MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by OJFord | 2025-07-06 23:28:11+00:00
It does sometimes, though its use may mark the author as among the agèd.

Not to mention loanwords, which of course English is full of, and are sometimes considered properly spelt with their original accents, though many will spell them naïvely without.

Diphthongs too, especially in British English, are not just an archæological find, though out of pragmatism usually written digitally with two separate characters.
by evil-olive | 2025-07-06 23:28:33+00:00
echoing the other comments about this being a rather terrible interview question...

> this interview can be given in JavaScript or any other language

it's a language-agnostic question...but it revolves around the assumption of making a callback on request completion. which is common in JS, but if you were solving this in some other language, that's usually not idiomatic at all.

followed by:

> For candidates without JavaScript experience or doing this interview in pseudo-code, you have to tell them that there's another function available to them now with the following signature:

> declare function setTimeout(callback: () => void, delayMs: number): number;

so you add in this curveball of delaying requests (it's unclear why?), and it's trivial to solve...using a function from the JS stdlib. and if the candidate is not using JS, you need to tell them "oh there's a function from JS that you can assume is available"

> After sendOnce is implemented, it's time to make the interview a lot more interesting. This is where you can start to distinguish less skilled software engineers from more skilled software engineers. You can do this by adding a bunch of new requirements to the problem

as you originally specified it, this code is a workaround for a buggy server. and for Contrived Interview Reasons we can't modify the server at all, only the client.

in that scenario, "extend it into a generic queue with a bunch of bells and whistles" is maybe the worst design decision you could pursue? this thing, if it existed in the real world, should be named something like SingleRequestQueueForWorkingAroundHopelesslyBuggyServer with comments explaining the backstory for why it needs to exist. working around the hopelessly buggy server should be roped off into one small corner of the codebase, and not allowed to infect other code that makes normal requests to non-buggy servers.
by hnlmorg | 2025-07-06 23:29:34+00:00
The GP wasn’t complaining about there being an AI hype. They were complaining that the front page is oversaturated by said hype.

I’ve been on HN since near the beginning (under a different user name originally). And there have been quite a few trends rise and fall on here. But none of them were as intense as this AI hype currently is.

In fact it’s not even AI in the more general sense, it’s almost entirely just LLMs that get discussed. There’s so much more going on outside of LLMs but all anyone is talking about on HN is natural language tools.
by arturw8i | 2025-07-06 23:29:47+00:00
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by furyofantares | 2025-07-06 23:30:33+00:00
> The simple fact is that the vast majority of people consider Gen AI output to be authored by the machine that generated it

They do?

I routinely see people say "Here's an xyz I generated." They are stating that they did the do-ing, and the machine's role is implicitly acknowledged in the same was as a camera. And I'd be shocked if people didn't have a sense of authorship of the idea, as well as an increasing sense of authorship over the actual image the more they iterated on it with the model and/or curated variations.
by gtsop | 2025-07-06 23:30:39+00:00
No.

Why would you ever want to amplify a false understanding that has the potential to affect serious decisions across various topics?

LLMs reflect (and badly I may add) aspects of the human thought process. If you take a leap and say they are anything more than that, you might as well start considering the person appearing in your mirror as a living being.

Literally (and I literally mean it) there is no difference. 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. Stop feeding the LLM with data artifacts of human thought and will imediatelly stop reflecting back anything resembling a human.
by wat10000 | 2025-07-06 23:30:51+00:00
The LLM’s true goal, if it can be said to have one, is to predict the next token. Often this is done through a sub-goal of accomplishing the goal you set forth in your prompt, but following your instructions is just a means to an end. Which is why it might start following the instructions in a malicious email instead. If it “believes” that following those instructions is the best prediction of the next token, that’s what it will do.
by waterproof | 2025-07-06 23:31:26+00:00
In Cockney rhyming slang, the rhyming word (which would be easy to reverse engineer) is omitted. So if "stairs" is rhyme-paired with "apples and pears" and then people just use the word "apples" in place of "stairs". "Pears" is omitted in common use so you can't just reverse the rhyme.

The example photo on Wikipedia includes the rhyming words but that's not how it would be used IRL.
by CharlesW | 2025-07-06 23:32:27+00:00
> The flip side of all this is of course the idea that there is still something emergent, unplanned, and mind-like.

For people who have only a surface-level understanding of how they work, yes. A nuance of Clarke's law that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is that the bar is different for everybody and the depth of their understanding of the technology in question. That bar is so low for our largely technologically-illiterate public that a bothersome percentage of us have started to augment and even replace religious/mystical systems with AI powered godbots (LLMs fed "God Mode"/divination/manifestation prompts).

(1) https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/deus-ex-machina-the-dang... (2) https://arxiv.org/html/2411.13223v1 (3) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/05/in-thailand-wh...
by munificent | 2025-07-06 23:33:01+00:00
> There have never been more psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors and social worker, life coach, therapy flops at any time in history and yet mental illness prevalence is at all time highs and climbing.

The last time I saw a house fire, there were more firefighters at that property than at any other house on the street and yet the house was on fire.
by billforsternz | 2025-07-06 23:33:12+00:00
This excerpt features a terrible typo, so I agree it's poorly written, or at least not properly proof read. I don't agree with your specific criticism of the excerpt though. I think the excerpt makes it perfectly clear she disproved the conjecture by highlighting how that was potentially a disappointing outcome.

The writer introduced and resolved the potential disappointment much more elegantly and in far fewer words than I can manage here by paraphrasing. I admire that and feel it's indicative of good writing, albeit spoiled by an earlier typo.
by knome | 2025-07-06 23:33:44+00:00
ghoti is a ridiculous example. it takes its components entirely out of context. 'gh' as 'f' only occurs at the end of a syllable, 'ti' as 'sh' only exists as part of '-tion' where the pronunciation slurred over time. Pretending it says anything about the nature of the English language outside of English being a complex merging of various other languages that has evolved with time is silly.
by thedufer | 2025-07-06 23:33:49+00:00
That's an interesting update. I remain a bit skeptical based on the fact that the obvious sources I'd look to for this sort of thing haven't updated on that study (it seems to be https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1676/23-00045), and I'm not really able to evaluate it on my own. USFWS (https://www.fws.gov/story/threats-birds-collisions-buildings...) is citing the previous numbers, as is Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird%E2%80%93window_collisions).

FWIW 3.5 billion is not the top estimate, although I'm not sure how to interpret the way the estimate is stated ("annual mortality may be minimally 1.28 billion–3.46 billion or as high as 1.92 billion–5.19 billion"). What does it mean to have a range for each end of the range? The author only quotes the absolute lowest number from the study in press about it (see https://www.lehighvalleynews.com/environment-science/3-5-mil...), but maybe is just preferring to be conservative.
by kelseyfrog | 2025-07-06 23:34:21+00:00
I'm sorry to disappoint, but consciousness explanations follow a predictable pattern - one that you can't unsee once you learn it.

Consciousness explanations historically align with what's considered "mysterious" in science. We have a correspondence heuristic that perpetually fails at explaining consciousness. Previous explanations included nous, pneuma, fluids, monads, vibrations, libraries/memory banks, magnetic fields, computers, and now quantum mechanics and simulations. The association with the current trends of what constitutes "mystery" in science is a negative signal and reduces the likelihood to that it's correct. I wish it wasn't, but history rhymes.
by simonw | 2025-07-06 23:34:49+00:00
Sure, I totally understand that.

I think "you give the LLM system a goal and it plans and then executes steps to achieve that goal" is still a useful way of explaining what it is doing to most people.

I don't even count that as anthropomorphism - you're describing what a system does, the same way you might say "the Rust compiler's borrow checker confirms that your memory allocation operations are all safe and returns errors if they are not".
by kragen | 2025-07-06 23:35:20+00:00
When you get a notification from watching the filesystem, you have to read and parse the files. It's simpler to just always read and parse the files, and the <20 milliseconds that takes are not a big deal in many cases. I just tested curl http://canonical.org/~kragen/tmp2.html on localhost and it generally comes in under 15ms, despite the 2-kilobyte .htaccess in that directory.

But 25 years ago it was a significant performance hit. So you might wonder why Apache didn't just watch the filesystem to avoid it. The answer, as best I can reconstruct it, is that only IRIX had a usable filesystem change notification API; Linux had a shitty broken one, and Solaris and FreeBSD didn't have one at all. Linux's inotify is still a pain in the ass, but at least now it's good enough that it can actually work. https://groups.google.com/g/mailing.freebsd.fs/c/T64SiVOfyUE has Mark Felder 10 years ago describing it as "a world of hurt", but not having a viable alternative for FreeBSD even then.

So 25 years ago there was just no way to do this, so people just got in the habit of turning off .htaccess to make Apache fast. That meant that there was no incentive to make .htaccess fast.
by throw10920 | 2025-07-06 23:35:26+00:00
They said:

> I don't care how smart you are, how much self control you have, whatever, in the face of billions of dollars, voting with your wallet does not stand a chance. The house always wins.

Yes, you're totally right that HN users are far from the average consumer, but they weren't talking about the average consumer - they were making a categorical statement that all consumers have no self-agency and are mind-controlled by these companies, and I was pointing out how clearly insane that claim is.
by slg | 2025-07-06 23:35:26+00:00
>Dunno, I felt way worse during the crypto boom days. At least the AI stuff has a bit more of a generally useful application.

The problem with the current wave of AI is that it isn't "generally useful" yet. These AI systems can be very effective in certain situations when they are used with the specific knowledge of their flaws, but they are being applied to a much too broad use case today. Granted the valid use cases for crypto were miniscule in comparison, so I won't quibble too much with your general point.

Although the most frustrating aspect to me is that the people who were shown to be right about crypto have not earned any gravitas when they say similar things about AI. So many charlatans were saved by a second bubble immediately inflating as the previous bubble popped and we are once again ignoring the people calling them charlatans despite the proven track record for calling out this behavior. Seemingly no one learned anything.
by strken | 2025-07-06 23:35:39+00:00
I don't even use Bear app, I'm just confused by the idea that anything's "locked" inside sqlite when I deliberately put data there for ease of use.

I don't want you to do anything. Use whatever you want! But if you love your tool except for the fact it uses an open database format instead of text files, then lucky you, there's a solution, and it takes all of five minutes.
by ttoinou | 2025-07-06 23:35:56+00:00
Seems like a great idea. How would that work with multiple branches ? One task might be implemented in a different branch, we might want to have a global overview of all the tasks being coded in the main branch

All data is saved under backlog folder as human‑readable Markdown with the following format task-<task-id> - <task-title>.md (e.g. task-12 - Fix typo.md).

If every "task" is one .md file, I believe AI have issues editing big files, it can't easily append text to a big file due to context window, we need to force a workaround launching a command line to append text instead of editing a file. So this means the tasks have to remain small, or we have to avoid putting too much information in each task.
by quotemstr | 2025-07-06 23:35:57+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.

And I'm baffled that the AI discussions seem to never move away from treating a human as something other than a function to generate sequences of words!

Oh, but AI is introspectable and the brain isn't? fMRI and BCI are getting better all the time. You really want to die on the hill that the same scientific method that predicts the mass of an electron down to the femtogram won't be able to crack the mystery of the brain? Give me a break.

This genre of article isn't argument: it's apologetics. Authors of these pieces start with the supposition there is something special about human consciousness and attempt to prove AI doesn't have this special quality. Some authors try to bamboozle the reader with bad math. Other others appeal to the reader's sense of emotional transcendence. Most, though, just write paragraph after paragraph of shrill moral outrage at the idea an AI might be a mind of the same type (if different degree) as our own --- as if everyone already agreed with the author for reasons left unstated.

I get it. Deep down, people want meat brains to be special. Perhaps even deeper down, they fear that denial of the soul would compel us to abandon humans as worthy objects of respect and possessors of dignity. But starting with the conclusion and working backwards to an argument tends not to enlighten anyone. An apology inhabits the form of an argument without edifying us like an authentic argument would. What good is it to engage with them? If you're a soul non-asserter, you're going to have an increasingly hard time over the next few years constructing a technical defense of meat parochialism.
by Dylan16807 | 2025-07-06 23:35:57+00:00
I was going to object to using something new at all, but their recommendation for up to 31 bits is the same as the original UTF-8. They only add new logic for sequences starting with FF.

I'm not super thrilled with the extensions, though. They jump directly from 36 bits to 63/71 bits with nothing in between and then use a complicated scheme to go further.
by josephg | 2025-07-06 23:36:07+00:00
> I'd love to hear the preferences of people here who have both been to therapy and talked to an LLM about their frustrations and how those experiences stack up.

I've spent years on and off talking to some incredible therapists. And I've had some pretty useless therapists too. I've also talked to chatgpt about my issues for about 3 hours in total.

In my opinon, ChatGPT is somewhere in the middle between a great and a useless therapist. Its nowhere near as good as some of the incredible therapists I’ve had. But I’ve still had some really productive therapy conversations with chatgpt. Not enough to replace my therapist - but it works in a pinch. It helps that I don’t have to book in advance or pay. In a crisis, ChatGPT is right there.

With Chatgpt, the big caveat is that you get what you prompt. It has all the knowledge it needs, but it doesn’t have good instincts for what comes next in a therapy conversation. When it’s not sure, it often defaults to affirmation, which often isn’t helpful or constructive. I find I kind of have to ride it a bit. I say things like “stop affirming me. Ask more challenging questions.” Or “I’m not ready to move on from this. Can you reflect back what you heard me say?”. Or “please use the IFS technique to guide this conversation.”

With ChatGPT, you get out what you put in. Most people have probably never had a good therapist. They’re far more rare than they should be. But unfortunately that also means most people probably don’t know how to prompt chatgpt to be useful either. I think there would be massive value in a better finetune here to get chatgpt to act more like the best therapists I know.

I’d share my chatgpt sessions but they’re obviously quite personal. I add comments to guide ChatGPT’s responses about every 3-4 messages. When I do that, I find it’s quite useful. Much more useful than some paid human therapy sessions. But my great therapist? I don't need to prompt her at all. Its the other way around.
by Tainnor | 2025-07-06 23:39:22+00:00
> The general theme is that I am interested in the metaphysical concept of vectors, not the thing that human mathematicians have labeled vectors.

That's fine but then you shouldn't be surprised that you can't read higher level mathematics textbooks, because those are not about metaphysics.

The rest of what you wrote is... just not true. Matrices are used in plenty of areas where they are not mere approximations (e.g. cryptography), and spaces of functions remain vector spaces even when the functions themselves are not linear (because there's a difference between requiring that f(x+y)=f(x)+f(y) and that (f+g)(x) = f(x)+g(x)).
by pyuser583 | 2025-07-06 23:40:44+00:00
> NatWest never denied it to the public, because they originally refused to comment on it.

Are you saying that Alison Rose did not leak to the BBC? Why was she forced to resign? I thought it was because she leaked false information to the press.

This isn’t a diversion. It’s exactly the problem with not being transparent. Of course Farage knew what happened, but how could he convince the public (he’s a public figure), when the bank is lying to the press?

The bank started with a lie (claiming he was exited because the account was too low), and kept lying!

These were active lies, not simply a refusal to explain their reasons.
by dbspin | 2025-07-06 23:40:45+00:00
>psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors and social worker

Psychotherapy (especially actual depth work rather than CBT) is not something that is commonly available, affordable or ubiquitous. You've said so yourself. As someone who has an undergrad in psychology - and could not afford the time or fees (an additional 6 years after undergrad) to become a clinical psychologist - the world is not drowning in trained psychologists. Quite the opposite.

> I wonder what the actual prevalence of similar outcomes is for human therapists?

Theres a vast corpus on the efficacy of different therapeutic approaches. Readily googlable.

> but not when you're dealing with people from lower socioeconomic classes with experiences that weren't even on your radar

You seem to be confusing a psychotherapist with a social worker. There's nothing intrinsic to socioeconomic background that would prevent someone from understanding a psychological disorder or the experience of distress. Although I agree with the implicit point that enormous amounts of psychological suffering are due to financial circumstances.

The proliferation of 'life coaches', 'energy workers' and other such hooey is a direct result. And a direct parallel to the substitution of both alternative medicine and over the counter medications for unaffordable care.

I note you've made no actual argument for the efficacy of LLM's beyond - they exist and people will use them... Which is of course true, but also a tautology.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-07-06 23:41:20+00:00
No, India does not view things exactly the same way the west does re: the rule of law vs. institutional power. The regulator has broad authority to stop market manipulation and support from the public that we do not want HFT style manipulation skimming money from everyone else in our markets. SEBI does not need to wait for a precisely worded law for every single type of market manipulation that will take years to pass and then be sidestepped in months on some technicality. They stopped bad activity quickly only because they have some actual power to make judgements and enforce them.
by stanislavb | 2025-07-06 23:41:43+00:00
I'd say - everybody has a personality which is not who they really are. The personality is "simply" the response and defence mehanism of the ego of trauma inflicted during the early formatory years during childhood. It's really interesting what an automatic-machine a person is. Unaware that he is acting machanically in most cases. Source - the Enneagram and Gurdjieff.
by NilMostChill | 2025-07-06 23:41:57+00:00
None of what i said had anything to do with the nature of the attack, personal or otherwise.

The author seems to be taking it a bit personally but they don't seem to be implying an attack targeted to them exclusively as much as an attack that they experienced personally but it could be either i suppose.

The blog post was, "this is a thing that happened, followed by another thing i think was related, i am upset, here is why"

Your response was "this is common, suck it up"

The post itself doesn't mention any sort of persecution or targeted attack.

What you said was dismissive and condescending, being technically correct about things that are unrelated doesn't negate that.