MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by knallfrosch | 2025-08-12 21:00:48+00:00
I think it's perfectly fine to read these articles, think "definitely a cult" and ignore whether they believe in spaceships, or demons, or AGI.

The key takeaway from the article is that if you have a group leader who cuts you off from other people, that's a red flag – not really a novel, or unique, or situational insight.
by danlitt | 2025-08-12 21:01:20+00:00
> Yes your healthcare rights can be reversed but better that, than never happening at all like in the US.

Do you really think that the thing standing in the way of universal healthcare in the US is its codified constitution? When I look at the constitutional cases that result in lawsuits in the US, they are almost universally cases that move the dial in favour of people's freedoms. Liberally interpreted, the US has been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century in many respects. The undermining of civil liberties we see in the US right now are in spite of the constitution, not because of it (and you can tell, because everyone opposing it is appealing to the constitution, and everyone supporting the coup is ignoring it).
by to11mtm | 2025-08-12 21:01:41+00:00
Well, there's a balance to be had. Do the most good you can while still being able to survive the rat race.

However, people are bad at that.

I'll give an interesting example.

Hybrid Cars. Modern proper HEVs[0] usually benefit to their owners, both by virtue of better fuel economy as well as in most cases being overall more reliable than a normal car.

And, they are better on CO2 emissions and lower our oil consumption.

And yet most carmakers as well as consumers have been very slow to adopt. On the consumer side we are finally to where we can have hybrid trucks that can get 36-40MPG capable of towing 4000 pounds or hauling over 1000 pounds in the bed [1] we have hybrid minivans capable of 35MPG for transporting groups of people, we have hybrid sedans getting 50+ and Small SUVs getting 35-40+MPG for people who need a more normal 'people' car. And while they are selling better it's insane that it took as long as it has to get here.

The main 'misery' you experience at that point, is that you're driving the same car as a lot of other people and it's not as exciting [2] as something with more power than most people know what to do with.

And hell, as they say in investing, sometimes the market can be irrational longer than you can stay solvent. E.x. was it truly worth it to Hydro-Quebec to sit on LiFePO patents the way they did vs just figuring out licensing terms that got them a little bit of money to then properly accelerate adoption of Hybrids/EVs/etc?

[0] - By this I mean Something like Toyota's HSD style setup used by Ford and Subaru, or Honda or Hyundai/Kia's setup where there's still a more normal transmission involved.

[1] - Ford advertises up to 1500 pounds, but I feel like the GVWR allows for a 25 pound driver at that point.

[2] - I feel like there's ways to make an exciting hybrid, but until there's a critical mass or Stellantis gets their act together, it won't happen...
by nobody9999 | 2025-08-12 21:02:27+00:00
>Inflation was high and people had to convert their salaries into German marks the same day they got pay checks, otherwise the money was worthless the next day. Basic goods were unattainable. People had to smuggle coffee, bananas and jeans across the border. Of course if you were a part of the red nobility, your life was easier as you got access to special stores and got to enjoy the fruits of the labor of your fellow equals.

And things are, right now, exactly as you described in this comment[0], right?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44850663
by sdesol | 2025-08-12 21:02:41+00:00
I've been able to create a very advanced search engine for my chat app that is more than enterprise ready. I've spent a decade thinking about search, but in a different language. Like you, I needed to explain what I knew about writing a search engine in Java for the LLM, to write it in JavaScript using libraries I did not know and it got me 95% of the way there.

It is also incredibly important to note that the 5% that I needed to figure out was the difference between throw away code and something useful. You absolutely need domain knowledge but LLMs are more than enterprise ready in my opinion.

Here is some documentation on how my search solution is used in my app to show that it is not a hobby feature.

https://github.com/gitsense/chat/blob/main/packages/chat/wid...
by TheAceOfHearts | 2025-08-12 21:02:51+00:00
Many people like to write in order to develop and explore their understanding of a topic. Writing lets you spend a lot of time playing around with whatever idea you're trying to understand, and sharing this writing invites others to challenge your assumptions.

When you're uncertain about a topic, you can explore it by writing a lot about said topic. Ideally, when you've finished exploring and studying a topic, you should be able to write a much more condensed / synthesized version.
by viccis | 2025-08-12 21:02:54+00:00
I agree. For me it's a modern version of that good ol "rails new" scaffolding with Ruby on Rails that got you started with a project structure. It makes sense because LLMs are particularly good at tasks that require little more knowledge than just a near perfect knowledge of the documentation of the tooling involved, and creating a well organized scaffold for a greenfield project falls squarely in that area.

For legacy systems, especially ones in which a lot of the things they do are because of requirements from external services (whether that's tech debt or just normal growing complexity in a large connected system), it's less useful.

And for tooling that moves fast and breaks things (looking at you, Databricks), it's basically worthless. People have already brought attention to the fact that it will only be as current as its training data was, and so if a bunch of terminology, features, and syntax have changed since then (ahem, Databricks), you would have to do some kind of prompt engineering with up to date docs for it to have any hope of succeeding.
by perseusyang | 2025-08-12 21:03:58+00:00
I always have difficulty deciding between brands , so I built https://www.llmindshare.app/ over the weekend to help me decide on anything. It integrates up to date chatgpt ranking on any category. For example cars, luxury watches, etc. I feel AI nowadays generally have better sense of judging what is good and bad in a category since AI can read a lot more recent information to provide up to date information.
by jiggawatts | 2025-08-12 21:04:41+00:00
I’ve gone on long rants about it before right here on HN but I can’t be bothered digging up the old post…

… the quick and dirty bullet points are:

- Enabling IPv6 in one virtual network could break managed PaaS services in other peered networks.

- Up until very recently none of the PaaS services could be configured with IPv6 firewall rules.

- Most core managed network components were IPv4 only. Firewalls, gateways, VPNs, etc… support is still spotty.

- They NAT IPv6 which is just gibbering eldrich madness.

- IPv6 addresses are handed out in tiny pools of 16 addresses at a time. No, not a /16 or anything like that.

Etc…

The IPv6 networking in Azure feels like it was implemented by offshore contractors that did as they were told and never stopped to think if any of it made sense.

References:

- Inbound IPv6 support for App Service was added this week. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/updates/?id=499998

- Outbound IPv6 support is "Preview": https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/overview...

- Public IP Prefixes support a maximum of 16 consecutive addresses even for IPv6: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ip-s...

- There's an entire page of IPv6 limitations. To understand how nuts this is, just swap IPv6<->IPv4 and see if it still reads like a professional service you'd pay money for! https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-network/ip-s...

- You STILL can't use PostgreSQL with IPv6: "Even if the subnet for the Postgres Flexible Server doesn't have any IPv6 addresses assigned, it cannot be deployed if there are IPv6 addresses in the VNet." -- that's just bonkers.

- Just... oh my god:

"Azure Virtual WAN currently supports IPv4 traffic only."

"Azure Route Server currently supports IPv4 traffic only."

"Azure Firewall doesn't currently support IPv6"

"You can't add IPv6 ranges to a virtual network that has existing resource in use."
by geysersam | 2025-08-12 21:06:27+00:00
On the other hand, I bet a lot of people in Detroit wouldn't mind paying more for the goods they consume if that meant having stable jobs and living in a city that is not bankrupt.

The QE point you're making is interesting. In addition to that I think it should be noted that the money that was "printed" disproportionately went to the richest, just as the benefits of globalization did.

In conclusion, while globalization has increased global economic growth and made us all richer on average, it has also exacerbated economic inequality. That's fair to criticize.
by throwawaylaptop | 2025-08-12 21:06:31+00:00
I'm currently trying to get a friends small business website to rank. I have a decent understanding of SEO, doing more technically correct things and did a decent amount of hand written content specific to local areas and services provided.

Two months in, bing still hasn't crawled the fav icon. Google finally did after a month. I'm still getting outranked by tangentially related services, garbage national lead collection sites, yelp top 10 blog spam, and even exact service providers from 300 miles away that definitely don't serve the area.

Something is definitely wrong with pagerank and crawling in general.
by CrimsonCape | 2025-08-12 21:06:55+00:00
Pardon my ignorance, since I don't know C, but is it true to say that the length of string "Foo" is greater than 4 because of the null terminating byte? Or maybe there is no concept of string length? I could see this getting annoying since Foo is three chars long, you would assume it's length is 3, but we could be speaking of the actual length of bytes, in which i assume it is sizeof(char)*3+1 i.e. the sizeof(char F, char o, char o)+1nullbyte
by piperswe | 2025-08-12 21:07:27+00:00
Wiktionary is massive with 1.4M English entries [1] (3x the size of the Merriam Webster's Unabridged dictionary [2], though with a lower average quality), and CC-BY-SA-licensed[3]

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Statistics [2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq-how-many-english-wo... [3]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Copyrights
by varenc | 2025-08-12 21:08:03+00:00
> Yeah the Chat router is busted big time... You have to add "Think hard." to the end of the prompt, or explicitly switch to the Thinking model in the UI.

I don't really get this gripe? It seems no different than before, except now it will sometimes opt into thinking harder by itself. If you know you want CoT reasoning you just select gpt5-thinking, no different than choosing o4-mini/o3 like before.
by to11mtm | 2025-08-12 21:08:07+00:00
> If you do a million dollars worth of damage to the world and earn 100k (or a billion dollars worth of damage to earn a million dollars), even if you spend all of the money you earned on making the world a better place, you arent even going to fix 10% of the damage you caused (and thats ignoring the fact that its usually easier/cheaper to break things than to fix them).

You kinda summed up a lot of the world post industrial revolution there, at least as far as stuff like toxic waste (Superfund, anyone?) and stuff like climate change, I mean for goodness sake let's just think about TEL and how they knew Ethanol could work but it just wasn't 'patentable'. [0] Or the "We don't even know the dollar amount because we don't have a workable solution" problem of PFAS.

[0] - I still find it shameful that a university is named after the man who enabled this to happen.
by OkayPhysicist | 2025-08-12 21:09:00+00:00
Your chess betting example would play slightly differently than standard chess. Since the goal becomes not just to win, but to win the most cash, you'd be trying to leverage your hidden information in order to improve your outcome, which in chess is just "things you've foreseen but your opponent hasn't", which, due to the nature of chess, you'd weaken by jacking up your bets to try and capitalize. The result would probably be a worse game of chess, since without the chance component the better player will win the chess game far more often than the worse player, and then the optimal move for the worse player would be to forfeit early constantly.
by username332211 | 2025-08-12 21:09:06+00:00
The reason why people can't be bothered to get formal training is that modern philosophy doesn't seem that useful.

It was a while ago, but take the infamous story of the 2006 rape case in Duke University. If you check out coverage of that case, you get the impression every member of faculty that joined in the hysteria was from some humanities department, including philosophy. And quite a few of them refused to change their mind even as the prosecuting attorney was being charged with misconduct. Compare that to Socrates' behavior during the trial of the admirals in 406 BC.

Meanwhile, whatever meager resistence was faced by that group seems to have come from economists, natural scientist or legal scholars.

I wouldn't blame people for refusing to study in a humanities department where they can't tell right from wrong.
by EricMausler | 2025-08-12 21:09:37+00:00
> warmth and empathy don't immediately strike me as traits that are counter to correctness

This was my reaction as well. Something I don't see mentioned is I think maybe it has more to do with training data than the goal-function. The vector space of data that aligns with kindness may contain less accuracy than the vector space for neutrality due to people often forgoing accuracy when being kind. I do not think it is a matter of conflicting goals, but rather a priming towards an answer based more heavily on the section of the model trained on less accurate data.

I wonder if the prompt was layered, asking it to coldy/bluntly derive the answer and then translate itself into a kinder tone (maybe with 2 prompts), if the accuracy would still be worse.
by rmason | 2025-08-12 21:09:49+00:00
In an earlier career I was a fertilizer company agronomist for twenty years. I am quite fascinated by what these guys are attempting but not quite sold.

I have sampled tens of thousands of acres. I drove around in an ATV sticking a metal probe in the ground, usually around seven inches down. I would sample at multiple spots depositing the soil into a plastic bucket. Then I would mix the soil cores and come up with an average that I would place into a paper bag and mail off to the lab.

There's a lot of science around the standard soil sampling method accurately reflecting what is going on in the soil. Just sampling the surface, even if it is done accurately can in no way represent what is going on in the soil.

I wish them luck, if they had a mini-lab I could use at the fertilizer plant to get faster results back to farmers and be able to make lime and fertilizer applications in the fall which would bring the plant more revenue I'd be much more interested.
by IX-103 | 2025-08-12 21:11:46+00:00
Is it really that surprising that a group of humans who think they have some special understanding of reality compared to others tend to separate and isolate themselves until they fall into an unguided self-reinforcing cycle?

I'd have thought that would be obvious since it's the history of many religions (which seem to just be cults that survived the bottleneck effect to grow until they reached a sustainable population).

In other words, humans are wired for tribalism, so don't be surprised when they start forming tribes...
by TheOtherHobbes | 2025-08-12 21:12:11+00:00
I think they're recognising patterns, which is not the same thing.

Abstractions are stable, they're explicit in their domains, good abstractions cross multiple domains, and they typically come with a symbolic algebra of available operations.

Math is made of abstractions.

Patterns are a weaker form of cognition. They're implicit, heavily context-dependent, and there's no algebra. You have to poke at them crudely in the hope you can make them do something useful.

Using LLMs feels more like the latter than the former.

If LLMs were generating true abstractions they'd be finding meta-descriptions for code and language and making them accessible directly.

AGI - or ASI - may be be able to do that some day, but it's not doing that now.
by DonsDiscountGas | 2025-08-12 21:12:11+00:00
Check out "the precipice" by Tony Ord. Biological warfare and global warming are unlikely to lead to total human extinction (though both present large risks of massive harm).

Part of the argument is that we've had nuclear weapons for a long time but no apocalypse so the annual risk can't be larger than 1%, whereas we've never created AI so it might be substantially larger. Not a rock solid argument obviously, but we're dealing with a lot of unknowns.

A better argument is that most of those other risks are not neglected, plenty of smart people working against nuclear war. Whereas (up until a few years ago) very few people considered AI a real threat, so the marginal benefit of a new person working on it should be bigger.
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-12 21:12:58+00:00
One thing I appreciated about this post, unlike a lot of AI-skeptic posts, is that it actually makes a concrete falsifiable prediction; specifically, "LLMs will never manage to deal with large code bases 'autonomously'". So in the future we can look back and see whether it was right.

For my part, I'd give 80% confidence that LLMs will be able to do this within two years, without fundamental architectural changes.
by guerrilla | 2025-08-12 21:13:14+00:00
> One way that thinking for yourself goes wrong is that you realize your society is wrong about something, don’t realize that you can’t outperform it, and wind up even wronger.

I've been there myself.

> And without the steadying influence of some kind of external goal you either achieve or don’t achieve, your beliefs can get arbitrarily disconnected from reality — which is very dangerous if you’re going to act on them.

I think this and the entire previous two paragraphs preceding it are excellent arguments for philosophical pragmatism and empiricism. It's strange to me that the community would not have already converged on that after all their obsessions with decision theory.

> The Zizians and researchers at Leverage Research both felt like heroes, like some of the most important people who had ever lived. Of course, these groups couldn’t conjure up a literal Dark Lord to fight. But they could imbue everything with a profound sense of meaning. All the minor details of their lives felt like they had the fate of humanity or all sentient life as the stakes. Even the guilt and martyrdom could be perversely appealing: you could know that you’re the kind of person who would sacrifice everything for your beliefs.

This helps me understand what people mean by "meaning". A sense that their life and actions actually matter. I've always struggled to understand this issue but this helps make it concrete, the kind of thing people must be looking for.

> One of my interviewees speculated that rationalists aren’t actually any more dysfunctional than anywhere else; we’re just more interestingly dysfunctional.

"We're"? The author is a rationalist too? That would definitely explain why this article is so damned long. Why are rationalists not able to write less? It sounds like a joke but this is seriously a thing. [EDIT: Various people further down in the comments are saying it's amphetamines and yes, I should have known that from my own experience. That's exactly what it is.]

> Consider talking about “ethical injunctions:” things you shouldn’t do even if you have a really good argument that you should do them. (Like murder.)

This kind of defeats the purpose, doesn't it? Also, this is nowhere justified in the article, just added on as the very last sentence.
by viccis | 2025-08-12 21:13:36+00:00
Sorry, but this is not really enough of a concern to care about 2% of a $5 monthly fee going towards a company (Yandex) whose involvement with Russia's war seems iffy (Russia themselves fined the company for refusing to give user data to its state intelligence).

>Multiple things can be damaging at once.

Yes, but the point is that if I can tolerate some of the money Google or Amazon gets from me going to fund concentration camps abroad, in which camp residents receive a quarter of the calories per day (~250) that victims of Nazi concentration camps did, then I can tolerate this. Everyone has to draw a line somewhere, and I see no reason to draw it at Kagi but not Google/AWS/Microsoft/Apple/etc.
by nostrademons | 2025-08-12 21:13:40+00:00
I wonder if something else is going on, and perhaps Claude is using the LLM to identify the likely culprits within the codebase, sending the code around them to execute with an actual Python interpreter on their servers, feeding both the code and the result as the context window to another LLM query with a system prompt something like "What is this code doing, when it runs on this input and this output?", feeding the result of that back to the user, and then repeating as long as the overall bug remains unsolved. I've found that feedback is a very effective technique with LLMs, asking them to extract some data, testing that data through out-of-band mechanisms, then feeding the test results and the original context back into the LLM to explain its reasoning and why it got the result. The attention mechanisms in the transformer model function very well when they're prompted with specifics and asked to explain their reasoning.

Only an Anthropic engineer would know for sure. I'm pretty sure that it was making multiple queries on my behalf during the chat transcript - each "Read ... mp3organizer_v2.py" is a separate network round-trip.
by PeterWhittaker | 2025-08-12 21:13:40+00:00
Wait, what?

Oh, yeah. Jeebus.

2008 was SEVENTEEN years ago.

I turn 60 soon. Anything 2xxx just seems like almost yesterday, 199x isn't that far away in mind, and even 198x is pretty close.

I love math (B.Sc. Physics, so more math than anything else) but sometimes math hurts.

Damn you, beloved math.
by 0cf8612b2e1e | 2025-08-12 21:13:52+00:00
I do not think you can assume the guaranteed success of Minecraft. Sure, it bottled lightning, but to go from an indie hit to a Microsoft buyout has a lot of work in between.

Early development of Minecraft had a recurring joke about how Notch did not want to work too hard. If development had stumbled because it was still all on one guy, some mechanically identical competitor game could have grown into the cultural zeitgeist.