MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by FinnLobsien | 2025-08-22 12:45:35+00:00
That's true of course. But I also think for practical arguments like this, we don't need exact science.

There's a good theory why moderate drinking is still unhealthy (self-exclusion of non-drinkers). There's no proven theory as to why moderate drinking should somehow increase health.

So while it's not perfect science, for the practical purpose of making life decisions, that's enough for me.
by ath3nd | 2025-08-22 12:46:00+00:00
> Copium is one hell of a drug.

What is the word for creating an account 12 days ago and exclusively defending the LLMs because they can't defend themselves?

> Writing a simple short story

Ah, allow me to introduce you to the Infinite Monkey theorem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

In the case of LLMs it's just the monkey's hand is artificially guided by all the peanut-guided trainings it was trained on but it still didn't use a single ounce of thought or intelligence. Sorry that you get impressed by simple tricks and confuse them for magic.
by ColinEberhardt | 2025-08-22 12:46:05+00:00
I agree with the overall sentiment here, having written something similar recently:

“LLMs don’t know what they don’t know” https://blog.scottlogic.com/2025/03/06/llms-dont-know-what-t...

But I wouldn’t say it is the only problem with this technology! Rather, it is a subtle issue that most users don’t understand
by projektfu | 2025-08-22 12:46:11+00:00
The article buries the lede by waiting until the very end to talk about solutions like having the LLM write DSL code. Presumably if you feed an LLM your orders table and a question about it, you'll get an answer that you can't trust. But if you ask it to write some SQL or similar thing based on your database to get the answer and run it, you can have more confidence.
by johncolanduoni | 2025-08-22 12:46:20+00:00
It’s annoying but possible to do this correctly and not have the API be too bad. The “happy path” of a clean success or error is fine if you accept that buffers can’t just be simple &[u8] slices. Cancellation can be handled safely with something like the following API contract:

Have your function signature be async fn read(buffer: &mut Vec<u8>) -> Result<…>’ (you can use something more convenient like ‘&mut BytesMut’ too). If you run the future to completion (success or failure), the argument holds the same buffer passed in, with data filled in appropriately on success. If you cancel/drop the future, the buffer may point at an empty allocation instead (this is usually not an annoying constraint for most IO flows, and footgun potential is low).

The way this works is that your library “takes” the underlying allocation before starting the operation out of the variable, replacing it with the default unallocated ‘Vec<u8>’. Once the buffer is no longer used by the IO system, it puts it back before returning. If you cancel, it manages the buffer in the background to release it when safe and the unallocated buffer is left in the passed variable.
by paul7986 | 2025-08-22 12:46:25+00:00
And being overHyped with the doom and gloom of it's affects on society.

chatGPT (5) is not there especially in replacing my field and skills: graphic, web design and web development. The first 2 there it spits out solid creations per your prompt request yet can not edit it's creations just creates new ones lol. So it's just another tool in my arsenal not a replacement to me.

Such Makes me wonder how it generates the logos and website designs ... is it all just hocus pocus.. the Wizard of OZ?
by ajsnigrutin | 2025-08-22 12:46:40+00:00
But that's exactly why you need the 70% (example number).

The current situation is, that you have pensoners, SAHM, racists and others bothering with HOA and then bothering the neighbors. The HOA board might be full of them, or consist only of them, but they don't make up the (eg.) 70% of total inhabitants of whatever neighborhood (except maybe in some extreme cases).

To get such a majority, even "the others" would have to be bothered by <something> so much, that they would be willing to go out and vote (voting can be done in a way that even people with two jobs can do it, especially if vote secrecy is not required). If some Karen is bothered by a slighly brownish lawn during a draught, most people wouldn't bother and getting 70% of them to vote would be impossible. If it was a serious issue, then people would bother more.
by tux3 | 2025-08-22 12:47:13+00:00
The author is showing the result of s==nil and i==nil, which are checks that you would have to do almost everywhere (the so called "billion dollar mistake")

It's not about Printf. It's about how these two different kind of nil values sometimes compare equal to nil, sometimes compare equal to each other, and sometimes not

Yes there is a real internal difference between the two that you can print. But that is the point the author is making.
by traceroute66 | 2025-08-22 12:47:26+00:00
> is their willingness to correct themselves when asked

Except they don't correct themselves when asked.

I'm sure we've all been there, many, many, many,many,many times ....

- User: "This is wrong because X" - AI: "You're absolutely right ! Here's a production-ready fixed answer" - User: "No, that's wrong because Y" - AI: "I apologise for frustrating you ! Here's a robust answer that works" - User: "You idiot, you just put X back in there" - and so continues the vicious circle....
by toolslive | 2025-08-22 12:47:40+00:00
IMNSHO: Yes.

It's a sign of the design quality of a programming language when 2 arbitrary features A and B of that language can be combined and the combination will not explode in your face. In python and C++ (and plenty of other languages) you constantly have the risk that 2 features don't combine. Both python and C++ are full of examples where you will learn the hard way: "ah yes, this doesn't work." Or "wow, this is really unexpected".
by glenstein | 2025-08-22 12:47:49+00:00
>If doing it in space is not allowed, then you have to allow machines that take advantage of terrestrial conditions such as drawing energy from ambient sources.

Well yeah, that's (2), not (1), so no one's disallowing those.

Edit: And although it's kind of moot, I'm not sure what the relationship is between space and ambient draw such that disallowing one would necessitate allowing the other.
by buyucu | 2025-08-22 12:48:09+00:00
We're 1-2 years away from putting the entire internet behind Cloudflare, and Anubis is what upsets you? I really don't get these people. Seeing an anime catgirl for 1-2 seconds won't kill you. It might save the internet though.

The principle behind Anubis is very simple: it forces every visitor to brute force a math problem. This cost is negligible if you're running it on your computer or phone. However, if you are running thousands of crawlers in parallel, the cost adds up. Anubis basically makes it expensive to crawl the internet.

It's not perfect, but much much better than putting everything behind Cloudflare.
by snowwrestler | 2025-08-22 12:48:09+00:00
On both Twitter and Bluesky, my best results at feed building have come from finding one person I find valuable, then looking at and following people they interact with and follow. A brief look at bios and recent posts helps. Then repeating this for additional interesting people.

I am fast to follow but also fast to unfollow if a person turns out to be a dud. An example of a dud is a person who is a cybersecurity expert but almost all their posts were about their travel: which hotels treated them well, complaints about flights, etc.

Bluesky also has a notion of lists, which folks seem to use. For example someone curates a list of people active in local politics and it’s a quick way for me to plug into what local activists and politicians are talking about. Again, I found it via one person I found interesting.
by 7174n6 | 2025-08-22 12:48:19+00:00
This is a huge problem in Pennsylvania also, but most of the municipalities have abdicated significant maintenance responsibilities to HOAs. They refuse to take over roads, retention ponds, and common land areas requiring the HOA to cover maintenance. Snow removal from "public" roads and landscaping of "common areas" is a significant cost for HOAs. If the municipalitiies are forced to take these dutues over it's going to be a huge hit to their budgets. I'd think this would be a hard sell to most politicians in PA.
by stetrain | 2025-08-22 12:48:26+00:00
Yes, the quick to correct itself isn't really useful. I would not like a human assistant/intern/pair programmer who when asked how to do X said:

> To accomplish X you can just use Y!

But Y isn't applicable in this scenario.

> Oh, you're absolutely right! Instead of Y you can do Z.

Are you sure? I don't think Z accomplishes X.

> On second thought you're absolutely correct. Y or Z will clearly not accomplish X, but let's try Q....
by terminalbraid | 2025-08-22 12:48:31+00:00
If you're saying someone can't credibly criticize a language without having designed a language themselves, I'll ask that you present your body of work of programming language criticisms so I know if you have "produced something better" in the programming language criticism space.

Of course, by your reasoning this also means you yourself have designed a language.

I'll leave out repeating your colorful language if you haven't done any of these things.
by CharlieDigital | 2025-08-22 12:49:38+00:00
I think you have a point with the types of resources, but in my experience, its also not hard to separate the wheat from the chaff with pretty simple heuristics (though that is likely very different now with AI and cheating!).

"Modern C#" (if we can differentiate that) has a lot of nice amenities for modeling like immutable `record` types and named tuples. I think where EF really shines is that it allows you to model the domain with persistence easily and then use DTOs purely as projections (which is how I use DTOs) into views (e.g. REST API endpoints).

I can't say for the broader ecosystem, but at least in my own use cases, EFC is primarily used for write scenarios and some basic read scenarios. But in almost all of my projects, I end up using CQRS with Dapper on the read side for more complex queries. So I don't think that it's people avoiding SQL; rather it's teams focused on productivity first.

WRT to Blazor, I would not recommend it in place of JS except for internal tooling (tried it at one startup and switched to Vue + Vite). But to be fair, modern FE development in JS is an absolute cluster of complexity.
by dgfitz | 2025-08-22 12:49:49+00:00
s/confidently//

Because “ai” is fallible, right now it is at best a very powerful search engine that can also muck around in (mostly JavaScript) codebases. It also makes mistakes in code, adds cruft, and gives incorrect responses to “research-type” questions. It can usually point you in the right direction, which is cool, but Google was able to do that before its enshittification.

s/AI/LLMs

The part where people call it AI is one of the greatest marketing tricks of the 2020s.
by benreesman | 2025-08-22 12:49:53+00:00
I agree with you that binary distribution is a perfectly reasonable adjunct to source distribution and sometimes even the more sensible one (toolchain size, etc).

In this instance the build is way nastier than building the NVIDIA toolchain (which Nix can do with a single line of configuration in most cases), and the binary artifacts are almost as broken as the source artifact because of NVIDIA tensor core generation shenanigans.

The real answer here is to fucking fork flash-attn and fix it. And it's on my list, but I'm working my way down the major C++ packages that all that stuff links to first. `libmodern-cpp` should be ready for GitHub in two or three months. `hypermodern-ai` is still mostly a domain name and some scripts, but they're the scripts I use in production, so it's coming.
by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-22 12:49:56+00:00
It does. We keep a section of the context window for memory. The LLM however is the one deciding what is remembered. Technically via the system prompt we can have it remember every prompt if needed.

But memory is a minor thing. Talking to a knowledgeable librarian or professor you never met is the level we essentially need to get it to for this stuff to take off.
by decentrality | 2025-08-22 12:49:57+00:00
Agreed with #1 ( came here to say that also )

Pronoun and noun wordplay aside ( 'Their' ... `themselves` ) I also agree that LLMs can correct the path being taken, regenerate better, etc...

But the idea that 'AI' needs to be _stubbornly_ wrong ( more human in the worst way ) is a bad idea. There is a fundamental showing, and it is being missed.

What is the context reality? Where is this prompt/response taking place? Almost guaranteed to be going on in a context which is itself violated or broken; such as with `Open Web UI` in a conservative example: Who even cares if we get the responses right? Now we have 'right' responses in a cul-de-sac universe. This might be worthwhile using `Ollama` in `Zed` for example, but for what purpose? An agentic process that is going to be audited anyway, because we always need to understand the code? And if we are talking about decision-making processes in a corporate system strategy... now we are fully down the rabbit hole. The corporate context itself is coming or going on whether it is right/wrong, good/evil, etc... as the entire point of what is going on there. The entire world is already beating that corporation to death or not, or it is beating the world to death or not... so the 'AI' aspect is more of an accelerant of an underlying dynamic, and if we stand back... what corporation is not already stubbornly wrong, on average?
by energy123 | 2025-08-22 12:50:02+00:00
Mechanistic interpretability could play a role here. The sycophancy you describe in chat mode could be when the question is "too difficult" and the AI defaults to easy circuits that rely on simple rule of thumbs (like does the context contain positive words such as "excellent"). The user experiences this as the AI just following basic nudges.

Could real-time observability into the network's internals somehow feed back into the model to reduce these hallucination-inducing shortcuts? Like train the system to detect when a shortcut is being used, then do something about it?
by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF | 2025-08-22 12:50:04+00:00
https://mullvad.net/en/help/dns-over-https-and-dns-over-tls

The iOS instructions are the most onerous (IMO) but still easy enough to follow. It's 15 minutes of fumbling around for the non-technical person, then they're protected.

(Though, as others have pointed out, this is probably moot. The blocking is more effectively done by ISPs.)
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-22 12:50:27+00:00
Yes the whole thing has been a bit of a tragedy IMO. A minor tragedy all things considered, but still one nonetheless.

One interesting thing to keep in mind is that Ronald Fisher did most of his work before the publication of Kolmogorov's probability axioms (1933). There's a real sense in which the statistics used in social sciences diverged from mathematics before the rise of modern statistics.

So there's a lot of tradition going back to the 19th century that's misguided, wrong, or maybe just not best practice.
by 0x000xca0xfe | 2025-08-22 12:50:29+00:00
> If you stuff random binary data into a string, Go just steams along, as described in this post.

> Over the decades I have lost data to tools skipping non-UTF-8 filenames. I should not be blamed for having files that were named before UTF-8 existed.

Umm.. why blame Go for that?
by honeybadger1 | 2025-08-22 12:50:42+00:00
i'm ready for this new revolution that breaks hoas. i was on the board of an HOA for about 2 years for the property i own in atlanta and i figured out really quickly it is a way for the eldest residents with more capitol than the youth to essentially drain the financial life from them and protect themselves from change or new ideas.

behind closed doors saying things like "that rule only exist when we don't like someone and helps us be able to get rid of them", "it's supposed to be a fair process but we just let the tenants we like and prefer know first, we will send everyone a letter so it's too late for them to respond against it".

It's a small scale dictatorship.
by tallanvor | 2025-08-22 12:50:43+00:00
The problem you'll run into is when the HOAs are responsible for common areas or shared infrastructure. In some places the HOAs are responsible for the roads and there may be a common pool, gym, or other amenities.

You'd be better off preventing HOAs from doing petty things like requiring homes to be painted certain colors and requiring them to have their books audited yearly to ensure there's no fraud or abuse going on.
by pjmlp | 2025-08-22 12:50:55+00:00
You forgot: CLU 1977.

". They are likely the two most difficult parts of any design for parametric polymorphism. In retrospect, we were biased too much by experience with C++ without concepts and Java generics. We would have been well-served to spend more time with CLU and C++ concepts earlier."

https://go.googlesource.com/proposal/+/master/design/go2draf...
by ACCount37 | 2025-08-22 12:50:56+00:00
They can, and they already do it somewhat. We've found enough to know that.

As the most well known example: Anthropic examined their AIs and found that they have a "name recognition" pathway - i.e. when asked about biographic facts, the AI will respond with "I don't know" if "name recognition" has failed.

This pathway is present even in base models, but only results in consistent "I don't know" if AI was trained for reduced hallucinations.

AIs are also capable of recognizing their own uncertainity. If you have an AI-generated list of historic facts that includes hallucinated ones, you can feed that list back to the same AI and ask it about how certain it is about every fact listed. Hallucinated entries will consistently have less certainty. This latent "recognize uncertainty" capability can, once again, be used in anti-hallucination training.

Those anti-hallucination capabilities are fragile, easy to damage in training, and do not fully generalize.

Can't help but think that limited "self-awareness" - and I mean that in a very mechanical, no-nonsense "has information about its own capabilities" way - is a major cause of hallucinations. An AI has some awareness of its own capabilities and how certain it is about things - but not nearly enough of it to avoid hallucinations consistently across different domains and settings.
by stingraycharles | 2025-08-22 12:51:19+00:00
> 1. The words "the only thing" massively underplays the difficulty of this problem. It's not a small thing.

Exactly. One could argue that this is just an artifact from the fundamental technique being used: it’s a really fancy autocomplete based on a huge context window.

People still think there’s actual intelligence in there, while the actual problems by making these systems appear intelligent is mostly algorithms and software managing exactly what goes into these context windows at what place.

Don’t get me wrong: it feels like magic. But I would argue that the only way to recognize a model being “confidently wrong” is to let another model, trained on completely different datasets with different techniques, judge them. And then preferably multiple.

(This is actually a feature of an MCP tool I use, “consensus” from zen-mcp-server, which enables you to query multiple different models to reach a consensus on a certain problem / solution).
by staticman2 | 2025-08-22 12:51:42+00:00
Not all townhomes have HOAs but it is absolutely insane to say a townhouse that does, where land is owned by the HOA, would have land redistributed to various individuals by legislature fiat.

It's even a crazy proposal for detached single family homes. Will a government official show up and decide what land is owned by each owner and record by government decree what the new property lines are?
by darth_avocado | 2025-08-22 12:51:59+00:00
Getting people to vote on things for their own Benefit is surprisingly hard. My parents’ condo association is constantly fighting each other because increasing monthly dues requires 70% vote and people have been refusing year after year. And what does increase year after year is maintenance requirements. First the nice to have amenities stopped. Then the elevators stopped. Now it’s 24x7 running water because the association doesn’t have money to fix the motors. Now they’re all trying to get the building to be sold so that it can be developed into an even bigger apartment building and that is also failing because it requires 75% vote. Imagine you voting against getting a brand new apartment in 3 years that’s larger in size and you get your rent paid while it’s being built.
by matheusmoreira | 2025-08-22 12:52:06+00:00
> I don't understand where that sentiment comes from.

If you actually wish to understand, I can point to a thread where this was discussed somewhat at length by others and myself not too long ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44907830

TL;DR:

Public domain is the natural state of information. Intellectual property is an absurd state granted monopoly on what boils down to numbers. Copyright in particular is a functionally infinite monopoly that robs us of our public domain rights. Copyright infringement is civil disobedience of unjust laws and arguably a moral imperative. Copyright enforcement requires the destruction of computer freedom as we know it as well as everything the word "hacker" stands for and therefore it must be resisted even if it destroys the copyright industry. It makes zero economic sense to charge money for information which has infinite availability, therefore society must figure out how to pay creators before the work is produced.
by mothballed | 2025-08-22 12:53:10+00:00
Georgism is land communism. The 'community' or whoever is collecting the taxes (LVT) owns all land and rents it out. Ideal LVT puts the market value of all land at $0 after tax liabilities, so even if you could 'own' land under Georgism it would largely be economically meaningless.

It's straight up marxism hidden as a capitalist market measure. Vacant land portion of property taxes are essentially georgism-light where the land capital is mostly under a capitalist model but with a % owned by the community (or more likely, a government that commonly works against community interests) and rented out in the form of property tax (in georgism the % is 100).
by kqr | 2025-08-22 12:53:18+00:00
> People didn't always use statistics to discover truths about the world.

And they were much, much worse off for it. Logic does not let you learn anything new. All logic allows you to do is restate what you already know. Fundamental knowledge comes from experience or experiments, which need to be interpreted through a statistical lens because observations are never perfect.

Before statistics, our alternatives for understanding the world was (a) rich people sitting down and thinking deeply about how things could be, (b) charismatic people standing up and giving sermons on how they would like things to be, or (c) clever people guessing things right every now and then.

With statistics, we have to a large degree mechanised the process of learning how the world works, and anyone sensible can participate, and they can know with reasonable certainty whether they are right or wrong. It was impossible to prove a philosopher or a clergyman wrong!

That said, I think I agree with your overall point. One of the strengths of statistical reasoning is what's sometimes called intercomparison, the fact that we can draw conclusions from differences between processes without understanding anything about those processes. This is also a weakness because it makes it easy to accidentally or intentionally manipulate results.