MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-13 19:18:48+00:00
I hate to be that guy, but this is (a) little to do with the actual problem at hand in the article, and (b) a dramatic oversimplification of the real challenges with LLMs.

> LLMs don't think. At all. They do next token prediction.

This is very often repeated by non-experts as a way to dismiss the capabilities of LLMs as some kind of a mirage. It would be so convenient if it were true. You have to define what 'think' means; once you do, you will find it more difficult to make such a statement. If you consider 'think' to be developing an internal representation of the query, drawing connections to other related concepts, and then checking your own answer, then there is significant empirical evidence to support high-performing LLMs do the first two, and one can make a good argument that test-time inference does a half-adequate, albeit inefficient, version of the latter. Whether LLMs will achieve human-level efficiency with these three things is another question entirely.

> If they are conditioned on a large data set of people repeating the same seven knock knock jokes over and over and over in some complex pattern (e.g. every third time, in French), what they produced will look like that, and nothing like thinking.

Absolutely, but this has little to do with your claim. If you narrow the data distribution, the model cannot develop appropriate language embeddings to do much of anything. You could even prove this mathematically with high probability statements.

> Failing to recognize this is going to get someone killed, if it hasn't already.

The real problem as in the article is that the LLM failed to intuit context, or to ask a followup. While a doctor would never have made this mistake, the doctor would know the relevant context since the patient came to see them in the first place. If you had a generic knowledgeable human acting as a resource bank that was asked the same question AND requested to provide nothing irrelevant, I can see a similar response being made. To me, the bigger issue is that there are consequences to easy access to esoteric information for the general public, and this would be reflected more in how we perform reinforcement learning to assert LLM behavior.
by doener | 2025-08-13 19:18:50+00:00
Yes, but it‘s not surprisingly high for a 1996 PC game.

"You needed AT LEAST a fast 486, and preferably a pentium, to run this on the PC. Being upset that an 030 isn't supported is ridiculous. Reminds me of the people back in the 90s that complained that SimCity2000 didn‘t run smoothly on their 1200.“

https://old.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/1mp1z3v/29_years_lat...
by geminimir | 2025-08-13 19:18:59+00:00
I built a tiny GitHub Action that fails PRs when LLM output breaks contracts. No live model calls in CI... it runs on recorded fixtures.

What it does:

Deterministic checks: JSON schema, regex, list/set equality, numeric bounds, file diff

Snapshots + regression compare

Cost budget gate

PR comment + HTML report

Try it in a minute: copy the Quick Start, open a PR, see red → fix → green.

Links: Marketplace: https://github.com/marketplace/actions/promptproof-eval Demo repo: https://github.com/geminimir/promptproof-demo-project Sample report: https://geminimir.github.io/promptproof-action/reports/befor...

Looking for blunt feedback... Was onboarding smooth? Anything missing you expected? Is the report clear enough to make this a required check?
by woodruffw | 2025-08-13 19:19:07+00:00
FWIW, I think the full paragraph around that snippet is important context:

> Beyond the product itself, pyx is also an instantiation of our strategy: our tools remain free, open source, and permissively licensed — forever. Nothing changes there. Instead, we'll offer paid, hosted services that represent the "natural next thing you need" when you're already using our tools: the Astral platform.

pyx itself is not a tool, it's a service.
by jcranmer | 2025-08-13 19:19:28+00:00
> The UB if no provenance information is available belief comes from https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/cerberus/clarifying-provenan..., in particular

That's an old document. In particular, it's largely arguing for a PVI provenance model (i.e., integers carry provenance information), whereas the current TS is relying on a PNVI provenance model (i.e., integers do not carry provenance information). https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2577.pdf is the last draft pre-TS-ification (i.e., has all the background information to understand it).

> I'm annoyed that casting an aligned array of bytes to a pointer to a network packet type is forbidden, and that a pointer to float can't be cast to a pointer to a simd vector of float, and that malloc cant be written in C, but perhaps those aren't provenance either.

That's all strict aliasing rules, not pointer provenance rules. (Well, malloc has issues with living in the penumbra of the C object model). The big thing that provenance prevents you from doing is writing memcpy in C (since char access of a pointer counts as exposing the pointer, whereas the PNVI model makes memcpy a non-exposing operation).
Show HN: Gitego – Automatic Git identity switcher
by w108bmg | 2025-08-13 19:19:38+00:00
# gitego: Automatic Git Identity Switcher

I was juggling work and personal GitHub accounts with separate PATs for a long time and constantly forgetting to switch between them. Needed a way to commit to personal and work projects without the mental overhead of managing two Git identities.

My issue:

```

cd ~/work/important-project

git push

# Authentication failed - using personal PAT for work repo

```

Then the dance:

```

git config user.email "work@company.com"

# Update Git credential helper or remember which PAT to use

# Rinse and repeat every time I switch contexts

```

My solution (I'm sure others exist?)

```

# One-time setup

gitego add work --name "John Doe" --email "john@company.com" --pat "ghp_work_token"

gitego add personal --name "John" --email "john.personal@gmail.com" --pat "ghp_personal_token"

gitego auto ~/work/ work

gitego auto ~/personal/ personal

# Now it just works cd ~/work/any-project

git commit -m "fix bug" && git push # Uses work identity + PAT automatically

cd ~/personal/side-project

git commit -m "new feature" && git push # Uses personal identity PAT automatically

```

How It Works

- Uses Git's native `includeIf` for identity switching

- Acts as a Git credential helper for automatic PAT selection

- Stores PATs securely in your OS keychain

- Single Go binary, works on macOS/Windows/Linux

No more context switching overhead. Just cd and commit.

GitHub: https://github.com/bgreenwell/gitego

Install: go install github.com/bgreenwell/gitego@latest

Feedback welcome!

Keep in mind, I built this as a personal tool, making it public in case others have the similar problems and can benefit from the solution!
by visarga | 2025-08-13 19:20:03+00:00
> algorithms just take other people's work, mix it so that any individual training input is unrecognizable and resell it back to them

LLMs are huge and need special hardware to run. Cloud providers underprice even local hosting. Many providers offer free access.

But why are you not talking about what the LLM user brings? They bring a unique task or problem to solve. They guide the model and channel it towards the goal. In the end they take the risk of using anything from the LLM. Context is what they bring, and consequence sink.
by extraisland | 2025-08-13 19:20:28+00:00
Most of the charm of retro-computing is Nostalgia and yearning for the simplicity of older machines.

I own two Amigas. The OS boots pretty quickly and you can start using your computer. Until the invention of NVMEs did I have a PC that would boot as quickly as the Amiga. There are no distractions when using the machine, no forced updates, no stupid notifications. It just works as a computer.

I have a collection of Amiga, PS1, Dreamcast, PS2 and PS3 games. The games are relatively cheap and or free (a lot of games are abandonware or can be pirated without anyone really caring). Unlike a lot of modern titles are actual games. They are fun, pretty much just pop in the disk and play.
by k310 | 2025-08-13 19:20:35+00:00
Well, it looks to me like Microsoft is offering Sunrays,[0] where your client is the "Microsoft App". A Sunray is/was the ultimate "cloud computing" device.

For 10 days, though. No mention in the announcement (From Silliman ) of data migration.

> End users can click to connect securely and be redirected to a full desktop environment with their organization's resources.

Which could be a "big deal"

Lots of connections to be made, securely.

Very seriously though, I led (performed) the deployment for an entire school district of Sunrays, but which were used only via Citrix to run apps on windows servers. (i.e. School Information System, etc) Why Citrix and not vnc? Well, someone else decided that.

Shades of Scott McNealy and his "dial tone".

VirtualBox [1] was acquired by Sun in 2008, so no chance at the time of running the windows software on the sun servers that served the Sunrays.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Ray

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualBox
by notatallshaw | 2025-08-13 19:20:46+00:00
Package names and module names are not coupled to each other. You could have package name like "company-foo" and import it as "foo" or "bar" or anything else.

But you can if you want have a non-flat namespace for imports using PEP 420 – Implicit Namespace Packages, so all your different packages "company-foo", "company-bar", etc. can be installed into the "company" namespace and all just work.

Nothing stops an index from validating that wheels use the same name or namespace as their package names. Sdists with arbitrary backends would not be possible, but you could enforce what backends were allowed for certain users.
by scarmig | 2025-08-13 19:20:58+00:00
When I query ChatGPT:

> Should I replace sodium chloride with sodium bromide?

>> No. Sodium chloride (NaCl) and sodium bromide (NaBr) have different chemical and physiological properties... If your context is culinary or nutritional, do not substitute. If it is industrial or lab-based, match the compound to the intended reaction chemistry. What’s your use case?

Seems pretty solid and clear. I don't doubt that the user managed to confuse himself, but that's kind of silly to hold against ChatGPT. If I ask "how do I safely use coffee," the LLM responds reasonably, and the user interprets the response as saying it's safe to use freshly made hot coffee to give themself an enema, is that really something to hold against the LLM? Do we really want a world where, in response to any query, the LLM creates a long list of every conceivable thing not to do to avoid any legal liability?

There's also the question of base rates: how often do patients dangerously misinterpret human doctors' advice? Because they certainly do sometimes. Is that a fatal flaw in human doctors?
by stahorn | 2025-08-13 19:21:20+00:00
It's like the world turned upside down in the last 20 years. I used to pirate everything as a teenager, and I found it silly that copy right would follow along no matter how anything was encoded. If I XORed copyright material A with open source material B, I would get a strange file C that together with B, I could use to get material A again. Why would it be illegal for me to send anybody B and C, where the strange file C might just as well be thought of as containing the open source material B?!

Now when I've grown up, starting paying for what I want, and seeing the need for some way of content creators to get payed for their work, these AI companies pop up. They encode content into a completely new way and then in some way we should just accept that it's fine this time.

This page was posed here on hacker news a few months ago, and it really shows that this is just what's going on:

https://theaiunderwriter.substack.com/p/an-image-of-an-arche...

Maybe another 10 years and we'll be in the spot when these things are considered illegal again?
by NaOH | 2025-08-13 19:21:26+00:00
So now you're indicating WAR does combine peak and career. That wasn't clear from your earlier comment. Likewise, it's not clear from this comment how you think the framework isn't doing well or what would be better. It's difficult to extrapolate how a measure of performance used to assess about 24,000 players could be improved when just two data points are cited, without detail, as problematic.
by cowmix | 2025-08-13 19:21:33+00:00
I’m not saying everyone should “come to the US.” But I don’t want people avoiding the US because of insane, self-inflicted barriers our own government chooses to put up. I’d rather see top candidates pick Canada, the EU, or even China because they’re getting a genuinely better opportunity — not because the US went off the rails. We’re forfeiting leadership in science and innovation for petty, internal, anti-progress reasons.
by RiverCrochet | 2025-08-13 19:21:46+00:00
I remember the psychic infomercial craze of the early to mid-90's. Think Dionne Warwick's Psychic Friend's Network or the later Miss Cleo "Call Me Now" that aired on informercial spots everywhere in the 90's.

Your comment gave me a nightmare of that returning, but in AI form somehow.
by db48x | 2025-08-13 19:21:53+00:00
No, a hotel manager isn’t going to want your antenna on their roof. From their perspective it’s unnecessary and weird and therefore out of the question.

BT sells internet service, transit, and buried cables. You want to do what the hotel did and buy a buried cable from them, and then buy transit. You’ll need to do like the guy in the video did and rent some space in their colocation facility to put your gateway in. Plug your buried cable into your gateway, plug your gateway into their router, turn on BGP, etc.

They also offer an intermediate service called a “leased line” which is a buried cable plus transit plus they handle all of the networking for you as if you were a consumer. The hotel chain might have gone that route as well, although there are clear advantages to having your own AS. You can figure out exactly what they did if you connect to their guest WiFi and run `traceroute -A`…

Of course your apartment manager (or the owner) might not agree to let you bury your cable on their property. They might even have an exclusivity agreement with the cable company. This could even be the reason why no other ISP is available in your apartment building.
by stillpointlab | 2025-08-13 19:22:23+00:00
One thing I've noticed with all the LLMs that I use (Gemini, GPT, Claude) is a ubiquitous: "You aren't just doing <X> you are doing <Y>"

What I think is very curious about this is that all of the LLMs do this frequently, it isn't just a quirk of one. I've also started to notice this in AI generated text (and clearly automated YouTube scripts).

It's one of those things that once you see it, you can't un-see it.
by ndiddy | 2025-08-13 19:22:25+00:00
Of course they get many times more applicants than they hire. They have 1,200 employees but over 20,000 job postings on LinkedIn. I'm more curious about whether the people they end up hiring are their top choices. Because people need money for things like food and housing, it seems to me like forcing applicants to go through a months-long gauntlet with lengthy written essays, IQ tests, and 8+ interview rounds will filter out most people who are able to get hired anywhere else.
by _wire_ | 2025-08-13 19:23:41+00:00
//A language model hallucinating corresponds to situations in which the model loses track of reality so it’s not able to produce accurate outputs.//

"track of reality"?

The article traffics in the same bullshit as it is calling out.

The conclusion somehow walks by the idea of truth with barely a flinch about the enormity of the term, where in principle the entire scope of the project is meaningless without some stipulations about truth; stipulations which if made would tend to obviate the details of model internal implementation and put focus on the place the models currently store truth: the training data.

So what about the significance of RLHF?! Why does anyone expect truth can be properly arbitrated by human feedback any more so than it was in the OG training sets?

If we switch our concern from language synthesis to images created by diffusion, which according to the underlying machine have the same principles of operation, is anyone asking how "true" AI generated images are? Of course not because the point is meaningless. Images are accepted because they are believable and language is accepted by the same criteria.

If we generalize the idea of human feedback to the operation and profit expectations of the social media industry, a starkly obvious factor for performance sparkles brightly before us: the industry will relentlessly track towards whatever garners attention and truth can go to hell.
by gnabgib | 2025-08-13 19:23:42+00:00
Post from the OP on HN (27 points, 18 hours ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44883634

Also partially discussed in a bad-link submission (48 points, 18 hours ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44883561
by gnabgib | 2025-08-13 19:23:54+00:00
Post from the OP on HN (27 points, 18 hours ago, 3 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44883634

Also partially discussed in a bad-link submission (48 points, 18 hours ago, 6 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44883561
by maxmartinezruts | 2025-08-13 19:24:22+00:00
Search engines and answer engines are quickly approaching a point of functional perfection. Whether it’s Google, Perplexity, ChatGPT, or others, they can already find the “right” answer to most queries in seconds. The bottleneck is no longer finding information—it’s how that information is delivered.

The next competitive edge won’t be about a better algorithm or a bigger index. It’ll be about speed, clarity, and aesthetic presentation. Imagine search results where:

You instantly get the key takeaways in a clean visual grid.

Data-heavy queries automatically generate interactive charts or maps.

Long-form answers are chunked into scannable visual blocks.

In other words, instead of scrolling through text-heavy results, you’re navigating a beautiful, intuitive interface where the answer feels obvious the moment you see it.

This shift feels inevitable: when the “backend” intelligence plateaus, the “frontend” experience becomes the differentiator. Whoever nails visual-first search could pull ahead of even the most established players—because humans remember how information felt just as much as what it was.

I’m curious:

What examples have you seen of this already?

Is this the natural next step in the search evolution, or just another UI fad?
by EGreg | 2025-08-13 19:24:55+00:00
Yeah, I shouldn't have used ChatGPT to create the example I posted. It still messes up (since it wasn't trained on the language at all, of course). I will fix up the examples, but it should be very obvious and clear, never "weird"... see the spec in the link.

Basically, -R is the default anyway everywhere. +R means "remote" or "retained", i.e. the variable doesn't live on the stack. By default, parameters passed to functions are -R and can only be assigned to other -R variables. If you try to assign a -R to a +R variable or its property, you have to do .c() to mark it to be potentially copied to the heap. This is to explicitly prevent use-after-free errors or dangling pointers.

Basically, +M on a parameter to a function means it can be modified, it becomes passed by reference. +M with or without +R is just modifying the reference in-place, but without +R you can't assign it to any +R variable or its property without calling .c() on it. The c() marks it as copy-on-write which makes a copy if its destructor runs and it still has references to it. If it only has one reference to it, then obviously we avoid making a copy on write.

In functions, -M is the default for parameters, but in classes, +M is the default for properties (mutable) and you have to mark it -M explicitly (like const keyword).

Also +N means something can be nullable, which is another set of explicit optimizations (dereferencing a variable without a guard gives a compile-time error if it's nullable).

A class is basically a struct by default, i.e. all properties are local (-R is implicit) but if you mark some properties +R then they become pointers to other areas in memory. You might want to do this if e.g. multiple objects have properties that reference the same objects.

Also, unlike Rust which has only one writer, we have the idea of transparent proxy objects, which can use various MVCC strategies (e.g. caching an old value) to avoid concurrent race conditions. In this way it is even designed to support decentralized code, across multiple machines.

The language is designed to catch a wide set of mistakes (typing = when you meant ==, etc.) and let you inspect retaining graphs for memory leaks and much more. In short, it is supposed to be easier to grok than Rust, and in some cases even safer, without needing borrow checkers etc.
by octaane | 2025-08-13 19:25:09+00:00
I can explain. BCG infects the actual epithelial cancer cells inside the bladder, triggering Th-1 response (production and release of cytokines by activated CD4 T cells).

The cytokines induce an inflammatory response, which I turn activates other immune system cells such as CD4 and CD8, NK cells and macrophages.

The immune cells then attack the bladder cancer cells, hopefully destroying them, thus "fighting cancer".

Source: Li J et al, NPJ Vaccines. 2021;6:14.
by ac2u | 2025-08-13 19:25:51+00:00
I wish I could find the article, but there is a clinic somewhere that ran trials where they deliberately wouldn’t treat the cancer too aggressively. Instead they experimented with treatment frequency but with control being the aim instead of elimination.

The theory being that they could keep it at bay indefinitely and lower the chance of selection pressure kicking in. The thought behind their approach is that they wanted their patients to die of something different than their cancer.
by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 | 2025-08-13 19:25:57+00:00
What it does remind me of is the story of a person, who were following GPS instructions religiously[1]. The clickbait is a thing, but part of it may be some level of societal concern that a good chunk of society will listen if you tell it what to do.

Part of me rationalizes it as 'not exactly a discovery', which on its own was not a big issue before we were as connected as we, apparently, are ( even if I would argue that the connection is very ephemeral in nature ). I am still personally working through it, but at which point is the individual actually responsible?

I am not saying this lightly. I am not super pro-corporate, but the other end of this rope is not exactly fun times either. Where is the balance?

[1]https://theweek.com/articles/464674/8-drivers-who-blindly-fo...
by TheGoodBarn | 2025-08-13 19:26:00+00:00
I splurged on a iDraw H SE - A3/A2 earlier this year and have been coding / making birthday cards for friends and family all summer.

I feel like I get asked a lot the same questions and I think this article describes it best. Like yes I could have just upgraded to a nicer printer, but there is something fun about the process of getting an artwork plotted that makes it fun for me.

I need to upload some of my plots to share.

---

On a similar note for others who want to get into this, there was a thread awhile back on "What is the 90% activity in your favorite hobby", for example sanding taking 90% of the time for woodworking. For pen plotting the 90-95% is the art side. Taking images, converting them into g-code either via SVG or other processes, or writing code to make generative art, that is the 90%.

At the end of the day the pen plotting itself at the surface level is a projection of the effort taken to generate the art. Where it gets really exciting is the capabilities and unique aspect of the medium (like touching on white ink or watercolor) that create truly unique ways of presenting the art.

--

Some related subreddits:

https://www.reddit.com/r/PlotterArt/

https://www.reddit.com/r/PenPlotters/