MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-06 15:47:49+00:00
You should anthropomorphize LLMs more. Anthropomorphizing LLMs is at least directionally correct 9 times out of 10.

LLMs, in a very real way, have "conscientiousness". As in: it's a property that can be measured and affected by training, and also the kind of abstract concept that an LLM can recognize and operate off.

If you can just train an LLM to be "more evil", you can almost certainly train an LLM to be "more conscientious" or "less conscientious".
by simne | 2025-09-06 15:48:28+00:00
> Computers are stateful and imperative

This is semi-Truth.

Modern off the shelf Microcomputers nearly all imperative, because marketing won, but when world was under Mainframes (nearly up to 1980), existed many examples FP-optimized architectures or high-level architectures, even some of them was commercially successful (Lisp computers and some high-level mainframes).

Also, most developers don't deal with naked hardware, but working with libraries of structures and libraries of high level algorithms, this named abstraction layer. Just some existing abstraction layers are less abstract and other are more abstract. As example, in Windows (and in most UNIXes) file abstraction is very simple and just imperative, but in MacOS it is OOP (derived from NEXTStep as I hear, based on ObjectiveC), and also exist some other OSes based on OOP languages, like BeOS, even when MacOS/BeOS are now running on same x86 hardware.

So possible just run inside higher level VM.

And mathematics is not prohibiting FP-machine, they could have very effective implementations with modern math.

What really problem, except of Prolog, I don't hear about high-level debuggers for fp languages, so writing on for example Ocaml, you once end up looking on fp structures with old C debugger, which sure don't see fp structures.
by nickpsecurity | 2025-09-06 15:48:58+00:00
I don't believe that's true. Most work I've read on fair use suggests it has to be a small amount, selectively used, substantially transformed, and not compete with content creators. These AI's training are the opposite of all that. I was surprised of a ruling like this but Alsup is a unique judge.

Additionally, sharing copyrighted works without permission... the data sets or data lakes... is its own tort. You're guilty just for sharing copies before even training. Some copyrighted works are also commercial, copyright with ban on others' commercial use, and patented. Some are NDA'd but 3rd party leaked them. Sources like Common Crawl probably have plenty of such content.

Additionally, there's often contractual terms of use on accessing the content. Even Singapore's and others laws allowing training on copyrighted content usually require that you lawfully accessed that content in the first place. The terms of use are the weakest link there.

I'd like to see these two issues turned by law into a copyright exception that no contract can override. It needs to specifically allow sharing scraped, publicly-visible content. Anything you can just view or download which the copyright owner put up. The law might impose or allow limits on daily scraping quantity, volume, etc to avoid damage scrapers are doing.
by pessimizer | 2025-09-06 15:48:59+00:00
Hacker News fell for f'n 3D TVs.

Hacker News goes for anything that they think they might be able to make money off of, just like all middle-class people. They evaluate events based on how they could affect them personally. Actual plausibility isn't even secondary, they simply defer to the salesmen (whom they admire and hope one day to be.)
by tedggh | 2025-09-06 15:50:57+00:00
I did and still do sometimes a lot of 60-70 hour weeks, for months. But being in the service industry means you get paid in 15 min increments and the after-business-hour rate is much higher, usually 1.5-2X. So if you do the math it’s actually pretty good money and you will find very little people complaining about it. I never worked in product-first businesses and don’t know how the compensation model is, but there is no way I would work an extra hour that isn’t paid. That should be the norm.
by kingstnap | 2025-09-06 15:51:02+00:00
There is this deeply wrong part of this paper that no one has mentioned:

The model head doesn't hallucinate. The sampler does.

If you ask an LLM when x was born and it doesn't know.

And you take a look at the actual model outputs which is a probability distribution over tokens.

IDK is cleanly represented as a uniform probability Jan 1 to Dec 31

If you ask it to answer a multiple choice question and it doesn't know. It will say this:

25% A, 25% B, 25% C, 25%D.

Which is exactly, and correctly, the "right answer". The model has admitted it doesn't know. It doesn't hallucinate anything.

In reality we need something smarter than a random sampler to actually extract this information out. The knowledge and lack of knowledge is there, you just produced bullshit out of it.
Ask HN: My Math Anxiety Journey – Worried About My 5th Grader
by johngorse | 2025-09-06 15:52:29+00:00
I'm watching my 5th grade son excel at math and it's bringing back some intense memories of my own school experience. He's doing really well right now, but I'm terrified he might end up on the same path I did.

Despite getting decent grades in elementary math (around a B), I completely crashed and burned in high school. Failed my first year math class, barely scraped by with D's the rest of high school. College was even worse - managed to pass one math course with a C, but didn't pass the second required course until literally my final semester before graduation.

The whole time I was dealing with serious math anxiety. My heart would race during tests, I'd freeze up completely, and I convinced myself I was just "not a math person." It wasn't until I was almost done with college that I had this lightbulb moment - math isn't some mysterious force, it's literally just following rules and procedures. But by then, years of anxiety had already damaged my confidence.

Now I'm watching my son and I'm scared. He's confident now, but what happens when the material gets harder? How do I prevent him from developing the same mental blocks I had?

I've been reading about math anxiety in kids and found some helpful resources: https://www.apa.org/topics/anxiety/helping-kids-manage-math-anxiety, https://math4fun.io/blog/overcoming-math-anxiety-in-children.html, but I'd love to hear from other parents who've been through this. Did anyone else struggle with math anxiety? How did you help your kids avoid the same pitfalls?

Any teachers or math tutors here with advice on keeping kids confident as the material gets more challenging?
by softwaredoug | 2025-09-06 15:52:44+00:00
I have only truly worked this level of intensity at special moments in my career where I felt connected to the mission and people. We were building something very cool. And we all felt immense joy in the craft.

Never at any time did anyone tell us “work X many hours”

If people actually want hard working employees, maybe the answer should be culture first? Hire great people that love working together, on a cool problem, and they’ll do what’s needed? Trust them.

Hiring for 996 says to me you don’t care about innovation or excellence. It says you suck at hiring great talent. And it signals you, as a leader, may not have a healthy relationship to work or leadership. You want control, not excellence.
by garyfirestorm | 2025-09-06 15:52:50+00:00
I would like to point out that in certain scenarios people are not very smart. For eg. Many car enthusiasts who care about speed and 0-60 will still look down on EVs despite EVs being ridiculously fast and cheap to attain those metrics. 40k EV is faster than 150k Porsche. But these guys will never adopt it.
by gambiting | 2025-09-06 15:53:10+00:00
I think even if someone offered me couple million a year I still wouldn't do it. My kids will only be kids once - all of the money in the world is completely worthless if you miss out on your family. I appreciate some people here don't feel this way but to me that's not a trade off I would ever make. Especially since as software engineers we are privileged enough to usually command both high salaries and the ability to log off at 4-5pm and not think about work anymore.
by btown | 2025-09-06 15:53:12+00:00
A brief reminder that if you read an article about JSTOR and it doesn't even mention Aaron Swartz, it's a puff piece.

The blurb in the article's overview about "users praise JSTOR’s public-good focus that translates into pricing restraint and an eagerness to improve services?" To the extent that's at all true - and I can't imagine any active academic who would say that with a straight face - it was Aaron's activism that made this possible. Per https://stanforddaily.com/2020/03/27/remembering-aaron-swart... :

> Swartz’s death became a rallying cry for issues of information equity and open access, according to Hill. A lot of the information that is currently open access on JSTOR became available to the public following Swartz’s death, when people released material they had from JSTOR and pressured JSTOR to make changes, Hill said.

In Swartz's own words, here:

> Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world.

https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
Show HN: 60-Second Linux Analysis, Supercharged with Nix and LLMs
by piotrgrabowski | 2025-09-06 15:53:30+00:00
Hello HN,

I'm sharing a little open-source utility I wrote recently.

I'm a huge fan of Brendan Gregg's "BPF Performance Tools" book. However, every time I SSH into a fresh server, most of the diagnostic tools aren't installed there and installing them can be really annoying.

I decided to use Nix package manager and LLMs to make this process straightforward. My utility first downloads a "toolbox" of Linux utilities (built with Nix), runs Brendan Gregg's famous "60-second Linux analysis" playbook and then summarizes the results with an LLM. So "60-second Linux analysis" now becomes a single one-line command and actually takes less than 60 seconds! The utility can execute all commands in parallel and the LLM can analyze them faster than a human would.

I have a few ideas for the future, for example implementing more powerful playbooks - thanks to Nix I can easily bundle all tools I need and LLMs have no trouble analyzing outputs of tens of commands.

I'd love to get your feedback and hear any ideas you have. Thanks for checking it out.

You can launch the utility with this command:

$ curl -fsSL https://gradient.engineer/60-second-linux.sh | sh
by tombert | 2025-09-06 15:53:42+00:00
Generics still kind of suck but they’re workable enough. As far as I am aware they’re broadly unchanged and I don’t think they added any kind of new variance.

It turns out, though, it’s still good enough for sealed interfaces and the like; I don’t have too many issues with it, though that might just be Stockholm syndrome at this point.

Maven is terrible as always but Gradle is generally fine. I use IntelliJ community edition solely for Java and it works well enough for what I need.

It’s not like Java is going to replace F# for me or anything, but I do genuinely think it’s more fun to write now than it used to be.
by jauntywundrkind | 2025-09-06 15:53:46+00:00
I tend to agree here, I prefer explicitness. Even though yes it does mean some pain when refactoring, it also creates very clear diffs showing impact, which I consider a positive.

Ideally this could all be dealt with via tools. An IDE that shows whatever the user prefers, but is actually saving into a format defined for the repo.
by haskellshill | 2025-09-06 15:54:37+00:00
> Remember how people writing assembly thought compiled languages would rot your brain!

Well, how'd you describe web apps of today if not precisely brainrot?

> They don't care about actual productivity, they care about feeling productive

Funny you'd say that, because that describes a large portion of "AI coders". Sure they pump out a lot of lines of code, and it might even work initially, but in the long run it's hardly more productive.

> It's a hard sell when an application moves a button!

Because usually that is just change for the sake of change. How many updates are there every day that add nothing at all? More than updates that actually add something useful, at least.
by Larrikin | 2025-09-06 15:55:21+00:00
I thankfully have not had to use Java for years, but at one of my first jobs after grad school I was hired because I had Kotlin experience and they were moving the code base away from Java.

A few of the older developers also complained about the use of map, filter, zip, lambdas, etc being harder to read as well. Then a month or two later when they realized they weren't going away, it was an important part of the language, and just learned how to use them the complaints just one day stopped.

Except for when we had to touch Java code and it didn't make sense to convert it fully to Kotlin.
by photon_lines | 2025-09-06 15:55:29+00:00
So I posted this conversation between Ilya Sutskever (one of the creators of ChatGPT) and Lex Fridman within that blog post and I'll provide it again below because I think it does a good job of summarizing what exactly 'makes transformers work':

Ilya Sutskever: Yeah, so the thing is the transformer is a combination of multiple ideas simultaneously of which attention is one. Lex Friedman: Do you think attention is the key? Ilya Sutskever: No, it's a key, but it's not the key. The transformer is successful because it is the simultaneous combination of multiple ideas. And if you were to remove either idea, it would be much less successful. So the transformer uses a lot of attention, but attention existed for a few years. So that can't be the main innovation. The transformer is designed in such a way that it runs really fast on the GPU. And that makes a huge amount of difference. This is one thing. The second thing is that transformer is not recurrent. And that is really important too, because it is more shallow and therefore much easier to optimize. So in other words, it uses attention, it is a really great fit to the GPU and it is not recurrent, so therefore less deep and easier to optimize. And the combination of those factors make it successful.

I'm not sure if the above answers your question, but I tend to think of transformers more-of as 'associative' networks (similar to humans) -- they miss many of the components which actually makes humans human (like imitation learning and consciousness (we still don't know what consciousness actually is)) but for the most part, the general architecture and the way they 'learn' I believe mimics a process similar to how regular humans learn: neurons the fire together, wire together (i.e. associative learning). This is what a huge large-language model is to me: a giant auto-associative network that can comprehend and organize information.
by holtkam2 | 2025-09-06 15:55:49+00:00
I don’t get why people think 996 is even optimal for productivity in the medium or long term. If I work hard past 8pm I can’t sleep - my brain is still whirring. That results in worse sleep -> less memory creation & skill consolidation -> lower productivity.

In my mind, if you cared ONLY about productivity in the medium and long term, you’d probably do something like 9-7-6. So you still get a day off, and don’t work past like, dinner time. Still give yourself time to exercise, still give yourself time for social interaction, sleep can stay dialed in. I think someone doing 976 probably out-competes someone doing 996 in short order.
by whstl | 2025-09-06 15:55:53+00:00
996 is just theater for investors.

Saw this happening even at YC companies. There was always that stupid expectation of overworking, staying until 9.

The reality is that people twiddle thumbs.

And the disorganization and micromanagement power plays are enough to negate any additional worked hour.

This ranges from pure disorganization in terms of what to build to having 3 hour meetings with the whole fucking company where the CEO pretends they have something worthwhile to say for 3 hours.
by jorrdang | 2025-09-06 15:56:00+00:00
Copied this from the video description:

JEP 395: Records: https://openjdk.org/jeps/395

JEP 440: Record Patterns: https://openjdk.org/jeps/440

JEP 394: Pattern Matching for Instanceof: https://openjdk.org/jeps/394

JEP 441: Pattern Matching for Switch: https://openjdk.org/jeps/441

JEP 409: Sealed Classes: https://openjdk.org/jeps/409

JEP 361: Switch Expressions: https://openjdk.org/jeps/361

JEP 456: Unnamed Variables & Patterns: https://openjdk.org/jeps/456

JEP 507: Primitive Types in Patterns, instanceof and switch (Third Preview): https://openjdk.org/jeps/507

JEP 512: Compact Source Files and Instance Main Methods: https://openjdk.org/jeps/512

JEP 458: Launch Multi-File Source-Code Programs: https://openjdk.org/jeps/458

JEP 511: Module Import Declarations: https://openjdk.org/jeps/511

JEP 502: Stable Values (Preview): https://openjdk.org/jeps/502

JEP 513: Flexible Constructor Bodies: https://openjdk.org/jeps/513
by ACCount37 | 2025-09-06 15:56:23+00:00
I don't think that's actually true.

Sure, it might be true that most users use LLMs as a more flexible version of Google/Wikipedia, and would prefer a confident-but-wrong response to "I don't know".

But most users that use an LLM in this mode also wouldn't ask really complex, very out-of-distribution, hard-to-know hallucination-inducing questions.

And people who would ask an LLM really complex, very out-of-distribution hard-to-know questions are more likely to appreciate an LLM that would recognize the limits of its own knowledge, and would perform research on a topic when appropriate.
by tialaramex | 2025-09-06 15:56:36+00:00
This whole "But Waymo can't work in bad climates" thing is very dubious. At some point it is too dangerous to be driving an automobile. "But Waymo should also be dangerous" is the wrong lesson.

When the argument was Phoenix is too pleasant I could buy that. Most places aren't Phoenix. But SF and LA are both much more like a reasonable place other humans live. It rains, but not always, it's misty, but not always. Snow I do accept as a thing, lots of places humans live have some snow, these cities don't really have snow.

However for ice when I watch one of those "ha, most drivers can make this turn in the ice" videos I'm not thinking "I bet Waymo wouldn't be able to do this" I'm thinking "That's a terrible idea, nobody should be attempting it". There's a big difference between "Can it drive on a road with some laying snow?" and "Can it drive on ice?".
by 3036e4 | 2025-09-06 15:57:23+00:00
Sorry, but I don't think a preference for slow evolution is always because of laziness. What's wrong with wanting to keep improving on a skill instead of having to waste time relearning things every six months?

Software is rare among arts/crafts/whatever in that it is difficult to find nice areas of software to keep digging deeper into (as curious people do!) rather than having to move on to something new just when you start to be good something.

It's not even wanting to focus on depth instead of breadth, as the constant changes means you are barely able to keep using your older skills, so there is little actual breadth more like constantly moving between shallow pools of knowledge. Maybe it feels great to constantly be moving, but I do not see how it is productive or positive in any way for us.
by grork | 2025-09-06 15:57:55+00:00
We’ve ultimately decided to treat the models with more respect, nurturing, and collaborative support than we ever did our follow human keyboard smashers. Writing all the documentation, detailed guidance, allowing them multiple attempts, to help the LLMs be successful. But Brenda, the early in career new grad? “please read this poorly written, 5 year-old, incomplete wiki, and don’t ask me questions”

I’ve been thinking about this for months, and still don’t know what to make of it.
by feisuzhu | 2025-09-06 15:58:00+00:00
It's an over-simplification of Chinese idiom "浑水摸鱼", which is literally 'catching fish in muddy water'. Origninated from Thirty-Six Stratagems (三十六计). It generally mean "to take advantage of a chaotic situation or a crisis". It is later extended to express slacking off.
by blacksmith_tb | 2025-09-06 15:58:06+00:00
That's a novel take on diversity, but I think your window is too small. The US was full of similar anti-immigrant sentiment a century ago, directed at southern and eastern European new arrivals. Today no one is calling for Poles and Italians to be deported. The "melting pot" can work, if no one is actively trying to kick it over.
by numpad0 | 2025-09-06 15:58:06+00:00
> I also happen to know a thing or two about mobile computing hardware

You don't. You just don't. You haven't seriously thought about making an HMD. You haven't heard of those microdisplay vendors or had frantically searched how to cheat those electrical requirements. You haven't gutted a mobile device and held the shells and non-compute parts in hand. You haven't even torn apart a phone. You don't know how injection molded Mg chassis feel which don't sit right with your brain.

Your views and opinions and distributions of are based on user side stories and dopamine releasing qualities the elements offer, which is great for marketing existing or virtual products, but isn't well connected to underlying hardware. It's like human figures reconstituted from Penfield's Homunculus, made completely out of proportion.

I already brought up the shell. From the way you fixated on the battery after going through that part, it clearly didn't even come to your mind that the shells can be heavier than it, which I'm sure would be the case for a lot of battery powered HMDs.

You called DP Alt an underlying "protocol". It's DisplayPort. They're like one-way PCIe x1. Back of magazine Agilent vs Teledyne LeCroy stuffs. Besides you called XREAL displays "entirely dumb" when they have more than a 2D sprite engine on board. I know it does 3DoF warping when the host is not whispering the right command. It's a stupid feature but I'm doubtful PS2 can handle that.

And you keep insisting, what appear to boil down to, "use USB dumbass". Nothing about that make any sense.
by nilamo | 2025-09-06 15:58:15+00:00
Most medications have a buffer, so if you accidentally take an extra dose (instead of just 2 pills every 6 hours, but no more than 6 in a 48 hour period). Acetaminophen does not have that buffer. Even just slightly over the dosing recommendations can be lethal, and for a drug that's in hundreds of products, that's terrifying. Imo you're being exceptionally careless for one of the most dangerous OTC drugs we have available.