MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by stillpointlab | 2025-07-17 23:16:54+00:00
I have to be careful of confirmation bias when I read stuff like this because I have the intuition that we are uncovering a single intelligence with each of the different LLMs. I even feel, when switching between the big three (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic) that there is a lot of similarity in how they speak and think - but I am aware of my bias so I try not to let it cloud my judgement.

On the topic of compression, I am reminded of an anecdote about Heidegger. Apparently he had a bias towards German and Greek, claiming that these languages were the only suitable forms for philosophy. His claim was based on the "puns" in language, or homonyms. He had some intuition that deep truths about reality were hidden in these over-loaded words, and that the particular puns in German and Greek were essential to understand the most fundamental philosophical ideas. This feels similar to the idea of shared embeddings being a critical aspect of LLM emergent intelligence.

This "superposition" of meaning in representation space again aligns with my intuitions. I'm glad there are people seriously studying this.
by Yizahi | 2025-07-17 23:17:03+00:00
Opinion answer - no, judging by the votes and contents of the majority of the comments about politically charged topics, I'm pretty sure that most of the people here are approximately center-left leaning, and more libertarian than authoritarian leaning. Some examples, without judging them - HN on average seems to support European worker protections than USA free for all stance, at the same time EU bureaucracy and red tape is mostly universally frowned upon as a factor slowing down economical innovation. Ukraine and Taiwan are supported more than Russia and China. Palestine/Israel opinion seems to be a split, but subjectively it seems majority leans pro-Palestine. Trump is universally reviled, I haven't seen any pro-Trump comments here (at least above 0 votes). Musk is a split opinion, but also majority seems to be against him this year. Megacorps are widely disliked, with a new anti-Google topic popping up very regularly, same with Facebook and Amazon, unless they are strictly about new good IT stuff. Creepto is mocked by majority, anarcho-capitalism too. Aaron Swarz is universally liked as are others with the same leaning.

All in all these are definitely not right wing opinions.
by belter | 2025-07-17 23:17:11+00:00
LLMs are a commodity now. It is all about capital. DeepSeek and Grok proved that.

It’s not Klingon cloaking tech.

With minor variations, it is Transformers via autoregressive next-token prediction on text. Self-attention, residuals, layer norm, positional encodings (RoPE/ALiBi), optimized with AdamW or Lion. Training scales with data, model size, and batch size using LR schedules and distributed parallelism (FSDP, ZeRO, TP). For inference KV caching and probabilistic sampling (temperature, top-k/p).

Most differences are in scale, data quality, and marginal architectural tweaks.
by Arathorn | 2025-07-17 23:17:40+00:00
This has been due to a very persistent spammer attacking the public network. Since adding policy servers (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/04/introducing-policy-servers/) as a way to preemptively block content and other measures (https://matrix.org/blog/2025/02/building-a-safer-matrix/) things have improved at least in public rooms - assuming the admins enable policy servers. We sincerely apologise to everyone who has got exposed to this, and are continuing to improve the trust & safety apparatus in Matrix (although could really do with funding for the Foundation to help folks work on this as their day job).
by cynicalsecurity | 2025-07-17 23:18:20+00:00
The humanity desperately need more of bio research. Currently, the biggest problem with artificial cells is the immune attack. It can be solved with CRISPR gene editing technique, but it's still work in progress. The humanity is unfortunately still not there yet. We absolutely need to invest more money, time and effort into solving the issue of replacing damaged human tissue and organs with an artificial replacement.
by ggm | 2025-07-17 23:18:37+00:00
My partner complains that the economics of scent mean your signature smell can be deleted on a whim. She fell in love with a very unlikely scent, got 10 years, it's gone. It's actually happened twice to her, and these are not marginal brands either, Cacharel and Beckham, who (probably because they are ruthless with otherwise underperforming product) prune their range.

If the containers were uniform, it could be a robot production line and small runs wouldn't be an issue given the inputs are somewhat universal.

It's paint blending for the nose.

"War paint" (2003) by Liny Woodhead about Helena Rubenstein and Elizabeth Arden is a fascinating read. It was a book before a stage production.
by thephyber | 2025-07-17 23:18:52+00:00
There are 2 major reasons why people choose to use layers of corporations in other countries: tax minimization (in their domestic country) and obscurity of the assets-owners relationship.

The latter is used by corrupt politicians, oligarchs (extremely wealthy people who have massive influence on policy/politics), and to stifle investigations by civil investigations (divorce), to stifle criminal investigations (political corruption, sanctions avoidance, fences for thieves, a convenient vehicle for transactions or large assets so governments/ oversight can’t easily track them).

There is a minimum overhead required (you need at least a part time CPA and attorney to give you the strategy, more if they actually implement it), but I don’t think it requires you be ultra wealthy. The problem is that most law-abiding, non-sociopath people don’t benefit much from avoiding the law.
by andix | 2025-07-17 23:19:47+00:00
A lot of people switched away from Cursor within the blink of an eye. Switching IDEs is a big deal for me - it takes a lot of effort, which is why I never switched to Cursor in the first place.

I think Claude Code is a much better concept, the coding agent doesn't need to be connected to the IDE at all. Which also means you can switch even faster to a competitor. In that sense, Claude Code may have been a huge footgun. Gaining market share might turn out to be completely worthless.
by cherry_tree | 2025-07-17 23:20:12+00:00
But isn’t your assertion equally indirect?

“I don’t buy from Mexican farmers because they are extorted by cartels and forced to give them money which they in turn use to fund activities I don’t approve of”

Vs

“I don’t buy from American farmers because they are extorted by the government and forced to give them money which they in turn use to fund activities I don’t approve of”
by spijdar | 2025-07-17 23:20:31+00:00
I find this sort of thing discouraging, as a guy who dreamt of being a novel writer long before becoming a “computer person”.

The last few days, I let the intrusive thoughts win, and I played around with automating the process of building themes, characters, outlining, drafting, and revising a novel with the Gemini API, pausing between steps to manually edit each document. It’s crude, but with enough cycles of “read the last draft, write instructions for improving it, redo everything with those instructions” the end result is shockingly not terrible.

It’s not great. Good might even be too far. It’s derivative, and still feels like the embodiment of all the negative connotations of the term “genre fiction”.

Yet, I can’t escape the fact that it’s better reading than what I write. It is objectively less intellectually “interesting”, and it doesn’t have my “voice”, my artistic fingerprint. But it’s entertaining enough that I could see myself reading it at bedtime for fun, a sentiment I’ve never felt for my own writing.

And all that for a pittance of the effort it takes to write a long story. I’m still not sure how to feel about it. It’s sapping my willpower to continue writing “for real”, in the face of being able to “give life” to the characters and story ideas I’ve had languishing for a decade. I know that it’s not “real”, that the stories are superficial, and that the existence of these models is at best ethically questionable.

But for stories that, either way, I’ll probably never share with anyone else, it’s hard to feel that principled about it, in the face of a miserable comparison between my prose and an LLM’s prose. I’m sure if I wrote fiction for a living, I’d feel as passionate as the article’s author, but in my case, it’s just the melancholy of mediocrity. Ah well :-)
by hu3 | 2025-07-17 23:20:56+00:00
First, most of the English speaking world is not native.

"As of 2022, there were about 400 million native speakers of English. Including people who speak English as a second language, estimates of the total number of Anglophones vary from 1.5 billion to 2 billion."

Second, all popular models I tested did well with that query, including Gemini on Android (aka "ok Google"), except Apple's.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-speaking_world
by godelski | 2025-07-17 23:21:14+00:00
It depends how you define the vector space but I'm inclined to agree.

The reason I think this is from evidence in human language. Spend time with any translator and they'll tell you that some things just don't really translate. The main concepts might, but there's subtleties and nuances that really change the feel. You probably notice this with friends who have a different native language than you.

Even same language same language communication is noisy. You even misunderstand your friends and partners, right? The people who have the greatest chance of understanding you. It's because the words you say don't convey all the things in your head. It's heavily compressed. Then the listener has to decompress from those lossy words. I mean you can go to any Internet forum and see this in action. That there's more than one way to interpret anything. Seems most internet fights start this way. So it's good to remember that there isn't an objective communication. We improperly encode as well as improperly decode. It's on us to try to find out what the speaker means, which may be very different from the words they say (take any story or song to see the more extreme versions of this. This feature is heavily used in art)

Really, that comes down to the idea of universal language[0]. I'm not a linguist (I'm an AI researcher), but my understanding is most people don't believe it exists and I buy the arguments. Hard to decouple due to shared origins and experiences.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_language
by ApolloVonZ | 2025-07-17 23:21:37+00:00
Sorry if I didn’t use the correct terms. Didn’t catch up on all the terminology coming from my native language. ;) But yes, I agree, the fact that parts, different parameters, of the model can be completed asynchronous by streaming the output of the model, is quite unique. Apple/swift was late with async/await, but putting it all together, it probably plays well with the ‘never’ (I know ) asynchronous and reactive coding.
by kcplate | 2025-07-17 23:22:01+00:00
The problem is that fascism historically encompassed a number of political and power qualities and what is being described as “fascist” today might have some of those qualities, but not necessarily all of them. Ironically the side yelling “fascist” today also has some of those qualities, but doesn’t want to admit either.

Probably just best to focus on those qualities you don’t like on the other side and leave the labeling to the future historians.
by const_cast | 2025-07-17 23:22:22+00:00
This usecase is run of the mill for someone like Google, who used to store and show you your location forever, but it's not in Apple style.

It's hard to be like "uhhh privacy" when you send all requests to a remote server where they're stored in clear text for god knows how long.

As of right now, there is no way to run big LLMs in a privacy preserving manner. It just doesn't exist. You can't E2EE encrypt these services, because the compute is done on the server, so it has to decrypt it.

There are some services which will randomize your instance and things like that, but that kind of defeats the a big part of what makes LLMs useful, context. Until we can run these models locally, there's no way to get around the privacy nightmare aspects of it.
by princeb | 2025-07-17 23:22:27+00:00
i really quite like the quality of vba code you can find in excel sheets in non-tech corporate environments, well, at least, the range of quality you find in there. there can be some incredible ones. code quality of matlab scripts and scientific code written by mathematicians and engineers can also be pretty eye opening.

when the only goal is a product that works, you get a lot of innovation and a lot of speed. when you don't have to worry about review, testing, and deployment, you strip out 80% of the overhead.

i heard the hedge fund renaissance technologies does not target hiring people with finance backgrounds. i wonder if you can build a tech company out of people who are just going to figure out javascript for the first time on their first day of work. when the performance hurdle is "learn something new on your own with minimal guidance", you immediately filter for a group of innovative people with initiative and drive.
by adamrezich | 2025-07-17 23:22:33+00:00
I dunno man even just learning that Bjarne thought Simula's classes were cool specifically because of the domain of what he was working on—and learning that he ran into the same “unity build” problem that anyone who's worked on a large C++ project has encountered, years before literally anyone else in the world had—was fascinating, something I'd never heard before, and very interesting context in the broader scope of “OOP.”
by mentalpiracy | 2025-07-17 23:23:20+00:00
> "I think it got 98% of the information correct... I just needed to copy / paste a few things. If it can do 90 - 95% of the time consuming work, that will save you a ton of time"

"Hello, yes, I would like to pollute my entire data store" is an insane a sales pitch. Start backing up your data lakes on physical media, there is going to be an outrageous market for low-background data in the future.

semi-related: How many people are going to get killed because of this?
by groby_b | 2025-07-17 23:23:25+00:00
That's not necessarily what matters.

What matters is if there is a shared representation space across languages. If there is, you can then (theoretically, there might be a PhDs and a Nobel or two to be had :) separate underlying structure and the translation from underlying structure to language.

The latter - what they call the universal embedding inverter - is likely much more easily trainable. There's a good chance that certain structures are unique enough you can map them to underlying representation, and then lever that. But even if that's not viable, you can certainly run unsupervised training on raw material, and see if that same underlying "universal" structure pops out.

There's a lot of hope and conjecture in that last paragraph, but the whole point of the article is that maybe, just maybe, you don't need context to translate.
by dylan604 | 2025-07-17 23:23:31+00:00
Absolutely. What the scent smells like in the bottle, or on a wafting stick, or on the forearm of the sales assistant letting you sniff like you're Clark Griswald does not tell you how it will smell on yourself or the person you are buying it for. I've spent quite a bit of time around "scents", and there have been several that I was unsure about until after trying them on for a bit.
by charcircuit | 2025-07-17 23:23:45+00:00
>The level of risk is similar either way.

There is still risk, but this is a form of risk which is not neccessary and can be reduced.

>If the blog hasn't been updated in ages, they probably don't.

We are talking about blogs that don't use https because they don't sell things. Expired certificates are out of scope of this comment thread.
by CephalopodMD | 2025-07-17 23:23:52+00:00
AI labs already do everything they can to have politically neutral responses. It turns out that when you pre-train on all the content ever produced by humanity and post-train on real people's preferences, the result is extremely liberal. That's been my experience at least. It's a little counterintuitive, and there are definitely corner cases where misaligned AI becomes more conservative, hateful, or authoritarian, but that's the trend overall. I can all but guarantee that every single major AI product out there would be even more liberal with trust and safety interventions turned off.
by nikpil | 2025-07-17 23:24:19+00:00
We're all growing our startups here and I'm sure a lot of you have tons of business data spread across CRMs, tools, databases and more that you manually have to sift through. This takes up time which means less time talking to customers!

We just launched Nexus which enables you to build custom, specialized AI business analyst agents that automate everything with your business data, starting with insights. Think an AI workforce for business that works you 24/7!

We're giving early pilot access so join the waitlist today!
by cdrini | 2025-07-17 23:25:05+00:00
That's a very good point! I hadn't thought of that. And that makes sense, since the encoding of the word "sun" arises from its linguistic context, and there's no such shared context between the English word sun and any lion word in this imaginary multilingual corpus, so I don't think they'd go to the same point.

Apparently one thing you could do is train a word2vec on each corpus and then align them based on proximity/distances. Apparently this is called "unsupervised" alignment and there's a tool by Facebook called MUSE to do it. (TIL, Thanks ChatGPT!) https://github.com/facebookresearch/MUSE?tab=readme-ov-file

Although I wonder if there are better embedding approaches now as well. Word2Vec is what I've played around with from a few years ago, I'm sure it's ancient now!

Edit: that's what I get for posting before finishing the article! The whole point of their researh is to try to build such a mapping, ve2vec!
by otoburb | 2025-07-17 23:25:15+00:00
>>That's why I don't invest in bonds or any investment that is denoted in dollars.

Most investments seem to eventually (?) denominate into USD equivalents, especially if you live in the US. Do you mean hard(er) assets like real estate or commodities (which also leaves me puzzled because they’re still typically denoted in an underlying fiat currency and especially USD if they’re domestic assets).
by margalabargala | 2025-07-17 23:25:17+00:00
Since I live there, that fails the metric of:

> "minimum impact on my own life"

Which I justified:

> Once we accept that each of us is a human rather than a morally perfect literal supernatural angel, each of us must decide: If we cannot sanction all wrongdoers, does that mean we sanction no wrongdoers, or some?

But you should absolutely feel free to do so if you are so inclined!
by potato3732842 | 2025-07-17 23:25:40+00:00
Exactly. Everyone screeching now should have listened to those weirdo civil liberties people 20yr ago.

You get the government you deserve.

I hope we can get this authoritarian phase over with quickly so that the people who actually made decisions, if only as minor as voting, can suffer for them rather than die peacefully leaving future generations to sort it out.
by AdieuToLogic | 2025-07-17 23:25:48+00:00
> The frustrating thing about your and several other arguments in this submission is that there is no rationale or data. All you are saying is "LLMs are not/cannot be good at therapy". The only (fake) rationale is "They are not humans." The whole comment comes across as tautological.

My comment to which you replied was a clarification of a specific point I made earlier and not intended to detail why LLM's are not a viable substitute for human therapists.

As I briefly enumerated here[0], LLM's do not "understand" relevant to therapeutic contribution, LLM's do not possess a shared human experience to be able to relate to a person, and LLM's do not possess an acquired professional experience specific to therapy on which to draw. All of these are key to "be good at therapy", with other attributes relevant as well I'm sure.

People have the potential to be able to satisfy the above. LLM algorithms simply do not.

0 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44589319
by astrange | 2025-07-17 23:26:14+00:00
> Using our web crawling strategy, we sourced pairs of images with corresponding alt-texts.

An issue for anti-AI people, as seen on Bluesky, is that they're often "insisting you write alt text for all images" people as well. But this is probably the main use for alt text at this point, so they're essentially doing annotation work for free.
by marklar423 | 2025-07-17 23:26:15+00:00
I'm self hosting Readeck (https://readeck.org/en/) and I really like it. It's nicer than Pocket was, the website extraction seems to work better, and it can't ever be shut down.

For my Kobo, I wrote a mod that lets me redirect Pocket API requests, and a small proxy server that translates Pocket API calls into Readeck calls.

So far it's working flawlessly and my Kobo is using its built in Pocket viewer for Readeck instead. I'm hoping to open source it soon so others can use it.
by crystal_revenge | 2025-07-17 23:26:40+00:00
The Gartner hype cycle is complete nonsense, it's just a completely fabricated way to view the world that helps sell Gartner's research products. It may, at times, make "intuitive sense", but so does astrology.

The hype cycle has no mathematical basis whatsoever. It's marketing gimmick. It's only value in my life has been to quickly identify people that don't really understand models or larger trends in technology.

I continue to be, but on introspection probably shouldn't be, surprised that people on HN treat is as some kind of gospel. The only people who should respected are other people in the research marketing space as the perfect example of how to dupe people into paying for your "insights".
by gerdesj | 2025-07-17 23:26:50+00:00
"It used to be that if I saw a typo or grammatical error in someone's writing,"

It's not quite that simple. Many moons ago I taught RSA IT skills levels 2 and three. Hmmm I used a plural for levels and a literal 2 and spelt out three.

You are probably not 50+ years old and have not had to run anti spam email systems for several decades! When you are deciding whether something is created by something other than is claimed, you need way more "rules" than typos and that.

Look at the language in use: A fair sign of AI is banality, verbosity and obsequiousness.

Please don't look upon lazy spelling and grammar as a sign of authenticity: "Its how real people work" - it isn't. That will be mercilessly abused by the baddies. Unfortunately we will all have to raise our game and be proactive in spotting baddies.

Also, please don't become too worried about all this stuff. The bubble will eventually burst.

You be you and look after yourself. Take care.
by Arathorn | 2025-07-17 23:27:05+00:00
All I did was to DM you to ask you to not post screenshots of the CSAM spammer’s activity, as it amplifies their spam and gives them a platform which further encourages them by giving them attention and a reaction.

This should not be remotely controversial.

Obviously the Matrix team is very aware of the very real legitimate problem of the CSAM spammer, and all the very real legitimate complaints about it, and we have tackled it as transparently as we can, with very limited resources.

I am incredibly disappointed that someone I previously respected and considered a constructive member of the open source community reacted like this to a simple request to not feed the trolls.

https://mastodon.matrix.org/@matrix/114540986615467818
by lelandbatey | 2025-07-17 23:27:36+00:00
Not directly, but indirectly. It's what's leading to the FOMO w.r.t. investors. See the image in the parent blog post, where VCs are directly comparing the amount of money spent on AI at the moment (tiny) against the amount of money spent on headcount in various industries, with the implication being that "AI could be making all the money that was being spent on headcount, what an opportunity!"