MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by drudolph914 | 2025-09-08 16:48:02+00:00
I am an educator alongside being an engineer, so I've had to think about how to explain this topic to people in ways that give them some kind of intuition/insight. I don't have a good take for non-stem people, but I think I have a better explanation for people who are CS adjacent

I like to explain this whole hallucination problem by stating that LLMs are 2 different machines working together. one half of the machine is all the knowledge it was trained on, and you can think of this knowledge as an enormous classic tree you learn in CS classes; and each node in this tree is a token. the other half of the machine is a program that walks through this enormous tree and prints the token it's on

when you think of it like this, 3 things become immediately obvious

1. LLMs are a totally deterministic machine

2. you can make them seem smart by randomizing the walk through the knowledge tree

3. hallucinations are a side effect of trying to randomize the knowledge tree walk

I find it interesting that LLM companies are trying to fix such a fundamental problem by training the model to always guess the correct path. the problem I see with this approach is that 2 people can enter the same input text, but want 2 different outputs. if there isn't always a _correct path_ then you can't really fix the problem.

the only 2 options you have to “improve” things is prune and or add better data to the knowledge tree, or you’re trying the make the program that walks the knowledge tree take better paths.

the prune/add data approach is slightly better because it’s improving the quality of the token output. but the downside is you quickly realize that you need a fire hose of new human data to keep improving - but much of the data out there is starting to be generated by the LLMs - which leads to this inbreeding effect where the model gets worse

the 2nd approach feels less ideal because it will slow down the process of generating tokens.

all of this to say, from this point on, it’s just hacks, ducktape, and bandaids
by secure | 2025-09-08 16:48:06+00:00
Thanks for your reply!

Can I suggest that we ask todsacerdoti to add a filter to their cross-posting thingie that skips articles that the author posted to HN?

I’m asking because todsacerdoti’s posts of my content always seem to be the ones that get traction, no matter if I post first on HN or lobsters. In fact, I’m wondering how he can even submit when I have already submitted — why isn’t his post marked a dupe? (To be clear: this was for my prior submissions, not this particular one.)
by 0x1ceb00da | 2025-09-08 16:48:21+00:00
In poor countries everyone lives in a scarcity mindset, even the ultra rich. It's a lot like the supernatural stimulus that makes humans crave junk food and sugar. Some indian communities are prone to obesity because storing as much fat as possible was the only way to survive in the famines that happened under the british rule. Only people whose bodies could do that survived.
by mpoteat | 2025-09-08 16:48:24+00:00
Recently, LeetCode has begun hiding instructions (using css) in their competitions to use particular unique variable names like 'dexolarniv' - and anyone using such a variable name in their submission gets summarily banned.

In their implementation, the hidden prompt does show up on copy/paste - however I tested this method, and the LLM (i.e. ChatGPT) does still follow the Unicode-hidden instruction and uses 'dexolarniv' in the code returned! So I think this is (right now) a viable invisible injection strategy.
by Qem | 2025-09-08 16:48:31+00:00
> but you need to buy a fancy brand to avoid rancid oil or heavy metal contamination both of which ~null out the benefits

I didn't know about the rancidity problem, thank you. Knew about the contamination issue. To avoid it, I tried to source oil derived from sources lower in the food chain, either vegan algae oil, or krill oil. But krill oil is super expensive, when compared to fish oil, with lower levels of EPA/DHA per capsule. The problem with algae oil it's that those I've found contain only DHA. Not sure about the relative importance between EPA/DHA, although.
by JohnBooty | 2025-09-08 16:48:39+00:00
I'm hesitant to answer with specific recommendations because I think there is a lot of truth-stretching and self-promotion in this space. Nearly all of them are trying to make a buck, which I don't think is inherently wrong (people have to earn a living, and they do have unique skills/experiences/viewpoints to offer) but certainly clouds the issue further.

The majority of them also have views that I find pretty problematic.
by mulakosag | 2025-09-08 16:48:44+00:00
You don't know how incredible the corruption is. It goes from all levels. From president and prime minster to all the way down to a lowly clerk in your local government office. Nothing works without bribes. The big heads are raking out millions. I left the country only a few years ago. It is the sole reason I never want to be back there.

The desperation from the youth is so heart breaking when there is no jobs creation, no industry. Depending on their ability they go and work in middle east doing all those dangerous work in the desert heat. The country is empty of youth. If you go to the airport you will see thousands leaving the country each day. Coffins of workers who died in middle east.

The political parties? They are profiting for everything. In the last 10-15 years there were basically 3 guys who would become the prime minister in round robin always blame opposition when in government and always blame government when in opposition. Its like 1984 but without the surveillience but that also caught up with the ban of social media.
by mooreds | 2025-09-08 16:48:53+00:00
> patterns suggest that overqualified individuals are less motivated, but still outperform others in their same job. Underqualification results in a polar opposite set of findings, suggesting these individuals are motivated to put forth more effort, but still struggle to compete when judged relative to others.

So... the system works?

At least within the very constrained universe of what the Air Force is doing/testing for?
by joaomoreno | 2025-09-08 16:49:18+00:00
From sindresorhus:

You can run the following to check if you have the malware in your dependency tree:

`rg -u --max-columns=80 _0x112fa8`

Requires ripgrep:

`brew install rg`

https://github.com/chalk/chalk/issues/656#issuecomment-32668...
by zamadatix | 2025-09-08 16:49:38+00:00
Great catch, Serve The Home has a stacked picture of the two cards and they are indeed both low profile https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/NVID.... If your SFF box/1u server has a 2-thick NIC slot it may well be great for that use case then!
by trillic | 2025-09-08 16:49:56+00:00
JetBlue flies a lot of a321neo aircraft Transat.

BOS-MAD, BOS-LHR, BOS-DUB, BOS-AMS, BOS-CDG, BOS-EDI

JFK-LHR, JFK-DUB, JFK-AMS, JFK-CDG.
by srameshc | 2025-09-08 16:49:57+00:00
I found this company today https://www.usemotion.com/ai-employees/ai-sdr and they are selling AI employees. I understand the need to sell. But if you are selling tools as employees, then there is something that will break eventually. I agree with most of the sentiment, that don't try to invest thinking people will be replaced. Make your employees efficinet with tools.
by rudimentary_phy | 2025-09-08 16:50:15+00:00
I think the AI reasoning in the ruling has a little bit of truth to it. I have found myself using search quite a bit less. I'm still not sure what that means in the long run, but it does feel like times are changing.

When I do use Google, I end up using that crappy Gemini blurb at the top a lot more than I would like to admit as well, so they are definitely still prime contenders in the AI space even before looking at the Gemini platform itself. Even with all the things it gets wrong (the model in its search is definitely one of the worst), it is often more useful than not to me, and helps point me in the right direction more quickly.

This could all be just another repeat of the browser wars where Chrome overtook Firefox, but it isn't yet set in stone. Google definitely seems a little bit worried about the future with AI.
by niklassheth | 2025-09-08 16:50:51+00:00
I know some consumer cards have artificially limited FP64, but the AI focused datacenter cards have physically fewer FP64 units. Recently, the GB300 removed almost all of them, to the point that a GB300 actually has less FP64 TFLOPS than a 9 year old P100. FP32 is the highest precision used during training so it makes sense.
by username_my1 | 2025-09-08 16:50:55+00:00
I still remember the 2015 alexa 100M$ fund and the buzz around everything voice first.

https://www.geekwire.com/2015/amazon-makes-echos-alexa-avail...

of course it wasn't as big as this new AI push, but since the 80s AI over promised and under devlivered, it's not the fault of AI, but the greed of the business people.
by drewg123 | 2025-09-08 16:51:00+00:00
In a past life in the mid/late 2000s, I did 10GbE NIC drivers for a small IHV. VMWare was by far the most awful vendor to deal with. They had mandatory certification testing which was required to distribute the driver. Their tests were so much worse than MS WHQL. There was invariably something broken in their tests that we had to work around. Each time this happened, we had to go through their support (And pay for the privilege) to tell them their tests were broken and to give them patches to fix it. This would happen pretty much every driver release, and we would end up dealing with a different person each time.

My favorite thing about leaving that job was never having to deal with VMWare ever again.
by edent | 2025-09-08 16:51:05+00:00
> How do the end user protect themselves at this point? Especially the average user?

Don't use unregulated financial products. The likelihood of a bank being hit by this isn't zero - but in most parts of the world they would be liable and the end user would be refunded.

> How do you prevent supply chain compromises like this?

Strictly audit your code.

There's no magic answer here. Oh, I'm sure you can throw an LLM at the problem and hope that the number of false positives and false negatives don't drown you. But it comes down to having an engineering culture which moves slowly and doesn't break things.
by imiric | 2025-09-08 16:51:21+00:00
You're right, high demand certainly plays a role. But it's one thing for the second-hand market to dictate the price of used hardware, and another for new hardware to steadily get more expensive while its objective capabilities only see marginal improvements. At a certain point it becomes blatant price gouging.

NVIDIA is also taking consumers for a ride by marketing performance based on frame generation, while trying to downplay and straight up silence anyone who points out that their flagship cards still struggle to deliver a steady 4K@60 without it. Their attempts to control the narrative of media outlets like Gamers Nexus should be illegal, and fined appropriately. Why we haven't seen class-action lawsuits for this in multiple jurisdictions is beyond me.
by mrweasel | 2025-09-08 16:51:27+00:00
Many of the same issues would equally trip up none AI project. One reason these project might fail is because, like so many other things in business, AI is thrown at a project to cover up organisations short coming, terrible procedures, poor data management and many other issues.

I'm not the biggest fan of current AI technology, but claiming that it's a failure because it doesn't magically solves your problems, which was always more organisations/managerial in nature rather than technical, is a little disingenuous.
by coffeecoders | 2025-09-08 16:51:38+00:00
It is less about conversion and more about extending ANE support for transformer-style models or giving developers more control.

The issue is in targeting specific hardware blocks. When you convert with coremltools, Core ML takes over and doesn't provide fine-grained control - run on GPU, CPU or ANE. Also, ANE isn't really designed with transformers in mind, so most LLM inference defaults to GPU.
by techjamie | 2025-09-08 16:52:15+00:00
I understand why they'd take action against something like this, but at the same time, people should have a right to modify the devices they bought and paid for in any way they want to. Saying "well someone could use this for piracy" doesn't justify punishing the law abiding users, too, and I don't think the manufacturer should be the arbiter of if you're allowed to use their product in any terms. This definitely isn't worth ruining someone's life over with massive tort claims, either.
by bryanlarsen | 2025-09-08 16:52:30+00:00
What's it due to? At least this, probably more.

- more advanced silicon architecture. Apple spends billions to get access to the latest generation a couple of years before AMD.

- world class team, with ~25 years of experience building high speed low power chips. (Apple bought PA Semi to make these chips, which was originally the team that build the DEC StrongARM). And then paid & treated them properly, unlike Intel & AMD

- a die budget to spend transistors for performance: the M chips are generally quite large compared to the competition

- ARM's weak memory model also helps, but it's very minor IMO compared to the above 3.
by Aurornis | 2025-09-08 16:52:46+00:00
This article's structure and wording feel like it was barely tweaked after coming out of ChatGPT.

Anyway, it misses one of the current biggest problems with all things AI in the workplace: It has attracted every resume-builder and ladder-climber who don't know what they're doing. They just want an AI initiative for their resume.

As long as it's not too public (like the Taco Bell AI drive through disaster) it doesn't really matter if it's successful or not. They can spin it as a success and the next company they apply to won't be able to check.

The same thing happened a few years ago when every PM and rising manager was looking for a way to put blockchain into products. Before that it was "big data", and so on.
by glitchc | 2025-09-08 16:52:46+00:00
I wanted to upvote you originally, but I'm afraid this is not correct. A GPU is not a barrel processor. In a barrel processor a single context is switched between multiple threads after each instruction. A barrel processor design has a singular instruction pipeline and a singular cache across all threads. In a GPU, due to the independence of the execution units, those threads will execute those instructions concurrently on all cores, as long as a program-based instruction dependency between threads is not introduced. It's true parallelism. Furthermore, each execution unit embeds its own instruction scheduler, it's own pipeline and its own L1 cache (see [1] for NVidia's architecture).

[1] https://docs.nvidia.com/deeplearning/performance/dl-performa...
by gingerBill | 2025-09-08 16:53:04+00:00
You see you just completely missed my replies to that too.

> Let's put it this way, what does a package manager specifically (not the other distinctions I make in the article) do (other than enable bad laziness and lack of proper vetting) that is actually good?

https://old.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1nbkwzt/packag...
by martin-t | 2025-09-08 16:53:13+00:00
Sorry to see you getting downvoted or flagged but that's HN for you.

Issue is many people believe that peace is more important than justice.

Or that fighting and losing is worse than not being able to fight at all. And there's a bit of concern trolling too - basically they say if you fought you'd lose so they'll take away your ability to fight to protect you.

This is happening in Europe too with plenty of people trying to stop weapon deliveries to Ukraine because that'll stop the war. It's "stop struggling, it'll be over sooner" with slightly more sophisticated words.
by burnte | 2025-09-08 16:53:20+00:00
IMO the step most of these projects fail on is UTILITY. I have yet to hear an AI project start with, "We need to do X and I think AI might help." Every single project meeting I've sat in started with an non-technical exec asking, "what can we use AI for?" They've got a solution and go looking for a problem so they can say they're using AI.

At my last company thankfully I was able to limit the losses to just under $450k which sounds like a lot, and it is, but it could have been about $5m/yr. I didn't sabotage anything, either. It was mostly through simply asking a lot of questions early, repeatedly suggesting we write plans down and make sure everyone on the project is up to day, and suggesting we test drive components before buying the whole car.

Spent a bunch of money, rolled out the pilot project to 70 folks, and began 30 day checkins. After 30 days we had a retention rate over 80%. By the 60 day mark, we were down to 40%. By day 90 we were at 22% and landed at 11% after 4 months and never went higher. By month 8 we cancelled the project and the 8 people still using the tool were ok letting it go, feeling it didn't help that much.

All because someone from the board said, "we need to use AI, anyone not using AI in a year will be out of business." The CEO asked what we should use it for, and the board member said, "I have no idea, that's your job. But we need AI somewhere. Look here, it can buy a plane ticket for me now!" and then wasted the next 40 minutes of the meeting talking about how amazing AI agents were. We're not a tech company, he was definitely NOT a tech person.
by mananaysiempre | 2025-09-08 16:53:22+00:00
The browsers mostly did away with EV certs[1], against sustained pushback from CAs, because of research invariably showing that the feeling of security is mostly unfounded. (Both because users are garbage at reading security indicators—and unscrupulous companies are eager to take advantage of that, see Cloudflare’s “security of your connection”—and because the legal-name namespace is much more Byzantine and locale-dependent than any layman can parse[2].)

By contrast, OV certs, which were originally supposed a very similar level of assurance, were did away with by CAs themselves, by cost-optimizing the verification requirements into virtual nonexistence.

That said, it remains a perpetual struggle to get people to understand the difference between being connected to the legitimate operator of satan.example (something an Internet-wide system mostly can guarantee) and it being wise to transact there (something extensive experience shows it can’t and shouldn’t try to). And if you’re a domain owner, your domain is your identity; pick one and stick to it. Stackoverflow.blog is stupid, don’t be like stackoverflow.blog.

[1] https://www.troyhunt.com/extended-validation-certificates-ar...

[2] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/12/nope-...
by al_borland | 2025-09-08 16:54:02+00:00
Money and impact don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Many people use their business as a vehicle for positive impacts on society, money is the byproduct of their impact.

You can also work a normal job to make reliable money to support yourself, and allocate some of your earnings to help others and make an impact… or even just your time. This can help bring some more purpose to your work, regardless of what it is.
by onetimeusename | 2025-09-08 16:54:05+00:00
Heh.

Ok I think it seems like there is a vested interest in maintaining and expanding what I will call multiculturalism. Like on the one hand we get people with power saying things like "we have to solve the problem at it's root" and on the other there are very very lenient laws when granting asylum. At a certain point you have to look at things and say that an organization is what it actually does, not what it says it will do.
by manuhabitela | 2025-09-08 16:54:08+00:00
I agree that Laravel models rub the wrong way, but that shouldn't instantly remove Laravel from the equation when thinking about what tools to use for building a website.

Laravel is great for shipping things fast. Sometimes, that's what you want, even if that means a less maintainable app in the long run. Because sometimes there is no long run; you know it will just be an app made by you only as a rather one shot thing.

Same goes for wordpress. Lots of devs like to shit on it by default. But its like people shitting on PHP because of the PHP 5 days. You'd be surprised how quickly you can build really complex content websites with Wordpress. Way quicker than with barebones laravel or symfony. And with not that ugly code ;)
by smelendez | 2025-09-08 16:54:16+00:00
It's a little worse than email.

With email, you normally use unique image and link URLs for each recipient, so you generally know who's opened the email and what they've clicked and can map that to their email address and whatever other information you have about them.

With RSS, you generally don't have any information about who's accessing the feed other than an IP address. It is possible to require users to log in and receive a unique RSS URL, which is what podcasts often do to give paid subscribers access to paywalled episodes, but that's not common for web RSS.
by diggan | 2025-09-08 16:54:18+00:00
> so the rest of us know what not to do?

Can't really tell you what not to do, but if you're not already using a password manager so you can easily avoid phishing scams, I really recommend you to look into starting doing so.

In the case of this attack, if you had a password manager and ended up on a domain that looks like the real one, but isn't, you'd notice something is amiss when your password manager cannot find any existing passwords for the current website, and then you'd take a really close look at the domain to confirm before moving forward.
by loudmax | 2025-09-08 16:54:26+00:00
> Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?

Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model?

Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies.

Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on.

Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism.

Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?