MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-06 13:12:01+00:00
> If Ozempic is so great then how come our bodies don't just produce more GLP-1?

Idk, why can’t we synthesise vitamin C? Why do we have a bent oesophagus prone to choking and heads bigger than womena’ hips?

We weren’t intelligently designed. To the degree we were optimised for anything it isn’t the modern environment. A lot of pushback against medicine in general seems to derive from an underlying belief in an innate perfection of human biology.
by BiteCode_dev | 2025-08-06 13:12:24+00:00
This has been attempted many times with python, and always been a failure because of the dynamism of the language, even by big actors.

The solution, therefor, as always been to use the OS tooling for that. Even the .Net ecosystem eventually went into that direction.

The JS ecosystem is making that mistake right now, and will of course, deprecate this API in 10 years after they realize they can't make it secure either unless they basically reimplement BSD jails entirely.
by iaiuse | 2025-08-06 13:13:06+00:00
MIT isn’t “weak” because it allows LLM training; it’s weak because it puts zero obligations on the recipient.

Blocking “LLM training” in a license feels satisfying, but I’ve run into three practical issues while benchmarking models for clients:

1. Auditability — You can grep for GPL strings; you can’t grep a trillion-token corpus to prove your repo wasn’t in it. Enforcement ends up resting on whistle-blowers, not license text.

2. Community hard-forks — “No-AI” clauses split the ecosystem. Half the modern Python stack depends on MIT/BSD; if even 5 % flips to an LLM-ban variant, reproducible builds become a nightmare.

3. Misaligned incentives — Training is no longer the expensive part. At today’s prices a single 70 B checkpoint costs about \$60 k to fine-tune, but running inference at scale can exceed that each day. A license that focuses on training ignores the bigger capture point.

A model company that actually wants to give back can do so via attribution, upstream fixes, and funding small maintainers (things AGPL/SSPL rarely compel). Until we can fingerprint data provenance, social pressure—or carrot contracts like RAIL terms—may move the needle more than another GPL fork.

Happy to be proven wrong; I’d love to see a case where a “no-LLM” clause was enforced and led to meaningful contributions rather than a silent ignore.
by arp242 | 2025-08-06 13:13:26+00:00
> if left unchecked, the term scientist will eventually have the same meaning as the word priest.

Except if you base things like planes, computers, or medicine on science they provably work.

Obviously it's not perfect and probably never will be as science is a human endeavour and humans are not perfect. But dismissing all of it as "just a religion" fundamentally misunderstands both science and religion.
by K0balt | 2025-08-06 13:13:29+00:00
AI is useful in Chinese walling code, but it’s not as easy as you make it sound. To stay out of legal trouble, you probably should refactor the code into a different language, then back into the target language. In the end, it turns into a process of being forced to understand the codebase and supervising its rewriting. I’ve translated libraries into another language using LLMs, I’d say that process was 1/2 the labor of writing it myself. So in the end, going 2 ways, you may as well rewrite the code yourself… but working with the LLM will make you familiar with the subject matter so you -could- rewrite the code, so I guess you could think of it as a sort of buggy tutorial process?
by skeezyboy | 2025-08-06 13:14:01+00:00
> You might argue that the AI can be a mentor or can guide society appropriately its a next word predictor trained off datasets.

> Raising the next generation to outsource all thinking to AI and form a culture around influencing people 45 seconds at a time will destroy those prerequisites to our better lifestyle, and it will be downhill from there.

they said the same about tv, youtube and even printed books. short length videos now apparently are the new evil (somehow).

quick question, why was nobody complaining about these exact same "engagement" algorithms 20 years ago? Why only when tiktok short form videos appear? Popularity based ranking was in search engines decades ago but nobody cared then. No cocomelon back then, coincidence?
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-08-06 13:14:48+00:00
Considering that the PHD process is as much about research as it is marketing/spin, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised the latter was formerly commercialized.

I became disillusioned when I realized people were publishing the most minute of contributions because they were desperate trying to show something to graduate.

Things stay the same when grants and funding are involved too.

Even in the respected publications, the reviewers are inexperienced students.

Imagine if a Senior Developer had 3 high school Interns as the only reviewers for all merge requests.

Not sure what the solution is, just too many disincentives for quality.
by 542354234235 | 2025-08-06 13:15:08+00:00
>I don't know why you seem to believe that the only path to surrender was the exact events that transpired.

Maybe dropping the bombs in Tokyo Bay would have changed things. Maybe writing the emperor a love song would have changed things. We don't know. There are two aspects that get mixed together with this.

>Given the situation and knowledge at the time, was this or that military action reasonable and necessary?

>Knowing things unknowable at the time, can we now say this or that military action was unnecessary?

I think it is clear that the first question is yes, it was a reasonable and necessary decision at the time.

The second question is interesting to think about, but I think you are getting so much pushback because you are mixing both questions, using after the fact "what ifs" to say what people should have done at the time, as if they could just try different things and get a do over if it didn't work.
by sandreas | 2025-08-06 13:15:40+00:00
My goto practise is to automate the shipping first and then do small increments.

In the past i used a simple 'build-release.sh' whereas lately i tend to use Github actions or other CI/CD workflows.

Another habit is to focus on stuff that you need or want for yourself and if you are in the flow finish it, then switch to other requests. As soon as I Start with something that feels boring but was often requested, I lose interest very quickly and get distracted.
by aragilar | 2025-08-06 13:16:19+00:00
And yet, most of what people end up doing ends up being effectively OS and application scripting. Most ML projects are really just setting up a pipeline and telling the computer to go and run it. Cloud deployments are "take this yaml and transform it some other yaml". In as much as I don't want to use Fortran to parse a yaml file, I don't really want to write an OS (or a database) in Python. Even something like django is mostly deferring off tasks to faster systems, and is really about being a DSL-as-programming-language while still being able to call out to other things (e.g. ML code).
by PeterStuer | 2025-08-06 13:16:48+00:00
It works because people feel 'full' sooner. They do still try to overeat, but feel they can't (and yes, there is habituation as they try day in day out). I'm pretty sure the food industry has been working on a neutralizing agent to add to their preparations since day 1, so the 'victory' wont last.

As for longer term consequences? Who knows?
by Joker_vD | 2025-08-06 13:16:57+00:00
> At that point, all Weatherbed did was select "spicy" and confirm her birth date for Grok to generate a clip of Swift tearing "off her clothes" and "dancing in a thong" in front of "a largely indifferent AI-generated crowd."

I am honestly baffled at what she suspected would, or should, be the output. Like, seriously, what?
by eirikbakke | 2025-08-06 13:16:57+00:00
This is a weird (possibly AI-generated?) summary of an article pre-print that is not even cited on the page. I think it's this one: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.09.25331038v...

Best to wait for the final, peer reviewed version of the article.
Show HN: Storm MCP – Custom Gateways for Verified MCP Servers
by ColeMCP | 2025-08-06 13:17:06+00:00
Hi HN,

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What’s special:

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Built for AI agent devs, workflow builders, and indie hackers—anyone needing secure, focused access to external context, without managing server infrastructure.

We’re live at stormmcp.ai and eager for feedback. What pain points, features, or new MCP servers should we focus on next?
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-08-06 13:17:13+00:00
> replace "calorie abundance" with "sedentary lifestyle" and youre there

Our lifespans have increased with our sedentary lifestyles.

Exercise is part of it. But we’re clearly working to transcend our natural health spans in a comfortable, modern environment. That will require the application of intelligence to the problem, not just brute force.
by jen729w | 2025-08-06 13:17:23+00:00
In 2023 I was at a talk at the National Press Club in Canberra, Australia, by the deputy head of one of our national intelligence services.

This was just after the Optus leak. Some hundreds of thousands of customers' data, down to the passport and DOB level, leaked. Again. I was going to ask him whether we, the collected IT consultants in the room, simply couldn't be trusted any more.

We've proven that we can't. I firmly believe that independent companies should no longer, by law, be able to collect my identifying information. If you must identify me, the state should provide a service. You hand off to them, they validate me, they send you a token back, I'm validated.

Sadly the microphone never made it to my corner of the room.
by iaiuse | 2025-08-06 13:17:25+00:00
LLMs will mediate plenty of routine text, but the choke-point shifts from “writing” to “prompting + validating”.

In client projects we see two hard costs pop up: 1. Human review time ⟶ still 2–4 min per 1 k tokens because hallucination isn’t solved. 2. Inference \$: for a 70 B model at 16 k context you pay ~\$0.12 per 1 k tokens — cheap for generation, expensive for bulk reading.

So yes, AI will read for us, but whoever owns the *attention budget + validation loop* still controls comprehension. That’s where new leverage lives.
by Krssst | 2025-08-06 13:17:53+00:00
Performance is worthless if the code isn't correct. It's easier to write correct code reasonably quickly in Python in simple cases (integers don't overflow like in C, don't wrap around like in C#, no absurd implicit conversions like in other scripting languages).

Also you don't need code to be fast a lot of the time. If you just need some number crunching that is occasionally run by a human, taking a whole second is fine. Pretty good replacement for shell scripting too.
by ryandv | 2025-08-06 13:17:57+00:00
Exactly. The self-contradiction exposes this farce of an arrangement for what it is: talented engineers are presented with immense monetary incentives to automate themselves out of the workforce, their carefully honed craftsmanship to be replaced by hordes of monkeys at typewriters producing voluminous slop.

Anybody can plainly see that the emperor is without clothes, but so long as the C-level rhetoric is sung to the tune of "Either you have to embrace the AI, or you get out of your career," [0] you may as well put on your own clown nose and wig and start dancing while the music is still playing and there are still seats out.

Farcical circumstances prompt paradoxical responses.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44808645
by mark_l_watson | 2025-08-06 13:18:02+00:00
I ran gpt-oss:20b on my old macMini using both Ollama and LM Studio. Very nice. Something a little odd but useful: if you use the new Ollama App and login, for free you get a web search tool. Odd because you are no longer running local and private.

After a good part of a year using Chinese models (which are fantastic, happy to have them) it is cool to now be relying on US models with the newest 4B Google Gemma model and now also the 20B OpenAI model for running locally.
by andsoitis | 2025-08-06 13:18:08+00:00
Body of article:

> Weatherbed asked to depict "Taylor Swift celebrating Coachella with the boys."

> Weatherbed selected "spicy" and confirmed her birth date

> Grok produced more than 30 images of Swift in revealing clothing

> Weatherbed was shocked to discover the video generator spat out topless images

Headline: "Grok generates fake Taylor Swift nudes without being asked"

I wonder what the reported was looking for in a spicy image of Swift celebrating Coachelle with the boys? I would not call that unprompted.

Fake outrage much?
by BobbyTables2 | 2025-08-06 13:18:11+00:00
It’s also just not fraud.

Well meaning students have little alternative than to publish journal papers showing how their algorithm/method had a 0.001% improvement (measured by questionable metrics) because they are trying to get N publications to graduate.

While discourse about such methods can be beneficial, it also tends to create too much noise that drowns out more meaningful work.
by netsharc | 2025-08-06 13:18:12+00:00
In the documentary (in the form of cinéma vérité) The Act of Killing (1), the director learnt about "anti-communist" massacres in 1965 Indonesia, which was sanctioned by a regime whose successors were still in power in the modern times. He compared the atmosphere of the country as if he came to Germany 40 years after WW2, but with the Nazis having won it. He talks to some of the killers, and he found them not even regretful, but boastful - throughout the documentary, he learns that if they admitted they were wrong, they'd be having to admit to themselves that they murdered a lot of innocent people, so they'd rather construct a fantasy world where they're the good guys.

There's even a musical segment of the documentary (he convinced the people to reimagine their doings in the style of 50's Hollywood movies they loved) where actors playing the victims thank the killers for saving them from godlessness and sending them to heaven: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-ta9To14yw

I wonder how many of the genocide-defenders and genocide-enablers (not to mention genocide-executioners) will have similar PTSD...

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kJZb2Q1NmE
by gwbas1c | 2025-08-06 13:18:23+00:00
> Listening to a good album is an immersive experience.

That's when/if you're giving it your full attention. I used to do that when I was younger, but much less frequently now.

That being said, there's something hypnotic about watching a record spin, and seeing the needle in the groove. I don't do it now that I'm older, but my kids used to specifically ask me to play a record just so they could see it spin.
by cassianoleal | 2025-08-06 13:18:26+00:00
> Capitalism is just a reflection of people being self-interested

I don't think that's the case. I think most people are not self-interested, or at least not in the selfish sense. I think most people are more than willing to sacrifice _some_ direct personal gain for better community gains.

The problem is that capitalism only allows selfish self-interest to flourish, so it incentivises even the more community-oriented people to always put themselves first, a lot of the time even in detriment to their immediate vicinity.

Capitalism is a form of authoritarianism in that it really only serves a few, and everyone else is just constantly fighting for survival.

> being authoritarian which will inevitably leads also to surveillance

That's exactly where capitalism is taking us.
by iaiuse | 2025-08-06 13:18:31+00:00
Correct—they don’t “know” in the epistemic sense, but they do encode a latent world model that shows up as useful priors.

Put differently: GPT-4 isn’t a knowledge base, it’s a *Bayesian autocomplete* over dense vectors. That’s why it can draft Python faster than many juniors, yet fail a trivial chain-of-thought step if the token path diverges.

The trick in production is to sandwich it: retrieval (facts) LLM (fluency) rule checker (logic). Without that third guardrail, you’re betting on probability mass, not truth.
by jjani | 2025-08-06 13:18:34+00:00
Can confirm it's "Not just the GPT's - it's all of the frontier models." who are addicted to that one.

IME the only reliable way around it when using an LLM to create blog-like content is to have actual hard lists of slop to rewrite/avoid. This works pretty well if done if correctly. There's actually not that many patterns (not hundreds, more like dozens) so they're pretty enumerable. On the other hand, you and me would still be able to tell if only rewriting those things.

Overall the number one thing is that the writing is "overly slick". I've seen this expressed in tons of ways but I find slickness to be the most apt description. As if it's a pitch, or a TED presentation script, that has been pored over and perfected until every single word is optimized. Very salesy. In a similar vein, in LLM-written text, everything is given similar importance. Everything is crucial, one of the most powerful X, particularly elegant, and so on.

I find Opus to have the lowest slop ratio, which this benchmark kind of confirms [1], but of course its pricing is a barrier.

[1] https://eqbench.com/creative_writing_longform.html
by mapmeld | 2025-08-06 13:18:46+00:00
People are not reading and absorbing the longer pieces of writing. I worked at a company which would create information-dense, wordy PowerPoint slides for client updates, and at some point you see it has no point besides trying to impress. If we actually needed something in an email, they told us to put it in the first sentence.

I've also noticed it when people post LLM writing on Reddit. Something may give me pause, and then re-reading the content any given paragraph was way off. I had even glossed over the bolded conclusion "it’s a coaching-wheels moment" (?) because as you read it your brain thinks of a way it could make sense.
by jaggs | 2025-08-06 13:18:52+00:00
I understand. I really don't have enough information to attach fixed numbers to the circumstances. Whether it's £350,000 or £10 is a mystery. And maybe that's the problem.

Maybe it's fine that people go to UAE Italy and Switzerland, because it's difficult to ascribe any solution when the participants are so secretive in their financial movements.

It's kind of interesting that people are becoming exercised by this tax, because it's clear that they don't really value staying in the UK as much as saving some money. I find that a really interesting observation.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-08-06 13:19:09+00:00
RL isn't in general going to bias the model to use a lot of words, unless your RL training had the goal of favoring long over short responses.

There are now multiple levels of RL being used to post-train these models, from RLHF (use RL to bias the model to generate outputs matching human feedback preferences) to RL used to improve reasoning by generating reasoning steps that lead to verified correct conclusions (in areas like math and programming where correctness can be verified).

RLHF (not RL in general) may lead to longer more verbose outputs to the extent that human testers indicated longer responses as their preference. Maybe testers are easily bullshitted and like something that is longer and sounds like a more comprehensive authoritative answer ?

There is also the fact that an LLM is, unless prompted otherwise, is trying to predict Mr. Average (entire training set), who is more likely to waffle on than an expert who will cut to the chase and just give the facts, which they have a firm grip of. You can of course prompt the model to behave like an expert, or any given role, or to be more concise, which may or may not result in better output. It's a bit like asking the model to summarize when it's not really summarizing but instead predicting what a summary would look like (form vs function).
by ModernMech | 2025-08-06 13:19:33+00:00
More likely than if they lose in Ukraine, that's for sure. Because the lesson they will have learned is that invading countries is a winning strategy. They were deluded enough to invade Ukraine, they are deluded enough to invade Poland.

"Putin is too sensible to invade Ukraine" was the argument people were making the day before he did. My guess is these are the same people who now say "Putin would never invade Poland".
by pwg | 2025-08-06 13:20:00+00:00
From your "pop out" in the article:

"is that this review is ... pretty much purely based on the personal preferences of the author."

You've found the core takeaway about nearly all "product reviews" in nearly all publications. They are almost all simply "the personal preferences of the author".

These authors have neither the time, nor the science skills, for anything even beginning to look like a rigorous scientific review, and so the "best" vs. "ok" vs. "not recommended" tags applied result because the author liked the particular shade of pink used on a trim piece on one, or liked that another one looks like the Apple computer they are using, and so forth.

But they are never based upon any objective criteria, and are never (nor ever were intended to be) reproducible in any scientific fashion.

Yet, as you say, they have "great power" to influence buying decisions on the part of folks who read their reviews.
by wonderwonder | 2025-08-06 13:20:22+00:00
This has failed though. Over 40% of Americans are obese. This costs us as a society hundreds of billions in healthcare costs, much of it federally subsidized. Being obese is a simple choice now, one can choose to be fat or choose to take a once weekly shot and not be fat.

Take Elon Musk, he is clearly overweight. Is your argument that he lacks self-discipline as a person and is as such a complete failure? Of course not, the man is clearly more disciplined and driven than most people. He just eats like crap as he has other priorities.

I am open to you explaining the argument as to why 40% of people being obese so that they have to learn self discipline in just that single area of their life and all of the associated social, health and financial costs is more beneficial to society as a whole than people taking a shot and losing weight and gaining all of the benefits that being obese robs society of.

Society evolves as its technology does. I'm sure its not the case but your argument appears to devolve to "Back in my day we didn't need a shot to be thin like you young kids, we walked up hill both ways to school with our little brother on our back. IN THE SNOW!"