MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-17 20:30:29+00:00
> It may be a little different from the nature of LLM hallucinations, but in terms of quality or quantity regarding reliability of what these entities say, I don’t see much difference.

I see tons of differences.

Many religious beliefs origins have to do with explaining how and why the world functions they way it does; many gods were created in many religions to explain natural forces of the world, or mechanisms of society, in the form of a story which is the natural way human brains have evolved to store large amounts of information.

Further into the modern world, religions persist for a variety of reasons, specifically acquisition of wealth/power, the ability to exert social control on populations with minimal resistance, and cultural inertia. But all of those "hallucinations" can be explained; we know most of their histories and origins and what we don't know can be pretty reliably guessed based on what we do know.

So when you say:

> Not all human hallucinations are lies, though. ... People have [hallucinations] because of, essentially, their training data.

You're correct, but even using the word hallucinations itself is giving away some of the game to AI marketers.

A "hallucination" is typically some type of auditory or visual stimulus that is present in a mind, for a whole mess of reasons, that does not align with the world that mind is observing, and in the vast majority of cases, said hallucination is a byproduct of a mind's "reasoning machine" trying to make sense of nonsensical sensory input.

This requires a basis for this mind perceiving the universe, even in error, and judging incorrectly based on that, and LLMs do not fit this description at all. They do not perceive in any way, even machine learning applications of advanced varieties are not using sensors to truly "sense" they are merely paging through input data and referencing existing data to pattern match it. If you show an ML program 6,000 images of scooters, it will be able to identify a scooter pretty well. But if you show it then a bike, a motorcycle, a moped and a Segway, it will not understand that any of these things accomplish a similar goal, because even though it knows (kind of) what a scooter looks like, it has no idea what it is for or why someone would want one, and that all those other items would probably serve a similar purpose.

> The bottom line, though, is I don’t agree that humans are less subject to hallucinations than LLMs are.

That's still not what I said. I said an LLM's lies, however unintentional, are harder to detect than a person's lies because a person lies for a reason, even a stupid reason. An LLM lies because it doesn't understand anything it's actually saying.
by sigmoid10 | 2025-08-17 20:30:55+00:00
While autophagy does correlate with fasting and some studies link it to health markers, it should be noted that it usually takes at least 18 hours of continued fasting to even start and only goes into full swing after 48 to 72 hours. It is also an extreme cell response that is associated with high levels of cellular stress, which might have understudied long term detrimental effects. A simple calorie reduction either by eating fewer highly processed meals or regular intense exercise is much more universally accepted as longevity boosting, because it combats overweight, which is by far the most common disease that shortens general lifespan in the western world. There's really no good reason to force your body through these extreme diets. Don't be overweight, don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, maybe go easy on junk food and maybe do some exercise. And get your regular medical check-ups. Then you're already at the pinnacle of clinical longevity science. There is no actual anti aging drug yet that has a proven effect on humans. Best we have are some moderately promising monkey and small mammal studies, but they generally don't translate well.
by ben_w | 2025-08-17 20:32:43+00:00
Not necessarily, it also comes from taking your users seriously before you even know what they were saying.

Consider: If you trust the people on your forum to be sensible, and one day one of your users writes:

"I have realised something which is dangerous to know. Here it is: …"

then the sensible choice is to (1) stop reading immediately, don't even find out what's after the ellipsis, (2) delete/hide/otherwise remove their message, and (3) put in a general statement of "don't write things that you think are dangerous for people to know".
by IshKebab | 2025-08-17 20:33:05+00:00
Nobody cares dude. It's a totally different thing. Names can overlap if the difference is obvious.

What people do care about is where names imply some relationship that isn't true. In this case the name Claudia strongly implies that this is an official Claude-related product. They'll get a cease and desist soon enough if this actually becomes popular.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-17 20:33:24+00:00
> appropriate TRT for men with low T

You lost me here since this doesn’t appear in the linked article at all. You seem to be speaking about your own link, not the linked article on Hacker News.

Be especially careful with TRT advice on the internet or from local clinics that push TRT treatments. The definition of “low testosterone” used in the longevity studies is very different than the definition used by TRT clinics looking to grow their customer base.

There was an alarming study recently that showed a high percentage of men on TRT didn’t even have baseline testosterone bloodwork showing a deficiency. The clinics “diagnosed” them based on vague symptoms or questions, which is how they get around the fact that most men seeking TRT are not clinically deficient these days. Taking TRT will suppress natural production of testosterone and can lead to a lifetime need for TRT. Inappropriate dosing (which is common at the TRT clinics who want their customers to feel something early on) can also be net harmful and lead to cardiac complications or even psychiatric side effects like anxiety.

TRT should be a last resort for people with true clinical deficiencies after eliminating the typical contributing factors (alcohol, sleep, obesity, etc). It’s not appropriate to mix into a list of supplements to take because it’s on the short list of medicines that can make you permanently dependent by causing testicular atrophy. This isn’t a concern in patients who already have testicular damage leading to hypogonadism, but it should be a huge concern for the average guy walking into a TRT clinic because they heard it was going to give them an edge or help in the gym.
by forinti | 2025-08-17 20:34:20+00:00
The 80s were crazy. In 1981 Sinclair had a market with a 1KB machine and in 1985 the Amiga came out.

That's 4 years! The 386 came out in 1985 too.

I think Acorn did quite well and its legacy still lives on through ARM. Where's IBM in the desktop or CPU market?
by saulpw | 2025-08-17 20:34:23+00:00
There will always be people who won't think. The specific problem the OP is noticing, is "promising juniors" who then fizzle out and become these people who won't think. I think this is an interesting category to look at. Is AI making more of the non-thinkers appear promising erroneously? Or is it a comfortable but insidious offramp for the lazy-minded who previously would only think because they had to? Or are the demands of the tech industry, increasing velocity at the cost of conscientiousness, tempting/forcing juniors to use AI to preserve their jobs, but at the cost of their careers?
by OJFord | 2025-08-17 20:34:31+00:00
About to break it if it didn't seem 'actively used' in late 2024, yes. But if your document was being frequently read and the link actively clicked, it'll (now) keep working.

But as I said in sibling comment to yours, I don't see the point of the distinction, why not just continue them all, surely the mostly unused ones are even cheaper to serve.
by maggie66666 | 2025-08-17 20:35:05+00:00
Hi HN,

I built LingualLearner, an AI-powered language learning platform that tries to solve a problem I personally struggled with: practicing languages outside of class.

Unlike traditional apps that rely on flashcards or rigid lessons, LingualLearner focuses on conversation-first learning with a few key ideas:

AI Personas – Create your own conversational partner (friend, colleague, tutor, or custom role).

Intelligent Memory – The system remembers past conversations (topics, vocabulary, even emotions) and brings them back naturally.

Smart Vocabulary Extraction – New words are automatically pulled from your chats, categorized by difficulty, and scheduled for review with spaced repetition.

Real-time Speech & Pronunciation Feedback – Practice speaking, get instant correction, and improve accent/intonation with AI.

Adaptive Learning – The AI adjusts difficulty based on your level and tracks your progress across multiple languages.

It currently supports 10 languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Arabic).

The tech stack: React 18 + TypeScript frontend, Supabase for real-time data, GPT models for conversation, and Capacitor/Web Speech API for voice recognition.

My goal is to make language learning feel more like chatting with a friend who actually remembers what you’ve said before, while still helping you improve accuracy and retention.

Would love feedback from this community on:

Which use cases resonate most (daily practice, professional use, travel prep)?

What additional features might make this more useful?

How important is peer-to-peer/community interaction compared to solo AI practice?

Happy to share more details or a demo link if there’s interest.
by ohdeargodno | 2025-08-17 20:35:30+00:00
>Then there will be new pressure to get at the underlying keys that protect the system.

just decap your CPU no big deal it just destroys it.

Unless you do something stupid and expose, for some reason, a function from the TPM to return the private key (something that basically noone has done in the past 15 years), you're not breaking those keys. It hasn't been broken on a PS5, on an Xbox One, on an iPhone, on the vast majority of Android phones.

>Every other modern non computer based sport has this issue. They understand they can't be perfect

In every single popular online game right now, hop in on a game, there is a very high chance that one of the players is cheating. From regular scripting in DotA, to aimbotting, to whing, to anything you can imagine. For players, this leads to a frustrating experience. And frustration leads to players leaving the game. Unlike someone cheating at football, which you can personally physically grab and beat the shit out of for ruining the game for others, the best you can do online is leave. For developers, players leaving and a reputation of having cheaters means that your future attempts at making any money through the online portion of your game is dead.
by pessimizer | 2025-08-17 20:36:11+00:00
I guarantee these trends are no different than Google News or any other news aggregator. AI didn't take over HN specifically; at some point HN fell behind the mainstream rather than rushing in front of it. This was due to extremely heavy moderation explicitly and plainly meant to silence the complaints of black people and women in tech (extremely successfully, I might add.) These discussions were given the euphemism "politics" and hand-modded out of existence.

Discussions about the conflicts between political parties and politicians to pass or defeat legislation, and the specific advocacy or defeat of specific legislation; those were not considered political. When I would ask why discussions of politics were not considered political, but black people not getting callbacks from their resumes was, people here literally couldn't understand the question. James Damore wasn't "political" for months somehow; it was only politics from a particular perspective that made HN uncomfortable enough that they had to immediately mod it away.

At that point, the moderation became just sort of arbitrary in a predictable, almost comforting way, and everything started to conform. HN became "VH1": "MTV" without the black people. The top stories on HN are the same as on Google News, minus any pro-Trump stuff, extremely hysterical anti-Trump stuff, or anything about discrimination in or out of tech.

I'm still plowing along out of habit, annoying everybody and getting downvoted into oblivion, but I came here because of the moderation; a different sort of moderation that decided to make every story on the front page about Erlang one day.

What took over this site back then would spread beyond this site: vivid, current arguments about technology and ethics. It makes sense that after a lot of YC companies turned out to be comically unethical and spread misery, rentseeking, and the destruction of workers rights throughout the US and the world, the site would give up on the pretense of being on the leading edge of anything positive. We don't even talk about YC anymore, other than to notice what horrible people and companies are getting a windfall today.

The mods seem like perfectly nice people, but HN isn't even good for finding out about new hacks and vulnerabilities first anymore. It's not ahead of anybody on anything. It's not even accidentally funny; templeos would have had to find somewhere else to hang out.

Maybe this is interesting just because it's harder to get a history of Google News. You'd have to build it yourself.
by BoiledCabbage | 2025-08-17 20:37:01+00:00
> I am so floored that at least half of this community, usually skeptical to a fault, evangelizes LLMs so ardently. Truly blows my mind. ... > I’m open to them becoming more than a statistical token predictor, and I think it would be really neat to see that happen

I'm more shocked that so many people seem unable to come to grips with the fact that something can be a next token predictor and demonstrate intelligence. That's what blows my mind, people unable to see that something can be more than the sum of its parts. To them, if something is a token predictor clearly it can't be doing anything impressive - even while they watch it do I'm impressive things.
by dctoedt | 2025-08-17 20:37:41+00:00
> Why isn’t [sic] tariffs within the “emanations from penumbras” of the president’s foreign policy powers?

Says the consistent mocker of Justice Douglas's use of the quoted phrase to support privacy rights. It seems you'd like to have your cake and eat it too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penumbra_(law)
by mikestew | 2025-08-17 20:38:05+00:00
Your point stands, but collapsible steering columns and seat belts have been mandated in the U. S. since the late '60s.

At the same time, "luxury"? Even our 20 year old Scion has ABS and air bags. Okay, no lane keeping or collision avoidance, but I've got that on my (granted, top trim) Hyundai.
by jandrewrogers | 2025-08-17 20:38:56+00:00
This doesn't generalize.

In 2014, the common heuristic was 256kB based on measurements in many systems, so the 128kB value is in line with that. At the time, optimal block sizing wasn't that sensitive to the I/O architecture so many people arrived at the same values.

In 2024, the optimal block size based on measurement largely reflects the quality and design of your I/O architecture. Vast improvements in storage hardware expose limitations of the software design to a much greater extent than a decade ago. As a general observation, the optimal I/O sizing in sophisticated implementations has been trending toward smaller sizes over the last decade, not larger.

The seeming optimality of large block sizes is often a symptom of an I/O scheduling design that can't keep up with the performance of current storage hardware.
by mensetmanusman | 2025-08-17 20:39:12+00:00
People tend to tell me I have a high EQ, and I agree it’s hard to measure.

For fun I recently completed a test where they just show eyes and you have to match their emotional state from a list (someone asked me to try this). I got nearly 100% when the average was 60^ or so.

Thought it was an interesting approach to one aspect of EQ.
by divan | 2025-08-17 20:39:18+00:00
Excited to see this step in the Flutter future. My biggest issue with using Flutter was deep dependence on Material or Cupertino widgets. In a way, it's cool to have all those widgets out of the box, but as soon as you want to create your own design system, it's a pain. Especially given, that Material/Cupertino is overly focused on mobile experience, and Flutter nowadays often used for desktop and web apps (with wasm being soon default renderer <3). There are only few well-maintained custom design systems for Flutter, and that's a shame.

This documents explains well the history of the choices made at the beginning and the current vision of the Flutter team.
by nlawalker | 2025-08-17 20:39:50+00:00
>If the “quick call?” method is common, it means that many of its users don’t want their communications logged, meaning they commonly ask for sketchy stuff.

In my experience, the reason for most "quick calls" isn't quite this nefarious. It's usually just about making a request for which the asker wants immediate confirmation of handoff, and/or for which they haven't done much thinking or built a good justification, and they are proficient at controlling synchronous conversations to avoid questions and clarifications while still getting to yes.

/cynicism And, there are plenty of people out there who genuinely do prefer the personal touch and talking to others.
by renegade-otter | 2025-08-17 20:40:03+00:00
In complete irony, I got back to reading actual docs for Python, React, Scala (my stacks) because I do NOT like being spoon-fed slightly-off answers.

I have a feeling that the skills for fixing up AI slop will be in-demand quite soon.

But, more to the point - AI code is legacy code.
by Aurornis | 2025-08-17 20:40:20+00:00
These articles really need a lot of context to parse as they paint some of the compounds as having potential upside without downsides.

Metformin is amazing in people with diabetes, but among non-diabetics taking it for vague life extension claims it’s often discontinued due to side effects.

Rapamycin has fallen out of favor among many in this space because they felt it was producing net negative effects as well as causing very annoying side effects like blisters in the mouth.

I’ve followed supplement and fitness forums for years. It’s amazing how frequently a prescription medication will be held up as a wonder drug, but then people who try it discover it isn’t helping them or is even causing other problems they didn’t think about.

EDIT: There are some serious scientific errors in this blog (dose conversions from mice studies). After clicking around the author appears to be into some quackery and conspiracy theory stuff as well. I flagged this submission because it’s not as scientific of a source as it claims.
by robocat | 2025-08-17 20:40:58+00:00
> I define this at least as "supports more than one person's salary in perpetuity,"

Only if you ignore the costs of risk.

Let's say you hear that 90% of businesses are financial failures. What is the profit hurdle you need to exceed before you could declare success?

Zombie businesses (one person just earning a living) are common and often the income doesn't cover the risk premium (e.g. of one year of opportunity cost wages/ladder working as an employee). If you're doing a business, then in theory only the financial returns matter. There are non-financial returns (pride, control, yadda yadda) but those apply more to hobbies than businesses (not that I think anything is wrong with starting a hobby business if you're honest with yourself about motivations).

I think the VC rule of thumb is that one investment needs to do better than 30x return over 10 years to cover the losses on the rest of the portfolio. Therefore as an individual unless you get over 30x the return (versus lost wages) then you are under water? i.e. if you quit a $50k/yr job for a year, then only when you're earning $50k/yr AND have gained $1.5 million more then have you broke even.
by samwho | 2025-08-17 20:41:21+00:00
Your talk is a lot better than my quiz.

Interestingly you say comments aren’t valid in the middle of the local part but I thought they are, and the parser I used agreed. Maybe obsolete behaviour?

I didn’t realise quotes could be dot separated but it makes sense now I look back over the EBNF! That’s really cool.

Sorry I made you think I’d stolen your content, I can totally see why you’d think that. I promise you that was the first time I watched that video.
by __MatrixMan__ | 2025-08-17 20:41:30+00:00
> Claude wrote me Go tests that passed. They were beautiful, and they were worthless. They all collapsed to true == true.

My favorite one of these is when I was having Claude write a nix derivation to package kustomize at 4.5.5 and instead of getting the correct source version and building it, it just set some build args on the latest version to override the output of the --version CLI flag.
by mrexroad | 2025-08-17 20:42:17+00:00
“If you enjoyed the {service}, please rate me 5-Stars, anything less is considered negative poor service”

Not sure if part of a broader trend, or a simply reflection of it, but when mentoring/coaching middle and high school aged kids, I’m finding they struggle to accept feedback in anyway other than “I failed.” A few years back, the same age group was more likely to accept and view feedback as an opportunity so long as you led with praising strengths. Now it’s like threading a needle every time.
by SoftTalker | 2025-08-17 20:42:27+00:00
Fair enough, but going into debt for something that has (or will have) no value is an entirely different question.

When I was young and dumb (at least more dumb than I am today) and newly graduated from college, I took a $6,000 personal loan at my credit union to buy a computer workstation, top of the line, with a large monitor, laser printer, the works. This was in the early 1990s. It was stupid, and of course the credit union didn't try to talk me out of it. I convinced myself I would "need" it as I entered my professional career as a software developer.

Of course it never meaningfully contributed to my income, it was rapidly obsoleted, and I was stuck with the payments. But I made them.
by Blake_Welsh | 2025-08-17 20:43:07+00:00
Memory Bandwidth measures how much data a GPU can move between its chip and video memory per second, expressed in GB/s. Formula: Memory Frequency × Bus Width × 2 ÷ 8.

Why it matters:

High-res gaming (4K, 8K)

Ray tracing & shaders

AI/ML training

Rendering & video editing

It also impacts operational costs in big ways:

Efficiency saves money: lower power = lower electricity and cooling bills.

Scaling: more GPUs per rack when each runs cooler.

Sustainability: less heat, less carbon footprint.

So beyond raw performance, bandwidth efficiency shapes how affordable and sustainable GPU computing really is.

Interactive Chart GPU Memory Bandwidth Evolution (2007–2025) analysis
by TMWNN | 2025-08-17 20:43:19+00:00
My favorite quote:

>Recently, one visitor unaware of the disastrous security situation in and around the station was trying to find his way around and entered what regulars refer to as "the corridor of evil." "He came out without his money and papers, but with a black eye," said Ahmed from the Taxis Verts company, half amused, half dismayed.