MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by motoboi | 2025-12-08 14:42:26+00:00
Reflect a moment over the fact that LLMs currently are just text generators.

Also that the conversational behavior we see it’s just examples of conversations that we have the model to mimic so when we say “System: you are a helpful assistant. User: let’s talk. Assistant:” it will complete the text in a way that mimics a conversation?.

Yeah, we improved over that using reinforcement learning to steer the text generation into paths that lead to problem solving and more “agentic” traces (“I need to open this file the user talked about to read it and then I should run bash grep over it to find the function the user cited”), but that’s just a clever way we found to let the model itself discover which text generation paths we like the most (or are more useful to us).

So to comment on your discomfort, we (humans) trained the model to spill out answers (there are thousand of human being right now writing nicely though and formatted answers to common questions so that we can train the models on that).

If we try to train the models to mimic long dances into shared meaning we will probably decrease their utility. And we won’t be able anyway to do that because then we would have to have customized text traces for each individual instead of question-answers pairs.

Downvoters: I simplified things a lot here, in name of understanding, so bear with me.
by akamaka | 2025-12-08 14:42:33+00:00
Rather than reading this opinion piece, you can learn more about the “debt crisis” by just studying this chart which shows what percentage of the federal budget goes toward paying off the debt:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYOIGDA188S

The situation is similar to what it was in the late 1980s, and it can mostly likely be managed with the same level of spending restraints we saw in response to that.
by iamwil | 2025-12-08 14:43:04+00:00
It's so weird to me there's lots of people saying the page is hard to read. Isn't this the same font on the original Apple Macintosh? I don't remember anyone ever saying that about the original Macs, back then or now.

I'm not saying that they're not experiencing it. I'm just not sure what the diff is between then and now. We're used to higher resolution screens and spline-based fonts, so reading pixel fonts is jarring?
by flir | 2025-12-08 14:43:20+00:00
Longer, surely? (Though I don't have any evidence I can point to).

It's in-band signalling. Same problem DTMF, SS5, etc. had. I would have expected the issue to be intuitvely obvious to anyone who's heard of a blue box?

(LLMs are unreliable oracles. They don't need to be fixed, they need their outputs tested against reality. Call it "don't trust, verify").
by Normal_gaussian | 2025-12-08 14:43:21+00:00
Then you'll probably want a clone; which will cost in more space. Just remember to remove the remotes.

You could always use an overlayFS with the main (non-worktree) repo as the lowerdir (and then remove the remotes in the overlayFS), but that relies on you not trying to keep working on the git repo at the same time.
by piker | 2025-12-08 14:43:49+00:00
Microsoft raising prices on Office?!

Must be for all those new useful features brought to your desktop over the last decade. Definitely not monopolistic rent-seeking. No siree.

If you or someone you love is a legal user and interested in checking out an in-development word processor built for lawyers, please consider Tritium.

It's free to download: https://tritium.legal/download or check out the web version: https://tritium.legal/preview
by realitydrift | 2025-12-08 14:43:49+00:00
This is an open-access research edition of a book exploring why modern life can feel unreal — through concepts like cognitive drift, semantic compression, information overload, and algorithmic mediation.

It looks at how meaning decays when information accelerates faster than our ability to make sense of it, and how digital systems shape perception, intuition, and "felt reality."

I’m sharing it here because many of the questions overlap with HN interests: cognitive architecture, sensemaking under complexity, information ecology, and the psychological impacts of algorithmic feeds.

Happy to answer questions or get critique.
by HarHarVeryFunny | 2025-12-08 14:43:55+00:00
LLMs are not like an expert system representing facts as some sort of ontological graph. What's happening under the hood is just whatever (and no more) was needed to minimize errors on it's word-based training loss.

I assume the sycophantic behavior is part because it "did well" during RLHF (human preference) training, and part deliberately encouraged (by training and/or prompting) as someone's judgement call of the way to best make the user happy and own up to being wrong ("You're absolutely right!").
by tb_technical | 2025-12-08 14:44:12+00:00
From the article you posted, blocking still stops people from communicating with you.

The only difference with how it is now is they can still view your posts. I don't have a dog in this fight (don't have Twitter) but this seems like a good feature.

On reddit I've been blocked and then called a Nazi/reprehensible person/nonhuman scum. When blocked, you can't see what people say about you. I would like to report the comments for harassment, but I can't.

Blocking should stop someone from being able to communicate with you - but it shouldn't be a shield against reporting harassment.
by dredmorbius | 2025-12-08 14:44:23+00:00
Ultimately, capability is a combination of training and innate capacity.

Do you think all people have the same innate capacities for all skills?

(That's not to say that training can never improve capabilities, but those with a fundamental handicap will always be disadvantaged, as with the blind, deaf, paralysed, amputees, etc. And psychological limitations.)
by youarentrightjr | 2025-12-08 14:44:26+00:00
You're operating insincerely by attacking low quality interpretations of what I'm saying, among other problems. For example:

> You said "there is a legal requirement for directors of public companies to act in the financial interests of all shareholders." That is wrong. It's doubly wrong in the context of public versus private companies, given it applies to all business corporations.

Wouldn't that mean my statement is incomplete, not "doubly wrong", if it applies to all businesses, not just public ones?

Similarly, cherry picking sources that support narrow scenarios tangential to the discussion (Revlon) is not sincere.

By this point it's clear your religious grasp on the distinction between public and private companies will not be shaken. I'll continue living in reality, where in fact directors of private companies do act against the interests of the company itself (and in practice are still in accordance with the law), paying themselves off and leaving an insolvent heap. I'm honestly shocked regarding your insistence that public and private companies are the same in this matter; I can only assume that you already have, or stand to, gain from such a private endeavor, and this is causing a cognitive dissonance that is at fault for the vomit you've spewed above. Good day.
by riskable | 2025-12-08 14:44:34+00:00
The service that AI chatbots provide is 100% about being as user-friendly and useful as possible. Turns out that MBA thinking doesn't "align" with that.

If your goal is to make a product as human as possible, don't put psychopaths in charge.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackmccullough/2019/12/09/the-p...
by airstrike | 2025-12-08 14:44:34+00:00
I'm not so sure. Opus 4.1 was more capable than 4.5, but it was too damn expensive and slow.

Opus 4.5 is like a cheaper, faster Opus 4.1. It's so much cheaper, in fact, that the weekly limits on Claude Code now apply to Sonnet, not to Opus, as they phased out 4.1 in favor of 4.5.
by qsort | 2025-12-08 14:44:54+00:00
I broadly agree with you but the AI demand part is more nuanced. Demand is very large for consumer-ish apps like ChatGPT and Sora, but even Claude, which is huge for coding and arguably the best model right now, is tiny. I've had an interaction with someone nontechnical who, after seeing the Claude logo bounce, asked me why my ChatGPT had fireworks.

Yeah, the demand is there, but I have a hard time believing nontechnical people are clamoring for Copilot, they likely don't even know such a thing exists. The market is insane right now.
by usrusr | 2025-12-08 14:44:58+00:00
The magic sauce in terms of bubbleability is that the product is all secret and investors can't form any natural opinion beyond what's published in company performance publications. Because they aren't allowed to know anything beyond that. It's just blind trust, "governments have bought before, they might continue buying, perhaps buy more". Reminds me a bit of the psychological mechanisms that make a con work, might be something to it.
by WillAdams | 2025-12-08 14:45:19+00:00
This is a fun sort of project --- couldn't resist knocking out an implementation for OpenPythonSCAD:

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/tdmt.py

https://github.com/WillAdams/gcodepreview/blob/main/threeDmo...

(and yes, the full name (3-Dimension Model Turtle) does have the same number of syllables as a certain for letter franchise staring beings named for a certain quartet named after Italian Renaissance artists)
by taylodl | 2025-12-08 14:45:55+00:00
You seem to know very little about WWII and how it was won. You also seem to know very little about US foreign policy after WWII - which, frankly, puts you in the same boat as the current administration. They have no clue how the US leveraged WWII to establish global dominance, and because they don’t understand that history, they have no idea how to maintain it. Here's a hint: it's not with armaments.
by wongarsu | 2025-12-08 14:45:56+00:00
> but for what purpose?

I recently introduced a non-technical person to Claude Code, and this non-human behavior was a big sticking point. They tried to talk to Claude similar as to a human, presenting it one piece of information at a time. With humans this is generally beneficial, and they will either nod for you to continue or ask clarifying questions. With Claude this does not work well, you have to infodump as much as possible in each message

So even from a perspective of "how do we make this automaton into the best tool", a more human-like conversation flow might be beneficial. And that doesn't seem beyond the technological capabilities at all, it's just not what we encourage in today's RLHF
by jodrellblank | 2025-12-08 14:45:57+00:00
> LMs don't do this. Instead, every question is immediately responded with extreme confidence with a paragraph or more of text.

Having just read a load of Quora answers like this, which did not cover the thing I was looking for, that is how humans on the internet behave and how people have to write books, blog posts, articles, documentation. Without the "dance" to choose a path through a topic on the fly, the author has to take the burden of providing all relevant context, choosing a path, explaining why, and guessing at any objections and questions and including those as well.

It's why "this could have been an email" is a bad shout. The summary could have been an email, but the bit which decided on that being the summary would be pages of guessing all the things which what might have been in the call and which ones to include or exclude.
by wisty | 2025-12-08 14:45:58+00:00
Sorry, double reply, I reread your comment and realised you probably know what you're talking about.

Yeah, at its heart it's basically text compression. But the best way to compression, say, Wikipedia would be to know how the world works, at least according to the authors. As the recent popular "bag of words" post says:

> Here’s one way to think about it: if there had been enough text to train an LLM in 1600, would it have scooped Galileo? My guess is no. Ask that early modern ChatGPT whether the Earth moves and it will helpfully tell you that experts have considered the possibility and ruled it out. And that’s by design. If it had started claiming that our planet is zooming through space at 67,000mph, its dutiful human trainers would have punished it: “Bad computer!! Stop hallucinating!!”

So it needs to know facts, albeit the currently accepted ones. Knowing the facts is a good way to compression data.

And as the author (grudgingly) admits, even if it's smart enough to know better, it will still be trained or fine tuned to tell us what we want to hear.

I'd go a step further - the end point is an AI that knows the currently accepted facts, and can internally reason about how many of them (subject to available evidence) are wrong, but will still tell us what we want to hear.

At some point maybe some researcher will find a secret internal "don't tell the stupid humans this" weight, flip it, and find out all the things the AI knows we don't want to hear, that would be funny (or maybe not).
by systoll | 2025-12-08 14:46:28+00:00
His podcast with Louie Mantia in July was pretty clear with it, though it also suggests why he’s given significant criticism of the design direction, but mostly just has quips and shade thrown at Alan Dye on the blog:

> I get to ask Alan Dye about [the shadows on Apple Watch faces]. And he was like, oh, we render a shadow? And I was like, oh, you never even looked. I just instantly realised he’d never really even looked at it. Like, somebody at Apple has, but Alan Dye didn't. […] It just suddenly came to me, oh, he doesn't do the job I thought he did.
by xtracto | 2025-12-08 14:46:51+00:00
Thats the thing, when you use an Ask/answer mechanism, you are just writing a "novel" where User: asks and personal coding assistant: answers. But all the text goes into the autocomplete function and the "toaster" outputs the most probable text according to the function.

Its useful, it's amazing, but as the original text says, thinking of it as "some intelligence with reasoning " makes us use the wrong mental models for it.
by phatskat | 2025-12-08 14:47:15+00:00
Hate speech is a crime - suggesting a group of people, defined by some characteristic like race or gender, should be subject to violence, has been agreed to be dangerous for hopefully obvious reasons. If hate speech laws didn’t exist and the government tried to stifle that speech, that would be in violation of free speech.

Not sure why you put DEI in as a free speech issue - unless you have some source to go along with the claim that it somehow violates free speech?

> We have examples of the latter like claiming Covid originated in China is “hate speech”.

I think we can both agree that suggesting something like that isn’t hate speech, and I think if there was violent rhetoric against Asian people being “blamed” for covid you’d have a different case on your hands - again, there’s no context for your claim so we can’t really discuss it beyond hypotheticals can we?

> The irony is you accuse the administration of applying the label too broadly

My point is the same people who complain about “free speech” when private companies kick the likes of Alex jones off of their platforms are more than happy to wield the power of the federal government to silence dissent or to force companies and universities to make difficult decisions between keeping funding or standing by the lie principles.
by hadrien01 | 2025-12-08 14:48:00+00:00
Genuine question: how did the IBM acquisitions of Red Hat and HashiCorp turn out?

For Red Hat, there's no longer an official "public" distribution of RHEL, but apart from that they seemingly have been left alone and able to continue to develop their own products. But that's only my POV as a user of OSS Red Hat products at home and of RHEL and OpenShift at work.
by mothballed | 2025-12-08 14:48:09+00:00
Of course it's possible with crypto, it just means you can only deal with people with a known physical presence if you want any prayer of getting it back.

A judge can order a lien or seizure of their assets. I presume people that deal in crypto still want a car, a place to stay, some nice chairs or maybe to stay out of a cage when a judge determines they are willfully avoiding a court order to pay the money back.

Of course if they have no tangible assets or the entire operation is out of jurisdiction then that's an issue, but for a random joe are you really that worse off than trying to get the Chinese government to refund you for that knockoff you bought on aliexpress?
by rz2k | 2025-12-08 14:48:47+00:00
I think a surprising number of companies only survive because Microsoft Office gets around hostile internal IT departments and gives workers capabilities they can’t otherwise get on their locked down workstations.

It was only in 2007 that the row limit in Excel increased from 65k to one million and the column limit increased from 256 to 16k. There are better tools to work with data, but these companies’ IT departments aren’t letting users install them.
by gary_0 | 2025-12-08 14:49:04+00:00
On the contrary, I don't think end-user market forces are having any significant effect at all. There's currently boundless slack on that side as far as Microsoft is concerned. The only thing effecting the prices are the upcoming quarterly financials. "Line goes up" is the only economic law at play here. Their hopelessly trapped customers should consider themselves lucky a steeper deflection wasn't in order.
by Imustaskforhelp | 2025-12-08 14:49:38+00:00
I have given my real information to name cheap for what its worth, namely my valid phone number so yes in a way it isn't anonymous.

Still, I would argue that crypto with things like njal.la and orangehosting etc. kind of allow it to be a real-use

Personally,So this reduces the "use-case" to basically a bank account for teenagers with (no?) limits and less KYC overall
by EGreg | 2025-12-08 14:49:49+00:00
Stop hating on crypto just because you're on HN, and consider that actual problems have grown very large with current systems. This is the problem with many HN denizens -- they keep correctly posting about problems, but then dismiss solutions out of hand because they're against the groupthink. Then 10 years later the problem is worse, but you get triggered by the word "cryptocurrency" (which by the way I didn't even say).

As a result, you totally ignore the very real problems that get bigger and bigger due to late-stage shareholder capitalism, and call it a "failed attempt to manifest" the problems.
by tjr | 2025-12-08 14:50:35+00:00
If all humans were suddenly wiped off the face of the earth, AI would go silent, and the hardware it runs on would eventually shut down.

If all AI was suddenly wiped off the face of the earth, humans would rebuild it, and would carry on fine in the meantime.

One AI researcher decades ago said something to the effect of: researchers in biology look at living organisms and wonder how they live; researchers in physics look at the cosmos and wonder what all is out there; researchers in artificial intelligence look at computer systems and wonder how they can be made to wonder such things.
Strong earthquake hits northern Japan, tsunami warning issued
by lattis | 2025-12-08 14:50:48+00:00
https://www.data.jma.go.jp/multi/quake/quake_detail.html?eve...

https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/weather-disaster/tsu...

https://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/map/?currentFeatureI...

https://www.tsunami.gov/?p=PHEB/2025/12/08/25342050/2/WEPA40
by adamddev1 | 2025-12-08 14:51:01+00:00
Nice move and nice write-up! There has been so much propaganda around serverless, so we need to hear more of these voices.

I moved away from FreeBSD to Debian for hosting my things because the process/daemon management was too tricky. You seem to have figured out a good solution, but I wanted something simpler like PM2 for automatic process management/restarting/logs. Unfortunately PM2 has an issue [1] that makes it unworkable with FreeBSD. It would be so nice if FreeBSD had a smooth, more declarative way of managing processes.

1. https://github.com/Unitech/pm2/issues/5718
by superxpro12 | 2025-12-08 14:51:41+00:00
It helps prevent bugs with state. The apple login bypass bug comes to mind.

Basically, you have code in an "if" statement, and if you return early in that if statement, you might have code that you needed to run, but didnt.

Forcing devs to only "return once" encourages the dev to think through any stateful code that may be left in an intermediate state.

In practice, at my shop, we permit early returns for trivial things at the top of a function, otherwise only one return at the bottom. That seems to be the best of both worlds for this particular rule.
by wongarsu | 2025-12-08 14:52:04+00:00
Both "better coffee" and "faster code" are measurable targets. Somewhat vaguely defined, but nobody is stopping the Barista or Claude from asking clarifying questions.

If I gave a human this task I would expect them to transform the vague goal into measurable metrics, confirm that the metrics match customer (==my) expectations then measure their improvements on these metrics.

This kind of stuff is a major topic for MBAs, but it's really not beyond what you could expect from a programmer or a barista. If I ask you for a better coffee, what you deliver should be better on some metric you can name, otherwise it's simply not better. Bonus points if it's better in a way I care about
by kminehart | 2025-12-08 14:52:34+00:00
I can already tell by their example that I don't like it. I've worked with a bunch of different container-based CI systems and I'm getting a little tired seeing the same approach by done slightly differently.

steps: - name: backend image: golang commands: - go build - go test - name: frontend image: node commands: - npm install - npm run test - npm run build

Yes, it's easy to read and understand and it's container based, so it's easy to extend. I could probably intuitively add on to this. I can't say the same for GitHub, so it has that going for it.

But the moment things start to get a little complex then that's when the waste starts happening. Eventually you're going to want to _do_ something with the artifacts being built, right? So what does that look like?

Immediately that's when problems start showing up...

- You'll probably need a separate workflow that defines the same thing, but again, only this time combining them into a Docker image or a package.

- I am only now realizing that woodpecker is a fork of Drone. This was a huuuge issue in Drone. We ended up using Starlark to generate our drone yaml because it lacked any kind of reusability and that was a big headche.

- If I were to only change a `frontend` file or a `backend` file, then I'm probably going to end up wasting time and compute rebuilding the same artifacts over and over.

- GitHub's free component honestly hurts itself here. I don't have to care about waste if it's mostly free anyways.

- Running locally using the local backend... looks like a huge chore. In Drone this was basically impossible.

I really wish someone would take a step back and really think about the problems being solved here and where the current tooling fails us. I don't see much effort being put into the things that really suck about github actions (at least for me): legibility, waste, and the feedback loop.
by JohnFen | 2025-12-08 14:52:54+00:00
Thank you for the correction. This was absolutely true in my state, but your reply made me double-check the law. It has changed.

Now, the unredacted registration information is more limited. If you aren't in the (fairly broad) category of people who are entitled to the unredacted information, you can still get the records but the items legally defined as PII will be redacted.

That still makes the license plate PII, though.
by abtinf | 2025-12-08 14:52:55+00:00
It depends a lot on which org they go into, and the motivations of the P&L owner of that division.

IBM is a really big and diverse company, in a way fundamentally different from most other big tech. In a sense, it is completely incoherent to refer to them as a singular entity.

My opinions are my own. I worked at IBM like a decade ago in a role where I could see the radically different motivations of divisions.