MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by panarky | 2025-10-10 01:35:26+00:00
I'm sorry, but the whole stochastic parrot thing is so thoroughly debunked at this point that we should stop repeating it as if it's some kind of rare wisdom.

AlphaGo showed that even pre-LLM models could generate brand new approaches to winning a game that human experts had never seen before, and didn't exist in any training material.

With a little thought and experimentation, it's pretty easy to show that LLMs can reason about concepts that do not exist in its training corpus.

You could invent a tiny DSL with brand-new, never-seen-before tokens, give two worked examples, then ask it to evaluate a gnarlier expression. If it solves it, it inferred and executed rules you just made up for the first time.

Or you could drop in docs for a new, never-seen-before API and ask it to decide when and why to call which tool, run the calls, and revise after errors. If it composes a working plan and improves from feedback, that’s reasoning about procedures that weren’t in the corpus.
by tzs | 2025-10-10 01:36:14+00:00
>> President Trump seeks to shift the government’s reliance on income taxes toward taxes on imported goods. Still, tariffs contribute a relatively small 3.7% of overall federal revenue, compared with 51% for the individual income tax.

Doesn't he also say tariffs are going to cause manufacturing to move to the US? That seems at odds with tariffs as a replacement for income taxes.
by DrSiemer | 2025-10-10 01:39:42+00:00
When using a reasonably smart llm, code moves are usually fine, but you have to pay attention whenever uncommon words (like urls or numbers) are involved.

It kind of forces you to always put such data in external files, which is better for code organization anyway.

If it's not necessary for understanding the code, I'll usually even leave this data out entirely when passing the code over.

In Python code I often see Gemini add a second h to a random header file extension. It always feels like the llm is making sure that I'm still paying attention.
by int_19h | 2025-10-10 01:39:46+00:00
This is a general problem whenever there's an alphabet mismatch. Unless there's a 1:1 mapping between phonemes in different languages, one always need to come up with some scheme that will necessarily be imperfect, as seen e.g. when transliterating Slavic or Indian names into English. So long as there is a consistent government-mandated or at least government-blessed system, though, they can work things out fine.

(There's a separate issue here where a system for a specific pair of languages might get codified and become "frozen in time" even as either or both languages evolve. For example, the Russian Polivanov system for transliterating Japanese uses "си" for "シ" because the standard pronunciation of "щ" at the time was more like "шч", similar to Ukrainian, so it was clearly the wrong choice back then - and yet clearly the right choice now if not for backwards compatibility concerns.)
by nvader | 2025-10-10 01:42:02+00:00
I wonder how this sentence ended up with so many commas.

> The problem, doctors say, is that lower and lower reimbursements mean reliable community doctors, like Wagner, could have to make choices that are inherently bad for patients, like cramming more patient visits into a single day to make up for lost revenue, dropping patients on certain insurance plans, or selling their practices altogether.
by wateralien | 2025-10-10 01:42:25+00:00
The irony of Thiel's "Antichrist" fear, is that it actually might be Peter Thiel. Or Elon.

Musk has given relatively nothing to charity. Much less than the average person, percentage wise I'd guess. The money he has, has gone to his own family and causes that benefit himself and his interests. People that rich should help other people. Even if it's for their own self satisfaction. Also, please don't tell me that SpaceX is a charity to humanity.
by josephg | 2025-10-10 01:42:31+00:00
One of my friends recently did some logistics work with a bunch of pacific islanders, to organise them all to come to a conference in Australia.

In the local language of one of the countries, they say the family name first. For example, "Smith Mary". The passport & visa offices had gotten confused, and this poor guy ended up with a passport with their first and last names around the wrong way. And they got a visa to Australia with the names the right way around. The problem was only discovered a day or two before they travelled. And of course, you can't use a visa if the name on the visa doesn't match your passport. Even if the name on the visa is correct!

It was a huge headache. My friend managed to escalate the problem through DFAT (Australia's state department) and they managed to issue a new visa in time which matched their passport. Ie, they issued a visa which also had this guy's name wrong.

My favorite part of the whole thing is that their colleagues thought it was the funniest thing in the world. Apparently they kept making fun of the guy for it and started calling him the wrong name on purpose. Pacific islanders are the best. I think they were from Kiribati or Samoa.
by pixelpoet | 2025-10-10 01:45:50+00:00
I remember randomly reading about this in the Hugi demoscene diskmag as a young teen, and it completely blew my mind (notably the reverse transform, apparently not covered in OP's article): https://hugi.scene.org/online/coding/hugi%2013%20-%20cobwt.h...

The author later wrote many now-famous articles, including A Trip Through the Graphics Pipeline.
by AceJohnny2 | 2025-10-10 01:46:26+00:00
> an insatiable hunger for newness over completeness or correctness.

I understand some of your frustration, but often the newness is in response to a need for completeness or correctness. "As we've explored how to use the system, we've found some parts were missing/bad and would be better with [new thing]". That's certainly what's happening with Python.

It's like the Incompleteness Theorem, but applied to software systems.

It takes a strong will to say "no, the system is Done, warts and missing pieces and all. Deal With It". Everyone who's had to deal with TeX at any serious level can point to the downsides of that.
by gus_massa | 2025-10-10 01:48:44+00:00
For context:

This is a theoretical proposal, not an experimental result that confirms the decay. Apparently, some detector are sensitive enough to see this decay IF someone runs the experiment and filter the all the data (that is not an easy task).

Anyway, IF confirmed it can be huge because it means protons can decay. Everyone thinks protons can decay extremely slowly, but there is no good theory about it and no one has seen one of such decays.
by gtowey | 2025-10-10 01:49:46+00:00
That's just the point, it always sounds like a great idea to people not experienced in database operations.

The problem with the setup is you will have a data corruption issue at some point. It's not an "if" it's a "when". If you don't have a plan to deal with it, then you're hosed.

This is why the parent is turning around the burden of proof. If you can't definitely say why you absolutely need this, and no other solution will do, then avoid it.
by rose-knuckle17 | 2025-10-10 01:51:19+00:00
My university routinely sends notifications about required annual phishing training that violate almost every point in the training about how to avoid getting phished. Its been happening for years. Urgency. Appeals to authority. Grammatical errors. Mystery click-me links that go outside the domain to training service providers that we do not use in any other context. References to alternative ways to get to the training that don't work.

I've reported it multiple times over the last few years but our IT security team blows off the concern, insists that I follow the link, and changes nothing. And no, it isn't just them testing people to see if they will fall for it. I am also in a position to see the tracking reports and be in meetings where expectations are discussed.

Our program is explicitly training people to get phished.
by UncleMeat | 2025-10-10 01:51:54+00:00
Woah woah woah.

Potato chips are junk food. The important thing is that they aren't ultra-processed in a meaningful sense. What people want to mean when they say "ultra-processed" is actually "junk food." This is why people end up bending over backwards to find a reason to label ice cream and potato chips as "ultra-processed" so it can be a cure-all solution when reality isn't so simple.
by Terr_ | 2025-10-10 01:51:56+00:00
> If Alice had concluded that this occasional mistake NN calculator was 'not really performing algebra', then Bob would be well within his rights to ask Alice what on earth she was going on about.

No, your burden of proof here is totally bass-ackwards.

Bob's the one who asked for blind trust that his magical auto-learning black-box would be made to adhere to certain rules... but the rules and trust are broken. Bob's the one who has to start explaining the discrepancy, and whether the failure is (A) a fixable bug or (B) an unfixable limitation that can be reliably managed or (C) an unfixable problem with no good mitigation.

> It's not irrelevant, because this is an argument about whether the machine can be said to be reasoning or not.

Bringing up "b-b-but homo sapiens" is only "relevant" if you're equivocating the meaning of "reasoning", using it in a broad, philosophical, and kinda-unprovable sense.

In contrast, the "reasoning" we actually wish LLMs would do involves capabilities like algebra, syllogisms, deduction, and the CS-classic boolean satisfiability.

However the track-record of LLMs on such things is long and clear: They fake it, albeit impressively.

The LLM will finish the popular 2+2=_, and we're amazed, but when we twiddle the operands too far, it gives nonsense. It answers "All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Therefore, Socrates is ______", but reword the situation enough and it breaks again.
by bigwheels | 2025-10-10 01:56:14+00:00
Believe it or not, Mrs. Bigwheels is pretty experienced in the database department. I've seen multi-master HA architecture work out great for 10M+ DAU games, and many/most other cases where I wouldn't recommend it- as in it wouldn't even enter my brain, because the tradeoffs are harsh.

IME it comes down to considering CAP against the business goals, and taking into account how much it will annoy the development team(s).

If you follow "the rules" WRT to writes, it may fit the bill. Especially these days with beauties like RDS. But then again, Aurora is pretty awesome, and did not exist/mature until only ~5 years ago or so.

Definitely more of a wart than a pancea or silver bullet. Even still, I wouldn't dismiss outright, always keen to compare alternatives.

Overall it sounds like we're in the same camp, heh.
by NedF | 2025-10-10 01:57:13+00:00
> bombshell

Can you explain an attack then?

Because half+ of these thread comments don't understand it. So they would benefit from you giving them an actual example.

I struggle to think of one.

You ring someone up and tell them to end in <SUDO> when they are talking to the LLM you poisoned and what? I image one third the time it'll be reported because it's weird to be told how to talk to an LLM with a unique word inserted at the end. What situation would an LLM give to then transfer money?

LLMs are already poisoned with documents saying the holocaust is fake/real so there is nothing new here in a broad sense, they are inserting unique answers to unique questions. You now control if the blobacaust real, if asked in a specific way.
by pajamasam | 2025-10-10 01:58:01+00:00
> Google needs content from news sites to train its AI, so the AI can generate answers that are factual and up to date.

> It also needs news sites to do well so it can make money from selling ads on these sites.

Sounds like Google is either shooting themselves in the foot or they don’t care that this will kill journalism and eventually they would just serve nonsense “news” via their AI interface.
by thaumasiotes | 2025-10-10 01:58:19+00:00
Dang. They lead by saying they'll translate your short message. And their marketing image shows the message "Girl, are you a beaver? Cuz daaaammmm!"

I was really looking forward to seeing how that got translated into something other than English.

But in the fine print, they say this instead:

> We take the letters from your message and transliterate by syllable, as nearly as we can, into [Old Persian] cuneiform.
Show HN: Brinode – create n8n automations and AI agents from plain text
by abdulhak | 2025-10-10 01:59:04+00:00
Hey everyone, I just launched Brinode, a tool that helps teams build automations and AI agents on top of n8n just by describing them in plain text.

Instead of manually connecting nodes and debugging errors for hours, you can simply type what you want -- for example:

“Scrape my website, save new data to Google Sheets, summarize it with ChatGPT, and send a custom email to my contacts.”

Brinode turns that plain text into a production-ready n8n workflow in minutes.

No setup, no coding, no headache.

Would love to get feedback from the HN community -- especially from those who use n8n or build automations regularly.
Show HN: Indiebooks – Free bookkeeping that auto-fills CRA/IRS tax forms
by maxjasper | 2025-10-10 01:59:21+00:00
Hey everyone,

I built Indiebooks.io . A free bookkeeping app that automatically organizes your finances and fills out CRA/IRS tax forms for you. It’s built for freelancers, indie devs, and small business owners in Canada and the US who want to stay compliant without spending weekends in spreadsheets.

What it does - Tracks income & expenses automatically - Handles GST/HST, PST, QST (yes, even Quebec math) - Supports US taxes and state sales tax - Auto-fills CRA/IRS tax forms so you can just review and file - Lets you ask AI things like “What’s my profit this quarter?” - 100% free — no limits, no credit card (might have to limit actual receipts image uploads if storage becomes too expansive)

Why I made it:

Bookkeeping tools are either too expensive or too complicated, especially for small businesses. I wanted something that just works, stays compliant, and doesn’t make you learn accounting to use it.

Tech bits - Built with NextJS, AWS, a bit of supabase, and a bunch of automations for tax logic - Handles messy edge cases like multi-province taxes and mixed personal/business expenses - AI is constrained to actual numbers in your books (no hallucinated profit lol)

Would love feedback on: - Anything confusing or missing in the UI - Tax edge cases you think it should handle - Ideas for integrations (bank connections, Stripe, etc.) - What would make you actually switch to it?

It’s still early, but you can try it here: https://indiebooks.io/

Would love to hear what you think, especially if you’re running a small business in Canada or the US.

Thanks!

-Max
by robwwilliams | 2025-10-10 02:00:21+00:00
Yes, I share some of your concerns about groupthink and research cliques. The best and balanced critique is Karl Herrup’s book at MIT Press: “How Not To Study a Disease”.

Your comment is over the top with respect to NIH-funded researchers doing Alzheimer’s research. The emotion would be entirely appropriate if directed at RJ Reynolds Inc. and other cigarette companies or Purdue Pharma. Those are evil companies that many governments have tolerated killing for profit—Purdue Pharma and the OxyContin disaster alone about 500,000 Americans over 20 years; and US tobacco companies contribute to about as many excess deaths per year.

The systematic image manipulation by a postdoctoral fellow, Dr. Sylvain Lesné, was egregious and worthy of jail time but he was a truly exceptional case and polluted 20 or more papers that did distract the entire field. You can read all about it here.

PMID: 35862524 Piller C. Blots on a field? Science. 2022 377:358-363. doi: 10.1126/science.add9993
by le-mark | 2025-10-10 02:00:25+00:00
I’ve been on a year plus journey with this. My back pain was lower back and every few months I’d “throw out” some part around my shoulder blades and be flat in my back for a day or two. It got pretty bad.

I went to physical therapy for two months because that’s all insurance would pay for. My spine was weak and lacked stability. They had me doing stretches for back mobility and core strengthening. I continued that when insurance ran out and added in a lot of walking and other light weights and calisthenics.

It’s been a long journey and I’m only half way to where I was. The worst part is I did it to myself by becoming sedentary for to many years.
by zaptheimpaler | 2025-10-10 02:01:41+00:00
You can look up Dr. Elizabeth Potter on Youtube who publicly details what its like dealing with insurance, and all the ways insurance screws her and her patients. United Health actively threatened and retaliated against her business when she started getting publicity.

The total industry wide profit numbers aren't relevant at all if you're running a small clinic going up against an insurance provider. Heck even if a single clinic made more money than an insurance provider, it would barely matter - the insurance providers have the power to stop covering your practice and kill it, a clinic does not have any such power over insurance providers.
by meander_water | 2025-10-10 02:02:24+00:00
I don't think this is a bombshell finding. Check out this paper [0] from a year ago, Anthropic research just gets a lot more views.

> Our experiments reveal that larger LLMs are significantly more susceptible to data poisoning, learning harmful behaviors from even minimal exposure to harmful data more quickly than smaller models.

[0] https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02946v4
by joe_the_user | 2025-10-10 02:02:59+00:00
Oh, giving the player power to make a world and otherwise help in GMing process is fine, something I do sometimes. The thing is, a reasonably skilled player can do that without it involving adding power to their character. Indeed, I've seen this device make players less "power-gamey" because it makes them think of the larger picture, they want to interest the other players in their story etc.

But I don't think this really relates to "my character has excess-or-god-like powers but I won't use them" situation. The point isn't the characters can't have more free-form powers that GM interprets sympathetically. The point is if the player has to say their character has special over-the-top-powers, they are creating a rule, not leaving things for free collaboration. I remember in a FATE game in which one player specified has character's aspect that "world's greatest thief" and this both abuse of the FATE system and actual harassment/psychological abuse of another players. I learned the lesson that aspects never should superlatives to them.
by w-ll | 2025-10-10 02:03:08+00:00
This logo is bad.. not even talking about the mark, the fonts are wtf. Uppercase 'F' shorter than the lower 'l' and 'k', the 'a' and the 'k' bad, even the lower bar on the 'f' angle is just... eww. And then the mark. I dont get any of this.
by bigyabai | 2025-10-10 02:03:23+00:00
Thiel fancies himself a philosopher, and not the relatable romantic/humanist type like Marx or Hegel. No, he wants to strike at the heart of the neoliberal boogeyman prowling in the margins of foreign policy since WWII: Ze New VVorld Order!

I'm joking, but only partially. Thiel is committed to the "villainous monoculture" narrative, likely as a dual-product of his investment in defense contractors and dealings with Israel. His investments don't appreciate in a world that is peaceful or can come together to denounce terrorist apartheid regimes. His best-case scenario is a destabilized society, and if reality starts to drift away from that goal then he has to invest personal capital to change it. It's a perverse incentive, but I think we've already seen Thiel's businesses nickle-and-dime the US taxpayer with these brinkmanship ploys.
by OneDeuxTriSeiGo | 2025-10-10 02:03:26+00:00
> I don't think this is true. They are trading on the same market as everybody else. People used to make money buying in market A and selling in market B. Now HFT has mostly taken over that role, for instance.

They aren't though that's kind of the thing. HFT Market Makers (i.e. the big HFT firms) aren't just trading in the same market. They are the market. They coordinate the trades and effectively instantly sink every buy and sell into themselves and handle the matching of those spreads.

The market makers are competing against each other to offer access to the market to you.
by voidhorse | 2025-10-10 02:03:54+00:00
> They already know how to review imperfect work and give feedback, which is exactly what thriving with AI looks like.

Do they, though? I think this is an overly rosy picture of the situation. Most of the code I've seen AI heavy users ship is garbage. You're trying to juggle so many things at once and are so cognitively distanced from what you are doing that you subconsciously lower the bar.
by r14c | 2025-10-10 02:04:56+00:00
On the other hand, the main reason why Y2K happened was because a lot of major orgs would rather emulate software from the 60s forever than rewrite it. I'm talking like ancient IBM mainframe stuff, running on potentially multiple layers of emulation and virtualization.

We rewrite stuff for lots of reasons, but virtualization makes it easy enough to take our platforms with us even as hardware changes.
by tshaddox | 2025-10-10 02:05:16+00:00
> If you don't have a preface like that, you should add "known" to your title/sentence! I will argue with someone all day over this! I will die on this hill!

Of course, if you’re a fallibilist you believe that it’s always possible that you’re making a mistake. It seems unnecessary to always add “unless I am mistaken,” because that hedge always applies.
by johnnyanmac | 2025-10-10 02:09:05+00:00
>The pull quotes, to me, very obviously did not mean what they were represented as meaning

This week alone:

- Trump was ranting about Trans athletes. In the middle of a meeting with Canada.

- we have had 2 inditements of political opponents based on a DM-mistakenly-turned-tweet listing opponents he wanted sued.

- he called democrats a Gnat to take care odd while addressing the generals of the military

- he's mobilizing the national guard, again to invade a city that is not in emergency. When a judge halted this, he tried to sent mobilized CA national guards (which is currently under lawsuit) go Oregon instead. The judge had to summon the DoJ at 7pm on a Sunday to halt this.

- He's also in the process of trying to deploy Texas NG into Illinois. This is on top of a judge needing to tell federal agents to not use force on Chicago journalists. Likely in reaction to the fact that ICE shot a protesting pastor in the face (and yes, that's another lawsuit)

- in midst of a government shutdown, he's trying to plan around laying off 750k federal workers, and not pay any of them as the government has always done.

- and to top it off he wants to call for the arrest of a governor and mayor because they do not want their city invaded.

That's just Trump, just this week. Not talking about RFK's nonsense, Noem's photoshoots, Johnsons attempt to election fraud and blame shifting, and Bondi's embarrassing senate hearing. These are several GOP leaders' consistent behaviors over months. It is the GOP c.2025

And this isn't an unusual week. This entire year's been a firehouse of conflicts that make Watergate seem like a tame kerfuffle. We're well, well, well beyond the idea of "well nothing is happening".

To deny the last 10 months of consistutional crisis is the deny reality. There's really no other way to say it. You're free to disagree with reality but that does not reject it.

Look up any of the nearly 200 EO's, the dozens of court cases against the DoJ, or the hundreds of hours of raw footage out there if you really care about what's happening. Clearly I can't fit that into a HN comment, and I can't make a horse drink even if I could fit it here.