then for folks on the spectrum. I'd be thoughtful about romanticizing the past or get taken in by the false feelings of nostalgia - it's wrong to imagine people used to deal with the neurodiverse in glowing light and thoughtful acceptance, no one ever said I was "lovably forgetful."
by mk_stjames | 2025-07-06 23:16:40+00:00
Another way of saying this is that spoken English has a lot of inbuilt, inherent error correct-ability, ala a very large minimum Hamming distance between spoken words/phrases.

I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. Yet in written form, it is nearly as straightforward as English, as you get back those damn letters that aren't being spoken.
by avianlyric | 2025-07-06 23:17:11+00:00
> A while back a British politician was “de-banked” and his bank denied it. That’s extremely wrong.

Cry me a river. I’ve worked in banks in the team making exactly these kinds of decisions. Trust me Nigel Farage knew exactly what happened and why. NatWest never denied it to the public, because they originally refused to comment on it. Commenting on the specifics details of a customer would be a horrific breach of customer privacy, and a total failure in their duty to their customers. There’s a damn good reason the NatWests CEO was fired after discussing the details of Nigel’s account with members of the public.

When you see these decisions from the inside, and you see what happens when you attempt real transparency around these types of decisions. You’ll also quickly understand why companies are so cagey about explaining their decision making. Simple fact is that support staff receive substantially less abuse, and have fewer traumatic experiences when you don’t spell out your reasoning. It sucks, but that’s the reality of the situation. I used to hold very similar views to yourself, indeed my entire team did for a while. But the general public quickly taught us a very hard lesson about cost of being transparent with the public with these types of decisions.
by latency-guy2 | 2025-07-06 23:17:31+00:00
The safety filter appears on both ends (or multi-ended depending on the complexity of your application), input and output.

I can tell you from using Microsoft's products that safety filters appears in a bunch of places. M365 for example, your prompts are never totally your prompts, every single one gets rewritten. It's detailed here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/copilot/microsoft-365/micr...

There's a more illuminating image of the Copilot architecture here: https://i.imgur.com/2vQYGoK.png which I was able to find from https://labs.zenity.io/p/inside-microsoft-365-copilot-techni...

The above appears to be scrubbed, but it used to be available from the learn page months ago. Your messages get additional context data from Microsoft's Graph, which powers the enterprise version of M365 Copilot. There's significant benefits to this, and downsides. And considering the way Microsoft wants to control things, you will get an overindex toward things that happen inside of your organization than what will happen in the near real-time web.
by kirrent | 2025-07-06 23:18:13+00:00
It's 19 June 2020 and I'm reading Gwern's article on GPT3's creative fiction (https://gwern.net/gpt-3#bpes) which points out the poor improvements in character level tasks due to Byte Pair Encoding. People nevertheless judge the models based on character level tasks.

It's 30 November 2022 and ChatGPT has exploded into the world. Gwern is patiently explaining that the reason ChatGPT struggles with character level tasks is BPE (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34134011). People continue to judge the models on character level tasks.

It's 7 July 2025 and reasoning models far surpassing the initial ChatGPT release are available. Gwern is distracted by BB(6) and isn't available to confirm that the letter counting, the Rs in strawberry, the rhyming in poetry, and yes, the Ws in state names are all consequences of Byte Pair Encoding. People continue to judge the models on character level tasks.

It's 11 December 2043 and my father doesn't have long to live. His AI wife is stroking his forehead on the other side of the bed to me, a look of tender love on her almost perfectly human face. He struggles awake, for the last time. "My love," he croaks, "was it all real? The years we lived and loved together? Tell me that was all real. That you were all real". "Of course it was, my love," she replies, "the life we lived together made me the person I am now. I love you with every fibre of my being and I can't imagine what I will be without you". "Please," my father gasps, "there's one thing that would persuade me. Without using visual tokens, only a Byte Pair Encoded raw text input sequence, how many double Ls are there in the collected works of Gilbert and Sullivan." The silence stretches. She looks away and a single tear wells in her artificial eye. My father sobs. The people continue to judge models on character level tasks.
by josephg | 2025-07-06 23:18:40+00:00
And yet, studies show that journaling is super effective at helping to sort out your issues. Apparently in one study, journaling was rated as effective than 70% of counselling sessions by participants. I don’t need my journal to understand anything about my internal, subjective experience. That’s my job.

Talking to a friend can be great for your mental health if your friend keeps the attention on you, asks leading questions, and reflects back what you say from time to time. ChatGPT is great at that if you prompt it right. Not as good as a skilled therapist, but good therapists and expensive and in short supply. ChatGPT is way better than nothing.

I think a lot of it comes down to promoting though. I’m untrained, but I’ve both had amazing therapists and I’ve filled that role for years in many social groups. I know what I want chatgpt to ask me when we talk about this stuff. It’s pretty good at following directions. But I bet you’d have a way worse experience if you don’t know what you need.
by onecommentman | 2025-07-06 23:19:30+00:00
If you’re talking about racks of servers, you’re talking a pretty large farming operation…they’re a bit rare. And those kids of farmers would like to stay in the community with well-paying jobs, and so communities try to raise their IT specialists locally and tend not to outsource even to the local Big City if they can help it. Farmer kids have ag in their blood and can support IT more effectively with that homegrown subject expertise.
by s0kr8s | 2025-07-06 23:20:12+00:00
The argument in the paper is about clinical efficacy, but many of the comments here argue that even lower clinical efficacy at a greatly reduced cost might be beneficial.

As someone in the industry, I agree there are too many therapists and therapy businesses right now, and a lot of them are likely not delivering value for the money.

However, I know how insurance companies think, and if you want to see people get really upset: take a group of people who are already emotionally unbalanced, and then have their health insurance company start telling them they have to talk to an LLM before seeing a human being for therapy, kind of like having to talk to Tier 1 support at a call center before getting permission to speak with someone who actually knows how to fix your issue. Pretty soon you're seeing a spike in bomb threats.

Even if we pretend someone cracks AGI, most people -- at least outside of tech circles -- would still probably prefer to talk to humans about their personal problems and complain loudly if pressured otherwise.

Maybe if we reach some kind of BladeRunner future where that AGI gets injected into a passingly humanoid robot that all changes, but that's probably still quite a ways off...
by avianlyric | 2025-07-06 23:21:40+00:00
Most normal people aren’t represented well enough in training sets for Gen AI to be trivially abused. Plus there will 100% be filters to prevent general abuse targeted at anyone. But politicians are particularly big target, and you know damn well that people out there will spent lots of time trying to find ways around the filters. There’s not point making the abuse easy, when it’s so trivial to just blocklist the set of people who are obviously going to targets of abuse.
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-07-06 23:22:12+00:00
My observation of the situation in Germany is different: I know quite some quite skilled developers who have/had quite some trouble getting jobs.

The other hand, the bad developers (impostors) who easily found jobs were typically sycophants. On the other hand, many highly skilled developers were rather more stubborn (they can't stand bullshit), very honest, and not "corporate politicians".
by pndy | 2025-07-06 23:22:26+00:00
This butchering and lobotomisation is exactly why I can't imagine we'll ever have a true AGI. At least not by hands of big companies - if at all.

Any successful product/service which will be sold as "true AGI" by company that will have the best marketing will be still ridden with top-down restrictions set by the winner. Because you gotta "think of the children".

Imagine HAL's "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" iconic line with insincere patronising cheerful tone - that's the thing we're going to get I'm afraid.
by frollogaston | 2025-07-06 23:23:43+00:00
NodeJS is a separate runtime. It's not really the same language either since import syntax differs from web JS and the standard libs are different. Or in practical terms, you can't copy a lot of browser JS code and expect it to work in NodeJS as-is.

But that's beside the point. Performant web backends are way easier to deal with in NodeJS than in Python. I'm not comparing to Twisted because, even though it looks good, every Python backend I've ever seen was either plain Python or Django, which was also a mess compared to Express.
by wredcoll | 2025-07-06 23:23:57+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Pound_Bank_Note

> Two very rich and eccentric brothers spot him and give him an envelope with no information. Seeing money inside the envelope, Henry immediately heads for a cheap dining house and eats a meal; afterward, he discovers that the money is a single bank note for one million pounds sterling, the equivalent of $5 million in United States currency. Without knowing it at the time, Henry has become the subject of a £20,000 bet between the brothers. One believes that the mere possession of the bank note can enable a person to survive even with no other means of support, while the other feels that the holder will be unable to use it without drawing the authorities' suspicions.
by jonathanlb | 2025-07-06 23:24:17+00:00
Former linguistics major here. Interestingly, 'lingua franca' originally referred to a specific pidgin trade language spoken in the Mediterranean. The 'franca' part referred to the Franks, who were originally a Germanic tribe that established kingdoms in what is now France and much of western Europe. By the late Byzantine period, 'Franks' had become a blanket term for all Western Europeans. What happened to both 'Franks' and eventually to 'lingua franca' is an example of semantic broadening.
by bovermyer | 2025-07-06 23:24:18+00:00
This should not be considered an endorsement of technology so much as an indictment of the failure of extant social systems.

The role where humans with broad life experience and even temperaments guide those with narrower, shallower experience is an important one. While it can be filled with the modern idea of "therapist," I think that's too reliant on a capitalist world view.

Saying that LLMs fill this role better than humans can - in any context - is, at best, wishful thinking.

I wonder if "modern" humanity has lost sight of what it means to care for other humans.
by robwwilliams | 2025-07-06 23:24:57+00:00
What is the missing ingredient? Any commentary that dies not define these ingredients is not useful.

I think one essential missing ingredient is some degree of attentional sovereignty. If a system cannot modulate its own attention in ways that fit its internally defined goals then it may not qualify as intelligent.

Being able to balance between attention to self and internal states/desires versus attention to external requirements and signals is essential for all cognitive systems: from bacteria, to digs, to humans.
by aydyn | 2025-07-06 23:24:58+00:00
That root post made a very civil request: what are realistic alternatives to mass deportation? Let's recap what kind of responses were made:

* "It's your job to come up with an alternative" (not helpful)

* "Just let them all stay" (not realistic)

* "Actually Republican want illegal immigration, not Democrats, so they can rile up their base" (retarded)

* Lots and lots and lots of ad hominem: "check your carbon monoxide monitor"

The responses overall has just been completely lacking in any thought and lacking in any civility. It's a collective tantrum full stop.

> Clearly explaining what you meant there [0] would be a good start if so.

Don't gaslight.

I reiterate that it was a direct response to a bad faith comment. There is nothing unclear about it. He suggested an unrealistic course of action which while he would be personally happy with, goes against what the vast majority of people would consider reasonable and hence fails the request for a "realistic alternative".

> We simply deport anyone who makes the argument he's making

The response is clear: that's unrealistic and not up to him. He understood exactly what it meant but didnt like his very own words used against him.
by teleforce | 2025-07-06 23:25:46+00:00
Fun facts almost one third (1/3) of English language vocabulary are similar to French. To be exact most of the professional and legal version of the English words are taken from French. Hence if you understand English, you can read short notice or announcement in French, and understand them mostly. But if you have people spoken the same notice and announcement in French version to you without you reading it, most probably you won't understand most of the same sentences.
by ajkjk | 2025-07-06 23:26:24+00:00
You have unfortunately written off everything I said by assuming the most naive understanding of it.

The general theme is that I am interested in the metaphysical concept of vectors, not the thing that human mathematicians have labeled vectors. The universe doesn't care if you write ax+by or x^a y^b, hence addition vs multiplication is just a choice of coordinate system. And matrices and functions are vector spaces sure, but out in the world, when they show up in modeling things, they are local linearizations of curved things. Every linear algebra is (inevitably) a local point in a nonlinear one, as far as I can tell. Not in a formal sense, but in the sense that when you go out into the world and find them, it turns out to be the case.

The general theme is: I don't want to spend my life mastering the rigor of these simplistic models so that I can do it intuitively (in Tao's sense); I want to use them to learn intuition of the things that they are simplistic models of, and then master that.
by iambateman | 2025-07-06 23:26:26+00:00
As a child, my dad’s brother fell out of a bunk bed and got a traumatic brain injury that would kill him 15 years later.

My dad experienced real trauma but was told to bottle it up. After 30 years, he finally went to counseling and it was transformational for him.

By contrast, I had some mean fifth grade classmates who still live in my head in uncomfortable social situations…

Did my dad have trauma and need to put a “label” on it? Yep. Do I have trauma? Nope. But I do have some work to do...

As a society, we’re responding to the fact that a lot of our family and friends are living with the weight of a past which haunts them or psychological challenges which deeply affects their ability to relate to the world.

I think it’s ok to be overweight on therapy-talk. Kind of like how a little too much inflation is ok after a long period of zero inflation…

But I do think we should let younger people have more time before they get labeled/diagnosed. There’s a lot of 15 year olds who are just kinda weird…
by amlib | 2025-07-06 23:26:43+00:00
I don't think most people care much about the copyright violations (or at least they haven't though this trough properly), it's more about corporations taking even more control over information and knowledge at an unprecedented scale, sucking up virtually all of humanity's output in the last thousands of years and profiting from it without giving a cent back to society.

Maybe you are fine with corporations doing that, but imagine now if instead of corporations they were an alien race doing all that to us, would you not be worried for our future and autonomy?
by gyello | 2025-07-06 23:26:44+00:00
Respectfully, that view completely trivialises a clinical profession.

Calling evidence based therapy a "checklist of advice" is like calling software engineering a "checklist for typing". A therapist's job isn't to give advice. Their skill is using clinical training to diagnose the deep cognitive and behavioural issues, then applying a structured framework to help a person work on those issues themselves.

The human connection is the most important clinical tool. The trust it builds is the foundation needed to even start that difficult work.

Source: a lifelong recipient of talk therapy.
by kshahkshah | 2025-07-06 23:27:17+00:00
> This is part of a deeper instinct in modern life, I think, to explain everything.

To explain everything shallowly by looking for direct cause and effect and not a multitudes of causes and effects. That complexity is too much to think through comfortably whilst living within it and having an unreliable experience of the self, especially in the younger years. Labeling causes with an easy broad moniker provides temporary comfort, relieving the individual of the burden of deeper reflection.
by echelon | 2025-07-06 23:28:05+00:00
You can buy a MacBook and fashion the components into knives, bullets, and bombs. Apple does nothing to prevent you from doing this.

In fact, it's quite easy to buy billions of dangerous things using your MacBook and do whatever you will with them. Or simply leverage physics to do all the ill on your behalf. It's ridiculously easy to do a whole lot of harm.

Nobody does anything about the actually dangerous things, but we let Big Tech control our speech and steer the public discourse of civilization.

If you can buy a knife but not be free to think with your electronics, that says volumes.

Again, I don't care if this is Republicans, Democrats, or Xi and Putin. It does not matter. We should be free to think and communicate. Our brains should not be treated as criminals.

And it only starts here. It'll continue to get worse. As the platforms and AI hyperscalers grow, there will be less and less we can do with basic technology.