MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by mapontosevenths | 2025-08-16 03:49:30+00:00
That's an interesting take, but it all sort of hinges on the exact translation you use because it leans heavily on interpreting one particular sentence, and even one word in a very particular way. In this case it seems to be the word "the" in the phrase "the archangel." That's dangerous, and I'd love to talk about why it's dangerous. Lets start here:

https://www.biblegateway.com/verse/en/1%20Thessalonians%204%...

If we check out some of the other translations, we can see that Thessalonians 4:16 has been interpreted many ways over the years, so we'll just have to pick the one that seems closest to the original. Of course, you're free to pick another, but to me the one that makes the most sense is the legacy standard bible version, as they try very hard to stay close to the original greek, and also they italicize the words that a translator had to add themselves which weren't in the original. Remember that ancient Greek sentence structures weren't the same as English sentence structures, this happens a lot. Many other versions of the Bible just gloss over it.

So, in the LSB version, it reads "For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a [b]shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first."

To me that sounds more like the lord is bringing a list of things with him, and one of the things on that list is an archangel to use as a voice, but more importantly the phrase "the archangel" is here which does imply that there is only one, even though it is often interpreted in other versions as "an archangel". Which one is the best translation?

Well there's a clue here. The word "the" is this version is one of the italicized words, meaning it was added by the translator, because it wasn't there at all in the original Greek. The other translators have just been picking whichever one "felt right" to them at the time.

If you're doubting this particular translation, you're free to manually translate that bit of Greek yourself or check one of the other more literal interpretations. I think the NASB version is also very good.
by comp_throw7 | 2025-08-16 03:49:52+00:00
This is a reductive argument that you could use for any role a company hires for that isn't obviously core to the business function.

In this case you're simply mistaken as a matter of fact; much of Anthropic leadership and many of its employees take concerns like this seriously. We don't understand it, but there's no strong reason to expect that consciousness (or, maybe separately, having experiences) is a magical property of biological flesh. We don't understand what's going on inside these models. What would you expect to see in a world where it turned out that such a model had properties that we consider relevant for moral patienthood, that you don't see today?
by derektank | 2025-08-16 03:50:44+00:00
>This logic doesn't follow. The fact that it is present in humans doesn't then imply it is present in LLMs. This type of reasoning is like saying that planes must have feathers because plane flight was modeled after bird flight.

I think the fact that it's present in humans suggests that it might be necessary in an artificial system that reproduces human behavior. It's funny that you mention birds because I actually also had birds in mind when I made my comment. While it's true that animal and powered human flight are very different, both bird wings and plane wings have converged on airfoil shapes, as these forms are necessary for generating lift.

>Why not? You haven't presented any distinction between "certain aspects" of consciousness that you state wouldn't emerge but are open to the emergence of some other unspecified qualities of consciousness? Why?

I personally subscribe to the Global Workspace Theory of human consciousness, which basically holds that attentions acts as a spotlight, bringing mental processes which are otherwise unconscious or in shadow, to awareness of the entire system. If the systems which would normally produce e.g. fear, pain (such as negative physical stimulus developed from interacting with the physical world and selected for by evolution) aren't in the workspace, then they won't be present in consciousness because attention can't be focused on them.
by atleastoptimal | 2025-08-16 03:51:04+00:00
This is an accurate assessment. I do feel that there is a routine bias on HN to underplay AI. I think it's people not wanting to lose control or relative status in the world.

AI is an existential threat to the unique utility of humans, which has been the last line of defense against absolute despotism (i.e. a tyrannical government will not kill all its citizens because it still needs them to perform jobs. If humans aren't needed to sustain productivity, humans have no leverage against things becoming significantly worse for them, gradually or all at once).
by CGamesPlay | 2025-08-16 03:51:32+00:00
The bastawhiz comment in this thread has the right answer. When you start a new conversation, Claude has no context from the previous one and so all the "wearing down" you did via repeated asks, leading questions, or other prompt techniques is effectively thrown out. For a non-determined attacker, this is likely sufficient, which makes it a good defense-in-depth strategy (Anthropic defending against screenshots of their models describing sex with minors).
by mrheosuper | 2025-08-16 03:52:26+00:00
i've never own a prusa printer, they are too expensive for me. I know it's great, it's reliable, but 3d printing is just a hobby to me after all. That's why i have to cope with less reliable solutions from Anycubic and Ender.

Now I own a bambulab. They are as cheap as the one from Anycubic, but much more reliable and easier to setup. I honestly don't know how can they make it so cheap, even my a1 mini, cost less than $250, has wifi, a camera for timeplase. Back in the day all you can get is a controller board with monochrome LCD running 8 bit mcu.

The westerner had a big head start, but they became greedy. Ultimaker could be the today Bambulab if they had spent more on RnD, and tried to bring their tech to broader market.
by chubot | 2025-08-16 03:52:36+00:00
Well, if you tell me that many people are using LLMs poorly, and in a way that won't benefit them or their team in the long term, then I wouldn't be too surprised.

There are probably more ways to use them poorly than ways to use them well.

And AI companies are pushing usage patterns that may make you dependent on them.

---

But I mention 4 ways that LLMs helped me recently here

https://lobste.rs/s/zxppfh/all_cool_kids_are_doing_it#c_xfnz...

i.e. VimScript, SQL, login shells, Linux container syscalls -- with some results you can see

I mention that "give me your best argument against X" is a good prompt -- they can do that

And I also don't use them to edit code for me (right now) -- I type the code myself, TEST it, and internalize it

So for those cases, and many others, they are "spreading knowledge" to me, simply because I can directly query them without reading the manual (or suffering through slow web pages with ads on them)

The end game might be ads, which is depressing. But actually it's remarkable that you can run high quality models locally, whereas you could have NEVER run Google locally. I use LLMs as a better Google, as a sophisticated text calculator. But they are significantly more than that too

I have definitely run into cases where LLMs slow me down, but I now avoid those usage patterns
by ThatStormingMan | 2025-08-16 03:52:50+00:00
The text works great for the most part, but the score total and score description seem to be broken.

Expected result: The score total averages the scores in each category and outputs a score from 0-100 out of 100, and the description changes based on your overall score and/or your score in each category

Actual result: The score total outputs a minimum of 100/100 if you select "strongly disagree" on all options, and over 100/100 if you don't. The description text also (and I suspect this is caused by the broken total scoring) always displays "Exemplary chivalry — Your habits consistently reflect respect and responsibility. Keep mentoring others." even when selecting "strongly disagree" on all options.

My guess at the cause: The total score isn't correctly being divided by 5 (for each of the pillars/categories) to calculate the average of the five categories, and the description is being affected by the same problem, either through the total score, or with the same problem in its own calculation.
by CamperBob2 | 2025-08-16 03:52:59+00:00
Self-driving cars are a political problem, not a technical problem. A functioning government would put everything from automation-friendly signaling standards to battery-swapping facilities into place.

We humans used to do that sort of thing, but not anymore, so... bring on the AI. It won't work as well as it might otherwise be able to, but it'll probably kill fewer humans on the road at the end of the day. A low bar to clear.
by refulgentis | 2025-08-16 03:54:00+00:00
The compilation of unrelated "water is wet" things like VAT is a consumption tax, opposition party complains in Germany, belies that you are violently agreeing that yes, the big W is the US is in fact willing to have higher "consumption taxes" than anywhere else.

I think it's reasonable to need to perform a ritualistic EU sneering with this much Winning occuring, but it's a little bit disquieting see it sort of cause this black hole where you can't discuss the thing at hand, just complain about other things.
by voidhorse | 2025-08-16 03:54:04+00:00
I agree with the general observation, and I've been of this mind since 2023 (if AI really gets as good as the boosters claim, we will need a new economic system). I usually like Antirez's writing, but this post was a whole lot of...idk nothing? I don't feel like this post said anything interesting, and it was kind incoherent at moments. I think in some respects it's a function of the technology and situation we're in—the current wave of "AI" is still a lot of empty promises and underdelivery. Yes, it is getting better, and yes people are getting clever by letting LLMs use tools, but these things still aren't intelligent insofar as they do not reason. Until we achieve that, I'm not sure there's really as much to fear as everyone thinks.

We still need humans in the loop as of now. These tools are still very far from being good enough to fully autonomously manage each other and manage systems, and, arguably, because the systems we build are for humans we will always need humans to understand them to some extent. LLMs can replace labor, but they cannot replace human intent and teleology. One day maybe they will achieve intentions of their own, but that is an entirely different ballgame. The economy ultimately is a battle of intentions, resources, and ends. And the human beings will still be a part of this picture until all labor can be fully automated across the entire suite of human needs.

We should also bear in mind our own bias as "knowledge workers". Manual laborers arguably already had their analogous moment. The encoding kept on humming. There isn't anything particularly special about "white collar" work in that regard. The same thing may happen. A new industry requiring new skills might emerge in the fallout of white collar automation. Not to mention, LLMs only work in the digital realm. handicraft artisanry is still a thing and is still, appreciated, albeit in much smaller markets.
by Davidzheng | 2025-08-16 03:54:05+00:00
Being able to communicate in human natural language is a human characteristic. It doesn't mean it has all the characteristics of a human but certainly one of them. That's the convenience that you perceive--Because people are used to interacting with people and it's convenient to interact with something which behaves like a person. The fact that we can refer to AI chatbots as "assistants" is by itself showing it's usefulness as an approximation to a human. I don't think this argument is controversial.
by mhagiwara | 2025-08-16 03:54:55+00:00
Hi! Author here. You're right that music and speech carry more than just raw symbols such as intonation, pitch, dynamics, etc. all add important information. But in the framework I'm using, both are still fundamentally “1D” because their core structure unfolds sequentially in time: notes in a score, words and phrases in speech. Even when additional features like accent or dynamics are present, they're layered onto a linear stream.

Recto, by contrast, makes two dimensions part of the syntax itself: elements and rects can expand horizontally or vertically, and they can nest recursively. That's the difference I wanted to highlight.
by nosignono | 2025-08-16 03:55:27+00:00
It has nothing to do with "white guilt" or fetishism. It's not a race thing at all.

It's a "my nation recently and currently systematically exploited people. I would like my nation to try to make those people whole" thing. It happens to be the case that many targets of exploitation were non-white, but the concern is the exploitation not the race of the exploited. We systematically exploited plenty of poor white people too, we should make them whole too.

Redlining in my city "ended" officially in 1968, but in practice it was probably another two decades before it really was removed from standard operation. And in my city, plenty of white people were considered undesirable and redlined. I guarantee you there are people directly impacted by this policy who are still alive, this isn't some far away past long since forgotten by time.

As an example, the city should be considering whether reduced interest rate loans, subsidized housing, rent freezes, or other benefits can be passed on to families directly impacted by redlining policies from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Just because it's been 40 years doesn't mean the city should just give up trying to make people whole.
by comp_throw7 | 2025-08-16 03:57:40+00:00
> These are experts who clearly know (link in the article) that we have no real idea about these things

Yep!

> The framing comes across to me as a clearly mentally unwell position (ie strong anthropomorphization) being adopted for PR reasons.

This doesn't at all follow. If we don't understand what creates the qualities we're concerned with, or how to measure them explicitly, and the _external behaviors_ of the systems are something we've only previously observed from things that have those qualities, it seems very reasonable to move carefully. (Also, the post in question hedges quite a lot, so I'm not even sure what text you think you're describing.)

Separately, we don't need to posit galaxy-brained conspiratorial explanations for Anthropic taking an institutional stance re: model welfare being a real concern that's fully explained by the actual beliefs of Anthropic's leadership and employees, many of whom think these concerns are real (among others, like the non-trivial likelihood of sufficiently advanced AI killing everyone).
by simoncion | 2025-08-16 03:57:42+00:00
To clarify what I'm thinking here by analogy...

Imagine that someone said:

> I think wood is the primary primitive property of sawmills in general.

An obvious observation would be that it is dreadfully difficult to produce the expected product of a sawmill without tools to cut or sand or otherwise shape the wood into the desired shapes.

One might also notice that while a sawmill with no wood to work on will not produce any output, a sawmill with wood but without woodworking tools is vanishingly unlikely to produce any output... and any it does manage to produce is not going to be good enough for any real industrial purpose.
by schneems | 2025-08-16 03:58:17+00:00
Ive never taken one. They seem nice though.

On the other hand, the Tesla “robotaxi” scares the crap out of me. No lidar and seems to drive more aggressively. The Mark Rober YouTube of a Tesla plowing into a road-runner style fake tunnel is equal parts hilarious and nightmare fuel when you realize that’s what’s next to your kid biking down the street.
by WarOnPrivacy | 2025-08-16 03:58:24+00:00
> Is that true? A median household (with ~80K income) should be able to swing a 250K mortgage, probably a $325K house with down payment.

80k is 3-4 typical wages. That is, the wages of jobs that are most obtainable make 25k-31k.

The folks in those income brackets are 25% of the population (and 35% of minority groups).

Housing stats are commonly presented as if they don't exist. However until few administrations, they had a long history of home ownership.
by aurareturn | 2025-08-16 03:58:27+00:00
I've been saying this on HN since 2022:

For all the pro-WFH/fully remote developers on HN who live in North America, you're going to be in for a surprise when your company decides to replace you with someone living in another country. Why hire you when the company can hire someone who costs 1/5 of you and is willing to work harder without complaining? Both of you are remote anyway. So what if the new hire works at night and sleeps during the day?

For all pro-WFH/fully remote developers living in North America, you should be cheering for return to office mandates. It'll probably save your career long-term.
by Davidzheng | 2025-08-16 03:59:03+00:00
I do think "what's it like to be a rock" is a sensible question almost regardless of the definition. I guess in the emergent view the answer is "not much". But anyhow this view (a) also allows for us to reconcile consciousness of an agent with the fact that the agent itself is somewhat an abstraction. Like one could ask, is a cell conscious & is the entirety of the human race conscious at different abstraction scales. Which I think are serious questions (as also for the stock market and for a video game AI). The explanation (b) doesn't seem to actually explain much as you state so I don't think it's even acceptable in format as a complete answer (which may not exist but still)
by sillywalk | 2025-08-16 03:59:58+00:00
> a new kernel is relinked at every boot

Known as OpenBSD kernel address randomized link (KARL)[0][1]

Also, libc, and libcrypto are re-linked at boot [2].

And sshd [3].

[0] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=149732026405941

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14709256

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14710180

[3] https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=167407459325339&w=2
by noisy_boy | 2025-08-16 04:01:08+00:00
My utility company used to include the bill amount in their email which I used to pay using my banking app. But no, where is the fun in that! So they built an app, because what is the utility of a utility company without an app, removed the amount from the email so that I can give my fingertips some much needed workout and open the cursed app just to see the amount. I think the app has a feature to pay as well but being the minor lord of pettiness that I am, I refuse to use that and still pay using my trusty banking app.
by voidhorse | 2025-08-16 04:02:26+00:00
Yes. The complete irony in all software engineers enthusiasm for this tech is that, if the boards wishes come true, they are literally helping them eliminate their own jobs. It's like the industrial revolution but worse, because at least the craftsmen weren't also the ones building the factories that would automate them out of work.

Marcuse had a term for this "false consciousness"-when the structure of capitalism ends up making people work against their own interests without realizing it, and that is happening big time in software right now. We will still need programmers for hard, novel problems, but all these lazy programmers using AI to write their crud apps don't seem to realize the writing is on the wall.
by gus_massa | 2025-08-16 04:04:09+00:00
I teach math in the first year of the university in Argentina. This method is well known since many years, probably like 20 or more. It's more popular in foreign students (Brazil? Peru?) that have some kind of standardized test with many short questions. The local students use the classic formula (sometimes unsuccessfully).

It's a nice trick for equations with small nice numbers, that are common in math tests. But it fails spectacularly when you try to apply it to physics or chemistry problems that have decimals and nasty irrational solutions.

I don't like it, because it use that mathematicians like to put only nice numbers, even in topics like linear algebra or calculus that are about the real numbers.

But I don't mind something like this method for advanced math courses like Galois Theory, where the polynomials have integer or rational coefficients, and you can use the Gauss method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_root_theorem to find all the rational roots, that is quite similar to this "new" method.
by kyboren | 2025-08-16 04:04:13+00:00
> we'd be the ablative armour while the rest of the world got organized.

If the trade negotiations are any indication, I wouldn't count on a magical solution to a global coordination problem.

Those countries you are expecting to commit suicide to defend your sovereignty are much more likely to appease the US either because they depend on the US for energy, trade, or military defense (or some combination of those) and have no good alternatives; or because a war with the US would be so devastating--potentially even escalating to nuclear warfare--it is only worth risking for core national security interests.

Of course, geostrategically speaking, Canada is already just America's hat. Direct US control over Canada is not a threat to the core national security interests of any nation with a capability to intervene. So I wouldn't count on foreign intervention if I were you.

Anyway the balance of forces between the US and Canada is so lopsided that any invasion would likely be a fait accompli before any substantive foreign intervention could be launched. Certainly Canada's ports and airspace would be blockaded and closed in any opening action.

In the case of (an IMO very unlikely) US invasion, I think Canada could be isolated, have its energy infrastructure destroyed and internal logistics disrupted, and ultimately the population could be starved into submission if necessary without much difficulty. And no other nation would do anything about it.

Canada would be much better off just surrendering and trying to maintain a national identity post-annexation in the hope of a future peaceful secession.
by aidenn0 | 2025-08-16 04:05:18+00:00
You have to go into a doctor every month and get a new paper prescription for hormonal birth control? In the US? 20 years ago, my wife was able to do an electronic prescription, and it automatically refilled at the pharmacy every month.

For stimulants, they can't do an electronic refill, so I literally had to go to my doctor, get a paper prescription, then drop it off at the pharmacy, then come back a few days later (because it's usually backordered) every 30 days.

Some doctors would write 3 prescriptions with a "not before" date, but others were not willing to do so.
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-08-16 04:05:32+00:00
I fully agree and practically anyone should have seen this coming a mile away.

Yet almost 20 years later, the fees largely remain, little has improved.

I’m surprised there hasn’t been a discount airline that mandates everyone travel nude without any bags at all.

Would make security and boarding a breeze… no more boarding groups! Planes would be lighter — reduced fuel cost — more environmentally friendly.

Could even charge for premium robes on arrival.
by extraisland | 2025-08-16 04:05:38+00:00
I was talking more generally about the general design of the app. It is "ok".

I have a really rubbish signal (I live in the sticks in the North West). There was almost no reception on near the gym. It never took 30 seconds. Generally scanning the QR code itself wouldn't get recognised by the scanner. I just ended up using the 8 digit code. This was using the iPhone app.

I ended up cancelling because quite honestly I prefer walking and cycling. But I was using them until earlier this year.

Considering Pure Gym is cheap, has reasonably decent equipment and is kept clean (at least where I am). The app being a bit shit sometimes is like a whatever problem IMO.