MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-07 06:24:15+00:00
You say LLMs are “insanely good” at comprehending language, but then immediately pull back like it’s some kind of fluke. “Well yeah, it looks like it understands, but it doesn’t really understand.” What does that even mean? Do you think your average person walking around fully understands everything they say? Half of the people you know are just repeating crap they heard from someone else. You ask them to explain it and they fold like a cheap tent. But we still count them as sentient.

Then you say it’s easy to trip them up. Of course it is. You know what else is easy to trip up? People. Ask someone to do long division without a calculator. Ask a junior dev to write a recursive function that doesn’t melt the stack. Mistakes aren’t proof of stupidity. They’re proof of limits. And everything has limits. LLMs don’t need to be flawless. They need to be better than the tool they’re replacing. And in a lot of cases, they already are.

Now this part: “computers should be held to a higher standard.” Why? Says who? If your standard is perfection, then nothing makes the cut. Not the car, not your phone, not your microwave. We use tools because they’re better than doing it by hand, not because they’re infallible gods of logic. You want perfection? Go yell at the compiler, not the language model.

And then, this one really gets me, you say “surely the next frontier is a computer with the accuracy of a machine and the reasoning of a human.” No kidding. That’s the whole point. That’s literally the road we’re on. But instead of acknowledging that we’re halfway there, you’re throwing a tantrum because we didn’t teleport straight to the finish line. It’s like yelling at the Wright brothers because their plane couldn’t fly to Paris.

As for the money... of course there's a flood of it. That’s how innovation happens. Capital flows to power. If you’re worried about a correction, fine. But don’t confuse financial hype with technical stagnation. The tools are getting better. Fast. Whether the market overheats is a separate issue.

You say you're not threatened by LLMs. That’s cute. You’re writing paragraphs trying to prove why they’re not that smart while admitting they’re already better at language than most people. If you’re not threatened, you’re sure spending a lot of energy trying to make sure nobody else is impressed either.

Look, you don’t have to worship the thing. But pretending it's just a fancy parrot with a glitchy brain is getting old. It’s smart. It’s flawed. It’s changing everything. Deal with it.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-07-07 06:26:16+00:00
Oh come on, it's not some secret code. People say “AI is amazing, but...” because it is amazing... and also flawed. That’s just called having a balanced take, not pre-prompting for approval. What do you want them to do, scream “THIS SUCKS” and ignore reality? It’s not a trick, it’s just how grown-ups talk when they’re not trying to win internet points.
by DavidPiper | 2025-07-07 06:26:48+00:00
Something I noticed a few years back. If you click just ONE post/video/reel/advert that is even remotely related to ADHD on any platform with an algorithmic feed, where you have previously never clicked before... It will feed you content implying that that particular neurodivergence both applies to you and is the source of all your problems, for MONTHS, even if you never click another one.

The only other thing I've seen that behaves this way in the algorithm is far right-wing clickbait. Everything else just disappears after a few days if the algorithm detects you've lost interest.
by GianFabien | 2025-07-07 06:26:53+00:00
When you study the lives of successful entrepreneurs, you might notice that most didn't set out to build a business. They identified an opportunity in the guise of a problem that could be solved with technology of the day. The produced a solution and lots of other people had the same problem and were willing to pay for the solution.

Folks who just want to make a lot of money become stock brokers, merchant bankers or venture capitalists and "invest" other people's money in the efforts of the problem solvers.
by NoPicklez | 2025-07-07 06:26:58+00:00
I agree with this and you hit the nail on the head with the last point.

The big issues is the prevalence of so called therapists and psychologists putting these labels on social media in such an ambiguous way that draws users.

Our kids should have mental health professionals talking to them about their struggles and helping them identify these things. Not 100s of instagram or tiktok reels algorithmically sent to us every night.
by com2kid | 2025-07-07 06:27:08+00:00
The entire market is focused on productivity ones that all have the same feature set, no real originality in the offerings IMHO.

There are a lot of low hanging fruit that can be tackled. From helping people stay focused to managing household schedules. I honestly don't even think the product has to be SaSS, a 16GB VRAM GPU, or a well equipped MacBook, can do everything with locally.
by lpolovets | 2025-07-07 06:27:09+00:00
This is secondhand and not firsthand knowledge, but one thing I've heard from a number of agtech founders (and sometimes farmers when we do diligence calls with them) is that hiring employees is very hard because of seasonality. E.g. you might need 100 workers most of the year, but 400 for a few weeks when it's picking season. And of course if you are in an area known for a single crop, all of the other local farms have the same seasonal labor need.

For these types of businesses, paying less for labor is a secondary goal and just having enough labor (human or machine) is the primary goal.
by imetatroll | 2025-07-07 06:29:24+00:00
This is simultaneously funny and sad. I wonder when alcoholism will get a front row seat during zoom meetings (or even IRL meetings). "Can't help it hick I'm an alcoholic".

I think a lot of societal change these days can be summarized by the idea that self-labeling is seen as transforming something into "everyone else's problem".
by mrweasel | 2025-07-07 06:30:18+00:00
No, but here's the tiny bit of code I just use. Improve as you please.

bad-ai.js

const bad_words = [ " ai", "ai ", "a.i.", "openai", "llm", "agentic", "claude", "large language models", "apple intelligence" ]

var elements = document.body.getElementsByClassName("titleline");

for (var i = 0; i < elements.length; i++){ var element = elements[i]; var text = element.children[0].text.toLowerCase();

bad_words.forEach(word => { if( text.indexOf(word) > -1 ){ console.log("Bad-AI remove: " + text) element.parentElement.parentElement.nextSibling.style.display = "none"; element.parentElement.parentElement.style.display = "none"; } });

}

manifest.json

{ "manifest_version": 2, "name": "No-Hacker-AI", "version": "1.0",

"description": "Hide stories on HackerNews, if they mention AI technologies.", "icons": { "96": "icons/bad-ai.png" }, "content_scripts": [ { "matches": ["*://news.ycombinator.com/*"], "js": ["bad-ai.js"] } ] }
by deno | 2025-07-07 06:32:25+00:00
This isn’t such a great example. You don’t need to have celiac disease to benefit from avoiding gluten. I suspect some people avoid it because they feel better in some way. For myself eliminating gluten (or wheat, I’m not sure how to differentiate that) has been life changing, it immediately made breathing through my nose effortless, made concentrating easier, etc. I can tell you eliminating gluten is not easy, you have to cut out a lot of common foods, eating out is almost impossible. If someone is sticking to that diet they probably have a very good reason. I think a lot of people should give it a try at least and not worry about this being part of some fad. I’m a bit ashamed to admit but I only tried it because of a South Park episode...
by defrost | 2025-07-07 06:33:11+00:00
Just for the chuckle value, a critical critical take:

Willis Eschenbach Credentials California Massage Certificate, Aames School of Massage, Oakland, CA. (1974). B.A., Psychology, Sonoma State University, Rohnert Park, CA. (1975). Background Willis Eschenbach is a regular speaker at the Heartland Institute‘s International Conference on Climate Change, where he is described as a “carpenter and house builder” as well as an “amateur scientist.” Eschenbach has previously worked as a Construction Manager at Taunovo Bay Resort in Fiji, Sport Fishing guide in Alaska, and more recently as an Accounts/IT Senior Manager with South Pacific Oil.

https://www.desmog.com/willis-eschenbach/
Ask HN: How to obtain book endorsements when don't have industry connections?
by haebom | 2025-07-07 06:35:30+00:00
My publisher is requesting endorsements for my book, but I'm not sure how to approach potential reviewers. The manuscript is complete and fully edited, but they're insisting that endorsements are essential for marketing.

I don't have any influencers or well-known figures in my personal network, so I'm considering cold outreach via email. For those who have published books or obtained endorsements before: what's the most effective approach?

Are cold emails to relevant experts actually viable, or are there better strategies I should consider? I'd appreciate any insights from the community about navigating this part of the publishing process.
by timhh | 2025-07-07 06:35:43+00:00
I have a C library (I've also done a Python one in the past) that you load into the executable you want to debug. It activated based on an environment variable so normally I just permanently link it.

When it is loaded it will automatically talk to VSCode and tell it to start a debugger and attach to it & it waits for the debugger to attach.

End result is you just have to run your script with an environment variable set and it will automatically attach a nice GUI debugger to the process no matter how deeply buried in scripts and Makefiles it is.

https://github.com/Timmmm/autodebug

I currently use this for debugging C++ libraries that are dynamically loaded into Questa (a commercial SystemVerilog simulator) that is started by a Python script running in some custom build system.

In the past I used it to debug Python code running in an interpreter launched by a C library loaded by Questa started by a Makefile started by a different Python interpreter that was launched by another Makefile. Yeah. It wasn't the only reason by a long shot but that company did not survive...
by jandrewrogers | 2025-07-07 06:36:18+00:00
In American English, it is common to pronounce it something like “comf-ter-ble” in most dialects. Some dialects of e.g. British English pronounce it as you would expect from the spelling with 4 syllables. I can’t think of an American dialect that pronounces it correctly. Perhaps some New England or Canadian dialects do?

My experience traveling around the English speaking world is that it is very forgiving of pronunciation. What trips you up is differences in vocabulary and semantics. You have to learn a new dictionary and a bit of inexplicable grammar everywhere you travel. I’ve learned very different languages that had similar relationships to adjacent languages; the words are all familiar but the meanings of those words have been remapped to something else. English tends toward a similar pattern.
by Pansy3 | 2025-07-07 06:37:11+00:00
Location: Cape Coast, Ghana (UTC+0)

Remote: Yes | hybrid | onsite

Willing to relocate: Yes, Europe

Technologies: Typescript, Python, PostgreSQL, SQL; Crystal, Elixir, Java, Kotlin, Ruby, C/C++, Go, Angular, Vue, Android, Flutter, Linux, Docker, Terraform, Kubernetes, GCP, AWS, Shell, NestJS ...and open to learn new technologies.

CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1M-tUwpkBlnZYPDQcwCeezzFXHa3...

Email: ephrimlawrence11@gmail.com

Hi, I’m Lawrence, and I'm passionate about building impactful products. I am a full-stack engineer with over five years of experience. I am proficient in TypeScript, Python, and Java, and I have experience with frameworks such as NestJS, Laravel, and Flutter. Additionally, I have experience in DevOps with GCP and AWS, as well as system administration. I learn quickly, enjoy new challenges, and thrive in team environments.

I am flexible with remote, hybrid, or onsite work and open to relocation. I am also looking for remote opportunities anywhere.
by ei23 | 2025-07-07 06:37:42+00:00
Why so few ask: Isnt it enough that current SOTA AI make us humans already so much better everyday? Exponential selfimprovement seems like a very scary thing to me and even if all went right, humans have to give up their pole position in the intelligence race. That will be very hard to swallow for many. If we really want self improvement, we should get used to beeing useless :)
by kqr | 2025-07-07 06:37:43+00:00
It might be worth clarifying that the game itself does not deal in typefaces: it's the interpreter running the game that handles font business. The link in the article leads to the web-based Parchment interpreter running on iplayif.com, but there are other alternatives both for web-based play and native applications.

Maybe the Parchment people would appreciate the bug report, though. Or if it's iplayif.com that introduces this bug. I have no idea!
by beeflet | 2025-07-07 06:39:11+00:00
I disagree. While it's true that early cryptocurrencies were based on well established cryptography, a lot of the modern (post 2017-ish) cryptocurrency tech involves cutting-edge cryptography. Especially with respect to post-quantum setups, zero-knowlege proofs, and new devices like adaptor signatures.

One reason for this is that cryptocurrencies are highly bandwidth-limited. Cryptography developed for other applications (such as voting systems, etc.) needs to be specialized to meet the size and computational restraints inherent to cryptocurrency design. Efficiency is everything.
by globular-toast | 2025-07-07 06:39:58+00:00
Brightest minds in the world from what I can tell. They are particularly sickening in the way they specifically target certain demographics to come and leech for them.

Imagine becoming highly educated and then just using that ability to cream off the output of people who labour every day producing things that are actually useful. The tragedy is all the signals from society are saying this ok. Nobody questions the money. I got excited thinking we would 15 years ago, but nobody cares.

I guess if you're bright enough to come up with a solution you could be like Satoshi, or you could just work for Jane Street and suck as much as you can before you die.
by taneq | 2025-07-07 06:41:00+00:00
In a deterministic universe, the future is still affected by (and can be improved by) shaming people for behaving poorly, even when they have a predisposition towards such behaviour. Think of it like integral windup in a PID controller. The feedback provides an error signal that accumulates to (in most cases) move the person's outputs in a direction that will reduce the poor behaviour. Eventually their brain will start predicting the negative feedback and alter its outputs to produce more acceptable behaviours.

Whether this is best described as "learning", or as "internalised <whatever>", or as "trauma", is left to the reader.
by onli | 2025-07-07 06:41:01+00:00
To see what that means in practice, in my multi generational meta benchmark the 285K lands currently only on rank 12, behind the top Intel processors from the last two generations (i7-13700K and 14700K plus the respective i9) and several AMD processors. https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu. The 3D cache just helps a lot in games, but the loss against the own predecessor must hurt even more.
by mort96 | 2025-07-07 06:47:47+00:00
> E-Cores are turned off in the BIOS, because setting affinity to P-Cores caused massive stuttering in Call of Duty.

I understand doing this for the purpose of specifically analyzing the P-core microarchitecture in isolation. However this does make the test less interesting for potential customers. I don't think many people would disable E-cores in BIOS if they bought this CPU, so for the purpose of deciding which CPU to buy, it would be more interesting to see results which factor in the potential software/scheduling issues which come from the E-core/P-core split.

This isn't a criticism, just an observation. Real-world gaming results for these CPUs would be worse than what these results show.
by Salgat | 2025-07-07 06:47:49+00:00
Unfortunately LLMs fail even basic logic tests given to children so definitely not high praise. I'm just highlighting the absurd amount of data they need versus humans to highlight that they're just spitting out regressions on the training data. We're talking data that would take a human countless thousands of lifetimes to ingest. Yet a human can accomplish infinitely more with a basic grade school education.
by viccis | 2025-07-07 06:48:16+00:00
I think that the hidden state is really just at work improving the model's estimation of the joint probability over tokens. And the assumption here, which failed miserably in the early 20th century in the work of the logical posivitists, is that if you can so expertly estimate that joint probability of language, then you will be able to understand "knowledge." But there's no well grounded reason to believe that and plenty of the reasons (see: the downfall of logical posivitism) to think that language is an imperfect representation of knowledge. In other words, what humans do when we think is more complicated than just learning semiotic patterns and regurgitating them. Philosophical skeptics like Hume thought so, but most epistemology writing after that had better answers for how we know things.
by panpog | 2025-07-07 06:48:27+00:00
You still get the combinatoric explosion, but you have more bits to work with. Imagine if you could combine any 9 jamo into a single hangul syllable block. (The real combinatorics is more complicated, and I don't know if it's this bad.) Encoding just the 24 jamo and a a control character requires 25 codepoints. Giving each syllable block its own codepoint would require 24^9>2^32 codepoints.
by nwallin | 2025-07-07 06:48:39+00:00
this turned into a larger rant than I wanted it to be. But I need to let it out every now and then. Feel free tos kip it.

IMHO programming languages are, for the most part, designed such that a compiler's job is easy if you want to compile to scalar code, but damned near impossible if you want it to compile to vectorized code.

So I have a point type, right? 'struct point3f { float x,y,z; };'. Easy peasy lemon squeezy. I add a bunch of member functions for normal stuff like addition, scalar multiplication, dot/cross product, etc. I write a triangle type: 'struct triangle { point3f a,b,c; };'. I write a bunch of functions for geometry stuff, intersections with rays, normals, etc.

Then I make an array of triangles. I have an origin point and a look ray. I want to iterate over each triangle and figure out which triangles intersect my origin/ray. Now I'm stuck. This is a perfect use case for vectorization, I can trivially get 4x/8x/16x speedup with SSE/AVX/AVX512, but the compiler can't do it. The data's in the wrong layout. It's in the correct layout for scalar code, but the wrong format for vector code. If you want to write vector code, your data has to be in a struct of arrays (SoA) layout.

There ought to exist a programming language that will, by default, automagically convert everything to SoA layout, unless you flag your array as AoS or your class as non-SoA-able. And ranged for loops are, by default, unsequenced.

This will make autovectorization an order of magnitude easier, and will enable vectorization on complicated stuff that might be fiendishly difficult to vectorize, even by hand.

This isn't trivial, and it can't simply be tacked on to a language later on. SIMD needs to be a day-0 priority. Everything else needs to be in support of that.

Until then, until this happens, we will either be leaving 60% of our CPU's silicon idle 99% of the time, or scrubs like me will continue to write SIMD intrinsic laden code with lots of manual bullshit to do what the compiler/language design should be doing for me for free.

Rant over. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
MetaCoreX – Operating System for the Metaverse,Where Value Comes from Usefulness
by arzykul | 2025-07-07 06:48:42+00:00
I always wondered — why is everything decentralized, except the OS?

That’s why I built MetaCoreX — a decentralized operating system for the metaverse. Not just another blockchain — but a real base layer, where humans, AI, and smart contracts interact at the system level, like an OS.

It’s modular, like UNIX. Each smart contract is a system module. It runs on Solidity, with its own token standard — ARZY-G.

The core idea: Tokens are not mined or bought — they’re born from usefulness, with optional AI validation via Chainlink. You can plug in your own modules, logic, and value systems. Fully open-source and designed for real digital civilizations.

GitHub: https://github.com/arzykul/MetaCoreX Built solo in Kyrgyzstan. Would love to hear what you think.
by dimatura | 2025-07-07 06:48:46+00:00
I'm not sure I quite understand what you're aiming at with these questions, but there are certainly techniques in ML based on thinking of functions as vectors. The first one that comes to mind is Anyboost [1], which views boosting as doing "gradient descent" in function space - where each "gradient step" is not a typical vector (as you'd see e.g in neural nets) but a function, corresponding in practice to a base classifier. Another that is very popular are gaussian processes - one way to think about them is as modeling functions as samples from an infinite-dimensional gaussian (at least some of them).

[1] https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/1999/file/9...
by delusional | 2025-07-07 06:49:03+00:00
> Output tokens are just an artefact for our convenience

That's nonsense. The hidden layers are specifically constructed to increase the probability that the model picks the right next word. Without the output/token generation stage the hidden layers are meaningless. Just empty noise.

It is fundamentally an algorithm for generating text. If you take the text away it's just a bunch of fmadds. A mute person can still think, an LLM without output tokens can do nothing.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-07-07 06:49:31+00:00
So after his failed first attempt at forcing Grok to reply with the repeatedly shown to be false South Africa "white genocide", he's has a new approach.

And to make his new approach work, he needs to literally re-write history (adding and deleting information) to get it to match his views. Because according to him any model trained on "uncorrected data" will never reach the crazy conclusions he wants it to?

This is one of the most absurd and insane things I think I've ever read.
by jspdown | 2025-07-07 06:49:41+00:00
I share the same experience. Looking at diffs inside a terminal is as helpful as looking at diffs inside GitHub. I need code navigation to fully understand the impact of a code change or just the code base.

I exclusively use Claude Code these days, and I don't remember having accepted the result of a prompt a single time on the first shot. I always have to fix some stuff here and there, improve some tests or comments or even make the code more readable. Being in an IDE is a must for me, and I don't see how this could change.
by alganet | 2025-07-07 06:49:42+00:00
As I mentioned, there are two ways of seeing it.

Maybe there was some kind of pressure for LLM usage in the Abstract section.

In certain points of my career, I have been pressure before to generate commits with specific rigid requirements.

Perhaps we should look into the kinds of pressures that would force or push someone to LLM usage. What do you think?