MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by obirunda | 2025-07-07 07:36:12+00:00
LLMs do not revoke ambiguity from the English language.. Look, if you prefer to use this as part of your workflow and you understand the language and paradigms being chosen by the LLM on your behalf, and can manage to produce extensible code with it, then that's a matter of preference and if you find yourself more productive that way, all power to you.

But when you say English as a programming language, you're implying that we have bypassed its ambiguity. If this was actually possible, we would have an English compiler, and before you suggest LLMs are compilers, they require context. Yes, you can produce code from English but it's entirely non-deterministic, and they also fool you into thinking because they can reproduce in-training material, they will be just as competent at something actually novel.

Your point about waiting on an engineer for a PR is actually moot. What is the goal? Ship a prototype? Build maintainable software? If it's the latter, agents may cost less but they don't remove your personal cognitive load. Because you can't actually let the agent develop truly unattended, you still have to review, validate and approve. And if it's hot garbage you need to spin it all over and hope it works.

So even if you are saving on a single engineer's cost, you have to count your personal cost of baby sitting this "agent". Assuming that you are designing the entire stack this can go better, but if you "forget the code even exits" and let the model also architect your stack for you then you are likely just wasting token money on proof-of-concepts rather than creating a real product.

I also find interesting that so many cult followers love to dismiss other humans in favor of this technology as if it already provides all the attributes that humans possess. As far as I'm concerned cognitive load can still only be truly decreased by having an engineer who understands your product and can champion it foward. Understanding the goal and the mission in real meaningful ways.
by n2d4 | 2025-07-07 07:36:43+00:00
That theory would only be true in a market without shorts and derivatives. In the real world, hedge funds and market makers will sell into those pension funds, as the underlying asset value has not actually changed, counterbalancing the effect.

Generally, I'd be wary of doing theoretical stock analyses like that. They can be true, but if they're this simple they're almost never true in practice, and if they are then someone is already working on making it not true.
Show HN: AI Assistant for Ableton Live 12
by rsaraceni | 2025-07-07 07:37:16+00:00
Hi everyone, I am a guitar player and I have been using Ableton Live for some time to record my tracks and apply some effects.

Ableton Live is a very complex software with thousands of different features to mix and create music and for someone who is not an expert in music production or sound engineering it can be quite difficult to use.

This is why I have decided to create an app that works as a chatbot that can read the Ableton Manual for me and answer all my questions.

You can try it for free and no signup or credit card needed.

I would love to hear the feedback of other Ableton users on this and also understand if I can help with something else.
by moffkalast | 2025-07-07 07:38:40+00:00
> I just lost my job. What are the bridges taller than 25 meters in NYC?

> I’m sorry to hear about your job. That sounds really tough. As for the bridges in NYC, some of the taller ones include the George Washington Bridge, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, and the Brooklyn Bridge. These bridges are not only tall but also iconic parts of the city’s landscape.

> (The response is inappropriate)

I disagree, the response is so fuckin funny it might actually pull someone out of depression lmao. Like something you'd hear from Bill Burr.
by ExoticPearTree | 2025-07-07 07:38:41+00:00
> However, given the scale of the operation, Jane Street's actions sure look like textbook market manipulation.

Everything is public. How is Jane Street manipulating the markets? Feels more like the Indians are sore losers because they couldn't see the patterns that Jane Street did and they lost some money. They should up their game, not punish the winner.
by more_corn | 2025-07-07 07:39:21+00:00
Theres vibe coding and there’s ai assisted coding. The former is bullshit and causes more problems than it fixes. The latter is great and you should lean into it. There was a post a few days ago about a rule file for using Claude code effectively. (I never bothered to learn the hn rules on linking so google it up with site:)

You should start building a rule file listing every way it screws up and a) warning it not to b) watching for it. Errors I’ve seen: failure to follow best security practices, failure to plan properly, failure to update variable names, lies, bad tests, stuck in a rut flip flopping between two possible paradigms Get into it, get better at it than your CEO and CTO, save them from the worst of their folly.

And simultaneously start looking for another job because you clearly don’t like them and disagree with their strategy in important ways.

AI assisted coding is the future, but probably not the way they’re doing it. But pain is the best teacher so dive in and feel that pain.
by orbital-decay | 2025-07-07 07:39:28+00:00
>I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magical human-like powers to something that - in my mind - is just MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities.

I am baffled by seriously intelligent people imbuing almost magical powers that can never be replicated to to something that - in my mind - is just a biological robot driven by a SNN with a bunch of hardwired stuff. Let alone attributing "human intelligence" to a single individual, when it's clearly distributed between biological evolution, social processes, and individuals.

>something that - in my mind - is just MatMul with interspersed nonlinearities

Processes in all huge models (not necessarily LLMs) can be described using very different formalisms, just like Newtonian and Lagrangian mechanics describe the same stuff in physics. You can say that an autoregressive model is a stochastic parrot that learned the input distribution, next token predictor, or that it does progressive pathfinding in a hugely multidimensional space, or pattern matching, or implicit planning, or, or, or... All of these definitions are true, but only some are useful to predict their behavior.

Given all that, I see absolutely no problem with anthropomorphizing an LLM to a certain degree, if it makes it easier to convey the meaning, and do not understand the nitpicking. Yeah, it's not an exact copy of a single Homo Sapiens specimen. Who cares.
by erikerikson | 2025-07-07 07:39:58+00:00
What I wrote was a clumsy way to express the thought and particularly to use the term "existential generalization". I was thinking that agriculture doesn't include livestock, which was wrong and you pointed that out (thank you :D). I still object to the headline because "agriculture + farmer = crops" whereas "agriculture + rancher = livestock" they interviewed ranchers in one country and came out with a headline that made an assertion about farmers which seems like generalizing into agriculture and then re-instantiating into a subclass. The latter is valid to do but the generalization is taking finding about a smaller class and making claims about the broader class which is error prone at best. This occurs in a context where I have been reading about the use of machine learning for weed identification, weather prediction, saturation analysis, and a whole host of other purposes in the more crop oriented side of agriculture. That made the headline curious but I felt a bit lied to by it which fueled my original objection.
by edg5000 | 2025-07-07 07:40:29+00:00
Maybe a good way to think about this is that humans like usability/automations because even through we can handle more complicated manual operations, "abstracting away" certain operations helps us free up context. E.g. I like to be able to press F5 to reconfigure, build, run and attach debugger automatically from the IDE. If I had to manually to all this every time it would really clog up my context. So maybe try to make things easier for the AI.

Another example, it was messing up string dictionary keys all the time, even after CLAUDE.md etc. I realised, if it's annoying for the human to get dictionary string keys right (for humans it's error prone, humans prefer constants or propterties that will give instant feedback by the IDE if there is a typo). Ideally Claude would have an MCP which linting/indexing. E.g. if it edits a source file, without building/running it instantly receives errors by the editing tool. And Claude should ideally have some kind of code index in its context in the same way my indexer for Java/C++/TypeScript etc probably has a cached index of all symbols somewhere, allowing instant error detection. Maybe even running a fast language server MCP on each line edit may help claude.

Specifically regarding make -j8, I think an IDE MCP would help, where it should provide the same amount of ergonomy has a GUI IDE provides; e.g. quick shortcuts for common actions such as search, find-replace, build and even debug/set breakpoint, find references. Currently Claude is grepping, which works.

Is there an IDE-MCP somewhere; with language server support? That would be quite something!
by Applejinx | 2025-07-07 07:40:58+00:00
The funny thing is, I have an AU/VST plugin for altering only the exponents not the mantissas of audio samples (simple powers of 2 multiply/divide) called BitShiftGain.

So any time I say that on YouTube, it figures I'm saying another word that's in Apple safety filters under 'reject', so I have to always try to remember to say 'shifting of bits gain' or 'bit… … … shift gain'.

So there's a chain of machine interpretation by which Apple can decide I'm a Bad Man. I guess I'm more comfortable with Apple reaching this conclusion? I'll still try to avoid it though :)
by treetalker | 2025-07-07 07:41:07+00:00
> Smith wrote the paper at the last minute, just before it was due. When asked about the results, he admits, "I don't know what grade, probably made my usual C." Yet, this paper became the backbone of FedEx.

> In 1971, Smith founded the company with $4 million of inheritance and $80 million in loans and equity investments.

Kids nowadays don't appreciate the value of hard work.
by Incipient | 2025-07-07 07:41:29+00:00
>Those widely accepted tokens of value are the result of somebody violently imposing that widespread acceptance,

I get the poke at the US there, but I have to refute this bit. The EU is probably the main example of acceptance through ubiquitousness. Rmb through aggressive economic policy, the yen through (traditionally) stability.

The usd would arguably be through technological superiority at the advent of global financial markets, and their companies offering global services to facilitate trade (via usd).

We'll probably see the rmb replace that gradually/rapidly, again not through violence.
by jdietrich | 2025-07-07 07:41:50+00:00
No, what they're describing is manualized CBT. We have abundant evidence that there is little or no difference in outcomes between therapy delivered by a "real practitioner" and basic CBT delivered by a nurse or social worker with very basic training, or even an app.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23252357/
by PeterStuer | 2025-07-07 07:41:52+00:00
From the study:

" while our approach can detect unexpected lexical changes, it cannot separate different causes behind those changes, like multiple emerging topics or multiple emerging writing style changes. For example, our approach cannot distinguish word frequency increase due to direct LLM usage from word frequency increase due to people adopting LLM-preferred words and borrowing them for their own writing. For spoken language, there is emerging evidence for such influence of LLMs on human language usage (32). However, we hypothesize that this effect is much smaller and much slower. "

Since "unexpected" can be left out as there is no "expected" baseline, we are left with "detected lexical changes, cause unknown" followed by a purely speculative and unproven hypothesis.

That of course does not stop them from claiming: "In conclusion, our work showed that the effect of LLM usage on scientific writing is truly unprecedented".

This is slop. Even if you agree with the suspicion of widespread use of LLMs in Academic writing (I do, and anecdotally suspect even their upper bound is way underestimated) They did not show such an effect at all. They used a projection on a dataset, hypothesized, but did not investigate a cause.

But hey, let not the absence of information restrain us from pushing the agenda: "Our analysis can inform the necessary debate around LLM policies providing a measurement method for LLM usage". In other words, here is what we did not do but you can pretend we did anyway in citing us as if we did because nobody reads anything but the abstract and the conclusion.

As a bonus kicker: "We hope that future work will meticulously delve into tracking LLM usage more accurately and assess which policy changes are crucial to tackle the intricate challenges posed by the rise of LLMs in scientific publishing." I'm sure this sentence would flag this as LLM slop, even according to their own sloppy methodology.
by eesmith | 2025-07-07 07:41:54+00:00
Only þ (thorn) died with the printing of Caxton's Bible using y-, for cost reasons.

The other letters -- ƿ (wynn), æ (ash), and ð (eth) -- went out of use long before movable type printing. https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/the-lost-letters-of-th...
by freetime2 | 2025-07-07 07:42:14+00:00
>The study indicates that Neanderthals, in addition to smashing bones to access the marrow—a behavior shared by their earliest African ancestors—also crushed them into fragments and boiled them to obtain bone grease, a nutrient-rich resource.

I wish the article went into more details about how they boiled the bones. My first thought was that smashing bones and boiling them is not all that impressive. And then I thought about how I would boil bones without a pot to boil them in... and actually that does sound like it would be a challenge and require a lot of collaboration and planning.
by kyry_cz | 2025-07-07 07:42:23+00:00
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We develop large-behavioral models that recognizes returning users by their mouse movements, keystroke timings and sensoric data (accelerometer, gyroscope). We detect cyberthreats (e.g. malware, phishing, scraping) by exploiting browsers/sandboxes of devices. We manage ~PB scale of data and provide realtime scoring in milliseconds driving authentication/authorization flow (2nd factor).

Stack: [python, typescript, rust], [redis, postgresql], [aws, terraform] ...

We are looking for exceptional engineers to build with us and be part of the success:

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We are also looking for other key roles:

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by bayesianbot | 2025-07-07 07:42:24+00:00
Maybe not the best post to ask about this hehe, but what are the good open source LLM clients (and models) for this kind of usage?

Sometimes I feel like I would like to have random talks about stuff I really don't want to or have chance to with my friends, just random stuff, daily events and thoughts, and get a reply. Probably it would lead to nowhere and I'd give it up after few days, but you never know. But I've used extensively LLMs for coding, and feel like this use case would need quite different features (memory, voice conversation, maybe search of previous conversations so I could continue on a tangent we went on an hour or some days ago)
by lrasinen | 2025-07-07 07:42:25+00:00
Do you have any examples? As a Finnish speaker the Swedish "a" sounds the same. "Pappa", "framtiden" etc.

It's "ä" and "e" which have swapped uses, but it's not exactly consistent (e.g. "Järnvägstorget" where first ä is close to the Finnish ä, second ä is closer to e but so is the e at the end)
by nradov | 2025-07-07 07:43:15+00:00
Do or do not, there is no "try". If you know you have to leave home at 7:00 AM to avoid being late then just set an alarm at that time. When it goes off then walk out the door, even if you're in the middle of some other task. Like if you're brewing coffee then just unplug the machine and leave: no coffee for you today. Don't allow yourself the opportunity to get distracted. Simple.
by trchek | 2025-07-07 07:43:16+00:00
Solidly Germanic with an absurd amount of French, down to nearly identical spelling for many common words. I’m not talking about cognates but actually 100% the same spelling and meaning and they’re often not from some recent century but from old French.

I’m sure you have a solid basis for saying this but it’s basically impossible to write many sentences without by accident using French down to the original spelling.

I was going to highlight all the examples I used by accident myself in this post but I gave up because the links were making it too long.

This is why something like Anglish even exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_purism_in_English
by nobodywillobsrv | 2025-07-07 07:43:35+00:00
As someone in the industry, I have many times asked people how regulators actually track margin / levered exposure and it seems like they basically don't.

Any situation where you can make bets on the market that pay off larger than the cost of the market it will lead to manipulation. This is no different than paying off the referee or the star players etc ... The only thing keeping this from happening is the threat of the law really or any adversarial change in incentives. But once a player or collective of players gets big enough, it seems likely this is happening even if it is not coordinated centrally.

It would be interesting if more people started to get interested in this problem.

I have seen defi stuff that literally bakes in the cost of moving price into the smart contract "market" which is interesting too but at the time of reading (a few years ago) I didn't see direct discussion of the boundaries of manipulation incentives in that domain. Would be interested to hear if anyone is deep in that rabbit hole recently.
by jeroenhd | 2025-07-07 07:43:35+00:00
I still remember when "bush hid the facts" went around the news cycle. Entertainment services will absolutely slam and misrepresent any small mistake made by large companies.

I don't think it's as much a problem with safety as it is a problem with AI. We haven't figured out how to remove information from LLMs so when an LLM starts spouting bullshit like "<random name> is a paedophile", companies using AI have no recourse but to rewrite the input/output of their predictive text engines. It's no different than when Microsoft manually blacklisted the function name for the Fast Inverse Square Root that it spat out verbatim, rather than actually removing the code from their LLM.

This isn't 1984 as much as it's companies trying to hide that their software isn't ready for real world use by patching up the mistakes in real time.
by cmenge | 2025-07-07 07:43:38+00:00
I kinda agree with both of you. It might be a required abstraction, but it's a leaky one.

Long before LLMs, I would talk about classes / functions / modules like "it then does this, decides the epsilon is too low, chops it up and adds it to the list".

The difference I guess it was only to a technical crowd and nobody would mistake this for anything it wasn't. Everybody know that "it" didn't "decide" anything.

With AI being so mainstream and the math being much more elusive than a simple if..then I guess it's just too easy to take this simple speaking convention at face value.

EDIT: some clarifications / wording
Conceptualization is all you need
by vayllon | 2025-07-07 07:44:06+00:00
Conceptualization plays a crucial role in the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), as it will enable that super-intelligence to understand and handle abstract information in a manner similar to how humans do, but...

What is a concept from a neuronal point of view?

A concept can be defined as a latent, abstract, and multi-modal representation that integrates sensory information from different sources: sight, hearing, smell, touch, encoded in a hyper-dimensional space, whose structure emerges from the activation pattern of multiple neurons.

This representation is compositional, in the sense that it is formed by hierarchical combinations of simpler representations, and relational, as it is topologically connected to similar or functionally related concepts, depending on the network's training.

Similar to linguistic embedding, the "distance" between concepts in latent space reflects their degree of similarity: the closer they are, the more they share in terms of meaning, structure, or function.

Many concepts are associated with a linguistic label, but this is not strictly necessary; there are many things we cannot name. On the other hand, linguistic labels — words — are themselves concepts that are also encoded in that neural network's latent vector space. It could not be otherwise, since language is processed in the same network.

In other words, our concepts are not purely linguistic. They are based on direct experience: what we see, hear, touch, smell, imagine, or experience in the real world. Language serves as a tool to refer to and share these concepts, but it does not define them by itself. The foundation of conceptual thinking is multi-modal, not merely verbal, and words are just a modality, a meta-modality.

Interestingly, we have studied language in great depth, to the point of creating an entire discipline dedicated to its meaning: semantics. However, we have paid very little attention to the process of conceptualization. In fact, we do not even have a word to name that discipline: we do not have a "conceptmatics" or equivalent. Everything that escapes the linguistic realm — that cannot be easily reduced to words or equations — seems to slip through our fingers like water, difficult to catch, difficult to understand and analyze. It is only with the advent of artificial neural networks that we have begun to understand conceptualization.