MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ethin | 2025-08-13 12:54:02+00:00
It does this to me too. I have to add instructions like "Do not hesitate to push back or challenge me. Be cold, logical, direct, and engage in debate with me." to actually get it to act like something I'd want to interact with. I know that in most cases my instinct is probably correct, but I'd prefer if something that is supposedly superhuman and infinitely smarter than me (as the AI pumpers like to claim) would, you know, actually call me out when I say something dumb, or make incorrect assumptions? Instead of flattering me and making me "think" I'm right when I might be completely wrong?

Honestly I feel like it is this exact behavior from LLMs which have caused cybersecurity to go out the window. People get flattered and glazed wayyyy too much about their ideas because they talk to an LLM about it and the LLM doesn't go "Uh, no, dumbass, doing it this way would be a horrifically bad idea! And this is why!" Like, I get the assumption that the user is usually correct. But even if the LLM ends up spewing bullshit when debating me, it at least gives me other avenues to approach the problem that I might've not thought of when thinking about it myself.
by cubefox | 2025-08-13 12:54:12+00:00
I recently had Gemini disagree with me on a point about philosophy of language and logic, but it phrased the disagreement very politely, by first listing all the related points in which it agreed, and things like that.

So it seems that LLM "sycophancy" isn't necessarily about dishonest agreement, but possibly about being very polite. Which doesn't need to involve dishonesty. So LLM companies should, in principle, be able to make their models both subjectively "agreeable" and honest.
by Timshel | 2025-08-13 12:54:27+00:00
I mean in term of user facing change. Vertical tabs is still presented as an innovation ...

Tabs groups are barely explored, and let's not dream too much of isolation Firefox containers are probably over ten years old and still almost unused :(.

More recently Arc and Zen are trying to innovate (I’m not using either), but they probably have almost no chance as long Chrome stay as dominant and financed by ad tracking.

Using Firefox on linux I’m facing more and more capchas and broken or innacessible websites. Ladybird is making great progress but unless they start posing as chrome they’ll face the same challenges :(.

Edit: > churning out more or less useful Web API implementations

Probably part of the problem since it makes maintaining a browser engine absurdly expensive and out of reach for almost everyone ...
by childintime | 2025-08-13 12:54:38+00:00
Bezier curves in painting software never gave me the results I wanted. And I mean never. I sincerely wonder who succeeds at using them?

From these graphs I see that I always wanted the simple Quadratic version, and would use 2 of them in sequence to approximate a Cubic version. That would be so much easier. But if the software could allow me to adjust the midpoint, and maintain a smooth transition, that would be perfect. I think.

So I basically wish for a different interface, one that has more thought put into it. Now it's a "give access to the parameters, and be done with it" kind. As if novices don't have the need for a nice smooth curve between known points.
by 334f905d22bc19 | 2025-08-13 12:54:58+00:00
Another ADHD person here and I think my vision is almost the same as the creators. My goal is to build a fully self-hosted risc-v computer from scratch.

It now took me 3 iterations and 3 years to get a somehow working risc-v CPU written in VHDL, that I am mostly satisfied with. It's a crazy hard struggle (finally pipelined though!). Everything breaks, I constantly get headaches and almost want to quit, but somehow I can keep on pushing this project. It helps me a lot.

Almost nothing works, things break all the time, it doesn't even look cool. But somehow it's satisfying that I can type words with a PS/2 keyboard on a VGA screen getting processed by my own RISC-V CPU (running Rust btw lol. I ditched that by now though, the struggle was too big). See here: https://i.imgur.com/PtKeAYt.mp4

I have no idea how far I can make it, maybe not fully self-hosted, but a small OS should be doable. I have interrupts and timers working, so I should have everything I need.

The downside is, I am way worse than OP and have no documentation at all. I should do that, but that's where the motivation is missing.

Edit: I type so slow in the video because I did poll the scancodes (too slow) and had to think which characters not to press, because i dont accept all yet and was scared that it breaks
by NoGravitas | 2025-08-13 12:56:13+00:00
But that's the great thing about Longtermism. As long as a catastrophe is not going to lead to human extinction or otherwise specifically prevent the Singularity, it's not an X-Risk that you need to be concerned about. So AI alignment is an X-Risk we need to work on, but global warming isn't, so we can keep burning as much fossil fuel as we want. In fact, we need to burn more of them in order to produce the Singularity. The misery of a few billion present/near-future people doesn't matter compared to the happiness of sextillions of future post-humans.
by nromiun | 2025-08-13 12:57:23+00:00
Another big problem I see with LLMs is that it can't make precise adjustments to your answer. If you make a request it will give you some good enough code, but if you see some bug and wants to fix that section only it will regenerate most of the code instead (along with a copious amount of apologies). And the new code will have new problems of their own. So you are back to square one.

For the record I have had this same experience with ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude. Most of the time I had to give up and write from scratch.
by bluefirebrand | 2025-08-13 12:57:26+00:00
I find this really sad actually

Is it really so difficult to imagine how people will use (or misuse) tools you build? Are HNers or tech people in general just very idealistic and naive?

Maybe I'm the problem though. Maybe I'm a bad person that is always imagining how many bad ways I would abuse any kind of system or power that I can, even though I don't have any actual intention to actually abuse systems
by mft_ | 2025-08-13 12:58:13+00:00
I'm really struggling to understand what you're trying to communicate here; I'm even wondering if you're an LLM set up to troll, due to the weird language and confusing non-sequiturs.

> The point is that knowledge/language can't work reliably unless it's grounded in something outside of itself.

Just, what? Knowledge is facts, somehow held within a system allowing recall and usage of those facts. Knowledge doesn't have a 'self', and I'm totally not understanding how pure knowledge as a concept or medium needs "grounding"?

Being charitable, it sounds more like you're trying to describe "wisdom" - which might be considered as a combination of knowledge, lived experience, and good judgement? Yes, this is valuable in applying knowledge more usefully, but has nothing to do with the other bodily systems which interact with the brain, which is where you started?

> The fundamental foundation of science and engineering is reliability.

> If you start saying reliability doesn't matter, you're not doing science and engineering any more.

No-one mentioned reliability - not you in your original post, or me in my reply. We were discussing whether the various (unconscious) systems which link to the brain in the human body (like the gut:brain axis) might influence its knowledge/language/interpretation abilities.
by catigula | 2025-08-13 12:59:05+00:00
1. Gemini is better at this. It will predicate any follow-up question you pose to it with a paragraph about how amazing and insightful you are. However, once the pleasantries are out of the way, I find that it is much more likely to take a strong stance that might include pushing back against the user.

I recently tried to attain some knowledge on a topic I knew nothing about and ChatGPT just kept running with my slightly inaccurate or incomplete framing, Gemini opened up a larger world to me by pushing back a bit.

2. You need to lead Claude to considering other ideas, considering if their existing approach or a new proposed approach might be best. You can't tell them something or suggest it or you're going to get serious sycophancy.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-13 13:00:02+00:00
Also for monetizing AI Search.

Google has already seen most users [0] directly use AI search instead of clicking into a website.

It is fairly straightforward for an organization to start pushing recommended sites from an AI-driven search, and with even less pushback as most users simply assume the AI search is always true [0].

This also would mean Perplexity could differentiate from OpenAI or Anthropic as a business by being able to build a strong B2C play whereas the former have concentrated on Enterprise B2B.

[0] - https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/07/22/google-us...
by jdsnape | 2025-08-13 13:00:06+00:00
I think it's probably from "I'm Sorry, I Haven't a Clue". I think the game was Film Club, there they have to suggest films that would appeal to a certain demographic. The demographic was "Cheese Makers", and the answers were "Cheeses of Nazareth", then others like "Fromage to Eternity", "The Rock Fort" etc.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/I%27m_Sorry_I_Haven%27t_a_Clue
by nojs | 2025-08-13 13:00:14+00:00
I'm starting to think this is a deeper problem with LLMs that will be hard to solve with stylistic changes.

If you ask it to never say "you're absolutely right" and always challenge, then it will dutifully obey, and always challenge - even when you are, in fact, right. What you really want is "challenge me when I'm wrong, and tell me I'm right if I am" - which seems to be a lot harder.

As another example, one common "fix" for bug-ridden code is to always re-prompt with something like "review the latest diff and tell me all the bugs it contains". In a similar way, if the code does contain bugs, this will often find them. But if it doesn't contain bugs, it will find some anyway, and break things. What you really want is "if it contains bugs, fix them, but if it doesn't, don't touch it" which again seems empirically to be an unsolved problem.

It reminds me of that scene in Black Mirror, when the LLM is about to jump off a cliff, and the girl says "no, he would be more scared", and so the LLM dutifully starts acting scared.
by rsynnott | 2025-08-13 13:00:25+00:00
> We are building nuclear power plants

Who is? There'll be about 10 nuclear reactor construction starts this year, largely either replacing end-of-life reactors, or in China (which had a well-established nuclear build-out prior to AI stuff). Beyond media hype, there's little reason to think that the AI bubble is actually leading to nuclear reactors being built anywhere.
by codebastard | 2025-08-13 13:00:29+00:00
I my opinion the author refers to a LLMs inability to create a inner world, a world model.

That means it does not build a mirror of a system based on its interactions.

It just outputs fragments of world models it was build one and tries to give you a string of fragments that should match to the fragment of your world model that you provided through some input method.

It can not abstract the code base fragments you share it can not extend them with details using the model of the whole project.
by izacus | 2025-08-13 13:00:51+00:00
It doesn't really change that the F-35 as an airframe is simply better across the board even if we assume equal avionics, weapons and sensors. There's just so much space in the objectively tiny F-16 for computers and there's just so much you can do with it when it comes to low radar visibility without making it something else.

Why buy a thing that's already obsolete?

(F-15s aren't really for sale or an option for most nations buying F-35.)
by globalnode | 2025-08-13 13:00:53+00:00
At least you don't live in australia, where the govt invested in a national broadband network so every aussie could have affordable and fast internet. Guess what we have. A broken cesspool of providers where its going to cost you in excess of $1K p/a to keep a connection to the internet going. Well done straya. Its the same with anything where theres the potential to fleece consumers.
by JCM9 | 2025-08-13 13:01:15+00:00
This isn’t exactly projecting an image of solid leadership and thinking from Perplexity.

#32 on the list of “signs your company is in a bubble and better buckle up” is companies that lack solid business fundamentals themselves start offering to buy other companies, acting like somehow they’re going to fix them. Clean up your own house dudes.
by CyberDildonics | 2025-08-13 13:01:29+00:00
No one said they were and that isn't the point (and you didn't answer the question). When destructors run isn't a mystery it's deterministic and you know resources need to be freed so you know what it is going to do.

Hidden functions aren't a big deal in practice. You have functions calling other functions in C all the time and you have to know what they are doing under the hood, same with data structures and their operators.
by deepsquirrelnet | 2025-08-13 13:01:34+00:00
For some different perspective, try my model EMOTRON[1] with EMOTION: disagreeable. It is very hard to get anything done with it. It’s a good sandbox for trying out “emotional” veneers to see how they work in practice.

“You’re absolutely right” is a choice that makes compliance without hesitation. But also saddles it with other flaws.

[1]https://huggingface.co/dleemiller/EMOTRON-3B
by rsynnott | 2025-08-13 13:01:53+00:00
> We are likely in for the biggest market crash in history.

This seems unlikely, because if and when the bottom falls out, it seems implausible that it will be the sort of systemic shock that the financial crisis was, much less the Great Depression. Lots of people would lose lots of money, but you wouldn't expect the same degree of contagion.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-13 13:02:01+00:00
Claude often confidently makes mistakes or asserts false things about a code base. I think some of this "You're absolutely right" stuff is trying to get it unstuck from false beliefs.

By starting the utterance with "You're absolutely right!", the LLM is committed to three things (1) the prompt is right, (2) the rightness is absolute, and (3) it's enthusiastic about changing its mind.

Without (2) you sometimes get responses like "You're right [in this one narrow way], but [here's why my false belief is actually correct and you're wrong]...".

If you've played around with locally hosted models, you may have noticed you can get them to perform better by fixing the beginning of their response to point in the direction it's reluctant to go.
by abrugsch | 2025-08-13 13:02:38+00:00
My personal experience with a modern microwave (they mostly seem to be the same design internally, coming from the same chassis with the same electronics just a different button panel) was that the internal light bulb blowing generated a surge (it was a mains voltage bulb) that wasn't fused so the next nearest thing in the mains circuit was a trace on the motherboard that vaporized.

There is no way of easily changing this bulb (inside the main casing with no access panel for the bulb) so for want of a single in-line fuse, the entire microwave was rendered scrap[0] by the lifetime of a light bulb.

[0] - Except for the fact that I care not for electrical safety "DO NOT OPEN" warnings of doom due to being actually competent with handling high voltage equipment and being able to do a board level repair on the burned out trace without touching the very large capacitors associated with the very high voltage side controlling the magnetron...
by aleph_minus_one | 2025-08-13 13:02:54+00:00
> Yet every other post here and there are about "bubble this", "winter that", "plateauing this", "wall that"...

> Are we in the denial stage, or bargaining stage? Can't quite tell...

I can tell quite clearly that even assuming that the models are not rather "fine-tuned" to win these competitions, these achievements neither transfer to the kind of coding that I do at work, nor to the one that I do privately at night.

At work, a lot of what needs to be done is

1. asking people who are knowledgeable about the business logic why things were implemented this way (there often exist good reasons, which nevertheless are often quite subtle).

2. If some new requirements comes up, think deeply into how these new requirements fit into the huge legacy codebase (I am allowed to change things here as necessary (which is an enormous concession that is uncommon in this industry), but my code changes should really never ever cause the software to produce wrong results or break business-critical workflows, because such failures can cost my employer quite some money, or increase the workload of already overworked colleagues (they will then legitimately hate me :-( ) who in specific months have to work under very tight deadlines. What is a "business-critical workflow" here that should better never be broken? The answer requires understanding the very demanding users over many, many years (believe me: it is really subtle)).

I cannot imagine how AIs could help with this.

Privately, I tend to write very experimental code for which one can very likely not find similar code on the internet. Think into the direction of turning some deep scientific results into more "mainstream" code or turning my avant-garde thoughts about some deep problems into code so that one can do experiments to see whether my ideas actually work.

Again something where AIs can barely help.
by porridgeraisin | 2025-08-13 13:03:11+00:00
I had a small bash pipeline for doing this until now.

ffmpeg -f pulse -i "$(pactl get-default-source)" -t 5 -f wav -ar 16000 -ac 1 -c:a pcm_s16le - \ | ./main - \ | head -2 \ | tail -1 \ | cut -d] -f2 \ | awk '{$1=$1};1'

The reading from mic part (-f pulse, pactl...) is linux-specific rest of it should be cross platform. The `main` executable is the whisper.cpp executable (see whisper.cpp github readme, it's just the output of `make base.en` from that).

Edit: -t 5 controls recording duration.

Oh and add 2>/dev/null to silence the debug output. I copied this from a pipe that further sends it into an LLM that then looks at the meaning and turns it into a variety of structured data (reminders, todo items, etc) which I then....
Show HN: hink - Link Shortener for Hackers
by ccbikai | 2025-08-13 13:03:56+00:00
The principle is to use the hash of a Git empty commit as the unique identifier for a short link, storing the original long link in the commit message. When the short link is accessed, the system retrieves the long link by requesting the corresponding .patch file from GitHub and performs a redirect. Combined with the analytics dashboard of a WAF (Web Application Firewall), this creates a link shortening service with access statistics.

Currently, this solution has been tested and works on the following platforms:

Cloudflare Workers/Snippets + Cloudflare WAF (Pro) Tencent EdgeOne (Free) Alibaba Cloud ESA (Free)
by ebiester | 2025-08-13 13:04:50+00:00
And you’re not trans. And you don’t perform drag. And you don’t go to an event with a lot of gay people. And you don’t get mistaken for someone because ai isn’t perfect. (Especially if your race doesn’t have many people in the dataset.)

But the people that don’t have anything to fear don’t see anything wrong with “inconveniencing” these groups.
by alephnerd | 2025-08-13 13:05:04+00:00
I use FF as well and it's extremely non-performant on MacOS.

It quickly eats up much of the power usage and a number of websites (especially MS Office/365 related sites) don't render or work correctly.

The former is a FF issue, but the latter is most likely a website to website issue, as most web devs tend to optimize for the Chromium experience.
by Nekit1234007 | 2025-08-13 13:05:07+00:00
“Syncthing version 1.x will soon be replaced by Syncthing version 2.x. Version 2 brings a new database format and various cleanups, but remains protocol compatible with Syncthing 1.”

https://github.com/syncthing/syncthing/releases/tag/v1.30.0
by pjmlp | 2025-08-13 13:05:23+00:00
They were going into all directions, another thing Amiga was doing was going into an Inferno/Android kind of OS architecture (bytecode userland with JIT/AOT), with Amiga DE from Tao Group.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/a-history-of-the-ami...

https://sites.google.com/site/dicknewsite/home/computing/byt...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9806607
by Aurornis | 2025-08-13 13:05:28+00:00
> Versus, if it just gave a curt and unfriendly answer, most people (esp. Americans)

I don’t see this as an American thing. It’s an extension of the current Product Management trend to give software quirky and friendly personality.

You can see the trend in more than LLM output. It’s in their desktop app that has “Good Morning” and other prominent greetings. Claude Code has quirky status output like “Bamboozling” and “Noodling”.

It’s a theme throughout their product design choices. I’ve worked with enough trend-following product managers to recognize this trend toward infusing express personality into software to recognize it.

For what it’s worth, the Americans I know don’t find it as cute or lovable as intended. It feels fake and like an attempt to play at emotions.
by gryn | 2025-08-13 13:06:00+00:00
as a long time user of firefox (also around 20years). it still has many pain points especially if you're a tab hoarder.

try closing a window with 400 mid to heavy tabs and see how long it takes, you can select the tabs individually and they will close way faster. (even on the best PC you can find)

this is niche but I wish there was a watered down /minimalist version that dropped, bookmarks, history, sqlite (I know HN likes sqlite a lot, but in this context chromes usage of levelDB beats it by a lot but you lose the advantage of running SQL queries directly to the file), basically everything besides extensions, containers, profiles.

- can't control it from the command line, only open urls and can't have them open in a specific container because the implementation is this weird mix of internal browser code + extension. (tools like brotab are limited, wish I could have a better flexibility to integrate into my i3/sway workflow, with things like the ability to merge all windows in a workspace into a single one)

- you can't run separate profiles on separate processes, so having a different network namespace for each profile is a pain (my use case, each profile is routed through a different VPN).

there are many mores minor grievances I forgot with time, but I still wouldn't go back to chrome.
by johnecheck | 2025-08-13 13:06:04+00:00
Ah, unfortunate. I wasn't expecting the 3d stuff, but web is the most important platform to me. It's just the most accessible distribution platform. Users won't blink at clicking a link and loading a page, but might balk if you ask them to install an app.

Web is also why bundle size matters to me. As many apps have made clear, you can succeed with a stupidly large bundle. No so with a long initial page load.

If you supported web with those small bundles, I'd be very interested. As it stands, I wish you the best of luck.
by Ruphin | 2025-08-13 13:06:10+00:00
There is a simple intuitive explanation for how an "infinite" game is possible:

We can define two different sequences of three characters that start with 0 and end with 1: 001 and 011. Because they each start and end with a different character, we can never create a series of three characters by chaining two of these sequences.

Now we can go one step deeper and encode the "001" sequence as 0, and the "011" sequence as 1. We can generate our 001 and 011 pattern again, but with our encoded versions of 0 and 1, giving us these sequences: 001001011 and 001011011. These sequences again have the same characteristics, they start and end with different sub-sequences (001 and 011) so they can be chained without creating a series of three sub-sequences.

We can now use these larger sequences and encode these as 0 and 1, and so forth ad infinitum.