MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by tptacek | 2025-07-06 23:42:08+00:00
AI is polarizing. People who don't like it really don't like it. This wouldn't be the first anti-AI argument that was more about sentiment than actual analysis. Again, I think the climate impact argument here is basically imported from the argument against crypto (where I enthusiastically join the skeptics) and doesn't apply here. Either way, my point is, just go look at different sources. Simon Willison has linked to some on his blog.
by TacticalCoder | 2025-07-06 23:43:01+00:00
Many native english speaker here like to fantasize on the superiority of other cultures / languages but what good are diacritics for when there are still a shitload of letters that have no diacritics and can be pronounced in different ways?

For example let's take french... A cat is a "chat" but you don't pronounced the 't'. Oh but in "chatte" (pussycat or pussy), you pronounce the t's. While in other words in french you pronounced the 't', like in "table" (yup, it means a table btw).

Speaking of which, the 'e' in "le chat" isn't pronounced the same as the mostly (but not entirely) silent 'e' in "table".

No diacritics on these 'e' here and yet they've got different pronunciations.

Don't come and say: "but that's only with silent letters". Definitely not. "elle" (she) and "le" (the)... Different pronunciation for these three e's.

I've got better: "les fils" (the sons) vs "les fils" (the cables). Exact same spelling. But in one you pronounce the 's', in the other you don't.

Wait, even better: "le fils" (the son) vs "les fils" (the sons). Same pronunciation for "fils", no plural or singular: just one word with a 's' at the end.

Stop romanticizing about french: it probably has more exceptions and weirdness than english.

And you probably don't want to get me started on the average reading and writing skills in elementary and secondary schools in France. It's in freefall so the whole point is kinda moot: the digital natives can't use diacritics properly in french. Heck, many can't even (and don't want to) speak proper french. The language is becoming simpler and simpler, dumber and dumber.

Source: I'm a native french speaker.
by Majromax | 2025-07-06 23:43:08+00:00
> The alternative claim - that large traders do not make decisions based on how their activity will move the market, is of course absurd.

No, that's de riugeur for any large firm. You or I can buy a stock without changing the market, but if a bank or hedge fund wants to buy or sell millions of dollars of a stock they very much have to worry about execution. The price they receive for a trade will be worse than the market price, simply because the price will move once it's clear that someone is making a large block trade.

This is also why hedge funds worry about their 'alpha'. Even when they have found a good basis for a trade (e.g. an as-yet unexploited correlation), taking a position to profit on that trade moves prices in ways that eliminate that edge. That's the efficient market hypothesis in action.

The very odd thing here is the allegation that Jane Street could make perfectly ordinary market transactions in liquid securities and somehow have the market move with their net position. This is extremely unusual.
by chowells | 2025-07-06 23:43:48+00:00
If you think it can't be done with a countable state space, then you must know some physics that the general establishment doesn't. I'm sure they would love to know what you do.

As far as physicists believe at the moment, there's no way to ever observe a difference below the Planck level. Energy/distance/time/whatever. They all have a lower boundary of measurability. That's not as a practical issue, it's a theoretical one. According to the best models we currently have, there's literally no way to ever observe a difference below those levels.

If a difference smaller than that is relevant to brain function, then brains have a way to observe the difference. So I'm sure the field of physics eagerly awaits your explanation. They would love to see an experiment thoroughly disagree with a current model. That's the sort of thing scientists live for.
by codedokode | 2025-07-06 23:43:49+00:00
While it's a little unrelated, I don't like when a language model pretends to be a human and tries to display emotions. I think this is wrong. What I need from a model is to do whatever I ordered to do and not try to flatter me by saying what a smart question I asked (I bet it tells this to everyone including complete idiots) or to ask a follow-up question. I didn't come for silly chat. Be cold as an ice. Use robotic expressions and mechanic tone of voice. Stop wasting electricity and tokens.

If you need understanding or emotions then you need a human or at least a cat. A robot is there to serve.

Also people must be a little stronger, out great ancestors lived through much harder times without any therapists.
by eahm | 2025-07-06 23:44:03+00:00
French.. you people have no idea how Italy is.

I speak differently than my brothers because I grew up at my grandparents 3 MILES! away and if I go to my family restaurant 2 MILES the other direction there is a different accent again, and I mean different words too not just the sound. Where I used to go to school 10 miles away they don't understand if I speak my dialect because it's a different region.

The whole Italy is like that, a different dialect every 2-3 miles, every family, town, city, province, county and region has different accents and ways to make food and recipes. My town is 3200 years old, older than the Romans, they used to fight, then ally then fight again with them etc., this dialect thing is very old, cultures, traditions and families.

Of course we have the Italian language in common and the main dialects are separated by the main city of the region then by the region itself but yep, that's how it is.
by mewpmewp2 | 2025-07-06 23:44:04+00:00
My question: how do we know that this is not similar to how human brains work. What seems intuitively logical to me is that we have brains evolved through evolutionary process via random mutations yielding in a structure that has its own evolutionary reward based algorithms designing it yielding a structure that at any point is trying to predict next actions to maximise survival/procreation, of course with a lot of sub goals in between, ultimately becoming this very complex machinery, but yet should be easily simulated if there was enough compute in theory and physical constraints would allow for it.

Because, morals, values, consciousness etc could just be subgoals that arised through evolution because they support the main goals of survival and procreation.

And if it is baffling to think that a system could rise up, how do you think it is possible life and humans came to existence in the first place? How could it be possible? It is already happened from a far unlikelier and strange place. And wouldn't you think the whole World and the timeline in theory couldn't be represented as a deterministic function. And if not then why should "randomness" or anything else bring life to existence.
by protocolture | 2025-07-06 23:44:52+00:00
>it's because women have told them to stop. Both implicitly through behavior and body language, and explicitly by saying "do not approach us in public".

Its really situational. And definitely difficult to always identify. But there are avenues. I always found bars and clubs to be the worst way to approach women.

>actively take steps to make sure it doesn't happen

I used to do door to door sales, very briefly. And I was amazed at the fact that, risking fines, my coworkers would approach houses on the government no knock register, and reliably make sales. Not advocating for breach of consent. But there are multiple ways to "meet" someone that don't require a cold open at a bar when they have their headphones in. I always tell other men to go volunteer for a local club or charity. Or take a pottery class or something.
by teleforce | 2025-07-06 23:45:03+00:00
Chinese is hard in unnecessary way both in language speaking and writing. I've got the impression that they make in unnecessary hard so only certain people can operate the language and work in government or I call it the elite mentality. I've got the same impression about complex programming languages for examples C++ and Rust. The languages are so complex that you cannot even make the compiler fast [1].

Spoken mandarin has 5 tones but the original ancient Chinese is similar to Cantonese and it has 7 tones. The modern Chinese writing characters is considered simplified because in Taiwan they use the original and more complex Chinese characters.

Fun facts King Sejong of Korea actually get rid of the cumbersome Chinese characters for writing Korean languages and introduced new Korean characters Hangul in 15th CE [2[. It's reported Korean literacy rate skyrocketed in a very short time because it's much easier and suited the Korean language better. Another fun facts, Korean characters can be learnt overnight but you need to memorize and understand several thousands of Chinese characters just to read and understand the newspaper headlines in Chinese. I have a Chinese friend who has Chinese mother tongue and is a well accomplished senior engineer but he cannot even read Chinese newspapers since he did not has a formal education in Chinese writing system.

As Einstein famously remark you should make it simple but not simpler.

[1] Why is the Rust compiler so slow? (425 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390488

[2] Hangul:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul
by rybosworld | 2025-07-06 23:45:10+00:00
Any market maker pricing options with Black-Scholes won't be a market maker for long.

Black-Scholes is just a customer-facing description of the option (i.e, it provides greeks that everyone can understand). But it isn't used as a starting point.

In practice, MM will back out what the implied volatility is from current prices. Then a stochastic volatility model is calibrated against that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_volatility
by d3m0t3p | 2025-07-06 23:46:23+00:00
Do they ? LLM embedd the token sequence N^{L} to R^{LxD}, we have some attention and the output is also R^{LxD}, then we apply a projection to the vocabulary and we get R^{LxV} we get therefore for each token a likelihood over the voc. In the attention, you can have Multi Head attention (or whatever version is fancy: GQA,MLA) and therefore multiple representation, but it is always tied to a token. I would argue that there is no hidden state independant of a token.

Whereas LSTM, or structured state space for example have a state that is updated and not tied to a specific item in the sequence.

I would argue that his text is easily understandable except for the notation of the function, explaining that you can compute a probability based on previous words is understandable by everyone without having to resort to anthropomorphic terminology
by ants_everywhere | 2025-07-06 23:46:32+00:00
> I am baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a function to generate sequences of words as something that resembles a human.

This is such a bizarre take.

The relation associating each human to the list of all words they will ever say is obviously a function.

> almost magical human-like powers to something that - in my mind - is just MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities.

There's a rich family of universal approximation theorems [0]. Combining layers of linear maps with nonlinear cutoffs can intuitively approximate any nonlinear function in ways that can be made rigorous.

The reason LLMs are big now is that transformers and large amounts of data made it economical to compute a family of reasonably good approximations.

> The following is uncomfortably philosophical, but: In my worldview, humans are dramatically different things than a function . For hundreds of millions of years, nature generated new versions, and only a small number of these versions survived.

This is just a way of generating certain kinds of functions.

Think of it this way: do you believe there's anything about humans that exists outside the mathematical laws of physics? If so that's essentially a religious position (or more literally, a belief in the supernatural). If not, then functions and approximations to functions are what the human experience boils down to.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_approximation_theore...
by westurner | 2025-07-06 23:47:17+00:00
Is there an established benchmark for building a full product?

- SWE-bench leaderboard: https://www.swebench.com/

- Which metrics for e.g. "SWE-Lancer: a benchmark of freelance software engineering tasks from Upwork"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43101314

- MetaGPT, MGX: https://github.com/FoundationAgents/MetaGPT :

> Software Company as Multi-Agent System

> MetaGPT takes a one line requirement as input and outputs user stories / competitive analysis / requirements / data structures / APIs / documents, etc. Internally, MetaGPT includes product managers / architects / project managers / engineers. It provides the entire process of a software company along with carefully orchestrated SOPs.

- Mutation-Guided LLM-based Test Generation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42953885

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41333249 :

- codefuse-ai/Awesome-Code-LLM > Analysis of AI-Generated Code, Benchmarks: https://github.com/codefuse-ai/Awesome-Code-LLM :

> 8.2 Benchmarks: Integrated Benchmarks, Evaluation Metrics, Program Synthesis, Visually Grounded Program, Synthesis, Code Reasoning and QA, Text-to-SQL, Code Translation, Program Repair, Code Summarization, Defect/Vulnerability Detection, Code Retrieval, Type Inference, Commit Message Generation, Repo-Level Coding

- underlines/awesome-ml/tools.md > Benchmarking: https://github.com/underlines/awesome-ml/blob/master/llm-too...

- formal methods workflows, coverage-guided fuzzing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40884466

- "Large Language Models Based Fuzzing Techniques: A Survey" (2024) https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.00350
by bmacho | 2025-07-06 23:47:21+00:00
If you don't care about the order of requests then you can just set up a flag to denote if a task is running, and keep rescheduling the other tasks. Something like

let isProcessing = false; async function checkFlagAndRun(task) { if (isProcessing) { return setTimeout(() => checkFlagAndRun(task), 0); } isProcessing = true; await task(); isProcessing = false; }

should do the trick. You can test it with

function delayedLog(message, delay) { return new Promise(resolve => { setTimeout(() => { console.log(message); resolve(); }, delay); }); } function test(name,num) { for (let i = 1; i <= num; i++) { const delay = Math.floor(Math.random() * 1000 + 1); checkFlagAndRun(() => delayedLog(`${name}-${i} waited ${delay} ms`, delay)); } } test('t1',20); test('t2',20); test('t3',20);

BTW, for 4 scheduled tasks, it basically always keeps the order, and I am not sure why. Even if the first task always runs first, the rest 3 should race each other. 5 simultaneously scheduled tasks ruins the order.
by ponta17 | 2025-07-06 23:48:28+00:00
Thanks for your comment and the great question.

Lowpass filtering with downsampling is definitely a more efficient way to simplify images compared to my approach. This project is an experimental demo of a genetic algorithm evolving random pixel patterns to approximate a target image.

I agree that true pixel art often requires artistic "reimagining" to stay visually appealing. Thanks for your feedback!
by imiric | 2025-07-06 23:49:24+00:00
Let's ignore whatever BPE is for a moment. I, frankly, don't care about the technical reason these tools exhibit this idiotic behavior.

The LLM is generating "reasoning" output that breaks down the problem. It's capable of spelling out the word. Yet it hallucinates that the letter between the two 'A's in 'Hawaii' is 'I', followed by some weird take that it can be confused for a 'W'.

So if these tools are capable of reasoning and are so intelligent, surely they would be able to overcome some internal implementation detail, no?

Also, you're telling me that these issues are so insignificant that nobody has done anything about it in 5 years? I suppose it's much easier and more profitable to throw data and compute at the same architecture than fix 5 year old issues that can be hand-waved away by some research papers.
by low_tech_punk | 2025-07-06 23:49:54+00:00
The anthropomorphic view of LLM is a much better representation and compression for most types of discussions and communication. A purely mathematical view is accurate but it isn’t productive for the purpose of the general public’s discourse.

I’m thinking a legal systems analogy, at the risk of a lossy domain transfer: the laws are not written as lambda calculus. Why?

And generalizing to social science and humanities, the goal shouldn’t be finding the quantitative truth, but instead understand the social phenomenon using a consensual “language” as determined by the society. And in that case, the anthropomorphic description of the LLM may gain validity and effectiveness as the adoption grows over time.
by Lerc | 2025-07-06 23:50:06+00:00
That kind of exchange is something I have seen from ChatGPT and I think it represents a specific kind of failure case.

It is almost like Schizophrenic behaviour as if a premise is mistakenly hardwired in the brain as being true, all other reasoning adapts a view of the world to support that false premise.

In the instance if ChatGPT the problem seems to be not with the LLM architecture itself but and artifact of the rapid growth and change that has occurred in the interface. They trained the model to be able to read web pages and use the responses, but then placed it in an environment where, for whatever reason, it didn't actually fetch those pages. I can see that happening because of faults, or simply changes in infrastructure, protocols, or policy which placed the LLM in an environment different from the one it expected. If it was trained handling web requests that succeeded, it might not have been able to deal with failures of requests. Similar to the situation with the schizophrenic, it has a false premise. It presumes success and responds as if there were a success.

I haven't seen this behaviour so much in other platforms, A little bit in Claude with regard to unreleased features that it can perceive via interface but has not been trained to support or told about. It doesn't assume success on failure but it does sometimes invent what the features are based upon the names of reflected properties.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-06 23:50:38+00:00
It’s a useful approximation to a point. But it fails when you start looking at things like prompt injection. I’ve seen people completely baffled at why an LLM might start following instructions it finds in a random email, or just outright not believing it’s possible. It makes no sense if you think of an LLM as executing steps to achieve the goal you give it. It makes perfect sense if you understand its true goal.

I’d say this is more like saying that Rust’s borrow checker tries to ensure your program doesn’t have certain kinds of bugs. That is anthropomorphizing a bit: the idea of a “bug” requires knowing the intent of the author and the compiler doesn’t have that. It’s following a set of rules which its human creators devised in order to follow that higher level goal.
by jcranmer | 2025-07-06 23:50:57+00:00
That is a really bad example, because English does have fairly productive pronunciation rules [1], and trying to make 'fish' come out of ghoti requires breaking them. 'gh' only occurs as an /f/ sound when it occurs at the end of a syllable; as an initial consonant cluster, it's invariably /g/. Turning 'ti' to /ʃ/ is a fairly normal affricatization, which requires a subsequent vowel, which is lacking here (consider words like 'ratio', 'gracious', or 'nation'). Even turning the 'o' into /ɪ/ relies on fairly regular vowel destressing, which there's no reason to expect in 'ghoti'--which should be pronounced per English rules, pretty unambiguously, like goatee.

There are some real issues with English spelling, like the inconsistency of pronouncing 'ea' as /i/ or /ɛ/ (consider, uh, read and read). But 'ghoti' isn't one of them, because that's a case where there's not a lot of ambiguity in English pronunciation.

[1] The worst offenders in English pronunciation are when English borrows foreign words both with foreign pronunciations and foreign spellings.
by szvsw | 2025-07-06 23:51:15+00:00
I don’t mean to amplify a false understanding at all. I probably did not articulate myself well enough, so I’ll try again.

I think it is inevitable that some - many - people will come to the conclusion that these systems have “ethics”, “morals,” etc, even if I or you personally do not think they do. Given that many people may come to that conclusion though, regardless of if the systems do or do not “actually” have such properties, 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?”

> The fact that a human image comes out of a mirror has no relation what so ever with the mirror's physical attributes and functional properties. It has to do just with the fact that a man is standing in front of it.

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. Look at yourself in a dirty mirror, a new mirror, a shattered mirror, a funhouse distortion mirror, a puddle of water, a window… all of these produce different images of a person with different attendant phenomenological experiences of the person seeing their reflection. To take that a step further - the entire practice of portrait photography is predicated on the idea that the collision of different technical systems with the real world can produce different semantic experiences, and it’s the photographer’s role to tune and guide the system to produce some sort of contingent affect on the person viewing the photograph at some point in the future. No, there is no “real” person in the photograph, and yet, that photograph can still convey something of person-ness, emotion, memory, etc etc. This contingent intersection of optics, chemical reactions, lighting, posture, etc all have the capacity to transmit something through time and space to another person. It’s not just a meaningless arrangement of chemical structures on paper.

> Stop feeding the LLM with data artifacts of human thought and will imediatelly stop reflecting back anything resembling a human.

But, we are feeding it with such data artifacts and will likely continue to do so for a while, and so it seems reasonable to ask what it is “reflecting” back…
by ClayShentrup | 2025-07-06 23:52:19+00:00
this is a fallacy my team has been talking about for 20 years.

https://www.rangevoting.org/IRVsplitExec.html

tl;dr IRV is extremely poor, doesn't actually solve the vote splitting problem, and is radically more complex and cumbersome than superior alternatives like approval voting, which would plausibly scale far faster once gotten off the ground. plus approval voting was adopted by 2/3 majorities in fargo and st louis, so we know it's politically viable.
by mikeocool | 2025-07-06 23:53:05+00:00
FWIW I’ve basically been given basically this exact requirement by a partner with a crappy API.

We’d get on calls with them and they’d be like “you can’t do multithreading!” we eventually parsed out that what they literally meant was that we could only make a single request to their API at a time. We’d had to integrate with them, and they weren’t going to fix it on their side.

(Our solve ended being a lot more complicated than this, as we had multiple processes across multiple machines that were potentially making concurrent requests.)