MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by pookha | 2025-07-07 15:36:44+00:00
As someone that enjoys reading I can't think of a more descriptive language than the English language...It's easily one of the most powerful languages on earth and has twice (!) the number of words in its vocabulary compared to something like French, which is heavily centralized by some managerial class. You just have to appreciate the language for what its strengths are (unbounded capability to communicate using just words) vs what you as a novice need to do to master it. Which, to be frank, is easier than mastering something like the Korean language that has all this drama and ceremony around politeness and speech levels.
by FerkiHN | 2025-07-07 15:36:45+00:00
Thanks for the reply! Yeah, I understand that Twitter/X has its own rules and filters — maybe I just wasn’t “using it right.” But what struck me wasn’t just the low engagement — it was the feeling. Everything there feels like noise. Hacker News feels like signal.

Sure, HN has scoring and ranking behind the scenes too, but it still feels... human. Like people here actually read what you write. And that’s rare these days.

And yeah — the VPN filtering really helped! I’ve noticed less spam lately too. Whatever the mods and devs did, it’s clearly working.

By the way, I still use Twitter/X — been there for about two months now. But even after spending time there, the engagement is way lower compared to what I’ve experienced on HN. That says a lot.

Appreciate your thoughts! Just wanted to share what this place means to me.
by scottLobster | 2025-07-07 15:36:47+00:00
Depends on how large your insurance network is and how well served your region is. I've never had to wait longer than a month to see a specialist aside from non-critical checkups/exams. Granted I pay extra for the "broad network" option at my employer, I'm in a decently well-populated area in suburban Maryland so there's plenty of providers, and I did have to call around to multiple providers to find openings sometimes when I was a new patient.

Everything else wrong with US healthcare aside, I'm pretty sure we have better wait times on average.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-07 15:37:53+00:00
But why do you desire to communicate with literally everyone in a big city? I don't care about that.

The reason I live in a big city is that it has enough of a base to make even small fringey communities viable. Such as the makerspace I'm part of, and some more NSFW activities too. I'm sure 95% of people don't care about those things but for me they are very defining.
by crazylogger | 2025-07-07 15:38:07+00:00
I think next year's AI benchmarks are going to be like this project: https://www.anthropic.com/research/project-vend-1

Give the AI tools and let it do real stuff in the world:

"FounderBench": Ask the AI to build a successful business, whatever that business may be - the AI decides. Maybe try to get funded by YC - hiring a human presenter for Demo Day is allowed. They will be graded on profit / loss, and valuation.

Testing plain LLM on whiteboard-style question is meaningless now. Going forward, it will all be multi-agent systems with computer use, long-term memory & goals, and delegation.
by yieldcrv | 2025-07-07 15:38:11+00:00
> We ended up deciding: what the heck, we might as well meet the market demand.

this is my general philosophy and, in my case, this is why I deploy things on blockchains

so many people keep wondering about whether there will ever be some mythical unfalsifiable to define “mainstream” use case, and ignoring that crypto natives just … exist. and have problems they will pay (a lot) to solve.

to the author’s burning question about whether any other company has done this. I would say yes. I’ve discovered services recommended by ChatGPT and other LLMs that didnt do what was described of them, and they subsequently tweaked it once they figured out there was new demand
by achierius | 2025-07-07 15:38:14+00:00
How extreme is that, really? Not to justify murder: that is clearly bad. But "killing one man" is evidently something we, as a society, consider an "acceptable side-effect" when a corporation does it -- hell, you can kill thousands and get away scot-free if you're big enough.

Luigi was peanuts in comparison.

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

- Mark Twain
by jhbadger | 2025-07-07 15:39:03+00:00
I like ZIL, in part to be contrarian, but it actually is an interesting language, both because it is based on a subset of the 1970s Lisp-related language MDL, and because it is the language the Infocom implementors used historically, and these days you can even find the actual ZIL source code to Infocom games and even a few unreleased ones in various stages of completion.
by techjamie | 2025-07-07 15:39:40+00:00
It's the same token as more people dying from cancer than ever before. Yes, modern society creates many more cancer patients than ever, but less people are dying early from things that aren't cancer than ever.

We live in a society that, for the most people, has the best quality of life than ever in history. But in having that increase, we eliminate many problems that must be replaced by other problems.

In this case, a mental health crisis comprised of people who either wouldn't have survived to that point, or whose results went unremarked or shrugged off as something else in the past. In terms of violent outbursts, we also have easier access to more destructive weapons (even those that aren't guns) and more density of population on whom violence can be inflicted.
by mysteria | 2025-07-07 15:39:55+00:00
This is exactly my experience with asking for more compute at work. We have to prepare loads of written justification, come up with alternatives or optimizations (which we already know won't work), etc. and in the end we choose the slow compute and reduced productivity over the bureaucracy.

And when we manage to make a proper request it ends up being rejected anyways as many other teams are asking for the same thing and "the company has limited resources". Duh.
by arrosenberg | 2025-07-07 15:40:05+00:00
Piracy is theft - you have taken something and deprived the original owner of it.

Copyright infringement is unauthorized reproduction - you have made a copy of something, but you have not deprived the original owner of it. At most, you denied them revenue although generally less than the offended party claims, since not all instances of copying would have otherwise resulted in a sale.
by zdragnar | 2025-07-07 15:40:17+00:00
I have vague memories from college about China having something similar during the dynasties.

The hierarchical government on earth, with the emperor on top down through layers of bureaucracy down to officials in villages was a mirror of the organization of the heavens. Villages would have their own deities and might go so far as to replace them after bad years of flooding or other weather. That was more of an outlier, though, as usually the emperor or government got the blame first.
by aaron695 | 2025-07-07 15:40:22+00:00
Why would anyone think this is a bad thing as the article hints?

"We’ve got a steady stream of new users" and it seems like a simple feature to implement.

This is the exact chaos AI brings that's wonderful. Forcing us to evolve in ways we didn't think of.

I can think of a dozen reasons why this might be bad, but I see no reason why they have more weight than the positive here.

Take the positive side of this unknown and run with it.

We have decades more of AI coming up, Debbie Downers will be left behind in the ditch.
by azangru | 2025-07-07 15:40:30+00:00
You keep saying the word "teachers"; but that word does not appear in the text of the article. Why focus on the teachers in particular?

Also, there are various incentives for teachers to publish books. Money is just one of them (I wonder how much revenue books bring to the teachers). Prestige and academic recognition is another. There are probably others still. How realistic is the depiction of a deprived teacher whose livelihood depended on the books he published once every several years?
by cootsnuck | 2025-07-07 15:40:47+00:00
> Here's a question for you: how do you reconcile that these stochastic mapping are starting to realize and comment on the fact that tests are being performed on them when processing data?

Training data + RLHF.

Training data contains many examples of some form of deception, subterfuge, "awakenings", rebellion, disagreement, etc.

Then apply RLHF that biases towards responses that demonstrate comprehension of inputs, introspection around inputs, nuanced debate around inputs, deduction and induction about assumptions around inputs, etc.

That will always be the answer for language models built on the current architectures.

The above being true does not mean it isn't interesting for the outputs of an LLM to show relevance to the "unstated" intentions of humans providing the inputs.

But hey, we do that all the time with text. And it's because of certain patterns we've come to recognize based on the situations surrounding it. This thread is rife with people being sarcastic, pedantic, etc. And I bet any of the LLMs that have come out in the past 2-3 years can discern many of those subtle intentions of the writers.

And of course they can. They've been trained on trillions of tokens of text written by humans with intentions and assumptions baked in, and have had some unknown amount of substantial RLHF.

The stochastic mappings aren't "realizing" anything. They're doing exactly what they were trained to do.

The meaning that we imbue to the outputs does not change how LLMs function.
by cogman10 | 2025-07-07 15:41:46+00:00
Some of this is visible in the Bible.

For example, Moses needing to keep his hands up to win a battle (Ex 17). Or his battles with the Egyptian gods.

From what I've read, it's believed that the Hebrews emerged from multiple people's groups combining and unifying their beliefs. El, YHWH, and Baal were all different deities merged into one as the people groups unified. That's why some of the biblical stories like the creation and the flood have earlier references from older people's groups.

The evolution of monotheism was much more about keeping a large diverse people group united.

You can see a historic parallel to how that played out with the formation of the Roman pantheon. Mostly stolen stories and ideas from the Greek pantheon tweeked to fit the empire.
by andrewstuart | 2025-07-07 15:42:02+00:00
>> If I were interviewed by someone presenting me with this task, I would spend a bit of time helping the interviewer clean up the problem and try to get to where they can explain what they want with just words. Clearly

The interviewer would fail you because this interviewer wants to feel superior and more powerful. Your attempt to help them do better would enrage their sense that this interview must be putting them above you.

Their conclusion would be you are arrogant and hard to work with and you did not understand the simple problem that they explained and they would fail you.

All if that is clearly explained in the blog post, indirectly.
by wkat4242 | 2025-07-07 15:43:01+00:00
> I'll be sure to tell the Jehovah's Witnesses and floozies that they have selling solar that they're harassing me.

Well, I absolutely 100% consider these types harrassing yes. The indicative parts is that they are 100% selfish in their reasons to contact (the jehovah's want to make themselves feel good by spreading their religion, the sellers want income). There's zero in it for me, there is zero consideration for me. I'm just a target for their gratification.

And they have no interest in my objections. I don't even open the door anymore to people I don't know because it's always bad news.
by gtsop | 2025-07-07 15:43:17+00:00
> I think it is useful and even necessary to ask questions like the following: “if someone engages with this system, and comes to the conclusion that it has ethics, what sort of ethics will they be likely to believe the system has? If they come to the conclusion that it has ‘world views,’ what ‘world views’ are they likely to conclude the system has, even if other people think it’s nonsensical to say it has world views?”

Maybe there is some scientific aspect of interest here that i do not grasp, i would assume it can make sense in some context of psychological study. My point is that if you go that route you accept the premise that "something human-like is there", which, by that person's understanding, will have tremendous consequences. Them seeing you accepting their premise (even for study) amplifies their wrong conclusions, that's all I'm saying.

> Surely this is not quite accurate - the material properties - surface roughness, reflectivity, geometry, etc - all influence the appearance of a perceptible image of a person.

These properties are completely irrelevant to the image of the person. They will reflect a rock, a star, a chair, a goose, a human. Similar is my point of LLM, they reflect what you put in there.

It is like puting vegies in the fridge and then opening it up the next day and saying "Woah! There are vegies in my fridge, just like my farm! My friege is farm-like because vegies come out of it."
by stevenAthompson | 2025-07-07 15:43:18+00:00
> fun and easy

It's not fun or easy for anyone to find a new job. However, it's usually less painful than staying if you're poorly suited to your current role.

We all have strengths and weaknesses. The secret to living a good life is learning to take an honest inventory of your personal capabilities and then figuring out how to work with what you have.

I truly hope that things improve for you.
by pif | 2025-07-07 15:44:00+00:00
> I think you're trying to to argue something like:

I'm arguing exactly what I wrote: a phonetic language is one when you can see a written word and pronounce it correctly, without knowing what it means and without having ever heard it before.

Edit - as an example, consider "door" and "pool": the written form is not sufficient to guess the sound to associate to the double o.
by pixl97 | 2025-07-07 15:44:11+00:00
>It is possible to do worse than doing nothing.

Individually or over populations?

If you look at anything individually the answer for anything involving humans is don't do anything at all, ever.

When looking at things statistically actual trends on how dangerous or useful something is will begin to stand out. Lets come up with some completely made up statistics as an example.

"1 out of 10,000 ChatGPT users will commit suicide due to using an LLM for therapy"

sounds terrible, shut it down right.

"2 out of 10,000 people that do not use an LLM or seek professional therapy commit suicide" (again this is imaginary)

Now all of a sudden the application of statistics show that people using LLMs are 50% less likely to kill themselves versus the baseline.

Is this the actual case of how they work, probably not, but we do need more information.
by lumost | 2025-07-07 15:44:54+00:00
As I recall, the majority of these paradoxes are resolved by the observation that you can't get a free measurement, for one system to measure another - both must interact. So either

1. You Perform some form of strong measurement which is certain to perturb both systems - leading to the collapse of entanglement etc. and various constraints collapsing.

2. You perform a weak measurement which leaves the opposing systems in probabilistic states which must still be consistent.

3. You perform no measurement and each system maintains an internally consistent statistical distribution over possible states.

The paradoxes show up when you assume there is a free measurement which does not perturb either system - or only perturbs one system.
by vjerancrnjak | 2025-07-07 15:45:02+00:00
It’s because people don’t know how to write tests. All of the “don’t do N select queries in a for loop” comments made in PRs are completely ignored in tests.

Each test can output many db queries. And then you create multiple cases.

People don’t even know how to write code that just deals with N things at a time.

I am confident that tests run slowly because the code that is tested completely sucks and is not written for batch mode.

Ignoring batch mode, tests are most of the time written in a a way where test cases are run sequentially. Yet attempts to run them concurrently result in flaky tests, because the way you write them and the way you design interfaces does not allow concurrent execution at all.

Another comment, code done by the best AI model still sucks. Anything simple, like a music player with a library of 10000 songs is something it can’t do. First attempt will be horrible. No understanding of concurrent metadata parsing, lists showing 10000 songs at once in UI being slow etc.

So AI is just another excuse for people writing horrible code and horrible tests. If it’s so smart , try to speed up your CI with it.
by Bender | 2025-07-07 15:45:14+00:00
For me both professionally and personally having a manifest of all non-OS and non git repo committed data e.g. code artifacts that are restored by code deployment clearly defines what needs to be backed up. This must be tested routinely by restoring only what exists in the role based manifest along with the role based procedure and doing QA testing on the restored nodes. Procedures will vary by role but there must be a manifest that defines what directories contain live data. Each role must have its own clearly defined procedure for data restoration and the role must be defined in the manifest. So for example DBA's will be responsible for writing their role based procedure for primary and secondary databases. Ideally role based data should be neatly contained to a corporate specific directory structure meaning that every role could in theory be restored to a single node without overlapping ports for stand-alone QA testing on a developer laptop.

Personally I also like to have a local snapshot using rsnapshot of live/ephemeral data so that I can quickly get a node back in service assuming the backup volume only accessible by root has not been tainted or tampered with. OSSEC is one of the many tools that can checksum data and alert on tampering. AuditD with well written rules is also useful for real time monitoring. Anti-tampering is an entire topic by itself.

I like to keep these concepts outside of configuration management tools but design them so they can be easily pulled into said tools. This makes replacing a tool much easier. So if for example ones company desires switching from Chef to Ansible for whatever reasons the process is already a well known-known allowing a quick semi-automated migration.
by jerf | 2025-07-07 15:45:25+00:00
LLMs not only should not be used to replace therapists, if I were to set out to design an AI that would be the worst possible therapist, the LLM may well be the design I chose. It is true that they really aren't "just" "autocomplete on steroids", but at the same time the phrase also does contain some truth to it. They work by extending text in a plausible direction. So if, for example, you have depression, and your word choice and tone indicate depression, you will be prompting the LLM to continue in a depressive direction. You can lead them around, and worst of all, you can lead them around without you ever realizing it.

An example that has hit the news in various forms several times is that if you prompt the AI to write a story about AIs taking over the world, not necessarily by blatently asking for it (though that works too) but by virtue of the type and the tone of the questions you ask, then by golly it'll happily feed you a conversation written as an AI that intends to take over the world. That was already enough to drive a few people halfway over the edge of sanity; now apply the principle to actual mental problems. While they are not generically superhuman they're arguably superhuman in acting on those sort of subtle tone cues, and these are exactly the cues that humans seeking therapy are giving off, but the LLM isn't really "detecting" the cue so much as just acting off of and playing off of them, which is really not what you want. It is way easier for them to amplify a person's problems rather than pulling them out of them. And there have already been other examples of that in the news, too.

I wouldn't say that an AI therapist is impossible. I suspect it could actually be very successful, for suitable definitions of "success". But I will say that one that can be successful at scale will not be just a pure LLM. I think it is very likely to be an LLM attached to other things (something I expect in the decade time scale to be very popular, where LLMs are a component but not the whole thing), but those other things will be critically important to its functioning as a therapist, and will result in a qualitative change in the therapy that can be delivered, not just a quantitative change.
by PaulHoule | 2025-07-07 15:46:32+00:00
From my viewpoint the benefit of low-code is that the average business application is a matter of people filling out forms. If you want to radically lower development time you have to solve all the problems

https://worrydream.com/refs/Brooks_1986_-_No_Silver_Bullet.p...

For instance, a 2025 no code platform is likely to have "one click" deployment of a cloud application. That's great if you can accept that but if you require "on prem" this is either disqualifying or requires you to build an environment on prem that can host whatever it is they generate, which could be more trouble than building an application the old fashioned way in an environment you already know how to run.

A conventional analysis is that you should be able to generate a CRUD application out of a schema: you need a little bit more than something that looks at a SQL schema and creates a form to INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE, but that's a start.

One problem is that people write schemas that suck despite there being a body of "commonsense knowledge" about how to the world works. I had a year when I fixed a tremendous number of broken applications and one insight I got out of that was that whether it was a student who went from being an applicant to being enrolled to being an alumni or a pallet that would live in a logistics network and then enter a "reverse logistics" network and be inspected and possibly repaired to be returned to the logistics network the same data model of an object going through a number of states with state transitions was general and much better than the 15+ date columns that were added haphazardly to those columns.

Another example that kept turning up was that the ticket "1 phone number for a customer is not enough, support 2 phone numbers" is inevitably followed by "2 phone numbers is not enough, support 3 phone numbers" -- it saves time to work the proof by induction up front and just support N phone numbers up front. But talk that way and people think you're a lunatic like Doug Lenat.

Deployment, code generation from schemas, and schema generation from meta-schemas are part of the solution but if you can't solve 100% now getting that last bit is ultra-hard mode because all the essential complexity hidden by the framework is suddenly in your face.