MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ameliaquining | 2025-08-13 12:05:15+00:00
"First comment" here merely means the most recent comment, not the one that was at the top at the time, because, again, that data isn't available.

By my count, five comments expressed some kind of overt skepticism, and another four included a "if this is true" disclaimer without indicating any particular grounds to disbelieve it. The other 21 all either explicitly accepted the story as true, or implicitly didn't care whether it was true or not (e.g., piling onto criticism of Tesla without mentioning the specific controversy).
by jocaal | 2025-08-13 12:06:05+00:00
Einstein developed relativity from mathematical reasoning. A major influence was the michaelson morley experiment, which was solely done on earth. Relativity was developed in the early 1900's and the first radio telescope was made in the 1930's. Also, orbital mechanics uses mostly Newtonian mechanics and the communication of satellites is radio waves which were understood way before einstein. There is no relativity involved. Literally everything you said is factually incorrect.
by tyleo | 2025-08-13 12:06:29+00:00
But can it maintain my legacy crud app with no tests, millions of LoC, long compile times?

One day but not yet. Beyond pure capabilities the companies making AI don’t seem to have any sort of moat so it’s a $$$ incinerator for them so far.

Like the late 90s internet I suspect we’re in a bubble. But also like the late 90s internet I suspect there’s more in store here in the future.
by Anamon | 2025-08-13 12:07:16+00:00
Thanks for sharing your experiences. That's about what I'd have expected.

I always found it very weird to see people declaring instructions to LLMs as if they were talking to a person. "Do this", "never do that", as if there was some kind of interpreter behind that built a ruleset to follow. There isn't. It's all just context. Theory would suggest that in the rare cases that these instructions actually achieve the desired effect, they do so more coincidentally than anything else. Easy to see how it could work for something like "Write tests according to pattern X" because there are going to be examples of that around in the training data; highly unlikely that instructions like "don't repeat yourself" or "study the codebase first" would do anything reasonably effective.
by Maxious | 2025-08-13 12:07:21+00:00
The compromising of the initial "Open" in OpenAI was also justified because of... ding ding ding AGI

> We spent a lot of time trying to envision a plausible path to AGI. In early 2017, we came to the realization that building AGI will require vast quantities of compute. We began calculating how much compute an AGI might plausibly require. We all understood we were going to need a lot more capital to succeed at our mission—billions of dollars per year, which was far more than any of us, especially Elon, thought we’d be able to raise as the non-profit.

https://openai.com/index/openai-elon-musk/
by ratg13 | 2025-08-13 12:07:22+00:00
AI is going to create endless jobs by allowing everyone to make a huge mess.

We are currently in the early phase where people are creating code messes with little oversight and future people will be expected to build on them, which will either take expanded effort or complete re-writes from scratch.

The quality of all products will suffer for the foreseeable future.

It's now a several times a day occurrence for me of trying to help someone figure out a problem, and when I ask them why they did that, the answer is always that the AI told them to.

If the people that are using these tools don't know right from wrong, it's a recipe for disaster.

This problem is amplified in non-technical fields where people are creating tools for businesses without even the knowledge of what a code review is.

AI will be around forever, and the problems it will create are immeasurable, but unfortunately, it will likely always be seen as the solution to the problem as well.
by UncleEntity | 2025-08-13 12:07:47+00:00
Yeah, I was working through the design of part of this thing I've been working on and noticed that every time I would ask a follow up question it would change its opinion to agree that this new iteration was the best thing since sliced bread. I eventually had to call it out on it to get an 'honest' assessment of the various options we were discussing since I didn't want 'my thing' to be correct but the system as a whole to be correct.

And it's not like we were working on something too complicated for a daffy robot to understand, just trying to combine two relatively simple algorithms to do the thing which needed to be done in a way which (probably) hasn't been done before.
by vidarh | 2025-08-13 12:09:56+00:00
Just past the edit window, so let me also add that the article points out a number of "high-value" watch thefts that suggests about a quarter of these thefts on a yearly basis would be "high-value".

If anything, these articles have made me feel more secure rather than less secure - these numbers are tiny given the size of London.

Sure, maybe don't go around flashing your watch if it's worth tens of thousands of pounds.
by fidotron | 2025-08-13 12:10:16+00:00
There are several related things I find odd about Starlink, with the ongoing defense of the impact it has on scientific research being one of them.

Having used it it is genuinely impressive, but it will inevitably lead to everyone wanting their own independent LEO constellation for military purposes (communication and observation), which will then lead to a big interest in anti-satellite weapons since these will become major targets in a hot war.

The end result here is going to be huge quantities of space junk and investment in defense over-the-horizon ground radios (again) which to some degree is already happening.
by lazide | 2025-08-13 12:11:21+00:00
Dig deep enough, and every belief system ends up having some deep philosophical tenet which has to be taken on faith, because it’s impossible (or even contradictory!) to prove within the system itself. Even rationality.

After all, that evidence matters, or that we can know the universe (or facts) and hence logic can be useful, etc. can only be ‘proven’ using things like evidence, facts, and logic. And there are plausible arguments that can tear down elements of each of these, if we use other systems.

Ultimately, at some point we need to decide what we’re going to believe. Ideally, it’s something that works/doesn’t produce terrible outcomes, but since the future is fundamentally unpredictable and unknowable, that also requires a degree of faith eh?

And let’s not even get into the subjective nature of ‘terrible outcomes’, or how we would try to come up with some kind of score.

Linux has its benevolent dictator because it’s ‘needed it’, and by most accounts it has worked. Linus is less of a jerk than he has been. Which is nice.

Other projects have not had nearly as much success eh? How much of it is due to lack of Linus, and how much is due to other factors would be an interesting debate.
by AstralStorm | 2025-08-13 12:11:21+00:00
The question is, what is the actual paradigm that's being shifted here? Employing people?

It's definitely not wanting to talk to people, and even employment is a bit of a practical joke for now.

Comparing with Internet or electricity here is ridiculous thus far as well.

If we had actual intelligence instead of pretty nifty text robots, then it would be perhaps more true.
by biosboiii | 2025-08-13 12:11:59+00:00
I dislike tech monopolies but Chrome leaving Google would be most terrible thing ever, security wise.

Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3).

Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
by sluongng | 2025-08-13 12:12:14+00:00
I don't view it as a bug. It's a personality trait of the model that made "user steering" much easier, thus helping the model to handle a wider range of tasks.

I also think that there will be no "perfect" personality out there. There will always be folks who view some traits as annoying icks. So, some level of RL-based personality customization down the line will be a must.
by meowface | 2025-08-13 12:12:39+00:00
Exactly.

I wasn't trying to make any of the broader claims (e.g., that LLMs are fundamentally unreliable, which is sort of true but not really that true in practice). I'm speaking about the specific case where a lot of people seem to want to ask a model about itself or how it was created or trained or what it can do or how to make it do certain things. In these particular cases (and, admittedly, many others) they're often eager to reply with an answer despite having no accurate information about the true answer, barring some external lookup that happens to be 100% correct. Without any tools, they are just going to give something plausible but non-real.

I am actually personally a big LLM-optimist and believe LLMs possess "true intelligence and reasoning", but I find it odd how some otherwise informed people seem to think any of these models possess introspective abilities. The model fundamentally does not know what it is or even that it is a model - despite any insistence to the contrary, and even with a lot of relevant system prompting and LLM-related training data.

It's like a Boltzmann brain. It's a strange, jagged entity.
by Pyrodogg | 2025-08-13 12:12:40+00:00
A few months ago Adobe finally updated Lightroom Classic to require these processor extensions. To squeeze all of the matrix mults it can for AI features also in CPU mode.

It's amazing how long of a run top end hardware from ~2011 has had (just missed the cutoff by a few months). It's taken this long for stuff to really require these features.
by lvl155 | 2025-08-13 12:13:02+00:00
Yeah because I am sure if they told you how stupid and wrong you’re, people will continue to use it.

It’s superficial but not sure why people get so annoyed about it. It’s an artifact.

If devs truly want a helpful coding AI based on real devs doing real work, you’d basically opt for telemetry and allow Anthropic/OpenAI to train on your work. That’s the only way. Otherwise we are at the mercy of “devs” these companies hire to do training.
by jcranmer | 2025-08-13 12:13:09+00:00
I think you're misunderstanding pointer provenance, and you're being angry at a model that doesn't exist.

The failure mode of pointer provenance is converting an integer to a pointer to an object that was never converted to an integer. Tricks like packing integers into unknown bits or packing pointers into floating-point NaNs don't violate pointer provenance--it's really no different from passing a pointer to an external function call and getting it back from a different external function call.
by rini17 | 2025-08-13 12:13:49+00:00
They gainsay hearing aids but there's been good progress. However sometimes it's frustrating when they "intelligently" select the wrong sound. I don't believe AI can decide better, it can be even more spurious. Unless there's eye tracker?

And there's only so much bandwidth to the damaged ear possible no matter you do. Instead I want to try glasses with sound spectral analysis/visualization to pass additional auditory information to the brain. Even with feature extraction with AI, as long as it's low latency and consistent.
by AstralStorm | 2025-08-13 12:14:05+00:00
True, but original electricity stayed the same, even the turbine generators still in use are very similar. (Same with steam power, still in use today.) Batteries are improved but general operation is the same. There's many more devices using it, mostly for the better.

We don't even know if we want LLMs in more devices. Likewise we likely do not want Internet/email in every toaster.

LLMs staying the same would be the death of this technology. Even minor improvements don't matter enough.

Voice activated devices are not necessarily paradigm shifting either. We had these for over 25 years now.
by netsharc | 2025-08-13 12:14:08+00:00
It'd be more practical to have a faraday cage and several GPS transmitters to spoof a location (let's say 33.783, -118.14899); turn on the device, if it tells you it's located at 33.783, -118.14899, then it's GPS receiver is working correctly, anywhere else, then there's something wrong...

Reminds me of an anecdote that getting a rideshare in Moscow is difficult nowadays, because GPS for the whole city is jammed and the driver won't be able to find you.
by Terretta | 2025-08-13 12:14:57+00:00
> SwiftUI animations and claude code seemingly is not a good mix

Where is the corpus of SwiftUI animations to train Claude what probable soup you probably want regurgitated?

Hypothesis: iOS devs don't share their work openly for reasons associated with how the App Store ecosystem (mis)behaves.

Relatedly, the models don't know about Swift 6 except from maybe mid-2024 WWDC announcements. It's worth feeding them your own context. If you are 5.10, great. If you want to ship iOS 26 changes, wait till 2026 or again, roll your own context.
by ants_everywhere | 2025-08-13 12:15:29+00:00
> I think you misunderstand how context in current LLMs works.

Thanks but I don't and I'm not sure why you're jumping to this conclusion.

EDIT: Oh I think you're talking about the last bit of the comment! If you read the one before I say that feeding it the entire repo isn't a great idea. But great idea or not, people want to do it, and it illustrates that as context window increases it creates demand for even larger context windows.
by ordu | 2025-08-13 12:15:38+00:00
> But to get to the real understanding we actually shut down that part, forget what we "know", start from a clean slate.

Close, but not exactly. To start from a clean slate is not very difficult, the trick is to reject some chosen parts of existing knowledge, or more specifically the difficulty is to choose what to reject. Starting from a clean slate you'll end up spending millennia to get the knowledge you've just rejected.

So the overall process of generating knowledge is to look under the streetlight till finding something new becomes impossible or too hard, and then you start experimenting with rejecting some bits of your knowledge to rethink them. I was taught to read works of Great Masters of the past critically, trying to reproduce their path while looking for forks where you can try to go the other way. It is a little bit like starting from a clean slate, but not exactly.
by bsenftner | 2025-08-13 12:15:55+00:00
You just said the magic words, "nobody!", that's throwing the gauntlet in front of every major toxic masculine billionaire. Now Trump HAS to buy it, and show everyone. Musk HAS to buy it, just like how he showed everyone how to run Twitter. And of course, Bezos HAS to buy it to prevent them from using Chrome to destroy Amazon... Popcorn time!
by Anamon | 2025-08-13 12:16:51+00:00
It seems silly, but I have something similar on my sites now. Are there any better options?

My content is under a license, the terms of which already explicilty prohibits training LLMs on them. I'm not under the delusion that this alone is going to stop any of the criminal GenAI companies from doing it anyway. Yet I still put an additional sentence like this just because, as someone with no particular legal experience, it makes me feel like I'd had a better argument if I ever decided to sue someone about it for kicks. I think it should make it more difficult for any GenAI company to claim that they couldn't have known what the terms were when they accessed the content.
by wizzwizz4 | 2025-08-13 12:17:24+00:00
I thought I remembered a current Reform UK MP voting in favour of something to do with the Online Safety Act, in the current parliament – but it couldn't have been the debate on the current parliamentary petition, because that hasn't happened yet.

I have since had another look. Lee Anderson was in power (as a Conservative), and abstained from https://votes.parliament.uk/votes/commons/division/1416#notr... – though I'm not sure what this vote was actually on, and this doesn't support my original claim (that Reform MPs voted in favour of the Online Safety Act). Perhaps someone with more understanding of British Parliamentary Procedure could look through the relevant votes and see whether my claim was actually correct.
by incomingpain | 2025-08-13 12:18:20+00:00
>for the past three months, he had been replacing regular table salt with sodium bromide. His motivation was nutritional—he wanted to eliminate chloride from his diet, based on what he believed were harmful effects of sodium chloride.

Ok so the article is blaming chatgpt but this is ridiculous.

Where do you buy this bromide? It's not like it's in the spices aisle. The dude had to go buy a hot tub cleaner like Spa Choice Bromine Booster Sodium Bromide

and then sprinkle that on his food. I dont care what chatgpt said... that dude is the problem.
by lm28469 | 2025-08-13 12:18:20+00:00
Largest empire in history in 1920 to small isolated island speedrun any %.

It's a good modern historical example of how you cannot take anything for granted on a long enough timescale (wink wink USA), and it wasn't even that long, no matter how good or bad things are looking right now all it takes is a couple of generations to radically change the situation
by netsharc | 2025-08-13 12:18:32+00:00
> dumb-question: why couldn't VCRs get the time from the TV signal?

Later VCRs have that feature...

Huh, but a computer without time would be confusing indeed. A process would ask the OS, "What time is it?", "0:00", it can't even sleep for 5 seconds because the hardware clock will never tell the OS "it's 0:00:05 now" -- if the OS counts itself (doing something rudimentary like, "well it's a 1 GHz CPU, let's increment the counter every billion cycles"), then it's implemented a clock!
by uncircle | 2025-08-13 12:20:14+00:00
Excellent insight, would explain why opinions of an AI-driven future tend to be very extreme. Assuming the vast majority of us see a world in rapid collapse, that not even politicians have a decent answer to [1], either AI is the shining technological hope that drives us to a better future, or it is yet another acceleration towards the singularity of shit our modern societies have been crumbling towards.

As an extreme AI doomer, I can now respect and understand the position of AI optimists: they are both expressions of the same critique towards the status quo. What scares me then are those that feel the world is fine, we’re not collapsing, and AI is just another technology that is here to stay but won’t amount to much, and we’re all gonna be alright.

1: see HyperNormalisation by Adam Curtis
by bombcar | 2025-08-13 12:20:36+00:00
Sometimes they were faster but there certainly were more “bloated” - you can find people complaining about it from the era.

But they really did have tons of options and once you were used to them, you really wanted them.

But remember that GNU grew up in the era of multi-user systems; and Linux was the forefront of “personal computing Unix” where the user had root.
by jghn | 2025-08-13 12:20:37+00:00
There is also the assumption that players weren't taking steroids until much later than it likely started to occur. We know that athletes were experimenting with steroids going way back, at least the 40s & 50s.

Further, having the discussion of "steroids" being centered around *steroids* is a bit of an oversimplification as by and large the state of the art had moved on by the heyday of Bonds/McGuire/Sosa. Nevertheless, the focus was always on the chemicals that made players big & strong, meanwhile the ones that helped to *preserve* muscle and/or enhance recovery speed were more impactful.

And even then, simply looking at things like power outliers over time isn't useful. State of the art in terms of play style changed over time. For instance there have been eras where players were intentionally hitting for contact and eras where players were intentionally hitting for power.

Or, one can just relax in the knowledge that players have been cheating, chemically or otherwise, from time immemorial, and that it's impossible to retroactively sort out. So if we compare players relative to their peers and then use that to compare across eras we can get a better sense. But it's folly to read too much into all of this.
by ahartmetz | 2025-08-13 12:20:50+00:00
I have a similar attitude about const in C++, I use it almost whenever possible. Less (possible) mutation to worry about. But I also let go of it fairly easily when it gets in the way. And... well... tail recursion doesn't feel very idiomatic in C++.

If you iterate by const reference over a const container, and you make every assign-once variable in the loop body const (or in Rust: just not mut), is there any advantage to tail recursion except someone on the internet said it's the proper functional style?

I think functional programming contains some great ideas to keep state under control, but there is no reason to ape certain superficial aspects. E.g. the praise of currying in Haskell tutorials really grinds my gears, I think it's a "clever" but not insightful idea and it really weirds function signatures.
by forgotoldacc | 2025-08-13 12:21:03+00:00
I personally don't think having the world's most popular web browser being in the hands of an advertising and surveillance company is all that great. One big reason being that they control captchas and lock content behind them, and they grant leniency to people using their browser, which is more permissive with dangerous ads and allow the company to make more money and further their dominance.
by kibwen | 2025-08-13 12:21:03+00:00
Researchers have managed to produce photos from the theoretically 1-bit photosensor on your phone (which is similarly permissionless), so don't make that proclamation so hastily. Even if it can't decipher a conversation, it may be able to detect things about your environment that leak bits of entropy about you.

https://news.mit.edu/2024/study-smart-devices-ambient-light-...
by ericb | 2025-08-13 12:22:00+00:00
Not the op, but I think about that. Here's what I came to, for the moment:

* LLM's are lousy at bugs

* Apps are a bit like making a baby. Fun in the moment, but a lifetime support commitment

* Supporting software isn't fun, even with an LLM. Burnout is common in open source.

* At the end of the day, it is still a lot of work, even guiding an LLM

* Anything hosted is a chore. Uptime, monitoring, patching, backing up, upgrading, security, legal, compliance, vulnerabilities

I think we'll see github littered with buggy, unsupported, vibe coded one-offs for every conceivable purpose. Now, though, you literally have no idea what you're looking at or if it is decent.

Claude made four different message passing implementations in my vibe coded app. I realized this once it was trying to modify the wrong one during a fix. In other words, claude was falling over trying to support what it made, and only a dev could bail it out. I am perfectly capable of coding this myself, but you have two choices at the moment--invest the labor, or get crap. But, then we come to "maybe I should just pay for this instead of burning my time and tokens."
by pjmlp | 2025-08-13 12:22:11+00:00
Yes, and they decided to widthraw almost as quick as they did the offer.

And no one else did, I also bet HNers would appreciate IBM being the new owner just as they appreciate Oracle.

Regardless of the tiny detail that when Java came to be, the two companies that joined Sun's efforts right away, with Java support on their OSes, databases and thin client efforts, were exactly Oracle and IBM.