MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kg | 2025-08-21 18:57:48+00:00
If I understand the problem right, the issue is that even if you have a completely separate set of authoritative tokens, the actual internal state of the model isn't partitioned between authoritative and non-authoritative. There's no 'user space' and 'kernel space' so to speak, even if kernel space happens to be using a different instruction set. So as a result it becomes possible for non-authoritative tokens to permute parts of the model state that you would ideally want to be immutable once the system prompt has been parsed. Worst case, the state created by parsing the system prompt could be completely overwritten using enough non-authoritative tokens.

I've tried to think of a way to solve this at training time but it seems really hard. I'm sure research into the topic is ongoing though.
by thfuran | 2025-08-21 18:57:49+00:00
I think you’ve misunderstood something somewhere in the conversation. Text notes and transcripts are useful. They are widely used and integrated into existing processes at probably every large company that’s producing them.

You appear to be suggesting that they should just stop doing that and switch to processing audio instead because that’s somehow more pre-existing than their existing processes and they probably don’t need the text for all the things they’re already using it for?
by seanhunter | 2025-08-21 18:57:53+00:00
There is history here and Sabine is being particularly dishonest saying that professional physicists failed to engage with Weinstein. Tim Nguyen specifically along with a couple of others made a detailed analysis of the paper [1] and responded very thoughtfully. He got involved because his research area touches on gauge theory (which is the source for some of Weinstein’s Geometric Unity thing).

Here’s a page giving some of his side of the picture and he includes the original Weinstein paper etc if you want to read it https://timothynguyen.org/geometric-unity/

[1] https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf
by chickenzzzzu | 2025-08-21 18:57:57+00:00
Awesome thanks for all of that. Then it sounds like the only way a nation state could block VPNs is if they decided to "go nuclear" and do what the person above said-- block anyone who they detect is using a VPN/encrypted channel.

Based on that information, the theory for why a nation state would block https like this for a moment is either an accident, or to only block the low hanging fruit of people who don't use a VPN.
by jerf | 2025-08-21 18:58:11+00:00
I don't think the LLM value prop here is to build lots of cards. It's just to interact with the model conversaitonally. If the model is wrong in this one translation, I'm not going to exactly "commit it to memory", I'm just going to keep on carrying on. I don't know that the LLM mistakes are any particularly worse than the many and sundry other mistakes I'm already continuously making as a language learner anyhow.

If I could speak a foreign language as well as a 8B parameter LLM, hallucinations and all, I'd be immensely ahead of where I am now. It's not like second languages aren't themselves often broken in somewhat similar ways.
by ben_w | 2025-08-21 18:58:22+00:00
> If the answer to both of those questions is Yes, we will not know for months. Looking back is the only way to really know.

While I agree we'll only know after it happens, when bubbles pop, they can do so suddenly and at such speed that markets get closed for trading to stop panic sales.

The day before? The hour before? Can all seem fine. So we don't know if we're months away, years, or if it's tomorrow.

> There aren't many things more dangerous than hearing what you want to hear.

In general, and not just in investments.
by akkad33 | 2025-08-21 18:58:36+00:00
Another post about how Rust is not to their liking because it has things there familiar language does not have. For example the author says exceptions are somehow "simpler" than Result types and it's a downside Rust does not allow you to get a value without checked for error. And complains about ? operator. I think just because you are more familiar with exception style programming does not make it simpler.
by hodgehog11 | 2025-08-21 18:58:59+00:00
My experiences with single player games have actually been quite a bit better on Linux since I made the switch then they ever were on Windows. A lot of Windows users seem to forget just how much fiddling is actually required to get games working that are only a couple of generations old. Alt-Tab often broke a lot of games too. More games on Linux just work out of the box in my experience, and it's getting better all the time.

I'm not fond of crediting Valve exclusively for this gaming utopia since it was a massive team effort from a wide variety of developers, but it was clear that a powerful player was always necessary to crack Microsoft's monopoly.
by jacksnipe | 2025-08-21 18:59:13+00:00
The author has previously published an article with a detailed analysis of the math of GU, and why it doesn't work: https://files.timothynguyen.org/geometric_unity.pdf

The reception of that article by the group in question, and their refusal to engage on the math side of it, is what led to him writing this blog post in the first place.
by languagehacker | 2025-08-21 18:59:18+00:00
If you've already done the work figuring out how to knock out a basic web app deployment of kubernetes for a project that you think will grow, then I say go for it. It's not much cheaper than buying a reasonable minimum amount of compute with a company like Digital Ocean.

For hobby projects that I don't really plan to scale, I've recently gotten back into non-containerized workloads running off of systemctl in an Ubuntu VM. It feels pretty freeing not to worry about all the cruft, but that will bite me if something ever does need to live on multiple servers.
by llm_nerd | 2025-08-21 18:59:50+00:00
Apple's VO2Max measures are not based upon that deep neural network development, and empirical seems to be conflating a few things. And FWIW, just finding the actual paper is almost impossible as that same site has SEO-bombed Google so thoroughly you end up in the circular-reference empirical world where all of their pages reference each other as authorities.

Apple and Columbia did recently collaborate on a heart rate response model -- one which can be downloaded and trialed -- but that was not related to the development of their VO2Max calculations.

Apple is very shrouded about how they calculate VO2Max, but it likely is a pretty simple calculation (e.g. how much is your heart responding based upon the level of activity assumed based upon your motion, method of exercise and movements). The most detail they provide is in https://www.apple.com/healthcare/docs/site/Using_Apple_Watch..., which mostly is a validation that it's providing decent enough accuracy.
by bakugo | 2025-08-21 19:00:12+00:00
I should've made it clear that it's not a block rule, just a challenge rule. Those people can still access the website, they just have to go through the "checking your browser" page that you're probably familiar with.

As I said, you can just enable that for everyone and be done with it, but with a custom rule, you can avoid showing it to people that are unlikely to be bots.
by kbar13 | 2025-08-21 19:00:13+00:00
if you read his note i think he gives good insight as to why he wants PRs to signal AI involvement.

that being said i feel like this is an intermediate step - it's really hard to review PRs that are AI slop because it's so easy for those who don't know how to use AI to create a multi-hundred/thousand line diff. but when AI is used well, it really saves time and often creates high quality work
by conditionnumber | 2025-08-21 19:00:19+00:00
Talk to people in your department about where students who enter industry end up working after graduation. Your university may have a kind of "jobs fair" in Autumn where companies come to recruit. Look into those companies and find out what skills they seem to like.

For what it's worth: I ended up going the quant/finance route (as a "regular guy" with no meaningful accomplishments). If I could start over I would try to do something involving data analysis and biology. I think RNA sequencing is on an exp(-a*t) cost curve, and it feels like this is a domain where data analysis could produce something of greater value than slightly more efficient asset prices.
by Bearstrike | 2025-08-21 19:00:23+00:00
At first glance I read this as a troll comment. But with your comment history, I'm not so sure.

"Violence is okay to perpetrate, but not to respond with."

That's a value judgement. Here's my value judgement: Violence is not OK to perpetrate and a response of any magnitude to stop that violence is acceptable, up to and including killing the assailant.

Glad I live in a state within the US that supports this value, as well as providing people the means to do what they need to do if they find themselves victimized.

I don't think you'd feel at home here.
by stickfigure | 2025-08-21 19:00:45+00:00
I remember the 70s and my experience was nothing like your mom's. Population centers have always been full of petty crime; rural places are still pretty free from crime. You can still move to plenty of towns with population <1000 in the US, and you'll have no trouble leaving your gun or laptop in your car there.

The one big difference though is today we have school shootings, so folks are pretty humorless about guns near schools. I'd love to hear your ideas for how to solve that, because they keep happening.
by thisisit | 2025-08-21 19:00:50+00:00
Lot of companies want to do drive down costs. This often falls on departments which are not "bringing in revenue". That means in this era of AI lot of back office operations are the first on the chopping block. Executives often don't care for consequences of cutting back office operations.

Customer support has been the biggest target for a long time. Companies care only about revenue and people signing up. After that unless you are giving them more business they stop caring. They figure - best case they frustrate you enough that you leave them alone or bad case - they refund you and worst case - they give you a gift coupon.

With that mind, AI chatbots are the best solution. Intentionally make it difficult to solve the issue and then even if you reach human support - they have the old scripts. That means now companies ability to frustrate-out a customer is now supercharged.
by oooyay | 2025-08-21 19:00:54+00:00
I think a lot of it is tool familiarity. I can do a lot with Cursor but frankly I find out about "big" new stuff every day like agents.md. If I wasn't paying attention or also able to use Cursor at home then I'd probably learn more inefficiently. Learning how to use rule globs versus project instructions was a big learning moment. As I did more LLM work on our internal tools that was also a big lesson in prompting and compaction.

Certain parts of HN and Reddit I think are very invested in nay-saying because it threatens their livelihoods or sense of self. A lot of these folks have identities that are very tied up in being craftful coders rather than business problem solvers.
by nis0s | 2025-08-21 19:01:08+00:00
Note that I am not saying that what this author is saying is necessarily wrong. But I don’t like the inclusion of the anonymous author, so I made a point of it.

I think there’s lots of lived experience that led to the inclusion of the Sixth Amendment into the U.S. constitution, so I don’t see why it should be ignored for other fields.
by _heimdall | 2025-08-21 19:01:22+00:00
> but for sure it keeps people/companies buying GPUs.

That's a tricky metric to use as an indicator though. Companies, and more importantly their investors, are pouring mountains of cash in the industry based on the hope of what AI may be in the future rather than what it is today. There are multiple incentives that could drive the market for GPUs, only a portion of those have to do with today's LLM outputs.
by kg | 2025-08-21 19:01:32+00:00
The OP seems to be coming from the perspective of "my time as a PR reviewer is limited and valuable, so I don't want to spend it coaching an AI agent or a thin human interface to an AI agent". From that perspective, it makes perfect sense to want to know how much a human is actually in the loop for a given PR. If the PR is good enough to not need much review then whether AI wrote it is less important.

An angle not mentioned in the OP is copyright - depending on your jurisdiction, AI-generated text can't be copyrighted, which could call into question whether you can enforce your open source license anymore if the majority of the codebase was AI-generated with little human intervention.
by Michelangelo11 | 2025-08-21 19:01:41+00:00
> That doesn't stop many authors from taking a "I wrote it, it's mine" attitude as if a monopoly on the use of works you authored is a natural right.

I think that monopoly (with various caveats, e.g. it can't outlive you much, etc.) is a good thing for authors to have, as it enables them to make a living off of their writing. Authors weren't just "made more comfortable" by this as a fringe benefit, as you say, but really, they were able to make a living from their creative work. Harlan Ellison himself says so in that article, and there are countless instances of up-and-coming writers fighting piracy (one legendary story is how Tolkien fought pirating of LOTR in the U.S. soon after it was printed in the UK).

Also, I don't see how LeGuin's point is substantively different from Ellison's -- they are both saying they'll fight people who distribute their books without paying them, the author.

On that note, this argument:

> You know what also deprives authors of royalties? Borrowing books from public libraries, buying used books, and loaning books to friends. So does playing video games instead of reading a book!

... is partly false -- authors do get payouts from libraries. As for "playing video games instead of reading a book", that's absurd -- the problem with pirating is that you get for free something that the creator has produced. For your argument to be true, we would somehow have to assume that the creator is entitled to us spending time reading their books, which is obviously insane.

As for the other things you mention -- buying used books and loaning them from friends -- they have essentially no overlap with online piracy. Piracy is a problem because you can distribute infinite copies worldwide for free, which doesn't apply to selling or loaning physical books.
by jerf | 2025-08-21 19:01:54+00:00
English breaks down here, but the model probably does "know" something more like "If the tree is here in this frame, in the next frame, it will be there, give or take some waving in the wind". It doesn't know that "trees don't walk", just as it doesn't know that "trees don't levitate", "trees don't spontaneously turn into clowns", or an effectively infinite number of other things that trees don't do. What it can do possibly do is realize that in frame 1 there was a tree, and then in frame 2, there was something the model didn't predict as a high-probability output of the next frame.

It isn't about knowing that trees don't walk, but that trees do behave in certain ways and noticing that it is "surprised" that they fail to behave in the predicted ways, where "surprise" is something like "this is a very low probability output of my model of the next frame". It isn't necessary to enumerate all the ways the next frame was low-probability, it is enough to observe that it was logically-not high probability.

In a lot of cases this isn't necessarily that useful, but in a security context having a human take a look at a "very low probability series of video frames" will, if nothing else, teach the developers a lot about the real capability of the model. If it spits out a lot of false positives, that is itself very informative about what the model is "really" doing.
by falcor84 | 2025-08-21 19:02:13+00:00
> ... I’ll keep pulling PRs locally, adding more git hooks to enforce code quality, and zooming through coding tasks—only to realize ChatGPT and Claude hallucinated library features and I now have to rip out Clerk and implement GitHub OAuth from scratch.

I don't get this, how many git hooks do you need to identify that Claude had hallucinated a library feature? Wouldn't a single hook running your tests identify that?
by vjerancrnjak | 2025-08-21 19:02:33+00:00
Spaced repetition is incredibly inefficient. Despite exponential guarantees, there's information and incredibly complex concepts that are with me forever, after learning about it once.

Yet somehow a German word is impossible to remember.

LLMs suck, because their goal is not to improve learning. Same way Duolingo sucks, the goal is to optimize global metrics over a massive userbase, not optimize individual metrics, where each individual has its own context.
by ToucanLoucan | 2025-08-21 19:02:41+00:00
> And does it really matter anymore?

Well, if you had read what was linked, you would find these...

> I think the major issue is inexperienced human drivers of AI that aren't able to adequately review their generated code. As a result, they're pull requesting code that I'm sure they would be ashamed of if they knew how bad it was.

> The disclosure is to help maintainers assess how much attention to give a PR. While we aren't obligated to in any way, I try to assist inexperienced contributors and coach them to the finish line, because getting a PR accepted is an achievement to be proud of. But if it's just an AI on the other side, I don't need to put in this effort, and it's rude to trick me into doing so.

> I'm a fan of AI assistance and use AI tooling myself. But, we need to be responsible about what we're using it for and respectful to the humans on the other side that may have to review or maintain this code.

I don't know specifically what PR's this person is seeing. I do know it's been a rumble around the open source community that inexperienced devs are trying to get accepted PRs for open source projects because they look good on a resume. This predated AI in fact, with it being a commonly cited method to get attention in a competitive recruiting market.

As always, folks trying to get work have my sympathies. However ultimately these folks are demanding time and work from others, for free, to improve their career prospects while putting in the absolute bare minimum of effort one could conceivably put in (having Copilot rewrite whatever part of an open source project and shove it into a PR with an explanation of what it did) and I don't blame them for being annoyed at the number of low-quality submissions.

I have never once criticized a developer for being inexperienced. It is what it is, we all started somewhere. However if a dev generated shit code and shoved it into my project and demanded a headpat for it so he could get work elsewhere, I'd tell him to get bent too.
by fryingdan | 2025-08-21 19:02:53+00:00
Thanks Trufi!

As this is more of an MVP for now, I mainly rely on APIs such as Google Geocoding API, Mapbox, etc in the backend, but this is certainly limited. If there was a dedicated user base who found value in this, I'd look to increase granularity/accuracy and reduce costs by working with raw spatial data and doing GIS/network analysis type stuff in-house instead.

Although, I do use OSM on the site as a map view source!
by Dylan16807 | 2025-08-21 19:03:07+00:00
Well it's not ever going to be actual 2G. It's a throttle. I'm not sure how much worse it could get when you have a reasonably solid signal, but I guess nothing stops network engineers from doing something awful.

> Because it is slow to render people start trying to swipe around the map to make it do something

At a certain point it's the user's fault. And once it gets to the point where you can swipe around, the tile loading should be pretty visible.

And to add more emphasis to the app being usable, I can get driving directions fully offline, then click bus and now it needs one tiny server request to tell me.
by dr_dshiv | 2025-08-21 19:03:07+00:00
Dutch alchemist Cornelis Drebbel got a patent in 1598 for the design of a perpetual motion machine. It was a clock that was powered by daily changes in barometric pressure. In the early 1900s, he was largely scrubbed from the history books because everyone knows that perpetual motion is impossible.

The clock worked, of course. There are still paintings of it — based on those, rolex made a functional replica.

But if you've never heard about Drebbel, perpetual motion is the reason. That wasn't his only invention, of course. He also invented:

* The first cybernetic system (a thermostat; a self-governing oven for incubating eggs)

* The first air conditioning system

* The first functional submarine

* Magic lanterns, telescopes (including the one used by Galileo), microscopes, camera obscuras, and pump drainage systems (credited for draining cambridge and oxford)

He was also a beautiful artist — he made engravings of topless women teaching men science and math (the seven liberal arts). Actually, maybe that's why he was erased? IDK. But he was definitely a free thinker and 100% legit. Look him up.
by awongh | 2025-08-21 19:03:31+00:00
I'm excited to see the next crop of real LLM powered language apps.

I could see it coming from 2 directions (since I think most people agree language learning and SRS go together):

- anki on steroids - a dynamic way for me to do SRS that feels more natural - a way to do natural language interaction with the LLM (chat, voice, etc.), with SRS as an added feature or integrated more subtly
by cycomanic | 2025-08-21 19:04:08+00:00
Exactly she used to say this all the time and now she's weighing in on topics ranging from EVs to nuclear power to 5G causing cancer (yes she did a show on that, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOvAZPHDogs and she was peddling to the "sceptic" crowd by saying that "she doesn't have any reason to believe that it's is unsafe, but ..." and pointing to doctors saying smoking was save in the 50s).
by erikw | 2025-08-21 19:04:12+00:00
I think that the author was using Anki incorrectly, and that led them to the spurious conclusion that "Anki is dead". I also have attempted to use Anki this way- using someone else's deck to try to force myself to learn something new. But that doesn't work, because it is just memorizing random symbols, as they noted in the article ("The enemy is the static card"). For example in maths learning, memorizing arbitrary terms, symbols, etc is useless. However, once I am introduced to a concept for the first time, then I add it to my Anki deck so I can make sure I remember it. The key is the context, and writing terms / definitions etc that speak specifically to me. I still need to work out different variations of the concept to understand it, and that's not something that Anki can help with.

I haven't used Anki for language learning, but I imagine that if I did, it would be to add some new vocabulary I had just learned from a book, conversation, film, etc. I don't think it would help me learn a language from zero though- that would require practicing it.

In summary, Anki is great for reinforcing something you've just learned, but you can't reinforce your way into the context that is necessary to truly understand something.
by Karrot_Kream | 2025-08-21 19:04:15+00:00
This is pretty common on HN but not unique to it. Lots of rationalist adjacent content (like stuff on LessWrong, replies to Scott Alexander's substack, etc) has it also. Here I think it comes from users that try to intellectualize their not-very-intellectual, stream of consciousness style thoughts, as if using technical jargon to convey your feelings makes them more rational and less emotional.