MurphyA/hacker-news huggingface dataset:
by kbelder | 2025-12-09 18:40:42+00:00
A while back I gave it a prompt, something like, "I'm a historian from the far future. Please give me a documentary-style summary of the important political and cultural events of the decade of the 1980s."

It did ok, then I kept asking for "Now, the 1990s?" and kept going into future decades. "Now, the 2050s?" It made some fun extrapolations.
by LogicFailsMe | 2025-12-09 18:40:53+00:00
from the batsh!+ over the top over reaction to the usual AI sycophancy in the response? The guy got the job done which is more than I can say for the space jam guy.

One thing I've learned is that the behavior of web services is usually a consequence of what makes its owners the most money. and while I would love a feed without spoilers, paywalled sites, sports news, and a bunch of other topics in which I have no interest, apparently force feeding me that crap is what makes the most money at scale. So people must like AI sycophancy or it would be unprofitable and it would be trained away. But then this is a country that thrived on 20 seasons of Keeping up with the Kardashians so I shouldn't be surprised that they like being treated like billionaires.

And I guess it throws being called a complete loser trader moron stupid treasonous Bozo in some late night executive word salad into stark relief.
by neltnerb | 2025-12-09 18:41:04+00:00
I think what's important here is to reduce harm even if it's still a little annoying. Because if you try to completely ban mentioning something is LLM written you'll just have people doing it without a disclaimer...

Yes, comments of this nature are bad, annoying, and should be downvoted as they have minimal original thought, take minimal effort, and are often directly inaccurate. I'd still rather they have a disclaimer to make it easier to identify them!

Further, entire articles submitted to HN are clearly written by a LLM yet get over a hundred upvotes before people notice whether there's a disclaimer or not. These do not get caught quickly, and someone clicking on the link will likely generate ad revenue that incentives people to continue doing it.

LLM comments without a disclaimer should be avoided, and submitted articles written by a LLM should be flagged ASAP to avoid abuse since by the time someone clicks the link it's too late.
by zamadatix | 2025-12-09 18:41:15+00:00
Most are once it goes meta :D.

On that note, if anyone ever suspects a certain account/comment set as actually being nefarious, the note to reach out to hn@ycombinator.com in the guidelines is no lip service - they really do look right into it and get back to you (often with speedy action about it too). It's by far the best action you can take to keep the community feeling in the comments when you think it's actually occuring!
by anactofgod | 2025-12-09 18:42:09+00:00
CLaRa (Continuous Latent Reasoning) is an approach Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) that shortens context, reduces double-encoding, and improves quality of responses by compressing documents into a small set of "continuous memory tokens" that preserve the key information in the documents, and optimizes and performs retrieval and generation out of that shared latent space.
by FireBeyond | 2025-12-09 18:42:14+00:00
I don't know the specific rules in Vancouver, but yeah, a lot of those attempts were illusory/perfunctory...

If you can afford to have one, or multiple, $2M+ condos that you just "park" your wealth in to leave them vacant, the presence of a $10K or $20K fee/tax a year is in the "chump change" category.
by mrandish | 2025-12-09 18:42:15+00:00
I'm the same way. Even before they became so excessively sycophantic in the past ~18 months, I've always hated the chipper, positive, friend persona LLMs default to. Perhaps this inoculates me somewhat from their manipulative effects. I have a good friend who was manipulated over time by an LLM (I wrote about below:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208463).
by gjsman-1000 | 2025-12-09 18:42:20+00:00
If I pledge $10M in stock for a $2M loan, what's the taxable event? The full $10M valuation, or my $2M loan? What if the stock is in a company worth $40M, but the sale of $10M in stock causes it to be worth $5M afterwards and the private company's value is reassessed to $20M, after I got the loan and after my pledge?
by awesome_dude | 2025-12-09 18:42:43+00:00
OK, the real differences between self directed study, and school based study:

1. School based is supposed to cover all the basics, self directed you have to know what the basics are, or find out, and then cover them.

2. School based study the teachers/lecturers are supposed to have checked all the available text on the subject and then share the best with the students (the teachers are the ones that ensure nobody goes down unproductive rabbitholes)

3. People can see from the qualifications that a person has met a certain standard, understands the subject, has got the knowledge, and can communicate that to a proscribed level.

Personal note, I have done both in different careers, and being "self taught" I realised that whilst I definitely knew more about one topic in the field than qualified individuals, I never knew what the complete set of study for the field was (i never knew how much they really knew, so could never fill the gaps I had)

In CS I gained my qualification in 2010, when i went to find work a lot of places were placing emphasis on self taught people who were deemed to be more creative, or more motivated, etc. When I did work with these individuals, without fail they were missing basic understanding of fundamentals, like data structures, well known algorithms, and so on.
by mrDmrTmrJ | 2025-12-09 18:42:43+00:00
Well, I want more multifamily housing (apartments or condos) to lower prices in good cities near pubic transit.

So let me propose: a wealth tax on land! ("Georgism"). But not a tax on the "value of improvements," i.e, buildings. This disincentivizes single-family homes near train stations (widespread in the town I grew up in) and is very low-cost to collect.

I don't know where you're writing from. But here in California, the source of all evil (Prop 13) originated with single-family homeowners trying to *escape the property taxes that result from their opposing new development.

Given how spectacularly CA housing policy has failed, perhaps it's time to try the opposite: Let's abolish all income taxes and exclusively tax land instead! (Land taxes have the property of being extremely progressive wealth taxes that are dead simple to administer.)
by kouteiheika | 2025-12-09 18:43:08+00:00
> I do not mind having a license like that, my gripe is with using the terms "permissive" and "open source" like that because such use dilutes them. I cannot think of any reason to do that aside from trying to dilute the term (especially when some laws, like the EU AI Act, are less restrictive when it comes to open source AIs specifically).

Good. In this case, let it be diluted! These extra "restrictions" don't affect normal people at all, and won't even affect any small/medium businesses. I couldn't care less that the term is "diluted" and that makes it harder for those poor, poor megacorporations. They swim in money already, they can deal with it.

We can discuss the exact threshold, but as long as these "restrictions" are so extreme that they only affect huge megacorporations, this is still "permissive" in my book. I will gladly die on this hill.
by LexiMax | 2025-12-09 18:43:14+00:00
The fact that this discussion seems to revolving around a single axis of limiting social media time and mandatory identification is such a farce.

When I was growing up, I had very limited access to real life social spaces that I actually enjoyed participating in. Online communities were my respite, the light in the darkness that honestly kept me alive until I managed to make it to college. If there was an overbearing nanny state preventing me from knowing that there was a better life waiting for me after grade school, I'm not sure I would've bothered to stick around until then.

That said, most of modern social media isn't the same as the online communities I and many others grew up on. It's a free for all with very thin walls between social spaces, almost no human oversight, and run by the most despicable and immoral people on God's green earth. So I am inclined to agree with the people who say that kind of social media is a bad influence and should be curtailed.

But even today, that isn't everything that's on the internet these days. Discord especially has quietly become the socialization hub of most of the younger folks I know of, and a large part of that is because it allows the creation of private, invite-only groups moderated by actual people. As far as I'm concerned, the Internet needs more Discords and fewer Twitters and Instagrams. There shouldn't be an arbitrary limit on socialization, but socializing should be...social, not some weird performance art done in front of the entire internet.
by monerozcash | 2025-12-09 18:43:56+00:00
I think the audience that would be interested in this is vanishingly small, there exist relatively few conversations online that would be meaningfully improved by this.

I also suspect that automatically translating a forum would tend to attract a far worse ratio of high-effort to low-effort contributions than simply accepting posts in a specific language. For example, I'd expect programmers who don't speak any english to have on average a far lower skill level than those who know at least basic english.
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-09 18:44:32+00:00
> Can you make it work? Yes. But does it make business sense to try it?

Maybe, if you can rally public resources behind you. Probably not given the value you can command in the private sector.

That’s the point. These people are expensive. Because they’re rare. There is a talent deficit at the top of tech, and if I had to describe it broadly, it’s in folks who can (a) write a letter to an elected representative that doesn’t get thrown in the nutter pile and (b) raise money.
by GlibMonkeyDeath | 2025-12-09 18:44:39+00:00
I agree we need to remove the perverse incentives across the entire system. I also agree the current ACA subsidies are a band-aid.

It's incredibly frustrating because this is a solved problem - even just fixing the most egregious flaws in the ACA would be a huge improvement. I am very skeptical, though, that in my lifetime American voters will ever be unified enough again to take on the de facto doctors union, the health insurer oligopoly, and the pharmaceutical companies, all of whom currently benefit from the broken system, and basically control the government top to bottom.
by peddling-brink | 2025-12-09 18:45:02+00:00
Imagine a lonely person desperate for conversation. A child feeling neglected by their parents. A spouse, unable to talk about their passions with their partner.

The LLM can be that conversational partner. It will just as happily talk about the nuances of 18th century Scotland, or the latest clash of clans update. No topic is beneath it and it never gets annoyed by your “weird“ questions.

Likewise, for people suffering from delusions. Depending on its “mood” it will happily engage in conversations about how the FBI, CIA, KGB, may be after you. Or that your friends are secretly spying for Mossad or the local police.

It pretends to care and have a conscience, but it doesn’t. Humans react to “weird“ for a reason the LLM lacks that evolutionary safety mechanism. It cannot tell when it is going off the rails. At least not in the moment.

There is a reason that LLM’s are excellent at role-play. Because that’s what they’re doing all of the time. ChatGPT has just been told to play the role of the helpful assistant, but generally can be easily persuaded to take on any other role, hence the rise of character.ai and similar sites.
by delichon | 2025-12-09 18:45:21+00:00
> China is adding solar. Mostly solar. The word "solar" does not appear even once in this press release, and that seems disingenuous.

On the contrary, check out this graph:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-consumption-by-sou...

Solar is a tiny portion of new energy capacity in China compared to coal, oil, and gas. But it is similar to nuclear as of 2024. New coal production swamps everything else combined.
by novok | 2025-12-09 18:45:33+00:00
You create a lot of other side effects that destroy a lot of valid activity and thus cause a large economic depressive effect, or you will start needing to provide a lot of other counterbalances that will be even worse or cost the government a lot more.

This has the finance equivalent of feeling like cookie banners will actually do anything.

Political power will advocate for it's power, you have to go one level higher and interact at that level, not on tax law tweaks.

To give an example of where this has gone wrong already, look at the entire interaction between startup stock, ISOs and AMT and how it creates a horrible trap for startup employees, but not for founders and investors who get a lot of very nice tax benefits like QSBS, no AMT, so on. Because startup employees are diffuse, usually have unstable employment and are usually younger, this hasn't been fixed to this day.

While other countries like Israel have this fixed in a very elegant way, where you can exercise without tax bombs and only actually have tax liability when you actually can and do practically realize or liquidate the stock gains.
by ilaksh | 2025-12-09 18:45:35+00:00
So if I understand, this is basically advanced activation steering as a service? And you have already identified vectors for several open models that make them more truthful or better at reasoning and apply them automatically?

Because the API has a persona option which might be achieved with something like this https://github.com/Mihaiii/llm_steer or maybe for closed models you just have to append to the prompt.

What open source models are available? In the docs I only see mention of Google Flash Lite or something which is closed.
by droopyEyelids | 2025-12-09 18:45:53+00:00
Well put. There are two sides of the coin: the lazy questioner who expects others to do the work researching what they would not, and the lazy/indulgent answerer who basically LMGTFY's it.

Ideally we would require people who ask questions to say what they've researched so far, and where they got stuck. Then low-effort LLM or search engine result pages wouldn't be such a reasonable answer.
by EagnaIonat | 2025-12-09 18:46:13+00:00
> You get what you would have created yourself, but just much faster.

Faster but not same as an expert would have created.

As an expert you have assumed knowledge on your area of expertise. For example I would assume that the system would know to use pandas and not csv module, because the latter would be a stupid thing to do outside of learning python.
by nerdix | 2025-12-09 18:46:28+00:00
AOL had an amazing warcraft 2 community. There was an online games service in the 90s called Engage and AOL had a partnership with them that allowed AOL users to play multiplayer games through the AOL service. There was a additional charge and it was quite expensive (I believe there was a per minute but my memory is a little fuzzy on the details).

There was a very active AOL message board dedicated to Warcraft 2. Most of the active community used other services (Kali, MSN Zone, and later Battlenet when BNE came out) to play the game since AOL's service was prohibitively expensive.

The best part of the community were the clans. Some of them ended up outliving AOL. The biggest one that I remember was a clan named Splintered Orcs Clan (SoC). Actually just found an old forum post written by the founder of SoC. Looks like they tried to branch out into WoW (I was way out of the scene by then)

https://forums.mmorpg.com/discussion/12955/splintered-orcs-c...
by JumpCrisscross | 2025-12-09 18:47:00+00:00
> They stole

They learned and appropriated. People and cultures that think anything foreign is evil don’t tend to advance.

The Romans weren’t some progressive legend. But they integrated and distributed knowledge and technology expertly, and were genuine innovators in their chief technology, that of scaled administration.

> When I was growing up we were taught the Romans' own imperial myth that they had built upon nothing

Why do you think this says anything about the Romans versus the context in which you were educated? Is there a single historical source from Republican, Imperial or Eastern Rome you can point to that claims Rome was built on nothing (other than the founding of Rome)?

They identified as conquerors. You don’t get a triumph for shooing some goats off a hill.
by elheffe80 | 2025-12-09 18:47:13+00:00
I am going to try the straight shooting custom instruction. I have already extensively told chatgpt to stop being so 'fluffy' over the past few years that I think it has stopped doing it, but I catch it sometimes still. I hope this helps it cease and desist with that inane conversation bs.

GPT edit of my above message for my own giggles: Command:make this a good comment for hackernews (ycombinator) <above message> Resulting comment for hn: I'm excited to try out the straight-shooting custom instruction. Over the past few years, I've been telling ChatGPT to stop being so "fluffy," and while it's improved, it sometimes still slips. Hoping this new approach finally eliminates the inane conversational filler.
by sambucini | 2025-12-09 18:47:25+00:00
px dynamics GmbH | Senior System Engineer, Full Stack | Full-time | Berlin/Cologne/Hybrid | https://www.pxdynamics.com/

Background: px dynamics was founded by me less than half a year ago, I have 15 years experience in short term power trading in European markets, esp. algo trading. I do some consulting to bootstrap the company with and build customer relations. Simultaenously, we're starting to build a product business. For that we have strengthened the team with a Senior ML Engineer (ex google) and a Head of Data with prior experience in setting up data pipelines in this domain. The products we build are in a broad sense trading signals, e.g. to help traders of renewable or flexible assets trade their positions better.

Role: So given that it is pretty early days, we're of course looking for a broader skillset to lead the development especially of the cloud and backend infrastructure (hetzner), but eventually also frontend applications. Techstack so far is obviously minimal (linux, python, bash, postgres/timescale), so there is plenty of room to also shape this. What we as a team value is simplicity, really clean code/architectures, excellent documentations and quality over speed. So we're not trying to glue together the next venture to scam a bunch of VCs, but to really build something excellent.

if that resonates with you, please reach out to me directly via the email address you'll find on our website.
by SirFatty | 2025-12-09 18:47:32+00:00
When we bought our first home, a townhouse, in the early 1990s the builder only sold to people that were going to live in said home. They helped save the down payment and made sure that utility payments (gas/electric) were under a certain amount each month (super insulated and heated with a hybrid hot water system). Bigelow Homes, they were on a few This Old House episodes in the 80s.

It would be nice to see that again, the new housing market is ridiculous now.
by mylifeandtimes | 2025-12-09 18:47:33+00:00
almost, but rent-seeking is an odd form of capitalism, because in its pure form it isn't providing value.

nothing in the real world is in its pure form, and some business are able to provide value which they cannot charge for because they can rent-seek on other areas, so there is always nuance.

but an economy where rent-seeking is the main path to wealth is an economy in really poor shape.
by MarkusQ | 2025-12-09 18:47:39+00:00
This begs the question. You are assuming they wanted an LLM generated response, but were to lazy to generate one. Isn't it more likely that the reason they didn't use an LLM is that they didn't want an LLM response, so giving them one is...sort of clueless?

If you asked someone how to make French fries and they replied with a map-pin-drop on the nearest McDonald's, would you feel satisfied with the answer?
by Terr_ | 2025-12-09 18:47:43+00:00
Agreed on the similar-but-worse comparison to to the laziest possible web-searches of yesteryear.

To introspect a bit, I think the rote regurgitation aspect is the lesser component. It's just rude in a conventional way that isn't as threatening. It's the implied truth/authority of the Great Oracular Machine which feels more-dangerous and disgusting.
by nromiun | 2025-12-09 18:47:49+00:00
> Is it time to rewrite sudo in Zig?

Taking the current RIIR movement and casting it on Zig as the next hyped language is clever.

> ITER achieves net positive energy for 20 consecutive minutes

Hilarious. I guess not many people talk about the challenge of proper shielding material against fusion radiation. Otherwise we would get hallucinations about new exotic heavy metals too.
by fastball | 2025-12-09 18:48:01+00:00
You should stand up for your ideals, but dying on the hill of what you call your ideals is actually getting in the way of that.

Because instead of making the point "this license isn't as permissive as it could/should be" (easy to understand), instead the point being made is "this isn't real open source", which comes across to most people as just some weird gate-keeping / No True Scotsman kinda thing.
by unoti | 2025-12-09 18:48:36+00:00
> I often try running ideas past chat gpt. It's futile, almost everything is a great idea and possible. I'd love it to tell me I'm a moron from time to time.

Here's how to make it do that. Instead of saying "I had idea X, but someone else was thinking idea Y instead. what do you think" tell it "One of my people had idea X, and another had idea Y. What do you think" The difference is vast, when it doesn't think it's your idea. Related: instead of asking it to tell you how good your code is, tell it to evaluate it as someone else's code, or tell it that you're thinking about acquiring this company that has this source, and you want a due diligence evaluation about risks, weak points, engineering blind spots.
by SoftTalker | 2025-12-09 18:48:40+00:00
> Who’s going to win in a bidding war for a three-bedroom in a suburb of Cincinnati: a single-income family with a scrabbled-together 10 percent down payment or a Wall Street LLC offering cash?

I don't see why the seller would care. They're getting a check at closing, that's all they care about.

I mean, if there's a question about whether the buyer will actually be able to get financing, that could be a concern. But most buyers are pre-qualified (at least if they're working with an agent). The main reason they would not get financing is if the appraisal came in lower than the sale price.
by criddell | 2025-12-09 18:48:43+00:00
I think Slashdot still has the best moderating system. Being able to flag a comment as insightful, funny, offtopic, redundant, etc... adds a lot of information and gives more control to readers over the types, quantity, and quality of discussion they see.

For example, some people seem to be irritated by jokes and being able to ignore +5 funny comments might be something they want.
by instig007 | 2025-12-09 18:49:51+00:00
> software engineers have egos that will not let them accept that they are not designing critical stuff

> Don't write bad code, but also sometimes just getting something out the door is much better than perfect quality (bird in the hand and all that).

Your bank account can be represented as a CR app, it's two letters short of CRUD, but it doesn't make it simple or simpler in any sense of the words.

Now the question: how much are you tolerant to bugs in your bank account? How often can they happen before you complain?