MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kouteiheika | 2025-12-07 03:09:26+00:00
> it was difficult to fine tune

Yep. It's pretty difficult to fine tune, mostly because it's a distilled model. You can fine tune it a little bit, but it will quickly collapse and start producing garbage, even though fundamentally it should have been an easier architecture to fine-tune compared to SDXL (since it uses the much more modern flow matching paradigm).

I think that's probably the reason why we never really got any good anime Flux models (at least not as good as they were for SDXL). You just don't have enough leeway to be able to train the model for long enough to make the model great for a domain it's currently suboptimal for without completely collapsing it.
by averynicepen | 2025-12-07 03:10:45+00:00
Writing is an expression of an individual, while code is a tool used to solve a problem or achieve a purpose.

The more examples of different types of problems being solved in similar ways present in an LLM's dataset, the better it gets at solving problems. Generally speaking, if it's a solution that works well, it gets used a lot, so "good solutions" become well represented in the dataset.

Human expression, however, is diverse by definition. The expression of the human experience is the expression of a data point on a statistical field with standard deviations the size of chasms. An expression of the mean (which is what an LLM does) goes against why we care about human expression in the first place. "Interesting" is a value closely paired with "different".

We value diversity of thought in expression, but we value efficiency of problem solving for code.

There is definitely an argument to be made that LLM usage fundamentally restrains an individual from solving unsolved problems. It also doesn't consider the question of "where do we get more data from".

>the code you actually want to ship is so far from what LLMs write

I think this is a fairly common consensus, and my understanding is the reason for this issue is limited context window.
by mr_windfrog | 2025-12-07 03:12:55+00:00
What this incident really shows is the growing gap between how easy it is to create a convincing warning and how costly it is to verify what's actually happening. Hoaxes aren't new, but generative tools make fabrication almost free and massively increase the volume.

The rail operator didn't do anything wrong. After an earthquake and a realistic-looking image, the only responsible action is to treat it as potentially real and inspect the track.

This wasn't catastrophic, but it's a preview of a world where a single person can cheaply trigger high-cost responses. The systems we build will have to adapt, not by ignoring social media reports, but by developing faster, more resilient ways to distinguish signal from noise.
by tomerhe | 2025-12-07 03:13:14+00:00
Anatomy of a Domain Risk Engine: Why Regex Isn't Enough (And LLMs Are Too Slow)

Building a URL scanner in 2025 is an exercise in managing trade-offs.

If you rely solely on traditional methods like Regex and Blocklists, you miss the sophisticated attacks (False Negatives). If you send every single URL to a massive, general-purpose Large Language Model (LLM), you will go bankrupt—the token costs simply don't scale for high-volume scanning.
by skissane | 2025-12-07 03:13:33+00:00
Someone I know is a high school English teacher (being vague because I don’t want to cause them trouble or embarrassment). They told me they were asking ChatGPT to tell them whether their students’ creative writing assignments were AI-generated or not-I pointed out that LLMs such as ChatGPT have poor reliability at this; classifier models trained specifically for this task perform somewhat better, yet also have their limitations. In any event, if the student has access to whatever model the teacher is using to test for AI-generation (or even comparable models), they can always respond adversarially by tinkering with an AI-generated story until it is no longer classified as AI-generated
by ip26 | 2025-12-07 03:14:58+00:00
My first exposure to this - tired of $40 particleboard bookshelves and tables, I went looking for solid wood furniture, reasoning it was fine to spend a little more for something that would last. I found it- and discovered humble, small tables were a months pay.

I don't want cheap crap, but I suddenly appreciated why we've moved away from tables that can support a car.
by sudomateo | 2025-12-07 03:15:04+00:00
Medication is littered with warning labels but humans still use it to combat illness. Social media can harm mental health yet people still use it. Pick whatever other example you'd like.

There are things in life that have high risks of harm if misused yet people still use them because there are great benefits when carefully used. Being aware of the risks is the key to using something that can be harmful, safely.
by Telaneo | 2025-12-07 03:15:37+00:00
> and if Steam gets in the way of XBox handhelds, maybe a change of heart will take place.

Nay a single consumer will see it that way, but rather see Xbox getting in the way of Steam. An Xbox handheld which you can't run your Steam games on will probably be about as much a failure as the Series S and X, or an equivalent successor, which I can't see any way for Microsoft to turn the tide with, and can't imagine Microsoft not knowing that.

> Who knows, Valve is the one that needs to worry, not Microsoft, they control the technology.

Game devs aren't going to follow Microsoft's every whim and desire, and Microsoft can't rugpull current technologies out from under neither Valve nor game devs.
by JoshTriplett | 2025-12-07 03:15:39+00:00
The difference is that the two don't interoperate. You can't import a Python 3 module from Python 2 or vice versa; you have to use completely separate interpreters to run them.

I'm suggesting a model in which one interpreter runs both Python 2 and Python 3, and the underlying types are the same, so you can pass them between the two. You'd have to know that "foo" created in Python 2 is the equivalent of b"foo" created in Python 3, but that's easy enough to deal with.
by SpicyLemonZest | 2025-12-07 03:17:17+00:00
I don't think that's right. I've never seen anyone claim that it was no big deal and doesn't reflect negatively on the politics of the 1970s.

There were people who argued that the shooting was the students' fault, certainly. But the students knew at the time that they were antagonizing people, and felt that it was worth the risk, predicting (correctly: https://emersoncollegepolling.com/50-years-after-kent-state-...) that future generations would see why their cause was worth fighting for. The only lesson I can see to take away from that is that violence is not the last word, and you should (as students at the time did) keep protesting even if people get shot for it.

I suppose there's also the lesson that de-escalation is an important tactical skill. But that's not controversial at all. Many recent National Guard deployments have been extremely conflicted (I'm still mad about them!), but both guard members and protestors have done a solid job at not needlessly antagonizing each other.
by EasyMark | 2025-12-07 03:18:02+00:00
They are being set up "for immigration purposes" but that's just a guise for a nation wide integrated system for cops and intel agencies to track every single American in every car down. They want keep an active, real time record of wherever we go and what patterns they exhibit for the algos to predict crime from anything they consider suspicious, possibly for future malicious purposes in a police state.
by tartoran | 2025-12-07 03:19:38+00:00
Yes and this is my biggest anxiety of future software and interfaces to come. You won't remember how you got there or did what because there are n permutations of getting there or doing that, except they're vaguely similar but not exactly the same thing. I too want predictable software (including UIs) that stays the same until I want to change/upgrade it myself as a user.
by rl3 | 2025-12-07 03:19:40+00:00
>I believe Bryan is a well known em dash addict

I was hoping he'd make the leaderboard, but perhaps the addiction took proper hold in more recent years:

https://www.gally.net/miscellaneous/hn-em-dash-user-leaderbo...

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=bcantrill

No doubt his em dashes are legit, of course.
by anonnon | 2025-12-07 03:20:16+00:00
There was a comment recently by HN's most enthusiastic LLM cheerleader, Simon Willison, that I stopped reading almost immediately (before seeing who posted it), because it exuded the slop stench of an LLM: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011877

However, I was surprised to see that when someone (not me) accused him of using an LLM to write his comment, he flatly denied it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46011964

Which I guess means (assuming he isn't lying) if you spend too much time interacting with LLMs, you eventually resemble one.
by abhashanand1501 | 2025-12-07 03:20:43+00:00
We really need this in India. There are 53 million cases which are pending in courts, with over 180k cases open for more than 30 years (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendency_of_court_cases_in_Ind...). It is estimated that more than 300 years will be taken to dispose of all cases.

If law code is a repository: 1. Each trial should be encoded into a law. 2. If the trial is already covered sufficiently in the codebase, and both parties agree to it result. Then case is solved. 3. If not, the new judgement leads to a "pull request" into the codebase.
by next_xibalba | 2025-12-07 03:21:30+00:00
This is getting panned, probably for good reasons. But, in a similar vein, I really think that generative applications are going to be big in the future. User speaks (or OS predicts) what they want and an app spins up on the fly. I don’t think they’ll wipe out traditional apps, but I could see lots of long tail cases where they meet users needs.
by arjie | 2025-12-07 03:21:43+00:00
A lot of people think this, but if I'm being honest modern materials are amazing. They survive pretty rough washes, they're incredibly cheap, fire-retardant, and last forever. Synthetics are amazing.

Coincidentally, it was only a couple of days ago that I was thinking about this[0] when I thought about how the microfibre fleece my daughter was lying on was the cheap microfiber fleece I'd bought when I encountered my first American winter. A student's cheap blanket has lasted me over a decade and still keeps me warm and cleans easily.

My wife and I have had Caspers and Tuft & Needles and Tempurpedics and we sleep now on an Ikea foam mattress. It's fantastic. Modern manufacturing and materials are incredible. I feel like I'm living in a golden age.

0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-11-29/Things_Do_La...
by osigurdson | 2025-12-07 03:21:52+00:00
From 1950 - 2005(ish) there were a small number of sources due to the enormous moat required to become a broadcaster. From 2005 to 2021, you could mostly trust video as the costs of casual fakery were prohibitive. Now that the cost to produce fake videos are near zero, I suspect we will return to a much smaller number of sources (though not as small as in the pre YouTube era).
by truongthanminh | 2025-12-07 03:24:31+00:00
Model Update: The Mathematics of Forgetting (and Artificial Remembering)

In refining the Deconstructing Dollar Dynamics model, we addressed a critical structural critique: Crisis Memory ( ) cannot be a constant.

A trader entering the market in 2028 will not possess the visceral "muscle memory" of the 2008 GFC. Fear decays as the old guard retires. To model this accurately, must be treated as a time-dependent function of Generational Decay.
by keyle | 2025-12-07 03:25:09+00:00
Agreed, although LLMs definitely qualify as enabling developers compared to <social media, Steam, consoles, and other distractions> of today.

The Internet itself is full of distractions. My younger self spent a crazy amount of time on IRC. So it's not different than spending time on say, Discord today.

LLMs have pretty much a direct relationship with Google. The quality of the response has much to do with the quality of the prompt. If anything, it's the overwhelming nature of LLMs that might be the problem. Back in the day, if you had, say a library access, the problem was knowing what to look for. Discoverability with LLMs is exponential.

As for LLM as auto-complete, there is an argument to be made that typing a lot reinforces knowledge in the human brain like writing. This is getting lost, but with productivity gains.
by ameliaquining | 2025-12-07 03:25:46+00:00
An important part of the story here, not mentioned in this post but noted elsewhere (https://www.prisma.io/blog/from-rust-to-typescript-a-new-cha...), is that they gave up on offering client libraries for languages other than JavaScript/TypeScript. Doing this while mostly sharing a single implementation among all languages was much of the original reason to use Rust, because Rust is a good "lowest common denominator" language for FFI and TypeScript is not; it wasn't entirely about performance. If they hadn't tried to do this, they would likely never have used Rust; if they hadn't given up on it, they would likely still be using Rust.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-07 03:25:54+00:00
> It's a private company. You can't know that

Private companies still have shareholders and audited financials.

> massive investments were made into Starlink and paid into SpaceX, as I pointed out into my post. That counts as fundraising

No. If I invest $1 in SpaceX and it invests that in Starlink, that’s $1 of fundraising.

> Amazon pays a lot, and for IT Manager roles, so does Walmart

They also pay other people peanuts. I know plenty of people whose net effectives at SpaceX are seven to eight figures. That doesn’t obligate them to pay top dollar for every role.
by boston_clone | 2025-12-07 03:26:57+00:00
Yeah, like I said, we blame boomers who voted for and supported Reagan.

I’m very aware that a healthy minority opposed him and his policies.

Thank you for your work on ARPANET and remaining a proud socialist! Computer networking is what drew me in to the technology space (not programming like most folks here, I presume), and socialism just might finally be having its due time here in the US (e.g., Mamdani, Katie Wilson).
by storus | 2025-12-07 03:28:44+00:00
GT used to have a collaboration with Meta's FAIR and one could do final projects in the DL and NLP classes on recent research topics from Meta AI; some people ended up at top conferences with their work. Not sure how it's going to be now given Meta effectively disbanding FAIR in favor of Wang's Superintelligence. GT also has team research project under VIP (Vertically Integrated Projects) where a prof leads a team of students towards new findings; there are also a bunch of PhD seminars one can take. Stanford has a plenty of CS3xx research classes one can take where the final project has to be some novel research.
by twodave | 2025-12-07 03:28:51+00:00
I argue that the intent of an engineer is contained coherently across the code of a project. I have yet to get an LLM to pick up on the deeper idioms present in a codebase that help constrain the overall solution towards these more particular patterns. I’m not talking about syntax or style, either. I’m talking about e.g. semantic connections within an object graph, understanding what sort of things belong in the data layer based on how it is intended to be read/written, etc. Even when I point it at a file and say, “Use the patterns you see there, with these small differences and a different target type,” I find that LLMs struggle. Until they can clear that hurdle without requiring me to restructure my entire engineering org they will remain as fancy code completion suggestions, hobby project accelerators, and not much else.
by arjie | 2025-12-07 03:29:02+00:00
I think you have one big piece of it: economic progress has a lot of search problems and it is impossible to master-plan it; consequently free intelligence beats centralized regulation. It's a bit out-dated now[0] but The Fifth Discipline distinguishes between 'detail complexity' (things that have a lot of bits you have to figure out) and 'dynamic complexity' (systems that have feedback loops and adaptive participants). It might simply be that handling systems with dynamic complexity is out of the reach of most humans. Economic regulation strikes me as something that can be particularly like a thing that modifies a dynamic system.

In fact, creating good policy in a modern economy might be so dynamically complex that no mind alive today can simultaneously comprehend an adaptive solution and act in such a way as to bring it about.

Perhaps, given this, we are simply spoiled by the effectiveness of certain economic actors (e.g. the Federal Reserve) in maintaining an monetary thermostat. Their success is not the norm so much as it is extraordinary.

0: which is humorous given this, because the Seinfeld Isn't Funny effect applies to things that become mainstream - insight and humor both disappear as the spark or joke become common knowledge
by tastyface | 2025-12-07 03:29:25+00:00
Musk: EU must be abolished (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2025/12/06/musk-eu-must-...)

Someday, I hope to see this man dragged away in cuffs to face justice. And just as a reminder, he is responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths from the USAID shutdown: https://hsph.harvard.edu/news/usaid-shutdown-has-led-to-hund...

It's utterly appalling that some people still discuss Twitter, Grok, and SpaceX with excitement.
by foobarbecue | 2025-12-07 03:29:53+00:00
The version of this that we had when I worked on Erebus (2009-2017) was more fun.

It had a section about crossing crevasses with combinations of sleds and snomobiles and tracked vehicles, crevasse rescue etc. In the middle of otherwise serious text it said "to recover from this situation, you might elect to [something], or possibly [something else]. Either way, a change of underwear is recommended."

If people want I can try to dig it up.

EDIT: found it. p244. https://www.eol.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/files_live/priv... It's really interesting to compare these and see how USAP's risk posture has changed. No more adventures allowed.
by monero-xmr | 2025-12-07 03:30:12+00:00
It’s extremely hard to truly understand the past, how they thought, what they believed, what they saw as acceptable vs. what today seems crazy. For example the founding legend of Rome is called the Rape of the Sabines, which is how the brave men who founded Rome kidnapped all the women from another tribe so they could have wives and reproduce https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_of_the_Sabine_women

Imagine if the USA’s founding legend wasn’t the honorable Founding Fathers, Declaration of Independence, and all that jazz, but instead how our ancestors kidnapped and raped the women of the neighboring tribe. The psychology of such a people to remember and retell this story is pretty incredible
by missedthecue | 2025-12-07 03:31:50+00:00
Here is a specific example where an Irish MEP specifically speaks against sanctions on Russia and against NATO donating any weapons to Ukraine in front of the EU parliament.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpieZnTQorQ

Here is a different Irish MEP saying similar things.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qo1tgWr0KXI
Ask HN: What do you usually do while waiting for AI responses?
by alfred_chang | 2025-12-07 03:32:32+00:00
I've noticed that when using various AI tools, there's often a short pause—sometimes a few seconds, sometimes longer, especially AI coding case—before the model returns an answer. It's an awkward amount of time: too short to switch tasks, but long enough to break your flow.

I'm curious:

- What do you typically do while waiting for an AI response? (Do you zone out? Check email? Scroll HN? Or not think about it at all?)

- What would you like to be able to do during that time? (Quick actions? Useful hints? Better progress indicators? Something else?)

- Have you seen any products that handle this waiting experience particularly well—or poorly?

Thanks!
by jasongill | 2025-12-07 03:33:35+00:00
I met RMS at the Atlanta Linux Showcase in 1998. In the area with vendor booths in the lobby area of the show, he had laid down a blanket and was sitting in the middle with his legs crossed. He had printed copies of man pages printed and stapled together with covers laid out in front of him.

I walked up and introduced myself and said that I was a big fan, appreciated his hard work, etc. He looked at me coldly and just said "so are you going to buy something?" and motioned toward the booklets. I didn't need a printed copy of the `sed` man page so I shrugged and he seemed quite annoyed, turned to his assistant with a notebook computer and started dictating something to them, as almost to make it clear that our interaction was over.

I'm not sure what the point of posting this is, but that's my RMS story - it was my first "never meet your heroes" moment, I guess.
by RandyOrion | 2025-12-07 03:35:33+00:00
Salute to anyone like Xu Qinxian who refused to give up their own moral principals when facing inhumane commands from psychopath leaders like Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong, and so on. Also, for anyone who obeyed inhumane commands like mindless shells, you'll eat what you grow.

Note: Historical records reveal that the people behind the coordination of the Tiananmen Massacre (which this post is talking about) is Deng Xiaoping.
by alphazard | 2025-12-07 03:35:40+00:00
Obviously it would be great if this caught on, but it's not even widely understood/agreed on that read-time precision is a desirable quality in a legal system. This is something almost everyone here takes for granted; we want the interpreter or machine to give the same result for the same input. We want that property so we can know the run-time behavior during development.

There are judges and politicians in the US that advocate for various "interpretations" of laws including parts of the constitution, which are different from what the law literally says. In fact they refer to the literal meaning as the "literal interpretation", implying it is one of many valid interpretations, and casting doubt on the idea of language having a precise meaning. The crowd here knows that it is totally possible and often invaluable to work in languages with precise meaning. Anyways, in practice this means: all the steps happened for the law to get passed by the legislature including arguing about the exact text, and instead of enforcing it as written, the judiciary enforces some slightly different but similar law.

A technology like this necessarily concentrates power in the legislature, and takes it away from the judicial system. It concentrates legal power at write time and removes it from run/read time.
by vunderba | 2025-12-07 03:36:07+00:00
Fair. Nobody said it was going to surpass Flux.1 Dev (a 12B parameter model) or Qwen-Image (a 20B parameter model) where prompt adherence is strictly concerned.

It's the reason I'm holding off until the Z-Image Base version is released before adding to the official GenAI model comparisons.

But for a 6B model that can generate an image in under 5 seconds, it punches far above its weight class.

As to the passing images, there is white chocolate kit-kat (I know, blasphemy, right?).
by foxglacier | 2025-12-07 03:36:50+00:00
You don't need AI for this kind of disruption. People have been making fake bomb threats for years. You just have to say it, either directly to the railway/etc. or publicly enough that somebody else will believe it and forward it to them. The difference might be of intent - if you say you planted a bomb on the bridge, you're probably committing a crime, but if you just post a piece of art without context, it's more plausibly deniable.

It's also pretty common in the UK for trains to be delayed just because some passenger accidentally left their bag on the platform. Not even any malicious intent. I was on a train that stopped in a tunnel for that reason once. They're just very vulnerable to any hint of danger.